Tenured Radical

The Move Is Official: Please Join Us At The Chronicle of Higher Education

2011-07-06T19:07:00.000-05:00

You can wait to be redirected, or click here to get to our new home, where we are in 3.0.

Tenured Radical is on Brief Hiatus

2011-06-27T13:10:00.002-05:00

If you are looking for us over at the Chronicle, hang in there: we are still unpacking.

It's Moving Day: Tenured Radical Migrates To The Chronicle Of Higher Education

2011-06-22T12:52:00.024-05:00

Yesterday around cocktail hour the sun was slipping over the virtual mountains when we at Tenured Radical heard the sound of galloping pony hooves. Sitting on our front porch, surrounded by boxes and half-full L.L. Bean sail bags, we squinted into the glare and saw that it was Historiann. "Hellzapoppin!" she yelled, in that instantly recognizable voice that is a cross between Dale Evans and Mary Maples Dunn. She swung handily over the pommel, skirt barely in place as usual, and dropped her reins (we were impressed to see that cow pony come to an immediate halt, like they do in the movies.) "I'm getting crazy numbers of pings from your blog!" she said, as we put a bourbon and branch in her hand. "When in 'tarnation were you going to tell me that you were moving?"

Oops. There is so much going on at chez Radical we had neglected to announce that we are migrating from the Blogger site where we were born and raised to a Word Press platform hosted and maintained by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Tenured Radical: the 3.0 Edition will debut there shortly.

So, without further ado, I want to anticipate and answer a few questions.

Are you leaving a forwarding address? Yes. You should be able to click whatever link you are using and be forwarded directly to the new site. Over time, you might want to replace that link, but don't worry about it now.

Will you be behind the pay wall? Nope.

Will you be edited, or censored, in any way by The Chronicle? Nope.

Will your archive move with you? Yep: hence the pinging over at Rancho Historiann. The computer people have been opening the links in 723 posts to make sure they still work on the new platform. Any problems should be reported to the management here, and we will forward them to our virtual IT friends over at the Chronicle.

Do you ever edit your posts subsequent to publication? Yes: I am a notoriously inaccurate typist, and frequently leave words out in my zeal to get ideas onto the screen and out to the world. I also occasionally edit something to assuage hurt feelings: I edited a series of posts after I "came out," removing a few made-up stories that were versions of the truth. Even though the focus of Tenured Radical has changed dramatically since those early days to avoid the personal as much as possible, I still have to edit from time to time when people mistakenly see themselves in a post. My policy is to be attentive to the feelings of friends, students and colleagues. People I don't know, and who I haven't named, who claim they have suffered harm from one of my blog posts might want to look up "narcissistic personality disorder" in the DSM IV.

Have you ever taken a post down completely? There are five posts I have taken down completely. The first was about something that happened in class, a post which rightly came back to bite me in the butt, because I had no idea that everyone at Zenith knew that I was the Tenured Radical. I then removed three others that had the potential to do similar damage. However, I have since come to believe that it is simply wrong to write about students, or any other private person, without their permission -- this includes children, spouses, parents, colleagues, neighbors, siblings and (fill in your relationship to me here ________.) But posts about students are the worst: written as amusing anecdotes that showcase our wit, wisdom and sorely tried patience, they are all exploitative and mean to some degree or another. I always make a point of telling my students in the first class that I will not write about them.

The other post I took down was, ironically, the post that originally brought me to the attention of a larger audience: "Where Credit is Due: Rutgers Basketball, Don Imus and Drive Time Shock" (April 2007.) In that post I asked why the national success of a team of African-American female scholar-athletes had caused them to be called sluts and whores by a major media figure. I compared the gender and racial dynamic in play at this moment to the significant support for the white, male members of a prominent lacrosse team, who were fighting felony charges that they had raped and beaten a stripper hired to entertain at the end of an all-day beer fest. It was a small part of the post, but the blogging equivalent of a hand grenade: referring to the symbolic importance of a college athletic scandal I knew little about made me the object of an ongoing attack organized by an academic blogger who was writing a commercial book about the case because he believed that the charges were false. The lacrosse players were eventually exonerated due to gross inconsistencies in the evidence, as well as multiple transgressions on the part of the prosecutor. This public official was subsequently disbarred, and is one of several parties, including the university, who have been punished by civil lawsuits filed by the young men and their families.)

What did Tenured Radical have to do with this case? Exactly nothing, except that the effort to achieve justice for the athletes dovetailed nicely with said blogger's campaign against so-called liberal scholars. It was quite the experience to be sucked suddenly, and without warning, into a full-on battle against the forces of political correctness. Members of this blogger's apparently vast audience threatened to sue me, maim me or get me fired. They filled my comments sections with crazed invective. They left threatening messages on my voice mail. They sent me vicious emails about what a terrible person I was, copied to numerous faculty colleagues who I am sure had no idea what a blog was or why they were supposed to care about a southern lacrosse team. They fired off numerous letters demanding my immediate termination (often with false return addresses and written in block letters) to university officers, colleagues and the Board of Trustees.

It was a strange introduction to the blogosphere. But it was also like getting an unasked for internship in a culture war I had thought was over, and that had certainly never touched me at good old Zenith. In retrospect, it was a little glimpse of that libertarian nest of snakes that would emerge a few years later as the Tea Party movement, and of the "gotcha" politics that would snag people far more important than I. On the plus side, it garnered me a ton of great readers, proving once again that there is no such thing as bad publicity as long as you don't send anyone naked pictures of yourself.

So the question is, if there is so much good news associated with this moment, and it boosted me to academic blogosphere superstardom, why did I take the post down?

Was it because I was afraid of a lawsuit, as said blogger implied in a recent series of attacks at a neoconservative website? No. I left the Rutgers post up for a long time so that the selective quotations that made me a punching bag could be put in the context of the whole argument by a reasonable reader. However, the post came down (I still have it, actually) after a reputable source and a blogging colleague told me that the mothers of one of the accused athletes had been inconsolably distressed by it. Subsequently, a pseudonymous contact claiming to be the wife of a civilian contractor in the Middle East and a friend of this woman contacted me. She amplified, in a very moving way, on the distress my post had caused in a home already under strain from the son's legal troubles. In response, I removed the post. I asked this correspondent to convey my deepest apologies to her friend and to put us in touch if a direct apology would be helpful, something she was unlikely to get from any of the thousands of other journalists who had vilified her son and his friends.

Whether these messages ever got through, I do not know. Subsequently, I came to wonder whether the story about the mother was real or invented, because I came to wonder who this "friend" actually was (impersonation is quite common in the virtual world, as are "sock puppets," a single person claiming to be many different commenters.) The pseudonymous correspondent abruptly cut off contact when, as part of my effort to reach out to her "friend," I questioned the motivations and mental health of the activist blogger who had, in my view, amplified any original harm by out of context quotation and endless, public cyber-bullying of anyone who suggested that long-standing problems of violent conduct on this team had made the false charges believable to begin with. It has happened more than once that someone, operating out of the anonymous email accounts that are so easy to open, has made and cultivated contact with me and then disappeared when I voiced my view that the manic activism of this blogger, and an over the top obsession with women and people of color as chronically unworthy and/or dishonest, might be a symptom of a personality disorder.

So what have you learned, dear? When in doubt about whether a topic is combustible, stay away from it, and be very, very careful when treating statements made in the media as factual. Particularly when commenting on a topic that is likely to draw unwelcome political attention, always hedge your bets with those words we history scholars use when making an argument from inferential evidence: "perhaps," "it seems," and "although we cannot be sure" are all useful phrases that permit the blogger to revisit an analysis later, or make a theoretical argument that stands up to new facts and reinterpretation of old facts.

Know your enemy, and don't reason with people who have an ax to grind. Easier said than done. However, unpleasant as it was, this episode was a great turning point for my own critical thinking about why I blogged, what I blogged, and with whom I got into pi$$ing matches.

Even when you don't know them you are writing about real people. What one academic blogger thinks or says can't really matter, can it? The answer to that question is that it is hard to know, and every post should be read prior to publishing with an eye to how it might be misunderstood. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't write it, but when flame wars start, the intelligent work you are promoting on your blog is obscured. It is a hard, but true, fact that you only get one chance in the blogosphere, and that chance is in the original post: no amount of explanation or clarification will be adequate for your critics, who are only interested in promoting their own views. Even if we bloggers were inclined to apologize or retract in the face of unjust criticism, we live in a society that now sees every error, every slip, as evidence of severe and permanent character flaws.

Assume that you are read by everyone in your life. Half of your acquaintances who take umbrage at a post will never tell you; and half of these people also insist they would never be caught dead reading any blog, much less yours.

Is this the last post over at 2.0? Yep. The final box just went on the virtual truck. I'll see you all over at the Chronicle in 3.0, and Historiann? Hope that pony got you home all right last night. Ponies always know where to go, even when bloggers don't.

In Sisterhood: Support The Strike At London Met's Women's Library

2011-06-21T15:02:00.002-05:00

There's a long history of feminist resistance in England

Eighteen months ago found your Radical in London. On the trail of radical feminist Leah Fritz, I had also decided to check out what archival material was available on the feminist anti-pornography movement in London. What I found at The Women's Library at London Metropolitan University changed the shape of my research. I discovered that, just as radical feminists in the United States had become intractably divided over the representation of eroticism, Andrea Dworkin's ideas had roamed across the pond and found both opposition and fertile ground on the British left. In the UK, where there is no absolute right to free speech, and where skinhead violence had produced legislation against hate speech that would have violated the First Amendment in the United States, the struggle took some similar, but also different forms.

I loved the Women's Library and vowed to return to do more comparative research that pushed the nationalist frame of my project. Imagine my shock when I received an alert that dramatic cuts at London Met would endanger the work of this valuable collection and eliminate the BA in history. From the History of Feminism Network:

The Women’s Library is home to world-renowned collections on women’s struggles throughout history and has hosted excellent exhibitions on women workers and female led-strikes. This Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Women’s Library staff will themselves take action to ensure that London Met University continues to be a thriving centre for the study of gender and feminism.

London Met Unison and UCU have voted for a one day strike on 22nd June unless the management resolve their dispute over compulsory redundancies (200 announced so far) and the closure of 70% of courses.

These cuts are of concern to all of us working in the fields of feminism and gender studies, across UK higher education institutions. Judging the value of academic disciplines according to narrow definitions of economic viability will particularly discriminate against already marginal subjects. The History BA is among those London Met courses set to close, despite it having long been such an important focus for the study of women’s history and with the Women’s Library hosting this years Women’s History Network Annual Conference.

This is why we want to express our strong support for the Women’s Library staff and everyone at London Met taking industrial action next week.

Come along to support the picket line! Meet 8am sharp, outside the Women’s Library, 25 Old Castle St, London E1 7NT (5 mins from Aldgate East Tube).

Send messages of support to moreinfo@thewomenslibrary.ac.uk and
t.doherty@londonmet.ac.uk

As the friend who sent me this confided, "While I don't know a whole lot about the cuts, I'm heartsick that an archive like The Women's Library is in danger. This is especially troubling for those of us who are pursuing subjects that are not necessarily represented in larger archives - I fondly remember my time at that archive." So should we all.

Mr. DeMille, He's Ready For His Close-Up: Vito Russo And Gay Liberation

2011-06-20T16:20:00.003-05:00

Michael Schiavi, Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times Of Vito Russo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). 361 pp. Index, illustrations. $29.95 hardback.

It is June, otherwise known by Presidential proclamation as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month, a time when major cities and resort towns around the country have parades and sell beer. What we are celebrating, other than the success of GLBT entrepeneurship, is the Stonewall Riots. An iconic event, it began on June 28 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York, following a raid on the Stonewall Inn, and continued on for days as roving groups of queers provoked, and resisted, the police. This, it is said, was the birth of gay liberation, which is technically true. Activists subsequently formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a group that made a definitive break with homophile politics. For those of you who don't know this history, homophile groups were accomodationist in their strategies, trying to persuade straights and the state that gays and lesbians, except for their sexuality, were just like everyone else: unfortunately, in this day and age of gay marriage, gay babies and gay war, this is increasingly the case.

Homophile groups like Mattachine, ONE and Daughters of Bilitis were not, however, conservative, a charge made by the GLF at the time that scholars like Martin Meeker, Marcia Gallo and David Johnson have effectively refuted. They laid a critical foundation for community building and formal legal action that would produce a gay rights movement of the 1970s that would seek to extend basic civil rights to people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender status. GLF, on the other hand, adopted the confrontational stance that had become characteristic of the black power, anti-war and radical feminist groups with whom many of their members were, or had been, associated. GLF was to the homophiles as the Black Panthers were to the Urban League.

We are long overdue for more books that look at this historical moment at the level of the individual life, as Michael Schiavi, associate professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, does in Celluloid Activist. Vito Russo was one of the gay men who came to Greenwich Village as a young gay man to embed himself in its queer counterculture, and he quickly became involved in radical activism after Stonewall. But Russo is even more famous for his path-breaking book, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, originally published in 1981 and re-published in a revised edition in 1987. Born in 1946, this founder of gay cultural criticism should be signing up at the social security office this year, but like many men of his generation he contracted AIDS and died in 1990.

Schiavi's is an authorized biography, which may account for its emphasis on Russo's achievements (which were many) and its less sure touch about the complexities of his personality. Schiavi has a keen sense of Russo's place in the gay men's culture that flourished in the 1970s, organized around uninhibited sexuality, and known colloquially as "the party." Schiavi's difficult task of situating Russo in his social world, and interpreting him through it is largely successful, and caused me to wonder whether, for certain figures, group biographies are almost necessary.

Russo had a network of deeply devoted friends, who were attracted to his evanescent personality and sharp intelligence, friends whose patience he often tried. Russo's love life is a particular minefield: he seemed to be both a little bit of (what we used to call back in the day) a star f**cker, and he very much enjoyed being the object of star f**king. While relationships were not the strong suit of many queer folk in those years, in part because relationships were either not the point or they were wide open, Russo seemed to have a particular penchant for falling in love with beautiful, helpless, unemployed boys; pledging undying devotion to them; moving them into into his apartment; and then getting really, really sick of them and kicking them out. It didn't make me not like him, but it did make me think that there was some deeper insight that Schiavi was avoiding here, perhaps out of tact and deference to the family.

Russo's work on the Celluloid Closet (which was made into a documentary after his death) came from a public lecture he put together over the years, in which he demonstrated, through film clips and analysis, how unnamed but very obvious "gayness" in films produced, and shored up, the idea of "heterosexuality." This is such a basic tenet of queer studies now that it is hard to recall what a stunning insight this was in the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly since there were not so many gay or lesbian books. Russo came to this analysis from his formal academic training in film and a lifetime of fandom. Like many gay kids, Vito seem to have been born a movie queen and a fan of the great divas: Stanwyck, Crawford, Davis. He was one of those guys weeping in the front row as Judy Garland, in her late years, stumbled drunkenly over her lyrics mid-set. He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of classic Hollywood film making and acquired a rather large collection of movies (Schiavi suggests that some of these may have been stolen) prior to the days when such things were available on VCR, and delighted in showing them to friends.

Vito maintained a rather tenuous economic existence, even though he worked constantly as a journalist and operated on the edge of show business, a world he clearly adored (one of his great thrills after his AIDS diagnosis was an introduction to Elizabeth Taylor.) He was friends with Bette Midler during the Divine Miss M's Continental Baths days, and then not so much when he insisted that she identify with queer activism after her mainstream success, something she clearly viewed as exploitation and he viewed as her selling out the people who had made her career in the first place. (I think they were both right, although it isn't clear what Schiavi thinks.) Vito's relationships with other celebrities endured, however, particularly his friendship with Lily Tomlin. One of the interesting parts of the book which should push another scholar to get going on her, is Tomlin's development of comic characters that were clearly queer, her struggles over coming out, and her regret, voiced at the end of the book, that she did not do so earlier.

Vito Russo was in the first great wave of men to be diagnosed in the portion of the AIDS epidemic that swallowed communities of urban gay men in the 1980s. One of the triumphs of this book is that it articulates what it felt like to be at Ground Zero in downtown New York, as one's friends died slowly of horrible diseases that could just barely be treated. I found these chapters enormously difficult to read, as the lists of men who had peopled the early chapters of the book were diagnosed and died. Schiavi also depicted, quite accurately in my view, how those years felt. I recall sick men taking care of sick men; the halls at NYU hospital where deathly ill people waited for a bed for days; parents unable to comprehend the cataclysmic, sudden death of a child; scattering ashes in favorite vacation spots. People behaved far better than you might ever have imagined they could, and they behaved indescribably badly. I recall watching an age peer wander around the room incontinent and unable to find the bathroom, the rest of us not knowing that his brain was being eaten by toxoplasmosis because his lover (who was also infected but didn't want anyone to know) insisted that our friend had been tested (he hadn't) and didn't have AIDS. All of this is in the book, and Schiavi describes it with a sure narrative touch.

One reason to read, or to teach, this book, is that it links lots of different things in the life of one person: gay community, activism, the emergence of a gay intellectual sensibility, the party, and the party's end. Because of this, when it comes out in paper, you could easily use it as a text for a post-1945 GLBT history course. But honestly? It's also a good read -- not always an easy one, but a good one -- and you might want to have it on your bedside table when you are done with Gay Pride and ready to return to gay life.

A Radical History Review: A Perhaps Unnecessary, But Overdue, Tribute To My Dad

2011-06-19T11:08:00.011-05:00

We at Tenured Radical no longer have a father to give presents to, or buy cards for, on Father's Day. When we did have a father, this is who he was. He probably had as many flaws as the next 1960s and 1970s Dad, but he was a very nice person, a widely admired physician, and a hard worker. He went out of his way to make a nice life for his family and to provide the resources that made it possible for both of his daughters to have an excellent education.

Although I don't think he would have described himself this way, he was an organic intellectual who had tremendous curiosity about the natural, social, cultural and political world. He was the Oliver Saks of internal medicine, collecting and collating information with what I can only describe as pleasure, putting it together like a puzzle until all the pieces fit. In practical terms, this meant he was a very good and thorough doctor, and would bird-dog a peculiar set of symptoms until they could be treated effectively. Once, over four decades ago, before tick-born diseases were well known to all of us, he correctly diagnosed a man who had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever -- a disease that was entirely treatable, but had been missed because it almost never appeared in Pennsylvania.

We held a memorial service for Dad back in September, 1997, two months after he died so that everyone from the hospital could be there. One of the things that was truly memorable (I do not remember a thing about the eulogy I delivered, although I have a copy of it filed away somewhere) was the number of people who got up to speak about him and revealed things I had not known about Dad. And yet, each of these anecdotes was completely consistent with the person I did know. For example, a developmentally disabled man whose job it was to keep the stairwells clean got up to speak in front of about three hundred people. He explained his job, and said that every day my father made a point of telling him what good work he was doing on the stairs and thanking him for it.

Dad really liked people, and he was interested in them: he spent hours in the evening and on weekends talking to his patients on the telephone, often helping them make decisions about painful chronic diseases, terminal cancers or conditions that had suddenly turned scary. I remember lots of conversations ending with him saying, "Go to the emergency room, and I'll meet you there," and he would get dressed and head back out to the hospital no matter what time it was.

When Dad retired because his own illness had advanced, he was deeply concerned about the increasingly money-driven, and litigious, world of medicine that was separating the interests of doctors from their patients and making personalized care all but impossible for many young doctors who would have liked to provide it. As chief of medicine, he also understood that lots of different people played important roles to make the mission of a hospital successful, and that all jobs -- even the ones that other people might view as menial -- were important. He enjoyed teaching, he enjoyed solving difficult medical problems, he appreciated the professionalism of his nurses and he enjoyed helping young doctors make their careers.

I realized some years ago that, despite the great differences in our professional lives, I have ended up sharing many of my father's values and pleasures, even though I don't recall him ever having conveyed them except by example. One of the many reasons I am sorry he is dead is that I think we would have enjoyed talking about these things together. So, without further ado:

Happy Father's Day, Phil Potter. The mission continues.

Tell Me How You Really Feel, Dude: Prof Said To Have Peed On Colleagues' Office Doors

2011-06-17T14:51:00.004-05:00

We at Tenured Radical have been alerted by our pals in the legit educational press (Inside Higher Ed) that there are many more reasons than we knew to hire more women in the STEM fields. Tihomir Petrov of the Cal State Northridge math department is on the lam after having failed to appear in court to answer two charges of public urination, a misdemeanor. Where did he pee? In his department, apparently.

It sounds like revenge urination to us, and a unique way of showing contempt for colleagues that we feel lucky to have never encountered. Imagine coming to work and finding a big puddle of man-pee in front of your office. According to the Los Angeles Times, "In early December, Petrov was captured on videotape urinating on the door of another professor's office in Santa Susana Hall, according to authorities. School officials had concealed a camera nearby after discovering puddles of what they thought was urine at the professor's door, officials said." It seems that Petrov might have an ongoing problem with either retention or rage.

Although the evidence seems strong, Petrov has pleaded not guilty, and there is no sign of him anywhere on the department web site.

Question: Why Do Development Offices Raise Money For Sports When Academics Are Being Cut?

2011-06-16T07:45:00.015-05:00

I've got an idea: let's run a fund-raiser for the humanities!

Answer: Because the entertainment value of major sports for fans, alumni/ae and students -- primarily the football and basketball programs that can be packaged and sold to a mass audience -- is viewed as a necessary and normal feature of university life. But that's not true. Instead, it is a competitor for funds that ought to be going to teaching and learning, and because of that, part of what threatens the survival of full-time academic labor and the accessibility of higher education to a broad range of students.

Why am I, a sports fan, thinking these crazy thoughts? Libby Sander's reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education this morning that 22 elite college sports programs made a profit in the last fiscal year. This is an increase from "from 14 the previous year....The median surplus at those programs was $7.4-million last year, up from $4.4-million in 2009." However, the median deficit in the Football Bowl Subdivision (this is the category that used to be called Division I-A) was $11.6 million.

Let me put this in the homey, old-timey budget language that conservative politicians prefer. This news is similar saying that, of the seventy people who live on my street, two of us made more than we did last year, and everyone else went more deeply into debt. And both of us who made money did so because our parents wrote us a big, tax-deductible check.

Of course, this is old news. But think of the aggregate deficits in programs below the FBS. It's a staggering amount of money that could be used to lower tuitions, give financial aid and hire full-time faculty who would be able to devote themselves to educating students at public schools the way can devote ourselves to teaching and advising at places like Zenith. That colleges and universities would continue to invest in an enterprise on the unproven theory that it is good for the overall fiscal health of the institution is a business model that would simply be jeered at outside the Church of Latter Day Sportsfans.

If you are waiting for one of those garden-variety attacks on college sports programs more generally, you can stop reading: I don't think they are any less useful than any of the other budget lines devoted to co-curricular student life. I continue to believe that organized sports are good for student-athletes: at their best they create a sense of community and identity, instill discipline, and -- here's something that troubles our intellectual project -- teach students how to cope with failure. Furthermore, it is only a very few teams who are responsible for the vast majority of a school's athletic budget. If you take out the big so-called "revenue generating" sports like football, and men's and women's basketball, athletic programs represent a lot of jobs, most of which are not particularly well paid. You can, for example, get a top-flight, national team quality rowing coach who manages 50 - 100 athletes at a D-I school for under $80K, most pay more like $45K, and many entry level coaching positions at Ivy League rowing (and other athletic) programs pay under $10K, if they pay at all.

But you have to ask: in a period of budget cutting, why are enterprises that justify themselves through their supposed potential to generate revenue to support the university's academic mission -- but actually don't -- not scrutinized? With another million tossed on top, that $11.6 million that the average school loses on major sports represents an endowment that would add three tenure-track positions. Don't like tenure? Well, budget those positions as contract faculty earning good wages and benefits at $200K a year, and we are talking about employing 55 extra faculty. Instead, these schools are howling about how much the English department costs and flushing all this money away.

Furthermore, when athletic programs are threatened, it seems to be a trigger for unbelievable fundraising that academic cuts don't inspire, despite the fact that a B.A. in history is more likely to send a young person off to law or medical school than four years stomping around on the sidelines as a second string special teams dude. At UC-Berkeley, a school that has suffered debilitating cuts to its academic programs, three programs that were on the block -- women’s lacrosse, women’s gymnastics and rugby -- were saved only a few months after the cuts were announced by fundraising solicited by "alumni, student-athletes, coaches and fans." Of course, cutting these teams would not have been necessary if the so-called "revenue generating" sports were not swallowing the athletic budget.

While the pledges that saved these programs sound like an act of spontaneous love, those of us who work for universities know that no one is allowed to raise money without the permission and support of the development office. Furthermore, you don't come up with the kind of money that Berkeley did (between $12 and $13 million in pledges) without having tapped some very, very deep pockets. We are not talking bake sales and pathetic, dinner time cold calls from student-athletes. My guess? Somebody pulled the trigger on donors who had already been identified, and the "cuts" had been targeted in such a way as to activate those donors.

What a development officer would tell you is that these major donors aren't willing to give that kind of money to support teaching or learning, and that the university might as well collect it for something they do support -- even if that project creates or solidifies a budget commitment that could otherwise be eliminated. Giving money to schools for high-profile sports rather than education is an absurd proposition unless you put it in the context that policy makers and major foundations like Gates appear to believe that a teaching career is the professional equivalent of a life spent as a Peace Corps volunteer or a nun. However, if that is so, whose fault is that? Who is not making the argument for the importance of these fields? The very highly paid administrators and fundraisers whose job it is to do so, that's who. Too often the burden of persuasion is put on the shoulders of those of us who are also laboring 50 - 80 hours a week in the classroom: this is a little like telling the people who walked out of Merrill Lynch with their personal items packed up in boxes on an hour's notice that they were personally responsible for policies set by the CEO, the Board of Directors, the Fed and Congressional oversight committees.

Big-time sports are a fiscal drag on the educational enterprise, and should not be the object of major fund-raising. Worse, they are a source of fictional knowledge about what role colleges and universities are supposed to play in our political and social economy. They promote the notion that higher education is really just entertainment and that college and university campuses are a playground for students and alumni/ae alike. If we faculty have a role in this, it is to demand answers to these questions, particularly since we are doing the lion's share of the work for a fraction of what these programs cost.

Too Badgered? Biddy Martin Leaves Wisco Chancellorship, Heads To Amherst As President

2011-06-15T09:15:00.003-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that Carolyn A. ("Biddy") Martin will leave her post as Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin and become President of Amherst College. However, she has been quite clear that it is not because Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislature are trying to flush the state's education system down the toilet. And it isn't because her plan to break the flagship away from the other campuses ran into trouble, in case that had occurred to you.

