The Books of My Life: Radical Campus

I don’t recall when I first heard about Simon Fraser University. It had to be sometime in the 1970s. I knew that it was one of the new universities being created and built around the globe in the post-World War II period in places like Great Britain (the most interesting of the bunch on new universities in the UK for me was the University of Sussex thanks to its interdisciplinarity), the United States (SUNY Albany), Canada (SFU, Lethbridge, Trent), Australia (La Trobe, Flinders, New South Wales, Macquarie), New Zealand (Waikato), and France (Nanterre). I also knew that Tom Bottomore, whose work on the history of sociological thought I admired, was there. What I did not know was that Bottomore had come and gone by the time I considered applying to Simon Fraser and that he came and went because of Simon Fraser's growing pains.

I thought about applying to Simon Fraser when I began applying to university in the 1970s. I ended up not applying, however, for some reason, probably because of the rain which I had had more than enough of when I visited my mum's England. Instead I ended up matriculating at Indiana University in Bloomington, something that, in retrospect, I regret given the humidity of the area and what has happened to that “university” in recent years. I now wish I had applied to SFU, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Texas, where I was going to finish my Indiana undergraduate degree anyway because of the health problems I had as a consequence of the climate in Bloomington, Indiana.

When it came time to apply for a postgraduate degree I once again considered applying to Simon Fraser. I ended up not doing so though I applied to several other universities in Canada including the University of Toronto,  the university closest to my heart in North America, and Queen’s University in Kingston, where Klaus Hansen and George Rawlyk, both of whom I wanted to study with. I also applied to the University of Chicago, the University of Kansas, and La Trobe University in Australia where I wanted to work with Rhys Isaac. I was admitted to all of them though none of them worked out for various reasons most of them revolving around money. I did not have it and I did not get the necessary financial aid in the form of teaching or research assistantships at any of them. I did get into a snail mail shouting match with the graduate chair at Kansas who eventually told me that perhaps I was not a University of Kansas kind of guy. I guess I wasn't. Oh well, such is academic life.

I never forgot SFU, however. Given my interest in the history of higher education and particularly in the history of higher education in Canada, the US, and, to a lesser extent, England and Australia, I never forgot that Simon Fraser was one of the new universities and I was interested in these new universities and if they really were that different from the old ones. For these reasons I wanted to learn more about the history of Simon Fraser. When the opportunity arose I picked up a copy of SFU historian Hugh Johnston’s history of the early years of Canada's “experimental” and “radical” (I would prefer the term “progressive” instead here) university Radical Campus: Making Simon Fraser University (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2005).

Simon Fraser University, as Johnston makes clear, is historically important, for more than simply being one of the new universities being built across the globe in the post-World War II era. Along with the University of Victoria (initially a satellite campus of McGill University in Montreal and later a satellite campus of University of British Columbia) in the BC provincial capital, SFU, and importantly so, broke the monopoly on higher education UBC long had in the province of British Columbia. The government of Social Credit premier W.A.C Bennett decided, in the early 1960s, thanks in particular to demographic pressures, to break UBC’s monopoly on higher education in the province, and he did. As a consequence Simon Fraser offered to BC’s growing student population an alternative to UBC, as did the community colleges established in the province around the same time.

Though Simon Fraser was the brainchild of the Bennett government SFU was and is, as Johnston tells us, Gordon Shrum’s university. Shrum, who had been a physics professor at UBC, head of BC Hydro, which the Social Credit government had also created, and first chancellor of SFU, was, to a large extent, the creation of Shrum, It was he who, with the help of SFU’s first president Patrick McTaggert-Cohen and its first academic planner Ron Baker, both of whom Shrum hired, built this “instant university” from scratch between 1963 and 1965, the year the campus, which was still partly under construction, opened on the top of Burnaby Mountain east of Vancouver.

