The Emerging Scholars Blog

This is the last of four interviews I conducted at February’s Jubilee conference. Alissa Wilkinson has a professional life that probably looks like a lot of ESN members: in addition to editing The Curator for International Arts Movement, she also teaches writing at The King’s College and serves as Associate Editor for Comment, not to mention her various columns and articles in other publications. I spoke with Alissa about vocation, balance, and life as a writer, editor, and teacher.

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Micheal Hickerson: One of the reasons I wanted to interview you because of all the different things that you are doing that relate to the same general vocation and calling. I think that’s a pretty common thing among ESN members and among people in academic or cultural fields, and it’s becoming more common. First of all, I wanted to ask you about the publications that you are connected with. You were the founding editor for the Curator, which is published by International Arts Movement. There is also Comment, where you are the —

Alissa Wilkinson: I am the associate editor.

MH: Let’s talk about the Curator. Why did you decide to start that magazine and what was the origin story for it?

AW: I’ve been connected with the International Arts Movement in different capacities pretty much since I’ve moved to the city, which was about four and half years ago. I had been going to their head morning meetings in Tribeca, and we had a discussion group. Several of my good friends who are now on staff with me were also going to that group, and we got to talking about how good it would be for IAM to be putting something out there into the cultural sphere that was an example of promoting good work, which was where the idea of the Curator came in.

One morning over breakfast we just had this idea, “Hey, we should do an online magazine. I mean how hard can that be?” We decided the point of it should be to curate culture in such a way that we are looking to promote good culture that might otherwise be overlooked, because magazines like, on one hand, The New Yorker and The Atlantic tend to be very good at writing good cultural criticism and then on the other hand, there are Christian publications that do the same thing. They mainly focus on what’s broader in culture — either pop culture or high culture — but things that people are already talking about. The idea was let’s also write about things that people might not be talking about.

Photo credit: Anna L Conti via Flickr

In that way, it fit with the idea of IAM as a local movement more than just something that was from New York. I have writers all over the country — actually all over the world — and I encourage them to seek out what is interesting in their area, like a small band that they love, or their friends’ work, or something like that. Maybe they find a book in the library that was published 25 years ago and think, “I can’t believe nobody has read this book.” The concept was to publish culture essays that had a personal bend that would help uncover good culture.

I started recruiting some writers, and Kevin Gosa who works here at IAM with me started recruiting some writers he knew, and between the two of us we got up quite a list. We launched on August 29, 2008. Since then we’ve published three essays continually every week, and we’ve added a lot of writers. We are hatching plans of maybe some blogs, I am not sure yet, but it’s been a good experience. I’ve been handling most of the work on that end. I am trying to get some coworkers to come on and help with some of the scheduling and I have an assisting editor who helps me proofread.

Everyone volunteered their time up until about this time last year and now we get to pay them a little. It’s been good and we’ve gotten a lot of buzz. Actually, I was surprised we’ve gotten links from Book Forum and from Kottke, which is pretty well known. People seem to be resonating with the idea. Read the rest of this entry »

Great question.  Do you resonate with the response Rachel Toor received from a graduate class in physical education?

When we were wrapping up, I asked them a question: “What is your relationship to reading and writing?” At that moment, they morphed from T-shirt-clad physical specimens and became generic graduate students, indistinguishable from all-in-black, cigarette-smoking studiers of literary theory and bearded-and-geeky future scientists. It’s all we do, they wailed, and it’s hard. … The journal articles he makes us read (they said, directing accusing fingers at my colleague) are dense and boring. We’re getting good information, but it can be painful. And, they said, we have to learn to write like that. — Rachel Toor, Bad Writing and Bad Thinking, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/15/2010.

What do you think about Toor’s thoughts on the topic?

No, I said, you don’t. … In 1946 he [George Orwell] wrote “Politics and the English Language,” an essay that explains the connections between bad writing and bad thinking as well as the political consequences: “Modern [insert the word "academic" here] English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional [or scholarly] writers.”

By writing prose that is nearly unintelligible not just to the general public, but also to graduate students and fellow academics in your discipline, you are not doing the work of advancing knowledge. And, honestly, you don’t really sound smart. I understand that there are ideas that are so difficult that their expression must be complex and dense. But I can tell you, after years of rejecting manuscripts submitted to university presses, most people’s ideas aren’t that brilliant.

