How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth It Is...Or Is It? The Radical Rates Rate My Professors.com

A couple weeks ago, I Googled myself. Admit it: you do it too. But it really is worth doing occasionally if you have become a blogger, because it gives you the illusion that you have some clue as to whether you are being needlessly slandered by others. Strangely, Tenured Radical itself is #5 in terms of hits for "Claire Potter," whereas a paper I gave at the University of Connecticut five years ago is on the top of the list (I suppose because the paper was about J. Edgar Hoover, who is slightly better known than I am.) But imagine my surprise when I saw at spot #3 the phrase: "Claire Potter is arrogant and inflammatory...." Whoa, now. Imagine my further surprise when, upon closer inspection, the post was not located in any place where I am used to being bashed for my politics or my behavior, but on the website faculty love to hate, RateMyProfessors.com.

Since I asked RateMyProfessors to take it down, I reproduce the text posted on April 5, 2008, in full here:

Claire Potter is arrogant and inflammatory, but also one of the most articulate people I've ever met. Her ideas and lectures are interesting, if offensive and disorganized (she sometimes tells the class she hasn't prepared). If she spent more time engaged with students and reality and less writing her blog, perhaps she'd be more palatable. Well perhaps, but not likely.

While I was at it, I took down this one from last semester:

While Potter is very engaging and clearly knows her stuff, she teaches a very biased view of history (that is, liberal feminiest[sic] history). any conservatives are always "they" and there is far more focus on liberal presidencies-with some scoffing over the kooky reagan years. If we're going to teach History, let's at least try to tell the truth. Yes let's -- like, for example that we spent a week on Barry Goldwater, and subsequently, the last three weeks of the semester on the new conservatism and neo-liberal governance. And all historical figures are "they" to me because -- well, they aren't me. You don't need to know much about object relations theory to know that.

Now, why did I have these comments taken down -- a move which is, by the way, only temporary, since permanent deletion occurs at the discretion of the site managers, who have no idea whether the comments accurately reflect an experience in my class? Well, because I consider them inaccurate and malicious, and I don't want them popping up on random Google searches. There actually is also a little matter of truth at stake here. In relation to the first comment, I have never told a class I was unprepared, although strangely, the day before this "evaluation" was posted, I had lectured the class about their uneven preparation, and given them a little in-class, surprise writing exercise. And as for the second comment I took down, also completely wrong: this strikes me as something that may well have been written by someone who knows about me, assumes that I would teach a political history class in a certain way, but was not actually in the class. This is not the first time I have suspected that people who are not my students comment on me, since several years ago I had RateMyProfessors take down a comment for a class I had not even taught. This took several tries, by the way, and the rating itself remains.

To test my theory that ratings could be posted by people who had never been my students, I went to the dreaded site, and registered myself, under my own name, as a Zenith student. Easy-peasy. The only false information I provided was a birth date that made me 19 years old (I wish!) and the box I checked that affirmed my status as a Zenith sophomore. I then successfully added a rating about myself. You can see it here: it's the anxious looking green emoticon that has the comment "interesting." I thought it only fair to add something right down the middle, neither good nor bad. Inflammatory perhaps, but arrogant never, that's my motto.

Now if I can do this, using my own name and without setting off any alarm bells on the website, what this means is that anyone can register as anyone and leave an evaluation -- for anyone -- that says anything. That's right. You could do it from prison if you had internet privileges, or from Afghanistan, if you were just farting around in between avoiding the Taliban. So think about that the next time you go into a class feeling insecure and betrayed because someone has posted something nasty about you on RateMyProfessors: it might not even be one of your students who did it. Furthermore, it makes you wonder -- when most professors have fewer than a dozen ratings, if someone has amassed an unusually high number -- sixty or seventy say -- who the heck is actually adding them? Can it really be students?

RateMyProfessors does not address the question of verification anywhere on its site, nor does it even suggest that it is possible for a person who is not actually your student to post a review of your teaching. But it does have a page where the site managers tell you what you can do to correct an unfair comment (other than post a video of yourself telling your students how wrong they are, a new feature called "Professors Strike Back" that is designed for those of you longing for your own reality show.) You can also ask that the comment be reviewed by the site managers as false or defamatory, as I did with the comments above: when it is, should they decide not to put it back up, the rating itself remains, something they don't tell you. But what else can you do? Why you can give them more publicity! As they explain:

"The best thing you can do is write an article about the site in your school paper. This ALWAYS has a huge impact on the number of ratings and makes the site become less entertainment oriented (an admission that selling advertising is the actual point of this website -- duh) and more of a resource for helping you plan your class schedule. Other things you can do is post flyers around campus, post links to the site on message boards that are school-related, and email your friends about the site."

Other than friendly advice on how to make a complete fool of yourself, this speaks to what I think is the central feature of the site. Students need to be highly motivated to use it, and normally they are motivated because they really like you or, conversely, they are getting revenge for some imagined or unimagined insult by writing something spiteful in public. The suggestion that professors themselves should mobilize students to "tell the truth" about their classroom experiences I find just bizarre and manipulative. I mean, who would do that?

But this isn't the only problem with RateMyProfessors from my point of view, or even the one that deserves serious attention. The problem is that, while accepting employment at a college or university means that you agree to the principle that your teaching will be evaluated as part of your contract with the school, none of us have any obligation to have things written about us by God Knows Who on a site that is completely and utterly commercial. Furthermore, the site can do whatever it wants with the ratings -- including, if it desires, publish a book based on the "data" it collects. The Terms of Use state explicitly that everything posted to the site is owned by the site and, while posters are warned that they may not do anything that violates civil or criminal statutes, by rules they themselves have established, RateMyProfessors claims that it may reproduce anything on the site without restriction. I'm sure that this is boilerplate copyright language, and I am equally sure that the site manager's refusal of liability is unenforceable, but the point remains that we -- the faculty -- are the ones whose work and identities are the substance of the site. And we have not been asked for our permission for "data" to be collected and published about us.

But that said, corporations are not this powerful: I think universities and individuals probably have the legal right to have themselves removed from, or to opt-out of, this site. If I knew how to do it I would, just on principle. Like Facebook, it is nothing but a crude marketing device in drag, where getting you on the site and keeping you there for as long as possible is the real point.

Take My Phone. Please.

"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.

A Woman's Place is in the House

Ok, I just needed to say that: if you are a feminist who has tenure or is even older, you used to own that tee shirt. Yes, in order to win the Democrats had to float more conservative candidates, but look at it this way: our new speaker represents the Castro district in San Francisco! Yes, I am just as worried about the future of a woman's right to choose as I was yesterday -- but THANK YOU South Dakota, thank you Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood (daughter of the late Governor Ann Richards), thank you, you brave organizers who knocked on doors to stop a referendum that would have put Roe on the line in the Supreme Court, and was intended to do so, since you can't get an abortion in South Dakota anyway. And all those anti-gay marriage referendums are pointless and nasty -- but what about the minimum wage referendums that got passed all over the country that are pinned to the rate of inflation? Yeah, baby! This is critical for two reasons. First, it is the only thing that has been done for working people in this country in years -- those people who have three or four jobs per family, and still have to join the military to pay for college or a trade school. Second, it means that the business class may begin to hold the party in charge accountable for ruinous fiscal policies that drive up the cost of living, a move that could alter the political landscape significantly.

*************************************

In other news, my partner read my blog yesterday, which is only because I told her about it just the day before. The good part is that, although she does not like blogging as a form (this may be related to coming from a very literary family, but I think is more related to questions of privacy), she likes the blog and she still likes me. The bad news is, she doesn't really want to be in it and didn't like the pseudonym I had chosen, so I needed to go back and do some editing, and also explain to the few of you who know me what has changed and why, thus risking putting her in the blog again. But ars gratia artis, as they say out in California.

Permission to blog about others is a tricky and interesting question, because actually no one in my blog has given me permission to write about them, but as I pointed out to N, a great many of our friends do write and publish about their families. And if and when Extravaganza finds out, I am confident he will be thrilled, as he aspires to be a superstar and he understands already that good publicity is critical to his career. But back to my conversation with the love of my life: we agreed to some changes. One which you will note is that I changed the pseudonym to an initial. We picked N, a letter of the alphabet that is in the middle, and relatively uncontroversial and uncoded as, for example, a letter like "X" might be (would you want to be described by the love of your life as X? Not.) She also doesn't want to be called an academic, despite the Ph.D., and we agreed on "teacher" which is true, and also reflects her real modesty about her intelligence and what I think is the great work she does in the world.


But as to her presence in the blog, this is a real personal, ethical and artistic dilemma. My initial reaction was that I didn't want to blog as though I was single (as in unpartnered, unmarried) because one of the things that was tricky about commuting all those years is that in a variety of contexts people treated me as though I was single. I disliked this increasingly, and when it appeared we were going to live together, I looked forward to ironing out this irritation. Back in the day, when I corrected people's misapprehension about my relationship status, I usually had to do it in terms that were less about us and who we were than about what my audience already understood about conventional relationships. And this meant, in turn, that I often had to describe my intimate life to people in ways I found intrusive, burdensome and inaccurate if not incorrect -- why we commuted, how we did it, that we didn't consider our bond to be "the same as" being married (an explanation I usually had to provide, not to conservatives who were "defending" marriage, but to liberals demonstrating their ecumenicism about the institution and about me.) But that we WERE deeply committed. In other words it was a big drag, and usually an unintended invasion of MY privacy. And I suspect it was less of a drag for N all these years, because I was living in Zenith, a place where LGBTQ people are not exactly invisible, but not exactly movemement-oriented or diverse either, and she lived in the highly urban and diverse Big City, traditional home to many kinds of queer folk, ranging from married to free love types. So even though I know this is not going to be a huge issue in the blogosphere, I wanted to start off on the right foot.

But the other dilemma is a real one for abstract and practical reasons. The practical is that N doesn't think this blog will remain anonymous for long, that I have utterly blown my cover and that anyone with half a brain can use the information I have provided to discover my real identity if they try (I would say my characteristic typos are a likelier clue for those who know me.) I didn't tell her that I already blew my cover with Dr. Virago when I tested my Gmail account, because she doesn't know Dr. Virago, and Virago has better things to do than out me (love the apes, Dr. V.) But I also think this would presume that anyone cares who I am, and that I can restrain myself from being egotistical enough to urge my friends and allies at Zenith to read my blog. This last is dicey, given that I am well-known for enjoying the payoff of a quick laugh and not paying enough attention to the consequences of my snarky and perverse behavior. I admit this is a personal flaw and a vulnerability, but it is also probably a good test of character to not make such a spectacle of myself until I consciously decide to NOT be anonymous.

But there are other reasons I am glad that N raised this issue. The ethical question is, what are your obligations to those you write about, aside from doing it honestly and restraining yourself from being out of control critical or making judgements that are likely to wound others? This is something N thinks about all the time, as she is a social scientist of sorts, and a radical person in a research world that is often very exploitative. As a historian, I haven't thought about it much at all until recently because all the people I wrote about were dead. I realize that this isn't a good excuse, but the chances of a nasty phone call or being shunned are smaller when you write about the dead, you must admit. However, my current research is about people who are by and large alive, as well as still really pissed off at each other, and I think this blog question overlaps with the ethical questions and risks attendant to doing that kind of recent history. And what is blogging as a literary form, anyway? Is it memoir, current history, news, gossip, critique, commentary, all of the above? Each of these genres has different, although overlapping, conventions. Which ones help me navigate? At what point do my own thoughts and experiences borrow, or steal, the thoughts and experirences of others? When do they cease to be mine alone?

So I have to think strategically as I sort these things out. One thought I did have is that I have noticed a modern genre of gay male writing -- Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris and Bob Morris -- where the writer is kind of an abject, insecure sissy and the "boyfriend" is always self-assured, masculine, nurturing, confident, and slightly condescending about the author's insecurities (not that there's anything wrong with that!) But I have wondered -- why the pattern? Is it because making fun of themselves then insulates authors from worrying that the Significant Other will object to his/her representation in the essays as the inevitable foil for what must be a more complex, interior narrative articulated by the protagonist? Yo, English professors -- chime in here.

Ok, enough, enough. I managed to bring this blog back to intellectual issues for a hot second. Now it's your turn.

The Radical's History Reviewed: When I Was Bad, I Was Horrid

Mostly because they have been linked by my history colleague Historiann, I have of late been drawn to the luridly enraged and cruelly hilarious posts at Rate Your Students. A blog response to the notorious RateMyProfessors.com, RYS, from my point of view, is a kind of academic pornography: it's outrageous, and it relies on cruel caricatures of students that have enough truth in them to make them universally recognizable -- the terrible students described at this blog can be found at a community college, an Ivy, or any stop in between. It doesn't stop at pillorying undergraduates, but produces the occasional post that skewers graduate students for being whining, careless little piss-ants.

You will notice that RYS is not on the list of blogs I follow regularly (see widget on the left), but in fact I do follow it regularly from a bookmarked link in my Safari navbar. While there are many blogs I follow from bookmarks, RYS is there as the internet equivalent of sliding a dirty magazine between the mattress and the box spring. I don't want to read it, but I do -- or more accurately, I don't want to want to read it. Every time I do it feels like the time a feminist colleague of mine urged me to read Jane Gallop's Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (Duke: 1997): "It's like a horrible traffic accident," she said; "You can't not look."

Yet RYS, compelling as it is, reminds me that one characteristic of the blogosphere is a kind of self-righteous rage that often gets focused on students, colleagues, institutional politics, varsity athletics, or "the administration" -- a rage that is more complex, surely, in its origins and context than whatever rant I am reading wants to admit to. Many of us are frustrated, insecure, overworked, under-rewarded, and uncertain about what the future will hold. We were told in graduate school that if we worked hard we would succeed, and we did work hard - so why are some of us teaching adjunct and some of us on a jet plane to a contract for a crossover narrative history of the Nixon presidency and a named chair? Why do some of us get up early and stay up late, publishing and teaching our hearts out in visiting positions, only to be told that we are "too far along" for the tenure-track assistant professor slot we would take despite our age and accomplishments to get our careers back on track? Why do some of us resolve every year to put our scholarship first, only to be loaded down with committee work, course overloads, and the excess grunt-work of the university?

Enter the clueless student who, through carelessness, narcissism, and often unconsciously rude and over-privileged behavior, becomes the fulcrum around which all of our rage and frustration about Planet College congeals. This is the student who disputes every grade below an A-, and tells you in the teaching evaluation that you have liberal bias; the student who walks in ten minutes late, misses every question you answered about the assignment that is due tomorrow, and expects you to repeat it all one-on-one in a special appointment outside office hours; the student who drinks pints of water in class, and then needs to leave abruptly in the middle of your lecture to refill the water bottle and, inevitably, go to the bathroom.

Well dear reader, I was once that student. Not always, or even most of the time, but sometimes. And like the girl with the curl, when I was bad I was horrid.

I was reminded of this because I was recently assigned the task of either disposing of several large boxes of personal papers (which we have hauled from home to home for almost twenty years) or finding a place to keep them other than the front hall of our otherwise gracious home. Clearly decisions needed to be made. Upon opening one box, I discovered an accordion file that contains what must be almost every college paper I wrote and -- I kid you not -- thirty notebooks full of lecture and seminar notes from the classes I took as an undergraduate at Oligarch University.

The courses I liked are obvious: "E. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels," I scribbled on one notebook cover, after a hasty post-lecture conference with one professor. In a different color ink, there is a library call number: clearly I actually got this book out of the library and read it. Similarly, on the inside front leaf of the notebook for a course on the Third Republic, I noted advice given to me over a beer by one of my favorite professors: "Find Charles Tilly/could be critical to future." Little did I know that fate would deliver Tilly and his wonderful wife Louise into my hands (actually me into theirs, but I am the hero of this story) when they took a position at the New School in New York. They, in turn, would invite me to join a proseminar where I spent a semester developing a dissertation on American bandit crime with Eric Hobsbawm. Wheels within wheels, man. You couldn't make this up. And it all started with a professor who liked to sit down and have a drink with his students.

