New Studies

This just in from Hillel’s Shavua Tov:

Two new studies provide interesting insights about the lives of today’s Jewish teens. The new American Religious Identification Survey found that the number of Jews who define themselves as Jews by religion is going down, while the number who identify as Jews by ethnicity is staying the same.  Meanwhile, a BBYO study of Jewish teens found that 67 percent would like to better connect with their religion but 48 percent of those claimed they did not know how, and 55 percent said they wanted a less conventional way to connect. These trends suggest that new modes of Jewish life are being developed – and we are proud to say that we are part of leading this project as we help Jewish college students imagine how they want to be Jewish, combining Jewish tradition with their values and ideas.

William Damon on Character Education

An important interview with William Damon from the Chronicle of Higher Education. An excerpt:

Q: How do you see your work in the context of the school-reform movement?

The message of my work is that schools need to give students a better understanding of why they are in school in the first place — that is, how the skills students are learning can help them accomplish their life goals. That is the only way to really motivate students in a lasting way. And if you ask any teacher what the major problems in schooling these days are, I’m sure that student motivation will be at the top of the list.

Now in order to help students understand what schooling can help them accomplish, they must be given opportunities to reflect on what they want to do with their lives. What are their ultimate concerns, their highest purposes? What kinds of people do they want to be? Those questions should not be asked or answered in a vacuum. Good schools can provide students with rich historical and literary knowledge about how such questions have been addressed by thoughtful people throughout the ages.

Present-day school-reform movements tend to focus on basic skills, especially ones that can be measured by standardized tests. The skills are important, and the test scores can be useful as indicators of learning. But the skills and the scores are means to an end and not ends in themselves, and they should be presented to students in that way.

Students learn bits of knowledge that they may see little use for; and from time to time someone at a school assembly urges them to go and do great things in the world. When it comes to drawing connections between the two — that is, showing students how a math formula or a history lesson could be important for some purpose that a student may wish to pursue — schools too often leave their students flat.

If you visit a typical classroom and listen for the teacher’s reasons for why the students should do their schoolwork, you will hear a host of narrow, instrumental goals, such as doing well in the course, getting good grades, and avoiding failure, or perhaps — if the students are lucky — the value of learning a specific skill for its own sake. But rarely (if ever) will you hear the teacher discuss with students broader purposes that any of these goals might lead to. Why do people read or write poetry? Why do scientists split genes? Why did I work hard to become a teacher? How can schools expect that young people will find meaning in what they are doing if they so rarely draw their attention to considerations of the personal meaning and purpose of the work others do?

Professors as Mentors

Oct. 28

Mentor, Friend — or Both?

TAMPA — The session on mentoring minority doctoral students was proceeding swimmingly enough, as the panelists offered useful tips about how the traditional methods for guiding graduate students work (and don’t) for students of color, earning the kind of head-nodding agreement that is typical at gatherings of like-minded people. That all changed when one of the presenters, Javier Cuevas of the University of South Florida, said that he had changed his mind in recent years about one key question.

“I used to think that you didn’t have to have a close relationship with the student to be a mentor,” Cuevas, an associate professor of molecular pharmacology and physiology at South Florida’s College of Medicine, said at the session at the Compact for Faculty Diversity’s Institute on Teaching and Mentoring here. “But I’ve come to believe that there’s a huge difference between an adviser, who may only be concerned about the student’s performance on a particular project, and someone who has truly taken on the role of mentor. To me, friendship is an essential component of being a true mentor.”

The notion that a faculty mentor must — or at least should — be a friend to a graduate student or junior professor to be effective provoked intense debate among the several dozen academics in the room. “I agree that an emotional connection, a level of caring, is an essential component of being a mentor,” said Alvin Fox, a professor of microbiology at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine and director of the medical school’s Sloan Minority Ph.D. Program. “But friendship is not the correct term. I think it says something beyond that.”

