Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

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Race, Religion, and Ethnicity in the Study of Antiquity

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This semester I am teaching a substantially revamped course on “Race, Religion, and Ethnicity in the Study of Antiquity.”  One of my new goals for this course is to explore the ethical implications of what we, as students of the past, research and write.  This is something that has been on my mind for some time, and while I have found resources such as Eidolon and Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s site enormously helpful, I have still have some ways to go.  I am hoping to be able to progress along with my students.  A version of the syllabus (which has some mistakes) is here.  Note that I am also experimenting (it is a small class) with a variation of “ungrading.”

We met for the first time the other day and worked together on a concept map of “race”.  Pretty much everyone at Brown has thought about race somewhat, so our map is probably not typical.  It is also clearly imperfect.  But simply the process of trying to articulate in this way what we might mean by “race” was both challenging and enlightening.  Below is what we came up with (we drew on Whiteboard and I redid it in Miro).  (Note that you may need to zoom in with your browser to see some of the connecting words – a disadvantage of using the free version.)  Comments welcome!

Reading Recommendation Letters

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As longtime readers of this blog know, I have been thinking for a long time about issues of evaluation: How do we know if we, as individuals and collectives, are doing a good job?  Within the academy, what are the best practices when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of our teaching (and here) or a job candidate (here, here, and here)?  Much of my own thinking has been influenced by Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is particularly helpful for identifying our biases and developing strategies for working around them.

One of the most pervasive components of an academic file, be it for a job, fellowship, or promotion,  is the recommendation letter.  Yet few documents are as subject to bias, both by writers and readers.  In this short piece, I try to outline in general terms how I read, and write, such letters.  My way is certainly not the only way, but my goal is to contribute to a conversation about how we use such letters.

The following opinion was published in Inside Higher Ed.

What a professor considers when reading recommendation letters (opinion)

Submitted by Michael L. Satlow on January 11, 2022 – 3:00am

The season of writing recommendation letters is coming to an end, and the season of reading them will soon begin. For those being evaluated—particularly for a fellowship, an academic job or admission to a graduate program—the entire process of how those decisions are made can be mysterious. And perhaps nothing about it is as baffling as the role that recommendation letters play.

The content of the letters is itself a bit of a mystery, attenuated by the need for the applicants to waive all rights to ever see what is in them. (And that really is necessary if the letter is to be taken at all seriously.) While, earlier in my career, I used to ask for many such letters—and continue to do so, but less frequently—I more often find myself writing and reading them. Academics use no single approach to the way they read letters, but perhaps by explicitly stating how I read them, I can help to dispel for the applicants some of the apprehension and anxiety inherent in the process.

When I read recommendation letters, I look for three things: 1) confirmation, 2) context and 3) insight. Let me unpack each one.

When I have to evaluate any fellowship, job, promotion or graduate admission application, I begin with the applicant’s statement or cover letter and then move, if available, to that person’s other written materials, usually a writing sample or proposal. Those are the primary documents from which I form an impression. I then turn to the rest of the information—maybe a transcript, test scores, previous education and letters—to see if I can confirm that impression. In the best applications, everything lines up; all the materials present a coherent image. When they do not, I need to re-evaluate my initial reaction and think a bit harder about which evidence to value more and which to value less. Almost always, when it comes down to a discrepancy between items written by the applicant and the recommendation letters, the letters lose.

The primary scenario where the letters become more important is when they can provide greater context for the applicant’s work. Applicants (and, in fact, not just applicants—I frequently find myself in such a situation) sometimes are too close to their material to put it into a context that somebody not in their immediate field fully understands. I often find myself wondering about the significance of a proposal in an area with which I have limited familiarity and look to the letters to provide the lay of the land. While I do not really fault an applicant—especially a junior one—for being unable to articulate the significance of what they are doing, I do depend on the recommendation letters to provide that information.

Finally, my ideal candidate for almost anything—and this may speak to my own idiosyncrasies—is confident but has some humility. I always delight in learning something small but new from a letter, an accomplishment that the applicant may have forgotten to mention. I am very cautious about discussions of character traits because they are so prone to unconscious biases, but fun and positive facts are always welcome.

Note what I do not take very seriously: value judgments and the stature of the letter writer. Letter writers often have a direct interest in the success of a student. I know that I feel a little proud when someone I recommend gets a notable acceptance. But I find the praise routinely found in recommendation letters—most egregiously in letters for tenure and promotion—mostly vapid and unhelpful. “Best student in my career” or “pathbreaking scholarship” are meaningless terms unless they are backed up with evidence, as they so often are not.