Call me simple-minded, call me anti-intellectual, but I believe that most poor scholarly writing is a result of bad habits, of learning tricks of the academic trade as a way to try to fit in. And it’s a result of lazy thinking. Most of us know that we may not be writing as well as we could, or should. Many academics have told me that they suspect they are bad writers but don’t know how to get better. They are often desperate for help. I tell them to reread Strunk and White, and to take a look at “Politics and the English Language.” Yeah, yeah, they say, and get buried working toward the next submission deadline, prepping for the next class. … — Rachel Toor, Bad Writing and Bad Thinking, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/15/2010.

Taking a step back to consider the bigger picture:

• How much attention do you give to reading and writing about your faith?
• What habits have you formed toward the end of good thinking and good writing?
• What encouragement/resources have you found a blessing in the development of these habits?
• How often and well do you articulate your faith among you colleagues?
• What resources/opportunities do you desire the Emerging Scholars Network to offer to assist you in the above areas?  Note:  If you have not already done such, please review Suggested ESN Readings from Urbana 09.

Our Week-in-Review feature has a new format.  We know there’s way too much to read out there already, so we’re going to be highlighting the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week.  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.

A Better Pencil – Inside Higher Ed interviews Dennis Baron, author of A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. It’s a history of writing implements in the digital age, and Barron provides some insights into how our media affect our messages. For example, in his class on the history of writing, he sometimes uses an exercise in which his students have to write on modeling clay – very old-school.

Photo credit: 2careless via Flickr

One indisputable sign of that postmodern Stalinism is the revival of the idea of the great Russian nation, which Stalin had recognized as the most important achievement of the czars. “The Russian czars did a great deal that was bad,” Stalin noted at a famous toast on November 7, 1937, at the height of the terror. “But they did one thing that was good — they amassed an enormous state,” he went on. “We have inherited that state.” — Postmodern Stalinism: Revisionist histories help revive his reputation in Russia (Jonathan Brent, Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/21/2009).

According to  John F. Burness, Study Abroad Is Often Not All It Should Be (Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/21/2009).  Have you taken advantage of the surge in studying/teaching in other countries? If so, how have you found it to be of educational value and on what grounds would you recommend it to the next generation of scholars?

How have you responded to the controversy raised by The seven deadly sins of the academy (Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education, 9/17/2009)?  Tom found the editor’s comment, in which Ann Mroz highlights that she is a woman and a feminist with a sense of humour who supports academic freedom and the right to free speech, perplexing.  How do you have conversation about the seven deadly sins without a shared moral framework?  Is it just a shouting match, even the part about being open?

Terence Kealey was asked to write on the theme of “the seven deadly sins of academe”. He was explicitly asked for a “lighthearted” or “wry” piece, and we suggested the topic of “lust”, which was a “sin” identified by a straw poll of academics; it was not Dr Kealey’s own suggested topic. Dr Kealey’s article was satire. I fully support his right to express himself in this way. If people are offended, that is their right and they also have the right to express that.

If we cannot have freedom of speech and robust debate in the academy where can we have it?

Nine Famous Workspaces – The personal productivity website Lifehacker has been focusing on workspaces all week, and this post shows off workspaces of some famously productive people: Al Gore, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and so on. No academic workspaces are included in this post, unfortunately, but it’s still an interesting peek at others’ working lives.

Bonus: Don’t forget to order your copy of George Marsden’s Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Amazon, Abebooks, B&N, WorldCat).  We’ll be discussing it in October for our 2nd ESN Book Club.

Norman Borlaug’s Nobel Prize Lecture – The death of Borlaug, one of the founders of the Green Revolution, sparked numerous tributes (NY Times, WSJ, Guardian). Gregg Easterbrook in the WSJ estimates that Borlaug’s agricultural work has saved more than 1 billion lives and counting. Leave it to GetReligion, however, to highlight the link between his Lutheran roots and his agricultural work. In his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, Borlaug cites Genesis 41, Isaiah 8 and Isa. 35, Joel 1, and Amos 4 as justification for both his work and his hope in its success. [It reminds me of Walter Bradley's work that won the Bosscher-Hammond Prize at Following Christ. ~ Mike]

The Game of Ghost Writing – Doug Lederman at Inside Higher Ed reviews a couple of new studies that examine the practice of scientific “ghost writing”: journal articles written by pharmaceutical companies or other corporate interests but published under the names of academics who had little to nothing to do with the research. (Mike’s note: I agree with the commenter who observes that “ghost writing” is hardly the term for this practice.)

