Chris Hardie has written a very informative piece about what’s happening at Earlham College, the beloved Quaker school out in Richmond, Indiana. The news is pretty grim. Take this devastating detail: “In 2007, Earlham had over 1,200 undergraduate students. This fall, that number was 671. The college has mostly retained the same number of teaching faculty in that time…”
This has been happening for awhile. Then-dean of Earlham School of Religion Matt Hisrich warned us about some of this back in late 2020 when he revealed that Earlham College was raiding what had always been treated as ESR’s endowment. By all accounts the current EC president is doing his best after inheriting a mess but cutting programs and reducing staff isn’t goin to help turn it around.
Unfortunately, this spiral is becoming ever more common with small liberal arts colleges. The pandemic hit hard and a current drop in students (a baby bust that started in the 2008 recession) is just going to make things that much harder for these kinds of schools.
I appreciate Hardie writing this. Back in 2013 I got to know him as a fellow panelist at an ESR leadership conference and we’ve kept in touch over the years. In recent years he’s been on a task almost as quixotic as saving small colleges: he bought a paper, the Western Wayne News (publisher of this article), and has been trying to build a model of a sustainable local paper. I shared his great manifesto in defense of the open internet a few years ago and try to keep up with his blog. I’m glad to see Friends are sharing today’s article pretty widely on Facebook.
Earlham College has long been an invaluable part of the Quaker institutional landscape and Earlham School of Religion fills a need that no other school comes close to. Seeing these on the edge is worrisome for the whole Society of Friends. Guilford College in North Carolina has been having a rough go of it as well, though champions like my friend Wess Daniels have been passionate at drumming up support.
Last week my son Gregory’s scout troop headed to southern Pennsylvania to start a 50-mile backpacking trip south, to cover all of Maryland’s portion of the Appalachian Trail and end up in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. I was asked to drive them, and as it seemed a little too far to commute back to South Jersey I spent four days by myself down there and had a great time. I thought I’d share various thoughts:
Hostels are great. I haven’t stayed in a hostel in forever but at $35/night, the price was right. I’m so glad I did. Every night was a new cast of people to get to meet, quirky and fun and delightfully weird. This was the weekend of the Flip-Flop Kickoff festival put on by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. As I understand it, the “flip flop” is an alternate way of doing a through-hike on the Appalachian Trail (“the AT”). Instead of starting in Georgia and heading north along with hundreds of others, you start in Harper’s Ferry (the honorary halfway point) and go south, then find a ride back to Harper’s Ferry and go north. The festival brought a lot of hikers to Cross Trails hostel, where I stayed, and I even participated in a few events; I felt myself an honorary AT hiker!
I loved the ambiance and the characters at Cross Trails Hostel. The staff were great.
I love my bike. I put my bike rack on my old econobox car and used it every day to commute the five miles or so from the hostel to Harper’s Ferry. The C&O Canal Towpath is a mostly flat, beautiful trail that winds 180 miles alongside the Potomac River. One day I continued north from Harper’s Ferry and rode it to Shepardstown: a beautiful ride apart from the calf-breaking bluffs on either side of the trip.1 Also a lot of outdoor fun is whitewater rafting. There’s three companies in the area offering it and I had a good time with Harper’s Ferry Adventure Center.
The C&O Canal Towpath trail is wonderful.
Don’t forget the non-vegan restaurants. I was excited by a vegan option in Harper’s Ferry but my favorite meal by far was at a regular cafe in Shepherdstown. I had an amazing homemade black bean veggie burger, a sesame noodles appetizer, decent fries, and a tall cold glass of hard apple cider. Five stars to the Blue Moon Cafe. Extra bonus: there’s an actual creek flowing through the back patio.
Five stars to Shepherdstown’s Blue Moon Cafe.
There is so much history atop itself in Harper’s Ferry. It’s a tiny town and yet every time you turn around there’s something monumental going on. John’s Brown raid is perhaps the most famous but it was also the site of multiple Civil War engagements, a provisioning stop for Meriwether Lewis, and a place where Thomas Jefferson waxed poetic.
The Oddfellows Hall. One of their members was taken hostage by John Brown. As if that’s not enough history, famed Civil War photographer Matthew Brady set up his camera here and took lots of pictures of soldiers from this vantage point.
Don’t defend Harper’s Ferry. There’s much one could say about John Brown’s motivations, tactics, etc., but really dude, how dumb do you have to be to try to force-start the Civil War there of all places? As soon as word got out about what was happening, militias from three states and federal troops poured in from the hills on all sides of the town and trapped him. It was over almost as soon as it began. The Civil War engagements were like that too. It’s a fishbowl with mountain ridges on all sides: you just set up your munitions on Maryland or Loudoun Heights and lob cannon balls down on the town until you get a surrender. A quote attributed to a Union lieutenant in an exhibit really summed it up for me: “Gen. Jackson and Gen. Hill told me personally, they had rather take it [Harper’s Ferry] forty times than to undertake to defend it once.”
These are the little hills behind Harper’s Ferry. On either side are much taller ones.