Shrum, McTaggert-Cohen, and Baker, Johnston tells us, established SFU’s character, its curriculum, hired its administrative staff, hired the initial heads of faculties at the university, and hired its architect and designer, Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey (yes one of those Masseys). The modernist campus Ericson and Massey built (one similar to the campuses of the new US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs Colorado, the new SUNY Albany campus in the capital of New York, and a host of other modernist campuses across the globe), reflects Shrum’s vision for SFU, one that drew on English elements and American elements. The massive Academic Quadrangle simulates, for example, if in miniature the quads and courts of Oxford and Cambridge while Shrum’s establishment of a board of governors for the university reflects a more US style of academic governance, a style of governance adopted by the University of Toronto and other Canadian universities in the early twentieth century and after. One might argue that this mixture of the English and the American is what makes English language Canadian universities Canadian and part of what, at least in part, makes English Canada, English Canada.

Shrum's academic vision for his university, one that was somewhat English, was one of curricular interdisciplinarity, a curricular interdisciplinarity dominated by the humanities, the arts, and education (the only other “practical”professional schooling for employment after graduation, commerce, was added at the last minute at the behest of one of the members of the board of governors Arnold Hean). His was a vision of a university with a small cadre of administrators, of a university with active faculty heads initially appointed by him and his staff, and of a university with an active faculty association (which never really got off the ground in the early years of the school given that limited numbers of faculty joined it).

Shrum’s vision for SFU was initially something that drew interested faculty and students to it in its early years. Many of them were fascinated by the university's “experimental” and “radical” or interdisciplinary aspect and character. Some will see this fact, namely that it was this “experimental” and “radical” in character, also, at least in SFU"s early years, Simon Fraser's Achilles heal. Much about the workings of process and power at SFU was not spelled out or addressed by its founder. Initially the play of power within the university had a more informal collegial English like character, hence the importance of faculty heads and the small administrative staff. Once issues of hiring, promotion, and tenure (something that was more important in American universities at the time) came into play, however, the struggle over who had the power became of great important.

The fact that SFU got up and running just as the student movement was becoming prominent, Johnston reminds us, all across the globe, also complicated the battle over process and power at SFU. This was exacerbated by the fact that one of the things the student movement and its faculty allies were concerned with was who had the power in universities. Many students and many faculty at SFU wanted more "democratic” universities in general and a more “democratic” Simon Fraser in particular. An additional aspect that complicated this struggle for power in at SFU was the fact that as Canadian universities were created and grew in the 1960s the differences between British, American, and Canadian conceptions of power and process, particularly amongst its nationally varied faculty, became increasingly important.

The issue of who had the power, as Johnston points out, became problematic at SFU when the questions of how faculty heads were chosen and when hiring, promotion, ant tenure issues and procedures reared their ugly heads in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many faculty (culture wars within the faculty are quite common) and students (culture wars amongst students are quite common) preferred elected to appointed heads seeing the election of heads as more “democratic”. They soon got what they wished for, and as a consequence, this gave meany the heady sense that, as Johnston notes, further “democratisation” of the university (not to mention Canadian society) was possible (the heady air of reform and revolution). As Johnston notes, these debates and disagreements, disagreements that eventually led to a strike by some Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology faculty, an increase in paranoia and misreadings on all sides, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) censuring SFU twice for limiting academic freedom, if to little real effect, were the result of this battle for power and control of Simon Fraser University. That the battles in this culture war resulted in what was and is the original sin at the heart of American, Canadian, and increasingly British universities, the establishment of boards of governors made up of non-faculty elements who had a monopoly on power and who appointed the president and chancellors of their universities, will likely be read as a paradox by many. This original sin was aided and abetted by the BC legal system when a judge ruled that the power to hire and fire at SFU lay exclusively with the board of governors and that, as a consequence, whatever procedures there were for hiring, promoting, and firing of faculty was theirs.

