Dr. Karen Prior is a writer and professor with street cred in the form of an FBI file. She has three dogs, one horse, six chickens, and she lives out of town, where, I imagine, people with FBI files naturally gravitate. A formerly freckle-faced pothead with a penchant for getting arrested, Prior admits she doesn’t hide emotions well and so to some, she can be a handful. But such feisty attributes come in handy when you’re the chairwoman of the English and Modern Language department at Liberty University, a school known for its extreme conservatism and loyalty to the evangelical traditions of its founder, Reverend Jerry Falwell. It’s no wonder she’s written a memoir.
It’s hot and sunny and we’re in the country near Amherst, Virginia on Karen’s front porch. She offers me iced tea, which I, for some reason, decline. As she heads to fetch her own, I navigate three German Shorthaired Pointers and sit down on a wooden rocker. The dogs are curious about my backpack but soon lose interest, circle around, and drop to their bellies, almost in unison. Karen returns and sits opposite me in her own rocker.
***
The Rumpus: Which is your favorite dog?
Karen Prior: [Pointing at the dog directly in front of her] This one. Because she loves me the most. They’re all great, really. But this one, she never leaves my side.
Rumpus: You have room for lots of animals out here in the country.
Prior: Sometimes more, sometimes less. I had to put down my twenty-five year old horse last fall. Now I have just one and board two more.
Rumpus: Can you draw a comparison between horse care and being a professor?
Karen Prior: There’s a lot of mucking out of stalls. You’ve got to put up with a lot of crap and then clean it out before you get to the stuff you really enjoy, the riding and the teaching.
Rumpus: Politics.
Karen Prior: You know.
Rumpus: How did you end up teaching at Liberty University?
Prior: The truth is, most academics aren’t privileged enough to choose. It’s not like I could just pick a school and teach there. I had a Ph.D. in English. Ph.D.’s in English don’t have many options. That being said, my husband and I sat down and decided what areas of the country we wanted to live in, and Virginia is so beautiful it’s always been on our list. And then there was Liberty, looking for an English professor and its beliefs and mission match mine. It all went very quickly after that.
Rumpus: And the hiring body at Liberty didn’t mind your record of arrests or the FBI file?
Prior: No way! I was advocating for pro-life causes each time I was arrested. Trespassing, disorderly conduct, stuff like that. I put my arrests right down on my application, and they were a real career boost. I mean, at Liberty they were. Not at most schools.
Rumpus: So why did the FBI have a file on you?
Prior: Hate mail. Death threats. It was for my personal safety.
Rumpus: Can you share anything more specific?
Prior: When I was doing media interviews for pro-life protests, someone left a wire coat hanger in my mailbox.
Rumpus: Wow. How’s that for discourse.
Prior: It communicated very well.
Rumpus: Why Pro-Life? That’s not very academic of you.
Prior: For many people, abortion is a personal or religious or political issue, but for me it’s a rational issue. I simply believe that human fetuses are unborn children. That’s it. The logic of that position carries itself out. When I started really getting involved in the pro-life movement, heavily involved, I had to go to my mother and tell her that I’ve never had an abortion because she was probably thinking I did because my commitment to the cause seems so inexplicable. For many people there is that kind of personal or emotional motivation. It’s not like that for me. Pro-Life is a position I arrive at intellectually.
Rumpus: What is one stereotype about Christian education?
Prior: That the purpose of it is to shelter students from the outside world, when in fact its purpose is to equip students to engage and critique culture from a biblical point of view. There should be no sheltering in a quality, Christian education.
Rumpus: Then how would you respond to someone who says Liberty University shelters students by restricting them with curfews and rules banning rated “R” movies on campus.
Prior: For the most part, the rules are designed towards, but perhaps not always successfully communicated as rules for community living. Even though I disagree with a rule against rated “R” movies for an individual, I can understand, taking into account the many different backgrounds our conservative minded students come from, how it would be easier for a university to create one rule toward upholding biblical standards of living for an entire community of developing young people. The rules are certainly different than I expect individual Christians would make for themselves. The system isn’t perfect, but there is a good idea behind it.
Rumpus: Liberty University is large and loud in the political realm. Bachmann, McCain, Perry – swinging by to speak at Liberty University has become a pre-requisite for Republican presidential candidates. Mitt Romney was the commencement speaker. Liberty has also grown in size, from around six thousand residential students in 2002 to twelve thousand students in 2010. Public commentators and comedians and the like have a lot to say about Liberty. What’s one negative stereotype about Liberty University?
Prior: Let’s see. There are so many! One stereotype is that our professors don’t have the same academic backgrounds and qualifications as professors at other universities.
Rumpus: True or false?
Prior: It has to be false. We’re from the same state colleges and institutions everyone else is from. There simply aren’t a lot of evangelical schools that offer Ph.D. programs in many disciplines. So we come from and publish in the same sort of academic environments as everyone else. [Karen has her Ph.D. from State University of New York at Buffalo.]
Rumpus: Here’s my pageant question. So what does it mean to be an academic and a Christian in 2012?
Prior: I think the fragmentation that we have seen at the end of modernity—or in post-modernity as some would have it — means that Christianity is just one more of many niches in both academia and the world. In a sense, I think Christians in academia have an equal footing in being just one more niche, but on the other hand, because Christians believe in a meta narrative, in a unifying story, we also have the opportunity to integrate our story as Christians with other stories being told. That’s exciting.
Rumpus: Your memoir, Booked: How Literature Saved My Soul, is being published by T.S. Poetry Press this fall. Why should people care about it?
Prior: That’s a valid question because my life is a pretty boring life, despite the FBI file and all that. But really, the connections I draw between my ordinary life and the great books that shaped me, is where I hope to meet my reader. Books are the great common ground, regardless of religious or political beliefs. Most of us live ordinary lives, yet want to draw out meaning and make connections. My book shows some of those connections and how all of the stories we interact with affect our lives. It’s not just a memoir. It’s a memoir about how other people’s stories shaped my life.
Rumpus: Did you have any moments of self-discovery as you wrote? Did you discover that you were a worse person than you remember? Or better?
Prior: My editor said I sometimes came off like a jerk! And he’s probably right because at one point I was trying to figure out how I was going to tell stories about people who caused me pain. In doing that, I had to think through what I thought about those painful moments and how I feel about them now. In early drafts, I sounded bitter, more bitter than I felt.
Rumpus: Did you find a way to work around that?
Prior: It’s a matter of voices. I had to think through those situations in order to figure out how I feel now. After that, I could frame the narrative in a way that reflected both my opinions during the moment of pain and also now, as an older woman thinking back. In that respect, writing my own memoir further shaped my life.
Rumpus: I bet it was all of that Christian rock that led to your painful days.
Prior: No! No, I never listened to Christian Rock.
Rumpus: That’s too bad. Christian rock is the stuff of great memoir.
Prior: Well, I do remember one time when I was a teenager and a locally famous evangelical preacher came to my church and preached about the evils of rock. He preached against all rock, even Christian versions. And his argument had nothing to do with the lyrics. He was just really anti-drums. It was the beat. It was too sensual or something like that. It was ridiculous.
Rumpus: Drums lead to sex, right?
Prior: Exactly. Drums lead to sex. So after his message, sometime later, my youth pastor got all motivated and took all of us youth group kids to his attic…
Rumpus: Creepy.
Prior: It sounds creepy, but it wasn’t even a real attic, just a cubby hole built into the side of an upstairs bedroom. He brought us up there to show us where he used to keep all of his rock albums, which he’d burned in a fit of righteousness. You know, I’m sure he had a more sophisticated argument, but all I remember was that he then related rock to drums and then to rhythm and then to sex. And somehow he tied Africa into all of it.
Rumpus: Geez.
Prior: It was about that time that I left the youth group to smoke more pot.
Rumpus: Good! I wanted to get around to this topic, because of your current employer. So here’s the question: how does your history of pot smoking influence your teaching pedagogy at Liberty University?
Prior: Well, to my great surprise, I ended up pursuing a profession in which having all of my brain cells working at maximum capacity would have been nice. So there’s that. But you know, really, my past affects my teaching now in the same way most choices affect anyone’s life. I was trying to enjoy myself then and have a good time. I’m trying to do the same thing now only I’ve found a better and more fulfilling way.
31 responses
Terrific interview. Can’t wait to read the book.
I know all about her “street cred.” I was on the streets of Buffalo, defending women’s access to abortions, during the “Spring of Life” anti-abortion campaign in 1992.
I’m dismayed that the Rumpus would let itself be used as an anti-choice platform. Are you taking a page from Dan Savage’s book–do you imagine that every right-wing cause you ally yourself with or even mildly approve of shows that you’re a no-B.S free-thinker? Gadflies soon turn into contrarian jerks; they automatically support regressive trends, for no other reason than to show they’re not in thrall to the shibboleths of the left.
I loved this. I’m a student at LU in their Masters in Professional Counseling program and have noticed that the stereotypes of conservative evangelicalism may be present at the university, but their are a great many students for whom those stereotypes do not apply.
Cole. Way to be. You turned pro-life into anti-choice. Really?
