Introducing The Academy

Posted by admin on Sep 22, 2009 in Academy, Back Issues, Volume 14 Issue 1 | 0 comments

Professors lament students are entering the university devoid of historical context. Ask a student the dates of the fall of Rome, or of Constantinople; their minds, and lack of answers, resemble a fill in the blanks sheet – before someone fills in the blanks.

No longer will students have to head into their classes uninformed, ill-informed, or even wiki-informed. Here at “The Academy” we’ve compiled a list of important dates that all should devote to memory.  Impress your professors with these snippets from the totality of human knowledge.

385 BC: Plato founds his school of philosophy at Hekademia, (later called Akademia), a grove of olive trees dedicated to the Greek goddess of wisdom. 

AD 2006: The Mars’ Hill sections “Academia” and “Politica” converge into “Issues & Ideas.”
AD 2009: “I&I” spits academic discourse and news back into a section of its very own, birthing “The Academy.”

The birth wasn’t that messy, though some in the waiting room were skeptical about the existence of academic news. Yet which other section of the paper could cover the new MLA style rules? Where else but right here and right now would you learn that there is a highbrow version of social networking, academia.edu, where more than 58 000 academics like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker post research topics and papers, “follow” their favourite colleagues on a news feed, and choose to “like” each others’ books?

But we’re about more than just that kind of academic news. The blue banners on light stands around campus proclaim the year’s theme: “Renewing our minds. Becoming like Christ.” Jesus may never have had a BA or a B.Sc., a B.Ed. or a B.Hk., and he definitely never had a BBA – free lunch for 5000 isn’t exactly a shrewd business move – but he had his eyes fixed on another world. In Romans 12:2, Paul exhorts the church to be transformed—to escape conformity—through the renewing of minds. Paul is urging the saints to make their whole beings a sacrifice dedicated to the glory of God. 

In high school, I took Paul’s call for mind renewal as an invitation to get smart and then dedicate it to Jesus. That may be why more than a few of us ended up at TWU. Flawed high school hermeneutics aside, may every act of the mind point us towards a greater reality. The vast spectrum between logical principles and creative expression all have an original author. He authors, we discover. 

This year, may our minds encounter transcendence, whether in mathematical equations or music theory or philosophy or even film studies – seriously, there are Russian filmmakers who will blast you with the biggest ideas in the most absurd ways. “The Academy” wants to share in the blasting and discovering process. 

Let’s write about the important questions we wrestle with in our own departmental corners of campus; let’s share about the research being conducted by our professors and peers. Jesus may not have had a BBA, but let’s not ignore the economic bottom line here. There are a lot of mind-transforming classes offered at TWU, and auditing them is expensive. I guess that would make “The Academy” priceless.