Yesterday I had the rare pleasure of attending Mass in the building where I work. On Ash Wednesday, the local parish (St. Thomas Aquinas) hosts Mass in the Old Main Chapel downstairs. Some friends came over from my husband's building for the service and it reminded me of my high school and undergraduate days. It was truly special to be surrounded by people who share my faith even if it was just for an hour.
There are a few things that can drive me absolutely, positively insane about working at a public university, but it's just too darn far to drive for me to think about working at Regis in Denver. (They don't have a theatre department so they wouldn't have a plum teaching position for me, anyway.) Some of these things include:
*The behaviors they assume students share, i.e. everyone is sexually active or wants to be (I'm willing to concede a majority of students, likely, but still...)
*The relative lack of open discussion about morality and values within classrooms for fear of offending people of a particular/ of no religious faith
*Occasional flat-out hostility toward people who do practice a religious faith.
All people of faith are not ignorant wingnuts. I attended a university that encouraged exploration of faith in the crucible of intellectual inquiry and I am proud of that tradition.
*In certain departments, the assumption that your presence means you share a value system with your instructor. (Try being toward the pro-life end of the spectrum in the women's studies department. I really enjoyed that, and I'm not being sarcastic.)
*The substitution of the lame, empty word "diversity" for words like "respect," "justice," "decency," "duty," "love," and "friendship." We already have a diverse community. What we're missing is shared respect, frank conversations, a basis of caring, a sense of duty towards each other, and a willingness to be open to friendship. People are afraid to speak in terms of morality on a public campus for fear of mixing church and state, even though many of these moral values can easily be justified in secular terms.
This post has been brewing for awhile because I've been reflecting quite a bit on the good things about this campus and about my position here. Still, I needed to vent regarding the disparities I see between my former private-education experiences and my public-school life.
I know that it was beneficial in many ways for me eventually to attend a public university where everyone was not "like me." It opened my eyes to the truths within a variety of other belief systems which I might never have encountered otherwise.
One of the biggest benefits of attending a public university for my Ph.D. was that I could work on my dissertation and not be afraid to critique both my own religious tradition and the traditions of my scholarly discipline. I'm in a weird place scholarship-wise because I value and practice Catholicism (making me more of a theologian than a religious-studies scholar) and also value and practice feminism. The end result is that neither women's studies departments nor Catholic universities are necessarily a good "fit" for my scholarly work since it contains aspects that make both uncomfortable. Which probably explains why I'm working in administration instead of in the classroom...at least for the time being.
3 comments:
This deserves comment, but I can't think quite what to say. Except that I agree with your observations and frustrations. I'm interested to see how things at UNL will compare to CU, since Lincoln is a very Catholic town, but the university may well be a bubble within the city that's very different... especially in the science fields.
I read a book by David Denby in which he recounts his experiences retaking the core curriculum at Columbia as an adult. He talks about the young students' reactions to Dante's Inferno and how horrified they were at his judgmentalism. The teacher asked the students what circles they would design in hell and one student said that Dante should be in a special circle for those who are intolerant.
Your point about diversity reminds me of that story. Tolerance has become the new morality for those who are afraid of frank discussion of religion and ethics.
It also makes me sorry for all the students who are missing out on the stunning audaciousness of Dante's creation, but that's a whole other topic...
I don't think it's a simple private/public university divide. My current university is private and nominally Methodist (my advisor said he'd taught here for 10 years before he discovered that fact), but it's every bit as "tolerance-and-openness"-worshiping as any public university. In fact, it's more knee jerk in that regard than my public undergrad university was (tho perhaps times have changed since the simple, carefree days of Nirvana-fueled apathy that characterized that period...). Perhaps, then, it's more of a Catholic university thing, I don't know. Interesting observations, though, and certainly something that I note as well in my current academic life.
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