How Should Teachers Be Evaluated?

In nearly 40 years of teaching in various institutions I have never encountered a teacher who enjoyed being evaluated. I have been both a teacher under evaluation and an evaluator of other teachers.  As a teacher I have never received an evaluation less than above average and in the last half of my career my evaluations were consistently excellent, yet I still cannot say that I approve of teacher evaluations.

In theory the purpose of evaluating teachers is to improve education.  In practice I have never seen evidence of this cause and effect, but I have witnessed plenty of evidence to the contrary.  Education is a very complicated business and there is no simple, efficient and effective way of determining how one teacher’s performance can affect outcomes.  Assessing student outcomes in order to evaluate teachers is simply unfair and counter-productive--it leads to “teaching for the test,” the marginalization of weaker student cohorts and rests on two false assumption:  1) that the ways students are tested are magically perfect measures of everything a student has learned and can do, and 2) that teachers are uniquely, 100% responsible for student learning.

In addition to student outcomes, there are a number of other ways that teachers can be evaluated:  administratively (punctuality, assiduousness, dress and comportment, etc) , or through self evaluation, or via cv and documentation (certified activities to improve pedagogical skills), through peer evaluation, class-room observations and student evaluations.  I have dealt with each of these approaches over the years without ever coming away with the impression that the process was achieving its objectives.  To my surprise, while trying to defend lecturers in the programs I was supervising against the nasty notes the Department Chair was sending to any part-timer who scored below average on student evaluations, I discovered that my University’s policy, on the books, was to include all of these approaches when evaluating any professor or lecturer.  In practice the only evaluation that the Department actually carried out on a regular basis was the student evaluation.  Here we have the basic problem with teacher evaluations, why they invariably go awry, no-one is interested in following through with the extensive procedures that would be necessary to make the evaluations credible.  Even if people were interested and determined enough to follow the various necessary procedures, they would find themselves dedicating most of the institution’s time, energy and resources to assessing teachers instead of educating students.  In the end, teacher evaluations are simply a means of turning teachers into scapegoats for everything that is wrong in the educational system, not to mention the problems of society at large.

Anyone who has ever stood at the front of a classroom should realize that teachers are being evaluated, measured and assessed by multiple gazes every minute of their teaching day.  Why should teachers be evaluated when so many other professionals aren’t and no-one is interested in even attempting to ensure that they are evaluated thoroughly and fairly?  Why does the issue keep coming up? Mostly, it’s self-fulfilling prophecy.  We know that teachers are not well paid for the value of the work they do, and consequently Faculties of Education tend to attract the bottom of the barrel of University admissions.  The universities then exacerbate the problem by adopting a business model which dictates that they produce as many B.Ed.s as possible, the sausage-factory mentality, ignoring both the need for and the quality of what they are producing.  We then assume--quite wrongly, by the way--that the teachers who are produced under these circumstances can’t be very good and we therefore have to vigilantly assess them after the fact, as if there were some kind of recall mechanism in place to eliminate or repair defective teachers--which, of course, there isn’t (unless you believe in the Government of Manitoba’s plan to force teachers to  re-quality for their jobs every five years).  Contrary to the logic of the situation, skilled, determined, dedicated, effective, intelligent teachers do emerge year after year, not because of but in spite of the system.  Those teachers would, no doubt, like to be recognized, acknowledged, celebrated and rewarded, which brings us back to the many failures of how teachers have historically been evaluated, and the negative or inconsequent results of those evaluations.  There’s more to come on this subject.

The Greatness Trap: Why Good Is Good

You might have noticed that I am fixated on the expression “good teachers.”  All good teachers aspire to be great.  If you are consistently good, you can be sure that eventually one of your students will announce to you that you are a “great teacher.”  Accept the compliment graciously because your hard work deserves at least some of it, because these monumental moments are the real payday in a teacher's life, and because, according to the French aphorism,  “To refuse a compliment is to demand a second.”  At the same time, good teachers need to remain wary of how "greatness" can be a trap.

Do I sound like I'm talking to myself?  Yes, sort of, but I hope I was able to spot the signs of my own hubris and overcome it expeditiously.  Once upon a time, the Maclean's Guide to Canadian Universities used to publish a section called "Popular Profs" in which my name was listed along with three others from my university.  (I would eventually realize that popularity is the kiss of death to a university career. 1) After a former student called me to alert me that I had been named in Macleans, I did wander around for a few days (or was it weeks?) thinking "Wow, I must be a great prof!"  Slowly it began to dawn on me:  "Okay, you're great!  So now what?"  

Thought number two: "If I'm already a great teacher, I shouldn't have to work so hard."

Thought number three wasn't really a thought; it was a behaviour.  A behaviour that caused me to look up a word in the dictionary, a word I already knew but I now had a more profound understanding of:  "mannered."   It means to be artificial, stilted, unnatural.  I was becoming mannered because I was trying to imitate myself, trying to repeat those small excentricities, warm tones of voice, empathetic glances, magnanimous gestures and concerned postures that I thought had made me popular.  As I recognized what I was doing, I also realized that I was spending way too much time thinking about myself, instead of what I was supposed to be thinking about, my students and what I was teaching.  It was time to simply acknowledge that I was lucky, to appreciate and make the best of my good luck, and get back to doing what good teachers do.

Hubris (the pride that comes before a fall) is only half the story of the "greatness" trap.   

Greatness, like all stereotypes, labels, myths and identities, becomes the standard against which you are measured and measure yourself.  If your preoccupation with greatness causes you to work extra hard, to take on extra responsibilities and go beyond what is expected of you and find extra satisfaction in your work, then it can be a good thing.  However, if it becomes a distraction and source of stress, or traps you into something that doesn't support good teaching, then it isn't.  You already know what I'm talking about here.  How many times have you heard, in a sarcastic tone,  something like:  "Well, if you're a feminist then shouldn't you  . . . . "  Or, "'If you are an environmentalist  then you should . . . ."  Or, "If you are such a great teacher then you should . . . ."  

