I have regarded my time at UCLA a great privilege, both because of the high intellectual quality of the students who have chosen to take my courses and because of the stimulation from serving with such extraordinary scholars in the department of history and other departments on campus.
I have been honored by invitations to work with colleagues in seven different departments to mentor the research of their graduate students, as well as my own in the history department.
So I am retiring with strongly mixed feelings. I love teaching. If I were independently wealthy, no one would have needed to pay me to teach (grading is a different story!).
The vibrant cross-disciplinary intellectual life at UCLA has benefited me enormously during my 33 years of association with this great university, first as a guest professor in 1981, when I was still teaching at the University of Tuebingen in Germany, and then when I was invited to become a full-time faculty member at UCLA and began teaching a full course load in 1988.
I have happily done so every year since.
One change that I’ve noticed during the last 15 years in particular is that many students are coming to UCLA with less confidence in their ability to think critically than seemed to be the case earlier. Is this a consequence of the emphasis on “teaching to the test,” one of the unfortunate features of the No Child Left Behind Act? In any case, I’ve especially needed to challenge my students to think for themselves even when writing their exams, rather than seeking simply to echo what they’ve heard from me.
I’m grateful that UCLA allowed me to pioneer in the field of the study of religion in general and the beginnings of Christianity in particular. Along with colleagues in five other departments, I co-founded UCLA’s Center for the Study of Religion in 1995, and then served as the CSR’s director for 14 years. In that role I welcomed to our campus distinguished scholars from around the globe whose research focused on helping us understand why religions are powerful, pervasive and sometimes dangerous.
The cultural phenomena that we identify as religion have inspired many of the finest, most compassionate actions and high-level art and music that human beings have created. Likewise, some (but not all) of the most horrible things that human beings have done to each other have been committed in the name of religion.
What is clear is that, whatever one believes personally, not understanding both aspects of the effects of religion leaves anyone dangerously in the dark regarding what has happened and what is now happening in the world. My privilege and my mission at UCLA has been to seek to overcome this ignorance and to inspire my students to think critically about the strengths and weaknesses of any religious tradition in its history.
In my own research, I have been especially interested in the social, economic, political and psychological consequences of any belief system, whether religious or ideological. So at this point in my life, I am trying to finish a book about the challenge the early Christian movement brought to the dominant cultural values for gendering boys and girls into honorable men and women in the early Roman Empire. It turns out that an in-depth understanding of this history practically leaps off the page with its immediate relevance to issues about gendering that all cultures in the world face today.
Because of my intense involvement with students, it has been difficult for me to block out the time needed to finish this book. So, while I will profoundly miss my interactions with UCLA students, I do look forward to the quiet days in my home office when I can think and write for sustained periods. Then on to the next book.
Be well! Auf wiedersehen!
Bartchy is a professor of Christian origins and the history of religion, and a co-founder and former director of the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA. He will be retiring in July.