Life in the Pissant Swamp: More Memories of Academic Old Days

 

Every once in a while I think back on my fifty or so years as a student and a teacher in higher education. I was a student at several academic institutions, mostly research universities, over those fifty years, and I taught in several academic institutions over those fifty years including Brigham Young University, the University at Albany, SUNY Oneonta, SUNY Cobleskill, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. During my over fifty years of teaching I saw a lot of interesting things as a participant-observer in the academic jungle but then I also saw a number of interesting things in life.

There were, of course, differences between the institutions of higher education where I taught history, communication, and sociology over the years. Two were small colleges. One, SUNY Oneonta, was a small liberal arts college with an increasing emphasis on the practical I can get a job by majoring in things like criminal studies and human services. The other, SUNY Cobleskill, was a small agriculture college and its student body reflected that reality. One had to teach very differently at these two colleges as I learned very quickly despite them being both small SUNY colleges. 

Two of the institutions I taught at were universities. One, BYU, was owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons. It had an honour code and a notion of in loco parentis right out of the pre WWII years and the 1950s. The other was a second or third level research university that had been turned into a university in the 1960s by Governor Rockefeller and his boys. They wanted to create a university system in New York that rivalled that of California. They never came close. 

Still another institution I taught at was a polytechnic, RPI. RPI had a million dollar president and dreams of being MIT or Cal Tech, dreams that could never come to fruition given the marginalisation and small size of their liberal arts programmes and given the poor quality of their facilities (poor library, poor bookstore) compared to those two other institutions it unfortunately measured itself against. 

The students at the institutions at which I taught were also somewhat different. BYU and RPI recruited students nationally and had a healthy number of very good students. That said, the best students at BYU, the best students I ever taught during my academic life, had a broader intellectual focus than students at RPI. BYU was a large multiversity with strong programmes in the humanities, arts, and social sciences while RPI was a science institute with weak humanities, arts, and social sciences, and its students were more focused on the sciences. SUNY Albany, SUNY Oneonta, and SUNY Cobleskill were state and regional institutions. Most of SUNY Albany’s, SUNY Oneonta’s, and SUNY Cobleskill’s students hailed from New York state so these higher education institutions were very much a reflection of New York. SUNY Albany, BYU, and RPI had master’s and Ph.D. programmes if on a small scale and of much less elite status than say the University of Chicago, the University of California, Davis, or MIT. None of these three were members of the prestigious Association of American Universities, the universities that produce most of the faculty in America’s research universities. MIT and Cal Tech are members of the AAU and that should tell you something important about the difference between them and SUNY Albany and RPI.

In terms of faculty, I found them much the same at all of these institutions I taught at with the caveat that those at BYU were somewhat different than those at the other schools. The BYU faculty, most of whom were LDS, skewed somewhat politically conservative even in the humanities and social sciences, the areas that skew liberal in most non-religious colleges and universities these days. Additionally, faculty at BYU had to pass their own kind of honour code test to be able to teach at the Y. This is not to say that there were not faculty at the Y who were liberal in politics; there were. Nor is it to say that BYU faculty were unproductive in scholarly terms: they were very productive across the academic board.

As for the workplaces at all the colleges they were not that different from other workplaces that I have worked in apart from the educational credentials of most of the workers in academic workplaces. There were, as there are in other sizeable workplaces, cliques, including political and ideological cliques. Some of the workers got along. Some did not. There were workers who are interested in status and power. There was Machiavellianism. There were workers who were more introverted and there were workers who were more extroverted. There were bureaucratic meetings. There were missives from on high that were suppose to be obeyed. There were occasional parties. There was plastic fantastic collegiality. There were the poorly attended graduate student gatherings to give papers at which some papers that should have been critiqued more extensively were not.

Recently, I have been thinking a bit about my time at RPI where I taught in Science and Technology Studies for five or six years if memory serves. RPI students, as I said, were generally quite good even if they were very focused rather narrowly on the sciences. In my early days at RPI I used to say that the thing that distinguished RPI students from my students at SUNY Albany was that most of my RPI students were familiar with the various iterations of Star Trek while few of my SUNYA students at the time even knew what Star Trek was. 

At RPI I taught US History courses, a sociology of religion course, and I stepped in to teach a course on the war in Afghanistan after the faculty member who was supposed to teach it could not. Beyond academics I met with prospective students who were interested in history and took them on a tour of campus. I attended graduation parties. I was asked by the assistant dean to put together a curriculum for history in STS. I kept the two US history classes already on the books and wanted to add a course on the making of the modern world. There were a few grad students in the department but I never met any of them.

