Tag Archives: meritocracy

We’ve already got the robes: Of monks and us

This is the last post in a six part sequence called Strange Rumblings in the Meritocracy.

In this series I’ve written a lot about education, its constraints, the pressure we all feel to compete in the meritocracy, and some possible ways out. Much of this came from my reflecting on the fact that the financiers I study make use of university credentials to speak to their own worth in ways that are far from what we would like to do in our classrooms and in our research. I’ve distinguished assessments that are supposed to speak to essential parts of a person (GREs, SATs, GPAs and so on) and mark them as special, from feedback on particular work that is often offered open-endedly and in a pass/fail format (on, say, a thesis), as in a model of apprenticeship. I’ve also suggested that the more we get in the business of assessing the worth of someone’s character or the potential of someone’s soul from our various course and research offerings, the less we know what we’re doing, and the more we play into our current, meritocratic modes of anointing elites. In this last post I want to offer some thoughts on what academia might look like if somehow we were able to strip away the meritocratic ranking, the obsession with grades and league tables, and focus on the substance of teaching and growing what we know. So in the grand spirit of comparison I want to compare the student’s path in a university to the novice’s path in a Catholic monastery.

To reiterate I’m not saying academia is a monastery, or the monastery is a college (though there are similarities). What I am suggesting is that, insofar as we want to get out of the soul-weighing business, and into the work of teaching what we know, monastic formation is worth considering.

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How to Teach Anthropology Without Making Your Students Dumb

Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Daniel Souleles. This is the first post in a sequence called Strange Rumblings in the Meritocracy.

Yes, this title is clickbait. Please, allow me a few paragraphs to explain.

In my graduate program, particularly in the early stages, there was a lot of anxiety, impostor syndrome, and fear. All told, fear was probably at the root of things–fear of failure, fear of being found out, and perhaps, most basically, fear of being tossed out. Over the first two years of the program we would meet at the beginning and or end of each semester with the four professors who ran the program. Masters students and other  departmental students called them “the four horseman.” And The ever-present concern in these meetings was that your number would finally be up. It helped matters not one bit that there was a healthy oral history in the department about all manner of ejection. Did you hear the one about the whole cohort that got asked to leave after summer field-work? The fields lay fallow that year, and there was but one survivor.

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