If a writer says that the applicant was the “best student” he ever had, for example, I want to know what that means and how often that writer has used the term for other students. “Pathbreaking scholarship” requires a serious elucidation of the specific intervention made by the work, how it is “pathbreaking” and the specific ways in which the writer thinks it will be influential. It also demands a candid evaluation of whether, when it comes to prediction, the writer has previously demonstrated their ability to be more accurate than not.

When I look at who wrote the recommendation letter, I often think back to the other letters that I have read by this writer for comparison. (The fields I work in are small enough that this happens more often than one might think.) Is the writer always critical, or is every scholar “the best of her cohort”? I have neither the time nor the inclination to actually dig up those past letters, but I am left with distinct impressions about which letter writers are honest and which are not. And, ultimately, a letter from a giant in the field at a most selective college or university, in and of itself, is not worth more to me than one from a junior scholar at a less selective one.

How I read letters has also informed how I write them. I do not think that I have ever written a letter for a person who has superhuman intellectual powers or who is without room for professional improvement, and I never try to write a letter that suggests otherwise. I also try to keep my letters succinct, because I know how much work these evaluations require. I try to be helpful to colleagues who are laboring in good conscience to make incredibly difficult and consequential decisions. And I hope that my colleagues have equal consideration for me.

I wish I could say whether most scholars share my approach to the reading of these letters. From my own limited experience, I know that at least some do not, and probably most scholars, afraid of endangering the chances of a candidate they are recommending, are more effusive than I am when they write such letters. The very fact, however, that I do not know how my colleagues read these letters is part of the problem: we rarely have an honest and open discussion about how we evaluate. One of my goals in this essay is to advance that conversation.

This might be cold comfort to applicants. The application process in academia is as messy and subjective as it is in almost every other field. When I say that recommendation letters on their own and the support of the “big guns” are unlikely to land a fellowship, position, promotion—as other letters are unlikely to torpedo such chances—I know that I do not speak only for myself. I also know that most selection committees are made of smart, hardworking people who are genuinely torn by difficult decisions. I would like to think that most of us would rather you invest your energy and time in your own work rather than cultivating letter writers, and that you have some faith in the evaluation process.

Michael L. Satlow is professor of religious studies and Judaic studies at Brown University and the author of How the Bible Became Holy [1] (Yale University Press, 2015).

Source URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2022/01/11/what-professor-considers-when-reading-recommendation-letters-opinion

Links
[1] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300171921/how-bible-became-holy

Sacred Time: A First Stab

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I have not posted very much over the period of COVID.  This was due in part due to the predictable psychological effects of living under COVID (maybe a mild case of “languishing,” as the press has called it).  More importantly, though, it is because I have been hard at work on a new book that focuses on the lived religious experience of those in Late Antiquity – the time (second to seventh centuries CE) of the formation of Judaism and Christianity as we presently know them.  The reading, writing, and working out of my ideas has not left me with the mental space and emotional energy that usually drives my blogging.  I do hope, though, that this post will help to get me back into the habit of doing so.

I have been finding one particular chapter of the new book extraordinarily vexing to write.  This is the chapter on “sacred time,” on trying to understand how people in Late Antiquity understood the timing of their rituals and festivals.  Part of my process for developing ideas is to present them to public audiences and talk about them when they are still rough, after which I often substantially revise my thinking.  Over the past couple of years I have had little opportunity to do this, but was, finally, able to discuss a version of this chapter with a group at Brown University, the Cultures and Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean seminar.  After reflecting on that conversation, I have begun to rewrite the chapter.  Below is my latest draft of the beginning of the chapter (stripped of the notes).  I’m not yet sure whether it will work and survive the writing of the rest of the chapter (again), but I would be interested in reactions.  Does it make you want to read further?

 

It would have been hard, anywhere in the Roman Empire, not to notice the Kalendae Ianuariae.  The kalends – the first day – of the month of January had been observed as a festival by Romans for centuries, and over time had become a raucous, multi-day festival.  In the fourth century, the Greek rhetorician Libanius, writing in Antioch, observed that the three day holiday, capped off by a day of revelry, was so joyous that on the fourth day, as people began to return to work, they “prayed to see the same festival again.”  It was one of the few Roman holidays so pervasive and important that even the rabbis, who studiously avoided mentioning nearly all Roman and Christian holidays, speculated about its origin and meaning.  The bishop John Chrysostom, writing shortly after Libanius, himself devoted a sermon to the holiday, sputtering in anger at his congregants who seemed to have participated widely in the “demonic” celebrations, and emphasizing that Christians do not need special holidays, and should, in fact reject them: all of time now is a continual feast, he argued, in which one day is not more “sacred” than any other.

We will return later to the Kalendae Ianuariae, but for the moment, it is worth thinking about the many complex issues that it raises.  Everybody knew that timing was no less important than space and method for communicating effectively with invisible beings.  John Chrysostom might cavalierly dismiss the importance of sacred time, but even he knew that there was no chance he could convince his congregants that time was now entirely uniform.  The problem, though, was how one could actually identify a propitious moment: What actually made one period of time more sacred than another?   Was sacred time baked into nature itself and made visible in such signs as the rising and setting of the sun; the movement of the planets; and phases of the moon?  Or was it sacred because some commanding body – the Roman Senate, a city council, God – said it was?  Moreover, how did one person’s sacred time, such as the Roman Kalendae Ianuariae, layer onto other and competing sacred calendars, such as that of the rabbis?  And what was at stake, not only theologically but also in the exercise of power?  For motives that are not entirely pure, groups throughout history have struggled to control the calendar and its holidays.

Today, when we think of sacred time, we normally think of dates on the calendar, whether a particular day of the week or holiday, marked especially by official days off from work.  This was also true in antiquity.  Like today, people in antiquity were constantly reconciling multiple calendars, especially the festival calendars of Roman imperial authorities, municipalities, and their spiritual leaders.  Scores of such calendars from Late Antiquity survive, often inscribed on stone or prepared in codex form for individual rich patrons.  These festivals would be most palpably experienced in the closing of the law courts (which was, like today’s closure of government offices and services, the way holidays were officially recognized), gatherings – often accompanied by free refreshments – and noisy and sometimes spectacular processions.  These were, perhaps like our own official festivals, complicated affairs that intricately linked notions of the sacred with commerce and projections of power and authority.

People in antiquity, though, also experienced sacred time in ways that were less connected to the calendar.  Sacred time was an inherent part of the natural order, which also made it visible.  The cosmos, and the motion of the planets, were visible signs of time, if only one knew how to read them.  Sunrise and sunset, so often dramatically distinguished from the flow of the rest of the day, were clearer.  The moon, particularly the full and new moons, was also a visible marker of time.  Birth, death, and menstrual cycles – often hard breaks in the course of an individual’s life – could hold private significance, for individuals and families.  It goes without saying that extraordinary weather events and other natural events, such as earthquakes, were also seen as irruptions of the sacred into the undifferentiated flow of profane time.

How people actually experienced and understood sacred time – how it actually worked in practice – is among one of the more difficult dimensions of ancient religiosity to recover.  While some representations of time survive in inscriptions, calendars, and zodiacs, these artifacts can only indirectly reveal how people actually experienced time.  The often-polemical writings of the elite too are informative, but they frequently obscure the more direct experience of sacred time.  As we have come to expect, almost nothing survives from antiquity that shows how the non-elite – and especially women, children, and slaves – experienced time.  Nevertheless, a careful and critical investigation of the fragments that we do have, bolstered with some informed speculation, can help us to bring into better focus the basic contours of how sacred time “worked” in Late Antiquity.

 

So You’re Going to College…

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open+course+catalog

I originally published this in 2015, but am re-upping it as the new college year begins.

 

Over the years, I have offered scores of first-year students advice.  I have encouraged them to clarify their goals; to create long term plans; to think strategically about what they want to get out of the next four years; to explore intellectual interests outside of their comfort zones; to challenge themselves.  I have rarely encouraged students to take (or not take) specific courses or professors, a practice that I have always found questionable.  Most of my advice has inevitably been ignored.  That, though, doesn’t seem to trouble anyone.  First-year students, who by the time they see me, are overwhelmed with advice and the entire newness of college are usually just happy to leave with their PIN and the administration feels like it has done its task in offering advising.  I have tried to avoid cynicism.

This year, although I will not formally advise first-year students, is a little different.  This year I have skin (and an absurd, unsustainable amount of money) in the game.  My son enters Brown next year and it has made me think hard about what I want him to take. Below I sketch out my advice to him.

First, a few words of introduction.  Brown is unusual in that it has no core curriculum or general education requirements.  So in many respects that is what this is, my vision of what every college educated students should take, or at least know by the end college.  It probably mirrors in some way the requirements at many other colleges, although I hope that the brief explanations I provide of my reasoning are useful.  It is also tailored to my son’s own background, with his unique set of strengths and weaknesses, as I briefly indicate below.

