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I'm standing here because our Society's Executive asked me to speak to what they perceived as a concern in our Society, namely, low morale in our ranks.

You may not feel that yourself, directly. You're a tenured professor, you're carrying on and publishing interesting, significant research in areas you're excited about, you have good students, your colleagues are not at each other's throats, your department or other venue in academia is secure from frontal assault by administrators or government--maybe for this year anyway.

But it's also evident that not all are in that happy situation. Tenure-track contracts are increasingly hard to come by. Even if you land one, cutbacks may mean the position you're tracking is gone by the time you come up for tenure. Or maybe you're tenured and your whole department is being merged or even scratched altogether.

What you might then try to do is to get hired somewhere teaching part-time, as some have been doing for years and as others have been doing more and more as academic institutions resort increasingly to that way of cutting costs. If you do manage to get one of those part-time assignments, it may be in the courses the regular faculty shy away from and/or the courses with the big enrollments. If you're hired as a regular part-timer, you may find yourself teaching one new course after another.

One thing the changes we're confronting mean is that departments are offering fewer courses and teaching larger classes. And the classes will be quite biblically illiterate and more visually and aurally oriented than text oriented. A recent Ph.D., or a graduate student on receiving the union card at graduation, might be just the person to communicate with such students, who are not that far from her- or himself in age. But if full- and part-time positions are fewer and fewer, will she or he ever get a chance to do so? A woman graduate student might hope for affirmative action hiring and then equity in employment if she does get hired. A male graduate student might affirm both of those desiderata and yet worry that he may be less apt to find a job as a result.

So, what downers have I overlooked? Doubtless they'll be raised by others later in this session. My assignment now is to reflect, with you, on our common situation and to see if, despite all, there is reason to affirm our field collectively and what we do or hope to do as individuals. As the King James translators render Proverbs 29:18: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." If we start with the premise that we're going to perish, then maybe we will. If we hold before us a vision of what we do as right and good, maybe we won't perish--though it may be only by the skin of our teeth.

1. Jobs

In his study of graduate education in religion Claude Welch weighed a number of very variable variables and predicted that by 1984 "the number of faculty needed for expansion" would be "a negative number" (Welch 1971: 102). Welch's review in Religious Studies Review of the state-of-the-art volumes on religious studies in Canada concludes by saying that "it is certainly no fault of the authors of these studies that Canadian as well as American educational institutions are in a mode of retrenchment and financial stringency, so that . . . employment projections are already out of date" (Welch 1996: 35).

So, what, if anything, can one say about the job picture? I've not done any Redaktionsgeschichte on what is reputed to be the graduate student's prayer every third week in November--that at least one of those planes bearing its precious cargo of religious studies professors to the AAR/SBL meetings might, well, somehow evanescence into the third heaven. What I did do was to send a little questionnaire about jobs and retirements to departments and programmes of religious studies in Canada as well as to Canadian theological colleges. The results suggest that any such third-week-in-November prayer has the demographics fairly accurate.

Both the retirement figures and the part-time figures show there are jobs but they don't show a job--at least a full-time job--for every Ph.D. graduating in the next five years. That is not really something new. For full employment, you have to go back to the 1960s, when (as Claude Welch put it) "the education escalator still seemed to be running," "Education was 'the greatest growth industry'" around, and interest in the academic study of religion prompted "dreams of ever onward and upward" (Welch 1971: vii).

2. Drop Out or Stick It Out?

The figures I've cited might be reason to drop out of graduate school. One of my former students after going on for her M.A. in Hebrew Bible recently decided to stop at that point because she couldn't see any jobs down the road; fortunately, she had an alternative career--a point I'll come back to. Whatever decision you as a student take, your professors will respect it. They have some qualms these days about advising students to go on to graduate study anyway, and they may talk to you about job prospects (although when they do so, they're often in the dark about them, like everyone else). On the other hand, I suspect that those same professors might wish you would go on because they love what they do and would like you to know that joy too.