Then I pulled out a notebook from a political science course called "Culture, Class, Revolution and the Intellectual," and one vivid -- but not the only -- blemish on my undergraduate past flashed before my eyes in nauseating detail. You see, we had virtually no advising at Oligarch, which means that the vast number of us chose the courses we took by a method that was governed by an entirely personal calculus. For example, my roommate and I, most semesters, signed up for a lecture course that required us to read novels: the Victorian novel, the Eighteenth Century Novel, the Modern American Novel. I was an English major, she was an Art major, but why did we sign up for these classes? Because we liked reading novels, and we liked to talk to each other about them. Duh. My other method was to sign up for courses that were either taught by people I knew to be good, or cool (a technique for making intellectual choices that my students at Zenith practice to this day), or courses that promised reading or insight on a hip topic that I knew nothing about. I also signed up for what seems now, for someone who became a twentieth century historian, an excessive number of courses in Renaissance literature, where my huge and unaccountable crush on the professor was entirely and fully satisfied by excelling at close readings of Spenser and his contemporaries week after week, and imagining how my insight and critical skills might ultimately lead to a romantic encounter with this scholar.

But until the fall of my junior year, at a certain point in every semester, I -- not very consciously -- decided which courses deserved my full attention (Spenser, for example) and which ones I could blow off. And I blew off, I'm afraid to say, more than enough courses to produce an undergraduate transcript that would raise fatal doubts about my capacity for graduate study were I to apply today.

"Culture, Class, Revolution and the Intellectual" was one of the courses I ultimately blew off. The early pages are promising: "Can intellectualism bridge the gap between intellectuals and reality?" I mused on September 13. "Look over last year's notes on [Raymond] Aron." The following week we read Camus' The Rebel: "in the final analysis," I wrote, "being an intellectual depends on autonomy -- but is autonomy possible? Is money a practical problem?" I was so deep.

By the following week things had, imperceptibly perhaps, started to fall apart. Underneath a few sketchy ideas about the role of art and artists in a revolutionary movement (I told you I was deep), I had written to a classmate: "I heard in the dining hall that a freshman tried to kill himself in the seventh floor men's room in Sterling Stacks last night. This is unsettling." No shit, Sherlock. The following week, underneath disjointed scribbles about C. Wright Mills ("the activist intellectual," "constant need for critique," etc.), I wrote: "I've got to stay awake. This class has only ten people in it, and I'm falling asleep, about to embarrass myself. Three girls across the table are doing it too -- one was really asleep for a while." And later: "She's done it again. I'm going to sleep, and it doesn't help that the two girls next to her are yawning quite a bit. How embarrassing."

Reading this ancient notebook, I was identifying entirely with the instructor, who I have to tell you, I do not remember at all. But she was a woman, teaching at Yale when there were almost no women teaching at Yale -- I probably took courses from all of them, in fact. Dear God. What a monstrous little bastard I was. I turned the page to the following week's session.

"Proposed Camp for Deposed Dictators," I had written at the top of the page, not even bothering to note what the reading assignment was -- had I done it? "Campers: Shah of Iran, Idi Amin, Somosa, Richard Nixon. Games campers will not be allowed to play: capture the flag, Monopoly. Books campers will not be allowed to read: How To Be Your Own Best Friend, The Good Soldier, Mad Magazine, Look Back in Anger. Required Reading: You Can't Go Home Again." Once an English major, always......

Oh, what a card I was. Two weeks later, I had clearly stopped listening in any meaningful way. Sketches of beatniks, gerbils and people throwing up alternated with the New York Times crossword puzzle carefully pasted into the notebook. Looking up occasionally with a feigned frown, I hoped to appear serious, present and engaged as I did battle with Eugene T. Maleska -- in pen, thank you very much, just to prove how much confidence I had in my own brilliance, despite the fact that I was now learning nothing. Oh sure, there were occasional, feeble stabs at being engaged with the course. "For next week read How Much to Catalonia (?????)," and a page of notes labeled "preparation for oral report on Bakunin" (I gave an oral report on Bakunin?) The notebook ends in mid-December with a crude cartoon of a prisoner in a cage saying: "Help! I am trapped in this class and I almost laugh all the time it is so silly!"

Lucky for this professor that a semester must, eventually, come to an end, eh? And how lucky that this was prior to the routine use of teaching evaluations. And yet, having carefully documented all my misbehavior as if it was a rational response to her poor teaching, I don't recall the professor ever treating me with the disrespect I clearly deserved, calling me out from behind the crossword puzzle, or taking revenge of any kind. Maybe she knew she wasn't teaching well, or maybe there was more of a laconic attitude towards seminar work among Oligarch undergraduates than I recall and there was nothing she could do as we withdrew singly and as a group. Maybe the deadening, tortuous pace of this class was not something she felt she had much power over. Who knows?

Strangely, a quick look at my Oligarch transcript, also in the box, shows an A- for the course. Must have been the oral report on Bakunin.

As I say, I don't remember this professor at all, which in a way is truly horrifying -- only her last name survives on the outside of the notebook. If she remembers me, and wants to report me to RYS in an ex post facto kind of way, I think it would be fair. But I would like to close by remembering, very briefly, another class that I blew off: the first gay and lesbian studies course I ever took, taught by a famous gay poet, who we queer students all admired because he was handsome and witty and smart, was publicly involved with another famous gay poet, and appeared to be having the romantically perfect intellectual life that we all craved. Inexplicably however, or at least inexplicably to the youthful me, I did all the reading for this course but could sometimes not bring myself to actually go to class for a week or so at a time. Now, of course, it seems very clear that I was more than a little conflicted about my own sexuality, blah, blah, blah; and what that had to do with me taking the class in the first place, blah, blah, blah. But I worked very hard to compartmentalize that knowledge then because it would have interfered with my pose, which relied for its effect on a feigned indifference to the emotions and responsibilities felt by ordinary, boring people; my biting, sarcastic wit; and what I (tragically funny this) believed was my intellectual uniqueness.

At one point, when I had missed about two weeks of classes in a row, I ran into my professor on the street.

"Sorry I haven't been in class," I said in what I thought was a sophisticated and nonchalant way, "I've been very ill." This professor, to my surprise and horror, turned around and fell into step with me, thus enhancing my discomfort. He encouraged me to talk in detail about the illness that had kept me home from class, day after day, and yet left me free to roam the streets only an hour or so after the most recent meeting. Quickly regaining my composure, I drew on some details of illnesses that I was, in fact, regularly plagued by, hinted at the possibility of a walking pneumonia, trips for chest x-rays and what have you. The more I talked about it, the more convinced I was that I had pulled myself back from the brink and was, in fact, on my way home from another tiring trip to Radiology.

"Hmmm," he said, and stopped walking. "Well, let me give you a piece of advice. I don't mind if you lie to me about why you aren't coming to class. I expect it, really. But don't lie to yourself. That's a very bad habit to get into. See you next week." And then he walked away, leaving a rather stunned and humiliated me behind. I didn't miss any more classes.

I suppose there should be a moral to this story, but I don't think there is: it's probably unwise to draw morals from partly digested snippets of one's own life anyway. Speaking bluntly to students as if they were adults doesn't always work, which I know better than anyone. In fact, it almost never works, because we are often speaking about something important that only time can reveal to them. But I do wonder about the motivations of those who convert their classroom experience to raging, mean, (often hilarious, I admit) posts on Rate Your Students. Often we have no idea what is going on behind the facades erected by students who use politeness and good behavior to fend us off while they collect their average or better than average grades. But we might learn something about good teaching from the students who fail, the ones who go out of their way to flout our authority. Or at the very least, we might see their rudeness as an opportunity to teach to more than the text once in a while. And if we understand their arrogance, their bravado, their selfishness, their narcissism and their cluelessness as critique or resistance, we might even gain some insight as to what we have at stake in our role as classroom authorities in the first place.

"And Your Little Dog Too!!!" Christina Hoff Sommers Still Wants The Ruby Slippers

Yesterday one of my trusted agents (and I keep telling you, my agents are everywhere) sent me a link to Christina Hoff Sommer's recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, "Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship." I thought Sommers was going to really let fly about vaginal orgasm ("what vaginal orgasm????"), or weigh in about whether women were on the cutting edge of medical practice in the nineteenth century until men invented medical school as a canny strategy to take over the birthing room. But I soon realized that the article was just another tired old piece of conservative wheel-spinning crap, the central ideas of which Sommers (who calls herself an "equity feminist") has published elsewhere.

As I wondered why the Chronicle would publish something intended only to generate more of the drama Sommers is famous for, this exchange from The Wizard of Oz, featuring Judy Garland and the transcendent Billie Burke floated into my head.

Glinda: "Are you a good witch -- or a bad witch?"

Dorothy, shocked: "Who, me?! I'm not a witch at all. I'm Dorothy Gale, from Kansas."

Glinda, gesturing at Toto: "Oh! Well is that the witch?"

Dorothy: "Who, Toto? Toto's my dog."

Glinda: "Well, I'm a little muddled. The Munchkins called me because a new witch has just dropped a house on the Wicked Witch of the East. And there's the house, and here you are, and that's all that's left of the Wicked Witch of the East. And so, what the Munchkins want to know is - are you a good witch or a bad witch?"

Dorothy: "But I've already told you. I'm not a witch at all."

This is precisely what it feels like to get into an argument with conservative ideologues who are trying to suppress real debate in the name of (you guessed it) free and open intellectual exchange. Believe me, I've been there. Or you can pick up the phone and call some people I know at Duke.

Sommers, a philosopher and ethicist who used to teach at Clark University but now lives high off the conservative foundation tit, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a founder of the Independent Women's Forum and a beneficiary of the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute's lecture program. The two books she is best known for are Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women (1995), and The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (2000). When not cashing checks from Enterprise and Luce, she makes a living out of bashing liberal feminists and policies that suppress real gender equality -- you know, Title IX, pay equity, and all that jazz that keeps us from being the country we really could be if men were free of government interference. One of Sommers' arguments is that the American feminist establishment has hoodwinked the public into their man-hating agenda by publishing reams of false scholarship, riddled with factual errors and outright lies.

Worse, these feminists have willfully snookered the government and major foundations so that they can keep a stranglehold on research money that will go to perpetuating their outrageous falsehoods and embedding them in social programs of various kinds. The outcome, Sommers charges, is a feminist policy agenda driven by bad data (unlike, say, federally mandated abstinence programs, which are based on "good" research that "proves" teenagers will give up sex when asked to do so.) Worst of all is the cloud of feminist opprobrium hanging over the male gender. Institutionalized feminist rage has made boys the object of oppressive scrutiny, she argues, suppressing their intellectual and social development. Meanwhile, girls charge ahead, beneficiaries of special attention, special programs, beaming approval and the encouragement of all their teachers.

Sounds like the university you work in, doesn't it? Men cowering in the halls, women running roughshod over the hiring process and pushing any male student who hasn't already gone into hiding to the back of the proverbial bus? I'm sure someone at a conservative think tank somewhere is running an experiment in which sad, underachieving little boys, when asked to pick their favorite action figure, choose Malibu Barbie.

In the Chronicle piece Sommers airs her grievances toward Berkeley law prof Nancy Lemon, and a widely used textbook Lemon wrote and edited, Domestic Violence Law (2005). In what seems like a fishing expedition, following a series of public lectures attacking the book and a post on Feminist Law Professors (which she refers to, but I can't find unless it was in the video link in this post) she wrote Lemon an email pointing out the supposed errors in her work. In a frosty reply that I won't quote since I haven't seen the original, Lemon wrote back that she was all for accuracy and scholarly dialogue, but that Sommers might have offered the opportunity for that before she went around the country trashing Lemon's book for fun and profit. "I confess," Sommers writes:

I had indeed publicly criticized Lemon's book, in campus lectures and in a post on FeministLawProfessors.com. I had always thought that that was the usual practice of intellectual argument. Disagreement is aired, error corrected, truth affirmed. Indeed, I was moved to write to her because of the deep consternation of law students who had attended my lectures: If authoritative textbooks contain errors, how are students to know whether they are being educated or indoctrinated? Lemon's book has been in law-school classrooms for years.

One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack.

You know, I am glad you brought this up Christina, because I thought the exact same thing about the Bush administration a few years back. Question the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and boom! your wife gets bounced from the CIA. Point out that the Bush administration lied its way into the Iraq war, lied about torture, lied about the orders that were given to sexually humiliate prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and some ass hat named Cheney or Rumsfeld calls you a traitor. Hell, if you aren't a citizen, and better yet if you were born in Syria or Egypt, they render your sorry behind into a medieval prison where folks really know how to make you scream like a pig. And it is this issue that has troubled me all along: reasonable, evidence based criticism is too often treated by conservatives as a personal attack.

But let's get back to feminism for a moment. What the scope of Sommers' criticisms are I don't know, but in this article she cites two supposed inaccuracies in the Lemon text: one is to the legendary Romulan "rule of thumb," by which women could only be legally beaten with a rod as thick as a man's thumb. The second is a disagreement about how many women end up in emergency rooms as a result of domestic violence; and whether there is a study by the March of Dimes finding that "women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease." In the latter case, Lemon and the author of the piece claim to have documentation to back of their claims, and Sommers implies that they are lying. In the former, Sommers claims that Romulus never existed, and Lemon says the piece itself can survive that criticism. But no, Sommers says: "Students deserve better. So do women victimized by violence." What battered women do deserve -- well, Sommers never gets to that.

But this is, of course, typical of so-called critique emitting from conservative ideologues bankrolled by activist foundations. What is central is an insistence that if a factual error is found, no matter how small or irrelevant to the argument it is, the entire work is false and a deliberate attempt at ideological indoctrination. ("Somebody is a witch here, Dorothy! If it's not you, then it's someone in one of your footnotes!") Furthermore, research data cited that can be countered by other data, no matter how cooked or ideologically motivated that data is, is pronounced a lie.

In the case of the Romulus problem, one of my colleagues in Classics tells me that Sommers is correct, and that there is nothing that can be said about such a person or his putative legal code with any historical accuracy. A second colleague in History amplifies: no one knows whether there was a Romulus or not, as there is no recovered evidence about anyone who lived in Rome prior to 509 BCE. "Romulus was said to have founded Rome in 753 BCE and been its first king," she writes, and notes that literary sources written 8 centuries later refer to him. And yet, if lawmakers and jurists subsequently believed that there was such a person as Romulus, and based their judgments on documents that purported to describe ancient law and practice, one might still usefully refer to such a thing as the "Romulan rule of thumb" playing a role in the legal oppression of women. Take a look at Warren Burger's selective gloss on the history of sex in his concurrence with the majority decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) if you don't believe that bad history can have a major impact on the law. Or arguments that rely on an entirely invented world history of race in United States v. Thind (1923).

Furthermore, as Sommers hammers at a variety of what she calls factual errors, she conveniently sidesteps an important assumption undergirding her attacks on liberal feminist scholars, which is that they have an agenda and she doesn't. No one has a hammerlock on objectivity and truth because of their intellectual standpoint. All research is produced through some kind of ideological apparatus, as are all facts and all questions. Sommers' assertion that "decades of women's-studies scholarship that presents women as the have-nots of our society" creates misguided and ideologically-driven social policy because "this is largely no longer true." Have-not is a technical term I am unfamiliar with so I can't quarrel with her there, but I am much more familiar with this data on the median wage gap between men and women, and as of 2006, women earned .77 for every dollar a man earned. Interestingly, the gap shrinks (although it does not close) as education level drops: at the top of the scale, female Ph.D.'s earn an average .70 for every male dollar.

By picking away at small issues and claiming that they completely undermine larger arguments, Sommers distracts attention from her own distortions by forcing others to defend their own credibility. In this post on Feminist Law Professors she writes: "I will also take this occasion, once again, to correct a false allegation that was made about me. On September 2, 2008 an entry on this blog mentioned that I had once called women’s studies professors “homely.” I never said any such thing."

Who cares? Let it go. In fact, if you want to use that word, some of us are homely, some are acceptable to lovely, and I am fabulous.

My advice to Sommers about making claims that her views ought to define feminism, or anything that has anything to do with policy on the majority of women? Leave the Ruby Slippers alone, girl friend. They don't fit.

I'll end with this exchange between Glinda the Good and the Witch of the West:

Wicked Witch (to Dorothy): "Give me back my slippers! I'm the only one that knows how to use them. They're of no use to you. Give them back to me. Give them back!"

Glinda (to Dorothy): "Keep tight inside them. Their magic must be very powerful or she wouldn't want them so badly."

Wicked Witch: "You stay out of this, Glinda, or I'll fix you as well!"

Glinda: "Oh, rubbish! You have no power here. Be gone before somebody drops a house on you too."

Sticky Wiki

Cruising around the blogosphere as one does, and following link to link, I ended up on Academic Cog's December post about the academic job wiki. My favorite Cog was upbraiding midnight raiders who erased sections of the wiki, claiming that they had done so as a "political act" to protest the oppressions of the job market. I agree with Miss Cog, mutilating the wiki was a mean thing to do, although I think it was probably a function of wiki-madness itself, perhaps enhanced by drink, that gave some jerk the idea that hir own rotten year on the job market could be made better by destabilizing other people's peace of mind. Having never really thought much about this job market wiki before last year (when I stumbled upon it and, to my horror, found a colleague's divorce detailed by a disappointed job hunter as the reason why s/he was given a job, purportedly by sympathetic friends, that "should have" gone to someone junior), I have now encountered it accidentally several times in the last six weeks.

The first was at the AHA, where I had an exchange with another colleague who I don't know particularly well. Both of us are tenured full professors at SLACs, so neither of us (I think) fall into the category of people who might justifiably be enraged on our own, or our students', behalf by the state of the job market. I mentioned the incident I have sketched out above as a reason why I thought the wiki was not so great (not that there is anything one can, or should, do to stop it, as it is a wiki.) My colleague got fighting mad -- or at least it seemed so to me -- because, as s/he pointed out, the job market is so stacked against the job-seeker, anything that could give a candidate more information was justified.

OK, I said, trying to de-escalate, but any and all information? Including putting the personal business of strangers up? And how did more information about others really help a job seeker? (Academic Cog, by the way, makes a good point that being allowed to deal with disappointment privately is a benefit of the wiki.) As I also pointed out, one had to rely on the good will of other strangers that the information posted was accurate. And, although some of it seemed to be good sharing - "received phone interview 11/21" - some of it was bad sharing -- "I hear that there is a short list already." "I hear there is an inside candidate." Well, from whom did you hear that?

My colleague was unmoved by my skepticism and we agreed to disagree. I shimmered across the room to get another beer, and forgot about the wiki for another few weeks.

But once I started to ask around, I found that people actively on the job market give the wiki mixed reviews. For every jobless soul I have talked to who finds it helpful to have "more information" there is another who is made anxious by the compulsion to check the wiki and its inevitable failure to offer any concrete help in the job hunt. "I try to stay off it," more than one has confessed. "It makes me anxious, but I keep checking anyway," said another a few weeks back. And I get that: if you are a blogger, how many times a day do you check to see if there are any comments? Any comments responding to your response to a comment? A visit from the Diva that might need to be purged? (nb: the Diva has been very civil of late and we at Tenured Radical appreciate it.) How could you help but go on the wiki if you were on the market?

Okay, so when I decided to write about the Academic Job wiki, I went to the original wiki, and then followed Academic Cog's link to the scratchpad version that was established when the Raiders of the Lost Wiki took a number of pages down from the real one. And I found, in relation to my own American Studies searches at Zenith:

NB to candidates: Caution when applying here. Institutional cultures vary by department, last year's search for a [field censored by TR] specialist in [department censored by TR] was tanked by a hostile admin, and several junior fac of color were not granted tenure. Research well, ask around, and get the specs.

Now, this information is only partially accurate, to begin with. Furthermore, as neither of our American Studies searches were partnered with the named department, or in the designated field, and the search chairs are reporting to an entirely different administration (president, provost and divisional dean are all different people), I ask you: what did this have to do with the actual searches that candidates would be participating in? What does the wiki tell them that helps them be better candidates for our jobs? That there is racism at Zenith? Well I could have told you that if you had asked. And those who work at universities where there is no racism might want to write a comment for this post about what it is like to work under those conditions. Enquiring minds want to know.

I suspect that the person who wrote the wiki post is the same anonymous commenter who occasionally shows up on this blog to hint darkly about my naivete about the "troubles" at Zenith. I don't mind the insinuation, although as regular readers of this blog know, having been among the first round of casualties in those troubles, aka, the Unfortunate Events, it is not I who needs to be reminded that the past is not always a place we want to visit. But at what university or college have these things not happened? Where have deserving people not been misunderstood? Welcome to the academy.

Furthermore, I wonder -- is such a comment actually intended to hurt rather than help? Certainly suggesting that job candidates ask directly about whether the tenure process is biased against candidates of color seems like a bad strategy. Ask me that and you are asking the person who will be candid and think it is a reasonable conversation in a recruiting situation; ask some other search chair and they might suggest you pick up your dossier on the way out the door. You really have no way of knowing. But let's assume encouraging people to make themselves conspicuous by collecting gossip that they have no way of evaluating is not malicious: how would a candidate act on that advice? Not apply for a job s/he is qualified for and increase the risk of remaining an adjunct instead? Or apply for the job, perhaps get it, and then be permanently vigilant about what terrible thing will happen next at the hands of unknown enemies?

Alright, I'll stop fulminating. I know that it was a spiteful attempt, probably by someone who has all the reasons in the world, to slam Zenith more generally in response to having been slammed by the Zenith personnel process. But as to whether such comments "help" others? Let's not be naive. And this leads me to the problem with the wiki: there seems to be no wiki administrator who is in a position to address the question of whether a post, disingenuously claiming to be helpful, actually hurts job candidates in the end by complicating their feelings about places that people inevitably experience differently and search processes which do not privilege the individual.

As to what I learned from the wiki, I think it would be helpful for people running searches to read it to think about what not to do and how to be as respectful of candidates as possible. As Academic Cog points out, search committees keep candidates on the string for far too long. Candidates receive interview requests so much at the last minute that even knowing whether to pre-register for the convention is impossible -- a convention you really might not be able to bear going to if you have no interviews. (The Radical once received such an invitation on Christmas Eve.) These endless timelines are something we need to re-think, since job searches may be disappointing on many levels, but they don't have to be gruesome or dismissive: to this extent, I agree wholeheartedly with my AHA colleague that more transparency would help. Reading the wiki comments should be sobering about the level to which those running searches do not feel bound by common courtesy. Not returning response cards included in the application by the candidate; not acknowledging the receipt of applications; not letting people know they are out of the running; personal rudeness on interviews: the list is long, and these careless things happen everywhere, including Zenith, I am sorry to say.

After my own search is over, I will do a post about how to do a search that will include some things I wish I had done better this year -- maybe an article for AHA Perspectives. Someone should, at any rate, and I hope some of the comments on this post will give advice on that. But let me say that although the wiki does no terrible harm, the good it does may be undermined by the level to which it incites insecurity among job seekers and distributes questionable information (some of the clothing advice is truly useless obsessing: no one does-- or doesn't -- get a job because s/he did -- or didn't -- wear a dark suit.) What might make sense is if, alongside the wiki run by job seekers, each professional assocation maintained a wiki in which search chairs who had advertised with that association's newsletter posted a tentative schedule at the time of placing the ad, and were asked to either maintain that schedule or alter it if circumstances dictate. Comments about discourteous or unprofessional treatment that go directly and confidentially to the Vice President of the Professional Division of that association could also be a feature of this page. Job seekers have a perfect right to do what it takes to feel empowered, but having information made publicly available by the search committees themselves strikes me as an intervention that would allow those who want to get off the wiki to do so.

