End the University as We Know It

Mark C. Taylor writes,

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

A great piece with plenty to evoke conversation and debate. Though it breaks my heart a bit to suggest tenure be phased out before I've had my own chance to abuse - cough - embrace the system :)

Postmodern Faith

This past weekend on retreat at St. Gregory's I finally put my finger on why I don't think postmodernity - ultimately - offers the place to start to explore faith and knowledge. I found and used much postie lit in my work to make the argument for universal faith; which is to say that all have recourse at some point to articles of argument which are not fundamentally deconstructible. Fair enough - Wolterstorff makes similar points in Reason within the Bounds of Religion. It's a useful enough line of logic in the contemporary academy.

The problem comes in execution. Faith remains an autonomous activity of human beings, something that we take as a leap, as Kierkegaard would say, or a "mad decision" as Derrida would later argue. But the Christian experience knows faith is too impossible for mere human beings to make on their own.

Faith begins in God, not the actualization of self. And until we recognize and embrace that we can't make it ourselves, but it is a gift, mysterious, unfathomable and outrageous in this broken world, we shall never rest easy in its constituent beliefs and activities.

How small and foolish I feel after such simple revelations.

The Challenge of Power and the New Geography of Human Settlement

Yet another piece has emerged challenging what has become the conventional wisdom of green energy, and not without cause. Wired magazine, a favourite in my household, recently did a feature spread on how emerging technology might revolutionize the electrical grid - a grid which, it is important to emphasize, functions like much of our domestic tele-communications infrastructure, with degrading 19th and 20th century components waiting on catastrophe. Wired received marked criticism for its futuristic nearly science fictional take on how to solve America's (and to us Canadians that means North America's) electrical power grid problem.

The real concern, as I understand it, is that policy advocates aren't sufficiently aware of the actual science behind electrical power generation and - especially - the delivery of electricity. Electricity is the ultimate JIT (just-in-time) product. Once it's generated there is no effective way of storing it (even some of the best industrial batteries save only 50% of the charge put into them which degrades over time) with severe limitations on transportation (higher voltage transit may mean lower losses, but ultimately even those equations break down). The fact is the best way of producing electrical power is a relatively local generating station, meeting the capacity of the region. That is a problem.

And it means some interesting opportunities. I was reflecting with a room full of electrical engineers and contractors recently that perhaps as energy costs rise - which if we move from carbon based generation to "something else" and that cost is accurately reflected in market rates it most certainly will - perhaps human settlement patterns will reflect this new reality.

The old geography is one based on transportation and agriculture, focussed especially on rivers. But new technology has made travel - both of people and of consumables - easy and fast. I think there are two critical geographic factors that will begin to determine where and how people settle: 1) fresh water, and 2) electrical generation capability.

Already companies and corporations are yielding to the latter. Google may "do no evil" with its low-energy HQ in California but its 100-megawatt server farms are popping up in places like Lithuania and China, where power is cheap and plentiful (though not especially clean).

There are places in Canada that have massive hydroelectric capacity - for example - that have no market to deliver the power to. Is it possible that as generating power becomes more and more expensive (in $$) and costly (in environmental terms) that these places - with gluts of fresh water and clean, easy power generation - will become the new cornerstones for industrial and human settlement?

In the short term, at least, I doubt it.

Theology on Tap

This group is very cool, and I could not have brainstormed a more compelling tagline: Good food. Great beer. Excellent ideas. I'm having lunch with the Chaplain who runs it this week, and might end up doing a few things with them. I'm starting a rather similar kind of event - if a bit lower on ideas and higher on good beer - this summer called Common Ground, with some great, community active friends in the Locke Street neighbourhood.

God and Evil

From C.S. Lewis via John Stackhouse, something that took on fresh meaning following a much loved sermon yesterday.

The real danger is coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not, "So there's no God after all," but, "So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer."

Can God be Trusted?

Pursuant to a variety of recent blog posts, last night I read John Stackhouse's book Can God be Trusted?: Faith and the Challenge of Evil, a delightful, if roving, popular read on some of the issues at stake in the discussion.

What I appreciate most about the book is its popular but deeply sympathetic tone to the challenge of faith. It offers no ultimate answer, though does provide a reasonable outline for why belief in God might be consistent with the problem of evil. However, discussions like this often seem to intellectualize the very problem which is not - really - fundamentally intellectual. Stackhouse does not. He lets the reader continue to feel the heft of the existential problem of faith, and further to agree that faith is hard - it is no naturally easy thing to fall into, or to fix ourselves up with. And it is not, of course, something we can stir up in our own hearts with sufficient study and reflection.

Such faith, Stackhouse rightly notes, is moved and made within us by the Spirit of God, echoing my own oft repeated evening prayer: I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!

When it comes to the deep pain and problems of the age we are in, I can think of no other prayer by which to come to faith.

Bravo to the writers of Battlestar Galactica

This past semester I felt less like a PhD English student and more like a serious critic (and fan!) of Battlestar Galactica. This is not to say that I neglected my studies: all my papers are now done (see my comment to Adunare's last post), my GA research is finished, I completed the Graduate Program in Teaching, and I have submitted a paper to a conference. All of this - and I do mean ALL - pales in importance to the evenings and afternoons and early, early mornings I spent catching up on the past 4 seasons of this epic TV space drama.

Not only did I engage this series with all of the giddy giggling, knee-slapping joy, and loud WTFs one would expect from a Calvinist proselyte, I also brought the wisdom of Battlestar to bear on discussions in a grad seminar and a fourth year course I gave a few guest lectures in. My enthusiasm was no doubt fuelled by the sheer amount of time I spent trying to get caught up so I could watch the final 2 hour episode when it aired a few weeks ago. This involved watching all of season 4 in a raucous 24 hour marathon.

Not only does shit blow up in this series (a creational requisite for space dramas and good TV in general), but the character development is of a depth rarely achieved in this medium, and the issues dealt with are as current as today's news yet as epic as the great myths. If it sounds like I'm gushing, I am! But that is because this series is that good!

The more Battlestar I watched the more I was moved by the way its worlds mirrored our own: making me more keenly aware of human sinfulness, our dreams that literally keep us alive, the often crushing difficulty of being a leader in a difficult time, the high honor and value of bravery and sacrifice, etc.

The series as a whole makes epic the line of the Bob Dylan song that frames the final episodes: "There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief. There is too much confusion, I can't get no relief." The series makes the chaos of life so real that any watcher of it (especially after 24 hours straight!) ends up insisting on this same thing: there must be some way out of here. That Christianity provides a sounder answer than Balthaar does in the last episode is not surprising; but that does not make the struggle to live that "answer," especially in the midst of holocaust or disaster, any easier.

Or maybe it does...

Either way, if Admiral Adama was to become a Christian and a preacher I'd want to go to his church. So say we all.

The Last Day of School

It's the last day of school - here come lip synching and ice cream trucks, writes Jennifer Gardy (from one of my favourite blogs). I finished my last bit of teaching for the year on Tuesday night, with a mixture of relief and nostalgia. Where to go from here? Jennifer writes,

[O]nce the undergrads have left for their summer jobs, for their hometowns, and for their European backpacking adventures, the faculty and staff that are left behind pull a Tom Cruise in Risky Business. With no one to answer to, it's pants-less lip-synching from now 'til September, baby... Our department even brings in an ice cream truck once every summer to dispense free treats outside the building...

Obviously I teach at the wrong school. Many professors where I come from would decry this sort of thing, partly because it's a debasement of academia but mostly because they don't get invited to those kinds of parties.

Our Postmodern Financial Crisis

Via City Journal, Andre Glucksmann argues that the old axiom it is true because we say it is, has run its course:

Postmodernism, which places itself “beyond good and evil,” beyond true and false, inhabits a cosmic bubble. It would be a good thing if fear of a universal crisis allowed us to burst the mental bubble of postmodernism—if it washed away the euphoria of our pious wishes and brought us once again to see straight. That may be no more than another pious wish. But we should not succumb, as so many did in the 1920s, to a catastrophic sensibility. Yes, history is tragic, as Aeschylus and Sophocles knew. And yes, it is as stupid as set forth in Aristophanes or Euripides. No roll of the dice and no act of God or of mathematically refined finance can abolish chance, corruption, or adversity; the providence of the stock market cannot save us any more than that of the state. Let these lines from Plato be inscribed at the entryway to future G-20 meetings: “Is there not one true coin for which all things ought to be exchanged?—and that is wisdom.”

His Dark Materials: On Death and Life

Alan Jacobs takes issue with author Philip Pullman, who insists that the message of Lewis' book is: "Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-coloured people are better than dark-coloured people; and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it."

I quite liked the Narnian tales. I also quite liked His Dark Materials, though I have obviously not put enough reflection into how, why and in what ways these tales reflect the existential squabble of Lewis and Pullman - and their respective worlds.

In this, however, I think Jacobs makes a salient criticism. Having read Pullman's books (several times) it is ironic to find him accusing another author of celebrating death, especially when compared against his own idea of death as eternal release to rejoin the cosmos. Indeed - if God is to have one cardinal sin (of which the Angel masquerading as God in Pullman's series has many) it would be his inability to face death, and that ecstatic reunion with the universe. It is his insistence to continue to live, which leads to his need to dominate, and to suppress all that is vibrant and good.

Racism and sexism Narnia may have, but not - I think - this kind of necrotism.

Nude Bathers

How do you "do" public life without becoming an arrogant SOB?

I've now had this conversation with at least a few good friends, and finally see bits of it are picked up independently by another friend's blog.

"Doing" public life seems to come with a few pieces. First, it comes with a set of values - independent even of opinions on issues themselves. I mean by these values things like: being informed - being engaged - active interest in politics and common life generally - being concerned with "big picture" stuff - and more. Second, valuing these things often (though not always) breeds a certain kind of personality. It means: having a thick skin - being confident - being prepared and thinking strategically - making value judgments quickly and decisively - and more.

I grow increasingly concerned that this matrix of public life is turning me into an arrogant SOB. I find myself increasingly dulled by pedestrian conversation, which does not obviously connect in with public values - values I seem to have mapped onto others as being necessary parts of having a complete, intelligent, self-aware life.

Academics can have the same SOB's problem - but this is different. Academic conversation can be just as pedestrian: sock makers making socks for other sock makers. Public policy types love to condescend the academy as self-proclaimed prophets preaching to no one who's listening - or, at least, no one who is capable of generating real change. Accomplishment is the name of this game. And that, friends, comes in bullet points - not long essays: snap decisive judgment.

I'm not at all impressed with this tendency, or with my collusion in it. It directly contravenes the excellent notions of co-vocationalism and craftsmanship that I have been exploring, but I find it built subtly into my vocational and social life all the same. Dinner conversations inevitably focus on the news of the day, the global economy, foreign policy and capital markets - advertising strategy and business plans. Such dinner tables are - without a doubt - poor hosts; where the values and desires of the home are forced on the guest.

I'm disappointed - but I'm also curious. I think the topic this opens for me is "spiritual formation for public life Christians." - how to stay rooted in the midst of the political cycle. I don't have the answer, and I'm a bit worried about where the road leads from here unless I start to.