The Tradition of Conceited Course Catalogues

    I might be slight overanalysing this, but bear with me for a second. Have you ever taken a good look at a course catalogue at Kenyon? It is easy to see it as a purely functional item, one of routine almost. After seeing a physical Kenyon course catalogue from the ‘70s, however, I realised there is a hint of tradition between the numerous lines about Socrates and the “future” of the Liberal Order. Every semester (presumably since Kenyon’s foundation), course catalogues get distributed to every single student on campus, and while it is hard to look at them as more than a reminder of all the hours we will be spending in classrooms, their almost unchanged and rigid structure actually makes quite a few normative claims.
  

  While this week’s readings on tradition can get very contradictory at times. While the two may disagree on many things, such as the reality of the past that traditions may attempt to establish a connection to, It is safe to say that both Bellah and Hobsbawm would agree that a tradition establishes a link to some past (perceived or existing, depending on the author). They both agree that traditions make normative claims on what is deemed acceptable and virtuous by the community, and push a certain way of behaviour. They are endowed with symbolic meaning and they need to be repeated. For the Purposes of this post, I will mostly be leaning onto Hobsbawm’s definition of invented tradition as a set of practices normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature which seek to inculcate certain values of norms of behavior by repetition which automatically implies continuity with the past, however.

    I am by no way saying that course catalogues are a potent medium of transmitting normative claims, or that either of the authors was thinking of such items when writing their works, but course catalogues sure hold some implicit meanings through symbolism, which is transmitted in a very particular way.
    For starters, course catalogues are distributed every semester. For every single semester that Kenyon was operational, course catalogues existed. If that does not bind one to the past, I do not know what would. Kenyon students from the very foundation of the college are all bound by the shared experience of looking at the same list of classes and wondering “what kind of monster assigns a mandatory class this early in the morning?!” My point here being: we have all engaged with this item in the same way since Kenyon began. I would lean towards Hobsbawm here and classify this connection to the past as part of an invented tradition, as it very clearly began with the “Revolution” that was Kenyon’s founding all these years ago.
    They all fit the very same, rigid, format; distinguishing between departments, and within each department you can find all the classes they may take; the title of the class being the first thing you look at, then the professor’s name, and then a course description, as well as meeting times/places, etc.
    Course catalogues are “governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour” (Hobsbawm: 2011). What exactly do I see in a course catalogue that inculcates certain values and norms of behaviours, you may ask? For one, They surely seem to hold professors to a high esteem, placing their names in a relatively prominent position, right before any class description, where their names cannot be ignored. They are singled out, the high position in the catalogue perhaps symbolic - as if to point out their importance; subtly communicating the respect with which a student should view the professor. The symbolic placement of professors’ names “offers examples of the men and women who have embodied and exemplified the meaning of the community,” in other words (Bellah). The course descriptions communicate what the leaning process should be like. It conveys rules on pursuing the search of knowledge in the forms of the questions each course seeks to answer, the focus of the course, and maybe the means through which this topic will be studied.

    I could elaborate a lot more on this, but I feel like I have overstayed my welcome by now. This post is meant to look into some of the ways a course catalogue is a routine item which -through its use of symbolism and the semesterly repetition of its distribution- has potentially become an object of tradition. It communicates rules and role models and it establishes a connection to the past, which are all components of a tradition according to both authors. In doing so, the seemingly innocent course catalogue provides a very positive view of Kenyon. One that glorifies its staff, values its methods of pedagogy, and provides students with ways. If Hobsbawm classifies invented tradition as a set of practices normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature which seek to inculcate certain values of norms of behavior by repetition which automatically implies continuity with the past, there is definitely reason to think that a course catalogue from the ‘70s might fit into that definition.