One form of Christian presence on campus.

A few different strands of thought came together for me this morning in the form of a question. Let me throw out the question first, and then elaborate.

Is there a public Christian intellectual presence on your campus?

Here are the threads that came together for me. First, in our recent book discussion of John Stott’s Your Mind Matters, Stott describes a kind of intellectualism that is very public. For example, in chapter 3, he “examines six spheres of Christian living, each of which is impossible without the proper use of the mind”: worship, faith, holiness, guidance, evangelism, and ministry. These have internal and private aspects, but also external, public aspects. I’d be willing to bet that, on your campus, there are at least two or three of these which are very public indeed. Picture the sidewalk evangelists who roam through each year, or campus ministry student outreach events. On some campuses, worship or holiness might have similar public aspects.

Image credit: falonyates via Flickr.

Second, John Sommerville’s call at this year’s Midwest Faculty Conference for Christians to make new culture in the university. In one respect, this will require Christians who are public intellectuals, on their campus if not in the broader community. I think of academics like Jacques Ellul, Henri Nouwen, or (to mention someone still alive!) Mary Poplin, who build explicit connections between theology and their academic disciplines. There are many more people – and models for doing this – that could be mentioned. (Francis Collins, of course, is another.)

Finally, while at the Midwest Faculty Conference, I spoke with John Sommerville briefly about his involvement with the Christian Study Center at U. Florida, which is one of a number of Christian Study Centers around the country. (Others include the MacLaurin Institute in Minneapolis, the Rivendell Institute at Yale, Chesterton House at Cornell, and the Center for Christian Study in Virginia.) John commented that the campus ministries at UF didn’t have much involvement with the Center as he would like, and we wondered together if campus ministries (in general) understood the importance of a Christian presence among the ideas of the university.

So, after all that, back to my question: Is there a public Christian intellectual presence on your campus? If you’re wondering about the many modifiers in that question, here are some ad hoc definitions:

• Public: Involved in the common life of the university. Not necessarily outspoken or famous, but known on the campus in general, not just within a small group of insiders.
• Christian: Explicitly Christian in their beliefs and thought. Not necessarily trying to bring up their faith at every opportunity, but also not attempting to hide it or keep a clean separation between their public and private personas.
• Intellectual: Characterized by the life of the mind, careful and considered thoughtfulness, and good scholarship. Ideally, respected by both friends and foes as a solid thinker.
• Presence: A recognizable part of the broader campus community and culture (and not just the Christian communities).

(Feel free to dispute or redefine any of these definitions in the comments.)

And, if your campus has a public Christian intellectual presence, what does it look like?

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From Tom

Historic Bible pages put online (BBC News, July 6, 2009):  Check out “virtual re-unification” about 800 pages of the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript, i.e., the earliest surviving Christian Bible, at www.codexsinaiticus.org. Is it a The rival to the Bible (BBC News, Roger Bolton, October 6, 2008)?

Is Having More Than 2 Children an Unspoken Taboo? (Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/10/2009):   The article begins

By academic standards, Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum has it made. She is a full professor of bioengineering at Rice University, runs a thriving cancer-research laboratory, and is a member of the prestigious National Academy of Engineering.

But with four children at home, she sometimes feels like an academic outcast. In fact, Ms. Richards-Kortum says she is most comfortable in her dual roles as professor and mother during the research trips she takes several times a year to southern Africa.

“Here I’m this weird, freaky person because I have four kids,” she says in Houston. “There I can establish rapport and credibility with people because big families are much more common. It’s the only time I feel like it’s a real professional advantage.”

Ms. Richards-Kortum is one of a very small number of academic women with three, four, or more children. In academe, where having even one child can slow down success, trying to manage multiple kids can be a career-stopper.

The article ends with a number of tips on how to manage a big family and a big career. I asked a friend who has four kids and recently served as an adjunct professor at a major university for her thoughts on the topic.  Her comment, “Um, yes.  I don’t personally know anyone in academia with more than two children.”  How about you?  Do you know exceptions and if so, how do they navigate all the pressures and responsibilities of their position?

