We have reached the point in the semester in which I rediscover that the number of free hours available in a day is both somewhat fixed and completely finite. A meme comes to mind, shared by a friend in ministry who responded thusly when asked how things are going:
This semester I am taking a civil engineering class. A graduate civil engineering class (it’s a seminar- if you suspect that I lack underlying engineering skills at even the undergraduate level, you are completely correct. This, fortunately, is mostly discussion of the impacts and application of those skills, and that I can fruitfully do.) My thought in engaging civil engineering/city planning at the graduate level was “I want to know what you know—teach me.” The actual experience of engaging a discipline in the graduate seminar classroom is, of course, more akin to “I will shoulder all of my own learning responsibility and part of the teaching responsibility, which means I agree to present content and lead discussion over several days across the semester.”
Let’s review.
In short, this is hilarious and terrifying and in some ways exactly what I wanted. And in other ways, by which I mean in most ways, it’s your basic college/high school/ grad school nightmare, except that it’s real. You know nothing! Everyone else knows everything! Now: present!
I did not sneak into this class; I explained who I am and what I hope to do, and the professor said “Great; come do it with us!” In that way, this expansion of my thinking space seems both easy and low stakes; it would fit with the self-understanding of the ivory tower to simply use what I gain here to pontificate more powerfully while not speaking at all of what it took to secure access to this learning.
And yet I am going for, and trying to invite all of us toward, a different take on “more powerfully.”
Graduate education obscures both the lurching fits and starts of the learning process and also the costs of engaging therein, and it does this in part by insisting on the illusion of disembodiment-- a separation from reality that leaves people without some mode of family wealth both hungry and hustling.
(Receiving the above information was bleakly hilarious and apparently this kind of requirement is fairly representative for public universities- you should know that the stipend at this particular school is $20,500. In United States dollars. Full time. For a year.)
And even accepting for a moment the fallacy of knowledge acquisition sans bodies (an imaginative exercise necessitated by the refusal to pay people enough to eat and the simultaneous refusal to allow those people to do other work for other money), we are stymied again by a valuing of learnedness that separates itself from learning. In short, the culture of graduate-level academia incentivizes knowing over learning, and it appears to prefer also the pretense of knowing to the behaviors of learning.
Do these “rules” and oddly stacked incentives affect me as something of a visiting student? Maybe. Probably, in the manner of ambient air pollution. And yet I’m not here to pretend, and so far as I know, I also don’t want any of the things that pretending gains. So I’m sort of positioned offsides, observing as if visiting from another land. And yet I am more deeply implicated than it might appear, for these messages about what is valuable (and why the needs and wants and varying capacities of our bodies, in particular, are not) are threaded through every realm of our shared world-building project.
Thus, while I watch the principles of American empire at work in academia and occasionally [sob] laugh, I am also inevitably and inescapably reflecting on how these same beliefs and behaviors manifest in that other last bastion of the liberal social contract: the mainline church. (Do we know anything, y’all, about valuing learnedness more than learning? About wanting to speak to or of people’s spirits while not making space for their actual bodies? About paying poverty wages for some positions, while others differently situated maintain a cultivated failure to understand? Oof. Yes.)
In short, I hope soon to have something reasonably intelligent to say about bike lanes and the allocation of rights within public space as a value-ordering activity, but I don’t want to obscure the somewhat arduous and rather exclusive path leading toward those conclusions. To take charge of one’s learning is to face uncertainty, to engage in self-and-other-advocacy, and to endure a certain amount of psychic and physical pain. Bringing together cross-disciplinary thinking, in other words, is not magic: it’s work. It’s important. And, truly: it’s constructive theology. And gaining access to do that work, meanwhile, requires something else; I believe we could call it privilege.
For now . . . I’m off to make a slide deck about “sharrows,” knowing that it might someday mean a faith-rooted conversation about who gets to walk or bike safely on the south coast . . . and why the answer, for all of us, needs to be “the people of New Bedford.”
In faith and fine print,
j