Most of my advisors tell me something to the effect that they don’t know any PhD grad who doesn’t get 5 years out and hate their dissertation, think the opposite of what they wrote, etc. In BYU Religious Education, this takes an interesting form. While it is true that there is a major concern on the part of those who are thinking about a job in RelEd over whether they will lose all touch with their field, research agenda, etc., there is also an explicit attitude expressed by members of the search committees with regard to the influence of the PhD experience. I have heard from more than one source that people on the hiring committees routinely ask something like the following of potential candidates coming out of PhD programs (i.e., non-CES-track hires): “Robert J. Matthews [of blessed memory] used to say that it takes seven years for people to get the PhD out of their system. What do you think he meant by that?”

For me, the major difference between my advisors’ statements about the degree/my own feelings about it, and what I’ve heard from my sources about certain BYU RelEd faculty, is the overt pathological language: While I might think that the PhD is a stepping stone, an activity wherein the process is the important thing and not necessarily the finished product, the BYU RelEd attitude seems to be that the PhD is something you “recover from” or “get over” as you would a serious illness. It is like Chemotherapy: necessary but sickening nearly to death. Or, alternatively, it is a result of substance abuse: After the PhD you have to sober up from Dissertating Under the Influence. Serious counseling and behavior modification is necessary if the victim is to be fully integrated into healthy, normal society.

What do you think he meant?

In Plato’s dialogue Crito, Socrates tells his friend Crito that he cannot flee his death sentence and impose upon himself exile. He is an Athenian and everything he has become, all the things that make him Socrates, are the result of Athenian culture and Athenian institutions.

I sometimes feel similarly towards the University of Utah.

My time at the University of Utah was a struggle. Long commutes. Financial struggles. I was not a favorite of the faculty. By having kids and a wife who worked, my commitment to the scholarly pursuit was often questioned.

I am a Ute officially because I got two degrees there, my BA and MA. Both are in political science. I actually never lived on campus or even in Salt Lake County, but I spent about 5 years there as a student. It was there as a junior that I fell in love with political theory. It was during my senior year that I took a class focusing on John Rawls.

My understanding of Rawls was greatly expanded while taking graduate seminars in the philosophy department. It was while listening to a public lecture by Utah philosopher Bruce Landesman on John Rawls that I decided to focus my studies on Rawls. That lecture was 11 years ago.

This last school year, I had the privilege of teaching political philosophy and American Heritage at BYU (after teaching similar courses for three years at BYU-Idaho). In addition to my teaching during this last year, I had a number of opportunities to participate in conferences dealing with Mormonism, Religion, and public affairs.

While these meetings and discussions at BYU have been a lot of fun, they have also reinforced two things. First…boy am I a liberal. This was my first heavy dose of conservative academia. Having been trained in the liberal egalitarian school, I was for the first time surrounded by Straussians and religious conservatives. While I expect this in most LDS settings, my department in Rexburg was quite moderate in terms of politics. This moderation was also found in the political science department at BYU, but these conferences had a considerable conservative, though still very intellectual, bent. Second, I am a secular thinker when it comes to politics. My attempt to form a religious argument for egalitarianism has become a secular critique of religious themes. [Read more...]

*As will soon become apparent, I have been influenced by several posts of late. You might consider this a longish comment.

In a routine meeting, I recently heard a department chair of religious studies describe the relationship he has with his own religious tradition as tortured. He went on to say that the tension between faith and scholarship is essential to what religious studies people do. Instead of seeking a once-and-for-all resolution or peace of mind, as some might like to have, he recommended that his audience just accept the tension and learn to put it to use. It offers a lot of creative potential and leads you to ask really difficult and interesting questions, questions that no one else would ask, he said. Without it, “you’re just an historian.”
[Read more...]