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June 6, 2008
Spirituality as "resistance"
Independent scholars get together for the first time at SFU.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
History was made last month, when the Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars (CAIS) held its inaugural symposium.
Award-winning essayist and novelist Sir John Ralston Saul, distinguished patron of CAIS, launched the event at Simon Fraser University, Harbor Centre, with the keynote address Saturday night, May 24. The next day, assorted speakers, including Ralston Saul, shared how they came to be independent scholars and discussed the role that independent scholarship plays in society.
CAIS, based at Simon Fraser, has been meeting about once a month for the past five years. The academy offers members opportunities to advance their research through association with like-minded peers and to learn about the work of others, among many other benefits. Rabbi Dr. Yosef Wosk, director of interdisciplinary programs in continuing studies and associate member of the department of humanities at SFU, gave an overview of the academy.
"The Philosophers' Café program began, it's 10 years now, and, over those years, we've been fortunate: there's been close to 60,000 people [who've attended the cafés]," explained Wosk. "The café, to me, was always not goal-oriented. If someone said at the end of a gathering, let's strike a committee, let's go out and do this, that, to me, would be anathema to the café discussion. We wanted it to be just [a place with] the university to be a fair broker, where people could feel safe, no matter who they were or where they came from or what they had to express, they could speak to each other."
With the café's success, Wosk said he began to think about a more focused forum for such individuals. "Not just lifelong learning," he said. "We're all involved in [that] and we're very fortunate to be living in this generation and in this particular place ... and part of being fortunate, is a responsibility of we do with it. So the idea of the scholars was to focus the learning that we have."
In the early 1990s, Wosk happened upon an advertisement of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars and he and friend Mark Dwor flew down to North Carolina for the NCIS's biennial conference. "Within two years, we were sponsoring the American group here, at the Centre for Dialogue, and it was wonderful," said Wosk, who went on to explain the CAIS evolution from that, into having the continuing studies department at SFU as a beachhead between the university faculty and community scholars. The group is now fully funded, with strong administrative support, said Wosk. "The rest is up to us," he stressed, encouraging the audience of some 50 scholars to get others interested in becoming part of CAIS.
Dr. Elena Feder, an independent scholar, film and media arts theorist, translator and curator, co-convened and co-organized the symposium with Wosk. Of his vision for the academy, she said, CAIS is "both a building and an ethos, a nonexclusionary centre of discussion, knowledge sharing and dissemination that gives voice to thousands of non-faculty, independent, community scholars, and aims to promote high-level associations with a global network of independent scholars, universities, institutions and industry."
In organizing the symposium, Feder said there was a decision not to have speakers present "20-minute papers that barely touch on a subject," but rather to allot 15 minutes "to a small, but carefully selected number of speakers whose work and personal interest offer a distinct perspective and shed a new light on the core principles of independent scholarship and public intellectual practice."
One of those speakers was Or Shalom Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan, who also holds a doctorate in philosophy and education. In 2005, she left a successful career as a tenured full-time professor "in order to work as a clergy person in a fledgling religious movement, the Jewish Renewal."
Kaplan said she had an ideal working situation at her university and did not leave teaching because of any personal resentments. "I left for different reasons," she said. "I always had a nagging feeling as an educator in that setting that I wasn't really serving people. I always had a nagging feeling that I wasn't really making a difference in people's lives, and that I wasn't uplifting the world. I had an ongoing inner dialogue with myself over years: How could that possibly be true if I'm working in higher education? Isn't education one of those significantly touchy feely professions, where you're helping people grow all of the time? I started to realize that maybe it isn't that kind of profession."
She noted that universities have been attracting more students for pre-professional training, and fewer for pure study; and that, more often, universities departments and professors are being asked to justify themselves in economic terms. Over a decade, she said, she watched this process undermine the sense of community at her university and related a story about herself reaching the point of measuring personal happiness in terms of productivity.
"So I ended up in a spiritual community," she said, "because, for a long time, I've thought that spiritual communities should be sites of resistance to the dominant society. Where others preach war, I think spiritual communities should preach peace. Where other institutions emphasize material success, we should emphasize spiritual and ethical growth. Where other organizations drain the energy of their participants, we should come together for rest and for healing. Where most workplaces draw people into ... labor, rewarding their time with money, but keeping the products that the workers make, a spiritual community should create a space where people can choose to engage in loving volunteer work that creates the community that they're a part of."
Kaplan quoted Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said that, in our time, simply having a spiritual life is, in and of itself, an act of resistance. He describes spiritual life as having a sense of wonder, or radical amazement, said Kaplan. In this state, instead of seeing things for their ultimate purpose, she explained, we begin to see things for what they are in and of themselves, and we find that "everything in life has a depth that we haven't yet discovered."
A person has to take in account all the various sides of themselves – and ask some very critical questions about themselves – in order to grow spiritually and ethically, she continued. "It seems to me," said Kaplan, "at least in one model, a public intellectual is someone who works in communal institutions to foster this place of inner exchange and this place of interpersonal exchange."
Kaplan described critical thinking as "the ability to confront one's beliefs. It's the ability to connect logical thinking with other aspects of consciousness. It's the ability to develop historical imagination. And it's the ability to think metaphorically." This kind of work, she said, "cultivates people's ability to do the hard work of those things that I listed as acts of resistance: reaching for peace, growing ethically, pausing from productivity to allow creativity and, most of all, creating community out of the sheer love of learning from one other."
Other speakers at the CAIS symposium included former city councillor, now consultant, Jim Green; city librarian Paul Whitney; writer, broadcaster and arts policy consultant Max Wyman; writer and broadcaster Chuck Davis; Susan Jamieson-McLarnon, director of public relations at SFU and acting executive director of the downtown campus; and Havana-born artist Antonio Eligio Fernández (Tonel), who teaches painting and drawing at the department of art history, visual art and theory at the University of British Columbia. The list of suggested readings for the symposium, the weekend's proceedings and a blog are, or will soon be, on CAIS's website, independentscholars.net.
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