The news became public the day after Wisconsin's Supreme Court upheld the state's new anti-union legislation. As Jack Stripling writes,

Ms. Martin was emphatic that the failure of the proposal to break the flagship campus from the university system, a quietly devised plan that drew the consternation of the system's Board of Regents when they learned of it, was not among the reasons for her departure.

"Amherst would have been an attractive possibility to me at any point, because of my own history, what I feel like I owe to liberal-arts education," Ms. Martin said. "What role the actual events of the past year have played, it's hard to say. Maybe a year from now, it will be clear to me what various strands went into the braid of this decision. What I can tell you, honestly, is I'm not leaving because I didn't like the outcome in the Legislature."

Being president of well-endowed Amherst -- and living in that part of the country we New Englanders simply refer to as "The Valley" is a sweet deal, however you cut it, particularly if you are a lesbian. (Is Martin the first out lesbian college prez? Enquiring minds want to know.) Those who follow the progress of top administrators can't help but think that Martin is headed for the presidency of a major research institution after she proves her leadership skills with the Lord Jeffs -- a school which, by the way, has a fantastic faculty, but which Zenith hammers in rowing several times a year.

I think Biddy Martin will do a great job at Amherst, but that won't change any time soon unless she can bring a few Wisco oarsmen and women with her.

Every Graduate A Potential John Dillinger: An Incomplete History Of Student Loan Repayment

2011-06-14T10:44:00.018-05:00

Banks seestudent loan defaulters as white collar bandits

Back in 1981, a New York friend of mine went to the bank shortly after payday to find that hir checking account was abso-total-lutely empty. Zero. Zed. Nada. In the course of an inquiry that began with outrage and ended in shame, ze discovered that the federal government had attached hir salary to begin reclaiming a thousand dollars or so of the student loan arrears ze had amassed since graduating three years earlier.

This was back in the day when student loans for an Ivy League education might top out at around $10K for a degree that had cost under $50K in 1970s dollars. Prior to Ronald Reagan raising the interest rate from 3% to 9% in 1982, and eliminating the deduction for student loans in 1986, my guess is that the payments were a couple hundred dollars a month (go here for Kelly Phillips Erb's excellent history of student loans in a recent issue of Forbes.)

I cannot recall the details of this person's circumstances. However, back in the day, I knew a great many people who didn't pay their students loans, and there were three reasons for it. The first was that many of us earned very little money. We graduated into a recession job market, we went into artsy, theatrical or literary fields, and people like us could be had for salaries of less than $12K a year. This translated into a paycheck of around $450 every two weeks, half of which had to be banked for rent. The second reason people didn't pay was that they could get away with it. The federal government did a very poor job of monitoring who paid and who didn't pay, and didn't report people to credit agencies for years after they had broken all contact. This latter action would have had immediate consequences in a city where landlords routinely ran credit reports to screen out potential deadbeat tenants who, under consumer-friendly New York housing laws, were nearly impossible to evict. Hence, I knew a number of non-payers that -- after missing a couple payments and suffering no consequences -- stopped paying entirely even when they could easily afford to do so. The third reason people didn't pay was that, because there was no means test for awarding student loans, anyone could walk into the financial aid office and walk out with $5K, minus an exorbitant processing fee of several hundred dollars. In other words, some people who had taken out student loans had used them to enhance their standard of living. I am just speculating, but I believe this category of borrowers may have regarded student loans as free money all along.

Back to the empty bank account: I must say, all of us who met this friend at a bar later and chipped in what we could from our own paychecks to help hir make rent, were seriously impressed by the possibility that an entire bank account could be seized. By moving against one person, the government made a dramatic impression on a whole friendship network of twenty-something middle-class people. Several rushed in to various financial institutions on the following day to ask for mercy and make arrangements to pay up. Although I had no student loans, I made a mental note at the age of 22 that I would never default on a bill. You might ask, why would you have ever defaulted, Tenured Radical? The answer is that I was at the beginning of my financial life, had never had a conversation about money with my parents or anyone else, and was just learning to pay bills in the first place.

One of my Google alerts is "student loans." It will be no surprise to anyone that students -- many of whom are adults -- are taking out more money in educational loans than they ever have, which I believe has a reverberating, depressing effect on the economy as a whole whether the money is repaid or not. For-profit institutions make borrowing particularly easy in exchange for degrees that may or may not translate into a job at all, much less one with a high enough salary to guarantee repayment. On-line universities and technical academies can be the worst offenders, siphoning tax dollars in the form of uncapped debt into inflated executive salaries paid out of tuition revenues that are 90% loan driven. Non-profits have constant institutional discussions about what the caps on student debt ought to be, but despite that, many students graduated this spring from Ivies, state unis and liberal arts colleges that aren't trying to cheat anyone with as much as $50K in loans.

Students, needless to say, were defaulting on unsustainable education debt at very high rates even before the job market became so tight. But unlike other debt, as Megan McArdle points out in the June 14 edition of The Atlantic, whether they are government or private, student loans are forever:

There are only two ways to erase the debt: prove you're permanently disabled and will never again earn more than a pittance; or die. [Note: I had a friend who chose the latter strategy of dead-beatism. After hir death, I discovered a shoebox of dunning notices from the federal government -- another branch of which had been paying hir disability and welfare -- that dated from hir diagnosis with a then-fatal disease. But I think there are also some programs in the military that also pay down debt, which has become an incentive to become cannon fodder among people who have no other reason to serve.]

Moreover, student loans are large, which means they're worth suing over. Creditors can correctly assume that most people with a college diploma, or a law degree, are eventually going to have something worth taking: a bank account they can seize, a salary they can garnish. Everything I have ever heard indicates that there is little chance of settling a student loan for less than the principal, and that even that is far from a slam dunk. If the interest has been accruing for a decade or so and is now multiples of the original value of the loan, the lender may waive some of it, but not necessarily all of it. Moreover, most of the amount forgiven counts as taxable income, including a lot of the back interest (any amount in excess of $2500--or all of it if you make more than $75,000 a year.)

And of course getting a principal-only settlement requires you to amass a sum equal to the original principal of your student loan--without the creditor finding and seizing it.

So if you are a college graduate who thinks ze needs another degree to even imagine getting an interesting job, someone who wants to complete a degree, a mother considering a return to the workforce, or someone who simply wants to change directions, you need to have a plan for paying that money back before taking the loan out. Smart colleges and universities will begin helping students learn to plan this kind of strategy, as well as working ethics courses into the curriculum so that students won't feel so free to step away from an obligation they have contracted when the full impact of that contract becomes clear.

On Political Conversation, Or The Lack Thereof: A Provocation To Debate

2011-06-13T09:13:00.006-05:00

"Balogna?" Really? Photo Credit.

On the op-ed page of today's Grey Lady, liberal Paul Krugman explains why expanding Medicare will save money. On the other side of the page, Ross Douthat explains why text messaging pictures of your muscle-y male chest and your d*ck to women who don't want them should disqualify you from sitting in Congress. Want to know why without reading the article? Not because it is sexual harassment, but because it is evidence of narcissism. Whoa, male politicians! No reason to resign en masse!

My point is not that Ross Douthat is a faux intellectual (which he is), or that the importance of Weiner's behavior does not extend beyond the playground sausage jokes of which otherwise sentient adults do not seem to tire. My point is: why didn't Ross Douthat write about the conservative argument behind cutting Medicare and explain to us why making Medicare less available is good for the economy and good for the health of the nation's citizens? And why does the New York Times encourage this "You say po-TAY-to and I say po-TAH-to" form of political journalism?

See, if I were a real journalist (and not just a blogger who was super-popular with people who either agree with me or want to see me on fire in the streets so that they can decide whether to urinate on me or not) I would insist on having a discussion with newspaper folks around the following points:

Anthony Weiner

What we do talk about: the many slang words that signify the phallus, whether men who do dumb things are also incapable of making political decisions, hypocrisy.

What we ought to talk about: whether men who are sexual harassers should be fired from whatever job they are doing, including Supreme Court Justice; that Anthony Weiner has consistently supported women's right to choose abortion, ending the war in Iraq, expanding federal health care dollars, and environmental legislation; and why women politicians are never involved in sex scandals and seem not to send Twitter pics of their vaginas to strangers.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

What we do talk about: How Maria could have not known; how terrible his children must feel; that all those rumors about sexual harassment and groping were true after all (surprise!); and that he supports gay marriage (which is nice, but solves not a single pressing problem except how the party-planning industry will survive the economic crisis.)

What we ought to talk about: How, under the Governator's leadership, a struggling public education system in California that used to be the finest in the country has been reduced to ashes; how he worked to end bilingual education in a state of multilingual tax payers most of whom have legal residency if not citizenship; his continuing support for private prisons, the three strikes law, and expanding incarceration at the same time as he was shrinking education dollars; his support for school prayer; his claim that he is incorruptible because he is wealthy; that, despite his wealth, he apparently owes $80K in back taxes; and why women politicians are almost never involved in sex scandals or have love children stashed away in the guest house.

Newt Gingrich

What we talk about: That a man who wants to be President, and has repeatedly compared a sane federal budget to a sane household budget owes Tiffany's around half a million dollars; and that in a party of "family values" he seems to change out wives like other men change out cars.

What we ought to talk about: Newt Gingrich called for the expulsion of Gerry Studds from Congress after Studds admitted to being a homosexual; he was involved in the 1992 check kiting scandal in Congress (he used one of those checks to pay the IRS nearly $10K he owed in taxes); he is on record favoring the United States withdrawal from the United Nations; he led the charge against the Clinton national health plan; he designed and successfully passed a welfare "reform" bill that took welfare mothers out of college and put them in sub-minimum wage manual labor; that he has vowed to put God back in public life; AND why women politicians don't seem to be changing out their husbands like cars (sometimes owning two at the same time!) while at the same time claiming to be very religious people who believe that Family is the building block of the Nation.

I offer these remarks as a design for what a real conversation about politics might look like. But I would also like to suggest that, unless the news media is willing to make the Ross Douthats and the Paul Krugmans have the same conversation, politics will continue to be incoherent, and citizens will continue to cast their votes (or not) on the basis of no information whatsoever.

What's More Fun Than Feminist History? More Berkshire Conference Highlights

2011-06-12T16:03:00.006-05:00

Iacovetta presents at an event that makes me want to go to Canada

The 15th Berkshire Conference is finishing up with a business meeting as I write here at my desk in Shoreline, a meeting where outgoing president Kathleen Brown of the University of Pennsylvania will hand the organization over to Franca Iacovetta of the University of Toronto. Iacovetta will take us to Canada for the very first time, just as Vicki Ruiz took us West for the first time in 2005, and Ruth Mazo Karras took us to the Midwest for the first time in 2008. Thanks to a great program committee, the University of Massachusetts -- Amherst, and a hard-working local arrangements (who, it is rumored, started shuttling people to the airport at 4:00 a.m.) the meeting appeared to come off without a hitch.

If you heard a rumor that this year's festivities included a burlesque show, I won't say you are wrong -- they also included a spirited exchange between Radicalesbian Artemis March and a young feminist (whose name I never learned) about pornography, which cheered up those of us who are writing books about the sex wars of the 1980s. Historiann never made it because of a family emergency, which has caused her to confess to having a family (but let's not belabor it, shall we?), but the blogger meetup went off without a hitch even without our favorite cowgirl. If you want to see the Tweeted conference, go here. If you want to see an analysis of the program's bias towards US and modern history, go to Blogenspiel. FeMOMhist has a running commentary here, here, here and here. Janice Liedl reports in here, and Knitting Clio's day 1 report will probably be followed up soon.

Last night, at the traditional Saturday party, you couldn't help but wonder which of the under-thirty set out there shaking it in a line dance would be the future Berks president who takes us to -- Mexico? Hawai'i? Oregon? Who knows -- the sky is the limit, and we can boogie anywhere you take us.

If this was your first Berkshire Conference, the point is: keep coming. And consider posting to the page on the website, redesigned under Brown's direction in this conference cycle, called "Think/Learn/Teach/Do," that asks you to reflect on your conference experiences.

One of my favorite additions to the conference this year was the poster sessions, a way of presenting research that is common in other fields but rarely employed at a history conference. I think it's a keeper: scholars with research to present can do so in an interactive way with a mobile audience who stops by to talk to them about it. It doesn't force you to listen to a whole panel, it allows you to connect to a scholar whose work you are interested in and, best of all, doesn't force you to choose between the talk you really ought to be at (because it's a friend, your research field, a famous person) and the talk that piqued your interest but doesn't have any utility for your work.

So without further ado, here is a short film I made of a poster session with a Flip. Kelly O'Donnell is a second-year graduate student in the History of Science and Medicine program at Yale, and her poster session was on the Menstrual Cup: take it away, Kelly.

Berks Highlights: There's Got To Be A Morning After (If You Can Make It Through The Night)

2011-06-10T13:40:00.003-05:00

Sarah Palin is not at the Berkshire Conference

The sun is finally shining in Amherst, after a day and a night of severe weather that created delays, cancellations, and flights diverted to places like Syracuse. Power was out for up to four or five hours in Massachusetts and Connecticut, but not at the air-conditioned opening reception last night, where we all treated each other to drinks purchased with the *two* free tickets that were stapled to the conference folder. As most of us enjoyed ourselves at the opening plenary, dinner at Amherst Chinese (which can seat a large group if you are looking for a dinner reservation tonight) and the dessert reception, our sisters were fighting their way cross-country through a storm system that stretched from Chicago to Philadelphia. Rumor has it that the heroic local arrangements committee was dispatching transportation to Bradley Airport in Hartford until 3 A.M. Bleary-eyed latecomers nevertheless hauled themselves out of bed for panels beginning at 8:30 a.m.

Because of a variety of appointments, I didn't make any panels this morning, but the conference has a lively book exhibit and numerous common spaces in the Campus Center where knots of old friends are gathering, and editors chat up potential and signed authors. Supported by the free WiFi, and surrounded by an invisible Bell of Silence, scholars are finishing up their comments and papers. The coffee isn't perfect, but it's good. All is well.

Cliotropic Tweets the Berks

By afternoon, I was ready for scholarship. I started my Berks experience with "Queering the College Campus," which was a great pick, and was Tweeted by Shane Landrum here. Two fabulous papers by Susan Freeman and Heather Murray made me believe that lesbian history is moving into a whole, new exciting register. Stephanie Gilmore linked the field to histories of sexual violence and the ongoing state of terror that is endured by contemporary GLBTQ students despite the broad-based "acceptance" of homosexuality among young people of all political and religious beliefs. Given the Title IX suit at Yale, the activism at Dickinson against that school's ineffective rape policies, and the periodic scandals that erupt about fraternity and athletic team hazing, Gilmore's presentation on her new research about violence against LGBTQ students -- which connects homophobic violence to all three phenomena -- was particularly compelling. Athletic teams and frats are particular nodes for homophobic violence and harassment (pledge rituals include such tasks as "taking a picture of a faggot"), but Gilmore was persuasive that by focusing only on this we neglect the ways in which entire campuses and administration policies are complicit in maintaining sexism and heterosexism. Gilmore's research argues that GLBTQ students navigate harassment and sexual violence every day, and that college administrations -- who proudly boast that such students are an aspect of campus "diversity" -- know this and do nothing to change it. Administrators who she has interviewed, while they condemn violence against such students, vigorously resist the notion that they are capable of intervening in it. One unintended outcome of the demise of in loco parentis policies (many of which were themselves sexist and homophobic) has been an insistence by student life professionals and administrators that such violence is a feature of "student culture" that only students themselves can change. On the other hand, the same administrators will defend explicitly violent, sexist, racist and heterosexist rituals associated with student organizations because they and powerful alumni/ae insist that eliminating them will be disruptive to college tradition and memory (can you say Chief Illiniwek?)

Other panels that are looking good for a Radical sighting today are:

"Researching and Interpreting Feminist Activism of the 1960s abd 1970s: An Intergenerational Roundtable," with Judy Wu, Ros Baxandall, Marisela Chavez, Amy Kesselman, Jessica Lee, Barbara Ransby and Sheila Rowbotham. Cape Cod Lounge; and

"Plenary: The Sex of Geopolitics," with Anjali Arondekar, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Geeta Patel, Carol Vance and Siobhan Somerville. Bowker Auditorium.

Thanks to those of you who are introducing yourselves randomly: keep coming up to say hi -- that's what the Berks is about, but it is particularly nice to see someone who says "Hi, I usually comment on your blog as....." If you are reading this before 5:30 on Friday June 10, don't forget to show up to meet the bloggers at the Grad Lounge of the Lincoln Campus Center. Although Historiann won't make it, there are confirmed appearances by Clio Bluestocking, Another Damned Medievalist, Janice Liedl, and Knitting Clio.

The Berkshire Conference: What To Do, What To See, What To Wear

2011-06-08T20:47:00.005-05:00

In the introduction to her classic volume of essays, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: 1986), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg wrote:

The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians has proved one of the pivotal influences in my professional and personal life. Through both formal and informal comments on a succession of papers, Berkshire members have contributed to my development as a woman historian and as a historian of women.

Second that.

So Sisters, the triennial gathering of the tribe is about to begin. By tonight, participants in the 15th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women will have begun to assemble for this year's event, “Generations: Exploring Race, Sexuality, and Labor across Time and Space.” The conference begins on Thursday June 9 and ends on Sunday, a day devoted to seminar-style discussions organized around papers submitted in advance. Undecided? Living nearby and thinking of dropping in for the day? On site registrations are welcome. Click here for all the information you need. Congratulations to president Kathleen Brown, her program chairs, and everyone else who worked hard to put this together. By this time Thursday, you will all be watching it unfold before you. As a former program chair, let me say that is a glorious feeling. (And Sue Porter Benson? I miss you tonight.)

What follows are some common questions and answers as you pack your suitcases.

Should I network? Yes and no. If you are a younger scholar, you should always be networking. On the other hand, one of the beautiful things about the Berks is a sociability unmarred by icky things like job interviews, editorial board meetings, recruiting, being a dignified senior person blah, blah, blah. My advice is that you should take this as an opportunity to make friends: I have made nearly all my best friends in the historical profession through the Berkshire Conference, and let me tell you, being funny is a higher value than being smart. One of my favorite Berks memories is being in a hotel room with my team and some random graduate students that we had picked up somewhere. A former undergrad, now a prize-winning professor, showed up with -- well, I guess there's no other way to put it: weed. Anyhoo. We all inhaled, and what followed was a game of charades in which we made the grad students guess who our dissertation advisers were!

OK, you had to be there. My point is: if you have the choice between trying to make an impression on someone by buying them a drink or telling them about your research, you know what to do.

Are men welcome? Humans of all genders are welcome: I don't think Tom Dublin has missed a Berkshire Conference since I was a tiny Radical pecking hir way out of the egg. Tom and his partner, women's history legend Kathryn Kish Sklar will be recruiting for their web-based project, "Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000," so if you see one of them walk by, tell them you're interested, and say that Tenured Radical sent you. Other male-bodied folk to keep your eyes out for are Shane Landrum of Cliotropic fame (who is on a great state of the field roundtable on transgender history on Saturday at 3:30); Robert Beachy, who has a forthcoming book on gay Berlin (do I see Joan Scott as a comment on that global heteronormativities panel?); political science prof Paisley Currah, who is presenting in a Sunday seminar on his hot project about pregnant men; and many more. OK, well a dozen more, actually. So this will be practically the only place where history is practiced that men will find themselves in a distinct minority, which is one reason -- if you are a cool feminist man -- to attend.

What should I wear? I am the wrong person to ask, as anyone who knows me would testify. As I write, my black tee shirts are neatly piled across the room next to two pairs of jeans and a pair of black cowboy boots (received just in time, since I mistook the re-heeling shoe bag for the "Please take me to Good Will" shoe bag.) Coats and ties are not necessary, although I shall bring a tie and a formal shirt just in case it cools down in time for for my own panel (Saturday at 1:15, with Jane Gerhard, Carolyn Bronstein and Vivien Fryd.) The ethic is summer casual: there's no need to look "professional," in the conventional sense, and don't wear anything that is going to be ruined by sitting in the grass, blowing off the panel you were going to attend, and talking to a new friend.

Also recommended for this weekend? Sunglasses, sunscreen, a broad-brimmed hat, sandals, and dancing shoes for the Saturday night shindig. If you are staying in a place that is not air-conditioned, purchase a small fan on your way in from the airport. There are plenty of places to shop in the vicinity, but be warned: the UMass campus is a good hike from the town of Amherst itself.

Will I find a girlfriend at the Berks? I can't guarantee this, but it is true that some nineteenth century Seven Sisters-y thing kicks in at the Berkshire Conference, even (or especially) among the non-Sapphicly inclined. If you do not have a girlfriend already, it is, in fact, likelier that you will find a girlfriend at the Berks than anywhere else you have been or ever will be.

It is highly unlikely -- although not impossible, I suppose -- that you will find a boyfriend at this conference.

Registration opens at 8:30 AM tomorrow in the campus center, is open until 8:00 PM and the program starts at 3:30. Yowzah! I'm partial to round tables, and will be choosing between the following tomorrow:

"What's So Feminist About Food History?" with Hasia Diner, and Franca Iacovetta, the next president of the Berkshire Conference in its big move to Toronto in 2014.

"New Generations of Feminist Legal History," which features some great new research by Leigh Ann Wheeler on the ACLU's fight for sexual freedom in the 20th century.

"Peyton Place: Selling Sex and Crafting Readers," with Ardis Cameron who wrote a preface for a brand new edition of the novel that became a synonym for small, petty ~~history departments~~ New England towns.

And of course, you must attend the star-studded opening plenary, with Kathleen Brown, Martha S. Jones and Rebecca Scott, from 7:30 to 9:00.

As The Department Turns: What Causes Conflict, Drama And Other Energy Sapping Dynamics

2011-06-02T10:07:00.003-05:00

Things can explode when you least expect it!

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education features a blog post by David Perlmutter entitled "It's Not Your Fault." Aimed mostly at helping assistant professors and graduate students understand how they might have unintentionally become the target of a senior person's anger or jealousy, Perlmutter explores six factors that might cause unwelcome behaviors by senior people. While it is sometimes the case that a younger person's actions might have provoked the incident or ongoing dynamic, it is also likely that it didn't. The project of figuring out what went wrong can be just as agonizing for a younger person as the reprisals and criticisms themselves.

As Perlmutter notes wisely, "sometimes the quickest relief comes from merely figuring out that a single tussle or a longstanding feud is not your fault but rather originates in the minds, culture, politics, or economic situation of others. So don't bang your head on the office door trying to uncover what you did to create an enemy. Sometimes the enemy is the problem, not you." Knowing that you are not at fault does provide quick relief -- but real change can only come when a whole department adopts an ethic of civility and respect, and works hard to maintain it.

What makes the behaviors Perlmutter describes tolerable and normal in an academic setting, whereas in other settings they would be considered aberrant? For example, a student who repeatedly shouted at other students would be perceived as an asocial bully; a corporate executive who schemed, cheated and manipulated things to serve only personal interests would be seen as a weak link in a well-run business; a politician who tolerates only his own values and enforces them ruthlessly is known as a dictator.

One answer to the question of how academia's maintains its exceptionalism is our rigid seniority system. The tenure and promotion system gives some people absolute power over the fortunes of others, and it can easily transform nontenured people into bargaining chips, allies, enemies and/or surrogates. A second, and less frequently discussed, dynamic of tenure is the tendency of faculty to work at one institution over the course of decades, causing them to over-invest in their sense of control and authority within the department rather than be ambitious in a larger world that is less easily controlled.

Perlmutter's theory suggests a kind of deference to the status quo: be clear about what you are, and are not, responsible for in a department that will not change. Alter behaviors of your own that are drawing negative attention if you can; accept those dynamics that you cannot change, and work hard to leave, if these dynamics are impossible to evade. This is one good approach, and I would certainly advocate it over participating in draining, time-consuming personal struggles against people who will cheerfully stab you in the back to get you out of their hair. But how might a department's dynamics actually be altered over time to diminish or eliminate the conditions I have described above? Here are a few suggestions.

Vote as little as possible. I would put voting at the top of the list of department practices that create cascading damage. Department cliques form around common ideological predilections that not only harden over time, but require recruitment to maintain themselves. This affects hiring and promotion decisions as cliques strive to maintain dominance over department policies by controlling more votes. It also means that younger and more vulnerable members of a department are always being scrutinized for their loyalties in ways that prevent them from making independent decisions for fear that they will be punished by one clique or another. If you work in a department where there is a high insistence on secret ballots, you can be sure of three things: that everyone knows, or will know, who voted which way; that the final vote does not reflect any collective agreement about what should happen; and that there is a system of informal punishment in play, probably run by those people who are insisting on the secret ballot in the name of "protecting" everyone who is not a full professor from retribution (by some other person, over there.)

If you must vote, find ways to reincorporate the minority and make compromises with it. Department power brokers don't do this, not only because they don't have to, but because every time they win a vote their endorphins go off the scale. This is what they live for: to them, each vote won is another brick in the wall of their ideological fortress.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Did you win a vote about a line going to one field rather than another? This is the moment to reach out to the other group and find a way to define the line to take account of their interests; or to promise that the next available line will be dedicated to their excellent proposal. Questions of department policy can be trickier, and for this reason, should never be voted on. Because of the right to autonomy that disagreeable senior people can claim, a privilege that few administrators will challenge, no senior person has to abide by a policy that s/he did not vote for. More time has to be taken to establish the grounds for a policy, and to establish a policy that everyone can live with. Consider having these discussions facilitated by a professional if your department is very fragmented and can't make these decisions on its own.

Be creative in finding ways for younger people to practice contributing their views and running things. All department committees do not have to be run by a tenured person, or have a tenured person on them. Conversely, all departmental committees ought to have one untenured person on them, unless there are so few untenured people that this places an undue burden on them. The transfer of influence to younger generations should be a project so continuous that it is hardly visible. Instead, what many departments have is a situation where a few aging faculty are grimly holding onto the reins of everything until they retire. What that conveys to younger generations (we can even be talking about people in their forties and fifties who are themselves fully promoted and well-regarded in their fields) is that they only way to get what you want is to become that same person.

Have a department handbook and review it regularly to make sure that it matches desirable department practices. We don't like to spend our time hashing these things out and writing things down, but a department that makes a practice of saying what it means and meaning what it says is going to be less vulnerable to power plays and the factionalism that is incited by bad guys. The result of not having an updated handbook can be an unspoken sense of "how things are done" that is not written down anywhere, cannot be conveyed to others precisely, and is tremendously powerful because it represents "rules" that are invisible to all but those who wield enough influence to enforce them. Often practices are "recalled" at a moment of decision-making, which politicizes the process and allows self-interest to substitute for transparent procedure. One version of this is the notion of "precedent,"which has tremendous force in my institution and in my department, even though it is only appropriate to the legal system. When someone starts talking about "precedent" you know you are in the danger zone, and that an outcome will be determined by the most powerful people in the room because a) they have the longest memories; and b) even if their memories are not accurate, they have the power to enforce their memory anyway. Remember: there are things that are governed by the department handbook, and everything else is up for discussion. Ruling by precedent is another way of saying, "Things ain't gonna change. Not in my lifetime."

