Colman McCarthy on Low Comedy and High Cons in GOP Race

Colman McCarthy, bless his heart, tells it like it is about the GOP primaries, in brilliant commentary at National Catholic Reporter.  His essay begins as follows:

If ever the country needed bed rest and a chance to dose up on Prozac or the antidepressant of your choice, it’s now. Through some 20 televised debates and hundreds of interviews, Republican aspirants to the presidency assaulted the nation’s intelligence, or what was left of it, with displays of venality, egomania, pandering, deception, self-delusion, self-promotion and scripted nonsense -- and that’s just from Newt Gingrich.

And it only gets better after that.

NY Times on the Country-Clubization of American Higher Education: Money Flowing to Adminstrators' Pockets, While Students and Faculty Suffer

Sam Dillon's recent New York Times article about how college and university presidents are now spending their schools' money confirms a point I've made repeatedly on this blog: namely, that many top administrators in American higher education today are earning top dollars, while faculty needs--and the needs of students--receive short shrift.  As I've noted, higher education in the U.S. is modeled more and more on the corporate world whose representatives now dominate the governing boards of colleges and universities.

In the process, the importance of education is being lost sight of, as is the value of a liberal arts education rooted in the core values of the humanities, values necessary to sustain civil society.

Power, Sociopaths, and Social Intelligence: Dacher Keltner on the Paradox of Power

 

I’m fascinated by the research of psychologist Dacher Keltner re: power, which I’ve recently discovered through Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog.  Keltner notes that a power paradox is at work in many of our social institutions.

On the one hand, psychological research is increasingly demonstrating that most social groups place a premium on social intelligence, when it comes to identifying and rewarding those with the promise to be powerful leaders.  But on the other hand, once many of those identified as leaders assume the reins of power, they begin to behave like sociopaths.  They behave in a way that undercuts their claim to power and negates the social intelligence that placed them in the seat of power in the first place.  Keltner defines the paradox of power as follows: “The skills most important to obtaining power and leading effectively are the very skills that deteriorate once we have power.”

Bishop Harry Jackson on "Disproportionately Educated" Gays and the African-American Community

And in the curioser and curioser world that Christian homophobes seem intent on creating for themselves (and the rest of us, if we give them political power)--a world in which all pornography including Playboy centerfolds is ipso facto gay pornography, because gays are, well, bad, and pornography is bad--gay folks are also "disproportionately educated".

And that makes them bad. And racist. Because it seems they're getting that education to set themselves apart from African Americans, to lord it over their black brothers and sisters.

Gay: bad. Education: bad. Educated gays: bad and racist.

And so lack of education is good? Ignorance is a virtue?

Being authentically black is about being uneducated and proud to be uneducated?

I wonder who's the real anti-black racist here.

Cultic Catholicism and the Demise of Catholic Influence in the Public Square

In my posting yesterday about the ongoing intra-Catholic discussion of the funeral of Senator Kennedy (and how that discussion is being related to debates about health care reform), I mentioned a Catholic religious movement about which I’ve blogged a number of times previously. This group is called the Legionaries of Christ.

The Legionaries of Christ are a religious community founded in 1941 by Father Marcia Maciel. The group has both a vowed (i.e., a “religious”) and a lay component: it has both members who follow the consecrated life of religious and priests, and lay people who follow the community’s life without entering religious life. It operates seminaries and schools in a number of countries, including the United States. Its lay movement Regnum Christi is said to have over 70,000 members worldwide.

The influence of the Legionaries and Regnum Christi is considerable, and flows through many different channels, some of them not evident to many members of the public. As an article entitled “Legion and RC Front Groups Identified” at the ReGAIN website (more on this site in a moment) notes, many websites that, at a first glance, one would not know are Legionary-sponsored or Legionary-affiliated (e.g., Catholic.net, Theology-on-Tap, Catholic Youth World Network) are actually fronts for this influential religious group.

The nationally circulated publication National Catholic Register is owned by the Legionaries. Through its ties to the previous pope, John Paul II, the influence of this movement has expanded exponentially in many countries, including the United States, in recent years. This influence is more extensive than many Catholics realize, due to the group’s penchant for secrecy and its preferred method of evangelizing “from the top.”

As Jason Berry and Gerald Renner’s exhaustively researched study Vows of Silence (NY: Free Press, 2003) notes, the Legionaries and Regnum Christi actively recruit Catholics in economic elites, and rely on the behind-the-scenes influence of these highly placed community members to promote the group’s interests. Come up against the Legionaries of Christ and any of the many institutions and media outlets where their influence is strong, and you come up against a very powerful network, indeed.

Unfortunately, this influential religious community is now under investigation by Rome, after it was discovered that the community’s founder Father Marcial Maciel not only sexually abused seminarians in his religious order, but fathered a number of children whom he supported secretly for years, using his community’s funds to do so.

As yesterday’s posting notes, some U.S. Catholic colleges—a tiny handful—have developed strong ties to the Legionaries and their lay group Regnum Christi in recent years. I suggested yesterday that the Catholicism such colleges end up fostering usually has more in common with cults than with bona fide Catholicity.

I made that suggestion, in part, to reference a growing body of significant literature emerging from former members of the Legionaries and Regnum Christi, which explores parallels between the Legionaries and other cults. In a response to one of those commenting on yesterday’s thread, I recommended a 2006 study by one former Legionary, Father J. Paul Lennon, in the journal of the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA). Father Lennon’s study takes Janja Lalich and Michael D. Lagone’s checklist of characteristics of cults and applies that checklist to the Legionaries of Christ.

Interestingly enough, even as I was blogging about this issue yesterday, a blogger at a blog dedicated to helping Catholic parents and the public understand how the Legionaries and Regnum Christi operate was posting about this very same issue. I think, but have not yet confirmed, that this blog may belong to the same Father Paul Lennon who published the 2006 ICSA study.

The posting on the Understanding the Legion blog also offers a checklist of characteristics of cults, applying them to the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi (and citing Janja Lalich and Madeleine Tobias, Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships [Berkeley: Bay Tree, 2006]). For those who want more information about the connections between cults and the Legionaries and the groups they influence (including schools and readers of Catholic publications with ties to the Legionaries), I recommend a treasure trove of resources on this topic at the ReGAIN website. ReGAIN is a network of past and present members of the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi and of others who share ReGAIN’s concerns about the activities and influence of the Legionaries.

I’d like to note a number of the characteristics of cults that, in the view of many former Legionary and Regnum Christi members, apply to the Legionaries of Christ and the movements it sponsors. In particular, I’d like to note cult-like characteristics that, in my view, seriously impede the efforts of Catholic educational groups associated with the Legionaries of Christ to pursue their educational mission effectively and faithfully.

According to the studies cited above, among the characteristics of cults that the Legionaries of Christ and groups associated with it exhibit are the following:

1. Punishment of those who ask questions, raise doubts, or dissent from the Truth/law.

‪2. Excessive use of mind-altering practices including meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).

‪3. The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel.

4. Control of information available to group members in order to restrict their ability to think for themselves.

Father Lennon finds strong parallels between the behavior of the Legionaries and Regnum Christi, and the preceding characteristics of cults. He notes (with documentation) how these groups punish those who question, express doubts, or dissent in the following ways:

▪ Critical thinking is deliberately suppressed, and strong pressure is applied to silence anyone who asks critical questions.

▪ Those who persist in engaging in critical thinking, asking questions, or expressing doubts are sidelined, shunned, exiled, and dismissed (e.g., they may be told they are not “good” or “faithful” Catholics, that they have departed from the Truth, that they are “of the devil” and headed to hell, that they are immoral, that they are liars, that they are “liberals,” etc.)

