Kurt Kankan Spellmeyer

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, and supports himself by working as a professor in the English Department at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The Cold Mountain (Kanzan) lineage of Rinzai Zen can be traced back to the Han Shan Temple in Suzhou, China.

Professor Spellmeyer is the author of Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century (SUNY Press, 2003), The New Humanities Reader (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002), and Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition (Prentice Hall, 1992), which won the Ross Winterowd Award in 1993. 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. While he is quite critical of conservative elitists like Allan Bloom, he also takes aim at some self-professed "leftists" whose exclusionary discourses claim an oppositional status but also function as cultural capital reinforcing class distinctions of the kind described by Pierre Bourdieu. The spectacle of Yale-educated Marxists lecturing the mystified children of truckers and secretaries about their interpellation can be seen, Spellmeyer argues, as an example of the academy's own unacknowledged imbrication in ideology. 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, displacing a working class constituency.[1] The Ehrenreichs' thesis has been given new life more recently by Thomas Piketty in the essay "Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict."[2] In a review of Arts of Living, one critic had this to say:

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.[3]

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. In 2004, he received Rutgers' Teacher-Scholar Award for outstanding contributions to the scholarship on teaching.

Since 1985, Spellmeyer has served as Director of the School of Arts and Sciences Writing Program, a recipient of Rutgers' President's Award for Programmatic Excellence in 2000. 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.

His latest book is Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction (Wisdom Publications, 2010).[4] Spellmeyer is a contributing editor at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.