I invited the specter of AI into the first session of "DIY Religion" today, even as we set up a very analog classroom. As an icebreaker I'd asked students to tell us something they'd done for the first time in the last week - sort of a no-brainer for first year students - and we heard about sleeping in airports, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and visiting the Met, getting a nosering, asking someone to be their friend, and lots about food: first fried oreos, Taco Bell, Five Guys and a sandwich costing more than $35. When it came my turn all I could think to say was that I'd gotten to know NotebookLM, one of the AI devices the university is sharing with us. I was relieved that the name drew a blank, though they surely know other similar programs. I told them a little about it anyway, and how when I added a bunch of texts from our class it described another class - interesting enough, but not the one we're embarking on. I guess I'm opening a space, or acknowledging we're all now in the space, where AI is always present.
Or maybe not always. I've been moved by articles I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education on student fatigue at online LMSs (learning management systems), as well as on the irresistible ease with which AI can generate summaries, to abandon online reading responses. Instead, I'm having students buy a notebook (I showed them my MUJI one as an example) and copy passages from the readings into them, and then respond, all longhand. Mind-maps, diagrams and drawings welcome too! The notebooks will start our class discussions but also provide them an archive of the highways and byways of their thinking over the course of the semester.
Just a pretty pic from Holy Apostles. I'd not been by the north wall of the transept before (during the rebuild of our parish house, the rector's office has been moved into this space, which used to be a small chapel,
over which this ship of faith hung), so hadn't ever had occasion to notice that the clerestory windows above the nave have captions. The one up across the nave from this chapel reads: "I saw the spirit ascending."
Had a trifecta of AI encounters yesterday.
First was an article from Axios (a news service which somehow got into my email feed), predicting that in the near future, the internet will have less and less direct human participation. Instead it will be "bot versus bot," as online venders will have AI bots to customize the prices they offer to individual customers based on their past internet interactions, and hapless customers' best defense will be deputing their own AI "agent" to foil the vendors' bots. Soon websites will be designed mainly for "agents," not human readers. And not just in e-commerce.
This kind of spiraling digital arms race is most familiar today in the realms of electronic trading and cybersecurity, where offense and defense have long played a "see if you can top this" game.
The same brutal competitive dynamics are about to spread everywhere — to job applications and classrooms, dating apps and customer service, coding helpers and scientific research.
Classrooms?
My next was an article written by Marisol Aveline Delarosa, one of our grad students in creative writing, for Public Seminar, called "Who Does My Algorithm Think I Am?" Bemused by the ads internet algorithms were sending her, Delarosa fed a bunch of these products into ChatGPT and asked what sort of person would be interested in those things. The surprisingly detailed profile generated was off but in some details uncannily right. She hen fed ChatGPT's profile into an image generator. The resulting rather glossy images (whom she named "Alex") looked, Delarosa found, nothing like her - but a lot like what she hoped to look like when she was a teenager.
To be fair to the algorithm, I spend more time with me than anyone else and I’m still trying to figure myself out. Interacting with machine learning has only made me more certain that if I have any charm that Alex doesn’t, it comes from a place of capriciousness. ...
I often take myself out to different bars and restaurants to figure out my favorite drinks and dishes because people are always asking me for recommendations. But I also do these things to get to know myself and the city I choose as my home.
The other day I went for a massage and a glass of wine, ... I am the only person that really knows me, and I have a generally good relationship with her. She has her idiosyncrasies and I pay attention to them. I always try to find her a seat in her favorite spot, at the bar or in the corner with a view of the exit. I’m happy to sit there with her in long, seemingly pointless periods of silence that busy, perfect Alex would never understand.
The third hit closer to home. On Wednesday, our Faculty Center for Innovation, Collaboration and Support sent a welcome for the new year, one section of which was advice on how to devise an AI policy for our syllabi. The examples ranged from a total ban to actively working with AI tools with students. But none of them prepared me for Friday's news from the Provost's Office that we all now have access to a bevvy of generative AI services through the Google Workspace for Education.
NotebookLM is a personalized research assistant that allows you to upload your own sources such as documents, PDFs, YouTube videos, and Google Docs, and interact with them directly. You can ask questions about the uploaded content, receive answers with cited sources, and generate outputs such as summaries, briefing documents, timelines, FAQs, study guides, and audio overviews (podcast-style).
Advocates of AI in our faculty always encourage us to try things out, the closer to what we know and care most about the better, so I opened a NotebookLM account and created a "notebook" into which I fed a half dozen of the readings I'll be giving students in "DIY Religion." I was curious what kind of "summaries" and "study guides" it might offer for these various works, and of course was wondering how they might shape (or replace) reading the texts if students came to this site before looking at the texts.