My interest was piqued when I read Prior has an FBI file. “Interesting,” I thought, “the Feds are finally more even-handed in their investigation of activists.” No such luck! Prior states that she has a file for her own protection. Meanwhile, environmental and animal rights activists who use similar civil disobedience tactics are routinely treated as terrorists. I am not calling Prior a terrorist, but extremists who share her anti-choice views are terrorists and unfortunately, the government does not apply their own definitions of the term to the religious right.
Romanhokie, Anti-choice is a more accurate description than pro-life. Pro-life in the context of abortion reduces a very complex set of decisions down to a ridiculous dichotomy. Choice is really what’s at stake–do women have the right to decide what happens to their bodies in the context of pregnancy or don’t they? People who call for restrictions on abortion say no, women don’t have the right to those choices (although many of them, when talking about their own children, use the language of choice, as in “we chose life,” even while they would deny that choice to other women). They are, in the truest form of the term, opposed to choice, or anti-choice.
“I’m dismayed that the Rumpus would let itself be used as an anti-choice platform.” After reading the interview, which was cursory and brief, Cole’s statement kinda sounds like the logic of homophobia: if I consort with, I will convert to.
AHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Prior says “For many people, abortion is a personal or religious or political issue, but for me it’s a rational issue. I simply believe that human fetuses are unborn children. That’s it. The logic of the position carries itself out.”
But that’s not a rational position, and anyone who’s had a smattering of training in logic knows it. Taking a rational position requires more than simply believing something is so–there has to be something to back that up. It’s accurate to say that Prior’s argument extends rationally from her belief–if one believes that fetuses are unborn children, then abortion is indeed murder (and one would think that the next rational argument to proceed from that is that the women having them should be arrested for premeditated murder, but somehow that never gets discussed).
But the belief itself is not necessarily a rational one, and is certainly not a settled one in the world of science. If you begin your argument with a shaky premise, then it doesn’t matter how well you build that argument, it falls apart when the foundation crumbles.
I thought this was interesting, and I’m happy the Rumpus is interviewing people their audience probably isn’t used to hearing about on a more personal level.
On a different note, This woman’s pro-life stance isn’t “rational.” How does that even make sense? There’s nothing logical at all about being pro-life. Just admit it’s a gut, religiousy impulse belief. Is she anti-death penalty, too? Anti-war? Those take human lives, too. I doubt that she is, though it would certainly be logical and rational to also not support those things. This need by conservatives to couch their beliefs in terms of science and logic is pathetic.
Oops, Brian beat me to the rationality post.
I agree with Brian Spears and Sarah. Plus my own two cents…
Why do some people think they should be able to make decisions for people other than themselves? Being rational entails exercising reason, and that entails not thinking you have the power to make decisions for the entire human race. I certainly would not tell folks they are not allowed to buy a memoir by someone who wants to make decisions for every single human being just because it is what I believe. Are people who have had or will have abortions excluded integrating their story into this unifying meta-narrative?
Great interview. Honest, to the point. I love what Prior says about quality education and the critique of culture- that’s bigger than people realize and it’s what a lot of “quality” educations are missing.
Great interview, Rumpus (Chris). This is the first piece of journalism I’ve read from you in about 6 years.
Thanks for being honest enough to ask questions others in your position would normally side-step.
“Ad astra per alia porci.”
I’m not trying to discredit Karen’s credentials, but Liberty University is the academic equivalent of calling Taco Bell fine dining. Combine “…and its beliefs and mission match mine.” with her doesn’t hold water “rational” approach to the choice discussion, along with the creation nonsense taught as science and you can see just how academic the institution is.
The “Modesty – Slits” in Liberty University’s Dress Code for Women are . . . interesting. Was this the name The Slits used before they became The Slits? http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/liberty-university-s-guide-female-modesty
@Brian Spears, here’s the thing. I don’t see it as anti-choice. Of course, the whole pro-life vs. pro-choice is so dichotomous that the American public have made it less about circumstances and more about simply saying “yea” or “nay”.
I, of course, do not believe that one can legislate morality to the extent that certain actions are not “universally” moral or immoral. As a Christian myself, I do not see in Scripture where God or Christ does the same thing the same way twice. He works with each person as a unique individual. And I think He offers grace to those women or couples who decide that abortion is an option. I would never presume to tell another person how to arrange his or her life and realize that even my own daughters will do things that disappoint me in the future, but that will not reduce their value to me as beautiful human beings.
@Nathan, as for Prior’s credentials, she was educated at SUNY Buffalo. Liberty University meets the accreditation of a regionally recognized organization. Further, if you were “not trying to discredit”, then what was the purpose of your Ciceroan rhetoric of even mentioning it?
Thanks for dong this interview,Christopher! Nice to know there is an intelligent,snarky,can-hold-her-own female professor at Liberty.
Yes, I read the entire interview including where she was educated. Which is why I mentioned I was not trying to discredit her credentials, but those of the university. The teaching of creationist young earth philosophy as science and the silencing of dissenting opinions or discussion eliminates any credibility the institution could hope to have, regardless of regionally recognized accreditation.
A purely biological definition of when human (or any biological) life begins (i. e., at fertilization) is arguably more “rational” than an arbitrary, socially constructed, psychological, or religious one. I don’t buy it, but that’s not to say it’s not inherently rational or at least scientific. There’s room for disagreement even within the realm of logic.
Being heavily anti-religion myself I can’t comment on the rules and regulations of a school dedicated to christian tunnel vision. I can tell you that her stance on abortions is both not as logical as she’d like to think it is and clearly had a lot to do with that FBI file. A coathanger in the mailbox is probably chump change next to what prolifers do to abortion clinics and doctors who work at them every day.
Regardless of political stances, she sounds like an interesting woman. The interview was well thought out, I see no pro choice pushing- merely a different viewpoint, which the Rumpus of all websites would be keen to utilize. So I personally disagree, strongly, with just about everything she stands for- doesn’t mean this wasn’t a job well done.
@Brian Spears, here’s the thing. I don’t see it as anti-choice.
Can you explain why you don’t see it as anti-choice? I think I did a creditable job the first time explaining why I thought choice was a more accurate frame than life, though I’d be happy to go into it more deeply. So far you haven’t done that. Explain to me why life is a better frame than choice.
I realize this is small beans compared to other comments, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone say they were also preached to about drums. Growing up, it was drilled into my head that all drums and beats were tools of the devil that originated in Africa, and any music other than the calmest of gospel was highly blasphemous.
I guess I just feel validated that I wasn’t crazy in remembering being told this. No one ever seemed to believe me. I turned to Atheism at a pretty young age; I’ve often wondered if I wasn’t surrounded by such extreme, crazy beliefs if I would had been more open to religion.
Talk about white privilege. She boasts about her pot smoking, then lands a cushy academic job. A young person of color busted with a tiny bag of weed is unable to get school loans or apply for an entry level mcjob.
i’m really pleased the rumpus chose to run this interview. i disagree with her entirely and think she should go back to smoking pot, but i’m stoked it’s out there for us to discuss. the comments (besides this one) are stellar.
I’m with Betsy in terms of appreciating that The Rumpus ran this story – it is good for us to read what other people think, listen to someone else’s story, and not just to stay in our own thought ghettos where we all nod approvingly at each other. It sharpens our convictions and challenges them when we get out a bit.
…to open up the dialogue even more…perhaps…
http://arispeaks.com/2012/06/19/pro-choice-and-pro-jesus-abortion-in-faith-perspective/
She had to “put down” her horse ? That does not sound very pro-life to me. I’d like to know why she killed that horse. You know, the logic behind the action.
Harry, are you unfamiliar with the term “pro-life” as it is used in this context? Or simply changing the terms midstream? Way to advance the conversation …. Way to mock the difficulty most undergo as their pets age and near death. If you are “pro-choice” (assuming you are familiar with how that term is used in this context), way to make the rest of us look like jerks.
@Richard — well Richard, very simply, and not putting “words in other people’s mouths”, she made a choice to take a life. A life is a life. And a choice is a choice. So it follows that although she is “pro-life”, she feels o.k. in her choice to take the life (of another creature), but wants to deny women to be able to make that choice when it involves their own bodies. Sure the horse was sick, or handicapped, etc.—hard choice. But a woman with test results showing that her fetus is going to be handicapped or brain dead, etc..she gets no choice, right? And as for trying to sidetrack or change my statement…well…nice try.
@ Cole Says:
“I’m dismayed that the Rumpus would let itself be used as an anti-choice platform.”
Anti-choice? What choice, exactly, are we talking about here?
Agree with Brian about her “logical” position on abortion. You can logically derive anything you want if you are are allowed to pick and choose the base axioms that you consider self-evident. This is the whole crux of most religious arguments, really, with Evangelical Christians, because eventually you get down to “because the Bible says so. QED.”
That being said, I’m glad The Rumpus is willing to publish interviews with people outside the mainstream of Rumpus thought, which is obviously pretty solidly liberal-progressive-feminist-LGBT. Exposure does not equal endorsement.
It was a quality read. Thank you.
Thank you, Ray Shea. Yours is a refreshing attitude. I think we could do coffee, for sure.
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