Evocations

Callings and Vocations

Years ago, I came upon a book entitled Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue, published by Trilogy Books in 1992, by Gail Griffin of Kalamazoo College. I have been thinking of it some in recent weeks, in part because I keep encountering the v-word. Vocation, I mean. Everywhere I look, it is an issue. There seem to be two meanings to it these days: vocation as in calling and vocation (often adjectival) as a synonym for work related. In the latter meaning, the term is often set over against the non-vocational, setting up the usual false binaries between meaning and work, intellectual and economic, and etc. 

Griffin is taking up the other meaning in many ways (though to teach as a college professor implies both meanings perhaps, given the binary between teaching and research or scholarship). She takes up the gendering of these matters in various ways, including the ways teacher=female, scholar=male, for example. She also gave me one of my favorite quotations about the vocation of teaching, worth us all reflecting on -- especially given the ways Shimer focuses on teaching and learning, and perhaps even teaching as learning. Here are her words: 

    ...teaching is about passing on the tools for survival. (p. 73) 

Hmmm. I think this is about more than those tools we use to gain and use jobs, but they are also those (especially given the ongoing gendering of the labor market in the US and globally). And, of course, survival means more than that -- especially given the spate of news on violence, sexual assault and harassment, and related matters across the US, including on our campuses. Here are more of Griffin's words:

    Teachers have always been the voices for culture, passing on accumulated knowledge. Academe thus     amounts to oral history. If in thinking of oneself as a voice a teacher has in mind a sort of funnel or a        megaphone through which culture spreads to the little pitchers with big ears -- then one's task is     relatively simple. If, however, one sees oneself in a problematic ironic relation to that story as its         narrator; if one cannot tell the story without disrupting it -- then in that case, one's vocation is at     once more difficult, more dangerous, and much more interesting. (p. 181)

Survival and danger. Is that what it is all about? 

Griffin ends the chapter from which this last quotation comes from with these words: "A vocation: a song in many voices." Is that what a Shimer education is all about? 

Marge Piercy is Coming and You Should Be There

When I arrived at Shimer, a group of students were doing a tutorial on the "political novel." Among their readings: the work of Marge Piercy. I had taught (having been nudged into it by my partner) a book called Sex Wars in Introduction to Women's Studies in my prior life -- and have read some of her other novels. And, I love her poetry. So, I am thrilled to say that Marge Piercy is going to be doing an event for Shimer in April (details below). 

Why Marge Piercy for a great books college in Chicago? Well, of course, it is not all about the fact that I love her work -- and so do some other Shimerians. There are other reasons. Here are a few:

1. We read the Declaration of Sentiments in some of our courses here at Shimer. This document is a fascinating use of a founding US document to move forward the argument for women's rights. Written in 1848, a year when the Communist Manifesto and much else was penned, the document begins as follows:

"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Recognize its origins? The changes?

What does Piercy have to do with this? S0me of the characters of Sex Wars were among the key figures in the creation of this document -- and in the social movements associated with the document.  As historical fiction, the novel instances one way to take the past (including past texts) and make them alive and relevant today. 

2. Because Marge Piercy is a poet -- and she knows what phlogiston is. Try this poem, entitled "For the Young Who Want To" to see her use the term in a poem. The poem is worth a read for many other reasons, including its relevance to reflecting on the purpose and the impact of education. 

3. Because she is mathematically inclined. She knows that one plus one equals one. (Yes, she does. Try this poem.)

4. She knows the midwest, having been born in Michigan and ended her graduate work at Northwestern. Here's what she says on her website about Chicago as a part of her biography:

After that marriage, Piercy lived in Chicago, trying to learn to write the kind of poetry and fiction she imagined but could not yet produce. She supported herself at a variety of part-time jobs; she was a secretary, a switchboard operator, a clerk in a department store, an artists’ model, a poorly paid part-time faculty instructor. She was involved in the civil rights movement.

