This semester I will be teaching a graduate-level course on “Mishnah and Tosefta.” I have taught versions of this course before (and have posted them) but have made a few changes. Should anyone be interested, I am posting the revised syllabus here.
Mishnah Syllabus 2018
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Canonization: The Simulation (Conclusion)
Yesterday in class we ran two historical simulations of the canonization of Christian Scripture. The assignment and process is described here. The results of both simulations were similar, in part (I presume) due to some tweaks in the rules that I made since I last did this (see here). Taking away some of the innate power of the Bishops and lessening the active role of the Emperor created a more level playing field that allowed the other Christian groups managed to rally and bypass what would become the “Orthodox” position. The winning proposal for a canon of Christian scripture in the simulation that I ran was:
- Exclusion of the Hebrew Bible and the redaction of all included texts from references to it;
- Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, and Thomas;
- Letters of Paul;
- Book of Revelation;
- Ability to add (but not subtract) texts to the canon, as determined in future synods;
- Ability to interpret texts allegorically (not sure what this means, but the Montanists insisted that this was a deal-breaker)
It certainly is possible, historically, that a coalition of Marcionites, Gnostics, and Montanists could have arrived at something like this. Could they, though, realistically have opposed the bishops?
We discussed what would happen on the next day. My students were positive that there would be hell to pay. The bishops, they assumed, would align with the emperor, have them all declared heretics, and persecute them. Maybe that’s right. But it is interesting to imagine another outcome. At a time when the meaning and boundaries of “heresy” and “orthodoxy” were very much in play, and it is not impossible that the majority of Christians in the empire would have had more sympathy for positions that would align with those that would be branded “heretical,” perhaps the “heretics” could have united and convinced the emperor to abandon the bishops. That which became heretical perhaps could have, with a bit of expert politicking, have become Orthodox and the Christian canon would look quite different.
One striking anomaly in the two simulations was the position of the rabbis. In my simulation they scored 0% (accomplishing none of their goals) but in the other they scored 100%. The reason is that they set different goals. The rabbis in my group wanted the Hebrew Bible included as part of the Christian canon but the rabbis in the other simulation wanted it excluded. The rabbis in this second group argued that having the Hebrew Bible as part of the Christian canon was bad for both Christians and Jews; they need a clean separation rather than intertwined stories. Looking at history – at the Christian need to continually wrestle with its Jewish past and understand, theologically, the place of contemporary Jews – the rabbis who argued for separation may have been on to something.
America First
America leads through its values. A hackneyed phrase if there ever was one and one that I never took seriously until this week.The true meaning of this phrase – and particularly of the key ambiguous words “leads” and “values” – began finally to dawn on me as I followed the ludicrous attempt by Sean Spicer to defend the patently false assertion that the inauguration crowd was far larger than it was. The entire issue was silly (how consequential is this crowd size?) but what it represents was much bigger: Despite a more than healthy amount of skepticism, I do not expect our government to lie. Maybe obfuscate, skirt around issues – but not to assert falsehoods. I just took that for granted.
But of course, and this is where I confess to coming unconscionably late to this realization, in many, probably most, countries this is not the case. Their governments do lie, with regularity. They also steal and subvert the public will. In the eyes of those who live in these countries, America is hope. It is not just a place in which they might want to move but, more importantly, a model for how their own government could operate.
A government that does not lie is just one of many things that I take for granted but shouldn’t. We practice our religions; say what we want without fear of government persecution; promote individual freedom and equality under the law; consider immigrants a vital part of national fabric; wrestle openly with our continuing problems – the whole usual gamut. I’m not sure if any other country in the world enacts a set of values like this; even those countries that we consider close to us in values (e.g., the U.K.) often have strong nativist tendencies and more tightly constrain civic rights.