▪ Absolute, unquestioning obedience to the Truth as formulated by the leader(s) is exalted as the primary virtue of religious life.

▪ Dissenters are shamed (they are told that they are worthless, that their questions arise from ill intent, that they are “of the devil,” that they are arrogant/proud/angry/bitter/corrupt, that they support a culture of death, etc.).

▪ Verbal whipping is used by the group and its leaders to shame and then marginalize/expel doubters, questioners, and dissenters.

With regard to the excessive use of mind-altering practices including meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines, Father Lennon notes the following practices of the Legionaries:

▪ Prayer and meditation lean heavily towards discursive rather than affective practices.

▪ These discursive practices discourage the active use of imagination and emotion to probe the significance of beliefs and internalize those beliefs; instead, they try to brand the “truth” of a belief in the adherent’s brain to bend his will to the Truth as laid down by the leader(s).

▪ This notion of prayer depends on the belief that “God’s will is manifested infallibly in the mandates and even the wishes of my legitimate superiors.”

▪ Community members are kept busy at mind-numbing activities that suppress the impulse to think, ask questions, or even probe the significance of the “truths” imposed from above.

▪ Community denunciation sessions are held in which the will of the leader(s) as enforced by the community is imposed on anyone who dissents in any way.

With regard to the third criterion of cults—how members should think, act, and feel is dictated by the leadership—Father Lennon notes the following:

▪ The Legionaries and groups associated with them strongly stress conformity to one way of thinking and acting—a “group-think” in which the community discerns who belongs and who does not, who should be expelled and who should be permitted to remain, who is righteous and who is unrighteous, who is faithful and who is unfaithful, who is headed to heaven and who is headed to hell.

▪ The emphasis on unquestioning obedience and absolute conformity to the “truth” as dictated by leader(s) and enforced by the group causes the group’s belief system to be focused on external appearances rather than internal appropriation and understanding of beliefs.

Finally, regarding the fourth criterion of cults—the group seeks to control all flow of information to restrict the free ability of group members to think for themselves—Father Lennon notes that the Legionaries and groups connected to them do the following:

▪ Restrict social contact with “outsiders,” including even with non-Legionary family members of adherents.

▪ Censor access of group members to books, films, publications, telephones, and the Internet.

As I note above, I find a strong disconnect between the goals and mission of bona fide Catholic education and what the Legionaries and their affiliates are all about. I actually have some personal experience with the movement by which the Legionaries assert their dominance within Catholic colleges. I have taught at one Catholic college which has now become strongly associated with the Legionaries of Christ, and whose educational mission seems to be faltering as a result of that connection.

That college was just on the cusp of “coming out” as a loud and proud Legionary-affiliated institution at the time it chose to smear and then expel me, and seek to refashion itself in line with the dictates of the Legion of Christ. I saw the shift taking place, fought as hard as I could to resist it, and can attest to its destructive effects on the life of this Catholic institution.

This is a college that provided fertile ground for the Legionaries, since it is owned by a religious community that exhibits characteristics already prominent among the Legionaries and their affiliates. For quite a few years, the community has had a sordid history of punishing and expelling members who raise questions or dissent—often brutally so. The college owned by this community in turn applies these techniques of violent control to dissenters within the college community.

Though I had never once spoken, taught, or written about the topic of abortion before I came there or during my stay there, I was told that I was pro-abortion, in favor of killing babies. When my expulsion from the campus community was finalized, the religious superior led a procession of faculty (all men, as it happened) and his community members to the community cemetery to bury fetal remains. I was told by faculty who were in the known that this was a public ritual of humiliation and expulsion aimed at me as a proponent of abortion.

The religious superior announced a few weeks later to the campus that I was a diseased limb that needed to be lopped from the campus tree to assure its health. I had no idea why I was being characterized in that way, since he refused to meet with me to discuss why I was being ritually humiliated and expelled, and my rights violated.

I know of one member who left after years within this particular community, and who was not even offered bus fare or a ride as he left to move to his new home. In another case, a member who left was ordered by the religious superior to mop the floors of the community house for weeks on end, hour after hour each day, before he left. On the night before he left, the superior woke him up up in the middle of the night and told to dust the superior’s choir stall in church, over and over again for the rest of the night.

When I was teaching at the college owned by this community, and as similar techniques of shaming, silencing, and expulsion were being applied to me as a theologian, a student who was in a class I taught entered the community. From the moment he entered, he ceased to speak to me, even to say hello when we passed on the college’s grounds.

After several years, he left, and then contacted me to ask my forgiveness. He told me that the novice master (now the community’s superior) had forbidden him to speak to me. He also told me that one of the ways in which the novice master taught obedience to him and his fellow novices was to have them dig a hole half of one day and then fill it back up the rest of the day. This was in the mid-1990s, when such methods of teaching vowed obedience were increasingly regarded as barbaric, unchristian, and a form of mind control in most religious communities.

Obedience was far and away the premier virtue in this religious community and on the campus it owns. Shortly after I arrived at the college owned by the community, one of the faculty members who wanted to see the college and community move even more to the fringe right than it already had moved took me aside and said that the one flaw in the religious community owning the college was that it did not demand absolute obedience.

This began to shift when I was at the college and a new abbot was elected. This abbot and his second-in-command set up a check-in system for all community members each night, in which they would (so community members told me) stand at the door of the monastery and count each member as he returned home that night, scowling as they did so. Because the religious superior preferred coffee to soft drinks, he yanked all dispensers of soft drinks on each floor of the religious house and decreed that each floor would have a coffee dispenser.

When questions arose about whether to tear down one of the old buildings on the campus which had been built by a previous generation of the community, a plan for the building’s renovation was drawn up and the community members voted to endorse the plan. One morning, they woke up to see the building they had voted to preserve and renovate being torn down. The superior told the community that God had spoken to him in the night and ordered him to tear the building down.

A community member who left this community has told me that after he left, he was asked to return for a conference with the religious superior. There was contention about whether he could have money his family had donated to the community, which should have been given to him, according to the dictates of canon law, when he left the community.

When he arrived for what he was told would be an amiable discussion with the religious superior, he found that a circle of chairs had been placed in the room for the meeting, with his chair in the center. The circle of chairs was occupied by the senior members of the community, who—so he told me—harangued and threatened him throughout the meeting. The person who is now the superior of the community informed him that if he raised questions about the decision of the community re: his money, a damaging letter would be placed in his personnel file, now that he had transferred to the diocese.

As I say, I know a bit about how the Legionaries of Christ gain a foothold in some Catholic educational institutions, and I know what that process does to those institutions. It radically undermines their ability to produce well-prepared, well-educated, well-rounded students with a wide range of knowledge in the liberal arts. It reinforces the pre-existing tendency of these educational institutions to indoctrinate students and browbeat them to external conformity to the community's norms.

To the extent that this kind of education now predominates in Catholic circles, it is having seriously deleterious effects on American Catholicism. This kind of educational system is not producing Catholic leaders who are well-equipped to think and dialogue with others in a pluralistic society.

It is producing, rather, people whose ability to reason, to engage in critical thinking, and to listen and appreciate diverse viewpoints is strongly impaired. It is producing people who substitute slogans and slurs for thought. It is producing people unable to articulate Catholic values and Catholic ideas for the public square, because they themselves do not understand those values and ideas. It is producing moral imbeciles.

And in doing so, it is seriously undermining the effectiveness of Catholicism in the public square, and the ability of the Catholic community to convey its core values to the public square.

Bishop Joseph Martino Resigns: David Gibson on the Backstory and Health Care Reform

I last wrote (as well as I can ascertain) about Archbishop Joseph Martino of Scranton towards the end of March, when I discussed his attack on Vice-President Biden in a posting which notes that we had just begun to see the first shots in a “bitter war that theocratic right-wing Catholics who are more Republican than Catholic intend to wage against the new administration.”

In that posting, I argued that, as a body, the American Catholic bishops have—with notable exceptions—willingly permitted theocratic extremists to capture the center of the American church. I noted that the politico-religious agenda of these extremists is a mishmash of ill-digested Catholic theology and American evangelicalism, and that most U.S. Catholic bishops know this, just as they know that many of those promoting a right-wing theocratic agenda are badly educated Catholics. They know that traditional Catholic values are incompatible with many of the values of right-wing evangelicalism.

But they have allowed this mentality to grow, to represent itself as authentic Catholicism, as the only possible Catholicism, and have done next to nothing to correct it. They have allowed the American Catholic church to become captive to ideological operatives who promote political goals antithetical to Catholic values.

And not much has changed since I wrote that analysis in late March. If anything, things are growing worse, with open attacks on health care reform by right-wing Catholics (more on that in a moment) and the disgraceful sideshow out of Bedlam we’ve seen in recent days, as the self-professed guardians of orthodoxy have fumed over the choice of the Catholic church to give Christian burial to Senator Kennedy (for a sample of this discussion at its lurid extreme, see Christopher Nowak's recent thread of statements about the Kennedys and the funeral at the Grand Rapids Catholic Examiner).

For readers who want to follow what I’ve written about Martino, I suggest clicking the label with his name at the posting to which I link at the start of this piece. The “search blog” feature at the head of Bilgrimage is not working properly, by the way. It yields partial results for some search terms, but misses others entirely. If you’re relying on it to search the blog thoroughly, I’m afraid whatever is awry with it may cause you to miss information.

And now I want to update the Martino story. Both Martino and his auxiliary bishop, John M. Dougherty, have just resigned. David Gibson has a good summary of the Martino story (and of the possible backstory of this resignation) at Politics Daily yesterday.

Gibson reports that there are suggestions that the polarizing, extremely partisan behavior of Martino and some other bishops may have caused the powers that be to nudge the Scranton bishop to step down. As he notes, that polarizing, partisan behavior has been on full display in the response of a few U.S. Catholic bishops to health care reform, and of a handful of U.S. Catholics of the fringe right to the choice to give Ted Kennedy a Christian burial.

Gibson writes,

Whatever the ins and outs of the internal church maneuvering, the upshot is that a leading voice in the anti-Obama wing of the church hierarchy has been silenced while both Obama and Biden continue to take center stage.

At Edward Kennedy's funeral on Saturday, for example, Biden received communion while Obama gave a moving eulogy. Obama also spoke quietly before the service with Boston's Cardinal Sean O'Malley, who himself rejected lobbying from the Catholic right that he not allow the pro-choice Kennedy a public funeral or at least not to appear if there was a public funeral. Some reports say O'Malley sought to open a channel of communication with Obama via their brief chat, which lasted just 2-3 minutes.

Moreover, the lionizing of Kennedy in the wake of his death arguably showed him to be a far more prominent and beloved Catholic figure than most any bishop.

In addition, there are signs that some bishops are growing uneasy with the more strident and even partisan tone of many church leaders, especially in the wake of the shooting of Kansas abortionist George Tiller. The opposition of some bishops to health care reform -- which the pope has declared a fundamental human right -- as well as fallout from the fierce opposition by some to Obama's appearance at Notre Dame in May has also given some bishops pause.

“[There are signs that some bishops are growing uneasy with the more strident and even partisan tone of many church leaders”: if that’s true, I have to wonder what has taken many bishops so long to see the bitter fruits being borne now after several decades of carefully cultivated moral imbecility in American Catholicism around the single issue of abortion.

I’ve been noting this over and over on Bilgrimage from the last campaign period forward: mobs ranting and raving about baby-killing at McCain-Palin rallies, posturing as pro-life when they advocate for unlimited rights to carry guns, for capital punishment, against health care coverage for all citizens, and for draconian measures against immigrants. The real motives of these groups have about as much to do with respect for life as oil has to do with water.

And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see this. How has it taken so long for many of the bishops to see what is right before their eyes, as the self-professed guardians of orthodoxy scream about liberals and socialists and the culture of death (and bashing gays and killing baby killers and denying communion and Christian burial to fellow Catholics)? Bitter fruits. And fruits that have been growing apace for years now, carefully cultivated by many of those who appear suddenly to recognize their incompatibility with the gospel—now that it may be too late to do much about them.

And as Frank Cocozzelli notes in a good article yesterday at Talk to Action about the Catholic right’s attempt to block health care reform, it’s not really about abortion all in the final analysis. No matter how loudly the guardians of orthodoxy shout about baby killing, it's impossible to disguise what their opposition to health care reform is really about, in the final analysis.

It’s about money. It’s about protecting the interests of wealthy economic elites, the same wealthy elites that fund the right-wing Catholic think tanks like the Cardinal Newman Society (on this group, see, e.g., here and here) and the Catholic colleges that such think tanks anoint as more Catholic than the rest, like Patrick Madrid’s Belmont Abbey College (see here and here).

It’s about serving the interests of wealthy elites whose primary concerns seem to have more to do with profit than the common good, with free enterprise than the gospel. Cocozzelli writes,

For the likes of Deal Hudson, Brent Bozell III and Bill Donohue would resort to mendacious means to protect the interests of their benefactors who provide funding to Heritage, MRC or the Morley Institute is not surprising. In doing so they camouflage the considerable corporate opposition to necessary forms of health insurance and for a fair and vigorous public option.

As for Archbishop Chaput, Bishop Nickless and Cardinal Rigali, such recklessness sets a new low. Perhaps these three princes of my faith are genuinely worried about issues of abortion and euthanasia. But to react in such a reactionary manner tells us that they are so obsessed with these what are in reality, peripheral issues that would gladly leave 46 million plus Americans without health care coverage.

So obsessed with peripheral issues that they would gladly leave 46 million-plus Americans without health care coverage. As they try to convince us that they are motivated by respect for life. And that they represent the Catholic tradition in its truest, purest form. When they are, in reality, nothing more than shameless shills for corporate economic interest groups that are bitterly hostile to the Catholic tradition of respect for life and human rights. No matter how much they scream about baby killers and liberals and the culture of death.

Getting Democracy Back: Sara Robinson on Education in a Fascist-Proof Society

As an educator, I’ve written extensively (most recently here) on this blog about my intent concern that American higher education is now failing the nation, as it adopts leadership models drawn from the corporate world. And as it substitutes the values of the corporate business world for the values of higher education—values that higher education has a serious obligation to communicate to students, if we want to keep democracy alive.

I’ve noted that American colleges and universities have a strong obligation to teach students to respect diversity, to collaborate with others across racial, ideological, religious, and national boundaries, to use critical thinking skills to understand the socio-economic and political world, and to draw marginalized communities into social structures. I’ve also noted that American institutions of higher learning—including church-owned ones—benefit largely from public tax dollars precisely because our culture has always understood that, in receiving such public support, universities and colleges covenant themselves to inculcate values necessary to sustain democracy, and to produce leaders for the future.

In my view, the shift to a corporate model of doing business in American higher education is seriously undermining its ability to fulfill this social contract. So I’m very interested to note that Sara Robinson’s recent list of steps concerned citizens need to take to make our society “fascist proof” includes rebuilding our educational system.

Robinson states,

We need to get serious about investing in education. It's well understood now that our broken health care system is right on the bottom of the barrel among industrialized countries; but most of us don't realize that our schools are in the same comparatively wretched shape.

Thomas Jefferson understood that liberal democracy is impossible without a literate, well-informed populace; and the endless parade of teabagger loonitude is precisely the kind of know-nothing nightmare he most feared. . . . .

Don't know much about history -- so the Christian right is busily rewriting it to argue that there's no such thing as a wall between church and state. Don't know much biology -- so fewer than half of all Americans think the theory of evolution explains our origins. Don't know much about the science book -- so we're ready to believe whatever junk science the corporate PR folks can conjure up. Don't know much about the French I took -- which has left the country insular, parochial and unable to work and play well with others in a world it purports to lead.

But the worst failure is that we went through a decades-long patch where we didn't teach civics -- and still don't much, especially in states where it's not part of the standardized tests. Which means that there are tens of millions among us who have absolutely no idea what's in the Bill of Rights, or how a law gets made, or where the limits of state power lie.

It's quite possible that if the conservatives hadn't undermined universal civics education, the right-wing talking heads would have never found an audience. Instead, what we have is a country where most people are getting their basic political education from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

If we want our democracy back, that has to change.

And:

We need to focus on restoring our basic liberal institutions. In 2005, Chris Bowers noted that progressive ideology has always been disseminated through four major cultural drivers: the universities (and related intellectual infrastructure); unions; the media; and liberal religious organizations. Knowing this, conservatives set out back in the 1970s to undermine all four of these institutions -- and over time, they've largely succeeded in blunting their historic capacity to disseminate and perpetuate the progressive worldview.

As I’ve noted before, if American higher education expects to have a viable future, if it wants to retain its traditional academic identity and not simply become a propaganda machine for the corporate business community, it needs to take another look at some of the founding figures of modern American higher education, including John Dewey, who made the democracy-education link explicit.

Or at Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman University, who made that link explicit, and then deepened the analysis by applying the link specifically to one historically marginalized community, her African-American community. Bethune’s passion for education was driven by her vision of democracy as a network of social participation in which every voice was needed, and should be welcome. If you want a treat on this late-summer weekend in which it seems we’ve been bombarded for far too long with voices of hate and destruction rather than reason and hope, listen to Bethune’s contribution to NBC’s 23 November 1939 town meeting of the air on the question, What does democracy mean to me?

Edward M. Kennedy: The Best Old Boy Who Ever in This World Did Live

As I think about the loss of Ted Kennedy and about an appropriate way to eulogize someone who contributed so much to the United States, from a Catholic social justice perspective that often seems to be in its death throes these days, I think back to a childhood scene involving my maternal grandmother.

As readers who have followed Bilgrimage for some time might guess, my mother’s mother played a significant role in my childhood. My grandmother shaped my outlook on life, and her lessons in values—ones she took dead seriously, and which her grandchildren had no choice except to regard as significant—formed my character in ways I feel sure I will never totally fathom. It was this grandmother who taught me to pray on evenings when I would spend the night with her as a child, and we would talk into the night as I slept beside her.

As I’ve grown up and look back on her subtle techniques of character formation, I realize that my grandmother deliberately staged the constant visits we made to her as occasions to teach her grandchildren about values. Many of our visits included a drive to the cemetery in which her parents and grandparents are buried, along with countless other relatives on that side of my family. My grandmother herself is now buried in that cemetery.

On these occasions, as we’d walk slowly through the cemetery from grave to grave, she would tell us stories of each person buried in the plots to which she guided us. These were stories designed to make us aware that who we were was an extension of who our forebears had been and what they had done: we had a heritage to carry on, and we also needed to remember with gratitude the sacrifices made for us by those who came before us.

Needless to say, each story included a little moral lesson.

One grave puzzled me, though. It did so because my grandmother never failed to visit it and point it out to us. But she had no story to go with the burial site.

What she did instead when we reached this grave was pat the tombstone and say, “Here lies the best old boy who ever in this world did live.” That was it. That was her eulogy, and it has stuck in my mind as an exceptionally fine one.

Years later, I discovered the reason for my grandmother’s reticence to talk about this fine “old boy.”

The man she was eulogizing—and encouraging us to remember—was her cousin, her first cousin. He was the son of an aunt about whom she was always reticent—a half-aunt, as she was quick to point out, born to her grandfather's second wife.

The reason for the reticence, I have learned as an adult, is that this aunt had a child some years following her husband’s death, a child born to a neighboring farmer up the road from her. In rural Arkansas, such events caused quite a stir—at least in the area in which my family lived. They brought shame on an entire family, down to third and fourth cousins descended from half-brothers and sisters far back in the family tree.

Despite this shame, which obviously mattered to my grandmother many years after her poor old widowed aunt had stepped across the conventional line with a neighbor (as old letters delicately explain), my grandmother obviously cherished the cousin whose tombstone she wanted us to remember, the best old boy who ever in this world did live.

And I can think of few better ways to eulogize Senator Kennedy. My grandmother was wild about the Kennedys. They could, in her eyes, do no wrong. When she saw the photograph of a Ryan relative of theirs in County Wexford, she was absolutely convinced—nothing would persuade her otherwise—that this Kennedy cousin had to be a cousin of hers, given that her own mother had been a Ryan born in County Kilkenny close to the Wexford border, and that the president’s cousin looked like the very spit and image of her mother.

If my grandmother were alive today, she would say of Ted Kennedy—I know it in my bones—and of his death, “We've just lost the best old boy who ever in this world did live.” And as her grandson, I can think of no finer way to eulogize a man I admired deeply, and for whose good work on behalf of all of us I will forever be grateful.

Higher Education and the Money Racket: Continued Abdication of Leadership

I’ve written frequently on this blog about the extremely destructive effects that the adoption of a corporate CEO style of leadership is having on academic life in the United States. Click on “higher education” and “leadership” at the end of this posting, and you’ll find a well-documented trail of postings dealing with these themes.

As the posting to which I’ve just linked states,

As I’ve noted repeatedly, my entrée point into discussions of overcompensated CEOs is my experience in academic life, where the adoption of a corporate leadership model has resulted in a trend to gross overcompensation of university presidents and CFOs, as faculty salaries remain flat or fall. This trend has been radically destructive of important values essential to the mission of universities.

The corporatizing trend in university leadership rewards big men and big women at the top who all too often lack any real understanding of what academic life is all about, and any profound commitment to academic excellence and collegial pursuit of the truth. Increasingly, the leadership structures of many universities is top-heavy and top-down, as the corporate model is imposed on academic life.

My essays on these themes note that university boards of trustees bear great responsibility for creating (and sustaining) a situation in which concerns about money are trumping (and even obliterating) concerns about academic integrity and values. More and more, trustees of universities come from the business sector rather than the academic world, and they have brought with them to the schools they serve a CEO model of leadership that is antithetical to what academic life is all about.

Since I have written extensively about this topic and have encouraged the new federal administration to monitor what is happening in American higher education, because colleges and universities are key to building democracy and sustaining its core values, I’m interested to read today an article in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, which focuses on the responsibility of trustees to exercise more oversight in colleges and universities they govern.

The article begins by quoting Dr. Larry Handfield, chair of the board of trustees of Bethune-Cookman University, who notes that the responsibilities of trustees are growing more acute. Dr. Handfield notes that boards today are increasingly expected to oversee policies and their implementation in the schools they serve.