Visiting new meetings is great. On Sunday morning I had church time so I motored south to visit Goose Creek Meeting in Lincoln, Virginia. 2 It’s an old meeting, steeped in its own history. It’s aways fun to see a new meeting. They have honest-to-God pews with hymnal racks along the back, each carefully stocked with a Bible, an FGC hymnal, and Baltimore’s Faith and Practice. They have a loud clock, which I’ve always heard was a Hicksite marker and indeed I later learned the Hicksites held the meetinghouse in the nineteenth century schisms.3 There were only two messages and one was a fake Gandhi quote (you all will be happy that I didn’t fact-check it in real time and just let the sentiment behind it stand for itself). It seemed like a really grounded meeting. I was impressed that people got there early and sat quietly preparing for worship. Everyone was very friendly for the few minutes of coffee hour I could squeeze out before heading back north to pick up scouts.
Nice light in the main room before worship. Note the hymnal racks on the back of benches and also the prominent clock.
When looking back to Nazi Germany in the 1930s are we so sure God Could not have found a way?
Henry Cadbury believed the Jewish people should have appealed to the German sense of justice and national conscience. Then those Germans would have stood up for the Jewish people, and prevented the Nazis from acquiring power. The death camps would not have happened.
Many probably think that is naive and could not have worked. But that is what nonviolence is about, connecting with those you are hoping to change. Listening deeply and being willing to change yourself. This is also what faith is about, believing in the presence of God today. Believing that as you listen closely you will be guided by the Inner Light. Believing somehow God will find a way.
There’s a fine line between idealistic naiveté and realistic solidarity. I’m still of the mind that Cadbury should have harbored more cynicism of what was happening as the Nazi Party grew in Germany but I can see Jeff’s point: in 1934, was the future we know inevitable?
Johan Maurer weighs in on the civility-in-politics questions happening now. He makes useful distinctions between mass behavior and spontaneous protest and then lays out the situation for those of us who follow the Prince of Peace.
I’m convinced that the USA is in a kind of danger that is new to most of us. But even if our worst fears turn out to be exaggerated, the scale of pain and despair among some (and wicked glee among others) is something that demands a prophetic and pastoral response from all who claim to represent Good News.
Also check out his list of eight options for responding to the current political crisis.
The nature of religion has changed, within Quakers we have seen the numbers of young people engaging in our community fall as the effects of economic insecurity have taken hold. And perhaps more importantly, because ‘young adults’ have no time for institutions that often seem arcane and irrelevant, and which have failed to engage with the realities of life for the vast majority of people in our society.
I wish I could share more of his enthusiasm. I’m not seeing anything particularly game-changing in his article. Half of it is generic cliches about millennial preference with extrapolation that they should align with decontextualized Quaker values. He cites a few happening young adult Quaker scenes in the UK and a promising Young Quakers podcast five episodes old; he’s fond of American Emily Provance’s blog. Good stuff to be sure, but you could pick pretty much any year in recent memory and point to similar evidence and imagine an imminent surge. It’s 2018 and we’re still saying “hey this could happen!” It could but it hasn’t so why hasn’t it and what can we do about it?
Also in these contexts “radical faith” sometimes sounds like buzzwords for non-faith. Is the Quaker meetinghouse just a quiet empty room for participants to BYOF (bring your own faith)?
Update: Chris chimed in via Twitter to add that his piece’s observations aren’t just from the year of working with BrYM Friends:
Ah, I’ll take a read of yours too — but those thoughts come from my experience of being around Quakers over the last 8 years, inc setting up a new young adult group (Westminster!), visiting Qs across Britain, and interviewing many of our community over the last year!
I haven’t posted anything on the horrific mass shooting because like most of you, I’ve been in shock, trying to learn and trying to make sense of something that will never make any sense. I don’t have any profound insights on the shooting. I don’t want to claim I know the real reason this happened and I don’t want to mansplain a list of fixes that will keep it from ever happening again. I’m grieving for the victims and their families.
I ache for my LGBTQI family who are too used to random violence, both mass and personal. I worry for the way the shooter’s ethnicity and allegiance will only be used to justify more bigotry and violence. I’m sick of living in a world where ISIL thinks mass shootings are a justifiable political statement and I’m sick of living in a country where the NRA and its politicians think it’s okay to sell military-grade assault weapons. I pray for simple things: love, healing, consolation. And I cry inside and out. Life and love will win out.
The most popular post on my blog, year after year (and now decade after decade), is a 2005 piece on baby names: Unpopular Baby Names: Avoiding the Jacobs, Emilys and Madisons. We used the techniques listed to aid in our attempt to give our own kids classic names that wouldn’t be overused among their peers. The 2015 numbers are out from the Social Security Administration. How did we do? The charts below shows the respective rankings from 2015 to the year they were born.
The names of our two “babies” — Gregory, 5, and Laura, 4, are both less popular now than they were the year we named them. Yea! They’re both in the low 300s – viable names but far from overused.
Francis, now 10, was dropping in popularity and dropping into the low 600s. With that trend, we actually worried about the name becoming too unpopular. But an uptick started in 2010 and became pronounced in 2013 when an Argentinian named Jorge Mario Bergoglio decided to start calling himself Francis. The name is now in the high 400s.
