This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here, we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, we share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. Today we're speaking with Katherine Loftin, who is Yale University Lex Hickson Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies and Professor of History and Divinity. She is also the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean of Humanities at Yale. Her first book was Oprah, the Gospel of an Icon, and her second book was Consuming Religion, which pursues the dependent relationship between religion and consumer capitalism through 
through a series of case studies, including Herman Miller, the Kardashian family, and the Goldman Sachs Group. And today we're talking mostly about how your writing life has changed since becoming a dean. So I'm wondering if you could start by telling us a bit about how you think your approach to writing has shifted as your role at Yale has changed. I have gotten so much clearer about why I write. what it does to write as a person who has the privilege to work in higher education and therefore in part be supported by the institution I work for as a writer. So many writers don't have that opportunity and have to still cycle through the same question. What does this matter? Who's listening? Is this purposeful or is this just my own inner being poured out on some page for someone, no one that will read it? 
But my own experience of being a leader has, made me realize how much writing helps me get my mind right, helps me figure out the arc of a thought and how hard it is to come to know anything comfortably or surely. So with very minimal time to give to the space of something that feels really nourishing if I can do it deeply, I have become very aware that we write in order to understand what we think, And the more I understand what I think, the better a listener I am to other people's thoughts and a better fighter I am for why it's so important to protect financially supported space for people to freely wander in the shoals of thinking. So a lot of my time, I try to be very strategic about where I put that effort because of the minimal time and the summer I've spent mulling on the problem of book talk. 
which is a subset of TikTok where people discuss avidly books. Among the authors that are most popular is a, what I'm kind of calling the thriller romances of Colleen Hoover. So this has allowed me to do two things. One is just think about why are thriller romances delicious to fall into for such a huge number of people, including myself, but also to think about what is the use of scholarly work to explore spaces and that have been explored well by many other people. As I'm writing, I'm leaning on so many incredibly insightful book talkers themselves and commentators who have written a lot of explorations of what this phenomenon is. And I find that time and again, there is no kind of grandiose justification other than the further I will come to understand, the better I will be advocate for understanding as a practice of the humanities. 
That's really helpful to hear, especially for those of us who work on topics that we feel like lots of people have already said really smart things about. So why are we spending time on doing that further? And I think you've just provided some good reasons. A lot of us think of working as a dean as a very nine to five job and maybe even more than that. So I'm curious how you have time to do this kind of writing or where, when, how you fit it in. I get asked that a lot. And I think, number one, that the question is rightly posed because it is an undue burden what it means to maintain faculty-governed institutions in this country. That's why it's so hard to find faculty who want to do it. 
It's not properly remunerated. It's complicatedly honored among the faculty themselves. And you're facing, at most institutions of higher ed, a fairly hostile system of governance, whether it whether in the form of state legislature or in boards of trustees who are extremely ambivalent about the faculty as a species. So let's begin. This is not a fun kind of boss to be, and very few people would raise their hands to do it. And I appreciate that the question is often from colleagues who are saying, well, I don't know how you do it. I mean, I just couldn't imagine trying to, and partly what they're saying is real writing takes real time and I don't have real time, but I have a devotion to writing as a, 
practice of self-understanding akin to what I think about when I think about the question of religion itself. I do it because I believe in it very, very deeply, that writing is a way we get our minds straight. I spent 10 years watching the Oprah show, and if you ask a lot of people who watch the Oprah Winfrey show, and you said to them, what's the thing Oprah tells you to do the most? You're going to hear from them things like love yourself, trust yourself, listen to your intuition. But he said, no, no, what's the practice Oprah tells us we all should do? Everyone's going to say journaling. It's going to say journaling. And she'll buy you journals and tell you the journals again. 
So writing is a very basic feature of human self-exploration. And I would say I do it in that vein of trying to understand, again, my own mind alongside the chaos of other people's words and thoughts. And I do it like I call a friend. You know, I don't have a day go by where I'm not on the phone for at least an hour with somebody I love. I can't give that up. If I give that up, I'm going to be a terrible person. That makes my days a little challenging and figuring out what the way to pick and choose things. And there are things that are not done as well. And I was just talking to a student who is struggling as they realize the many burdens they're facing as they're going on the job market this year as doctoral students. 
And what we were just working through is what can we accept this second best effort, third best effort on a list of things? Because we're not going to be amazing with all of them. And every word I write is not great. Every sentence I put out there is not genius. I'm just doing it because doing it feels better than not doing it. And like the ritual cadence of intimacy, I know that that presence is its own practical, spiritual, inevitable reward. Getting on that phone, talking to someone when you're feeling broken, taking a minute, putting a pen to paper, rattling off on a word file your anger of the day. Those are practices I am certain, among all things, will make me be less insane to interact with as a human being, much less as a leader or a person who has a lot of responsibility to make sure people's workplace is less violent to them. 
I really relate to that. I think a lot of us humanities scholars have that same urge or need to write. You know, it's like that old advice people give, you know, only do this if this is something you can't not to do. If it's like talking to a friend every day or a family member, something you need that is kind of life-sustaining or, as you were saying, helps us feel clearer or maybe even provide some calm, although not always. But it is a practice, I think, that many academics feel better when they're doing regularly and helps many of us write, as you say, to understand what we think on topics. Yeah, I would point out that a lot of times when academics encounter public media in some form or another, they discover that the best kind of things are headlines. 
You know, scientists identify the cell that gives us the key to kidney cancer. Scholars discover a document that proves, you know, the first enslaved person arrived in the United States in 1618, not 1619. We like headlines, but most of that is we in that sentence is headlines. popular mediated culture, looking for things that can extend across massive populations with interest. But what scholars do, people who are professional nerds, is they make things that are anti-headlines. Some of my favorite books are books that make it incredibly complicated to come up with a one sentence version of what the truth is, because the truth is rarely one sentence. And that nerdiness takes time to achieve that subtle fact of the world. One of my favorite novels is the novel, Middlemarch. 
And anyone who's had the pleasure of reading that book, and not for all people, is it a pleasure. One of the things that's so amazing is how she slows down to the metaphor she uses, just the sound of a beating heart, just the slowness and smallness of human interaction. And I think of a lot of scholarship as just taking that microscope, that pen, down, down, down, down to the small song, with the edge of the small place you can think about, that rarely lifts you out into a place of da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Here's the headline. It's something kind of complicated. And that's why academics are annoying to be around, because we're always saying, well, it's complicated. That's our role-specific obligation. That's what it means to be able to have free exercise of this knowledge practice is it's not ends oriented. 
It doesn't give us an obvious way. It can build up over the slow fact of time. 12 dissertations can show us how we might change a date of a start of a thing. How many experiments in a lab can help us get to target that cell towards cancer treatment. But it's slow. It's infinitesimal. And participating in that slow, small scramble to see better, I just, I think is, practice that we are obligated by the work we get to do. But even more, I just know that makes me feel better when I'm facing everyday dumb interactions that make me feel bad. So I'm like, why is it so hard with this one person? Why is this so confusing? Why do we always seem to get in the same fight? 
Slow it down. It happens for a lot of complicated reasons. And knowing that complexity is the given rather than the strange is one of the many reasons I think, you know, writing is so, so deeply spiritually rejuvenating. Are there benefits to the, the shorter story? more popular pieces, do you think, for academics to write? I really do. I don't think it should be obligated. I get very concerned when it seems as if that becomes the measure of your viability, is whether or not you can. On the other hand, I think it's also equally dangerous how much many faculty stigmatize the popular as a problem. So in general, the university has an understandably ambivalent relationship with the popular. And as someone who has, you know, the 
day after I received tenure, a very old faculty member in one of the departments I received tenure in remarked that he was surprised that someone could receive tenure having written about the history of opera. Now, he hadn't even read my file well enough to understand that I didn't work on the history of the lyric tradition that produces beautiful songscapes like Carmen, but instead just saw that it was absurd enough to him that that popular culture, not even getting the right popular culture right, which was a leading character named Oprah Winfrey, who was a very popular person. So popularity has been a topic I've given a lot of time and energy to, the way the university is ambivalent, complicated. They want it. They don't want it. 
But at the end, what I know is that for myself, the times I have fought to understand myself in that form of writing, I have liked the test just in the same way I think we see debates over history textbook standards can really excite academic communities. How do we change what the standards are for history across the United States for those who decide state by state? And they are often decided in these bullet points. Here are the 17 things students in fourth grade will learn about Florida state history. Well, that's, you know, being able to break down to those bullet points becomes all of a sudden a really salient political fight. And if academics can't join that fight well, then we're not training ourselves especially appropriately for the real changes this thinking can make. 
So I know it's helped me to figure out what facts do I really hold? So I wrote a piece a couple of years ago when Oprah Winfrey interviewed Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. And it was for a more popular publication. And just working on that really made me realize what it was that was so arresting to me about Oprah's kind of power and what it made me think about the difference between that and the kind of power of watching Harry and Meghan try to craft out of their leap from the monarchic frame. And it just helped me think in a way that I had not been able to force myself to because I was lingering in the strangeness of theoretical arguments about capitalism and blackness and commodification. 
But when it comes right down to it, let's just agree, no one is better at teaching people what the importance of feelings are than Oprah Winfrey has been. And just arriving at that made me realize how significant a historical player she was and why she might belong very well in a history textbook standard for the consequences she's had on how we talk and think about ourselves. I also swim in those religion and popular culture waters and often think how much I owe the people who came before because I haven't encountered too much antagonism or pushback against the fact that I'm I'm studying more popular culture, but I'm very aware that that's because of people before me who I think have made it more valid within history and religion and humanities departments. 