Good message. But, unfortunately, the article itself underscores precisely the problem I keep pinpointing—a problem which, as it grows more acute, spells trouble for the nation at large, given the role universities have historically played in producing leaders and transmitting values.

Search the article for the word “money,” and you’ll find it appears three times. Do a search for the word “fund,” and you’ll see it used seven times in the article. The word “dollar” shows up once, and the word “business” appears twice.

Guess what never gets mentioned even once? “Academic” and “values.”

Note that I’m not disagreeing with what Reginald Stuart, the article writer says. He’s clear that money is the bottom line in academic life today. He’s describing accurately what is there and what he sees.

But in doing so, he’s also exposing a very serious problem, one that needs much more attention than it’s getting in our society today. As long as money is the bottom line, and as long as boards of trustees think of their responsibilities largely in fiduciary terms, university trustees are doing a tremendous disservice to the institutions they lead.

Academic integrity and academic excellence are what it should be all about. And values. And boards that do not recognize this and take steps to assure that a school’s values are front and center, and that a school’s leadership promotes academic integrity and excellence first and foremost, are grossly abdicating their responsibility to lead.

The Revolving-Door Syndrome: More on the Hazards of The Corporate CEO Model of Educational Leadership

I said earlier that I had made my final post for the day--but I should know better than to say that anything I plan or do is ever final. I'm logging in now to share some thoughts provoked by a Huffington Post article today linking to a story by Christian Rexrode at the McClatchy website, which announces that three more of Bank of America's board of directors have just quit. That brings the total of those who have resigned from the 2009-2010 class of directors to nine--half of the board.

This story of pronounced organizational instability jogs my memory to post something that I intended to say in a story about the sociopathic CEO and the application of that concept to leaders in higher education.

One of the negative consequences that those who study leadership in higher education are tracking in colleges and universities which adopt the corporate CEO style of leadership is the destruction of collegiality by presidents acting like CEOs on many college campuses. The corporte CEO style of leadership in universities is corrosive to the ties that bind a college community together--and, in this respect, it's corrosive to everything that colleges and universities are supposed to be about.

The concept of "collegiality" stresses the calling of a community of scholars and students to "bind together" in the pursuit of truth. The word "collegiality" comes from Latin roots meaning "bind" and "with."

The corporate CEO style of leadership disrupts collegiality, by imposing on institutions that are meant to employ a model of shared governance a top-down, and often autocratic, governance model. In the corporate world, CEOs are by their nature top dogs, the ones who make the decisions and hand them down to those "beneath" the CEO, who are expected to implement the decisions without questioning.

This model of leadership is a bad fit for higher education because higher education depends, at its most fundamental level, on a concept of leadership that values collaborative decision making involving the whole university community. This model of leadership sees decision-making as a shared venture, in which a community of scholars and students collaborate to generate ideas, discuss them, and then craft institutions to facilitate the implementation of those ideas.

At its worst--when a university president-as-corporate CEO moves toward that sociopathic edge described by Hartmann in the posting I discussed yesterday--an autocratic university president who views herself or himself as a CEO can create total insability throughout an entire institution. When his or her power is unchecked by governing boards who see no incompatibility between the corporate CEO style of management and university leadership, an autocratic university president can produce a revolving-door syndrome in the institution she or he leads, such that key offices see one person after another moving through them, causing serious instability in the whole organization.

That kind of instability, especially when it occurs in key university positions, undermines continuity, leading to institutional chaos, since the rules are constantly shifting, the chain of command is new every day, and no one knows to whom to report or what the expectations of the new supervisor might be. Such organizational chaos, induced from the top by autocratic leaders employing a corporate CEO style of management antithetical to the core values of higher education, seriously impedes a college or university's mission. It siphons off precious energy the college community needs to devote to the pursuit of its mission, since that energy has to be devoted, instead, to constantly adapting to new supervisors and new ways of doing business.

The loss of energy for the university's mission, in turn, causes misssteps that can lead to problems with accrediting bodies, whose primary function is to assure that universities have a clear mission, pursue that mission with integrity, and have strong processes of self-correction when the mission is not being pursued successfully. And when accrediting bodies begin to look askance at a university that is faltering in its pursuit of its mission due to autocratic leadership, donations from granting bodies and the university's stakeholders begins to dip, as well, since donors are hesitant to give funds to a university that seems to be spinning out of control with organizational chaos, a revolving-door syndrome in key offices, and loss of energy and focus for its mission.

It is the responsibility of a governing board, of course, to rein in leaders whose leadership style induces constant organizational instability and chaos, a revolving door in key offices, and a loss of energy for a university's mission, with consequent loss of credibility by the university. Unfortunately, in some institutions, the governing board is the source of these problems, in that it deliberately enables the out-of-control, or even sociopathic, autocratic university leader because she or he appears to be a tough, decisive CEO in the corporate style.

To the extent that the governing boards of American colleges and universities continue to refashion institutions of higher education around ideals and models drawn from corporate experience, which are ill-suited to the mission of higher education, and to the extent that boards choose and keep empowering leaders who employ those corporate models even when strong evidence suggests that such leadership is harming colleges and universities, we're in trouble, as a culture. We're in trouble because we depend, all of us, on the ability of our institutions of higher learning to produce leaders with values and skills necessary to keep democracy alive.

And that's not the goal of corporate culture, in most of its embodiments--not in any shape, form, or fashion. As the "Spiritual Autobiography" of a significant leader of higher education in the 20th century, Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded Bethune-Cookman University, repeatedly notes, higher education has a crucial role to play in sustaining democratic institutions, by inculcating in students the core values necessary to keep participatory democracy alive. When we allow the values of corporate culture to dominate our institutions of higher learning, we court trouble for our culture as a whole.

Thom Hartmann on the CEO as Sociopath: Applications for Higher Education

Thom Hartmann posted an interesting piece at the Alternet site a few days ago. He suggests that, to be a successful CEO—particularly in the corporate, for-profit sector—one needs to have sociopathic tendencies.

Hartmann is a trained psychotherapist as well as a journalist. In this piece, he argues that to make decisions on an ongoing basis that ruin the lives of other human beings, and to be willing to reap rewards for doing that as a “leader,” one has to have sociopathic tendencies. How otherwise to put your head on the pillow at night (and take the big paycheck to the bank), without ever wondering about the lives of those you destroy?

The heart of Hartmann’s argument:

CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths -- people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

I think Thom Hartmann is onto something. As I’ve noted in previous postings, I’ve found this pattern of academic-leader-as-sociopathic-CEO on the rise in institutions of higher learning, and I believe that it’s a pattern that ought to concern everyone in American society, due to the trend-setting influence of higher education in our culture.

As university boards of trustees are dominated more and more by those with ties to the corporate world (corporate attorneys, business leaders, church leaders who run big church corporations, etc.), boards of trustees look more and more for presidents who think like CEOs, who act like CEOs, who proudly profess to be CEOs rather than academic leaders. And the consequences for the institutions such CEO-presidents lead could not be more dismal.

Academic inquiry and academic excellence suffer in these institutions, because faculty are exploited and know they’re exploited. Some academic CEO-presidents gleefully undermine faculty governance and faculty rights, ignore due process in firing faculty, threaten faculty members with reprisal if faculty ask critical questions: they reduce faculty to the level of dispensable workers-cum-things in a labor pool without the protections from workplace harassment long afforded to academics to enable them to engage in serious thought and serious research.