More Annals of the Great Depression: What Divides Us And Why

At Zenith University, like everywhere else, there are budget cuts. There were cuts last year; there will be more cuts this year; one imagines there will perhaps be more cuts next year. Everyone thinks of us as a rich little school, and compared to some we are: compared to many schools with which we are associated (Amherst, Williams) we are not. What compounds the problem (and I won't bore you with the details) is that up until about a decade ago, the combination of poor investing, insufficient fund-raising and living beyond our means meant that not only did Zenith's endowment not grow, it shrank dramatically from the bountiful era of owning My Weekly Reader, a period which shaped the expectations and thinking of several generations of faculty still working at the university. Assertions that we are very short of cash are met with varying levels of disbelief, even though we all also know that it is true.

To make a long story short (and not be revealing in ways that will make me even more unpopular at Zenith today than I was yesterday) budget talk reveals many things about the normative assumptions of one's organization. Chief among the assumptions under discussion in mine yesterday was that the "normal" Zenith employee has, or wants, children; and that the childless among us benefit in countless ways from their colleagues' desire to have and raise children. Another is the extent to which many of my colleagues believe, despite reassurances to the contrary and the ongoing scrutiny of the budget process by a committee of trustworthy people we elected, that any attempt to curtail faculty benefits and privileges (even those unequally distributed, as I will discuss below) is part of an ongoing conspiracy by the administration to proletarianize the faculty. This conspiracy has been in the works for decades, so its proponents believe, and is now being activated by the global financial crisis, which will allow the Zenith administration to do what they have wanted to do all along: strip us of every last right and privilege.

Loud protests that there is "fat" elsewhere that can be cut rend the land. No one who has made this claim has been specific as to where such cuts might be usefully made, or why, other than the fact that they do not represent direct faculty interests - from what I understand, budgets like financial aid, University Relations and student services are where "fat" can be found. Some colleagues make unproven claims of varying extravagance about how they only came to Zenith in the first place because of the benefit currently under discussion, or that they have turned down attractive offers from other, unnamed, institutions only because of promised benefits that Zenith now threatens to rescind. Still others assert that it is only the excellent benefits that allow people to take moderate-wage academic jobs in the first place, and that benefits cuts will send high quality potential scholars into other fields.

This, of course, ignores the fact that some academics (economists, scientists) are paid dramatically more than others (historians, literature professors); and that there seem to be, depending on the field in question, between ten and fifty well-qualified people for every position at an American college or university. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe all those people teach adjunct because they love the freedom and hate TIAA-CREF.

Of course only in academia would anyone imagine a set of conversations with a dean as a promise, or as some have claimed, a “contract,” to be kept in perpetuity regardless of the financial circumstances of the institution. Even unions have to negotiate their benefits periodically to reflect a new economic climate. In fact, anyone who has had their eyes open lately knows that, except for not getting a raise this year, the faculty has been the last place Zenith has targeted for actual cuts. All the administrative departments are letting people go and not replacing them, and Zenith administrators did receive what amounted to a salary cut last year when their annual performance bonuses were canceled. Offices like Admissions, for example, are doing more with less, processing more paperwork (financial aid requests have grown, as have applications to Zenith) with fewer staff.

So imagine my surprise when, in response to what has been framed as a temporary scaling back in Zenith's tuition benefit (in which the University proposes that it will continue to grow, probably not at the rate tuitions will increase, but constituting tens of thousands of dollars per dependent child) created a storm of unreasoning protest. Of all the benefits we have, this group of faculty declared, this was the one that could not be tampered with. Imagine my further surprise when, in response to a number of us who have no access to this benefit suggesting that we could support a cut in the tuition benefit equal to all other cuts being made, we were roundly scolded for being ignorant, uncaring, unfeeling and deluded.

This is a more civilized critique than those who questioned child-supremacy used to get: the child-free, regardless of why they were in that position, were until recently routinely spoken of as narcissistic, selfish, or child hating. Now we are just patronized because of our failure to understand why a continuing, although smaller, increase in a benefit we do not receive is something we should be willing to fight for while our own paychecks are frozen and our health care costs rise. That we are also appalled, distressed, and alienated at how quickly the child supremacists are willing to throw us under the bus to preserve a large benefit that we do not share; or that our primary human attachments might be to ourselves, or to members of a non-hetero/homonormative social formation, many of them find naive and morally questionable.

I would like to point out that the loose coalition of the willing that does not consider this cut unthinkable is made up of gay people and straight people; the coupled and the uncoupled; the married and the unmarried; those who have dependent (or formerly dependent) children and those who do not. I mention this because one of the first things people make sure to tell me in particular is that they are not homophobic (you know what? If you feel you have to say this, you are homophobic. I didn't bring it up, you did.) Several of the kinder scolds suggested that we who were not with the program would understand this issue better if we actually had children and better understood the sacred bond between parent and child. The most ignorant argued that the childless were not excluded from this benefit, and could access it any time we liked by having, adopting or inheriting children. Of all the unspoken assumptions, perhaps the one best masking itself as intellectual common sense was that we who are childless at Zenith do have a moral and ethical commitment to our colleagues' children, because it is these children who, as adult workers, will earn the professional wages to pay for our government benefits in retirement.

In other words, because I haven't had children, regardless of how much I have paid into Social Security over the years, I will become a welfare queen in old age. And as I sign my government checks over to the BMW dealership and the grog shop, it will not be just any children who support me in the style to which I am now accustomed, but the children of my Zenith colleagues. That I might have ethical obligations to children who are dependent on a network of adults for their education is not even worth arguing to these vigorous proponents of the nuclear family, nor that I might specifically wish to sponge off them in the future, rather than trust that my colleagues' children aren't going to use their fancy liberal arts educations to become itinerant folk singers. That this is a benefit that ought to be extended as part of an equal compensation package granted to every worker for whatever educational purpose s/he chooses (which might require capping the benefit at a certain amount per worker, or per beneficiary) is even more unthinkable to many of those who have Gone Nuclear even though, to date, two of my colleagues who are, I think, heterosexual, have articulated this position. My point is, either we have all earned it, or we all haven't earned it. Pick one, and that's where we can start the process of coming to consensus about this little plum in the budget.

No, they respond: nothing will do but an unlimited benefit reserved exclusively for the children of Zenith.

This ugly, divisive incident has reinforced my belief that one of the major, under-examined flaws of New Deal liberalism has been the extent to which it left intact the assumption that our fate, as human beings, should remain tied to so-called traditional notions of the family and the workplace. This was not, of course, an entirely unexamined assumption. One of the most graphic examples of how this played out was Social Security. Labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris's In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2001) has documented the lengths to which framers of the original legislation passed on August 15, 1935 went to limit women's secondary access to funds that were the legal entitlement of a male breadwinner. Kessler-Harris and Linda Gordon, among others, have written about the systematic exclusion of workers, primarily of color, who were specifically written out of Social Security legislation because they were employed in seasonal, at will, or non-organized workplaces.

Although legally these exclusions no longer exist, in fact, they do. Because one’s social security benefits are paid according to the amount and duration of what a worker has paid in, people who enter the workplace late, or work sporadically (often women) have fewer benefits. Because their work takes place in a home or a workplace that is lightly scrutinized by the authorities (a farm, a sweatshop) the immigrants and people of color who do what amounts to day labor often do not have social security contributions made in their names. And we who are prevented from marrying our partners and creating federally recognized families do not inherit a spouse's Social Security benefits, nor can we designate them to anyone who is not a dependent child.

