Wrap-up of AHA Day 1: The Radical Hasn't Been To A Session Yet

And doesn't really expect to. I'll be lucky to make the book exhibit. Much as I would like to see some scholars perform their scholarship in groups, this year I am fated to see them do it one at a time in hotel rooms. Which is interesting, but not exactly the community experience one expects of a scholarly meeting. However, since Zenith seems to be one of the few schools that did not cancel its searches, it makes us minor celebrities. Thanks, (Not So) New President.

Yesterday's highlights outside of the hotel room where my search committee was meeting included brisk walks up and down the Avenue of the Americas (quickest cutover to the Doubletree, where our interviews are being held, is on 47th street - that way you exchange the clots of tourists on Broadway who stop and take pictures of each other in front of the ESPN studios for the not much lighter, but moving crowds on Sixth Avenue.) For reasons I am unclear about, since I lived in New York for years, my 24 hours at the Hilton has caused me to think back to my post-college days as a writer for an advertising agency, lodged on the 40th floor of a skyscraper two blocks north of this singularly unattractive hotel. I spent my days writing about what we did at the agency -- writing press releases for our clients, and articles for the company newsletter (entirely written and published by me) that kept everyone up to date on the latest AT&T campaign. Then one day this job, which I had imagined from the movies would be glamorous, came to resemble the Hanoi Hilton rather than the New York one down the street, and I went to graduate school. The rest, dear readers, is History.

Highlights of this meeting so far include a chance meeting in the registration center with Tom Sugrue, whose new book, Sweet Land of Liberty: the Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North I hope to receive free in the mail this spring as part of this year's Beveridge Prize reading. The day was concluded not, as you might imagine, by going to what looked to be an outstanding plenary sessions, but by cabbing it to Chelsea, where my Conn College neighbors James Downs and Jennifer Manion hosted a gay party. Topics of conversation included: the beautiful view from Jim's balcony, the economy, how long Jen should cook the pigs in blankets, canceled searches, how unbelievably beautiful Jim's apartment is, flatlined salaries, and how nice it was that Jim and Jen had had this party in the first place.

Go East, Old Radical: Home From the American Studies Association

I have spent much of my life going east, or going "out east", as they used to say in southern Idaho, a place where I spent a large part of my youth. Going East is, of course, for those of us born and/or raised in the former English colonies, a consequence of having gone West in the first place. So now I am Back East (another quaint phrase from the Mountain States), in my comfortable remodeled nineteenth century clapboard house, determined to spend the day at home after having spent the weekend working for Zenith.

This is one of the few times I have attended a convention without attending either a panel or a party. For all my careful collation of the many events where the big American Studies programs host gatherings of the interdisciplinary clan, the combination of interviewing, the time change, the thin air, and a tendency of the bodily fluids to evaporate without even becoming sweat first, caused me to be perpetually exhausted and unenthused about social life. Furthermore, the fact that the convention itself was across a faux Spanish Colonial plaza from the hotel, and not in the hotel, meant that the social space was divided. There were certain people who I wanted to run into who I did not; and of course, going to the parties meant effort -- not stepping out of common space briefly, seeing who was there, and electing to stay or go.

Friday afternoon I did zip around the book exhibit looking for wonderful new books that I have no time to read in the near future, but ordered anyway to add fresh color and style to the piles of books already in my office. One thing I learned, as I wove my way through all kinds of fabulous people I have not seen in too long, is that Harvard University Press no longer takes credit cards at conventions, as they are worried about keeping our personal information safe. As a result, upon my return, I simply ordered the Harvard books from the library consortium to which Zenith belongs, and saved about eighty dollars. Ka-ching! My advice to Harvard? If I want to be a credit card cowboy, let me! And your pals at University of Chicago and Duke, where I did spend my hard earned cash, were puzzled as to your new policy.

