Busy Week

Wow, it is finally Friday. I've had a busy week. We are in the process of interviewing for a position in the BIC so we've been interviewing candidates, observing teaching and the like. It is also tenure review season, annual review season, and I've in fact being reviewed as my three year stint as BIC director is drawing to a close. If all goes well, I'll do it for another three years.

Anyway, I guess what's "on my mind" in Facebook status language is the concept of evaluation and judgement and the importance of discernment. In yogic terms, discernment is viveka, it is basically the quality of mind that we develop through yoga practice that enables us to determine true from false, real from not real, good from evil, purusha from prakriti. In many ways, viveka is what keeps us on the path and without it we get lost.


So I've been thinking a lot about the capacity to discern, in terms of evaluating progress toward tenure, evluating performance, evaluating my "job satisfaction." I'm enjoying the challenges of the new job a great deal, but at the same time I've really been reinforced in my view of my "dharma as teacher." In many ways, directing BIC is teaching on a macro level. A lot of what I enjoy about the job is mentoring young faculty through the tenure process and there is a lot of telling and sharing what I've learned. I was actually talking with Sam and Candi about it at the New Menoring dinner. It is different than how I typically teach philosophy in that I'm just pretty straight forward about this is the lay of the land as I see it. In the philosophy context, I try to be a bit more Socratic, in the sense that I present ideas but I more try to create a context where the discussion of ideas occurs. So part of me likes the straightforward approach. There's another aspect to the teaching dimension of BIC in the sense that I have the opportunity to think and to a certain extent bring about, good pedagogy more globally, in terms of reshaping curriculum and encouraging active engagement in the classroom etc.

Yesterday, I was sitting in the office typing up some administrative request and a student came by looking for his keys. I told him to wait a couple minutes and I would help him look in the front office. I went out and he and a friend were sitting patiently. They asked if I was "BIC Director" and I said "yes." I asked if they were BIC students, yes. first year. They like the BIC and they said "thank you for the BIC." Now that was pretty cool, but I'm just a small part of BIC, its my turn at the directing of it but it evolved over close to a thirty year period from its initial seed existence as a response to a university self study, chaired by my good friend and mentor Bob Baird, to where it is now as one of four programs in the honors college.

That's one of the things I like most about BIC, is that I feel like I'm part of a large team working toward a common aim.

But it is still a different feeling for me than the feeling of being in the classroom talking with students about Plato. There's something very deep in my soul that knows "this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing." That's dharma and it is quite different from "job satisfaction." I'm one of the lucky ones in a sense that my "job" and my "dharma" overlap a great deal, but I think it is important to keep the concepts and my experience of them distinct.

This came up in a different way in one of my philosophy student's blogs. Karl Aho, you can check out his blog post here

He was asking about how to maintain the leisure necessary to philosophize when pursuing professional philosophy and I answered him on the blog, but it strikes me that it is a good parallel with one's own personal yoga practice and what goes on in the yoga classroom. There's an overlap sure, but you have to cultivate the space in your life for practice without its public context.