The Faculty of the Future:  Leaner, Meaner, More Innovative, Less Secure (Forum, Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/10/2009): demands more attention. I asked a business professor to comment on the Forum, below’s a glimpse.  Any first reactions?  More from my friend next week.

I have to agree with the third author (ANTHONY T. GRAFTON), unless there is a significant change in how knowledge is valued and expertise is assessed, the humanities are screwed.  However, it is possible that a collapsed job market will dissuade universities for focusing on “career value” (i.e. incremental salary increase in your next job) as their basis for why people should come to college.  If the focus moves back to education for the sake of being a better person, participant to society, better able to adapt to changes (i.e. long term) then there might be an increase recognition of the value of the humanities [but I wouldn't but your food money on this shift happening quickly].

PETER N. STEARNS says exactly what you would expect someone who has been a Full time Dean/Provost/Department Head for 20+ years to say.  (He was at CMU as Dean of H&SS in the mid-1990s).  The primary issue with his comments is the internal contradiction between saying that academic careers will be more home/family friendly and that there will be less facilities support for faculty (i.e. anyone who has tried to do writing or meetings from home know that this it is very difficult when there are children in the house), greater teaching loads at non-standard times (i.e. working two nights a week teaching an evening class – not so great for  family life), and a significantly greater emphasis on “productivity” (i.e. measurement of outcomes that an individual has only minimal control over – and hence a significant increase in uncertainty and stress – again, not so good for supporting family oriented folks).
Other than this he’s probably right…. :-)

From Mike

So You Want My Job: College Professor – The Art of Manliness continues of a series about (supposedly) dream jobs with an interview of Hunter Baker, Director of Strategic Planning, Assistant Provost, and Adjunct Faculty member at Houston Baptist University. If you are already a faculty member, I don’t think Hunter shares anything you don’t already know, but undergraduates or mid-career professionals who think that academia might be a good career choice might get some useful insight. Hunter has some practical advice about finding a job:

The job prospects differ tremendously based on your field. I think those who get their doctorates in professional fields like business or public administration will typically have a very good opportunity. I also believe the scientific and technical fields have good outlooks. My area, which is in the social sciences or the humanities depending on how you see it, is very competitive. People who study things like political science or history do it because they love it. The one thing that protects you in the job market is that there are lots of people who get as far as the ABD (all but dissertation), but far less who actually grab the brass ring.

If you do it, get your degree from an established institution. I would not recommend getting an online Ph.D. and then trying to find work. That is going to be an uphill battle. The situation may change, but right now it is the reality.

Fast Tracking a PhD – Can you finish a PhD in 3 years? Judy Beth Morris did, with some very careful planning, lots of motivation, and some luck. She admits that it’s not possible in all disciplines, but she shares some good advice about dissertation strategy:

It’s essential to zero in on a dissertation topic as soon in the process as you can. I figured out pretty quickly what I wanted to do with my dissertation; I had the first chapter by the end of my first semester. The professor of the film history class I took that first semester assured me that it was a worthwhile dissertation topic: the “extended adolescence” of Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy films and how and why the films resonated with Depression-era audiences. I knew that I would have fun researching this topic, so getting it done was not going to be a problem. Thus, the “dissertation topic” piece fell into place for me.

Another crucial piece of the puzzle involves working on the dissertation as part of your coursework. I was able finish the bulk of the work while I was taking classes because I chose my classes with the end project in mind: my goal was to use class papers as eventual chapters in the dissertation. This worked much better than I could have hoped; I seemed to choose just the right seminar classes with research paper assignments that would allow me to cover the different facets of my topic.

Take a look at the article, and let us know what you think. How realistic is it to finish a PhD in 3 years?