An even knottier issue, from my perspective, is the extent to which New Deal social legislation, and reforms associated with post-war prosperity and the rise of workplace benefits, depended on the private sector to support middle-class expectations of comfort and security. From what I know about the New Deal state, this dependence had two broad origins. The first was ideological: southern Democrats vigorously resisted any shift of power and authority to the federal government that might eventually be used to overturn racial subordination. A more national political problem for the Roosevelt administration was the danger of totalitarianism that was becoming prominent in Europe and Asia in the 1930s, and the fear that New Deal initiatives would be perceived as socialist or fascist.

What has been less written about is the extent to which the New Deal state simply did not have the capacity to run a large social welfare system and turned to Fordism as a solution. An early prototype of national welfare, the Civil War pension system, was notorious for its inefficiencies and corruption, and because it only extended benefits to Union veterans, was never meant to be comprehensive or permanent. By the time the American state did prove itself capable of creating a fully functional national bureaucracy capable of large-scale taxation and disbursement during World War II, the ideological moment for the creation of a social welfare system had both passed and never arrived. I say passed, because the crisis of the Great Depression was finally ended by putting the nation on a war footing for the rest of the century, thus making prosperity the "norm" and effectively re-stigmatizing the poor. I imagine the ideological moment as never having arrived because, as Kessler-Harris and Gordon point out, the notion that what we now call “benefits” were permanently sutured to the notion that the normal condition of individuals was to belong to a patriarchal family living off a family wage that freed women to be full-time mothers and children to be full-time students. Furthermore, Cold War heterosexual parenting was articulated as service to the state, supported by an elaborate series of tax deductions, workplace benefits and enhanced public education designed to help (white) families become and remain middle-class. "Benefits" are part of that structure, even though we have come to think of them as something we are owed, separate from salary, because we so depend on them to remain middle class. They operate in part as an enticement when the labor market is competitive (not a stage of history we are in right now), and they are a way of shielding what are essentially salary bonuses from the Internal Revenue Service.

Whether the United States, as a cultural, political or economic formation, actually values children is debatable. But what remains relevant from my point of view is that little that has changed over the past several decades to alter the basic assumption among many liberals that workers who are married and/or have children actually deserve more benefits from their employer. Gays and lesbians are now included in this ideology because we are no longer always prevented from marrying and having children (even though these are much more difficult hurdles than the vast majority of heterosexual people understand.) I think this is interesting, because certainly at Zenith, years ago when many of us questioned why unmarried workers were not entitled to health insurance for their domestic partners, the very same people would shrug their shoulders and say some version of, "That's the way of the world, I guess," but they also refused the notion that unmarried workers were not being equally compensated. Now that we (the unmarried) actually have such benefits, they forget that they never supported them, or that many of them said openly that the flood of claims from the unmarried would overwhelm the system, causing a reduction in everybody's benefits.

And this is what they believe, but will not say, about the tuition benefit. They believe that if it is extended to every employee, there will not be enough left for them. All the rest of it is just smoke, mirrors and ideology my friends. But it is also pretty insulting, because it expands the dictates of the nuclear family to all of us who, frankly, do not benefit from it at all. Most important, it avoids the main point: the major systems that have made this country one of the most prosperous in the world have always been discriminatory. Now that they are in crisis, this is glaringly obvious, and falling back on families and family wage models to fix that crisis is mere tinkering with a system that was designed to fail in the first place.

How Many Administrators Does It Take To File A Department Of Education Report?

Two. One to file the report, one to respond the barrage of stupid newspaper articles written about the report after the data is crunched by a non-profit conservative think tank.

This half-assed joke is a response to an article by Tamar Lewin in today's New York Times that ran under the headline "Staff Jobs On Campus Outpace Enrollment." The data, taken from Department of Education reports filed by 2,782 colleges and analyzed by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, shows that public and private colleges have about the same ratio of staff to student (8 and 9 per 100, respectively) and have bloated at about the same rate since 1987. Lewin writes,

In the 20-year period, the report found, the greatest number of jobs added, more than 630,000, were instructors — but three-quarters of those were part-time. Converted to full-time equivalents, those resulted in a total of 939,00 teaching jobs, up from 614,000 in 1987.

The largest number of full-time jobs added, more than 278,000, were for support staffs, and grew to more than half a million positions in 2007, from 292,000 in 1987. Colleges also added some 65,000 management positions, almost all of them full time; all told, they had 185,000 managers in 2007, up from about 120,000 managers 20 years earlier.

“Colleges have altered the composition of their work force by steadily increasing the number of managerial positions and support/service staff, while at the same time disproportionately increasing the number of part-time staff that provides instruction,” the report said. “Meanwhile, employee productivity relative to enrollment and degrees awarded has been relatively flat in the midst of rising compensation.”

Blah, blah, blah. Nowhere does Lewin suggest that fewer instructors could have been added if more of them had full-time jobs, or that actually most schools are actually understaffed. In fact, the way that this number is simply dropped into the piece as a comparative figure suggests that hiring hundreds of thousands of professors at servant wages and no benefits is not such a bad model for higher education, and perhaps something we might want to think about for administrators too.

Lewin notes that CCAP doesn't claim tuition increases are caused only by administrative bloat; cuts in state financing for higher education are also a factor she mentions (briefly). But - irresponsibly, in my view -- Lewin emphasizes the report's finding that students are paying the price of bad management decisions all the same, decisions that are the wasteful outcome of students' intense desire to be pampered, to be coddled and play! In other words, just like homophobia and mortage rates that adjust beyond people's ability to pay, tuition increases are a lifestyle issue.

Interestingly, CCAP seems to be located at The Ohio State University. Ohio is a state that has set the pace for destroying alternative education by its onerous accountability regulations. The authors of the report actually name the constant need to respond to government agencies as a critical factor in administrative bloat ("I've got an idea, boys," the economist said brightly. Let's get rid of the people who adjudicate racial and gender bias on campus and make room for more statisticians who do 'outcomes assessment.'")

And yet, much as I find this position dishonest and irrelevant to major issues in higher education today -- like the desire to escalate the testing mandate to include college students, the tax dollars that have been shifted to incarceration rather than education, and the ways in which the poor are structurally excluded from even imagining a college education -- it is a position and Lewin ignores it almost completely. It takes going to the CCAP website to figure it who they are, and reveal that the CCAP are not impartial observers with no agenda. What Lewin privileges in her article instead is the increase in student services that students are being "forced" to pay for -- but that they have foolishly demanded all the same. That's right -- blame the student/consumer: not cuts in public funding and financial aid, higher enrollments that are necessary to keep a college or university afloat in a politically hostile environment, or the many administrators who are hired to respond to idiotic questions about "degree productivity." Instead, we have this quote from the report's author that does not characterize the majority of the CCAP findings:

“A lot of it is definitely trying to keep up with the Joneses,” said Daniel Bennett, a labor economist and the author of the center’s report. “Universities and colleges are catering more to students, trying to make college a lifestyle, not just people getting an education. There’s more social programs, more athletics, more trainers, more sustainable environmental programs.” Read the report for yourself here.

Neither the article or the report talks about actual education, however. Indeed, and my comrade Margaret Soltan over at University Diaries is gonna love this, "more athletics" is just dropped in there, as if it is men's wrestling or women's crew that is jacking up tuition dollars, not taking your crappy, third-rate football team up to D-I and building them a $3 million stadium; or paying a coach $1.6 million a year.

Yeah, let's blame Title IX. Or better yet, let's just be direct and blame women, throwing in the men who aren't masculine enough to play big money sports for good measure.

And this is where Lewin's decision to produce this article as if it were written in an ideological and conceptual vacuum is, in my view, truly bad journalism. To quote from CCAP's mission statement, it "is dedicated to research on the issues of rising costs and stagnant efficiency in higher education, with special emphasis on the United States." It goes on to explain:

“Affordability” means not only rising tuition and other costs to the consumer of education services, but more broadly the burden that colleges impose on society. “Productivity” refers not only to the costs and resources needed to educate students and perform research, but also to the measurement and quality of educational outcomes. CCAP is also concerned about finding new ways to do things better – to improve affordability and productivity. In particular, it is interested in how the forces of the market can be used to make higher education more affordable and qualitatively better.

In other words, CCAP isn't actually interested in how teaching or learning actually happens, or indeed, what it means to be a student, a teacher or an administrator. It is interested in minimizing "the burdens" education places on society and maximizing the production of the cheapest degrees possible.

On Jobs and the Jobless: Listening To The Underemployed

Sterling Fluharty, who blogs at PhDinHistory, writes (in response to this post where I urged job-seekers to stop attending panels that seemed to be only increasing their anxiety about ever being employed): "Do you really feel it is pointless for the AHA to have panels on the job market? What if ideas for reforming the market and fixing its problems emerged from these sessions?"

Well, OK, if you put it that way. And anyway, saying that those panels are pointless would be doing a disservice to those who put them together, as well as to those who benefit from them. This advice -- like my advice to stay off the wikis -- was only for those of you who use sessions organized by the Professional Division as concrete venues for self-destructive obsessing about your powerlessness. I hope it didn't cause the intended audiences to run to the over-priced hotel bar instead, or prompt any of you who were interviewing to spend what remains of your latest student loan on Yodels and Ho-Hos rather than on getting your shoes shined.

Oh Sterling, I'm just pulling your leg. Because I now know that you participated in such a panel, and that you posted your contribution on your blog. For those Readers of the Radical with too little time to click on the link, I have pasted in Sterling's summary of the situation currently facing historians who are, who are soon to be, or who have been, looking for a teaching job:

It should go without saying that the vast majority want to become tenure-track history faculty. Let me describe how difficult this process is before I tell you why the overall goal is impossible. Did you know that only half of the students who entered humanities doctoral programs between 1992-3 and 1994-5 completed their degree within ten years? By comparison, the dropout rate is 10 to 15 percent in business, law, and medicine professional programs. Now let's focus on those who survive their history doctoral program. According to the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF), nearly half of the assistant professors who were hired between 1999 and 2003 had earned their PhD in history five to nine years previous. The average time between graduation and the time they landed their current tenure-track position was 3.3 years. Academic job seekers in history now have to prove themselves worthy to job search committees by spending several years after graduation teaching and publishing. Furthermore, my analysis of NSOPF data shows that only 31 percent of all the individuals who earned a PhD in history between 1966 and 1992 were tenured faculty as of 2003. Some of these doctoral recipients may have left academia by that time, but even the AHA agrees that only about one third of history PhDs will ever achieve tenure. One reason why this is happening is that the overall proportion of college faculty who work without any chance of tenure is now at 65 percent and keeps rising. The academic system is rigged against PhDs in history, and the rest of the humanities for that matter.

The essay, which I do recommend you read in full when you have a chance, concludes with a series of excellent questions:

How long will we continue to blame students in and graduates of history graduate programs if they don't succeed? Are we denial about the structural changes that have happened in higher education over the last several decades? How long will be persist in doing history that brings us prestige rather creating history that has value in the eyes of undergraduates and the public? Are we content to teach an ever decreasing proportion of college undergraduates? Do we believe that we can expand our associates and masters programs? Are we willing to let tenure-track positions disappear? Will we fight back against the for-profit colleges that started this trend of hiring the cheapest teachers they could find? What will it take to learn the skills of public and digital history? Can we make our type of history relevant to the American public once again?

To focus on perhaps the least significant of these questions: I don't know who the "we" is who "blame" the unemployed -- although the stream of advice that emanates from blogs like mine, and the invective towards candidates who do risible or weird things during interviews that has appeared elsewhere, certainly implies that one's success (or lack thereof) on the conventional academic job market is determined by doing the "right" things. And for all I know graduate advisers emanate displeasure towards and begin to avoid the unsuccessful. But certainly those of us who have jobs know perfectly well how many good candidates never even get a chance to strut their stuff; how many of those who do end up unemployed failed to get a job for reasons entirely out of their control; and how, when departments are ranking lists in post-interview mode, many people vote to hire in complete ignorance, or disregard, of the scholarship and credentials the candidates have worked so hard to display. It is often said that one of the great, ghastly, come-downs in academic life is observing the chaos and insane, internal power struggles attendant to the first hire after you yourself have been hired: "How in God's name," you think, "did this department ever get it together to hire me? What awful things were said? What worthy people were sent packing as if they were so much trash? Who here smiles to my face but really hates me??!!"

But it is true more generally, and not just in academia, that people who are unemployed do, in the end, blame themselves even when they know it isn't their fault, or that the odds are heavily stacked against them. Acknowledging this latter point is where, despite the ways Fluherty's essay will be controversial, I think he makes a particularly useful intervention. Using a couple of excellent graphics, Fluharty argues that according to his data, fewer than half of history Ph.D.'s can expect to either be on a tenure-track or to have full-time work teaching history over the next decade. Is this a question of overproduction of Ph.D.s by doctoral programs? Not necessarily. It is also the effects of history itself: the increasing disregard of "history" as an influential force in national politics (hell, for the past eight years the White House couldn't even cope with the present); the marginalization of the humanities in higher education more generally, and particularly in the two-year colleges attended by most post-secondary students; and what Fluherty suggests is a close link between widespread, or narrowed, interest in history among undergraduates and the condition of our democracy more generally. I find this last point particularly intriguing and wish he, or someone, would write more about it.

The point is, however, that given the actual numbers -- Ph.D.'s versus full-time teaching jobs -- it isn't possible for everyone with a PH.D. in history to have full time work, it never was, and it won't be any time soon. The profession needs to deal with this reality, as opposed to putting all its energy into workshops on interviewing, grooming, and putting together the best dossier. Fluherty has two concrete proposals in the attempt to turn the conversation away from the question of what is fair, to the the question of what is possible. One is that the AHA create a searchable data base into which graduate students could upload their materials and a new personality test which measures the " non-cognitive qualities that make a historian successful in the world of work," and which could be used colleges and universities to fill available jobs; the other is that historians need to be trained for and imagine themselves working in sectors of the intellectual market that are actually growing, specifically the digital industries.

The data base idea is not a horrible one, and god knows, searches as they are currently structured are possibly one of the most inefficient activities of an inefficient profession. They are huge time-wasters for everyone involved, and cost vast amounts of money that could be better spent actually educating students. But right now most full-time faculty can't even wrap their heads around why you would hire in fields that actually represent the cutting edge of the historical profession, much less altering the arcane, prejudicial processes of the traditional search, through which "the best" historian out of a pool of several hundred well-educated candidates is seen as deserving of a job. So good luck with that one. And actually, I don't believe in testing, or that what it takes to be a good teacher and colleague can be quantified, much less in any non-biased way. So I would scrap this one.

However, that the historical profession has not responded adequately to real changes in how what we do can be packaged and sold (sorry to be so crude, but that's the actual trend in education, not just a way of talking about it); that, as a profession, we in the humanities continue to sell the romance of careers in classroom teaching to graduate and undergraduate students, despite the fact that we live in a world where other forms of learning, formal and informal, are increasingly dominant; and that as educators, we haven't responded in a proactive way to new forms of digital democracy that might make the liberal arts usable of accessible to a broader group of consumers than those currently enrolled in four-year colleges, is spot on.

What we continue to do, according to Fluharty, is react to shrinking possibilities in a college and university world we thought we once knew, a world that we keep imagining will return some day. Fluharty not only argues that this world isn't coming back, but that it never existed in the first place, and that endless tinkering will not make that so. These ideas will be contentious ones, but they are well worth putting on the table. And if I don't entirely agree with his solutions (which revert to a kind of pragmatism that the essay itself undermines), I think the critique is a sound one. In fact, I think he should be nominated to the professional division on the basis of this essay alone.

And by the way Sterling, good for you for dropping your anonymity, thus allowing others who will find these positions contentious to argue openly with a real person. I don't know whether you did this on principle or not, but one way for young scholars to get some credit for the academic blog world that they are the principle contributors to and innovators in is to start telling us who they are so we can start including in professional and institutional conversations that cross the boundaries between conventional and unconventional career paths.

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