This approach to academic life undermines academic excellence in the grossest way possible, by making faculty frightened to think, speak, publish, and teach. In institutions governed by fear, where a ruthless CEO-president can fire at will (and there are such institutions of higher learning out there), faculty become so intimidated that they will not open their mouths even when academic integrity is at stake.

I have seen a case like this first-hand, and it has been sobering to watch. The president-CEO whose behavior I’ve observed closely, since I have had to work closely with her, actually calls herself a CEO—and proudly so. Her pattern, by now a well-established one, is to go into a relatively stable academic institution and immediately produce such chaos that the institution starts to malfunction, and then falls on financial hard times.

The chaos results from a pathological tendency of this leader to imagine that even those she has placed in positions of trust, and needs to trust in order to keep her institution functioning, are conspiring against her. When she begins to distrust a member of her own team, she actually targets that person and begins actively subverting his or her work, to lay a foundation for firing him or her with allegations that the team member did not work hard enough or competently enough.

The economic hard times this president-CEO induces through her deliberate creation of institutional chaos then become an excuse to fire more faculty at will—targeted faculty whom the president suspects of being enemies—without due process or strong proof of financial exigency. This, in turn, leads to negative media attention and negative scrutiny from accrediting bodies and academic watchdog agencies, who censure the schools led by this president. And the negative media attention and censuring by academic bodies in turn causes further attrition of funding to the school from donors who would otherwise support the school’s mission, but become concerned that its current leader is undermining the mission.

I’ve become convinced that this person’s behavior does, indeed, have a very strong sociopathic basis. She seems tragically incapable of viewing the other human beings around her, including members of her own academic team, as human. She treats people as objects—dispensable objects to be moved around at her whim on any given day, and when she has grown tired of those objects or suspicious of them, to be discarded like used tissue, with nary a thought about the consequences of such treatment for their human lives.

To behave that way, and to do so over and over again, even when the consequences for oneself are painful (e.g., negative media attention, complaints to academic watchdog bodies, lawsuits), one has to be sick, I’ve concluded. One has to be incapable of learning to change one's dysfunctional patterns, even when those patterns cause one increasing pain. This is a very specific kind of soul-sickness, a soul-sickness rooted in a remarkable capacity of a CEO to view other human beings as less human than herself, as, in fact, dispensable objects.

The corporate world rewards such sociopathic behavior in its CEOs by paying them big bucks. Sadly, the academic world has begun to do the same, as it makes dollar signs rather than academic integrity its bottom line—as its governing boards do this, that is.

In the case I’m discussing above, though the CEO-president in question has now replicated the pattern I’m describing at each institution she leads, her governing boards have stood behind her. Her ruthless, inhumane treatment of her employees is justified as good economic stewardship, necessary hard-nosed pragmatic decision making to keep an institution economically viable.

When this approach to academic leadership is allowed to go unchallenged in our society, and when it’s allowed to become prevalent throughout higher education, we’re in trouble as a society. Higher education is not, in the final analysis, about making big bucks. It should not be about that goal, at least.

It should be about producing leaders who have sound values necessary to keep democracy alive. We fund all institutions of higher learning, both public and private, lavishly because of the social contract colleges and universities have made with our culture, to use those funds to produce strong, ethically grounded leaders with the skill to build democratic institutions for the next generation.

When we allow sociopaths to run our universities, and to justify their sociopathic behavior by claiming that they are simply being good CEOs, we’re headed for big trouble as a society. Academic leaders who betray core democratic values in how they run a university teach an unhappy lesson about values to the students of their university.

As I've noted in previous postings about this topic, before it loses its soul definitively, American higher education would be well advised to re-examine the philosophy of some of the prophetic founding figures of values-oriented, transformative higher education, including Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of Bethune-Cookman University. In her "Spiritual Autobiography," Dr. Bethune notes the foundational significance of institutions of higher learning in imparting the values necessary for democracy to thrive, as she concludes, “In this atomic age, when one small materialistic possession has wrought fear among peoples of the world, I am convinced that leadership must strive hard to show the value of these spiritual tools which are as real as anything we touch or feel, and far more powerful."

Stimulus Package as Opportunity to Reshape American Education

Nicholas Kristof has some important things to say today about American education in his New York Times op-ed piece about poor educational system as our national shame
(here).

Kristof notes that the stimulus package allocates more than $100 billion for education, whereas the entire discretionary budget for the Education Department last year was $59 billion. As he notes, this provides an opportunity for us to look very carefully at what works within our educational system from primary schools up through higher education, and to enhance what we do well while correcting what we do wrong.

Kristof focuses, in particular, on the contribution of good teachers:

First, good teachers matter more than anything; they are astonishingly important. It turns out that having a great teacher is far more important than being in a small class, or going to a good school with a mediocre teacher.

In my view, this is absolutely correct. And unless we can refashion our educational systems so that outstanding teachers are encouraged and rewarded, we will not make headway in the area of education.

As I've argued repeatedly on this blog, our educational system--in particular, American higher education--has restructured itself in the past several decades according to guidelines derived from the corporate business world (here). We now have a top-heavy educational system (at all levels) in which grossly overpaid "experts" with little feel for education and woefully inadequate commitment to outstanding education run the show. While teachers, who do the real work, and the hard work, of struggling to educate, are under-supported, used as pawns in cynical political games played by those at the top, and increasingly relegated to second-class citizenship in the academy.

It should not be this way. And until we fix this situation, we will continue to see conspicuous failure in our educational system. Good teaching needs to be rewarded. And there needs to be a weeding process at the top, at each level of our educational system, to deal with the over-paid and ill-qualified "managers" now running the show.

Eating to Save the Earth: More New Year's Notes

I blogged shortly after new year's day on cooking to save the earth (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-years-notes-on-eating-to-save-earth.html). Among the reasons I wanted to blog about that topic in the new year is that, it seems to me, many folks nowadays aren't learning basic skills and wisdom rooted in the folk cultures of the world--skills and wisdom about food and eating. I suspect there is no lack of good will among many young folks in the developed areas of the world about eating to save the earth (and for health). What may be lacking is knowledge: wisdom essential to making good choices in this important area of human life is often not passed on by parents, by my generation.

So there's a method to the madness of my occasional posts about a meal I happen to have cooked. I'm hoping that these notes might be helpful for at least a few readers searching for ideas about how to eat low on the food chain, while eating well and doing a bit to help the environment. It also occurs to me that many of us who are in need of ideas in this area also happen to be those of us living on the economic margins: we're those who find it hardest of all to pay for good food, to buy the kind of food that preserves our health while filling our stomachs.

The ideas I'll occasionally share about cooking will point to meals that are (I hope) not only tasty and healthy, but less expensive than many we might cook or buy at a restaurant.

So, with that as preface, here's a recipe I thought to share today. It's a dish I just cooked for Steve's and my dinner.

On the weekend, I had made borscht to share with our friend Mary, who has been struggling to recover from a horrible auto accident before Thanksgiving. Soups heal; I'm convinced of it (they do, that is, when they're well-made and made with love).

When I prepared two bunches of beets to shred for the soup, I set the greens aside and carefully washed them. I find that beet greens have to be washed vigorously, since sand packs down into the crevices where the stems grow from the beet. I soak the greens and their stems several times in a large bowl of water, shaking them when I put them into the water, and then letting them sit a moment for the sand to fall to the bottom of the bowl. After I repeat that process several times (changing the water each time), I give them a final wash of cold water, using the sink sprayer to dislodge any remaining sand.

I always shred a handful of beet greens for a pot of borscht. The greens I don't use in the soup, I then put aside for future use, wrapped in a clean cloth and placed in the vegetable bin of the icebox.

Today I decided to use the greens I'd set aside when I made borscht on Sunday. (Last night, I had actually taken a handful of the small, tender greens to put into an arugula salad.) I removed the stems and put them aside, then chopped the greens.

In a large skillet, I heated some olive oil and added to it half a bell pepper and half an onion I had found in the hydrator, both chopped. As they began to sautee, I added the beet greens, along with about a cup of cooked cabbage left from a meal yesterday.

Just as the beet greens wilted, I added a toe of chopped garlic, salt and pepper to taste, and a sprinkle of oregano. The moisture from the cabbage broth that clung to the cabbage leaves helped to make a sauce. I took the vegetables off the fire and added a handful of frozen peas--English peas, we say in the South, to distinguish green peas from the many varieties of field peas we enjoy.

As Steve walked home from work, I put pasta (orecchiette) on to cook, grated some fresh parmesan, and set out a bowl of roasted slivered almonds. That was our meal--the pasta topped with the sauce of beet greens and cabbage, with parmesan and almonds sprinkled on top. A delicious meal, a healthy one, and an inexpensive one, which made good use of a vegetable (beet greens) that many of us are tempted to discard when we buy fresh beets.

(The stems of the beet greens? Well, I'm experimenting. I cut them into pieces about two inches long and put them into a jar of pickled beets that I have on hand all the time in the icebox. If they pickle well, as I hope they will, they will add interest to future meals . . . .)

Arne Duncan as Education Secretary: Reflections on Obama's Cabinet Choices

I’ve been ho-hum about most of Mr. Obama’s cabinet appointments. But the choice of Arne Duncan as education secretary interests me and even gives me reason for muted hope. It’s not that any of the previous selections have struck me as particularly bad. They have just been unexciting.

Most seem sound enough, if weighted a bit more on the side of centrist expertise than I’d have hoped. And by “centrist,” I’m referring not only to the ideological orientation of the cabinet choices. I’m referring as well to the provenance of those being selected. They’re from the usual power centers of American society; they have the predictable educational pedigree of such selections. They represent, in other words, the very folks who have led us right to the brink of economic collapse—and that concerns me.

The appointment of Arne Duncan does grab my attention, though. I knew next to nothing about Duncan before the appointment. What I’m reading strikes me as hopeful. I like that he has managed to maintain positive ties to the teachers’ union in Chicago while running a major metropolitan school system. He supported the failed plan to start a high school for gay-lesbian youth in Chicago—a good plan for a valuable project, which should have been implemented.

And, according to today’s New York Times, Duncan is a strong advocate for an initiative dear to the new president’s heart—an enhanced early childhood education program for youth across the nation (www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/us/politics/17early.html?partner=p). This is an initiative we sorely need.

It’s no secret that the American educational system is in trouble—dire trouble. And at all levels. What seems to escape the attention of a public infatuated with scores “proving” that pupils can read, write, and cipher adequately (or proving the opposite, which is, unfortunately, more often the case) is that a good education is about more than acquiring basic skills.

It’s about entrée. It’s about ability to contribute in a participatory democracy. It’s about access to power and privilege in a society in which power and privilege (and the world’s goods) are inequitably distributed.

The most scandalous failure of our current educational system is its apparent inability to level the playing field by drawing the youth of marginalized communities inside. We have spent several decades lamenting the lack of basic skills among American students, and punishing educators and schools that work hard to inculcate those skills, while ignoring the most salient—the central and glaring—fact about our schools’ shortcomings. This is their inability to begin the process of educating youth on the margins at the critical early-childhood threshold—to begin the educational process in a way that draws these young folks into education and into the participatory structures of democracy for their entire lives.

Too many of our citizens are left outside. Too many of us not only live on the margins: we are left on the margins. We are left there by an educational system that does almost nothing to educate us, even when it graduates us and offers us degrees.

Early childhood education is critical because the early childhood phase is the make-or-break moment in the educational process. Fail to induct a youngster into the educational system at this threshold moment, and you’ve lost him or her for life. Society has lost this valuable citizen, and the talents this citizen brings to us, forever.

What strikes me as particularly promising about the choice of Arne Duncan for secretary of education is not so much his potential to address the manifold problems of our educational system. It’s his focus on what is the problem of the system, the core problem: its failure to reach children on the margins, particularly at the key moment of early childhood education.

The various educational reforms of recent neoconservative administrations have been, frankly, shell games. They have been shell games because they begin with the assumption that the most significant thing wrong with our educational system is its failure to teach basic skills. From there, they move to the punitive (and polarizing) assumption that schools should be rewarded or penalized on the basis of students’ scores on standardized tests.

What this neoconservative strategy entirely misses is the fact that many American students will never get to the point of meeting society's benchmarks in the areas of reading, writing, and doing math because they have not been reached at all by the educational system. Not, that is, in any way that counts, in any way that allows them to understand the importance of education to their entire lives. Not in any way that allows them to become educated.

They were not reached at the moment when reaching out and drawing in is most important: at the very beginning of their schooling. They will never be adequately taught, these students left behind, because our society and its schools have not cared enough to demonstrate to these marginalized young people their importance to all of us, as they begin their educations.

Until we address that social assumption—the assumption that we can live with marginality and do nothing about it—we will not being educating the majority of our citizens. Not adequately, that is.

And addressing that assumption is definitely going to take reform of how we train those who teach. The education departments of too many of our universities are, frankly, laughable. They are too often staffed by people too woefully uneducated themselves to educate any other human being.

And they are staffed that way from the top down. There are wonderful educators in many of our education departments. There are people in those departments who are willing to wear themselves out trying to reach students.

But these educators rarely control or even exercise much influence over the direction of schools of education. Instead, “professional” “educators” tend to predominate at the top of such departments—and at the helms of universities that sponsor schools of education. “Professional” as in trained—trained bureaucrats.

Many of those heading education departments and entire universities are people with doctorates in fields like education who are shockingly devoid of even the basics of education—of the depth and breadth of a liberal education that comprises wide reading, of interaction with educated people from many different schools of thought, and so forth. Too many professional educators approach the task of education as an administrative game. Too few understand it as what it is when it is done right: the challenge of reaching out and drawing in, particularly of reaching to and drawing in those on the margins.

Too many educators lack this perspective on what education is all about because their educational “training” has taught them to create nifty slide presentations or to crunch numbers in salary scales or how to craft a memo to avoid legal entanglements. But it has not taught them to understand how social structures work or how the human mind and heart function. The education of far too many educational bureaucrats is simply not education at all, in the classic sense of that term.

I hope that Obama and Duncan begin addressing these problems. It is high time that they do so. It is imperative that they do so, if we’re going to begin recovering our democracy.

Doing so will not be easy, however. It will require that they go up against the most powerful and least educated elites in our educational system—folks like the presidents and boards of trustees who run the universities. The folks who command the high salaries while assigning the hard work of education to shockingly underpaid and exploited faculty members such as those Gina Nahai discusses in a Huffington Post article earlier this week (www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-nahai/the-great-shame-of-americ_b_150940.html). (Here's where the good relationship with the Chicago teachers' union will be valuable: the "professional" educators at the top are there because, on the whole, they resist adequate pay for the real educators beneath them.)

As long as the system producing the "educators" who have failed to educate several generations of American youth remains in place, not much is going to change. Nothing much has changed as we have allowed—forced is a better word—our schools to play the numbers game with standardized scores while failing to reach scads of our youngsters in any meaningful way.