Maimonides on Trustworthy Sources (Harper’s) – Reader David O’Hara sent us this great quote from Jewish medieval philosopher Maimonides.

More on the challenge of humility.  What does it mean “to serve” and “put the interest of others” ahead of one’s own in the context of higher education?  Bearing the Burden reviews some recent posts on how

the service burdens are unfairly distributed, falling mainly on academic do-gooders, “who work hardest for the institution” yet “reap the fewest material benefits because they publish at a slower pace.” … academic do-gooders need to learn to just say no. … “those of us who overwork are covering up for and enabling those who under perform. Most universities have no mechanism for forcing tenured people teach better, teach more, show up at office hours, give students responsible advice about their program of study, or do the committee work they have been assigned” – Gabriela Montell, Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/18/2009.

Lots of provoking material in Academic Bait-and-Switch, Part 2 (Henry Adams, Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/15/2009).

1. Freshman disinterested in reading, mastering the basics of writing sentences, and earning their grades as the “interesting distinctions between the worldviews of freshmen and graduate students at Elite National U.”
2. A summary of the graduate student’s encounter with a parent over the “F” he had awarded their son.
3. The final sentence of the essay reads, “If the Blunts didn’t want their son taught by a TA, I wondered why they sent him to Elite National U, but I thought it wise to keep that to myself.”

[Editor's note: This is a new weekly feature from your blog contributors. Each week, we'll be posting articles, books, news, etc., that Tom, Mike, and the ESN community have been pondering. If you have a book or article you'd like us to add to next week's Review, add it in the comments or send it to either Mike or Tom. Thanks!]

The Harvard disadvantage – The Boston Globe takes a very personal look at students from poor backgrounds at Harvard and their struggles to fit in with the children of privilege.

In the Chronicle, Audrey Williams June provides two looks at the changing world of tenure: a report on the rapid decrease of tenure-track instructors (73% of instructors, including graduate assistants, are now off the tenure track) and a profile of St. John’s 2008 decision to move 20 contingent writing instructors to tenure-track positions.

A few weeks ago, Inside Higher Ed published this advice on managing large writing projects from John Gastil. I (Mike) am working on a large writing project myself at the moment, and plan to take Gastil’s advice about outlining, scheduling, and setting deadlines.

A fine tuned universe? At Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog, RJS (a science professor) reviews some high profile opinions on the Anthropic Principle.

From the community

Dave Snoke submitted this very interesting article from the UK, about an Oxford researcher, Justin Barrett, who claims that belief in God (or at least, a god) is ” built into the natural development of children’s minds,” not something learned from the culture around them.

Books

N.T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision (InterVarsity Press, 2009). Here’s a quote to ponder:

“Knowing God for oneself, as opposed to knowing or thinking about him, is at the heart of Christian living. Discovering that God is gracious, rather than a distant bureaucrat or a dangerous tyrant, is the good news that constantly surprises and refreshes us. But we are not the center of the universe. God is not circling around us. We are circling around him. It may look, from our view, as though “me and my salvation” are the be-all and end-all of Christianity. Sadly, many people — many devout Christians! — have preached that way and lived that way. This problem is not peculiar to the churches of the Reformation. It goes back to the high Middle Ages in the Western church, and infects and affects Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative, high and low church alike. But a full reading of Scripture itself tells a different story. God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world.” — pp.23-24.

I apologize for not posting for quite some time.  But I have a good excuse as our family’s experiencing the explosive growth of a willful three year old who not only tirelessly explores but also agressively competes with a newborn and 8 year old twins for attention.  

Although my wife and I rejoice in our three year old’s overcoming of a number of developmental delays, we weren’t ready for so much to happen at the same time.  Further reflection offers that trying to do a fair amount of work at home in our kitchen area, which became a habit with the birth of our fourth child in June, creates a difficult atmosphere to accomplish tasks requiring longer periods of concentration.  Does anyone else live/work in a similar scenerio?  If so, how do you find the time and the ability focus to keep up with higher education’s continual demand for writing, presentations, and lectures? 

I’ll bet a few of you who don’t have families or kids face issues in finding the time and the ability to focus upon the materials required from you.  Please share a little about your context and how you try to address the obstacles which you face. 

BTW, I’ve been encouraged to set aside a time to write/prepare materials and not let anything violate it.  In addition, I’ve retired to the basement office with my hot chocolate for a lock down of sorts until lunch, which I’ll inevitably eat quite late as I get into extended periods of thought and composition.  So here I am getting the task done.  At least this one time ;-)