Th souk in Cairo 



NEW EVIDENCE  FOR “RELIGIOUS LIBERTY”, A.K.A. Discrimination against Gays.

 

It may seem surprising that those who defend religious liberty from the perilous effects of providing services to gay people so rarely cite the most compelling biblical evidence in support of their position. That is partially explained by the fact that liberal denominations (including Anglicans, Catholics and variious Orthodox churches) have conspired to suppress the oldest evidence on the subject, even though I have repeatedly called attention to it.

 

Some years ago in the souk in Cairo I purchased a papyrus fragment from a dealer who  has also provided texts to eminent scholars from Harvard and other famous institutions. He assured me that th fragment dated to the second century CE.  Its significance was immediately clear , for the fragment  began with  words from Mark 12. 31 (or possibly Matthew 22.39) “…thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”  The new fragment continues, “unless thy neighbor loveth another of the same sex.  Those shalt thou not deck the weddings thereof with flowers, nor strike the lyre nor blow the tuba (Grerk salpigx) nor make unto them a graven image for their album, nor serve them nor bow  down before them. Neither shalt thou let them draw water from thy well, nor eat the bread of thy oven. Nor shalt thou lay healing hands upon them, not on their handmaidens.  Neither shalt thou fix the axle of their cart when it carrieth no longer its burden, nor sell them cloaks to warm by night nor hats to shelter from the heat of the day.” The prohibitions continue for another 23 lines in the papyrus thereby including almost all activities known in the eastern Mediterranean of the time. 

The significance of the papyrus is all the more evident when one realizes that no other biblical passage explicitly restricts the providing of services or the sale of commodities to gay people. 

VIRGINIA, NORTH CAROLINA, NOW MISSISSIPPI . ARE  THE FIRINGS AN ACCIDENTAL CONVERGENCE?

 

If you want to crash an airplane maybe you lock a pilot out of the cockpit.  If you have an ideological agenda for a public university maybe you fire its leader without any transparent process or clear justification.  That’s what almost happened a while ago  to Teresa Sullivan at the University of Virginia.  Students and faculty rallied and the dismissal did not work.  It did work a few months ago when the Board of Governors  of the University of North Carolina statewide system decided to force its  president, Tom Ross, to retire.  Again there was no careful or transparent process. Another Republican dominated board just let him go.  Faculty and students grumbled but there was no effective protest. Who knows what sort of appointment will be made as his replacement?

Now it’s Mississippi’s turn. Alan Blinder reports that 2,500 students have protested the board’s decision not to oust te Chancellor Daniel W. Jones.  Again there was no transparent process and no clear  reasons given. 

Conspiracy theories come immediately to mind – the master hand of a right -wing think tank , for  example.  But that’s too easy. My suspicion is that the problem is deeper than that.  Why, after all, would such a master plan for locking the pilot out of the cockpit have enough appeal to result in these destructive board actions?  The answer has to be that two conflicting views of education are at work, a traditional one represented by the targeted heads of institutions, and another that distrusts the whole enterprise, and tolerates it only in so far as a  rigorous cost benefit analysis makes some support for higher education  inescapable. 

PS Friends point out that I omitted the situation n Alabama and that the UK has seen a similar pattern. Then there is Texas, always the big one. A friend writes: "  
You left out the biggest example of this chain of purges which began at UT-Austin, where the Regents, all appointed by Rick Perry, clearly wanted to be rid of Bill Powers, president of UT-Austin.  He was given the same one-year parachute that Tom Ross was given.  The real test of this theory for NC will be in the kind of individual chosen to lead the UNC system.  One can hope that reasonable heads will prevail. "
Yes, I hope but don't aske to bet. 

CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTIOM?

 

Of course we want jobs for our students. That’s why faculty work hard to help them think clearly, make and defend an argument, speak and write cogency, and all the other good  practical things  that come from a liberal education.

But we want something more – a genuinely satisfying life.   That may seem beyond reach but it turns out the key to it is close at hand. It is engagement, curricular and extra-curricular.

The importance of student engagement emerges with compelling clarity in the 2014 Purdue-Gallup Index Report, a study of more than 30,000 college graduates and their experience in the workplace.   It’s not a pretty story but there is hope.  This survey found that more than half of college graduates employed full time were either “actively disengaged” or “not engaged” in their work.  That’s the bad news.

The good news is that those who as students had high level of intellectual and extra-curricular engagement were much more engaged in their work, and in community involvement and reported higher levels of satisfaction and well-being.

Even better news is that we now know how to achieve that engagement.  One crucial factor is good mentoring; as the Purdue-Gallup report  says “… if graduates had a professor who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams, their odds of being engaged at work more than doubled … And if they worked on projects that took a semester or more to complete, their odds of being engaged at work doubled as well.”

This report is a discourse shifter, a game changer, maybe, certainly a powerful alternative to the jobs, jobs, jobs rhetoric that has dominated decision making in higher education in recent years.  People who uses the tired old discourse should be routed to this report and asked what they expect from their employees and what they want for their children and grandchildren.  The answer in one form or another is likely to include the word ”satisfaction,” maybe even  in a sense of joy in one’s vocation.  

Building student engagement is not a secret art, the arcana of few genius teachers. In recent years the data acquired from student surveys and other studies show that a relatively small number of practices have a high impact on student engagement.  Using data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)  George Kuh has identified ten practices that closely correlated with student academic engagement.  The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), and Wabash College’s Center of  Inquiry in the Liberal Arts also point to  practices that produce strong results. 

 

Stay tuned. I’ll put that material together in another blog post, soon. I promise.  Soon. Real soon.

 

 

THE TWO HEADS OF CONSERVATIVE EDUCATIONAL THOUGHT

 

If Jedediah Purdy has it right in the March 19th New Yorker ( “Ayn Rand  Comes to UNC” )  some contemporary conservative thinking about higher education has two heads

 

One wants is to increase “ ’diversity of ideas” on campus and ‘encourage respect for the institutions that underlie economic prosperity,’ including ‘private property,’ ‘competition,’ and ‘limits on government.“

The  other head calls for a return to “the Great Books model of humanities education: literature and philosophy as a source of eternal truths, dating back to Plato, passing through John Locke, and perfected by Ayn Rand and the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek. A Pope Center research paper published this year describes a “renewal in the university” through privately funded programs dedicated to teaching the great books untainted by relativism.”

 

But the truly great books can’t be pushed so easily into programs proving “the morality of capitalism,” or battling against relativism.  At the core they put under scrutiny that drive contemporary behavior, corporate and individual.  Challenging the “unexamined life” is  are subversive, now as it was then.

 

You can't have it both ways, a curriculum that inevitably challenges the way students decide to spend their lives, and a set of values that uncritically support corporate needs. Which will win out?

 

I was walking in our nation’s capital during the recent Great Recession when I saw a great banned hung on a pretentious building.  It said JOBS, JOBS, JOBS.  I thought that this must be the slogan of some left-leaning think tank, or maybe of the Democratic party trying to drum up support for new federal efforts at stimulating job creation.

 

Wrong!  When I crossed the street to see whose building it was, I found the national headquarters of the Chamber of Commerce.  The slogan was not advocating Obama’s stimulus program – far from it!  The Chamber was using it as a weapon against what they regarded as stifling restrictions on free enterprise.  It was a clever move as can be seen in the recent history of, for example, action to combat climate change.  

 

The presidential campaign of 2008 seemed to evolve around the slogan. On October 15 2008, Joe Biden made his famous gaffe, “ the number-one job facing the middle class [is], as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs."  Four years later Romney  was campaigning under the same slogan.



 

But when I  first saw it I misunderstood that slogan in another respect.  It was not only effective in economic and political matters; it also helped shift thinking about higher education. Soon in North Carolina the newly elected governor, Pat McCrory, announced he wanted a funding formula for public higher education that was “not based on how many butts [were] in seats but how many of those butts can get jobs.“  The shift to job preparation may also explains why the administration of Governor Scot Walker of Wisconsin deleted the sentence “Basic to every purpose of the [University] system is the search for truth,” and inserting language about meeting “the state’s workforce needs.”  Jobs, Jobs, Jobs again.

Both governors have backed away from their gaffes, but it’s discouraging to find such an impoverished understanding of higher education in such exalted places.  Then I came across Tony Grafton’s encomium of Latin in “Latin Lives” in  the February 16th 2015 issue of the Nation, That gave me an idea. The eminent historian of Renaissance Europe, says he notices a recent  “explosion” of love of learning among his undergraduates:  “Other factors must also play a role. But it turns out that for a surprising number of students Latin – and Latin studying of a special kind -- has been the fuse that sparks this explosion.”  Grafton goes on to describe the effects of the Paideia Institute in Rome, a total immersion, living Latin program.  That was what set off their intense  academic engagement of  these undergraduates, and the high quality senior theses that Grafton found himself  reading at all hours of the day and night.  Hard work – as Grafton puts it, “sleepless nights, exhausted mornings and boundless pleasure. The joy of Latin, the joy of scholarship.” 

 

Did he say “joy”?  That's a word we do not hear very often in higher education.   

Of course! That’s it. The learned business leaders of the Chamber of Commerce and he distinguished governors of our beloved states never meant to promulgate such a simplistic slogan as Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.  Time for a little creative vandalism an emendation obvious to the philological eye.  It’s time to break into the Chamber of  Commerce’s headquarters, retrieve their huge banner, unfurl it again, properly emend it to read not Jobs Jobs Jobs – but Joy Joy Joy.   That’s what is in the texts we classicists teach, waiting for those who are lucky enough to be at a college that values the past and knows the life-changing potential of an education grounded in the Classics.

 

 

Every few hundred years iconoclasm breaks out again.  The “peoples of the Book,” as we blandly say, are especially prone to it,  when they read “thou shalt not make unto thyself a graven image…” (Exodus 20.4, Deuteronomy 5.8).  Ninth century Byzantium, seventeenth century England -- on it goes.   Today’s New York Times reports the appalling story of ISIS’ destruction of antiquities.  But what they are doing iis more than smashing old images, or depriving us all of our cultural heritage.  And it is not just about art.

Iconoclasm is an extreme form of selectivity about the past. It tells the onlooker what is to be avoided, and, indirectly, what is to be given pride of place in this case the Prophet’s words and not much else.

We need to speak out in every way we can about this abuse of the past.  It’s a war crime and ought to be punished as such.  But we have an iconoclasm of our own, subtler but no less pernicious.  It is evident when we remove from the curriculum and from research support the study of those cultures, from the third millennium BCE, through the Hellenistic age and the Romans, to the art and architecture of early Christianity, down to Byzantine civilization.  For years persistent neglect, as pernicious as war, has been waged against such study.  Now only a small fraction of American students has the opportunity to study this part of our past in any depth.

 

Maybe that iconoclasm ought to be recognized as a war crime, too.