Don't naturalize abuses of power by ignoring them. One problem with Perlmutter's view about correctly locating responsibility for bad behavior is that it locates abuse of power in the dyad. Any good executive, manager or shrink would tell you that asocial actions have a corrosive effect on everyone, not just the person at which they are aimed.

When acts of abusiveness and factionalism are perceived as isolated and not contextualized by the department's tolerance for them, something else occurs. The department divides itself into bullies, the directly bullied, and the people who watch -- who are themselves being indirectly bullied. Here's a scenario for you: in the midst of a departmental disagreement, a member of the department starts screaming at another. Silence falls. This has happened before. After a pause, the two actors in this drama drop out of the discussion, a decision is reached, the meeting ends. The screamer leaves the room, and a number of well-wishers run up to the person who was screamed at and ask sympathetically: "Are you all right?"

What is wrong with this picture? First of all, it doesn't actually matter what decision was reached, it was a bad one because it was made under the wrong conditions. Furthermore, having gotten away with this form of venting in the past, the screamer has done it again, and has corrupted the process of decision making completely without being censured by the group. While the group has established its capacity to be sympathetic, it hasn't demonstrated its capacity to be ethical.

Don't gossip. Don't make commitments as to what you will support, or have conversations about departmental matters, unless you are actually in a meeting. If you are doing this, for whatever reasons, you are subverting the group decision-making process. The other thing you are doing is letting departmental business expand to fill time that would be better spent writing, reading, prepping for class, going to the gym or watching YouTube videos featuring cats doing tricks.

The following activities, conducted outside department meetings, contribute to factionalization that will eventually bite you in the butt: saying spiteful things about people, regardless of how horrible they are; relating things as fact that are only speculation; representing someone else's thoughts on a matter; allowing another person to persuade you that you are uninformed and should follow the lead of your elders; receiving or seeking tales (that can never be completely true and may be false) about some other colleague's views about you and obsessing about them; becoming persuaded that only your group is right and the other group is not only wrong but that their success will be a disaster; assembling, or participating in, a bloc of committed votes prior to a departmental conversation about the issue at hand; and assuming that because someone has been nasty to you and your allies that you can be nasty to that person and hir allies without accelerating the damage.

I'm sure I could add to this list, and that readers will. My point is that anything that happens in a department is part of a group dynamic that implicates every person who is a member of the group. This is why departments acquire reputations for good or bad behavior, and it is why troubled departments cycle through the same scandals and difficulties over and over again. Acting systematically to prevent that is as important as understanding and addressing any of the individual events and decisions that are the symptoms of dysfunction.

Are Students A Captive Audience? Constructive Disagreement And Classroom Politics

2011-05-31T10:57:00.003-05:00

The perfect teacher.

Recently I was reading a discussion of the relationship between campus speech codes, sexual harassment, and free speech doctrine. Because I am not a legal scholar I won't dwell on the details, but the dilemma for educational institutions is this: how might one seek to regulate classroom expression that creates a hostile environment for students in a protected class without infringing on freedom of speech? Such utterances by a teacher or another student might include: "Students of color are only here because of affirmative action;" "Tammy sure is easy on the eyes;" or "Learning disabled people get extra time for the test, but I don't believe that anyone deserves accommodation." (I made all these up, but I once knew a male prof who was famous for saying to any female student who had a hyphenated last name: "Your mother must be one of those feminists.")

The answer to the questions I began with is this. While individual speech acts in a classroom might be found to violate the right to work or learn in an environment free from harassment, speech codes do violate the right to free speech, as well as academic freedom. Furthermore, speech acts are only taken seriously as discrimination when perpetrated by a faculty member against a student. In 2008 a member of the Dartmouth faculty sued on the claim that her students had created a hostile environment, and was mocked by the national press as a result.

Faculty are, in fact, perceived as having an almost uniquely destructive power to harm their students intellectually by forcing their views on them. One way of thinking about this is what is called in labor law "captive audience doctrine," by which employees are forced to listen to political, religious or discriminatory speech. If said employees resist, or refuse to participate as part of an audience for such speech, and are threatened with reprisal as a result, the captive audience doctrine might be invoked. (Note: since the National Labor Relations Board is a mere shadow of its former self, actually winning a discrimination case or a grievance under captive audience doctrine is very difficult.)

Sound familiar to you? This is more or less the principle on which conservative groups like Students for Academic Freedom ("You can't get a good education if they're only telling you half the story") and Minding the Campus assert that so-called "liberal indoctrination" in the classroom establishes a hostile environment for conservative students. As the Student Bill of Rights published by SAF states,

Professors are hired to teach all students, not just students who share their political, religious and philosophical beliefs. It is essential therefore, that professors and lecturers not force their opinions about philosophy, politics and other contestable issues on students in the classroom and in all academic environments. This is a cardinal principle of academic freedom laid down by the American Association of University Professors.

In an academic environment professors are in a unique position of authority vis-à-vis their students. The use of academic incentives and disincentives to advance a partisan or sectarian view creates an environment of indoctrination which is unprofessional and contrary to the educational mission. It is a violation of students' academic freedom. The creation of closed, political fiefdoms in colleges, programs or departments, is the opposite of academic freedom, and does not deserve public subsidy or private educational support.

Contained in this statement, which mirrors what might appear to be a worthy standard for professional pedagogy, is language that points to a growing source of resentment among students: faculty often tell them things that don't support, and even contradict, the world view that they brought to college in the first place. What many teachers see as factual information, such students perceive as "opinions" that they must pretend to replicate, even if they have another "opinion." What faculty see as reasoned argument that is well supported in the literature, and requires equally reasoned and well-supported argument to rebut, students can perceive as "indoctrination."

The two paragraphs I quoted above set the stage quite neatly for an application of captive audience doctrine to the classroom. In the second, the faculty member's "unique position of authority" is emphasized, a position that is buttressed by "academic incentives and disincentives" (grades) that can be used to reward students who accept indoctrination and punish those who don't.

But are students always a captive audience? Do faculty always hold a position of unique authority? Does the fact of grading itself mean that the faculty member's unique authority is always already abusive? And what are the implications of all of this for a liberal arts education -- which ought to be about debate, disagreement and transformation?

These may not be important questions for teachers of math and science (I am sure commenters will inform me on this point), but they are for those of us in the social sciences and humanities. They are particularly serious questions for teachers of feminism, race, colonialism, post-colonialism and queer studies, who are repeatedly harassed by students and conservative organizations, and risk having the institutional support for their work withdrawn, because their work challenges centrist and conservative (and perhaps even liberal) views about race, sex, gender and empire. However, a central issue for all social sciences and humanities scholars, regardless of field, is that our very work and identities are built around the idea of constructive disagreement as a path to knowledge. Useful disagreement depends on the notion that truth is not always an absolute value, and accepting the possibility that those things that are obvious are not always true. If students do not believe they are empowered to disagree with us, and if disagreement itself is viewed as destructive in a classroom context, in what context can students be transformed into scholarly thinkers? Conversely, if all student views -- no matter how factually incorrect of interpretively flawed -- have to be deferred to for fear of being charged with "indoctrination," under what conditions might a class acquire a body of knowledge about a subject, or a set of intellectual tools that constitute a recognized approach to that body of knowledge, at all?

Want some recommended reading? Try Robert I. Sutton, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't (2007). Reviewed here at Tenured Radical in July 2007.

Celebrating The Greatest Generation (Of Women)

2011-05-29T12:23:00.004-05:00

In case you didn't know it, today is Rosie the Riveter's 68th birthday. Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Samuel Redman is celebrating on The Berkeley Blog with a piece just published today, "Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter and World War II in American Memory." Okay, Rosie's probably a bit older than 68, but why would you ask a girl her real age?

Redman's piece documents Rosie's national debut on May 29 1943 on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post with a feature announcing her contributions to the war effort. Look at the muscles on that gal! She needs them to control that phallic rivet gun that she used to knock out one prefabricated ship after another. According to About.com's Kennedy Hickman, "US shipyards would produce 2,751 Liberty Ships. The majority (1,552) of these came from new yards built on the West Coast and operated by Henry J. Kaiser."

Operating four yards in Richmond, CA and three in the Northwest, Kaiser developed methods for prefabricating and mass producing Liberty Ships. Components were built all across the US and transported to shipyards where the vessels could be assembled in record time. During the war, a Liberty Ship could be built in a about two weeks at a Kaiser yard. In November 1942, one of Kaiser's Richmond yards built a Liberty Ship (Robert E. Peary) in 4 days, 15 hours, and 29 minutes as a publicity stunt. Nationally, the average construction time was 42 days and by 1943, three Liberty Ships were being completed each day.

Redman draws on one of the many fabulous projects being done at the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library, this one intended to document the WWII home front in the Bay area. Giving a sample of a few real "Rosies" in the story, Redman notes that while our memories are shaped by triumphant images of this military turning point in the twentieth century, "Both men and women who lived through this time, as they advance in age, continue to wrestle with sometimes conflicting memories about the war."

Isn't It Time To Bring The State Back In? Thoughts On The Recent Pew Report On Higher Ed

2011-05-26T08:16:00.009-05:00

If you have a Google alert on "college," as I do, you will know that the last week has been filled with pundits weighing in on the question of whether college is a worthwhile investment. This is because, on May 16, the Pew Center released a new report called "Is Higher Education Worth It? College Presidents, Public Assess Value, Quality and Mission of Higher Education." Highlight: although every feature of the report addresses the wreckage that privatization and cutting public education budgets has created over the last two decades, the report never suggests that getting the government back into the business of funding higher education would be a good start to solving any of these problems.

Now, although I always find what the Pew Center has to say interesting, as a researcher my first question about the study is this. Putting aside the fact that there could be no demographics more narrow than "college presidents," or as imprecise as "the public," why was neither group asked what seems to be the most pertinent questions, which are: "Why do you think that the government stopped subsidizing higher education? Stopped taxing the wealthy, and corporations? Why did the government decide to shove the costs of becoming an educated citizenry onto a public that is, itself, being shoved into lower paying jobs so that corporations can make even larger profits that they will not be taxed on?" Another, and perhaps more scientifically framed, question that neither group was asked was: "Do you think a robust, excellent and inclusive system of higher education serves a greater social and economic good, the benefits of which extend beyond the individual earner? Would you agree to higher taxes for the wealthy so that your children could gain access to a quality college education at a low cost?"

I find this absence fascinating, since everyone in higher education, particularly college presidents, knows that these are the relevant questions. The failure to ask them has, therefore, provoked a storm of pertinent but pointless articles about whether higher ed is worth it at all, and if it is, should entering first-year students head straight for the B.A. that has the greatest net worth, immediately and over time. What are those degrees? If you guessed "anything engineering!" you win; if you guessed "Petroleum engineer!" give yourself a gold star. (It doesn't look like we are going green anytime soon.)

The report is also full of intriguing nuggets that someone should follow up on. For example,

A majority of Americans (57%) say the higher education system in the United States fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend. An even larger majority—75%—says college is too expensive for most Americans to afford. At the same time, however, an overwhelming majority of college graduates—86%—say that college has been a good investment for them personally.

This same group believes that they make more money ($20K a year) because of their college degree and, conversely, that taking out the loans to pay for it has limited their life choices:

A record share of students are leaving college with a substantial debt burden, and among those who do, about half (48%) say that paying off that debt made it harder to pay other bills; a quarter say it has made it harder to buy a home (25%); and about a quarter say it has had an impact on their career choices (24%).

The landscape of higher education seems similar to Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 lament about the closing of the American frontier. People seem to believe in college, but it isn't within the grasp of those who actually might attend.

Nearly every parent surveyed (94%) says they expect their child to attend college, but even as college enrollments have reached record levels, most young adults in this country still do not attend a four-year college. The main barrier is financial. Among adults ages 18 to 34 who are not in school and do not have a bachelor’s degree, two-thirds say a major reason for not continuing their education is the need to support a family. Also, 57% say they would prefer to work and make money; and 48% say they can’t afford to go to college.

The college presidents were asked almost no questions about money, although their view of what a college education was "worth" expressed a whole set of values that you could predict (it's priceless!) But the two parts of the survey simply don't mesh. If students overwhelmingly say they don't go on to college because of finances, college presidents overwhelmingly say that college students are ill prepared to make use of college. There is a complex study in there, in and of itself: do part of that 48% actually know they are so ill-prepared for success in college that they don't consider it a worthwhile risk? Conversely, are many of those students who appear to be ill-prepared simply working too much to attend to their studies?

This latter question strikes me as quite urgent, particularly since it is perceived as a phenomenon largely confined to public schools and community colleges. This is where it has its largest impact. But it is also the case that I have been aware, in my almost twenty years at Zenith, that a large number of students who are poor work several jobs, not just to pay their own bills but to send money home to their families. Indeed, paychecks from college jobs that are often packaged in as part of financial aid often go straight to family members. Many of these students eat less, sleep less, and have less time to study.

Now, no one asked the college presidents why they thought students were less well-prepared, and what they would do about it if they could. No one seems to have linked lack of preparation either to escalating poverty or the funneling of education dollars into the pockets of testing companies, constant drilling to the test, and talented teachers fleeing the profession because of how badly they are treated by school systems, much of which has happened as a result of No Child Left Behind (2001) and its subsequent iterations under the Obama administration.

This is the curious thing about this report is that it dances around policy questions, but doesn't ask a single one directly, or name a single policy that has shaped the higher education landscape. "The public" is asked to confine its thoughts to individual success; "college presidents" are asked to ruminate on the mission of college. But the two are never articulated as part of the same system, or as having a mutual set of interests that are social and organically intertwined. And this, I would argue, is because neoliberal government policies, and right-wing political demagoguery, have sold the ideology of "low taxes" and "small government" so successfully that the moral commitment of the state to nurture an educated citizenry has entirely evaporated from the equation.

If "college presidents" and the Pew Foundation don't understand that, why wouldn't "the public" be confused about the present and future state of higher education?

Do Girls Rule The World? A Response To Beyonce Inspired By A Young Feminist

2011-05-23T09:55:00.006-05:00

It's really amazing what you can find on the interwebz

A feminist vlogger who posts to YouTube under the the name NineteenPercent is responsible for an incisive critique of the new Beyonce song "Run The World (Girls)." This young intellectual, who could give any second waver from the 1970s a run for her money, points out that putting snappy tunes out there about how girls (or women) "run the world" is diss-information since equality for "Lady Humans" is not on the agenda nowadays. Then she runs it down how bad things really are: in one state a bill making cockfighting a felony crime was passed recently but a bill that would have made assaulting your wife a felony failed.

If women are making 78 cents to every dollar a man earns, NP points out, women do not run the world. Not even close to it. Furthermore, women are definitely not running the anti-violence agenda if, when we discuss crimes that are overwhelmingly committed against women, we have to footnote our remarks apologetically by acknowledging that women are not the only victims of that crime, and men are not the only perps, and so it can't really be a way of enforcing systemic gender discrimination, right?

Take rape for example. This is a crime that Beyonce and her girlfriends are able to prevent in the video by dancing skillfully in front of a gang of men who have apparently come to beat and rape them. Much as Austin Powers defeated the fembots, Beyonce and her dancers terrify their assailants into submission by donning metal fingernails, shaking their scantily-clad hoo-hoos at them, and proving (DUH!) that girls run the world. However, apparently this technique has not yet been deployed on college campuses, which is why the rape of women by men (78% of college rapes are by a known assailant) is a huge problem. Perhaps because it is a well-known fact that girls run the world, should you be in a situation convened to discuss said rapes, you may be reproved by men and women alike if you do not adhere to the following rules for discussion:

a. You have to constantly amend everything you say to include the (often pointless and unproven) "fact" that men are raped by women too, and women are raped by other women. You have to stipulate this even though, according to Department of Justice Statistics, 91% of rape victims in the United States are women, 99% of rapists are men and you are probably in that room because of a recent and (too) horrible (to cover up) rape of a woman by a man. Go here if you want to see a truly idiotic discussion on the topic of female rapists that nevertheless semi-accurately reflects every exchange I have heard the under reporting of these dastardly criminals who are using forced sex to maintain their rule of the world. Only one commenter interrupts the thread by asking: "how can women rape men without a penis? like, with a strap-on?" No one answered this incisive question, so eager were they to break the silence and report on the dozens of men they personally knew who had been raped by women taking time off from ruling the world.

b. You have to refer to a woman who has been raped as a "survivor" as if she had suffered a near death experience, or was returning from a form of social death caused by the rape.

c. You have to have long conversations about consent, as if unwanted sexual intercourse had occurred because of a failure to communicate rather than a WOMAN being physically overpowered by a MAN who wanted it, and wanted it now. What now passes for anti-rape programming is often commonly called "consent training." It is a lot like dog training, in which women are taught to send very clear signals (andnotgetdrunkandnotgoplacesaloneandneverleaveyourfriendsatapartyandstayprettycoveredupbecausea guymightgetthewrongideaanddontputyourdrinkdownanywheresomeonemightputsomethinginitanddontgoupstairs atthefrathousewithanyoneandalwaysmeetaguyinapublicplaceforthefirsttimedontlethimknowwhereyoulive) and men are taught to keep their ears free of wax so they can hear a woman say no -- "which means no!" The difference between consent training and dog training is that in the latter case dogs receive treats when they listen and respond to commands (here's an idea: women could carry cans of beer, and when they say no to sex and men agree not to rape them, the guy gets a can of beer.) You would be surprised how confusing "consent training" is to college women who end up believing that the outcome of any given sexual encounter is a fifty-fifty proposition even when they said quite clearly that they did not want to have sex.

OK sure, did we expect much of Beyonce anyway, given that she was the woman whose big hit a couple years ago informed the man she dumped that she had done so, not because she didn't dig him, but because he hadn't "put a ring on it?" I think we know from whence she thinks grrrrl power derives (should Hilary try this in the Middle East?) So without further ado, let's hear from NineteenPercent.

Hat tip.

Why Does The Sun Go On Shining? Why Does The Sea Rush to Shore?

2011-05-21T10:49:00.000-05:00

The answer to these and other pressing questions can be found here, with a Big Hair Bonus. (And yes, I would embed, but YouTube won't let me. Buncha intellectual property pansies, if you ask me.)

For a brief history of Skeeter Davis, born Mary Penick, go here. Here's hoping you survive the day, and if you don't, that we encounter each other in that Big Blogger Meetup in the Sky.

Love Is A Many Splendored Thing Department: This Week's Sexual News In Review

2011-05-19T09:38:00.006-05:00

Happier Days? Photo credit.

I want to start out by saying that there are more men than Arnold Schwarzenegger who have children that they know about but did not acknowledge to their wives and the children they live with until much, much later in the game. I have met four in my lifetime, quite ordinary men who were not governor of anything, so it's not really that rare. But I have the same question about all of them, large and small: how do you hide a second family? And more important, how many people have to be paid off not to reveal that you have a second family when you are governor of California?

Personal responsibility is definitely taking a hit this week, since it turns out that pedophile priests are not responsible for their actions, and the church was not responsible for supervising them. No, it's what you suspected all along: the collective power of queers and fornicators to ruin innocent lives is too powerful, even for God! According to a five year study commissioned by the Catholic Church, the sexual abuse of children and teens by priests rose dramatically in the 1960's "because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s." The report, commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and executed by a "research team" from John Jay College to the tune of $1.3 million, must be a great relief to the Universal Church. "The bishops," so reporteth the New York Times, "have said they hope the report will advance the understanding and prevention of child sexual abuse in society at large." Probably not. It probably won't advance the understanding of sexual abuse in the church either.

If it is true that it never occurred to priests to abuse children until they were put under such intense psychological pressure by other people having sex, that would mean it could never happen again. How do I know this? I'm a historian, of course. My analysis of the data (done for free, just this morning, and I offer it to the Pope out of shame for how queer people hurt these poor priests) has revealed the 1960s are not only over, but will probably never happen again. Only the law of circular time, which governed Aztec history prior to their conquest (and conversion to the One True Faith) by Spain in the early 16th century, would suggest otherwise, and everyone knows that in the United States we live in linear time.

And the Church wants to know why people don't take it seriously anymore? Mary, please.

In other news, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned as head of the IMF following charges that he tried to rape a chambermaid. Strauss-Kahn, whose nickname is "Hot Rabbit," according to the New York Daily News, is in Riker's Island, asserting his innocence. 57% of French citizens also think he has been set up by his political enemies.

I would take this even possibility even semi-seriously except for two things: one is that French people think Americans are too hysterical for words about sex, which is true, but I doubt that the NYPD would have walked into this $hit $torm unless they believed the woman (and why would an immigrant woman and a single mother call attention to herself in this way unnecessarily? I ask you.) More important in my calculus is the number of powerful American men who have firmly asserted their innocence and/or threatened to bury people for spreading rumors about them that turned out not only to be true, but part of a pattern of out of control and/or criminal sexual behavior. For example, Ah-nohld and his campaign staff responded viciously to charges of sexual harassment: in 2003, one woman sued then-governor Schwarzenegger, charging that he and his staff had spread false rumors that she was a convicted felon. And do you recall that president who did not have sexual relations with that woman -- except that, actually, it turned out that he did? And John Edwards, who first lied about, and then finally admitted, having had an affair with videographer Rielle Hunter, but denied being the father of her child -- except that it turns out he is?

There seems to be a certain kind of man -- and not surprisingly, he is usually a rich and powerful one (The Council of Bishops, The Leader of the Free World or Aspiring LOTFW, The Governor, The Banker Of The Planet) -- who thinks that if he just asserts something is so the rest of us are bound, by some strange compact, to believe him. Surely this is a much more interesting topic for historical analysis than the strange theory that priests crumbled under the weight of birth control, gay liberation and abortion, and were forced to calm their nerves by diddling children.

The Chaz Project: Gender, Celebrity And The Emergence Of An FTM Activist

2011-05-17T15:49:00.020-05:00

Chaz Bono, with Billie Fitzpatrick, Transition: The Story of How I Became A Man (New York: Dutton, 2011). 244 pages. Illustrations, index. $25.95.

Becoming Chaz (Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, 2010). 88 minutes. Premiered at Sundance Festival and on the Oprah Winfrey Network (May 10 2011).

Famous people live in bubbles; the children of famous people also live in bubbles, and benefit much less from the experience. Witness Chaz, the only child of Salvatore "Sonny" Bono and Cherilyn Sarkisian, otherwise known as Cher. One of the many criticisms that will doubtless emerge about Chaz Bono's revised history, one that centers his gender transition and his new life as an embodied man, will be some version of this: how can a person who has had access to every possible advantage represent himself as an average transman? To this I have two answers:

Everyone's life is worth saving, no matter how rich his parents are, and;

One of the ways that rich people are different is that their books get published and distributed widely when other, equally good or better, books do not. Get used to it.

Timed to come out together, Transition and Becoming Chaz, tell Chaz's story about his journey to a fully male identity. They are part of an activist project, in which Chaz hopes to use his fame to reach out to other people who may be struggling with their own or a loved one's gender transition and promote tolerance towards queerly gendered people. They are also a long-term public relations project, through which Chaz has struggled to represent himself rather than be represented by the tabloid press. Together, for those of us who are more up to speed on trans politics and trans studies, these newly released accounts of Bono tell us less about the world of gender politics and gender transition technology than they tell us about the world of celebrity.

However, those who simply take celebrity for granted and know bupkis about transgender or transsexual lives may learn some things they need to know. For example:

Kids who grow up into people who want to transition have very active inner lives that are gendered differently from the way their bodies present.
Puberty stinks even worse for trans people than it does for cisgendered people.
People who transition from female to male may initially come out as butch lesbians (but not all butch lesbians identify as trans.)
Parents often do not respond well to gender transition.
Girlfriends who appear to be on board with gender transition can still be self-centered and mean. Sometimes they bail out.
Injectable testosterone works faster than Androgel.
Lots of psychotherapy is recommended.
Having lots of gay friends doesn't necessarily make a person sophisticated when it comes to actually having a queer kid. (Cher is an excellent example of this: did I say that lots of psychotherapy is recommended? And Sonny, who seemed not to care that he had a queer kid, then cosponsored the Defense of Marriage Act.)
Having lots of psychotherapy, a big book contract, and the admiration of thousands of transmen doesn't mean that when people call you fat, weird and ugly; or make sexist, homophobic and transphobic jokes at your expense, it doesn't hurt. A lot. (Editorial clarification: Chaz has always been attractive, but in his new incarnation has an inner confidence and a sunny smile that makes him about as good or better looking as any other middle-aged Italian American guy.)

OK, so for those of you who knew fewer than five of the things I listed above, you should go read the book. If you have limited time, are only interested in the FTM part of Chaz's life story, and are curious about the nature of celebrity, I would say watch the movie. The first two-thirds of the book are a revision of Chaz's coming-out-as-a-lesbian story (which someone of my age might recall was pretty awful) that accounts for his male identity. It also includes a survey of Chaz's descent into drug abuse, which is a cautionary tale worth reading. Having known several people who became addicted to drugs like Vicodin and Oxycontin, this actually can happen to anyone. Chaz was getting legal scrips for so much high-dosage Oxy that he had to go to a hospital pharmacy to get them filled, and even the pharmacists did not bat an eye, much less call the DEA or the California medical licensing board.

I am not sure whether it will matter to you, but: there are better books about trans lives out there, and if you follow the links in this post, you will find them. Chaz speaks only for himself but, in trying to reach a far broader audience (in what has to be a rudimentary general education project if it is to succeed in Omaha as well as in Los Angeles), the book tends not to be very aware of its own limitations. Chief among these are the essentialist story it tells about gender, the book's main preoccupation; and its failure to address class, age and race. Transitioning to a male body and a male social identity are quite different experiences for different people, as are the life histories that lead up to these transitions. Although there are common themes, transmen have very different life stories, as do transwomen. Generation matters: there are a significant number of people, particularly very young ones, for whom challenging gender as a system of power means living between or outside categories as a genderqueer person. So Chaz's story is the 100-level course. If you want the 200 level course, go to Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge: 2006); if you want a better memoir, and one that tells the MTF story where our heroine gets to keep the girl and the kids, my favorite is Jennifer Finney Boylan, She's Not There: A Life In Two Genders (Broadway Books, 2003).

Which brings us to class. While having access to lots of money hasn't made Chaz's life a happy one (one might argue the opposite, in fact), the book has nothing to say about the vast number of trans kids who are entirely without resources, even to feed, clothe or house themselves. It is a sad fact that most people in America are poor, whether they are gender normative or not. It is a sadder fact that vast numbers of gender non-conforming youth are bullied at school, abused by their families, and end up on the streets fending for themselves. Many of these kids, particular male-bodied trans kids, are sex workers, as their foremothers were.

