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Call for Papers: “Religion as a Changing Category of Muslim Practice”

22 Friday Feb 2019

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One-day workshop on 24th May 2019 at Pembroke College, University of Oxford.

Deadline for proposals: 28th February 2019.

Organisers: Dr Alex Henley (alex.henley@theology.ox.ac.uk) and Nabeelah Jaffer (nabeelah.jaffer@pmb.ox.ac.uk).

This workshop will focus on ‘religion’ as a changing category in modern Muslim practice.  Participants are invited to share case studies from their research as a basis for discussion of the possible insights to be gained by bringing critical approaches to the category ‘religion’ to bear on our study of Islam.

The aim of the meeting is to support and encourage such fledgling studies, sharing both methods and findings in order to identify: effective methodologies; a useful conceptual vocabulary; common patterns among diverse case studies; degrees of variation across contexts; and potential new avenues for research. To this end, participation will be open both to researchers already focusing on these themes and those interested in exploring these aspects of their empirical work further.
For further details and submission guidelines, see here:

https://www.pmb.ox.ac.uk/content/religion-changing-category-muslim-practice-one-day-work-shop

Gender and Career Progression in Theology and Religious Studies

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Recently I have received a link in my emails to a report on Gender and Career Progression in Theology and Religious Studies undertaken by Mathew Guest, Sonya Sharma and Robert Song (2013). Detailing some comparative data in the field charted against the gendered profile of the discipline, the report highlighted a number of factors that influence women’s pathway through academic study and career progression in academia that I feel are worth reiterating to our readers. While there are other Arts and Humanities-based subjects that are marked by the trends indicated in the report, in a comparison between English, Philosophy, Anthropology, Mathematics and Chemistry, the field indicated by Theology and Religious Studies (TRS) fared worst as regards a gradient decline of women enrolled in further study, or progressing through academic promotion procedures. Whereas by and large female students outnumber male students in undergraduate courses, over the course of postgraduate work, taught and research, the figures begin to tip in balance. As the study shows, ‘the drop off rate for female TRS students is more than twice that of any of these other subjects’ (12).

Of the numerous indicators gathered by the report, the ‘gradual female withdrawal in tandem with academic progression’ (4), a recurring theme was that of lacking confidence in women candidates. However, three issues stand out as especially connected to the academic subject area, rather than a patriarchal institutional culture underwriting academia at large: the recruitment strategies of some institutions that recruit from countries in which candidates are likely to be funded for their studies by their church, which may reinforce a conservative, gendered reception of Christianity also at a structural level (14). To develop the level of confidence in female students to pursue a career path in particular sub-disciplines consequently appears as comparatively more problematic. The report specifically names Systematic Theology amongst its finds (15). A second area highlighted in relation to that of recruitment from elsewhere is the connection of TRS departments with denominational affiliation, often due to supplying training for ministry for which the recruitment by the churches into ministry impacts upon the question of diversity at the university (13). And thirdly, the administrative struggle of TRS departments in their variously re-structured forms. Specifically in the complicated relationship and disciplinary distinction drawn between religious studies in a broader, often interdisciplinary field, and theology, the report noted the implications on directions for research when targeting submissions for the REF (cf. 16). All of these issues, in effect, are symptomatic of funding politics, as they come through at various stages for career progression: in recruitment, in funding further studies, and in impact assessment for career progression.

Motivation to pursue further study, in my own case here at Stirling (one of the few non-denominational schools – and one without the competing demands of classical theology), had largely been kindled by a postgraduate initiative titled “Feminine Divine” that was run over the spring term in 2009 by research postgraduates of the interdisciplinary school for Languages, Cultures and Religions at Stirling. As a first point of contact with the postgraduate community, the lively and welcoming circle of feminist postgraduates made a strong impression on me, as I shied away from approaching (our very approachable!) staff to discuss options of further study. In light of prejudices against tags such as “feminist,” highlighted in the report (8, 16), I recall the reaction of one of my friend’s parents, who upon hearing of their daughter’s participation in the group, cautiously asked if her relationship to her male partner was still all it could be. The equation between the theme “Feminine Divine,” feminism, and lesbian culture in the popular imagination gave rise to many a discussion since.

The question of funding, albeit related to other reasons and factors cited by the study, analysing the recruitment processes and circumstances of candidates, remained largely absent from their consideration – due perhaps to the focus and response of those interviewed for the report. Having been one of the 33.2% of female research postgraduate students in the figures from 2010-11 cited (9), I vividly remember the apprehension in the run-up to deadlines for funding applications after the announcement of cuts in the Arts and Humanities, that could have very well spelled the end of my own academic aspirations. The prospect, particularly in a time of economic austerity, of finding part time work that could fund tuition fees and living costs, especially if there are no family savings to meet some of the costs, is not inviting. And in retrospect, with my study all but completed, I know all too well that without funding, I would have written a different study: economic demands play crucially on the scope and outcomes of research, whichever the field.

Curiously, the report characterised Philosophy and English as two comparative reference groups for the field in light of working methods and subject matter within the Arts and Humanities, cited to aid the interpretation of the absolute figures attained from Higher Education Information Database for Institutions (HEIDI) (10). I say curiously because in the logic of funders – and certainly in the historical development of Religious Studies – TRS nestles under the rubric of Historical and Theological Research. While I do not have access to the numbers of female students progressing through a career in Historical Research, my estimate is that this line of inquiry might have found TRS less of a special case. Obviously this is not to say that it would therefore be any more acceptable to the health of the academic institutions to maintain this imbalance. The recent decision by the Church of England to allow for women bishops offers hope that a symptomatic imbalance in the ratio of male and female students and academics, that may have skewed the ratio of some institutions in the study in comparison to the national average (13), is likely to change over the coming years by providing significant role models to an aspiring generation of women scholars.

Institutions and organisations are eager to pick up discussions to maintain a strong and healthy disciplinary diversity, and the annual ‘Socrel Response Day’ on the theme ‘Achieving Gender Equality in the Academy: Intersections, Interrogations and Practices’ (October 4, 2014) in London is an event of primary importance to raising awareness and facilitating discussions that prepare responsible leadership in academia for a future in TRS. Plans and preparations for a mentoring scheme, central amongst the recommendations of the report, are encouraged in order to facilitate and prepare students and academic staff to face the challenges in pursuit of achieving gender equality in the academic engagement with TRS and beyond.

Creativity, academia and Critical Religion

17 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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It is widely acknowledged amongst those who still care that academia in the UK is in very serious trouble.  The most infamous embodiment of the current malaise is a mechanism imposed upon universities by successive Westminster governments: a system of ‘research assessment’ driven by an ideology of neo-liberal commodification.  Until 2008 it was called the Research Assessment Exercise; it now operates under the equally Orwellian name of the Research Excellence Framework (REF).  Readers fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the blight that is the REF may need an explanation: universities submit publications by their scholars to subject-oriented panels of academics, who will assess their relative ‘excellence’, awarding them scores from 1-4 to indicate just how ‘excellent’ they really are.  An accompanying ‘environment’ narrative describing how wonderful these scholars’ departments are is also assessed, as are so-called ‘impact studies’ (the devising of specious measurements of the supposed ‘impact’ of academic work upon non-academics, an idea that barely works in the classical sciences, never mind the humanities).  From all this, an overall score for the department will be given.  That score, in turn, will determine the funding that the state gives each university, though perversely, the exact methodology for that decision has not (yet) been made public.  Of course, many academics and most university bureaucrats have strong vested interests in these outcomes.

The broader ramifications of the REF are apparent in numerous contexts, long before the REF submission deadline at the end of 2013.  Most universities appear to have appointed yet more managers, directors and deputy principals whose primary responsibility is to maximise their institution’s overall score for the REF.  It goes without saying that many of these people are on salaries that far exceed those of the academics they are supposed to be ‘helping’.  Varying levels of competency, transparency and accountability characterise such institutional engagement, as conversations with almost any UK academic will verify.  The REF and its implementation corrodes the UK academic environment on all levels: for example, Phil Davis shows how citation records are being falsified in order to improve the supposed relevance of texts.

One of the most important elements of academic thinking to suffer in this context is interdisciplinarity.  The REF’s structures barely cope with scholars who cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, such as those working in Critical Religion.  A quick look through the list of scholars involved in the CRA highlights the nature of the boundaries issue: literature, gender, law, postcolonial studies, art, history, politics, philosophy, music, and a raft of other disciplinary descriptors feature prominently.  Critical Religion is in substantial part about questioning the boundaries and categories that are seen to exist in different contexts, and related to that, to interrogate the power relations underpinning these categories – who benefits from categorisations and whose position is strengthened by maintaining them?  Whether this be about interrogating ‘politics’ (e.g. here) or ‘gender’ (e.g. here) or ‘interreligious issues’ (e.g. here or here), there are innumerable categories that cannot simply be maintained in their present form without distorting the nature of human relationships.  This thinking has its origins in ‘religious studies’, but perhaps the Critical Religion Association should have been called the Critical Categories Association!

These crossings form an integral part of the creative process.  I have written here before on interdisciplinarity: it often involves a kind of creative thinking that needs a certain kind of space to be available.  No scholar I know can squeeze meaningful engagement with their research into half-an-hour between lectures.  Creativity needs a different kind of space, a space that may well lead, for example, to a loss of a sense of time or awareness of one’s immediate surroundings.  In my own writing, I sometimes find myself working through the night on a chapter or an essay, not realising that I have completed 8 or 10 hours of intensive work – and outside it is becoming daylight again.  These creative periods can lead to substantial leaps forward that push in some way at previous understandings, giving birth to new ideas or imagining new ways of interpreting old problems.  As I have argued on my personal site, academic creativity is not substantially different to creativity in other contexts, though the forms it takes may differ.  Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi calls this ‘flow’ – the creative energy that enables us to engage our creativity to the full:

As Czikszentmihalyi explains, entering a state of creative ecstasy presupposes certain training and experience.  In an academic context, the degree pattern – undergraduate, taught postgraduate, and doctorate – is a way of developing this experience.  Creativity, however, also needs more than just technical prowess, precisely because transgressing boundaries requires imagination: after all, the boundaries that we are seeking to overcome are frequently ossified and maintained (whether consciously or unconsciously) by vested interests.

The REF directly hinders this creativity, as do the endless funding applications we are expected to pursue (given the ridiculously low success rates, they’re largely pointless), the mindless form-filling for TRAC, and so on (Ross McKibbin eloquently describes some of the other manifestations of commodifying academia).  These are mechanisms ‘human resources’ management (HRM) deploys in order to control the transgressive creativity of academic research.  After all, although the REF ostensibly encourages ‘international level’ creativity that HRM desperately seeks to control, the REF’s regimentation of research activity maps onto HRM’s aims.  Hindering interdisciplinarity, requiring endless completion of ‘accountability’ exercises, and rewarding only certain kinds of work… all minimise the spaces needed for ‘flow’ – or even kill them off altogether.

And yet these things will not last: as David Jasper once remarked, we may one day be remembered for writing an important book, but we will not be remembered for our funding applications.  As the REF deadline draws ever nearer and overpaid managers exercise ever more unwanted pressure on academics, I sincerely hope that mechanisms of solidarity, perhaps through the union or the CDBU etc., can enable resistance to these attempts at commodification to flourish.  If we care about our universities, we need to resist, not least by constantly reaffirming that the preservation of creative ‘flow’ leading to boundary transgressions are the things that really matter.  In so doing, we may yet manage to subvert the rampant managerialism that is destroying higher education.

(I would be interested in comments that discuss more specific ways in which this might happen…)

——-

Warm thanks to Jason Theaker (photographer and academic at Bradford University, who sent me the video link in relation to a discussion about this image and text), and to Alison Jasper and Richard Roberts for helpful comments on a draft text).

Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Daly: Impact or ‘Impact statements’?

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

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In the run up to the next round of assessment in UK Universities (the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ or REF, 2014) research is routinely being framed in terms of its ‘excellent impact’ as well as its academic value and viability. Impact is defined as the research’s ‘excellent’ contribution to national UK ‘growth, prosperity and well-being’.
To improve their chances of getting a slice from the £3billion pie of research funding available, researchers must be able to produce evidence of this ‘excellence’; completing ‘impact statements’ that show what they are doing has changed or influenced lives, with an emphasis on lives outside the world of Higher Education and with more than a nod in the direction of government policy on economic and social benefits. 20% of the value of research submissions in 2014 will be related to this kind of measureable impact.
Patti Lather, an American cultural critic situated in the field of education, connects this notion – being presented as a matter of common sense – that academic research needs to be measured on the basis of a calculation of economic and social benefit, with a ‘turn to policy’ detectable now over a number of years and closely related to ‘neoliberalism with its managerial and instrumental demands’ (Lather, Engaging Science: Policy from the side of the Messy 2010). Whether or not it is true that – aside from policy makers – people are widely demanding measurable indications of knowledge as a transferable or exchangeable product from Universities in the UK – it is clear that these Universities have also had a long and proud tradition in the past, of fostering the kind of critical impact that throws ‘common-sense’ notions – about the nature of women as inferior to men and gender more generally as irreducibly heterosexual, for example – out of the window.

