 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
| Kurt Spellmeyer | |
|---|---|
 Kurt Spellmeyer | |
| Personal life | |
| Born | 1955 United States |
| Religious life | |
| Religion | Zen Buddhism |
| School | Rinzai |
| Lineage | Cold Mountain Sangha |
| Website | Cold Mountain Sangha |
Kurt Spellmeyer is a Zen teacher and professor in the English Department at Rutgers University.
Zen lineage
Kurt Spellmeyer, Kankan Roshi, trained with Takabayashi Genki and Kangan Glenn Webb, founders of the Seattle Zen Center. In 1985, Spellmeyer completed his training under Webb Roshi and was authorized to teach. He received the dharma name Kankan (Ch. Guan Han, “Sees the Cold”), at a private ceremony with Webb in 1991.
Kankan Roshi has practiced Zen meditation for 40 years. He has directed the Cold Mountain Sangha since 1994. The Cold Mountain (Kanzan) lineage of Rinzai Zen can be traced back to the Han Shan Temple in Suzhou, China.
Teaching
From 1985 until 2021, Spellmeyer served as Director of the School of Arts and Sciences Writing Program. Spellmeyer earned a PhD from the University of Washington. The Writing Program at Rutgers, which offers courses at all levels from developmental writing to advanced writing for the sciences and the professions, currently serves 17,000 each year and employs roughly 250 faculty.
Writing
 | This section may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (June 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Spellmeyer is the author of Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction (Wisdom Publications, 2010), Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century (SUNY Press, 2003), The New Humanities Reader (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002), Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition (Prentice Hall, 1992).
In Arts of Living, Spellmeyer asks readers to separate the explicit content of academic knowledge from the way that this knowledge helps perpetuate enduring forms of structural inequality. He is critical of both conservative elitists like Allan Bloom and self-professed "leftists" who claim an oppositional status while reinforcing class distinctions of the kind described by Pierre Bourdieu. Although Spellmeyer's research has been influenced by sociologists like Bourdieu, Charles Derber, and others, he is particularly indebted to Barbara and John Ehrenreich's work on the rise of "new class"—the professional-managerial elite, including academics, who have become the core of the Democratic Party in the U.S., displacing a working-class constituency. In a review of Arts of Living, one critic said:
Not everyone who reads Spellmeyer's text will agree wholeheartedly; as John Brereton states in his blurb, it's "guaranteed to be controversial." And, rightly so. Spellmeyer has few kind words for critical theorists, contending that critique is an illusion by which we only change our ideas when we should be seeking to change actual lives. Even if one does not agree with parts or most of his arguments, Arts of Living, I believe, is an important read for every humanities scholar and teacher.
— Beth Brunk-Chavez, Composition Studies Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2005), pp. 140-143
Spellmeyer has also published articles on theories of composition/rhetoric, critical theory, and the sociology of knowledge and of academic institutions, in journals that include College English, College Composition and Communication, The Journal of Advanced Composition, Pedagogy, Transformations, and Religion and the Arts. Spellmeyer is a contributing editor at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
Awards
In 1993 he won the Ross Winterowd Award for his 1992 book Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition.
In 2004, he received Rutgers' Teacher-Scholar Award for outstanding contributions to the scholarship on teaching.
References
- Spellmeyer, Kurt. "Spellmeyer, Kurt". english.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
- "About the Teacher – Cold Mountain Zen". Retrieved 2023-08-12.
- "About the Teacher – Cold Mountain Zen". Retrieved 2023-08-12.
- Spellmeyer, Kurt. "Spellmeyer, Kurt". english.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2023-05-28.
- "Rutgers Writing Program". wp.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2023-08-12.
- Robert Thurman (20 April 2010). Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction. Wisdom Publications. ISBN 978-0861715824.
- Ehrenreich, Barbara; Ehrenreich, John (19 February 2013). "Barbara and John Ehrenreich: The Real Story Behind the Crash and Burn of America's Managerial Class". Alternet.org. Retrieved 18 April 2018.
- Brunk-Chavez, Beth (2005). "Review: Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century, by Kurt Spellmeyer" (PDF). Uc.edu. Retrieved 18 April 2018.
- "Newsletter of the Friends of Rutgers English: Online - Kurt Spellmeyer Wins Scholar-Teacher Award". english.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 2023-08-12.
.svg){kind=small}
