Books for the fall: With reflections on the academic vocation

This fall, I’m scheduled to teach one course, Social Sciences I (and audit a course for training purposes). The books I have on my desk for course prep are as follows:

• Benedict, Patterns of Culture
• Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis and New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
• Durkheim, On Suicide
• Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
• DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
• The Marx-Engels Reader
• James, Psychology: The Briefer Course
• Gilligan, In a Different Voice

It will be great to get to read a lot of the texts and authors that I “should’ve” read, and also to teach the ones I already know. I imagine that I’ll be continuing to focus on new courses next year so that Shimer can ensure that I’m adequately flexible, and so I will continue to get a chance to expand and deepen my knowledge of what one might call “great books.”

To me, this highlights one reason people want to go into academia, a reason that can often get buried among many other legitimate concerns — we want to know stuff. By no means is an academic career the only or even necessarily the best way to know stuff, but it is certainly a really good way to attain that goal. Anyone can be an avid reader, but there are relatively few people who are paid to read books and talk about them with people.

When we’re in grad school, there’s this pressure to somehow know everything already or at least appear to — but there’s no substitute for just steadily reading over the course of your life, adding new books to your repertoire and returning to old ones. It seems so obvious when I say it, but it’s only in the last couple years that I was able to step outside the grad student “panic mode” and reflect on the magnitude of having an entire life to study this stuff.

Inside Higher Ed articles

This morning, Inside Higher Ed published pieces by me and Virgil Brower on the importance of the Great Books approach to education.

Grading as performative speech act

In my feminist theology class last year, I had occasion to explain the notion of performative speech acts to them. I used the standard examples: an oath exists simply by virtue of someone swearing an oath, the act of getting married consists of saying “I do” (under the appropriate circumstaces), etc.

And then it occurred to me — their grades are performative speech acts as well. They get the grades they get by virtue of me, the recognized instructor of the course, saying that’s what they get.

End of semester activities: Life after The Absolute Deadline

The end of Shimer College’s semester is structured pretty uniquely.

The immersion method

The established orthodoxy holds that the ideal classroom experience is a discussion-centered format with a small class size. This approach is supposed to facilitate “active learning” on the part of students, which is the only way to actually change their deeper thought patterns. Among its other benefits, this model also helps them to become better readers, as the kind of critical engagement we’re looking for is practiced in the classroom, with on-the-spot feedback and guidance from the professor.

Many educators have concluded, based on their experience, that this model simply isn’t realistic. Students aren’t engaged enough to make it work, and they feel ripped off at having to listen to each other when there’s an expert standing right there — thus teaching evaluations tend to reward more authoritarian, lecture-centric approaches. My first couple years of teaching inclined me in that direction as well.

Since arriving at Shimer College, I’ve changed my mind. The reason the ideal model doesn’t seem to work is that no one is actually doing it.

Where I teach

Shimer College’s main floor has two drinking fountains, one of which has notably stronger water pressure than the other. Indeed, the weaker one is so weak that one is in continual danger of touching one’s lips directly to the faucet. Accordingly, last week someone put up labels over them: “The Good Fountain” and “The Bad Fountain,” respectively.

Shortly after the labels were posted, someone edited the latter to read “The Evil Fountain.” A subsequent editor christened it “The Privation of Good Fountain.”

UPDATE: The label for the good fountain has been removed, calling the ontological premises of the entire system into question!

Shimer College’s new president

Shimer College has announced that its next president will be Susan E. Henking, currently of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the first woman to serve as Shimer’s president since its founder, Frances Wood Shimer, and — in a move apparently calculated to make me feel more at home — is also a scholar of religion who has been active in the AAR, including in LGBT studies.