On Shunning in the Academy

On October 17, 1981 my Dad committed suicide by placing a revolver in his mouth, pointing it upward toward his brain, and pulling the trigger. Not surprisingly, this event constituted a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in the lives of his wife and children. I was eighteen years old at the time and in my second year of university (my first year at York University in Toronto). I thought for the longest time that I had also died.

I think it is not possible to trace with any degree of precision the exact causes of complex human choices like the decision to take one’s own life. It is possible, however, to consider the array of conditions that might make such a choice seem necessary. And for my Dad, certainly, one such condition (not the only condition, but one among many) was the state of his relationships with the college in which he had spent the most of his working life as a faculty member, a department chair, a musician, a teacher, and a scholar.

The year was 1981. At that time, the State of Pennsylvania had a mandatory retirement age of sixty-five for all state employees. And so my Dad had received a letter from the State informing him that he would have to retire at the close of the 1981-1982 academic year. To say this letter was brusque would be to understate the matter to the point of absurdity. There was nothing in the letter that would have signified the quality of his contributions to his institution, department, or to his students. There was no gesture of thanks for his years of service nor was there any indication that he had left a legacy of learning that would ever be acknowledged or appreciated by the institution or by his colleagues.

In the two years preceding my Father’s death, his Department was in a state of conflict – a bitter feud the magnitude of which might be unthinkable outside the academy. Inside the academy, I suspect, most of us know what this kind of battle looks like, feels like, and how it insinuates into even the most mundane activities of academic life. Within his department, my Dad was systematically isolated, vilified, and actively shunned. There were rumors after his death that members of his department had actively solicited students to harass my Dad (hot-gluing his office door lock, for example). It is not rumor, but fact that my Dad received anonymous hate mail attacking his teaching, his credentials as a musician, the quality of his performances, and – just to make very sure he understood how deeply he was hated – his ability to make love to his wife. It is not clear who sent those letters. To me the maliciousness of the letters seems self-evident. Whatever my Dad had done as Chair, as a teacher, as a musician nothing, it seems to me, could have merited such treatment.

Often in our University (and at colleges and universities across the country, I am convinced) our battles are waged at a pitch of intensity that the issues hardly seem to merit. And at times, we battle over matters that do seem tremendously important, but our tactics seem to me to be aimed not so much toward facilitating transformation as at destroying one another. When this is the case, I suggest that we are no longer struggling in service of principles and practices, philosophies, or equitable working conditions, but for domination and control. These battles take on a pornographic quality in which explicit submission becomes the object of desire.

My Father’s case is an extreme one – demonstrating the logics of academic conflict extended to their most horrific conclusions. The end is, perhaps, unusual, but the ways of thinking and being, the convictions about the legitimacy of causes, the degrees of certainty not only about the effects of one another’s practices but about the interiority of others – these prevail. These logics I see in operation all around me. And there is a kind of amnesiac quality to the waging of conflict between faculty, between faculty and administration, and between faculty and students. As we fight for that which we believe to be right – whether that is a conviction about who should be department chair, or how a course should be taught and what its content should be, or the core values of a curriculum, or whether the Left or the Right or the Center prevail in the academy – we slide inexorably, it sometimes seems, toward murderous intent. We wish for the absence of the other and frame arguments designed to exterminate the other or at least other-thinking in our midst. And we forget quite quickly once the battle has been won what the issues were.

What we don’t forget is who we hate.

Years after conflicts have concluded, we remember to turn away from one another, to refuse to speak to one another, to dismiss any and all needs or claims of the one who offended or from whom we took offense.

I’m using “we” here not as a rhetorical conceit, but with the recognition that I too begin to hate. I begin to imagine conspiracies designed to humiliate and isolate me. I begin to fear even those whom I most admire and desire to emulate. I forget the days when I might have seen as others see, practiced as others practice, believed as others believe. I skip past the days of learning and the discomfort that attends not knowing and behave as if I have always thought so, done so, been so. And I temporarily or permanently misplace the possibility that I might be wrong or might not have an utterly complete grasp of the truth.

In principle, I love my work. I am sometimes astonished at how much I care for my colleagues, my students, and the web of ideas and knowledge-making practices with which I regularly engage. I feel embarrassed to write that I also have come to love the institution at which I work (loving your school is not terribly cool, I think). The question I am grappling with, though, is how recovery might be possible when those feelings of care and satisfaction with one’s work and respect for one’s colleagues are lost. For colleges and universities to realize to any meaningful extent their potential to critically and productively engage in meaning-making, knowledge production, and the enablement of student learning, we will have to, I think, address this problem. We are limited in our ability to sustain intellectual communities by our inability to understand, value, and nurture the relational.

And the answer is not, I am convinced, that we simply need to be more civil or more collegial. Making nice with one another will never be a substitute for rigorous critical engagement with epistemologies, pedagogies, with knowledge-production and the conditions that attend the production of knowledge. Toni Morrison in her Nobel prize acceptance speech writes, “Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without and alphabet, the choice word or the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge not its destruction.” It is the ineffable, I yearn for, I think -- that there be some recognition among and between us of our interdependence and mutual contingency, not that we must always like one another, but that we need one another and we come to know through one another. I would like some sense of wonderment to infuse our conflicts such that we might recognize the degree to which we are and our students and our institutions are impoverished by the absence, the silencing, and the destruction of the other in our midst.

Me and My Friend Bill

Me and my friend Bill have a lot in common. When Bill was a kid, he wanted to be a professional baseball player – until he got to be a teenager and figured out that he was never going to break the 5’5 barrier. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional jockey – until I got to be a teenager and figured out that I was going to come within a few hairs of hitting the 6’ mark.

Bill and I both love to talk about ideas. We talk about teaching – a lot. We talk about far-flung things like whether there might be life somewhere else in the Universe and whether Bill O’Reilly is stupid or evil. We talk about close up things like campus politics. Mostly we agree in our conclusions although we arrive at them via different routes.

Bill and I are both interested in the fact that apparently contradictory claims can be simultaneously true. Bill and I have almost nothing in common.

Bill likes to teach and he’s good at it, but what he really wants to do is to sit in his office and think about complex mathematical problems. And what Bill needs is time to do what he wants to do. I would rather take out my intestines and play with them than sit in my office thinking about complex mathematical problems (or any other kind of mathematical problems, for that matter). After Bill has thought for a long time, he wants time to write down what he thinks of; he wants to be paid for his hard thinking and he wants to publish cool articles about the things he thinks of.

I like teaching best of all. And I like to write too, but I like to write about teaching. I like to be alone to reflect and write and reflect some more. But almost everything I write has to do with teaching.

The work Bill loves to do the most has nothing to do with teaching and teaching gets in the way of the work Bill most loves to do. I want to be really clear: it isn’t that Bill doesn’t like teaching and it isn’t that he doesn’t care about doing it well – he does like it and he does care about the quality of his teaching. But, teaching is not the professional activity from which he derives the greatest sense of satisfaction.

My question is this: is there room for someone like Bill at a regional comprehensive university with an emphasis on teaching.

Historically, Bill’s scholarship of discovery has been more highly valued (and rewarded) than the scholarship of teaching. There has been, I think, an understanding across the professoriate that scholars teach in order to pay for their research. The scholarship of discovery has led to remarkable strides in understanding across the disciplines. In the sciences, in economics, history, political science, philosophy, literary studies, the scholarship of discovery has transformed what we know about the world and why the world is the way it is.

At the same time, however, there is a significant body of research demonstrating that there is no apparent relationship between the scholarship of discovery (or any other scholarly tradition) and the quality of teaching. In the short term, the results of this kind of research typically do not change the content of undergraduate courses and this research has no demonstrable effect on pedagogy.

Earnest Boyer’s pivotal book, Scholarship Revisited, lays out a more expansive model for understanding faculty labor. Boyer names three scholarly traditions in addition to the scholarship of discovery (the scholarship of integration, the scholarship of application, and the scholarship of teaching) and argues that all four forms have their place in the academy and need to be accounted for in evaluating faculty labor. Boyer does not seek to overturn the hierarchy by putting the scholarship of teaching on top. Rather, he suggests that faculty might work in any one of these traditions and make significant contributions to their institutions and to knowledge in their disciplines.

Boyer’s model offers institutions and faculties a way of understanding and evaluating faculty labor that is more honest in the sense that we might use the model to more accurately describe what we do and evaluate what our colleagues are actually spending their time doing. Boyer’s model is also more egalitarian than historical academic evaluative practices have been. It does not excuse teaching faculty from doing research, writing, and publishing, but suggests to institutions the value of labor demanded by the scholarship of teaching, in particular. It is important to note here that the scholarship of teaching is distinct from excellence in teaching. I can see no evidence, for example, that I am a better teacher than Bill because I write about teaching.

For SCSU to take up the Boyer model in any meaningful way, we would have to see our faculty’s individual and collective strengths through new lenses. We would need, I think, to recognize that people like Bill make this teaching university a better, more interesting, more lively intellectual community. We would need also to stop behaving as if we are not a teaching university. When faculty are engaging in the scholarship of teaching, we would need to recognize the value of that work too. We would need to see the variety of scholarly practices in which our faculty engage as complimentary and overlapping rather than as competing practices in a zero sum game. And, finally, we would need to stop the institutional practice of seeing faculty labor (or any other labor for that matter) in simple binary terms. We would need to acknowledge in some rich way, the complexity of the everyday working lives of faculty and find ways to value and evaluate faculty labor that account for the complexity.

Finally, we should, I think, as a faculty and as an institution make a more deliberate and responsive effort to talk publicly about the value of all of the scholarly traditions to the quality of the University. Rather than subscribing implicitly if not explicitly to the popular notion that research has no value to students, communities, or the State and is not the proper work of the professoriate at a regional comprehensive university, we should begin to explain why and how all of these traditions do, in fact, have value. We would need to make the case that the value of a University education is derived not only from what happens in the classroom, but also from the intellectual liveliness of the institutional community, the quality of mentoring, of social, athletic, leadership opportunities, and a plethora of other factors.

My friend Bill tells me I have a tendency to go to the holier than thou place. He may be right. He says I fill too many screens on this Blog. He is certainly right about that. So I submit this entry with apologies both for my sermonizing and long-windedness.

On Beloved Community

A week ago I co-facilitated a CETL book talk with my friend, Marla Kanengieter, on bell hooks’ Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. Eighteen faculty attended and between us we had a pretty good conversation that wound among the matters of co-optation, anti-racism, and whether change can best be effected from outside or inside higher education. But hooks uses a term in the book we didn’t talk so much about and that I am intrigued by: “beloved community.” When the book talk was over and the participants had left, Marla and I stayed to talk a bit. She asked me what “beloved community” at St. Cloud State University would look like to me.

hooks writes of the need for honesty, clarity, love, and radical intellectualism (as distinct from public intellectualism which she thinks of as signifying that someone smart is arguing ideas that fail to engage meaningfully in critique of the status quo). For hooks, “beloved community” is not a facile notion. The distinguishing features of the terrain of “beloved community” are not a surface smoothness – civility or making nice for the sake of stability – but depth and reach, profound spiritual and rigorous intellectual engagement in the labor of the professoriate and in the struggle for democratic education and increasing social justice.

So what would beloved community at SCSU look like to me? I offer the following as a provisional answer – as an early and perhaps stumbling attempt to articulate what it is that I hope for in a University community to which I find myself deeply attached even when I feel most discouraged and at odds with it.

On Beloved Community (at St. Cloud State University)

In a beloved community, there would be widespread and deeply felt respect for the labor of faculty, staff, students, and administrators. Rather than competition among constituencies for the honor of hardest working, most dedicated, and most necessary to the success of students, we would recognize the extent of our mutual contingency – the degree to which we are all necessary, responsible, and responsive to one another’s needs and the needs of the institution.

