As I prepared for this week's Sunday School class which I have been teaching for almost three years, I was thinking of a just concluded conference at the University of Texas. Put together by graduate students in Chicano studies, it was a great gathering of young and old scholars, and I truly enjoyed it. But my thoughts were also on the lesson which is about when some Mormon communities practiced what they called the "United Order". In short, it was a communitarian approach to a religious life when all the families gave all their possesions to the church. The church would then sit with the family and figured out how much land and resources the family needed to live adequately.Then the family got title to all those possesions which they kept as long as they maintained the rules of the covenant between them and the church. At the end of the year, anything that was left over was given to the church to provide for the poor and afflicted, and also to sustain its mission.
The United Order went the way of other utopian communities but the principle remains a part of the charge of being a Latter-day Saints. Needless to say, few of us live that "higher law" wshich requires a deep concern for the poor, a dedication to loving those around us, and engaging in sustained religious work. At the same time, the law of consecration can teach us much about living in this life, and can also be of help in many aspects of our lives, especially those of us who joined the academy or took up writing because we believed in social justice, in the need for a better world, peace and in being good stewards of our world.
During the conference I heard a young lesbian scholar talk about her work with gay students. Her mission, undoubtedly, was not only about teaching them course work but also about literally keeping some of them alive by having them find dignity and pride in who they were. Now, admittedly I don't always understand gay scholarship, and sometimes I struggle with some of the language and explicit sexuality that is often part of queer studies, but I couldn't help admiring the commitment she was making to her students beyond the classroom.
Many of the people who enter the field of Chicano and Latino studies often do so because they feel a commitment to their community and seek to use their scholarship to help do just that, but over time it is easy to become a "professional Chicano/Latino studies" scholar and get caught up in the game of upward mobility, tenure and recognition. Acceptable research, fund acquisition, and gaining recognition become more important over time. The "community" becomes a distant memory or simply another academic topic to be discussed. And of course, it also becomes a term to throw around to impress audiences and students with "our commitment".
Our topics become esoteric and we stop showing up to events where community people and students are around--such as the conference I attended just this week. We also become uncomfortable when we are reminded by those same people that we are becoming irrelevant to their lives, as did one community activist to some of us a few years back in Phoenix at a Chicano Studies regional conference.
The Law of Consecration had several important principles. The first was to live lives devoid of materialism and pride; another was to be concerned about the poor and not to judge them; still another to gain skills and talents that could be used to serve the community: it required a mind single to the glory of God. Now, those are very tough demands, but they made me think about our responsibilities to our field, our students and to the institutions in which we work--the latter can often be met by making them more sensitive and relevant to the students and community they serve.
I thought about how how much more I could help my younger colleagues become better scholars; how I could teach in ways to make the course work more relevant and also a rallying cry for people to be better members of their communities. I don't mean being more ideological or using the classroom to organize students for partisan issues, but rather making them better human beings who feel the need to be "their brothers/sisters keepers", who shun materialism, seek to be peacemakers, who are concerned about those in the margins of society, and who are disciplined in the way they live their lives.
The latter is also part of the Law of Consecration. It means living a moral life, and while I know that morality can be interpreted in different manners--political, social, religious, environmentally, etc.--I think that we can all agreed that it does call for higher ideals than those which come from just "living life". It calls us to be "better than what we have become". And all of us in the academy know how easy it is to become disinterested teachers, uncaring mentors, and individuals focused on our own needs. We can also become what they call in Mexico "pilotos", pilots who fly in, teach their class, pick up their check, or attend the mandatory meeting, and then fly out not to be seen until the next scheduled flight. We see our responsibility in the rank and status process of our colleagues beginning when we read the files instead of two or three years earlier when we notice they are struggling or making the dumb scholarly mistakes we all make. We also apply to jobs advertised when we know we are not going to take them even if offered, and in the process either intimidate or cause to be overlooked other scholars who do need the job and would actually take it.
There is a joke among academicians that the university life would be wonderful if it wasn't for the students. I have used it myself in lighthearted moments. Yet, being a professor is first about being a teacher. Now, it doesn't mean that it is the thing we most like about the academy. Some of us might like more the intellectual environment, writing books or articles, artistic performance, or even the hours, but we must never forget that it is the students and the classroom that make all of those things possible. It was wonderful to hear two scholars I deeply admire talk about their concerns that the academy was moving away from truly serving the students. And they were not engaged in a political or ideological discussion but simply one in which two great teachers and mentors lamented that in our modern, hyper-individualistic, capitalist society our students were a low priority. Even when some of these changes were going to benefit them greatly, they rejected them as being unfair to students.
Religious consecration means setting aside the best for the Lord. In the academy, it should mean reserving our best for our students and for our communities. It means sacrificing some of the perks, some of "our" time and doing things that are for the benefit of others. This does not have to mean that we give up our individuality, that we focus only on the job nor that we accept the new assessment schemes that universities have put together to dwindle the faculties and make learning a business. It does not mean acquiesing to bad leadership; in fact, it means the opposite. It means being engaged and interested.
Now, as previously mentioned, I know that those of us in the academy, and often those who write, are a breed apart. We need our space, our time and sometimes for long stretches. I knew one dean who believed that professors should leave the campus every fourth year on a sabbatical, visiting professorship, study abroad or other activity that allowed them a break from the routine. I happen to agree because feeling fresh and excited is often the way we do the things we do best.
At the same time, the idea of commitment--our own personal law of consecration--should help us keep going even when we don't have the optimum situation. We should seek always to fulfill that goal we had when we entered the academy. It might mean having good semesters and bad ones, feeling fulfilled one year, and totally dejected another, but in the end it is about sticking to our passion and our vision of what the "good scholarly life" truly is.
And unlike those who practiced the Law of Consecration or other utopian schemes who had friends and neighbors (colleagues ?) we often have to do it by ourselves. That is why conferences like the one I attended are good. We get a chance to see friends, see the next generation of scholars, and experience the enthusiasm that had us excited throughout graduation school and our first few years in the academy.
