This study describes the cultural, cognitive, social, and emotional work that once-devout members of the LDS Church must engage in to leave the church and divest themselves of Mormon culture. A Grounded Theory approach with a multi-modal memoing process showed that, for the devout, leaving the LDS Church and Mormon culture is not a singular event, but rather a process of gradual transformation that requires time and effort, passing through a series of punctuating events. Formerly devout ex-Mormons had to confront various problems, including the LDS Church’s truth claims and ethical contradictions from within the particular Mormon framework that leavers believed in and followed, which in turn had shaped and constrained both their leaving process and their post-Mormon selves. Interview data revealed a necessary reconstruction of post-Mormon emotionalities. And devout women who left Mormonism bore an added burden of overcoming internalized misogyny.
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF 21 ST CENTURY HIGHER EDUCATIONDuring the spring of 2016, the California legislature considered two versions of a bill that would guarantee students in the 23-campus California State University system a bachelor's degree in four academic years. This overlapped with existing legislation that mandates target graduation and retention rates and per-student budgeting, and impelled, I would argue, a series miseducative institutional decisions within the CSU system. These three legal constraints serve as a nexus of social control that works through an efficiency calculus and a concomitant rationalized bureaucracy, which in turn directly contradicts other CSU-wide institutional goals of student-centered learning and student success. 1 This contradiction stealthily divorces university institutions from student learning, and remarries them to graduation and retention rates, classroom failure rates, and now the metric of time to graduation, which, as workers within the academic labor force, faculty are obliged to respond to in substantive ways in their pedagogy. Administrators now instruct faculty to advise students to take as many credits as possible, follow pre-determined "roadmaps" to graduation, avoid taking classes outside of those roadmaps, and to incur extra expense by taking intercession courses (which in the CSU system cost on average twice as much as regular session courses). The reduction of student learning to an efficiency calculus is nothing new and, by this point, an expected feature of the neoliberal university.In the mid-20th century, philosopher and social scientist C. Wright Mills envisioned academic work as a craft, that is, as intellectual craftsmanship to act as a guiding value for intellectuals, academics, and teachers within the 1950s context of an emergent white-collar class and its corporatization of social structures-that is to say, at the beginning of the neoliberal order. Dis-
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.