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Russell T. McCutcheon, "Our Primary Expertise: A Future for the Study of Religion" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
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A
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A
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C
Hello and welcome back to the New Books and in Religions Podcast, a podcast channel for the New Books Network. This podcast actually will be cross posted to all religion podcasts because it affects the entirety of the academic study of religion. It is my pleasure to welcome back to the podcast Dr. Russell Tina Kutchen, to speak about a timely, fascinating, intriguing, perhaps some controversial work called our primary expertise, A Future for the Study of Religion. Russ, welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:07]
B
Very good of you to have me back. Raj, good to see you.
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C
Yeah, my pleasure. And the podcast is, of course, a service. It's a service to put books on the radars of those who might be interested, layperson scholars, et cetera.
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B
And.
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C
With this sort of publication, it seems especially a service insofar as I think there might be a number of folks who are not aware of these conversations or may rather not be aware of these conversations. And so do you want to give us a sense of the genesis and the gist, you know, what's going on in this book?
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B
It's a collection of essays, as I have often done throughout my career, framed, introduced, and then each with a new introduction and framed in such a way as to try to intervene at this particular moment in higher education when I think it's an error to say the humanities is under attack. It's far broader than the humanities. It's the liberal arts. How I use that as a broader designation. It's higher education itself, but the mistaken assumption that it's a recent phenomenon. I think it's a long, many decades long trend, especially in North American, but specifically American higher education, and where the study of religion finds itself in that large kind of soup, in that large kind of mix. And one of a variety of things I've done like this over the years, trying to suggest to colleagues that although they don't control, you know, world finance, stock markets, government policies, they do have agency. They might consider doing a few things that at least in this particular time, might be beneficial to their students, the staff, other faculty members. I see such a dearth of other scholars doing this that it's among the reasons I feel rather compelled to keep coming back to this issue in some of my current work.
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C
Now, when you say doing this and this sort of work of re. Envisioning, re envisioning, reimagining a field, its contours, its evolutes, its utility, that seems to be born of a particular perspective, would you say, or penchant. And that might be a bit rare, would you say?
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B
Yeah, it is that. I think among the things that, you know, I'VE just, I've just produced a second edition of my first book, Manufacturing Religion, and that doesn't come out till I think, February or March. Not, not looked at the proofs yet. And I think what in that opportunity to do that, you have to look back and, you know, think about a book that's over 30 years old. And I think that what unites a lot of my work is a frustration with the manner in which the field was established in North America in the 1950s, 60s, even 70s, depending where you are, and the manner in which arguments about uniqueness set apart special interpretive skills, special institutional settings. Yes, the anthropologists study religion. Yes. The historians. Yes, the. But they all miss the sine qua non. The, you know, we have different names for it and the persistence of that strategy. And how ironic it might be that the foundational strategy opted for by scholars a few generations gone by now has been, I would argue, and I think others would argue this, the conditions that has isolated us and made us rather exposed and easy to get rid of when certain larger contextual factors change. So this set of interests has been with me for a long time. And if you couple that with the job I was hired to do over 20, 25 years ago now to try to revive and I don't want to overstate this, but this department I was hired to be the chair in, I came as an outside chair, was very small, was not graduating of students and was due to be cut, lose the major and cut and instead a brand new dean hired an outside chair and took a gamble. So how to combine certain kind of methodological frustrations with the field with a role that occupied a lot of my time for 18 years, all told, I think has produced a recurring posture that I have that we might have more control over our conditions than we think. And certain I'll use the word penchant that you used that scholars have concerning how special their objects of study are is part of the problem. I can elaborate.
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C
Yeah, I mean there's so many threads there. Someone answered to the booklet. I think crucial to your journey is your experience there. And so could you perhaps give us the snapshot of then what happened? You came into this post 25 years ago with this mandate. The administration took a gamble. And how would you characterize what you were able to do there?
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B
The longtime chair had retired and the search to replace him, he's passed away now. His name was Patrick Green failed. So they re advertised it the next year. And the re advertisement year was the first year of a brand new Dean Bob Olin, who's now retired former chair of math at Virginia Tech, who became our longtime dean of arts and sciences here. So he decided to search again. And that was the year that I applied and I came into a situation that I've written about. And anybody who follows anything I read, I write. I'm not sure who does might have heard this story. We were four and a half faculty members due to two cross appointments. Nobody had tenure other than myself. I was brought in as a tenured associate professor from a southwest Missouri state it was called back then, now it's called Missouri State. So they hired an outside chair and we were the second strongest of the weakest programs on our campus, you know. So our state credentialing agency, case in point, Indiana didn't have any annual minimum graduation numbers and just this last end of June their state legislature put through. So all states now seem to have this right. A state credentialing board in the US and ours had determined we needed to graduate seven and a half students every three years since then. Now it's every five years, a rolling average. And we were nowhere near that. And that was the minimum for viability and non viable programs could be merged, could be closed, could be cut a variety of. And it happened to coincide with a year in which what we call here in Alabama proration, a current budget is revised in hindsight like an actual operate current budget and higher ed when this happens and state government comes up short higher ed K to 12 other state agencies owe money back. So it was not a good time to have these two things happen at the exact same time. And Bob was rather bold and instead of closing our little department not going to be huge savings little department. One staff member, not sure what his rationale was, but he searched again and that's the context into which I was hired. So it becomes painfully obvious to anyone hired in that context is that the administration, let alone students, moms and dads, like we have a variety of constituencies, right? They need to see an immediate change. They need to have some kind of confidence to stick with you for some midterm changes, medium range, right? They need to have some confidence to stick with you for the longer term changes that might never happen because they take a decade. So from the get go we just reinvented the place from top to bottom and doing it in a way that tried not to alienate faculty. How far can faculty change and reinvent themselves? And also in a way that the ultimate goal of it probably eluded us at the start. That emerges as you're doing it, you have certain strategic short term goals. Increase the number of majors, the metric that is so important to universities even while courses are full, we can talk more about that. So the department that eventually we now inhabit today, 25 years later, it's certainly not what we had in mind at the time. We're now 14 faculty. The university grew significantly, but there was no reason that we should get those resources all along. But we got some resources. We didn't grow the same as other programs. The core curriculum or general education program doesn't prompt every incoming student to take one of our courses the way, say, they have to take freshman composition in an American university with English. But we thrived during that time. And I would like to think that among the reasons that we did well, knock on wood, was this shift that we gradually made away from the content that we still teach, but toward broader cross content skills that our students would learn across our courses. And that's among the things that I try to talk about in this book. And thus, yes, please learn ancient languages, do fieldwork somewhere. It takes time to do this. But understand that what I think our students have all along taken away with them are broader set of generalized things about how society works, how groups of people work. I don't think that's a new thing to teach students. The vast majority of our majors historically have not become scholars of religion. We all know that the vast majority of students that we teach when they take one or two courses with us are not scholars of religion, let alone our majors. And given the declining job market in academia for faculty, it's now the situation that our graduate programs are akin to the undergrad. The majority of these graduate students are not becoming professors and probably not becoming scholars of religion hired into some, you know, think tank as a scholar of religion. But the vast majority are finding rewarding lives for themselves, have a fond nostalgia for our programs. So we have to really take a serious inventory to. Despite the importance of the content to many of us, I think we've been teaching broader skills all along to our students and we need to really double down on that and figure out how to do it far better than at times, maybe the haphazard way in which we have already been doing it. So that's a shift that we started to make early on in our department. We started to be more explicit about it because practically speaking, as a chair, I'm looking for something that unites a group of people who, like in most faculties, nearly have a happenstance relationship to each other, who didn't get a job elsewhere, who got hired? What do they happen to work on? So the mythology of coverage. Can we cover the world's religions? Whether departments were once able to do that, that's long gone by now. So what unites the group that happens to be here? It probably is not going to be region, historic period, data, religious tradition. It's probably going to have to be at the level of theory, method, questions. And so from a departmental identity, moving us forward, creating a sense of who we are among ourselves, let alone students, it really became a necessity to shift the conversation from content. I say data and people get pissed off in humanity. So now I'll say content, region, expertise, to these other things that we've also all along been doing. So in our department, that shift was of necessity. It hit us long before the current issues that are hitting other departments in the last several years, especially, especially last two or three years in this sense of every so many weeks seeing about a university, closing programs, shifting often to an emphasis on the professional schools, business, nursing, engineering, social work, et cetera, closing whole math departments and relying on a core group of contingent faculty to deliver sufficient math courses to the professional schools. It's not the same rationale in many cases, but it's a very similar rationale in some cases. And so I think we went through a bit of an incubator, petri dish moment in this department long before. And I think some lessons we learned will be useful to others, but they have to be willing to renegotiate. You know, I'll jokingly say you haven't read the Bhagavad Gita. They have to renegotiate that approach to their object of study. That I know it might be important to you or you, but I have other interests and what unites us. And thus we eventually in our department came to start calling it the examples approach. Can you see your object of study as exemplary of some broader tradition, principles, strategy that we see just happening across culture? And thus do you have conversations with faculty in other disciplines? Do the students who take your courses leave your courses with insights applicable in a host of ways? And can you be a little articulate and explicit in that shift, even though it's probably gradual, even though, you know, you need X number of semesters or weeks in a class to kind of get there? Do you understand that your punchline is that you're not necessarily producing scholars of Greek Orthodoxy, scholars of Islam, that traditional rationale for our field, but you're probably all along been doing something else?
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C
Yeah, I mean, that's endlessly fascinating. I mean, someone needs to do a study just on you and your department, what you've done. But I think that's a great segue into what you are alluding to and talking about, which is our quote unquote, primary expertise. So how. I usually ask about a genesis of a book, but I think it's pretty clear what the genesis of this book is. But was there a particular impetus to get this going? Was it because of reception or conversations about other writing you've done or sort of. How would you characterize that?
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B
I think all along a lot of my work has been interested in the conditions of the field, how the field is practiced. I think I've written on a variety of things of relevance to traditional views on the field. But mostly that's certainly what I've been doing. This particular collection and the framing of it was very explicitly linked to conversations over the last two years, give or take, where when I make a case for the kinds of pivots that we've experimented with here and that I advocate when scholars rather younger than me so it's not the privileged, old elbow patched, tweed jacketed professor will come back and criticize my recommendations as imperiling the life of the mind that we are the last bastion of within the university. I have explicitly had that said to me on a variety of occasions and whether you ever could engage in that. And I don't even know what that means. Does it mean I'm being flippant? Recline on the campus Lonnie Grass and read Plato and I don't know. I know I started grad school with some nostalgia in my head about what grad school was and it failed to live up to that pretty quickly. Why aren't we sitting around talking about beauty and justice and truth and. And I would like to hope that the university is not a business the way other businesses are businesses. But I'm not naive that someone on this campus is paying my wage. They're paying the light bill. There are workers this very moment from facilities going through our offices in our building, changing out air filters in our H vac ductwork system that they regularly do like it is a large operation, and I'm not naive to that. And when I hear someone push back at this particular time in higher ed, when the rules of the game seem to be changing so dramatically and players who probably thought they would be left standing at least here in the US after many public higher ed programs that are tax supported collapsed themselves, realize now how tenuous their grip might be on things. I'm talking rather elite schools. I think we know who I'm talking about. To have someone in that context double down on a rationale so utterly privileged and it just shocks me. And these were sometimes people in institutions in our field that were under threat. And so I would talk to friends privately to think I think the majority of people are just going to double down on very old traditional arguments about how important we are, how unique we are, how this is where, you know, the study of religion is where the depth of the human and the human experiences and we know that rationale. And one after the other we see now kind of major programs losing majors, losing departments reformed as centers, maybe losing tenured jobs. There's a range of things. So this book came from that kind of frustration. And I don't want to blame the victim. I have a lot of empathy and even sympathy for some colleagues. But I'm now a senior scholar age wise in the field. I had trouble getting a job. I know people who didn't finish their PhD from my time who never got tenure track jobs. So if I'm among the seniors in the field and I'm very well aware of this, then to me, nobody who's a professor in our field right now is unaware of this. We all are aware of it as dramatically as it has ramped up in more recent years. And I don't mean to say I can identify with the current grad. It was tough in my time. It's so much tougher now that it almost seems insincere for someone of my generation to identify with the current. But these are long, decades long trends that we happen to be present to see come to their fruition. And so it creates in me a situation where I have sympathy for colleagues, but a deep frustration that especially an older generation did not think this through a very long time ago doesn't mean we would have saved anything. We still don't control world politics. We don't control. But we were just caught terribly flat footed. And I would always want to be upbeat and positive, if nothing as cynic as someone who thinks it could be better. I think a critic is that's they're an optimist. But the fear is that we're just quickly, quickly running out of time.