Long story short, a long short story Johnston is more implicit about than explicit about (he is a historian after all), SFU became what it appears Shrum and many faculty who came to SFU in the early years of the school did not want it to become, a corporate university run by a board of governors and its appointed president. The history of the once “experimental” and “radical" SFU, in other words, was like that of other Canadian, American, and British universities in the post World War II period. SFU’s story, even if it began as something different, was the same as that of other universities in North America and Britain. It is a story of increasing bureaucratisation (see Max Weber), of increases in administrative personnel particularly in the middle and lower echelons of the administrative bureaucracy. It is the story of the bureaucratisation of faculties and the story of the increasing use of part-time quasi- faculty (sessionals, adjuncts),. It is the story of the need for more monies, monies that were increasingly raised via fundraising and wealthy donors as public support for education has not kept up fully with increasing numbers of students matriculating in universities. It is the story, of ever more pressure for “practical" professional programmes and the presence of more “practical" professional schools as the ideology of education for a job became more and more predominant and dominant (see Thorstein Veblen on this), a decline in the importance of the humanities, and the bureaucratisation of the interdisciplinarity that made SFU somewhat unique as it became a faculty with specific emphases rather than a mode of general operation. It is the story of more campuses, and, in turn, an even greater need for administrative personnel and the need—the circle of university life—to raise even more monies via fundraising and from wealthy donors who want their cut of “practical” and professional flesh as a consequence, and Americanisation. It is the story of isomorphism in action.

Life as Crisis Management: This Time it is UPS, or the UPS Kiada

 

It was only a few days ago that I wrote a blog about the Sisyphean task of dealing with FedEx, a private postal agency for those of you who don’t know. Today I am writing about my kafkaesque dealings with another private postal agency, UPS.

Both FedEx and UPS, along with a public postal agency the United States Post Office, USPS, can be difficult to to deal with as was proved to me once again this week when FedEx failed to get critical information from a company I bought CDs from in England before the package left England and it has been, as a consequence, stuck in customs in New Jersey since Monday of this week. 

As for UPS they were supposed to deliver a package to me yesterday between, they said, sometime in the morning, this sometime in the morning being left deliberately ambiguous, and 9 pm. So I did as you have to do when you deal with these postal corporations, I waited. I waited and waited and waited. Around 1 pm local time I looked at the tracking and saw that the package was stuck in Bayonne, New Jersey and that it would, UPS said, be delivered. What time or even what day it was supposed to be delivered was, as it always is with these bureaucracies and intentionally so, unclear.

So, I called UPS. It took me three to five minutes to finally convince the labyrinthian UPS automated answering system to give me a real living breathing customer representative. I asked the representative when the package was supposed to be delivered and he told me a thick accent that it would be delivered sometime tomorrow, Saturday. I told him I would not be home on Saturday and asked him to have it delivered on Monday. Stupidly, it appears in retrospect, I assumed everything was set. I even went to the grocery store and credit union afterwards.

When I looked at tracking this morning, the morning after, however, I saw that the item was loaded on the truck and is supposed to be delivered to me today. I ticked the box to change delivery times, as guest, but was met with a request for an almost $12 dollar charge for the honour of changing the time of delivery. That, that charge, which I regarded as emblematic of the sickness at the heart of vampire capitalism, was a no go for me. I ain't gonna pay to do something I already did via the telephone and which I or anyone else should not be charged for in the first place.

What I learned from all this is that the customer always gets screwed. UPS fucks us over in terms of delivery dates, fucks us over even when we call to change the delivery date, and it wants us to pay to change a delivery date online. This is the world we live in, I guess.

Life as Crisis Management: FedEx, Again

 

It happens like clock work. Every month I am reminded that we live in Franz Kafka’s world, that we live in Vladimir Voinovich’s world, that we live in a postmodernist world of bureaucratic absurdity. I was reminded of this yet again this week thanks to FedEx.

As some of you may know I love classical music. As some of you may also know I hate Amazon. Given this I try to order classical CDs from another source. Usually that other source is Presto Classical, an independent music store in England.

