Faculty Ministry: <i>Faculty Newsletter</i> 1999 (Winter)

EDITORIAL
Usually there is a Guest Editorial. The version this time is excerpted material from a chapter of the book reviewed in KEEPING UP. I chose the essay by Paul Vitz because of its unusual content; hope. So often we look at today's higher education world with sadness and despair but Vitz has given reason to look up expectantly. Maybe Post Postmodernism will usher in a world of sunny possibilities. Toward the end of his chapter, The Future of the University: From Postmodern to Transmodern, Paul Vitz, Professor of Psychology at NYU, posits a "Transmodern Mentality" which could be characterized as: "A spirit of hopefulness; a desire for wisdom; a concern with religious and transcendent and spiritual things; a re-discovery of the importance of truth, beauty, goodness and harmony; a concern with simplicity and the quest for a mature and balanced understanding of experience." (p.113) He hopes for "an integration of existing valid intellectual approaches, including those from the pre-modern tradition, a kind of synthetic mentality, rather than an analytic one." (p. 114). He then sweeps through music, architecture, painting, poetry, academia, the general culture, French intellectual circles and concludes with theology. In all of these he lists names of those actively producing works in this"transmodern" mode. He starts with music. "Catholic and Polish Henryk Gorecki….Eastern Orthodox Arvo Pärt from Estonia." He concludes the music section by pointing out the great commercial success of Gregorian Chant CDs. In Architecture he names, "The school of Notre Dame under Dean Thomas Gordon Smith" and others who are looking "for models of beauty and order." For"Transmodern Art" he suggests painters "Norwegian Odd Nerdrum, the Swede Torgny Lindgren,….the Americans David Ligare, Bruno Civitico and Audrey Flack." After mentioning several transmodern poets he points out, "With respect to poetry as well as much else in the arts, the university community dominated by modern and postmodern ideology, is quite out of touch with new developments." In response to the Derrida dominance of the Humanities, Vitz recommends the book, A Blessed Rage for Order by Alexander Argyros (1991) and Frederick Turner's The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit (1995). He points out that Canadian "Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989) and The Ethics of Authenticity (1992) are having major impact." The French intellectuals he points us to include: Philippe Beneton, Alain Besancon, Pierre Manent and others." Theology, no longer the queen of the curriculum, is also a source of hope. Vitz recommends Pope John Paul II's, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994) as well as the works of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Thomas Torrance. "In short, it is already time, not only for conferences on `The Death of Postmodernism' but for others on the birth of this new ideal of hope, of wisdom, of virtue and the good, of beauty and harmony, on the resurrection of Classicism and other premodern concepts in the different arts and in the intellectual life itself." And we all sigh - may it come quickly.

KEEPING UP
How much energy and time do you and other Christians on your campus give to the work of stewarding higher education? Here's a resource of great value: Re-thinking the Future of the University, edited by David Lyle Jeffrey and Dominic Manganiello, University of Ottawa Press, 1998, distributed by University of Toronto Press. It is a series of lectures given at the University of Ottawa in '95-'96. Among the authors of these lectures are: George Marsden (Newman, Theology and the Contemporary University), Jean Bethke Elshtain (The Politicization of the University and Its Consequences), David Lyle Jeffrey (Can Humane Literacy Survive Without a Grand Narrative?), Mark Schwehn (The Future of Teaching) and Paul Vitz (The Future of the University: From Postmodern to Transmodern).

The subject matter ranges from an enlightening picture of the goals and governance of medieval universities through the perilous state of modern higher education in North America to possible futures for teaching and research. Good bibliographic material is available in each essay. Although the focus is strongly on Canadian universities, the situation in the U.S. is also well illuminated.Here are some of the highlights: (George Marsden is wondering what John Henry Newman would think if he came back.) "The most striking first impression would be the way in which higher education had become a mass enterprise. Modern universities, he would soon realize, were not shaped by any unifying 'idea'. They were products of the market." Pg. 29. (Jean Bethke Elshtain) "Now what is at stake in all of this is our understanding of truth itself. For truth is part of what is up for grabs these days as we educate for pluralism defined as moral relativism. Students are not so much enjoined to debate what is true or not, as the case may be; to sort out what is true from that which is false; as to disdain the notion of truth altogether." Pg. 46. (Mark Schwehn) "Good teaching always needs more resourcefulness more than it needs more resources." Pg. 80. "So long as knowing is regarded as an individual state of mind rather than an interpersonal activity, so long as individual research projects, sometimes undertaken at the expense of good teaching, are the only path to academic preferment, so long as the university is regarded by its members as more and more a resource center and less and less a community of scholars, so long as teaching is itself understood exclusively in terms of the transmission of knowledge and skills at the expense of the cultivation of character and virtue, so long as the imperatives of hyper-specialization lead teachers to retreat further and further into the realms of cyberspace, so long as, finally, education becomes mere training at the expense of the sacred task of inquiry, university teachers will aid and abet the unraveling of the fabric of democracy." Pg. 84 (Dominick Manganiello) "Although our culture prides itself on being technological, in fact, it has increasingly tended to privilege techne, or technique, while discarding logos, the Greek word that denotes, among other things…meaning. We have lost, as a result, the primary force in our lives,what Vicktor Frankl calls, "the will to meaning." Pg. 118.

MODEL OF MINISTRY
An interview (email) with Dr. Lytton Musselman, the Mary Payne Hogan Professor of Botany, Manager of the Blackwater Ecologic preserve, and director of the wetlands MS program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. He is also on the faculty of Au Sable Institute where he teaches woody plants during exceptionally cold May terms. Lytton is faculty advisor for the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship group at Old Dominion.

1. You have recently returned from your third Fulbright adventure. What have you done on these and how did you get into the Fulbright program?
The Fulbright program offers a variety of overseas experiences for US citizens (there is also a large program to bring foreign scholars here). Best known and largest is the Visiting Scholars Program, which is administered by the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (CIES). CIES has officers for the different regional programs. For example, I have always gone under the Middle East and North Africa Program and have served on the committee that reviews applications for this region. These are competitive awards and the application and selection process takes about twelve months. First review is by a committee in the discipline, i.e., biology, and music. If you make it through this committee the next is the area committee. In the case of the Middle East, this is composed of people who have worked there and have expertise in that area.

Two kinds of awards are generally available--teaching and research. For my first award, I had a research appointment. I soon learned that this could result in isolation from students so I volunteered to teach. For future awards, I requested teaching/research. This gave the greatest flexibility.

Teaching is THE way to get into the culture. I love the interaction with students. My first Fulbright was in 1982 and the personal contacts of that time are still bearing fruit both professionally and spiritually. In the Middle East, a teacher is a very respected person especially atthe university so many doors are opened.

2. In what way have these experiences benefited your own work and that of your department and university? How do you think they have benefited your host institution and countries?
My time has been professionally and personally worthwhile. I have garnered a lot of data and had the opportunity to write up much of it. One spin-off of this is the preparation of an account of the ferns as well as a project on wildflowers. In short, I learned a great deal about the plants of the Middle East. Collaboration with the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature will continue. We hope to have a joint project training one of their staff at my university as well as having me visit as a consultant.

3. Have they been good times for you and your family?
On a personal note, I have appreciated the interaction with students and professionals, especially in agriculture and conservation. But I have also been saddened to see darker aspects of this society, different from other Arab countries in which I have worked or lived. This includes the treatment of women, "honor" killings, the general angst of this society, and the persistence of tribalism.

My wife loved her job teaching English and became the most popular teacher even though she has a reputation for being demanding! As a result, she was asked to teach numerous additional courses.
For my children, one college age and one in high school, this was a difficult country. Our daughter was constantly harassed when in public. Like most other foreigners in their schools, our son was always an outsider and constantly ignored and mistreated.

4. How do you think your Fulbright years have served Christ's Kingdom?
My wife loves these young people and I have seen her in tears for them many times. At Christmas, she gave each of her students a "Jesus" film in Arabic. Despite the way she has been treated, she wants to return with the Good News! It is so good for them to see people from a "Christian" country who take Christianity seriously. Like most of the world, they believe that a religious belief is part of every human's makeup.

5. Do Christians face any discrimination in the Fulbright application and granting process?
I have not seen any discrimination in the process. In fact, I told the Fulbright Commission executive about my faith. Because he knows the Arab culture so well, he knew that Arabs would accept the fact that I would speak up for my faith.

6. Is the motive to "do Gospel work" appropriate or sufficient for one to try to get such a grant?
It is rare that people behave differently overseas than they do at home. If you are active in student outreach at home, it will be the same overseas. Like any position, we answer to the Lord and have to be honest about the time we spend on our job. Be successful at that and use it as a springboard for contacts and interaction. Use your time as a Fulbright scholar working for the Kingdom the same way you use your faculty position at home.

7. Any suggestions for those thinking about doing as you have done?
Go for it! Now is the time! There is a needy world out there. People are broken, their life is full of broken dreams and, like the song says, "at the end of broken dreams, He's the Open Door".