The Emerging Scholars Blog

Sometimes, we all need help from the "hand of God."

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1. Faith and Freedom (Inside Higher Ed, June 9): Our brothers and sisters to the north are facing an interesting debate. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (the largest Canadian faculty association) has begun a campaign to “investigate” colleges and universities that require faculty to sign statements of faith, claiming that statements of faith are inherently inconsistent with academic freedom. Christian Higher Education Canada, an association of 33 Christian institutions (including Mike’s graduate alma mater) has responded with a call to discuss exactly what is meant by “academic freedom.”  CAUT’s position is clear:

“Nothing that calls itself a university should have a faith test. That’s just not acceptable.”

As we’ve seen in the CLS v. Martinez case, conflicts between secular and religious visions for education are here to stay for a while.

2.  Faculty Burnout Has Both External and Internal Sources, Scholar Says (Audrey Williams June, Chronicle, 6/9/2010).  Tom: I agree with the comment that more research is needed in this area.  I’d like to see a copy of Janie Crosmer’s paper. A short quote from her interview:

Q. What are the key things that contribute to faculty burnout?

A. Lack of time, poorly prepared students, cumbersome bureaucratic rules, high self expectations, unclear institutional expectations, and low salary. Research shows that the sources of stress have remained unchanged for 25 years. We know about the problem, but we’re not doing anything about it.

Any thoughts on whether academic burnout is unique?

Photo: Lego recreation of Diego Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” goal from the 1986 World Cup. From a series of Lego versions of famous photos by Balakov on Flickr. HT: Alan Jacobs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you have a set of must reads which you believe should lie at the foundation/base of a college education (i.e., American college education), no matter the institution, e.g., Christian college/university, community college, engineering/tech school (e.g., Carnegie Mellon University or MIT), Ivy League, liberal arts college, state university?  If so, what are they and why?  Below’s a recent email from a faculty friend regarding his alma mater, Harvard.

it’s sad but the harvard faculty could never approve anything like the “great books” program…they could never have a coherent view of what education is about, now that the “veritas” of the old harvard has been removed…a cafeteria approach is all that could reach a consenus in the recent revision of the general education requirements…they couldn’t agree or approve the wonderful suggestion of requiring one course in “faith and reason”  (broad guidelines, could even be taught by an atheist)…but too many faculty fussed and worried about any courses that involved that sloppy, unscientific thing called “faith”…St. Johns is one school that does have a “great books” program as the foundation of their liberal arts curriculum…and another school “st. thomas aquinas” (i think that’s the name) also has a similar curriculum…and the conservative “hillsdale college ” in michigan has a coherent liberal arts foundation (freshman take either greek or latin)…. [Follow-up email] … columbia university’s substantial, coherent core curriculum…harvard faculty would  never approve this  old-fashioned approach…consensus is impossible with them…  http://www.college.columbia.edu/core

In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (HarperCollins, 2005), Swarthmore Professor Barry Schwartz takes a few pages to highlight Shopping for Knowledge (pp.14-17):

1. the loss of general education requirements, in particular the capstone course which was intended to teach students how to use their college education to live a good and an ethical life, both as individuals and as members of society and 2. the purchasing of goods such as classes and degrees. … Now students are required to make choices about education that may affect them the rest of their lives. And they are forced to make these choices at a point in their intellectual development when they may lack the resources to make them intelligently.

Upon reflection, my education at Grove City College (1992-1996) began with a class to set the tone for college education but lacked a capstone course.  Furthermore, the core curriculum sought to teach values over the course of several years (6 classes, 1 per term for the first three years) drawing from compilations of readings and Building a Christian Worldview (W. Andrew Hoffecker, editor, P&R Publishing, 1986. Note:  written by a cross-disciplinary faculty team from the college).  Although there was not a focus upon the great books providing the core of College Education, the Good Book (i.e., the Bible) was given significant attention in all the classes (Note:  One of the core classes was a Bible overview).

Back to the question, do you have a set of must reads which you believe should lie at the foundation/base of a general college education (in the United States of America)?

And I guess that I have raised a second question, if must reads are not the center of a core curriculum are there certain principles at the foundation/base of a general college education (in the United States of America)?  Or is a core curriculum only possible in unique educational settings and the ability to assume a college graduate has read or considered certain materials a thing of the past (or possibly one that was only fulfilled in an ideal, distant past)?