But NotebookLM was way ahead of me. Unsolicited, it generated an overview of the whole set of readings (even a pdf it couldn't fully scan)
as well as various sample questions I might ask to go more deeply into the material. These were good, serious questions, and each generated a rich multi-paragraph answer with links back to the texts - specific paragraphs relevant to the topic. Brilliant! But will anyone ever just read an article again, or even its first paragraphs? Will we wittingly or unwittingly start writing for this kind of AI reader, or depute an "agent" of our own who knows better than we how they work to do it for us?!
Also available was an "Audio Overview" and a "Mind Map." But this was just the beginning! By clicking a button I saw I could get a "Video Overview," an "explainer video presented to you by AI," so click I did. "This may take a while," it said, but very few minutes later it offered me a seven-minute presentation on the passel of articles, complete with an argument and slides with highlit quotations, engagingly narrated by a male voice and structured around questions addressed to the audience. It was entitled "The modern quest for certainty," correctly identifying a key concept embedded within one of the articles which I was planning to devote class discussion to, but gave it greater prominence in the whole than I am planning to. So I clicked again, and not very many minutes later I got an engaging eight-minute report called "The Pluralist's Puzzle," which synthesized the material in a way much closer to what I had in mind, beginning and ending with moments from our one first-person text. Much closer.
Reader, it was really good. Not exactly what I will be saying but if a student gave this presentation I'd be impressed. I think I might need to go for a massage and a glass of wine.
(Forgive the Spanglish pun of my title; in Spanish it would of course be IA not AI AI AI AI...)
A giant has fallen - well, half of a giant. A northern red oak in nearby Riverside Park, which at over 350 years may be among the city's oldest trees, split in two in a heavy storm in early July. I don't know what effect this will have on the remaining tree, not being an arborist. But the open wound surely makes it vulnerable to further loss.
Looking through my old photos (with the help of Photos automatically tagging places), I find I never took a picture of kin! Too big, I guess - I know from trying that it's nigh impossible to convey the size of a tall tree, not to mention the highest canopy beyond the canopy. But here it was, in early November 2020 (in fact it was the day after the election), forming the dark background on the left as I was trying to capture the sense of a portal into the light. (It's taken from the other side of the Forever Wild walk which went beneath those branches.)
I've not been chronicling the daily deluge of outrages here but know that this makes me feel wretched.
Seen from the future, won't this blog look like clueless or callous oblivious-ness? "While they were doing X, how could you have focused on Y"? What happened to "say their names"? Do you care only about your little world? You think it can or should survive without the rest? How could every day's post not be about Gaza? I have no answer.
Back to school - well, almost! It's orientation week, when new students and faculty are welcomed: the campus is full of people again! (Classes actually start in a week.)
I'm not the only returning faculty member here trying not to pinch himself. After all those attacks on universities, the hounding of international students, and our own need to restructure, are we really OK? The threats persist but it seems that, for now, we are.
Different people from across the diocese preside, read the assigned scripture passages and the Lord's Prayer, and offer a reflection each day, so it offers a pleasing variety of voices. (The Lord's Prayer has been read in Cantonese, Spanish, and a poetic contemporary adaptation.) The reflections are each a gentle jewel, too, introducing us to a range of perspectives and experiences - and preaching styles. As they parse readings, feast days and collects, a common refrain has been the Church's call to witness to true Christian love in this time of injustice and hatred. Today's reflection let us make the connection ourselves.
It would be far more prudent for you to even leave [your occupations] for a time, than suffer yourself to be carried away by them, and certainly by degrees led whither you would not. Do you ask whither? I reply, to a hard heart. Do not further ask what that means; if you have not greatly feared it, it is yours already. That heart alone is hard which does not shudder at itself for not feeling its hardness. Why ask me? Ask Pharaoh. No one ever got his hard heart cured unless God haply took pity on him, and, according to the prophet, removed his heart of stone and gave him a heart of flesh. What then is a hard heart? It is a heart which is not torn by remorse, nor softened by affection, nor moved by entreaties; which does not yield to threats, but is hardened by scourges. It is ungrateful for kindnesses, faithless in counsel, cruel in judgement, shameless in disgrace, without sense of fear in the midst of danger, inhuman in things human, heedless, in things divine; it forgets the past, neglects the present, does not look on to the future. It is a heart emptied of all the past except the wrongs it has suffered, which lets slip all the present, which has no forecast of the future, no preparation to meet it, unless perchance it be with a view to gratifying its malice. (Chapter 2, §3)
Sound like anyone you know?
My fumbling prayers and intercessions have recently included the plea that the hearts of the powerful be changed. And that the rest of us be able to resist their insidious power to make us like them. I guess I've been shuddering at not fully feeling my own hardness of heart... a start.
At an event for the families of incoming students today, the parents of three of the students in my upcoming first year seminar came to introduce themselves. Unexpected, since there weren't that many people at the event, and even more unexpected because all three told me their son was in the class. Last year's first year seminar had all women! Is it something in the title, "DIY Religion"?
The parents were all curious what "DIY Religion" meant, too. Didn't they read the course description? I hope their kids did! I told them that the course starts with the reality that more and more people are turning way from "organized religion" to do their own thing, something we'll be learning about first-hand from alums. But in fact this entrepreneurial spirit is less new than it might seem. The vitality of religious traditions has always come from the ways in which people make them their own. That so many religious leaders insist on the importance of this or that practice or teaching just tells you at least some folks were doing other things. The story is messy, and not always happy. But the DIY impulse is part of taking a religion seriously, and part of how traditions grow.
What I didn't get into was how New Schooly the class will be. I mentioned that it's the Lang fortieth and that we'll be hearing all about life at and after the college from alums, of course. But the readings are New School-heavy too, as we've been at the forefront of appreciating the reality of DIY religion from the getgo. Most obviously, "lived religion" approaches build on the transformed understanding of human history and psychology offered by pragmatists, and amplified by qualitative sociologists. But New School also contributed to the rise and fall of secularization theory. And, in tandem with that, to exploration of what could take the place of forms of religion becoming obsolete. Indeed one of the New School founders, Herbert Croly, actually offered "schools of social research" as a kind of DIY religion of humanity!
If humanism is to triumph over the headstrong and capable particularism which is the immediately dangerous enemy, it must anticipate in the lives of its own promoters the beginning of that better cooperation between science and social purpose, between the intelligence and the will, which it hopes to spread throughout the world. Probably such cooperation will not go very far until it receives an impulse from the restoration of religion to a worthier place in human life, but the religious revival, if it comes, must come when and where it pleases. In the meantime, something can be done to anticipate by education the birth of the new faith, and in this pedestrian job, schools of social research ... could make an indispensable contribution.
"A School of Social Research," The New Republic June 8, 1918: 167-71, 171
Went with a friend back to see the Hilma af Klint flower paintings at MoMA and noticed they'd done some Hilma-inspired planting in the sculpture garden. Af Klint's work is more breathtaking on a second pass, and even more confounding her ambidextrous alertness to nature's most delicate forms and the weirdly precise cosmic-anthropomorphic patterns and resonances she discerned "behind them." While these flowers seemed bemused to be approached as vessels of occult revelation, resonant geometries of truth they certainly are.
Telling the Lang story isn't going to be quite as straightforward as some imagine. It's a little like the New School centennial, where the mood of celebration made research on forgotten promises and unplanned changes seem out of place. Who really wants to know just how different what we've become is from what past generations of stakeholders had in mind? Who really cares about what might have been: we're here now!
But 40 years is different from 100. Plenty of stakeholders from the beginnings are still around - if no longer involved with the school. Their judgment on what's unfolded isn't just a historical hypothetical. Yet the main audience for our storytelling isn't the faculty and administrators but the community of alumnae/i, and the hope is not only to honor their experiences but to draw them back into a shared story.
So what is the story? The ready template is that, over four decades, we have become ever more fully ourselves: the interdisciplinary seminar-focused social justice-oriented urban liberal arts college we were always striving to be. There is truth in that, and it's inspiring to register how the numbers of students and faculty have grown to fill out this dream.
Some things inevitably got lost in that growth, of course: it's a tradeoff. A community of 300 students know each other in ways one five or six time that size can't hope to, likewise a core faculty of a few dozen. Our life is now organized around departments and programs, most still interdisciplinary but generally operating in siloed parallel with each other. Like any other school which has grown, we now have to promote interdisciplinary relationships and curriculum intentionally (like through minors!). But we're still small, and students still thrive in an open curriculum where they put together amazing interdisciplinary courses of study, drawing on a spectacular smorgasborg of teaching talent, some in new fields like contemporary music, media studies, journalism+design, and code as a liberal art. We've grown and we've grown!
A different kind of story-telling would pay more attention to ruptures. The move to departments and majors a decade and a half ago was not just a shift, but came together with significant turnover of faculty and with the phasing out of the program in Education Studies which was the beating heart of the college's non-disciplinary ethos. Today students and most faculty can't imagine Lang was ever opposed to the idea of majors! Having arrived just as this sea change was underway, I remember two largely non-overlapping faculties.