You alluded to a sometimes contentious relationship between faculty and deans, or maybe you said something else and my mind went there. I know it seems like it can sometimes be difficult when someone has been a faculty member, then they become a dean. I don't know if you have the same scholarly community that you used to. And I'm asking this partly because we might have listeners who are thinking about the possibility of a deanship later on and are curious about how that changes their academic community and how they're relating to other scholars on campus. I do think that anyone who wants to do this kind of administrative work has to really do a strong audit of what's the reason that they're doing that. And if you can be very clear about that for yourself and 
you're going to find, as in most things in life, your relational world can be altered or sustained based on that commitment. You know, it was very clear to me, I entered administration because there were problems I experienced as a faculty member. And I listened to other faculty members complain about voluminously that I wanted to solve. And as a result, my own relationship has been, and I believe this very strongly, that an academic dean should understand themselves more as a union steward than as a boss. Now, I am treated as a boss. This morning, I received a message that instructed me I needed to write a faculty member who was living in his faculty office like it was a frat house room. So I needed to write that faculty member and say, stop acting like this is a house you give no regard to and treat like trash. 
That's a boss gesture. I have to write someone and say, don't do that or else. This is not the flavor of thing for which I'm joyful to send the message, but I'm doing it on behalf of another community of workers, facilities staff. who have to regularly clean the buildings and find regularly the disgusting fact of some faculty's irresponsibility towards other people. So in that moment, I'm being a boss. But even in that bossness, I understand myself as responding to a group of workers and their needs. And I have tried to check every single thing I say or do as a dean. Am I representing a group? Or am I speaking for myself? If I'm speaking for myself, it's pretty rarely going to be the right thing to do. 
If I'm representing a collective need or concern, I feel I'm working on behalf of the group that has been extremely supportive of me. And insofar as that's been true, I've actually found in my work as dean and being the privilege of being the dean of humanities, it's been incredibly just magical for my work because I get to read all this extraordinary scholarship in the process of doing our reviews for promotions and supporting junior faculty on their way to tenure. And I just get to learn about fields that I would never encounter if I just was in the joyful place of American religious studies where I spend most of my days. And that's been really just so supportive to being more creative and brave in my own hypothesis as I start seeing connections among fields. 
I also felt, and I did do before I became a dean, I had several conversations with very dear friends of mine, both on the faculty where I currently work, but also elsewhere, about creating sustaining practice of reading and thinking together. And indeed, that's the thing I most often, when I'm in a kind of conflict with a co-worker who's also a friend, they say, we need to get back to our writing. We need to get back to our, you know, it's usually the resolution, because if we're fighting over something in governance, it's because we've lost sight of that we're practicing nerds and teachers. So we do best when we're being that together. I'd say finally, as a dean, I have made the choice not to leave the classroom. 
I understand many deans that don't do that. It really is an extra piece of time, but That has helped me sustain a practice of solidarity, especially through the COVID crisis of figuring out what is my relationship to the voluminous problems I'm receiving in my inbox from faculty struggling and the regular fact of students have changed a lot in the 10 years of higher ed. The classroom is the front line of thinking about that and being able to be in that space and share it with commiseration with colleagues has made me feel in general more like someone who represents the faculty rather than rules over them. That sounds like an incredible schedule. And I guess I wonder, I mean, to be able to fit all that in, especially since you haven't totally left behind teaching, have you gotten better at not being a perfectionist about certain things? 
What's maybe changed, if anything, that allows you to fit all that in? I always want to acknowledge that, you know, first, I had a child who was in her late teen years when I entered this work. And I think it's very difficult to imagine being a leader at this at this level of invasion, emergency invasion. If you also have the gorgeous and strange emergency invasion of serious dependence in your life where you need to be frontline for their care and thought. I've seen people do it, but they usually then something else gets lost. I've had the advantage of having a different kind of day. And I also note that, you know, I have a, everyone has a kind of ability. I had the gift of being trained at the University of Chicago by Kathy Brekus, who is a person who always kind of said about herself, and it was true to watch, she has one of the quickest eye to historical detail and very difficult written documents. 
She can read script from the 17th and 18th century very easily and well. She just, the eye travels over it. And she can hold in her head a pretty substantive array of geographic and historical details. In some fields, people are really good with languages. They just pick them up quickly. I watch in different technical fields that your kind of acuity with higher math can make all the difference if you're a biophysicist. I have an uncanny knack with bureaucratization. It's not hard for me. Bureaucracy makes perfect sense. I was raised by a bureaucrat. My parents were both self-identified socialists. I find... bureaucratic and administrative systems, not difficult to understand. They make pretty clear sense to me. And if anything, I walk in with a kind of righteousness. 
This can be simpler. All of this could be simpler. And by bringing that spirit, I would say travel through bureaucratic issues that arrive on my desk with a lot of dispatch and believe that they should be principally dealt with as much dispatch so we can get back to the mission of learning, thinking, and teaching. And kind of making overly complicated bureaucracy is usually a way of slowing down academic freedom. So every time you see a complicated bureaucratic structure, I believe faculty should treat that as a hostile act towards their freedom as academics. So simplifying bureaucratic structure is something I'm convicted about. I'm pretty decent at doing and trying to make that more brief. I'm also regularly trying to honor that what I should be doing. 
