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.

Background

Several years ago, I conducted a summer’s worth of field-work with a Catholic Monastery, learning how people become monks and make sense of what God wants them to do.  I lived in-cloister, worked, participated, did interviews, and got into some archival material.

Becoming a Monk

The similarities between monastic and academic life are striking. Most basically, people come in response to a calling. They feel that God has called them to the monastery and a life of prayerful devotion. In turn the potential monk has to take their understanding of that God wants them to do and test it against the understanding of the other brothers. And in turn, the other brothers see it as their responsibility to “form” the raw spiritual energy and personal gifts of the individual in the rock-tumbler of life behind the cloister. As individual as a person’s loving relationship with God is, it must be socially legible, and articulated within the standards of the community.

All of this leads to a series of stages and steps. First a monk comes with informal visits, staying for observational periods, perhaps in a monastic cell, and definitely on the chore-roster. The interested person will participate in all parts of monastic life except department (I mean brother’s) meetings. If, after spiritual advisement and personal discernment, someone decides they want to give monasticism a try, they will enter a one year trial period called the postulancy. At this point, the individual is living as a monk, and trying things out but has not joined the monastery, and certainly not taken any vows. All along the way the postulant takes classes, has spiritual advising, and works on and around the monastery.

If, after a year, the postulant still wants to enter, and if, after a year, the brothers in the monastery still like the postulant and think he’ll be a good monk, the postulant is admitted into the monastery. This is the only time at which the community of solemnly professed brothers get to decide communally whether they will allow someone to enter their monastery. There are other times at which an adviser, or a committee’s opinion can weigh heavily on the living and working conditions of the monk-to-be. But entry to the novitiate is special for it’s formality and its representation of the voice of the monastery.
Should the brothers let the postulant in, he is granted a habit, takes a monastic name, and adopts simple vows–a temporary version of the solemn, permanent vows a monk takes at the end of formation. In this particular monastery, they swore vows of chastity, obedience, individual poverty, stability (staying at this monastery), and conversio morum (allowing the monastic community and the holy spirit to work on their souls).

Simple vows lasted a period of three years and could be renewed three times. This was the period of time over which an individual was meant to truly reflect on their calling in order to decide to enter into life-time vows to the monastery. In turn, in the ideal scheme of things, simple vows would lead to solemn vows which were permanent and only lifted under extreme and unusual circumstances.

All along the way individuals en route to becoming monks are doing work around the monastery, taking classes and studying up on topics of monastic interest, undergoing spiritual advisement, and participating in the regular ritual life of the monastery. Note, too, that classes are not simply in spirituality or theology, but often take a humanistic or liberal arts bent, encompassing literature, philosophy, and history. Too, monks will regularly leave the monastery for parts of their formation, often pursuing academic degree of ones sort or another that match up with their temperament and personal potential. Many also get ordained as priests.

So, just to spell this out, monks become monks via a stepped process of work, scholarship and individual discernment. Formally and substantively this has more than a few echoes to scholarship in which one proceeds, at least ideally, by regular steps and examination to ever higher levels of mastery and community acceptance.

Lifting the Constraints

The similarities to academic life in aspiration and substance make the monastery all the more interesting when one realizes the liberty and hospitality with which monks treat interested comers. First, it’s worth realizing, that this particular order of monks had a commitment to hospitality dating back to the 5th century AD. They treated the stranger as Christ and found space for all visitors. Though they ran a retreat house, the room-rates were suggested. Moreover they welcomed just about anyone interested in their way of life to come and give it a try. All were welcome, even anthropologists.

This hospitality extended to provisioning too. Simply put, if you lived at the monastery, the brotherhood took care of you. They maintained a communal pantry from which you took what you needed. Additionally there was one cooked meal (lunch per day) at which everyone gathered. Individual monks were not meant to accumulate private property, and mostly wore either their monastic habits or used-clothing donated to a community chest. Beyond this the monastery would attempt to assume your debts if you entered and take care of your education and your healthcare, all until your death. One monk estimated
it cost them around $8,000 per year to keep a monk on site. It’s worth noting, too, that they had a wonderful library at the center of things.

Now, given all this, you might expect the monastic life to be overrun with freeloaders and in a constant state of expansion. The monks themselves, when I casually talked to them about their formation process figured that something like one in every two, or 50% of potential-monks ended up staying at the monastery. Since the monastery’s founding in the 1950s, 237 men entered the postulancy. So, if we figure on this notional rate of monastic grown, 50%, we might expect somewhere around 115 monks at the monastery. This would have been something to behold, given that there were only 14 monks (13 solemnly professed and one between the postulancy and the novitiate), 25 monastic cells, and a handful of graves, when I was there doing field work. This brings up a fairly obvious question. Where did those other 223 men go? Why didn’t they remain in paradise?

Leaving Paradise

About halfway through my fieldwork, one of my monk-friends said it might be of interest to look through their “register of religious”, a handwritten notebook tracking the arrival and departure date of all men who entered the postulancy, as well as offering brief biorgaphical information (birthday, place of origin), and, occasionally, reason for leaving. In exchange for access, I agreed not to chase anyone down. Though, I did spend much of the rest of my fieldwork talking to monks about why all those people left, collecting their stories.

The raw numbers were the most surprising. Again, since the 1950s, 237 men had elected to enter the monastery for a postulant period, and only 23 had completed monastic formation and were currently at the monastery or had died, in vows, and in residence. So, roughly speaking, 9 out of 10 people who tried to become monks at some point or another decided that the life was not for them. Put another way, 9 out of 10 people who, at one point, had heard the voice, or at least the push, of a God, into monastic life, ultimately abandon the vocation.

Remember, too, that the material barriers are more or less removed–the monks will provision you (there is no adjunct-food-stamps-scamble here). Moreover, more often than voting people out at the novitiate stage, the monks tend to be pretty forgiving and allow people who really want to stay, to do so. If anything, the monks could stand to be more selective, as, arguably, several personality misfits, have created a considerable amount of heartache for the brothers over the years. So, why did they leave?

Generally, I heard three reasons for leaving: sickness, mismatch, and growth. Sickness was straighforward. Some people had mental problems or enduring trauma, that made the close quarters and solitude and quiet of monastic life impossible. Mismatch happened to otherwise healthy-minded people and was sort of a catch all to not fitting into monastic life. My favorite such story was one man who left not too long before I arrived, and had been there for the better part of a year, one day, decided that he was actually a Buddhist, and therefore should leave the monastery. And finally, the monks had an idea that people grew and developed spiritually while at the monastery. For this reason, they had the idea that often people coming out of the monastery were in a better place than when they started. Moreover, even if it was appropriate for someone to enter the monastery at one point in their life, it might not always be the best place for them. If they outgrow the monastery, they probably should leave, and there are some social scripts for this happening.

One delightful version of this was a longtime, solemnly professed monk fell in love and left the monastery to get married. The monks noted, that perhaps in the past this may not have gone over so well, but now they were just happy for the guy. They missed him, but thought it was probably right that he moved along.

When all is said and done, even given direction from God, a loosening of material constraints and considerations, and a more or less open process that takes all comers, around one in ten people actually make it as monks. Perhaps the vows make a difference. Celibacy, obedience, poverty, stability, close communal life, all these things may strike some as burdens. But it’s worth noting, that, again, everyone who has shown up for the postulancy has thought that all of this stuff sounds great. Everyone more or less accepts the premise of the lifestyle when they start.

One further curious outgrowth of the monastic life is the support and devotional community that has sprung up around monks. Not only are their retreat houses generally occupied, and their services fairly well attended (despite being a few miles up a winding mountain dirt road), but they have developed a network of 100s of oblates, lay-, unvowed-people who admire the monastic life, go to monks for spiritual direction, and participate in retreats. Moreover, the monks manage to support a bit above 50% of their operating budget from donations.

Meritocracy, Inequality, and Monks

With monastic formation we have a process of education that is mostly open, materially unconstrained, individually tailored to each monk, and perhaps functioning as a decent analog to some kind of university education (though at a much lower cost)–book learning, character shaping, lifestyle change, etc. And what happens? Lots of people show up, most stay awhile and learn something or other (the average stay I found was 6 years and 11 months, perhaps exaggerated from some 50+ year outliers), and the overwhelming majority leave because the monastery no longer works for them, or they found what they were looking for.

What do we think would happen if we allowed all comers, perhaps over some minimal competency requirements, to enter our doctoral programs and our professional ranks?How long do we really think people would stay with academia if there weren’t such stigma and cost attached to leaving? What if we could strip away the sunk and the transaction costs from pursuing an education? What would happen to meritocratic elitism if everyone who thought they needed and could do, say, an MBA at Harvard or a PhD at Berkeley, could go and try? Would the education still be a loud proxy for one’s capabilities as a human being? Or would it, perhaps, start to more accurately speak to the mixture of bravado and spreadsheet proficiency one actually learns? How many professors or graduate students would actually remain academics? Perhaps more interestingly, how many undergraduates would study with us in the absence of student debt and our society’s credentialist arms race? How many would care what we have to say if, in some small way at least, we didn’t have our finger on the button that could destroy what they think are their chances of achieving a degree, getting some middle class job, and building a particular life? How many of us are scared of the answer?

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.

Suffice it to say, I felt tremendous relief when I made it through my first two
years and got the go-ahead to continue to doctoral exams. At this year-end meeting, I figured, too, this might be a good opportunity to satisfy my curiosity. I was wondering why on earth I had been admitted to the program. I hadn’t studied anthropology as an undergraduate, and had worked as a paralegal in the years prior. I had read a lot of anthropology and tried my best at writing samples and statements, but have increasingly come to the conclusion that my application was strange, and is not the stuff that good advice is made of. So, I asked one of the horsemen why they let me in. He looked puzzled, and paused, picked up my file (a real, honest-to-god manila file), leafed through, and said, “Oh, you did good on the  GRE.” So a test of algebra II, trigonometry, and analogies got me into a doctoral program in anthropology. This test, at least in some people’s eyes, made me smart. Never mind that I had not demonstrated a whit of competence in my actual, chosen, field of study. The GRE said I was good people.

This brings us back to clickbait. If a test can make you smart, it can also
make you dumb. We have lots of assessments like this in the universities at
which we work. We rank people based on GPA and give honors accordingly.
We often have classes that have one or two make-or-break assessments–a term paper or
two, or a couple of exams. In our academic hiring processes we allow for the prestige
of a particular doctoral program or a particular fellowship, or a particular
well-placed (though perhaps unread) publication to speak for someone’s worth. More
generally, this type of meritocratic sorting becomes a justification for inequality. If
academic credentials are something we can get by dint of hard-work completely
under our own control, then whatever praise or scorn that comes with that work
is justified. Karen Ho (2009) writes about the way junior investment bankers are
seen as smart and qualified based on their elite educational pedigrees,
even without having even basic financial knowledge. I found something
similar in my work on private equity investors. Others have written about how merit
and worth is constructed via academic and scholastic credentials
(Hayes 2013, Khan 2012). It’s a big topic, but for now, I’d like to contrast meritocratic
sorting in class assignments, one-offs that feed into the merit-machine, to a more
iterative goal-oriented assessment, the dissertation (please, hold your laughter).

If meritocratic assessment speaks to your intrinsic worth, apprentice-style
assessment just speaks to how well you did on a particular piece of work, in
pursuit of a goal, nothing more. A decent example of an apprentice-style
assessment is the dissertation (at least in its ideal type). Yes, I can see
the groans and hear the eye-rolls from here. Bear with me. A dissertation, first and
foremost, has an obvious goal in and of itself–an original contribution to some
discipline. Its structure, such as it is, is obvious and more or less known to all
who pursue it. Moreover, people writing dissertations often go through revision,
after revision, after revision, until they get it right. It should not
be a once and done thing. Moreover, once someone has got it right, there is a defense,
which, again, in its idealized form, is a summative conversation about the
work. The defense happens when the committee is convinced you’ve made a contribution to  scholarship, and serves to verify things. That’s it. It would be crazy to
suggest that you give it your best shot, turn something in,
sacrifice a Nuer Cow to Margaret Mead, and hope for the best. No,
of course you can’t redo the dissertation. How would we be able to tell who is
really good at anthropology?

This is the difference between meritocratic sorting and apprentice-style assessment.
Given that I have no interest in passing judgment on someone’s self-worth in the
context of a university anthropology course (that’s some hubris right there), and given
that I have no interest in sorting people into smart or dumb, I’ve made
numerous tweaks and changes to my courses over the years to bring them more in-line
with apprentice-style learning. So, like any good clickbait, this post will end in a
(short) list. Forgive me, Margaret-Mead-Cow-God. What follows are some of
the changes that are found across my syllabi.

1 The Ideas

Every syllabus is an argument. Often it illustrates the thesis or learning
objectives of the course. Sometimes a course plan just argues for the florid paragraph or two we write at the top of a syllabus. When I teach intro to cultural anthropology I want
students to understand basic ideas in anthropology (society, culture, etc.),
be able to read actual ethnographies, then based on those two things do
simple research projects. This type of schematic organization allows me to break the
course into thirds, and spend a month or so focusing on each area. Each subsequent
part of the course reinforces and uses what came before. This mode
of idea-sorting also gets away from the listicle style course. It’s
easy to make, say, an intro course that has a week or two on culture,
society, relativism, exchange, sex, gender, kinship, violence, economics, religion, and
so on. The course in this form becomes a kind of obnoxious cocktail party–lots of
zippy one-liners followed by a hangover in which you realize you don’t remember much
of what happened. Toss in some high-stakes exams and all bets are off.
Sometimes, though, lists are important or at least unavoidable. When I
teach kinship, it’s hard to avoid six or seven different theoretical approaches.
Still, even in that case, I subsume kinship theories to a third of the
course focused on basic ideas, then a third of the course on application
in ethnography (reading cases), and a third of the course seeing
how kinship knowledge from anthropology is used in cross-disciplinary spats
as well as contesting larger societal common knowledge.

The leitmotif with all this idea-talk is having a few expansive sections,
that match up with clear theses or goals, in which students have time to
play with and get to know ideas. Also if you teach any good ethnographies,
there is no need to fear missing something. They tend to bring in just
about everything the discipline does. Seriously. Just try to list all the
anthropological topics mentioned in Righteous Dopefiend.  Death to the survey-course.

2 The Assignments

Assignments are the part of the course where students get to try out ideas that
they’ve never thought before. My courses tend to have five assignments–the first is a
daily reading response (250 words) and or periodic seminar management which is simply graded  pass-fail (4/5 of responses or a good lively conversation usually passes). The last
assignment is a research-proposal or a paper (anywhere from 1500 to 3000 words).
The majority of the grade, 60 percent or so, comes from applied field-research assignments–interviews, observations, fiddling with social psych inventories, and so on.
Students gather their own data and compare what they’ve learned to course readings and
discussions. To take one small example, in a class on Business, Society, and Culture
(or, Who Gets Rich and Why) we spend a lot of time talking about theories of
alienation and the condition of wage labor. So, students do an exploratory
interview with someone about their job. They take notes, record, and ultimately write
a paper (around 1000 words) interpreting what they learned researching as it compares
to course material. The assignments reinforce course content. The finals doubly so, particularly if people elect to do a research proposal, and push their curiosity beyond the course’s syllabus.

3 The Grading

All the above is for naught if, like I and my colleagues before them, your students
carry “the fear” into your class. If they’re so afraid of screwing up that they won’t
take intellectual risks, then they will simply repeat what you say and what they
think you want to hear. So in addition to laying out a clear, detailed rubric by
which I will grade each assignment, and supplying thorough, explicit feedback
with each grade, I allow students to rewrite as many times as they would like.
I also let people rewrite a final in the following semester. I’ve even set up
a protocol with a cover sheet and an office hour meeting. This does two things–
it allows me to be completely honest with grading without fearing I’m ruining
someone’s life (remember this is not a judgment of who you are, just how
you did on an assignment), and it allows the students who want to experiment
and learn and stick with it space to do so. There is an ancillary benefit too,
some people get things right away, others take a lot of time to mull things over.
There’s space for both in this type of class.

A further note–I do not require participation in class; and I have no attendance
or late policy. Part of this is temperamental–I have no desire to be a disciplinarian,
or compel someone to do something they don’t want to do. I assume if a
student is not in class they have a good reason. I count not wanting to
be there as a good reason. And as to participation, some people are anxious
speaking in front of others, and don’t learn well under that sort of pressure.
I trust students to make that assessment on their own. And, perhaps
against considerable odds, I’ve never had much trouble getting discussion
going in class, and people generally seem comfortable working with me.

My classes change from semester to semester. Midway through my classes I give
an informal, anonymous, evaluation of the course to that point. I take time to debrief
with the class and see what is or isn’t working and what they would change.
This is how I came around to not offering exams and not cold calling. It turns out
I could teach just fine without those artifices, mostly as I realized I didn’t
want to perpetuate a system of winners and losers via my college classes.

TL;DR: Listen to your students; don’t coerce them; assess the assignment not
the person; and give people space to screw up and learn.

(NB: I’ve developed my classes through time at private and public, big and
small universities, all with different student bodies. Also,
I understand that many, perhaps the majority of my colleagues
labor under conditions not of their choosing in which this type
of experimentation with courses is impossible because they aren’t
paid enough and have no institutional support or time to devote to
their intellectual craft. Simply put, this is crap.)

Hayes, Christopher. 2013. Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. New York: Broadway Books.

Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press.

Khan, Shamus Rahman. 2012. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at the St Paul’s School. Princeton: Princeton University Press.