At the moment, UK Universities still appear on the surface of things at least, to be relatively upbeat about ‘impact statements’. For example, Dr Nadine Lewycky, Arts Impact Officer at Warwick University said recently that many researchers are already making a real impact. She was employed at Warwick University to help academics identify new ways of building ‘impact’ into their research and in the podcast, she claims all she was really doing in many cases, was helping her academic colleagues find the right language to make existing ‘impact’ more apparent in order to bring ‘academia into the public domain’.
Reading between the lines, however, this seems strongly to suggest that academics, are being required at the same time, to bring their research into line with a particular kind of language that defines knowledge in terms of a regulated domain or economy of transfer and exchange. The knowledge that is produced by research becomes framed as something essentially to be managed, measured and marketed. Ideas that academic research could also contribute to processes of individual or communal becoming, transformation or a matter of following the dictates of human curiosity in order to reveal something previously undisclosed or unsuspected or even as a means to great pleasure and delight, are increasingly likely to be met with raised eyebrows and the accusation that we are being naïve.

Common-sense dictates after all that people want to see what they’re getting for their tax-pounds – especially in a time of economic crisis – so ‘impact statements’ are one way to achieve the necessary transparency and accountability. But common-sense – which typically denies that there is any need for further analysis – is notoriously amenable to ideological manipulation. Common-sense dictates that taxpayers demand something they can see or point to for their tax-pound, yet this may not be true, or it may not be any more true than the fact that tax-payers also belong to complex networks of diverse and interrelated factors and forces in the context of which, determining what they want or need is a messy, untidy and hugely difficult business. What about our accountability to multiplicity and difference (Lather 2010, 14) to all those things that don’t fit neatly into the impact statement grid?

The idea that there is something wrong with an ‘impact imperative’ is not simply to dismiss the attempts of the research councils, or people like Dr Lewycky, to draw attention to the many wonderful things that are done in UK universities – for example, to help those who suffer from cancer or dementia or in all kinds of synergies with the work of the arts and forms of technology. Nor am I arguing that academics ought not to concern themselves with the lives and concerns of people outside their ‘ivory towers’. Arguably, it is very important to ‘reinscribe an applied edge to’ (Lather 2010, 28) the work we do. In this sense, being encouraged to go outside the university and talk with people about what we – collectively – do, can only be a good thing. The problem is the way in which the value of what we do via these processes is then being framed.

There are different ways to understand the impact of knowledge that is cultivated in Universities. Just to take one single example, in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir, Sorbonne-trained philosopher, posed the question ‘What is a woman?’ and came up with the disturbing answer that ‘she’ was effectively a male invention. A woman was not born as such – somehow ‘essentially’ female – but became one in conformity to the philosophical assumptions that framed the whole of European society and those global contexts colonized by it. The world was normatively male and women as well as men saw themselves very largely through the fantastical lenses of powerful men, buoyed up by the assumed superiority of their culture and education. Whatever could not be conformed to this view was dismissed; women were discounted as either bad or mad. Beauvoir’s book – The Second Sex – was controversial and upset people. It was scandalous and subversive. Yet within a couple of decades, these ideas had had an enormous impact and they were being widely applied in every conceivable context, ushering in a whole new wave of feminist thinking.

Armed with Beauvoir’s ideas for example, a brilliant and passionate young woman called Mary Daly turned her gaze on the Roman Catholic Church and its theology in the 1960s and came up with her own question: Why is the Church’s role in conditioning women so rarely referred to? Her answer, contained first of all in The Church and the Second Sex (1968) followed by a series of powerful discussions in subsequent books, was that philosophical assumptions that determined women’s value and role in life were woven into the very fabric of Christianity:

If God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling ‘his’ people, then it is in the ‘nature’ of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated.
Beyond God the Father (1973,13)

Yet like Beauvoir before her, Mary Daly ruffled feathers and upset people. Though she had her books published and was frequently ‘in the news’, she upset even feminists and her attempts to teach men and women separately caused a perfect media storm.

In an article in the Guardian published on the anniversary of Beauvoir’s birth, Toril Moi tells us that The Second Sex was both a source of inspiration and insight for countless women – ‘ “It changed my life!” is a refrain one often hears’ – but it was also a stumbling block, something many people including women and even feminist women ignored or rejected.

In other words, there are different ways in which to understand ‘impact’ than one that is determined through the collection of measureable, marketable data in response to a ‘common-sense’ demand for demonstrability. Beauvoir and Daly initiated debates that have extended over decades and their ideas have not always been found acceptance. Yet it would be crass to claim that these debates have not been profoundly important, affecting our understanding of what gender is all about and whose interests it has served in ways that now saturate the policy world of ‘equalities mainstreaming’ or ‘gender awareness’. In other words, whilst the direction of ‘impact statements’ is all about what the public is getting for its money, it says nothing about the bigger issues of impact that offend or contest common sense and sensibility and in which universities have always, in the past, taken a leading role.

Standing in between the demands of government and the demands of senior academics within the academy, the research councils must have a difficult balancing act to achieve. Yet it is hard not to feel that they are too compliant with the assumptions being promoted as common sense, that value is equivalent to the manageable and the marketable and that to have impact, university research must be measurable; from numbers of cancer survivors for ever increasing lengths of time to numbers/examples of citations, hits on websites, completed feedback forms, numbers of tickets purchased, books sold, tv & radio interviews broadcast, related primary school activities organized, blog entries written ……

Mission studies, mission history, and the language of religious conversion

23 Monday Jan 2012

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For those of us researching mission history, as much of my own research could appropriately be characterised, there are recurring questions about how to approach the issues raised.  Coming as I do from a liberal Enlightenment university tradition, it is out of question for me that the study of mission history would be connected to the pursuit of mission activity in the sense of proselytism. I am far from alone in this: Andreas Feldtkeller is one of many who have argued coherently against this confusion (e.g. he does this elegantly and succinctly in Sieben Thesen zur Missionsgeschichte, series: Berliner Beiträge zur Missionsgeschichte, Berlin, Heft 1, September 2000).

However, these issues do still intrude.  When, a few years ago, I initiated the Christians in the Middle East research network, now run with colleagues from Balamand and St Andrews, several enquiries came from individuals and organisations who were seeking to ‘convert’ Muslims in the Middle East to (a very evangelical kind of Protestant) Christianity: some sought an academic connection with us, others wanted to use our mailing list to promote their work; one enquirer even suggested we might want to make use of his staff in the region as ‘agents on the ground’ to promote our (supposedly) evangelical mission.  Although one of the areas we are interested in is the study of missions from, to, and within the Middle East, especially historically, pursuing such activity today is emphatically not what the CME network was created for; these enquirers were rebuffed, politely but clearly.

Nonetheless, such interventions raise interesting questions about conversion and what is meant by this use of language. Specifically, we might ask what the proposed conversion is really from and to that these people are now trying to pursue, and that missionaries in the past have sought to bring about.

Simplistically, in this instance, we can point to a change from adherence to a tradition called Islam, to a tradition called Christianity. Indeed, such language of Christianisation is the dominant model for a great deal of mainstream church mission activity around the globe from the 18th into the 20th century; now this tends to be something that is pursued only by certain fringe groups and smaller denominations. In this model, existing beliefs were to be repudiated and replaced with new beliefs – the simplicity of this language conveys the simplicity of the process as many missionaries initially saw it in the past (and some still do so today).  After all, many missionaries reasoned, the Greek New Testament used simple language to describe the transformation that the new believers in the gospels and Pauline letters were to undergo: metanoia is the key term here. This was used in the Septuagint (a Greek version of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible) to mean ‘after-thought, change of mind, repentance’ and is used in the New Testament to denote ‘repentance from sin’.  What was argued on this basis is that the ‘former life’ of the convert was one of sin, and only turning away from that enabled salvation. This becomes a kind of ‘re-enculturation’: the complete abandonment of existing patterns of belief and behaviour and the complete adoption of new patterns of belief and behaviour (for a brief discussion of the problems with the term ‘belief’, see my posting here).

Of course, such ‘re-enculturation’ is impossible.  Enculturation, as a process of socialisation and hegemony-production, is often defined as enabling competent engagement in a specific cultural context; further encounters with other cultural norms move into what is commonly called acculturation.  There is a fluid boundary between these two, ever more so as discerning specific cultures without resorting to essentialist distortions becomes increasingly difficult in our globalised world (such distortions easily elide into racism: I am thinking of conservative writers such as Niall Ferguson, Samuel Huntingdon and others).  In the 19th century, missionaries – representatives of European global dominance, whether they felt this gave them power or not – could perhaps still convince themselves that they were engaging with an alien culture when they left Europe, and that converts should follow their particular understanding of metanoia.  However, as I have shown in the Palestine context (and many others have done so in other contexts), any conversion that might have taken place was always a process of acculturation: converts maintained significant elements of their enculturated norms, and amended or added to these in taking on the missionaries’ new norms.  (Incidentally, I argue that despite the asymmetrical power relationships, it was the missionaries themselves who underwent the most significant changes in the missionary encounter: a process of reculturation.)

What does this mean for the question of conversion from and to?  If, as I have argued in an earlier blog posting, we cannot usefully speak of different ‘traditions’ in a world religions paradigm then questions of conversion also become much more complex (scholars such as Suzanne Owen and our own Tim Fitzgerald have also argued this in other contexts). Following the argument above, we can say that ‘conversion’ is not so much about moving from one enculturated norm to another (what I have loosely called ‘re-enculturation’), but acculturation, and consequently, the language of ‘religious conversion’ becomes rather meaningless.

In conclusion, the most appropriate usage of the term ‘religious conversion’ seems to be – at best – as a descriptor of certain historical attempts to pursue a particular strategy of Christianisation, attempts that we should be glad are largely behind us.

Musicology and philosophy, religion and political science – the issue of interdisciplinarity

15 Friday Jul 2011

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I have for some time been reflecting on why it is that so few ‘secular’ scholars engage meaningfully with ‘religion’, or to put it another way: why is it that so many of us as religion scholars depend upon and practice disciplinary heterogeneity, whereas many of the scholars we use do not appear to engage substantially with what we write.  My thinking on this has been further prompted by reading a blog entry by J.P.E. Harper-Scott, Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.  He recently wrote about a conference he attended for musicologists and philosophers.  The frustration evident in his posting is clear: the musicologists at his conference engaged actively with a variety of philosophers, but from his perspective at least, few if any of the philosophers engaged seriously with musicologists that he regarded as central to his work.

He outlines his main point as follows:

The musicologists at the conference are interested in philosophy. They read major figures such as Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and so on, and they read the secondary literature too… at least enough to gain perspective on the principal debates… In the main, however, philosophers who are interested in music… do not read musicology. If they did, then their frequently catastrophic failures of definition and unwillingness to engage with – or even conceive of – political, economic, cultural, and historical context for the music, composers (where there are any), performers, listeners, and critics who jointly make up the world we call ‘music’ would show up to them as glaringly as an elementary error in a syllogism. The short form: there will never be meaningful exchange between philosophy and musicology while philosophers fail to read anything as obvious as the major writings of Richard Taruskin.

That I can do no more than acknowledge knowing Taruskin is a musicologist limits any further comment I might make on Harper-Scott’s argument about musicologists and philosophers.  However, as I asked in a comment on his blog, why is it that some disciplines seem to be more interdisciplinary than others?  After all, the experience he describes is far from unique.  I want to develop my relatively unformed comment a little in this blog posting.

Many of us working in the field of ‘religion’ depend upon a variety of other disciplines – such as political science, philosophy, history, linguistics, phenomenology and more – to help us understand the phenomena we are dealing with.  Consequently, numerous scholars who are not directly involved in ‘religion’ as a discipline inform the work that I (and many other colleagues) pursue.  For example, in a relatively short essay soon to appear in what promises to be a useful collection on Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (eds. Hilde Nielssen, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, Karina Hestad Skeie), I refer to the following scholars (in order of appearance): Gen Doy, Simon Gikandi, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler, Benedict Anderson, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Edward Casey, Jeremy Black, Hélène Gill, Victor Turner, Homi Bhabha, Karina Hestad Skeie, Pierre Bourdieu, Christine Lindner, Andrew Ross, Susan Thorne, David Richards, Lester Irwin Vogel, Bill Marshall, Robert Young, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty.  This list reveals a fairly clear ideological bias, but it also suggests a wide range of disciplines that I draw on for my paper – and in this regard I see myself as a typical religion scholar: most of the interesting ‘religion’ work I read uses these scholars and many more.

However, few of the scholars I mentioned not explicitly working in the field of religion (such as Skeie, Lindner, Ross, Thorne, Vogel) appear to engage very much with religion scholars of any hue, even if we think of ‘religion’ in extremely broad terms.  Why is it that so few ‘secular’ scholars fail to engage meaningfully with ‘religion’?  For example, Said’s dismissal of missionaries in Orientalism has been commented on adversely by many – though that has not stopped scholars using his work creatively (one might think directly of work such as Richard King’s Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East).

However we understand ‘religion’, whether as a category or as a field of study – and there are issues here that go to the core of what we think the discipline of ‘religion’ is about – Harper-Scott, in his response to my comment, identifies the problem in ontic/ontological terms.  I can see a validity to this understanding, though I would express it slightly differently and perhaps point to the idea of ‘professionalism’, as Said called it in his 1993 Reith Lectures (Representations of the Intellectual, New York: Vintage, 1994: 73-4; rather wonderfully, the BBC have made it possible to listen to his lectures online).

Said argues that amongst other things, professionalism induces specialisation.  One very clear way in which this manifests itself in the contemporary context is in governmental assessment exercises.  In the UK, for example, academics are required to write several pieces of work that can be entered into the RAE, or REF, or whatever the government’s lackeys of the day decide to call the arbitrary quantification of academic ‘output’ – even the word induces nausea – as if writing an article is being equated with factory production.  These ‘outputs’ are assessed by other academics in ‘the same field’, the idea being that political scientists are best placed to peer review and assess the work of other political scientists, religion scholars can best do the same for their colleagues, and so on.  Of course, there is an inherent logic here, but one of the problems with this approach is that it fosters increased specialisation, and in turn, Said argues, this leads to shutting out other disciplines; from the perspective of a literary scholar:

Specialization means losing sight of the raw effort of constructing either art or knowledge; as a result you cannot view knowledge and art as choices and decisions, commitments and alignments, but only in terms of impersonal theories or methodologies.  To be a specialist in literature too often means shutting out history or music, or politics. (p77)

The production of ‘impersonal theories or methodologies’ fits the stereotype of the academic in the wider public, but this is core of the problem.  What happens to the disciplines that have been shut out?  Simplistically put, they often tend to shut out other disciplines too, the consequence being atomisation – whilst this makes control by university administrators and management much easier, it tends to deaden wide-ranging intellectual and public engagement.  And it is precisely engagement – in the academy and the wider world – that Said argues for.  Not as a ‘professional’ he points out, but as an amateur, engaging in ‘an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialization'(p82); this sounds remarkably similar to Harper-Scott’s description of musicologists’ approach to philosophy.  Said is not suggesting that this is easy, far from it!  His Humanism and Democratic Criticism (esp. ch. 5) discusses further some of the immense difficulties involved (and he is not the only one to deal with these issues, as, for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus demonstrates).

However, the obvious difficulties involved do not obviate the necessity of such engagement.  Of course, if it is impossible to see how one’s academic life might relate to the wider world, it will be difficult to see how it could relate to other academics, and how other academics could relate to it.  What connects the list of scholars noted above in relation to my essay is their general willingness to engage across and beyond the boundaries of ‘their’ discipline, whether this be politics, economics, or history etc., however hard it may be.  Indeed, it is probably appropriate to argue that some of the most stimulating scholars are those who explicitly engage with other disciplines and the wider world.  The apparent failure, often, to engage with religion is therefore all the more puzzling.

There is, of course, a difference in the way musicologists and religion scholars have dealt with some of the issues raised by postmodern thinkers: I think it is probably impossible for most musicologists to deny the existence of ‘music’ and the attendant emotional and physical engagement that the practice of music, however defined, can offer.  Engagement, as Said calls it, has multiple levels; with some scholars essentially denying the existence of religion as a phenomenon enabling emotional and psychological engagement and seeing it only as a category of study, it is perhaps understandable that scholars from other disciplines might see what we think of as important as actually being irrelevant.

I suspect this is perhaps part of the issue for many who see themselves outwith the discipline of religion: a lack of personal engagement with religion – however defined – means they regard themselves as ‘secular’ without ever really thinking about what that term means (in other words, they ‘don’t believe in god’ and therefore they must be ‘secular’).  In this kind of thinking, ‘secular’ is the mainstream and ‘religion’ is seen as an optional but largely irrelevant add-on.  From such a starting point there is no reason to think an understanding of religion might have a substantial bearing on political science, history, economics etc.  Perhaps this stems from a mistaken understanding that there is ‘a universal definition of religion’ that can be compartmentalised away, failing to recognise historical contingencies and discursive constructions arising from and impacting upon politics, history, economics and so on (as Talal Asad would perhaps argue).  That precise problematic is, of course, one of the key issues that the Critical Religion Research Group is seeking to address in its programmes, and my colleagues and I seek to explore different aspects of this in our various blog postings.  As the summer is upon us and we look back at nearly six months of postings on a variety of topics, it is to be hoped that a helpful contribution to the furtherance of interdisciplinarity and understanding of the place of ‘the study of religion’ has been made.

‘The study of religion’ (as it is often called) is ‘an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary mode of engagement: incorporating many disciplines, but also going beyond the limits of any one discipline’ (as we say here).  Reflecting on what it is we are thinking about when we think about ‘religion’ helps us cross disciplinary boundaries and engage with wider questions, and can, in fact, only happen by doing so.  Perhaps the philosophers at Harper-Scott’s conference left with a greater awareness of the importance of engaging with musicologists’ work; similarly we hope that ‘non-religion’ scholars will find what we do stimulates further engagement with some of the questions we are dealing with.  Conversing with other religion scholars is good – conversing with people from all kinds of disciplines and backgrounds is even better!

(I would like to gratefully acknowledge comments from Richard Roberts on an early draft of this posting, though he is not, of course, to blame for any inconsistencies etc. in my text.)

The Role of the University Amplified

21 Tuesday Jun 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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I return to the topic of the role of the University, addressed in my first blog (31 January 2011), because of several recent events. The first gave me reason for great applause: the 2011 Gifford Lecture (31st May), in the form of one-off public seminar entitled “The Role of the University in the 21st Century”. The second gave me reason for great pause: last week’s announcement of A.C. Grayling’s new private university in London.

The first, made up of a panel of five speakers within the academy, finally began to address and debate the fundamental question of the University’s identity in our present culture and economic climate, precisely the question I had been calling for. Since others have given a synopsis of this event (see http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/14887, e.g.), I will not go into further detail here. But it was clear in talking to colleagues and panel members afterwards that this was only a start. No solutions were proffered, no blueprints for the future drafted. This was simply an opportunity to get the central issues, beyond just the headline tag lines of cutbacks and pending HE white papers from governments, out on the table for scrutiny. And I was delighted to see such strong and passionate discussion in the form of a much needed diagnostic.