As a part-time faculty who was not on campus very often, only a couple of times a week in fact, I really did not get to know the faculty in Science and Technology Studies well. I met the chair, of course, Sharon Anderson-Gold, who was wonderful. It was she who gave me the opportunity to teach at RPI and she who counselled me on my academic career. I met Kate Boyer, a historical and cultural geographer, at the downtown library of SUNY Albany and was surprised to learn that she was the daughter of the noted historian Paul Boyer (author of books on the Salem witch trials and American religious apocalypticism) who I had communicated with about the Waco tragedy. She left for the University of Cardiff while I was still on the faculty. I met one of your typical high flyers, a historian of science who had dreams of holding administrative positions in the department and presumably the college if not beyond. There is, after all, money in those there administrative positions. He is no longer a faculty member in the department. I saw a couple of my colleagues on the bus occasionally and we exchanged little more than pleasantries. I briefly met the Fortun's, two on the rise cultural anthropologists who, I think, studied with hot shot cultural anthropologist Michael Fischer and like him were interested in the intersections between environmental risk and environmental disaster and science and technology studies generally They soon left for the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Irvine. And I met someone, thanks to a colleague at the University at Albany who told me about her, someone who was interested, as was I, in Mormonism.

Given our common interest in Mormonism I invited this faculty member out for lunch at Ali Baba's a wonderful Turkish restaurant near the RPI campus one day. I recall several things about this meeting. When she mentioned that she had looked at my syllabus for my Sociology of Religion class I asked her what she thought. She gave me a backhanded comment saying that it was better than previous iterations from other faculty members in the department. 

After our lunch she said she would invite me to lunch or dinner either at her new digs in Massachusetts or at Ali Baba's. She never did. I suspect the reason is a remark I made about ethnocentrism. She rightly noted that Mormons are ethnocentric. I pointed out, just as rightly in response, that so are other cultural and ethnic groups, such as Jews (I think she was Jewish and so was I). Ethnocentrism you see is an inherent aspect of how most humans and most human groups construct identity. In order to become you you have to create a them and the them you often create is profane to you in some way, shape, or form. I guess I was too politically and ideological incorrect for her.

After Sharon Anderson-Gold's death a newly appointed dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and the Social Sciences from the University of Michigan, undoubtedly with visions of even higher status administrative appointments dancing in her head, redid the STS curriculum extensively creating "interdisciplinary" classes of 100 students in the process. I was moved out of my office and stuck in a faculty gathering spot in the basement resulting in fewer students coming to see me. I did teach two more classes in the department but was not offered another history or sociology class under the new regime. Some of the reason for this may have been because I opposed the curricular reforms (which were hardly new, they had been tried before including recently at the University at Albany) of the new dean arguing that before one could benefit from interdisciplinary classes until one had to learn the basics of the core disciplines of the humanities and social sciences such as history. Another reason is probably because I did not want to teach a class to 100 students at the same pay rate I was getting for teaching 40. My time at RPI thus ended without much notice, with little fanfare, and without much of a bang. Such is the life of an adjunct, the lumpen academatariat of the postmodern university.

I have not worked at RPI since. I have not even been on campus. I have no idea if the curriculum has once again been changed by a new dean who too wants to make his or her mark before he or she moves onto something bigger, better, and more remunerative. I did see that the current Science and Technology Studies webpage tries to sell itself to prospective students by saying they have small class sizes. I assume this means that the academic experiment of a new dean who wanted to make her mark with classes of 100 students or more in a college of less than 7000 students at the time has been reversed. That, in my mind, is all for the good.

Memories of Old Days: Illness as a Reality

 

From 1954 to 1967 I had a pretty "normal" adolescence. By that I mean that my adolescence was pretty much like that of my peers.

