Biography
Warren G. Frisina is dean of the Stuart and Nancy Rabinowitz Honors College and professor of religion at Hofstra University. Frisina joined Hofstra in 1997 after six years as the American Academy of Religion’s associate executive director (1991-97). In his final six months with the AAR, he was acting executive director. Before his appointment as dean, Frisina chaired Hofstra’s department of philosophy and religion, and eventually was founding chair of the department of religion.
Frisina’s PhD is from the University of Chicago (1987). His books include: The Unity of Knowledge and Action: Toward a Nonrepresentational Theory of Knowledge, SUNY Press, 2002; Teaching the Daodejing, ed. with Gary DeAngelis, Oxford University Press/AAR Series, 2008, and The Pragmatic Century: Conversations with Richard J. Bernstein, ed. with Sheila Davaney, SUNY Press, 2007. His most recent article is: Forming One Body with All Things: Organicism and the Pursuit of an Embodied Theory of Mind, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, January 2021.
Frisina served as founding chair of the AAR’s Institutional Relations Task Force (1998-2005), AAR Secretary (2012-15), Chair of AAR Task Force on Membership Development (2013-15), and as a member of the AAR Futures Task Force (2020-2022).
Candidate Statement
These are perilous times in higher education. The freedom to pursue our research and to share our findings with students is at risk in ways few of us could have imagined until recently. Polarized political voices challenge the core mission we share with all institutional members of the American Council of Learned Societies. In recent years the AAR Board of Directors has felt compelled to issue statements (either in concert with other learned societies or on its own) making explicit commitments many of us thought we could take for granted on subjects like: academic freedom, social justice, and the need to attend to diversity equity and inclusion within higher education and across all sectors of our society.
These facts speak directly to the importance of the AAR and its leadership at this moment. When the AAR was founded, the Board focused its attention on carving out discursive space within academe for our then nascent field. Without the visionary leadership of those founders, the academic study of religion as we know it would not exist. But now, at a time when the public’s trust in academe is as low as it has ever been, the AAR’s Board faces a different kind of peril. It is the AAR’s job, in partnership with other learned societies, to insist in the face of public skepticism, that our core mission as scholars and teachers is critical to human flourishing within the U.S., but also globally.
The Board primarily pursues this objective by promoting the academic study of religion in all its various forms. Our research and teaching will always be our first line of defense against those who would dismiss what we do as dangerous or worse, superfluous. Promoting, supporting and making visible members work, helping to disseminate it in a variety of forms, including social media, is the way we collectively make our case.
But recently the AAR’s Board has been required to do more. It must take up and discuss difficult issues with the aim of building consensus among a membership that is extraordinarily diverse. The recently issued Policy on Board Statements detailing how and when the AAR takes a public stand on issues confronting our membership is a good example of a form of leadership that our founders likely never imagined would be necessary.
I accepted the invitation to stand for election as the AAR’s Secretary because I know firsthand how difficult and complicated it can be for an institution to navigate perilous times. It is the Secretary’s responsibility to ensure that the record of the Board’s conversation is complete, that all voices are represented, and that the membership can always know not just what the board has decided but also why.
If elected it would be a privilege to serve the AAR’s membership in this capacity in the coming years.