I was not hired because I'm a world class bureaucrat. I was hired because I'm trying to teach and think in the field of U.S. religious history that I was trained in. And that has some useful applications to this work, but it's not so useful. keenly attracted to it. So trying to figure out how to make space right is about also not letting in any given day yourself become mystified by problems that are so often made difficult. I believe to either A, speak responsibly to multiple working parties that are collaborating in the university and trying to communicate across impasses to each other. And those can be simplified with right collaboration, honest speech and respect for the differences of those capacities. And two, I believe very much that if an email is more than a sentence long reply, 
there must be something wrong. So I believe we can move more quickly than we do. But again, I want to acknowledge that's a bit of an ability and not something that everyone feels equally in my witness. So you sound like exactly who should be in this deanship position. For some of our listeners who are thinking about dean positions in the future, I know a lot of us think that it might be a more social space in the academic world. I think some of us imagine it as days where you're working with other people, lots of meetings. And you usually have the luxury of going back to your own office. So sometime alone that we academics are used to. Is it more social in a way? 
On this podcast, we've often been talking about some of the loneliness of academia and and what we do to solve that or make that more manageable for you. How is the the social lonely balance in being a dean and academic? This is a beautiful question, Rachel. I could just meditate on it for a long time. And I have been thinking a lot about what I value most about this work because I reflect on just the future for myself in it. And I would definitely say the number one reason I became an administrator was for the money. I needed money. And I find that in academic life, especially in the humanist space, we are the most underpaid faculty. Or you could say rightly paid. 
If you're an economist, you say rightly paid. I believe underpaid faculty in the higher education space. And I carried into my academic life significant debt that I accrued in graduate school. So number one, I needed the money and I was probably never going to be able to say no because I needed the money that much. Number two, I had struggled a great deal with just my own depression, anxiety and addictive behaviors. And there's a way in which a highly regulated schedule, really amazing for that, you know, needing to be in a meeting 830 every day and being accountable to communities of people who are not academics because academics are really important. They're one powerful and central feature of higher ed, but there are many other communities of intellectuals, learners, and creators we work alongside. 
And so when you're going to that meeting at 830, I'm not talking to a bunch of nerds who I can kind of like commiserate about the late night struggling over a book review. I'm talking to people who have very different professional expectations and abilities than me who need me to act like a professional too. I say both those things to say it is a more social job, but it's a social job to which you're accountable in different spaces that most Professor identified people have not really had a lot of training for. We're not trained to be managers, either at the strategy around bureaucracy that I mentioned, but even more managing human populations who are not students. Or since most academics have a concept of students that's not entirely equal to teacher, how can you change your idea of students to be a fully equal subject to yourself? 
I think most academics who end up being successful in administration are people who don't imagine the student to be subject to them, but are some collaborator. So it's a relatively easy transition to a situation where most of the rooms I sit in as an administrator, I am the only person who is an academic in the room. How do I operate fairly, equitably, respectfully in a situation where I am not the expert? My only expertise is in being a faculty member and fighting for their rights. There's a lot of other things to running academically. These nonprofit corporations that have a lot of complicated resource issues that they're managing as they're trying to rebuild classrooms, lab spaces. I say that all by way of saying it is social, but it's also really, and I admit it's been very, very challenging for me to figure out what kind of person to be because my weirdness, I'm a weird person. 
Nerds are weird. How to be a little more normal for a situation where people have no patience for, oh, Katie's just kooky. And that's what you, no, I'm not kooky. I'm a professional trying to work with other professional people on things I'm often very ignorant of. I spent a lot of time working on this massive move that 15 humanities departments made to a building. And the number of times I'm debating really small details of office design. I don't know anything about wood, molding, windows. I don't know anything about HVAC. I don't know. I'm an ignoramus. And yet I'm being asked to sit in meetings because at the end of the day, faculty will be occupying them among other people. And they'll need to fear their voice has been heard. 
I took great pleasure in that. I learned so much. Some of my dearest friends at the university are people who I learned and walked through that work together. But I would just say coming in with an experience of being profoundly humble at what you're ignorant about is step one. And I find a lot of faculty are not as great at being learners as they are at being maestros. And that self-reeducation is a process that at our best is glorious. But it also can create stumbles, confusions, and also I'll say in my own station, sometimes really unfortunate reproductions of abusive behavior by higher administrators who haven't decolonized themselves of their own practices of authority, which are very deeply held because that's how you got the job to begin with, by being named an authority. 
books written? And I mean, I'm feeling at this point in our conversation that the answer is yes, but having some ease or ability to get through some of the parts of your job as you do is part of what makes it all fit together. But maybe you can elaborate on the yes, but or how you would advise someone that yes, you could have this type of position and still write more books. Well, I would begin by noting that I have always, I think it would be safe to say that if you looked at my CV, the question of a book has not been the strongest question since the beginning of my career. My dissertation was a disaster. It was a beautiful failed experiment. 