I don't, of course, remember much from before 1962 and the years from 1962 to 1965 are kind of a blur with little chronological context stuck in my memory. I remember hiding in these, what seemed to pre-teen me, monster shrubs along the front of our house in a large village of around 1200 people lying along a river plain. I remember watching the Wizard of Oz by myself on the television and being so scared by the Wicked Witch that I learned to tie my shoe laces for the first time. I remember learning to ride a bike that my Dad bought for me. I recall one day racing a car home on the bike and apparently forgetting how to use the breaks on it. I did stop but not thanks to the breaks. I was stopped by the brick steps that rose up to our front door patio. I remember crying afterwards because parts of my nose were detached from my face. I remember my Mum running out, picking me up, putting me on the kitchen table, and calling the doctor. The doctor came over and sewed my nose back on while I was still awake and crying. The scars are still noticeable if you look close enough. I remember the first day of school. We lived on the north side of the village so I and a friend (Mark Mattson?) walked across the river and took a left. The school wasn't too far down the road that ran along the south side of the river. I recall walking to a railroad trestle that crossed a deep gorge and looking down, way down to the river below.  It was amazing. I remember the Beatles, buying Beatles records, and going to see the movie A Hard Days Night with my sister at what seemed like a huge cinema to us little ones. I remember massive snow falls and building forts in the snow after the snow stopped. I recall running around in the woods sometimes alone, sometimes with others I recall my sister and me investigating what maleness and femaleness were like. And I remember the assassination of the then US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy. That was shocking.

Then everything changed in 1966 and 1967. We had moved to the big city in the meantime and I got involved in track. I was a good 75 metre runner but since two of my classmates were substantially taller than me, had longer legs than me, and were just as fast I never finished above third. I was, if I can be immodest for a moment, quite good at long distance running. One beautiful and sunny day I was doing a long distance run. I was leading, as I almost always did, but suddenly I could not breath. I had to stop and sit in the grass. My parents took me to see a doctor and I was diagnosed with hay fever. 

In the next meantime we moved to an even bigger city. My breathing problems continued. Dad took me to the Methodist Hospital in Oak Cliff, a city that had been incorporated into Dallas. They diagnosed me as having asthma and put me on cortisone. Cortisone was great and it made me feel like I could do anything I wanted to do. On the down side, It also had side effects, in my case blown up cheeks. So I was taken off cortisone and put on a portable nebuliser instead. 

My doctors soon wanted to investigate other theories as to why I had breathing problems. They did a skin test for allergies which, as a recall, was negative. They put me on an all soy died which wasn't very good at the time and again the results were negative for allergies. They supposedly fixed a problem with my esophagus. All the while I continued to use the nebuliser, something that largely kept me stuck inside when I was not at school since I had to take it three times a day, morning, after school, at night.

The nebuliser treatment wasn't very helpful. I recall that I had bouts of breathing troubles periodically. On one oocasion my breathing got so bad that Dad had to take me to Methodist Hospital where I was given what seemed like a massive dose of epinephrine in a very large syringe. I watched as the doctor put in into the pit of my arm. I recall vomiting from it when I got home, something that helped my breathing. I also recall having immense difficulty simply walking up the stairs of my junior high suffering as I went up and having to stop and to catch my breath at each landing on the way up.

In the 1970s my asthma treatment changed and changed again. I was put on kenalog but when the kenalog shot wore off I generally ended up in the hospital. Once the kenalog was no longer helpful I was put on albuterol, theophylline, and prednisone. I recall one day being taken to Parkland Hospital where I was given what to me was the most awful and painful thing I had ever experienced: a blood gas test by someone who really did not know how to do it. Man did it hurt. It was not until the 1990s with the introduction of advair and singulair into my asthma treatment regimen that I could actually live a somewhat normal life if with limits, limits learned over the course of forty years.

Thinking back on my illness I think that having asthma played a major role in making me who I am today. It made me introspective, introverted, distant, bookish, and a cinephile as I read and watched movies a lot because I could no longer do what my siblings and the neighbourhood kids did which was to head outside in the neighbourhood to play, play which involved a lot of running around and the playing of semi-organised games of football, the Texas religion.

Musings on Original Sin and the American Research University

 

Recently I have been thinking a lot about the original sin or the nearly original sins of mega- (and increasingly maga-) research universities in the United States. I have been thinking a lot about, in other words, the presence of a Calvinist like original sin in universities classified by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as Research Universities I and Research Universities II. These are the universities that generally offer a host of doctoral programmes. Some of them are also members of the "elite" and influential Association of American Universities.

It may seem to some that I am conjoining two phenomena that should not be mixed up given that I am talking about sin. Sin, of course, is usually classified as something cultural and more specifically religious in form, while universities are generally thought of as educational bureaucracies and hence without sin. On the contrary, I don't think that I am mixing incompatible things up here though I may be doing a bit of, what is for many, an odd kind of mixing and matching by arguing that there were and are three original sins that characterised research universities of the past and characterise research universities in the present.

