Seeing complaints about abysmal #AAR submission rates. Unsurprised. New membership rule punished contingent faculty. But also -- let's talk structures. The study of religion in the U.S. is diminishing, if not dying. We're not OK.
Since this pandemic, how many religious studies faculty/programs/positions have been eliminated, retrenched, or folded? How many come to mind? A quick search of Google nets these. Not even close to comprehensive. Apologies to our colleagues who faced these closures, trauma.
The University of Vermont tried to be "done with religion." But, as @ProfIRMF well tell you, religion ain't done with it.
religiondispatches.org/the-university…
religiondispatches.org/the-university…
It's not just the US. The University of Sydney slated religion for elimination. Queensland, Monash, Deakin, Newcastle? Closed religion or blended it into other programs.
theconversation.com/unis-are-killi…
theconversation.com/unis-are-killi…
But, there's more to this as well. Rightfully, we focus on the precarity of our colleagues who are being ground into dust by a diminishing number of tenured positions. They work from contract to contract, visit to visit.
There is also a precarity of departments and programs. In the last three years, my department has experienced *three* separate curricular reviews. Each of those reviews meant roughly 30+ hours of work per faculty member per semester. Doubled, if responses are required.
That work is performed by fewer faculty. We're down 2 since the pandemic. Not deaths. Just positions left unfilled. The result? One of those was in Black & African Religions. That's right -- while Unis launched DEI initiatives, we lost our Black & Africana Religions courses.
We're in a fight, literally, to keep our department *above* the line where we end up a headline on InsideHigherEd. We face, in the administrative analysis, "significant difficulties." For faculty considering retirement, we have no guarantee of add'tnl resources.
How many other departments out there are like this? Lots. Not a religious studies scholar? Take a look at your colleagues. Ask them what's been happening. How are their faculty meetings? Major counts?
A lot of scholars are not writing #AAR proposals, they don't have time. Some are working to protect the positions/depts/programs that they have so that the next generation of scholars has something to inherit -- and something less precarious than what's here now.
To be clear (waves hands at headlines) -- The interdisciplinary study of religion is *essential.* Critical approaches to religion are essential. #AAR must continue to play a central role in this. But, if scholars are choosing not to do the labor to contribute papers ...?
Maybe in part it's b/c of the unseen struggle. The generations that saw the single greatest explosion in religious studies positions? They're reaching retirement age -- and, arguably, are simply not retiring ... yet. But, they will. There is 0% guarantee their positions remain.
Curricular revision, analysis of enrollment data (majors, minors), new certificates, every inter-disciplinary hire all of these are part of a fight for the field. And that fight is all the more sudden given the shock of the pandemic and the "demographic shock" all admins discuss
I lament the conversations, the exchange of ideas, the collegiality, and the *new and novel approaches* to our field that have *already* been lost as indicated by the decline in #AAR applications. Our field faces a crisis over the next decade, these lost apps shed light.
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