I never published it. I parsed it out into articles. I then wrote a relatively short book on a person I've been obsessed with in her productions. And I did that really assembling together some articles I'd written on her, plus then a series of essays that did compile to a book. But I've tried to underline that, like one of my teachers, Jonathan Z. Smith, I do consider myself primarily an essayist and article writer. And I feel so grateful to be in the subfield of or the field of religious studies, which welcomes that the subfield within that American religious history is a book field. And I say all this by way of saying, because as a dean, you're often trying to figure out is a field an article field or a book field. 
And I'm often exploring the way that across religious studies, there's a lot of subfields, some of them, especially those with more philological training. tend to be more article driven and you see people assemble articles into books. But the grand sway of the humanities is book driven. And I begin always, and I say this to faculty, I have to mentor for tenure. What's a great book? I'm still learning. I'm really interested in it. I love books. I read them all the time. I wouldn't consider myself a great author of them. I consider myself a great, at best, writer of 20 pages of something that tries to sustain an idea. And in that practice, that's not perfectly companionable with administrative work because administrative work is very consuming and complicated and requires, I think, pretty profound intellectual attention. 
But I do think finding space for writing alongside has made me a more loving, compassionate, and present dean to the struggles of the range of faculty I work with and advocate for. So I consider it and have many times said to leaders above me, you want us to be right. And you want... I will be a better companion to the efforts that you want us to represent. But, you know, the meetings are hard to control because, again, it's not only my schedule or professional needs that deciding when we set meetings. And I do feel that when you're in an administrative job, you've agreed to give up yourself in part in favor of this role that you occupy. And in that, I just welcome the religionists to think with me about what in the history of ecclesiology and other kinds of organizational structure is for when religion 
When do you say, well, of course, the rabbi would show up for that. That's their job. Whatever's going on in their life, their job is to serve this community. And I consider that an honor to place on the side my own particular individual self. At the same time, I know that nurturing that to some extent is what makes me bearable and alive alongside all of these people's concerns. So I think it's I have not written a book while I've been an administrator. I have set the purpose that every year I like to give sustained thought. And I always say to myself, just get 20 pages of original thought done this year. And you, I swear at the end of that will feel like you have participated in the academic mission and made yourself quiet in a way that I think does redound to loving care of others. 
to know that it's good for you to be writing. Do you feel like you have support from your higher ups there and community of deans or the people above you for your own writing and whatever way you can fit that in? Well, I want to go back and say one thing first, and I'll return to that, that question of upper management and its engagement. I'd say first that, you know, there is no, the goals that you think you're setting for yourself are very rarely only coming from you. They are coming from sources in society. We have not But I believe academics are working constantly to try to penetrate through great scholarship. So I'm going to make a kind of political claim, which is I do sometimes wonder if humanities faculty have made themselves imprisoned in the idea of a book and therefore made themselves less free to be teachers and political actors. 
That are books a kind of repeated cudgel? Are you making a thing? Are you making a thing? A thing called a book. There's a real value to books and their writing. We should fight every day for their freedom to be created. But when we establish a certain number of them to be a marker of a kind of accomplishment, when anyone who's listening to this, I'm sure can right now think of a person whose work they love, who wrote very, very little, who just wrote one thing that like cracked you open. And we know amount is not the thing that defines intellectual perception. We know it's perception itself, which is subjective, but we all can witness and talk about what makes that possible. So this is a long way of saying I have definitely made it one of my clauses to press against the production of books as the standard of understanding and with total compassion why many institutions set a standard of productivity as the evaluation for tenure. 
There is a way in which that can be safer than making a standard of quality, which could be more disputed. But I just flagged that book production and now I could get more nerdy about it, which is we all know the monograph is a crisis object. I have the privilege of co-editing a book series with John Modern at the University of Chicago Press. One of the few presses that really fights for first book authors to be published, supports weird and strange monographs. But I am looking as a dean across university presses that are struggling just as much as higher ed is and celebrating the odd monograph that was once a dissertation is going to be a diminishing possibility for a lot of faculty. 
So I'd like us to start thinking more about what are we looking for? We're looking for creative scholarship from faculty. And kind of decolonize, again, the idea of the book as the measure of that, I think could be not only spiritually sustaining to people who really struggle with that form, but also open up what really is the purpose of knowledge. And when do we know we found a fact? Is a book really the only way to do it? I think there's other ways. You know, upper management is a thing I think a lot about, not least of which because I do this work as an administrator, but also because I'm an intellectual who cares a lot about ecclesiological power and how do things, where's the source? 
of power and how does it circulate is something that as a student of Foucault, I'm endlessly interested in. Where does it begin? Who has it? I think I've had the ability at Yale to speak very freely about what it is I believe I need as a humanities faculty to thrive because I operate within a community of faculty who for all of their diversity, diva-dom, absurdity, are also incredibly passionate expositors for the liberal arts and the positive good of humanistic knowledge. So I never speak as a first person in any meeting with provost, the president, the corporation, which is our board of trustees. I speak always thinking through what is the thing that the last 20 conversations I've had with faculty, the last 100 conversations represent. 
And I always come, and now you can just say this is the nerd self. I think often, who are the three people I could quickly check across ranks, from a lector in Spanish to a full professor in the humanities program that the utterance I'm about to make represents what I think is their fighting view. So in that frame, I have to say I have felt extremely supportive because I don't represent my interests as much as I do the ongoing thriving of a division that at the university I work is very important to it. There are many universities across this country where divisions and units of the humanities feel under siege, disrespected, not seen as central to the university mission or its power. At Yale University, it is and has been historically its strength as an institution. 
So figuring out how to speak on behalf of its faculty feels like fighting for a thing that I do think we watch regularly, how important it is to the political formation of this democracy and how also one of the ways the right is undermining us by trying to deny tenure and focusing more often than not on humanistic scholars and their scholarship as the reason to end it. So you can see it's, I get very animated by the question of speaking even to my bosses, because I think that that's a way of thinking about how in general, when we're working in Louisiana, Oregon, Iowa, how do we speak to our bosses, colleagues, state legislatures, boards of trustees there? Yeah, what you say also reminds me that someone in your position, I mean, you've been saying this a lot during our conversation, needs to, or hopefully is someone who is advocating for other academics, which isn't something that 
we academics are always used to since we're usually so self-involved in our own research. And so in some ways, it's kind of the best human sides of an academic that might come out in your type of position. I'm wondering, you know, for our listeners who are thinking that maybe they're going to be applying for these type of administrative jobs, did you think you had demonstrated before that you were that type of academic who could sometimes stand back who was going to be, you know, sort of fighting for other people's interests, who wasn't only about yourself and your research, which often feels like it's almost an academic's job at times to always be sort of selling their own ideas. I think of this moment, Rachel, when I finished the draft of the Oprah book. 
I had the privilege of having a fellowship at Princeton University for a year, and that's where I wrote the book, 2008 to 2009. I asked a faculty member there, Lee Schmidt, to read it, the draft of the book, and the comment he gave back to me, and I sent him this, you know, whatever, 350-page book, and he sent back, he's like, your footnotes, you've just got to get rid of all these footnotes. So it's the comment he sent back to me. Now I want to say that's also what the University of California Press said. So in that moment, Lee Schmidt is rightly channeling a machine of producing knowledge that says, we just need a single footnote that says where that source is. We don't need you to babble on. 
Just why are you babbling on? Well, that babbling on, that footnote, I think is super sacred and really important. Now, there's a lot of really interesting scholarship on the history of power knowledge in the footnote itself. But I think anyone listening has a relationship to the footnote that's not merely hostile, but kind of invested. And I think the doctoral student is just the classic. Why? Because we're trying to respect there's so much knowledge. How can I possibly claim that I'm on top of all of it? Well, one way I can kind of record that struggle is in these overlong footnotes, which I have been absolutely a person who has written in my life a volume of that. And I think of administration as trying to bring the footnotes of care for others to the forefront. 
What are the things, who am I fighting for? I'm fighting for conditions of thought, knowledge that I could easily create a footnote to or else I shouldn't be speaking. So I think of the footnote as a kind of humility. But it also can be a way of trying to humble the subject beyond their free speech. And so we always are bandying between the kind of complicated docility that disciplinarity can make in a subject. And what we know as Black feminists teach us, citation is a politics of care and recognition. So in my own life, I would say I definitely wobbled between being a massive egotist. Oh, surely I'll cut all those footnotes. This is my book, my argument. That sounds like freedom. And also absolute humility that I know really nothing without having wandered through the shoals, the sentences of so many brilliant people that I've gotten to work with. 
I think the reason that I emerged in administrative power was for two reasons. Number one, I was in a situation at Yale in 2016 when I received my first decanal appointment. that was defined at the institution by financial austerity and continuing post-2008 politics of retraction, which was really damaging our mission and its practice, and I believe an unnecessary practice of austerity at every measure. And number two, the critique of what we now are referring to DEI, but there were massive protests, massive relative to Yale's scale at Fall 2015 over questions of the racist past of the institution. And I was understood at that time as a relatively neutral subject. I had a lot of affiliation with the progressive politics of the critics, but I also was a person who was understood to be not at the forefront of those protests. 
I would not show up at a rally at that time in my life. I was relatively self-interested in my own strangeness, struggling with my own miseries and pain and did not see and had felt that my own life as subject to the kind of childhood pain I brought forward, a sense of being a queer outsider, I really didn't have a powerful practice of solidarity. I had a practice of being efficient on email, good at taking care of a lot of different kind of people. But I think the process of being in administration and witnessing what are the people who are fighting for their own work that I have the honor to represent, has humbled me and made me a much more activist person than I wouldn't have been otherwise. 
I have discovered both the truth of a lot of critiques that I read, nodded to in grad school, but really didn't know what their palpable truth was until I occupied administrative systems and see how they do make decisions based on theories of power knowledge that I think academics have fighting words for. And by the way, among academics, really, we have a wide array of differing views. And humanists do not agree among themselves, but they also don't agree with social scientists. And they have some real beef with the scientists. There are different epistemologies at fighting play in higher ed. And I found myself more and more a fighter the more I've sat in leadership and realized how important that fight is, not because I'm going to win, but because the only way you change a conversation is by entering a view that's not being spoken forward in a room. 
And so it's been a privilege to practice that and, frankly, to discover my politics through The job, in some ways, of being a person who also represents conciliation, reconciliation, and the medium view, which is what an administrator often has to do. Not everyone is used to thinking about a dean as something like an activist, but it seems like you're saying this is a way to actually affect change, maybe more. maybe more than just by writing? I mean, what would you say about the written word versus the kind of, maybe it's writing, but policy change that you're able to do as a dean? I think the most important thing any leader does is protect the power of the classroom and enfranchising teachers to as much freedom and creativity they can possibly practice. 
So I think the classroom is our most critical political site, and that's why it is the site of such heavy political attention on both sides of the aisle. What's the curriculum? What's happening in that room? Who's teaching you? I am arrested by the case of New College and what is happening there, I believe, should be a much stronger national conversation than what we're having. Because what's happening in those classrooms, what is happening so those classrooms are not teaching the same students, not teaching the same curriculum, is something I think any academic who is invested in the work is being valuable. Do you believe that learning more assists the practice of democracy? Yes or no? I think most people who are in higher ed have some sense of, yeah. 
I think knowledge, greater knowledge to greater numbers of people helps the world. If you don't agree with that, I don't think higher ed is probably a place you're going to be exceptionally comfortable because that is our product. That is what we do. But it's just highly disputed what that should be. And it's highly disputed at every institution in this country. And it's disputed at Yale. It's disputed at New College. It's disputed at Louisiana State. So what you want, I think, in leadership is to be doing it because you have a conviction. And if you don't have a conviction, I'm going to tell you, it's just going to steal from you. It's just going to steal left and right. Most higher ed institutions have nowhere near the amount of infrastructure. 
I agree absolutely with every critique that comes, especially from student unionization efforts and faculty complaining about salaries when they say we have too much administration. They are totally right. We do have too much administration, but I would also flag that's because we have administration that they're often accusing of bringing rightly in managerial techniques, things that are not academically inclined, student services practices that have not been rigorously met The number one thing we need in this country is more faculty. We need more faculty to run these institutions, to teach the classrooms of students we want to teach well, because teaching now takes so much more time than it ever has in human history. Because if you're doing it well, you're being attentive in ways that are extremely difficult. 
I think there is no harder job than being a full-time teacher in the United States at any rank level. And yet the way we devalue that across K through 16 education I'm not going to sermonize about, but we all know that and watch as the amount of teachers quitting right now are showing that's again across K through 16 ranks that we don't value well the kind of work it takes to be an exceptional teacher. So my number one outcry would be fighting for that classroom, which means fighting for more faculty and faculty who are well supported with the terms of tenure to do that work. And as for, you know, activism or not activism, I do think you ask any number of deans, you're going to get very different answers. 
I can just say that for myself, the more I have become healed as a person, and I mean physically, humanly healed, the more clearly I see the relationship between whatever power I have and trying to feel like I have participated in at least speaking forward the pain I see. I have no conviction that I or any individual will make change, but we all have a right to witness. And as scholars, we're trained to being especially good observers of what's going on. So the more I can speak that forward, that's what I feel I can stand by and leave records of what are of concern. as we are all facing a time that feels quite in crisis on many fronts. One of the questions that we're asking all guests is about something you wish you had known earlier about writing or publishing earlier in your academic career, that is. 
I wish that I had known that there is a difference between being a writer and being a scholar. And I had so much struggle in graduate school around my voice. And now as I work with doctoral students, I think they often watch them too. I have this thing I want to say, but you people keep making me read all this scholarship. Give me a footnote. Tell me who else. So scholarship is checking, checking, checking with traditions of knowledge, available documentary evidence. Writing is a process of self-making in the world, right? Those are two things that are not really so beautifully synchronized. And I think one of the reasons I've chosen the essay as a genre type is I find that's a space I can play a little more with that at my abilities and level than a book feels too hard to figure out how to put those two things together for me. 
Sometimes how to be a nerd and how to be myself, myself as nerd. So I wish I'd known sooner. Those two things are more odds. The history of scholarship is a lot less about writing than it has been about providing evidence. Most of scholarly history has been the production of, the checking of documentary scientific evidence. The book as a measure for academic success in the humanities is a very 20th century incarnation. The idea was you learn languages, you translate texts. I mean, I'm not gonna retell the history of the humanities, but suffice to say that we have made self-production in the form of writing books and articles our measure, but that practice of scholarship is a weird compromise between what we know writing can do 
and what we understand the practices of scholarship to be. And I think if we can recognize more of the tension between those two things, we'll be more gentle on what are the regular struggles of. Where's my voice in this introduction? I can't figure out the argument to this chapter, right? Because not all chapters really resolve in clean arguments. Sometimes many beautiful dissertations I've mentored, the chapters are providing evidence. We don't know the interpretation yet. We just know they found some new evidence we haven't looked at. This sheaf of archives, this view of a person. And the forcing of a writerly answer through interpretation, craft, creation is a really high standard. And it's a standard we should be a little more gentle around ourselves. 
And that's why I'm personally really invested in us rethinking what the dissertation can do by looking back at earlier forms where the dissertation was more a provision of evidence with very limited interpretive moves forward from it. And also a dissertation that might be more first person exploration. How does an epistemology of a particular person help us see things differently? This is a long speech to say, I just wish I'd understood that being a writer is not the same thing as being a scholar. That would have helped me in some of my regular fights with a lot of different people, not least of which referee number two. Just a regular fight over my voice and how irritating they find it. It takes a certain confidence, I think, to be able to write in the essay form, especially the personal essay. 
Some grad students have had it or, you know, even before social media, before... there were kids who grew up with that, because I often think kids who did grow up with that really do have more of that confidence. But at what point in your career did you find the essay form as satisfying for you as a writer and feel that you have the confidence to do that kind of writing? I think I always could tell that when I would speak and what I felt was my just plain thinking voice on the page, it just automatically sometimes irritated people. I think a lot of, religious and sexual subjects in the history of the world have felt something like, just the way I am seems to bother you. 
And that can sometimes accrue to a prejudice, homophobia, anti-Semitism. These are words described as irritations, an idea of a people. And I did experience myself on the page. I remember writing a paper in my second year of college in response to a sociology course that was a practicum in public policy. And the teacher just saying, you know, your voice is just overwhelming the data. Your voice is overwhelming. When I look back at the paper, they're absolutely right. My voice is overwhelming the data. And I think the more that I have thought about what that response, voice, data, self, subject, and there's amazing, gorgeous scholarship and critical theory that's given great hold of that. And I think one of the profound effects of Black Studies on the humanities has been just to force all scholars to ask, what's the relationship between voice, subject, and data in a really grand scale way? 
So I think that's a longstanding issue for me. I want to flag though that in... When I was first coming out as a scholar, both working at Reed College and then Indiana, Paul Harvey with Kara Burnidge and some other scholars had started this blog, Religion and American History. And I found in that space, I wrote some things for them. And it was such an open and inclusive place where it seemed very easy to pop up and say something weird about something small. I just really appreciate that Paul encouraged among a great group of people, many of whom were students at Florida State at the time and now have gone on to remarkable careers as American religious historians. you know, just post something, post something about pop culture, about politics. 
If you can relate it to religion and American history, cool. If it doesn't seem like it, we'll just wandle through it. There'll be another post. I found that license and space so liberating. I'm excited to go to UC Colorado Springs this fall and just thank again, Paul, who is such a, I think a supporter to many people in the study of American history, find a different voice for themselves than what they've been trained as historians. That's true. I remember taking advantage of that space too, and also reading many, strong and interesting and diverse voices there too in American religious history. Another question we're asking guests is if there is a writing practice or habit that has been working for you. I think the major thing is acknowledging how long anything I like takes. 
I will often put something in a calendar and say, like, I have this book review due and I'll put three days in the calendar for it. I don't know why I lie to myself. It's three weeks often. It's three weeks. Just multiply it. It's just wrong. And being over time, the more gentle I've been with myself about the reality of how long anything takes. And then acknowledging when something's taking a long time, that's not a problem. That's a sign of how serious the thing is. The challenge is we live in these marketplaces that require the production of work. And if you don't produce the work, then you won't be successful as a faculty member in many institutions that demand a certain amount of work in order to be promoted, tenured, and sustained in your employment. 
That short cutting of the slowness of thought is really harmful, but we have to remember it doesn't stand in for the truth. One of my favorite things I wrote as a pre-tenure scholar was a book review of Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption. It took me 14 months to write that dirty book review that really isn't, when I read it now, I don't think it's especially insightful. I just love that book and really figured out for myself why I love that book. And it took me 14 months to do it. That book review counted nothing towards any of the tenures that I received. So I just note time and again, the thing I know that the best for my mind is not reflected well in the instrumental processes of tenure. 
And trying to be honest that really true things take longer time and figuring out what the shortcuts are so I can produce for the forces of the market what they think they need to keep the widget machine going is just a regular ongoing compromise that I was blessed the minute I achieved full professor to try to put down to not worry about as much. But I know that that is just one of the hardest things about survival in this industry is how often real thought feels slower than the press of market reality makes you do. Yeah, thank you for that. I think that's something many of us have trouble doing, being realistic about how long writing will take. Well, this has been really helpful and interesting. 
And I know our listeners are going to enjoy getting to listen to our conversation. So thank you so much, Katie. Thank you, Rachel. This has been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Visit our podcast description to find out how to contact us and send us your questions about academic writing and publishing. Follow us on social media at writingitpod and subscribe to us so you never miss an episode.