diversity

Do We Need Diversity in Reviewers?

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diversity-in-business-backgrounds-wallpapersThere has been a growing movement calling for the reading of diverse books. One question is whether these books will get much attention if there is not a greater diversity of reviewers. This has long been a preserve of white males in the major review publications (a quick survey of the recent reviews in the NY Times Book Review had about two-thirds of the reviews written by men and a small number by those with recognizably non-Western names).

This was an issue discussed by a panel this week at Book Expo America and covered in a Publisher’s Weekly article. On one hand, major publications are cutting back on book sections. On the other hand, there is the wide open world of blogging and Amazon reviews. But the major publications still serve as gatekeepers. One option is to assign some reviews to outside reviewers who are women or ethnic minorities. Such reviewers may see a work with different eyes.

As a white male reviewer, I get this and would heartily agree with this sentiment. In the area I most review, Christian non-fiction with an academic bent, I am struck by how many of the reviews (and blurbs for books) are by white men. How interesting it would be if more of the books by white authors were reviewed by persons of color, and persons outside the writer’s theological perspective.

I wonder about this in other areas as well. What if male-oriented action fiction was reviewed by women or majority world reviewers? What if heterosexually oriented romantic fiction was reviewed by men or by LGBTQ reviewers? Suppose some military history were to be reviewed by scholars of pacifism?

Of course it is always helpful to have those conversant with the literature they are reviewing writing reviews.  But it does occur to me that mixing up review assignments might help give a more diverse perspective on a book, and perhaps expose a book to new audiences of readers.

It also strikes me that it does publishing a service when review publishers diversify their reviewers. The panel obseved:  “the masters of the universe are not book reviewers, but publishers.” Yet I would contend that non-white, non-male reviewers are also aware of different authors than the white males. Those who review in the self-published world might especially have an important role in calling attention to writers who might be overlooked by the mainstream publishers. Review publications as well as publishers might also note book bloggers with significant followings from ethnic minority backgrounds, and those who have received recognition like WordPress’s “Freshly Pressed.”

It does seem that a crucial issue is how intentional publishers will be in seeking to broaden the diversity of their published authors. This never just happens but is the result of intentional action. Publishers have to believe that publishing a greater diversity of authors makes good business sense. The book blogging world can be a source of identifying new authors with growing followings. One thing publishers are beginning to figure out through vehicles like Netgalley and their own blogger programs is that bloggers and their social networks have a great value in book promotion. If these efforts can be used to recruit a greater diversity of reviewers, then it also stands to reason that this could be a powerful resource for diversifying a publisher’s author portfolio.

I say we need diversity in reviewers.

What Would Bring Them Together?

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The Crucifixion, As Seen From the Cross, James Tissot

The Crucifixion, As Seen From the Cross, James Tissot

What would bring together a Libyan, at least two criminals, urban natives, provincial dwellers, and diaspora people, women, children, the religious and cultural elite, and forces of an occupying army? On the first Good Friday it was the execution by crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. If you don’t believe me, read the narrative of Luke 23:26-56:

  • Soldiers lead him away (v. 26) and mock him (v. 36).
  • Simon of Cyrene (a town on the coast of Libya) is impressed to carry the cross (v. 26).
  • A crowd of people including women follow (v. 27). Likely this included both residents of Jerusalem and diaspora Jews in town for the feast of the Passover. From Jesus’ words in v. 28, living and children yet unborn might have been there as well.
  • Two criminals were executed, one on each side of Jesus (v. 32).
  • Rulers of the people join in mocking Jesus (v. 35).
  • A Roman centurion (the officer leading the group of 100 troops garrisoned there and probably participating in the crucifixion) praises God and says “surely this was a righteous man” (v. 47)
  • Joseph, a Judean member of the religious elite, secures Jesus’ body and lays it in a grave (vv. 50-51).
  • Women from Galilee, a provincial region from which Jesus came, followed Joseph and noted the location of the tomb so they could return with spices and perfumes (which would mask the smell of the decaying body).

