all brows need not be furrowed

May I point out a few quick things about this wonderful, piercing dialogue at Cambridge between Roger Scruton and Jordan Peterson? 

 
They’re right! Art is indeed that which sorts empirical phenomenon so it can address us, and much of the academy muffles the speech. (Many of my fellow academics who sneeringly dismiss Peterson or Scruton would not last ten minutes in a debate with either of them.) But the academy is – to a certain extent – already on the side of the angels. There is a post-critical theory movement that has arisen due to the sheer failure of the kind of critique that Scruton and Peterson take on. To put that melodramatically, God has his 7000 who have not bowed the knee to Foucault.

Folks like Rita Felski exemplify this, as do the folks present at the conference Jonathan Anderson organized on post-secular (Jeff Kosky, Lori Branch), as of course does Jonathan’s work. It's been a theme here for a while. Did I mention just down the way from Cambridge the Tate Modern launched a Bible commentary? That feminism has been hacked by the Virgin Mary?

While some of the negativity is still subsidized, a lot of it has collapsed or is collapsing on its own. Peterson is in a pitch battle with those who militantly cling to the old order. The battle is real. But the attack mode has serious drawbacks, and lends outsiders (those who only listen to Peterson) the impression that the entire academy is crazed and the only sane ones left are Peterson and Scruton. I am not saying Peterson should not be fighting – the fight came to him. I have listened to and read a good bit of Peterson, and I’d consider myself a selective admirer (and critic). His more severe critics should ask themselves why he can consistently fill a Toronto lecture hall for serious lectures on the Bible and they can't. Still, Peterson's is not the only, and for many of us, not the best strategy.

That said, Scruton and Peterson are right about transcendence. I can’t emphasize that enough – I’m only mentioning Peterson's tone (which is why so many academics are allergic to Peterson – a tone which, considering Peterson’s enemies, he arguably has to take on to survive). If, as Scruton so wonderfully puts it, “culture is the residue of what we have loved,” we have a shot at fortifying that residue, at "bunking" instead of debunking. Peterson and Scruton are not hidebound conservatives - they insist we need to be “building the future instead of criticizing the past.” As they put it, "there is no formula"; and because of that, some of us may choose to take a different approach. If we are to focus on particular places as Peterson recommends, strategies will differ based on locale.

So, here's to little Kings College Cambridges popping up in many unexpected places, while believers in cruciform beauty quietly find as many allies as we can.

Happy Epiphany!

Iconoclasm in the Age of Facebook

That art history is suppressed religious discourse is not a new idea.  "The familiar thesis of art as a secularized religion," wrote Joseph Koerner more than twenty years ago, "is a foundation of the historiography of painting as it developed in the discipline of art history since Romanticism"(148).  Or as James Elkins put it more recently, "some of the interpretive discourses in contemporary art history are implicitly religious… some of art history… is a shadow discourse.  It wants to say things about transcendence, the sacred, the spiritual, but in an academic setting – and for many reasons that continue to confuse and fascinate me, it feels it cannot." And so, resisting "several decades of sometimes ruthlessly secularized art criticism," Elkins demurs:

Getting to know some of the many careful and reflective people who write about religious art from outside academia has made me sensitive to the absence of personally engaged conversations about religion (as opposed to historiographic, philosophic, or sociological conversations) in academia.  The excellent scholars of religion who are themselves religious, and value their scholarship principally as a way to enrich their religious experience, have shown me a different way of reading art history.  To them, some texts in art history are indirect, in that they explore religious issues without identifying them as religious (133).

Elkins appears to suggest that discussion around the perennial topic of iconoclasm will be hamstrung until this is somehow acknowledged within academia as well.  And here is where Baylor's Natalie Carnes comes in.  Taking issue with two recent books (Simpson's Under the Hammer and Latour's On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods) Carnes offers a conceptual shift in what she calls a "Prelude to a Theology of Iconoclasm" (h/t Tanner Capps).

Iconophilia need not be sanitized of iconoclasm to be iconophilia.  Indeed, iconophilia may even require iconoclasm, inasmuch as loving an image qua image may fail to take seriously the particular claim an image makes on the beholder.  ...The iconophila in which there is no hidden heart of iconoclasm is an iconophilia without philos.  It is iconapatheia.

Carnes' point that iconoclasm and iconophilia coinhere has precedent.  Koerner elsewhere suggested that "In Christian thinking, every semblance hides a dissemblance and every dissemblance, a semblance"; and David Freedberg likewise observed that "the love and fear of images, as the Byzantine arguments show so clearly, are indeed two sides of one coin" (405).  But whereas Koerner and Freedberg observe this dynamic, Carnes offers the same insight in the context of a creative theological project - an "ecumenical theology of iconoclasm," which crosses into art history's forbidden territory, a world (foreclosed by Koerner) "beyond representation."  Wagering on transcendence, Carnes avoids the very quality that Elkins finds so dissatisfying in art history, the ineffectual attempt "to speak about religion while remaining appropriately secular."

In an age of adverstising - where so many images rely upon apathy (iconapatheia) but deserve active resistance (iconoclasm), does iconophilia less robust than the one proposed by Carnes stand a chance?  Michael Sandel sounds the alarm, lamenting that corporate images are creeping onto once inviolate spaces - fire-hydrants, ballpark bases, and even human foreheads.  Faced (or defaced) with this situation, the iconoclastic treatises of the Reformation, subsequently discarded by their confessional progeny for admittedly legitimate reasons, are ripe to be recovered - not as Christological statements (they're often wrong on that front), but as early versions of Adbusters.  But recast in the wider, irreducibly iconophile framework of ecumenical Christianity, such broadsides can also offer the one thing that Adbusters never has:  A solution.

The End of the University (I'm sure of it)

It's over - the entire enterprise.  Begun in the Athenian groves of Akademos, reconvening in Paris to become what Newman called the glory of the Middle Ages, and surviving until 2013... but now it's done. The University as we know it is finished.  What killed it?  The internet.  So just before I submit my job application to another industry (all of which are doing splendidly), I'm offering you one last declaration of doom, so you can't say you weren't warned:

The typical liberal arts college... is obsolete.  Its sovereign isolation, its protected students, the one-track careers of its faculty, its restricted curriculums and teaching and its tepid purposes make it unsuited to the needs of the decade ahead.  To have a bright future, private colleges must struggle to surmount these defects in a context of significantly altered purposes.

To my embarrassment I now realize that said paragraph, perfectly mirroring the rhetoric of 2013, was published nearly half a century ago, and the University (curiously enough) survived.  But don't let a mere clerical error of mine throw you off.  It's over.  For real this time.

Evangelical Gothic

Firestone on Fire by millinerd

"Our Aim in the Undertaking is to promote the Interests of the Redeemer's Kingdom," explained Jonathan Dickinson, the first President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).  A refusal to deal seriously with such university origins is not dissimilar to the refusal to deal seriously with the origins of the universe: the six day creationist's naive hope that present realities magically dropped out of the sky.  In College, What it Was, Is and Should Be, Andrew Delbanco puts it this way:

To anyone even glancingly acquainted with the history of American education, it is hardly news that our colleges have their origins in religion, or that they derive their aims, structure, and pedagogical methods mainly from Protestantism...  Many academics have a curiously uneasy relation with these origins, as if they pose some threat or embarrassment to our secular liberties, even though the battle for academic freedom against clerical authority was won long ago.  If you were to remind just about any major university president today that his or her own institution arose from this or that religious denomination, you'd likely get the response of the proverbial Victorian lady who, upon hearing of Darwin's claim that men descend from apes, replies that she hoped it wasn't so - but if it were, that it not become widely known.

This is a pity and a waste, since there is much to be learned from the past, including the clerical past, about the essential aims and challenges of college education.  We tend not to remember, or perhaps half-deliberately to forget, that college was once conceived as a road to wealth or as a screening service for a social club, but as a training ground for pastors, teachers, and, more broadly, public servants.  Founded as philanthropic institutions, the English originals of America's colleges were "expected," as Morison put it, "to dispense alms to outsiders, as well as charity to their own children (pp. 7-8)

That these founding ideals might ameliorate the present crisis in higher education is one suggestion of Delbanco's book.  What W. Barksdale Maynard's Princeton: America's Campus accomplishes (among many things) is to show that Collegiate Gothic architecture once did just that.  By replicating the English Gothic of Cambridge and Oxford, Princeton resisted the secular German research ideal (Wissenschaft over Bildung) that had overtaken American education starting with Johns Hopkins, and renewed its original commitment to the liberal arts:

[One] plus for Gothic at Princeton was its religious tinge: a churchly, monastic quality suggested a bulwark against secularism, especially appreciated by the many ministers on the faculty and among the alumni (fully one sixth of the graduate were ordained).  "Princeton's crowning merit," said a reporter [in Harper's Weekly, 1887], "is that it can keep pace with all the learning and progress of the age without yielding to the encroachments of modern unbelief."  Parents could trust that their sons would learn the most advanced subjects and approaches "without sacrifice of those principles which are inculcated in the Bible... Its founders and upholders have pledged themselves and their successors to be true to that religion which has been faithfully taught here from the beginning."  Tigers celebrated their "loyal adherence to the sturdy, unsectarian, evangelical Christianity which is synonymous with the name of Princeton."  No style could better connote this time-honored and pious approach than Gothic (p. 82).

But if one can't afford, or does not prefer, the Gothic - another tack would be to simply reexamine founding ideals as one ingredient to present renewal - perhaps by reasserting Dickinson's motivation with a motto like (to choose one college at random) For Christ and His Kingdom.

(More on this subject to come, by the way, in a forthcoming issue of Books & Culture.)

Electric Education

For the futurist edpunks of Do It Yourself University, the foundation of education in this country was a "pallid imitation of the fourteenth-century English and European curriculum, which itself was a shallow error-riddled reconstruction of the intellectual achievements of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates."  Perhaps that's why colonial colleges produced dimwits like James Madison.

But Andrew Delbanco, in College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, actually bothered to learn something about Puritan education, and sees it as a way to renew our own.  Delbanco even identifies the root of critical thinking in American education in the "Puritan principle that no communicant should 'take any ancient doctrine for truth until they have examined it.'"  And then there were the professors.

Puritans spoke almost indistinguishably about teaching and preaching.  Consider John Cotton, arguably the leading minister of New England's first generation.  In his history of early New England, the Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Cotton Mather (Cotton's grandson), portrays him as a man whose religious faith and scholarly attainment are essentially one and the same. A "universal scholar, and a living system system of the liberal arts, and a walking library," he was the ideal to which every studious young person should aspire.  His reputation as a preacher was that of a man not merely erudite and eloquent but also able to inspire young people so they might "be fitted for public service."  By his voice and arguments, but most of all by his manifest commitment to the impossible yet imperative task of aligning his own life with models of virtue that he found (mainly) in scripture, he was mentor to his student in the same way that he was pastor to his flock. In his theological writings, which were largely concerned with what we would call moral psychology,  he explored the mystery and contingency of learning, which, he believed, sometimes proceeds in steps, sometimes by leaps, sometimes by sheer surprise in the absence of exertion, sometimes by slow and arduous accretion through diligent work...  [but] the moment of electric connection between teacher and student cannot be predicated or planned.

But education merely through an electrical connection avoids the electric connection here described.  Puritan pedagogy may have (in Delbanco's words) effectively dismantled the "limits of jealous self-regard in which [the student] has hitherto been confined," but MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) tend to leave those limits intact.  The "mystery and contingency of learning" becomes as predictable as a playlist.  Professors like John Cotton, whose lives might have spoken alongside their lectures, are kept at manageable distance, safely streamed to 10,000 students at once. 

The Secret of Art History

Oh how that brief list of theologically inclined, post-secular art history could be expanded.  The second edition of the standard grad student intro to the discipline, now ends - you may be surprised to discover - on a decidedly religious note. "What has continually haunted the discourse of art history is its foundation role, beginning most forcefully in the Romantic era, as a secular theology or coy religiosity..."  Donald Preziosi (we assume the editor to be the author of the book's unattributed coda) concludes half a thousand pages of historiography by identifying:

[The] (re-)emergence of the problem of religion in art and art history...  There is a differential intricacy of and an obverse complementarity between artistry and religiosity, art and religion, which, pursued in all its implications, would necessarily lead to a fundamental recasting of our entire understanding of both art and religion: a recasting wherein both these nominally and institutionally distanced practices are more importantly understood as different perspective upon a common concern - the nature of representation or signification as such. 

This is evident enough.  Hence the inadequacy of art historical genealogies (like the one here being quoted!) that begin with Giorgio Vasari, or (even worse) Johann Joachim Winckelmann, instead of the iconoclastic controversy, not to mention the book of Exodus.  What is far less evident is the truth of Preziosi's metaphysical claim casually embedded in said coda in the form of an insistence that religion is pure construction without remainder.  "Religion," proclaims - no, preaches Preziosi, "is a mode of artistry which is in denial of (or is duplicitous regarding) the fabricatedness of its own inventions, commonly attributing that artifice to the 'design' of an immaterial, and (for sectarian believers) a pre-existent and originating force of being."  Faced with such a colonialist caricaturization, why not let the subaltern (a "religious" person like David Bentley Hart, for example) speak? 

Religion in the abstract does not actually exist, and almost no one (apart from politicians) would profess any allegiance to it.  Rather, there are a very great number of systems of belief and practice that, for the sake of convenience, we call 'religions,' though they could scarcely differ more from one another, and very few of them depend upon some fanciful notion [as Preziosi seems to assume] that religion itself is a miraculous exception to the rule of nature.  Christians, for instance, are not, properly speaking, believers in religion; rather, they believe that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his church as its Lord.  This is a claim that is at once historical and spiritual, and it has given rise to an incalculable diversity of natural expressions: moral, artistic, philosophical, social, legal, and religious.

So no, there is no necessary conflict between acknowledging fabrications and having faith, between, for example, knowing that the gospels were actually written (how could they not have been?) and believing that God speaks through them truthfully, or between acknowledging an icon was actually painted and that the dead saint that said icon refers to lives.  God, of course, is not a cause, not even a big cause - he is instead the premise of all causality, and his mysterious influence within the infinite network of causality that he inaugurated (even to the point of choosing a nation and donning human flesh) is called providence.  "He is in essence outside everything," writes Athanasius, "but inside everything by his own power." So until Preziosi can produce a satisfying explanation for why there is something rather than nothing (he is welcome to try), his instinctual assumption against the possibility of immateriality will be no different in kind that an assumption for it. 

This is not to dismiss Preziosi as much as to point out an unfortunate inconsistency.  He is, you see, one of the discipline's most deft deconstructors - a veritable suicide bomber embedded in one of art history's privileged professorial perches.  In what is surely one of the better sentences of art historical writing in the last two decades, he writes that "Art [is] the very esperanto of European hegemony."  Preziosi admits that "the brilliance of this colonization is quite breathtaking: there is no 'artistic tradition' anywhere in the world which today is not fabricated through historicism and essentialism of European museology and museography...."  Yes, art is hegemonic, and the world's teeming international network of monolithic museums prove it so.  "Art history makes colonial subjects of us all."

Why then continue to perform art history?  That's a good question for another post.  The point here is the unintentionally humorous one that an author who has (brilliantly, in my opinion) exposed art history's shallow roots in the stripped soil of the European Enlightenment, is tethered to that same Enlightenment's assumptions about "religion."  "The essential 'secret' of religion," writes Preziosi (wait for it... drum roll please...) "is that there really is no secret at all that is separate from its alleged 'expression.'"  But all this statement tells us, a statement so blithely broadbrush that the paint gets very thin indeed, is the essential secret of art history.  This being that that the discipline's colonialist, European (and yes, white male) Enlightenment secularity has gone so blissfully unquestioned that it has survived two decades of deconstruction without so much as a scratch.

Until now.  Hence the recent publication string that questions such secularism; and hence Preziosi's need to (grudgingly?) acknowledge religion in the sweetspot of the discipline's chief initiatory document (the grad school reader).  Donald Preziosi, then, is like a Moses of sorts.  He has traced art history's repressed consanguinity with religion, and has traveled far enough to see the mountains of post-secular art historical research.  The future (or at least one of them), he tells us, is in those hills.  And yet, Preziosi is sufficiently hindered with his discipline's secular presumptions to be able to enter that land himself.  As a result, even as he emblazons we religious people with a scarlet "R"...  we still thank him.

Post-Secular Academia: Part Deux

"The Platonic Academy," writes Josef Pieper, was a "thiasos, a religious association assembling for regular sacrificial worship," an educative norm that Christianity obviously perpetuated, even if they shut Plato's Academy down.  In Exiles from Eden, Mark Schwehn elaborates:

Few would dispute the central point here.  Whether we look to the Platonic Academy or to the teachers of ancient Israel or to St. Augustine at Cassiciacum or to the medieval university or to Pico della Mirandola's disputatious Florence or even to the small colleges of early nineteenth century America, we find learning flourishing in communities formed by the conscious practice of spiritual virtues.  Over the course of the last century, the modern university has ceased... to attend to character formation, or it has imagined that such attention should be an 'extracurricular' enterprise having little or nothing to do with knowledge.  From this perspective, the current resurgence of the community question may be Western culture's awakening from a comparatively brief slumber induced or at least maintained by what Parker Palmer has called objectivism.  If so, the 'problem' is not to explain, much less to justify, the relationship between religion and higher learning: it is to account for how we could ever have lost sight of it.

The post-secular university so frequently discussed today is consequently more norm than novelty, boasting an embarrassment of historical riches upon which to draw.  So what then was this secular modern interlude?  I prefer Mark Noll's definition:  Modernism was "a recent heresy maintaining that only certain learned rationalists could see the true character of all things as essentially natural and also recognize the mythic unreality of the supernatural realm."  That viewpoint has obviously not disappeared, but it has been dethroned, and the icy core of its onetime dominion - the academy - is unevenly thawing.  Perhaps the first imperative to insist upon in the new context is that religiously inclined individuals need show more hospitality to the secular mentality than the secular mentality once showed to them. 

Some friends have expressed unease when I speak of this religious turn, and their point is well taken.  Academia is of course not monolithic, and anti-religious prejudice is still thick on the ground in many places.  It is easy to overerplay the new (and possibly quite tentative) state of affairs.  There is also a case to be made this all comes much too late.  In 1970, before any of this was on the immediate horizon, George Steiner surveyed the prospects of secular reason, whose momentum he considered unstoppable.  Strangely enough, the apocalypticism on offer in Bluebeard's Castle was rooted less in Spenglerian conservatism than in the Frankfurt School!

The notion that abstract truth, and the morally neutral truths of the sciences in particular, might come to paralyze or destroy Western man is foreshadowed in Husserl's Krisi der europäischen Wissenschaften (1934-37).  It becomes a dominant motif in the theory of 'negative dialectic' of Horkheimer, Adorno, and the Frankfurt School.  This is one of the most challenging, though often hermetic, currents in modern feeling and in the modern diagnosis of the crisis of culture...  Reason itself has become repressive.  The worship of 'truth' and of autonomous 'facts' is a cruel fetishism...  The disease of enlightened man is his acceptance, itself wholly superstitious, of the superiority of facts to ideas...  Instead of serving human ends and sponteneities, the 'positive truths' of science and of scientific laws have become a prison house.  As Horkheimer and Adorno emphasize in the Dialektik der Aufklärung, the old obscurantism of religious dogma and social caste have been replaced by the even more tyrannical obscurantism of 'rational, scientific truth.'  ...We cannot turn back.  We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing.  We shall, I expect open the last door in [Bluebeard's] castle even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, onto realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control.

Do not combine that prose with whiskey.

Steiner laughs off any hippie holdouts: "The flower child in the Western city, the neoprimitive chanting his five words of Thibetan on the highway are performing an infantile charade, founded on the surplus wealth of that same city or highway."  And what of the brave resistance of the humanities?  Curiosity's Blitzkrieg happens as they sleep:

Already a dominant proportion of poetry, of art, has receded from personal immediacy into the keeping of the specialist.  There it leads a bizarre pseudo-life, proliferating its own inert environment of criticism (we read Eliot on Dante, not Dante), of editorial and textual exegesis, or narcissistic polemic.  Never has there been a more hectic prodigality of specialized erudition - in literary studies, in musicology, in art history, in criticism, and in that most Byzantine of genres, the criticism and theory of criticism.  Never have the the metalangauages of the custodians flourished more, or with more arrogant jargon, around the silence of live meaning.

This religious turn, this return to practice, this shift described by Mark Schwehn from Wissenschaft (knowledge) to Bildung (formation), and from Henry Adam's self-creation back to Augustine's created self, may consequently be like trying to turn an oceanliner with a paddle while the rusted rudder is fixed.  But the religious virtue of hope, of which there are whiffs in Steiner, mitigates his conclusions, as does the fact that Steiner issued those dim predictions over forty years ago, and we're still here.  In many places, the native religious shape of education flourishes, the sciences are understood as they first were in this country (Walter Minto called them "a continued act of devotion"), and the humanities thrive in their native habitat of meaning.  Religiously inclined academics have new resources and new confidence, and theirs, unlike Steiner's flower children, is no infantile charade.

But will we ultimately succeed?  Carry the day?  Turn the ship?  Eliot answered that one in Four Quartets: "For us, there is only the trying, the rest is not our business."

(Here, by the way, is part une.)

How to Make History

One can smell 1990s academic prose, heavily seasoned with fin de siècle despair, from three book shelves away.  I was fortunate enough to go to graduate school when this kind of academic work had curdled.  People clearly wanted something new, and yet, the ladders used to attained academic posts of influence were built with such prose, so resistance was thin and scattered. Things change fast, however, and resistance is not so scattered anymore. One can find it books like this, or in this fantastic Festschrift for historian Caroline Walker Bynum, where Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton Brown put it this way:

If (to generalize wildly) the ‘new cultural history’ of the 1980s and 1990s was taken up primarily with questions of representation and discourse and the ‘new cultural studies’ of the 1990s with questions of domination or power, the question now might seem to be, what kinds of issues and questions should govern the practice of "history in the comic mode."

 Post-ironic history in the comic mode, among other things, involves a refusal to

smirk at the past or to wink at the reader as if to say, "But we know this can't really be true."  Instead… [it is] to recognize at least implicitly (and, we could claim, more rigorously) that a hermeneutics of suspicion must always go hand –in-hand with what Paul Ricoeur has called a hermeneutics of the sacred: a fundamental trust and investment in what’s actually there, staring us in the eye, as an inextricable part of meaning and significance…

Because of the subject matter that Bynum investigates (Jesus as mother, the dietary practices of female saints, blood piety, material devotion), Bynum always seems to be part of the fashionable turns to the marginalized and grotesque, even while she transcends fashion by refusing to do history ironically.  Holsinger and Fulton try to isolate her method.  What they cannot find is a list of "musts" or "hot topics" or "regrettable lacunae in previous work" to be redressed.  The best formula they can identify is to "start with the text - or the image, or the statue, or the piece of music.  As you study to interpret it, pay attention above all to the things that surprise you and then see how they compare with the things that you expect."  Bynum became a trend setter exactly by refusing to set trends.  She just did the work, "seek[ing] out religiously grounded answers to religious questions, intellectually grounded answers to intellectual questions."

Ultimately, this kind of straightforwardness involves a degree of risk: 

The point of writing history is not...  somehow to cleanse ourselves, as it were, of the taint of the past- the humanist/Reformation/Enlightenment project of exposing the past as past and cordoning it off behind the fence of anachronism.  Rather, it is to allow ourselves still to be touched by the past....

Because Bynum claimed that "Every view of things that is not wonderful is false," Holsinger and Fulton insist that "Scholarly irony about the things that make us smile is out of place here. It is not possible to wonder ironically."  If avowedly Marxist historians (who will always be with us) are ever on the edge of ushering their students to a protest march, then medieval historians in the school of Bynum, regardless of their faith commitments, seem ever on the edge of having their students pray, or at least imagining what it'd be like to do so.

All this returns to mind the curious religious mood in the academy of late.  Fulton and Holsinger explain that the profession [history] "has taken its 'quantitative' turn, its 'cultural' or 'anthropological' turn, its 'feminist' turn, its 'linguistic' turn, its 'postmodern' turn, its 'postcolonial' turn, its second 'cultural' turn," and now, we could certainly add, its religious one.

But my colleague Tiffany Kriner has some pointed remarks in this respect.  In an article entitled Our turn now?, she ratchets up the aforementioned risk even higher, letting it get dangerously close to our carefully curated career trajectories.  She turns Girardian theory not on literary material, but on scholars themselves:  "Perhaps in light of Girard's understanding of Christ's nonviolent, nonsacrificial, nonrivaling love, Christians in literary [or, we could add, historical] study ought to give up the mimetic competition, or perhaps, turn from claiming the territory of 'the turn' toward something else."  Kriner argues for the most novel turn of all, a "turn from the trap of acquisitive mimesis in academic cultures."

Unless they straight up quit, however, Christians (of which I am one) still have to inhabit the academy.  Is it possible to do so while still taking up Kriner's challenge?  Perhaps so.  Even though none of us - individually or institutionally - will do it perfectly, the famous second century Letter to Diognetus affords an answer.  Here is an excerpt, with some translation tweaks of my own to accommodate the academic life:

For Christians are not distinguished from the rest of academia by country, language, or custom. For nowhere do they use methodologies of their own... nor do they practice an eccentric lifestyle.... But while they live in both Christian and secular universities, as each one’s lot was cast, and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship. They live in their own colleges, but only as aliens; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners...  They are dishonored, yet they are glorified in their dishonor; they are slandered, yet they are vindicated. They are cursed, yet they bless; they are insulted, yet they offer respect...  In a word, what the soul is in a body, this the Christian is in the University.

Again, an impossible standard, but one worth advancing nonetheless.  That last sentence, it seems to me, even offers a reply to Marsden's well known book.  As Christians, it's too easy to overplay our distinction.  So long as guild standards are not gummed up with anti-religious prejudice (as they still sometimes are), we need those standards as much as anyone.  It may then be time, like Bynum, to simply do the work, to (in the case of historians) make history, while reneging the mimetic pressure that so frequently bedevils academic labor.   At the conclusion to his follow up to The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll argues that a besetting temptation for Christian scholars is to talk about how to engage the academy instead of actually doing it, like officials at a track meet perpetually calling the competitors to the starting line.  But the 90s are over, and the methodological openness of scholars like Bynum, Fulton and Holsinger gives us no excuse not to run. 

Nuancing the Post-Secular

Three things that the religious turn mentioned below, so far as I can tell, does not mean:

1.  Academia's religious turn does not mean that the prejudice against religion in higher education has gone away.  In fact, the new situation might intensify this prejudice among those who are particularly uncomfortable with, unprepared for, or even angered by recent developments.  The new interest in religion is in no way universal.  New books emphasizing the secular could be added to the ones I listed, even if they are not as numerous.  As I suggested, the interest in religion is one facet, albeit a rather significant one, in a much more complex condition, which it is beyond the powers of a blog to reveal.

2.  Academia's religious turn does not mean that religious academic communities - Christian colleges, for example - are automatically ahead of the curve.  At its best, Christian academia functions as a haven from anti-religious prejudice where serious scholarship can occur (hence guild standards still apply).  At its worst, Christian academia offers a haven from broader academia's more serious standards as well; and there is no reason to think that wider academic interest in religion will somehow remedy that situation.  But should such standards be held to (without forsaking the "emic" edge), the new scenario could put certain religious academic communities ahead of the curve, provided they invest the necessary resources into research in addition to teaching, thereby both exploiting and enhancing the current situation.

3.  Academia's religious turn does not mean that a scholarly emphasis on religion is entirely new.  How can scholarship that claims to seriously study human culture consistently ignore, dismiss, explain away or suppress a phenomenon as massive as religion?  Yet in many sectors it did.  Consequently, the religious "turn" is in some ways a return to normative scholarship, an inevitable fraying of a calculated prejudice which it took a great deal of energy to uphold - energy than many are simply tired of expending.

That is all, dear readers. 

Post-Secular Academia: A Present Reality

If you don't think academia has gone religious you either 1) haven't been there in a while, 2) are pretending to ignore such an obvious development or 3) are part of a religious subculture invested in the notion of "secular academia" as a foil that galvanizes institutional identity, justifies a lack of engagement, and rallies donors who don't know better.

But what about the rise of programs in secularism?  Doesn't this disprove academia's supposed "religious turn"?  Quite the opposite.  Previously, the entire university flew under the banner of secularism.  Now, the secular perspective has been historicized and relegated to one field among others (exactly what once happened to religion).  Needless to say, secularism continues to have a legitimate place in the modern university, but it now has to be chosen.  The title of one recent publication says it all: The American University in the Postsecular Age.  Indeed, new superstructures of post-secular discourse are being swiftly erected, as evidenced by the invigorating discussions on sites such as the Immanent Frame.

To offer more evidence for this phenomenon, I best limit myself to the field of my terminal credentials: art history.  The secular narrative of art history goes...  or better, went like this:  Art and religion were once inseparable, but as the modern world progressed, art and religion grew further apart.  This simplistic narrative has not disappeared, but it has been profoundly destabilized by countless recent publications.  I try to get the word out about this every year or so, but because the evidence is almost as overwhelming as the determination to ignore it, here we go again.

Consider a brief tour through some recent publications.  Strangely, even ostensibly Christian medieval art required a corrective, leading to The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (2005), a research path continued, to choose just one example, by Translating Truth (2011).  Meyer Schapiro's secularizing read of Romanesque sculpture has been undone in the discipline's journal of record, to the frustration of many.  The theological turn in Byzantine art is most evidenced in the translation of Pavel Florensky, whose thought is developed (not just regurgitated) in Clemena Antonova's Space, Time, Presence in the Icon (2010).

The undoing of Jacob Burckhardt’s secular Renaissance has been going on for decades, resulting in Christianity and the Renaissance (1990) and a host of more recent specialized studies giving special attention to religion such as The Controversy of Renaissance Art (2011) or The Vision and the Visionary in Raphael (2011), among others. The Baroque and beyond has enjoyed an overhaul with The Sacred Image in the Age of Art (2011), Rembrandt’s Faith (2009), or Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World (2010).

Contrary to popular perceptions, religious art flourished in the age of Enlightenment, a fact thoroughly documented by Art and Religion in Eighteenth Century Europe (2009).  The suppressed religious art of Romanticism has been recovered as well, leading to Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth Century France (1992), Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (2009), or Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (2006).  My colleague Rick Gibson explains that the same thing has been going on in the literature of this era, as evidence by The Romantic Reformation (1997).  In the realm of American art, Sally Promey encapsulated her field when she wrote the seminal article, “The ‘Return’ of Religion in Scholarship of American Art” (2003), a direction pursued further, for example, by George Inness and the Science of Landscape (2007).

Even the most doggedly secular of these sub-disciplines – the dominant field of contemporary art – has confessed its secular predicament and called, however halfheartedly, for change, as evidenced by Re-Enchantment (2008).  The big bad October crowd, sometimes accused of ignoring religion, appear to be loosening their secular grip as well.  In the second volume of of Art Since 1900 (2011), Benjamin Buchloh refers to Bill Viola’s “reinvesting representation with mythological imagery, even religious experience…" and Hal Foster speaks of “cultic reenchantment." It would be easy to overplay such prose, but just as easy to ignore it.  The article that led to Antonova's book subtitled Seeing the World with the Eyes of God, interestingly enough, first appeared in October.  In short, the pomo reaction to dry formalism and hard-headed historicism has fizzled, and the ensuing vacuum is being at least partially filled with faith.

Again, none of this is to suggest that the secular take on art has evaporated, that this interest in religion is fully informed (let alone traditional), or that the authors of the above publications are necessarily religious themselves.  Indeed, many of the authors make no claim of belief whatsoever, even while they emphasize the faith of others in their scholarship.  But if we were to include those who do profess faith, the list of religiously-minded perspectives on art grows, I remind you, downright unmanageable. 

For those without the time to catch up on this growing reading list, a cross-section of the above developments are captured by Timothy Gorringe's Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art (2011), reviewed by your scribe not long ago in First Things.  In an impressive display of academic Aikido, Gorringe does not ignore or refuse the secular, but offers a "positive appreciation of secularity...  [which is] part and parcel of Christian revelation."  If Gorringe is right, then saying (as a secular art historian of yore once did) that “religious tutelage had to be broken” for the still life or landscape genre to emerge, is like saying that Christ, because he employed chaff, fields and coins in his parables, was necessarily an atheist. Gorringe conceptualizes a domain - more terrifying to some than the apocalypse itself - where "the secular as an autonomous 'godless' sphere simply disappears."

Graduate methodology courses in humanities used to triumphantly culminate with gender, sexuality, and race. But the religious turn renders this crescendo penultimate, especially considering that feminism and multiculturalism have found a new - and arguably more lasting - warrant under religious sponsorship. As I suggested, all of this is especially inconvenient for the remaining secularists and, strangely enough, for religious folk committed to the old arrangement as well.  Academia going religious means that we religious people might no longer be able to justify ignoring it.  And yet, the "emic" (as opposed to "etic") approach from actual believers - and the debates that such approaches generate - can help ensure that this recent turn of academic fashion remains interesting enough to last.

ADDENDUM: Please don't neglect further methodological reflections, not to mention part deux.

The Gift of the Guild

Having just finished graduate school, I'm beginning to see more clearly how much I needed it.  Early on I designed a makeshift one-man historiographical seminar, comprised of Herbert Butterfield, Kenneth Scott Latourette's remarkable presidential address, some Christopher Dawson, and any other books I could put together that espoused a "Christian" view of history, whatever that might mean.  George Marsden's and Mark Noll's work played in as well, and a bit later, this little volume came in quite handy.  I'm deeply indebted, however, to Wilfred McClay for providing the capstone to this homemade seminar in his contribution to the series of essays on offer in Confessing History.

Christopher Dawson's view of history is intoxicating, especially considering how much it informed T.S. Eliot. "Every living culture," wrote Dawson, "must possess some spiritual dynamic, which provides the energy necessary for... sustained social effort." Europe's spiritual dynamic is Christianity.  It was challenged by science, but "only through the cooperation of both these forces can Europe can realize its latent potentialities."  McClay's, however, is the best critique of Dawson I have read:

It is one thing to argue that the Christian faith is socially beneficial and even intellectual and morally plausible, but quite another to argue that it is true.  But unless men and women are convinced of the truth of the Christian faith, how can it have the culture-forming role that Dawson describes - how can it even be a 'religion' in Dawson's sense, that organizing force that constitutes a social world?  For to argue for the resurrection of religion because it is the dynamic core of the culture of the West, and the proper partner for (and opposite to) science is, at bottom, to make an argument from utility, from the standpoint of consequences rather than truth.

Even if one were to defend Dawson's rhetoric as an apologetic strategy, McClay's critique still seems to stick.

I have a copy of the very book that McClay says is so rare, Herbert Butterfield's Christianity and History, and it has been dear to me.  For Butterfield, providence, like vengeance, is God's alone, and is not necessarily the domain of the historian.  His little book concludes, "Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted."  McClay, however, criticizes Butterfield as well, whose historiographical detachment makes little sense of the kind of history on offer in the Bible, rife with declinist narratives and precise attributions of providential activity.  For McClay, "Butterfield did something rather similar to what the analytic philosophers of his day were doing: asserting that because nothing can be said with clarity and precision about God's activity in history, nothing should be said at all."  The middle ground between Dawson and Butterfield, between Christian cultural progressivism and the providential cloud of unknowing, is something to which I will return.

In Confessing History, George Marsden emerges as a sort of neo-Butterfieldian.  Christopher Shannon summarizes what is termed "the Marsden settlement":

Christian scholarship consists in Christian scholars infusing the relatively neutral, technical, procedural norms of the various academic professions with their distinctly Christian background faith commitments.  These spiritual commitments inspire distinctly Christian questions and nurture a sensibility capable of producing distinctly Christian interpretive insights that may enrich the historical understanding of Christian and non-Christian alike, provided the Christian scholar achieves these insights with all due respect to secular professional standards of evidence and argument.

Though I find this rather plausible, Shannon - to put it perhaps a bit too strongly - smells a rat.  "It is my contention that in embracing naturalistic causality and the procedural norms of the historical profession, Christian historians merely trade one providentialism for another.  Where Christian historians of old once looked for the hand of the Holy Spirit, the new-model Christian history follows the naturalist quest for historical agency."  Shannon compellingly insists that we must think behind the nineteenth century:  "Christian historians should engage the profession not by adopting partisan positions on the causes of the Reformation but by exposing the real stakes of [the] debate:  The legitimation the modern secular world." 

Most essays in this volume aren't as extreme as Shannon's (which I'll confess I found appealing).  Others seek to restore a personal dimension to scholarship, as in a wonderfully moving essays by Una Cadegan (which could have availed itself of more art historical scholarship!).  But for me, the hinge paragraph, serving as a fulcrum for the sometimes conflicting essays, came from William Katerburg:

The crisis in contemporary historiography... is threefold: unresolved theoretical debates; mainstream historians who as a matter of practice ignore these debates; and a neglect of the useful, life-serving purpose of history (even though the scientific ideal that fosters this neglect has long been fragmenting).  One way through these dilemmas is to shift the focus of historical and theoretical debates form methodology and the possibility of producing stable knowledge to the purpose and meaning of historical study.  In short, a shift from epistemology to vocation.  If history is in the midst of a crisis, it is a crisis of vocation, not a crisis of epistemology.

Katerberg's very nuanced approach calls for a return to civic and ecclesial responsibility.  Confessing History's solution - if it can be said to have one - is pedagogy or perish.  Hence a focus later in the book on the classroom, on imparting virtues, caring for students, and serving the church as well as the academy.  This vocational turn emerges most clearly in Douglas Sweeney's essay:

During the mid-twentieth century, Christian scholars had to work hard to earn the respect of secular colleagues.  We devoted a great deal of energy to impressing them with our work.  We sought to acquire places of honor at the academic banquet.  But now that we have done this, a different agenda may be in order...  I am certainly not calling for a return to shoddy scholarship...  We must maintain, and even improve, our levels of academic excellence if we hope to make a difference as historians in our guild.  But rather than operate as other-directed, status conscious scholars, I hope we will finish the task of moving beyond our need for recognition and engage a bit more freely in public service that is fueled by Christian faith.

It is here that Alister Chapman's Books & Culture review is helpful.  Amidst all the important talk of meaning over monographs and pupils over the profession, "There is the question of how new this new inclination is.  Some of the engagement with postmodern thought is indeed new, but Christin historians have been committed to loving students and addressing society for a long time," Marsden and Noll among them.  In fact, Katerberg, in an interesting move, places Noll right next to Howard Zinn as a perspectivalist model for this new kind of history.  With Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (and its sequel), Noll spoke in and to his community from where he was situated, but he also - obviously - speaks in and to the profession of history with his other work as well.

Overall, it is dissatisfaction with the state of the profession (one which is by no means limited to Christian historians) that seems to animate many of Confessing History's essays. One historian complains about program envy and another (quoted anonymously) gripes about Christians who seem to have sold out to academic success.  Beth Barton Schweiger's illuminating essay affords a peek behind the academic curtain:

Graduate students learn that the hierarchy of the profession is predicated on knowledge, and not all of it is knowledge about the past.  The most powerful knowledge for students is knowledge of professional networks that will afford them fellowships, book contracts, or even the highly prized tenure-track job.  Intellectual merit is simply not enough.  In the end, scholarship is not the purely intellectual pursuit many students expected...  Historians like to cast the profession as one in which the value of ideas transcends that of cash and where wisdom is valued above power, but one of the most important lessons of graduate school is that professional history is a bureaucracy like any other.   There are careers to be made.

This, of course, is all true.  But is there any profession where it isn't?

All this is to return to McClay.  The middle-ground between Dawson's somewhat utilitarian progressivism and Butterfield's withdrawal from providential assignation is Reinhold Niehbur's view of history. 

Of the three writers under consideration [Dawson, Butterfield and Niebuhr], I suspect that Niebuhr may well be the one with the most to offer us in thinking about how a religious perspective can shed light on the present condition and future prospects of the idea of progress.  His "reflexive" outlook takes account of the virtues of both Dawson's and Butterfield's works, by acknowledging that the idea of progress is deeply rooted in the Christian Weltanschaaung and in Christian culture, but also by insisting that the misuses of the idea, including the overconfident identification of man's purposes with God's, are paradigmatic examples of sin at work - and moreover by insisting that the dynamic of progress in history, while genuine, is also by its very nature full of moral peril for us, because of the kind of being we are.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

Chapman's very fine review suggests that McClay's essay doesn't neatly fit into this volume.  But by applying McClay's Niebuhrian insight in that paragraph to the guild of history (or, in my case, art history), McClay's essay fits the volume well.  Niebuhr, to be sure, is not good for everything.  But we do well to bring to our guilds, which are not untouched by providence, the kind of realism that Niehbur brought to history.  To the extent that they have succeeded in countering historical misconceptions they have, however unwittingly, served God.  There has been a lot of poor history in the name of faith, and the existence of the profession of history can help Christians avoid, and correct, those mistakes.  Our academic guilds have progressed, they have been (not hopelessly) corrupted, and they are - especially now - open to correction.   It is consequently not duplicitous to, in Mark Schwein's words, "honor Chronos in our work and the Logos in our alleluias." The Lord of Chronos, after all, is Christ.

Confessing History makes clear that there are many ways to be a Christian historian, but the guild suspicion, though not present in every essay, seemed somewhat overblown.  The post-secular turn in academia makes conditioning in materialist epistemology much less of a concern than it may once have been.  The secular providentialism that Shannon rightly decries is certainly still there, but it is easily dismantled using the very guild standards that such views transgress.  Perhaps I say this because I've been professionalized, but that's a good thing, one which I'm well aware hasn't happened to me sufficiently enough.  Guild standards beat my mind into something better than it was; and because it is a mind that certainly requires more beating, there is nothing like a healthy fear of colleagues - perhaps especially secular colleagues - to help that process along.

Confessing History contains a moving sermon entitled, "For Teachers to Live Professors Must Die." It employs an elaborate mountaineering parable to propose that rather than ascending their professions in search of status, professors should kenotically descend to the cognitive level of their students (the pedagogic bibliography for this descent is especially helpful).  And while this is no doubt necessary, the sermon neglects to emphasize the rest of the story.  The aim of such a descent is to teach students how to climb.  Christian historians, because they're required to love their students, should naturally be better teachers.  Encouraging them to be better scholars, ones who thereby sharpen their students, continues to strike me as a more urgent concern.  And there is Scriptural support for that as well.

We should attempt to summit our disciplines because it's too easy not to try, and the views from the top need be seen with Christian eyes as well.  If the peak seems boring or irrelevant, that's because it hasn't been reached yet, so we should keep climbing   If we exert ourselves primarily to change our disciplines, for their sake over our own, we will only better serve our students and churches.  If we focus primarily on our students and churches, our guilds - which are ready for change - won't.

Where's My Coin?

It is said that Euclid once demonstrated a beautiful mathematical theorem, after which a young man asked, "But what do I get by learning these things?" Euclid famously replied, "Toss that man a coin since he must make a gain out of what he learns."  Maybe one could summarize much discussion about the contemporary university by suggesting that like that young man, many critics of American higher education want their coin, and they want it now.

For a different perspective, I have another installment in my "save the university" series at Public Discourse today entitled Medieval Wisdom for Modern Universities.   (Previous chapters included The State of Higher Desperation, Postmodern Pythagoras, and The Useless University.)

On the other hand, you might be equally edified by browsing the pleasant comments on my response video (where my beloved viewers seemed to miss the fact that I was intentionally overdoing it in response to this).

Update: Also, for those interested in seeing that friendship window at the PU Chapel, I uploaded some photos on flickr.  They're tough to shoot, but if you flick through my stream you can get some details.  If anyone can crack all the scenes let me know.  Some have stumped us.

Art History to the Rescue

The slightest amount of historical perspective on University education is often sufficient to cure graduate school griping.  Why so many in the humanities - which include historians - seem to lack such perspective is puzzling.   Peter Brooks' Our Universities: How Bad? How Good?, currently available in The New York Review of [each others'] Books, provides that necessary perspective, even if he doesn't go as far back as he might have (Self link? Don't mind if I do).

Brooks concludes his review of four of the most recent books in the "crisis in the humanities" genre (soon to have its own call number), by suggesting that a discipline like art history is not the problem, but the solution. Not without apologizing, he quotes Henry James' The Tragic Muse, where the character Nick Dormer stands before some portraits in London's National Gallery: 

As he stood before them the perfection of their survival often struck him as the supreme eloquence, the virtue that included all others, thanks to the language of art, the richest and most universal. Empires and systems and conquests had rolled over the globe and every kind of greatness had risen and passed away, but the beauty of the great pictures had known nothing of death or change, and the tragic centuries had only sweetened their freshness. 

Such is the wonder that both generated the liberal arts and can restore them. Universities do "deserve better critics than they have got at present."  Brooks is a fine start.

Anthropology of Secularism 101

Coming soon to a University near you. 

Critical Theory: Long in the Tooth

The extremely instructive Art Seminar series record discussions on the state of art history as a discipline.  Pick up any one of the seven volumes, and you'll immediately read in the uniform preface that theory lives!

People who would rather avoid problems of interpretation, at least in their more difficult forms, have sometimes hoped that 'theory' would prove to be a passing fad.  A simple test shows that is not the case. 

After a few handy graphs, it's proven.  Theory is forever.  I guess it really is simple:  If you think rigorously about interpretation, you must be into theory.  If not, you must be Roger Kimball. 

But - and this is very important - be sure not to continue reading past the preface.  On page ten of Volume 5, one encounters this from Rebecca Zorach (who gave a very fine lecture here last year).

It might also look like approaches driven by social and political issues - social history, feminism, postcolonial studies - are themselves getting a bit long in the tooth.  And I sense a certain impatience of late - not only in Renaissance art history but in other academic areas as well  - with the political.  We might feel irritated by what seems to be an austere moralism in feminist or postcolonial approaches; they might seem to threaten the pleasures we take in art. Or, on the other hand, we might feel exhausted by our own failures to use a politicized art history as a tool for substantive change.

But hasn't she seen the handy graphs?  Seriously though, good for the Art Seminar for permitting the questioning of its own premises. 

Advocates of critical theory continue to believe that those dissatisfied with it are necessarily "traditional" or "conservative."  But perhaps we're just bored (which is my interpretation of the empty chairs on the covers), and searching for new paradigms to help explain material that theory can't illuminate.  Aren't labels such as "traditional" and "conservative," furthermore, better applied to those defending the status quo?   From my vantage point, everyone is wondering what's next.  Maybe the place where the Art Seminar series ended up - a volume on religion (which I ransacked here) - provides a clue.

Response Video: Yes, I Want to Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities

Once I saw that even the fearless Fencing Bear was discouraged by that Humanities video, a swift response was called for.

Crisis of the Yawniversity

David A. Bell does not like Mark C. Taylor's new book on the crisis of the University.  He's more appreciative of Louis Menand's and Martha Nussbaum's books on the same subject, but is not fully satisfied with them either.  Bell, however, does offer an alternative diagnosis.  He argues that the "great confinement" era of University education, which began in the late 19th century, may at last be breaking down.  Consequently, Universities should awaken from their specialized slumbers and join Google Scholar, i-Tunes U and the Teaching Company at the open access party.

Why should serious public outreach be marginalized, just because it falls into the gap between traditional definitions of research and teaching?  Is an essay that intelligently guides interested amateurs through the thickets of learning really less valuable to the humanities than a piece of original research?  From a strategic point of view, at least, it is probably far more valuable.  Additional public outreach should not replace original scholarship, but it can complement it very usefully.  Indeed, by helping create a larger, more visible public constituency for the humanities, it will maintain the conditions under which serious scholarship can survive.  It will hardly solve this most recent, and most serious, 'crisis in the humanities,'  But it might, at least alleviate some of the worst effects.

In short, scholars - without forsaking specialization - must become contagions of instruction, habitually and effectively imparting enthusiasm for their subjects to a public that may not assume their subjects' importance.  Or, to put it more succinctly, teach or perish.

The Ph.D. Solution

The string of articles (like this one) involving academics whistle-blowing on academia continues. This time Louis Menand analyzes The Ph.D. Problem in Harvard Magazine: "The most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system." In short, Menand argues that the system is designed to produce A.B.D.'s (cheap teachers), not Ph.D.'s, for whom there are no jobs. Accordingly, long dissertation completion times benefit institutions, which may help explain why "You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years."

Add to this the fact that graduate students "are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization." Still, Menand infers that the theoretical twists are rarely original because most graduate students, in order to enter the system, conformed to its thought-patterns long ago.

Menand suggests the solution to a self-validating system where everyone thinks the same is Iconoclasm (and, eh hem, his wish is my command). Furthermore, he suggests the "academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction." For starters, why not return to the medieval roots of graduate education by considering it a form of the contemplative life? According to John Henry Newman, the intellectual life, at its best, "has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres." In an academic world where the very notion of an objectively beautiful cosmic order is dogmatically, instinctually resisted, that would be very Iconoclastic indeed.

Grade-Grubbing Explained

There's lots of good going on in academia, and I think I've defended it enough to permit myself another complaint. Previously at millinerd, I've expressed frustration with overly-professionalized undergraduates. Commence self-quotation:

Undergraduates today seem to lack what my generation specialized in - existential angst - erring as Gen Y seems to err on the side of careerism. As someone once put it, there is only one college major in the modern University: upward mobility.

But on further reflection, I believe I owe Generation Y an apology. If it is true, as indeed it is, that "the percentage of departments valuing research above teaching [has] more than doubled since 1968 (35.4 percent to 75.7 percent)," then undergraduates aren't to be blamed for soulless grade-grubbing; they're just patterning themselves after their tenure-chasing exemplars. And now, the 1987 anti-drug ad reference (a classic, by the way) should make sense.

The Frankfurt Fool

Adam Kirsch at The New Republic provides a very helpful review of Thomas Wheatland's The Frankfurt School in Exile. According to Kirsch, the book brings an appreciative, but more down-to-earth reading of the revered "fathers of critical theory" (Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm, Horkheimer, etc.). Incidentally, in Seminary instead of "church fathers," we all learned to say "church fathers and mothers." But I suppose that is easier to pull off in church history than with mid-century Marxism. Here's Kirsch:

Wheatland shows how the Institute [for Social Research] came into contact with two important segments of the American Jewish community. The first were the New York Intellectuals, who were in many ways the perfect American counterpart to the Frankfurters: Jewish radical intellectuals with an interest in politics and culture. While the two groups never engaged as deeply as they mightg have - in part, Wheatland shows, due to the Frankfurters' policy of staying aloof from American politics - some relationships did form, and New Yorkers like Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer became aware of Critical Theory.

But for Glazer, we might add, the awareness very much deepened, especially regarding Critical Theory's impact on public architecture. In his wonderful book that I continually refer to, From a Cause to a Style, Glazer is judicious about Critical Theory, but also mildly exasperated:

Young students should reach out, try, experiment. Even if the theory that speaks to them is impenetrable to me, they should try to realize the hints and insights and possibilities they divine in it. But when they design and build for the public, one factor affecting what they design must be public response... if the students empathize with the people [they build for], maybe what is necessary is not to critique it but to bring with their designs something they would not find in graceless environment[s]: perhaps humor, perhaps nostalgia, perhaps repose, perhaps even, if one is capable of it, something of beauty

But by the end of the book, the gloves come off. The sons of the fathers of Critical Theory, according to Glazer, soon became

scarcely comprehensible, and the less comprehensible... the more they engaged architects' interests, but in any case they were no longer theories that envisaged the role of the architect as enabling and improving the life of ordinary or run-of-the-mill people and communities, as early modernism did. Despite the influence of quasi- and pseudo-Marxist thinking in these advanced contemporary theories, they had little interest in the improvement of the common social life and the circumstances of the working class or low-income families, or in the social reform that is consistent with some kinds of Marxism. Rather, they showed much more interest in the catastrophism, the apocalyptic character, that is a more important part of Marxism. Theories in favor today among advanced architectural theorists and students are those that emphasize, indeed celebrate, breakdown in society and meaning, often in obscure and contradictory language.

And so, Glazer foolishly sold his birthright as the New York heir to the Frankfurt School for a mess of comprehensible language, concern for the needs of real people, social cohesion, and beauty. What was he thinking?