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A
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- [24:17]
C
Yeah, I mean, it really is so interesting. So even if my. With my own journey literally this, this month, I believe I've been, I defended literally a decade ago. So it's been an excellent time for reflection. You know, there were, there were some seismic shifts happening in America where some of the jobs were at the time that I was shortlisted for in 2016. And I opted, you know, to wait that out. And by, by 2020, I was like, oh, being quote, unquote, independent has not held me back at all in publishing. And I'm probably an extraordinarily interconnected independent scholar because of the podcast, et cetera. And so from the time that I was first independent and had morose, internalized shame about not having an institutional affiliation, although I had a number of teaching affiliations to about midway through that decade when I had very respected senior old school scholars knock on my door and say, hey, I love what you're doing. I love that you can produce good work on your own dime. I've got this brilliant grad student. Would you mind chatting with him or her about options? So now they are well aware it's not a question of being able to get the job, it's a question of there not being a job to get. And one wonders at what order of resolution within the institution do these decisions get made. I mean, is this sort of strategic thinking? I'm just thinking aloud here. Is it beyond the purview of, of the full professors? Is this something organizational? Is this something that department chairs can sort of sort. I mean, where would you see the change being affected from all of the.
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B
Professional inducements of our career steer away from this. I don't think individuals are powerless. I would like to think, without getting into a large philosophical discussion about free will, I would like to think that they have agency.
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C
Right.
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B
But all the inducements, the traditional inducements are less undergraduate teaching, more graduate supervision, less teaching, generally get to the big Eastern school or a school on the coast. Like we all know the inducements. Oh, I'm only in a community college. Like we know that kind of tone that comes and the internalized, I didn't make it or, or I'm in a directional school. Southeast North Nebraska University. Like there's pecking orders, there's the Ivy League, there's the land grants. So it's structural. Yes. All the inducements are not to talk about these things, not to address these things. It's a more recent phenomenon that graduate programs now I think, at least in our field, are starting to recognize career diversity, starting to sing the praises of alums who did not necessarily land tenure track jobs. I still see the placement rates to attract doctoral students, how many they place, but I often don't see details in those placement rates. How many of those people are in contract positions in universities, how many are contingent? So the shift, there are structural constraints definitely preventing the shift from happening. Having said that, there's no reason one can't change a syllabus and re situate the content you're looking at and move towards some broader set of skills that the student might have an ability to draw upon in any number of futures they might have. There's nothing stopping a program from instituting resume writing workshops. Not CV writing workshops, not mock interviews. The vast majority of those grad students probably will not even have a campus job. So I'm not sure. Mock interviews are probably solving, you know, 1998's problems. Right? That there's a number of things that we could be doing. But I don't think the inducements steer in that direction. I, I, the also the recurring, I'm getting frustrated. Also the recurring I wasn't trained to do that is something I also hear and that strikes me as just so deeply frustrating because I would like to think that people in academia are not the brightest people in society, but we have certain aptitudes. We should be bright, we seem to be motivated and we seem to have a real the love of, oh, I need to learn a new language, I need to learn something new because my research is going a new direction. We seem to be able to pivot but we seem unwilling to pivot in ways that benefit our own profession, that we study how other groups work and we're painfully poor at studying how our own institutions work. We quickly succumb to this self evidency of our object of study. So yes, there are structural constraints, but I just don't think that gets anyone off the hook that this was a slow moving iceberg that we have seen coming for decades, even though for a variety of very recent reasons it might have sped up and we were caught extremely strat foot flat footed. And the temptation is just to, as I say in the preface or the introduction, hold on even tighter to our precious and for some just go down with a ship instead of trying to reinvent the place.
- [29:55]
C
Yeah, that, that impulse, I mean, just as sort of a, I don't know, I guess an armchair anthropologist, if you will. I mean, I love people, I've watched people my whole life and, and that you see everywhere you see it at the academy, you see that with certain cultural issues, you see that, you know, a massive change is upon us, it's inevitable. So we, you know. One response set Just doubling down everything you have to the old. Either because there's a denial that this is slipping away or because you somehow, you think that if you double down on the old, you know, somehow you're not going to go down with the ship. Yeah, we see this and I suppose there are a variety of approaches and I think there are a variety of propensities, abilities to think on a higher level and to act and just stick one's neck out and to sully one's hands with something more practical. I mean one of the overarching takeaways. I mean, I think many can get behind the idea of religion not being. The academic study of religion not being exceptional in a sense that it once was. I'm certainly for most of my training that bias wasn't so much there at all. I think many people can maybe even get behind, you know, maybe even generalizing your expertise, you know, rebuilding curriculum for outcome. I mean that sounds eminently practical. And that also sounds to many, I think, almost an affront, you know, like, like not to put words in your mouth or to characterize your perspective of how people respond. But it's almost as if that's not what we do. And I'm not sure you're advocating doing that instead of excellent religious studies work, but perhaps in addition, could you say.
- [31:41]
B
A bit about that we're not job training. That's the right, that's the. And, and I gotta admit, that drives me kind of nuts at the graduate level. That's exactly what we've been doing for centuries. We produce professors, we produce people who apply and get certain kinds of jobs, and they're in elite enough institutions that it, it doesn't seem like a job and it's a lifestyle. And I get that that's really tempting and very nice, but when the larger conditions that support that change and they're not there anymore, then you either close shop or you pivot. My hunch is, since all along, as I said earlier at the undergrad level, we've been producing students who went on to a wide array of careers, taking with them certain things they learned from us, a nostalgia they have. They've loved being in our classes, but they're not scholars of religion. I don't see why we can't pivot at the graduate level in that exact same way and have people trained in, as I say, thick, advanced research skills, finding satisfying lives in a host of institutions. I don't know where they want to work, what they want to do, where. I would hope that as students who have a sense of nuance in cultural analysis, a sense of ambiguity and identity, how does identity work? How does conflict work? I can go on. Where they inform decisions that are shaping all of our lives, from government to non government to industry to. That, though, strikes a lot of people in our field as selling out. But all along the rationale we've used at the undergraduate level was just that, the wider applicability of the skills that we have. So either we were insincere about the undergrad rationale for our degrees, because that's the rationale we've all been using, or we're trying to hang on to the elite nature of graduate education where we didn't have to make that argument. And no matter how hard we grab, I just don't think we can hold onto that anymore. All that has changed. So I think the kinds of things I'm advocating for career diversity, practical application of skills, what are those skills? What are we teaching students how to do? Where else can they apply that at the graduate level is not radical at all, at all. But if you're a tenure track, especially a tenured professor, depending on the institution, depending on the taken for granted you operate with, it certainly can seem kind of radical. But increasingly there's, there's fewer and fewer people in that position. And the, the friendly ears on which this argument might now fall are sadly alienated from the kinds of structures and strings to pull to Reinvent the field. And that generation that could do it is. Is sadly, I think, quickly disappearing. I want to sound a little more upbeat than I am, to be honest, but it's. It's a frustrating position to be in, to have been chiming this for quite some time and not to have too many takers.
- [35:10]
C
And now the takers you might have, you would think of as not quite empowered to do as much as they once could.
- [35:16]
B
Like, if you're at a conference and there's a panel on career diversity, these things now happen a little bit. But there's a good chance that it's been put on by some graduate student committee that exists within the professional org. And that's precisely who attends it. People who are dealing with this challenge right now. And yes, they need help. They need a yes, yes, yes. But from my point of view, the people who should be attending it are department chairs, graduate directors. That's who ought to be there. They're in a position to make changes within units so that students who graduate now into an atrocious job market from, say, a doctoral degree aren't reinventing themselves after X number of years on a frustrating job market when they have to confront this decision. Instead, they could be coming out of. And we've talked about this, Raj, they could be coming out of graduate units that have already empowered them, that have already gotten them thinking of diversity and the kinds of skills they could accumulate across a graduate degree that might well position them for X. Even though they're trying very hard to become a faculty member. Yes, please. Some people will be hired. Increasingly few. So the people who have agency back to those structural constraints are probably. Some of my best friends are senior people, but they're probably thinking individually themselves. They're trying to lighten their load. They're trying to get their next project done. And the institutional situation in which we work for many, I think, are a secondary thought. Many will fall on that dagger of being chair. This is the way we describe it because it takes us away from our first love. This is so often the way we describe it. Instead of our best and our brightest should be department chairs, should be grad directors, should be focusing attention on the institutional conditions in which they and their peers seek to have their own career, let alone the next generation, let alone the next. Like, maybe I'm sounding like a really nostalgic old fart here, but I kind of revel in the fact that I work with people who were in middle school when we started to try to reinvent this place, that it was Successful enough that we're able to bring people along into this life who were in high school when we started, or they were younger, far younger. And that kind of forward thinking about the profession, let alone the field itself, I just fear is sadly lacking among many colleagues, again because of that siloification, content expertise, and again the institutional constraints that I think make us very flat footed in trying times.
- [38:22]
C
So if for a moment, for the sake of a thought experiment, you can sort of hover above yourself, your work, your institution, and kind of survey the field. You know the subtitle of this, you know, A Future for the Study of Religion. I think it's telling and it's intriguing. But, you know, what is your sense? What is your sense of, given the trajectories currently in motion and the limitations already in play, what is your sense of where the study of religion is headed?
- [38:58]
B
As we said earlier, I think though there are those who will double down on old traditional things. And the, to me important distinction between various forms of elite participant reflection on the faith, the meaning of it, whatever we want to call that, call that theology, that division between what we do and that I think for a number of people has long been a problematic distinction. So I think we will see some public university programs in the study of religion openly theological. The world religions discourse. What some people, Suzanne Owen, I think was among those who Coined back in 2011, the World Religions paradigm has been thoroughly critiqued by a lot of people. Nonetheless, religious literacy, how to use the discourse better is a huge engine driving some departmental identities. Kind of ironic given the critique of the world religions paradigm. So I think we will see various experiments in the very traditional way of approaching it. I think we'll see a small number of programs experiment with reinventing the field as a broader instance of culture studies, critical thinking, wide applicability, not a lot. I think that some will feel that's a bridge too far for them. Haven't you read the Bhagavad Gita? You know, long time ago I had an instructor working here who was hopeful, I think, to apply to a tenure track job should we get the position in Religion in Asia, Asian Religions. And I tried to make the person aware that we have no idea if we're going to get this search. So you need to just kind of work hard as an instructor. It's a one year position. I'd be happy to write a very strong letter of reference for you if you do well. And the response was, well, surely it's Religion in Asia, you'll get that position. It's important. This is a long time ago, and we had a chat on how the university works and how every department in the College of Arts and Sciences, and here we have a very big traditional college of Arts and Sciences, physics to gender and race to audiology to geography. And every one of those departments has a bunch of important things missing. I'm sure the English faculty think, you know, they ought to have six or seven Shakespeareans, as they did once before, or who knows what area, name it. So every field has important things to it. So my hunch was, whoever gets a line, they're going to get it for other reasons. They're going to get it because they were overlooked last year because their student to faculty ratio is X, because their cost of instruction is Y, because, like, who knows the reasons? So the failure to see your local scale of disciplinary value as not translating necessarily to a dean's desk, a provost desk, a board of trustees desk. And I'm not even going down the road of state government or federal government. Right. Provincial government in your case. It's that failure to understand that translation does not happen, which I think is evidence of people who just don't get involved in how their campus works. I think is evidence of where we're going to go. It gives us a good insight into where the field's going to go. I think. I don't know if I've told the story publicly. I know I've written about it. I think back a lot to a conversation I had with Richard Hecht, who was at one time retired, now the longtime chair at Santa Barbara. And I went there to give a public lecture on tenure track a long time ago. And he took me to lunch, as a department chair might do, with a guest. And I said, how come your department has been so successful? You know, they're a Maine, Santa Barbara, my gosh. And idiot Smart was retired, but he was alive. Then he came to the lecture, and I'm thinking it has something to do with their important research and publications. Richard, you know, why has your department been so successful? And without missing a beat, he said to me, because we have faculty on every senior committee on this campus. And the campus would have a hard time imagining running without our input. Now. I don't think that holds up all the time. We're in certain moment of changes. That bad equation might be gone. But it really woke me up as a tenure track guy to start thinking how a department functions in this wider institutional ecosystem. He didn't talk about their scholarship. He didn't talk about them having Cambridge University Press books. He talked about how they were integrated into how the wider campus functioned. And so many faculty in this day and age of a more professionalized senior administration on campuses, so many faculty today, I think, feel very alienated from that kind of work. And I still think what Richard said has value. Even though our situation has changed a lot in these 30 years, that that kind of awareness and work is crucial, is crucial to educating someone on how their campus functions. But for so many of us, it is seen as something that takes us away from our real work. You know, scare quotes. And I think that's. That's terribly problematic. I rambled there, Raj, but, oh, it's.
- [44:26]
C
Always about the scenic route. That was great. I just, I mean, so many ideas come to mind and thankfully I mute myself while you're speaking, so I don't interrupt. But I mean, I mean, there's also this level of, you know, there are colleagues of mine who, they're intrigued that I literally go and take on admin work organizations beyond my own cell phone operations. Whether it's a world Sanskrit conference, whether it's this, whether it's that. I enjoy admin work and I think it's important, and I completely get that. For me, it's an albatross. And I think some of us have the admin gene or at least enjoy the punishment of administration or a bit of both. And I think that these sorts of problem solving or paper pushing or however we want to characterize it, it's a super important skill set. But I think so many people in just about every organization, really, it's sort of beyond their pay grade and they're not really thinking about it. And they're just carving out. They're looking at their clearing in the jungle. They're not thinking about what else we need to do in the jungle. I know we've been on for some time and we'll close shortly, but what, what would your call to action be? I know we've circled around so much, but what's your call to action? Whether for grad students, whether for profits in the field, Administration. What would your call to action be?
- [45:53]
B
Professors, grad directors and chairs Start ought to be in those grad student forums. You're like, my God, we gotta. There's so much to do. And the problem is that, as Willy Wonka said, so little time to do it right, that the changes are moving quickly and we don't have the luxury of a decade to turn the aircraft carrier around. That old metaphor. But if we bracket that challenge for the Moment. We need to rethink what a dissertation is. Like, let's just talk graduate education. We need to rethink coursework. We need to rethink comprehensive exams. We need to rethink it all. Like, if the academic job market is not going to come back anytime soon, the call to arms is, why are we making graduate students do what we all did? Well, when I was in graduate school, like, we are now, the old farts, a lot of us, and there's no reason you have to write a dissertation. Like, yes, the grad school might have rules, but these are historically contingent markers of accomplishment that have been long used. Yes, indeed. Well, in this moment, what are they? What's a digital dissertation? Does your program accept articles and not just a dissertation if the dissertation is not going to be someone's first book? In a lot of cases today, this is now like an earlier generation of scholars. You know, your dissertation went in your desk drawer. You did not publish it. It was a credentialing exercise. Well, we're kind of moving back to that day with the job market being what it is. So it's kind of an ideal time to rethink. Well, if it doesn't have to be your first book to get a leg up on the job market and you already have a book, like, that's a phenomenon, I would argue, of the job market. Scholars of the 50s, 60s, they were largely putting dissertations in desk drawers. We famously all know that Jonathan Smith did