Author: AKMA

It’s all coming down the road — if only some school or some foundation wanted to get there first, with the most impact and the benefit of seeing how the pieces fit together! Yesterday’s pointer to the Eagleton lectures begins to hint at the value of distributing video (with the classy “Yale” imprint in the upper left corner) as a promotion for the intellectual discourse of your institution; today, Tom points to the Antiquary’s Shoebox, where Bill Thayer collects and digitizes articles of interest that have drifted into the public domain. A staggering proportion of humanity’s most important written works are out-of-copyright; as more and more of that legacy makes its way into the indexable, printable, open-access web, it will intensify pressure to put the remaining copyrighted material online in useful form.
 
Now, let’s say you’re the dean or president of an academic venture, and your institution began entering, marking-up, formatting, and promoting an online library of academically-important sources. Let’s say that your school puts its faculty online in short-span audio/video spots that address topical problems in digestible segments. In the process of producing these materials, of course, your students and faculty learn better the ins and outs of the texts that they’re working with (as Thayer notes, Qui scribit, bis legit: “One who writes, reads twice”). Let’s say that your students can expect open access to much of their learning materials, written and audio and video; and let’s say that your faculty and your institutional name are bouncing around the Web as the font of this treasury of learning. Doesn’t that sound like a big competitive advantage for your institution as you scrabble to attract students (and grants, and faculty)?
 
These are the faster horses of technology as it interacts with the academy. Every penny you invest in technologies that perpetuate the familiar patterns of classroom/library instruction depreciates the minute it’s spent. Every penny you invest in the technological transformation of the academy along lines that match best-use cases of various technologies (including, especially, the seminar room and the book) will redound to your advantage multiple times.
 
On the other hand, no one ever got fired for signing up for another year’s subscription to BlackBoard, and being an advocate for a transformative approach to technology and academy hasn’t helped me land a job. Maybe the future does indeed lie with encumbering teachers, students, writers, readers, researchers, and a generally-interested public with systemic limitations in order to preserve the economic and pedagogical superstructure of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century academy.

Beginning with Stanley. If I made a list of the people who have enthused about Terry Eagleton’s pushback against “Ditchkins,” the roster would include such an array of odd bedfellows as would amply populate a madcap smash hit Broadway musical about ivy-draped campus life.
 
I haven’t read the book, I’ve just watched the movies (1, 2, 3, 4, also available for free through Yale’s iTunes University channel). Eagleton presents a witty, pointed, welcome riposte to the latest generation of self-congratulatory cultured despisers of Christian faith. Eagleton doesn’t ascend to the heights of theological sophistication, but he doesn’t claim to — and that’s part of the point, since he can with relatively little effort show that “Ditchkins” hasn’t debunked anything other than a pallid simulacrum of the God to whom the broad, ancient Christian tradition has turned in faith and hope. In the name of intellectual honesty and rationality, “Ditchkins” unstuffs a straw adversary (largely of their own making).
 
I’ll confess to a degree of envy at this upwelling of media attention when Eagleton says stuff that I was trying to get at in my own responses to the tawdry new atheism. The “right answer” for which Chris Lydon was looking on Radio Open Source would have been William James or Ralph Waldo Emerson, not Thomas Aquinas or Augustine, but I was trying to get at the same sorts of point that Eagleton makes in these Terry Lectures. He wins for fluency, cleverness, and the clarity that a solo performance affords.
 
But hey, when Chris Locke and Richard Hays send me links to the same column, that’s an auspicious event. It’s all the more intensely intriguing since I first read both Eagleton’s Literary Theory and Stanley Fish’s Is There A Text In This Class? in Richard’s seminar on literary theory and biblical interpretation at Yale Div back in the early eighties. Ah, the halcyon days of youth, when no one (I think) would have imagined that the trajectories either of Fish’s postmodern Miltonism or of Eagleton’s post-Catholic Marxist criticism would lead to this convergent endorsement of hearty, full-blooded Christian theological reasoning.

