[Buddha-l] Liberal arts technophobia [was: Shingon sutras]

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 06:04 -0600, Jim Peavler wrote:

> I think academics, in the liberal arts particularly, 
> are amongst the most liberal socially and the most conservative 
> technically of any group I can think of.

My experience suggests you are right about this. For years I was the
only person in the Faculty of Religious Studies to use e-mail. Until
about eight years ago, most of my colleagues were still writing memos on
vellum and attaching them to the legs of pigeons. And even now in a
philosophy department I know "well enough to call my friend" (anybody
remember Tim Hardin?) I am considered a geek because I use Linux and
know how to write HTML code and can show a colleague how to save a word
processing document as a PDF file. 

As long as we are marvelling at philosophers, I like to think that the
study of philosophy should make a person broad-minded. What I have found
almost everywhere, however, is that philosophers have almost no
curiosity about Asian philosophy, and many don't even think of it as
philosophy at all. My colleagues at UNM are an important exception to
this general rule, although a couple of my colleagues here occasionally
betray the most astonishing ignorance of what the folks in China and
India were up to. It's not just ignorance in the sense of an absence of
knowledge, but the presence of misconceptions and outrageous
stereotypes. (I can only conclude that philosophers who can't write HTML
code also can't get over their childhood cultural prejudices.)

I also like to think of Unitarian-Universalists as a pretty open-minded
group. A couple of nights ago, however, I went to the Emerson reading
group at the local UU church. We read a sermon written by Emerson in
1832 in which he talked in passing about how some Christians are as
ignorant about spirituality as the "savages on the banks of the Ganges."
What was interesting to me was that the rest of his sermon was laying
out a view of the world that to me was obviously quite in keeping with
many of the main lines of thought among the very "savages on the banks
of the Ganges" that Emerson was holding up as paragons of spiritual
blindness. I pointed out this delicious irony to the folks in the
reading group, and to my amazement they just could not believe that any
Hindu or Buddhist had been as sophisticated as Emerson. Apparently they
were still viewing Hinduism and Buddhism in about the same way Emerson
had viewed them in 1832. These were Unitarians in 2005! It made me aware
of how much work we educators in the USA have to do to bring this
benighted parochial society out of its fog of cultural blindness. I hope
things are better outside the USA, but I suspect it depends on whether
one is living in a cosmopolitan centre or in a more bucolic setting. 

> I suspect there are still folks in the languages, history, philosophy, 
> and other liberal arts who don't read things online, and who would not 
> give much respect to anything published online.

I think you're partially right about philosophers. There is a huge
amount of excellent material available on line. (My students regularly
print it up and hand it in as their own work.) I routinely draw on on-
line materials, many of which are very nicely thought out and well
presented. The resources are stunning. So SOME philosophers are
obviously using the Internet with great skill. On the other hand, I find
that most of my colleagues are pretty much ignorant of what is available
on line. What amazes me is that some of them insist on getting a new
state-of-the-art computer every two years or so, bemoaning the fact that
their machines are obsolete. But all they do with their expensive
machines is read e-mail and write documents in Word. They could do THAT
on DOS 3.3. 

> Can one get the dreaded tenure if one has only published online, even
> if all the publications were refereed by academically sound referees?

Putting together a tenure-review dossier would require printing out
everything and making twelve copies (so that all twelve people who
review the dossier can lie about whether they read them), but I'm
guessing that if one could get one's work accepted in respected refereed
venues, reviewed and cited now and then by other scholars, one would get
tenure. Getting reviewed and cited, as things are now, might be
difficult. But I'm betting this will change eventually.

-- 
Richard