The discussion that unfolded over the next hour suggested that the scholars were divided more by rhetoric, perhaps, than by greatly diverging perceptions of what makes a mentor effective — and where the boundaries are between caring and friendship.

The philosophical question, “friend or no,” emerged from what was otherwise mostly a nuts and bolts discussion about effective mentorships, in which Arizona State University’s Carlos Castillo-Chavez discussed efforts there and elsewhere to encourage minority students to become mathematical scientists, and Gilbert John described Oklahoma State University’s outreach to Native American graduate students.

When it was Cuevas’s turn, he quickly made it clear that he was most interested in talking about what qualified as good mentoring, regardless of who was being mentored. “Whether one is African American, Hispanic, or Caucasian, good mentoring will help a student get through the program,” he said.

His definition of “good mentoring,” Cuevas said, required a faculty member working with a doctoral student or junior faculty member on two separate but complementary levels: first, professional and career development (”What does it take to be a pharmacy professor, a math professor? Giving them an understanding of the culture”) and second, psychological and emotional support, especially for those who don’t have a background in higher education and may be unprepared (or underprepared) to adjust to the lifestyle of a professor.

“Some mentors can’t provide both of those components, and so a person might need one mentor for one aspect of their career, and a different mentor for the other,” Cuevas said. But for those to whom he is a mentor, he said, “I think that providing that psychological and emotional support is a key component.” The difference between a true mentor and an adviser who is a mere “supervisor” is that the latter “may not mind if you take 10 years to get through the program,” Cuevas said. A mentor who cares about a student, he said, is “going to do what I can do in the rest of my life to make sure that the student moves through his or her career successfully.”

Fox, the South Carolina professor, said he agreed that “emotional involvement” was important for a mentor, because “if you’ve got no soul, no heart, all you are is a supervisor.” But “friendship,” he said in an interview after the session, involves a “liking” that he said was not necessarily part of the mentor-mentee relationship.

Another professor in the audience, who asked not to be identified, went further. “My concern about this ‘friend’ thing,” he said, is that some graduate students “come in with psychological problems that you have nothing to do with,” and the more an instructor got involved in their personal lives, the more entangling it could be. “I found it helpful to keep as much distance between this and you as you possibly can,” he said.

“Those personal issues are outside of what we’re supposed to be doing,” Cuevas agreed. He clarified that his definition of “friendship” did not entail the sort of personal entanglements the others seemed to envision. “Of course there have to be certain boundaries; you can’t have a relationship where there are no barriers, because if there aren’t, that person may not look at you as a person who can provide guidance,” he said.

Asked afterward to explain what the boundaries are, Cuevas said that he has “dinner parties at my house,” but he makes it a point to ensure that the graduate students he works with “don’t know what’s happening in my personal life.” A reporter asked whether “friendship” leads to involvement in a student’s personal issues. Cuevas paused and thought. “There’s a single parent in my lab who is struggling to get out of the lab on time,” he said. “I tend to think it’s okay for me to maybe offer some solutions, like finding closer day care, so in that way I do become involved in the personal life.”

But Cuevas would not, he said, try to advise one of the students he works with about how to handle a destructive personal relationship, because he has no expertise in that role. “My answer there has to be, ‘I can’t help you,’ and then direct them to the right person.”

He added: “I do think you can be friends as a mentor. But you can be friends with somebody without being that person you hang out and have a beer with.”

— Doug Lederman

The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/28/mentor.

© Copyright 2008 Inside Higher Ed

A New Paradigm: AskBigQuestions

(Also posted at www.rabbijosh.com)

This morning’s Daily Northwestern writes about the development of an initiative I founded last year called AskBigQuestions. The article focuses in particular on ABQ’s growth from being exclusively sponsored by Hillel to becoming an independent entity with sponsoring organizations from a variety of religious and scholarly communities.

This piece (see page 67), which I wrote last spring, tells a bit of the history of AskBigQuestions. What has changed since that time is that we have figured out one of the central conundrums of the initiative, namely: How does it relate to Hillel’s mission of inspiring students to make an enduring commitment to Jewish life? The Big Questions of ABQ are questions common to all human beings, regardless of one’s background. That’s precisely what makes it attractive to so many students. Yet it’s also what makes it difficult to explain to Jewish organizations and funders, who have often asked: “Why should we support something that brings together Jewish and non-Jewish students for discussions about topics that aren’t necessarily Jewish?” In other words, ABQ doesn’t promote Jewish particularism, it promotes humanism, and that’s not  necessarily part of Hillel’s agenda.

In moving ABQ outside of Hillel, while retaining a key sponsoring role for Hillel within a larger multivocal conversation, we’ve solved a key piece of this problem. The critics are right on this score: getting students in touch with life’s Big Questions is not solely Hillel’s challenge; rather, it is a challenge for the entire university community, of which Hillel is but one member.

Yet the key point remains: Hillel needs to be a leader in this effort, because we still believe in the fundamental value proposition that it is good for all students to ask these questions–including Jewish students. Our hope is that as all students engage the Big Questions of life, they will engage in the journey of self-discovery and engagement that leads to exploration of where they come from and development of their identity. My hope would be that through AskBigQuestions, Catholic students will explore their Catholic roots; Muslim students will explore their own beliefs and traditions; secular humanist students will look to the great philosophers; Jews will uncover Jewish ideas and texts; and all of these students will encounter one another. An image to represent this might be something like this:

This diagram represents what I think is the greatest aspect of AskBigQuestions:These questions are the common animating questions of the world’s great religious and scholarly traditions, and therefore they provide a common meeting point of conversation–or, what some of us would call the commons. By creating an environment in which we can explore, and not argue about, our multiple identities–secular, religious, ethnic, cultural–ABQ at once creates a universal humanistic common ground, and encourages particularistic expression. What we do with ABQ is redraw the line of religious and secular in a way that rejects the binary posited by so many in both religious and secular spheres, and instead includes them both in a common conversation about the meaning of human experience.

We don’t have to choose between being religious or secular, particularist or universalist. In today’s world, we have to be both: we have to go deeper in discovering our own identities at the same time as we go deeper in discovering what links us with one another.

Reimagining what happens in the classroom

I recently perused a recent publication called “A New Agenda for 
Higher Education” (http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/ 
productCd-0470257571….) from the Carnegie Foundation for the 
Advancement of Teaching. It was incredibly timely, in that the book 
discusses ways of blending the approaches to knowledge that typically 
characterize liberal arts education on the one hand, and professional 
education on the other, and brings cases and syllabi from actual 
courses taught by outstanding faculty in the sciences, humanities, and 
professions, each of which encourage students to develop a deeper 
engagement with the subject matter, themselves, and society. 
I was particularly struck by the use of the term “engagement,” which 
resonated with the ways we used it during our Consultation, and which 
point towards a richer field of meaning for the term in Hillel work. 
Engagement involves self-authorship in the context of community, 
society, history and tradition. We are approaching a point in Hillel 
where we are ready to think deeply and challenge ourselves and our 
students to develop methodologies of engagement that reflect this 
understanding. In particular, I was struck by the emphasis most of the 
featured courses place on writing, and in particular journaling and 
reflective essays–even in biology and engineering classes. 

Questions for us: What can we, as a co-curricular organization, learn 
from curricular entities? What are we uniquely positioned to 
contribute? What if more institutions of higher education adopted 
approaches like the one advocated in this book–what would that mean 
for Hillel?

Marriage and affiliation

Thanks to Scott Aaron for this piece on marriage and affiliation: http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/2008061520080614cohenstu… 

The key graf to me is this one: 

“The biggest behavior changes come with getting married, not with 
having children,” Kelman said. “Neither of us expected that.” 

Why would this be the case? One hypothesis is that the move of 
marriage is a bolder one that it once was. Another is that in our 
cultural imagination, marriage is often the end of the storyline– 
think how many movies and TV shows end with a wedding; they don’t end 
with the birth of a child. That may be implied, or it might not be. 
But marriage has become a giant differentiator in our culture. Thus 
when people get married, they ’stop doing the stuff they did when they 
were younger;’ they start living the script of ‘grown-ups.’ (They may 
well start living that script before they get married, too, and they 
may also fail to make the jump once they do get married. But in 
general I’d say there’s a strong correlation.) 

I have been struck since the Consultation by the notion of personal 
narrative, and how the congruence or incongruence between one’s life 
and the ’script’ of one’s life is at the core of authenticity, 
identity, and integrity. During the Consultation, I realized and point 
out that there is no real script for emerging adulthood, save some TV 
series like Friends or How I Met Your Mother. And even in those shows, 
there is a definite valence towards getting married. So it may be what 
we’re seeing here is that, as people get married, they start living a 
new narrative, one which for them includes commitment to Jewish life. 

What might this imply for Hillel?

Hillel 1.0 to Hillel 2.0: Notes for the Journey

One of my biggest learnings from the Consultation is that those of us 
in the room–and those of us in this discussion online–have a 
radically different view of Hillel than many of our key stakeholders. 
As my colleague Andrea Jacobs pointed out, there is a significant 
difference between an established institution and a new one: an 
established institution, like Hillel, has relationships, history, and 
expectations from its stakeholders. A new institution is free of those 
things (tutelage?)–for better and worse. 
It dawned on me that those of us in this discussion have an image of a 
“new Hillel,” one highly responsive to emerging adulthood, and 
motivated by a strikingly different set of questions than “Hillel 
1.0.” The essence lies in the animating questions of these contested 
visions. “Old Hillel” begins with the question, “Why be Jewish?” And 
while that’s an important question, it is a non-starter for anyone for 
whom the answer is, “Being Jewish isn’t important to me.” End of 
conversation. “New Hillel,” however, begins with the question, “What’s 
your story?” Our methodology is about helping a student author his or 
her personal narrative. As we ask “Where have you come from?” we 
unpack elements of a Jewish narrative, and we use those elements as 
rich context for exploring the question “Where are you going?” This is 
the difference between outreach and engagement: The one tries to bring 
the student into the narrative of Jewish life; the other acknowledges 
a co-created, negotiated narrative between the student’s story and the 
Jewish people’s story.

Developmental differences between under- and upper-classmen

Here’s something we need to talk about: What are the differences between freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors? What are the differences between undergraduate and graduate students? What are the needs and developmental tasks of our young alumni? How might a greater awareness of and sensitivity to the developmental realities of each of these cohorts inform our educational vision, within Hillels and among post-college organizations that foster Jewish identity?

I am not the first to notice that, in general, a major shift tends to occur around the beginning or middle of a student’s junior year. Their maturity level increases. They seem to grasp that their academic work isn’t simply about getting good grades or writing the paper they think their professor expects, but that intellectual life can have its own intrinsic rewards. Often times this correlates with a study abroad experience or moving into their first apartment. 

In Jewish terms, what strikes me the most is that students at this stage often move from a discomfort or resistance towards traditional modes of Jewish expression–text, ritual–to a greater curiosity or embrace of it. I tend to get many more juniors and seniors interested in study and conversations of meaning than I do freshmen and sophomores.

There’s nothing new here: I like to say that I didn’t really figure out how to go to college until the middle of my junior year (it’s a shame the first two years cost as much as they did). But do we take these developmental realities into account in our assessment of success, or in designing meaningful Jewish experiences? What does it mean to educate a Jewish student at each of these stages within emerging adulthood? What risks can and should we take, and what are the costs associated with them? We have only begun to do this at Northwestern. I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts.