Antiquitopia

I just finished reading The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue, who is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University. I read this because the chair of my department has asked the entire department to read it, but I would recommend it to all humanities professors or professors to be. And while it focuses on the humanities, many of the observations affect the future of the university world as a whole. Unlike similar books, Donoghue takes a long perspective. Most books speak of a crisis in higher education beginning in the 80s, perhaps the 70s in the clash between corporate business values and the values of the university. He claims, instead, that this tension has been around for over a century, at least since the rise of monopolistic capitalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But this is not just a book about corporate values of competition and the bottom line versus the last bastion of pro...

Finally, here are my closing remarks that I gave during the closing round-table discussion: I originally envisioned this conference as an ongoing dialogue. And I attempted to implement this in the very organization of the panels. The panels, in some ways, can be seen as interactive, with later panels commenting on the topics of earlier panels. With this in mind, I created the closing discussion as a “respondents’ panel,” in which the respondents could take the insights from their panels and put them directly into dialogue with one another in order to identify cross-panel themes as well as identify a few gaps in the conference, providing fertile directions for further inquiry. (Unfortunately, our third respondent, Jack Hawley, could not be with us, and so I am going to fill in for him, but by no means are my comments or interests reflective of his.) Bracketing issues suggested in the call for papers but not really discussed today, one key aspect of the institutional shapi...

As noted in my previous post, I decided to post my introductory remarks to the "Instituting Religion" conference: Good morning and welcome to “Instituting Religion: Investigating Trajectories of the Study of Religion in Institutions of Higher Education.” This is the Columbia Religion Graduate Students Association’s fourth interdisciplinary conference. This year we are sponsored by the Department of Religion and the Graduate Student Activities Council. Our first two conferences focused primarily upon theoretical and methodological issues regarding the study of religion within and without religious studies. Last year our theme turned to a more thematic discussion of Religion and Popular Culture. This year, returning to earlier concerns, we hope to take the institutional setting and shaping of the categories, theories, methods, general approaches, and assumptions we use in the study of religion/s (including the concept of religion itself). Therefore, instead...

It has now been a few weeks since my little conference, "Instituting Religion" at Columbia on April 10. I think I have finally recovered! And so I'll just give a few observations. Firstly, the conference went rather well. I enjoyed the presentations, the questions, and the discussion. I almost wish I could have recorded some of the Q & A times. As usual with such conferences, there just never is enough time for discussion early on, and by the end of the day everyone is a bit too tired to discuss too much. There were some very solid papers. Given that I was the conference organizer, I was in and out much of the day, and so I missed a few of the papers. But I was able to stay in the room for the entire first panel and response, and it was definitely very solid: Luke Moorhead (Yale) gave a theoretical discussion of Bourdieu with regard to the field, capital, and habitus of Religious Studies as it is negotiated with the competing capital of other fields of study i...

The Columbia Religion Graduate Students Association's conference, "Instituting Religion," is merely a week away now. If you are going to be in the New York City area on April 10, please feel free to stop by and hear some up and coming graduate students speak. For a schedule and to register (for free), check out our website: www.columbia.edu/cu/religion-gsa

If you are interested in religion, and you will be in the NYC area on April 10, do not miss the following conference, chaired by yours truly. Check out our website to see our schedule, abstracts, etc (either by the full link below, or click HERE ). I hope to see as many bloggers there as possible! The Religion Graduate Students Association of Columbia University is accepting registration now through April 4, 2008 for: “Instituting Religion: Investigating Trajectories of the Study of Religion in Institutions of Higher Education Thursday, April 10, 2008 301 Philosophy Hall Columbia University , New York Featuring: Presentations by Graduate Students from throughout North America Description: This conference will examine how religion has been and continues to be produced and studied in institutions of higher learning, paying particular attention to the rise of religion departments, religion programs, seminaries, and divinity schools as well as ...