today, i'm thinking about the economy and impact that it is having on higher education. i am very lucky to be teaching and working at a school that has financial resources and will weather this recession. we are making cuts, to be sure, but they are not as draconian as some schools where fine religious studies departments like that at the university of florida are facing extinction. there are at least two trains running here--the first is that many of colleagues in higher education still do not understand that not just anyone can teach religion or research it well. the study of religion is as complex as any other discipline in the academy. thinking of it as derivative, secondary, afterthought is to fail to educate students well and we let our own ignorance pass as expertise rather than a blind spot that needs to be corrected. second, when folks with this lack of awareness become administrators, this turns deadly. administrators who have never had an engaged conversation with colleagues in religious studies, taken a religious studies class, or engaged in careful and thoughtful reflection on the ways in which the study of religion as an impact on how we order our political associations, cultural leanings, and social structures (to name just a few), are ill equipped to make careful decisions about how to make budget cuts. it is ironic that at the very time at which we need to be educating students about the religious worldviews of peoples, is the very time we see this education as expendable or able to be done by scholars in other disciplines.
2 comments:
Emilie: Thank you for establishing this blog, and for your first topic. Both "trains" you point out about the precarious situation of religious studies in colleges and university are well taken. A piece of the examination returns to the Culture Wars (disagreeing with Martin Marty that they are over). Many universities, divinity schools, and seminaries we see as 'moderate to liberal' are seen as 'radical' by the Religious and Political Right. As such, there is not much recognition that these are the very places in academia where the charges can be fought through education of students, debate in professional guilds, and development of further socially transformative, justice-oriented pedagogies done with the highest of intellectual excellence and quality. Further, people in the U.S are scared of the reality and increase of religious pluralism, often mistaking religious pluralism with anti-American fundamentalisms the hear about internationally. This can be particularly seen in undergraduate courses in religion, and in seminaries in training for parochial understandings of Christian congregational ministries. Moreover, Black Religious Studies and African Diaspora Studies, etc. become even more devalued in such economic times because they are seen, as you point out, as neither valid areas of academic inquiry, nor worthy of budgetary consideration. As a result, the struggle for religious studies and the particularities of religious constituencies and traditions forming the contemporary world, are like art and music in public primary and secondary education, not part of the real canon.
well put joan!
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