Professors

Conferences sometimes struggle to accommodate religiously observant individuals. There have been instances where talks were scheduled on Saturdays, causing conflicts for observant Jews. Conferences are often scheduled over weekends, which can make it challenging for those who observe Sabbath. Some conferences now offer hybrid options like Zoom to accommodate those who cannot physically attend. Religious diversity on organizing committees can help improve accommodations. The academic community is generally tolerant of varying religious beliefs, but there can be a suspicion towards strongly observant individuals in religious studies. In STEM fields, tolerance of religious beliefs is more common. Seeking objectivity in academic work can sometimes conflict with deeply held beliefs, but anonymizing the review process helps reduce bias. In mathematics, beliefs about infinity and objective truth can influence the questions worth pursuing. Confessional work in religious studies explores the in All right, now we're back and we left off on the idea of, at least what I mentioned in conferences. So I just wanted to dive a little bit deeper into the idea of that. So as individuals whose job mandates that you go to conferences, sometimes presenting papers, sometimes just being there as a participant, how have you found conferences to manage religiously inclined, religiously observant individuals? Whether it be you're an observant or not, have you found some conferences are better at providing what people need in order to become fully observant? So the first thing I think of when you ask this question is a conference I was at in grad school that had a whole to-do involving one of the organizers quitting at the last minute because the other organizers insisted on scheduling talks on a Saturday, and this organizer, who was a fairly observant Jew, actually resigned in protest. Relatedly, I have not tried that at almost every conference I've been at because of the academic calendar. They get scheduled over weekends and they tend to have talks on a Saturday and Sunday, and I'm sure there are people who don't go to those talks or arrange their schedules not to be there on those days, but I've never seen a conference rearranged to accommodate people beyond scheduling their talks, not on a day they can't be there. As a non-observant person, how did you feel that this person resigned and caused a mess in the conference? Well, he was a difficult person. Oh, yeah. He's a very good character. Yes, I would say it's similar for the conferences that I've been to. I think by and large, given how tricky some of these things can be to schedule, just without even thinking about the religious side of things, I think most people just do it and then either make allowances or don't, and I think at least before COVID, a lot of the conferences didn't have a hybrid Zoom kind of option, so that's become more and more common for our conferences. So they'll either record the talks or there'll be a Zoom option where people can, if they physically can't be there for whatever reason, they can still watch it. So I'm actually in D.C. tomorrow for a conference that I'm helping organize, and one of the co-chairs is Muslim, and something that she mentioned, which was totally a blind spot for me was... Ramadan. Yeah, exactly. And there are a lot of people with halal, so we need to make sure that we have options for them. So that's something we are definitely doing, of course, this time. But this is something where I think having people with different religious backgrounds on the organizing committee can help us be aware of these things and make us do a better job with it. We love when religious diversity helps things out. Yep. You know, I haven't thought about this question before, because I think when I go to a conference, I just get into the zone, lock in, so to speak, and then it's just this special little universe, and everyone just makes it work, and then your other life is outside of that. So I haven't encountered many conversations with people about the challenges of keeping observance up while being at those spaces. I think I don't even hear about... I mean, I'm sure people do miss sessions in order to pray, you know, on Friday afternoons or go to church on Sunday morning or to observe Sabbath on Saturday. That's a hard one, though. The Saturday, that's tough, because so many conferences include Saturday, full-day Saturday sessions. So I've never... I honestly don't have a lot of awareness of it, which tells me that people either aren't observing, which I think that's probably unlikely, or it's not considered to be something you really talk about, you know, in an explicit way. So I think mostly people suspend those expectations when they come to South Asia Studies conferences. The American Academy of Religion conference is different, because it has religion in the title, so there's a lot more awareness around scheduling, and that's its own conference that has more of a presence. But even then, the people that I interact with are not talking about it a lot, even if I know they are observant in their own traditions. That's interesting. So even not within conferences specifically, but generally when interacting with the academic community, have you found them to be tolerant of varying religious beliefs, or not just religious, but various beliefs that people enter these spaces with? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I think that a lot of people in... So religious studies is different from theology, right? And a lot of religious studies scholars take... They're drawn to that conversation because of the capacities it allows, aside from, like, theological conversations. So I do notice, among some scholars, a reluctance to bring that in to the conversation, but I wouldn't say that extends to being intolerant. But there are instances where I've noticed a suspicion of people who are strongly observant, as if it somehow endangers the analytical process that's required to do something, like do an analysis that's objective. Now, that's a framework I don't agree with, right? That's very different from the way I try to approach my work, but I have noticed that there are scholars in religious studies who are very invested in the notion of objectivity as being separate from any religious tradition, and that does bug me. I know we'll get back to that idea of objectivity in a bit, but Swap, in terms of your interaction with the academic community? I think since it's STEM, I think it gradually, it kind of comes up. So I think, like, it'll come up over, like, dinner or drinks, just because I know these people, and then, like, they're talking about their family or kids or something, and that's very different than, like, sort of the nine-to-five or whatever it is of the conference. Do you find people are willing to share their religious beliefs if prompted? I know you mentioned earlier. Yeah, I would say maybe unlikely unless you know them to some extent. So, like, the people I have in mind are, like, people that I knew since we were in grad school together and we used to go to the same conferences, and some of them I've shared a hotel room with, because, you know, we were, like, pro-craft students, and that's what you do. But I think, like, those are, like, people that I'm close with, and I can have more, like, friends and colleagues, I would say. But I think with, like, random colleagues, I would say probably not. Decent. I think, yeah, so in STEM, it's very easy to be tolerant of people's beliefs about religion, as opposed to, say, beliefs about the law that's in the middle, which can actually be a little crunchy about conferences. But I think that that's related to a norm that people sort of largely compartmentalize, and, you know, you can believe whatever you want, but you're here giving a talk on Saturday, regardless of what you believe most of the time. And I think there is sort of a strong expectation that, you know, people work a little bit to accommodate, you know, when belief becomes, like, things you actually have to do rather than things that are just in your head. But I think the willingness to do that is one of those things. So with beliefs and objectivity being kind of a core piece of, like, peer review processes and getting papers published, have you found any conflict of people you've interacted with in the academic community, any conflicts with seeking objectivity, but maybe not just religious beliefs but other deeply held beliefs that can make it difficult to do your job as an academic? So I can start. So I think historically, potentially, yes, but I think a lot of more and more of our conferences have started doing something called double-blind reviewing. So what that basically means is the reviewers are anonymous to the paper authors, and the paper authors are anonymous to the reviewers. So you definitely submit just the title without names, affiliations, and you're in some ways judged on the merit of what you wrote. And at least for some conferences, typically the contents of the paper don't have anything that much to do with your beliefs, religious or otherwise. So I don't think it comes up that often. But at least with, like, anonymizing names is a good, like, first step of, like, I don't like this person, I don't like this university, or I don't like where they grew up or where they are from. So at least it helps from that perspective. That's a nice system. Professor Zrabotow. That's a slightly complicated answer, which is, of course, people are generally not directly writing about math, about their religious beliefs in math journals. But so the thing about math is actually that usually whether something is correct or not is not really in dispute. And so when we're talking about publication, like it's published, we're really talking about how interesting is it and are these questions that are worth asking. And there is, and particularly in logic, there is this set of questions about the role of infinity, the role of, like, whether there's objective truth, whether things, you know, everything is true or false. And there are different questions you can look at depending on what you think the right way to approach infinity is, for example. And actually people's beliefs about that really strongly influence their views on, like, is this line of investigation worth pursuing? And so in that sense, I think at that level of what gets published in better journals, which questions are worth asking, there is something about people's beliefs that's very relevant to that. I think mathematicians actually don't think very much about how their views on what's interesting until they are highly subjective and driven by their beliefs about the world in some way. Very interesting. I have a complicated response to this because it's a big part of the debate in our field, right? So there are types of work that's called confessional, where people are being very open about being someone who belongs to a tradition and they're writing about it. And then there's non-confessional scholarship where someone may or may not be a believer, but it's not relevant or brought in to the analysis. So it's something where that affiliation is not considered directly related to the analysis. And so some scholars have, so Melissa Wilcox is one of the scholars. You've read Melissa Wilcox in our class. So she's been really important in focusing on this debate recently, and she's noticed that confessional scholarship does tend to be lower on the hierarchy, even in religious studies for many people because it's not considered to be as objective. But the response to that is that whenever we're trying in a discipline like religious studies to appear objective, we are always making some assumptions about things that matter. We're always making some sort of normative claim. And so that's what something that, you know, Wilcox and others call crypto-normativity, right? This idea that I'm being objective, but really what you're doing is you're just not making really plain what your normative commitments are in the conversation, right? So one thing that she's pointed out is, well, we can never get away from this normative claim making. So the best we can do is be open about the claims that we're making. But I think that the issue still persists, that there's something about certain normative claims have a higher value in religious studies compared to other sorts of normative claims. And I think that the normative claims that align with objectivity, the way we kind of intuitively understand it, those still have a higher status in my field. Yeah. I just want to say I think it's exactly the same. Really? It's interesting because the normative claims in question are, you know, are about the axioms of ZFC correctly described mathematics, which are very different normative claims. Yeah. But I think the dynamic is actually exactly the same. That's so interesting. Thank you. I guess math and religion are the same. Done. So keeping going with this idea of objective truth and just objectivity in the field in general, have you found that any of your beliefs, religious or not, have come into conflict with any of your responsibilities as an academic? And how is that shaped different ways that you now approach writing paper, doing research? And it sounds a bit loaded, so no rush into it. I can jump in. So this is something we've been talking a lot recently is just the role of AI in society. Yeah. And specifically, like, a lot of these, like, large language models, for example, that are being used right now are doing things that potentially are illegal by accessing, let's say, trademark or copyrighted information. They're using a lot of resources in terms of, like, emissions and, like, electricity and so on. So I think there needs to be, I feel, a bigger discussion in computer science from an ethics perspective. Is this ethically what we should be doing? If you're burning all of these, like, resources for something that gives us not very good results or maybe good results or amazing results, depending on how you look at it, even if it's amazing, is it worth the tradeoff? And I feel like this is something we should be discussing more, but we're not. Have you seen people appeal to religion to abet their beliefs? So far, a little bit, but I think it's been more on the ethics side, which can tie into religion or may not, depending on how people view that. But, yeah, I think there are definitely some people who are thinking of it from the religious perspective. Most of the ones I know who are thinking of it is more from the ethics, like, is this a modern thing that we are doing for society or something like that. Yeah, no problem. So I was curious about your objective truths or feelings or beliefs and how that's kind of welcomed in the greater academic community and how those may play off on each other, any conflicts that may come up in there. So I think that when you're going into – so I can speak to it with teaching more easily. I think a lot of the – an important role of religious studies education is to try to open the mind, right, and to create a space where you're considering a lot of different possibilities and trying to, like, increase the time between learning about something and deciding whether it's good or bad. And I do think that that is a very powerful skill to develop. You know, of course, sometimes that comes into tension with things that I personally believe, right? So maybe I'm teaching people to – excuse me. No problem. Maybe I'm teaching people to suspend disbelief about whether something's right or wrong when personally I'm very opposed to that thing, right? But I still think it's very important to teach that skill. So that's something I encounter sometimes. And sometimes I come into – that brings with it a kind of conflict. Like, is – which one's more important, to learn to think critically and let's make sure we have the skills to work through a critical topic or to make the right decision about the topic, right? And that just changes all the time. If something's really at the foreground of, like, political or social life, right, that's when the – that's when, you know, it feels harder to make that decision, right? Like, but this is so important. This issue is so important right now. Maybe it's more important to think about ethics, like, boots on the ground at this moment. But I try to actually acknowledge the importance of issues but sort of avoid that temptation. Because I do think that that's – it's important to be consistent, at least in a teaching context, to teach that particular set of skills. But it is a struggle. I can't imagine. No. Struggling. I don't think I've ever seen a teacher say that all this long. No, that's not a problem at all. All right. So now I'm curious to kind of see how you guys feel. First of all, just to go around, how long have you guys been at Penn specifically at this point? 