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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014of all things!\u2014but I have some hope it will turn out worthwhile and relevant to our unusual moment. At the least, I\u2019ve got a stack of good books to recommend to you, and then the lowdown on our retreat for this year, which\u2014barring a sudden eruption of better circumstances\u2014is going to be both minimal and digital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First up: Carlos Eire\u2019s Waiting for Snow in Havana<\/a><\/em> (2003). This one tells the story of Eire\u2019s 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\u2019s an artfully rendered contemplation of power, culture, family, and\u2014in big and small ways\u2014transformation. Among the scenes stuck in my head is one where someone turns a seaside home into \u201cThe Aquarium of the Revolution\u201d 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\u2019s all there in his opening line: \u201dThe world changed while I slept, and much to my surprise, no one had consulted me.\u201d The smallness and the bigness, the power and the weakness, the personal placed up against a world-historical background.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second: Barbara and Karen Fields\u2019s book of essays and talks, Racecraft<\/a><\/em> (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\u2014and here\u2019s the crux, maybe\u2014that doesn\u2019t mean witches don\u2019t matter in a society organized around witchcraft, and it doesn\u2019t mean that race and racism aren\u2019t actual and powerful cultural artifacts created by racecraft. Through engagements with their own family\u2019s 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 \u201c[w]e all can be more certain that witchcraft exists than that witches do\u201d and that \u201c[t]he same holds for racecraft and races\u201d (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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Third: Andy Crouch\u2019s Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power<\/a><\/em> (2013). Crouch draws together storytelling, theology, philosophy, and practical wisdom. He\u2019s pastoral, is what I mean by that. As in his earlier (and related) book, Culture Making<\/a><\/em> (2009), Crouch takes the view here that human culture\u2014culture-craft, we could say, following the Fields sisters\u2014can be filled with terrible things but also is a source of much that is good and very good. \u201cGrain is good\u2014but bread is very good,\u201d he says at one point, and that\u2019s both true and a great metaphor, I think. In Playing God<\/em> 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\u2019s vision of zero-sum power and sees Weber\u2019s equation of power and coercive force as inadequate. Instead, Crouch says, we should notice how God\u2019s power is envisioned in Genesis, and throughout scripture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n God uses power, and the world teems with life. God uses power, and people gain power from God\u2019s actions, but God is not diminished. And people can use their power to bring about human flourishing, too. A good parent\u2019s power over a child is a prelude to the child\u2019s independent flourishing in the world. We teach our students so that they can outgrow us. That is\u2014not to put too fine a point on it\u2014quite the opposite of what happens in slavery, where the enslaved individual\u2019s 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\u2019s family and friends in Havana, as it does under slavery, wherever slavery appears. Power redeemed leads to creation and flourishing. Crouch says this: \u201cThe best test of any institution, and especially of any institution\u2019s 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\u201d (185). That\u2019s a hard, hard test, and worth considering with some fear and trembling<\/p>\n\n\n\n Individually, these books are dazzling. As a trio, they are something more. The Fields sisters\u2019 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\u2019s book does something special in this mix, too. Eire isn\u2019t offering a theory or pursuing a thesis. What he\u2019s doing is exploring the subtleties of human action through artful storytelling. The Fields\u2019 racecraft thesis sheds light on Eire\u2019s stories, for certain, and Crouch\u2019s definition of power does, too. But storytelling always exceeds and challenges theory, much as\u2014in Eire\u2019s book\u2014the 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<\/em> is about power or culture-craft alone is to miss its complexity, and to miss the granular nuance it brings to its human stories. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s where I want to think about advising. I didn\u2019t plan it, but as I started Crouch\u2019s book, I realized I was working my way across a version of the \u201cCultural Inquiry\u201d group from the shared curriculum we\u2019re about to launch together. Eire\u2019s 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\u2019ll need to find ways to help our students draw connections across any stack of \u201ccourses\u201d 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\u2019re 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? <\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to suggest a good question that might become part of our advising: What\u2019s in your stack? Just as we\u2019re 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\u2019re doing in and through the different courses in their \u201cstacks.\u201d I would love it if we built a culture where students asked each other versions of the \u201cstack\u201d question, too: What\u2019s going in your stack? Are those good together?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to suggest a second simple question for us, too, and this one I think is urgent for the year: Where\u2019s 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 \u201cWhat\u2019s going in your stack?\u201d If our students don\u2019t 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\u2014the challenge of the stack and the challenge of the hallway\u2014are heavy on my heart and mind for this year when we\u2019re launching a new curriculum in the midst of social unrest in the midst of a pandemic. We\u2019re in severe need of dazzling stacks and profound cross-curricular thinking, right about now; we\u2019re going to need big imaginations to get to both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s the retreat plan. It\u2019s a simple one. We\u2019ll have a morning devotion together just after breakfast, via Zoom. Breakfast will be on your own, wherever you\u2019d like to be or are able to be. We\u2019re 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\u2019d like to be or are able to be. Between breakfast and lunch, I\u2019m going to host a totally optional town hall where we can talk together about the hallway problem, if you\u2019d like; it\u2019s a piece of the puzzle that I think has received less attention as we\u2019ve 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\u2019ll connect casually with some colleagues. We\u2019re hoping maybe you\u2019ll eat together, even if it\u2019s a \u201cZoom\u201d lunch (or breakfast). We\u2019re hoping you\u2019ll 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\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n With much appreciation for the hard work going on in your many workshops, <\/p>\n\n\n\n Fred<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whitworth University 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. 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8\/2020<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"