The Review: Pomona, politics, and the long reach of New Age spirituality

On politics, therapy, and religion. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. By now you’ve probably read our Emma Pettit’s [exposé]( the self-destruction of Pomona College’s English department. The short version: A former chair of the department, Aaron Kunin, was found guilty, by a college disciplinary procedure, of retaliating against an English professor, Valorie D. Thomas, over a series of byzantine disputes involving funds and curricula. (Thomas, who is Black, alleged that Kunin, who is white, had violated antidiscrimination rules.) He challenged that conclusion in court and was exonerated. The drama is in the details. I want to home in on what might seem like an ancillary aspect of this story but which strikes me as something like its secret heart. That’s the “Innerlight Method” training session, which Thomas had requested $2,400 to attend. What is Innerlight? “The Innerlight Method™ is a groundbreaking energy therapy system for intuitive and highly sensitive adults and children,” according to its developer’s [website](. “It balances subtle energy systems to facilitate the body’s ability to heal itself.” Many readers will agree with Tyler Austin Harper’s judgment, on the [podcast]( hosts with Jay Caspian Kang, that asking your department to fund face time with your guru “is totally insane.” Insane, maybe, but not necessarily surprising. “This kind of New Age thinking,” Harper went on, “has totally colonized academia to a point that is totally bananas to me. You will hear so many people in HR and academic spaces talk in these woo mystical terms about ‘energy’ and ‘realignment’ and ‘soul healing.’ … This was the thing in this article that triggered me, because every time I hear someone talk like this in academia, which is all the time, my own soul shrivels up a little bit.” Since retiring from Pomona, Thomas herself has joined the ranks of the gurus; she runs a counseling practice “informed by decolonialism, intuitive inquiry, somatics, mindfulness, traditional and indigenous esoteric knowledge.” (She is also an expert in “equine somatics": “We interact with horses on the ground who are willing to collaborate to enhance our learning.”) The merger of the jargon of the therapeutic, New Age spirituality and identitarian politics is one of the odder legacies of the New Left — one that, at least on campus, abides. Its tributaries are many. Most respectably, there’s the consciousness-raising exercises of second-wave feminism, which the great sociologist of religion Robert N. Bellah understood long ago to involve a complex interface between politics, religion, and the therapeutic. “Women’s Liberation,” he wrote in the edited volume The New Religious Consciousness (1976), “has raised rather fundamental questions about the relation of human beings to the universe. Perhaps, some have said, the suppression of goddess worship since the Iron Age has been deeply pathological. … A return of the long-repressed feminine side of consciousness could lead, some have argued, to a new, simpler, more celebrative, more natural way of life.” SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. Less respectably, as I have [written]( about [before]( a current of New Age self-help — replete with often frankly mystical elements — runs through a great deal of recent institutional programming on the politics of identity. The apotheosis of this: the Re-evaluation Counseling (RC) empire, an offshoot of Dianetics, which influenced Erica Sherover-Marcuse in the 1970s and ’80s to develop workshops meant to “transform our own consciousness” when it comes to racism, sexism, and other ills. Latter-day prophets of renovated racial consciousness like Robin DiAngelo, who was recently [accused]( of plagiarism, are downstream of earlier New Age movements. All have in common a kind of introspection guided by morally prescriptive buzzwords which, if properly metabolized, will contribute to some measure of healing both private and social — both personal and political. Various theories of how the personal becomes political and the political personal have, in recent years, furnished interpersonal and professional disputes with a whole vocabulary, enriched and augmented by periodic injections of HR-mandated training programs. The peculiar character of this idiom is encapsulated in Thomas’s description of her therapeutic practice, in which “decolonialism” sits alongside “mindfulness,” as though these are things of the same kind. The presumed proximity of theory to therapy, and of therapy to spirituality —"DECOLONIZING OUR MINDS, OUR BODIES, OURSELVES: RESTORATIVE PATHS FOR MIND, BODY & SPIRIT,” as the poster advertising a 2016 talk archived on her website puts it — made it natural for Thomas to invite Niki Elliott, the counselor behind InnerLight Training, to her Pomona class on “Healing Narratives.” In a book titled I Feel Your Pain, Elliott expresses such unusual convictions as that unborn babies can communicate with her telepathically. Thomas herself stops short of anything quite so dramatic. “My guidance,” she writes, “is about transformative change not about maintaining an obsolete and often toxic status quo; you have the option to effect change and create possibility, and the additional option to experience the transformative presence of horses offering awareness, reflection, and their deeply social and relational way of being.” I’m not a horse person, but I don’t doubt their awareness. I just hope they’re not reading my mind. ADVERTISEMENT Upcoming Workshop [The Chronicle's Early-Career Faculty Bootcamp | September 2024] Join us in September for a half-day virtual workshop that will offer early-career faculty the opportunity to build their skills, understand institutional and role-specific contexts, and gain access to the insights that experienced faculty wished they had known. 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