She remembers those years in Chicago as the hardest of her adult life. She felt she was invisible. As a woman, society defined her as a failure: a divorcee at twenty-three, poor, living on part-time work. As a writer, she was entirely invisible. She wrote novel after novel but could not get published. Piercy remarks that at that time she knew two things about her fiction: she wanted to write fiction with a political dimension (Simone de Beauvoir was her model) and she wanted to write about women she could recognize, working class people who were not as simple as they were supposed to be.

(Here I should note that this evidences, as do the comments further above, that she has been influenced by works read in the Shimer curriculum!)

For these and many other reasons, including my suspicion that her work itself is of enduring historical significance, she wil be joining the Shimer community -- and you, if you want -- in April. 

Marge Piercy is coming to Chicago (of course, she has been here before) and will be giving a talk for Shimer at the Standard Club on April 18. If you are interested in attending, click here to RSVP. 

A New Version of Shimertopia

In addition to having a presence on this blog and others, Shimer is now appearing on occassion in the Huffington Post. Any comments you can make there will help get us attention. Please spread the word about that, and about this blog. 


Meanwhile, there is one more place to one more place to stop when you are cruising the web -- or updating your knowledge about today's Shimer.

That is, a new blog called Chicago is Our Campus on Chicago Now, a group of Chicago area blogs created (as they say) by Chicagoans for Chicagoans. The site was created by the Chicago Tribune Media Group. 

Shimerprez is the "author" of Chicago is Our Campus -- which will look at higher education related matters in Chicago and Chicagoland. Click here if you want to check it out -- remember, it is just starting! And, it appears on ChicagoNow. 

 

From Adam Kotsko

(Thanks to this site for the funky visual.)

For a discussion of MOOCs and the great books, there is nothing like a Shimer faculty member for thoughtful commentary. If you click here, you can read Adam Kotsko's views. 

Before you do, though, if you do not know what MOOCs are, here is a bit of an update. The acronym stands for Massive Open Online Courses. And this despite the fact that they sound vaguely like mooing cows and they are almost the opposite of a sacred cow in higher education today. They are at the center of media -- and higher education -- debate about how to make higher education scaleable (read: open to huge numbers of people for as little money as possible), combining a sort of populism with a variety of forms of access to new forms of learning. The big examples right now are Coursera and EdX. For a video on what a MOOC is, click here. 

In many ways, MOOCs are part of the "free" movement -- and the open movement -- both of which focus on linking access to education to the use of technology to the notion that these social goods ought be made as widely available as possible. In some ways they are utterly new -- and in other ways, their path was cleared by earlier efforts at on-line education in both the not for profit and the profit arenas of higher education. Some think the predecessors are large lectures with teaching assistants leading discussions (click here for that view); others connect this to earlier experiments in on line education. (See in this regard, Taylor Walsh's Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities are Opening Up Access to Their Courses published by Princeton in 2011, well before the first MOOC. For an interview with Walsh, click here. And no, it is not the same Taylor Walsh as the character in a not very high end television show.) And, of course, on line courses are not -- and never were -- the original form of distance or dispersed education.

For readers who are not Shimerians, perhaps, the notion of Great Books may need some clarification as well. Yes, the phrase has a specific meaning (linked to such names as Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins and to institutions like Columbia University, University of Chicago and Shimer), which links to a historical movement to identify and render accessible through the high tech of the era (a multi-volume encyclopedia) works of enduring historical significance. The movement was thus populist in some ways and linked to elite universities and colleges in others. 

So: today, MOOCs and great books? Great MOOCs? Here we are at the cusp of what some see as the changing nature of higher education. Read Adam's views -- and share your own please. 

Around the Web

Here are some places you might like to check out around the web, related to Shimer in one way or another (and presented in no particular order). And, thanks to this site for the non-internet web! Did you know when you google web -- images that is, you do not get spider webs? No, you get various images used to announce the inernet/web. Life has changed. What was a metaphor drawn from nature has now pushed nature to the side.) 

First: This site is about Liberal Education, across the US and beyond. It is filed with resources and should stimulate your mind. And, then, you can connect these resources to the drive to liebral education containied within great books! 