The world knows this, and they admire it. America has always been imperfect. We have struggled to enact our values along a whole range of issues, from supporting repressive regimes (often because of the material benefits) to dealing with the legacy of racism. Nobody admires our gun culture, our primary and secondary education systems (although our universities are envied through the world), or our strange, extraordinarily expensive healthcare system (although perhaps we got points for trying to fix this). But we have fairly consistently, as a people who has assigned to our government the role of speaking for us, aspired (or at least given lip service) to these values. In normal times (which these surely are) we typically assert our better natures.
Power comes in many forms. A country’s strong military or economic might is certainly a way for it to exert “power” on the world stage. Who can argue with a strong army? Yet while such tools of power are in some ways effective in the short term, one would at least like to think that they are both tenuous and costly. Russia, for example, does not lead by example but by bullying, and they are trapped in a cycle (as the old USSR was) of having to continue to invest resources in bullying to maintain their power. As soon as they stop, they stop leading. Is there any question that if China withdraws its army that Tibet would not gleefully exert its independence?
Despite having both the strongest army and economy in the world, we have always sought to lead not by throwing this clout around (which, of course, we do) but by example. Most of our allies follow our lead not because we occupy or threaten them, but because they like and trust us. We have always understood that threatening and bullying is in the long term costly and not effective. To use another hackneyed phrase, we are great because we are good; because no amount of strength and riches can exert the kind of power and authority of good values. I have always known this, but I have come to really know this only this last week.
A government that lies, that builds walls (I think here more of the symbolic than practical force of this action), that bans visitors and refugees, that floats the specter of religious discrimination – this does not accurately reflect our values. And no matter how strong we make our military or how many cars and glittery things we can all buy, they will never make America first in the world. When we look at ourselves the way that many other people in the world see us, we will find far more admiration than condemnation and now, increasing apprehension. If America loses its values, what is left for them? And for us?
These are things that I should have learned in elementary school. As too often happens, it is only when faced with the alternative that I realize what I have long taken for granted.
Justice for All
I had a letter published in the New York Times yesterday. I actually wrote it a couple of weeks ago. I continue to be upset by the enormous impact that money has on our legal system; it seems so very un-American. At the same time, in light of the massacre in Orlando this seems so trivial at the moment. We have so much to fix. Anyway, here it is:
To the Editor:
Re “PayPal Founder Is Said to Bankroll Hulk Hogan Suit Against Gawker” (Business Day, May 25):
It has been hard recently to get away from the stories about Peter Thiel’s funding of lawsuits against Gawker. The media coverage has focused almost exclusively on the threat that such lawsuits pose to freedom of the press. This, though, misses the much larger and more troubling story that deserves our full attention: that access to the legal system is so dependent on money that even a man as wealthy and famous as Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) needs a billionaire sponsor for a lawsuit.
The knowledge that money buys access to the law is by no means new, but this case could serve to bring this systemic issue more to public attention. Perhaps, if the media would redirect its focus, there is an opportunity in this presidential election year to help to ensure equal access to the law for rich and poor alike.
MICHAEL SATLOW
Providence, R.I.
Toward a New Model of Academic Publishing
A couple of months ago I published a letter in the New York Times sketching a different way forward for academic publishing. I have now published a more robust version of that argument in The Chronicle:
Academic Publishing: Toward a New Model
May 18, 2016
The web, we all thought, was going to transform academic publishing. At the very least, it would make research far more accessible, lowering the cost and expanding the reach of publications. At most, it would fundamentally alter the nature of research itself, making it far more collaborative. In either case, though, academic publishing as we knew it was doomed.
Now, a decade later, as the web has fundamentally transformed so many areas of our lives, academic publishing is one area upon which its impact has been only modest at best. There are, it is true, a few open-access journals and many academics maintain blogs, but contrary to expectations, journal costs have soared and our writings remain perhaps less accessible, locked behind paywalls while libraries forgo buying print versions. While it is not difficult to understand why this has happened, a solution to it has been elusive.
Academics want their work to be widely accessible, but even more than that they want tenure, promotion, and raises. Most institutions base their evaluations on peer-reviewed publications, and they rely on the publishers themselves not only to disseminate research but also to maintain a credible peer-review system.
To make research more accessible, separate the review and dissemination processes.
While in theory universities could conduct their own peer reviews (as they do to some extent in seeking outside letters, although the writers of such letters in my experience often fall back on, for example, the number of peer-reviewed publications by a candidate), in practice they outsource this task to the publications, upon whose judgments they base their own assessments.When faced with a choice of publishing within the traditional models or in an open-access venue that may have little (or, rightly or wrongly, suspect) review, most academics choose to sacrifice the potential of a larger audience for more certainty in furthering their careers.
How, then, might we rethink academic publishing to increase accessibility while maintaining the benefits of peer review? More important, how might we do this while recognizing the fundamental dual realities that (1) universities are already too stretched to devote significant resources to peer reviewing and (2) publishers are companies whose right to thrive financially should be respected? One solution is to cut the Gordian knot of review and dissemination.
I propose that we do this by delegating the responsibilities for peer reviewing to the professional, or “learned,” societies. In this model, authors would submit their work to one or more of the professional societies most appropriate for that work. The societies would oversee the peer review and give accepted works an imprimatur. Authors could then shop their works with imprimaturs to different publishers, which would be in the business of dissemination rather than evaluation.
Publishers might then set their own standards for publication (they might, for example, require an imprimatur from a particular society, or from two societies) and edit for style. A publication, though, would be only as good as the content it could attract, and in order to attract good content, publishers would have to offer authors better incentives.
Such a system would have many potential benefits. Professional societies are, by their very nature, in a better position to run a peer-review process than are publishers. They have fewer potential conflicts of interest, and they have better command of and access to the experts in the field. Our current system’s review process is often hobbled by a small pool of academics willing to review; many refuse because they believe that the system is exploitative.
If, on the other hand, professional societies were to take responsibility for reviewing, more academics would view that task as a genuine service to their colleagues. The result would probably be a larger and happier pool of reviewers more willing to give the work of their colleagues serious consideration.
Many, perhaps most, works of research could conceivably be submitted to more than one professional society for evaluation. The evaluation itself could take many different forms: It might judge an article to be publishable or not, for example, or to give a score on a five-point scale.
What is important is that the professional societies decide on a common form and then operate anonymously but transparently. How many articles, for example, were submitted this year, and how many were judged publishable? Are there different rates based on the gender or race of the authors?
Such statistics, which are hard to come by in our current model, would help us to better identify and root out systemic biases. They would also allow the universities to do a better job of understanding the results of a peer review and thus assessing their faculty members.Rather than serving as gatekeepers, publishers would be in the position of wooing authors. Publishers might vie for an article, for example, that has multiple high-level imprimaturs. Authors could then choose based on a variety of incentives that might be offered. One publisher might offer cash but retain all future rights to the work; another might offer less cash but allow the author to maintain rights; yet a third might offer no cash, but because the price of the journal is low, the work would be more broadly accessible.
The producers of the content would have far more power than is the case today. In fact, at that point authors might decide to simply self-publish on a blog or the like with notice of the imprimatur (a digital badge?), secure that for purposes of institutional review the work has been vetted.
Such a system, of course, would have a cost. Each professional society would have to create a robust referee system. This might be supported by fees that authors pay for each work they submit for review (perhaps subsidized by each author’s university) or, preferably, by increased dues across the board, with membership in the organization a necessary precondition for using the review system. Each of those ideas has its benefits and weaknesses, but either could work.
As a whole, this system would cost less than we now pay for the review and dissemination of research; increase its accessibility; help to make university evaluations more transparent; and allow academics to maintain more control over their research. It is a system that maintains the highest standard of scholarly scrutiny while delivering on some of the promises of digital publication. Whether that is to happen, though, is largely in our own hands.