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)
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.
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).
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?
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.
Great neologism, right? It is not my own, of course, but it has a delightful ring to it. It comes from a book I just finished entitled Being Wrong, authored by Kathryn Schulz. The subtitle is Adventures in the Margins of Error. It has been out for a while, and there is a lot of buzz about it. And, to be honest, I enjoyed the read.
So: wrong is joining other words that nudge us along by seeming so wrong to attach to the best of liberal education -- bewilderment, dead, glee, wrong. Really? Thoughtfulness seems obvious. It even seems right. It belongs. But wrong? Really? It seems so wrong. (Say that aloud in the right tone of voice.) And yet, it seems so right. (Even Bill Clinton agrees. Click here.)
Schulz's book is persuasive and thought-provoking. Wrong is important -- and not just as something to be avoided. It is something from which we learn. Something we need. Something that defines us. All of us. It is, she argues, part of what makes us human. (And thus more than animals in some sense.) She draws on all sorts of intellectual -- and personal -- examples to push us along. And her comments draw on authors from Aristotle to . . . . well, you know.
So, connections to liberal education? To Shimer? There seem to me several.
First, on neologisms per se. I like them -- they remind me that language grows and changes. Yes, there are rules (grammar; my own obsession with the correct use of apostrophes) but yes, things change. English is a living language. Hack no longer is principally a word for a kind of carriage. Nor, did I, in my youth, know what to google meant. [Well, there was a song from well before my time about googly eyes, but. . . . you know my point.) Neologisms build on the past and somehow link that to the new, the future. In some senses, that is what liberal education is about -- connecting us to history, but doing so in a way that imagines (and allows us to build) a future that is both like that past and challenges it. Neologisms, in some sense, face both directions -- to tradition and to invention, as do neologisms. So, too, I would argue, does the best of liberal education and the best of Shimer.
More directly, though -- how are being wrong and being educated, liberal education and Shimer connected? Let me quote from Shultz as I move to a second set of connections for us by offering a few quotations from the book. (My citatons are to the kindle edition).
The feeling of knowing something is incredibly convincing and inordinately satisfying, but it is not a very good way to gauge the accuracy of our knowledge. (kindle location 1103)
How can we square this feeling of rightness with the very real possibility that we are wrong? This is a question that haunts all of wrongology, not just errors of memory. (kindle location 1171)
By discussing confabulators and literature, memory loss and neurological dysfunction, conversion and lying, this author nudges us along to be thoughtful about ourselves -- and yes, to my mind, the role of being wrong in higher education as about cognitive, social, and emotional processes. Are we more error prone when we follow the masses? When we trust a source? Can higher education be groupthink? Or is its role to disrupt groupthink? Is error blindness a moral problem? How do we move beyond the conviction that we cannot possibly be wrong? (And how do we avoid the view that we are always wrong?) Is certainty toxic? Or is uncertainty toxic?
And a third set of reasons we may find this book of interest? Well, the book is profoundly interdisciplinary (or is it multidisciplinary? Transdisciplinary? Antidisciplinary?) In any case, it draws from a variety of intellectual arenas (and life arenas) to think through a topic (and indeed, make an argument) from a variety of angles. As it does so it addresses the complex relationships between being wrong -- moral error, factual error, dramatic changes in our belief systems, etcetera -- and various epistemologies and metaphysics. How do we know? And in what ways do we learn? Is this about multiperspectivalism -- or is it an admision that most of the things we are most interested in are not divided up into the kinds of arenas that academia uses to demarcate intellectual arenas? Hmm. Might she be right as she writes about being wrong? (She cites Montaigne. How can she be wrong?)
Finally, just a personal bit: I find it hard to be wrong. Do you? There are moments when I have been so wrong -- in various ways -- as to been challenged in a very fundamental way. And not just when the theories of religion's disappearance I learned in college and graduate school turned out to be utterly wrong. Because I have, on occasion, been utterly wrong. Have you? Is that part of what it means to be educated?
And yet, as the author of this book notes about many of us, I too enjoy the paradoxical experience of being wrong sometimes -- when it comes to optical illusions, for example. As she puts it: "emotionally, illusions are the gateway drug to humility" (kindle location 1027). Hmmm.
For some of the press on the book, though collected by the book's own website, click here. And for a video that is kind of fun, here. To buy it from indiebook.com try here. Or, try this site for some video that is not TED. Or try this bloggishness from a site with one of the best names I have seen in a while -- the accidental theologist. Or this, from an even more wonderful blog, overweening generalist, whose mission seems oh so Shimerish.
For folks in higher education, the back page of the Chronicle Review, the more magazine-y portion of the Chronicle of Higher Education is somehow mythic. It stands for something. I am not sure what -- some sort of quasi-popular essayist kind of writing that draws academics in, as though we are stooping to resognize ourselves in some out sized mirror. (Yes, a very mixed metaphor.)
Among the many essays that appear there, recently Alyce Miller wrote one entitled "Worshiping 'the Book'". The scare quotes around 'the Book' indicate both the irony -- and the mischief -- she intends, as she discusses academics discussing their work. What she argues is this: there is a sort of fetishization of "the" book linked to success within academia insofar as success is about the requirements of tenure as articulated at many institutions. The silliest version she cites is when something published as a series of pieces, in various venues, magically becomes more important, more successful, more emplyability worthy, when published together as a book. Hmmm.
Having said that, the same issue of the Chronicle Review (still Section B of the Chronicle of Higher Education) has a cover story entitled "Things We Do with Books" by Jennifer Howard. The essay discusses research on reading -- in various settings and in various sites. Do you cry when you read sometimes? Do you underline? Where do you read? How will people 50 years from now know what our reading is like? What does it mean that some books sit unread on our shelves (and, for example, Harman Melville never read. . . . this or that book about whaling)? Do I read to keep you away from me on the airpane or at breakfast? Do you read to broker a relationship with others?
These are not only fascinating questions, they are important ones. Hmmmm.
And all this in the December 21, 2012 issue of the Chronicle!
And, BTW, when googling Jennifer Howard, I discovered this piece, in which she writes about the Social Reading Project in which Shimer participates. Small world. I may have found a new wonderful favorite blog.
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?
Ok, the phrase " Not nobody. Not nohow" somehow reaks of bad grammar Yes it does. The allusion, though, is to Wizard of Oz. Here's the quotation in its context (thanks to this site for the help) :
Dorothy: Your Majesty, if you were king, you wouldn't be afraid of anything? Cowardly Lion: Not nobody! Not nohow! Tin Woodsman: Not even a rhinoceros? Cowardly Lion: Imposerous! Dorothy: How about a hippopotamus? Cowardly Lion: Why, I'd thrash him from top to bottomus! Dorothy: Supposing you met an elephant? Cowardly Lion: I'd wrap him up in cellophane! Scarecrow: What if it were a brontosaurus? Cowardly Lion: I'd show him who was king of the forest!
But, that is not the quotation I had in mind for today, one that dates to the very first year of this century. It comes from the Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14, 2001, “A
BATTLE PLAN FOR PROFESSORS TO RECAPTURE THE CURRICULUM” CHRONICLE B7:
“As we enter the new century,
society’s agreement on what defines an educated person, what constitutes
essential knowledge and common discourse, has essentially collapsed. As a
result, universities in the United States have a problem in the area of
curriculum that has been widely recognized. Curriculum means, literally, a
running track, but, in recent years, it has been called ‘a cafeteria with
little indication of which are entrees and which the desserts” and “Dante’s
definition of hell, where nothing connects to nothing.” (b7)
Many of you may know this picture, shared by Sharon Welton, of the Campbell Center, located near the same site where she took my picture during a recent visit to Mount Carroll:
