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CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan, Transcend Art and Peace
Created: November 14, 2001
Latest Update: November 14, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

But you can't be excluded permanently from a group of only twenty. Survival means coming to terms with each other. And coming to terms we did. Academic life is funny, at least if you want it to be funny, and I did. You have one structural context with your colleagues, and quite another with your students. Now, I don't mean that as a great principle in grand theory. I don't even believe in grand theory in the old sense of metanarrativeS. And I meant that capital S. It's not a typo. I like Rigney's metaphor of social theory being like the elephant and sociologists as the blind men. Each of us sees a different part of society, each of which may be may be true and partially descriptive, but none of us "sees" society, the megapicture. But I think that Habermas might be right that we need some overall metastandard for judging validity claims. I mean, look at this mess with Bin Laden. We really do need some kind of mediation theory that will guide us short of war and killing.

But I digress. We made tentative moves towards communicating, way back in the seventies, when my students and I started a department newsletter. Early shades of Dear Habermas. I think we called it the Serious Sociologist. You can tell we were having fun. Slubberdegullion and Taradiddle wrote little bits for us, as did some of the others, but it was like pulling teeth to get them to write. Somehow we came up with the idea of the Centerfold, and did a Centerfold of one of the statisticians in our department. Now of course, as a college newsletter, we didn't condone nudity. So we used a large stat book instead of a fig leaf. Remember, these were the days of Play Boy and Play Girl. So we soon found ourselves inundated with other prominent candidates for our centerfold. I remember one was a professor from some ivy league college back East.

But it was also the time of the Vietnamese War and of many serious questions on both sides of the issues of war and killings. So, lo and behold, the printer at Ambassador censored our newsletter on the grounds of obscenity, sure that we were part of the hippie anti-war movement, which some of us were. The printer decided that sociologists couldn't print a drawing of a nude, especially one discreetly covered, and a male nude, at that. These were also the days of radical feminism and the burning of bras.

We rallied, parading signs of "Stalag Ambassador." We had our own freedom rally. The President of Ambassador removed the censorship order and the Serious Sociologist enjoyed amazing popularity for a while.

. . . .

So we had a long history of playing together, but much of the playing centered in my classes, not in the halls and offices of our department. And now it had come to this: Slubberdegullion and Taradiddle and The Aging Fox were hovering around my door inspecting a posted list of grades, and nodding and whispering like what I'm sure was like the three witches of "Double, double, toil and trouble . . ." or was that "bubble, bubble, toil and trouble? Actually this whole scene had the makings of a Disney melodrama.

Image of witches and bubbles rising from cauldron. or maybe from computer.

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513 words. Former word count: 4723. I think. 4723 + 513 = 5236 . Total word count: 5236

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