Tag Archives: academia

In ‘The City’

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My dogs would not fit into a backpack. They are not city dogs.

M. and I are about to leave San Francisco after the American Academy of Religion annual meeting After four and a half days of sessions and meetings and breakfast meetings and receptions and in-the-bar sessions and restaurant meals and hurried conversations in corridors ending with an exchange of business cards and a promise to be in touch, I am just brain-dead.

The Contemporary Pagan Studies Group is looking healthy though.

And the noise. Is there some San Francisco ordinance against using sound-absorbent materials in restaurants? Do they cause cancer? Everything seems to be so acoustically “hard” everywhere: stone and painted plaster and mirrors plus the clatter of dishes and glassware—and then you play recorded music.

Jason Pitzl-Waters has been blogging some of the sessions too, and he will be home before I am, so go there for now. Check back here on the weekend!

No Snacks? No Class!

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George Parrott, psychology professor at Sacramento State University, cancels class because no one remembered to bring snacks.

Among the no doubt brain-numbing subjects taught by Prof. Parrott is is “Sports achievement and prediction.”  Is that for coaches, sportswriters, or for bookies—and who needs to go to university to learn it?

Extra Esotericism at the AAR

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Here is where I will be in a week, if all goes well: the Phoenix Rising Academy’s “additional meeting ” on esotericism in the academy at the AAR meeting in San Francisco.

Seven or eight years ago, it was the Pagan Studies people holding our own meeting because we did not official program status. We got that status in 2005, and for a time had an “additional meeting” as well for grad-student presentations and other forms of discussion, but that is not happening this year.

There is a Western Esotericism program unit now, so it is interesting that there is enough additional material for this meeting too.

The Campus Day of the Dead, 2011

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Day of the Dead altar to Marilyn Monroe, CSU-Pueblo

Day of the Dead Altar to Marilyn Monroe

As planned,  I stopped by the Student Center on Wednesday to check out the Day of the Dead altars.

No Vlad the Impaler altar this year! No altars to firefighters or Victorian writers either. Apparently Chicano Studies conformity was enforced, with Catholic Campus Ministries stepping in as a co-sponsor as well. Lots of crosses, “correct” altar decorations, Jesus candles, and Guadalupe candles—even if She is, as we say in religious studies, a multivalent symbol.

The altar to Marilyn Monroe shown above was the only one that broke the mold a little, sharing the “anyone can participate” feeling from previous years.

I drank some cups of colada morada with my Ecuadorian professor friend and nibbled some guaguas de pan. Eating babies—that’s a little edgy, but remember, it’s cultural. (Some pisco would have helped the colada.)

 

The Ethnographer and the Magicians

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At the site freq.uenci.es, described as “a collaborative genealogy of spirituality” (“Ask scholars, writers, and artists what they think of when they think of the word spirituality.”), anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann glosses an anecdote from her time studying British occultists in the 1980s.

Her book Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Harvard U. Press, 1989) still resonates, although not always in ways that Professor Luhrmann intended.

For some, it became a case study in how not to do research on new religious movement. In her article “Psychology of Religion and the Study of Paganism,” published in the collection Researching Paganisms, Melissa Harrington writes, “[Luhrmann’s] resulting thesis presents a rich ethnography, replete with original anthropological material, but with a weak conclusion that has been refuted by practitioners and academics alike.”

In the same volume, sociologist Douglas Ezzy critiques her “methodological atheism,” although he admits that “there is a long history of academic disciplinary boundary maintenance that this argument derives from.”

(Her faculty web page describes the work this way: “Her first project was a detailed study of the way reasonable people come to believe apparently unreasonable beliefs.”)

Ezzy continues, “The methodological atheism at the heart of Luhrmann’s thesis does not derive from an attempt to sensitively understand the experience of Witches, but from her enforced adherence, on pain of significant social sanction, to the atheistic tenets of academe.”

In her defense, you expect a PhD student to be acutely aware of “social sanction.”

I would have to say that Researching Paganisms (Google sample here) was party a response to Luhrmann’s 1980s work, or as the editors wrote, “In particular, it highlights the relationships of researchers with the communities researched, ‘ownership’ of knowledge so created, and problems in presenting a nonmainstream, and seemingly ‘nonrational,’ area within academic discourses across discipline boundaries.”

The 50 Best Professor Blogs

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I found this on University Diaries, which rightly heads the list.

Here is a sample:

  • The Cranky Professor: This history professor enjoys using the past to get a rise out of his pupils. That rise takes place more in their aptitude than in their angst.
  • The Faculty Lounge: When nearly a dozen bright minds collaborate in lively blog writing, the results are always worth the read. The blog focuses on the place of law in current culture.
  • The Irascible Professor: The smiling photo that opens the Irascible Professor’s page shows him as anything but. All smiles are aside, though, when he focuses on the serious issue of American education.
  • The Right Wing Professor: There’s nothing wrong in taking a look at a brand new point of view, realized fully. For those unfamiliar with the right, this is an excellent primer.
  • theblogprof: This professor has a special appreciation for religion’s place in scholarship. Learn more on how spirituality and academics aren’t so dissimilar.
  • Todd Kashdan: A quirky professor brings a bit of needed quirk to his readers’ understanding of world workings here. Posts about serial killers eating lobster have won many fans.

Oh yes, learn to write

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Walter Russell Meade on advice for new college students and their parents—if you are on of those, raise your hand.

Good stuff, such as “The real world does not work like school” and “Choosing the right courses is more important than choosing the right school.”

It’s actually a classic defense of liberal-arts education, including science, politics, economics, history, geography.

And this, of course:

Fifth, learn to write well.  This paradoxically is going to be more important than ever for the next generation.  I can’t tell you how many editors at how many famous magazines have told me over the years that most professors and academics simply cannot write, and bemoan the immense amount of time they must devote to impose some kind of intellectual structure and comprehensible prose on the crabbed drafts they get from, often, fairly well known people.

This will not last.  Publications are not going to be able to continue paying editors to spin straw into gold; if you want to have a public voice in the next generation you are going to have to learn to write well.  This is a hard skill to acquire, but it can be taught.  Most schools don’t do this well; it is expensive and academics generally don’t value clear and attractive prose writing as much as they should.  This is important enough that I would recommend you use it as a factor in choosing a college, but for those of you already enrolled, make a point of seeing what your school offers in this area.

A lot of what I do these days is helping people unlearn the bad, formulaic  writing that they picked up in graduate school.

Sociologists Flummoxed by Las Vegas

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Recently the American Sociological Association had to relocate its annual meeting to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

You would think that Las Vegas was a hotel buffet of raw material awaiting the sociological investigations, “the best spot in the world to do sociology,” as a member of the department at the University of Nevada, Las  Vegas, said. (There is apparently a university attached to the basketball team.)

But you would be wrong. You don’t know academics:

Lisa Dawn Wade, assistant professor of sociology at Occidental College, said the conference was her first trip to Vegas, and she described the experience in terms that corresponded with Jones’s assessment.

“There’s so much here,” Wade said, “and I feel like I don’t have the tools to process it… . There are stories here about consumption and about leisure and about social class that are really interesting, and I just feel kind of at a loss to say anything really smart about it.”

To borrow her blog’s subtitle, she must have experienced a failure of sociological imagination.

But some UNLV faculty members found themselves disappointed by what looked to them like knee-jerk reactions from their visiting colleagues. Las Vegas, they said, is a complex and multifaceted city too quickly written off by those who don’t really understand it at all — and many of the conference attendees, they said, hadn’t even tried.

I would never have called Las Vegas “too much the real world,”  but as Wade added in a carefully nuanced way,

Wade said it might not be a bad thing if the city made its visitors uncomfortable. Academics, she noted, tend to lead “pretty cushy” lives, and spending a few days in a difficult and even disturbing environment could prompt them to think about the “real people” who call the city home — and about the fact that, in many ways, Las Vegas is just a distilled and amplified representation of the world we all live in. “There’s a little bit of Vegas in all of us.”

I think I will suggest it as a venue for the American Academy of Religion. These meetings are planned seven or eight years ahead, but  you never know, a hotel workers’ strike might cause AAR to change its plans too.

Do You Call Your Professor “Professor”?

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How to address your professor, explained at Inside Higher Ed. (This is the American version.)

For those who prefer diagrams to prose, go here: “The Semiotics of Professor E-mail Signatures.”

It goes both ways. Advice to new doctorate-degree holders:

Once you have successfully defended your dissertation, after that initial round of congratulations and frequently bandied “Doctors” (which your close friends will likely succeed in articulating with exceeding sarcasm), and after you’ve managed to convince your nonacademic friends that you can’t write them Oxycontin prescriptions with a doctorate of philosophy, and when you show up for your first job, you’re going to need to decide how you prefer for your undergraduate and graduate students to address you. I say “undergraduate and graduate” because, if you teach both types of students, your preferences might be different in each case.

Just remember, you can move from formal to informal, but going the other direction is almost impossible to gracefully achieve.

The Higher-Ed Bubble

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Talk of the “higher-education bubble” seems to be increasing. This short article from a North Carolina-based think tank  pretty well sums it up:

Like the nation’s housing bubble, which eventually burst, the college bubble is caused by a number of factors. But the biggest force is, as my colleague George Leef has often pointed out, the overselling of higher education. The housing bubble was created, at least in part, by the conviction that everyone ought to own a home; the college bubble is occurring because so many peoplebelieve that everyone ought to attend college.

It’s depressing because so many people whom I know are employed in higher education, want to be so employed, or are connected with it, such as through academic publishing.

Speaking of the United States, what is the figure for entering freshmen who actually complete a bachelor’s degree in a generous six years? Under 50 percent, right?

Yet every high-school guidance counselor tells kids that even if they take on a pile of debt to get a degree, they will earn it all back and more. Not always true.

I don’t think making university education dramatically cheaper is the answer either. Some countries do — and then they end up with large numbers of young people who are now “above” working with their hands.

So they get jobs in bloated government bureaucracies, sit around drinking tea and soliciting bribes — or they emigrate.

(I’ve heard enough horror stories from the international students, of whom my university has quite a few.)

After decades of growth, starting post-World War Two when university education was subsidized for returning servicemen, then when the Baby Boom went to college (1960s-1970s), and then the “bubble” years following those,  it is really hard to think that higher education might be contracting.

But it might. And we have to have some response to that, right?