not publish his dissertation. It was a credentialing exercise to get a degree. That needs to happen. My gosh. At the undergraduate level, are we beyond the point of telling people that the number of majors matter? That has been such a huge issue to our department from very early on, for our own reasons in this state. And over the years, I've interacted with so many chairs and undergrad directors and other campuses, and they say we have eight majors. But, you know, we teach the core here in America, the general education, the core. And I would just shake my hand and try to say to them, they could hire a bunch of instructors to do that. You know the metric of saying you have a waiting list for your classes? That used to be a metric that you would use to justify your undergraduate program. Well, now an administrator will say, well, increase the class size. Like, why do you have a waiting list? You shouldn't have a waiting list. Get a bigger room. Meet at 8 in the morning when you can get the bigger room. If the rooms are all booked. Like, whether I agree with that comeback, that's the comeback. So the slowness of us, even at the undergrad level to pivot and to recognize the major changes that have been happening. So figure out how your own institution works. Figure out the scale of value for the undergrad, the grad programs. The call to action is is my colleague Richard Newton is trying to get together, even as when this posts, maybe it already happened. Undergrad directors at various schools get together, start talking to each other. You might be amazed at the low to no cost situation or sorry initiatives that you might experiment with doing. Recognize that service is in your own best interest to the faculty member. The students come and go. You're the one hoping to be there for a 25, 30 year career. So that movie night might be serving many other purposes than you can imagine. And if the current generation doesn't do a movie night, then you figure out what makes them on a 20,000 student campus, a 10,000 student campus, a 40,000 student feel connected, like they want to be there. Their retention events as well as recruitment. Oh, there's so many things, Raj, but figuring out how your own institution works and grappling with you're not irreplaceable. I want to be a resource for colleagues who want to have these conversations, but the reticence to have it, even in this day and age is at times shocking to me among professional associations, not just departments. I better stop there before I get too specific.
- [50:42]
C
Please say too much, Raj.
- [50:45]
B
I'm always impressed that you want to talk about these things and I know your academic story and your academic journey and I get the ongoing interest you have in them. But the fact that you want to publicize these conversations is always really important. And I just, I think I've said it in the past, but I just want to say it in case. Hoping this gets into the episode that like, thanks. This is, this is huge.
- [51:11]
C
Yeah, it's, it's, it's actually a pleasure. And you know, for the podcast friend and religions anyhow, I adopt the role of sort of, I adopt sort of a, an educated, interested layperson register so we don't lose anybody. And you know, my job is to have a look at the merits of the book. I may agree with the findings or disagree. Nobody would ever know because we're not at a conference and that's not my role because, you know, the guest is gone. I'm here to look at what it's gone through. Peer review, it's public press. Someone's done their job to vet it. And so we're looking at the book just to see what's out there. Now, similarly, but to my mind, at a higher octave, we have to see what's out there in terms of the very apparatus whereby the scholarship is being produced or not produced, because we all feel it. We all know publishing is changing. We all know the academy is changing. We all know where the tectonic shifts are palpable. But without the conversations, it's all going to catch us by surprise. And we'll have no strategy of navigating the tectonic shifts. There's no way that to hold them back. And I think the only sensible thing to do is to look, you know, to examine what's happening so that we can not be sideswiped and we can initiate some contingency planning wherever possible. So, and then that's what, that's one of the things I admire about your work because, you know, you're hardcore sort of religious studies theorists, but you're also eminently practical people. And that's, that is a rare combination of skills.
- [52:50]
B
So it's, you know, what I, I want to see back to the, the short term. I want to see other senior people writing stuff like this. What is your vision of the future of the field? How should a department run? And not just senior people. Like, when I was in my early 30s, I was just full of piss and vinegar and I knew how the field ought to be. And I assume there's others out there in their early 30s. Where do they think it ought to be going? Like, start writing on this. Give us all other ideas to work with. It's going to take time to get published. I hope we have the time, but I just see too few leaving their silo and taking a stab at this.
- [53:27]
C
Yeah, well, you're aware. So I'm glad that you and your contributors have certainly taken a stab at this. And so thank you very much for being on the podcast today.
- [53:35]
B
Thank you, Raj.
- [53:37]
C
For those listening, we've been speaking with Dr. Russell McCutchen on our primary expertise, a future for the study of religion. Until next time, keep. Well, keep listening, keep reading, and keep contemplating the future of religion. Take care.