‘Academically Adrift’

It is probably no surprise to a lot of us in higher education that “45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.”

(Lest I be accused of America-bashing, in talking with international students, I got an even worse impression of universities in some other countries, e.g. Italy and France.)

Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

An awful lot of students in university classrooms simply should not be there. They are not prepared—academically, psychologically, or both.

(“Psychologically unprepared” would have applied to me as a freshman too. I struggled along and “woke up” midway through my second year.)

These students are there because they are told to “get a college degree,” whereupon they will be magic somehow.

Now we hear more and more about a higher education bubble on the point of bursting, just like the real estate market.

Get a degree, have thousands of dollars in student-loan debt, and work at Starbucks. It’s not a viable model of higher education if the cost keeps rising but the benefits of paying them do not seem to be there.

If this realization reaches a tipping point, it won’t be good for academic employment for us professors.

The fiscal conservative in me says, “Go ahead, shut down a few state schools. All but about three states are running budget deficits and need to save money.”

And then I wonder if any of my academic friends would lose jobs or be unable to find jobs if that happened. But it might happen anyway.

Erin O’Connor comments too and has a more clever headline.

And Vanity Fair delivers the snark.

Why I Love Typographers

Because they have standards, damn it, and they don’t get all PC about them.

“Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong,” Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. “When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go, Aye yay yay,” she told me. “I talk about ‘type crimes’ often, and in terms of what you can do wrong, this one deserves life imprisonment. It’s a pure sign of amateur typography.”

What prompted this tirade was an observation that people who learned typing on computers do it. Putting in two spaces after a period (full stop) is the correct thing to do on a typewriter.

When I edit a piece of text, the first thing that I do is run a search-and-replace for two spaces. I know that I still sometimes put two spaces between words, but that is more of a nervous stutter-while-typing.

Via Ann Althouse.

Around the Pagan Blogosphere

• Ways of leaving offerings for land wights, at Golden Trail.

• Hermes versus the Internal Revenue Service (and a great poem) at The Alchemist’s Garden.

• “Animist Human Diplomats”  at Adventures in Animism. Are you asking more than you are giving?

• Still on the theme of place: Dealing with a psychically hostile place of the dead, from Three Shouts on a Hilltop.

This is not Good Academic Writing

Contrary to what some people think, this is not good academic writing:

The theory of [redacted] that have [sic] been presented in this paper [not that she actually, like, presented it ] could considered as plausible theoretical guesswork that could illuminate that presumed cognitive imaginative devices that led to the conceptualization of the initiatory experiences and their incorporation in the wider narrative life-story …. [it goes on].

That sentence fails the “Who did what?” test. It could be revised as “Blank’s theory does XXX because YYY.”

But I think it deserves as Author’s Query to that effect, because I really cannot tell what the writer wishes to communicate here.

There is a verb, however. Several, in fact. We have something to work with. But what should be the main verb?

Glass of red wine time.

Pagan Perspectives on Marriage

Charlton Hall, a licensed marriage and family therapist and an American Druid, is conducting research on Pagan attitudes towards marriage.

You may take a short survey and register your opinion here. The link is in the box on the upper left.

Feel free to pass on this link to other blogs, forums, etc.

The ‘Sickness’ of Monotheism

Prompted to write on “Muslim-Christian relations” for the Washington Post’s “On Faith” section, Jason Pitzl-Waters changed the terms of the usual interfaith conversation and “spoke truth to power,” thus:

These events are the sad fruits of mixing raw social and political power with religions that operate on a exclusionary, one-true-path, basis. What you see in Iraq or Egypt is just the extreme and violent form of a sickness that has haunted history since the now-dominant monotheisms rose to prominence and power [emphasis added].

He then linked to his piece on Facebook and at his Wild Hunt blog.

Right away some concern troll pops up asking, “Of course, you don’t address why a fair number of Pagans, who belong to a supposedly tolerant and diverse community of non-monotheists, are also in the anti-Muslim camp.”

It’s all about [nasty Western] imperialism, you see.

Sure. Take Persia (Iran) for example, the center of a major empire for centuries. Then conquered by the Muslim Arabs in the eighth century, who killed off most of the native Zoroastrian priests and imposed Islam at the point of the sword. Reconquered by the Muslim Tamerlane, who piled up thousands of skulls whenever someone “questioned his authoritah.”

Seriously, I think we are in the “anti-Muslim camp” because we know well that thousands of Muslims want us either (a) converted to their One True Way or (b) dead. Those are your choices.

Look what happens when a “moderate” politician in Pakistan questions that country’s draconian anti-blasphemy laws, which make it criminal to say anything remotely bad about Islam—although you can insult Hindus, Christians, and, I suppose, even Wiccans to your heart’s content.

When he is murdered, his killer is a hero to lawyers (!) and to religious leaders. (Read the dead governor’s last Twitter here.)

I have to wonder, when you drive through Islamabad or Lahore, are there billboards?

Know a Blasphemer?

Call our confidential tip line: 1-8oo-OFF-HEAD

Allah will reward you (and so will the government)!

Is a thorough knowledge of blasphemy law a way to riches in the Pakistani legal profession, like being an expert in water law is here in Colorado?

• • •

One of my favorite scholars of new religious movements, Bob Ellwood, wrote a book late in his career called Cycles of Faith: The Development of the World’s Religions.

He set forth a sort of “lifespan development” theory of religion, in which all the biggies go through the same stages, even as humans go through infancy, childhood, adolescence, etc.

It seems too pat, but it’s appealing, at least when looking at Christianity and Islam.

Ellwood argues that Islam now is where Christianity stood in the 16th century, in the “reformation” stage. And that was the era of the witch trials and of religious wars up and down Europe with aftershocks that carried into the Americas and even followed European explorers and settlers into Africa and South Asia.

