End times

The end of the university? Not a brilliant article, but an insightful one. Its odd, but not surprising, that he doesn't consider the role of student affairs as part of the university at all.

Sad news for TEC

Article on Ann Redding's deposition from the Episcopal Church. I guess if you want to be a truth-teller you have to be willing to face crucifixion...

Hermeneutics & higher ed

I apologize for my extended absence. I recently found out that I was accepted to a doctoral program in interdisciplinary studies at my current university, which I'll be doing part-time. My focus will be philosophy of education, hermeneutics, epistemology and higher education. I'm extremely excited about the opportunity, and I think it will have long-lasting and practical application on my job as a student affairs professional. It's a shame that most humanities & social science programs don't do more to train their gradutes for work outside the field of teaching - but that's for another post.

Also I've been busy preparing for the baby arriving this summer. Most of my readership are folks interested in religion and I still am, to be sure, interested in religion. I'm hoping that my dissertation will focus on the collision between the two worldviews of the academy and religion, and their impact on students as they begin to move from pre-critical to critical thinkers.

That being said, I've been dipping back into Heidegger, this time with a particular eye to hermeneutics.

"Conceived with a view to Dasein's possible self-transparency, hermeneutics does not itself carve out a trail to this awareness or propose models for doing so. It must remain the task of each individual Dasein to open up its own path to self-transparency....Dasein has a natural propensity to overlook itself, to deny that its possibilities for transparency are of its own making. This is especially evident in that human beings dissolve unawares into their world and are so lost to themselves. Instead of undertaking their own interpretations of themselves, they take up interpretations that are already available and so relieve themselves of the burden of self-elucidation. (98 - Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics)

So the question remains: Does higher education play a part in this process, should it play a part in this process and, if so, what is that role?

Cheers -

Lowering the drinking age...

This probably the most pressing problem in higher education right now, and nobody seems to be willing to take a stand. Really good clip that outline the problem. If you want me to give feedback based on my experiences in student affairs, let me know.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4819332n

The dark side of the moon

So, I was going to log on this morning to make a post and accidentally misspelled the URL of my blog. I got this instead, which I find extremely coincidental.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Cartesian dualism & family life centers

“In phenomenology, for instance, philosophers tell us that the basic unit is not the substantial self relating to an objective world as a neutral observer, but the ‘self-in-the-world.’ We are selves only in relationship – relationships with the world of which we are a part and with other selves who respond to us as well influence us…The classical Western notion of the ‘individual’ as a substantial entity over against the world (both cosmic & personal) is the correlate both of Aristotelian metaphysics and seventeenth-century science, and it is no surprise that the rise of the novel, which charts the destiny of the individual, occurred at approximately the same time as Cartesian philosophy….” McFague, “Metaphorical Theology” (96).

It seems to me that one of the greatest threats we currently face is the Cartesian dualism on which Modernism is built. What I mean by this is our assumption that a distinct split between subject/object, I/Thou exists in the world – or, as McFague says, the basic unit is self/world, rather than ‘self-in-the-world.’

I don’t know why I didn’t see it before, but it seems to me painfully obvious that post/modernism is not about a simple tearing apart at the epistemological structures of society (i.e. the structures of knowledge – who defines it, creates it, controls it), but a rejection of the Cartesian dualism which underlies the Western version of reality. No wonder post/modernity is and can only be a Western condition.

What this means to me, as a university educator & employee, is that my task is not getting my students to begin the process of meaning-making. In fact, I am confident they already are. My task is the problem of integration – that is, breaking down the barriers which they assume exist between the ‘different worlds’ in which they exist. In other words, what does a physics major’s religious identity have to do with anything? I would argue, a whole hell of a lot, even though being a fundamentalist Christian or an atheist doesn’t change the speed of light. But it may, in fact, in form her vision of her essential task in the world, and the assumptions which direct her work. In other words, all of the constituent elements which inform our reality are always already integrated, though we believe we can ‘bracket’ them quite easily. This is one legacy of Cartesian dualism.

The same case can be made for Christianity. A basic problem in the history of the tradition has been Christianity’s relationship to the world, as outlined by St. Augustine. A Modern (with a capital M) solution has been to drink deeply of the dualism presented by Cartesian philosophy and create cities within cities – the ‘family life centers’ of the world, which are a ‘Christian oasis’ in the midst of the turmoil of society. The way I see it, this is (at best) a dangerous exercise in hubris, if not (at worst) a turning away from the very call of Christianity. I say ‘hubris’ because it seems to me that these centers exist as a statement that Christians are somehow ‘better’ than the rest of the world, therefore they require castle gates to create a boundary between the clean & unclean. I say ‘a turning away’ because these centers imply a Christian’s job is to give resources, aid, skills only on the terms of Christianity – rather than giving charity freely with no expectation of conversion, which is the reward.