1.  Philosophy: 1-2 courses.  Everybody should have some idea about how to formulate the “big questions,” e.g., how to live the “good” or meaningful life.  One class should focus on major thinkers (more a history of philosophy); the other class either on moral philosophy or some specialized, non-analytical topic (e.g., idealism, existentialism).

2.  Political Science: 1 course.  This should be on political theory.  Every citizen should have an understanding of the theory that undergirds our society as well as alternatives.

3.  Literature. 1-2 courses.  While many students will have taken such courses in high school, college literature classes will increase their ability to engage with and profit from great literature.  At least one of these courses should not be a survey; the goal is to learn to read in a particular way.

4.  Art/History of Art. 1 course.  Art and music provide alternative ways of understanding and expression.  They also can serve as a great source of pleasure, whether in their production or consumption.

5.  Music/History of Music. 1 course.  See above.

6.  Economics. 2 courses. For better or worse, we live in an age that thinks economically.  A couple of courses will help students better understand what that means and give them some skills that might help them when it comes to employment.

7.  Math: 2 courses.  We live in an age of big data.  The ability to understand what to do with that data is valuable, not only potentially for career preparation but in many other contexts (e.g., evaluating claims in newspapers).  So statistics is a must.  For a second math course (my son has already taken BC calculus) I would recommend probability, as a way to understand risk.

8.  Computer Science. 2 courses.  As with economics, computers are a fundamental part of our society.  Computer science courses provide a better grasp of them; practical skills; and a logical and rigorous way of thinking that is applicable in other areas.  At least one of these courses should focus on programming.

9.  Laboratory Science. 1 course.  In college I took four semesters of laboratory science.  I didn’t like them and didn’t do well in them.  I’m glad I took them, though.  Everyone should experience a college lab and engage in the scientific method.

10.  Language.  I am less certain here.  My son is orally fluent in a second language and could continue study in order to have better facility in the literature.  Or he could take a new language.  Either way, some continued language training seems important.

11.  Writing intensive courses.  Very few things that one learns in college are is important as good writing.  At least one course every semester should involve extensive writing and the opportunity for revision, providing that the instructor delivers quality feedback.

12.  Class size.  MOOCs and online courses have been extensively discussed as potentially revolutionalizing higher education.  In the past few years we’ve also seen their limits, though.  For students in college, online courses might be a great way to “take” courses that focus on information delivery.  In fact, despite the fact that lecture classes can be quite enjoyable, I would advise students to take only a minimum of these courses in college.  The real “value added” of college is feedback and engagement, and the more time that one can spend in smaller classes the better.  Such a strategy might result, for example, in a student taking the introduction to macro economics online and then being able to take a smaller economics seminar.  This is not always easy to pull off (there is less motivation to do the assignments in a MOOC; one has to squeeze them in somewhere) but it seems silly to spend so much money on information delivery when there are so many cheaper ways to get the same thing.

13.  Research skills.  I am sometimes stunned by how poor the research skills are of some of my students.  I’ve had seniors who don’t know how to use a library (and their online research skills are hardly better).  In this case, as with writing, the discipline matters far less than the skill, and any class that helps one to develop basic research skills (history might be good here) is advisable.

This curriculum, over the course of four years, should leave room for most majors and several other electives.  It won’t, though, work for everyone.  Engineering, and some science, majors are locked into much more constraining curricula.  Pre-meds could probably do something along these lines but with fewer electives left.  Most importantly, though, it is important that the courses be seen not as things to check off a list but as enjoyable components of one’s education.

I don’t know if my son will take this advice, but if it was at all useful to you, let me know.

Great Jewish Books, Yet Again

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Did someone mention teaching?  It seems like ages since I’ve been inside an undergraduate classroom.  Yet here we go again, and although my first class is still a couple of weeks away, I am already growing anxious and excited.

This will be the fourth time that I’ve taught “Great Jewish Books” (see here, here, and here for the other times).  I’ve tweaked the assignments and tried to better represent women in the readings.  I had abandoned teaching Gluckl of Hameln (not such a great book!), but after reading Natalie Zemon Davis’s brilliant treatment of it in her book Women on the Margins, I decided to restore it.  I also tweaked the assignments again and intend (although it is not reflected explicitly in the syllabus) to more closely tie the weekly journal prompts to parts of Elements of Style (e.g., write this assignment using only the active voice) and provide more scaffolding for their peer reviews.

Now, on to figuring out whether we can meet outside on a regular basis so that we can take our masks off….

The syllabus, in pdf form, is here.