You should stand up proudly for your beliefs, but recognize that any label can be turned into a trap, a means of manipulation.

Here’s a case in point I came across in National Affairs: 

Great teachers matter enormously to the success of their students. While this seems like common sense, it has also been borne out by decades of empirical research: Several studies show that to which teacher a student is assigned makes a huge difference in determining how much that child will learn in a given school year. And many of the benefits of good teachers are more long-lasting. A new study by researchers at Harvard and Columbia, for instance, shows that a student assigned to a great teacher is less likely to have an early pregnancy, is more likely to attend college, and will earn a higher salary as an adult.

Wow, “common sense” and “decades of empirical research”! Talk about seductive! So, what’s the “great teacher” test?  In fact, that’s the point of the article, the necessity of testing, evaluating and grading teachers.  And who is going to decide who and what the great teachers are?  Some administrator or pedagog who hasn’t been near a classroom in the last ten years no doubt.  

To avoid the traps, stay focussed on what you know good teachers do.

1. This is, of course, anecdotal evidence, but when it comes to "popularity as career suicide" what other kind of evidence is there.   Three members of my department had, over the years, been identified as "Popular Profs" in The Macleans' Guide.  After being identified as "Popular," one was forced into early retirement.  The second was denied a full-time position, and I was blocked from promotion.

How Much Do Good Teachers Matter?

Sometimes the question is more important than the answer. Periodically, in the midst of a teaching session, I would ask myself this question: How much does the quality of my teaching really matter in the overall education of my students?  

Considering all the potential factors which could determine how well or much a student might learn, how big a difference could the time a student spent with me really make?  Relative to everything else that might be going on in a student’s life imprinting itself on mind and body,  if I imagined myself to be responsible for 2% of a student’s total learning in any given year, I would be claiming a lot.

If you believe in compound interest, 2% is a lot.  A 2% increase in knowledge compounded annually, will produce a life-changing increase in knowledge of 65% over a 25-year period (according to my compound interest calculator).  Put another way, at the risk of sounding biblical, good teachers plant seeds which they have sound reason to hope will grow over time and make a difference in the lives of those they’ve taught.

But the answer isn’t what is important about asking this question.  The question is important in its own right, even without an answer, because it reminds teachers of the limitations of their short-term influence.

Why should teachers remind themselves of their limitations?  For one thing, it’s a mental health issue.  In my experience, wherever teachers gather the phrase “burn out” is used all too frequently and glibly, but teachers do need to pace themselves.  There is no limit to how much work any individual might put into teaching.  No matter how much or how well you might do, when it comes to teaching there is always room to say I could have done more or better.

And there are no limits to what we might imagine the effect of a teacher might be.  Unfortunately, when we fail to achieve fantastic, imaginary goals, it is a typical  human response to do less rather than as much as we are able.  The Danes are repeatedly identified in global surveys (much to their own surprise) as the happiest in the world.  The reason they score so well on happiness tests is their modest expectations. Maintaining low expectations shouldn’t  be an objective, but teachers need to allow themselves to enjoy the satisfaction of their achievements--even if those achievements might not count as world-changing  or award-winning in anyone’s books.  Being able to say “that went pretty well” at the end of a class is a monumental moment in a teacher’s life, and the accumulation of those positive memories, the why and how and wherefore of them, is what makes good teachers good teachers.

There is another, and perhaps more important reason, that teachers need to question and recognize the limitations of their influence:  it’s focus.  Teachers need a version of The Serenity Prayer.  You know, the one that alcoholics recite:  “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”  

With teachers courage matters, but they also need determination, conviction, passion, optimism, idealism, skill, concentration and focus to do what they can do, taking care of the details, the immediate, the one-on-one, the minutia,  being on time, well prepared, creative and caring, without being distracted and overwhelmed by what they can’t control or do anything about at the moment.   I recently heard a Navy SEAL being interviewed (he was part of the team that assassinate Osama Bin Ladin).  He described losing his courage, freezing up, unable to move while in the middle of a rock-climbing exercise.  The instructor rappelled over to him and reminded him “your universe is three square feet.”  The trick is to stay focussed on the three square feet that matter right now, finding the next crevice and toe hold, and avoiding the paralysis of thinking about all those things that could happen, that might go wrong, that you can’t do anything about.  It is difficult to recognize and easy to forget how hard and how essential it is for teachers to stay focussed on what they want to achieve in the moment.  How much you matter doesn't matter!  What matters is what you are doing right now!

How We Train University Students to Write Poorly (with Addendum)

When I was in the hunt for a tenure-track university position, I attended a mentoring session on how to publish led by Linda Hutcheon, who was, at that moment, the newly hottest thing in Canadian postmodernist theory and criticism.  “Writing a thesis,” she told us, “was an exercise in covering your ass.”  There was nothing shocking or striking in her declaration; it was a well-worn bromide, a truism.  No-one in the audience blinked.

I began my teaching career giving one-on-one instruction in administrative writing (among other things) to civil servants working for the Government of Canada.  Those were the days when “writing style” meant being able to express yourself in clear, crisp and concise prose (without overdoing the alliteration).  Around the same time, a journalist, with the Ottawa daily, The Citizen, wrote a regular column on effective writing.  In one of his articles, he constructed the following fable to explain why and how government administrators deliberately wrote poorly:

One Friday morning, a middle manager discovered that the photocopy machine wasn’t working properly.  He immediately sent off a memo (yes this was before email) to an underling, telling him to “render it inoperative.” On his way into the office on Monday morning, the boss saw the photocopier in the garbage and asked the middle manager “Why in hell are we throwing out the photocopy machine?”  To which the middle manager replied, “I have no idea; I sent him (the fall guy) a memo on Friday telling him to unplug it.” 

