No, I don't.  But perhaps I soon will a bit more.  I registerd for this course today:

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/registry/courses/course.php?Code=DR2030

 The TPG made me do it, so crucial is it to any discussion in the politics forum these days.  The blurb describes it as more to do with an anthropological observation of Muslim people than a study of Islamic doctrine, but I've always maintained that this MESS we're in is political and only couched and translated into religious flim-flam.

So watch out kaffirs (is that right?) on the Politics forum, I'll be more confident in my opinions soon (justified or not!), inshallah, etc.  I promise to keep my hadith quoting to a minimum.

Jordan .

I'm a little concerned about the class, Andrew. Number one - the professor's name is "Marracini" not al Marracini or Mahmoud Marracini. This could be good or bad. Some of the most fully knowledgable sources are those who ARE or WERE Muslims or are of the Muslim geographical world. You shall see, I know, but I'm already getting a mental image of a guy (or gal) who may not be any part of the Ummah, like a Karen Armstrong, say, who is prone to romanticizing the Other. That is just a faulty as demonizing the Other, in my opinion.

A year and a half ago I bought a Time/Life "Special" Edition volume on "Islam" which illustrates the romantacizing angle. It is sweet and quaint with an itsy bitsy portion on the "extremists" though I'm not totally sure it was a word that harsh. It may have said "fundamentalists" knowing the horror evoked by a Time/Life reader by the Christian association with that word. ; ) Their section on Iran gives a perfect example of their miscalculation -- they talked about the upcoming Iranian election where it was all but a done deal that the reformist Rafsanjani would be elected. The word "Ahmadinejad" does not appear in the article. OOPS. I'm saving this volume as a period piece like the 1880s American History textbooks I collect.

Back to your class, then there's this...

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

 That was a lot to do with why I decided to sign up to it, yes.  A lot like my Gender Studies course last year.

I solemnly swear to keep all my critical (and judgmental) faculties sharp during the lectures.  The most concerning bit about a visit to the mosque (which is only about 100 yards from the university) is that there was an outbreak of some rare airborne exotic disease there last year.  I thought these people washed their feet!

x-ray
if your back's against the wall, turn around and write on it...

Haven't you heard that the personal is the political? 

A very fine course, in the most part.  A huge issue very very worthy of academic study.

Susan, because I know that a mother worries, here is the man who will be trying to shape my impressionable skull of mush: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~wad005/staff/gabriele-marranci.shtml

Phew, I just read it all, Andrew including the link to a recommended blog that went back to the August war between Israel and Hizbullah, which I learned was akin to the tit-for-tat Danish Mo-toon wars versus the Iranian Holocaust Cartoon Exhibitions.

None of what I read surprises me. Nor does any of it seem to merit a university class. It is representative of all that is useless and hence despicable about the university these days. Allow me to illuminate my grievances:

Here is the youthful and hip uber-cool professor hopelessly afflicted with Karen Armstrong Occidental Syndrome characterized by the Great White Hope delusion and doing his level best Margaret Mead-Indian Jones, bridging the West and the Islamic World, which he, nearly alone, is capable of actually grokking. Gotta wonder how his human specimen feel about Gabriele hovering over them taking notes during his field study.

Here's the title of one of his articles based on his field study. When was the last time you used the words "heterogamy" or "homogamy" in conversation? Perhaps it was the last time you discussed the "changing world."

Migration and Marriage; Heterogamy and Homogamy in a Changing World

You too may submit an article to the professor's journal. Here's what he's looking for...

Submit your research today

The importance of studying and understanding Islam and Muslims from a social scientific perspective seems more relevant today than ever. Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim life offers a platform for discussion on contemporary aspects of Islam and Muslims. We encourage new ideas, a scholarly discussion of fieldwork experiences, challenging views, and different methodological and theoretical approaches to Muslim life. The journal takes an interdisciplinary approach that benefits from a cross-cultural perspective. Its focus is on questions concerning the presence of Muslim communities in different societies, and the continuing active role that Islam plays in the lives of all Muslims.

Keep your approach interdisciplinary, if you will. And scholarly. So, if you want to submit, keep this in mind our stringent demands...

Non-discriminatory writing

Articles should make no assumptions about the beliefs or commitments of any reader, should contain nothing that might imply that one individual is superior to another on the grounds of race, sex, culture or any other characteristic, and should use inclusive language throughout. Please ensure that writing is free from bias, for instance by replacing 'he' or 'his' by 'he or she', 's/he' and 'his/her', and by using non-racist language.

Yes, such writing ought to facilitate the act of clearly informing "any" reader about the subject at hand, which is neither superior nor inferior -- it's really all the same after all -- to any human being regardless of which hormones tend to dominate their respective sacs of homo-sapien hetero-homo-protoplasm.