There was an earlier rupture, too, four decades ago, as Eugene Lang College was grafted onto a largely unwilling Seminar College. The Seminar College dean, an educational visionary who'd been at the school for twenty years of undergraduate experimentation, resigned in protest. (The archives has a thick folder of letters in her support from the entire faculty and many students.) There was a real conflict of visions for what the New School's liberal arts college should look like! I find the different visions from the time of the Lang founding fascinating - especially the one proposing a 1+2+1 structure - but to most people at the college now this is all water under the bridge. We don't really fit anyone's vision from 40 years ago, and that's fine: times have changed, so it's natural we outgrew some of the original plans.
Speaking of changes, the task of telling the story in 2025 is complicated by shifts in the larger university, too - transitions to which Eugene Lang College has often been oblivious. The little decal above is indicative of this myopia, though the larger version used on teeshirts and promotional materials did include The New School and New York City, too! Over the years our deans have shielded us from university changes, but financial challenges are now forcing an urgent university-wide rethink of "mission and vision" for which our faculty seems unprepared. At a recent meeting someone asked the university's president if Lang would continue to be a "free-standing liberal arts college" in any upcoming restructuring - as if any part of The New School had ever been free-standing!
In this context, it might be valuable to see Lang's story as part of a longer, and broader, story of liberal arts within the university, which has at least three parts.
1) That story would begin before we granted degrees, when The New School was the country's premier institution of adult education. A small BA degree program was introduced as part of the GI bill in 1943 but it shared the ethos of a school committed to lifelong learning about an ever-changing world, suspicious of the disciplinary commitments and departmental structures of academia.
2) The 1960s and 1970s saw experiments in instruction for traditionally "college age" students - the seeds of what became Lang - but these were initially just a small part of efforts New School made to reach new communities of still mostly adult students. These proto-Langs were interdisciplinary out of necessity, but also out of principle at a time of radical educational reforms like open curricula.
3) And when in 1970 the New School merged with the Parsons School of Design, whose degree-seeking students were required to take a certain number of "liberal arts" courses by the New York State Board of Education, yet another understanding of the aims of "liberal arts" education entered the mix - though it was many decades before the parts of the university really came together in a meaningful way.
The current restructuring may bring these disparate "liberal arts" projects together in challenging but perhaps also serendipitous new ways. We really have an unusual abundance of visions here!
As with my friend J's and my storytelling around New School history, I suspect we'll tell different (if not incompatible) stories of Lang's first forty years to different audiences in different contexts. Some will emphasize continuities and strengths, like the commitment to experimentation, to small classes, and to student and faculty freedom. Others will acknowledge the costs of change and what was lost and gained with departmentalization. Nostalgia is part of any commemoration but the sense that "the school isn't what it used to be!" has also been a constant over The New School's history, and the liberal arts parts are (as I've just demonstrated) no exception. Yet others will see Lang's 40 years as part of a longer and more multivocal university discussion about the aims of education, a discussion that we hope will continue to surprise and inspire (and disappoint) for years to come.
In keeping with this blog's penchant for naturalistic fallacy, what we found on a first trip to the New York Botanic Garden in two months seemed to reflect the mood two hundred days into a national calamity. A friend told me he'd spent the summer doomscrolling. We're all trying hard not to, too.
Spent much of the day reading two books I picked up at the Sagrada Familia. The more serious was full of historical and architectural detail. The other, a book for children of all ages, brought this whole history to life.
This expiatory temple (since 2010 officially a minor basilica) is a folly and a fancy, the the vision of one and the dedication of countless others, and it's alive with spirit! Though it's been updated in 2017 and 2023. Jordi Faulí and Pilarín Bayés' Little Story of the Sagrada Familia was originally written in 2011, and so conveys the excitement of the church when incomplete, a work in progress, a miraculously unfolding improbability. For a long time
On the last page of their book, Faulí and Pilarín imagine the final completion in a future of flying cars - but the cover shows its completion in sacred time, effected by angels! I'm so grateful for this vision of Sagrada Familia before it was a fait accompli.
Have I mentioned that I'm teaching a new First Year seminar this coming semester? I'm taking the Lang 40th anniversary as an excuse to reconnect with some of the folks who've taken our classes over the years. In general I think incoming students will really appreciate meeting alums and seeing where they might be in a decade or two. But for this topic it makes especial sense, as these alums have lived the changing realities of religion and spirituality of our time. The new students will interview many of these alums, but I'm also asking about a half dozen of them to come lead our class, reflecting on what they learned here and since, what they wish they'd known, what's changed and what hasn't... I expect to learn a lot too!
I missed this year's ChalkFIT when they went up, but some are still there, if a little faded. Apparently the theme this time around was "Reflection."
The bulletin for our church's Sunday services keeps getting thicker. What started as a brief section on ways one might support those affected by the war in Palestine/Israel (with QR codes) has grown and grown.
.jpeg)
