LAHC Dean's Blog

In the preface to his Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryū Suzuki writes, “The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion.  When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless.”  Like so much of the Zen literature, Suzuki’s remarks are simultaneously mysterious, inviting, elusive, frustrating, and (if I may boldly suggest) profound.  The notion of beginner’s mind (shoshin) has much to offer to all participants in the endeavors of teaching and learning, and I find it to be a particularly useful vehicle for thought at the beginning of the academic year.  

To allow oneself to be a beginner takes tremendous courage.  We appeal to this courage in our students when we invite them to allow unfamiliar ideas to challenge their prior beliefs and biases, and when we invite them to reflect on what they already know from fresh perspectives.  We appeal to the same courage in ourselves when we review our own syllabi, when we revise our courses from perspectives outside of our own, and when we come together to learn from one another.  In all of these examples, to become a beginner demands humility, vulnerability, and a suspension of certain forms of self-awareness.  This is difficult and potentially scary stuff, to be sure—but it sits at the very heart of the compassion that Suzuki encourages us to embody.  To be beginners with our students and with our colleagues allows us to participate in the courage that allows for boundlessness.  What better position can we hope to take in cultivating learning?

As I step into the role of Dean of the LAHC division, I am humbled and joyful to find myself beginning once again, and to do so within a community that embodies so deeply the promise of the liberal arts.

And with that:  Shall we begin?

In my posts and emails to our division over the last seven years, I have spoken to you in what I have lately recognized as a series of homilies. And I have to admit that, for better or worse, I’m prone to homilies.

Perhaps I inherited this tendency from my great-grandfather, Heinrich Friedrich. As a young man, he left his homeland and a career as a baker to follow a call he understood as a divine mission. He became a Lutheran pastor and moved his family to Texas, to preach and work for social justice. He would have put his mission in the language of his faith, but I understand his choices not through his faith but through philosophy.

The Reverend Daude saw his work through the lens of a gospel of divine love and acceptance; I see mine through the “gospels” of the Humanities. In both cases, I believe the goal is a kind of salvation characterized by freedom and autonomy, by an ideal of equality, by work that transforms our world to open space for dignity and compassion. He saw this transformation as an inevitable march toward a single Grace; I see it as our ongoing, fallible efforts to create a humane, genuinely pluralistic society.

Continue reading “A departing homily”

When I was in primary and middle school, my teachers were divided: Many thought I was possessed, and the rest thought I was a misplaced saboteur. For many of those years, I had my own desk in the hallway, and I had such regular “visits” with the principal that he used to greet me with, “What is it today, Matthew?”

A bit of context: This was a time before Gifted and Talented programs, before the idea of “enrichment” hit my schools. In the heightened anxiety of the post-Sputnik period of US education, teachers had a serious job to do, and I was — at best — a distraction.

Continue reading “Honoring All Our Students”

I was recently invited to Onondaga Community College near Syracuse to deliver an annual address hosted by the Honors College. The organizers found me through a contact here at ACC, (Thanks, Anne-Marie!), and in spite of reading some of my posts on the dean’s blog and my philosophy blog, and even in spite of a live conversation by Zoom, they invited me anyway. It will come as no surprise to my colleagues here at ACC that the title of my address was “Liberal Arts Can Save The World.”

I decided to address two topics that have captured my attention as dean and as a philosopher: The power of the Liberal Arts and AI Anxiety Disorder. I presented my “address” in the form of a class discussion, and the students were quite engaged. In case you’re curious, here’s an essay version of my address.

Let’s begin with a framing question: What is the point of an “academic integrity” policy in higher education?

The core notion underpinning to concept of academic integrity is intellectual integrity, which minimally involves not passing other people’s intellectual work off as one’s own. It follows from this that, in intellectual work, we have an obligation to attribute credit to the author/creator of any intellectual work we use in our own work.

It may be the case that, in selective admission institutions, professors can reasonably expect students to understand and apply this concept. In my experience at a highly selective liberal arts university, that is not necessarily the case in practice, and so arguing from selective admission institutions to community colleges may sound plausible in theory, but it’s unlikely to shed light on academic integrity policies in community colleges.

Continue reading “Academic Integrity”

But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

Recognize those lines? Yes, it’s from “Eclipse” by The Pink Floyd, the final track on Dark Side of the Moon. It also happens to be the epigram I chose for my dissertation on metaphysical method.

Eclipses have played a significant role in human history, mostly because of their power to scare the shit out of us. Consider the many peoples on this little planet who experienced the eclipse as a harbinger of The End, as signs of the wrath of some divine being or other, or as the unraveling of the fabric of nature.

Continue reading “And everything under the sun is in tune”

I want to start this reflection by sharing something with you: I have not agreed with every decision made by people up the chain. In some cases, I found the reasoning specious or self-serving or outright silly (and my supervisors have noted that one of my endearing traits is that I have never hesitated to say so). Moreover, I think many of our Administrative Rules are ill-conceived, poorly articulated, or vague — and that’s not an exclusive or.

Nevertheless, in my roles as DC and dean, I believe that my job as a leader is not to inflict my own assessment of decisions or rules on people who come to me for help, but rather, to help them navigate this institution as best I could. Yes, I have argued against what I considered poor decision-making, and I have lobbied for better ARs. But not to people who needed my help.

Continue reading “Owning Your Leadership”

I’ve been following the (Western English-language) news coverage of the dedication of the temple in Ayodya, and, in the spirit of religious literacy, I think there’s something about the choice of language that we should note. But first, some background. Let’s start with leader from Reuters:

AYODHYA, India, Jan 22 (Reuters) – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the consecration on Monday of a grand temple to the Hindu god Lord Ram on a site believed to be his birthplace, in a celebratory event for the Hindu majority of the world’s most populous nation.

Reuters

Continue reading “Lord Ram and the colonization of conscience”

There’s a poignant moment in Harry Potter’s story in which Harry, now in possession of all three of the Deathly Hallows, the most important magical artifacts in his world, confronts his end. One of these objects, the Resurrection Stone, is hidden in a snitch, which bears the cryptic words, “I open at the close.”

Reflecting on the close of my time as dean, I re-read an assignment I wrote in response to a prompt that was part of the application for this job. As I recall, the prompt asked applicants to lay out their vision of a response to Texas’s 60x30TX initiative. Like Harry, I didn’t realize during my adventure as dean that this hypothetical email would open at the close. Unlike Harry’s Resurrection Stone, my email didn’t conjure the dead of times past, but it did conjure the future.

Continue reading “I Open at the Close”