Middle managers write poorly, with purpose, using inflated language which might sound good to unwary ears, but leaving the message unclear, in order to escape responsibility for what they have written.  They cover their asses.  We unwittingly (or is it deliberate?) train university students to do the same.

The markers of defensive, cover-your-ass writing are pretty easy to spot:  passive voice, inflated, ambiguous vocabulary, un-contextualized jargon, confusing metaphors, and vague pronoun references.  Passive voice:  that’s when, instead of saying “John threw the photocopier into the trash,” you say, “The photocopier was thrown into the trash.”  With the passive voice you can avoid making anyone responsible for an action—at least until the boss comes nosing around. Inflated, ambiguous vocabulary and jargon need no explanation:  “render it inoperative” mis-speaks for itself—and I’m sure you have lots of examples of your own.   

Even though I spent a career in the metaphor business (a lit prof remember), I have come to detest how metaphors are used in daily life, not to clarify a point but to escape clarification.  This morning I heard VP Joe Biden (I like Joe) telling the people of the Ukraine “you have a tough road ahead, but the USA is going to walk that road with you.”  Metaphors are what politicians use to sound reassuring while promising absolutely nothing.  

I still remember when a university administrator accused our research project's computer technician of “making spaghetti” and later when discussing database management that we “didn’t want to put a Volkswagen engine in a Cadillac.”  I suddenly understood how an administrator could spend four hours in a meeting without ever saying anything useful . . . by speaking metaphorically.

Vague pronouns are probably the most common and seemingly innocuous way that writers can lead you in dizzying circles and avoid saying anything that can be grasped.  A pronoun is by definition a word which stands in for a noun.  A pronoun is doing it’s job if (with occasional exceptions called “empty pronouns”) we can clearly and easily identify the noun which the pronoun is standing in for.  Example: “Mary stood waiting in the rain without an umbrella crying for half an hour, and she said it was my fault.”  What noun should replace the pronoun “it” in this sentence?  See the problem?

Of the many ways we train students to write poorly (for example, by refusing to address the issue, endlessly passing the buck on to a fictional someone else who will magically solve the problem), the way we most actively encourage students to write unreadable prose is to present them with examples of bad writing suggesting that they are evidence of genius and, implicitly, the models students should be following. 

Now that you have your BS monitors turned on full, consider this passage from The Location of Culture in which Homi Bhabha defines his concept of “Third Space.”  I should explain that this book was repeatedly presented to me in graduate theses I was examining or supervising—requiring me to read it cover to cover.  Bhabha is a Harvard professor and his work is generally considered essential reading for students in the humanities and cultural studies.  “Third Space” is the concept for which he is best known.  

If you are a good-hearted, well intentioned person (which, by the way, most students are), you will attempt to understand, to make sense of, the passage.  I don’t want to stop you from trying to understand what you are about to read, but my intention is to demonstrate in terms of a few simple rules of English composition why and how this passage verges on incomprehensibility (maybe not “verges,” just “is” incomprehensible).

The linguistic difference that informs any cultural performance is dramatized in the common semiotic account of the disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (énoncé) and the subject of enunciation, which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgement of its discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific space.  The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot ‘in itself’ be conscious. (54)

Did you give up after the first sentence because of the vocabulary?  No doubt if you admitted to some cultural-studies scholar that you didn’t understand this passage, he would tell you that you need to understand that “linguistic difference” is a reference to Saussure and Derrida, “cultural performance” alludes to the work of Judith Butler, “semiotic account” comes from Saussure and the subject of the enunciation versus the subject of the proposition refers to basic linguistics but Anglo-Americans associate this distinction with Lacan.  The word “disjunction” is one that Sokal (see my previous post) would draw our attention to because it has a very specific meaning in logic, mathematics and biology.  In common language is just means a disconnection or separation.  We have no way of knowing if Bhabha is using this word in the common everyday sense or in a more specific scientific sense.  What we can attest is that he is laying on the jargon as thickly as possible, with little or no indication that it is clarifying what he wants to say.

However, what I want to draw your attention to is the word “which” in the first sentence.  “Which” is a relative pronoun.  According to the basic rules of composition, a relative pronoun, all things being equal, should refer to the closest noun or noun phrase, its antecedent. The first word “which” in Bhabha’s sentence is preceded by six different noun phrases.  If Bhabha isn’t following basic rules of composition, then the second half of his sentence can have six completely different meanings, and it would be impossible to know which of the six he is intending.  Therefore we must credit Bhabha with following this basic rule and we can substitute “the subject of the enunciation” for “which” and we get: “the subject of the enunciation [ . . .] is not represented in the statement.”  If you happen to know what “the subject of the enunciation” means (roughly, the person speaking) you will understand this statement because it is an analytic truth.  "Subject of the enunciation" means the subject not in the statement. Bhabha's sentence is the equivalent of you saying “My friend John is a bachelor, who is not married.”  Thus far Bhabha isn’t telling us anything; he is simply expressing a redundancy, repeating what anyone who knows the expression “subject of enunciation” would already know.

Are you still with me?  Did you notice that in the first sentence there are five pronouns?  “Which,” “which,” “its,” “its” and “its.”  The way these pronouns are lined up they all refer back to the same noun phrase:  “the subject of the enunciation.”  If we plug in the noun phrase for each of the pronouns we can see what Bhabha is saying in simple syntax.

1. “the subject of the enunciation is not represented in the statement.”  This is the analytic truth (redundancy) I have just point out.
2. “the subject of the enunciation is the acknowledgement of . . .”  My first reaction is that this is a nonsense statement, but it is a fragment so let us complete the phrase.
3. “the subject of the enunciation is the acknowledgement of the subject of the enunciation’s  discursive embeddedness and address.”  Yes, the big words seem deliberately confusing, but you can clarify the kind of thing this statement is saying by substituting simple nouns.  You would get something like this:  “The tree is the acknowledgement of the tree’s being in the forest.”  Here we have a statement that is inflated and awkward but at the same same time ludicrously obvious.  Yes, a tree being in the forest means that there is a tree in the forest.  Yippee!
4. the phrases which follow in the rest of the sentence simply repeat these ludicrous redundancies:  “the subject of the enunciation is the acknowledgement of the subject of the enunciation’s  cultural positionality.”  Or, the tree is an acknowledgement that the tree occupies a position in the forest. 
5. “the subject of the enunciation is the acknowledgement of the subject of the enunciation’s  reference to a present time and a specific space.” Yes, the tree, by existing, tells us that the tree exists in a specific time and place.  

As you can see Bhabha’s sentence either repeats information that is obvious, irrefutable because it is tautological, or he is saying something subtle that is simply wrong or at least unproved.  In other words, either he is telling us that “a bachelor is a man who is not married” which we already knew, or he is telling us that “a bachelor is a left-handed man who is not married” which is wrong or at least unproved. Whichever the case, the obfuscation of the sentence seems undeniable. 

Bhabha’s next sentence—“The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I the You designated in the statement”—is also an obvious truth, but at the same time it is misleading or at least confusing because now we have to wonder if we are still talking about the difference between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the proposition—the topic sentence of the paragraph. 

In the next sentence Bhabha reveals his great concept, his claim to fame the “Third Space” (always in capitals to make the point of its grandeur no doubt): “The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space [. . . ]. “  Back to pronoun reference:  if “these two places” refers back to “I” and “You,” then the “Third Space” seems so obvious that it hardly warrants a special name.  Yes, there is always a space of mediation between two people communicating which affects the communication  process.  What does this have to do with the topic sentence of the paragraph, the difference between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the proposition?

Then we have another series of four pronouns:  “which,” “which,’ “it” and “itself.”   Playing our substitution game we get:

1. “a Third Space [. . .] represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy”
2. “of which it cannot ‘in itself’ be conscious” gives us something like:  a Third Space cannot, in itself, be conscious of the general conditions of language [ . . .]

In phrase 2 above, we see an example of an out-of-control metaphor.  Specifically, we see “Third Space” being converted to a personification (what used to be called “pathetic fallacy”), something reified as capable of consciousness (which in this specific case cannot be conscious of a particular something).  Does this metaphor, the personification of “Third Space” help us understand what it is?  I think not; quite the opposite.  If the “Third Space” is a way to designate how communication between two people is mediated, then it is quite a simple concept, but the introduction of the metaphor of consciousness together with a flurry of verbs and verbal phrases which imply personification and whose exact meanings are always hard to pin down—“inform,” “dramatize,” “is the acknowledgement of,” and “represent”—guarantee that this simple concept will remained covered in a thick fog of confusion.

Whatever we might think of this passage, it isn’t good exposition, and we should not be holding it up to university students as a model they should follow in their own writing.

Addendum

From Wikipedia:

Bhabha has been criticized for using indecipherable jargon and dense prose. In 1998, the journal Philosophy and Literature awarded Bhabha second prize in its "Bad Writing Competition,"^[12] which "celebrates bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles." Bhabha was awarded the prize for a sentence in The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994):

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.^[12]

Professor Emeritus of English at Stanford University Marjorie Perloff said that her reaction to Bhabha's appointment to the Harvard faculty was one of "dismay," telling The New York Times that "He doesn't have anything to say." Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University, remarked on Bhabha's writing: "One could finally argue that there is no meaning there, beyond the neologisms and Latinate buzzwords. Most of the time I don't know what he's talking about."^[4]

Addendum 2

I admire the cartoonist's ability to make the point in a brief and entertaining fashion.

The Postmodern Hoax

Beyond the Hoax

Reading Alan Sokal’s Beyond the Hoax brought back the question that haunted my university teaching career:  How much of postmodernism was intellectual fraud?

"Transgressing Boundaries" and Social Text

Sokal is the physicist who submitted a deliberately bogus article entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries:  Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the cultural studies journal Social Text.

Post-structuralism as Mummery

After it was accepted and published (Spring/Summer 1996), Sokal announced that the article was nonsense, a parody of postmodernist half-baked arguments and verbiage. Sokal and the Belgian physicist/philosopher, Jean Bricmont, subsequently published Impostures Intellectuelles (1997) in which they systematically unmasked the mummery of leading lights of post-structuralist theory such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva.

Jacques Lacan as Charlatan

The most compelling essay I have read on Lacan is Dylan Evans’ “From Lacan to Darwin.”  Evans spent at least a decade studying Lacan, first in the context of psychoanalysis as a dedicated Lacanian disciple in Buenos Aires, then in Comparative Literature at UNY Buffalo, and finally in London as a psychologist and adherent of “evolutionary psychology.”    Evans confesses:

“As I became more familiar with Lacan's teachings, the internal contradictions and lack of external confirmation became ever more apparent. And as I tried to make sense of Lacan's bizarre rhetoric, it became clearer to me that the obfuscatory language did not hide a deeper meaning, but was in fact a direct manifestation of the confusion inherent in Lacan's own thought.”

Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Paradoxically, Evans offers the closest thing to a justification for Lacanian psychoanalysis  (and the whole of Lacan’s work for that matter) I’ve ever read.  The process is one in which the analyst is a fraud, and when the patient finally discovers that his psychoanalyst is a huckster then he is cured.  (Consider the possibility that the whole of postmodernism/post-structuralism was a hoax, and we are now cured because we can say so.)  Evans concludes by questioning the legitimacy of the process, but his preamble shows a degree of coherence that is rare in discussions of Lacan: 

“Lacan did not believe that psychoanalysts should think of themselves as experts, able to reveal the hidden meaning of the patient's speech, but he did believe that the patient should think of the analyst that way. The analyst, in other words, did not really possess a secret knowledge, but was merely 'supposed' by the patient to possess this knowledge. In the course of the treatment, the patient would come to 'de-suppose' the analyst of this knowledge – that is, to lose his faith in the analyst. That, in fact, was the whole point of psychoanalytic treatment.”

Fashionable Nonsense

How is it possible that this “fashionable nonsense” (to quote the American title of the Bricmont & Sokal book) became so widespread and firmly, even dogmatically accepted in the arts and humanities programs of Anglo-American universities?  The answer is fairly obvious and often repeated with allusion to the fable of “the Emperor’s new clothes.” What I can add, perhaps, is some of the detail of how university professors and students aspiring to become university professors were compelled to show an understanding of; that is, to pretend to understand, the nonsense underpinning post-structuralist theory. 

How Scholarship Becomes Dogma

The same requirement that we put on students writing theses applies to professors submitting their work for peer review:  “show that you have done the reading.”  “The reading” in the postmodern period is, of course, the post-structuralist theorists:  Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Foucault, etc, and to make matters worse, everyone who makes use of this Tel Quel cabal, which turns out to be just about everyone who is getting published.  For professors, the cliché is still fully functional: it’s publish or perish.  If you want to get published, which is what you do to get tenure and promotion, not to mention funding so you can go to conferences at juicy locations like Hawaii and Paris, then you better know your post-structuralist theorists, or at least be ready to pretend you do.  

The Trickle-Down Effect on Pedagogy

The idea that a couple of hundred specialists might gather at a conference to spout this turgid, empty language at one another, playing verbal puzzle games, didn’t really disturb me all that much.  Though it did seem a terrible waste of time and brainpower.  What did disturb me was to see students chastised for failing to “theorize” and “problematize” as if these terms signaled an accomplishment.  It disturbed me to see students struggling to understand theories which didn’t hold water and being forced, like their professors, to pretend they made sense and were being grasped;  or, worse still, simply being turned off the study of literature and culture because it had been transformed into the study of obtuse theories.

Negotiating Postmodern Dogma

Then, of course, there was my dilemma of how to negotiate the hypocrisy:  teaching theories I really didn’t find credible.  In my research and publications, I think I did alright:  showing that I had read the post-structuralists while signaling that I wasn’t really buying the theories they were selling (citing Sokal and Bricmont for example).  Teaching undergraduates, I could cherry-pick concepts and vocabulary, acknowledging their soi-disant origins, but spinning them, à la Rumpelstiltskin, into something that made sense; that is, that made sense to me, and could be transformed into something that made sense and was even useful for students.  I could explain deconstruction, as Ellis does in Against Deconstruction, in terms of the many challenges to essentialism (the idea that words get their meanings from one-to-one correspondence with the “essences” of objects in the world).  While acknowledging that the un-readable Kristeva did the earliest work on the important and useful concept of intertextuality, I could quickly turn to Graham Allen’s accessible description of the idea (in Intertextuality) that “meaning [. . . .] exists between a text and the other texts to which it refers and relates” rather than within an independent text.  The ubiquitous concept of “the subject” as an unstable site of consciousness, so typically associated with Lacanian psychoanalysis, is what the philosophy of mind is all about and could be explained in that context. 

The Imposition of Postmodern Dogma on Students

Dealing with graduate students and graduate theses was more problematic.  It was disheartening to see students being led down a garden path, into dead ends, on wild goose chases--all the clichés applied.  I tried to be frank, but I also recognized that if students wanted to get on in the academic world, they could not afford to be dismissive of post-structuralism. Even if you knew the emperor wore no clothes, there was no advantage and significant risk in saying so.

Postmodernism Versus Enlightenment

Perhaps the most important part of Beyond the Hoax is its preface.  There Sokal concludes, from the surprising attention which the hoax received (though I always felt it didn’t receive enough), that “a not insignificant cohort of adults recall having endured, as undergraduates, an English, cultural studies or women’s studies course overly filled with Lacanian or deconstructionist verbiage, and who may have doubted their own intellectual competence as a result.”  On a broader, political level, Sokal quotes Noam Chomsky’s complaint that postmodernist intellectuals, while claiming a leftist agenda, have actually deprived working people of the tools of emancipation by claiming “that the ‘project of the Enlightenment is dead,’ that we must abandon the ‘illusions’ of science and rationality -- a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use.”  To substantiate Chomsky’s point, consider the fact that we have been told ad infinitum by postmodernists that “common sense” and “binary thinking” (the only kind of thinking that the human brain is capable of) are evidence of right-wing, conservative ideology.

Postmodernist Abuse of Language

What I have most appreciated of Sokal’s work (though odd since he is a physicist) is his critique of postmodernist abuses of language.  What Sokal observes most often relates to how postmodern academics use terms from science which also exist in common language but without ever clarifying the sense in which the words are being used.  Instruction number one which I would typically give to graduate students approaching a thesis was “define your terms,” but it was a tough sell considering the postmodern scholars they were reading rarely, if ever, did so.  The postmodernists’ solution to the ambiguity, obfuscation and incoherence in their own writing was to celebrate ambiguity, polysemy and indeterminacy as if they were positive features in expository writing.

Science and Scepticism

The Sokal hoax provided a healthy revelation of what we were allowing to happen inside academia, but I’m less sure that the revelation has made its way into university classrooms.  As much as I admire what Sokal has accomplished, as he clarified his objectives in perpetrating the hoax and clarified the terms of the debate between postmodernist constructionist and empirical scientists, I found myself sliding back to where I had come from among the phenomenologists and skeptics.  The question, which is as old as philosophy itself, boils down to: “Is there an objective reality, uncontaminated by our perceptions and intentions, that we can have access to?”  Science must answer yes because the study of that reality is its defining objective.  Cultural-studies academics like me, unimpressed as I am with post-structuralism, are destined by discipline, like the ancient Greek philosophers of the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, to remain skeptical.

Reflecting on “The Annunciation/Visitation,” How to Read the Bible

After my last post, I got this message from a friend and former colleague:

“Now read a short passage from the gospels, which have a far greater claim on the consciences of Christians, the account of the Visitation (Luke 1:39-56), in any translation you choose. Clearly and unequivocally both the fetus of Mary (who was newly pregnant at the time of the incident described) and that of Elizabeth (who was six months along) are considered unreservedly to be human beings.”

(At the same time I got a warm, witty and encouraging message from one of my former students who, I think, was concerned that few people were responding to my blog.  Like all idle idealists I must confess to occasional naive daydreams about this blog somehow making me rich and famous--actually, I’d settle for rich or famous--but the reality is a blog is a public diary and I am content even if it remains no more than that.  After years in academia, I can’t tell you what a relief and pleasure it is to write what I think without having to find the exact quote with the right page number from the right authority, and to be constantly second-guessing myself about how my comments will play with the university, my colleagues, journal editors, peer reviewers and academic readers in general.  I should also mention that Google offers very cool stats-tracking telling me how many hits specific pages have received [yes I know “hits” don’t necessary mean very much, but I’m an optimist] and where my blog has been visited from.  As of today this blog has received 1,041 page views, mostly from Canada and the USA, but 49 from Russia and 3 each from Norway and Serbia.  [Eat your heart out, Lady Gaga!]  No doubt all quite meaningless but I thrive on self-deception.  My former student commented that for him the blog is like continuing our classes together, only for free.  Ultimately, same here.)

Back to “The Annunciation/Visitation.”  Reading over the passage from the Gospel of Luke, I was surprised by how familiar most of it was to me.  The passage supplies the text of the “Hail Mary” prayer which I recited some ten thousand times in my youth.  My friend/colleague’s claim that the passage “clearly and unequivocally” demonstrates that fetuses “are considered unreservedly to be human beings” overstates the case that could be made from the evidence which the text provides.  However, before I continue some fuller disclosure is in order on my part.

I am an agnostic.  I’ve heard it said that this is a cope-out position.  For me it is the only logical stance possible in relation to religion.  Unlike an atheist, I cannot find logical grounds for claiming that God does not exist, or that something equivalent to a supreme or divine force or forces in the universe do exist, although I might object to the specific beliefs or practices of a specific religion that I find unjustified, immoral, illogical, incoherent or impractical, especially if those beliefs or practices are played out and allowed to influence the political or judicial domains.  Even at the worst of times, I find the world to be a marvelous place, and nature itself to be miraculous.  I have no doubt that the universe far exceeds my human, intellectual powers of comprehension.  Therefore, it is logically impossible for me to claim that God (or gods) does (or do) not exist.  I just don’t know.  However, when I think of God, as he was presented to me as a child, an old white man with long hair and beard, I find no reason to believe or accept that God is (or must be) white or male.  When I think of the numerous images I have seen of Jesus Christ portrayed as a light-skinned man with light hair and eyes, I know those images are historically inaccurate.

As an agnostic my approach to religions and religious believers is to attempt to be respectful, to recognize that religious faith and a belief in God can be great psychological comforts, and that religious tenets can benefit and guide individuals, communities and societies positively.  I can’t know otherwise until I have seen evidence.  Of course, having witnessed the long history of Catholics and Protestants, Christians, Muslims and Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Zoroastrians and Buddhist all killing each other in the name of god and faith, I know that religions have a lot to answer for.  I understand the argument that the world has reached the point where it must overcome religious differences which only seems possible if we do away with religion altogether.  Would the world be a better place without religion?  These days it’s a real question.  I understand the argument for abolishing religion, but I’m not there yet (mostly because I don’t believe the world is there yet).

While I feel compelled to hold back on my critique of religion in general (and the less I know the less I have a right to speak), the exception for me is Catholicism.  I was raised as a Catholic, when being Catholic meant no meat on Fridays, fasting and confession before mass, which was in Latin, and mass was every Sunday, the first Friday of every month before classes started, and every major saint and holy day.  I also attended a Catholic high school where most of the classes were given by priests.  Catholicism is the one religion I have earned the right to criticize unreservedly.

Even as teenagers, my fellow young Catholics and I spotted parthenogenesis as being misogynistic and puritanical.  If you bracket belief in miracles for a moment and consider the historical facts recounted in the Bible, Mary was pregnant before marriage, but not by her fiancé Joseph.  She married Joseph and gave birth to at least five children, and the Catholic Church thinks we should celebrate her as a “Blessed Virgin.”  What’s wrong with being a non-virgin Blessed Mother?  Like all the other non-virgin mothers in the world only blessed?

“The Annunciation/Visitation” in the Gospel of Luke shows a very human touch and a unique awareness of women and pregnancy, as demonstrated by the description of how "the babe leaped in [Elizabeth's] womb" at the sound of Mary's voice.  Much as I like this passage, I don’t see that it in any way contradicts or overrules the Old Testament commandment concerning causing a miscarriage (as discussed in my last post).

As we reflect upon “The Annunciation/Visitation,” we shouldn’t lose track of the obvious.  Luke wasn’t there.  Luke was a Greek, writing in Greek some 30 to 70 years after Christ. Luke is the only evangelist to mention this meeting between Mary and Elizabeth.  John, Matthew and Mark all mention the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus.  In some instances John and Jesus sound like competitors, and their differences were emphatic (John didn’t drink, and was an extreme acetic; Jesus turned water into wine and was criticized for his pleasures and hanging around with publicans and prostitutes) but obviously they reconciled when Jesus agreed to be baptized by John.  I haven’t found anything in the gospels (other than Luke) to indicate that Jesus and John were related or that their mothers knew each other.  Making Elizabeth and Mary cousins who consorted while pregnant, anticipating the later meetings of John and Jesus, is a nice narrative touch which only Luke records.

I agree that the New Testament is, in general terms, a better reference for modern Christians, but evangelicals seem ready to use whatever part of the Bible suits them in a particular argument.  For example, in condemning homosexuality, Leviticus is typically quoted.

While I was writing this post, my friend (by the way, I never use this term disingenuously as some people do; in the 30-plus years we have known each other this is our first exchange on these issues) . . . he sent me this message and a list of quotations from the Psalms where the writer speaks from the perspective of before birth. 

"Well, we are not going to agree on this matter. A very large number of men and women have made studying, researching, interpreting, and, yes, translating the Bible their lives' work, for going on two millennia now; I think I'll rely on the consensus of their opinion, as expressed in and through the teachings of the Church.

13 For it was you who formed my inward parts;

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works;

that I know very well.

15 My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

In your book were written

all the days that were formed for me,

when none of them as yet existed.

(Psalm 139, New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition)"

As familiar as I was with “The Visitation” and “The Annunciation,” I can’t remember ever having read this Psalm before.  I find the writing quite beautiful.  Surfing online I was impressed by the number, extensive detail and precision of commentaries and interpretations available on this passage.  It is typically glossed as being about God’s omni-presence or more simply a reminder that we are God’s creations.  Nothing I have read in the Bible comes closer to animating the wonder and beauty of the fetus.  

My friend is right that “we are not going to agree on this matter,” but his message also brings our discussion back to order.  What I was presenting in the previous post was the duplicity of manipulating the translation of the Bible to suit a 1970s and 80s agenda.  One of the consequences of this manipulation is that the integrity of the Bible is brought into question.  Religious believers used to have to ask themselves why their religion, of all the many possible religions in the world, was the right one to believe in.  Now Christians have to ask the question King James attempted to resolve, which of the many versions of the Bible is the right one?  More overwhelming still, this post is a minor example of the ever expanding number of possible readings and interpretations of the Bible.  In brief, we are talking about the educational issue of how to read, in this case, how to read the Bible.

In his best known work of literary theory, The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye proposes four different approaches to reading a literary text, based on the three ways of reading the Bible outlined by Dante:  literally (the Bible as a historical document), allegorically (the Bible as symbols which must be interpreted), or anagogically (the Bible as a whole, as the word of God).  I have no trouble with the first two approaches but the third, the anagogic, troubles me.  Some readers are bound to be better than others--more knowledgable, dedicated, skilled and aware.  However, the idea that the 80 original books of the Bible, plus the Dead Sea Scrolls, or even just the 66 books of the canon, which were written by different people of varying cultures, in different languages, in different times and places, then repeatedly translated and edited, can now be read as a single work by a single author with one coherent theme, moral or message is . . . (and now I hesitate to give this procedure a name).  We accept the legitimacy of this approach because it has been done for thousands of years by thousands of people and accepted by millions more.  If it were done by an individual a diagnosis of insanity, more specifically, of schizophrenia would be likely.   The novelist, Jeffrey Moore, introduced me to a still more apt syndrome (in The Extinction Club) called “Pareidolia  [. . .] in which the brain interprets random patterns as recognizable images” (60).

As indicated in his message, my friend’s solution, which surprises me somewhat because he is obviously a skilled reader, is the Catholic solution, to rely on “the teachings of the Church.”  That is the last thing I would be ready to do.  As I’ve explained . . . been there, done that.  

I’ve been warned that making my postings so long is very un-blog-like.  If you are a determined enough reader to have reached this point, please accept my thanks and praise, but I have two more points that I consider important and would like to make.

If people, especially people with power and influence, are going to use the Bible to attempt to dictate modern morality, and even modern legality, then we are all compelled, if for no more than self defense and preservation (but let’s not forget the pleasure), to read the Bible along with them and where necessary against the grain of their interpretations and impositions. 

What was Jesus’s view of the fetus in the New Testament?  We don’t know, he never said.  Had he read the Psalms?  We don’t know.  Well then, what was his attitude toward the Old Testament?  Here we can have a partial answer in that the New Testament records Jesus going to great extents to avoid contradicting the Old Testament.  

Consider this sequence from Mark 12.  I’ve left in the opening line because it will be familiar and help provide context for many readers, but in general, the context is that the Pharisees and the Sadducees have been trying to trick Jesus into saying something blasphemous.

17 And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. And they marvelled at him.

18 Then come unto him the Sadducees, which say there is no resurrection; and they asked him, saying,

19 Master, Moses wrote unto us, If a man's brother die, and leave his wife behind him, and leave no children, that his brother should take his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother.

20 Now there were seven brethren: and the first took a wife, and dying left no seed.

21 And the second took her, and died, neither left he any seed: and the third likewise.

22 And the seven had her, and left no seed: last of all the woman died also.

23 In the resurrection therefore, when they shall rise, whose wife shall she be of them? for the seven had her to wife.

24 And Jesus answering said unto them, Do ye not therefore err, because ye know not the scriptures, neither the power of God?

25 For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.  

In this passage, the attempt is to trick Jesus into contradicting Leviticus.  You might remember from my first posting on the Bible that according to Leviticus if a man dies childless, his wife and his brother are required to marry and produce an offspring for him posthumously.  The Sadducees present Jesus with a trick hypothetical question:  what happens if a woman, following this law, has been married seven times;  when she gets to heaven and meets her seven husbands,  whose wife is she?  The obvious presumption is that a man might have several wives, but a woman with more than one husband is unthinkable--even in heaven.  From a modern reading, in the first place, one has to notice that Jesus does not speak against this law, and tacitly accepts that a widow must marry her brother-in-law and vice versa.  Second, impossible-not-to-notice claim (which should be great fodder for a stand-up comedian), there are no marriages in heaven (neither gay nor heterosexual nor lesbian, no monogamy, no polygamy and definitely no polyandry).  What would Jesus have answered if questioned about the law in Deuteronomy concerning the punishment for causing a miscarriage?  We can’t know, and therefore perhaps we should not ask the question.  I can accept this (in)conclusion as long as those evangelicals who oppose abortion also acknowledge that they cannot know the Christian, Biblical answer to this question either. 

My final point/addendum: for two overly-long postings I have been discussing the translation and reading of the Bible, in such a way as to no doubt give the impression that I am a supporter of abortion.  I’m not.  If the statistics I have seen (in the Times Almanac 2004) are anywhere near the truth, there has been a pandemic of abortions raging in America.   For pregnancies among American women, 49% are described as “unintended” and almost half of these unintended pregnancies terminated by abortion.  In 2000, 1.31 million abortions were performed in the USA; in 1996, 1.36 million.  Between 1973 and 2000 more than 39 million legal abortions were performed in the USA.  An abortion is nothing to celebrate.  I have to assume that the day of an abortion is never a happy day in any woman’s life.  Everyone should be interested in reducing the causes of abortion:  the poverty that typically accompanies single-motherhood, the lack of viable alternatives (day care, adoption, extended-family and community support),  and, of course, the lack of contraception, forethought and restraint which precede unwanted pregnancies.  I hope this impression is just my prejudice, but I do have the impression that the righteous attitudes of those people most stridently opposed to abortion cause rather than attenuate the number of abortions in the USA.   My intuition is that the rigid puritanism of the religious right has caused more abortions than it has prevented.  In any event, the Supreme Court of the USA decided in 1973 that it was a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester and nothing I have read in the Bible contradicts that right.

What Bible Translation Says about People Who Oppose Abortion

What surprises me about people who describe the Bible as “the word of God” is how blasé they seem to be about questions of translation.  Even a renowned scholar like Northrop Frye begins his book about the Bible, The Great Code, by glossing over the issue of translation quite glibly.  The translation process is always challenging and complicated.  It is very easy to translate inaccurately, to misconstrue meaning in the translation process, and very difficult to get a translation just right.  In fact, it is generally conceded that a perfect translation is an impossibility, some meaning is bound to be lost or changed as we move from one language and culture to another.  Even when the same word or expression exists in two different languages (which is not as common as you might think, and can create another problem called “false cognates”), the connotation of those words can be quite different in different cultures.  Apparently, describing someone as “a politician” in Mandarin is a complement, in North America, not so much.  As I learned living in Portugal, “ambitious” might be a compliment in English, but in Portuguese it almost invariably implies corrupt.  The ways to go wrong in the translation process are multiple; the ways to get it just right are slim to none.  If you are really unaware of the problems of translation you might consider this old joke (or maybe it’s a true story):  

A translation machine was used to translate the expression “out of sight, out of mind” from English to Cantonese.  The Cantonese translation was then fed back into the machine to translate back into English.  The result:  “invisible, insane.”

Of all the translation controversies, none have been greater than those surrounding translations of the Bible.  Just to review the basic (if approximate) facts:  the texts which eventually became the Old Testament were written in a dialect of Hebrew.  The New Testament was written largely in Greek.  Eventually, the 80 books of the Bible were translated into Latin.  Latin remained the principal language of the Bible for centuries, but the number of accepted books, the canon, was reduced to 66.  John Wycliff produced a hand-written version of the Bible in English in 1380.  Gutenberg produced the first printed version of the Latin Bible in 1450.  The Bible was subsequently reproduced, re-edited and re-translated into other editions in English and various other languages.  The first complete Bible (both Old and New Testaments) was produced in 1560, and is known as the Geneva Bible, and was the basis of most of the versions of the Bible which followed.  In 1605, King James of England commissioned a new edition/translation of the Bible and it was published in 1611.  Although hundreds of other versions of the Bible were/are available, the King James Bible has generally become the authoritative version of the Bible in English.

So, what about abortion?  Here’s what the King James Bible says about causing the death of a fetus:

22 If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.

It seems quite clear to me that the author of this passage did not consider a fetus to be equivalent to a human life.  

On the other hand, according to the passage immediately preceding this one, if a man beats his servant or his maid to death, he should be punished but not for murder.  If the servant survives for a couple of days following the beating, then the master escapes any punishment:  “he shall not be punished: for he [the servant] is his [the master’s] money."

(If you find this last bit curious, you might want to have another look at Graeber’s Debt:  The First 5000 Years where he discusses how people, especially women [or “cumal”], were used as money.)

On the other hand (yeah, I’m running out of hands), to compare with the punishment for causing the death of a fetus, the punishment for cursing your parents is death:  “17 And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.”

Not to lose the simple basic point, according to the King James Bible a fetus is not a human life nor is it equivalent to one.  The King James Bible does not support the basic foundation of the anti-abortion, pro-life movement. For people who might find the language of the King James a bit tough to follow, here is the New Revised Standard Bible’s version of the same passage which spells things out in more common English:

22 When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. 23 If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

And finally, I get to my point.  Here is the same passage as translated and adapted by a committee hired by Thomas Nelson Publishers to produce the New King James Bible in the 1970s:

22 “If men fight, and hurt a woman with child, so that she gives birth prematurely, yet no harm follows, he shall surely be punished accordingly as the woman’s husband imposes on him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. 23 But if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

Notice how “miscarriage” and “her fruit depart from her” are now being translated as “she gives birth prematurely.”  There are lots of passages in the Bible that I don’t completely understand, but this time it seems obvious that we have gone from a fairly clear, coherent passage to a stretch that doesn’t make sense in a modern context and would have made even less sense at the time the Old Testament was being written.  Imagine you bump into a pregnant woman (today or thousands of years ago) and no “harm follows,” she gives birth to a healthy baby (even if premature).  Would there be any discussion of a crime, or penalty or punishment?  For what?  The Biblical passage only makes sense if what is at issue is a miscarriage.

People who claim that the Bible is sacred can’t have it both ways.  You cannot claim that the Bible is “the word of God” and then change those words to suit (or accept those changes which suit) the political agenda of the moment.

 

Addendum from

That's not what the Bible says