Charity in Truth – Pope Benedict XVI has released a new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, “Charity in Truth,” which offers a Christian perspective on economics and society. Here’s the NY Times’ article about it. I have not read the 144-page document, but I expect that there will many connections that one can make between Christians’ role in society and Christians’ role on campus, particularly in seeking the good of the campus and our local community. One passage jumped out as I skimmed the beginning:

To love someone is to desire that person’s good and to take effective steps to secure it. Besides the good of the individual, there is a good that is linked to living in society: the common good. It is the good of “all of us”, made up of individuals, families and intermediate groups who together constitute society. It is a good that is sought not for its own sake, but for the people who belong to the social community and who can only really and effectively pursue their good within it. To desire the common good and strive towards it is a requirement of justice and charity. To take a stand for the common good is on the one hand to be solicitous for, and on the other hand to avail oneself of, that complex of institutions that give structure to the life of society, juridically, civilly, politically and culturally, making it the pólis, or “city”. The more we strive to secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbours, the more effectively we love them.

Are there implications for our common life on campus?

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Francis Collins

What do you think about Francis Collins Picked To Head NIH?  The NPR piece lays his credentials, faith, and embracing of the two out in the open.  I wonder how many hits there will be to BioLogos (which the NPR article links to) over the course of the next several days?  See BioLoguration for my earlier comments on the blog aspect of this amazing resource. And if you haven’t read Collins’ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, it’s time to pick up a copy (or at least catch the NPR interview) so you can talk about it with your family, neighbors, and colleagues ;-)

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John Sommerville at the Midwest Faculty Conference

Two weeks ago, I was at InterVarsity’s Cedar Campus for our 2009 Midwest Faculty Conference. John Sommerville, professor emeritus of history at U. Florida and author of The Decline of the Secular University, was the featured speaker. He spoke about the influence of secularism on the ideas and structures of the university (as he has previously written in the Chronicle), but also discussed new opportunities for Christian scholars in a “postsecular” university.

The third of his four talks addressed a key question: How can Christians change our universities? We’ll be posting the complete talk in the near future, but I wanted to highlight one suggestion that Sommerville made, explicitly borrowing an idea from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: The only way to change culture is to create more of it.

Specfically, Sommerville thinks that Christian academics ought to be creating new symbols within their discipline and for the university as a whole. While he thinks that new concepts and new ideas are important and necessary, these are far more rare and, really, outside the realm of possibility for most of us.  Symbols, however, are powerful conveyors of ideas that frame the thinking of both academics and the general public.

Indeed, he noted that the public often picks up symbols from the academy, even if they didn’t understand the ideas themselves. Think about how “relativity,” “deconstruction,” or “the uncertainty principle” have become common tropes in our culture and have influenced the way people speak, think, and create.  How many people actually understand the concepts behind these terms? Or consider how different words for the world around us – creation, nature, the environment, Gaia, Spaceship Earth – lead us to think of the world around us in different ways.

Sommerville’s own “symbolic” contribution to the academy is “the human”, proposing that the symbol of “the human” can generate many worthy questions within academia, while at the same time making room for religious voices:

• What does it mean to be human?
• What do human beings need to know?
• How can the professions serve human needs?
• How can universities value the humanity of students and faculty?

Notice that Sommerville is not proposing a new definition for humanity, coming up with new concepts about humanity, or attempting to “prove” Christian doctrines about human nature. Instead, he is trying to use the symbol of “the human” to raise questions and encourage discussions which can, in Sommerville’s phrase, “argue to religion” rather than arguing from religion.

So, in keeping with Sommerville’s suggestions about symbols and culture making:

What are the “culture making” symbols in your academic discipline?

Do you think that Sommerville’s symbol of “the human” has promise to change university culture?

What other symbols – created by Christians or nonChristians, by academics or non-academics, or even by yourself – could shape university culture in the future?

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From Tom

Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance (Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, 6/29/2009).  Do you agree with T. Mills Kelly, an associate professor of history and associate director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, who argues professors are shifting their on-line communication from e-mail lists to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook?

No Smiting (Paul Bloom, NY Times, 6/24/2009). Has anyone read The Evolution of God by Robert Wright?  The NY Times has taken interest in it with interviews (Questions for Robert Wright: Evolutionary Theology and Book Review) and a NY Times Sunday Review cover article by Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale. Below’s a section I find of particular interest.  How do you respond to the assertion of an evolving God who may in a some vague way exist beyond us, but in the practical realm is shaped by the experience and the marketing of dedicated practitioners?

For Wright, the next evolutionary step is for practitioners of Abrahamic faiths to give up their claim to distinctiveness, and then renounce the specialness of monotheism altogether. In fact, when it comes to expanding the circle of moral consideration, he argues, religions like Buddhism have sometimes “outperformed the Abrahamics.” But this sounds like the death of God, not his evolution. And it clashes with Wright’s own proposal, drawn from work in evolutionary psychology, that we invented religion to satisfy certain intellectual and emotional needs, like the tendency to search for moral causes of natural events and the desire to conform with the people who surround us. These needs haven’t gone away, and the sort of depersonalized and disinterested God that Wright anticipates would satisfy none of them. He is betting that historical forces will trump our basic psychological makeup. I’m not so sure.

Under age binge drinking on campus:  You may remember last year’s Rethink the Drinking Age Campaign Taking on 21 and College Presidents Take On 21), in which more than 100 college presidents and chancellors called for reconsidering the legal drinking age, which since the 1980s has been set at 21 (by each and every state).  Why?  Is it a desire to move beyond in loco parentis entirely?  What will be their response to the new research and conversation regarding colleges being the only environment in which binge drinking has increased over the past several decades?  What is the situation on your campus?  Is it more prevalent among men?  Note:  A few articles on this topic include: Inside Higher Ed’s Failing Grade on Alcohol, NY Times Op-Ed Binge Drinking on Campus, and Science Daily’s Higher Drinking Age Linked To Less Binge Drinking — Except In College Students.

From Mike

An Academic in Afghanistan (Chronicle, $) – William Corley, who has been involved with ESN from the beginning and usually serves his country as an English professor at Cal Poly Pomona, has spent the past year stationed in Afghanistan as a military analyst.  His recent essay in the Chronicle starts memorably:

First light on Memorial Day, 2009. I’m awake without an alarm at 4:53 a.m. After a quick visit to the gym and a short run, I put on my uniform and go to work. Day 208 in Afghanistan begins.

It’s a great perspective on both the military and academia, and I hope that you have access to the Chronicle so that you can read the whole thing.  Here’s a paragraph I especially enjoyed, comparing his military writing to that of his “real” job:

If I wrote as much in the States as I do here, I would probably be tenured already. Scratch that — I’d be an academic superstar. Even more ironic for a professional writer, the papers I produce here, despite the inevitable sequestration due to classification levels, circulate more broadly and are read more closely than anything I’ve ever published as an academic, notwithstanding the aforementioned Cassandra caveat. Would I produce more popular work if I limited myself to two pages when writing on an academic topic? Perhaps the MLA should look into this.

More on justification – As if N.T. Wright and John Piper weren’t big enough guns to weigh in on the doctrine of justification, now the Pope is offering his (new? old?) perspective, too. Scot McKnight helpfully summarizes Pope Benedict XVI’s view of justification, from the Pope’s new book, Saint Paul. (BTW, in case you don’t already know, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had long been an important theologian and scholar – check out both the number and variety of his writings and be suitable humbled.)

Academic Bait-and-Switch – I enjoyed and was challenged by this pseudonymous essay in the Chronicle by “Henry Adams” (as in, “The Education of…” I assume), which describes the author’s rude introduction to the graduate school TA system by teaching freshman comp at “Elite National University.” He describes the system as “bait and switch” because the “Elite” students came to campus expecting to be educated by the top scholars in the country, and instead find themselves taught by greenhorn TAs just a few years older than themselves.

