collegial scholarship

i spent an incredibly wonderful weekend last week with several colleagues as we began to shape a book project. what continues to resonate in me is the great spirit of collegiality as we exchanged potential essays and ideas over the course of the two days we spent together. there was much laughter and much piercing analysis as we worked through each other's work and pointed to the strengths and the places we wanted to see each other develop. it was a time of respect as well as challenge. it was, in the best sense, collegial scholarship.

many of us were and are being exposed to a completely other style of academic rigor. it is one in which one seeks to tear down another's work to prove how "smart" we are or how well we can use rhetoric and insight to embarrass and demean. this kind of last wo/man standing mentality is far from tackling each others' ideas with scholarly rigor. to my mind, it is a form of cowardice that hides our insecurities and blindspots. genuine academic rigor requires that we read a thinker's work with care, precision, and thoroughly.

i welcome the day when a womanist thinker's corpus is read in it's entirety by colleagues who think that reading a sound bite of her work is the same thing as mastering wittgenstein by reading absolutely everything by him and about him. exploring the deep levels of meaning of cannon's emancipatory praxis or riggs' mediating ethic cannot be understood by reading one article by them. these are dense concepts that require much more reflection than i see in work by folks like mcgrath and company.

this past weekend confirmed for me that genuine collegial work pushes us to think harder and deeper not only about our work but also the work that others create. it involves risk and a willingness to grow and explore new avenues of thought. it produces deep work--not niceness. the slash and burn mentality that passes for scholarship for far too many folk does little to help us think more deeply. it does, however, usher in a small and narrow scholarship that reifies disciplines but does little to give them new life or provide new insights.