The Emerging Scholars Blog

Last week I began a Chasing Wisdom series based up my Skype interview with Nathan Foster, Assistant Professor of Social Work, Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI.  In the first post, I focused upon how a private person, such as Nathan, wrote such an open book about his life, struggles, family, and vocation.

Nathan Foster and Tom Grosh IV Chat

Today, we’ll explore

1. becoming a wisdom chaser in higher education
2. discerning the call to higher education
3. being present to one’s family

Next week we’ll consider

1. power in the classroom from the perspective of the teacher
2. taking the first steps in teaching
3. how InterVarsity Christian Fellowship can journey with academics

And in case you were wondering, Nathan’s keeping an eye on the series and would love to respond to your comments. So please, take advantage of the opportunity!

Thomas B. Grosh IV:   What do academics chase? Is it wisdom?  Based on insights from your journey and that of your father’s, what would you say to encourage Emerging Scholars to become wisdom chasers?

Nathan Foster: Your question about education and wisdom is great. I worked at a place once and they didn’t like to hire people with advanced degrees.  And I said, “That’s crazy.  Why not?”  They thought [those with advanced degrees] become very arrogant and lost their ability to be teachable.  Don’t get me wrong education’s great and I’m a huge fan of it.  Personally I love to learn.  But it’s good for me to remember that there are potentially negative consequences from education.  We can get a little stuck up and we can lose some of our humility.  My wife calls it professoritis.  We tend to think that we’re right about things.  Now part of that comes from certain expectations.  When you’re teaching, people expect you to have the answers and they look to you to have the answers.  And so we get used to being right.  I’ve found it very seldom that students really challenge us on some of what we spout off.

I got a couple of good disciplines I try to practice to fight my professoritis. … Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, a physician challenged the PSU-Hershey Christian Medical Society to intentionally engage family during the selfish time of Medical School.  Although not currently a full time student, I too can become easily entangled in and distracted by perfecting must finish tasks, thereby taking away quality and quantity time with family and friends.  Father forgive me.

During the physician’s presentation, I was reminded how I often vie for the driver seat of my life and ministry instead of remaining in constant conversation with God.  Father forgive me.  Let me never forget to turn to you for my first and last thought of the day. As the physician reminded the PSU-Hershey Christian Medical Society, it takes intentionality to offer one’s whole life to the kingdom of God and to love/serve those He’s blessed us with the opportunity to be close to in family, local congregation, neighborhood, and vocation.  Father, may it be so for Emerging Scholars.

So as another year end approaches, join me in taking Thanksgiving to rejoice in God’s blessings.  And offer up distractions/difficult circumstances to God’s care instead of holding them close, potentially leading to waywardness and/or bitterness in 2010. I’d encourage you to take these next steps with me. …

1. Find a place of silence to pray through the deluge of concerns which so easily entangle and distract us in worship and time with family/friends.  Maybe this can occur for you during travel, shortly after you arrive to your destination, or near campus (if you’re not traveling).
2. Seek opportunities with family or friends over a Thanksgiving meal/conversation, a tea/meal during Thanksgiving break, and the Sunday meal before the term starts up again to share joys, distractions, and struggles. Have a family member or a friend hold you accountable to #3.
3. Dedicate the remainder of the year to God first and return to campus prepared to walk through the busy-ness of academic, cultural, familial, and social year end with a focus upon the Light of Christ as part of the Body of Christ (visit Bobby Gross: Living the Christian Year).

Looking for material to provide some direction for Thanksgiving?  This year I’ve found two selections from Christianity Today’s Holiday section particularly helpful, may they be a blessing to you.  Note:  If you have resources/testimonies to share, please do such.

1. Reflections: Thanksgiving, Classic and contemporary excerpts (one below):

Gratitude is the praise we offer
God: for teachers kind,
benefactors never to be forgotten,
for all who have advantaged me,
by writings, sermons, converse,
prayers, examples, for all these
and all others
which I know, which I know
not, open, hidden, remembered, and forgotten.