A week ago Presto Classical was having a half price clearance sale on Hyperion CDs, a classical label I admire and love. Time to buy alert. I bit. I ordered a tonne or a slew of Hyperion CD’s from Presto, so many, in fact, that I got the express FedEx delivery rather than the slower USPS one. Everything went swimmingly until the package of CDs got to US customs.

On Monday, American Memorial Day, I got a call from FedEx that took me aback (I initially thought it might be fake) because I had never experienced such a thing. They asked me how large the package of CDs I ordered from Presto was. As I had not packed the package I had no idea what its measurements were. I told them to contact Presto, they who actually packaged the package or to simply measure it themselves (the common sense approach). But that, of course, to paraphrase Faith in Buffy's body, would be wrong.

I tried to get hold of Presto but Monday was a holiday in Britain too. So, I estimated the size of the package (two rows of 5.5 inch CDs with safety packing material equals 14 inches wide. On Wednesday I finally head from Presto. They told me they send the measurements to FedEx and that my package would move through customs soon. As of [Thursday, Friday, Saturday] morning it has not moved at all. Fingers are, however crossed.

Anyway short story short, this is the second time I have been screwed by FedEx. I am sure time number three will be coming soon. Why? Because, to put it colloquially, FedEx sucks. Oh and another thing, the FedEx representatives I spoke to had very thick accents something that proved problematic for a 71 year old without 18 year old hearing. 

In the end I am left to ask why the package was allowed to move from England to the US without the dimensions of the package if FedEx needed the dimensions of the package? The answer, I must assume, is because we live in the world of Franz Kafka and Vladimir Voinovich. 

The Books of My Life: Demons/Devils/The Possessed (Dostoyevsky)

 

One of the things I wanted to do in my retirement is read or reread the great “big book” classics of Russian literature. Though the best laid plans of Ron don’t always come out as he intended, I have been able to largely do what I intended to do over the last several years. 

Since I have more in the way of cultural capital now then I had when I initially read some of Russian literature it has been an interesting experience reading or rereading the hefty Russian classics in my elderly years. The "big books" of Russian literature I have recently been able to get through or to get through again include Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblamov, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Aleksander Fadeyev’s The Young Guard, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Karamazov Brothers, The Idiot, and The Adolescent. I enjoyed them all immensely. They are, I discovered and re-discovered, classics for good reasons.

Recently I finished the last of the Dostoyevsky “big books” I have long wanted to read, Demons/Devils/The Possessed. I read two translations of this superb book simultaneously, the Penguin edition translated by Robert Maguire and the Alma edition translated by Roger Cockrell. Both were excellent though I think I preferred the Cockrell translation if by a very small margin. 

There were things I preferred in each of these translations, I preferred the notes in the Maguire edition. I found the notes in the Maguire, which were much more extensive and explanatory than in the Cockrell, superior to those in the Cockrell translation by a large margin. I preferred the Cockrell for its placement of the “At Tikhon's" chapter where Dostoevsky wanted it before his editor told him it would not make it past the censor. Maguire puts it in an appendix. 

There were also things I did not like in each translation. I did not like the use of country bumpkinish in the Maguire translation. It seems too mannered and fake to me. I did not like the use of Western measurements like miles in the Cockrell translation. I prefer that the Russian originals. I suppose that is the cultural anthropologist in me.

Finally, one thing I did not like about both translations was the fact that both placed their translations of the French, which in some chapters is extensive, in the endnotes. They should have been, in my opinion, at the bottom of the page a la the Oxford World Classics Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Footnotes make it much easier to read for those of us who have little French (like me) or no competency in French at all.

The American Health Care Kiada: Rolling the Boulder Up that Hill for Infinity, Continued...

 

The United States health care system is the worst I have ever encountered and I lived for awhile in Russia. I was reminded of this empirical fact again recently when I wanted to transfer my rheumatological care from the Centre for Rheumatology in Albany to Albany Medical Centre.

