Monasticism is My Favourite Word and Kristof Made it Dirty

I have a few favourite words as everyone does. Most of them are German and have to do with theory in some way.  I also love etymology and thinking about the origins of words. 

My favourite word for the past few months, dare I say almost a year now, is monasticism. Yup, monasticism. It is a word that for me is stripped of the overt religiosity of the term for I look at it from an etymological stand point. From the Greek , monasticism - > monastikos (solitary living) + ism (a state or condition). I strip it of the religiosity because I often couple this noun with an adjective. My go to combination is “academic monasticism”.  Yes I know the connotation is still there, but I am married to books instead of some deity say. 

Academic monasticism is seemingly my way of life, and that is not a bad thing. I often spend my time away from work, at home, reading or writing. Sometimes I do a crossword puzzle. All of this you see relates to words in some way because, of course, I like the words- the words are good.

Today I was feeling a bit under the weather so I spent the day in bed with the Twitterati. It was a very rich fulfilling #HigherEd Twitter day. I am enrolled in an online course on rhizomatic learning and I had nice dialogue with others who are part of the course from around the word.

Then the Nick Kristof NY Times article started making the rounds. I am not going to link to it because frankly he has gotten enough press off of his poorly researched op ed (a la Wente). Long and short he asks where have all the public intellectuals gone and says that social media and blogs should be a platform for more engagement but he is not seeing it (ergo his poor research). The article doesn’t touch on socio-economic conditions, it does not speak to accessibility issues. He thinks all of academe still operates in a vacuum. He ends his piece with this lovely line: “So, professors, don’t cloister yourselves like medieval monks — we need you!”

Heavy sigh.  For one to be an intellectual or a public intellectual for that matter you do not necessarily have to be an academic. I can easily give him the names of many people who do not consider themselves academics but are very much public intellectuals (oh fraught term that is it). Two, I would like to remind him of the value of reflection. In order for professors to do what they do and do it well it requires a certain amount of reflection. This reflection can necessarily be read as cloistering, but I certainly do not think higher education writ large is the elbow patch laden anchoritic cell dwelling entity that he reads it as. And this is where I get my back up because he makes monasticism seem like a bad dirty word, something to be avoided when in all actuality it is in some way a necessary part of engaging and reflecting with ideas.

Academic monasticism has value. It could from a materialistic stand point lead to research, publications, or looky looky a nice Sunday night blog post. But at its core, academic monasticism is about reflection and dare I say not enough of that happens on the regular. We spend so much of our life being reactionary instead of anticipatory. If we reflected more on what was going on we could (psychic friends network style) perhaps be a bit more proactive and put forth wonderful ideas which in turn help and engage in the public forum (which Kristof says is not happening at the moment).

So this is my public service announcement for today. Maybe monasticism is not the horrible thing the article makes it out to be. Maybe we all need a bit of academic monasticism. Being a student at any level requires a bit of academic monasticism in order to get things done (write an essay, read a chapter, study for a test). Being a part of any society requires reflection, and maybe Kristof needs a bit more of that time as well. 

Have a great long weekend everyone and take some time to reflect and engage if only to prove him wrong!

Postscript

As I write this I somehow feel this is like the battle cry for the introverts but anyone who knows me knows that I reside firmly on the “E” side of the Myers-Briggs. I am just really passionate about academic monasticism for some reason.