Friday's highlights also included drinkies with the delightful Gayprof, who has, it appears, acquired a little troll problem lately, attendant to (false) accusations that he has posted lies about the People With Balls and Sticks. A thorough look at his blog demonstrates that his assertions are true: he has not posted anything about these Fair Boys of the South. So what is that about? I made a quick pit stop at the trolls' normal home (where they are not considered trolls -- context is everything) and there is no incitement from the host of that blog either, so what gives, oh People of the Ball and Stick? I am a little worried that you found him through me, but Gayprof assures me he does not think so. New idea: maybe Joey777 thinks Gayprof is hot? Well, he would be right there, but there are better ways to get a boy's attention than peppering his blog with comments about an event he never mentioned until you started pestering him, but is -- um -- over. I mean over except for the cash damages and royalty payments.

(I am sure that my assertion that this crisis is over will launch another barrage of comments about justice delayed being justice denied, but all I can say is that if you are not one of those people regularly receiving a check from Duke, or a family member of such a person, get a life, OK???? And leave Gayprof alone: he has a blog to write and it isn't about you, Joey.)

Saturday's convention highlights included a trip to Old Town, where many purchases were made, including a straw cowboy hat that the saleswoman told me is also favored by Julia Roberts. "And," she said, taking a closer look at me, "Brad Pitt." Bingo. I bought it on the spot. My interviewing companion found just the right pair of moccasins, and I found a black cowboy shirt that will cause me to stand out in any crowd of aging East Coast lesbians.

If I did not go to any panels, I heard tell of a few: one apparently featured a paper on the work of feminist author Jane Lazarre who, by the way has a new novel out as of this month, titled Someplace Quite Unknown. Bravo: this is an incredibly complex, beautifully written book that reintroduces us to a ground-breaking writer.

So I am home again, souvenirs unpacked, laundry churning in the washer. Will this godawful semester ever end? Yes, eventually. But the travel schedule has become Radical in the Extreme, and I hope to do as much business by telephone as I can from here on out.

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.

Radically American Studies

I am writing this on the way home from the American Studies Association annual meeting, and am forgoing the Friday and Saturday night parties (not to mention lesbian club-hopping in Philadelphia) in favor of sleeping in my own bed tonight. It will be late when I get home, but worth the late-night travel amongst sketchy people to be home. I have been gone so long that for the first time ever on a trip I actually finished all the reading material I took with me, and watched all the Netflix videos. I also discovered that, despite the fact that Netflix keeps asking me if I want to watch something in my queue “right now,” in fact, you can’t do that with a Mac©. I know, because I finally tried last night, after about six months of piously sticking to my work, when in fact I would have rather been watching Fat Actress (or Fat Anything, for that matter.) This causes me to have a sneaking disdain for Netflix, so in love am I with my Mac©.

Thank God for the book exhibit, that’s all I can say. I was down to my last New Yorker yesterday when I got off the prop plane that flew me out of State U. But for the need to close my eyes and pray I would have finished that too: I only had a couple articles and a movie review left to go, and to my dismay, I got to the Marriott and found out that the conference book exhibit wasn’t going to open until this morning. It was around mid-day, and I realized that if not speaking to another person I was going to have to make do with the contents of my brain or the last episode of Damages on my iPod. I thought I was going to have to break down the door to the Franklin Room and start pawing through the boxes waiting to be unpacked by university press editors, but fortunately I had a lot of blog reading to catch up on, I had a panel to go to, a mother to bum an excellent meal off of, and I wasn’t left to think my own thoughts for more than a minute or two until 10:00 PM, when I could go to bed.

I thought the mania for never being without something to read was my own personal fetish, but today, in front of the Duke University Press booth I ran into an old friend, M, who confessed that she too had run out of reading material last night. She said that the last time this had happened to her was at that hideous AHA meeting in Atlanta, during the blizzard of ninety-whatever, where she was stuck in the conference hotel for days (fortunately they were rescued before they had to begin eating the graduate students). During that same storm, you may recall, I was able to leave Atlanta but not get home, and I wandered the South like a refugee before Sherman’s Fury for four days before hopping a flight to Albany, for God's Sake. Anyway, where was I? Books. My friend and I made a mutual vow to always over pack book-wise in the future, as it causes far too much anxiety and dismay to run out of reading material. One hesitates to carry too many books, since inevitably, despite the best intentions, one buys twenty or thirty pounds of books at a conference, and intentionally shlepping around other heavy volumes that one never gets a chance to read because one is too busy gossiping, drinking and going to parties -- uh, and yeah, going to panels --- seems pathological.

Did I go to panels? Yes, I actually did. I went to a big marquee panel yesterday, where I thought all the participants were wonderfully smart, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what they were all doing on the same stage together. But that could have just been me, since I had been the center of attention for the two previous days, and I probably wasn’t in good listening mode because subconsciously I was thinking, Why aren't they listening to me? Although I did run into D on the way out, and he confessed he had no idea what the panel was about either, and he bolted right behind me. Which was a good thing, since out in the hall a very large posse of queer people had gathered, many of whom are responsible for Social Text 84-85 (bought it, its in my suitcase), and many happy greetings were exchanged.

You know, as you get older, there are some people you only see in hotels, but you like them just as much as you ever did.

I also went to panels today, which were wonderfully smart. I missed the Fat Studies session, which I regret, but if you saw me at your panel, you should pat yourself on the back because it was great. And in the afternoon there was a roundtable on where American Studies is going now that it has made the transhemispheric turn, and in particular whether culture can continue to be a central concept in the era of globalization. The panelists were wonderful, and so was the audience, and it was the best general conversation I have heard in a long time.

As I wandered out of that, I passed a table where the graduate student caucus was collecting $$ to support their reception, and I gave them $20, since I vaguely remember getting an email from them last week asking if the program at Zenith could contribute something, and I was too overwhelmed by the petty details of my existence to do anything about it. So I gave them my own money instead, dumb ass Radical that I am. I did see some of my peers dropping a dollar in the box, and all I have to say about that is, Come on! Winos get a dollar; the graduate student caucus should get at least as much as you would give your administrative assistant to sponsor her in the walk against Breast Cancer.

The only party I went to this evening, very quickly before my train, was held by Potemkin U for grad students, alums and friends of the program, where one faculty member was, unaccountably, eating Chinese takeout from a paper box, although there actually was a lot of food that had been bought and paid for and was sitting on a buffet. The hotel liquor prices were so insanely high that I got a beer, and I never drink beer anymore because – well, never mind. But the beer was almost seven dollars, and I yelped at the bartender. “It’s only money,” he shrugged, snapping the cap off. I rolled over to another faculty member and griped about the drink prices, and she said, “No kidding, you should see what they charged us for the food.” The menu was salad and crudites, and a fair number of people who had nothing to do with Potemkin and who nobody knew were sidling in and filling plates and slipping out the door again. Graduate students, you say? My guess is not, that they were people with actual jobs: my mother always said academics were some of the most habitual freeloaders she had ever met.

I would say the highlight of the meeting was seeing a lot of younger folks, some of who were former Zenith students, some people who had worked at Zenith, all of whom seem to be doing splendidly. One of them was the wonderful Siva, who becomes more fabulous with each passing year. Somehow I had missed it that the Siva family had decamped for the University of Virginia, but we had a nice long chat about the pleasures and perils of the blogosphere, and exchanged compliments.

The sad news is that Roy Rosenzweig, Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History & New Media at George Mason University, died last night after a not so long but difficult bout with cancer. It seems fitting, of course, that many of us who knew and loved him in the American Studies community were together when we heard the news (Ann Fabian announced it to a packed room before her roundtable began; I started to cry, and a nice older lady next to me pressed some Kleenex into my hand and said gently, “It’s clean.”) I first knew Roy years ago on MARHO, the collective that edits the Radical History Review, and we kept up intermittently over the years. He was one of the kindest historians I have known, and also one of the most flexible, creative and farseeing intellectuals I have had the pleasure to be connected to. Roy made a huge commitment to thinking about the implications of the internet and technology for history and for American Studies before most of the rest of us knew what an Ethernet cable was. He was one of the great innovators in using the web and teaching the rest of us how it could not just improve, but change, our research and teaching. He will be joining that big editorial collective in the sky where Sue Porter Benson, who left us a few years ago, is already cracking them up, but he will be sorely missed from our number here on earth.