Academic Love and the Critical Space of Academia

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academia, Avery Dulles, Constantinianism, crisis, critique, fieldwork, governance, Jesuit, John Henry Newman, Judith Butler, medievalism, orientalism, PhD, public good, public sphere, radical, research

I want to write a quick response to Churl’s post yesterday on love in academia.  Like Churl, I too am a doctoral student. Like all doctoral students, my topic is fairly narrow: I study how Chinese Christians engage the public sphere. Like most topics, its narrowness is fairly expansive, encompassing fields I thought I’d never study.

Churl thinks that, unlike other people who seem to be doing more public service than him, academic work comes down to love. This is in the face of a shrinking academic job market, where tenure track jobs seem to be disappearing. Responding to only the latest apocalyptic statements in the higher education journalistic buzz, Churl argues that his job is to love his research subjects, to listen to them, and to stay in this metaphorical marriage though it really is doing him very little economic good.

I admit that I love my Chinese Christians too, more than they will ever know. I’d like to think that I listen to them closely. But God forbid, I hope I’m not married to them, or else my shifting postdoctoral research will be framed as a divorce. Moreover, as I once told my wife, “You are my love, not academia. That’s because while you love me back, academia will never love me back.”

Why do I stay, then?

To answer that question, we need to go back to what academia was originally for. John Henry Newman argues in The Idea of a University that the purpose of the university is to teach universal knowledge, including theology. I think Newman takes this a little bit too far, admittedly, to the point where he thinks that universities do not primarily produce research, but rather function as teaching centres. In his McGinley lectures on the relationship of church and state, Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ, has a more convincing answer. For Dulles, university theology is a gift to the Church because it isn’t produced under ecclesial governance, per se. As much as Stanley Hauerwas fulminates against the powers of the state over modern academia, neither is it governed by the state (or at least it’s not supposed to be). Teach-ins at the University of California, Berkeley, particularly by professors like Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown, have also railed against a market takeover of the university with attempts to privatize the institution, which means that the market isn’t supposed to govern academia either. Instead, the university, while cognizant of the competing governing structures of church, state, and market, is supposed to govern itself as an independent space producing knowledge that is critical of each of these structures. Pace Newman, the university is supposed to teach universal knowledge, and pace Dulles, the university is supposed to produce universal knowledge, and all this not for knowledge’s sake, but to contribute that knowledge to a critique of where knowledge gets bent by governing structures to legitimize their claims to power.

That the university doesn’t actually operate that way right now is not cause for cynicism; it is cause for thoughtful public action. This isn’t the first crisis of the university–imagine, for example, if you told the student strikers of the 1960s, faculty operating under totalitarian regimes, or even Galileo himself that they weren’t going through a crisis of the university–and it is not going to be the last crisis. The university is arguably always in crisis because its critical independent space of contested, contingent, and challenging knowledges isn’t always conducive to the governing power of church, state, and market. Because of this, the powers will always try to co-opt the university. Oftentimes, the university allows itself to be co-opted. But this isn’t a case to be cynical about the university; it’s a call to liberate it. To the extent that we can’t liberate it from within, we might need to take jobs outside of the university, but this doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in academia anymore. It’s that we will fight for its liberation from other vantage points because the existence of that critical independent space is crucial for the public good. After all, it makes sure that neither church nor state nor market has total domination over our knowledge production, but that their powers are relativized by constant independent, prophetic critique. (This, by the way, is why democracies must publicly fund universities. To the extent that they do not, their democracies themselves fall into crisis. To the extent that democracies fund projects only based on their supposed “relevance,” they undercut the university’s ability to produce the truly critical knowledges that make a democratic relativization of power work.)

To drive the point home that the university is an independent space that produces critical knowledge, let me suggest that Churl is himself deeply invested in this task. Referencing his studies in Old English, Churl often suggests that people think that his work is irrelevant to contemporary conversations. I beg to differ. Perhaps this is because I have spoken a lot with Churl, but in my understanding, one of Churl’s biggest pet peeves is something called medievalism. Just as racism is when you make stereotyping remarks that are often (but not always) derogatory about a race–and ditto for orientalism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, etc.–medievalism, as far as I can understand from Churl, is when you do that sort of thing to medievals. It’s when you call the Middle Ages the Dark Ages, or when you use the word medieval to mean backward and retrogressive, or when you posit that everyone who ever lived between the third and sixteenth centuries thought, lived, and acted the same way. Just like racism, sexism, orientalism, heterosexism, ageism, etc., medievalism is a modern construct, designed to legitimize modern power structures, underwrite policies ostensibly designed as egalitarian reversals of the Dark Ages, and undercut any appeal to tradition (despite the fact that anyone who has ever done an academic literature, legal, scientific, policy, etc. review is doing tradition).

So yes, of course, Churl loves his Old English research subjects by listening to them. But that love is not apolitical. By listening deeply to his Old English research subjects, Churl is challenging how our contemporary society is thoroughly underwritten by medievalism. Making that challenge in turn is a critical contribution of independent knowledge that not only isn’t governed by church, state, and market, but challenges some of the legs on which they stand. In other words, Churl is saying that medievalism is not a valid justification for any policy, political statement, public discourse, or poetic output. He knows better. It’s because his knowledge was produced in the independent critical space of the university.

I imagine, then and finally, that some readers of A Christian Thing may be aghast that I have lumped the church in with state and market governance. As Christians who believe in the holy catholic church and the communion of saints, wouldn’t we love nothing more than to be governed by the church? Yes, if only the ‘church’ were simply equivalent to the communion of saints at all times and in all places. With some degree of consensus, scholars of the late medieval period, especially those aligned with the theological school of radical orthodoxy, argue that the church began to consolidate its power as a bureaucratic institution, centralizing its hierarchy as a chain of top-down organizational command. To some extent, the rise of universities were a response to this new power consolidation, producing knowledges that were independent of this church governance and often in tension with it.

In other words, I’m suggesting that just as many have noted that monasteries were established as independent critical spaces after the advent of Constantinianism, universities became independent critical spaces after the church’s bureaucratic consolidation of power. Universities thus engage with these structures by producing truth independent of these systems of governance so that truth can’t be bent by power. Instead, scholars speak unvarnished truth to power. To the extent that the university has become complicit with the powers, then, we must work both within and without the university to return it to its prophetic character.

In short, it’s because we believe in the public good of prophetic critique that we are economically stupid enough to be doctoral students.

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Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. at the Qingming Festival

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Asian American, Benedict XVI, China, Chinese, civil rights, class solidarity, death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, dissident, Eucharist, exodus, Glenn Omatsu, Holy Week, Hoodie Sunday, human rights, I Have a Dream, Lent, liberation theology, Malcolm X, March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Moses, mountaintop, Promised Land, Qin Shihuang, Qingming Festival, radical, Sam Wells, Spring and Autumn Period, Third World Liberation Front, Tiananmen, Trayvon Martin

清明時節雨紛紛
路上行人欲斷魂
借問酒家何處有
牧童遙指杏花村

The drizzling rain at Qingming time
The rending flesh of the pedestrians
Where to find a pub to drink my sadness?
A cowherd points to Almond Flower Village.

–杜牧 Du Mu

Since before the days when Qin Shihuang conquered the various warring states that came to constitute the imperial Middle Kingdom, there has been the tradition of the Qingming Festival. Originally commemorated in memory of the accidental burning of a Spring and Autumn Period official’s servant, the festival has developed since the Tang Dynasty to be a day to honour the dead by sweeping the graves of ancestors, carrying willows and flowers to ward off evil spirits, and more recently, remembering the deaths of intellectual dissidents in twentieth-century Chinese history.

Typically, Qingming Festival falls on April 5.

But this year’s Qingming Festival falls on April 4.

And incidentally, April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think this warrants some theological reflection, particularly from Chinese North American Christians, about our solidarity in the struggle for human rights.

On the night before he died, King preached at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. His sermon came to be known as, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and his words that night foreshadowed his assassination the next day:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t really matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!  And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man: mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

Incidentally, Sam Wells also has a great meditation on death and Steve Jobs through the Mountaintop speech as well.

Asian American scholar Glenn Omatsu protests the domestication of the Asian American participation in the civil rights movement. He points specifically to King and says that the invocation of his tradition of non-violence has overshadowed the radical actions taken by the Third World Liberation Front in 1968 to found ethnic studies departments in California universities. For Omatsu, it’s not the legacy of King that needs to be reclaimed for our solidarity for rights, but that of Malcolm X.

I take issue with Omatsu.

When King said that he had been to the mountaintop, it would be right to think that he’s invoking Moses climbing Mount Nebo to look over into the Promised Land that he wouldn’t be able to enter with the beloved community. Most would remember his dream articulated at the March on Washington that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” For Omatsu, it’s precisely this that has led to a neo-conservatism among Asian Americans who believe themselves to have made it economically as “the model minority.” America is finally colour-blind, say the suburban dwellers; the dream has been realized. Omatsu is disgusted.

But a closer look at King’s sermon complicates things. Sure, King is a Moses figure, but the Promised Land of which King speaks does not refer to a colour-blind nation. Rather, it’s about a global human rights revolution in the second half of the twentieth century, a call to freedom just like Moses called on Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee–the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”

King had been to the mountaintop. He had seen the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Albany Movement, the Civil Rights Bill, the March on Washington, the March on Selma, and the action for which he was in Memphis. Like Moses, King had been to the mountaintop, and he had seen the Promised Land of justice and equality for the least of these, the coloured colonized by white supremacy and the impoverished trampled by an economic oligarchy. Interpreting the story of Exodus through the lens of solidarity, he sees that Pharaoh’s tactic for keeping the slaves enslaved is to divide them among themselves, to keep the ministers only thinking about themselves and preaching irrelevant airy-fairy hopes of white robes, milk and honey, and streets of gold over yonder while people here go naked, live in slums, and stay hungry. “But whenever the slaves get together,” King preached, “something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.”

For King, at that moment, what was needed was direct action for the case at hand: justice for sanitation workers in Memphis wearing black T-shirts and holding signs that read, “I Am a Man”: “Let us keep the issues where they are,” he said. “The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.”  Here, he fuses the Moses tradition with the Jericho Road in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. As he puts it in the speech, just like the Samaritan stopping on the “Bloody Pass,” we too must realize that the plight of the sanitation worker in Memphis is our plight as well. He imagines the priest and the Levite passing up the bloodied robbed man because they fear that he might be bait to lure them to bandits, or worse, he might be a con artist himself. King speculates that they probably thought, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” He then interprets the Good Samaritan as asking: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” King then continues:

That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

It was for this that King knew that he was going to his death. He talks about getting on the plane from Atlanta that morning, of the pilot’s voice coming over the public address system saying that because King was on board, they had had to take extra security cautions because of the threats on King’s life coming from Memphis. He remembers that before what we now know as the Civil Rights Movement happened, he had been stabbed while signing books, and the blade had come so close to his aorta that The New York Times reported at the time that if he had just sneezed, he would have died. He knew this because what he was doing was radical because he wasn’t just calling for everybody just to get along in a colour-blind nation. (And by the way, as James Cone points out, King and Malcolm X need not be pitted against each other, but can rather be seen as complementary figures in the black liberation movement.)

He was calling for class solidarity as the rubric of racial reconciliation and social justice. He had protested the Vietnam War, particularly because African Americans were disproportionately drafted, and now he was marching on poverty, calling for economic action on the part of everyone listening to him: “If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school–be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.” He was calling for both marches and outright boycotts on unjust corporations, “bank-ins” to take money out of mainstream banks and put them in black banks, and “insurance-ins” where black people could buy insurance plans from black insurance companies. He was calling for an Occupy movement before there was an Occupy movement; he was advocating precautions for the beloved community before the idea of subprime mortgages targeting African American populations was even invented. And for him, this Memphis case of sanitation workers was the perfect case where the rubber met the road because for King, the measure of a society was how the sanitation workers were treated. Radical? Yes. It’s what got King killed.

Perhaps it’s only right that the anniversary of the assassination of King and the Qingming Festival fall this year within Holy Week in the liturgical calendar. Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable was offensive precisely because as Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in Letters and Papers from Prison, it focused Christian practice on being “the Man [sic] for Others.” It was told to a lawyer who wanted to justify himself for having fulfilled the commandment of loving one’s neighbour as oneself. Jesus turned the lawyer’s world upside-down, telling him to go and do as a Samaritan would have done to go out of his way to help a bloodied stranger of the wrong geopolitical stripe on the Bloody Pass of the Jericho Road.

This was arguably what got Jesus, Bonhoeffer, and King killed. The offence was a radical view of the neighbour. Will we indeed love our neighbours as ourselves? What if the neighbour is of the wrong nationality? the wrong race? the wrong class? King’s words ring in our ears: The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

This is a question for reflection for Chinese North American Christians today. Qingming Festival is a day to honour the dead, yes. But to be Christian is not merely to honour our own dead, those within our own family or those within the diaspora that we call “Chinese.” King’s legacy–one that also garnered us civil liberties–begs us to come out of the convenient labels that we’ve constructed for ourselves–“Chinese,” “Asian,” “Asian American”–and realize that our solidarity with the poor for justice cuts across racial, ethnic, and class lines. There is a saying among Chinese in the diaspora that we should only sweep beneath the awnings of our own homes. The irony of this year’s Qingming Festival is that it calls us precisely to repent of this notion.

Yes, we honour our ancestors today. Some of these, yes, are the Chinese political dissidents that we remember yearly. But one of these is also the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Try that, friends, for much-needed reconciliation between Chinese American and African American communities today. Perhaps our Chinese churches should bring hoodies and a bag of skittles to church too. It is, after all, the Qingming Festival.

But more than that, as the Qingming Festival and King’s assassination anniversary both fall in Holy Week, we also remember as Christians the one who has gone before us from death to life, Jesus Christ. We have hope in King’s vision not because of King’s death, but because the resurrection of Jesus Christ at the end of this Holy Week reminds us that King’s blessed hope is ours as well. Strangely enough, this has been precisely what Pope Benedict XVI has been saying to the faithful regarding charity during this Lenten season:

The Lord’s disciples, united with him through the Eucharist, live in a fellowship that binds them one to another as members of a single body. This means that the other is part of me, and that his or her life, his or her salvation, concern my own life and salvation. Here we touch upon a profound aspect of communion: our existence is related to that of others, for better or for worse.

Qingming Festival and the assassination of King are not the end of the story of solidarity–indeed, of communion–with the least of these. They are the beginning: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”

When the Desert is Not the Edgy Place of Radical Prophetic Witness You Thought It Was

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Ash Wednesday, Lent, prophet, Prophetic Critique, radical, radical christians

Thanks to Chinglican and Captain Thin for adding necessary clarification, insight, and nuance to my rather terse critique of Driscoll.  I wish they could be there to tell my students what I mean when I am lecturing.  Sometimes I am too aphoristic.

Today, I want to talk about Lent, particularly about the motif of desert asceticism usually associated with it.  I was at an Ash Wednesday service the other day, and the text was from Hebrews 3.  What was interesting about it was its focus on the desert as a negative place.  Among Christians of my generation, the desert has in a sense become crowded – we like the desert fathers’ radical critique of society, and we like the wildness it represents outside the walls of the staid established church etc.  But in Hebrews 3, we see not an instance of noble desert asceticism, but an act of rebellion; Anglicans will be familiar with it from the “Venite” section in Morning Prayer:

“Today, if you hear his voice,
⁸ do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the wilderness,
⁹ where your ancestors tested and tried me,
though for forty years they saw what I did.
¹⁰ That is why I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
¹¹ So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”

This led me to wonder what the difference might be between positive and negative desert experiences.  For Christ and for many of the Church Fathers, the desert brought them closer to God.  But the desert experience here only distances Israel from her God and the land he promised her.

Interestingly, the contrast between these experiences is something we also know from our own experience.  We can think of those whose faith has been greatly deepened by desert-like experiences of suffering; we can also think of those who have been hurt again and again and again until they collapsed under their wounds and lost their faith entirely.  We can probably empathize to a certain degree with both.  What I want to explore here is how we might take up our own suffering – our own desert experiences – in a way that is positive and faith building rather than negative and corrosive.

Particularly interesting to me are the verses following this passage in Hebrews 3; the author talks about the negative desert experience as being “hardened by sin’s deceitfulness,” and I think we all know what this means.  “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” says the old saying that so wonderfully sums up what such hardening is about.  Betrayal – deceit – makes one more careful and more guarded; sooner or later, it causes one to trust no one but oneself.  And I wonder if this is not what this verse is about, if Israel did not in the desert experience and enact the deceitfulness of sin so often that it trusted no one – including God.  One does not get up one day and decide to rebel against God; it gradually happens as we experience fallen-ness – the deceitfulness of sin – and guard our hearts so tightly against its effects that not even God can get in.

But what can we do about this?  We cannot pretend we are not sinners, and cannot pretend that we do not experience sin’s deceitfulness daily in its manifold manifestations in the world (I include here the experience of suffering).  And what is one to do except become hard?  How can we remain spiritually tender amidst the hardness of the desert?

My first thought is that we can’t – which is why Christ has done this for us and imparts this to us through his spirit.  Christ is the only one who can both set his face like flint toward Jerusalem and still have the tenderness to forgive his enemies and make plans for the future care of his mother while on a cross.  You see, the miracle of Christ is not simply that he endured excruciating pain – even Jack Bauer can do that.  No, the miracle is that he endured excruciating pain and remained fully human, open to God and others, without hardening his heart like a stone.  If I might put it this way, it takes One who is fully God to remain fully and openly human while one is suffering – and that One is Christ.

This of course is why the author of Hebrews encourages those in the church to encourage one another daily as a way of avoiding the hardening that comes from sin and suffering.  It takes great faith to believe that God – and not the suffering, evil, and sin we see around us – is in fact the Sovereign of the universe.  Yet it is precisely this faith that allows us to remain open, relational, and human when we undergo suffering.  If evil is indeed the last word in the universe, we might as well just hunker down and do our best to survive until we die; but if the last word in the universe is a God who exists in an eternal trinity of self-giving, we can have faith that, at the end of the day, He (rather than our own hard shells) will ensure our ultimate protection, even when that is not immediately evident and demonstrable.  Through faith in the Spirit of Christ, we face our suffering as humans capable of relationships with others and God rather than as stones.  And it is through the church – through encouraging each other daily – that we remind each other of this faith and the way it leads us to God rather than rebellion in the desert.