—Lancelot Andrewes in Heirlooms

2. Thanksgiving in the Midst of Fear: Seriously ill in the days of the Black Plague, poet John Donne still celebrated God’s goodness (Updated by Philip Yancey and introduced by Chris Armstrong | posted 8/08/2008 12:33PM).  Excerpt below. …

O most gracious God, on this sickbed I feel under your correction, and I taste of humiliation, but let me taste of consolation, too. Once this scourge has persuaded us that we are nothing of ourselves, may it also persuade us that you are all things unto us.

In a brief few hours you have shown me I am thrown beyond the help of man, so much so that the physician himself had to send for assistants. By that same light, let me see that no vehemence of sickness, no temptation of Satan, no guiltiness of sin, no prison of death—not this first, this sickbed, nor the other prison, the close and dark grave—can remove me from the determined and good purpose that you have sealed concerning me.

Welcome to this week’s Week in Review! If you have your own link or suggestion, please add it to the comments, or email it to Tom or Mike.

From Tom

Historic Bible pages put online (BBC News, July 6, 2009):  Check out “virtual re-unification” about 800 pages of the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript, i.e., the earliest surviving Christian Bible, at www.codexsinaiticus.org. Is it a The rival to the Bible (BBC News, Roger Bolton, October 6, 2008)?

Is Having More Than 2 Children an Unspoken Taboo? (Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/10/2009):   The article begins

By academic standards, Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum has it made. She is a full professor of bioengineering at Rice University, runs a thriving cancer-research laboratory, and is a member of the prestigious National Academy of Engineering.

But with four children at home, she sometimes feels like an academic outcast. In fact, Ms. Richards-Kortum says she is most comfortable in her dual roles as professor and mother during the research trips she takes several times a year to southern Africa.

“Here I’m this weird, freaky person because I have four kids,” she says in Houston. “There I can establish rapport and credibility with people because big families are much more common. It’s the only time I feel like it’s a real professional advantage.”

Ms. Richards-Kortum is one of a very small number of academic women with three, four, or more children. In academe, where having even one child can slow down success, trying to manage multiple kids can be a career-stopper.

The article ends with a number of tips on how to manage a big family and a big career. I asked a friend who has four kids and recently served as an adjunct professor at a major university for her thoughts on the topic.  Her comment, “Um, yes.  I don’t personally know anyone in academia with more than two children.”  How about you?  Do you know exceptions and if so, how do they navigate all the pressures and responsibilities of their position?

The Faculty of the Future:  Leaner, Meaner, More Innovative, Less Secure (Forum, Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/10/2009): demands more attention. I asked a business professor to comment on the Forum, below’s a glimpse.  Any first reactions?  More from my friend next week.

I have to agree with the third author (ANTHONY T. GRAFTON), unless there is a significant change in how knowledge is valued and expertise is assessed, the humanities are screwed.  However, it is possible that a collapsed job market will dissuade universities for focusing on “career value” (i.e. incremental salary increase in your next job) as their basis for why people should come to college.  If the focus moves back to education for the sake of being a better person, participant to society, better able to adapt to changes (i.e. long term) then there might be an increase recognition of the value of the humanities [but I wouldn't but your food money on this shift happening quickly].

PETER N. STEARNS says exactly what you would expect someone who has been a Full time Dean/Provost/Department Head for 20+ years to say.  (He was at CMU as Dean of H&SS in the mid-1990s).  The primary issue with his comments is the internal contradiction between saying that academic careers will be more home/family friendly and that there will be less facilities support for faculty (i.e. anyone who has tried to do writing or meetings from home know that this it is very difficult when there are children in the house), greater teaching loads at non-standard times (i.e. working two nights a week teaching an evening class – not so great for  family life), and a significantly greater emphasis on “productivity” (i.e. measurement of outcomes that an individual has only minimal control over – and hence a significant increase in uncertainty and stress – again, not so good for supporting family oriented folks).
Other than this he’s probably right…. :-)

From Mike

So You Want My Job: College Professor – The Art of Manliness continues of a series about (supposedly) dream jobs with an interview of Hunter Baker, Director of Strategic Planning, Assistant Provost, and Adjunct Faculty member at Houston Baptist University. If you are already a faculty member, I don’t think Hunter shares anything you don’t already know, but undergraduates or mid-career professionals who think that academia might be a good career choice might get some useful insight. Hunter has some practical advice about finding a job:

The job prospects differ tremendously based on your field. I think those who get their doctorates in professional fields like business or public administration will typically have a very good opportunity. I also believe the scientific and technical fields have good outlooks. My area, which is in the social sciences or the humanities depending on how you see it, is very competitive. People who study things like political science or history do it because they love it. The one thing that protects you in the job market is that there are lots of people who get as far as the ABD (all but dissertation), but far less who actually grab the brass ring.