Islam, he argues “is in fact displaying many of the initial characteristics of the Reformation period in the history of a world religion. There is a response to secularizing trends, an inward fervor, the early desire to create an ideal society, the emergence of a new kind of elite.”  In this case, Islamic thinkers see decay in the Muslim world and blame it all on “the West” (and on the Jews, naturally).

So the concern troll above is just parroting that line: everything the matter in the Islamic world is the fault of “the West.”

Ultimately, Ellwood suggests, the blood-letting recedes, and we move into the era of Folk Religion, when a dominant religion becomes disconnected from the concerns of the political elites—except when convenient. That is where he places Western Christianity now.

I find the book interesting although I distrust Grand Intellectual Schemes. And I doubt that I will live long enough to see the end of the bloody Islamic “reformation,” which because I am a Western Pagan, represents a very real threat to my health and well-being if it comes too close.

Lucky for Jason Pitzl-Waters, there are no blasphemy laws in America, and the very fact that the Washington Post solicits his views shows that religion is not something we kill people over in America, usually.

Hard Times? Not for Hoodoo

People enter hoodoo through the door of suffering, to borrow a phrase from the Umbandistas.

The Wall Street Journal reports an uptick in the magic sector: “Need a Job? Losing your House? Who Says Hoodoo Can’t Help?”

In the early 20th century, white pharmacists in black neighborhoods began marketing hoodoo items through mail order after noticing they were fielding a lot of questions from their black customers about roots, herbs and potions. Their shops fell on hard times in the 1970s, in part because many African-Americans began to view hoodoo, also known as rootwork or conjure, as backward, say scholars who study the practice. “As African-Americans came more in the mainstream and more affluent, they were embarrassed by this stuff,” says Carolyn Morrow Long, author of  Spiritual Merchants,  a book about hoodoo stores.

Today’s hoodoo revival is again being driven primarily by white retailers, and that has some blacks criticizing the commercialization of ancient rituals for a quick profit. “Hoodoo is not just oh-help-me-bring-my-baby-back, help-me-get-my-man-back stuff,” says Katrina Hazzard-Donald, a Rutgers University sociology professor who is black and was taught hoodoo as a child. She says hoodoo stores are corrupting the spiritual belief system by selling inferior, nonsacred products and focusing on alleged quick fixes to problems. “What is so pathetic about it is they don’t even know the origins of all this stuff,” Ms. Hazzard-Donald says of online hoodoo vendors.

Among the businesses featured is the Forestville, Calif.-based Lucky Mojo Curio Co., which also figured in a recent journalistic book on magic in America. “I listened to your grandmother when you didn’t,” owner Catherine Yronwode tells her black customers—and, I suspect, Prof. Hazzard-Donald.

Don’t Mess with the Monk

Heather Abraham at Religion Nerd (in the sidebar) lists the most outrageous religion videos of 2010.

Included is the Christine O’Donnell “I’m not a witch” clip that prompted so many Wiccan responses and parodies. “Dabble-gate,” as Jason Pitzl-Waters calls it, also made it to number three on his top ten Pagan news stories of 2010 list.

But I agree with Abraham that the best video was a well-researched rap video based on Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, complete with reference to Philip of Hesse. Which is really fun if you are, in fact, a religion nerd.

Happy Crowleymass (in advance)

OTO Greeting CardIt is too late for Crowleymass this year, but if you want to be ready for next October 12th, order your cards through the Ordo Templi Orientis, New Zealand franchise.

Via Plutonica.

Wendy Griffin Named Cherry Hill Dean

Cherry Hill Seminary has named Wendy Griffin of California State University, LWendy Griffinong Beach as its new academic dean.

They made a good choice.

I have worked with Wendy for several years on  the American Academy of Religion’s Contemporary Pagan Studies steering committee, which she co-chaired from 2005-10.

She and I also worked as co-editors of the Pagan Studies book series when it was at Rowman & Littlefield, before CSULB made her chair of women’s studies and she felt that she had too much on her plate.

She is not only a scholar and mentor, but she knows the “business” of academia—how to get things done. I would not have accepted the position of Pagan Studies co-chair this year had she not agreed to remain “of counsel,” as the lawyers say, and tell me and Jone Salomonsen how to work the system.

From the Cherry Hill news release:

“I am thrilled, simply thrilled, that Wendy is coming aboard as our new Academic Dean!  I cannot think of a better person to lead Cherry Hill Seminary towards accreditation,” said Aline O’Brien, chair of the board of directors.  “At precisely the right time in the Seminary’s growth, Wendy brings her unique combination of academic rigor and priestesshood to serve our maturing Pagan movement.”

Wendy Griffin, Ph.D., is an academic by profession, and a sociologist by training, with a Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary social sciences. She is professor emerita and chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at California State University, Long Beach, where she has taught for 26 years.

Perhaps the first American academic to be openly Pagan, Wendy has published numerous academic articles on Pagan women’s groups and is the editor of Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity and Empowerment, a 13-essay survey of contemporary Feminist Witchcraft and Goddess Spirituality by British and American writers.  She is a founding co-chair of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group in the American Academy of Religion, and serves on the editorial board of Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies.

Griffin said of her appointment, “I am excited about being part of Cherry Hill Seminary and making a contribution to the growing reputation and professionalization of the Seminary. When I entered the academic world as a brand new Ph.D. 26 years ago, I had no idea I would be able to end my career helping to build an institution that would serve such a diverse and committed international community.”

As academic dean, Griffin will guide and direct the academic life of Cherry Hill Seminary, including work towards eventual accreditation of the institution.  “Wendy’s lifelong career experience will be invaluable as Cherry Hill Seminary continues to build and strengthen our program,” said Holli Emore, executive director.