It is also the case that Chaz appears to be choosing trans children as his issue, having been a neglected and abused child himself, and it may be that as an activist he begins to hone in on the cross-class dimensions of this issue as well as the surgical abuse of intersexed children. Childhood was a bad time for Chaz, and while his boyishness is the part of that story that is central to the book, he was alternately cherished and neglected. He suffered emotional abuse from one nanny in particular, who terrorized him when his mother was absent for large stretches of time. While we don't get details about his upbringing that stray far from the gender story, Chaz seems to go out of his way to understand and account for his parents' lapses, and being a victim of the press himself, is probably kinder to them than they deserve.

One result of parental neglect was that Sonny and Cher failed to notice that their child went to any number of schools but didn't really learn to do anything except to be a public person: everything else he has taught himself. In a way this doesn't seem odd, given Sonny and Cher's route to success. Cher was singing professionally at 16 when she teamed up with her 27 year-old partner, and my guess is that one or both were high school dropouts. Chaz was repeatedly pulled out of school by Cher to accommodate her career, and allowed to make his own decisions about whether and where he attended school (this meant living in New York with friends and attending the High School for Performing Arts) by the time he was fourteen. While Chaz returned to college in mid-life, his only real work -- other than three years of trying to break into the music business -- has been to use his celebrity to do political advocacy, mostly for GLBT rights.

Don't imagine that Transition will give you many insights into the inner life of a transman the way lesser-known, but more complex, autobiographies like Jamison Green's Becoming a Visible Man (Vanderbilt, 2004) and Max Wolf Valerio's The Testosterone Files (Seal Press, 2006) will. The story Chaz has to tell is a carefully crafted one that is intended to educate, but not to reveal much about who he really is or what he really feels. Because of this, the most affecting moments are not in the book, but in Becoming Chaz when we watch Bono watching his mother in the well-orchestrated television appearances and interviews that are designed to voice her support for him. And yet, even then, she can't seem to bring herself to refer to Chaz with male pronouns. Like, ever. Which is a little strange given the fact that she is an actress. The expression on Chaz's face as Cher "forgets" her lines, over and over, is unforgettable, as is his rush to forgive her for doing so. Nothing in the book is so ambivalent or complex as these moments when gender is temporarily displaced by the drama of the celebrity child.

Studies In Sexism: Roseanne Barr Tells All In New York Magazine

2011-05-16T17:16:00.004-05:00

Roseanne Barr, formerly the star of the hit TV sitcom Roseanne (1988-1997), now runs a macadamia nut farm in Hawai'i. However, she hasn't lost her wit or her bite, particularly when it comes to sexism. She has an amazing article in this month's New York magazine (May 15 2011) where she rips off the lid about how she was treated by producers Marcey Carsey and Tom Werner.

It didn’t take long for me to get a taste of the staggering sexism and class bigotry that would make the first season of Roseanne god-awful. It was at the premiere party when I learned that my stories and ideas—and the ideas of my sister and my first husband, Bill—had been stolen. The pilot was screened, and I saw the opening credits for the first time, which included this: CREATED BY MATT WILLIAMS. I was devastated and felt so betrayed that I stood up and left the party. Not one person noticed.

As Roseanne fought for creative control of her show, and for ownership over the character she had created, she was bullied, undermined and derided as a crazy person by everyone except her fellow cast members. This included numerous women on the set and on the production team who watched while men insulted her. Barr describes one confrontation where she threatened the writers with a pair of shears in their own office, a place where she "rarely went...since it was disgusting." (Go here for Tina Fey's revelation in the March 14 New Yorker that male writers on Saturday Night Live piss in cups rather than leave their offices to walk down the hall to the bathroom.) She also tried not to go to the writer's room because it too was a sea of sexism. Invariably, as soon as she entered the room,

one of the writers would crack a stinky-pussy joke that would make me want to murder them. Male writers have zero interest in being nice to women, including their own assistants, few of whom are ever promoted to the rank of “writer,” even though they do all the work while the guys sit on their asses taking the credit.

When the show hit number one in the ratings, instead of sending her the car that male stars receive, ABC sent her a humongous chocolate bar. Read the whole article here.

Hat Tip.

Network Down! And Other Thoughts On Shifting Our Educational Practice To A Virtual World

2011-05-15T10:37:00.005-05:00

Yesterday the Zenith network went down. While the message that informed us that things were working again said something about a hardware upgrade, it is difficult to believe that they really intended to take the whole system down during finals week. I suspect that, although tinkering may have been part of the issue, the network was also overwhelmed.

This happens periodically because of two institutional impulses, neither of which is inherently bad, but which together can create havoc: putting as much of our work on-line as possible and cutting the university budget. It is only a guess that these two things are related, but I can't recall a year during which we have lost our online services abruptly so very many times (the last occurrence was in the middle of uploading senior honors theses.) Here's a lesson for you, if you are an aspiring administrator: money saved by implementing technological innovations often requires spending the same money to maintain the system better, expand it and do ongoing maintenance so that it can handle the additional traffic.

Of course, it isn't just budget cutting that has produced this massive shift to putting things on-line. Some things are genuinely better and more convenient, as long as the system stays up. Submitting grades, registering for courses, and the various approvals that go up the line from faculty member to chair to dean to the provost (or registrar) work much better without the many forms we used to sign, many of which were folded, spindled, mutilated and left to molder at the bottom of backpacks long after the deadline to hand them in had come and gone.

Eliminating the forms is often articulated as a positive step, in and of itself. Whipped up by eco-enthusiasms, the university has created many opportunities to do everything pedagogical and organizational through our computers. Rumor had it that they were going to pick a couple courses to shift onto iPads, and that everyone would get a free iPad to experiment with this. I was, like, "Pick me! Pick me!" They did not, so I had to buy my own iPad, but I can see how an iPad would enhance a course in all kinds of ways and I wouldn't mind trying it. The only down side, as far as I can see, is that you can't use any book that doesn't already have an e-edition, and many university presses are not up to speed with this. The up side would be: if you are teaching Jane Austen or any other text where the copyright has run out, every reading in the course is free.

This semester, responding to the periodic exhortations to avoid the use of paper whenever possible, saving entire budget lines and forests of trees, I shifted one course entirely onto Moodle, an open source course management system (CMS) that made our work 100% paperless. All in all, I would say this has been a real success, I have gained a great deal and I have not sacrificed a single thing that I value. We do not yet teach on-line, mind you, although I fully expect that we will be invited to do so in the future to support the various graduate liberal studies degrees that Zenith offers, and I fully expect this will be greeted with hoots of derision and warnings about the coming Apocalypse. But the more you fiddle with the various platforms available, and Moodle is the best one I have yet tinkered with, the clearer it becomes how one might easily teach on-line from the comfort of one's own boudoir. In fact, during the snow emergencies this semester I quelled my anxiety about missing too much face-time by putting entire classes up on-line so that they could review the material themselves, with some gentle guidance from me. I was able to do this using simple applications available on my Mac and my iPhone, without any instruction from anyone, and to my great surprise and pleasure, it actually worked. Some of the material from those classes has reappeared in subsequent assignments as texts that had, for many students, the greatest impact of any they read in the course.

Now you might say, "Isn't shifting so much of your teaching to the Internet alienating, Professor Radical? Is encountering you as a virtual professor really what your students are really paying all that fancy-pants tuition for?" Here is an important point: they actually saw me twice a week, and they also had a teaching assistant who ran discussion groups outside of class and worked with them on their writing to great effect. So I am not yet an expert on what you can accomplish without any human contact whatsoever. That said, after a semester of Moodling, I find that -- other than the possibility of making all assigned texts and everything used in class available in one place -- the latter feature truly improves my relations with my students. As you move through the course, they can add things that they think are important, and you can tailor future classes to the students who actually enrolled in the course (as opposed to the fantasy students who might have enrolled, whose interests will exactly match yours, and who will hang on your every word regardless of what you say to them.) Although I didn't use these functions as much as I might have, there are also numerous functions that permit/force student participation and create opportunities for students to share their ideas with each other.

I would also say that, overall, I found the business of the course (turning work in and returning it) far more straightforward. Either the paper was, or was not, in the drop box when it is due, and it can be due at midnight if you want, making it more likely that students who work at the last minute will get it done. There was no haggling about whether the administrative assistant was -- or was not -- in the office at the designated witching hour. There were no papers slid under the office door, and we had no hoo-hah about printers that mysteriously ceased to function at the unluckiest possible moment. Importantly, exams taken on-line allowed those with accommodations for learning disability to take the extra time they are permitted with absolutely no effort or planning on my part: this is actually a very big deal in a lecture course, where you can have as many as ten or twelve different diagnoses that require as many different accommodations. Exams are clocked in by the Moodle, and there is no need for elaborate proctoring arrangements that also, not incidentally, reveal the identities of those with learning disabilities, invite stigma and, I am convinced, often cause students who would perform better with an accommodation to not reveal themselves..

Marking papers is also more fruitful, in my view. Instead of scribbling graffitti all over their work, I enable the editing function and add comments, re-arrange their sentences so they are grammatical, explain errors of syntax and structure, and so on. It took less time on my part, was far more legible (in the past, in order to make my point, I would find myself writing elaborate paragraphs at the bottom of the page, and connecting them to the offending passage with a long, curvy arrow.) By comparing the original (which remains in the drop box) to the graded version (which you upload later) students who wanted to improve (which is nearly all of them) could actually see the differences between the two versions laid out in front of them, rather than trying to figure out from a hopeless sea of red, green what good writing really looks like.

Downsides? I can't think of one for the pedagogical experience, except that I had to devise new techniques for learning names, something I normally did by handing back graded work and free writing exercises in class. A second issue that will affect some people more than others is simply spending too much time at the keyboard and risking ligament and tendon damage in the

Here's the catch, however. When the system goes down you can't work, unless you have had the foresight and the wit to download all the written work at once,. Having the university server crash, or become unstable and need to be taken down for maintenance, in the portion of your day or week that you have set aside expressly to mark papers or do final grades does temporary havoc to your sense of control and order, something we faculty prize enormously. When this happens, there is literally nothing that you can do but turn your computer off and catch up on the episodes of The Borgias that you have missed because of the intensity of the semester's end.

Why this forced work stoppage occurred yesterday at Zenith is anyone's guess, but it seems obvious that it is most likely to occur at exactly the time of year when we are all using the system most intensely -- finals week -- and during which a crash or downtime will also result the greatest inconvenience. Universities are going to have to take what they are saving on paper and administrative assistants and redeploy it to hiring more IT people, updating their systems more frequently, and having emergency crews on retainer to monitor the system during moments of abnormally high usage.

Here's my prediction: ultimately, universities will no longer maintain their own servers, and IT staffs will exist mainly to work on server space that is rented from Google, Apple or one of the megaliths. This will make systems more reliable under normal and extraordinary usage. But it will raise other challenges, one being a possible narrowing of the choices we have as institutions to decide what platforms and software we are using as those who own the servers have greater power over what kinds of innovation they will support. Another challenge is that, while each of our universities is vulnerable on its own, by linking our fate to the One Big Server (OBS) we become highly vulnerable together: a breach of security in one location can take us all down. This is something to anticipate and understand before that moment in which change is inevitable but the terms of change have already been decided entirely by corporations.

And The Envelope, Please: Tenured Radical Inaugurates the Spammies

2011-05-10T09:10:00.001-05:00

Doesn't this look so too much like Elliot Spitzer?

For reasons too mysterious to mention, I am in catch up mode and have no time to be clever or intelligent today. However, with the help of my spam file, I can try to be funny. I read in the Old Grey Lady a few months back that spammers have stopped kicking out routine messages by spambot, and instead have hired real people to roam through blogs leaving links to their wares.

Indeed, the quality of spam has changed in the past few months. It is friendlier and more conversational. It tries to relate to the topic of the post, and -- despite the fact that it is authored by people names "Viagra Online," "Moscow Apartment" or "Cupcake,"it has the sweet quality of an entry level person in a non-Anglophone country who is practicing hir English in hopes of one day immigrating or upgrading to a better job doing online tech support for Dell.

So without further ado, I present to you my favorite comments for the month of May that are attempting to sell you stuff you would never buy (like apartments in Russia that don't really exist.) The Spammies fpr the month of May go to:

Viagra Online, for: "I remember that in high school that in the five years never missed a class, she even gave the class sick, that is what I call love to the work."

kamagra, for: "many was the action during her life, and the legacy she leave in this world, for that reason we have to remember her and honored all the time, thank you Del Martin."

Generic Viagra, for: "I don't want to be unpolite, so I just gonna say something simple, the only thing that deserve a man who is violent against a women, is to be castrato, and in this way see if is so superior after this."

Star, for: "Stanley Fish is just an idealist, his ideas to save the world is complete crap I prefer viagra online instead."

I couldn't have said it better myself. (Follow that link for an old favorite that won't permit embedding.)

American Studies Declares A Victory Over All Other Fields: Amy Farrell Hits The Big Time

2011-05-07T08:26:00.003-05:00

So when folks tuned in to Stephen Colbert on May 4 to get his take on the Bin Laden thing, they also got American Studies celebrity Amy Farrell! Apparently this is her second time on Colbert discussing the history of obesity. Farrell's second shot at the big time was triggered by the publication of her new book, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. See both appearances on the Dickinson College website.

How did your favorite Radical become alert to this, since ze has not time to watch TV until the third week in May, and can't stay up that late under the best conditions? Facebook, of course. A really good blog reporter always checks the main feed for news about the people who are "friends" -- you know those folks. They are the people to whom you feel friend-LY -- who you don't really know, and/or who you wish you did know.

Photo courtesy of Amy Farrell

Farrell plays a great straight woman to Colbert's wackadoodle interviewing style. This week's episode also features Colbert running offstage screaming "I gotta pee!"

Have Radical, Will Travel: Or, Some People Do Go Both Ways

2011-05-06T06:44:00.002-05:00

Tenured Radical is over at Cliopatria today, with an original about a conservative history flack, Texan David Barton, that will not be cross posted here. In an attempt to remain a legitimate member of the Cliopatria team over at History News Network, I'm going to try to post original material in each place from here on out. We'll see how that works: going rogue seems to be more my strength.

In other Radical news, you can go here for an interview with moi written by Zenith cub reporter Abbey Francis, who made serious effort to make me sound less ungrammatical than I usually do. Go here for a list of summer reading on Africa compiled by Swarthmore's Tim Burke (dude, the only book that you cannot leave off this list is Jonny Steinberg's Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through the South African AIDS Epidemic.)

What's In Your Pocket? A Graduation Guide For Living In The Age Of Debt

2011-05-04T07:21:00.021-05:00

A few weeks ago, one of my friends was sorting a box of stuff that had gotten thrown into the garage prior to a kitchen renovation years ago. She found an historical artifact that she swears she is going to send me for a future lecture on the recent economic meltdown. It is a flier from one of those advertising mailers that usually has coupons for a few things you really want (like laundry soap), as well as ads for a few local gardening centers and siding contractors. This particular ad was for Countrywide Financial, one of the lenders whose dishonest practices figured prominently in the home loan bubble. Countrywide offered to refinance her home if she just filled out the coupon and sent it back, no credit check required. "Imagine!" she said to me, as if she had found a poodle skirt in the closet. "Refinancing your home through an advertising mailer!"

But that was exactly how it happened in those days. And despite everything, that's how it is still happening, except that the banks are shifting their lying ways away from a market they have already destroyed and towards consumers who have not yet had an opportunity to go into bankruptcy. This market is working class and middle class college students from prestigious institutions who will actually become paid workers (as opposed to the people who take massive loans out for on-line degrees and for profits, who default at the highest rate and often don't get a degree either.) A graduating senior who went to a mandatory financial aid exit interview informed me that, as part of this counseling session, a representative from a major corporate bank was available to explain to them how important it would be to sign up for a couple credit cards to establish a good credit rating. This would assume, of course, that these students had not already signed up for credit cards from the people who shill these instruments in the student center.

Part of what amazes me (other than the fact that colleges allow these snake oil salespeople on campus) is how persuasive the banking industry can be in convincing us that what is good for them is good for us too. Got debt? Here's a great idea: you need more! Because actually, paying back a college loan that is the equivalent of one or two down payments on a house, or four or five decent used cars, does not give you a credit rating at all. This was what I discovered when, prior to buying a house and after having paid back a small but significant graduate student loan, I tried to get a car loan. Oh sure: they were willing to lend me the money, but not at a good rate of interest. Why? Because I had no credit history, even after having made payments of over $20,000 in principal, interest and fees.

It is this crazy glitch in the system that allows the credit card lady to encourage people who are already massively indebted to take out more loans and not be locked up for the liar that she is. The only thing more un-American than having a bad credit history is having no credit history: hence, much of the information young people are being given as they exit college in debt is, in fact, aimed at helping them to take on more debt. We have to remember that this counsel is coming from a business class that contributes gobs of money every year to politicians who howl about a national debt that they claim is out of control, not because of war, runaway medical costs and tax breaks for the wealthy, but because of education and services to the poor, elderly and disabled. This national context makes it particularly bizarre that there is advice all over the Internet (probably written by former English majors now working for Bank of America at $10 an hour) about how to raise your credit score by maintaining a "healthy" amount of debt all the time and paying it off over the full term ("small amounts every month" is the phrase that recurs constantly) so that ~~the banks can haz maximum interest~~ the borrower can demonstrate good consumer citizenship.

So here's the Radical financial aid exit interview for those of you coming out of college or graduate school who are looking down that financial shot-gun barrel:

Paying off your college loans early saves you lots of money in interest. This may seem inconceivable to you, but making one extra payment a year will save you thousands of dollars in the end. Figure out how much extra that is every month (if your loan payment is $500, that's less than $50, or one Saturday night bar hopping in lower Manhattan) and add it in.
Everyone needs one credit card to buy plane tickets, and to cover some kind of emergency. By emergency, I mean realizing that a new transmission is in the cards, and you need that vehicle to get to work. A new couch on sale at Crate and Barrel is not an emergency.
If you are consistently carrying credit card debt you cannot afford to live the way you do. It is one thing to use a credit card to buy a couple thousand dollars worth of clothes that you will need to start your job; another entirely to be buying your groceries and gas with a credit card while your paycheck dribbles away on other things. Create a realistic budget, compare it to what you actually spend, and adjust accordingly.
You don't "need" to buy your home; hence, you do not "need" to build a solid credit rating in your first few years out of school. You may never need to buy your home. You may want to buy your home; it may fulfill a lifelong dream of domesticity to own your home; but it is actually not necessary. In fact, owning your own home is far more expensive than any real estate agent or loan officer will tell you: yes, the property taxes and the mortgage + the mortgage deduction will come out to less than renting in most places. But, utilities and energy costs aside, what about the part where a tree falls on your roof, or the old drunk upstairs leaves the bath tub running? So don't kid yourself that taking on all kinds of new debt following graduation is part of your long-term financial plan.
Consider getting a second job to pay off your student loans. One or two shifts a week as a food server, with tips, would actually allow you to double your payments and -- get this -- pay off that debt in far less than half the time, because you are whacking away at principle at an astonishing rate. The biggest lie about student loans is not the idea that the education you went into debt for is worth having, but that you should be able to graduate and just have a normal life like rich people do that has no pain in it. Paying off debts often hurts, and requires sacrificing leisure if you are going to do it expeditiously. But you might want to do that to become debt-free.
Debit cards are worth it if you pay attention. If you don't pay attention, your bank will charge you all sorts of fees for using a debit card, but if you do pay attention, you don't have to worry about carrying wads of cash around and using your credit card just because you have neglected to go to the bank. That said, having an unmeasurable access to your money makes it more likely that you will spend it in unplanned ways. Cash is better.
When establishing a bank account after graduation, look closely at smaller banks and credit unions. Any institution that has to work for your business is going to be more competitive in its services and fees, and credit unions are established for the benefit of the membership, not shareholders. One thing to remember is that you can change banks if the one you are patronizing doesn't serve you well, although online banking practices makes this infinitely cumbersome. I have been planning to leave Bank of America for years (the account that I originally opened was at a local bank that was eaten by larger banks in the go-go eighties, and eventually by BOA in 1995) and I have put it off because I would have to re-enter all the payment information for my monthly bills. Dumb, eh? But my point is this: bank fees change all the time, and banks count on it that you are not paying attention to them. That extra $35 you are being charged for this or that is a big chunk of that extra student loan payment you want to make every month.
Suze Orman is a highly grating personality but she is right about almost everything. One of her, or someone else's, money management books should be on your summer reading list. Her basic message is a good one: show yourself a little tough love, don't indulge yourself with a life you can't afford, free yourself from high interest debt, and you will liberate yourself to make the choices you want to be able to make in life. You might not become rich -- but you will be dramatically less coercible. You won't have to stay in a job you hate just to pay the bills; you can save money and support a life doing underpaid labor (like college teaching, for example); you can change careers; you can drop out of the workforce for a few years and raise your kid/travel/try to write a novel.

And while you are at it? I know this is anathema, but go talk to your parents about money. You would be surprised what they know, and if you are really lucky they will share their mistakes as well as the things they think they have done right.

Who Is On The Bus And Who Is Under It: Notes From Congress's Global War On Women

2011-05-02T06:01:00.010-05:00

Deny men health care in a political deal and see what happens!

Because it is April, and everything in university life has to be done in April even as the teaching commitments get jacked up to DEFCON 1, I am perpetually behind in my reading. So I didn't get to Katha Pollitt's excellent piece, "Women: The Bus Rolls On" (The Nation, April 14 2011) until this morning. In it, Pollitt points out that:

It’s getting awfully crowded underneath that bus. You know, the metaphorical one women keep getting thrown under, along with their rights, their health and their money. Women lost much of their insurance coverage for abortion during the fight over the healthcare reform bill last fall, but at least they got some good things out of it: coverage for millions of uninsured women, preventive care including breast and cervical cancer screenings, and a bar on refusing coverage for such pre-existing conditions as having been a rape or domestic violence victim.

But in the budget deal that the White House just struck with the GOP, those wheels just keep a-rollin' over female bodied persons, specifically poor ones, who are of child-bearing age. According to Pollitt's article, "to keep Planned Parenthood’s federal funding, Democrats agreed to bar Washington, DC, from using its own revenues" (emphasis mine) "to pay for abortion care for women on Medicaid. And in a tiny footnote, the final budget cuts Title X, the federal family-planning program, by $17 million." Congress can do this, as the government elected by District citizens shares its political authority with the federal government.

So on the day after Barack Obama announced the successful assassination of Osama Bin Laden, can we give a big cheer for democracy and freedom, those things the United States claims we have spent trillions of dollars to promote with military force since 2001? Can we give a big yell to the first black president, who has been the first president to sign off on completely gutting public funds for the reproductive care of poor women right outside his door who are largely black? Oh, the times we live in.

It is worth pointing out that this is the logical outcome of the Hyde Amendment, signed by President Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1977, which began the long march to slice away federal dollars from women's reproductive care. Feminists understood at the time that, while all of us were standing at that metaphoric bus stop, it was poor and minority women who would end up under the wheels. As I argue in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Policy History,

Feminists rightly viewed Medicaid ineligibility as a partial retraction of Roe v. Wade (1973), since it would restrict access for poor women to safe termination of unwanted pregnancies. Practically speaking, restricting Medicaid would de-fund $600,000 worth of procedures in New York State
alone. In a memo to Carter, Karen Mulhauser, executive director of NARAL, accused him of believing that his religious and moral values were superior to those of “millions of Americans who support the right to choose.” Furthermore, since abortion was legal, Mulhauser argued, for a President who had pledged himself to supporting human rights around the globe to withdraw equal medical access for poor women in the United States was hypocrisy.*

Of course, the political terrain has changed dramatically since then. We are now used to political strategies that shift the human rights burden to the private sector, not the least of which has been a decades-long war which has cost untold misery across several continents. While I am not immune to a certain relief that Bin Laden is now unable to plan further mayhem, I find it difficult to celebrate, given what it has cost. I'm not just talking about money and lives: a chaotic and dangerous foreign policy has diverted much-needed attention to the fight for women's rights, which have themselves been cynically deployed over the last decade as part of the casus belli. Indeed, as the United States was being ginned up for an illegal war in the aftermath of 9/11, one strategy was to keep women in the overdeveloped world fully informed about the oppression of women in selected states like Iraq and Afghanistan.

These human rights violations against women were, and are real: they have not been resolved as a result of horrific wars that have themselves inflicted terrible burdens on women. The next time you are all psyched up about NATO's intervention in Libya on behalf of freedom-loving rebels (and against a dictator who has been supported as a US ally since 9/11), ask yourself: what is happening to women and children as boys and men rush off to the "front" with pocket knives, when they aren't firing US-manufactured bullets into the air? Furthermore, recent scandals in the private human rights sector demonstrate that delivering women's rights into the hands of non-state actors, no matter how well intended, does not address fundamental inequities that are built into the law.

What does this have to do with federal dollars for abortion and family planning in the United States? Everything. If the President and Congress can't see the rights of women in the war zones they sustain as fundamentally affected by US policies, it all starts with the fact that they can't see the women in neighborhoods within a ten-mile radius of the halls of government either.

What can you do? Yep, that's right: give money to the private non-profits. The irony is just too much, isn't it? Go here to support the DC Abortion Fund; go here to make a gift to Planned Parenthood.
________________________________
*Mulhauser to Carter, July 17, 1977, Abortion 1/77-12/77, Box 1, Midge Costanza Papers, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.

The Only Good Professor Is A Dead Professor: Or, Is The Decline Of Academic Labor A Health Risk?

2011-04-29T06:12:00.002-05:00

When was the last time you stopped grading, writing, reading or writing up committee reports and went to the gym? In "Performance Pressure," published this week in the Canadian academic journal Academic Matters, Megan A. Kirk and Ryan E. Rhodes are betting you didn't do it lately. In "Performance Pressure" they argue that assistant professors are particularly at risk. "Being a professor is a profession that has been shown to have the longest work hours, heaviest work demands, highest psychological stress, and lowest occupational energy expenditure compared to other professional occupations," they write. Hence, among all professional workers, new faculty are most likely to become mentally run-down and unhealthy for lack of exercise:

For many, the allure of becoming a professor is the promise of a career that involves freedom of choice, national funding, opportunities for promotion, secured tenure-track advancement, and a flexible work schedule. It is no secret, however, that the path to becoming an established professor requires years of grueling, all-consuming service to prove oneself as worthy.

Assistant professors, those who have recently entered the academic profession, aim to reach tenure by spending countless hours teaching, marking, grant writing, publishing, reading, analyzing, recruiting, and presenting. Most of these “rookies” are also juggling relationships, families, and other personal goals. The reward is that once tenure status is granted, life as a professor can be absolutely wonderful. Or so we think. What if the pressure, expectations, and stress endured while trying to obtain a tenure-track position had devastating consequences on your long-term physical and emotional health?

In a sample of 267 assistant professors who had been hired in the last five years, Kirk and Rhodes found that only 30.7% were meeting a minimum level of physical activity necessary to maintain good adult health. This compares to 50% of young Canadian professionals who are meeting this basic standard. "The declining trend in physical activity was not independent of certain socio-demographic profiles," they note. "Those who indicated they were married, and worked 70-plus hours of work per week reported sharper decreases in physical activity across the transition compared to those who were single and working fewer than 70 hours." Having children was also a co-factor, which will not surprise those of you out there who are parents.

One recent preoccupation of this blog and a great many other publications has been the great difficulties of life as an adjunct or contract faculty member. But here's a question: although there are tremendous differences in salary, security and work conditions between ladder track faculty and others, are labor conditions that have marginalized some also putting increasing pressure on those who seem to be succeeding in this narrowing labor market? One of the things we all know implicitly is that the tremendous pressure to achieve tenure occurs in part because to not get tenure has a great likelihood of being a career-ending moment. That is a psychological stressor, including an inducement to work harder -- even at things that will never be noticed in a review. One thing I have suspected for a while is that there is simply more work to do than there was twenty years ago, even putting aside raised expectations for scholarly production in the social sciences and the humanities. Colleges and universities are accepting more students; many of the students we accept are more difficult to teach for a variety of reasons; the increased demand for measurable outcomes; and the drop in full-time teaching staff who can be expected to undertake and be responsible for these tasks makes them more time-consuming.

Love, Literature, and The Art Of Making A Life In Priscilla Gilman's "The Anti-Romantic Child"

2011-04-27T06:35:00.011-05:00

Priscilla Gilman's new memoir, The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), is this week's recommended reading. It is mostly about Gilman's struggle to help her son Benjamin overcome a set of developmental disabilities that make him sound quite charming and interesting -- as well as a challenging child who gives intricate meaning to that imprecise phrase "special needs." While she gestures at specific diagnoses, she resists the comprehensive and categorical workup with which so many of my students arrive at college. She also refuses medication, which seems to be the go-to solution for the vast majority of kids who see a neurologist nowadays, as it seems to affect Benj’s brain chemistry in dramatic and unhelpful ways. Intensive therapy, however, helps, and that story is going to be very instructive and encouraging for parents who are finding their way with similarly challenging children. As the book argues implicitly, it matters less what is "wrong" with Benj than it matters to cultivate his talents and strengths as an individual, give him access and connection to a world of feeling, and give him a way to live in the world as a creative and unique person.

Benj is high end (fill in the blank -- any neurological diagnosis is a menu nowadays) which means that, with a lot of hard work on the part of his parents and therapists, a child who is clearly brilliant by any standard but lacks the capacity to interact empathetically, receive affection in recognizable ways, or function in a standard social or learning environment learns to do so by the end of the book. The larger, and very compelling, theme of The Anti-Romantic Child, however, surpasses the particularities of Benj and his upbringing: it is about the romance that everyone needs to have to imagine a life. It is about what it takes to hold onto that romance and also grapple with the realities that clash with it. Gilman positions herself as a particularly romantic person (she becomes a Wordsworth scholar), but also creates a compelling perspective on that for the reader. The romances we develop about childhood, she proposes, are a healthy mechanism for choosing the parts of our upbringing that we want to honor and reproduce, while vowing not to pass on our own parents' shortcomings. And while the family romance in particular sets the stage for disappointment -- since, after all, people are dealt children quite randomly, and fully able children are bound to simply be themselves rather than made-to-order progeny -- Gilman learns that romance is also really about joy. As she watches Benj learn to live for himself, overcome simple difficulties that can be paralyzing for him, and actualize his humanity, she discovers in herself a whole new capacity for experiencing joy.

Perhaps it is no accident that Gilman has to recalibrate her romance about herself at the same time: her marriage ends, tested by circumstance and the deepening knowledge that two adults can acquire about the nature of intimacy. A second theme in the book is her path into, and out of, academia. For a variety of reasons, Gilman's career as a literary scholar had seemed pre-ordained. She gives birth to Benj while still in graduate school and, incredibly, is able to leverage a tenure-track job at Vassar as well as a part-time job for her husband. Particularly because they have a special needs child, being near family and friends, as well as avoiding a commuter marriage, seems to be the miracle they need. Increasingly, however, as she struggles with launching Benj, she also grapples with the knowledge that she has taken a wrong turn even as she has lived out a cherished romance about herself:

Vassar was a wonderful college, but my doubts, my dissatisfactions with academia remained. I would find myself warning my students against my path; I couldn't in all good conscience encourage them to go to graduate school when they said they wanted to read great books all the time and teach great students like I did. They were so idealistic; they had starry eyes and great hopes. I wished one of my professors had been more honest and blunt with me early on; I wish I'd known what I was getting into, that being an English major bore little or no relation to being an English professor. I was reading much less literature, especially world literature, now that I was a professor. I had to read endless scholarly articles, book reviews, and student papers. I had to immerse myself in the minor writers of my period. And, of course, there were virtually no jobs; my career was an aberration, not a model that could be easily replicated.

Love for literature did not necessarily a career as a teacher-scholar make. While having a developmentally disabled child was a huge challenge to that career, and to ordinary life, it may have also allowed her to speak the things to herself that many people feel but do not act on.

I would sit in interminable department or all-college faculty meetings where minutiae would be debated for hours, people got up in arms about the smallest matters, and both the bickering and the venom bore no relation to what was really at stake....Once I got to Vassar, I no longer had the anxiety about the unknown, but a new problem emerged; I realized that I had been so fixated on the elusive brass ring of a tenure-track job that I hadn't faced the fact that I wasn't truly suited to scholarship.....I knew what I had to do to get tenure, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

So she chucks it, moving to New York to have another literary life:

...it felt good to write to the head of the Vassar English Department and tell him I'd decided to leave academia after the coming year's teaching responsibilities were over; the father of a special needs child himself, he accepted my decision with great graciousness and understanding. Stepping off that tenure track felt like an enormous liberation, and I looked forward to beginning at the literary agency the following summer.

Gilman's book is a must-read for anyone interested in disability studies, and a thoughtful, third wave feminist meditation on mothering, work, and the work of mothering. But it is also worthwhile for those who have made academic careers, and are beginning to wake up in the middle of the night and wonder how they got there; those on the path to a scholarly career who may or may not have come to grips with the realities of why they want it; and those who cherish the reality of scholarly life in all its parts but have found the path to a tenure-track job frustratingly foreclosed by the poor job market. Under what circumstances is it OK to change your mind? Under what circumstances is it possible to live out your dream in another way? While a special needs child might force those choices, or clarify such decisions, for any one individual, they are good questions for all of us to ask ourselves as we do the ongoing work of making a life.

From Bathrooms To Board Rooms: Is Being Transgender A Promotion Problem?

2011-04-24T08:58:00.006-05:00

Faculty at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, a public university in Durant, OK, think it has been, and in an act of solidarity are helping a trans colleague grieve her tenure case.

Rachel Tudor, who teaches American and Native American Literature, Modernity and Theory, Humanities, Composition, and Philosophy in the English, Humanities and Languages Department has, according to our informant, "been denied tenure at our university and informed that her employment will be terminated effective May 31, 2011." Tudor is said to have had overwhelming support from faculty colleagues at every stage of the process because of her outstanding record as a scholar, teacher and colleague. The tenure case has been turned back by the dean and the Vice President for academic affairs. To support the appeal sign the petition here.

Professor Tudor's supporters say that they

have compelling evidence that this denial and dismissal are due to discrimination against her for being transgender. In a mess that has gone on for nearly two years, the administration at our university has repeatedly and egregiously violated established policies and procedures. The Faculty Appeals Committee has found in favor of Rachel twice, and the Faculty Senate has passed a resolution in support of her. Meanwhile, the VP for Academic Affairs and the President arbitrarily re-wrote the Academic Policies and Procedures manual in the midst of the process, in order to allow the VP for Business Affairs (!) to overrule the decision of the Faculty Appeals Committee.

A press release sent by Tudor's supporters tells the following story, with assertions of trans discrimination highlighted in blue:

After transitioning, Dr. Tudor was instructed by SOSU’s human resource department to only use a single-stall handicap bathroom on a different floor than where her office is located. She presumes the direction came from Dr. Douglas McMillan, the vice president of academic affairs, who reportedly had also inquired whether Dr. Tudor could be terminated because her lifestyle “offends his Baptist beliefs.” Human resources denied his request to terminate her but did direct Dr. Tudor to use the separate bathroom facility.

Assistant professors at SOSU are given seven years in which to obtain tenure, with the initial probationary period ending after five years. It is not uncommon at SOSU for applicants to pursue more than one application before being granted tenure. Dr. Tudor knows of two examples of active professors at SOSU who pursued multiple applications before obtaining tenure including the current chair of the Faculty Senate’s Personnel Policy Committee.

Applications for tenure are considered and voted on by a faculty committee. When Dr. Tudor applied for tenure in 2009 she was recommended by the Tenure Review Committee by a vote of 4-1, subsequently her department chair also recommended her for tenure and promotion. However, the dean and the vice president of academic affairs disregarded the committee’s recommendation and denied tenure, but refused to provide any explanation for the denial. The dean regularly refers to Dr. Tudor by the incorrect pronoun (i.e. “him”) although the dean is well aware that Dr. Tudor is female. Dr. Tudor filed an appeal with the Faculty Appellate Committee claiming that the dean’s and Dr. McMillan’s office did not provide her due process in explaining why tenure was denied. The Faculty Appellate Committee found in favor of Dr. Tudor, and directed the administration to provide Dr. Tudor with the reason(s) for its denial of tenure. SOSU’s administration determined that the appellate committee’s ruling was merely a recommendation and was not required to comply.

Dr. Tudor planned to re-apply for tenure in the 2010. However, before the application period began she received a memo from Dr. Doug McMillan stating that she would not be permitted to apply for tenure, alleging that Dr. Tudor’s application would “inflame the relationship between the administration and the faculty.” However, the timing of the memo immediately after SOSU was informed that Dr. Tudor had filed a discrimination complaint with the US Dept of Education suggests retaliation was the true cause of the administration’s action. Dr. Tudor is not aware of any other case in which an otherwise eligible professor has been forbidden to reapply for tenure. Dr. Tudor filed another grievance with the Faculty Appellate Committee, which again found in her favor. The decision was presented to the president’s designee, Mr. Ross Walkup. The president’s designee did not concur with the Faculty Appellate Committee’s decision, and Dr. Tudor appealed to the president of the university, Dr. Larry Minks. At the time of the filing of Dr. Tudor’s grievance the policy of SOSU provided that the Faculty Appellate Committee’s recommendation be given to the president’s designee who would in turn relay the recommendation directly to the president. However, the president’s designee, Ross Walkup, an employee in the university’s business office, refused to affirm the recommendation of the Faculty Appellate Committee. The administration amended the grievance policies to permit the president’s designee to issue his own separate recommendation to the president. Meanwhile, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution, without a single opposing vote, calling on the president to allow Dr. Tudor to apply for tenure. Eventually, the president issued a letter to Dr. Tudor denying her appeal citing, inter alia, a supposed lack of precedence for professors reapplying for tenure after denial (a fact readily regarded as untrue).

Dr. Tudor has exhausted her remedies at the university level. There is no other appellate process or avenue to pursue her grievance. Complaints are pending with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Oklahoma Human Rights Commission.

Tudor's own account of her path to termination can be found here. She is currently appealing her case to the State Board of Regents

While no outsider can speak with authority on a tenure process occurring elsewhere, such dissonance between faculty support for a colleague and administrative disdain for that same colleague is pretty compelling. Furthermore, transphobia aside, if this account is accurate, the university has violated its own policies to rid itself of a single professor, which is clearly illegal. As in many cases, administrators are probably betting on it that she will run out of resources before they do.

What can you do to help Professor Tudor? Meg Cotter-Lynch, Associate Professor of English asks you to:

1) Write a letter to the Oklahoma State Board of Regents asking them to direct President Minks to respect the decision of the Faculty Appellate Committee and the resolution of the Faculty Senate, renewing Rachel's contract and allowing her tenure case a fair, unbiased hearing. Their contact information is on Rachel's blog, linked above.

2) Spread word about this to interested colleagues and contacts, and ask them to write, as well. We are hopeful that public outcry may influence the Regents to reconsider President Minks' decision.

3) We would be particularly grateful for any contacts in the media and/or legal profession who might be willing to help.

Supporters take note: Professor Tudor's tenure case is surely not unconnected to other retractions, and standing limitations, of civil rights in Oklahoma. Is it any accident that Oklahoma is also way out front on eliminating a woman's right choose by banning all abortions after 20 weeks, and making it illegal for private insurers to cover "elective" abortion? That the Oklahoma House just voted to put an affirmative action ban on the 2012 ballot? That Oklahoma is one of four states to still list homosexuality as a criminal offense? I think not. So if you don't think trans issues are your issues, think again.

A final note: I and a great many of my friends who are trans-identified are very political people, and are very dedicated to social justice issues. But the vast majority of transpeople have many fewer resources than professional people do, may not have radical commitments and may simply want to live unremarkable lives. The kinds of humiliations, harassment and prejudice visited on one college professor are reproduced over and over again in places where human rights violations get significantly less attention than they will in any university, no matter how conservative it is. Trans kids spend whole days in pain because trips to the bathroom at school are so traumatic, and trans people are routinely discriminated against when trying to access housing, employment and the right to govern their own lives. So the next time you think it is "enough" progress to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) without full protections for transpeople, think about this:

The path to Professor Tudor's dismissal began by barring her from the women's bathroom.

I'm OK, You're (Really Not) OK: Memories of "An American Family"

2011-04-23T15:14:00.007-05:00

Tonight HBO rolls out "Cinema Vérité,"a movie, starring Tim Robbins and Diane Lane, about the making of the TV series "An American Family" (go here for a trailer.) My students can't imagine a world without reality TV, endless channels where you can test the authenticity of your own life and emotions against the appalling things that other people say and do. However, they probably also can't imagine being fifteen in the winter of 1973, as the Vietnam war was coming to its grisly end, and having the Loud family combust live, every Sunday night, on PBS. This is how one archive describes the series:

In 1971 filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond spent seven months documenting the day-to-day lives of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, CA, including parents William C. “Bill” and Pat Loud and their children Lance, Kevin, Grant, Delilah, and Michele. The resulting 12-hour documentary, "An American Family," debuted on PBS-TV in early 1973. The show captivated millions of viewers worldwide with its then-unconventional depiction of middle class American family life that encompassed the "real-life drama" of marital tensions and subsequent divorce, a son's openly gay life, and the effects of the changing concepts of the American family structure. Breaking apart from the traditional American family model of harmony and ideality portrayed in fictional television sitcoms of the early 1970s like "The Brady Bunch," the novelty and innovation of "An American Family" not only pioneered reality television, but also set the tone for the more complex family models exhibited in later shows such as "Roseanne" and "The Simpsons."

There was really nothing like it, I swear.

Nowadays, few people would ask, "Why would they do such a thing? Allow a film crew to follow them around for months?" Back then, that was part of the fascination. In the suburbs of Philadelphia the answer was arrived at quickly: the Louds lived in Santa Barbara, and people in southern California do all kinds of crazy $hit. Everyone knew that. But part of what was amazing about it to a teenager was the intimate glimpse of adult lives spinning out of control in exactly the way you knew they were spinning out of control down the street, or upstairs, but that no one was ever allowed to talk about. This was a moment in history where feminism was changing everything, but suburban women did not actually quite dig feminism. The sexual revolution and its attendant changes showed up a different way. Instead of doing consciousness raising, or succumbing to quiet despair, women had extra-marital sex with the tennis pro (male or female), drank a lot, and maybe left their marriages when their husband's drinking and screwing around finally got to them.

In the 1970s, women sometimes just left without telling anyone. I knew the parents of one friend were getting divorced, but one day, around the swimming pool I heard one mother whisper to another about the event that tipped the scales: "I've never heard of anything like it. She took off her shoes, walked down the beach with the lifeguard, and never came back." The image has stayed with me forever. Similarly, a college friend described her mother's departure from the family home: "Mom said she was going out to mail a letter," my friend said, after a few beers. "When we located her a month later, she was living with my social studies teacher."

On "An American Family" we got to watch things that were not unheard of, but were talked about in whispers if at all. They were things like: a son coming out as gay to his parents, heading off to live at the Chelsea Hotel and hang with Andy Warhol (wow! dude!); Pat Loud talking to her friends and to the camera crew about finding evidence of her husband Bill's affairs, since she was the book keeper for his business and paid credit card bills for trips he went on with, ahem, "Mrs. Loud;" the kids getting stoned; and Pat telling Bill, in front of a national audience, that she knew about his affairs, she was filing for divorce, and she was kicking him out of the house right now.

So needless to say, what surprised me about "An American Family" was not that these things happened, but that my parents let my sister and I watch them happen. Here is an important factoid about the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which culture was in terrible flux, and parents could say they didn't "approve" of The Rolling Stones and more or less enforce it: if it was on public television, it was OK. Seriously. Anything on public television was inherently safe to watch, whatever it was, even in Republican houses (which, by the way, ours was.)

But there was nothing safe about the Louds: nothing. That was why it was so cool, and I hope that "Cinema Vérité"captures that. For any number of uptight suburban kids it was our weird little Stonewall, the moment when we realized that not conforming, shucking the school uniform, was an option.

It Takes Dos Testiculos To Rule The Known World: A Brief Comment On "The Borgias"

2011-04-22T16:49:00.008-05:00

Jeremy Irons as il papa: Don't touch his junk, hear?

Q: What do you do when you discover that your Benedictine confessor is actually a Vatican spy, and you have just confessed your plan to have the King of France invade the Italian Peninsula to topple the papacy?

A: Take advantage of the screen in the confessional and stab him in the eye with a stiletto.

History fans will be pleased to know that the producers of The Tudors have debuted a series on late fifteenth century Italian politics, religion and family governance issues that make your problems look ridiculous. The Borgias stars Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia, or Pope Alexander VI, father of Cesare (pronounced CHAY-za-ray) and Lucrezia, reputed to have been incestuous lovers. Certainly the series has strongly hinted at incest: how many grown-up brothers stroke and kiss a sister on her wedding night? I ask you.

So far, it is 1492 or so, and we have met Niccolo Machiavelli, who is working for the King of Florence; an anonymous Native American snatched by Christopher Columbus; the serial killer son of the dotty and deaf King of Naples (this happy princeling displays corpses in his own little rotting Last Supper tableau); too many scheming cardinals to name; and Savanarola, a Dominican friar who looks like Uncle Fester. You don't even have to look it up on Wikipedia to know that this latter fellow is heading for a heresy trial and worse. However, if you do click on that link you will find that Savanarola was not only excommunicated and tried, but racked mercilessly and then burned into bits too tiny to be used as relics, which served him right because he may also have been responsible for the first act of institutional homophobia. In true Foucauldian fashion, prior to burning him, "the torturers spar[ed] only Savonarola’s right arm in order that he might be able to sign his confession." Brilliant. I wish I had thought of it myself. They knew how to keep order in the fifteenth century.

The success of such shows is part of an interesting phenomenon: the rise of religion on TV. In a recent post about Friday Night Lights, another one of my favorite shows, Flavia writes about unusual it is to watch a television show about modern life that takes Christianity for granted. "All of the characters appear to be nondenominational Protestants and some of their churches are clearly megachurches," she notes; "but nothing about their religiosity is depicted snidely or ironically or played for laughs. At the same time, the church-goers aren't romanticized or presented as unusually good people. They're just people: flawed, complicated people, trying to live up to their professed pieties. And as realistic as all that sounds, I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything like it on t.v."

That might be right, and may say something about the ways in which subcultural Christian media are going mainstream. Army Wives certainly has its moments where it is clear that God is lurking in the background; and Big Love has introduced a popular audience to the intricacies of the Church of Latter Day Saints. But shows like The Tudors and The Borgias go one step further and teach a lesson about what religion, and the political struggles that revolved around the evolution of Catholicism and Protestant dissent actually have to do with how world history unfolded. A keen watcher of The Tudors, for example, would think about how one lived from day to day in a culture that was framed by the mandatory celebration of key moments in the life of Christ. No sooner was Christmas over than one began prepping for Lent; following Easter, the various days of obligation and days of ascension never stopped until a good Christian was getting ready for Advent and gearing up for Christmas again. As the series progressed, moreover, a non-specialist understood that casting doubt on the deference of Kings to the Pope pretty much put every other fixed principle in play, particularly the "natural order" of gender that would ultimately result in England getting her first Queens and the eventual rule of commoners over both church and crown.

So far the most interesting thing I have learned from The Borgias, other than how to kill people with whatever tools the fifteenth century made available, was that back then the Pope had to be examined after the election to make sure he was actually a man. This had to be one of the worst jobs in Rome: crouching under a cleric's icky business to make sure he had, as the examiner announced,"Dos testiculos" (this was how they put it on Episode One) or "two balls, and they are well-hung," as I have found it described on several web sites. There is some disagreement as to whether this ritual actually happened or not: apparently this had to do with Pope John VIII, a superb intellect elected in 855, who turned out to be Pope Joan. Rumour has it she was discovered after she gave birth in the street during a papal procession and was executed, with her lover, on the spot. (I know: scholars who really know this field are going to ask me why I would go to a website called Papal Trivia: Fun Facts About the Popes for my information.)

Like The Tudors, The Borgias is also about how political structures and organized crime are more or less interchangeable forms of domination. The latter show is particularly striking in this regard, as the actors keep dropping family names that we are actually familiar with from The Sopranos. In other ways, The Borgias is just another juiced up soap opera that makes it clear how difficult it is to run a family when you are responsible for the spiritual and political fate of the known world. This responsibility requires dropping several bodies in every episode. In episode four, we see a garroting ("you use a cheese cutter," the assassin explains to Cesare, who has never seen someone dispatched this way), a stabbing, a snapped neck, and a poisoning gone wrong that has to be finished off with an inexpert smothering. These things must be done, there is no question, lest the Church fall into the grip of folks like, say, the Medecis, who in 1492 were still running a bank in Florence and biding their sweet time.

One of the show's signature moments, used in all the ads, has Rodrigo staring into the camera (this is early in the first episode, right after Cardinal Borgia has given Cesare his marching orders for how to buy the papacy) and murmuring intensely: "I will not forgive failure!" This sums it up: what responsible father of successful children would forgive failure?

Please Don't Flame The Students: Or, How (Not) To Interact With Young Conservatives

2011-04-21T17:19:00.017-05:00

Ellen Lewin, Professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Iowa, has become the object of unwelcome attention in the past several days. After having received numerous emails from the Iowa College Republicans advertising various liberal-needling events, Lewin snapped. The author and co-editor of numerous valuable books and anthologies in lesbian and gay studies replied: "F**CK YOU, REPUBLICANS!"

Oh, the emails we wish we could take back. Read about it in the Des Moines Register, and view the original emails here.

What is OK -- and not OK -- to say to students? Let me speak from experience, having never sent a written message to a student or group of students that was as elegant in its simplicity as Lewin's. Last fall I did write a much longer email to one of the students responsible for the "affirmative action bake sale" held at Zenith on October 29 2010. This was a cynical event that -- in the name of anti-racism -- articulated all students of color as unworthy of having been admitted to the school under the high standards set by we white folks.

Following an inspiring meeting organized by students of color, I wrote one of the leaders of the group that sponsored the "bake sale" about why I was critical of it. She passed the email on to numerous conservative websites which reprinted it with accompanying derisive commentary. One described it as a "rant" despite an accurate reprinting of the original message. (Interestingly, some conservative commenters on the same website disagreed, describing my email as respectful and reasonable.) At National Review Online, my message to the student was characterized as "logically bankrupt" and "obviously an attempt at intimidation." The name of the student was redacted in this article, presumably to protect her from others like me on the Zenith faculty, although if you Google "Cardinal Conservatives" her name is perfectly available. The idea, of course, was to portray this student as a helpless victim of my excessive, unregulated power. The narrative goes this way: conservative students are brave for confronting liberal faculty on their candya$$ views; liberal faculty are not entitled to disagree with conservative students because it is inherently abusive for faculty to disagree with students about politics.

This is all to say that redacting the young woman's name was strategic on the part of the author, Mytheos Holt, a former Zenith student who specialized in baiting people for publicity when he was an undergrad and now writes for NRO Online and other conservative sites. Holt is, perhaps, best remembered by the Zenith faculty for having used the phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei" in a campus newspaper article about the Obama victory and having to admit afterward that he hadn't been aware that this was the famous phrase over the gate at Auschwitz (so much for a liberal arts education.) The original article that contained these words also included an attempt to explain the depth of Mytheos's pain at John McCain's loss with the following simile: "my response to this election is probably quite similar to the response of the death row inmate who finally finds himself obliged to sit in the electric chair: no matter how long you have expected something unpleasant, it still hurts when it happens."

Having a private email, however dignified, reprinted multiple times taught me an important lesson that Professor Lewin has learned as well. It is a common strategy for conservative student groups to make every possible effort to get in the faces of faculty in order to provoke a response that will "expose" our inherent desire to oppress them and limit the expression of their ideas. Hence, when faced with such opportunities, however compelling, it is often best not to respond at all. The kind of emails Professor Lewin got about such things as "The Animal Rights Barbecue" ought to go straight to Trash, and to the Spam file if you are computer-savvy enough organize it. Looking back on it, I would still publicly support the students of color who organized against the "affirmative action bake sale." They did a great job, and they deserved to know that faculty had their backs on an important social justice issue. But if I had it to do over again I would not write an email expressing my views to that conservative student, nor will I ever do so again outside of an exchange related to academics.

This is not because it caused me any official trouble, or because in retrospect I believe that writing a student about an action I disapproved of was actually abusive. I didn't mind that the email exceeded its audience, although I did think it was dishonorable of the student to distribute it without my permission. I always like a little extra publicity from the NRO (it spices things up chez Radicale) or any other publication that chooses to link me. No -- I would not write this email because it was a waste of time to accept an invitation to dialogue with conservative students when, in fact, all these groups want is more ammunition to pursue an endless culture war while the world burns down around all of us and Citibank turns our pockets inside out.

The student was not interested in generating a dialogue that did not privilege her point of view, with me or with anyone else. Similarly, Professor Lewin's students did not genuinely want her to attend their event or talk to her about their opposition to animal rights. Of course, "F**K YOU REPUBLICANS" can, by no stretch of the imagination, be viewed as an invitation to dialogue either, but I think what Professor Lewin meant was "Please take me off your mailing list." Activist conservatives, particularly young ones who are trained by skilled organizers, view themselves as crusaders, not as citizens working to build democratic alliances. They are only interested in generating publicity, not in working out solutions to common problems. Part of that crusade is to provoke liberal faculty into what can then be publicized as intolerance and discrimination which, in turn, "reveals" them as hypocrites and liars. So the next time you get one of these emails, imagine this voice booming over a loudspeaker: "Sir, move away from the computer. Now, sir....please.... step away from the computer......"

And if you can't seem to do that, at least pry the "F" key off your keyboard.

Wednesday Writing Fun With Mary Beth Norton: How To Write A Trilogy

2011-04-20T11:24:00.004-05:00

At the newly redesigned History News Network, Cornell Historian Mary Beth Norton gives great advice on "How To Write A Trilogy Without Really Trying." What's her secret? Don't tell anyone that you're doing it. After publishing your prize-winning first book, jump into a new field (in Norton's case, women's history) that's raising a lot of important questions, then publish a second book that turns Early American history on its head. Realize that you aren't done, and over the course of the next thirty years turn out volumes two and three (in reverse order, no less!), as well as numerous other books, articles and a widely-used textbook. Easy-peasy!

As usual, Norton has chosen a great title for a great blog past that actually explains how an entire intellectual career has unfolded up to this point. Why is it a great title, other than the obvious allusion? Because no one who knows her would ever accuse Mary Beth Norton of "not really trying." Ever. At anything. You heard it here first.

Along this journey, Norton enriched her analysis by folding in new intellectual developments that were changing history as a field: she mastered the histories of gender and sexuality, as well as Atlantic Studies. She brought the trilogy to a crescendo (a?) this month with Separated by Their Sex: Women In Public And Private In the Colonial Atlantic World (Cornell, 2011). "And so my unintended trilogy on the theme of gender and political power in early America is complete," she concludes. "Research for it led me in each iteration in so many unexpected directions that I do not know what to anticipate as I embark on a new project, that long-postponed look at the years immediately prior to the American Revolution. But I do know that the book, informed by the past decades of work on the trilogy and its sidelight volume, will be very different from that I would have researched and written in the 1970s."

Stay tuned: the end of one thing is often t he beginning of another, and I wouldn't expect the announcement of Norton's next trilogy until at least 2030 or 2040.

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun: The Radical Responds To Her Critics

2011-04-19T13:40:00.009-05:00

Tenured radical faculty have too much, others have nothing.

This is a follow-up on yesterday's post, which unexpectedly turned into a brawl. Late-night anonymous commenters had issues with my inability to recognize that they are always right and that I am causing their oppression. How did this happen?

Let's roll the videotape:

I suggested (I deliberately did not make this a law, because I do not believe in coercion and I use my super powers with restraint and wisdom) that people who take full-time visiting faculty jobs should make themselves available to work full time, as opposed to teaching one or two days a week because they are traveling several hours each way from Big City. Fulfilling this obligation (something that would be a normal expectation anywhere but in academia and e-trading) could mean moving to or near the place of employ, or making arrangements to spend several nights a week there. I also suggested that if full time visitors were not going to do this, they should be responsible for actually getting themselves to the work site (a.k.a., skool) without assistance from the super-privileged tenured faculty who committed the crime of hiring them in the first place.

It turned out I was wrong about this, and that these are all not only highly retrograde notions unworthy of a true Radical, but also evidence of my secret affiliations with the radical right. "About as 'Radical' as Don Chafin, I'd say," sniffs Anonymous 5:40 (I had to look that one up, not being well versed in the history of union-busting coal industry minions.) "TR, you say it's 'just advice,'" Anonymous 12:29 summed up in hir closing argument to the jury. "Fine. But it's clear enough from your post that YOU are the one negatively judging those adjuncts who dare to hold on to their connections in other places. YOU'RE the one who feels offended by this practice, even though this practice is a totally rational labor response to a short-term, low-wage job contract." Yes, and it would be a totally rational response on MY part to fire YOUR sorry a$$ for putting in minimal time for the actual job I had hired YOU to do.

Actually, I have had two homes for most of my adult life, which was expensive as all get out, particularly when I was in a visiting gig early in my career. Subsequently, I commuted between Zenith and New York for over fifteen years. I had two homes that I eventually gave up for one home in New Haven, from whence I commute 30 minutes a day, three to five days a week. My point of view was that this was better than not working at what I wanted to do for a living. But things have changed, I guess, since I was a young Radical (favorite comment from one of the multiple blog posts elsewhere sending me the hate? "I want to rename her Tenured Liberal!" Yes, you do that. Sounds like a devastating criticism anyone would take to heart, even me.) The commenters above and others like them are clear: moving somewhere for a year, renting a room a couple nights a week, or taking responsibility for your own transportation to fulfill the terms of a full-time salaried, contract without any guarantee this will lead to future success or the lifetime security of tenure is something only ordinary people without PH.D.'s should have to do.

Well God Bless, and good luck. And the next time you decide to police the content of my blog, and reprove me for being condescending, be warned: act like d00shb@g$, and the condescension veers way out of control. Sorry. Like the relentlessly condescending/entertaining Rachel Maddow Show, Tenured Radical is not intended for children. It may include adult themes, hard language, nudity, and all minors should be accompanied by a parent, guardian or dissertation advisor. )

In other news, readers who perceive tenured faculty as responsible for the death of their life prospects are going to be really upset when they see this one. When we weren't looking, an administrator acquired two administrative jobs, 1,000 miles apart, that gross him $212 large a year. Talk about a highway flyer! According to Inside Higher Ed:

Donald Green is executive vice president of instruction and student services at Florida State College at Jacksonville, where he has worked since 1998. He is also, concurrently, the acting senior vice president of academic affairs at Essex County College, in New Jersey, where he has been working 15-20 hours a week as a consultant since last October.

Essex CC is actually paying Green as a consultant, at a rate of $130 an hour, which means he gets his benefits in Florida, Governor Chris Christie will be relieved to know. This is probably about $127.75 more per hour than the adjunct profs teaching Humanities 101 are making, and $105.10 per hour more than full-time instructional staff.

While it isn't clear that Green has done anything illegal, it does appear that the guy had all kinds of paid sick days, vacation time and what not to fly up to the Garden State for a week or so at a time to be an adjunct administrator of sorts. Marcella Washington, a political science prof at FSC, says that the faculty is investigating. Full-time faculty members work "more than 40 hours per week" at FSC and administrators should at least be putting in their full forty. "If we are truly giving all we have to our students, we don’t have time for another job. For [Green] to have another full-fledged job to put in 20 hours a week is just not giving all the attention and concern to Florida State College. It’s unacceptable behavior. [From an administrator], it just doesn’t set a good example.”

Interestingly, if you scroll down yesterday's comments you will get to "Christopher" who also had two jobs for a year, his regular adjunct gigs (three different jobs, it sounds like) and a one-year visiting slot with benefits that he was able to land in the same town.

The one year gig was a 3/3 and paid $46k. Except, I'm used to 6/6 and even 7/7, so 3/3 was a snap. I kept 3 of my adjunct gigs, and pocketed the $46k plus another $18k, give or take. Nice. Plus, the FT gig provided health insurance, and so I made sure during that year to have every test known to medical science done. I'm good. For now.

The more salient fact, though, is that when the FT gig was done, I still had employment. Yes, it was back to the adjunct pool, but that's certainly better than nothing.

I suppose folks could call me out for gaming the system. Right. Go for it. Sue me, or something.

Dude! I think people are not calling you out because they are in awe of you, as well they should be. Consider yourself invited for a guest post.

Are You Getting Your Adjunct On? A Few Do's And Don'ts For New Members Of The Adjunct Army

2011-04-18T06:30:00.017-05:00

Course by course, we build the nation!

Nick Parker's article about "The Adjunct Economy" in Boston.com is a must-read for anyone in a tenured or a tenure-track job, mainly because our lives are structured so as to obscure the way the majority of our fellow scholars live and work. As Parker, who teaches at Babson College, notes, adjuncts dominate the academic labor force and have become the new normal. In Massachusetts, there are over 19,000 adjuncts at work, "nearly 60 percent of the 32,000 or so faculty members in the state," Parker writes. "When you factor in graduate-student teachers, who often lead the discussion sections in math and science courses, the figure tops 70 percent."

This isn't just a community college, or public university, issue. For example, did you send your kid to Harvard to be taught by Nobel Prize winners? Think again. "At Harvard, adjuncts accounted for 57 percent of the faculty in 2005," Parker writes; "At Boston University that year, they made up 70 percent. And over the last three decades, the number of adjuncts employed across the country skyrocketed by 210 percent while tenure-track faculty hirings rose merely 7 percent." Yes, things have gotten worse. But even before the financial crisis, at Zenith we were approving faculty privileges for two and half pages of adjuncts (single spaced) at the beginning of every academic year.

If you are a newly minted (or not-quite hatched) PH.D. in the social sciences or humanities, you are most likely to be teaching as an adjunct in the fall (guess what? post-doc is now frequently just a fancy name for "full-time adjunct.") You are also hoping to leverage this into what used to be known in the profession as "a real job."

Here are a few hints for you:

Do finish your dissertation/get your book proposal out/get an article circulating. I know that you love, love, love teaching. But guess what? Everyone does, or claims they do, and it's still the people who finish things and publish them in prestigious locations who have a shot at a career in teaching, not the people who love teaching more than anyone else does, hold a quazillion office hours and over-enroll their courses. Those of you who immerse yourselves in teaching during that first year out as an adjunct as if you were in a tenure-track job are doing something wonderful for your students, but are cheating yourselves. The quickest way to remain an adjunct is to devote yourself to what adjuncts do: teaching core courses competently and creatively to full, or over-full, houses.

Don't listen to senior colleagues who tell you that there will soon be a line in your field and that you are ideally positioned for it. Gah! Every time I hear this -- and I have been hearing it for my entire career -- I wish I had a photograph of the Road to Hell, which is, I am convinced, paved with adjunct faculty who were fed this line. The idea that you actually have some control over your fate is attractive, I know, but the fact is, in a two decade career I know exactly three people who were hired by a school they were teaching for as adjuncts. I have, however, known dozens of people who have felt angry and betrayed because they were assured that this adjunct job was a stepping-stone to a bright future at that very same institution. Then, either no job was established in the field, or worse, someone shiny and new waltzed into the search and made them seem so Last Year in the eyes of the department. Strangely, this seems to happen to people in women's studies, ethnic studies, queer studies....there's a theme here, but I can't quite grasp what it is......

Never mind. An adjunct job is an adjunct job. It is temporary. Don't forget that. And if you have been hired as an adjunct at a very prestigious school it has the highest likelihood of being temporary, although it may be a nice wedge into a good job elsewhere.

Do move, or at least rent a room, if you must commute to a full-time adjunct position. There is nothing more annoying than hiring someone to do full-time visiting work and then have them work essentially part-time because it isn't a tenure-track job. Full time means 3-4 days a week, depending on the teaching schedule you are assigned; it means meeting with your students in office hours; and it means meeting with your students outside of office hours if they can't make it in the two hours you have decided you are willing to contribute outside of class. It means not pestering people you barely know for rides to and from the train station because you got a visiting slot in Bumpuddle, RI, but you don't want to give up your apartment in Cambridge because you heard there will be a great job at MIT next year.

However, the other reason to establish a presence is that this is an opportunity for you to actually do your work in a community of scholars, and to wean yourself from your primary identification with your graduate school. While it is foolish to commit yourself to them in ways that detract from your scholarship, a year in a department is potentially a year of new readers, new discussions, and new people to support your career. How can they do that if you aren't there?

Don't get involved in student politics. Particularly at small liberal arts colleges, particularly if you are faculty of color, or queer, or working class, students will be enraptured by you. They will bring little projects to you like cats dropping off mouse carcasses at the foot of the bed at 3 A.M. Don't get involved in their "fight" for ethnic/queer/disability studies, most especially if that was what you were hired to teach. Why? Because lurking behind your efforts is always the fantasy that you are creating a job for yourself and it's not true. Also, you will make yourself noxious to your colleagues, many of whom may support the agenda at hand, but will have a better sense than you do of what the institution will and will not support. Yes, there should be a permanent line in Martian Studies rather than a revolving door of adjuncts, and yes, it does say something about how Martians are marginalized in the university that there is not. But it ain't your problem.

Do expand your view of what you are willing to do to work in higher education, keep your scholarship going and build a rewarding career. Most institutions are subtracting full-time faculty and adding administrators: it's the cold, hard truth. Many administrators also teach, and it is not beyond reason that a person with a high scholarly profile who has stepped off the tenure-track might end up with a terrific and interesting job. Instead of obsessing about all that time you "wasted" in graduate school preparing for the tenure track job that doesn't exist, have lunch with archivists, people from the grants office, university press editors, deans, media and oral history project directors, and the people who do co-curricular planning. You don't need tenure to have a secure or rewarding life in academia. What tenure does is make a lot of decisions for you, and leave you free-ish to do your writing. But although the tenure-track job holds out the potential for security, it also places constraints and burdens on you that other jobs do not. It is worth thinking about whether the advantages of such work are really worth what you are putting into the project of finding a job as a scholar-teacher.

Don't get angry about being an adjunct. The real problem right now is that education is in chaos. It seems pretty clear that there is no commitment among private or public institutions to return to full-time labor, and this situation is unlikely to get better in the time frame you need to establish a life and a pension plan. Be clear about why you have decided to teach adjunct and what it has to do with moving forward in your life project. Rethink this continually, and be entirely selfish in the decisions you make. Anger at others -- your undergraduate mentors for "lying" to you about graduate school (they may well have, but what did you want from it?); your graduate mentors for not having enough influence; your current employer for exploiting you (because people aren't exploited in other professional occupations, I guess) -- is unproductive and pointless. Anger, IMHO, is often a symptom of a deep-seated shame about not having succeeded in a tangible way, and a strategy for deflecting that shame onto others because it is too darn painful. You need to address this if it is so, because you have nothing to be ashamed of.

Anger in itself is not a terrible thing, and appropriately directed, it can lead to constructive action. But inappropriately directed, it can cause you to start acting like a crazy person over time, which diminishes the possibility that you will acquire allies to help you move your career forward in any way at all.

Do join the union if there is one. You think you aren't "like" those other people? Oh yes. You are.

Should They Stay Or Should They Go? A Few Thoughts On Who Is "Supposed" To Be In College

2011-04-14T08:49:00.008-05:00

I have been reading a variety of books and articles in the past year that question the utility of going to college at all, much less whether it matters in the course of a life whether a young person decides to go to a selective, private college. If you are a famous actress, for example, it might not. Yesterday, "Kaiser," who blogs at CeleBitchy, mused about Emma Watson (of Harry Potter fame) and her decision to drop out of Brown, at least temporarily, because she holds herself to such high standards. According to the AP story Kaiser quotes:

Watson has always been studious. She enrolled to study liberal arts at Rhode Island’s Brown University in 2009. But being a movie star and an Ivy League student took its toll, and she says commuting back and forth to the U.S. left her stressed out. Ever the perfectionist, Watson couldn’t stand delivering a below-average performance, so she took some time off. How very Hermione.

“I just knew I was going to be beating myself up because I wasn’t going to be able to be doing the best that I knew that I could at school or in my job,” she said. “If I’d been getting B’s or C’s I would’ve been really upset.”

We all would have been really upset. What a thoughtful person. Exactly the kind of rational individual who is ideally positioned to take advantage of a liberal arts education.

And now let's hear from the other kids, the ones who don't have film and modeling careers to distract them.

Currently, I am reading In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic by the mysterious Professor X whose initial thoughts on this matter were published in The Atlantic in June 2008. A teacher of expository writing, who ended up in this position in the first place because he bought too much house and needed a second job, Professor X's argument is that the vast majority of people who end up in our community college system don't belong in college at all -- and wouldn't be in college if the United States didn't have a collective fantasy that higher education is a prerequisite for even the lowest paid work.

Needless to say, one powerful message In The Basement of the Ivory Tower delivers is how profoundly different the lives of academics are, not just because our students are sorted and tracked at an early age by testing, poverty and race, but because many of the students in most need of close attention and the time to reflect, read and learn to express themselves are the least likely to have that opportunity. Furthermore, a community college campus may be running two entirely different schools in the same space. By day, tenured faculty and long-term adjuncts teach students who may indeed go on to a B.A.: you might be interested to know that a number of these students end up at places like Zenith. They transfer in during sophomore or junior year, and do very well despite the fact that they haven't had access to the kind of curricula that elite liberal arts colleges see as a crucial foundation to upper level work. Other than intelligence, one reason for this in my view is a higher degree of maturity and commitment to their courses than many students (who have taken this opportunity for granted) have.

By night, however, Professor X describes classrooms given over to the generation of tuition revenues, paid by working people who don't give a rat's a$$ about literature, can't write or put together a coherent thought, and are taking an Associate's degree because they can't advance in their ill-paid jobs without it. Why, Professor X asks us, do we force dental technicians to read Wallace Stevens? And why do we cycle students through the same course that they have failed before because we think that writing a coherent essay has something to do with putting in a Foley catheter or making sure all the right boxes on the income tax forms are filled out properly?

It's not a dumb question, except that it misses what is for me a crucial point: if we are educating large numbers of people inappropriately, and at great expense to them, what would it mean to educate people well? While Professor X displays a high level of devotion to his students, the "realism" that he insists we adopt towards community college students, as taxpayers and as citizens, verges so closely on contempt for them that the book can be a difficult read. Granted, many students come to community college (or Zenith, for that matter) needing to be brought up to speed on things they never learned in high school. The gap in some cases is far greater than it is in others. But is that a reason to throw in the towel on college?

A redeeming feature of this book is that Professor X sees faculty and students as having ended up in the same canoe, up the same $hit creek, and without a paddle between them. "Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up," he writes.

I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.

You've got the message (the guy does have an MFA after all): garbage in, garbage out.

That Professor X is an "accidental academic" speaks volumes, in the sense of how much public policymakers now prize the voices of "outsiders" to the profession of education, as well as the opinions of successful businesspeople and politicians (for whom having gone to school is qualification enough to play a decisive role in shaping public education.) We who have made careers in higher ed, the reasoning goes, are far too immersed in our tenure systems, our unions, and our persnickety claptrap about committee work to understand "the big picture." We are myopic. We are perpetual adolescents who have fled from the challenges of the "real world" and pursued graduate educations that suit us for nothing better than to return to school for the rest of our natural lives ("Those who can't do, teach/Those who can't teach, teach gym," they are snickering in the New Jersey and Wisconsin governor's mansions.)

It's a surprise we are able to pull ourselves together to pay our taxes every year.

It's also not an accident that Professor X's day job is in government: a self-confessed bureaucrat of some kind, he is no stranger to waste, mismanagement, and the outdated social theories that throw money at problems, as if money solved anything. Indeed, that only a fraction of X's students are able to move successfully through the courses he teaches, and that a dramatically large number fail the same course repeatedly without apparently ever having had a clue what their own failure to do the work had to do with the outcome, is a compelling argument for cutting education budgets and excluding people from college altogether.

And yet: what does it really mean about us as a society that we are able to tolerate, simultaneously, such vast gaps in educational opportunity, and such profound contempt for those people to whom we literally give almost nothing for their hard-earned tuition dollars: not a clean classroom, not a professional teacher, not access to writing centers, not a class that meets before 10 P.M., not child care?

When I taught community college as an adjunct over twenty years ago, we received repeated memoranda reminding us to drop students from the roster if they missed two classes. Early on, I learned to throw these away without a thought, particularly since there were no administrators around between 7 and 10 in the evening when my two classes met. But it seemed obvious that these policies were intended to weed as many students out of the system as possible -- after, of course, having snarfed up their nonrefundable tuition dollars. For most students, missing two classes by midterm was routine: babysitters not showing up, a spouse having to pull an extra shift unexpectedly, a relative falling into the hands of the law, housing court -- you name it, they were derailed by it. Compare these to the equally good reasons I get from my current students for not coming to class ("I'm really stressed;" "My father's travel agent bought me the wrong plane ticket;" "my best friend is getting married in France;" "my roommate has been really upset lately") and ask yourself: why are these working people not due the same care and consideration that we assume those who pay far higher tuition deserve?

Give Me A T For Texas: Tuesday Tenure Report

2011-04-12T06:38:00.005-05:00

Another take on the path towards tenure

Where, oh where, has the Radical been? Well, many places, but the most recent impediment to posting has been the end of honors thesis season, which requires time-consuming, line-by-line scrutiny of all outgoing chapters. But by today, the little birds will have flown the coop once and for all and I am once again left to my feckless ways. A good scrounge through my Google reader shows that others have been busy out there, however, so with out further ado:

Just in Case You Were Curious: According to the campus newspaper, the Trinitonian, Trinity University of San Antonio Texas is making the institutional case for tenure. In an article that does a good job of explaining to students what tenure is and how faculty achieve it, Michael Fischer, vice president of Academic Affairs, “There are very good historical reasons for tenure and particularly in this political environment, there is even a greater reason for tenure, because tenure allows academics to say things that are unpopular,” Ahlburg said. “Without the protection of tenure, it would most likely lead to their removal, and that could be at a state institution by shutting off funds.” John Huston, chair of the economics department, argues in the same piece that tenure has other advantages for a teaching institution. “There are great advantages of having your faculty tied to your institution," he says; "So that their interests are aligned more with the institution’s interests. I know that I am going to be at Trinity for a large chunk of my career, so I have Trinity’s interests at heart and I think that’s a real plus of the tenure system.”

Other college administrators might want to take a page out of Trinity's book. My faith in the electorate's ability to reason is currently at an all-time low. But perhaps if colleges, universities and public school systems went on the offense and explained what tenure actually does, and why the ideal, mobile workforce that neoliberal and conservative policy makers imagine is not good for education it might make blowhards pols like Chris Christie and Scott Walker look like the anti-labor, anti-education governors that they are?

Update on DePaul University Tenure Bias Case: Back in February, I reported on the personnel troubles at DePaul University in Chicago, where 22 white faculty were awarded tenure last year and all six scholars of color were denied tenure. Those denied tenure, and a large number of their supporters on the faculty (who I'm guessing are white, if these numbers represent a trend) say there is a pattern of discrimination, and lawsuits have been filed. Philosophy prof Namita Goswami got the AAUP involved (excellent move, in my experience) and a summary of their summary of the case follows:

Goswami, who has a PhD from Emory University, was hired by the DePaul philosophy department in 2003 to teach "critical race and feminist theory." Between then and now she's published numerous journal articles, written a book that's under contract with SUNY Press, and won DePaul's highest teaching honor, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award, along with two competitive research fellowships. In spite of all that, somewhere along the way, the philosophy department decided she wasn't such a good fit.

Two years ago an ad hoc committee of the department made an attempt to get her terminated before her probationary appointment was even over. Among their complaints, according to the AAUP report: she didn't attend enough department events during a one academic year, "has interests other than continental philosophy"—notably, women's studies, which is integral to what she was hired to teach—and isn't fluent in German, though she speaks five other languages.

According to the AAUP report, written by Saint Xavier University history professor Peter N. Kirstein, this ad hoc committee essentially sought to "cashier Dr. Goswami for engaging in research that a majority find objectionable: Mainly doing her job as a scholar in postcolonial theory, critical race and feminist theory, and linking them to the discipline of philosophy." The AAUP concluded that Goswami was "excelling," and that her academic freedom had been violated by her department, in which "there appears to be a club-like atmosphere and a narrow perception of the discipline."

I've seen this story over and over again. It is the fundamental flaw of top-down diversity polices by administrations who refuse to also reform the tenure process. Departments that have historically failed to see the value in new scholarship are given all kinds of enlightenment points for hiring candidates that meet university criteria for diversity, but are then given a free hand to harass and dump them according to internal "standards" that have been left undisturbed. Someone could do the profession a great service by providing the comparative tenure data on this across institutions.

It's Only Good If You Can Get It: In Discover magazine, science blogger "Julianne" recently posted "How To Get Tenure At Almost Every Other Research University," a response to her colleague "Sean"'s "How To Get Tenure At A Major University." Sean's piece includes helpful hints under subheadings like "Be a productive genius" ($hit! That's where I went wrong!) As Julianne writes,

Personally, I found Sean’s advice really really dispiriting, and it probably would have freaked me out to read it as a postdoc. And yet, I find myself with “tenure at a major research university” without ever having lost sleep to fears about achieving seemingly impossible standards. I worked steadily, but not insanely. I had a couple of kids. I “dabbled” in other research areas, some of which turned into major research areas down the road. And it worked out (although, it likely wouldn’t have “worked out” if I was at Chicago or Caltech).

Julianne's advice follows more along the lines of demonstrating that you have "traction," as she calls it, which is imprecise but I think some of the best advice I have heard in any field. What she means by this is: have a research program, do it well, demonstrate that you are moving forward in a substantive way. Every once in a while, she suggests, it isn't such a bad idea to take a risk. While establishing a whole parallel track that isn't likely to pay off in any discernible way, a risk could amplify the direction you are already taking. "A colleague and I have had many discussions about the fact that, because we were more than willing to leave academia, we were more willing to take risks," Julianne writes. " These risks paid off in more interesting research than the path we were headed down as young postdocs."

You Might Not Want To Try This At Home: Techdirt reports that Michel Aaij of the Department of English and Philosophy at Auburn University Montgomery added his Wikipedia entries to his tenure dossier and they were a hit. Aaij has apparently been doing some on the ground work to persuade his colleagues that on-line media represents important scholarly contributions, and voila, they became believers. "It certainly would be nice if the overly broad anti-Wikipedia bias in academia was starting to fade," Techdirt notes. "Of course, it's important to point out that it wasn't just Wikipedia edits on his application [for tenure], but either way, it appears that his colleagues are gaining increasing respect for work done on Wikipedia in addition to traditional journals."

One caveat: I love Wikipedia, but it isn't a journal. Adjust your vita accordingly.

And now, to start your day on a happy note, in honor of Trinity College, here is 1976 concert footage of Lynyrd Skynyrd doing an old Jimmie Rodgers standard ("woman made a fool out of me.")

Tremble Administrative Swine: Reports From The Field On Sexual Assault

2011-04-05T06:02:00.001-05:00


How about we go to court on our first date?

Tenured Radical is out of town and a little slow on the flip-flop lately, but here's news: following an incident in which fraternity pledges chanted sexist slurs on the Old Campus last fall, sixteen Yale students have filed charges with the federal government that Yale University has a sexually hostile environment. As CBS News reported in its online edition,

“What we’re saying is that Yale, in its failure to respond to both public and private instances of sexual harassment and sexual assault, has said to the campus ‘this is OK’,” said plaintiff Alexandra Brodsky.

That belief pushed Brodsky, Hannah Zeavin, and 14 other men and women at Yale to file a complaint, charging the university has repeatedly failed to take action on harassment and sex crimes, including rape.

The students, who include men and women, are alleging a Title IX violation, and the Department of Education has launched an investigation

This follows on the occupation of an administrative building at Dickinson College earlier this semester by students demanding that anti-rape efforts be jacked up at that school. Here's a hint, ladies: if you've asked for action at your school and they don't hire anyone, if your school offers "consent training" rather than anti-rape workshops, they don't open a women's center, faculty are not receiving mandatory sexual harassment training, and the bulk of the website on rape is still devoted to all the things you, as a woman, can do to "avoid" being raped -- your school might benefit from a Title IX investigation too.

What's Cookin' In Higher Ed? The Race To Become The Stupidest State In The Union

2011-03-30T11:25:00.007-05:00

Do I smell a conservative advocacy group in Florida too?

A young friend of ours recently visited a public college which we at Tenured Radical have admired for years. S/he reported conversations with undergraduates about the effects of the persistent defunding of higher ed in that state, and the ways in which defunding has diminished a quality liberal arts education that people with very little money still have access to. A prominent problem, in the view of students there, was incessant faculty turnover due to low salaries, poorly maintained library collections and the erosion of benefits. In turn, the constant loss of faculty made it difficult to establish mentoring relationships, get recommendations for graduate school, or do senior honors work with faculty who had helped them develop the research and had planned to advise it.

The notion that college teachers are as interchangeable as hamburger flippers at Wendy's follows, of course, on the neoliberal notion that secondary school teachers are also interchangeable. Furthermore, on no evidence, free marketeers have sold the notion that college professors will continue to work cheerfully, and to a high standard, for as little salary and as few benefits as colleges and universities choose to pay us. The only teachers you really want at your school, the logic goes, have the personalities of 18th century Franciscan missionaries in the New World, willing to sign on to thankless, ill-paid labor purely out of love for those to whom they will minister. Although this theory goes unspoken in an increasingly adjunctified world of private higher education, attacks on educational employees in New Jersey, California and Wisconsin seem to be giving new energy to strategies for disempowering and intimidating teachers at all levels. This is particularly heartbreaking in states that seem to want to break with a long history of providing quality, public higher education to ambitious students with little money.

One problem with free market theories for reorganizing education is that they lead to a free market in educators. This, in turn tends not to be conducive to what administrators need to deliver a quality education to students: faculties who commit to a particular school, and create a culture of excellence, over the long term. Policy makers who believe that free market competition creates better education for the most people have, frankly, never been in a classroom beyond their three-year hitch at Teach for America. While I don't know anyone in teaching who wouldn't consider voluntarily sacrificing money and prestige to make and keep a desired life as a college professor, I also don't know a single college professor who, on balance, believes that year to year contracts, no job security, diminishing benefits and the lowest possible pay are the basis for building a career in education.

Tell that to the Florida legislature. Florida, of course, has been a leader in defunding education, (recently ranking 36th nationally in per pupil spending, ahead of luminaries like Mississippi) and in pioneering a terrific policy that gives troubled schools in poor districts even less money to work with (repackaged by the Obama administration as "Race to the Top.") Now it appears that Florida Republicans now want to do for higher ed what they have accomplished at the secondary level. Word out of Florida today is that a bill that would prohibit the granting of tenure at state and community colleges went through a legislative committee yesterday and is headed to the state senate. Faculty would work on annual contracts but administrators would not; only new and untenured faculty would be affected by the law. As Denise -Marie Balona of the Orlando Sentinel reports,

Opponents argue it would prevent colleges — already strapped by budget cuts and increasing enrollments — from attracting and retaining top-quality employees.

But state Rep. Erik Fresen, who presented the bill at Tuesday's committee meeting, said the legislation is designed to help college administrators.

If administrators had more flexibility with their personnel, Fresen said, they would be able to expand and cut programs to meet student demand, which can sometimes change quickly.

"Oftentimes, the colleges cannot respond in time because of these 'handcuff' situations," said Fresen, a Miami Republican who chairs the House's K-20 Competitiveness Subcommittee that voted 8-4 to approve the bill.

The bill also requires colleges, when facing layoffs, to let go of their poorest-performing employees first instead of basing decisions on seniority.

At least one community college president has already come out in opposition to the bill and, as Balona reports, Florida Gulf Coast University experimented with one year contracts but "had such trouble holding onto faculty" that it now offers multi-year contracts. But he greatest impact will be on community colleges and the students who attend them. According to Univsource.com, 66% of young people in Florida who continue their education beyond high school do so in-state. Two-thirds of them, even those who plan to take the B.A., will matriculate at community colleges following high school graduation.

So it is no accident that community college presidents, who are protected under the proposed legislation, understand what a disaster this policy is. It worth emphasizing that the right has produced a new strategy that is remarkably consistent: going after "workers" in the name of "citizens" and "taxpayers" -- as if they were not all the same people. In Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida right wing special interests and their political stalking horses have provoked college professors -- who are already educated, can leave the state and will -- with the hopes of caricaturing them as a bunch of overpaid, lazy babies who are sucking at the public t!t while students languish. But the people who will suffer, as the little story I opened with argues, are students. Students will have a longer time to graduation, they will have access to less qualified faculty who can't get better jobs, and most of their professors will be stopping off on their way to somewhere else. This, I am sure, will get lost in the debate as free marekteers replicate the success they have had in transforning the real estate market, higher finance and Iraq in the last decade.

In the coming weeks, we at Tenured Radical will have more to say about disinvestment in higher education in many kinds of schools, as well as its consequences for students as well as faculty. The management actively solicits guest posts on these issues. Although we have consistently bucked for the reform of the tenure system, the elimination of tenure in a climate in which any protection for public employees, is under attack and any security for the creation and maintenance of stable, dedicated faculties that can guide students through a two or four year degree, is truly unthinkable. We withdraw that position, pending a change in the political atmosphere.

Tuesday Found Objects: What You Need To Subpoena From My Zenith Computer Today

2011-03-29T06:18:00.007-05:00

I was hanging out this morning using my university computer to download BDSM pornography and order Angela Davis posters (paid for out of my research account, of course) when I decided to take a break and check up on what my other radical colleagues were doing.

They've been busy! So without further ado:

The Facts, Ma'am. Jon Wiener, from his perch at The Nation, asks: "What does it take to become the target of this kind of attack?" Wiener points out that Cronon is "not Bill Ayers," but a self-avowed political centrist who published "a simple fact" that Republicans in Wisconsin did not want revealed: their close ties to a group that drafts union-busting legislation and creates public relations strategies for passing that legislation. This fact, Wiener argues, "disrupts the Republicans’ explanation of what they are doing in Wisconsin. They say the new law there ending collective bargaining with public employee unions is an emergency response to this year’s fiscal crisis." However, "the goal is not to protect the little guy in Wisconsin but rather to help the big corporations that fund Republican operations." Read the whole article here.

It's Being A Professor Who Thinks That Is The Problem. One issue that we need to resurrect is the neo-liberal charge that tenure promotes the prolonged employment of "dead wood" professors. Clearly, it is Cronon's failure to become dead wood that has made him notorious and, as it turns out, dead wood profs aren't the ch!cks and d00ds that some right-winger wants to light up after all. No, no: some poor, defeated old sot, shuffling off to class with a tattered little set of notes after a nip too many turns out to be our ideal scholar. Tony Grafton, that guy you saw flying by your office window in a red cape, and with a big "H" on his scholarly chest, nails it in the New Yorker blog when he reminds us that, unlike politicians, historians are responsible for researching and relating the truth, and the truth sometimes hurts. As Grafton concludes, "the Republicans seem remarkably fragile. A professor writing a blog post gives them the shivers. It’s a good thing they chose politics, and not the kind of career where the going can really get rough. Professors, for example, teach their hearts out to surly adolescents who call them boring in course evaluations and write their hearts out for colleagues who trash their books in snarky reviews. These Wisconsin Republicans may never have survived ordeals like that. Happily, Cronon has been toughened by decades of academic life. He’ll be blogging—and teaching and writing—long after Wisconsin voters have sent these Republicans back to obscurity."

(Which reminds me that I have students standing around my office door growling in a menacing way and shaking pitchforks at me as a reminder that I should be using my Zenith computer to get their grading done right now!) OK, one more:

Yes, Historians Actually Care About The Rights Of All Working People. Eileen Boris is in the business section of the HuffPo this week, which you probably missed as you were clicking through to the ads for package tours to Cuba. Boris asks us to celebrate Women's History Month and commemorate the Triangle Factory Fire by reminding ourselves that the vast majority of working class women, and men, are no longer employed in an industrial workplace. While guaranteeing the basic employment rights of household workers are becoming the subject of new legislation, Boris points out, "one group of household laborers remains apart -- those paid by governments to care for needy elderly and disabled people. The California proposal explicitly excludes In Home Supportive Service workers, the type of worker whose omission from federal law the Supreme Court upheld in 2007 and the Obama administration has yet to rectify through new labor regulations. Meanwhile, Republican governors, as in Wisconsin, are eliminating collective bargaining for home care workers. An irony of current struggles might be that these public employees end up with fewer rights and poorer conditions than those who labor for individual housewives."

As Women's History Month draws to a close, we at chez Radical admit that we have done little to celebrate it, so here's my proposal: I would like to nominate Bill Cronon as an Honorary Woman. This is one of the few awards available to historians that he has not received, and I think it is time. Do we have a second? Thank you, Historiann! All in favor?

The aye's have it! Sorry, Wisconsin GOP. You lose again!

Monday Found Objects: Or, What Wisconsin Republicans Would See If They FOIA'd My Email

2011-03-28T08:17:00.002-05:00

Little things come in, and I sock them away. But so that no one has to file any paperwork, or break my system passwords, here's what's lying around my email box today:

How do I get these things? Go here to buy a set of Prince William and Kate Middleton paper dolls, each with fifteen different outfits. The dolls themselves are in their underwear, which I think is kind of interesting in the sense of what a future monarch and his queen might not have permitted even twenty years ago. I would have understood if I had received an email soliciting me to purchase the "Past Presidents of the AHA Paper Doll Set," promising hours of fun as we cross-dressed Barbara Weinstein and Tony Grafton, but this one's a mystery, Governor Walker. My guess is that they bought the American Studies Association mailing list.

Do the AHA survey, save a tree. Have you ever wondered -- as I do -- why there isn't an app for the American Historical Association? Well go to this survey and let the AHA know how you feel about electronic publication. I think you have probably read gripes on this blog about the high-quality journals that are partially read and have to be taken out for recycling with a back hoe. What Americanist has time for even the most intriguing article about Byzantium? What Byzantiumist has time for the labor movement in Victorian England? And how about those pages and pages of painstakingly crafted reviews of books you will never actually hold in your hand?

From Comradde PhysioProffe (who has recently changed the spelling of his name): "Holy Fuckeoly!" OK, this came into my non-university account, because CPP is propriety itself when it comes to the boundaries between professional and public. But for those of you who are as yet unaware of the creative use this scientist makes of the English language, his take no prisoners attitude, and his minute attention to good food and drink, go check in at his house.

Triangle Fire Memories: Last week, as I was gally-vanting around New England, other bloggers memorialized the anniversary of the lethal 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York's Greenwich Village, still the worst industrial accident on U.S. soil. Now, from Vineyard Video Productions, we have "You May Call Her Madam Secretary," a documentary film about the career of a woman who was inspired by that tragedy to pursue a life in labor policy. Frances Sternhagen presents the words of the first woman Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, in a film that gives us the history of a generation of liberals who would have eaten Scott Walker's lunch. Got any budget left? The video is a steal at $49.95.

The H-Net job listing. That's a joke son -- there are no jobs!

Because We Are All Bill Cronon: An Open Letter To Our Colleague In Madison

2011-03-26T06:44:00.015-05:00

Where is this clause in the constitution?

Dear Bill:

Welcome to the blogosphere! I like the design of Scholar as Citizen, and frankly, I'm also happy to have another age peer in the house. Although I've never had a whole political party go after me (very impressive, dude!), I did suffer an attack from a fellow historian and his followers that had its hair-raising moments.

I didn't get the death threats on my voice mail that an untenured colleague at a prestigious flagship received from the Sunshine Band. However, I got plenty of hate mail, as well as copies of numerous emails sent to Zenith's president, members of the history department, and the board of trustees. These various communications, and numerous letters, all called for my termination -- something that was, of course, impossible, since I already had tenure. It wasn't covered in the national media, but it was ugly all the same. On the other hand, you are more famous than I am, so it stands to reason that you would get a splashy, welcome Tea Party.

Here's my favorite line from Mark Jefferson, Executive Director of the Wisconsin GOP, who filed the FOIA on your email, quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"I have never seen such a concerted effort to intimidate someone from lawfully seeking information about their government," Mr. Jefferson said in the statement. "Further," he added, "it is chilling to see that so many members of the media would take up the cause of a professor who seeks to quash a lawful open-records request. Taxpayers have a right to accountable government and a right to know if public officials are conducting themselves in an ethical manner. The left is far more aggressive in this state than the right in its use of open-records requests, yet these rights do extend beyond the liberal left and members of the media.

Chilling. Just chilling. I hate it when the big, bad histowy pwofessors go aftah the eeny-weenie iddle politicians. Pick on someone your own size next time, ok?

What is fascinating to me is that your politicians in Wisconsin seem to be so affronted by the right to free speech. I thought the Republican party was all about our "freedoms": isn't that why they decided to trash the future of public education by diverting the money to a ten year war in Afghanistan and Iraq? Why we want everyone to have the right to not have access to affordable health care? Every yahoo conspiracy theorist to have all the weapons he can afford? Je ne comprends pas -- whoops. There I go being all socialist and academic again.

Another lesson of this little episode seems to be that when a college professor says something well-researched and true he is on particularly thin ice. I'm glad we cleared this up, because when Ward Churchill was fired, and right wing gun nuts orchestrated a campaign to force Michael Bellesisles out of his tenured job, I thought that it was poor citation, pretending to be a Native American and having an abrasive way of discussing the global context for terrorist attacks that were the issue.

Anyway, what you have discovered is that for all the trolls that are out there, plenty of colleagues will stand up for you too. Feels pretty good, even though it is a steep price to pay to have your life disrupted at the worst possible time of year.

Whatever happens next, this episode presents some possibilities for the rest of us that are highly un-funny. They are the kind of things we tenured radicals know, but never think about. So for all the bloggers out there, and for all the fans of Tenured Radical, I would like to inaugurate what I will now call the Walker Rules of Electronic Communication and Knowledge (WRECK):

Your university email account belongs to the university. While Bill Cronon is being persecuted by a bunch of right wing Republicans determined to reduce the American working class to pre-industrial conditions, technically your employer can enter your email account whenever it chooses. This means that we should all be careful what we say when we write from, or to, an edu address. In fact, it isn't such a terrible idea to add your gmail or yahoo account to the signature line of your university account requesting that all personal communication be sent there.
People (including students) who work in IT can get access to your university email through the web server whenever they want to. They shouldn't, and they probably don't, but they are capable of it. Don't put anything in an email that you would not want circulated. This includes personal matters (sex), conflict with colleagues, and correspondence about personnel cases that reveals any information that you, the department, the referees, or the candidate might consider private.
The computer you are assigned by the university belongs to the university, and they can search it at any time. They can also search your office without a warrant. According to FindLaw, unless you are covered by a state law or a union contract that prohibits such searches, "Employers can usually search an employee's workspace, including their desk, office or lockers. The workspace technically belongs to the employer, and courts have found that employees do not have an expectation of privacy in these areas. This is also the case for computers. Since the computers and networking equipment typically belong to the employer, the employer is generally entitled to monitor the use of the computer. This includes searching for files saved to the computer itself, as well as monitoring an employee's actions while using the computer (eg, while surfing the internet)." Does this mean that we should all be thinking about buying a home computer for all activities we wish to ensure privacy for -- downloading pornography, getting divorced, blogging? Maybe. And technically, the university could prohibit you from blogging on the computer they provide, although arguably this would be an infringement of academic freedom.
You can't be sure you have erased something from a computer or a server. In fact, according to Daniel Engber of Slate, you can be pretty sure that you can't erase anything permanently, even if you use a utility like Evidence Eliminator. And even if you could, those emails that you sent are now on someone else's computer, someone else's server, and so on. They are retrievable.
The Republican Party is owned and operated by vicious thugs who abuse their power to make us all into corporate servants and lackeys for capitalist special interests. This has nothing to do with computers: I thought I would just throw this in. But we are reminded that there is a long history for this sort of activity in the United States: in the late 1830s, for example, the southern slaveocracy pushed for national legislation to censor abolitionist literature. When they didn't get it, beginning with South Carolina, they passed state laws that allowed local officials to seize these materials and open the mail of private citizens. The parallel is obvious, isn't? Freedom to have absolute power over labor > constitutional right to free speech. It's a good thing the Grimke sisters didn't have an email account.

My understanding is that there is a campaign underway at the public unis to forward all sent mail to Governor Scott Walker (that's govgeneral@wisconsin.gov), Mark Jefferson (that's mjefferson@wisgop.org) and GOP State Party Chairman Brad Courtney (that's State.Chairman@Wisgop.info). Anybody who wants to dialogue with other ~~stalking horses for international capitalism~~ members of the state party leadership can go here for their addresses. Some people might interpret this as an attempt to crash their servers, but you and I know that it is just an attempt to give them a little historical context.

Anyway, Bill, good luck with this. I've always enjoyed your work, and while I know you never sought out this kind of notoriety, we couldn't be standing up for a better guy.

your friend,

Tenured Radical

"I Feel All The Time Like A Cat On A Hot Tin Roof"

2011-03-24T06:26:00.002-05:00

Received the news while sitting in a restaurant last night: Elizabeth Taylor, February 27 1932 - March 23 2011. I saw this movie for the first time when I was a student at Oligarch in 1976 and still think it is one of the rawest insights into love that has ever been put on the screen.

Go here for a full obituary from NPR.

Ask The Radical: Search Committee Smackdown, Part Eleventy

2011-03-21T17:48:00.005-05:00

Buy this poster while you wait.

It's that time of the year again. You've gotten all gussied up in your glad rags. You polished your power point and talked the talk. You perfected the technique of subtly checking your teeth with your bread knife at dinner. You left -- well, you left that fly-back academic interview feeling good about yourself. And then:

Nothing. They never call, they never write.....

Dear Professor Radical,

I have appreciated your blogs about the job market. I've tried to follow the rules-- both written and unwritten.

Could you post another one about the rules for search committees? The closer I get to a job without getting it, the more their etiquette seems to break down. I'm a big girl and I can handle rejection. But I don't like this awkward silence for weeks after the interview. It makes me feel like a dirty one night stand.

If a search committee chair doesn't know to write a letter of rejection -- well, no big deal except that neither place I interviewed has had the decency to tell me they've moved on. I'm smart and figured it out. But it just seems decent to tell me before I read it on the Wiki or, God forbid, from another candidate.

Can't we elevate the job process to a level that is more professional than bad dating ?? Thank God for basketball or I don't know what I'd do.

Well, you should also thank the Goddess that you aren't in my NCAA men's fantasy bracket, because I'm shooting a honkin' 96%!

OK, seriously. This sucks And you know it's wrong, but the question is, why do they do it? I'll tell you the top five excuses for not talking to the candidates.

#5: "We haven't finalized the deal with the candidate we did offer the job to, so don't alienate the other candidates in case we have to go to our second choice."  You know the worst of it? They really believe that it would cause an unrepairable breach if, in this crummy market, they offered you a job as the second choice candidate. This is what often prevents them from making a call that says, "You know, it came down to field, but we've offered the job to someone else and s/he has two weeks to respond. We'll get back to you the week of the 21st, for sure, and let you know what is happening." You're thinking, "Those d00ds have their heads up their a$$es!" Not really -- they have their heads back in the 1970s, when getting the job as a second choice really was a ticket to nowhere and the people who voted against your hire also voted against your tenure case, just on principle. And they would have been heartbroken to be a second choice, so you would too, right? Right? Uh -- I can't hear you, the industrial dishwasher is too loud.....

#4: "Was that my job? I thought the dean was supposed to be in touch with the candidates."  At many schools, some people will never run a search in their lives, and in small departments, many people may never even be on a search committee. I know at Zenith, you have a meeting with administrators prior to commencing your search. They cover all the parts of the process that have to do with ~~affirmative action~~ diversity hiring, but there is no instruction, written or otherwise, about how to run a search in a way that is gracious or efficient. The assumption is that you have learned this by being searched for (the same goes for tenure: everything you need to know to decide someone else's fate for the first time, you learn by coming up for tenure.)

As an added wrinkle, in many departments, once the candidates are produced, the search committee dissolves, and it may be no one's job to be in touch with the candidates.

#3: "When the heck are we going to get budget approval for this hire? Can someone call the dean, fuh Chrissakes?" Believe it or not, at many small schools, the administration approves multiple searches, but only actually has funding for X% of them. Departments propose their candidates, and the administration decides which ones are the "best" -- and only those departments get a new hire. This, and other budgetary shenanigans, can hold up a process for weeks. Throw a spring break in, and it's a real clusterf**k for the candidates.

#2: "We got our first choice! We got our first choice! Uh -- What other candidates?"  This is what you fear, and I am afraid it is often true. Academics can be narcissistic a$$hats, and unfortunately, because you no longer have anything to do with them, it's as if you never existed.

#1: "That's a really awkward and unpleasant call to make and I would really rather not."  Really, this is the reason that most finalists never hear from anyone. It's gotten too personal, and they don't want to disappoint you in person. What they don't get, because they can't cope with this, is that you already know and you would rather be treated like a person!

But seriously, guys. This is the second person I have heard from this week who was told they would hear something in a certain time frame, and they haven't even gotten a call to be told that nothing is decided yet.

WTF, search committees? Don't you read Tenured Radical?

Why Do The Kids Have Beans In Their Ears? It's Hazing Season Again

2011-03-19T06:48:00.015-05:00

I'm sorry - what position do you play?

Years ago, one of my students told me about a team hazing gone wrong. First year athletes were forced to drink massive amounts of alcohol. Then strippers, hired by the older students, were brought onto the scene. The strippers disrobed down to their G-strings and initiated a lap dancing thingie with the team initiates. But then one of the students being hazed freaked out, started yelling and tried to escape (the doors were locked, of course.) Two other students passing by heard the commotion, called Public Safety, and then broke a window because they thought the person inside was in danger.

Want to know the best part? The team doing the hazing was a women's team and the strippers were male. The young woman who freaked out, who was also drunk out of her mind, thought she was going to be raped as part of the "initiation." The student rescuers were also male, by the way, which is a nice part of the story (although the students relating it had a kind of "can you believe those d0ucheb!gs?" look on their faces while relating this portion of the sorry tale.)

Let's leave aside the kind of money that is spent on these teams to have the whole enterprise be damaged, not only by the drinking and brutality itself, but by canceling the season when it is discovered, firing athletes from the team, and having a scandal to deal with as the coaches try to recruit other athletes. What is so agonizing about this little Lord of the Flies scenario is that at Zenith, like all other schools, hazing is illegal and those who do it theoretically subject to severe penalties. Students know this. Each team gets a little talk from the athletic director at the beginning of the season explaining this in graphic detail: I am the faculty adviser to one of the teams, so I've heard the talk that every team gets, and there is nothing unclear about the policy.

Then students go out and haze new team members anyway. And students agree to be hazed, having been told it is dangerous and wrong, but leaving that information at the door because it is the kind of thing dumb grownups talk, talk, talk about. (Note: the incident I described above did not happen on the team I am connected to.)

Fast forward to the swim team scandal at Middlebury College reported by ABC News yesterday:

Little is known about what happened in early February at a swim team party. The event was designed to welcome first-year swimmers onto the team, but the school newspaper the Middlebury Campus reported that the party "crossed the line from innocent initiation to hazing."

This isn't the first time the Middlebury swim teams have faced tough punishment for hazing. In 2006, the men's season was canceled due to a hazing incident that involved alcohol. In 2003, the women's team missed two meets for hazing related offenses.

My question is: why do people have to be initiated into athletic teams at all? Isn't coming to practice enough? And why does the discussion about sexual violence on campus not get connected to the fact that women are brutalizing each other too but calling it something else? As a relevant aside about the willingness of students to participate in dangerous and painful acts that are the price of "belonging," click on the link above. After viewing an ad about psoriasis, you can see a short news item about a branding scandal at Texas Christian University, which the boy's parents only know about because the burn is so severe that he will require several surgeries to repair it. Look at the $hit-eating grin on the face of the kid who was branded, and compare it to his parents' outrage.

Middlebury isn't saying what happened, probably on the advice of their attorneys (the men's team was briefly pulled from competition too, but has apparently been permitted to continue their season.) Since Vermont has laws against hazing, if I were a local prosecutor I would start dumping paper on them right now since this is the second swim team scandal that has become public: the men's team had its season cancelled in 2006.

But I think Middlebury should say what happened, because it is happening at other schools too. I became privy, because of email address confusion and the tendency of angry people to hit "reply to all," to a second athletic scandal some years ago that resulted in a number of upper level students being tossed off the team mid-season. I was stunned by the nature of the behavior being disciplined and the large numbers of people who must have known about it prior to it being discovered by administrators. Furthermore, although it was probably a parent who blew the whistle in the first place, I was shocked by the number of parents who didn't think what had happened was such a big deal and that the punishment was out of line with the behavior (which was clearly illegal and a potential expulsion offense at Zenith.) They were outraged that the administration even thought it was their business that this thing had happened on school property. Several emails said pointedly that the abrupt termination of their progeny's athletic career was a punishment to them because of all the sacrifices they had made in helping to develop that child as an athlete (which would make a lot of illegal behavior acceptable because.....?)

I may be one of fewer than five people left on campus who actually knows what happened, and this is because, like rape, colleges balance the probability that this behavior will continue regardless of what they do against their strong desire to manage public information about the school. The secrecy of college judicial boards undermines a critical function of punishment, which is to deter future behavior by making it clear to the larger community what constitutes unethical behavior and why it is unethical. If Middlebury is distinguishing between "initiations" (which are OK?) and hazing (which is not), but being mysterious about the difference between the two, they aren't acting effectively to prevent future violations.

Take My Phone. Please.

2011-03-18T08:10:00.013-05:00

"Why don't you try two Dixie Cups and a string!?"

A couple years ago I began to receive e-mails from a dear friend in the University of California system; in the signature line, the e-mails said: "ACADEMIC OFFICE PHONE DISCONNECTED DUE TO BUDGET CRISIS." The first time I got this message the initial, draconian cuts had just been announced. Students and faculty were in the streets in California. Many of us at private institutions were waiting for the ax to fall. Later, we were accepting the news that there would be no raises the following year, and that by doing this our institutions might be able to avoid the layoffs of adjuncts and staff that many of the public unis were enduring.

Fast forward three years to where we are at Zenith, as far as I can tell. We ended up laying off lots of those people, and allowing other positions to go unfilled. At street level, things are horrendously disorganized, and you have to make a special call to get someone to vacuum your office. We have not received a raise that was not instantly swallowed by the increased cost of our benefits. In real dollars, our pay is static and losing traction; research and conference dollars tend not to meet expenses incurred.

The health insurance situation is pretty scary too. All employees are being asked to carry a greater share of our health insurance premium this year than last. Full professors are being asked to consider helping the administration to compensate associates and assistants by taking on the largest premiums, which is a major policy shift. Associates are not getting more than a salary bump at promotion, and are being asked to consider subsidizing in the compensation of assistants by paying larger premiums than they do, essentially nullifying much of the raise. Staff have actually had their total compensation cut as a lesson to all of us about what the future holds. Furthermore, everyone who works for the university is being asked to accept cuts in compensation so that the university can build endowments to pay for unlimited student financial aid and shave a percentage point off next year's tuition increase. This will make us the second or third most expensive liberal arts school in the nation, as opposed to the most expensive (which means it is still inaccessible to the vast majority of Americans.)

Now, lest you think I am a lunatic, let me just say: the fiscal health of the institution might require these things. I don't really know: I am surviving these changes by tuning them out and putting my queer shoulder to the wheel of my writing. Because the misfortunes at chez Radical are slight this year, I also feel that the salary I am not getting could be interpreted as a kickback to the administration in exchange for having not been put in the position of making these decisions and becoming the object of outrage. They are difficult decisions, with no easy answers, and universities being what they are, would have drawn criticism from some quarter whatever shape they took.

And yet, after almost two decades in which we have repeatedly been promised that Zenith will do something about a compensation rate that lags far behind our peer institutions, one can't help but feel that they have thrown in the towel without admitting that they have done so. You wish they would bring that big girl out and let her sing so you could stop thinking about it.

But here's the good news. Austerity has produced some moments of breathtakingly simple, but shining, intelligence, that may pave the way for a leaner but smarter budget. For example, someone in the Zenith administration had the bright idea of phoning around to ask those of us who had not used the entire budget allocated for conferences already attended if all of our receipts were in. If so, could we release the money to replenish the budget line so other colleagues might be funded for conference attendance? My source tells me that they reclaimed $10K this way that otherwise would have been slushed into next year's budget. I think they should use $500 of it to give whoever thought of this a bonus.

In the spirit of accentuating the positive, I have a suggestion: why don't you take my phone?

I'm serious. I don't know how much my phone costs, but whatever it is, it is not worth it. Here's why:

I don't think a student has called me on my land line in over three years. Students always contact me by email, grab me after class, or drop by my office. Since teaching is 1/3 to 1/2 of my job, and students do not telephone me, this means most of my work would not be impacted by the loss of a land line.
In the past year, I think I have received fewer than five telephone calls from administrators or colleagues outside the department and program in which I am appointed. They contact me by email too. Those people who know me, or like me, well enough to call me on the telephone, call me on my mobile. Those people who call me on my office phone often do not get that call returned for several days: I don't check my messages at the office because hardly anyone ever calls me.
In the past year, I have probably made ten phone calls to administrators, all of which have been to deans, regarding a student in crisis. If they are not there, I ask them to return the call to my mobile.
In the past three years, I have initiated exactly one conference call from my office phone. I can now accomplish this on my iPhone.
I used to use the university WATTS line for work-related long distance. I no longer need to do this, as unlimited long distance in the US and Canada is now part of a standard home telephone package and I have unlimited minutes on my iPhone in the US.
Because the university stopped printing an annual telephone directory, and fired or reassigned the telephone operators, I have no idea what most people's extensions are and getting them is a tedious task involving the online directory. Worse, we have a voice recognition directory that gives you the right person about 40% of the time. "TENURED - RADICAL," you find yourself enunciating into the receiver, for the fourth or fifth time. "Ringing - Benjamin - Clavical," the robovoice intones primly. In addition, because our landlines do not have speed dials, it is just easier to program colleagues' mobile phones (and the office extensions of administrators) into my own mobile.
When I want to talk to colleagues in my building, I get up and stroll down the hall. Since over half of my colleagues are junior to me, talking in person seems like the more civilized choice. Furthermore, people under the age of 35 don't even have land lines at home. Why would they need them at the office?
Here is who calls me most regularly on my office telephone: robocallers and textbook sales people. Far off in second place are colleagues and administrators; and in a close third are parents, to whom I am mostly not permitted to speak. In total, I would say I receive ten telephone calls a month on my land line, of which 1-2 are real people; I make about 3 calls a month.

So take my phone, Zenith. Please. By doing this, you could free up some money in our zero-sum budget game to reduce the cost of my benefits or bump up my research money. Or give me a tiny bonus to subsidize my cell phone costs. Or keep the money and allow me to deduct the cost of my mobile from my taxes as a legitimate business expense. And it would clear a lovely space on my desk where I could put a vase of spring flowers -- or a box of Kleenex, to prepare for the next round of budget cuts.

Killing Two Birds With One Stone: Tea Party Candidate Solves Social Problems, Shoots Self In Foot

2011-03-17T12:12:00.001-05:00

Tea Party social welfare program?

In case you were wondering why we haven't solved the problem of how to get cheap food on the table without large numbers of undocumented workers who will work under substandard conditions for no money, it's because wussy liberals won't bring back the chain gang.

Okay, Jack Davis, who wants to run for the vacant seat in New York's 26th congressional district didn't quite say that. But this is what the Tea Party candidate did say, according to reporter Jerry Zremski, as he was being screened by the GOP in that state:

that Latino farm workers [should] be deported -- and that African-Americans from the inner city [could] be bused to farm country to pick the crops.

Several sources who were in the Feb. 20 endorsement interview with Davis confirmed his comments, which echo those he made to the Tonawanda News in 2008, when he said: "We have a huge unemployment problem with black youth in our cities. Put them on buses, take them out there [to the farms] and pay them a decent wage; they will work."

Since Davis has been articulating such views publicly for at least two years, so the shock being expressed by the New York Republican Party leadership means little else than that they aren't doing their homework.

"I was thunderstruck," said Amherst GOP Chairman Marshall Wood. "Maybe in 1860 that might have been seen by some as an appropriate comment, but not now."

Davis spokesman W. Curtis Ellis acknowledged that Davis' comments "may not be politically correct and ... may not be racially correct."

Yes, Mr. Ellis, we can start there. Davis's comments are also really st00pid. One wonders how far the Tea Party tolerance for come one, come all freedom of expression will extend in the next election cycle if upstate New York Republicans (who are about as conservative as God makes 'em and not your normal bastions of political correctness) are running for the hills on this one.

Hat Tip.

A Casualty Of The Archives: Put Me On Research Injured Reserve, Please

2011-03-14T10:27:00.011-05:00

You did it again, Charlie Brown.

Two days ago I woke up with a slightly sore back. I did what I normally do with back pain (other than worry that my advancing age is causing my arthritis flareups to accelerate): pop two Advil and flex in the shower while hot water pounds on my lower spine.

It got worse.

Four hours later, I got up from my computer and was seized with paralyzing pain extending in a band around my spine. Such pain, at that central location of the body, causes involuntary gasps that sound like this: "$hi-hi-hi-hi-hitte!"

I couldn't think what I had done to cause this problem. I haven't been rowing (the recent flooding blew away our club dock, and you can't erg on the road.) The only exercise I have had during and after my travels has been my normal regime of weight lifting and a daily, sedate turn on the Exercycle.

I took two more Advil. And a Valium. No dice.

I'll spare you the rest of my treatment program (oh, hell -- why should I? I use the Valley of the Dolls method: codeine, vodka, more Valium to stop the spasms and ice packs.) However, as I lay in bed catching up on my grading, I had plenty of time to think. As the pain receded and localized to a small spot on the right side of my spine, I realized that the problem was my old friend: Archives Back.

Yes, Archives Back. I first developed this problem three years ago after a long research trip and realized that the only way I could have hurt myself was through the twisting motion that is required to get a very heavy archive box off the cart when in a seated position and bending from the waist. Your standard archives cart has three shelves, and torquing the spine repeatedly from a position in which arm strength is all but irrelevant puts enormous strain on said spine. I suspect that on that original trip I damaged a disc that is easily re-injured when I do the same stupid thing all over again.

So in the spirit of sharing, here are three common health problems arising from archival research.

Back and Neck Pain. I've already discussed how you get it and treat it (I also once pulled a bicep picking up a box from an awkward position.) But how to prevent it? My guess is that each full archives box (I'm talking the acid-free gray ones that meet NARA specifications, now, not the banker's boxes which are much larger) weighs about 20-25 pounds. My suggestion? Treat every box as if it is much larger, particularly if you are moving fast through a lot of boxes, as I was: get up, bend your knees, and lift straight up with your knees. A few stretches several times a day might not be such a terrible idea either; and I just get up and walk around the room every hour or so.

Paper cuts. I pulled a file that had a smear of blood on it, and the color indicated that there had been a casualty in the not-so-very-distant past. As everyone knows, paper cuts are the most unexpected of injuries: they happen in a perfectly unlucky moment of contact between finger and paper, bleed like a pig, and -- like a splinter -- are disproportionately painful. One of my co-researchers who joined me for lunch one day had sliced a finger open, which had turned so sore she felt it every time she turned over a document. My advice? Bring band-aids. But the only way to prevent paper cuts is be wearing those little white cotton Mickey Mouse gloves, which some facilities require. They are hard to get used to, but better for the documents and for you. (Evening addendum: check out some of the comments. Apparently gloves are no longer state of the art.)

Dust. One of my favorite books, ever, is Carolyn Steedman's Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Rutgers: 2002), in which she speculates that the mal d'archives, or archive fever (that Jacques Derrida bloviated about in this book) might have been caused by anthrax spores surviving in the bindings of ancient leather books. But even short of anthrax, dust is a problem, particularly for those of us who have allergies already. I keep on top of my allergies (which at their worst cause asthma attacks) with drugs I take daily, but I still suffer from an ongoing drip throughout a trip to the archives. This was all the more noticeable on my last trip because whatever affects me in the general atmosphere in Connecticut was not present in Southern California, so every time I emerged from whatever library I was in the sniffles went away. What to do? After a couple days, I doubled my medication, which helped only because it is of the non-drowsy variety: falling asleep won't forward your research agenda. Bring one of those cute little packs of Kleenex so that you don't have to cast your eyes about furtively to make sure that no one sees you wipe your nose on your shirt.

I also advise against wearing contact lenses in the archives: wear glasses for a day, see how much dust they pick up, then imagine that gluing itself to your eyes.

Hand and Wrist Pain. The two days that I was in the no-copy, no-photography archive reminded me that typing for six to eight hours a day is not something your average archive table and chairs are made for. The tables are the wrong height, and the chairs are often gorgeous, hard wood works of art with no back support whatsoever. I once saw a famous feminist historian walk into a manuscript room with a pile of couch pillows, which I suppose is one solution, although it is awkward and a little goofy. My approach is to sit up as straight as possible, keep my hands parallel to the keyboard, and stand up to shake my hands vigorously every 30-45 minutes. In this latter move, you drop your arms straight down, relax them and shake. It makes you look like you are doing the Hokey-Pokey, but so what? At my age I fear carpal tunnel syndrome more than I fear charges of eccentricity.

A note: I am glad to be done with Xeroxing, which is hard on the documents, environmentally unsound, and always caused me to worry about radiation. That said, other than the logistics of getting your material organized after the trip, photography has its physical hazards. Although I advocated for the cheap digital camera in this post, the truth is I took my expensive Nikon on this trip to see if it made a difference (particularly in reproducing feminist posters and graphics from conservative direct mail that would be at least usable in a Power Point, if not in the book.) The wrist that bore the weight of the camera was persistently sore. Now I know why other people use tripods.

Unrelated Coda: Check out Caleb McDaniel's instructions about how to grade papers using an iPad. Caleb, an assistant professor of United States history at Rice University who is writing a book about transatlantic abolitionism, has himself a a nice new blog called Offprints.

The Social Network: Or; Does Networking Really Matter To An Academic Career?

2011-03-12T08:08:00.003-05:00

One of 17 ways to visualize Twitter.

Why do we tell young scholars to "network," and what do we mean by it?

As I was finishing up Samuel Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) last night, I came across this gem of a quote on p. 138:

I feel that my career benefits regularly from the results of my networking. My ultimate take on networking is, however, this: No single event in the course of my career that I can cite has been directly caused by networking. Nevertheless, the results of networking have regularly smoothed, stabilized, and supported my career and made it more pleasant (there is that term again) than it would have been without it.

In general I would say (and I would say this to young writers particularly): Rarely if ever can networking make a writing career when no career is to be made.

Delany, as many of you know, is a queer science fiction writer who has also written a fair amount about the sexual landscape of New York City. To put this quote in context, Delany is writing about the redevelopment of the Times Square district in the 1980s and 1990s, and its consequences for human relationships. In the second half of the book, he works out the distinction between the formalized set of connections that "networks" represent (in this case he is talking about writers' conferences, and the science fiction events that are a part of his professional life), and what he calls "contacts." The latter category, he argues, are informal, unpredictable, and are produced through a spontaneous, democratic generosity that is far more likely to produce a significant change in one's circumstances.

Delany's view that cultivating connections did not make careers surprised me, to say the least, since I have always viewed the mainstream literary world as highly networked. Those of us who fail to break in may not be writing what a larger audience wants to read, but we often don't know (or command the respect of) the right people either. When I was living in New York full time in the 1980s, the people who got published were also the people who were adept at getting invited to parties, meeting important people, and aggressively using those people to move up the chain. Fran Lebowitz was, and still is, a classic example of such a person; but a great many other well-published authors, who are far less amusing, also fit that category. Perhaps it's just an outsider's perspective, but I still see major book contracts being delivered into the hands of some people and not others because they are able to work their networks effectively and get in to see the right people.

But what about the history world? What role does networking play and should we counsel younger scholars to put time into it? Has my own career benefited more from networking or "contacts"?

To answer the last question first, I would say that I would have to add a third category of connections that are neither contacts or networking, but something in between: more dynamic and spontaneous than networking, and more durable and sustaining than contacts. For example, I first met Historiann in a cab, a cab which she reminded me many years later when we sat down for lunch over beer and oysters, I paid for. I was a professor with a travel budget, she a graduate student, and the cab cost the same regardless of how many people were riding in it. I have no memory of paying for the cab, but it sounds like something I might do, as it fits my general philosophy of social welfare in which resources are redeployed to those who will, in turn, redeploy their own resources to others when they succeed.

Fast-forward any number of years, I have become Tenured Radical, and I get an email from the author asking me to look over a new blog, Historiann, which quickly became one of the hottest history blogs around. Since then, we have become friends and done three different projects together, none of which has probably changed our lives, but which have, nonetheless, been very pleasurable and satisfying. So is this contact or networking? Did the cab matter? Would we have met in the blogosphere anyway?

Who knows. I think the tougher question, since we are all free in the blogosphere to pursue the friendships and intellectual exchanges that we desire (and it would be interesting to hear more from Delaney about whether he thinks the Internet has altered his paradigm), is: in the more constricted realm of the job market and academic publishing, does networking matter?

To this I would actually say no, it doesn't. This isn't a reason not to go to conferences, of course, and I would urge all universities to fund conference attendance for graduate students and younger scholars to the fullest extent that they can. I think it works against the stultifying tendency of the academy to keep untenured people in as subservient a state as possible for the longest possible time. It encourages friendship rather than naked competition (many of my closest friends, and those who I still seek advice from, are women who I met through the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians as a graduate student.) Finally, it encourages people to keep up in their own and related fields, to be challenged by others and respond to those challenges, and to become socialized. These are all good things.

But I have never known anyone who could attribute their academic success to the fact that they were well-connected. In fact (brace yourself for a downer): some of the best connected people I know have suffered repeated setbacks, on the job market and in publishing, despite their ability to network and excellent reputations. Networking is also different from having letters from influential people, whose opinion is respected by others and who testify to your excellence. Such things count, as do the phone calls that people place before making a Big Hire, to the people they really trust (I've made those calls and received them.) But there are simply too many people involved in any given decision for even the most influential people to have a decisive role in your future. Paradoxically, it is not infrequent that when someone invested in your success is accidentally in a position to help you, s/he will recuse hirself from the decision entirely in order to ensure that the decision is perceived as just.

I'm not saying that this makes academia the cradle of democracy. I'm just saying it doesn't work that way. Delany's best observation is: "Rarely if ever can networking make a writing career when no career is to be made."

Where I would say that networking has helped me enormously is my ability to get things done. The more people you know in your field, the more effective you are. The more widely known you are as an honest person, or a fun person to work with, or someone who understands the principles of fairness and reciprocity, the more likely you are to make other people feel that you are worth spending their limited time and energy on. In a more local sense, I find my networks among mid-level administrators at Zenith to be an invaluable resource for problem solving, information gathering, and getting channels unclogged. If this post teaches you nothing else, it should be this: administrative assistants hold the keys to your kingdom; information technology people are gods and goddesses; and the registrar's office is a temple.

The ability to get things done not only makes life more pleasant, and far richer when you consider time consuming projects like program development and the hiring of new colleagues, but it frees up time to write. It also brings interesting and novel projects -- book series, journal articles, special issues, conferences, and Internet-based exchanges -- to fruition. This, I think, reveals the basic value of networking: when it works, it isn't about you. It's about you in relation to others. Scholarship, at its most effective, is about exchange, not about the grandiosity of one person.

And that's why it is worth paying attention to.

"And The Envelope Please:" CLGBTH Announces Its 2010 Prizes

2011-03-11T16:29:00.003-05:00

Breaking news from Ian Lekus, Chair of the Committee on LGBT History (affiliated with the American Historical Association):

Margot Canaday’s The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press) has been awarded the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History's 2011 John Boswell Prize. The John Boswell Prize is awarded for an outstanding book on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and/or queer history published in English during the two previous years.

The Prize Committee prepared the following commendation: “Canaday’s stunning analysis of the U.S. state during the twentieth century carves out a bold new place for sexuality at the center of political and legal history. Through a compelling series of case studies, The Straight State tells a story about the bureaucratic regulation of sexual and civic identities that are made problematic through their interaction with state actors and processes. Canaday’s insights about how federal power made homosexuality increasingly visible over time are sure to inspire fresh directions in work not only in GLBT history, but on citizenship and state-formation in history and beyond. This is a truly original book. Margot Canaday is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University.”

Download Margot's book to Kindle here! For a cute picture of Margot go here!

Cleverly using awards for scholarly excellence to recruit the young to homosexuality, the Committee also awards prizes to undergraduate historians. This year Shelley Grosjean has been awarded the 2011 Joan Nestle Undergraduate Prize for “A ‘Womyn’s’ Work is Never Done: The Gendered Division of Labor on Lesbian Separatist Lands in Southern Oregon.” The Nestle Prize is awarded for an outstanding paper on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and/or queer history completed in English by an undergraduate student during the previous two years.

The Prize Committee writes: “Shelley Grosjean’s well-written and persuasive exploration of lesbian lands in Oregon makes imaginative use of a wealth of wonderful sources: images as well as texts. She locates these utopian experiments in the contexts of 1970s lesbian feminism and back-to-the-land movements, moving easily between the experiential details of daily life and labor and the larger political, economic, and social forces that gave them meaning. Her paper illuminates not only the visions of community that motivated so many women; it helps to explain why their practical efforts to realize those visions met so many obstacles. Grosjean is an undergraduate at the University of Oregon.”

The Prize Committee also awarded an Honorable Mention to Bradley Milam for his essay, “Gay West Virginia: Community Formation and the Forging of a Gay Appalachian Identity, 1963-1979,” noting:

“Bradley Milam tells a moving and emotionally rich story about Appalachia, a part of the United States that has, to date, been almost invisible in GLBT history. Relying on oral histories, Milam’s paper counters the urban bias of so many gay community studies. He suggests that the elements of gay life and consciousness in West Virginia emerged in a chronologically distinctive fashion that may be more typical of rural areas. Even more provocatively, he argues that many gays and lesbians in the state resolved their identities not by leaving home, but by doing exactly what they were raised to do: attend church, form families, and adhere to traditional American values. Milam is a 2010 graduate of Yale University.”

The Prize Committee, chaired by Ellen Herman, included Chris Waters and Stephanie Gilmore.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

If A Pirate Wants To Donate $5 Million To Your "Liberal" Arts School, What Should You Do?

2011-03-09T23:00:00.005-05:00

"HARRGH! We're looking for University Relations! HARRGH!"

You might want to wonder if that pirate has a camera hidden in his blunderbuss before you say a word. Whatever you do, don't chat him up and think maybe once he really gets to know you he'll build a Women's Center instead of a Center for Swashbuckling Studies, because he could be a Republican in disguise. Those little jokes about peglegs are going to be awfully embarassing once the Disabilities Studies folks see them in the New York Times.

I never thought I would have to give this career advice, but I would feel remiss if I did not do so at this moment in history. In the wake of conservative activist James O'Keefe's most recent effort to help defeat the thugs Republicans are saving our country from -- women, the poor, and intellectuals -- I just want to know: why did Schiller, the president of fund raising at NPR, not even have an inkling that two unknown "Muslims" who supposedly wanted to make a major gift were not a little shifty? Had he never listened to his own radio station? Did he not take in O'Keefe's little scam that brought ACORN to its knees? Or the little rumble he tried to cause over at Planned Parenthood by impersonating a donor who would give money only on the condition that underage girls and as many black women as possible would be provided with abortions?

Here's the deal, for you other folks who have been living under a rock for the past year. O'Keefe sets up embarrassing scenarios that feature liberal groups. He then records them secretly to demonstrate what conservative activists "already know" -- that liberals are lying, law-breaking hypocrites. Of course, the videos and audio recordings often have to be edited to actually produce the "evidence," but no matter. Then mainstream conservative Republicans leap on the bandwagon and demand hearings to express their outrage that a single government dollar goes to these organizations (as opposed to the many federal dollars that go to homophobic religious organizations and schools, for example.) O'Keefe also has connections to the Leadership Institute, Morton Blackwell's organization that trains conservative youth (who, in turn, developed the affirmative action bake sale strategy recently used at Zenith by other students affiliated with LI.) O'Keefe was also arrested for trying to bug U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu's telephone.

The latest O'Keefe special involves unveiling NPR as a moral cesspool and a wealthy organization that is fleecing the taxpayer. It is timed to coincide with the annual pledge drive, as well as the debate in Congress provoked by House Republicans zeroing out what budget remains to support public broadcasting. O'Keefe hired two people who claimed to be representatives of a Muslim organization. They arranged to meet with Schiller in a Georgetown restaurant claiming they are interested in giving $5 million to public radio. "The heavily edited video," according to the AP account in Salon,

shows Schiller and another NPR executive, Betsy Liley, meeting at a pricey restaurant in Washington's Georgetown neighborhood with two men claiming to be part of a Muslim organization. The men offer NPR a $5 million donation. NPR said Tuesday it was "repeatedly pressured" to accept a $5 million check, which the organization "repeatedly refused."

"The current Republican Party is not really the Republican Party. It's been hijacked by this group that is ... not just Islamophobic but, really, xenophobic," Schiller said in the video, referring to the tea party movement. "They believe in sort of white, middle America, gun-toting -- it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist people."

Part of what I find puzzling about this is, while it wasn't a smart thing to say, it is at least an arguable point of view with some basis on the truth. Schiller didn't even say it on air. Rush Limbaugh says something whacko and false about every ninety seconds right on his own radio show and nobody really seems to give a good G-d damn. Schiller isn't even a journalist: he's a fund-raiser.

So what was the big deal?

If You Are Considering Writing A Memoir About Your Childhood Sexual Abuse....

2011-03-07T13:02:00.011-05:00

...Don't. At least, not unless you have a story to tell that pushes us beyond the horror of it all.

The Daily Mail, which reviewed Margaux Fragoso's Tiger, Tiger in the United Kingdom, says it is "shocking the literary world." Why? Because Fragoso references her love for the man who abused her for fifteen years, and because it is so graphic about the sexual fantasies they shared that some critics call the book itself pornographic. The NPR review, which suckered me into buying this ghastly memoir (oh had I only clicked "read more") comes closer to why I am shocked by it: it is such a poorly written book. As Dan Koies writes delicately,

But it's perilous to discuss Tiger, Tiger, because when an author asserts her moral right to reclaim her abuse and recast it as story, it's easy to seem churlish when you wish that she were a better writer — or that she'd had a more careful editor. While Fragoso's publisher, FSG, is selling the book as a cautionary tale for parents and an act of bearing witness for victims of abuse, it's also positioning Tiger, Tiger, albeit uneasily, as a literary breakthrough. But though Fragoso can write with terrible beauty, often her memoir is hampered by awkward sentences, sloppy storytelling and the kind of unbelievably detailed description and dialogue that makes you distrust a memoir's voice.

No kidding. I can add to that. There not a single likable, compelling or interesting character in the book, including Fragoso. Furthermore, the "big secret" which she hints at throughout -- that she was one of many children, boys and girls, who were sexually abused by this man -- is patently obvious by the time we get the reveal in the last ten pages. Really? You mean he lied and you weren't the special one after all?

Understanding that child sexual abuse is a truly terrible experience, and a vicious crime, why any press would publish a memoir that doesn't compel a more passionate response by the reader is a mystery. In fact, the chapters consist of four dreary (and mostly predictable) scenarios that are repeated over and over. Those scenarios are:

Schizophrenic mother repeatedly turns her child over to abuser, sitting there watching TV and writing obsessively in her notebook while the abuser sneaks off to kiss and cuddle her daughter;
Narcissistic, OCD, misogynistic father too self-absorbed to raise his own child repeatedly turns daughter over to abuser. Fearing his own attraction to Fragoso, he pushes her away, making her receptive to the overtures from the abuser and sending confused messages about "fatherly" love that abuser capitalizes on;
Abuser's girlfriend creates safe space for abuser to abuse Fragoso, her own sons, and numerous foster children, despite repeated accusations by the entire neighborhood and social workers that the abuser is, in fact, an abuser;
Long, self-justifying speeches by abuser about what a caring person he is and how special and unique his relationship with Fragoso is.

Yuck, yuck, and yuck. What a good memoir on this topic would look like isn't clear to me, but none of the people who ought to read such a book -- in other words, people who match the description of any of the people in Tiger, Tiger -- could easily learn much from it beyond the fact that they are not alone. It's important, perhaps, but it's not enough.

Really, the best advice I have ever gotten on this topic was from a friend who said to me once: "Always watch out for Mama's boyfriend. " Which is kind of what you learn from Tiger, Tiger, but it takes over 300 pages to get there.