The second, Grayling’s announcement of his New College of the Humanities, an independent, elite, for-profit university, employing high profile lecturers across a select range of disciplines and charging fees (£18,000) double the highest rates to be charged in England under the coalition government’s recent tuition fee ceiling rise, has provoked an intense reaction from those within and without academia, and not least from those at Grayling’s own institution, Birkbeck College, University of London. There is much one could say about the reaction alone, and Grayling’s own defence, as chronicled in the Guardian. But the principle of moving towards the wholly private university here in the UK does raise some concern. The idea of an independent university is not inherently wrong; one can see many good reasons for wanting to get out of reliance on public funding and government control, especially with the growing attitudes we’ve seen in Westminster over the last several governments (regardless of party). But the long-term consequences, as we can see from the American model, would be significant: the idea of the world-renowned British university education, which has maintained some relative degree of consistency, would give way to a great disparity in HE offering, far more than what is being threatened with current coalition policy. The elite institutions would become more elite, and infinitely more expensive, while the lesser institutions would become more parochial, and more interest-driven. In America this has led to a vast institutional difference in quality between degrees with the same name, but here in Britain it would also lead to a further classism. The quality of one’s education would be so much more dependent on the money one has before a degree is even started. As much as Grayling’s new model tries to encourage equality through competitive means-tested scholarships, we all know how these work, especially in a for-profit structure: privilege begets privilege, and means-testing becomes so quickly adjusted to the higher scale of those who have gained the competitive edge through previously having more than others. Grayling’s elite college will simply become an independent Oxbridge, a Harvard or Princeton only the wealthiest can afford. This may be what Grayling wants: a place to produce the cultural elite. But if we exclude Oxbridge, the cultural elite is not what the publicly-funded British university system was ever intended for. Its strength, at least until recently, has relied precisely on the fact that it provided a more equitable opportunity for all its citizens to be grounded in some form of tertiary education. And no more than in Scotland, where undergraduate education is still offered for free.

Of course, as I suggested in my January comments, the democratisation of HE on an economic model – the university understood primarily as an engine of the economy – has become self-defeating. If the State wants to invest in universities because they are seen as the chief provider of the workforce for a knowledge-based economy, then it will naturally demand more control of its output, and impose greater and greater pressure to corporatize and managerialize their systems. And by doing this, it quantifies education: in operational terms, accountability becomes predicated upon (fiscal) efficiency, while in pedagogical terms, learning and teaching become predicated upon professional ends alone, particularly towards the attainment of a sufficient enough salary (£21,000, under the government’s new regulations) to begin paying off the massive student debt accrued while gaining a degree. Here, economisation begets economisation: a student has no choice but to think of her or his education solely in terms of the market. But if everyone is doing this, then a simple undergraduate degree, in supply and demand logic, will begin to mean very little. The system implodes upon market saturation. And we are back asking the question: what good is a university degree for? And more fundamentally, what good is a university for?

We need to get beyond the paradigm of the university and its degrees solely as an economic good. But I am not convinced privatisation is the way forward, especially in Britain, where classism requires much less excuse to recrudesce, and would wring its hands at the thought of more private elite academies. How might the governments of the British Isles continue to think about universities in terms of publicly-funded institutions, without burdening them further with the task of chief contributor to economic development and sustainability? How might governments justify funding the HE sector, without requiring corporate accountability that necessitates fiscal streamlining and only economically viable subject areas? How might governments give back the university its historical autonomy, while still being convinced that such autonomy is a good, sound, even if not immediately quantifiable, investment?

I want here briefly to suggest four ways in which governments and academics alike might rethink their view of the university’s role, towards a more robust understanding of what overall purpose tertiary education might serve in today’s (Western) world. Each of these ways has an analogue in government thinking and policy that exist already, but thinking and policy not directly intended to maximise national economic interests. If governments would be willing to place the university under these analogous policy approaches, we might extricate ourselves from the self-defeating path the present policies on HE are doomed to follow.

The first is heritage. The university has long been a place, and creation, of heritage, of preserving what has been passed on to us, and what is valuable in and of its own right. Just as the monasteries, from the 6th C onwards, and out of which the idea of a medieval university eventually grew, were the preservers of ancient texts, and the developers of skills and practices that not only aided in that preservation, but allowed the old to be appropriated in new contexts, so too our universities have been the preservers of much of our most cherished knowledge, whether textual or otherwise, and have gone out of their way to allow the old to be appropriated in the new. What if governments looked at the universities as heritage sites? The British governments fund and support heritage sites around the UK not because they produce economic wealth (though income generated from tourism is not negligible), but because they have intrinsic value that goes deep into what it means to be British (Scottish, English, Welsh, or Irish), and what it means to have a rich and unique culture. What if governments took UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention mandate – “nature conservation and the preservation of cultural properties” – and applied it to universities? Here both the sciences (natural and social) and the humanities (along with the arts) would be seen as having intrinsic worth for their own cultural sake, and not because they necessarily add to economic prosperity.

The second is cultivation. The analogue to agriculture is obvious: every nation is highly invested in developing, sustaining and renewing its natural resources, primarily to furnish its own people with the necessities for living – food, clothing and shelter – but also to bolster its own GDP through exports. In the turn towards knowledge-based economies, governments have increasingly seen the mind as a natural resource, cultivated in the classrooms of primary, secondary and tertiary education. And the mind is certainly something to be cultivated, whether for professional means or otherwise. But with growing ecological concerns, development is now having to be balanced with sustainability and renewability. Nature, we have come to realise, is not a place for pillaging or exploiting without some serious deleterious consequences. Neither is the mind. Its development needs to be balanced with ideas and skills that are not strictly for instrumental and economic ends. Think of climate change: governments invest a lot of time and money fashioning and signing treaties to limit factors seen to damage our environment, at some cost to their GDPs and GNPs. The mind, too, needs to be seen with such balance. It is not just about cultivating a task-oriented faculty, employable only in prescribed contexts with quantifiable output. It is also about cultivating an intellect and an imagination, renewable in different contexts, perhaps even at the cost of immediate quantification and utility. The Germans, those masters of instrumental engineering, but to whom we also owe the invention of the modern university, have a wonderful word for this kind of comprehensive cultivation: Bildung. It can mean not only education, but a cultivation of an inner sense of what it means to be a human being physically, psychologically, morally, and spiritually, and a social sense of how that human being should engage with the world. It links cultivation and culture through creating, shaping, maturation and harmonization. The university needs to be seen once again as a ground for this kind of cultivation, now with a certain “intellectual ecology” in place.

The third is critique. This is perhaps the least expected way to conceive of the university, but in many ways the most immediately imperative. The university needs to remain a place of critical reflection on the ways we are told reality has been in the past, reality presently is today, and reality ought to be in the future. To do this, it must retain a strong degree of autonomy or “liberation”, i.e. freedom from control by the state, business and any other extrinsic seats of authority (church, international organisations, etc.). In this sense, we need to be able to speak of the “liberal sciences” as much as the “liberal arts”. If we relinquish this autonomy, as we are being forced to do under the economisation model, what space is left to challenge the very assumptions that are being imposed upon us, that we are expected to take for granted, including the assumption that the principle role of the university is to be an engine of the economy? The site of this very blog, Critical Religion, is a good example of attempting academic critical exploration: it is not a matter of exorcizing religion as an out-moded way of thinking or practice, but on the contrary, of exercising our very conceptions of religion to see how certain thoughts and practices, which may have once been seen as exclusively religious, are entwined with other modes of thinking and practice in today’s complex world. The analogue here to government might seem difficult to ascertain, for what government invites constant critique of its own operations? But, outside of dictatorships, most governments operate with precisely such mechanisms in place. In our own parliamentary system we have an official opposition party, who sits directly opposite the government to call its thinking and policy to account. The best governments, we know, are those not with an unrestrained mandate to do whatever they wish, but those held in check by strong and responsible opposition. What, then, if governments saw the universities as a kind of shadow cabinet on world affairs, past and present? Such a cabinet may not, and perhaps should not, have direct control over those affairs, but it should have much to say about the state of their health, and should influence them accordingly.

The fourth is creativity. Here the analogue is straightforward: governments invest much in national arts organisations. And at least here in Britain, governments do not expect to have direct, or even indirect, influence on the creative processes of those organisations. What if Westminster dictated to the National Theatre exactly what kind of plays it must commission or mount each season, or restricted BBC television to shows that in no way challenged or satirised the ruling culture? We are not naïve to think there is no influence whatsoever with state-run arts in the UK. But its governments know that in granting their funding they must also grant a great deal of autonomy to each organisation, if they are to survive the market. For the creative world is not about legislation and order. It is about allowing the artist’s voice to come forward in whatever creative form he or she feels most relevant, most powerful, most penetrating. The university has always been a place of immense creativity, not only within the arts, but within all manner of disciplinary enquiry. Scientists tell us some of the greatest breakthroughs in research come through creative moments that are not hypothesised or predicted. The arts are continually reliant upon people educated in humanities subjects that have no direct utilitarian purpose, other than to expose one to aesthetic or philosophical traditions (among others) and to then encourage the development of new creative traditions, or expressions, or ways of thinking. All governments know the arts are a crucial part of the cultural fabric of any society, and British governments especially are willing to take a loss, as it were, to ensure such fabric remains rich and variegated. What if the universities were seen as part of this same cultural fabric? They might generate certain “industries” with economic benefit; but their real benefit lies in the on-going creative energy and spirit that contribute to a much wider cultivation we spoke of above. As others have said, “That capability that leads to economically significant outcomes is derivative from a deeper creativity.”♦ The sooner governments can understand and accept this, the sooner the university can function to the full extent inherent in its very name: a universe undergoing constant re-creation.

This fourfold way of rethinking the university and its purpose cannot, by any means, be exhaustive. But perhaps it might be a start for those in offices of power, and who control funding from the public purse, to understand the university beyond the restrictive, and ultimately self-defeating, parameters set by the economic and business paradigms. After all, their own governmental structures and policies allow for interests well outside the immediate generation of measurable wealth. The university needs to be part of these interests. The poets, the theologians, the philosophers, even the pure mathematicians, all keep telling us there are some things that cannot be measured. We need to safeguard, as our public duty, and not merely as our private privilege, the place where such voices can still be heard, studied, and inflected.

 

(♦ Geoffrey Boulton and Colin Lucas, “What are Universities For?” (September 2008). After I had written my January 2011 blog with an almost identical title, someone pointed out to me this article, written two and a half years earlier, and under the auspices of LERU, the League for European Research Universities. The authors are from the University of Edinburgh and of Oxford respectively.)

On Theory and Practice in Religious Studies

14 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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This is the first time I have ever ‘blogged’. In fact the latter word was so new to my PC that I had to add it to the dictionary in the software. In the course of the past two decade I have, however, both made field notes and kept a personal journal as I moved between two very different academic contexts and I draw upon these resources in the following observations.

As Professor of Divinity in Scotland’s most ancient university with its longstanding traditions of scholarly activity and golf (a searching pastime and form of outdoor freemasonry), I was participant observer in what was until fairly recently an exclusively male lineage saturated with explicit patriarchy. I then moved from a university that is about to celebrate the six hundredth anniversary of its foundation in 1411-12 to a Chair in Religious Studies at my alma mater, a wet and windswept concrete and brick sixties campus university in the northwest of England, a locale that in part inspired Malcolm Bradbury’s notorious novel, The History Man. It has to be said that the extraordinarily different genii loci of both contexts were very much alive, although the now omnipresent dead hand of bureaucratising British managerialism is successfully killing off and marginalising nearly all individuality as diamonds are relentlessly transmuted into glass.

When I survey a lifetime and a career spent shifting back and forth between ‘Religious Studies’ and ‘Theology’, I find much of the ideological polarisation erected between these ways of doing things less than helpful. This is above all the case in an era of ever-growing and multi-dimensional global crisis in which the identity-intensifying phenomena traditionally represented by the problematic Western category of ‘religion’ play an important, yet extremely ambiguous role.

Whilst I had the privilege of swinging between these seemingly antithetical academic contexts, for me the pendulum came to rest in a decade of subsistence on the periphery of academia as I explored the interface between burgeoning psychotherapies ranging from the banal repetitiveness of Rogerian counselling to the sudden and unexpected transpersonal insights of psychodrama – and the marketplace of once alternative (but now increasingly main-line) spiritualities. This borderland runs through contexts that extend from (e.g.) the milieu of casual power-clothing in organisational shamanism and transformational rituals in top-flight schools of management and leadership studies courses to primal screaming, firewalking, rebirthing, and running sky- and ash-clad over the sand dunes at initiatory men’s gatherings. Experienced in this way no-one could accuse Religious Studies of being boring.

At the same time as going on this journey I began, as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross puts it in her landmark book, On Death and Dying, the process of ‘learning from the dying’ through a series of workshops led by an Irish seabhéan Phyllida Anam-Aire (‘soul-mother’) who had trained with Kübler-Ross herself. This fieldwork confronted me with dimensions of human pain precipitated for the most part by childhood sexual abuse and rape of participants in relation to which it seemed to me well nigh impossible to maintain the epoche, the bracketing out of the researcher’s subjectivity. My entire self-understanding was called into question and my personal and intellectual identity had to expand and own realities largely new to me, that is if I were to be both true to myself and to the manifest needs of others.

