Robert recently me a gentle note chiding me for silence. Being a lifelong academic, I used a tried and true response: “I am off for the summer.” Intellectually, I shut down from May to August–even if I do pick up a class or three over the three month hiatus.
The question sounded something a bit deeper. And the sounding was reinforced by an article he included in the note:
Link discusses his loss of faith in academia. The implied metaphor shook me. Teaching has been a vocation for me. And I have always considered myself lucky to have been able to make a living off of a passion and a vocation. (As a friend once told me, “It is always better to be lucky than smart. And I have always been smart.” )
In some part, my loss of faith is based in the very thing that has made my vocation a viable livelihood: the commercialization of higher eduction.
Michael Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy, has made a strong created a foundation addressing what he terms “Profoundly Disconnected.” He “challenges the absurd belief that a four-year degree is the only path to success.”
At first glance, the movement would seem to be an assault on higher ed. In reality, though, it is an affirmation.
http://profoundlydisconnected.com/
Equating success with college degrees is a form of reductionism that has cheapened skilled labor and higher ed alike.
I wonder if, like Oliver, my faith has been lost as well.
At the end of The Mission–a movie I have always wanted to live up to–one priest decides to follow his face and face death with the host. Another embraces his roots and battles overwhelming odds. I had always seen this as the two responses to that sort of injustice: embrace with love or battle for what you love.
What I failed to notice was the third option: the Indians, the believers, who melt quietly back in to the forest rejecting the options offered by the Church, Spain, and Portugal.