From the Community

In response to last week’s week-in-review about Galileo, Hannah referred us to Peter Harrison’s The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, which Ted Davis also recommended (though be sure to read Ted’s comments about the book).

In response to Tom’s April post about End the University as We Know It, reader Clint shared a link to his own blog post about the topic, “Restructuring the Humanities.”

Books

This is Mike here.  I spent last week at the 2009 Midwest Faculty Conference with John Sommerville, and I’ll write more about that experience next week.  In the mean time, I’ll mention two books that came very highly recommended at the conference, both of which weigh in at under 200 pages, which relate to topics we’ve discussed here online.

At the conference, Sommerville led a seminar discussing Culture Matters by T.M Moore. I bought a copy but have not yet read it. Subtitled “A Call for Consensus on Christian Cultural Engagement,” Moore

sketches the ways in which Christians engage, resist, escape from and try to change the culture in which they live (Richard John Neuhaus, from the Foreword).

Moore examines these ways through the cultural activities of specific Christians, comparing both classic and contemporary exemplars: Augustine, Celtic Christians, John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, Charles Colson, Phil Keaggy, and Czeslaw Milosz. I’m looking forward to Moore’s chapter on Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, whom I had the fortune to hear read a few years before his death.

The second book, which was highly recommend by InterVarsity’s own Tom Trevethan, was Naturalism by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. The book quickly sold out at the conference (OK – there was only one copy for sale), but here’s what John Milbank thinks of this book:

“Demonstrates with succinctness, brilliance, and precision that modern Anglo-Saxon naturalists are not rationalists but . . . are, in fact, the enemies of reason, which can only have any reality if the physical world has a spiritual, rational source.”

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Your Mind Matters

John Stott wraps up Your Mind Matters with “Acting on Our Knowledge.”  He begins by pointing out that we avoid the swing from anti-intellectualism to hyper-intellectualism, by remembering “just one thing:  God never intends knowledge to be an end in itself but always to be means to some other end.”

As a corollary to the mind and biblical knowledge being essential to the six spheres of Christian living, see Your Mind Matters 3: The Mind in Christian Life, Stott highlights the truth that:

“the acquisition of biblical knowledge must lead into these things [i.e., the six spheres] and enrich our experience of them.  Knowledge carries with it the solemn responsibility to act on the knowledge we have, to translate our knowledge into appropriate behavior.”

As a result, we find knowledge leading to worship, faith, holiness, and love.

Knowledge is indispensable to Christian life and service.  If we do not use the mind which God has given us, we condemn ourselves to spiritual superficiality and cut ourselves off from many of the riches of God’s grace.  … What we need is not less knowledge but more knowledge, so long as we act upon it. …

How have you found knowledge leading to worship, faith, holiness, and/or love?  Do you have particular illustrations in your own life and/or those of other followers of Christ (present or past) to share with the ESN community?

To inspire you, below’s a quote from A Priest Serving in Nature’s Temple: Robert Boyle’s Career Blended Faith, Doubt, and the Use of Science to Heal Disease and Fight Atheism.

Robert Boyle (1627-91)

As he [Robert Boyle, 1627-91] stated in A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things, he desired “that my Reader should not barely observe the Wisdom of God, but be in some measure Affectively Convinc’d of it.” There was no better way, in Boyle’s opinion, to “give us so great a wonder and veneration for it,” than “by Knowing and Considering the Admirable Contrivance of the Particular Productions of that Immense Wisdom,” by which he mainly meant the exquisitely fashioned parts of animals both great and small. Thereby, Boyle believed, “Men may be brought, upon the same account, both to acknowledge God, to admire Him, and to thank Him.” A pious and humble man, Boyle always sought to cultivate the same attitude in others. — Ted Davis Christian History 21(4) (November 2002): 28-31.

Note:  For more visit the Robert Boyle Project and read Davis’ longer article Robert Boyle’s Religious Life, Attitudes, and Vocation Science & Christian Belief 19.2 (2007): 117-38.  If you’re interested in my notes from Davis’ 6/29/2009 lecture on Robert Boyle’s Religious Life, Attitudes, and Vocation, drop me an email.

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1.  Andy Crouch: Christians, culture and power (Faith & Leadership, Duke University, 8:31 on-line video):  Andy’s back with more!  Do you agree with him that

Christians don’t like to talk about power. But cultural power — the ability to create — is something all people are meant to have.

Should we (or do you) start each day with such a vision? How well are you able to embrace and articulate a distinction between power to coerce (e.g., political) versus power to inspire (e.g., cultural power for the redemption of creation)?

2. Vatican’s Celestial Eye, Seeking Not Angels but Data (George Johnson, NY Times, 6/22/09).  Check out

[t]he Vatican Observatory Research Group [which] does workmanlike astronomy that fights the perception that science and Catholicism necessarily conflict.

Galileo Before the Holy Office

Anyone have reflections on Galileo or The Two Books (i.e., the Book of Nature and the Scripture)?  On Monday, I had the opportunity to hear Ted Davis, Messiah College’s Historian of Science, lecture on The Galileo Affair: What Really Happened. He had just returned from The Legacy of Galileo Symposium and had upgraded his presentation, below’s an excerpt.

No story in all of the history of science is more famous than that of Galileo, who was tried by the Roman Inquisition after he had written a book advocating the new astronomy of Copernicus.  But the real facts of his story are much less well known.  …  The ideas being debated involved science and religion, but this is not an example of the “warfare” of science and religion.  Galileo saw himself as a faithful Catholic; the church never opposed any proven fact; and the real debate was between different Christian views on how to interpret the Bible. — Ted Davis, Messiah College, History of Science.  6/25/2009.  Part of the the Central Pennsylvania Forum for Religion and Science summer lecture series.

3.  When to Be Naïve: It’s not a virtue just for children (Christianity Today Magazine, 6/12/2009):  Edith M. Humphrey, William F. Orr Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, has a good word to share, wish the article was slightly longer.  Note:  If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading Edith’s Ecstasy and Intimacy: When the Holy Spirit Meets the Human Spirit (Eerdmans, 2005).

We must therefore consider the dynamic of the Christian story rather than merely static principles. God alone, who lives from eternity to eternity, has the wherewithal to be absolutely simple and omnisciently wise at the same time; human beings, on the other hand, must take things in stages, for they are indeed players in the drama of God.”

As always, if you’d like to contribute to next week’s Review, add your link(s) in the comments, or send them to Tom or Mike directly.

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• Christian worship
• Christian faith
• Christian holiness
• Christian guidance
• Christian evangelism
• Christian ministry

We could discuss all of these if we had time, but two items on this list which particularly struck me were holiness and guidance.

I, for one, don’t usually associate my mind with personal holiness (perhaps that’s a problem with my mind!) but Stott emphasizes that, without right thinking, holiness is impossible. After all, we have to know what it means to be holy, by studying God’s word. But:

It is not enough to know what we should be, however. We must go further and set our mind upon it. The battle is nearly always won in the mind. It is by the renewal of our mind that our character and behavior become transformed. So Scripture calls us again and again to mental discipline in this respect. “Whatever is true,” it says, “whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

The second area that struck me as surprising was Christian guidance. Stott criticizes Christians who claim to know God’s specific will for their lives through a direct communication from God or an unusual interpretation of a passage of Scripture. Stott notes that, while this may happen occasionally, “this is not God’s usual way.”

Instead, citing Psalm 32:8-9 (”Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding…”), Stott argues that God instructs us, then trusts us to make our own decisions.

…although God promises to guide us, we must not expect him to do so in the way in which we guide horses and mules. He will not use a bit and bridle with us. For we are not horses or mules; we are human beings.

God has instructed, but has also given us intelligence and will to make our own decisions. To tell you the truth, this passage greatly relieved me – while I pray for important decisions, prayer is only one part of my process, and I’ve often wondered if I lean too much on my own understanding. I’m sure that it’s possible to do so and thus ignore God as a result, but Stott reminds me that God made me with a mind so that I could make these decisions.

For discussion

How else do Christians neglect our minds in our practices of holiness, guidance, or other areas on Stott’s list?

Do any of the aspects in Stott’s list strike you as unexpected?

How else do you see the use of our minds as vital to Christian living?

In contrast, do you see aspects of Christian living where use of the mind is overemphasized?

What about the minds of other Christians? Stott doesn’t write much (in this book) about the role of community or the church. How can other people’s minds help us in Christian living?

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This week’s Week in Review explores Google’s Book Search, China’s gao kao (”high test”), a call for papers on mentoring, and an article about linguistics and dying languages. If you’d like to contribute to next week’s Review, add your link(s) in the comments, or send them to Tom or Mike directly.

From Tom

Adam Smith: What’s Next for Google Book Search? (Chronicle of Higher Education, 06/12/09):  Do you use Google Books to take a preview and/or search materials?  Is your institution partnering with Google Book Search?  Does Smith address your concerns regarding access, fair use, and privacy?  What are your thoughts on orphan works?  How do you define orphan works?

Google has scanned millions of books and made snippets available online through its ambitious Book Search program. The project has taken heat from authors and publishers, but Adam Smith, Google’s director of product management, says it’s a good thing for academe. (Audio interview, 9:36)

[Mike notes: there are at least two groups not happy with Google's digital books program: the Department of Justice and Amazon.com.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.]

China’s College Entry Test Is an Obsession (NY Times, 06/13/09):  Who is familiar with China’s gao kao, i.e., high test?  Would a boost of similar seriousness about education be helpful in the United States or would it increase competitive commercialization of higher education?  How does one encourage the pursuit and wise application of knowledge through vocation in the wider society?

The Chinese test is in some ways like the American SAT, except that it lasts more than twice as long. The nine-hour test is offered just once a year and is the sole determinant for admission to virtually all Chinese colleges and universities. About three in five students make the cut.

Families pull out all the stops to optimize their children’s scores.

From Mike

Mentoring: Call for Papers – The University of New Mexico Mentoring Institute is seeking proposals about effective mentoring for their Second Mentoring Conference. I went last year and was favorably impressed. While the institute and conference are hosted by a public university, there were a number of Christian academics involved last year (from both secular and Christian universities), and issues related to religious faith were openly discussed. For example, several of the mentoring presentations addressed spiritual components of mentoring, two of the plenary speakers (Brad Johnson and Lewis Schlosser) spoke briefly about their different religious views in the context of their mentor-mentee and collegial relationship, and several speakers spoke to questions about how to relate to a mentor or protege with very different religious, political, or personal beliefs from your own. Deadline for submissions is July 31.

Languages on Life Support – From the Chronicle, a survey of the state of dying languages in the world today, and the efforts (or lack thereof) of academic linguists to preserve them.

Of the estimated 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world — about one-half of the number used 10,000 years ago — at least one-half will almost certainly be dead by midcentury, while another 40 percent will most likely become too diminished to survive much beyond 2100. The causes are largely agreed upon: colonization and other demographic shifts, government neglect or outright suppression of regional and indigenous languages, the influence of mass media.

The article explores the question of whether Noam Chomsky’s theory of a “universal grammar” eliminates the urgency to record details of specific languages.  Chomsky himself says no, but others aren’t so sure.  Personally, I was struck by the complete absence of any mention whatsoever of groups like Wycliffe Bible Translators or SIL, which are doing serious work around the world preserving languages.   (For more on linguistics, see my previous post about Dan Everett.)

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This event encompasses much more than the word conference can possibly contain, so a new word has been added to the lexicon. “Confamication” captures the fact of it being a stimulating conference, a restful vacation, which can both include and be a delight to the whole family. And it is a welcoming place for singles, couples and children as well.

Unfortunately, not all of academia shares this attitude that the “good life” includes rest, spiritual refreshment, and time with families and children. Lisa Belkin, who writes the Motherlode blog for the New York Times, recently published a heart-breaking letter from a young graduate student who, faced with an unexpected, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, has decided to have an abortion so that she can complete her degree. The decision was far from easy – you can hear her agony in her letter to Belkin. Explicit and implicit pressures from her graduate program were a major factor in her decision. Here’s how she described her sitaution:

A lot of your readers asked if I could take time off from the graduate program. They do not allow for any time off. There’s no deferral, classes are only offered once in the two years, and there aren’t any incompletes. I have been talking to students who are already there, who have had children, who are married and are quite a bit older, and who said it is really hard. I’m looking at 20 hours in class and 20 hours of papers and field research out of the classroom. Students with part-time jobs found it nearly impossible to keep up with the work, and a baby is not a part-time job. They also warned me that professors aren’t just tough, they can be especially harsh to the pregnant women in the program. By the time the baby would be due, there would be papers, projects, research. I can’t miss a single class without risking the whole program, that’s just the way it’s designed. It matters if you show up.

She ends her letter try to find hope in the midst of her sorrow:

If I get my degree then maybe the path it will take me on will lead me to work on women’s issues. Maybe one day I’ll make a million dollars and start a scholarship program for pregnant graduate students. I can’t believe that nothing good can come of this, I know I’ll do something right one of these days.

This tragic situation highlights only one aspect of the difficulty of having a family in academia, especially in the high-pressure world of research. Inside Higher Ed reported earlier this month that a growing, but still not huge, number of colleges and universities offered “family-friendly” policies, like maternity/paternity leave and tenure clock extensions (here’s a link to the full report from U. Michigan’s Center for the Education of Women). However, I’ve heard from some faculty that formal policies do little to prevent under-the-table discrimination against faculty members (especially women) who take advantage of them. Competition for tenure is so intense that it takes very little to move someone from “on track” to “off track.”

At Following Christ 2008, a tenured faculty member at a major research university told me that, in his experience, Christian faculty receive tenure at a much lower rate than nonChristians, and it has little to do with explicit ideology. Instead, he’s found that Christians usually value things like spending time with their family, involvement in a local church, and teaching their classes well – values that count for little when it comes to tenure decisions. He then raised the question of what kind of faculty was left when tenure decisions consistently “weeded out” people who loved teaching, made time for their family, and thought community involvement was important. (I hope that we’ll be able to publish an article in the fall based on his observations.) During the ESN Day Ahead’s panel discussion about different types of colleges, a faculty member at a research university noted that, at his school, two children is considered to be a “large family,” and that at least half of his department had no children at all. In contrast, a faculty member at a small Christian college said that almost all of his colleagues were married with children. (Evangelical Christianity’s suspicion of single adults or childless couples is a topic for discussion unto itself!)

Not all of the pressure against having children, though, is intentional or nefarious. For example, the most intense time of a traditional academic career coincides with the optimum years for having and raising children (biologically speaking). And, as my wife pointed out to me, it’s simply impossible to “have it all,” whether you’re a man or a woman – every major decision necessarily eliminates other possibilities. Our partner ministry in InterVarsity, Women in the Academy and Professions, has explored many other angles to this question, including whether you can have both a family and a fulfilling career, tough decisions along the way, and the choice to remain childless.

I could write a lot more and provide many more links, but I’ll end here with a few questions for you, our community:

Do you agree that there is pressure against having children in the academy? Have you experienced this yourself? Conversely, have you had good experiences?

How can ESN and InterVarsity support students and faculty who are facing family and career choices?

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