11 years. 11 years. So this is what – so I started here in 2014. So I guess it's like that deal. Yeah. I've been here since 2016. So this is my ninth year. And then there's that COVID year in the middle. Plus or minus on Canada. Yeah. So coming from different places, also feel free when you answer this question where you did your undergrad and your graduate studies, how have you felt Penn to be a place for people to act on their core beliefs, whether religious or not? Have you found Penn to be an open place for people to do so? Yeah. So I did my undergrad at Indiana University. Bojo. Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. So I'm from Tennessee to Indiana. And then I lived in the U.K. for nine years. So I went to Oxford University for my master's in Mankato. And I spent like a year of that in India at that time. Coming here – so I think that the U.K. is even more extreme than the U.S. academic context at keeping kind of your private life separate from your scholarship. That was a very extreme example of mentorship, of kind of saying, like, your academic work is really separate from a lot of your core values. You must – it's assumed that you're animated by some sort of core commitment somewhere in there, but you don't talk about it as much. I do think people talk more about their values in the American academic context, but there's still a division. There's – it's very Cartesian. Like, you know, division between body and mind. It's like you're – we sometimes – it sometimes feels like we're all brains in jars just floating around doing work. And it can feel very, like, countercultural to bring in other parts of yourself to the academic space. But it seems like that's similar across professions in the U.S. in general. I think that it's about the professionalization of academic life to me. Thank you. I think I largely agree. You know, we don't – certainly don't talk about religion much in math. We don't really talk about values much. It's like we all broadly share values. When we've had discussions that really were about values, we actually really haven't had the tools to have those discussions productively because they're so uncommon. And most of us do broadly share the same values, and so it hasn't been an issue. I imagine it would be much harder – it hasn't been an issue for me, actually. And I imagine it's much harder for people who don't feel as in sync about those values. Anisha? Yeah, I definitely agree with both of you as well. I think for me, like, I grew up in India. That's where I did my undergrad. I did my master's and PhD at Columbia, and then I've been at Penn here. So what I do miss, at least comparing Columbia to Penn, was Columbia has the core curriculum, and I feel like that has really helped, like, the conversation on campus because everyone takes the same set of classes by and large, at least for part of that core curriculum. At Penn, depending on what your major is, you could be completely not in touch with certain parts of the campus population, and I don't think that's good. And I feel at Penn, for better or for worse, again, there's been a lot of pre-professional stuff, at least in CS. So I don't think that's good either. So I feel like with college, there are four years I feel people should be doing things out of their comfort zone. They should be taking classes where they, if it doesn't help you get a job, so what, right? Like, this is to expand your mind, broaden your horizons. So I feel sometimes at Penn people don't do that, and I think Columbia having the core curriculum makes it easier to force people to do that. That's so interesting. I just want to build on that because I do think having a core curriculum would help because it gives people a common vocabulary to engage with. I do bring in my core values to my teaching, and not as much to my published research, I think, but in my teaching I do. But I've had colleagues comment on it being like, oh, that's a bold move. You know, I tell a lot of personal anecdotes in my classes, but it's just because it's how I, it's how, that's how I would prefer to work, right, to be constantly thinking about my work in relation to my life. But I also think there is, in research, there is a humility to also not injecting yourself into every single conversation because I know in the humanities, like, reflexivity, it's really important. You're always needing to be reflecting on where you are in position to your research, but it can also get a little narcissistic at a certain point where, like, it's all about me and how it relates to me. And I like the best form of that kind of work where you're decentering, let's say, like your values, you're still living out your values, but you're decentering certain parts of yourself to try to really understand a different context. I think that's a beautiful thing. To me, that is an expression of my core values, and it's, I think, a really important through-line to a lot of the humanities, too. So I guess sometimes I see a mix, like a suspension of some types of core values, but at its best, we do share a kind of commitment to this project, how to think across difference. I think that's when we're doing our work the best. How to think across difference. Yeah, yeah, in the humanities. I think that's when we're doing good. We're helping. So we'll wrap up this last question, but I was wondering if any of you had anything to say to religious students who may feel uncomfortable approaching professors for fear that their audacity might affect their performance in class. Swapiron already mentioned extensions for homeworks and exams. Do you have anything to say to these students who, maybe walking into a university, are afraid to act on their identity? So the biggest thing I would say is talk to someone, because the thing is, like, for example, the class I teach in fall, that's about 400 students. There's no way any of us know all the things that are going on in these individuals' 400 lives. So unless we know it, there's nothing we can do to help. So talk to a TA, talk to an instructor. Even though it might seem scary, maybe starting with a TA could be more helpful. And then the goal for us is to make it as accommodating an environment as possible. So if there's something we can do to help, we'd be happy to. Amazing. I guess I'd say it's one theme that's come up several times, this kind of compartmentalization. And I think we've sort of expressed this as complicated, but actually this is what that's good for. And I think, in general, one of the things we compartmentalize and should compartmentalize is that if a student needs, can't make an exam or something for a personal reason, that it kind of doesn't matter what that is, and it's not really our business. Actually, I know my department and the college is moving recommendations in this direction is really saying we should ask fewer questions about why a student can't do something, because we shouldn't be making lots of fine decisions. Like our job is to interact with this human being in this environment. And I think it's very understandable that a student might be concerned about how their religion would impact the interaction with a professor. But I think a lot of the time the answer is that's going to get compartmentalized out, and that's the thing compartmentalization is good for. Interesting. Yeah. I think what I would, I'm listening really closely, and I think partly what may appear to be like a risk is more of this compartmentalization. I think it's interesting to me to think about how not talking about religious identity could be easily interpreted as religious identity is posing kind of a threat to the classroom. But I do think a lot of professors are actually trying to create as welcoming a space as possible by focusing the conversation. I mean, I think that religious identity just comes up more often in my classes because I'm in religious studies. But even in religious studies, the reason why I don't talk about my personal beliefs is because I'm trying to create a space that's more welcoming for as many students as possible. So maybe I would tell, I mean, I think it could be useful for students to know that because that means that whenever a student is coming to me, I think and I hope that I'm very receptive if they want to talk about things because the reluctance to engage in that topic is never, I hope, coming from intolerance, but instead a kind of protectiveness of the classroom space. But I do see why students would yearn for a space to try to at least have moments where they can talk about those things. I think office hours are a good space for that. So I think it's a good, at least in my classes, I think it's important for me to remember to just remind people, you know, it is sometimes hard to take off the theology hat and put the religious studies hat on. And it's more than okay to need to meet in office hours to talk through how that's tricky. And a lot of students have done that with me. Because some of the things, you know, we do in class are upsetting because you're talking about really, really strongly held personal beliefs. But thank you for that question because it made me think more carefully about it. I'm glad about that. Just to close, either working with you guys, either taking courses with you, doing research or TAing, I just want to thank you for making my experience as a religious student on my own journey and my ups and downs of observance, making this a place where I feel comfortable. I know exactly for this reason of compartmentalization. There's a reason that I'll share more of my religious beliefs with friends and peers rather than directly with you guys. But I just want to say thank you for the various extensions and the understandings. And I hope that other students can feel as comfortable as I do with their professors. And with that, I just want to say thank you guys very much for coming to chat. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation.