Tag: summer

French Summers in Austin in the Age of Abu Ghraib

Jonathan Wilson
The Rio Grande (downtown) campus of Austin Community College
Cropped from a 2014 photograph by Larry D. Moore (CC BY-SA 3.0)

When I recall my time in college almost two decades ago, I remember scenes and moods.

The prickling of my damp skin when I stepped into air-conditioned buildings in August in the Piney Woods. The odd thrill of sneaking into classrooms late at night to watch classic movies on the projector screens while student security guards turned a blind eye. Basking in the love of my new friends as I walked back to my dorm through pouring rain, which seemed to keep coming down throughout that October. But also the loneliness and impotent anger I felt as an antiwar student at an evangelical Christian college in Texas during the early 2000s. Then the exhaustion and euphoria that hit me in the middle of each week around 3 a.m. during the misbegotten semester when all seven of my classes met on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And then, as looming storm clouds forced the outdoor ceremony into the basketball arena on the day I finally graduated, feeling as happy, sad, confident, and scared as I’ve ever been, then sensing catharsis as the rain started while our new local congressman, Louie Gohmert, gave our commencement address.

A few days ago, I learned about the deaths of two people who defined two of my summers during those years.

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Investing in a Part-Time Community

Jonathan Wilson1 Comment

St Peter's Cathedral, Scranton, Pa.

My teaching season began today. The summer isn’t over, but for the next two weeks, I will be participating in faculty development seminars offered by the Jesuit Center at the University of Scranton.

These seminars focus on pedagogy and the vocation of a teacher. Most participants today said they came to learn how to teach better. However, there is also a larger institutional purpose. The University of Scranton encourages its instructors to think of our work in explicitly Catholic ways. We are not expected to be Catholics—although I suspect most participants in today’s seminar were at least raised that way—but we are encouraged to place our teaching within that tradition. We are asked to “support the mission,” in the typical language used on campus; these seminars are designed to help faculty members across different disciplines conceptualize what that means.

At this point, I’ll confess to mixed feelings, but not about Catholicism. I’m not Catholic myself, but I’ve spent many years living and working in various kinds of Christian communities, and I admire Catholic theology’s ways of framing education as a work of deep love for the created world. I love its characteristic insistence that education should be part of a search for meaning, not simply a process of narrow knowledge-creation or knowledge-dissemination. On a practical level, I have taught in three Catholic institutions, each with a slightly different mission, and although this also means I know some of Catholic education’s limitations, I’m profoundly grateful for each.

My mixed feelings come instead from my work’s liminal place in the institution. Because I’m an adjunct, part of me resists the idea that I should contribute anything to the institution, as a specific organization, unless I get paid for it. The university has made no long-term investment in me, so I would be foolish to make long-term investments in it. This arrangement can lead to deep cynicism, and I don’t think I’m alone among contingent faculty members in experiencing that problem.

But however little faith I have in institutions, I’m not cynical about teaching. It’s a thing of joy and a work of love, and I’m willing to do just about anything that will advance it. It’s exciting to see any university cultivate it, even if just in theory, as much as this one has. So I’m optimistic about the next two weeks, and I hope I will be able to contribute something useful to these discussions.

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Image: Postcard, “St. Peter’s Cathedral and Rectory, Scranton, Pa.,” mid-twentieth century. Tichnor Brothers Postcard Collection, Boston Public Library.