In a beloved community, the over-arching, organizing questions driving institutional, college, and departmental decisions would be something like this: what are the conditions necessary for students, faculty, staff, and the University’s administration to engage together in empowered and joyful learning and teaching? What can we (I) do to create, support, and sustain those conditions?

In a beloved community, we would acknowledge the hunger of many faculty, staff, and students for spiritual sustenance and honor the need for community-wide as well as intimate conversations about matters of the spirit.

In a beloved community, we would argue mightily about ideas and issues. We would critique openly and fully arguments, interpretations, lived conditions and material realities. And we would leave those vigorous debates still speaking to one another, still convinced of one another’s integrity even though we disagree. We would leave ready to come back again another day for more discussion.

In a beloved community, we would be filled with and express our sense of curiosity and wonderment about the complex relationship between what we teach, how we teach, and what students learn. We would strive without embarrassment, shame or defensiveness to transform our classrooms and our teaching practices. And in this beloved community, because of our commitment to and pleasure in teaching, past and current students would narrate profound learning experiences that happened for them inside our classrooms as well as outside of them.

In a beloved community, we would listen deeply to one another. We would be less inclined to disbelieve and/or discredit one another’s lived experiences and embodied histories and more inclined to honor one another. We would be more ready and more likely to join in struggles for more fully realized social, economic, and political justice even when those struggles might not directly or immediately serve our own self interests.

In a beloved community, we would be as concerned with the spirit of the law as we are with the letter of the law. We would think in covenant as well as contractual terms about our responsibilities to one another. We would recognize that injustice thrives where policies, procedures, and accepted institutional practices are “understood” rather than explicit. Concomitantly, we would recognize that mere adherence to the rule of law is not enough to transform a co-located group or groups into a beloved community. We would care for and attend to one another not because we’ll get in trouble if we don’t, but because we are deeply invested in the quality of one another’s lives.

In a beloved community, the actions of individuals and groups would be less driven by the logics that attend the conviction that power, influence, and resources are limited -- that we must, therefore, use any means necessary to acquire them for ourselves. Instead, we would take note of our self-interest in institutional decisions and decision-making processes, but act with integrity and care in service of our shared interests. And collectively we would be fearless in accounting for the needs of historically excluded and marginalized faculty, staff, students, and administrators because we would recognize the degree to which the University is enriched, enlivened, and transformed by diversity.

In her book, hooks also talks about prophetic imagination and suggests that what distinguishes the practice of prophetic imagination from more prosaic practices is the courage and willingness to live as if the world one can see in one’s mind’s eye is the world in which one actually lives. As I write, I play in the vision of people writing into, deepening, and extending a shared imagining of beloved community and of a growing community behaving as if that is the world in which we live. Now that would be interesting.

About Table Hearth and Commons

Greetings --

The categories of "Table," "Hearth," and "Commons" for which this blog is named are drawn from Sharon Daloz Parks’ book, Big Questions/Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith. Parks argues that our prevailing conceptions of maturity fail to account for the developmental stages of traditionally-aged college students, particularly with regard to the nexus of the heart, spirit, and intellectual growth. Parks suggests that young adults, in particular, and all adults in actuality need a variety of contexts in which to receive spiritual and intellectual sustenance, to develop spiritual and intellectual maturity, and to sustain ongoing growth.

For Parks, "Table" signifies time and community in contexts in which colleagues, teachers and students, friends and mentors talk as they break bread together. "Hearth" signifies time and community in intimate contexts such as one-one-one conversations with trusted elders, mentors, or guides. "Commons" signifies time and community in contexts in which issues can be deliberated, debated, and in which critical engagement is encouraged and supported.

As Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, my hope in organizing CETL mission, vision, and goals around the themes of Table, Hearth, and Commons is to provide those sustaining contexts for the SCSU faculty community and to model the ways in which faculty might provide and the University might support those sustaining contexts for SCSU students.