This article has been sitting in my “guilt file” for a while. Last fall, Dan Edelstein wrote in Inside Higher Ed about the decline of foreign language requirements, leading off with this anecdote about a famous multilinguist:

When the young François-Marie Arouet was a student at the Jesuit collège Louis-le-Grand in 18th-century Paris, he spent many of his classroom hours studying Latin, along with a little ancient Greek. Had he ventured over to the nearby Collège Royal, today the Collège de France, he could have also taken lessons in Hebrew, Arabic, or Syriac. During a subsequent two-year stay in England, Arouet made it a priority to learn English; he would later pick up Italian. Upon his return, he published the Letters Concerning the English Nation (subsequently renamed the Lettres philosophiques), a founding text of the French Enlightenment, which established its author’s reputation as the philosophe called Voltaire.

Of course, Voltaire is hardly the only great thinker with a command of multiple languages. A quick survey of important Christian writers in English of the 20th century reads like a mini-MLA convention:

• C. S. Lewis – Medievalist who studied Latin and Greek as a boy and wrote criticism on French and Italian literature
• J. R. R. Tolkien – Philologist who translated works of Old and Middle English and Anglo-Saxon, learned Latin, French, and German as a boy, and, if his Wikipedia entry is to be believer, knew at least 21 other languages, not counting those he invented
• Dorothy Sayers – Translated works of Italian and French
• T. S. Eliot – Learned Latin, Greek, French and German in grade school, and later studied Sanskrit at Harvard, of all things

These writers have lots in common, but is there something important to be gained — by Christians, not just in general — from the study of languages? Is there something beyond the many other benefits of learning other languages that awaits Christians who make the effort? And, conversely, is there something that American Christians are in danger of losing because of our country’s infamous lack of language training?

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to  Tom or Mike.

1. Mike will write a longer post about this on Monday, but Bruce Waltke’s departure from Reformed Theological Seminary – following his appearance in a video posted on the Biologos Foundation’s website – has been making big news.  (In case you don’t follow Biblical studies, Waltke has been a leading OT scholar for decades.) More links to come on Monday, but Scot McKnight tipped me off to Michael Bird’s discussion, not just of Waltke’s situation, but other OT scholars who have left institutions because of conflicts over historicity.

2. Wired Campus: Lehigh Professor Advertises Course on YouTube (Mary Helen Miller, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/15/2010).  What do you think about this idea, click here to see the video.  Is it transferable to classes beyond journalism and social media?  Do you envision competition for students?  How does this mix with posting other YouTube material, i.e., should one choose to a solid line between public and private identity when providing posts?  Is it helpful/appropriate to have family or religious video under the same identity/name?

3.  Join us in prayer for the Ohio State University (OSU) Price of Life which begins on Sunday, April 18.  Click here for The Three Events which will Change History.  Note: More activities are listed under the schedule under the header About the Price of Life. For Emerging Scholars at OSU and in the area, don’t miss Price of Life Seminar on Human Trafficking: What Difference can a Fledgling Scholar Make? by Dr. Wayne Barnard, International Justice Mission.  For Emerging Scholars on other campuses, consider exploring this topic and other materials found in the website.

4. The Chronicle recently devoted an entire issue of the Chronicle Review to the problems facing graduate education in the humanities. Most of it is behind a paywall, but check out Katherine Polak’s “Letter from a Graduate Student in the Humanities.”(And, of course, you can compare the Chronicle‘s coverage with our own series, “Why Get a PhD in the Humanities.”)

5. German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas has written a new book, An Awareness of What’s Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, in which he tempers his previous judgment of religion and admits that religion isn’t going away any time soon. Stanley Fish reviews the book, and Chelsea Carlson reviews Fish’s review at the Harvard Ichthus’s Fish Tank blog, and both find Habermas’ treatment of religion as ultimately lacking. From Fish:

As Norbert Brieskorn, one of Habermas’s interlocutors, points out, in Habermas’s bargain “reason addresses demands to the religious communities” but “there is no mention of demands from the opposite direction.” Religion must give up the spheres of law, government, morality and knowledge; reason is asked only to be nice and not dismiss religion as irrational, retrograde and irrelevant.

Once again, a discussion of the relationship between “faith” and “reason” fails to bring up Douglas Sloan’s Faith and Knowledge. Sloan’s book analyzes the (failed) student and faculty ministries of mainline Protestantism between the 1930′s and 1970′s, and identifies a key factor in their collapse as the rejection of religion as a true area of knowledge fit for inclusion in the university.

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1. Peace is Patriotic: Anabaptists and the National Anthem (By Duane Shank, Sojourners, 3/3/2010): Did you attend a college sporting event where the national anthem of the host country was not played? Goshen College, a residential Christian liberal arts college rooted in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, has just started to play an instrumental version and it’s caused quite a stir. For Goshen’s perspective visit National anthem dialogue and implementation to continue at Goshen College (Press Release by President Jim Brenneman, 2/17/2010). Are they becoming conservative Christian or enculturated/liberal as they seek to be hospitable to guest teams?  HT:  Fred.

2.  Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature & Culture by ESN member Madelaine Hron (assistant professor in the Department of English and Film at Wilfrid Lauriern University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) has just been has been shortlisted for the prestigious The Raymond Klibansky Prize, for Best Book in the Humanities published in Canada. For more on the nomination click here.  For ESN’s 1/22/2009 pre-release author interview visit here.

3. What do younger faculty want? According to Harvard’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), they don’t want long hours, constant mobility, or career success at the expense of a good family and personal life (Chronicle, March 4). This is based on interviews with 16 “Generation X” faculty members at a variety of schools.  The full report can be downloaded from COACHE’s website as a PDF.

4. The State of the Humanities: Inside Higher Ed reports the latest results of the Humanities Departmental Survey.  The full report warrants closer reading, but IHE’s summary echoes earlier articles from ESN about the state of the humanities:

At a time when many humanities professors are worried about the future of the tenure track, the data in the report will only add to those concerns — especially because it predates the freezes on tenure-track hiring that have been instituted at so many colleges. Generally, the fields that have the highest percentages of tenured faculty members are among the smallest disciplines. And while the percentages vary, use of non-tenure-track faculty members is significant throughout. Further, the data back up a point made increasingly by activists for adjuncts: that significant numbers of academics are working full time, off the tenure track.

5. Alan Jacobs Makes Mike Jealous: Maybe it’s a bad idea to get a PhD in the humanities, but Alan Jacobs (English, Wheaton) recently reminded me [Mike] why I have always loved the scholarly study of literature.  On his New Atlantis blog Text Patterns, Jacobs recently reported the completion of his latest book project, a new critical edition of W. H. Auden’s important long poem The Age of Anxiety. Jacobs writes:

I have worked as hard on this project as I have ever worked on anything, and at the moment I am pleased and proud. There’s something especially rewarding about doing all this work — visiting libraries and archives, working through vast tracts of mostly useless materials, trying to decipher Auden’s terrible handwriting, comparing multiple editions of the poem, reading much of what Auden read as he wrote the poem, carefully marking up the typescript in order to preserve the poem’s intricate formatting — not for the sake of my own critical reputation, but in order to make the work of a poet I love more useful and accessible and comprehensible. I can truly call this a labor of love. But boy, am I tired.

If my GRE were up-to-date, I would have sent off three applications by the end of that paragraph. The book will be published later this year by Princeton UP, I assume as part of their Auden critical editions series.

Bonus:

Donald Kraybill, PhD, (highlighted in Amish Grace & Pop Culture) teaches on The Upside Down Kingdom.

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1. Alan Jacobs’ Grad School Thoughts: Should you go to grad school? “Probably not,” writes Alan Jacobs, Wheaton English professor and author of Original Sin, The Narnian, A Theology of Reading, and many other excellent things.  But if you insist, he’s got some good advice. (Also check out Alan’s contribution to our ESN article, “Why Get a PhD in the Humanities?”)

2.  James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom ties for OUR MOST AUDACIOUS CLAIM: THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK OF THE YEAR with Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft:  An Inquiry Into the Value of Work in Best Books of 2009 Part I by Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds Bookstore.  Take a few minutes to review the list, keep an eye out for two more parts going up next week, and let us know what books you’re interested in discussing this year.

3.  In The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (W.W. Norton, 2010), Louis “Menand asks four questions: Why is it so hard to create a general-education curriculum? Why have the humanities undergone a crisis of legitimacy? Why has ‘interdisciplinarity’ been seen—and ultimately failed—as a magic wand? Why do professors share the same politics?” — Oxygenating Academe: The Unpublic Intellectual (By Karen J. Winkler, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 10, 2010)

4.  ‘Baby Einstein’ Founder Goes to Court (By Tamar Lewin, NY Times, January 12, 2010):  Raises the question of access to and reproducibility of research in relationship to marketing and consumer concerns.  Do you know anyone who watched or advocated Baby Einstein?

5. Proof (or at least Evidence) That Mentoring Matters (by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed): A study presented the American Economic Association’s annual meeting found that mentoring had a significant impact on the number of grants and publications for female economists.

Before we get too far into 2010, let’s take a look back at our top posts for 2009, in terms of total hits. Posts from early in the year dominate because they’ve had more time to accumulate visits, but it might be good to revisit some posts you might have missed the first time around.

Photo credit: Optical illusion via Flickr

1. What’s the purpose of the university? — Wendell Berry on the university.
2. Why get a PhD in the Humanities? — Why, indeed?
3. Linguistics and Faith — Reflections on the work of a former Christian linguist.
4. Your Mind Matters 1: Mindless Christianity — The first post of our summer book club on John Stott’s classic.
5. Wendell Berry on the University — Yep, more Wendell Berry.
6. Well-Known Atheist Converts to Christianity — My April Fool’s Day post. Sincere apologies to all who were rickrolled.
7. End the University as We Know It — Conversation about a NY Times’ editorial on the future (or lack thereof) of the university.
8. Reading Lists and Primary Literature — What are the fundamental texts of your discipline?
9. Preparing for the Lenten Journey — Tom provides some resources for observing Lent.
10. Keys of Thriving (Not Just Surviving!) — Like the title says.

And two bonus posts that might be in our top 10 next year: your picks for best books for undergrads and my interview with Bobby Gross about his book, Living the Christian Year.

Two recent articles on the profession of education worth consideration:

1. In Search of Education Leaders, by Bob Herbert, NY Times Op-Ed, December 4, 2009
2. The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal, by Louis Menand, Harvard Magazine, November-December 2009.  HT: Miller.

Anyone willing to take a stab at why the educational system is so leaky and how we find/develop educational leaders which serve their department, discipline, campus, education in the United States/beyond?

Questions which come to mind with the Harvard degree program, topic of In Search of Education Leaders, “Will this program include the philosophy, purpose, and joy of education? Or are these unable to be expressed in the pragmatic, secular context of trying to keep up because we need to?”  With regard to ‘residency’ models, these already exist in education, e.g., the undergraduate student teacher model. Stronger cross-grade & inter-generational mentoring with the potential for long term relationships would profit the whole educational system.

HT:  Nick who responded to my Facebook musings by referring to Diane Rehm’s discussion of Women in Science with

1. Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, Morris Hertzein Professor of Biology and Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Blackburn was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Carol Greider and Jack W. Szostak.
2. Dr. Carol Greider, Daniel Nathans Professor of Molecular Biology & Genetics at The Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Greider was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak.
3. Melody Barnes, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and special assistant to President Obama

Yes, higher education is leaky pipeline for women in the sciences.  Any responses by those part of the system?

According to Louis Menand in The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal, the educational system is leaky in quite another way for the Humanities, but with a particular internal end in mind. Can/should higher education in the Humanities add practical skills and develop a specific graduation time line?  What about those who went through the system? Will they allow such changes (Note: Reminds me of the reduction of hours in medical training)?  Will the motivation for students in the Humanities become the pursuit and exploration of knowledge for the rich or those seeking direction later in life?  Even though the article seems focused upon the Humanities, especially English, does the article apply to all (or let’s say most) of higher education?

Campus Map

Does your choice of undergraduate major affect your religious faith? Inside Higher Ed recently reported on a study by Miles S. Kimball, Colter M. Mitchell, Arland D. Thornton and Linda C. Young-Demarco, all of U. Michigan, that asked that very question. Using data from the long-running Monitoring the Future study, Kimball et al. tracked the religiosity of college students (based on how frequently they attended religious services and how important they viewed religion in their lives, along with some secondary indicators) to see how their choice of college major affected them.

Photo: Campus map of Minnesota St.-Moorhead by xavierla, via Flickr. Did you ever choose a class based on how close it was to your dorm or parking lot? I never did, I swear.

What did they find? In (very) brief,

• Education or Business major increased religiosity.
• Humanities or Social Sciences major decreased religiosity.
• Biological or Physical* Sciences major had no effect on religiosity.

*Physical science majors showed a decrease in how important they viewed religion, but no change in how often they attended services. Biological sciences had no effect on religiosity. Read the rest of this entry »

This is our weekly post of links, resources, and articles that would be helpful to ESN members. If you’d like to contribute something, please suggest it in the comments, or send it directly to either Tom or Mike.

Update on the ESN Book Club: We’ve moved the dates back for our discussions to give you more time to order and start reading John Stott’s Your Mind Matters. The discussions will now start June 9. Read all the details here.

From Tom

Psychology Grad Students Get Counseled on How to Teach:  Below are a few suggestions, do they apply to all fields?  Are there key truths missing? Read the rest of this entry »