As it happens, what began as participant observation turned out to be an essential preparation for supporting, caring for, nursing and the eventual ‘home death’ of Audrey, my wife and life-partner for over forty years. The decade of my immersion was for my wife a time of acute illness and then terminal cancer and this distressing reality caused me draw upon what I was learning in fieldwork. Here one re-learned that bodies are indeed all too real and intrinsic, and that they should not be regarded as merely empty signifiers upon which to project metaphors and meaning. Bodies are, of course, both; as touch replaces words body speaks silently in love to body in mutual surrender before the final relinquishment of the physical relationship in decathexis.

Much of the fieldwork I engaged in demanded degrees of confidentiality that has made publication extremely problematic. Nonetheless, any idea that I might, along with the radical secularisers within Religious Studies and the sociology of religion, regard what I experienced and then deployed as the trivial spiritual residue of a fading human pathology is both implausible and unacceptable.

The problem remains: how can one responsibly represent human experience as this is characterised by ritualisation and altered states of consciousness and as they manifest themselves today in late modernity through complex processes of differentiation, migration and surrogacy within a theoretical framework that needs to extend from the level of globalisation down through human communities to the individual, afflicted human body? How can we clarify this matrix in order, as I would hope, not merely to explain and facilitate comprehension, but also to make intelligently accessible ways of doing things that are as ancient and, I believe, as important to humankind as the making of music?

What is a University for?

31 Monday Jan 2011

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The University is in a crisis. Even casual readers of the broadsheets know this. But the crisis is not what most people think, including those who run the University itself. The crisis is not that the University is underfunded, and therefore has to start cutting back on staff, programmes, and services. Nobody would deny the University is underfunded, and that the breadth and quality of education it once offered is now being seriously eroded. But funding is not where the real crisis lies. Cutbacks are just the symptom of a greater underlying problem. The real crisis is an identity crisis.

What, in this early millennium, and at this present stage of modernity, is the University for? What is its role in society? What is its fundamental raison d’être? We are being told one thing, and one thing only: it is to be an engine of the economy. It is to be, alongside several of other central engines, a crucial driver of economic activity. The government tells us this. The economists tell us this. Business tells us this. And now, increasingly, those who manage the universities – the Chancellors, the Vice-Chancellors, the Principals, the top administrators – tell us this. And thus, as part of the economic machine, the University must become more efficient, more corporate, and run on business models that have proven effectiveness towards economic growth.

This all may seem sensible enough, especially as the global economy becomes more homogenous, while still struggling to emerge from a recession that has made every institution (except banks) more fiscally aware, and more fiscally parsimonious. But the problem is that the University, as an institution, never began as an economic generator, run on the model of business. Nor have its main contributors, those who make the University what it is, the researchers and lecturers, ever seen themselves, except only very recently, and then not by choice but by coercion, as in the business of business. We did not undergo seven or more years of post-secondary education to become experts in fuelling the economy by providing qualified workers and immediately transferable research. Thus the crisis of identity. The University is being told it is one thing, but the very “cogs in the machine” do not, either by definition or by training, operate towards that end. They do not buy the metaphor of the machine or the engine itself. They do not buy the metaphor of buying. But they are now equally hard-pressed to tell us what they do accept.

The modern University has lost sight of its roots as liberal education. This is most salient in the area of the humanities: the University no longer has a sense of the “liberal arts”. Here, if we follow the theories of higher education that were forged during the 18th and 19th centuries in the West, “liberal” meant free from control of the State, from control of the Church, and from control of Business. This did not mean liberal arts subjects did not treat the domains of politics, religion and economics in their thinking. Far from it. But it did mean these domains did not set the agenda for research and teaching, did not dictate the curricula. Research was free to investigate all areas open-endedly, without vested interests, without being directed and governed by spread sheet logic and statistics. This was more than merely knowledge for knowledge sake; it was based on what it understood as the proper culturing, or cultivation, of humanity, and of the structures by which humanity should live. Research was free to probe, to question, to critique, to innovate the very paradigms under which we might find ourselves trying to live our lives, or better them. And these paradigms included those ruling within the domains of the State, the Church, and Business (which now too must be “capitalised”).

We now have a ruling global paradigm of liberal, free-market democracy – a politics so deeply entwined with an economic ideology (or a political ideology so deeply entwined with an economics) the two cannot be separated or distinguished – which, as a matter of course, is sold to us as truth. By imposing this paradigm upon the University, where now is the legitimate and legitimated voices who can, in the name of open-ended enquiry, ask the critical question: Is this the best paradigm available? Is this the only one we should be cultivating, and at all levels?

It might be. I can’t say I know the answer. But I do know the question needs to be asked, the matter debated, and no more than within the University itself. We need to address the fundamental issue of identity: what is the University now for? what is the University for now? And we need to debate this outside the context of a corporate understanding of balance sheets, of key performance indicators, and of government-led funding-driven research exercises. Must teaching and researching the disciplines of the arts and humanities necessarily lead towards some economic liquidity? Must careerism be the only motive for studying a subject like religion, or philosophy, or history, or literature? No one is debating these questions within the academy.

And the crisis is precisely that we cannot, under the present paradigm, find the space or the time to debate these questions. We are too busy administrating our way through the system, too busy conforming our research projects to maximise our minimal chances of being awarded external research funding from sources wholly wedded to the ruling paradigm, too busy writing departmental narratives that align ourselves to economic justification, too busy adjusting to managerial restructuring, too busy trying to attract “customers” through marketing schemes, too busy trying to achieve top-rate status as teachers and researchers who validate the ruling assumptions, too busy simply trying to survive what has become a profession with its own deep psychoses.

My own area, the study of religion (and theology), like so many of its cognate disciplines, will never be able to justify its existence on the grounds of economic contribution, careerist employability or spread sheet empiricism alone. Nor should it have to try. But it does, like others, have a tremendous amount to add to the debate about ruling paradigms. As we know, it had a monopoly on this subject – for better or for worse – for a good portion of the last millennium. And it should be given every chance to continue in that debate.

But the debate is not happening. Not in the halls of the government. Not in the aisles of the churches. Not in the boardrooms of the corporations. Not in the files of the so-called independent think-tanks. And not, worst of all, in the academic classrooms and research centres.

Perhaps blogs might be the only truly liberal sphere available these days.