If you do it, get your degree from an established institution. I would not recommend getting an online Ph.D. and then trying to find work. That is going to be an uphill battle. The situation may change, but right now it is the reality.

Fast Tracking a PhD – Can you finish a PhD in 3 years? Judy Beth Morris did, with some very careful planning, lots of motivation, and some luck. She admits that it’s not possible in all disciplines, but she shares some good advice about dissertation strategy:

It’s essential to zero in on a dissertation topic as soon in the process as you can. I figured out pretty quickly what I wanted to do with my dissertation; I had the first chapter by the end of my first semester. The professor of the film history class I took that first semester assured me that it was a worthwhile dissertation topic: the “extended adolescence” of Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy films and how and why the films resonated with Depression-era audiences. I knew that I would have fun researching this topic, so getting it done was not going to be a problem. Thus, the “dissertation topic” piece fell into place for me.

Another crucial piece of the puzzle involves working on the dissertation as part of your coursework. I was able finish the bulk of the work while I was taking classes because I chose my classes with the end project in mind: my goal was to use class papers as eventual chapters in the dissertation. This worked much better than I could have hoped; I seemed to choose just the right seminar classes with research paper assignments that would allow me to cover the different facets of my topic.

Take a look at the article, and let us know what you think. How realistic is it to finish a PhD in 3 years?

Charity in Truth – Pope Benedict XVI has released a new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, “Charity in Truth,” which offers a Christian perspective on economics and society. Here’s the NY Times’ article about it. I have not read the 144-page document, but I expect that there will many connections that one can make between Christians’ role in society and Christians’ role on campus, particularly in seeking the good of the campus and our local community. One passage jumped out as I skimmed the beginning:

To love someone is to desire that person’s good and to take effective steps to secure it. Besides the good of the individual, there is a good that is linked to living in society: the common good. It is the good of “all of us”, made up of individuals, families and intermediate groups who together constitute society. It is a good that is sought not for its own sake, but for the people who belong to the social community and who can only really and effectively pursue their good within it. To desire the common good and strive towards it is a requirement of justice and charity. To take a stand for the common good is on the one hand to be solicitous for, and on the other hand to avail oneself of, that complex of institutions that give structure to the life of society, juridically, civilly, politically and culturally, making it the pólis, or “city”. The more we strive to secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbours, the more effectively we love them.

Are there implications for our common life on campus?

Tomorrow, I’m leaving for our Midwest Faculty Conference, featuring John Sommerville as our plenary speaker. (Check out my quick review of his book, The Decline of the Secular University, as well as his latest essay in the Chronicle, “Universities Are Corporatized Because They Are Secularized”.) Since starting these summer faculty conferences a few years ago, we’ve tried to make them times of refreshment – for both faculty and their entire family. Our planning team even coined a new word for these events – confamication:

This event encompasses much more than the word conference can possibly contain, so a new word has been added to the lexicon. “Confamication” captures the fact of it being a stimulating conference, a restful vacation, which can both include and be a delight to the whole family. And it is a welcoming place for singles, couples and children as well.

Unfortunately, not all of academia shares this attitude that the “good life” includes rest, spiritual refreshment, and time with families and children. Lisa Belkin, who writes the Motherlode blog for the New York Times, recently published a heart-breaking letter from a young graduate student who, faced with an unexpected, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, has decided to have an abortion so that she can complete her degree. The decision was far from easy – you can hear her agony in her letter to Belkin. Explicit and implicit pressures from her graduate program were a major factor in her decision. Here’s how she described her sitaution: Read the rest of this entry »

There is a good blog post at Inside Higher Ed today about the struggle between commitment to a particular place and the realities of the academic job climate. Dana Campbell writes that she and her husband (both from the West Coast) assumed that their time on the East Coast would be temporary, and that even their faculty appointments in Maryland would be short. She continues: Read the rest of this entry »