Why did I want to transfer care? Well for several reasons. The Centre for Rheumatology uses an online portal system devised by the minions of one Jamie Dimon and it is awful. Why is it awful? Well the Centre did not do the obvious thing to do, namely ti set up a pay system through our already existing portal accounts. They set up one which we had to go through a series of puzzles to finally get to a level and a point to pay them for services rendered. When the Centre did try to do what should have been done in the first place (setting up a pay system allowing us to pay through the portal—and remember the portal has all the necessary information so we don’t have to go through a series of puzzles to get to a point when we can pay—it messed up the accounts system and sent us bills for services we had already paid for. In response I threw up my hands and decided to go back to my GP to get a referral to rheumatology at Albany Med.

Actually, this was the second referral to rheumatology at Albany Med my GP sent to them. She initially referred me to rheumatology at Albany Med but Albany Med denied the referral claiming that my insurance denied coverage. This had to be a mistake since my insurance (Medicare and employment pension) did not deny me coverage at the Centre for Rheumatology which I got a referral to because I did not want to deal with the bureaucracy at Albany Med anymore given the incompetence (something inherent to bureaucracies since humans are inevitably involved in the processes related to them). 

To make a long story even longer I was denied care for my fibromyalgia at Albany Med again but this time for a different reason than the insurance. Interestingly, I never received a call or a text message from Albany Med saying that that there was a message in my Albany Med portal saying that I was denied care for my infirmity. Given this I called to make an appointment for rheumatological care at Albany Med. The customer service operative I talked to told me that she had no referral so making an appointment was a no go. 

So, thanks to the bureaucratic unmerry-go round I contacted my GP’s office again assuming that the referral did not go through for some reason. Another referral was sent. The person helping me informed me through all this informed me of another relevant bureaucratic puzzle level in Albany Med referral process. All referrals to Albany Med, I was told, have to go through a central referral office which takes a look at them and passes them on if they pass go in the game of health care cartel life.

Anyway, I thought I have better look in my Albany Med portal to see if there was anything there. And there it was. There was a document relating to the referral sitting there waiting for me to read it. And read it I did. The document said that I needed to print out said document and bring it with me. 

There was a problem, however. I don’t have a printer. So, I called Albany Med was again. The person in rheumatology I was transferred to by Albany Med’s general customer service operative told me the referral had been denied. This time it had apparently been denied not for insurance reasons as before but it was denied because Albany Med’s rheumatology department does not treat patients with a diagnosis of fibromyalgia.

Why Albany Med could not have sent me a text message saying this or sent a message in my portal saying this instead of the download allowing me to avoid the download document prompt in the first place is beyond me. Well, on second thought, it is not beyond me. This is how bureaucracies, public or private, work. Computers and the internet have made it all worse. Their motto seems to be why save the “consumer” time and aggravation when you can have them go round and round in the unmerry-go-round that is bureaucracies?

The Books of My Life: The Perpetual Dream

 

Gerald Grant and David Reisman explore the variety of attempts to reform the liberal arts in American higher education since the 1920s in their award winning book The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Taking a page from Max Weber Grant and Reisman argue that these various attempts at reform (Grant and Reisman call them telic reforms or reforms pointing toward different endings for undergraduate education than those that dominated the world of undergraduate education at the time the book was written) can be conceptualised in terms of three broad ideal type forms: the neo-classical, the communal-expressive, and the activist-radical.

After defining what they mean by telic reforms Grant and Reisman flesh out their three ideal types of telic reforms in three subsequent chapters. In chapter three they explore the neo-classical great books programme at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland (and to a lesser extent at the campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico) with its we want to create the carriers and bearers of Western civilisation at its heart. In chapter four Grant and Reisman explore the communal-expressive ideal type of reform using Kresge College which was, at the time, part of the new University of California Santa Cruz, as its example. Kresge, according to Grant and Reisman, adopted their reform model of change me and I can change my world from social psychologist Carl Rogers. In chapter five Grant and Reisman explore the activist-radical type of telic reform using Audrey Cohen’s The College for Human Services (now the Metropolitan College of New York), as its prime example. The College for Human Services adopted a type of reform whose battle call was change the student and he or she can change the world making it a much better place in the process.