And nothing at all will change as long as we allow grossly overpaid, soulless—and yes, corrupt; corrupted by their privilege and power over others—educational “experts” to run our educational shows. How can someone who does not understand or value what his or her own soul says—who does not have the tools to do that, tools provided by a real education—touch the souls of others?

Questions Not To Be Asked: Brigham Young University Censorship of Student's Art Exhibit

Fascinating account yesterday on several blogs about an art project at Brigham Young University that has proven surprisingly controversial. I first read about this incident on John Aravosis’s America Blog, which links to commentary on Dan Savage’s website (www.americablog.com/2008/12/gay-bashing-mormons-censor-byu-art.html). Pictures from the project, as well as commentary about it by Michael, the BYU student who inadvertently caused the controversy simply by producing a stunning exhibit of photos, are at http://areyou1too.blogspot.com/2008/11/fine-art-portrait-project.html.*

Here’s what seems to have happened: for his final project in his Fine Arts class, Michael took photos of openly gay BYU students and of a non-gay family member or supporter of each student. He arranged the faces side by side in pairs in his gallery showing.**

There was no indication of which of the two faces was gay. This was the point of the exhibit—or one of its points: namely, as Michael notes on his blog, to emphasize that God creates each of us as we are, as equals, as equally beloved creations of God’s nurturing hands.****

It is we who add the interpretations that designate one person as acceptable and the other as not acceptable. The exhibit disrupts our tendency to classify in ways that exalt some and demean others. It forces us to admit that, without superimposed labels, we don’t actually even know who is the enemy and who the friend—who is gay and who is straight, who is abnormal and who normal, who is damned and who is saved.

This insight evidently proved too challenging and disruptive for BYU and the Mormon culture the university enshrines. A day or so ago, Michael discovered through a friend that his photos had been removed from the exhibit of final projects. To disguise the censorship, the school officials who removed the photos re-arranged the remaining projects so that no one could see that one project had been censored.

What’s fascinating to me about this story is how controversial a seemingly innocuous artistic observation can be: that we appropriate our world through interpretive devices, and some of these devices can be toxic, when they are imposed by those who need for us ally with them in hating others. In hating them merely and solely for who they happen to be. For who God made them to be.

Had a BYU art student taken Mapplethorpe-like male nude photos, or had she photographed a crucifix upside down in a bottle of urine, one could have anticipated the heavy hand of religious censorship. But all Michael did was photograph faces. And juxtapose those faces side by side. Without labels to tell us how we should read those faces. To tell us whom to love and whom to hate.

That this powerful, but entirely acceptable, final project statement would elicit censorship tells us—well, it tells me, at least—a great deal about where the churches have gone today, when it comes to loving or hating gay faces, gay human beings. The censorship here speaks volumes about the church’s obdurate and pathological need to maintain its labels at all cost—good-bad, acceptable-unacceptable, beloved-hated, saved-damned, straight-gay.

The thought of a world absent such labels appalls many religious groups. It does so because these groups cannot tolerate ambiguity. If we allow the gay and the straight, the damned and the saved, to be ambiguous, what else in our world will no longer be certain? At the heart of the resistance of the churches to gay persons—at the heart of the churches’ hate of gay human beings—is the fear that, if we rethink gender roles, everything else will be up for grabs.

Including the churches’ power over their adherents. Including how the church does business, how it proclaims a fraternal ethic while practicing a paternal one.

Anthropologists like Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger) have noted that social groups which feel themselves threatened need to draw insider-outsider lines. They also need to identify some group within their boundaries as a sly threat that has worked its way inside, and must be expelled to assure the body politic of its health and virtue.

For threatened social groups, Mary Douglas indicates, ambiguity is intolerable. It blurs the insider-outsider, the good-evil lines that the group needs (or assumes it needs) to maintain its integrity and cohesion as a social group. In Douglas’s view, this is the ultimate rationale of kosher laws regarding food: these laws rule out what cannot easily be sorted into acceptable-unacceptable categories. If an animal has a cloven hoof and ruminates, it may be eaten. But one that has one of these characteristics without the other is taboo: it defies easy classification—as do shellfish, which are fish but not fish.

As are gay people, in the minds of many churches: we are neither fish nor fowl, neither male nor female. If we are gay males, we pose a particular threat, because we call into question and subvert what many religious groups have chosen to believe is the central supporting prop of religion and culture: the dominant, superior male. Gay males are, in the eyes of paternalistic religious groups, males who deliberately and provocatively choose to cross the gender-classificatory line. We choose to become the despised “feminine.”

For this reason, it is crucial that one knows who these men are. It is crucial that the photos have labels. With labels, we do not know whom to approve and whom to reject, whom to include and whom to exclude. We do not know whom to demonize, without labels.

Michael’s work is slyly subversive, because it calls into question the central classificatory norms of Western culture, and of many religious groups within Western culture. It leads us to wonder if those norms are necessary. It leads us, in fact, to question the norms—and such questioning is intolerable at this point in our history, or so many churches judge, because the cultural pendulum is swinging too close to tolerance.

Michael’s work leads me, in turn, to question the right of those male-dominated, heterosexual-posturing groups within the power circles of many churches to own the bible. I have, frankly, had it up to here with the claims of these folks. I am tired of reading their blog postings and articles at sites such as National Catholic Reporter, where they interpret the magisterium for the rest of us, while soft-pedaling magisterial statements that bash gays. Or at Commonweal, where privileged, heterosexual males warn Obama not to incur the wrath of the Catholic church by appointing an openly gay cabinet member, or where the same privileged male voices explain that gay-inclusive readings of the scriptures are unthinkable and erroneous, because such readings subvert heterosexual male ownership of the bible.

Such readings are unacceptable to these married men who have long assumed that the bible belongs to them—as everything else does. It is their own privilege, not the scriptures themselves, that are called into question by readings of the scriptures open to the experience of human beings made gay by God.

We are at a turning point in the history of the churches, at which the ownership of the scriptures is being renegotiated. To a great extent, this turning point hinges on whether we will allow fraternal-sororal readings of the scripture that permit each person reading to have a voice in interpreting the word of God—a word spoken to all, after all—or whether we will continue to insist on a paternal reading of the scriptures that turns the scriptures over to the big man and big woman on top, and asks them to hand down to us the official word from on high.

We are a turning point in which we are having to ask whether love or hate energizes our reading of scripture and our scripture-normed practice of religion. And that question is—as Michael’s exhibit demonstrates—so controversial for religions that still wish to invest in male-privilege, paternalism, and hate that these religions will do everything possible to keep the question from being asked.

*Interestingly enough, this link appears to have stopped functioning since I composed this blog posting earlier today.

**For a clarification of what happened to Michael's blog, please see Amanda's comment below. Also please note Amanda's clarification of Michael's project.

****Examples of the photos in the exhibit are now at Michael's professional photography site, which identifies him as Michael Wiltbank. As a comment on this posting by Amanda notes, Michael Wiltbank's blog now has an explanation of why he moved his material about the exhibit from his blog to his photography website. This explanation is at the following link, which links to the photography website: http://areyou1too.blogspot.com/2008/12/because-this-blog-was.html. Out of respect for Michael's concern to protect the privacy of his subjects, I've removed a pictures of one of the duos in the exhibit. The picture heading the posting now is a picture of me and my two brothers, along with a cousin, when we were children. One of these boys would realize he was gay as he grew up. One would become a Baptist minister. One would father four children. One would die tragically young of alcoholism. The photo has no labels . . . .