Perhaps the academic year, with the distraction attendant on its various obligations, helpfully kept our minds off what-all will happen over the next few months. The greater leisure of the last couple of days, however, has brought a wave of stress and anxiety as we look ahead to graduation, wedding, packing, relocating, finding a new place to live (and where?), working out a way of living up to Interlochen’s financial expectations of us, and maybe one of us even getting a job.
 
One thing at a time: I have lectionary reflections to write and a valediction to compose. That’s two, I can count, but if I alternate between them I may make some headway on both.

I turned in my grades this afternoon; although I haven’t returned everyone’s papers, I’m pretty much done with my contractual responsibilities at Duke. I want to thank all the people who made this possible, etc.
 
I really have had a great time here; I’ll miss Durham and Duke a lot. I recommend Duke highly to any potential seminary student.
 
So my afternoon turned on a dime from reading and marking papers and ruminating about grades to thinking about the three lectionary reflections and the one valediction that I have to compose in the next ten days. The lectionary reflections should be pretty do-able without much strain, but I’ve been mulling over the valediction between thoughts.* It occurred to me that maybe it would be a good thing to coordinate the valediction with the commencement address, so I just shot a note off to the commencement speaker, Michael Bérubé (!). Myself, I think it’s swell that Marlboro arranged to bring in so distinguished an opening act before my closing remarks. In one of my fantasy worlds, Bérubé and Marlboro President Ellen McCulloch-Lovell will hear about Margaret’s and my vocational pickle and call up their high-powered academic friends and set us up with jobs — yes, it’s absurd, but that’s why they call it “fantasy.”
 
Anyway, Duke Divinity confirmed my positive expectations, and gave me lots to think about… after I write three lectionary essays and a valedictory address. (A very short one — no need to fear, Marlboro seniors.)
 
 
* “Between thoughts” — once upon a time, when we were living in Durham during my doctoral course work, the usual suspects had gathered at our apartment to watch a Duke basketball game. About two-thirds of the way into the game, one player passed the ball to another, who didn’t react in time to prevent the ball from hitting him in the head. The announcer helpfully explained, “Looks like that one caught him between two thoughts,” a characterization that Margaret and I have used ever since.

Annie Lennox’s “Into the West” segues into Aesop Rock, “None Shall Pass.”

In honor of May Day, I’ve been explaining the Labor Theory of Value and exploitation to Pippa.

The Wall Street Journal (cue the ominous organ chords) ran an article the other day that made me feel even more insignificant than I started out feeling; they claimed that nearly a half million Americans make their living from their blogs, and a pretty good living too! I was suspicious (though that might have been the ressentiment of an unpaid blogger who writes carefully and sometimes even thoughtfully), but hey — it’s the WSJ! If anyone knows economic statistics, it should be the financial paper of record, right?
 
Clay Shirky not only felt suspicious, but he followed it up with some analysis (at BoingBoing’s invitation). It turns out that “the median income for all bloggers running ad-supported weblogs is (wait for it)…
 
…$200. A year.”
 
(I feel better about my ad-free not-for-profit blog, although not so very much better that I wouldn’t entertain sponsorship offers.)
 
Shirky’s analysis eviscerates the nonsense that the prestigious print medium represented as a matter of fact. So the next time someone emphasizes the unique importance of carefully-edited, fact-checked, professional journalism — as the Apostle saith — think on these things.
 
But I really wanted to post about this to capture and re-quote the line Clay cites from Kevin Marks: “Any anecdote times a made-up number can be a big number.” That belongs in a compendium of quotations somewhere.

A number of concerned citizens called my attention to Mark C Taylor’s op-ed in the New York Times about “The end of the university as we know it.” (When did he move to Columbia? I wasn’t looking.) Speaking as a minor-league educational radical, I’m pleased that Taylor called the world’s attention to the possibility that higher education might be thinkable on some basis other than that which prevails in the U.S., that we have exported to the rest of the world.
 
Yes, but. Community College Dean presents a sensible pushback to Taylor’s somewhat err-atic expostulation. I hear CCD’s objections too, and they make a great deal of sense, institutionally speaking. What I suspect we need is someone who’s willing to imagine as widely as Taylor, but with a little more of a view to the wider networks from which our teaching and learning derive their meaning and find their value. So, in partial response to CCD, I would point out that many aspects of academic life are grossly over-managed, and Taylor’s apparently adminstration-free modules would represent a more congenial environment for learning about stuff than does the regimented, micromanaged Fordist education industry (to be fair, CCD also decries “seat-time-based measures” of educationl progress). How do we move away from commodified classes without the airy unreality of being a major in “Space”? (Who said one needs a “major” anyway?) How do we un-logjam faculties ossified by tenure without sacrificing one of the most improbable victories of academic workers?
 
I’ve talked and written about this before, but the most promising alternative curriculum that preserves to some extent the current infrastructure of education would shift our studies away from a grid of requirements satisfied by “seat-time-based measures” and toward a more Oxbridgean system of lectures, seminars, and tutorials, culminating in assessment based on demonstrable accomplishment. One could preserve a bulwark of academic freedom while at the same time reforming tenure by offering multi-year contracts on a rolling basis (guaranteeing senior faculty a generous number of years in which to look for another job if they are to be terminated) (I don’t like talking about alternatives to tenure, but I’m inclined to think it best for faculty to come clean about dysfunction in this particular system and come up with a better alternative before educational middle-managers force one down our throats). As faculties attain fluency i expressing themselves in non-print media, they’ll be in a position to receive assignments (and ecnourage advanced work) in other media — but heaven help us, not before then.
 
There’s lots to be said and done on this front, but Taylor has mostly just stirred the pot, and CCD has pulled out some stones and twigs that had been masquerading as nutrients. Let’s keep trying. We can do better; we owe that much to the world for supporting us. (And then let’s talk about what that “supporting” looks like — however bad the educational process has gotten, I don’t see us as having caused as horrible a disruption in the culture or economy as did brokers, bankers, and managers who were paid ten times what we are.)

“Since January, more than 13,000 people have died of complications from seasonal flu, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly report on the causes of death in the nation,” according to CNN.

Remember the movie scenes wherein prospective parents generate fantasies about their hypothetical children? “When she grows up, she’ll be an all-star softball player!” “When he grows up, he’ll be a ballet dancer!” I don’t think Margaret and I ever stated this explicitly in our newlywed conversations, but we both have upheld an unstated vow to make sure our children know that we love them very much and that we admire and respect their accomplishments — even when that makes them roll their eyes and shuffle their feet. Well, the last week has crowned all of Margaret’s and my parental fantasies with radiant affirmation.
 
As I said yesterday, on Saturday Josiah successfully defended his senior project at Marlboro College (his “Plan,” in Marlboro-speak; it always sounds to me as though they’re preparing tomorrow’s Hannibal Smiths). Yesterday, we got an email from the Interlochen Arts Academy, offering Pippa admission in their visual arts program, starting in the fall of this year. Today, Nate will defend his pre-dissertation exams in the University of Michigan doctoral program in music theory.
 
Anyone who has read here more often than occasionally has seen me marvel at our children’s accomplishments; I’m especially captivated at the convergence of these developments. Margaret and I may be in a difficult spot right now, maybe for a year, maybe more, maybe not at all — but we will brook no impediment to our children’s learning to soar to the limit of their capacities (“and beyond!” adds Buzz Lightyear).
 
I chose the headline title not because Nate and Si and Pippa are moving on to adult estate, but because I realize this morning that I am gradually moving out of my active role as “father-of-children,” and that’s OK, that’s what happens when families grow up. Thanks Nate, and Si, and Pippa, and Jennifer; thanks, Margaret my sweetheart. I’m so proud of you all.
 

On Saturday, Josiah performed and defended his Senior Plan at Marlboro. Margaret took the train up from Baltimore and reports that the performance was “fab”; evidently his examiners agreed, because his Plan has been approved. He’s now set for graduation in May, and his commencement ceremony will conclude with a valediction from a homeless theologian (last Friday, Marlboro’s president asked me to say the concluding non-prayer-thing). After that, it’ll be time for him to marry Laura (finally) in June.
 
I’m not sure how long everyone will be in Chicago to celebrate the wedding, but some of our friends and relations may want to check out this exhibition.