In later chapters Grant and Reisman explore similar reform attempts at and in other colleges and universities across the United States, all of which sought to bring engaged faculty and engaged students together in engaged and engaging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary colleges and universities. Chapter seven focuses on New College in Sarasota, Florida. Chapter eight focuses on the colleges at the University of California of Santa Cruz. Chapter nine focuses on the two new colleges, at the time, in the university system of the state of New Jersey, Ramapo College and Stockton State College (now Stockton University).

I quite enjoyed Grant's and Reisman’s book. I was somewhat familiar with attempts to reform American undergraduate higher education but The Perpetual Dream added immensely to my previous knowledge of attempts to reform American undergraduate education. There were a number of things I found interesting about the book. I think that Grant and Reisman were correct in arguing that one of the central things these reforms wanted to do was to create a sense of community. I liked that Grant and Reisman took a historical, sociological, and ethnographic approach to higher education reforms. I liked that The Perpetual Dream was in large part ethnographic in that Grant and Reisman individually and collectively spent time interviewing those at colleges and in schools undertaking telic reforms. 

One of the disappointments I had with the book is that Grant and Reisman aren't as explicit in tying these reforms to the economic, political, cultural, and demographic change the US was going through in the 20th century. That said, one gets the sense that Grant and Reisman are arguing that the ideal type reforms they explore were attempts to counter the anomie unleashed by modernity. In this context I found it interesting and, in hindsight, obvious, that money, economics, was central to these experiments in American higher education. Monies seem to be an eternal problem for experimenting colleges particularly of the private variety. They aren’t mainstream after all. They are more akin to institutionalised bohemias. Antioch College, for example, perhaps the example of the activist-radical type, seems to have been almost always be cash strapped. The Metropolitan College of New York is facing financial problems as I type. 

Political realities have also impacted the longevity of American reform colleges and reform within colleges and universities. Recently New College has been in the news thanks to the successful attempt of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his merry men to remake the college in their own politically and ideologically correct image. They want to make it, they have said, the HIllsdale College of the South. Hillsdale is a favoured college of some segments of the American right What is happening to New College reflects the broader reality that since the administration of Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s the US has become increasingly dominated by neo-liberalism and right wing populism. Note of interest, one of the other telic colleges of the countercultural era, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, agreed to accept New College students who did not wish to attend the Hillsdale of the South. Paradoxically Hampshire has recently decided to close because of economic difficulties.

There were other things I found less troubling about the book. I found, for example, Grant’s and Reisman’s contention that unionisation efforts by faculty in American universities added a layer of centralisation and bureaucratisation to American colleges and universities spot on but wondered why they did not pay as much attention to something else that added centralisation and bureaucratisation to American universities, the increase in administrative staff. From the vantage point of 2026 it is clear that not only has there been an exponential increase in administrative bureaucrats in American universities since the time Grant and Reisman wrote, but that these bureaucrats, because they are addicted to federal dollars and the ties of research dollars to college and university rankings, are undercutting faculty co-governance and faculty freedom of speech and research. Perhaps the faculty unionisation efforts Grant and Reisman criticise, were a  necessary countervailing force even if it has proved to be ineffective in pushing back against increasing administrative authoritarianism in America's major research universities.

Grant and Reisman rightly note that the increasingly consumerist model of American higher education and its need for student consumers has impacted reform efforts. It is, as they also note, not easy to convince students who have an increasingly I go to school so I can get a job mentality that a liberal arts reform college or programme is worth their while. Needless to say, many of the business types that serve on college and university boards of governance have a similar "pragmatic" attitutde.

