The office hours for November are on November 5. The next office hours are on November 19, December 3 and December 17 between 7:30 and 8:15 a.m. Office hours have usually been on the first Monday of every month between 7:30 and 8:15 a.m. Additional office hour times have been added for November and December.
The theme for November will be "Politics and Religion". Over the month of November, I will be proposing a new theory of Hindu Studies. I call it the Bias Theory of Hindu Studies. (I am hoping that people won't call it the Racial Bias Theory of Hinduism Academia -- although racial biases are part of the picture.) I will be making the argument that at least part of the problem for Hinduism scholars is that they have biases that they are not able to overcome. (Implicit racial biases may be part of the picture although racial biases do not represent the entirety of the matter). But this is only one part of the overall thesis. The overall thesis is that American universities, as organizations, do not have sufficiently good processes -- processes in the sense of organizational processes. This causes them to produce products that have a quality problem overall. The product in question is, of course, papers and such produced by Hindu Studies scholars. And although this area has half-beaten to death by a number of people, I believe that what I am proposing is novel. Wendy Doniger, Rajiv Malhotra, Balagangadhara, Paul Courtright, Russell McCutcheon - not a single one of them has really come up with the argument that I will be making as part of this thesis. None of them. And the funny thing is that they are all really quite fundamentally mistaken. Each and every one of them.
Anyhoo, besides Hindu Studies, this theory has significant applicability to American academia in general as well. I have laid out the basic arguments in one of the papers that I recently wrote which should probably called the Bias Theory of American Academia. In fact, one of the reasons I am quite happy to take the time to write these posts although I am extremely busy right now is that I have already written up the paper and so I know exactly what I am going to say. That is about it for an introduction. The first post will be up shortly.
Update (Nov. 11): Note that I am only promising to kick off my proposal this month. I am planning to make this into a two month series. The first series of posts will be this month. The second series of posts will be scheduled for a future month.
Update (Dec 3rd): The theme for November is "Politics and religion" and the subtitle for the theme for November is "-- and all the things you are not supposed to discuss at work."