Second: this site is entitled "Why Great Books Aren't the Answer" -- and I think given our emphasis on listening both to those we agree with and those we do not agree with, it deserves a read. (You may be surprised.)  

Third: If the phrase repurposed books means anything to you, click here. If not, click anyway. And perhaps try here as well. 

Finally, here's a question for you: what is the most Shimerian website you know. Leave an answer in the comments -- and spread the word to start looking for them! Shimerian websites??!??!?!

Quote for the Day --

Ronald Grimes is an expert in Ritual Studies. He is also, of course, a guy. Here are some quotations from his book, Marrying and Burying: Rites of Passage in a Man's Life (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995):

Teachers and students constitute a lineage. Though Academic paternity is even more questionable than biological paternity, it is nevertheless a powerful, sometimes nurturing force. In passing through the hallowed halls of academe, one gains fathers, mothers, children, sisters, and brothers. The brotherhood is not always kind. (p. 40) 

The educational process constitutes a ritualization of passage. Academic passage generates ancestors, spawns progenry, and consolidates cohorts. It constellates power and defines outsiders. So we do well not to minimize the impact of academic ritual in either its admirable or its contemptible forms. (p. 41)

Education is our society's most sustained effort at initiation. (p. 45)

Agree? Or? 

Where is Shimer's Prez Now?

Okay, here is another question about Shimer's Prez, aka Waldo. (And I do not mean Waldo, Alabama or Waldo, British Columbia, though that might be interesting since it is a ghost town. Nor do I mean Hurricane Waldo. I mean the little guy one looks for in pictures. You know, the banned books Waldo. )

But my question is not where's Waldo. It is about Shimer's Prez. Where is she?

If you know, comment -- and if you do not, you should ! Really? Find her. 

Books from Nowhere

My title is totally plagiarized from an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education authored by Jonathan Brent, a professor of history and literature at Bard College. Why? In order to direct you to his essay -- and here are some tantalizing quotations to enhance your desire to find it, somehow, on line or off -- and read along. 

    Quotation 1: Unerstanding a document's origin is essential to establishing its historical meaning.     When was a document written? What were the circumstances surrounding it? Who wrote it? In what     language? For what purpose? (Chronicle, p. B4, December 7, 2012)

    Quotation 2: How could such a great work be thrown onto the street of contemporary discourse like     a homeless person? (Chronicle, p. B5, December 7, 2012)

Leaving to the side the troubling equation of discarding a "great work" and discarding a person, these two quotations should raise some interesting dilemmas for Shimerians. If you are still not intrigued, try this:

    Quotation 3: "The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of     tradition," wrote Walter Benjamin. . . (Chronicle, p. B4, December 7, 2012). 

The Mind /Body Problem OR, Are You Losing Your Mind?

Today's quotation for the day reminds us that educational institutions sometimes embody (pun intended) the Western split of mind and body (or perhaps even fact and value) and at other times challenge those binaries. 

    "The separation of mind and body is a central idea in much of Western philosophy, and it has become the basis for many of hte policies and organizational models of education. This idea may be for some a reassuring existential construction or a pleasant and relatively low-risk form of self-aggrandizement that helps us feel justified in claiming some superiority over other creatures or distancing ourselves from the relentlessly corporal facts of human life. Regardless, it is complete fiction. " (Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh, We're Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education, New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, p. 71).

What does this mean about reorganizing higher education for the 21st century?  

About Keeling and Associates, click here. 

Shimer: All about the non-traditional

Last year, at graduation, our youngest graduate was an early entrant and our oldest was 62. Not that I was paying attention. This illustrates a key point about both Shimer and higher education more broadly: the 18-25 year old "traditional" student is not the only type of student out there. Nor is the "new normal" of students over 25 the sole set of non-traditional learners who engage with college. Yes, there are early entrants. 

For a discussion of this theme, see this piece, by yours truly, in the Huffington Post. And, comment away there -- it helps boost Shimer's visiblity. Were you an early entrant? Tell the world about it on the Huffington Post.