Job Cuts at King's College London

Some may well be aware that King's College London, where I study, is involved in some huge jobs cuts at the moment. Various aspects of this have ended up in corners of the mainstream press in the last week, and it's certainly hot news in some academic circles, especially in philosophy.

Last week, administrators in the School of Humanities emailed the students of the college announcing that they were in a period of consultation about restructuring the School, as part of overall restructuring of the College. Students were promised a voice in the consultation, and assured that the impact to students would be minimal. However, within days, news emerged that King's has made redundant several senior academics in the Philosophy Department. Students at this stage had not been given access to the consultation documents, nor was any means for providing feedback given, and I know of at least one friend who is losing his research supervisor.

Making people redundant before a period of consultation has properly commenced is not, I am informed, legal.

The problem here is that the college is being dishonest and trying to spin this issue in the media. For example, in this Evening Standard article, it states "A spokesman for King's said it was not clear whether compulsory redundancies would be necessary." If this really is from a spokesman for King's, then the person told a deliberate lie. Redundancies have already been forced upon some senior academic staff.

Academics from around the world have written to the principle of King's protesting this decision, some of which have signed this letter. So far, King's College senior management have seemingly responded with scorn, and appear to show a considerable disregard for the wider academic community, something I think is very dangerous for any academic institution to do.

The behaviour of the College toward one member of staff in particular, Professor Shalom Lappin, seems to me especially unethical. You can read his account here.

No one at this stage is denying that cuts might be necessary. However, there has been no open communication about what other options have been considered; the College provided inadequate avenues for feedback prior to making decisions, despite claiming that we had commenced a period of consultation; and the College management seems to be isolating itself from our own academics, our student body, and the wider academic community, and failing to engage with us in a meaningful way.

There are many aspects to this state of affairs that trouble me deeply, and I cannot summarise them all appropriately here. I recommend people read the links I have provided, and this open letter to the College management, and if you feel so led, please add your name to the letter. The only way we can force the College into transparency and honesty in this process is if the management are presented with a wide-ranging response, not simply one from those staff who may lose their jobs, and their friends and students.

Other Universities will probably be soon to follow suit, as the government has cut Higher Education spending. Some cuts will need to happen, but if they are to happen in an honest and sensitive way, then those who seek to go through this process in the shadows need to be brought into the light.

Stanley Hauerwas: In Praise of the Essayist

I've been reading some Stanley Hauerwas lately, having picked up a copy of The Hauerwas Reader for £8.10 before Christmas in my favourite second-hand bookshop. I'm a very slow reader, usually, especially when it comes to academic writing; I can read a novel in a couple of days if it's interesting (Generation A being a recent case-in-point), but it can take me weeks to read an academic monograph, if I don't get bored before the end and just skip to chapters that look sort-of interesting.

One thing that has surprised me about reading Hauerwas is that I've been able to read him quickly, with sustained interest. I'm not going to comment on the content of his writings here, I've not read nearly enough yet to do so competently, but I do want to praise his style.

Hauerwas says that 'one of my faults is I have no tolerance for the boring.' ¹ If this is a fault, it is one I share. Thankfully, Hauerwas is not boring. His style of writing essays, and publishing books which are mostly collections of essays, may make him hard to pin down, but they do make him very readable. It is not especially daunting to sit down and read someone, knowing that you only have 15-20 pages to read before you get a logical tea-break. More than that, within the short number of pages that makes up an essay, you get something resembling a full narrative; you are not left hanging, left confused by the minutiae, but you reach a natural conclusion. This, quite simply, makes for a more satisfying read. With The Hauerwas Reader, you are also rather helpfully pointed to several other, related essays that might provide a fuller picture.

The problem with academic monographs is that very few authors, even among those I love, know how to make best use of chapters (of course I'm being subjective!). One chapter with an interesting title may in fact be about something quite different than what I imagined, and one with a boring title might have been exactly what I was looking for. I would prefer it if each chapter in a book were more like an essay that stands by itself, but also contributes to the overall argument. Have a think about your favourite novels, and you'll probably agree that your favourite writers tend to use chapters in a clever way that contributes to the overall narrative structure, and helps break up the journey for you creatively. Perhaps I'm simply lazy; I'm certainly very much a product of our sound-bite age. I'm used to reading blogs and online news articles and RSS snippets etc..