Finally, I was intrigued by the fact that one might possibly and profitably apply another Weberian proposition to the reform movements in American higher education, namely, Weber's conception of authority. Many if not most of these reform efforts began with a charismatic reform figure and, increasingly, over time, became tradition bound and bureaucratic after the charismatic figure leaves or dies. At St. John’s, for instance, Scott Buchanan eventually came to the conclusion that books, including books outside the Western canon, needed to be added to the great books reading list. By that time, however, he had left St. John’s and St. John’s curriculum had been fossilised and sanctified, had been, in other words, turned into a tradition by those who followed in his wake and any effort to change that tradition was seen as a profanation.

As Grant and Reisman note academic reform is a perpetual dream, something that never ends and something that is often grounded in and founded on utopian ideologies. In my academic life I have been privy to several attempts to reform the curriculum all of which involved the reinvention of the metaphoric wheel. When I was at the University of Albany, for instance, there was Project Renaissance, an attempt to develop a living-learning interdisciplinary programme for selected students at the University (Grant and Reisman ignore these living learning reform efforts). It was actually hardly interdisciplinary at all. It was comparative. When I was at RPI there was an attempt to create an interdisciplinary curriculum with classes of over one hundred students, something hardly likely, in my opinion, to create a sense of community let alone a helpful learning environment. That "reform" effort seems to have ended as well. And so it goes and so it will likely continue to go.

Theocratic Blues: Life During Wartime

 

Unlike many of you out there in InternetLand I  lived in a theocracy in the United States, yes the United States the country that supposedly has and has had a separation of religion and state, church and state. How did I manage that? Well once upon a time I once lived in a place where religion, in this instance the Christian religion, and politics, in this instance conservative and right wing populist politics, were intertwined.

When I say I lived in a theocracy I don’t mean that I lived in Saudi Arabia where Sunni Islam is intertwined with the monarchical Saudi state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Iran where Shia Islam is intertwined with the Iranian state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Russia where once again the Orthodox Church and the Russian state commingle. I mean that I lived in Mormon Utah.

When I lived in Utah between 1991 to 1993 some 72% plus of the state was Mormon. The legislature of the state of Utah was dominated by Latter-day Saints. Some 90% of Utah legislators were Mormon. While the Mormon population of Utah has declined since 1993, in 2021 it was around 60%, the number of Latter-day Saints in the state legislature has remained about the same, around 86% in 2021. The Mormon theocracy that dominated the Utah of the early 1990s, in other words, remains intact.

Many will tell you that when I lived in Utah Zion was not a theocracy. That would be, they point out and despite many who believe the contrary, unconstitutional. It would be a violation of the US Constitution, the founding document of the American state. And while I agree that Utah was not a Mormon theocracy officially, it was one in practise. In this it parallels nineteenth century America, an era when the United States was unofficially (and illegally) a theocracy.

I say that Mormon Utah was a theocracy for a number of reasons. I had, to backtrack a bit, moved to Provo, Utah to do research on Mormons (Provo is to Mormondom what the South is to the US religiously, it is, thanks to Brigham Young University,  the LDS Church run university, the buckle of the Mormon Bible Belt).  When I lived in Provo the city was around 95% LDS. BYU was around 97% LDS. BYU had rules that everyone, student, faculty, and staff alike, had to abide by. Men could not have hair below their ears or their necks. Beards were forbidden for males. Women could not have dresses or skirts that rose more than one inch above their knees. Alcohol was forbidden. Caffeinated beverages, whether coffee, tea, or soda pop, were verboten. Smoking was prohibited. Unmarried men or women could not live together in "sin" on campus or off.

Of course, one might wonder whether these rules were followed. After all couldn’t I get 3:2 beer at local grocery stores in Provo if I wanted? Couldn’t one go to Provo’s one pub? Couldn’t one get coffee and tea at one of the few local coffee houses? The answer, of course, is yes. I would point out, however, that according to information I heard though the samizdat mill the police force of Provo and the BYU Police, which could operate state wide, kept an eye out for BYU students who violated the “honour code”. The Provo cops supposedly even kept an eye out for students coming out of the lone pub. 

I would also note anecdotally (ethnographically) that when I was on campus everyone I saw was following the dress and grooming standards the Church commanded. I did run into “Jack Mormons”, those who were only nominally LDS, in Salt Lake City. I saw "Jack Mormons" who smoked. I saw some Jack Mormon males with long hair. I saw all this during one of my monthly visits there to bookstores (Sam Weller’s Zion’s Bookstore, in particular) and to Squatters, where one could get a beer for a reasonable price since they brewed their own (I sometimes, I have to admit, went to Temple Square after getting a beer buzz at Squatters and listened to the sister missionaries there; Gentle entertainment in Utah). I could do all this because Salt Lake City was only barely dominated by Mormons at the time and thus was, despite the presence of the Church bureaucracy there, a less theocratic place (less not absent) than Provo or the rural towns in the state where nearly everyone was LDS and nearly everyone practised what the Church preached (the plan of salvation or eternal progression, the ideology around which all Mormon practise flows).

I would describe the unofficial Mormon theocracy as a kindler and gentler version of a theocratic state. No one was burned at the stake when I was in Zion, No one was tortured on the rack. No one was killed for their beliefs of lack of beliefs. Mormondom, in other words, was different in these regards from Christian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant theocracies in Europe during the so-called Middle Ages (ironically Christians had been killed for their beliefs in the Roman Empire but then the group persecuted often replicates what happened to it in kind) and beyond. On the other hand, there were some of the feminist variety who taught at BYU who were fired. There were people, including Mormon historians, who were excommunicated from the Church. And there were individuals, Mormon historians, for instance, whose scholarly work and published presentations drew the ire of true believers who threatened them with bodily harm and even death via email and the telephone. Again, kindler and gentler theocracy.

I have been thinking about my life in theocratic Utah because the United States, thanks to right wing populist "Christian" nationalists who worship at the altar of the American state rather than the Christian god ignoring, in the process, almost every aspect of Jesus’ supposed Sermon on the Mount (so-called in one of its two versions), not to mention the prohibition against having gods other than YHWH, are on the verge of turning the United States again into a theocracy, though this time an official theocracy. One can reasonably argue that they have already established theocracies in certain US states. And that is scary given the history of religious intolerance.

It is scary because these theocrats are people convinced of their own absolute rightness. They, they believe, after all have god on their side. They are people who, because of this, are inherently intolerant and inherently fascist (fascism goes back to authoritarian monarchs who claimed that they were god or the representative of god; theocracy). They cannot be reasoned with because of this holier than thou attitude. Backed by Big Money, particularly from big oil sources, they are taking over school boards and cleansing school libraries of books which they regard as pornographic (meaning books characterised by sympathy toward gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and other "outcasts") and which don't fit with their narrow and narrow minded ideology, and they are actively working for the firings of those who speak out against those they regard as saints (according to Reuters and the Guardian over 600 people were fired for freely speaking their piece about the theocratic and intolerant Charlie Kirk, for example). They are running for local offices, state offices, and federal offices. And they have an ally in that multi-divorced, bully, misogynist, arrogant, narcissist, and mentally ill bloke named Donald Trump. Their theocracy, I suspect, won’t be as kind and gentle as that of the Mormon Utah in which I lived. I only hope I can get out before the stone age horror begins yet again.

Is yet another Civil War in the American future? Should states like New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey form a union of their own? Should California, Oregon, and Washington do the same? Should all of these explore union with Canada, a nation, like any nation, with flaws but nowhere  near the flaws of the theocratising United States)? Should Margaret Atwood be considered a secular prophet? Time, as always, will tell.