Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

A colleague sent me this link to an op-ed piece in the New York Times by the Chair of the Religion Department at Columbia University, with the following provocative thesis (and some intriguing suggestions for completely restructuring higher education for both graduate and undergraduate students):( Read more... )

I'd love to hear some feedback on this article from people who've recently finished their PhD work and who've been able to find tenure-track work in their field. Do YOU think the current system (which has presumably worked for you, to some extent) needs major re-vamping, too?

Or, if you attend (undergraduate or graduate) or teach at a university or college which has some real interdisciplinary programs or opportunities for cross-disciplinary learning, please share.

In my experience, the most interesting and accessible cross-disciplinary dialogue takes place at academic conferences focusing on something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the pop culture text that we all want to talk about provides the common language to start understanding what the other gal or fellow is saying about how their particular theoretical tools or technical terms can apply to something with which I'm already very familiar and might even be useful in exploring some of MY questions. Besides, having a shared body of texts as a foundation makes it much easier to answer the 'And whaddya call that, when it's at home?' question which is too often ignored at single-discipline conferences like the American Academy of Religion or Society for Pastoral Theology meetings.