I have my own story about dropping out. After my first set of four doctoral exams (my prelims) my department chair, Claude Welch, asked me to work with him on what became known as the Welch report that I just mentioned. Valuable as it was for me, it took so long and was so diverting that I decided to quit graduate school. I still had ahead of me my second set of several exams, plus a dissertation. I was married with two youngish children. Job prospects looked dim. I told one of my professors, Van Harvey, I thought I'd quit, and he very kindly sat down and wrote me a letter telling me why I should continue. Like my original decision to go back to school, the decision to continue was one of the best decisions I ever made. Someone believed in me, and in what it was we were about. Before deciding whether or not to go on to graduate school, or to continue or not to continue graduate study because of the employment picture, or if you're employed but anxious about or despairing of the cuts, I think it's worth considering--or reconsidering--carefully what biblical studies is and whether it is important, not only in our academic venues but in our society generally, and for yourself.

3. Who Cares?

Does what we do or are preparing to do matter? Or, how does one demonstrate to others that it does? Or, how does one get and hold students--in order to play the numbers game with the administration? I see all of those as important questions and will be looking at them implicitly or explicitly. But I begin with that very basic one: Does what we do really matter? Is there anyone out there who cares? Do we care?

I begin with what I suppose to be obvious: that the texts we study have been extremely influential in Western history and, despite a much changed, much more pluralistic world, continue to be influential. I think in the first place of the canonical texts. For believers--and that covers a multitude of sins and sinners, scholars and non-scholars--the canonical texts are of some importance. Recently my wife and I trekked to the University of Toronto to hear John Updike read from his latest novel In the Beauty of the Lilies and answer questions from the audience. If after reading his oeuvre people still wondered if he was a believer, he stated plainly that he is indeed; he is even a churchgoer (in his own way, he added). One of the characters in that same novel says one should think of the Bible "as the primer of a language whereby we can talk to one another about what matters to us most" (1996: 79). When I read that I speculate that I am hearing John Updike's voice as well.

Tom Paine, after severely deconstructing the Bible in The Age of Reason (a book that rendered him a social leper), still finds room in his moral universe for Jesus, that "virtuous" and "amiable man," as he labeled him. Paine's contemporary, Thomas Jefferson, went to the trouble of extracting from the morass of gospel miracles a writing entitled "The Philosophy of Jesus" and another he called "The Life and Morals of Jesus" (Adams 1983). Today it is biblical scholars who are doing something similar--and finding fame and fortune as readers flock to the bookstores for the latest results. Television series about the Bible draw enough viewers to show in prime time.

Those readers and viewers--churchgoer and non-churchgoer, observants and non-observants alike--are drawn by curiosity as well as, for some, by existential interest or angst. In that, I think they are not far removed from university or theological students. In the interviews I did of doctoral students in religious studies for the Welch report (1971: 215), and then much later of religious studies students for the Ontario state-of-the-art review, those two concerns were commonly closely aligned: students said they were doing religious studies because they found such study interesting and because they also had a personal stake in it (Remus, James, and Fraikin 1992: 123-125). For others, the interest is more intellectual than existential. One biblical scholar I know says he got into biblical studies because he was fascinated by the odd behavior of those people back then--and today--and what made them tick. Then there are those whom Martin Marty (1989: 8) places on "the 'anti'-side" of organized religion who sign up for religious studies courses, including courses in the Bible, because religion, or a particular religion, may "haunt, bewilder, or tantalize them." There was the self-professed atheist I interviewed who was drawn to religious studies because (she said) atheists are "so interested in religion" (Remus, James, and Fraikin 1992: 125).

Whatever the reasons, people--many people--are still interested in religion and specifically in some version--written, oral, visual--of those old texts we pore over. In the university such persons may stumble into one of our courses, or sign up for one on the chance that maybe, in addition to filling a time slot, it will answer some questions both about the Bible and about life. Listen to a recent graduate in religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania:

I was "bitten by the religious studies bug" . . . early in my undergraduate career. The religious studies courses I stumbled upon . . . spoke to a question that I had always had as to whether there is something more than the rationality of the scientifically-explainable world. That world was one I had grown up with and more or less took for granted. My first religious studies courses fascinated me because they presented other people's efforts to determine whether or not 'something more'--God(s), if you will--exist(s), and if so, what that 'something more' is. (Doran 1995)

The temptation that lurks when one reads such a statement is to rescue our departments from oblivion or obliteration by hanging out our guru shingles alongside our academic degrees and compelling all to come into what Ivan Strenski (1986: 334) would call "the walk-in therapy center for the university." But listen to what the same student goes on to say:

I became a Religious Studies major first and foremost because I wanted to explore questions of ultimate meaning in an academic setting. I remained a . . . major because the literature I read . . . and the strenuous mental exercise that was often necessary to analyze this literature to my satisfaction, intellectually excited me. Other . . . courses may have been easier than my Religious Studies courses [!], but in no way were they more satisfying. (Doran 1995)

What this student sought--and found--was a tough slogging through of the issues, to go along with the personal existential questions she had. That is what biblical studies has been offering going back a couple of centuries (a look at D. F. Strauss's Life of Jesus or at some of the pioneers in Pentateuchal source criticism will dispel any doubts). And that is not so easy to find in our culture of sound bites and half-hour resolutions of insoluble problems.

If I may refer to that evening with John Updike again: The person who introduced Updike gave the impression that the general consensus among the Toronto literary and media elite was that Updike's new novel was okay once you got past the first fifty pages. So what's in the first fifty pages (actually it's more like eighty)? Lots of complex talk about religion. In my reading of those pages, those comments by our Toronto mavens tell more about them--and much in our culture--than about those pages. I suggest that biblical studies has little future in our universities unless we engage precisely in complex talk that takes seriously both our sources and our students and aims at helping students to read and master complex talk and to engage in complex talk themselves--because the world they're stepping out into ain't simple. To steal a line from Spinoza, "all that is excellent is as difficult as it is rare."

4. Pedagogy

One thing this means is broadening the perspectives that students bring to class. One way we've been doing that for decades is by helping students to understand that the Bible (as Ernst Käsemann used to say in his lectures) "ist nicht das vom Himmel gefallen Buch. " To do so we've used the various critical approaches to the Bible developed over the past two centuries.

Being initiated into that way of reading the canonical texts can change people. Edgar McKnight tells (1985: xi-xv) how discovering the historical-critical method in graduate school changed him and how he read the Bible. He goes on to say, however, that that method also proved to be "no longer completely satisfying" for him and for others, that something more was needed (1985: xv). That something more has turned out to be a whole panoply of newer approaches to the Bible that touch base with what many students are doing in other fields and that invite students--I think inspire is not overstating it--to engage texts in ways that include themselves and end-of-the-millennium society in the process. Also intriguing for students has been the greater attention we've paid in recent decades to non-canonical texts.

Even while we keep before us that it's precisely the canonical literature that draws many students to biblical studies courses, or some of the reasons mentioned earlier, placing it in larger contexts can be for students a liberating experience. Whatever else biblical studies is, it continues to belong to the humanities, the liberal, i.e., liberating arts, dispelling ignorance and broadening vistas. If one has any doubts about that as something sorely needed in our world one has only to glance at the headlines or to tune into newscasts. For some students taking biblical studies courses, and for those enrolled in theological colleges, their course of study is intended to lead to a career. But for most students who take those courses, including the career students, biblical studies is part of an academic experience that prepares them for living--and for life-long learning--rather than or in addition to careers. For most students enrolled in biblical studies courses, or humanities courses generally, those courses are not explicitly career-directed courses, and the courses prepare them for living and continued learning, not for getting a job. But the skills and the mode of being that the humanities impart are just the sort of qualifications that many employers are looking for, as various studies have shown. And if we take seriously what employers and people who study employment are saying now, we have to start thinking about being life-long employable rather than having life-long jobs. And to be life-long employable the skills and the habitus acquired in a liberal arts education are extremely valuable.

5. Versatility and Flexibility

Back in 1971 Claude Welch mounted a serious argument for having separate departments of religious studies (1971: 55-56). In the Ontario state-of-the-art review I cited some of the same reasons, but applied now to the Canadian scene (Remus, James, and Fraikin 1992: 57-59). I think they're still valid. But I also have to recognize that the times, they are a-changin'. Administrators are peering at every department under a fiscal microscope, and asking, Is this department really necessary--or necessary in this form?

As I mentioned earlier, much has changed in the way we study our texts: interdisciplinary is the rubric. You likely know the old story about the two people standing on the balconies of their respective apartment buildings shouting across to each other and each failing to understand a word the other says. Why? Because of course they were speaking from different premisses. Change "apartments" to "departments," and you get the picture of how things used to be, and not so very long ago. In a recent interview the chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania sees what has been happening in that department and in classics generally as "a kind of reversion with a contemporary twist to the more holistic approach used by classicists at the end of the nineteenth century" (Ralph Rosen, interviewed in Penn Arts & Sciences [1995a]: 2-3). The walls between philologists and archaeologists are now more permeable than they were, and "anthropologists, literary theorists, students of philosophy, historians, etc., are contributing to the work, and the whole field is becoming more interdisciplinary" (ibid.).

At these annual gatherings of our society some of the members of this society present papers to the patristics society and others to the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, or back home they invite classicists into their classes or stop in the hall to compare notes with them or with the philosophers or anthropologists or sociologists in their corridor. The AAR and SBL have for years sponsored joint scholarly forums. I would suggest that we look more closely at how the interdisciplinary work we do might translate into closer relations or even some working arrangements with other departments. One result of the crisis at the University of Pennsylvania a couple of years ago when the administration decided it would eliminate the department of religious studies is that the department has been "forging [even] closer alliances with other departments" and "stretching its conception of the study of religion" so as (in the words of the department chair) to "emerge an even more vigorous and intellectually lively Department" (Matter 1995: 1).

One might also look more closely at the curriculum: Does it reflect what has been happening in our fields and subfields and in the intellectual world generally? Pedagogically, what are we doing to open up the world of texts to those visually and aurally oriented students I mentioned earlier? As to standards, are we serious about excellence, so that any whiff of "bird" courses and easy graduate programmes is dispelled?

Maybe we don't have to worry so much about the numbers game now, ironically because of cutbacks. Fewer university courses mean that more students are crowding into religious studies courses. However, we do need to worry about the effect on faculty and the demands that more students make on preparation and research time--and what that means for students as well. These, it seems to me, are fit subjects for discussion at meetings of our professional societies.

6. Job Hunting

As a student I sent out many job applications. One of the questions on my little questionnaire was whether the recipients welcomed unsolicited applications from job-seekers. Almost two-thirds of the respondents said no they did not, adding comments like, we're "not in a position to hire." But the rest said they did put out the welcome mat, though one added that they kept them on file but seldom used them.

If they did dip into that file, what might make one applicant stand out from another? Academic performance certainly, publications, and letters of reference. On that basis I got a couple of interviews when I was an ABD; later, as a prof, when our department was doing searches I read applicants' publications and letters of reference most carefully. But another factor is also whether the applicant is known in the flesh to persons on the search committee. Going to colloquia and annual meetings of learned societies, giving papers there if possible, entering prize essay contests--all these are important therefore.

7. Employability

I want to say something about versatility, flexibility, and employability, not only in applying for jobs, but also perhaps in putting together a livelihood. I begin with one of the characters in Rohinton Mistry's award-winning novel Such a Long Journey, which is set in India. The man is a sidewalk artist. What does he draw on the sidewalk? Why, religious scenes. He is engaged to paint a long wall to keep people from urinating on it and otherwise defacing it. He's asked if he has enough gods to cover 300 feet of wall. No problem: "I can cover three hundred miles if necessary. Using assorted religions and their gods, saints and prophets: Hindu, Sikh, Judaic, Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Jainist." Hinduism alone would do the job, he says, but he likes "to mix them up." But, wait, how does he "know about so many religions?" Ah, smiles the artist, "I have a BA in World Religions. My specialty was Comparative Studies." Then he went on to art school (Mistry 1991: 225-26). He put these two specialties together and came up a self-employed professional. Life-long employable, you might say.

You may not have the talent or the inclination to supplement your religious studies degree with a master in fine arts in order to be able to illustrate children's Bible storybooks. Adding a degree in computer science in order to do computer animation of a new version of The Ten Commandments (not starring Charleton Heston) might not be for you either. But versatility and flexibility can be a good thing, at any time but especially today at interview time, whether that means being able to teach world religions alongside the Pentateuch or Q, or whether it means having more than one job skill. My colleague Ron Grimes is now a consultant for the American Bible Society's pilot project in what they call "transmediazation": translating biblical narratives into various multimedia forms such as comic books, study guides, and interactive CD-ROMs directed to young people. There's a long list of biblical scholars serving as consultants, and when Ron asks the Society why they want him they say it's because his work in ritual, drama, and art provides expertise in iconography, imagery, and drama that the biblical scholars don't possess. This brings to mind what one of the members of our society, Dan Fraikin, urged in the Ontario state-of-the-art review volume: that M.A. programmes in religious studies might equip students for what he calls "religion criticism" knowing about religious phenomena and how to interpret these for the public, whether in "school teaching, journalism, social work" or university teaching (Remus, James, and Fraikin 1992: 248-50). With respect to biblical studies there is an illuminating piece by Thomas Boomershine that looks at what is involved in creating an electronic visual-oral Bible -- something that biblical scholars have shied away from if not indeed resisted (Boomershine 1990).

My own story about employment is not typical and I don't recommend it as a path to follow if you don't have to. But it was skills, versatility, flexibility, and in some cases knowing persons that enabled me to survive. Because I became fluent in German while studying in Germany and in seminary had worked on a student journal of theology, I was asked to take a translating and editing job on a journal in Geneva, Switzerland. After returning home, because I had an M.Div. I then got a job as a minister, full-time for a while and then part-time when I later went back to graduate study. In between, however, because I had editing skills I got a job as an editor at Fortress Press. Because of that experience Claude Welch asked me to work on his study of graduate religious studies after I had left Fortress for graduate school. After my second set of doctoral exams job prospects were bleak, not only for me but for doctoral graduates generally. But because of the skills I had acquired, plus my ABD status, I got a multi-faceted job at Wilfrid Laurier: teaching; working for the Council on the Study of Religion soliciting advertising for JBL, managing the book exhibit at the AAR-SBL meetings for a couple of years, and seeing that the CSR's publications got published--TOIL (the forerunner of Opportunities), the CSR Bulletin, the CSR Directory of Departments and Programmes of Religious Studies, and Religious Studies Review. Because of all that, I was asked to be Director of Wilfrid Laurier University Press. So I didn't get to publish as much as of my own work as I would have wanted. But I helped other scholars get theirs published--and I and my family survived. And then one day I finally got to the point where I was able to shed all those other jobs and devote my time to teaching and research--a happy ending for me indeed.

I don't recommend such a curriculum vitae, and I sometimes have to make sense of it for myself by reference to the parable of the talents. But it worked. Whether it will have any application to you as a student or as an advisor to students I leave to you.

For me, going back to graduate school, and getting a wider and deeper perspective on the many questions I had about the Bible and religion and life, was one of the best decisions I ever made. Even if I had not been able to find a job teaching or being otherwise involved in scholarship and the academic life, it would have been well worth it.

8. Peroratio: Bottom Line(s)

I leave it to our Vice-President, Wayne McCready, to say something about departments establishing community profiles, as the University of Calgary's religious studies department has over the years, with partial community funding of a chair as a result. And I could go on and give a rabble-rousing speech about engaging in political action against government cuts to education and social needs and against the notion that the problem is budget deficits rather than deliberately ignored sources of revenue. I could point out, as does one of my non-canonical, heretical sources, that "A tax of 0.5% on financial transactions would generate enough revenue to replace the GST and all provincial sales taxes, as well as eliminating the federal deficit" (Cameron and Finn 1996: 12). I won't point that out or other alternative ways to finance essential social needs, including higher education.

Instead I'll close with a picture of humans huddled around the fire as the great ice sheets of the impending ice age are advancing and have already (it is rumored) "pushed the Cathedral of Montreal as far [south] as St. Albans, Vermont" (Wilder 1942, Act 1: 110). That is a scene from Thornton Wilder's play from 1942, The Skin of Our Teeth. Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus cannot admit to their fire all who will perish. So, who do they take in? Moses (the law); Homer (poetry); and the nine Muses (the arts) (Act 3: 146-49). Short-sighted governments and university administrations may deem the humanities, the arts, dispensable--a frill. But not the Antrobuses--not humankind. Those old texts and our study of them are not frills nor are they frivolous. They are about us--past, present, and future.

That's my bottom line.

Harold Remus is currently Professor Emeritus, Department of Religion and Culture, Wilfrid Laurier University and Adjunct Professor at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary.

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