Evocations

What Does Rich Mean to You?

Of course, rich has many meanings -- financially secure and more, deeply textured and full, and related meanings. (Shound you wish, you could check out a dictionary definition here or the wikipedia entry here which is utterly goofy.) But in what is often one of my rhetorical strategies, those meanings are not where I am heading today. Instead, I am heading to Rich as a last name, of well known poet and thinker, Adrienne Rich, profiled here by Chicago's own Poetry Foundation. 

Among the topics that Rich addressed across her oeuvre (aka body of works) are motherhood, sexuality, feminism, and education. It is the latter that is relevant for us today. In 1973/74, for example, she wrote as essay entitled "The Woman Centered University", available here. In 1978, she wrote "Taking Women Students Seriously" parts of which are available here.

Here are some of her words from her essay "Claiming an Education," a 1977 piece, originally given as a Convocation address at Douglass College (altered by the addition in the brackets):

       Ths first thing I want to say to you who are students, is that you cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education; you will do much better to think of yourselves as being here to claim one. One of the dictionary definitions of the verb "to claim" is: to take as the rightful owner; to assert in the face of possible contradiction." "To receive" is to come into possession of; to act as receptacle or container for; to accept as authoritative or true." The difference is that between acting and being acted-upon, and for women [and men] it can literally mean the difference between life and death. (Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979, p. 231; also available here) 

So: do you think that adding the "and men" is apt? Is this still relevant advice? 

I think it is relevant advice for all of us, though what makes it difficult for each of us to claim our education is shaped by our social circumstances. It is, as Rich pointed out decades ago, difficult to claim an education if one is at risk physically in some settings (is a late library night putting you at rick of rape, for example?)  -- or if one cannot afford education -- or if the presumptions of those around you are that you are not smart enough or capable enough to be educated? 

How might we better claim an education? Do you claim yours? How? 

Are You Slow?

At the start of the 2012/2013 academic year, the Dean of Shimer College, Barbara Stone, focused on the ways busy-ness shapes us in her convocation talk. It was a delightful, wry, and deeply important talk. It reminded listeners to ask the following question about higher education: are we better off if we "get through it" more quickly? It reminded us to ask about the value of pausing, of slowness, even, perhaps, of dawdling. I return to those themes today, because I am in need of a reminder that busy-ness is not everything. In fact, it is not much, in the great scheme of things. And, perhaps more importantly, education is a process embedded in time. 

A mentor of mine, Peggy Williams, Emerita President of Ithaca College and Lyndon State College, sent me a book some years ago which speaks to this theme.  The book is entitled In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. The author, Carl Honore, writes about slow food, slow cities, and, what surprised me at the time I first read it, slow education. While many of us are familiar with the first of these, a movement that began in Italy and now has "chapters" across the globe, the section on slow education may be less familiar. And yet, it is so obvious once one thinks about it. There is, in fact, a slow movement in many arenas of life, resisting the ways speeding up seems so obviously crucial to all of who we are. Why is becoming educated in less time better than taking more time? Why are we rushing? What happens to how we learn if we take our time? 

While the slow education movement seems to focus a bit on kids, the possibilities are much wider. For example, we often meausre the efficacy of colleges and universities by focusing on what percentage complete in 4 years. Of course, this is really about seeing if colleges and universities are fulfilling their promises to enable completion in that time. Having said that, as we face economic challenges, some universities are approaching the future with an eye to the 3 year undergraduate degree. Is a speedier degree a better degree? 

Thought about another way, the word pause is relevant. In this case, the fear of "gap years" and the fear of stepping out of school may be as relevant as the need to pause and consider one's reading and writing, problem solving and dialogue as one pursues a college degree. Here are some words of wisdom from Sharon Parks,  The Critical Years: Young Adults and the Search for Meaning, Faith and Commitment (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986):

    The modern academy had its genesis in the contemplative monastic tradition, but we have in large     measure lost the essence of our heritage through our inattention to the power of pause. Though     pause is essential to insight, the structure of the academy offers little time for contemplation.     Congested urban campuses, lockstep class schedules, mass-feeding dining halls, crowded     dormitories with little private space, interminable committee meetings and office appointments,     competition for grades, pressures for ‘excellence’ in research and teaching evaluated by the requisite     amount of publication – all conspire to erode the quality of contemplation essential to the     achievement of wisdom. Though the academy engenders a good deal of conscious conflict, it often     fails to allow the pause so necessary to the gestation of new images and insight. . . (pp. 145-146)

Words like slow and pause, as for me the word Shimer, remind us that thinking well is not always about thinking  now, this moment, immediately, and as quickly as possible. It is also about stopping and reflecting. 

PS: If you are in Chicago, here is the local slow food convivium. And, if you are in education, here is a website that Carl Honore recommends on the topic of slow education. 

PPS After this was written, but before it was published, a blog on Inside Higher Education published this on a related topic. Great minds. . . Great blogs. . . Great schools. . . . 

Conflict: A Quotation for the Day

Here is a provocative quotation from Sharon Parks' book The Critical Years: Young Adults and the Search for Meaning, Faith and Commitment (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986):

     In higher education, the moment of ‘conscious conflict’ is the celebration of a primary strength.     When serving at its best, the college or university ‘pulls together a livable tension of restless     opposites.’ The academy has a particular responsibility and a unique capacity to serve as a center of     conflict.” (p. 141)

Would you agree? 

Check this Out (A New Category)

(Thanks to this site for the image.)

Once in a while, there is just a notion that seems like an oxymoron and yet, is really pushing us into a new future. Perhaps a dystopian one and perhaps a utopian one. Perhaps just one of those soon to be run of the mill futures (a kind of future I recognized first when I suddenly realized the amazing idea of the video phone -- from  my youthful experience of a World's Fair -- was in my hand and even smaller than they hoped). In any case, NPR did a piece recently on such a notion: A bookless library. 

Check it out here.

Then, ask yourself about the ways this is -- and is not -- related to higher education and what we do. What does it mean to be a great books college in a world where a bookless library is imagineable.

What do you make of this? 

Is Russ Kick a Shimerian?

I had never heard of Russ Kick until I read a NY Times Book Review of his edited work, The Graphic Canon Volume 1 ( there are 3 volumes; 2 have been published and one is due in April). Probably, I would not have noticed the review had I not become a Shimerian myself this year. And yet, as soon as I read it, the question of Kick's Shimerishness came to mind.  I was startled to find that the graphic canon was not an attempt to identify, select and canonize extant graphic novels, but rather the creation of works that conjoined the imaginations of wonderful artists with works that, as the review itself notes, almost all appeared on Harold Bloom's list of the "Western Canon." (For Bloom's book, click here. For his list, try here.) While not identical to humanities lists taught at great books colleges, and certainly not identical to Shimer's curriculum, still, there seemed to be something sympatico here. Somehow, the review made evident that what some see as oxymoronic -- the notion of graphic (novels ) and of the (western) canon  conjoined -- was, well, not contradictory at all. In fact, the two might belong together in some important way. 

At first glance, though, the answer to today's question is obvious. No. Russ Kick neither attended nor graduated from Shimer College. And yet, the question remains. As I explored, I continued to believe I had to ask: Is Russ Kick a Shimerian? He has a tumblr. He tweets (where he says he is "avante garde old school." [Does that persuade you?]) Heck, there is an extensive wikipedia article about him. (Does that dissuade you?)  

What leads me to ask the question in this, Shimer-related part of the blogosphere are the following main points:

1. First and foremost, of course, is the list of works contained in the 3 volumes of the Graphic Canon. That is what attracted my attention in the first place. It seemed like such a Shimerish list. It includes such figure as: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe, various Brontes and much much more. 

Why else? Because I find myself drawn to certain aspects of popular culture that re-represent similarly canonical figures (most especially, in my case, Freud or others appearing in murder mysteries, usually more social scientific in some ways, but still), I felt somehow validated seeing the review. (For Freud in popular culture, see everywhere around you, or click here for a related paper.) See, I thought to myself, there are good connections -- and a wide(r) readership than we sometimes think for such works, and thus a wider set of Shimerians or friends thereof. Hurrah! 

(Or, is this an unfounded belief, confirmed a bit like that well known phenomenon where, if you buy a redf car, you somehow start to see red cars everywhere?) 

2. As I explored beyond the confines of the graphic canon, I discovered, of course, that there is a lot more to know about Kick. He is best known, probably, for his work at a web site (now definct) called The Memory Work. And, thus, for his political work on the left.  Among the things he has done, which I knew but did not know: he was in part responsible for reintroducing us all to visual depictions of war dead. The presence of war dead in news casts of my youth mattered to me; in some ways they defined me. Their reintroduction, controversy and all, seems to me important. 

Here, as well as in his association with something called the Disinformation Company, Kick seems to be pressing on the notion of what counts as "open" -- a term which is used a lot around Shimer, and so this too made me wonder about his Shimerishness. While this particular version may be a tad (seriously) to one side of whatever political spectrum you believe defines our era, it is still, perhaps, part of the great conversation that is democracy. 

3. And then there are his other books. With titles focusing on things we are not supposed to know as well as anthologies around major topics like death (not to mention the canon itself), Kick seems, here as well, to push on opennesses door.  

Yet, most crucially, there is the graphic canon. Here are a few of his words in that regard: -- yes, you have to click -- the link is to his related blog site. 

Here he is, probably long excoriated by many proponents of the "Western Canon"  not to mention many oponents of the "wester Canon" -- creating new ways into those same texts for new generations and new people. Kick may be a walking -- and certainly a writing -- paradox. I admit -- I find some of his writings deeply troubling; deeply deeply troubling. I do not know what to make of him. I do, though, like thr graphic canon. Thought provoking -- totally. Of course, I should note the publisher, and it is Seven Stories Press. 

Of course, this is all about the meta-question: what exactly counts as Shimerian anyway? But it is also about the grsphic canon -- which reminds us that many many people out there are reading away in new ways and encountering books we'd like to discuss with them. The fact that Kick was once associated with a blog called Books Are People too, perhaps, says it all. Or does it? 

Ruminations? 

 

Abraham Maslow's Footnotes

On page 51 of my edition of Religions, Values and Peak Experiences (Penguin, 1970) by Abraham Maslow, in the chapter entitled "Values in Education," there appears a set of footnotes that are among my favorite footnotes in the world. Admittedly, I love footnotes; I especially prefer them to end notes! (I get it; end notes are cheaper to print, but really? Here on the issue of the footnote, as a Shimerian recently said to me, is one of the values of interactive texts. I love that I can find notes -- one no longer distinguishes footnotes from end notes -- easily.) 

The context of these notes, of course, is Maslow's attempt to distinguish (as he does in the case of religion as well) between educational institutions (which sometimes mitigate against education) and education per se. (If you do not know who Maslow is, here is one place to look.) So, here are the three footnotes, with a few comments. Perhaps it will drive you to read this book which appears to be about religion (and is) but is centrally about education(in all its complexities).

Footnote 1 says "Isn't is a pity that my daughter left school in her senior year just before she finished her education?" 

Footnote 2 says: Professor Pangloss would have been delighted by the fact that all human knowledge happens to fall apart into exactly the same three-credit slices, like the segments of a tangerine, and that they all happen to last for exactly the same number of class hours. 

Footnote 3 says  "No man can call himself educated who does not know the Iliad (or constitutional law, or chemistry, or descriptive geometry, etc., etc.)." For that matter, one college I went to refused to give a degree unless the student could swim. Another one required that I take freshman composition even though I had articles in press for publication. Faculty politics are silly enough to supply us with many more examples thsan we need.

So: footnote one requires me to ask: what does he mean by this? Out of context the answer is not obvious. In context, Maslow is trying to get us to ask why we assume that leaving school means the end of education. Might it be possible that leaving school immerses you in a different form of education? This, of course, is not a question unfamilair to us a decade plus into the twenty-first century, given arguments for the educational superiority of drop outs, for example. (Though, I, personally, do not think this is quite his point.) 

Footnote two, of course, points to some of the ludicrous (and serious) parts of the organization of higher education in Maslow's time (the book was written mid-twentieth century). And, yes, the state still has an interest in saying "this is what a credit hour is" and this is how long a course must meet to be a college level course. This emphasis can become silly as when some states calculate the difference between a B.A. and a B.S. by the number of classroom minutes required. On the other hand, of course, is the need for some comparability in the interest of students. Hmmmm. (If you are sure this is an exaggeration, click here for one example. Read carefully. I am not saying this is wrong; I am saying: hmmm.) 

Footnote 3 is, of course, about the rigidity of requirements and the ways curricula can be misconstrued as "merely" political in the sense of his use of the phrase "faculty politics." Of course, even then, the decision to require things in curricula was not always taken for intellectual reasons; even then, money followed enrollment for various reasons, at least in some contexts. And, sometimes requirements are enforced with no flexibility emerhging from an understanding of this particular student at this particular time. And yet, we know, that our best institutions create requirements for reasons other than those implied by Maslow here (and other than those endemic in the commodification of higher learning). Here, the key is what we mean by best. And, given Maslow's desire to udnerstand humanity not through the lens of our pathology or failures (a la psychoanalysis, for example) but through persons who exemplify what is most aspirational (best) about some of us, I think this is his message to us here: we must think through what is best in all of our educational work. 

Of course, these footnotes are out of context, so I do suggest a re-reading of the book. Having said that, Maslow does successfully raise the question of how we can ensure that what we know as educational institutions are truly about education, in its deepest as well as its more immediate sense. He demands his readers ask whether, in fact, our institutions impede or enhance what we might think of as "truly" educational. 

A great question for Shimer -- and for all of us, once again, decades after Maslow wrote these footnotes -- and after much intervening debate about the purpose and delivery of education. Today, too, bringing questions of value to bear on how we think of education is key -- and here, value is not merely about the value proposition (though that is important) or cost versus value versus price (though those are important as well) but about that other meaning of value -- implied crucially in Maslow's version of the "value of education." 

Your views? Are footnotes important? What is the value of -- and what are the values in -- education? 

For an interesting piece on Maslow, click here. For a bit on his views as linked to education, try here. 

Speaking with the Dead

Shimer education – perhaps all excellent liberal education – is enriched by conversations we have with folks as disparate as Plato and Durkheim, Audre Lorde and Sigmund Freud, Lavoisier, Darwin, Frederick Douglas, and Virginia Woolf, Franz Fanon and . . .  .

What do these thinkers have in common?

They are dead.

Liberal education is , thus, entry into a relationship with the living dead.  Not vampires. Not zombies. Neither gods nor ghosts. We meet these particular living dead through the power of what they have written – and the many ways that subsequent generations have interacted with their work. Of course, our community with the dead is rooted in a community of the living as well, a community of inquiry, of criticism, of generosity and hope.

Here’s what Parker Palmer, a thinker whose focus has often been on the nature of teaching within community, says in his book, The Courage to Teach in describing a teacher who profoundly influenced him:

     Through this teacher and his lectures, some of us joined a powerful form of community marked by     the ability to talk with the dead. This is not a mark of madness but of an educated person. Learning to     speak and listen in that invisible community of history and thought makes one’s world immeasurably     larger and forever changes one’s life. (Palmer, The Courage to Teach, p. 137)

Parker Palmer’s reflection, of course, is not the only worthwhile way to think through the relation of living thought – and living thinkers – to the dead. There is, for example, Simon Critchley’s relatively recent publication, The Book of Dead Philosophers, which builds up, through accretion of multiple tales, a philosophical approach to life by looking at how the deaths of philosophers. A fun book, truly, not a morbid book, all cultural repression of death to the contrary notwithstanding. (See here for more on  Parker Palmer.) 

But one need not look only to such places for a reminder of the importance of speaking to, about and with the dead. An author who is popular amongst some Shimerians  -- and more broadly across American culture -- is Orson Scott Card. In his book, Speaker for the Dead, and in his work more generally, there is a tension between life and death, between xenocide and redemption, between truth and its consequences, and more. In the novel, there is imagined a form of “religion” which is non-theistic, in which one calls for someone to investigate the truth of someone’s life – not merely what happened, but why, and for what reasons, focusing perhaps upon the gaps between intention and actuality.  As imagined by Card, the practice of speaking for the dead is not about eulogies in the form of avoidance or hagiography or euphemism, but the recognizing of deaths (and thus lives) as meaningful. The notion that the dead go on living is re-imagined, beyond the views of the religions we all know, filled as they are with resurrection,  reincarnation and the like.  Here the telling of lives and deaths is also about active meaning making.  It is, in some sense that Shimerians might recognize, dialogical. Card’s work is often categorized as science fiction or fantasy; too often such genre fiction is dismissed as unimportant. And, yet, perhaps its historical legacy will be longer than we imagine.  (We must not forget that Dickens was paid by the word, and other classics, too, were the popular writing of their era.)

Speaking for the dead, is perhaps, though, different from speaking with the dead.

In thinking about the latter form of conversation with, we are, of course, considering how we speak – and listen – across the limits of radical otherness. So too is Card, who addresses this topic not through the lens of re-readings of Edward Said, but through the metaphor of alien species. As he does so, he asks what it truly means to encounter ideas – and lives – that are dissimilar from our own. He asks how we might do so without obliterating that difference – or even obliterating others quite literally – while also avoiding the creation of a morally (or cognitively)  relativistic world. Card asks what it means to build fences and to encounter – or create – openness. As he does so, he takes up the pain of encounter, the risks of openness.  Across histories or cultures  or lives that differ, how we speak and listen becomes of central importance.  (Whether Card fully agrees to this or not, it may be notable that he teaches now at a small liberal arts college, within the LDS tradition. And, his controversial, often homphobic, views of LGBTQ matters may speak against his work as a model of openness. For more on this, try here.) 

Here, then, is our question:  is the idea that we can meet Freud, or encounter Sappho, or reach across generations to enable a conversation between those long dead and living thinkers like Sandra Harding (for her faculty site try here) or Carol Gilligan (for her faculty site try here) --   or dare we say, ourselves? --  fiction too? Is it fantasy? Some thinkers have labeled religion a fantasy, others a chain of memory. Perhaps that is what education might be at its best as well – a chain of memory and a making of the future through conversations with and amongst the dead, in the context of an imagined future.

Do you speak with the dead? 

 

For a different version of this published elsewhere, click here. 

Questions Quoted

When I first "met" ShImer, I knew it was a great books school. And I came to know it as a school -- an educational community -- filled with the pursuit of great questions. Hence parts of this blog focusedon questions.

Here are a few to contemplate.

I admire the contributions of Eugene Lang, who has written much about liberal education; his questions include

In view of their acknowledged problems, have liberal arts colleges lost their relevance and do they, in terms of their traditional mission as liberal arts colleges, face extinction? If so, and the ‘natural selection process’ is allowed to proceed, does it matter? If it matters, why? What are the options for survival? And would ’responsiblecitizenship,’ as an active ingredient, contribute significantly as a force for breathing new life and vitality into the liberal arts mission? (p. 133, “Distinctively American: The Liberal Arts College"; click here for the article; click here for the innovative undergraduate institution named after Lang)

As I have noted elsewhere in this blog, I also admire as well the work of Sharon Parks 

How might the academy maintain its commitment to truth, proceed with integrity in the light of the relative character of all knowledge, and serve the formation of young adults. . . ? Is the epistemology assumed in the modern academy true? Is there an alternative epistemology, a more adequate way of perceiving the relationship of human understanding to the apprehension of the whole of reality? (Sharon Parks,  The Critical Years: Young Adults and the Search for Meaning, Faith and Commitment (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 136)

What are your questions? What are our answers? 

Glee?

No, I do not mean the television show, Glee. What I am raising, instead, is the place of laughter, joy, humor in relation to our joint enterprise: liberal education. The topic is a paradoxically serious one. Must liberal education be ponderously serious? Must great books education be somber? I think not. Part of the reason I believe this is my experience of Shimer -- where the utmost seriousness is combined with a significant sense of humor. But there is more, much more, to why I raise the question, "Glee?" 

Many years ago, I read a book by Peter Berger (someone whose social constructionist work is read in Shimer's great books curriculum and appears on many sociology syllabi across the United States and elsewhere), entitled The Heretical Imperative. In this 1979 book, Berger conjoins his (methodologically atheist) sociological hat with his (Lutheran) theological impulses (as he does in other work such as A Rumor of Angels).  Among other things, Berger argues for a variety of laughter as a bit of insight into what reaches beyond the human enterprise and gestures toward the  divine.  (For a review symposium on The Heretical Imperative, click here.) That I can remember (or, perhaps misremember) this decades after reading the book in graduate school is part of why the question "Glee?" seems so important to me. (Truth in advertising: Berger did write a subsequent book entitled Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (1997). I have not read it. Have you? Please share.) 

Why else "Glee"? I have always loved Freud's book  Jokes and their relation to the unconscious but that has absolutely nothing to do with why I am asking the question "Glee?" For those of you who know German well -- is it true, is the book funny? My German was never good enough to tell. 

In any case, there is a  serious reason why I am writing about laughter, humor, and related matters here, on this blog about higher education. And that is because I think one of the ends of education (note that I am not saying outcomes) is a meaningful life and meaningful work, both of which I also associate with humor. While I am not religious (or even spiritual, really), I am a scholar of religion. And, so I picked up a book recently which has contributed to my thinking about all this. The book? Between Heaven and Mirth by James Martin, S.J.  (For more on him, click here.) As I read, I substituted the phrase "higher education" and then "liberal education" and then "Shimer College" for religion. Hmmm, I thought. 

And, I noticed a whole array of "great book" types cited by Martin - from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King (not to mention Macchiavelli). Dorothy Day and Teresa of Avilla appeared in their humorous forms. 

While I am not writing about the comic, nor exactly about jokes, I am asking: must what higher education accomplishes be ponderous? I offer a hearty NO to that question. In my view, homo academicus (for a review of Bourdieu's book of this title, click here) and homo ludens are not opponents -- but friends -- unexpected allies even. (And, I am returning to jot here, that I wrote this before beginning our social reading of Utopia together. Duncombe's introduction raises related issues.) 

Homo ludens? Yes even play is important. Huizinga's work of that title reminds us that man (and I presume woman) plays. Think Shimer (and education more broadly) -- think riddles and puzzles and the "magic" of knowing. (Or, for a revisiting of Huizinga's work click here. Or, for a discussion of hte playful and the serious, try here.)  

And you?  Is there glee in your learning? If not, why not?  

Thoughtfulness: A New Year's Quotation

The calming voice of Mark Schwehn in Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (OUP 1993) is one I find useful, calling for understanding all that we do as teaching and a reframing of that work around notions of phillia and charity. Citing Leon Kass, he describes the objectives of our work as follows:

    colleges and universities ought to provide education ‘in and for thoughtfulness.’ The word thoughtfulness conveys, as Kass has noted, both the notion of being filled with reflections about important matters of human concern and the notion of being considerate of others. The same double meaning applies to the corresponding vice: to be thoughtless is to be both foolish and inconsiderate. . . . I have been suggesting that one cannot be truly thoughtful in either of the two senses Kass specified without being thoughtful in the other as well. (p. 58.)