But the rub is this: the essay-writing style of Hauerwas has already, in just a couple of weeks, led me to want to read more. Every time I finish an essay, I'm looking through the 'further reading' recommendations and scouring the footnotes for where to turn to next. Writing in a succinct, interesting way, then, encourages me to read more than writing in convoluted, multi-volume ways. Seems so obvious, but I wish more people did it!

[I could, of course, praise other multi-essay volumes, and especially thematic, edited volumes by many writers, and I may well do so in future. I also think that academic journals promote a great way of writing, I just wish they were more widely accessible.]

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¹ Stanley Hauerwas, 'Where Would I Be Without Friends?' in Mark Thiessen Nation and Samuel Wells (Eds.), Faithfulness & Fortitude: In Conversation with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000) p.318

What is Systematic Theology?

I did my BA in Theology, and took every 'systematic theology' course I could. I'm now doing an MA entitled 'Systematic Theology.' But I'm still not really sure what Systematic Theology is. It seems that most of what I thought it was is sort of 'doctrine' or 'speculative theology' (Speculative theology being the same genre as doctrine, but that is not written from a position of authority: some speculative theology becomes doctrine, some becomes heresy, some remains theology).

I thought Systematic theology was a sort of way of organising theological ideas so that they form a coherant doctrinal corpus. There may be many different theologies of the atonement, for example, but when a particular group decides on what is doctrine for them, they have to pick theologies that fit together without contradiction; they should point to their dependencies on other theologies within the system. For me, loosely, that's what systematic theology is.

I'm not sure that is what it is. From my class yesterday, systematic theology seems to be very concerned with 'fundamental theology', something I've not really encountered before in 3 and half years of a theology degree. This seems to me to be a sort of philosophical apologetics. I think I have a lot of biases against this kind of project. It seems to me to fit really into 'philosophy of religion', which is the disinherited love-child of philosophy and theology.

So, I ask: what is systematic theology for you?

How Rage Against the Machine Have Saved Christmas

So, cards on the table, I'm a card-carrying Rage fan, and have been for years. But this isn't really about that. It's about 2 other things.

First, it's very refreshing to me that the Christmas number 1 is a record that is about subverting consumerism. I'm always interested when little events like this disrupt our routine and challenge our perceptions. I haven't felt this good about a religious festival since the Chocolate Jesus Has a Chocolate Penis incident a few Easters ago.

What's so great about it, is that it forces us to stop and think. We rush through Christmas, spending serious wads of cash, without really thinking about the real reason for the season. And, beyond even that, I think the fact that divorce rates and assaults skyrocket just after Christmas tells us that something of the spirit of the season has gone awry, been hijacked.

If a chocolate sculpture of Jesus at Easter can disrupt the status quo, make us think for just a moment about the absurdity of the contemporary western choco-laden Easter, then I think it's fantastic. And if a bunch of people decide that they'd rather buy an anti-consumerist, anti-authoritarian rant instead of a 'schmaltzy ballad' engineered and created by a 'pop cartell' specifically to make lots of money, then something of the spirit of the season seems to me to have been re-found anew.

Secondly, this whole gag (and, really, it was rather more of a collective practical joke than a conscious rebellion) was conceived of by 2 people, and entirely co-ordinated via a facebook group they made up on a whim. In this way, it is something of a triumph of new media. Simon Cowell has said and implied that he believes X-Factor embodies true democracy, and has even mooted running a similar type of show for politicians around the general election. However, it seems that similar things can be achieved by a couple of people typing a few words into a website and seeing what happens.

But this has the potential to teach us something very useful. As Tom Morello rightly observed, this wasn't really about the song; it was about reclaiming the Christmas chart from the dull inevitability of Simon Cowell's mass-marketed 'pop monopoly'. What Facebook has proven (again, perhaps) is that if enough of the general public set their minds to something - even something relatively pointless - we can affect real change.

What if we took this very simple lesson, and applied it to something like climate change? Our leaders have let us all down horribly, and let our children down unforgivably at Copenhagen this week. It has become painfully obvious that, as in the cases of slavery and apartheid, our governments are not up to the job of leading us. And so the baton falls to you and I, average Joe and average Josephine.

We the people are going to have to lead this. We are going to have to force this issue through. We have seen that our governments promise much and deliver little; and any future government will promise much to become the government, and then deliver little. Business will do nothing unless forced, because change costs money which eats up profit, except where (as in some industries) green projects can be money makers.

If we are going to affect real change for the environment, we all need to make personal sacrifices. Some people think we will only do that if we are forced, but I don't think that's true; I think quite the opposite. In the fight against slavery, committed citizens refused to buy or eat sugar. The government refused to force change, so the people did it for themselves. The ONLY way to really change business is to kick them square in the profit-margins. What we need is a truly grassroots campaign, here. And I'm not convinced NGOs or political parties or businesses can manufacture one for us.

Free Will, Free Choice

In class today, we discussed grace and free will, looking at Augustine, Pelagius and Kathryn Tanner in particular.

It was the second 3-hour class of the day, and I didn't sleep brilliantly, so I'm afraid my thinking happened quite backwards today. But one thing that did occur to me was that it seems we conflate 'free will' with 'free choice' too often. We, today, tend to think of them as one thing, that freewill is a kind of limitless agency, and we assert our right to that.

thought and then re-thought, I wonder if there are not two things here. Free choice, for example, is never truely free; by this I mean 'free act'. In any given situation in life, we have various options open to us, but those options are finite. I can walk to work, cycle, get a bus, tube, taxi etc. I can freely or less freely choose. If I have lost my Oyster card, I can't choose to use the tube. etc.

Free will seems to me to be more about thought or intent. I can freely will to walk or get the tube or whatever; I can also freely will to sprout wings and fly to work, or go by rocket-ship. But I cannot choose to do that. That option is not open to me, and so I do not have free choice in the sense of limitless choice. Whereas anything I concieve of I can will (or desire, perhaps).

Now precisely how this relates to Christian theology is going to require a little more thought. But I suspect it might be okay to say that grace enables our will to be brought in line with that of God; and if what we will is possible, we will of course choose it- if I could sprout wings and fly to work, I definately would. We, therefore, have free will still- we can will anything- and a limited free choice, still; except choice is never free of will, either. Then, how do we 'get' grace?

10:10

My friend Jessie has posted a great article here about global warming, the environment, the 10:10 campaign and so on. It's informative, fun, and way better written than anything I can say on the matter, so please go and check it out.

I've been thinking about the environment a lot in the last week or so, and I may post some thoughts on it later on... I love the world. Places like the Boreal Forest, the Amazon, the Himalaya etc. literally blow my mind, and I'd love to visit them all... however, should I visit them, if I want them to survive, or if I really love them, would I leave them be?

More later.

Go read what Jessie says. She should know, she's a geographer don'tcha know.

What is a Traditional Anglican Anyway?

I don't know what a traditional Anglican is. What does this label mean?

These is much talk about the views of this constituency in the present debate on women in the episcopate. 'Traditional Anglican' seems to be being used as a shortcode for 'Anglicans against women in the episcopate', just as it was often used in the debates over homosexuality, too.

But is it correct that the belief that sacramental ministry can somehow be tainted or lessened by the minister's gender, sexuality, sinfulness or downright evilness? No, this is not an orthodox Anglican doctrine:

ALTHOUGH in the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good, and sometime the evil have chief authority in the ministration of the word and sacraments; yet forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in Christ's, and do minister by His commission and authority, we may use their ministry both in hearing the word of God and in the receiving of the sacraments. Neither is the effect of Christ's ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor the grace of God's gifts diminished from such as by faith and rightly do receive the sacraments ministered unto them, which be effectual because of Christ's institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men. (source)

Now this is the 26th Article of Religion for the Church of England, as appended to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Quite traditional, then. Unless, of course, one accepts Resolution 43 of the 1968 Lambeth Conference, that is:

The Conference accepts the main conclusion of the Report of the Archbishops' Commission on Christian Doctrine entitled "Subscription and Assent to the Thirty-nine Articles" (1968) and in furtherance of its recommendation:

(a) suggests that each Church of our Communion consider whether the Articles need be bound up with its Prayer Book;
(b) suggests to the Churches of the Anglican Communion that assent to the Thirty-nine Articles be no longer required of ordinands;
(c) suggests that, when subscription is required to the Articles or other elements in the Anglican tradition, it should be required, and given, only in the context of a statement which gives the full range of our inheritance of faith and sets the Articles in their historical context. (source)

But then you wouldn't really be a traditionalist if you accepted this, would you?