Reflections on the Summer of 2010, by Daniel A. Siedell

Reflections on the Summer of 2010

Daniel A. Siedell

Classes start next week.  As I hustle to put together course syllabi for the fall semester my work this summer has forced me to reconsider the contours of my academic vocation.  We academics live in bubble.  We live in a world in which seminar rooms, the lecture hall, faculty meetings, academic conferences, and "close readings" of the latest commentary on the work of this philosopher or that theologian, tend to take on an exaggerated gravity and relevance.    We believe that we're engaging, critiquing, or transforming culture in the seminar room and we surround ourselves with those who believe likewise.  We are rarely forced to leave this bubble in order to test whether our work has, could, or even should have value outside this admittedly narrow professional world.  For many of us the most challenging form of cultural translation in which we will have to participate this coming academic year will be to explain our work to a colleague in another department before or after a committee meeting.  Even for those academics who see beyond the bubble, the relationship is often a one way street, in which "we" are the ones delivering truth to power, "we" are the ones who are engaging, critiquing, or transforming whatever needs engaging, critiquing, or transforming "out there" in the world, or in the Church.  Rarely, however, does what happen "out there" challenge or test the value of our commitments, the relevance of our work, outside the hermetically sealed envelope of tenure and promotion, sabbaticals, leading student study trips abroad, and, perhaps most perplexing to the world "out there," summers off.

My summer was framed by two stiff challenges to my work that will significantly alter my academic vocation and perhaps even its content.  The first was my participation in Veritas Riff, the brainchild of Veritas Forum Executive Director Dan Cho, Silicon Valley consultant Curtis Chang, Rice University sociologist Michael Lindsay, and Christianity Today editor Andy Crouch.  Veritas Riff invited thirteen early to mid-career scholars to Cambridge, Mass. During the third week of June to participate in a series of seminars and meetings intended to challenge us to think more expansively about participating in and shaping the cultural discourse in different and broader ways beyond the limits and comforts of academia. The group featured, among others, a philosopher at Cornell, theoretical physicist from Oxford, political scientist from Vanderbilt, sociologist from Harvard (who received the news that she had been given tenure during our meetings), a Duke physician with a dual appointment in the Divinity School, an op-ed writer for the Washington Post and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and John Skeel, who holds an endowed appointment at the Law School at Penn. 

Clearly informed by Crouch's Culture Making, and Lindsay's The Halls of Power, the meetings were intended to give us encouragement and the resources to take our projects outside our disciplinary silos and into the larger and more messy and challenging arena of cultural work.  I certainly had my doubts about Veritas Riff and I spent several months considering whether I should even participate.  Although we were all coming from academia, the Riff organizers made it clear that this was not an academic conference.  It was recognized that we were most definitely in academia, but the meetings drove home the fact that we should not be of academia.

John Skeel focused on one of these devices, our improv lessons led by L.A. actor Marianne Savell, and offered a humorous account in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (Read it here.)  The improv exercises and the Second City metaphors were intended to force us academics, who have been trained to regard our bodies as means to get our brains from one class or meeting to another, to consider how and in what other ways we communicate.  The basic theatre and acting exercises we were taught can be helpful tools for us as we step outside the confines of tweed jackets and Burkenstocks into a world in which first impressions and non-verbal communication play fundamental roles in creating the space necessary for the positive reception of our work.  Skeel's description of these exercises seem to have captured the imaginations of some very serious-minded evangelical bloggers, perhaps overly influenced by James Davison Hunter's new book, To Change the World, who think that Veritas Riff is evidence of the low brow anti-intellectual gene resurfacing in evangelicalism.  (Read some here.)

The person that tied the Veritas Riff together wasn't Tina Fey, it was the prophet Daniel.  Mark Lamberton, Director of the Lloyd Oglivie Institute of Preaching at Fuller Seminary and former pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, led daily meditations on the book of Daniel focusing particularly on his faithful witness at the highest levels of secular power.  In addition, Andy Crouch offered a meditation on power drawn from St. Paul's journey to Rome in the Acts of the Apostles.  Crouch and Lindsay also offered disarmingly honest discussions of the challenges they faced in their own work as they sought to expand the scope of their projects.

The stiffest challenge to our academic comfort zone, however, wasn't the improv, it was from Jody Hassett Sanchez, former reporter and producer at ABC News and CNN and President of Pointy Shoe Productions, a documentary and long form production company that explores issues of faith and culture.  She studied each of our projects and interviewed us formally about our projects on camera.  She then gave us brutally honest feedback about the form and content of our deliveries.  It was during this excruciatingly painful process that I realized not only the potential of my work to reach an audience beyond academia, but also how ill-equipped I am to do it.

I cannot be content to let our work be defined entirely by the academic institutions that shape me.  Especially for those of us concerned with serving Christ in culture, we must find ways to test our ideas, commitments, our projects outside our academic bubbles.  Although I believe that my writing about paintings has relevance outside academia, Veritas Riff has shown me that it is not obvious and that I must continually put it to the test beyond the seminar room, lecture hall, or conference.

The second stiff challenge to my academic vocation came during my two-weeks at Whale & Star, the Maimi-based studio of artist Enrique Martínez Celaya, where I serve as Director of Special Projects (see www.whaleandstar.com).  However, I will reflect on this particular experience over at my blog in the weeks to come. 

by Daniel A. Siedell
(www.dansiedell.typepad.com)

 

 

Comments

[Matthew Milliner]

A related quote from Robert Browning (the Byzantinist, not the poet).

"Pedagogues are inclined to over-estimate the importance of education and to lose themselves in sterile discussion of its technicalities."