Faculty President’s Letter to the Faculty, Fall 2020
This letter was my contribution to Whitworth’s faculty newsletter for fall 2020. Usually, this is a fairly light update on the fall retreat and some of what’s ahead for the year. But 2020 was the summer of COVID 19, election 2020, and a great deal of racial tension in our country. So this was a different kind of effort.
I want to talk about three brilliant books from the stack of reading I put together this summer. This is all going to lead to a couple of observations about advising—of all things!—but I have some hope it will turn out worthwhile and relevant to our unusual moment. At the least, I’ve got a stack of good books to recommend to you, and then the lowdown on our retreat for this year, which—barring a sudden eruption of better circumstances—is going to be both minimal and digital.
First up: Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003). This one tells the story of Eire’s boyhood in Havana, which was interrupted by the Cuban Revolution and then by his flight to the US as an unaccompanied minor, at the age of eleven. The book is beautifully written, with each chapter turning on a small number of remembered images and moments. It’s an artfully rendered contemplation of power, culture, family, and—in big and small ways—transformation. Among the scenes stuck in my head is one where someone turns a seaside home into “The Aquarium of the Revolution” and fills its large swimming pool with sharks. An utter and terrifying transformation of a play space, but in the end an insignificant backyard pool remembered only by Eire. So a tiny, strange, enormous, beautiful, hideous, profound, ephemeral transformation, carried forever in the heart of the boy, who becomes the man, who becomes a historian, who writes a memoir about the time when a Revolution re-shaped him and everyone he knew. In some ways, it’s all there in his opening line: ”The world changed while I slept, and much to my surprise, no one had consulted me.” The smallness and the bigness, the power and the weakness, the personal placed up against a world-historical background.
Second: Barbara and Karen Fields’s book of essays and talks, Racecraft (2012), advances a brilliant case comparing the social construction of witches in witchcraft to the social construction of race in racecraft. In their reading, witches are an artifact of witchcraft, and race and racism are artifacts of racecraft. But—and here’s the crux, maybe—that doesn’t mean witches don’t matter in a society organized around witchcraft, and it doesn’t mean that race and racism aren’t actual and powerful cultural artifacts created by racecraft. Through engagements with their own family’s history, with the history of indentured servitude and slavery and civil rights in America, with Douglass and Dubois and Durkheim and King and Appiah and others, the Fields sisters construct their case that “[w]e all can be more certain that witchcraft exists than that witches do” and that “[t]he same holds for racecraft and races” (203). The raceraft thesis shed instant light, for me, on the experiences of Carlos Eire, including his instantaneous acquisition of a new racial identity upon landing in the US.
Third: Andy Crouch’s Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power (2013). Crouch draws together storytelling, theology, philosophy, and practical wisdom. He’s pastoral, is what I mean by that. As in his earlier (and related) book, Culture Making (2009), Crouch takes the view here that human culture—culture-craft, we could say, following the Fields sisters—can be filled with terrible things but also is a source of much that is good and very good. “Grain is good—but bread is very good,” he says at one point, and that’s both true and a great metaphor, I think. In Playing God Crouch makes the case that power (like all creation) is fallen, and that (like all creation) it might be redeemed and made new. Crouch engages but declines Nietzsche’s vision of zero-sum power and sees Weber’s equation of power and coercive force as inadequate. Instead, Crouch says, we should notice how God’s power is envisioned in Genesis, and throughout scripture.
God uses power, and the world teems with life. God uses power, and people gain power from God’s actions, but God is not diminished. And people can use their power to bring about human flourishing, too. A good parent’s power over a child is a prelude to the child’s independent flourishing in the world. We teach our students so that they can outgrow us. That is—not to put too fine a point on it—quite the opposite of what happens in slavery, where the enslaved individual’s power is taken, wholly, by the enslaver. Crouch, as he considers power and idolatry, privilege and status, shows how extreme cases like slavery make vivid the general principle. Power, twisted, dominates and diminishes, as it did to Eire’s family and friends in Havana, as it does under slavery, wherever slavery appears. Power redeemed leads to creation and flourishing. Crouch says this: “The best test of any institution, and especially of any institution’s roles and rules for using power, is whether everyone flourishes when everyone indwells their roles and plays by the rules, or whether only a few of the participants experience abundance and growth” (185). That’s a hard, hard test, and worth considering with some fear and trembling
Individually, these books are dazzling. As a trio, they are something more. The Fields sisters’ vision of racecraft makes clear we ought to be cautious about how a society can enact and reenact racism even through well-meaning moves meant to counter racism. Crouch enters the culture-making conversation from a different place, though, and enriches it, offering a hopeful vision of what redeemed culture-craft might accomplish. Eire’s book does something special in this mix, too. Eire isn’t offering a theory or pursuing a thesis. What he’s doing is exploring the subtleties of human action through artful storytelling. The Fields’ racecraft thesis sheds light on Eire’s stories, for certain, and Crouch’s definition of power does, too. But storytelling always exceeds and challenges theory, much as—in Eire’s book—the confounding and anticlimactic reality of nearby gunfighting turns out to be nothing like the exciting impression of gunplay Eire had picked up at the movies. To say Waiting for Snow in Havana is about power or culture-craft alone is to miss its complexity, and to miss the granular nuance it brings to its human stories.
Here’s where I want to think about advising. I didn’t plan it, but as I started Crouch’s book, I realized I was working my way across a version of the “Cultural Inquiry” group from the shared curriculum we’re about to launch together. Eire’s work might anchor a Literature and Storytelling course. Fields and Fields might anchor a Historical Analysis course. Crouch might provide a cornerstone text for Culture and Diversity. And that made me think this: If our new Shared Curriculum is to do what we all hope it will do, then we’ll need to find ways to help our students draw connections across any stack of “courses” like this. The individual courses are dazzling; combined, they can become something more. At what point and in what ways will our students think about the different question-making approaches they’re using in these different courses? At what point will we ask them about how the ideas in one course are enriching their thinking in the others?
I want to suggest a good question that might become part of our advising: What’s in your stack? Just as we’re all mindful of how we use our limited reading time across the summer, carefully choosing the books in the stacks on our nightstands, we might be helping our students think about how the courses they choose are going to add up to something. We can help them choose courses that will amplify and challenge each other. We can set aside advising time to help them process the different kinds of thinking they’re doing in and through the different courses in their “stacks.” I would love it if we built a culture where students asked each other versions of the “stack” question, too: What’s going in your stack? Are those good together?
I want to suggest a second simple question for us, too, and this one I think is urgent for the year: Where’s the hallway? Some of the work of connecting courses and concepts has always happened in the hallways, in our casual conversations with students and their casual conversations with one other. And those conversations are at risk right now, as we minimize our contacts. In this pandemic year, we still need to help students build the kind of community contacts that deepen learning and lead to questions like “What’s going in your stack?” If our students don’t have the hallways for low-key chit chat about serious stuff, then how will we help them connect? How will we help them find those spontaneous, relational occasions when so much good learning and processing can flourish? These two challenges—the challenge of the stack and the challenge of the hallway—are heavy on my heart and mind for this year when we’re launching a new curriculum in the midst of social unrest in the midst of a pandemic. We’re in severe need of dazzling stacks and profound cross-curricular thinking, right about now; we’re going to need big imaginations to get to both.
Here’s the retreat plan. It’s a simple one. We’ll have a morning devotion together just after breakfast, via Zoom. Breakfast will be on your own, wherever you’d like to be or are able to be. We’re going to have an installation service, with introductions to our new colleagues and a homily from our new provost, just after lunchtime, via Zoom. Lunch will be on your own, wherever you’d like to be or are able to be. Between breakfast and lunch, I’m going to host a totally optional town hall where we can talk together about the hallway problem, if you’d like; it’s a piece of the puzzle that I think has received less attention as we’ve scrambled to prep for the fall, and I want to make a space for us to consider it together. The rest of the day is yours. Faculty Exec and I decided, after much thinking together, that the right thing to do would be to let you make your own decisions about what to do with the time. Our hope is that in at least one way, at least one time, you’ll connect casually with some colleagues. We’re hoping maybe you’ll eat together, even if it’s a “Zoom” lunch (or breakfast). We’re hoping you’ll find some other excuses to just connect with a few folks casually. Maybe to talk about what was in your reading stack this summer. But in this season, we’re not requiring anything more than a time for a shared devotion and a time for our installation service. Those two shared moments in our communal year are indispensable. Exact times and a bit more information will be forthcoming, as details come together in early August.
With much appreciation for the hard work going on in your many workshops,
Fred
Whitworth University
8/2020