Look at the cute little Jihadi (tightly cropped so as to omit his Kaloshnikov) on the cover of what I'll bet is mandatory classroom reading material...

Next we find another classic example of academese. Do these people speak the same way they write? Check it out. There's a foggy haze over every sentence that wipes out any solid meaning. Is it an effort to: A. sound educated, B. render all meaning completely neutralized or C. all of the above?

Oh well, Andrew. I'm pretty sure GM (haha - what a corporatey monogram!) won't bedazzle you! What you have here is grand material for someone creating a character who is a professor of anthropologically oriented (not to be mischaracterized as "oriental") Islamic Studies at a Scottish university! Myself, I'd find it difficult to keep a straight face during this Emperor's New Clothes exercise in Nouveau Academia but would have lots to use in my private frame of jokester analysis after the fact. You know, I actually believe I could write your term paper right now without even knowing the details of what is expected. All I need to know is how many pages and the due date. If you want to really go out on a limb, you could submit my paper with your name and see what grade "we" get.

I'll close now with the title of one of my all time favorite classes. Meadow Soprano and Noah Tannebaum met during this undergrad course at Columbia University...

IMAGES OF HYPER-CAPITALIST SELF-ADVANCEMENT IN THE ERA OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM

With classes like these, universities are spawning legions of guppy graduates equipped for one thing only -- teaching similar classes to the next generation.

But really, I don't have an opinion yet, so please please please keep me apprised on how it's going! I need all the humor I can get these days!

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Susan, if you were ever under any illusion that my degree (in philosophy, for the love of God) would be remotely useful for anything, let me disabuse you of that notion right away!  I'm sure you never did suffer under that illusion anyway.  Far from finding this despicable, I positively revel in it.  I hope I never see university's primary value as anything other than the pure and undiluted search for knowledge....(okay, you may laugh at that statement).

Guppy graduates who are able to learn academese and then count themselves as really clever are in fact a scourge on the earth and I spit them out of my mouth like lukewarm vomit.  They are the middle managers of academic life, missing the big picture entirely and getting hot under the collar about prescriptive non-discrimanatory grammar.  Oh well, every course in the University will require a person, be they male, female or trans-gendered to write in this manner.  I make it a point of pride that I have never used the more horrible synthetic non-specific pronouns.  I love the English language more than I love pleasing a lecturer.  In times of need, one may always use the posh sounding non-specific pronoun 'one'.

I hope to learn some things I didn't know, and think some thoughts I wouldn't have otherwise, and I also hope to end up with the highest mark in the class, and that's all I want from it.  Having bad professors can be a problem, but it doesn't mean that nothing can be gained whatsoever.  Anyways, perhaps, just perhaps, you have been overly pre-judgemental, but even assuming you're right in all of your educated guesses, it isn't a disaster as far as I am concerned.  Having bad professors who can't teach or try to foist biased opinions on students is just par for the course, really.

Your offer to write my paper is extremely tempting and I actually considered it!  It would be a wonderful experiment.  But no thank you.  I would like to pick your brains a bit though about something that is useful though.  What's the verdict on wooden nickels?

For the record, and this is for Neff and Susan, what sort of things did they teach in the Philosophy, Divinity and/or Social Sciences departments of universities back in the good old days?

Edit: So as you don't make knee-jerk assumptions about the fine University I attend, I thought you may like to look at the courses overall that the Divinity Department offers.  The course leaflet for Understanding Islam is linked from there (the cartoons on the course guide are a bit of a disaster, and don't predispose me to the lecturer at all, I must say).  I am also taking the Reformation course in the second semester (because I'm fair and balanced).

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/divinity/ugrad/courses06-07.shtml

Philosophy IS useful, Andrew!!!! I thoroughly believe it to be so. Can't remember which one of them but one of the Coen Brothers was a philosophy major. Learning is good, too. As the inscription at the venerable Faber College reads: KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD. Who could disagree?

But if my prejudgment, based on all the material you have offered me so far on this professor and the recommended reading material, is close to indicative of what is TAUGHT in the class, I'd say the class would be near useless except for the narrow purposes I already outlined. And that's not a bad thing.

I'm having fun with the class already and I can hardly wait for updates when you're actually IN the class! Does it meet once a week? How many students in the class? I'll be it's teeny -- under 20, right? The better to do non-obtrusive fieldwork! Haha.

Gawd, what I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall of this classroom! Do they have flies in Aberdeenshire?

Susan

PS Back in the good old days of philosophy in a university, eh? You must keep in mind that I am a college dropout from Michigan State University. I never took philosophy but both my husband and my son did from UCLA. One of the philosophy professors happened to be there during both of their college careers so my son was able to experience the good old days via this aging relic. The first day of class the professor told the class that if any student believed they were able to draw a conclusion as to the teacher's OPINION, they should let him know and that he was not doing his job properly. I liked that. The object of his teaching style was to

teach the students to THINK. But you knew that, right?

I've spoken ad nauseum about the bad new days on campus where the emphasis is on spewing back the party line and where every class, regardless of the department, has the political correct element of understanding how racism, homophobia, xenophobia, imperialism, etc. permeate whatever the subject is. You may agree or disagree with me on this one (though volumes have been written on the subject of today's college campuses). I don't want to get too off track nor be repetitive because i've said it all before. If we have another thread on the subject of the American university I'll pipe up with examples galore.

PPS  I like this professor:

Morton Gauld.  RIP.

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Well, Susan, Morton Gauld was a lovely gentleman, and a true scholar, but never reached the dizzy heights of Professor. Over here, the title of Professor (at least in the old universities) often isn't bestowed until nigh on retirement, after clawing one's way up the ranks of Postdoctoral Fellow, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, and then maybe getting that elusive Chair and being called Prof.

However even the old universities have been forced to change their ways in many respects. British academe since the 70s has become progressively [ooh, how horribly inappropriate a word] more like its US cousin. British writer (and renowned Prof of Literature) David Lodge beautifully captures the change in British universities in his comic trilogy (the novels Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work). Nowadays, we've imported everything that started in American campuses: the rampant political correctness; the arcane academese; the endless round of self-promotion that is the conference circuit; the devaluing of teaching skill…. Oh bugger this, I could moan on for hours. It’s much more fun to read Lodge.

Pity the poor academic of today.  After years of pennilessness while getting that PhD, being left with all the undergraduate teaching to do and only having enough energy to spend half an hour a day working on the thesis after your teaching commitments and the three part-time jobs you have to hold down in order to pay the rent, you get your doctorate and find you’re competing with 200 other people for a 12 hour a week 6 month contract at a former polytechnic in the most unsavoury part of the country. God help you if you’ve actually managed to summon up the time, energy and social skill to find a mate, because you could both be past the age for breeding by the time you land a proper full-time job, which anway will only start you on a salary of $37,500 p.a.

And this is the crux of the problem. You have to play the political campus game, no matter how ludicrous you believe it to be. It's the only way you'll get an appointment. Every university in the UK has the dreaded Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to worry about, where each discipline is graded by the amount and ‘quality’ of research it produces, and the results of RAE will eventually determine the funding received by the universities. A department graded less than 4 (highest is 5*) is at serious risk of being shut down.  But ‘quality’ is determined on very narrow guidelines and those who conduct the assessments are panels of academics from competing universities. Vested interests abound. Academic departments are running around like headless chickens at the moment trying to grab people with high-profile track records in publication (publications as attention-getting and media-friendly as possible, I hasten to add), and academics are churning out more and more papers and articles for more and more Journals - and there are few scholarly publications nowadays which haven’t followed the fashion for more obscure academese about even more obscure topics. The research in universities has become ever more specialised, and this has filtered down through the whole university community, first  in what was being offered at postgrad level, and now comprehensively across undergrad courses too. Specialist researchers are not necessarily best placed (or often particularly well-equipped) to offer traditional general broad-based undergrad teaching, so the specialisms are becoming all that’s available.  After the last RAE, well respected universities has to close departments which were excellent at teaching their subjects, but didn’t produce enough fashionable research. So it continues, feeding on itself; concentrating on what’s perceived to matter, rather than what is actually healthy for a good education system.

I don’t know Dr Marranci, but I know plenty others in his position. He’s doing his job properly according to the conditions in which today’s academics are forced to work. The poor bloody sod’s playing the game. His ability to do that - to spin the right spin - and in so doing please the right university policy-makers and financiers, makes him a better man than I am, Gungadin. I wasn’t able to hide my distaste for the superficiality of the system, wouldn’t say or do something I didn’t believe in just as a career move, and generally just refused to jump through the required hoops. Those who can make the compromises necessary to do the job they love have my (grudging) admiration.

Higher Education nowadays has got nothing to do with the pursuit and exchange of knowledge unfortunately; it’s all to do with marketing and money. And there are far too many swine fighting over far too tiny a trough of swill.

And I'm off now to crawl back under my stone for another six months or so.

Hey, Log Weasel, I was actually hoping I might spur you into action!  Your post was enlightening and as is the case with all thoughtful words, I shall reread them. 

My dinner is just about ready.  

I hope you are doing well, being properly pleasant to the ghosts in your castle and that your Hero is treating you like a lady!

XOXO,

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin