Summer in Portland

Rest in the City of Roses

The Summer Institute is over, I've come down with a cold, and I'm spending part of my reentry at my friends' K and C's house. They've got a great place in SE, with a beautiful flowering tree in the back and a lovely windy row of roses on the way up the steps in the front. It's been truly relaxing. In fact, on Monday, C and I stayed in our jammies until 4:30 or so, just chatting about life and stuff. I learned that C isn't good at talking and doing something else at the same time, so mostly we just talked and didn't worry about the fact that we couldn't really do anything else because quite frankly, nothing else was really pressing.

In the meantime, I've been recovering some of the layers of what I learned at the institute, and one of those things was about intellectual freedom and intellectual responsibility. In one session I attended, we talked at length about how in US higher education, more and more students are coming to expect that they don't have to engage with ideas/texts/etc that are challenging to their own espoused core values. Examples of this abound, including in Arizona where a woman basically refused to read a required text and somehow the instructor was pressured to give her an alternative assignment. In my workshop, we talked about these kinds of situations and how they reflect the intellectual development of college students, according to the Perry scheme. (Dualism--Multiplicity--Contextual Relativism). I'm still unpeeling the onion, so I'll say more as it becomes more clear.

On Sunday morning, I was flipping channels and saw Ann Coulter on Book TV. Mostly, I shy away from the empty rhetoric of hate-tv people, but I was drawn in, waiting to hear the next crazy thing she might say. I think that she would likely be in support of the woman who didn't want to read Snow Falling on Cedars. Coulter's ultimate suggestions is that conservatives should take over the public school system and higher education. As she says this, I'm realizing just how deep the gulf is between dualism and contextual relativism. I'm not sure how we can really bridge this expanse--to forge understanding, if that's even a worthy goal. But, as a mother of a near-school-aged child, I'm nervous about sending my own child forth into a school system that is becoming more conservative and simulataneously less solid. My head hurts, but I'm giving it some time, as I continue in this reentry process, knowing that there'll be more to say as I keep peeling back another layer of the onion.