There are, I would argue, three original sins that have characterised American research universities since the beginning. There is the sin of corporatisation (the corporate form and corporate leadership of research universities). There is the sin of managerial capitalism (the ever increasing numbers of non-academic bureaucrats) in American research universities. There is the sin of big-time college sports and the boosterism that accompanies them-- 

There are several reasons why I have been thinking about the three original sins of American research universities in American research universities. There is, for example, the current right wing populist attack on American research universities we are seeing as I type. The right wing populist forces associated with the cult of Donald Trump have been very clever when it comes to bending American research universities, particularly the research universities classified as Research I by Carnegie, universities, to their will. The maga forces, like many nations and organisations before them, have long thought of American research universities along with governmental bureaucracies (the "deep state"), state bureaucracies (which are staffed with educated people and as data has shown the more educated one is the more likely they vote liberal and left), and intellectuals as the "enemy" standing in the way of making America great again. 

Given this categorisation of research universities as "evil" or profane by right wing populists the maga forces are committed, just as their kissing cousins they were in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, to reeducating the "left wing" administrators and faculties dominant in American research universities (studies have shown that faculties are indeed liberal but hardly radical outside of ever diminishing humanities and social science faculties, and vote Democrat). Welcome to the new cultural revolution! 

To accomplish this task the right wing populist maga forces have been using research monies as a weapon in their campaign to reeducate "evil" liberals, leftists, progressives, socialist, etc and their campaign to make universities Great (i.e., like us) again. They can do this because these research monies, which increased in quantity and significance to research universities during the Cold War and, particularly, during Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society, have become central to the continuing functioning of research universities and their hard science programmes and even their humanities and social sciences (the military-industrial-governmental-university complex). These research monies have become even more important to research universities in the economic contraction era of the post 1970s, an era when state support of educational institutions declined. 

Non-academic research university bureaucrats responded to this economic contraction and its era of boom after boom and bust after bust in several ways. They increased the numbers of students. They increased student fees. They increased the number of poorly paid and lucky to get benefits contingent faculty. They increased the number of non-academic bureaucrats to assure the continuing flow of research monies and donations from alumni and the wealthy.  The last, the research university addictiion to research monies as a kind of life blood, has allowed the bureaucrats at the Trump administration to use federal research monies as leverage, as a form of blakcmail, to bend universities like Indiana, Columbia, NYU, and Northwestern to their political and ideological will in what is in many ways a rerun of the McCarthy era in the United States.

One of the reasons maga has been able to bring many of America's research universities to heel lies in the very structure of the research university. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out long ago the American research university, unlike the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge which at the were a guild run by the faculty of the various colleges, was actually run largely by the business class who had high status in an America that saw business achievements, i.e., making monies rather than writing a book or doing philosophy, for example, as the height of American civilisational achievement. This meant that local and eventually regional and national business types were appointed to research university boards, the governing boards that controlled research universities. It has also meant that a growth mentality with its notion that growth is inherently good and that it must be maintained at all times, was strongly embodied in the local, regional, and national businessmen dominated research university governing boards.

Many research university bureaucrats, who were socialised into the same growth ideology as business men and women, also believed that growth was good and that growth helped enable the research university to survive and thrive and grow. In the post-1970s economic climate many of them came to believe that one of the ways to stimulate the growth in the student body was via big-time college sports (an ideology Murray Sperber laid to rest long ago). One can debate, of course, when big time college basketball and, in particular, big-time college football, arose and became central to America's research universities boosterist strategies. One can argue that it began in the years when Army's and Notre Dame's football teams or clubs fought their wars, wars that became a part of the fabric of broader American culture, with each other on the football pitches or fields in the 1910s through the 1950s. Alternatively, on can argue that big-time college football became important after World War II and particularly after the 1960s thanks to the the increasing professionalisation of college football and college basketball (the era when the category of "student-athlete" was invented),  the expansion of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, an NCAA that defeated, bought out, or occupied its rivals, making the NCAA akin to the commissioners of professionalised and professional sports in the United States, and the rise of regionally and nationally televised college football and basketball disseminating, in the process, the sports cult to the mostly male masses. I would argue for the latter and see the former as a prelude of coming not very attractive attractions. I would also argue that we are now at a crucial moment in the history of big-time college sports given the fact that increasingly professional college athletes can now be paid over the table instead of under it thanks to Name, Image, Likeness (NIL). Regardless of which perspective one takes it is incontrovertible that big-time college sports are now as central if not more central to the mission and functioning of America's research universities than education.

There is a lot that is rotten in the state of American research universities these days. There is the corporate control of American research universities. There is the fact that American research universities mimic the structure of American corporate capitalism. There is the fact that their has been an expansion of managerial bureaucracies in American corporate universities. There is the fact that monies are central and one of the central addictions of the non-academic bureaucrats who run American universities. There is the fact that in the increasingly economically unstable post-1970s era these bureaucrats have turned to part-time faculty who receive little pay and few if any benefits. There is the fact that American research universities have increasingly adopted the customer, the student, in other words, is always right mentality in American research universities (the university as consumer capitalist). There is fact of big-time college sports in research universities and the rot it brings including millions if not billions of dollars which are not used for educational purposes, the supposed mission of research universities, but for what are now professional sports teams owned if not controlled by university bureaucrats. There is the fact that academic bureaucrats, addicted to federal monies and the status such research monies bring are making treaties with the latest in the line of politically and ideologically correct "devils". And there is the fact that just as they did in the McCarthy era most American research universities are giving in to governmental power. I can smell the sinful stench from here.

 

The CVS Delmar Kiada, Continued...

Yes, dear readers, I am back again with another tale of bureaucratic woe. As you all know by now bureaucratic muck-ups never stop and they definitely never stop for you when you shop at CVS in all its various corporate forms. I learned this lesson yet again early this morning when I called CVS Delmar to renew several prescriptions that are up for refill.

I have been having problems with CVS and CVS's automated telephone system ever since I transferred my prescriptions to CVS from an independent pharmacy, an endangered species. For several months the automated system had two prescriptions for Famotidine in the system. I suspect one is for the old prescription and the other is the new. Presumably, the bright spots at CVS Delmar filled the new rather than finishing off the old or the old is not fillable but is still in the system for some arcane and occult reason.

This morning around 10 am when I called the new and even worse CVS automated telephone ordering system I learned that not only do I have two prescriptions for Famotidine I can theoretically get. Now I can theoretically get two prescriptions for Pregabalin. One is for the old the other is for the new. I happen to know that the old one has zero refills. Unfortunately, CVS's automated genius of a system does not. I would not worry about this crack up but unfortunately it is inhibiting my ability to renew Pregabalin by telephone. 

Refills, by the way, are not the only problem I have had at CVS Delmar. In an earlier post I noted their overcharging me for Pregabalin. Additionally, there is the Cyclobenezaprine and Budesonide problems. When my doctor refilled both the geniuses at CVS refilled them instantly though they should not have been able to be refilled since I got both medicines a short time before. It was, in other words, not time for them to be filled. They wanted to charge me $200 dollars for the latter and I have insurance. The insurance, of course, would not cover Budesonide because it was not time to refill it (by the way I was wrongly told by the CVS Delmar pharmacist at the time that I could renew the Budesonice in early December). I live in Alice in Wonderland world. 

Speaking of which, Alice in Wonderland Land that is, when I was at CVS Delmar on Tuesday to pick up a prescip I was told by the lead technician, when I asked if there were any prescriptions I could refill I was told no. It is not Thursday and I just renewed two. You draw your own conclusions.

America and Americans like to talk about freedom of choice. My beautiful choice is that I can shop at CVS or I can shop at Walgreens, both of which are incompetent and greedy. I can't shop at an independent pharmacy, which I used to be able to do, since CVS and Walgreen's have conspired to make it difficult for them to do business. I wish I did not have to do business with CVS but I am trapped. CVS even does my New York state health insurance. Hey I guess we do have a choice: I can go with tweedledum Walgreen's or tweedledummer CVS. Thank your corporate America. Praise the lord.

Postscript: When I called back around 4:30 I learned the pharmacy crew had removed one of the Pregabalin's (though they requested a refill for the older prescription rather than the most recent for some reason). I hope they also removed one of the Famotidine's Time will tell I suppose.

The DuckDuckGo Kiada

 

I have been using the DuckDuckGo browser on my 2017 iMac computer for over a year now. It has been a comme ci, a little bit of this, and comme ca, a little bit of that, experience thus far. In that it is kind of like life in general, isn’t it?

First off I have found that the DuckDuckGo (DDG) browser, which, as I understand it, parasites on the Safari browser, loads, generally speaking, very very slowly. I have tried various strategies to deal with this slow loading problem. I have opened the DDG browser by itself. I have opened Safari first closed it and opened DDG. I have opened Safari left it open and opened DDG. I have quit DDG three times—it goes into fire mode extensively on the first close even when I do no searches—before using it at all regardless of whether I open DDG by itself or in combination with Safari. On one occasion when I closed it after use I washed the dishes and it was still trying to close in fire mode after ten minutes of closing. Ultimately, I had to force close DDG, something I often have to do with DDG. 

Secondly, I have found DDG to b sluggish after I opened it with or without opening Safari first and with or without closing DDG thrice before use. DDG is like the slacker of browsers. Anyway, nothing that I have found helps combat this sluggishness.  

Thirdly, I have found DDG inconsistent. Take my use of the DDG Player, a player that allows one to watch YouTube without the annoying commercial interruptions, as an example of this inconsistency. Sometimes the playe works well. Sometimes it is sluggish taking several seconds before loading the player over YouTube. Sometimes it does not work at all and I receive the mantra that YouTube thinks I am a bot. Consequently I can only watch YouTube videos in commercial YouTube mode. Usually if I close DDG and wait for an hour or so YouTube no longer thinks I am a bot and I can go back to watching YouTube videos in Player mode.

Fourthly, I have found that DDG has trouble loading Google owned services and Yahoo (so does Safari though not as intensely as DDG) Mail. Sometimes, for example, when I try to sign into YouTube I get a message that the browser is not supported. Generally, if I try again and sometimes again and again I can ultimately get into, for example, YouTube. As for Yahoo it sometimes seems that it takes a minute or so before I can sign into Yahoo Mail.

In terms of aesthetics DDG has gotten "sexier", in my opinion, over time. I prefer the curved rectangle search box that DDG uses on the browser now, for example, to the standard rectangle box it had before.

Given all these issues I have stopped using DDG. I have returned to Safari and my computer is working almost like new again. Sorry DDG but you are not ready, in my opinion, for prime time at this point so goodbye for now. 

Postscript: I have been using the Brave browser for the last couple of days. It is flawed, as are all browsers, but superior to the DuckDuckGo browser.

The Books of My Life: God and Race in American Politics

 

There is no doubt that religion has been at the heart of American life since even before there was a United States of America. This is a fact that Mark Noll reminds us of in his excellent book God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2008). Not everyone, unfortunately, gets this, despite empirical evidence to the contrary. Far too many in academia, for instance, have missed the important role religion has played and plays in American economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic life because, far too often, they see religion as an epiphenomenon, as something caused by, economics or politics rather than as an important factor in the drama, comedy, and tragedy that is human life. One person who does grasp the importance of religion in human life is the aforementioned Mark Noll.

Noll, long of Wheaton College in Illinois and more recently of the University of Notre Dame (where I spent a semester eons ago), puts religion at the heart of his book, God and Race in American Politics. Noll argues that religion and the various economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic forces it interacts or intersects with, particularly race, have been central to American political history, American political culture, and American life since the beginning of the United States.

Noll takes a chronological approach to how religion and race have, to use a word that has become common in academia these days, intersected and been central to American political culture. He argues that before the Civil War religion, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant religion, was the civil religion or civic religion that gave Americans a common identity and held American society together. The Civil War, he rightly notes, split America’s churches apart just as it split America itself apart over the issue of slavery. 

After the Civil War, Noll argues, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant public religion was replaced by a more generalised civil religion, a civic religion that united the divided American North and South in the era after Reconstruction. This new civic or public religion united Americans around notions of America’s choosiness and America' messianic destiny. It was a civil religion, says Noll, a civic religion in which race was elided, elided because those opposed to slavery saw race in abstract terms and assumed that once slavery was ended the problem of race in the United States was once and for all solved. It wasn’t, of course, as Noll and as subsequent history reminds us.

While Whites in the North, claims Noll, consciously or unconsciously swept race under the carpet so to speak and made their peace in a variety of ways with Jim Crow racial apartheid in the South, a space simultaneously opened up for Blacks particularly in the Black church, and, by extension, in Black communities. Black Christianity gave Black churches important leaders and it provided a space for a prophetic reading of Christianity which placed racial inequality at the heart of its prophetic calls for racial justice. In the process, Noll argues, Black Christianity and its friends in the White community laid the groundwork for a civil rights movement that eventually united many Blacks and many Whites in an effort to bring about an end to racial inequality. In time this civil right movement had an impact on American politics in the form of a civil rights act, a voting rights act, and equal opportunity legislation, and led to a host of other civil rights movements including those for women and gays (all things that are now under threat in Trumerica).

The civil rights movement also, as Noll argues, gave rise to a White evangelical and largely White conservative backlash. It was, paradoxically, aided and abetted, Noll notes, by the end of Jim Crow. The death of Jim Crow enabled Southern evangelical Christianity to shed its perceived links and ties to racism and spread out from the South into other parts of the US in particular the Midwest and the Intermountain West and even to Southern California. In the process the civil religion that was hegemonic in the post-Civil War era split apart giving rise to two and perhaps more civil religions at cold war and sometimes even hot war with each other, a split that is clearly evident today.

Noll ends his book ends with the election of George Walker Bush in 2004. In a final chapter he offers a moderate Calvinist reflection on the human condition arguing that while humans are fallible they also can change their worlds for the better. In time, Noll opines, he hopes that America can once and for all come to grips with and overcome the racism that remains central in American political culture and in American life.

Though Noll ends his book with a message of hope it is clear that America is once again deeply divided, perhaps as deeply divided as it was prior to the Civl War. At present, as Heather Cox Richardson notes in her book How the South Won the Civil War the South, and more specifically the South's states rights ideology and fear of big government ideology, has, at least for the moment, won the civil war that the US has been fighting in cold and hot form since the beginning of its existence. Whether the Southern states rights ideology (an ideology that has no problem rationalising the use of the federal or local governments to send the military to California or overturn legislation passed by, for instance, the Austin city council), and anti-big government ideology (an ideology that has no trouble rationalising using the paternalistic nanny state to forward their ideological agenda) which is, at least ostensibly, central to the ideological culture of Trump and his cult which is transforming American political culture as I write, has won the war or has won simply won the latest battle in the seemingly never ending American culture wars, is an open question. The question of whether the Trumpian faith will prove any more lasting than the WASP civil religion or the civil religion that was hegemonic in the US from the Great Depression to Richard Nixon awaits a future social scientist and a future historian to answer that question.

While Noll argues that religion and race have been the forces around which American politics and American culture circles—the election of Trump seems to suggest he is at least kind of right—he does recognise that at times other economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic forces are important and even hegemonic in American political culture. In this context it is important to remember that the Trumpies, the latest of American religious and secular theocrats, may play with race and religion but they also claim to be proponents of free enterprise and individualism as well as defenders of traditional values, the traditional family, and traditional notions of sex (it is, of course, rather hilarious in this context that Trump has been married multiple times and engaged in several extra-marital affairs, is it not, but then humans are well known for their hypocrisies), notions that are often allied with religion. As with states rights, the Trump cult may officially defend the gospel of free enterprise individualism but Trump and his sometimes buddy Elon Musk are some of the biggest welfare queens that I know of.

Whether Noll’s admission that factors other than religion and race have been and are central to American political culture undermines his argument is debatable. What is clear is that religion, a cultural factor, has long been central to American life and American culture along with a host of other cultural, economic, political, demographic, and geographical factors, is an important factor in American political culture and American life today. It is likely to remain so for some time though the growth of nones, those with no religion, in America over the last fifty years or so is also worth watching

The SUNY Kiada: Musings on Applying for Jobs at Schenectady County Community College and Hudson Valley Community College

 

Some of you may know that I retired from teaching history, communications, and sociology in the SUNY system in 2021 after almost twenty years of “service (or disservice or malservice) to the college age students of New York state”.  I have largely enjoyed my retirement years since then. I love being able to read in the morning, watch movies and TV shows on DVD and blu ray in the afternoon, enjoy hygge with a friend in the evening, and the luxury of writing on whatever I want whenever I want.  

On rare occasions, however, I have gotten tired of the retirement routine and wished I was I was doing more than going to the grocery store and getting petrol once in a while (not to mention forcing my self to do some exercise). I have applied for a few jobs since my retirement and gotten even fewer of them. For example, I worked briefly at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences until I had had enough of the ultra-bureaucratic kafkaesque nature of that bureaucracy. I worked at the Albany Public Library in Pine Hills but my sixty-eight year old body would just not take the kneeling and rising necessary for that work.

Recently I received a message from a colleague informing me that Schenectady County Community College was looking for someone to teach history part-time. After thinking about it for a while—getting the job would complicate my medicaid and SNAP—I inquired about the job and I received a message of interest. I told the person looking to fill the position that I could teach, since I have taught, world history, western history, or American history.

At the same time that I applied to teach history at SCCC I applied to teach sociology at Hudson Valley Community College. I had taught introduction to sociology and sociology of religion (one of my topical interests) for several years at SUNY College of Oneonta and I liked doing both classes a lot. I had also taught social problems and social stratification during my years of college teaching.

 I soon received one of those delightful form letters from the person who hired for that position at HVCC in all its brusque and banal glory telling me that they had no interest in my application for the position. One can never, of course, know why one’s application was treated in such a summary way. I suspect that HVCC’s academic bureaucrats were looking for someone with a sociology degree which I did not have (though I do have considerable graduate student coursework in sociology not to mention actual experience teaching sociology successfully). I do know that American bureaucrats do like their credentials and that the United States is probably the most credentialed society of the old British settler societies. Still, I was surprised by the rapid dismissal of my application since I had taught sociology successfully in the SUNY system for years. Apparently HVCC does not want someone who has actually successfully taught sociology classes for years. Oh well. Live and learn.

It was a different matter at SCCC. I was eventually offered a part-time teaching position. Initially I declined two classes and took one, the class in world history to 1600. So, I put in an official application online for this position. It was relatively easy, thank god, since I already had an account (not to mention years of disinterest in my application) with SCCC Human Resources.

I think the person who hired me felt that I wasn’t fully committed to taking the position and that I had some uncertainty in the back of my mind, which I have to admit I did. Teaching students who are, at best, only somewhat interested in the subject of a class they are forced to take is frankly not easy. Eventually he offered me an opportunity, a possible opportunity, to teach introduction to sociology on the same day as world history. Since I like teaching sociology more than history as it is easier to get students interested in something they find somewhat practical and I have made my course practical emphasising what sociology (and history and anthropology since I integrate these into the class) can tell us about ourselves, I accepted. And then bureaucratic reality set in. 

I thought that since I had taught for nearly twenty years in the SUNY system jumping through the bureaucratic hoops again would be a breeze since SUNY had all my data on file. It wasn’t, however, easy. First off the HR bureaucrats at SCCC could not access my previous employment information. Additionally, SCCC HR wanted an “official” copy of my transcript and had a mountain of forms that I needed to fill out in order to teach at SCCC. 

The person in Human Resources sent me the forms via email. My old computer, however, had trouble opening them and after the several minutes it took to open them I discovered that I could not do the application on the computer since I they were not online filling out friendly (click and the box for name etc, opens). I apparently was supposed to print them out which was a problem since I do not have a printer. I tired of buying one after another of them since they broke easily. So I told the HR person all this. I was, in turn, sent another batch of forms online that took seemingly minutes and minutes to open on my 2017 iMac.

As for the “official” transcript, I discovered that there is now a service called Parchment through which one can obtain one's transcripts. I don’t know whether Parchment is a privately owned company offering this service (rather than a service owned and run by universities and colleges) and is another one of the ways public universities help subsidise a private business but I suspect it is. What I do know is that I did my bureaucratic duty or, more accurately, I tried to do my bureaucratic duty, and created yet another of the seemingly infinite number of user names and passwords one has to create for oneself in the brave new digital world and availed myself of the service. However, once I got to the end point of the process Parchment told me the transcript would go to the registrar rather than Human Resources. So, I quit doing what I was doing on Parchment and once again contacted HR. HR told me there was a place to put in the email address of SCCC HR on the application but I could not find it. I wondered why, given that I ticked the for employment box in the first place, this box did not automatically come up somewhere down the line since I had ticked employment rather than applying to college (or some such similar jargon) in the first place. Oh the eternal mysteries of digital technology.

Long story short, I gave up and told SCCC that I was withdrawing my application. I told the person who hired me that I might be interested in working in the fall if I had more time to deal with the  mountain of bureaucratic stuff via filling out the forms the old way after receiving them in the post. I suspect, however, that I cut my throat when it comes to teaching at SCCC in the future. C’est la vie.