Only recently did I reflect on the wide array of humanity that the crucifixion brought together–people who otherwise would not associate. Different social classes, urban and rural dwellers, Jews and Gentiles, people from Palestine, Africa, and Eurasia, men and women, oppressed and oppressors, criminals and those who sentenced them all were at the cross.

This was not a “kumbayah moment” by any means. And yet this gathering in a strange way pre-figured the new humanity, the “beloved community” that would arise from the death of Jesus on a Roman gibbet. It didn’t happen all at once, but within fifteen years or so there was a community like this in Syrian Antioch consisting of both Jews and Gentiles that reflected this kind of diversity–so much so that outsiders coined a neologism to describe them–“Christians”–and it stuck.

Diversity and inclusion is a big thing in the university context in which I work. And yet I’m struck by the stark contrasts that I’ve witnessed this week in the realization of this vision. On one hand, I listened to the newly invested first African-American president of the university where I am engaged in ministry speak of “inclusion with excellence.” It was a moment not unlike the inauguration in 2008 of President Obama. In the same week, I listened to the news reports of a university campus in Kenya with students with aspirations much like those with whom I work that was turned into a killing field.

It is hard to be flung back and forth between such high aspirations and such virulent hatred. Yet Good Friday reminds me that the followers of the crucified One, when most faithful to their calling become a community drawing together all the polar opposites and scattered peoples found at the foot of the cross and more. The apostle Paul wrote about this saying, “His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility” (Ephesians 2:15b-16, NIV).

If you don’t share my Christian convictions and have read this far, I thank you for extending such grace to my words. Truthfully, I’m writing more to speak to myself and perhaps to those who share my convictions. Against all the polarities we are tempted to create, God’s story is one of surprising us again and again by turning the “other” into a brother or sister, the despised “enemy” into my neighbor, and the criminal or oppressor I consider beyond hope to one with whom I’ll share paradise.

And it all began one Friday afternoon at a crucifixion…

Bob on Books Top Ten Posts of 2014!

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What a difference a year makes! Last December, I had been at this blogging thing only a few months and had a handful of followers and a little under 3300 views on the blog. I’ve had some surprises over the last year. This month, the blog has had more views (over 5,000) than all of last year. A question about growing up in working class Youngstown turned into a series of posts and its own category on the blog and the most viewed post of the year. In fact, due to interest from a couple Youngstown Facebook groups, strictly speaking all ten top posts for the year were in this category. What I decided to do with my top ten list was to post the top Youngstown post, which had over 10,000 views and then the next nine non-Youngstown posts. So here is the countdown!

#10: Dear Son, We’re Sorry to Inform You… This post was a parable. I’ll leave you to discover the point of the parable!

end-ono1

#9: Privileged, Persecuted, or Participating?  In response to an online symposium, I reflect on three possible postures Christians working in higher education might take toward the university world.

#8 Teddy’s Rules. Bookriot had an article listing these rules. I include these and reflect on the unpretentiousness of Roosevelt, something present day literati might learn from.

#7 So Whose America Is It Anyway? My response to Coke’s Superbowl commercial with a diverse ethnic mosaic of people singing “America the Beautiful” and the firestorm of criticism it elicited.

#6 What’s Missing in the Diversity Discussion? This is the post that led to the “Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown” series as I discussed how class is often (not always) overlooked in diversity discussions.

#5 On the Passing of Robin Williams. My own reflections on the news that this gifted comedian had taken his life.

#4 Sexual Imperialism. A response to highly-rated Gordon College’s possible loss of accreditation because of its statement of sexual ethics.

#3 Freedom of Worship = Freedom of Religion –Not! This post has had an interesting life, attracting little interest at first but eventually becoming one of my “most viewed” posts of the year, despite its awkward title!

#2 Let’s Retire This “Christmas” Song! Just posted a week ago, this post became the second most viewed post of the year. Seems a number of people agreed with my argument that “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is a song about date rape, has nothing to do with Christmas, and should be dropped from play lists.

Recipes of Youngstown

Recipes of Youngstown

#1 Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Food. This is the post that received over 10,000 views. Obviously, we Youngstowners love food, and this post is full of memories of quintessential Youngstown foods.

The irony is that, apart from the “Teddy’s Rules” post, none of these were on reading or books!  A post on Higher Education Books just missed the Top Ten and as more people learn about the blog, the reviews are getting more attention. But it is interesting to me that the more “issue-oriented” posts were your favorites. Oddly, those for the most part are the most serendipitous–they just happen!

At any rate, there’s the list. I need to give a few shout-out’s at this point. One is to the admins on “I Used to Live in Youngstown” and “I Grew Up in Youngstown” for letting me post on these pages. I also appreciate the hundreds of people who have commented and added your memories and insights to mine. I also want to thank my son, Ben, and his blog [BTW] Ben Trube, Writer and Tom Grosh who administers the Emerging Scholars Blog for all the people you’ve sent my way!

Most of all, I want to thank all of you who have stopped by, read, commented, and followed. It would be a whole lot less fun without you!

Look for a special New Year’s post where I preview some plans for Bob on Books in 2015!

Higher Education Books

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Higher education is in a season of change. Rising tuitions, cuts in government subsidies, the impact of new technologies on what is taught and how it is taught, campus social ethics, and more. I read regularly in this area because I work in collegiate ministry. This past year, I have been reading more in this area in preparation for a conference I am directing on “The ‘End’ of Higher Education” for faculty and colleagues in our organization. So I thought I would share the list. The links in the titles are to my full reviews of the books. They are listed in the reverse order of when I read them, most recent first.

1. Peter Brooks (ed.) The Humanities and Public Life. This is a transcript of the proceedings from a symposium exploring the contribution of the humanities to public life. It features a keynote by Judith Butler.

2. Suzanne Mettler, Degrees of Inequality. Mettler exposes how the failure to maintain our higher ed funding policies and other change dynamics are putting the dream of a college education out of the reach of many Americans.

degrees

3. Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams. Parks explores how higher education professionals can address the spiritual longings and aspirations of college students.

4. Paul Socken (ed.), The Edge of the Precipice. Socken and the other essayists explore why read in a digital age and how digital media changes for good or ill the act of reading and how those who teach in the humanities ought pursue their work.

5. Andres T. Tapia, The Inclusion Paradox. Tapia argues that “diversity is the mix, and inclusion is making the mix work.” He contends that places that “make the mix work” are not only better for the people but more productive as well.

6. Julie J. Park, When Diversity Drops. Park’s book is a case study of a collegiate ministry group in California, the practices they pursued to become more diverse, and how Proposition 209’s “color blind” admissions policies and the subsequent drop in racial diversity affected this group.

diversity

7. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University. Newman’s classic work on what a university is for, from a Catholic Christian perspective.

8. Ellen Schrecker, The Lost Soul of Higher Education.  Schrecker traces the history of the idea of academic freedom and decries the erosion of that freedom in what she calls the “corporatization” of the university.

9. Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time. Fish argues that it is not the job of the university professor to save the world or mobilize students to do the same, but rather to teach course content with excellence.

10. Donna Freitas, The End of Sex. This is a follow-up to her book, Sex and the Soul. In The End of Sex she chronicles the hook-up culture prevalent on most campuses, how this undermines real intimacy, and even calls for a recovery of the lost art of dating.

11. Anthony T. Kronman. Education’s End. His subtitle captures the essence of what he explores in the book: “why colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life.” The book is a well-argued and passionate plea for the importance of discussing the “big questions” in university courses and other university venues.

12. Philip E. Dow. Virtuous Minds. This is not a “higher ed” book per se’ but it explores from a Christian perspective how one develops “intellectual virtues”, actually relevant to Anthony Kronman’s concerns.

13. Jose A. Bowen, Teaching Naked. This provocatively titled book is part of a trend advocating “flipping” the classroom, where technology is moved out of the classroom to students outside personal and group work, while the professor focuses on what can best happen inside the classroom, the interaction of professor and student engaging the course content.

College

14. Mark Edmundson, Why Read? Edmundson pursues a similar question to that in Edge of the Precipice but argues far more hopefully for the power of great works to engage the great questions and to exercise a transformative influence in the lives of students through the power of words.

15. Andrew Delbanco, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be. The book follows the plan of its title, surveying the history of the university, particularly in America, which unavoidably includes its Christian roots, the current state of higher education, including the challenges mentioned at the beginning of this post, and his call for universities to continue to pursue “color blind” and ‘class blind” admissions and to be centers where the great questions are explored.

16. Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind. This is an older book that serves as a spirited argument in reply to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. He defends ethnic, gender, and cultural studies as a corrective endeavors to the biased majority culture’s marginalization of the non-white and those not in power.

17. P. Felton, H.D.L. Bauman, A. Kheriaty, and E. Taylor, Transformative Conversations. The book explores how one might go about developing formational mentoring communities among colleagues in the higher education setting. These are communities that honestly and without judgment pursue the large questions of vocation and purpose that continue to be important throughout life, and that rarely can be explored in a work setting.

18. Joe R. Feagin, The Agony of Education. This work, from 1996, explores the unique challenges faced by black students in the higher education setting.

These are by no means the only or even the best books on various aspects of higher education. They are those for which I have reviews online, going back to 2012.

What books have been helpful to you in understanding higher education? What books would you add to this list?

I Need Diverse Books

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This post is inspired by the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign that developed when the first ever BookCon, which took place this past weekend, announced an all-white author lineup. The Twitter campaign that followed garnered 162 million impressions in its attempt to raise awareness of the need for more books by and about people of various ethnicities and races. This post is not about that campaign (which you can read about here), but about my own growing realization that I need diverse books.

Nope, I’m not going to try to persuade you that you need more diverse books, or your children or your school or your library need more diverse books. So take a deep breath and relax. I’m just going to share how important reading diverse books is for my own life.

For one thing, even the local world of my neighborhood doesn’t look like me. I see saris and headscarves and skin much darker than mine. I hear other languages, and even sing some of the worship songs in our church in Spanish because we have Spanish speakers who are part of our worship. Certainly the world of the university where I engage in campus ministry doesn’t look like me. We have over 3,000 students from China alone and growing numbers from India and South America. We also have students from  the “hyphenated” communities in this country: African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans. And there are many from all these groups who call themselves “brother” or “sister” in my faith who I believe I will spend eternity with. Better start understanding each other!

Reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow for example portrayed to me afresh what it is like to be stopped simply for driving or walking while black, and the practices of illegal searches in this country that violate our Fourth Amendment protections.  Sheryl Wu Dunn’s Half The Sky reminds me of the systematic injustices and violence we do to women around the world, and how women have courageously fought back.  Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, helped me look at life through the lens of immigrants encountering very different value systems and trying to hold onto something of their identities. Julie Park’s When Diversity Drops helped me see  our collegiate ministry as students of different ethnicity encounter it. John Perkins books and the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. help me begin to understand the difficult experience of Blacks in America, and challenges me to match their Christ-likeness in pursuing justice and reconciliation.

This year I have been listening to a variety of voices, mostly outside my own faith community, who are writing about the future of higher education. Some of this has to do with a conference on this subject I am leading this summer. Why this is valuable for me is that if we are going to participate as responsible partners in conversations about the future of the university, we need to understand the issues and each other well. For similar reasons, I’ve read science writers like J Craig Venter on genetic research and Sir John Houghton (actually a committed Christian) on issues of climate change. Sometimes they open my eyes to issues I haven’t thought about. I don’t agree with all I read–what would be the fun in that?

I need diverse books because I believe God’s intention is to form a “beloved community” that is a mosaic of the peoples of the world. What a great design for engaging the diverse peoples and problems we confront in this world! Yet I come from a white, working class background that has shaped my outlook, for good and less than good. Beginning with the diverse narratives of the Bible, diverse books that help me understand the parts of the world that are “different” for me, and diverse friendships, I hope to be able both to offer what is unique in my own gifts and background and to welcome the abundant variety of gifted people that make up a “God sized, beloved community.”

Those are some of the reasons I need diverse books. What diverse books would you suggest I read? Who knows, you might see them in future reviews on this blog.