The popularity of our eldest son’s name, Theodore (“I’m Theo!, don’t call me Theodore!”), started off in the low 300s was holding steady within a 20-point range for years until around 2009. In 2015 it cracked the top 100. It’s only at 99 but clearly something’s happening. Equally disturbing, “Theo” wasn’t even on the top 1000 until 2010, when it snuck in at position 918. Since then it’s leap 100 spots a year. It’s currently at 408 with no sign of slowing.
And for those of you looking to spot trends: did we just call our names early? Maybe “Francis” isn’t a slow climb but is about the go shooting for the top 100 in two years time. Maybe “Gregory” and “Laura” will be all the rage for mothers come 2020. Yikes!
When I first started blogging fifteen years ago, the process was simple. I’d open up a file, hand-edit the HTML code and upload it to a webserver – those were the days! Now every social web service is like a blog unto itself. The way I have them interact is occasionally dizzying even to me. Recently a friend asked on Facebook what people used Tumblr for, and I thought it might be a good time to survey my current web services. These shift and change constantly but perhaps others will find it an interesting snapshot of hooked-together media circa 2012.
The glue services you don’t see:
Google Reader. I still try to keep up with about a hundred blogs, mostly spiritual in nature. The old tried-and-true Google Reader still organizes it all, though I often read it through the Android app NewsRob.
Diigo. This took the place of the classic social bookmarking site Delicious when it had a near-death experience a few years ago (it’s never come back in a form that would make me reconsider it). Whenever I see something interesting I want to share, I post it here, where it gets cross-posted to my Twitter and Tumblr sites. I’ve bookmarked over 4500 sites over the last seven-plus years. It’s an essential archive that I use for remembering sites I’ve liked in the past. Diigo bookmarks that are tagged “Quaker” get sucked into an alternate route where they become editor features for QuakerQuaker.org.
Pocket (formerly Read it Later). I’m in the enviable position that many of my personal interests overlap with my professional work. While working, I’ll often find some interesting Quaker article that I want to read later. Hence Pocket, a service that will instantly bookmark the site and make it available for later reading.
Flipboard is a great mobile app that lets you read articles on topics you like. Combine it with Twitter lists and you have a personalized reading list. I use this every day, mostly for blogs and news sites I like to read but don’t consider so essential that I need to catch everything they publish.
Ifttt.com. A handy service named after the logical construct “IF This, Then That,” Ifttt will take one social feed and cross-post it to another under various conditions. For example, I have Diigo posts cross-post to Twitter and Flickr posts crosspost to Facebook. Some of the Ifttt “recipies” are behind the scenes, like the one that takes every post on WordPress and adds it to my private Evernote account for archival purposes.
The Public-Facing Me:
WordPress (Quakerranter.org). The blog you’re reading. It originally started as a Moveable Type-powered blog when that was the hip blogging platform (I’m old). A few years ago I went through a painstaking process to bring it over to WordPress in such a way that its Disqus-powered comments would be preserved.
Twitter. I’ve long loved Twitter, though like many techies I’m worried about the direction it’s headed. They’ve recently locked most of the services that read Twitter feeds and reprocess it. If this weren’t happening, I’d use it as a default channel for just about everything. In the meantime, only about half of my tweets are direct from the service – the remainder are auto-imports from Diigo, Instagram, etc.
Tumblr (QuackQuack.org). I like Tumblr although my site there (quackquack.org) gets very few direct visits. I mostly use it as a “links blog” of interesting things I find in my internet wanderings. Most items come in via Diigo, though if I have time I’ll supplement things with my own thoughts or pictures. Most people probably see this via the sidebar of the QuakerRanter site.
Facebook. It may seem I post a lot on Facebook, but 95 percent of what goes up there is imported from some other service. But, because more people are on Facebook than anywhere else, it’s the place I get the most comments. I generally use it to reply to comments and see what friends are up to. I don’t like Facebook per se because of its paternalist controls on what can be seen and its recent moves to force content providers to pay for visibility for their own fan pages.
Flickr. Once the darling of photo sites, Flickr’s been the heartbreak of the hipster set more times than I can remember. It has a terrible mobile app and always lags behind every other service but I have over 4000 pictures going back to 2005. This is my photo archive (much more so than the failing disk drives on a succession of laptops).
Honorable Mentions
I use Foursquare all the time but I don’t think many people notice it.
Right now, most of my photos start off with the mobile app Instagram, handy despite the now-tired conceit of its square format (cute when it was the artsy underdog, cloying now that it’s the billion-dollar mainstream service).
Like most of the planet I use Youtube for videos. I like Vimeo but Youtube is particularly convenient when shooting from a Google-based phone and it’s where the viewers are.
I gave up my old custom site at MartinKelley.com for a Flavors.me account. Its flexibility lets me easily link to the services I use.
When I write all this out it seems so complicated. But the aim is convenience: a simple few keystrokes that feed into services disseminate information across a series of web presences.
Western Wayne News 
