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

Things can explode when you least expect it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disciplining Your Class: How Not To Go About It

Mark P. Talbert, a senior lecturer at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, is having a bad week.  Not only did he go berserk in front of his class, the episode was recorded by a university video system, which means the quality is better than what is produced by your average cell phone held in the air by a student.  Oh yeah, and it also means the tape is in possession of university officials, who are investigating, according to Inside Higher Ed.  Talbert's little breakdown was triggered by a very loud, and I suppose facetious, yawn.  Roll the videotape!



If it isn't bad enough that Talbert exposed his students to this ill-humored rant (my favorite part is where he tells the class that they are just going to stay there until the culprit confesses), he has now exposed himself to the slings and arrows of everyone on the Internet too, and many of them are ROTFLTAO.  A discussion of the merits of losing your $hit in front of an entire class appended to the YouTube posting include one gem that will keep me laughing all day tomorrow:  "OMG i wonder what he would do if someone farted...I think he would kill all of them. lol."

Where Women Gather, Trouble Follows: Letting Off Steam At The University Of Toledo

When you were flying over Ohio last week, did you see a big cloud over Toledo?  That was a bunch of steamed up faculty!  The Toledo Blade reports a wholesale restructuring of the University of Toledo that has comrades at that school in a state of distress.  According to Blade reporter Christopher Kirkpatrick,"President Lloyd Jacobs plans to break up the century-old College of Arts and Sciences and create three new colleges in its place."  These colleges will be "discipline-driven," and the humanities and social sciences have been promised an equal seat at the table with the professional schools and the sciences. Humanities and social science faculty are skeptical of this, and everything else about their future in the new university.  Jacobs was hired in 2006, promising the board of trustees that he would "create a UT academic experience more relevant to everyday life, and to ultimately remake the university into one of the best in the world."  Indeed, relevant can be a worrisome word.  This is not because being relevant is bad, but because an unspecific use of this word implies very strongly that the liberal arts model that the vast majority of faculty have committed their careers to is irrelevant -- and that they are, therefore, replaceable.  It was after Bennington President Elizabeth Coleman started using the word "relevant" in 1994 that she started firing faculty.  Bennington remains on the AAUP censure list to this day.

The published reports are pretty vague, so it is hard for an outsider to say whether the restructuring at UT, in and of itself, is an innovative idea or a way to turn the humanities and social sciences into service departments staffed by adjuncts.  The subtext of the faculty's discontent does seem to hint at the possibility of becoming vassals to a science-driven university.  This the president, and the committee that prepared the plan, denies.  "The move to break up arts and sciences," Kirkpatrick writes, "is an outgrowth of the near-carte blanche the board of trustees has given the president to increase the academic quality of its programs, students, and ultimately, its reputation. That in turn drives more research dollars and donations to the school."

There is very little real information in any of these news stories, so it remains a he said/they said kind of situation.  An unscientific poll by the UT student newspaper, The Independent Collegian, shows that, as of today, 71% of those voting in the poll do not feel fully informed or consulted by the strategic planning committee (14% do feel fully informed and 14% -- of which I am one, since you can't see the poll unless you vote -- don't know.  This is what I mean by unscientific.)  What is interesting to me is the article lists a series of criticisms of the Jacobs plan that are all too familiar.  These criticisms appear in practically the same language every time a university president anywhere tries to do either something bold and interesting, something evil and destructive, or just something.  The criticisms (areas where you could fill in the blank to reflect criticisms being articulated at your university are marked out in red) are as follows:

That President Jacobs is a surgeon and doesn't know enough about academic institutions to create a good restructuring plan;

That Jacobs is unacceptably autocratic and fails to consult fully with the faculty;

That Jacobs favors the sciences;

That the committee responsible for the plan was mostly made up of administrators and was entirely female (one critic wasn't sure that an all-female committee was necessarily a bad thing, but insisted that it was "strange" and "suspect."  We know faculty don't trust administrators, but are we admitting that male faculty don't trust women too?  This is worth the price of admission, if you ask me.)

That the report was released in the summer when the faculty were not there.

Changing anything at a university, no matter how small, always means kicking some a$$:  take it from someone who knows. I remember when some academics I know were outraged that they were being "forced" to learn to use computers. But kicking a$$ is something that trustees always want presidents to do on principle, just to show who is the boss.  It doesn't necessarily require a bold new plan. However, stay tuned:  the UT faculty may be on to something. Jacobs may indeed want to bust tenure, since he has indicated that a higher reliance on casual labor is an inevitable transformation that will occur in higher ed.

Uncivil Liberties: Teaching Evaluations and A Clarification

Courtesy of Margaret Soltan at University Diaries, who draws our attention to the recent exchange between Stanley Fish and Ross Douthat on this matter, I began thinking about teaching evaluations in a more orderly fashion than I have of late. My disorderly thoughts have been sparked by colleagues, several of whom are quite experienced teachers, receiving some of the rudest and cruelest teaching evaluations I have ever read at Zenith. Sexism is also on the rise, particularly among the students of younger, female faculty (who are also sometimes presumed to be adjuncts.)

I found these evaluations remarkable because my experience in the past has been that Zenith students often go out of their way to be charitable to someone they like and have empathy for, sometimes damning their professors with faint and contradictory praise as a result. The evaluations in question do the exact opposite: students going out of their way to slam the professor in a way that is obscurely connected to the matter at hand, sometimes perversely followed by comments that describe the class in quite thoughtful ways, making it clear the student got a lot out of the experience.

What has changed? We do teaching evaluations on line now; students do them in their rooms at whatever hour of the night they choose; and they must do them in order to get their grades. In other words, teaching evaluations have just become another $hitty chore that we drive students through with a stick. You might say: why not go back to doing them on paper, on the last class? The reason is, of course, that it was time consuming, wasteful, and expensive. As our registrar explained when we switched over to the new system, at the cost of no less than 10K a semester, the old system was badly flawed. Students often confessed to having collaborated as a class to turn in a group view of the professor, faculty often received their evaluations on the first day of spring classes (giving them no time to think about structural issues in their pedagogy), and envelopes full of evaluations that were to have been walked over by astudent were often found in the student center and abandoned in the dormitories.

So don't think we will ever go back to paper evaluations. The question is, what are teaching evaluations for? Are they intended to evaluate someone for tenure? (Yes -- and this was the issue that prompted the Fish-Douthat exchange.) Are they intended to help us become better teachers? (Yes, but if we don't trust them, how do we evaluate what they say?) Are they intended to help students think about what they have learned? (Maybe -- see Dean Dad about how students often forget what they have learned once the course is over.) The bigger question that Fish and Douthat raise is whether students ought to be the experts who are consulted in high-stakes evaluations of teaching.

If you ask me, one question that is not being asked here is: why do we consult students about the quality of the instruction without also consulting them on what they want to learn, why they want to learn it, and what its relevance to the larger program of study is? We ask them to enter into a conversation about teaching in the university without any instruction about what information we need, why or what constitutes responsible assessment of teaching (for example, "the professor was only interested in his own opinions" is hardly the point -- it is the student who ought to be interested in what the professor has to offer, and consider being less anxious about having her own views validated.) Furthermore, no one consults students about how they would like to be assessed and what they want to know about their own work. Grading can devolve into a grudge match between two teams with unequal power: in response, nationwide, faculty have thrown in the towel and inflated grades dramatically. We then get our students, and I suppose our self-respect, back by telling the press loudly that our students don't actually deserve the grades they are getting.

I Have Not, Nor Have I Ever Been

My last post about what I see as the pitfalls of academic celebrity drew some cheers; one caution (my beloved Western Colleague, she of the famous Tool Post, wisely suggested that I refrain from pissing in the wind); and one personally nasty signed comment (not, I might add, anyone mentioned in the post) which listed my numerous hopeless flaws and offenses to authority. I removed the comment (see sidebar for the comment policy), because if people want to write opinion pieces about my qualifications to walk the earth they are free to do it on their own blog -- but not on mine.

The style of the comment reminded me of the opening credits to a television show from my youth:

According to the writer, I am unlettered, unread, marginal to and ignorant about the world of queer studies, snide, have no queer vocabulary and wouldn't understand what I read even if I read it, and am a liberal. My readers can decide about all of these things on about the same basis that the commenter did. However, there was one damning accusation I wish to refute absolutely.

I am not, nor have I ever been:

A social historian.

Sunday Radical Roundup: Fathers' Day Edition

The new social media has made Father's Day an even odder event than it ever was when it was only about neckties, Lacoste tennis shirts and greeting cards. Facebook and Twitter are alive with paeans to fathers past and present: dead fathers are assured that they will never be forgotten, husband-fathers that they are truly appreciated. The Radical household does not engage this, as we have no fathers ("Down with the patriarchy!"): the last one crossed over into the Great Beyond over a decade ago.

So imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times, turned to an article about end of life decisions and instantly burst into racking, inconsolable tears over someone else's father. In "What Broke My Father's Heart" Katy Butler details the role played by fee for service medicine in ripping every shred of dignity and peace from her parents' final years. An ill-informed decision to put in a heart pacemaker (because a doctor refused to do emergency surgery on a painful condition without it) extended her father's life far beyond what he had intended: as he descended into stroke induced senility, blindness, and disability, his wife valiantly tried to care for him and the device beat relentlessly on no matter what. Worse, the doctor refused to disable the pacemaker, even though the patient's health proxy dictated that he be refused treatment at this stage.

Doctors pushing life-prolonging (and fully reimbursed) procedures on patients who have explicitly said they do not want their lives prolonged is one important theme; elderly partners and children whose life and health are shattered by the work necessary to care for a person who wanted to be dead, and would be dead were they not being artificially sustained, is another. The failure of the medical profession to deal with this ethical problem is the most serious issue raised, because it is impossible to plan well enough to make one's own end of life decisions in all circumstances.

People who know me well might assume that I am vividly recalling my own father's death from cancer, his frustration at not being able to die when he wanted to, and my mother's long struggle to run their household and sustain him. True, perhaps, and I see a great deal of my mother in the story, particularly her own unwillingness to relinquish him to the care of strangers despite the cost to her health. My father wanted to die months before he did, but had left it too late to take care of this difficult task himself. I was too cowardly to help him when he needed it: my parents lived in a state where the anti-abortion folks and the Catholic Church are as fierce as they come and I am ashamed to say that I was afraid to go to jail for something I believe in profoundly. Go here and scroll to p. 1017 for my father's views about how physicians could help patients choose the limits of treatment as patients and their families grappled with fatal disease.

But I also knew Katy's parents -- they were people of unsurpassed dignity, and they seemed to love each other very much. Jeff Butler was a distinguished History Department colleague and Val, his wife, was an artist, a teacher, and one of the most beautiful, gracious people I have known. They were cultured, kind and had a carefully chosen life. I suspect, although I do not know, that one of those choices was to separate from their homeland, South Africa, during the worst of apartheid. The history of the apartheid state was what Jeff wrote about, after all, and such people were frowned upon under Afrikaaner rule unless they had the right views. I arrived at Zenith the year after Jeff retired, usually only encountered him at the mailboxes, and would never say we were close. But he was the epitome of the cultured, high-achieving academic that liberal arts colleges prided themselves on in the late twentieth century. He had a sparkly smile, the look of a former athlete, and whistled ever so slightly when he talked. He had a broad South African accent that you might mistake for British, but once you have been to South Africa you never would. Jeff was always ready to offer congratulations on a recent achievement, and encouragement for the next one. As an older woman, Val was still stunningly beautiful, and always put together, with lovely white hair that was tied back in a knot. In contrast was Jeff's look of being slightly mussed and askew, a presentation that was accentuated by an empty sleeve pinned up to his shoulder or chest due to an arm lost in World War II.

Katy's story is very graphic, spare and sets out the problem of end of life decisions - and why it matters to grapple with them in a comprehensive way that forces doctors to the table -- in a precise way. Read it.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Disobey The President: Transforming The Military In Historical Perspective

We move forward into a summer of political negotiating that might end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the Clinton-era policy that lifted the ban on gays in the military, provided said gays pretend to be straight (and, as an ironic touch, created a phrase popular among the sexually dishonest who claim to be in sophisticated open relationships when actually they are just cheating like everyone else.) Policy makers and GLBT lobbyists wishing to lift the ban might usefully consult Beth Bailey's America's Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Harvard, 2009) as they consider how to present what is perceived by many to be an unprecedented alteration in the United States Armed Forces. As Bailey observes, the transition from the draft to an all-volunteer Army was a political decision made by the Nixon administration in 1970 that military brass resisted vigorously despite what they perceived as the poor quality of the draftees they were receiving. Appealing for volunteers to what the Army viewed as a narcissistic and indulgent youth culture, rather than relying on compulsory service and the traditional disciplinary measures designed to subdue individuality, was a system that had been in place since World War II. Despite what many perceived as the difficulties of instilling good discipline in unwilling warriors, and an Army War College study that argued the draft was unsustainable, the Army was comfortable with the system it knew.

Bailey reminds us how dramatic the changes designed to recruit an all-volunteer force were at the time: allowing common soldiers to grow their hair, decorate their rooms with psychedelic posters, live off-base with their families, hiring contractors to cook and clean, and allowing the consumption of beer on post all seemed to signal Armageddon to traditionalists in the 1970s. It is not insignificant, I think that it was in the 1970s that gay civil rights activists imagined that the bars to GLBT service passed during the Truman administration might fall in such a liberalized atmosphere. But this goal was eclipsed, first by Reagan's DOD Directive 1332.14 stating that homosexuality was "incompatible with military service," and then by the mobilization of gay activism to force the federal government to act in the AIDS crisis.

One critical thread that runs throughout the book is fear that the bodies who would find the volunteer military attractive would be ungovernable under any conditions, a conversation that centered primarily on race. Would the Army be more Black as it designed its appeal around employment and educational opportunities that would be attractive to the motivated poor? Or could the Army potentially be less Black -- as those who were either afraid to arm and train African-American men at the height of the Black Power movement, or who saw the failures of Vietnam as the failures of Black draftees -- hoped. This is important because it demonstrates that integration of the military had, over two decades, not eliminated racism (although no one advocated a return to segregation); and that military policy was perceived as critically linked to the social and political fabric of the nation, where conversations about Black exploitation vied with demands for Black opportunity. It also illustrates the tendency to elevate concerns about the failures of the common soldier to perform are not infrequently elevated over more appropriate concerns that would focus on leadership, command, training and the political viability of a wartime mission that is faltering.

Two other things strike me here, both related to the comparison that is often made between ending DADT and racial desegregation in the military, initiated in 1951 three years after Harry S Truman's Executive Order 9981. Black officers, most notably Colin Powell, have resisted this comparison, a stance that has been viewed as purely homophobic by gay activists. And while it is a homophobic stance, what was less well explained during the 1993 debate that resulted in DADT was the extraordinary difficulty of implementing racial integration and dismantling racism in the services, a project that continues to this day. I repeat: desegregation was not even initiated until three years after Truman's order, and race was an extremely contentious policy matter two decades later (as Bailey points out graphically in America's Army.) Was the compromise of DADT -- which is no different from a ban from the point of anyone who is queer -- actually a compromise after all, rather than a political punt by the Clinton administration? This might be worth taking a closer look at.

Secondly, to avoid getting stuck on the comparison between African-American civil rights and GLBT civil rights (a difficult conversation that inevitably becomes a distraction) Congressional and GLBT advocates might wish to focus instead on the difficulties of transitioning to an all-volunteer force in the 1970s, and the fact that they were overcome. In 1970, when Nixon proposed this shift, officers and noncoms almost uniformly believed that accommodating and encouraging individualism in daily military life (not to mention expanding the number of women in the service) would be a threat to good order. We see the same issues arising as are being addressed today: the capacity to ready troops for battle, and that altering the gender order would undermine structures of authority and the unquestioned obedience necessary to success in field operations.

What should be pointed out is that, not only was this transformation successful over time, but that it was also initiated in the midst of a long, difficult and inconclusive war. And yet, because this transition was ordered by the President, General William Westmoreland put the full weight of his authority behind it. Although, as Bailey writes, Westmoreland shared many of the reservations common among all the officers he spoke to on October 13 1970 at the Army Commanders Conference, he also believed that it was his --and their -- job to make the transition work if the President so desired it. As Bailey writes, Westmoreland "believed he must carry out the orders of his commander in chief to the best of his ability. And that day, he declared an end to debate. 'The decision has been made,' he said. 'I expect your full support.'" (51) And he got it.

So what's the lesson here? All institutional transformations are difficult. Achieving domestic partner benefits has not eliminated homophobia in the academy, and white people -- even when they are gay -- often are the direct beneficiaries of racism and class prejudice. Making comparisons between oppressions, in other words, invariably leads us into murky and difficult territory, even if the moral point is similar. But we can, in fact, point to specific moments in which limitations on military service have been lifted, and draw two conclusions. The first is that the successful outcome of that transformation, by which I mean the full integration of the group into military service in a way that is perceived as non-problematic, will come many years down the road. As Bailey notes in a later chapter, the idea that an all-volunteer Army might be more black was still distressing in the 1970s to numerous constituencies, some conservative and some liberal, twenty years after integration had commenced. The second is that the military both resists change to its practices and has, perhaps, the capacity to effect change better than any other American institution, because of its culture of obedience.

Professor Radical Goes To Washington To Preview The Apocalypse

Today the Radical got up at dawn, took a cab to Teenie Airport and came to our nation's capital on behalf of an American Historical Association book prize committee. But I was also in for a nice surprise. Because I do not travel in the Right circles, until I checked my Twitter account I had not had it on my radar that the Teabag people were marching on Washington today.

Hence, I got to see history in the making. The hotel where the committee was meeting is right near the Mall, so that when I checked in with half an hour to spare, I rushed back onto the street to begin documenting the event. That's when I ran into the gentlemen in the photo on the left. I saw their flag swirling about and asked them if they would pose. They were happy to do so, but asked me to wait until they could stretch it out completely. "We don't want you to just take a picture that makes everyone think it's a Confederate flag," one said.

But it is a Confederate flag, I thought. Well no, not exactly. " 'At's the state of South Carolina battle flag," the other guy explained proudly. I took the picture and thanked them, immediately sending the photo via iPhone to the Mother of the Radical (MOTheR) who is, in fact, a Little Old Lady in Tennis Shoes, but of the left-wing variety. Reach out and touch someone, you know what I mean? I was then summoned by the book prize committee, who had perhaps looked out the window and thought they had seen their missing colleague consorting with Civil war re-enactors. At their polite request, I ran inside to eat a turkey club sandwich and to sacrifice for the History Profession, which was Arnita Jones' point in flying me down here in the first place.

As soon as we were done deciding the prize, I skibbled back outside and over to the Mall to gain insight into fellow countrymen and women, the like of whom do not congregate by the thousands in Shoreline. I was also, frankly, intrigued by my first interlocutors' distinction between "the Confederate Flag" and the "South Carolina battle flag" -- in which, as you can see, the Stars and Bars are prominently embedded. The distinction they were trying to make, I think, was that the former was racist but the latter was purely military -- and thus, not racist. In other words, they wanted to be taken seriously as political activists and patriots, not be dismissed as garden-variety white supremacists.

Patriotism was a big theme of a march where participants invoked race and racism only to deny that their actions were racist in origin. However, the occasional appearance of a "redskin," or a minstrel Uncle Sam with blacked face and long, nappy, fake dreds pouring out of his stovepipe hat complicated that claim, as did portraits of Obama in whiteface with large, red lips. Had I expressed my belief that such depictions and performances are racist, however, I think marchers would have told me that was projection on my part. "Liberals carry the race card in their wallets," read many signs.

Perhaps the aggressive denials of racism are inspired by the marchers' fear that their profound hatred, fear and contempt for President Barack Obama will be perceived as racist, when in their view it is merely hatred, fear and contempt of a President who happens to be black. And they do hate him: Joe Wilson's attack several days ago -- "You lie!" -- was echoed on tee shirts, signs and banners; I am told it was an ongoing chant at the rally. The view that Obama lies about everything is reiterated in words and images: the president was caricatured as the Joker and as the Devil, among other things. I am actually quite persuaded that they don't hate him only because he is black. They hate all politicians except Joe Wilson, and they only like Wilson because of his current position as the John Birch of Congress and because he said what they already believe: all politicians, all powerful people, lie. When they say there are no death panels, the reasoning goes, when it's not even in the bill -- you can be pretty sure there will be death panels. Lock and load, boys.

But I am also persuaded that in a paranoid world where our beloved Constitution is being held hostage by mysterious forces (Richard Hofstadter, phone home!) and "they" will be breaking down our doors any day now to pry our guns from our cold, dead hands, there are no black people who are politically legitimate figures. People who valorize the North American eighteenth century as the epitome of freedom and don't seem to remember that this form of freedom accommodated chattel slavery are telling you something about whether black people sharing political authority with white people, much less having authority over them, is natural and normal. I asked one white, professional resident of the District if it bothered her that she couldn't vote for national offices. She replied that it did, but that on balance she was quite glad that the vast majority of the people who lived in the District were also disenfranchised.

Those voters would be black.

My belief that a very complex story about race was played out today on the Mall was intensified by the fact that, in an hour and a half of mingling with the crowd I saw exactly two African-American and one Asian descended participant: everyone else was white. Everyone. The not-Confederate flag was the exception rather than the rule; most people wearing patriotic colors were wearing garish American flag shirts, jackets and hats; tee-shirts commanded the Congress to "get your hands off my Constitution" or insisted that the wearer "loves this country but fears the government." Yellow "Don't tread on me" flags were selling briskly. But there were also real Aryan Nation types there. I saw one group of young men whose tees explicitly identified them either as Klansmen or Klan wanna-bes; and a second group wore Minuteman tees. At another point I was walking and chatting with a group, one of whom asked me if I had noticed how clean the Mall was after the rally (in fact I had; I had also seen marshals walking around reminding people to pick up their trash, and heard, in passing, other marchers proudly pointing out to each other how clean the protesters were leaving the Mall.)

I said yes, the Mall was clean, and it was pointed out to me in a meaningful way that "other groups" left the Mall filthy. "Why do you think that is?" I asked. Six or seven people turned around and said, more or less in unison, "Their culture!" Now, I mention this not to mock anybody, but rather to say that I think that this is an excellent example of how ordinary right wing people, not just politicians, have learned to talk about race in a certain way while still claiming that they don't see race -just "behaviors" or "culture." I asked what they meant by culture, and one person explained that after Symphony concerts the Mall was always clean, but after pop and rock concerts, Boy Scouts had to be brought in from the suburbs to clean it up. When I asked to what they attributed this phenomenon, one of my companions explained that those who don't clean up after themselves in public spaces are "freeloaders" (one of the day's buzzwords) and "people who think they are going to be handed everything they need." I asked whether people who marched on behalf of abortion cleaned up after themselves, and I was told that no one knew, but that "Pro-Life marchers always clean up."

I then asked if homosexual marchers cleaned up, and that brought the conversation to a thoughtful stop for a moment. One person said she didn't know, as she had never been to a homosexual march, and another said, "Oh, I think they would clean up!"

We are a very neat people. And if you are really lucky we divide all the perennials before we go home to sodomize each other.

Please consider that moment of cynicism as the kind of humor that often follows a complex and deeply disturbing experience. That said, it's really good discipline to get out among people you disagree with violently, to just listen to them and to try to understand that these are real people and not some figment of Rachel Maddow's imagination. Although it would have been tempting to push some of the conversations further, I don't think it would have been very smart to get into an argument with anyone, and I'm glad I didn't. It would have been confusing too: while the media and the Republican party may want to bill this as an anti-health care march, as someone who was on the ground, I have to tell you that this was but one of many issues. Furthermore, few people had any sense of what they wanted from a health care system except that it not encroach on their freedom; that they not lose the right to refuse medical care that the government might force on them (like vaccinations, abortion and suicide); and that people who can't pay for health care, for whatever reason, don't deserve it and shouldn't have it. I almost became convinced that health care reform is not, in a funny way, even their issue. On the right you can see a disabled woman in a wheelchair, who may have been there because she truly believes the government will put her to death. She was one of several disabled people I saw who apparently oppose any health care bill the President or the Democratic Party might come up with that is intended to prevent the insurance companies from fiscally raping them or shutting them out altogether. There were other marchers whose health is clearly precarious: elderly folks, smokers, the overweight, people soldiering on with canes, oxygen tanks, scoliated spines and missing limbs. Mysteriously, to me at least, they too oppose better, cheaper and more accessible health care; meanwhile, many of their fellow marchers will tell you that people who smoke, who are fat, who "make bad choices," don't deserve any breaks.

I would say that the spine of this protest is not any well considered opposition to health care, but to taxes, and to the idea of government itself. This is not news, but I did want to emphasize that I am aware of this. How we pave roads and fight Holy Wars against the Taliban without government is not clear to me, but my guess is that those are details that would naturally resolve themselves if we could just get the yoke of bureaucracy off our necks. One of the pamphlets I picked up was from FairTax.org, which proposes to run what is left of the country, and the gargantuan military that right-wingers believe is indispensable to preserving "our freedoms," through sales taxes. The IRS would be abolished! "No Income, Payroll, AMT, Corporate, Estate, Capital Gains, Interest of Dividend Taxes; Keep your whole paycheck -- No withholding." Astonishingly, they also have a plan to tax "illegal and underground economies." But everyone else was there too: the anti-abortion folks; the gun folks; the anti-sodomy folks, the birthers, the anti-immigration folks, the home schoolers, the prayer-in-schoolers, and the folks who are always telling you the end is near. There was one person carrying a sign with his three issues, none of which had to do with health care: "The CIA protects our freedoms; End forced abortions; Child molesters deserve life in prison." Another sign read: "Thank you FOX News, for telling the Truth!"

I am sure the Republicans will try to bill this as "the people" rejecting "the President's proposals," but take it from me -- there was something far more opaque and interesting going on than that. I think the Republicans are holding on to these shock troops by a thread, and perhaps not at all. Astonishingly, one theme that seems to be emerging (and it is particularly prominent in a DVD I was given that contains two short films, The Obama Deception and America: From Freedom to Fascism) is that there is no difference between Obama and George W. Bush, a fantasy that I thought was the exclusive purview of Ralph Nader and Alexander Cockburn. One sign that pictured Obama as the Anti-Christ, when flipped, displayed Bush as the Anti-Christ. In fact, the Obama victory is proof-positive of the conspiracy that this right wing fringe has warned us about since the 1930s. In this apocalyptic scenario, Obama's election is part of the Wall Street plot to bring America to its knees, and now it appears that George W. Bush was a critical agent in that plot. This was a very interesting discovery. Indeed, if you go to Freedom's Phoenix, who produced the films above, our hero, Congressman Joe Wilson, is revealed as a "hypocrite" who voted for health care for illegal immigrants in 2003. (I wouldn't take this to the bank: Freedom's Phoenix also hints that Barack Obama may be involved in the Kennedy assassination cover up, and that MRI brain scans can detect a tendency to "freeload" that could then be corrected through medical intervention.)

There's more, but I think you get the picture. Here's the good news: a group that is so internally fractured, unfocused and opposed to the political system is not a powerful interest group but a Frankenstein monster. These folks hate the Republicans too, and I think a lot of them are disappointed Goldwaterites for whom the conservative revolution that we historians are so fascinated by never happened. Their history is a story of decline, and of brave individuals fighting back against freeloaders, financiers and foreigners. "Everything Barack Obama says means something different," The Obama Deception warns, For the Teabag people, this is a lesson to be learned more broadly about a political class that, from their perspective, only pretends to be a two party system. When they protest big government," they are not Republicans, or even conservatives in the conventional sense of the word. They are defenders of personal liberty against a one party state linked to a secret global system, a state that floods a nation of good white working people with illegal immigrants and freeloading welfare cheats, chuckling relentlessly about how they are fooling all of us.

I want to thank the people who shared their stories with me today, and those who agreed to have their photographs taken to document this march on Tenured Radical.

This Is What You Do: A Shooting On Campus

Over two years ago, on April 17, 2009, after the Virginia Tech shootings, I wrote this post. Towards the end I wrote:

So far, two faculty members have been identified as among the dead, one of whom may have tried to block the classroom door to give his students time to escape through a second story window. Another faculty member, interviewed yesterday on NPR's Fresh Air, described barricading himself in his office as he heard the gunfire below, listening to students and faculty being shot and not knowing where his two children (enrolled at Tech) were at that precise moment. And I know that I am thinking about this because the human mind grasps precisely what it can handle and no more but: am I the only college teacher wondering whether I would have the courage to try to save student lives in such a pointlessly horrible situation, knowing that mine might be taken in the process? Or the flip side: have you imagined the agony of hearing or watching students being murdered while knowing that you were powerless to do anything to help them?

Well, one of the things I know now is that mostly it isn't that dramatic. What happened at around 1:30 today is that my administrative assistant came to my office and said calmly, "There has been a shooting on campus. A woman has been hit and the shooter got away." The shooter is, we think, her ex-boyfriend (it turned out the suspect is an older man from her hometown), and it happened in the middle of the campus bookstore. No one around me panicked, and I thought calmly, "OK, I am responsible for these people. What do I need to do?" We locked the doors and windows and went upstairs; two of us called the people who were not at the office and told them not to come in. Then we waited up on the second floor.

A student came by for office hours. We invited him in, I talked to him for a bit, and sent him home. He had no idea anything was happening.

We read our email alerts, deleted messages from our cell phones, and waited some more.

We watched as Public Safety cleared Foss Hill, where the students were holding their annual Spring Fling. The celebration -- a festival of music and partying (in 1972, the Grateful Dead came!) which marks the end of classes and the beginning of reading period -- had just begun when the shooting occurred. Coincidence?

Then we waited.

There was a police car outside our building, blocking off one of the streets, with lights swirling: the officer stood next to it with his hand on his gun.

And we waited.

After an hour, we all agreed to go home, and to leave in a group. Those of us old enough to have taken feminist self-defense classes in the 1970s rehearsed the classic moves to defeat a patriarchal aggressor: Jam the heel of your hand upward into the nose! Preferably hard enough to drive the cartilidge into the brain! Sharply slam your knee into his patriarchal nuts!

This all assumes that you even get to Feminist Move #1 and he doesn't just shoot you dead on the spot.

But as I say, it really isn't that dramatic. We saw each other safely to our cars, which were in a parking lot behind the DKE house, where the brothers had assembled some appropriate beverages, music, and were playing with the many wiffle ball sets they pass down from generation to generation. My friend Dr. Victorian noted brightly that had we known there were so many strapping young men available to protect us, we might have left earlier.

I came home and found out that the student has died; as I understand it, she was shot five times. There may be a second student who was hit.

Then I cried.

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

You can read everything I know about it here and here and here. When I first wrote this post, I had heard rumors about who had been murdered, but was not sure. Since then it has been confirmed: the murdered student's name is Johanna Justin-Jinich, and I have inserted her picture above. As of 8:30 P.M., while the police claim to know who her killer is, they have not released his name.

Excuses, Excuses....Excused: The Teacher Learns A Lesson

When I was a young faculty member, I had a comedy routine that went like this. I would cup my hand to my ear, look intent and say to a colleague, "Listen! Do you hear that?"

You would answer, "Uh -- no. What?"

Me: "That soft thumping sound!"

You, listening hard: "What do you think it is?"

Me: "The sound of grandparents hitting the ground."

I am, of course, referring to the grandparent holocaust that strikes around midterms and finals, grandparents whose sudden death causes their grandchildren to be unable to take their exams or turn in their papers. Some students have been known to lose more than one grandparent in a single semester; others seem to have more than four elderly rellies who slip in and out of comas, are sometimes miraculously healed (Praise the Lord!) or suddenly take a turn for the worse -- just when we thought that paper was going to come in.

OK, I'm being mean.

And I would have to say something strange has happened to me with age, which is not just that I'm not as mean as I used to be, but that I seem to have more students who have genuinely bad, documentably awful things happen to them and to their family members. I don't know why this is. Maybe I'm less of a cynic, having suffered my own share of bad things over the years, and I'm just noticing more. Or maybe it's just the accumulation of years. There are students managing chronic diseases, young people who have to learn more things about their bodies by the age of twenty than I have learned in over twice that time. Students whose fathers leave Mom -- in the company of their daughter's best friend from high school. Students who are descending into madness, living inside kaleidoscope brains that make reading, thinking and speaking a nightmare. Students whose parents are diagnosed with terrible invasive diseases; or students who have a parent or a sibling who has battled cancer for over a decade and announces that s/he is giving up treatment and is ready to die. Students who have a suicide in the family. Students with a loved ones in the hands of the judicial system, or with friends who have died violent deaths at the hands of other human beings. And this is not even counting casualties and stress to students and their families from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, something that I am sure is far more visible at institutions other than Zenith.

The predominant health issue at Zenith nowadays is nothing unusual. A vile illness is going around: a nasty, juicy cold that metamorphoses into a hacking cough and/or an ear infection. Everyone has it: job candidates, students, colleagues, administrative assistants. Walk into my office presenting those symptoms, and you can get an extension on anything -- guaranteed. Yesterday after class I was transformed into my visiting nurse persona, roaming around from student to student, urging them to go to the health center because I know three separate people -- one adult and two students -- who have been diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia in the last week. Who wants to drive a student to death's door just to make a point about getting a paper on time? Not me, buster. I can't even grade when I'm sick, much less write.

I have noticed, however, that sometimes the students who have the worst problems are the ones who never tell you what's wrong if they can help it: they are the ones who grit their teeth and soldier on, taking care of personal business without making an excuse or asking for an extension. Those are the students you have to really keep your eyes peeled for. Once, about ten years ago, I demanded that a student who had handed in absolutely no work all semester, and had evaded me with increasingly transparent lies, come to office hours to explain herself. She sat down across the desk from me as I began my stern lecture about taking responsibility, the importance of trust between teacher and student, the multiple excuses -- and then I noticed that she was trembling, tears sheeting down her cheeks as she sobbed quietly. "What's the matter?" I said. She whispered something I didn't understand. "What?" I said, now more urgently.

"I cut myself," she said, eyes squeezed shut in shame, leaking fresh rivers of tears. She pulled her cardigan off and dropped it onto the floor, revealing hundreds of fine, white, healed scars crosshatching her forearms, biceps and shoulders, fresh razor marks sketched like capillaries over the old wounds. "I thought I could stop but I can't."

Moments like this have made me a gentler person, even a person who sometimes imagines the worst when actually there is nothing more or less wrong with a student that an appointment book and a weekend without partying wouldn't fix. But it has also taught me that students who keep insisting on a family emergency that they won't explain often aren't fibbing. Often they have instead a fierce sense of privacy, are ashamed, or are witnesses to human pain that is far too awful to tell to a stranger -- such as a teacher. Once I had a first-year student who finally stopped promising to hand work in and admitted that she was flunking out because she slept twenty or so hours a day. Depression, I thought, and sent her to the office we call Behavioral Health. Over Christmas, I got a call from the Dean's office. My student had suddenly died, had gone to sleep one day and not woken up: it turned out she had been in liver failure, probably for over a year, and had had liver disease for far longer than that. Undiagnosed, untreated, liver disease -- not the freshman blues after all. I have never forgotten this.

I have a friend of over twenty years duration who is a dean, and who is simply one of the wisest people I know when it comes to thinking about the young. I am always calling her for advice even about students she isn't in charge of for this reason, and because I don't always know what it means to be my better self as a teacher. I asked her why a student, who has been faced with a particularly horrific family emergency, simply disappeared rather than drop an email to explain the multiple absences and arrange for extensions. "Don't they trust us to do the right thing in the face of something truly terrible?" I asked.

"Perhaps not," my friend said. "Or perhaps they think that if they don't tell anyone their lives can still be normal."

Or perhaps we just aren't as important in the scheme of their lives as we, perhaps unconsciously, believe we are.

The Content of Our Character: Making The History Of President Obama

We did it. Oh my God, let me help the Bushies pack. I've been saving boxes for them. And once we're done, I'll start saving boxes for Joe the Senator, that skunk of a former Democrat who has succeeded in making himself completely irrelevant. Hope it was worth it, Senator Lieberman: at least you will have two wars and thousands dead to look back on when you are going through your memory books in two years.

I myself feel as though I have just been liberated from a dictatorship: I cried throughout Obama's victory speech last night, overwhelmed with relief, exhaustion and the hope that things would be different soon. And you know, wherever Obama comes down on GLBTQ rights in the end, he won't be out to to get us like the Bushies and their pals in the Heart(less)land were. Things have been so bad -- for example, using hideous, antigay initiatives to get poor, white conservatives to the polls to vote for politicians who were ready to turn the economic screws harder on those same voters -- that I would settle for just being left alone by the state and by the people of this great land. And if Obama can do better than that, well then, Goddess bless him.

In the midst of our long-awaited celebration, may I inject a request that our euphoria not cause us to over-read what has just happened? One of the things that is going to be a little hard to take over the next few days is the ooze of self-congratulation already begun in the media about the sea-change in American race relations, "proven" by the majority of the electorate having chosen an African-American man as president. I needn't remind you that, although put in context it was a resounding victory, many millions of people did not vote for Obama: some of those people will become reconciled to his presidency and many, I suspect, will not.

This means that we need to take with a grain of salt the announcement by pundits like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, that inequality, and the culture of racial meanness that has pervaded politics since Reconstruction, is officially at an end. "And so it came to pass" Friedman writes biblically, "that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man — Barack Hussein Obama — won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States." He continues:

"A civil war that, in many ways, began at Bull Run, Virginia, on July 21, 1861, ended 147 years later via a ballot box in the very same state. For nothing more symbolically illustrated the final chapter of America’s Civil War than the fact that the Commonwealth of Virginia — the state that once exalted slavery and whose secession from the Union in 1861 gave the Confederacy both strategic weight and its commanding general — voted Democratic, thus assuring that Barack Obama would become the 44th president of the United States.

"This moment was necessary, for despite a century of civil rights legislation, judicial interventions and social activism — despite Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King’s I-have-a-dream crusade and the 1964 Civil Rights Act — the Civil War could never truly be said to have ended until America’s white majority actually elected an African-American as president.

"That is what happened Tuesday night and that is why we awake this morning to a different country. The struggle for equal rights is far from over, but we start afresh now from a whole new baseline. Let every child and every citizen and every new immigrant know that from this day forward everything really is possible in America."

After an entire election season of barely talking about race at all, suddenly an Obama victory has unleashed a torrent of reflection on slavery, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. (Um -- does anyone remember what happened to erode black citizenship after the civil rights movement? Like unprecedented rates of incarceration, ending antipoverty programs, and defunding public eduction?) Allusions to the horrors of American racism should probably be dealt with gently by the Obama administration, to be sure. Most white Americans don't really understand them, and they don't understand how they are implicated in inequality. But I am not comfortable with the announcement that Obama's great victory has simply bookended this history, and that we can now start all over. For example, on NPR yesterday, a white construction worker explained that he thought undocumented Mexican workers should be paid as much as he is, and that equal pay for equal work should be guaranteed by law -- but he doesn't want "them" in his union. Why? the reporter asked. Because, Joe the Carpenter explained, he doesn't.

Americans have a great fantasy about starting over. That was, in part, what the original colonial project in the Americas relied on: people who had mucked up their lives in Spain, or France, or England, or Scotland coming to try all over again in a place that they thought -- mistakenly -- was empty. Or Puritans leaving behind a corrupt church to gain God's grace all over again. Think of Lincoln surveying the scorched and tangled ground of Gettysburg battlefield, piles of bodies as yet unburied, and reassuring his audience that this evidence of political catastrophe marked a moment to rebuild American politics. Or think of the Mormons, piling their polygamous families in wagons and leaving their charred homes behind in Illinois, enduring endless hardship to get the shores of the Great Salt Lake, where Brigham Young announced firmly, "This is the place." And think of the Indians who had, in fact, lived in that place, and have been starting over ever since.

It's a myth, for sure. And yet, Americans do start over. Again and again. We fling history to the winds, we change our names, we change our genders, we change our noses and tummies, we change our wives, we change our vinyl siding. It is an indisputable feature of how Americans, and people who have longed to be Americans, understand the promise of this country. So it's wrong that we can just start over as if the long history of American crimes against black people never happened, but if we exercise some caution, it can be right too. After a Republican reign that has been a catastrophe, in which bad things happened one after another, each thing more incredible -- and predictable -- than the last, the nation has been liberated once again. This time we will be freed by a mixed race man, his father an immigrant, who will be the first black president -- not just in the history of the United States -- of the Western industrialized world.

But after the euphoria passes, let's get to work, shall we? Let's figure out what starting over really means and what it is going to take, on the streets and in the classrooms. Listening to John McCain's supporters boo and catcall the next President of the United States last night (something he and Sarah Palin taught them to do, just like Elizabeth Dole authorized that awful Jesse Helms-ian ad against Kay Hagen that will stain her otherwise good name forever) reminds me of the meanness that has been unleashed by the McCain/Palin campaign, a meanness that has lurked under the surface of every major Republican policy, and every major political season, since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. There's lots of work to do, but repairing our political culture is at the top of the list.

Oh -- and if you are a soldier in Iraq? Keep your head down and your vest buttoned tightly, friend. You're coming home.

For good post-election activities, click here for Barack's pre-inaugural reading list , compiled by Scott McLemee of Inside Higher Education. Your Radical is featured, as is her Zenith colleague Elvin Lim.

And A Special Little F***k You From Citibank: the Radical Comments on the Current Economic Crisis

One of my responses to the financial meltdown was to cancel a bunch of credit cards. How did I acquire all these credit cards in the first place? Well, in several ways, but most of all because they were offered to me by banks at low (or no) interest. They were offered to me as great opportunities, full of flattering language about how my credit history had caused me to be selected as a Particularly Prestigious Customer. In fact, I was getting them because we sold a house, bought a house, paid off a mortgage, acquired a new (relatively modest) primary mortgage, added a small construction loan, and made our payments punctually. In other words, because financial institutions share so much information, it was clear that the Radical family was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the space of about sixteen months. And much as I would like to imagine myself as Particularly Prestigious, I wasn't born under a rock. I was actually being offered these cards in hopes that I would overreach: that I would charge up a bunch of stuff, miss a payment (or not), and end up paying as high as 29% on purchases, accumulated interest, late payment penalties and miscellaneous fees. Which leads me to propose that in all the fuss about subprime mortgage lending, it is the extension of these fraudulent practices to the credit card market that has caused the second great weakness in our economy.

I had only one credit card for years -- the L.L. Bean Bank of America credit card that gave me free shipping --which I liked because, being a butch lesbian, I have a great need to be constantly filling out my wardrobe with flannel shirts, duck boots, jeans with flannel linings, wool socks, and whatnot. And then all of those years of commuting between Big City and Zenith also meant that new sail bags were always a fun holiday gift in the Radical household. Those of you who commute know what I mean: you empty the sail bag when you get home, leave it by the door, and start tossing things in the next day. By the time you are ready to return to the other home, you find your keys, your novel, your wallet and -- voila! Out the door.

That credit card got hammered during our big renovation two years ago (although many points were acquired and subsequently exchanged for new cross-country skis and a splendid bike rack), so -- although I tried to pay the card off every month -- at a certain point living expenses and construction expenses became so confused that I found myself with a sizable balance that was running at about 23%. What to do? Well, sensibly I thought, I acquired three other credit cards that offered me 0% financing for the first twelve months (I receive between three and six of these offers a day), split the outstanding balance on card #1 between them, and a year later negotiated with the other companies for a fixed rate of 7% that would last for the duration of the loan. I negotiated by simply threatening to cancel the card and get another one, and they (or their handsome, male, gay-sounding representatives) all quickly agreed to this low rate, particularly when I pointed out that it was well above prime. About a year later, I paid them off too, and then stuck them in a drawer, thinking that perhaps they might be useful in a refugee situation or some other dire fix where access to quick funding would make the difference between comfort and discomfort. "How sage you are, Radical," people would say as we settled into a comfortable hotel suite with our fluffy dog Breezy after a devastating hurricane, while they were breathing formaldehyde in government-issued trailers.

And yet there are two problems with having a lot of extra credit cards. One is that it is easy to lose track of them, because they blend in easily with ordinary household junk. One of my habits when I travel is to stick one of these cards in a Secret Location, so that if my pocket is picked I am not entirely without funds. Once, however, utterly by accident, I discovered that two ladies who had arrived under the auspices of Happy Housewives Homecleaning Services, and who left claiming that they had forgotten their vacuum cleaner (??), had filched one of these cards from an open suitcase. They were able to fill up their SUV and buy many cartons of ciggies at the Pequot reservation before I realized what was going on, canceled the card, and reported them. Not fun, on any level, particularly having to choose between reporting two desperately poor (but ambitious) women who wanted to go into the tobacco business and picking up the bill for their enterprise. Fortunately they were just petty thieves, and didn't find themselves in need of a set of antique nesting tables. But that taught me a lesson: if you are going to keep extra credit cards around, secure them.

The second problem is that before you know it, you have forty or fifty thousand dollars of credit available to you, which is no joke, particularly if you ever need a loan for something serious, like putting a new roof on the house, since all that credit counts against you when the bank is assessing you for a real loan. And for some reason, when the economy was tanking, that made me feel particularly vulnerable, perhaps because it was the one thing on which I could act. So I canceled WaMu (this was shortly before they stopped being WaMu, and I remember thinking at the time that their representative was particularly listless); and I canceled Chase (they resisted a little, but gave way). By the time I got to Citibank Amex, a card I do use every month for recurring household expenses, things were a little more complicated: I had to shift a bunch of bills to monthly payments from my checking account, then paid the remaining balance and called to cancel.

The representative put up vigorous resistance, so vigorous that I thought I would in fact keep this card as my backup. Now, just yesterday, I received a bill in the mail from Citibank for -- 50 cents. That's right. 50 cents. Why? Because that's what they charge you every month if you do not maintain a balance. And I swear to you, in the course of a conversation in which that nice gay man offered me the moon and the stars, he never mentioned that I would be charged just to have the card available. Had he done so, I would have canceled it, not because I can't afford six dollars a year, but on principle. And you know that, should I neglect to pay that 50 cents some month, they would charge me a $35 late payment fee.

If anyone in banking or government is listening out there: this is what is wrong with our financial system. Cheat, cheat, cheat. I believe that there were a great many people out there for whom having stuff they could not afford filled a great, aching hole. But I also believe that if you take a look at people like me, you will see a range of experiences: people being cheated a little bit here and a little bit there, and told in great surprise that the rule they have violated was right there, in .5 point type on page 13 of the agreement that revised their contract with the bank (a document they received last May.) Once I realized that, because I was paying my credit card off every month, I was getting the bill more and more frequently. Upon investigation, I learned that my credit cycle had been shortened to 17 days. I can only believe that the point was to trick me into "missing" a payment, when in fact I had literally just paid the bill.

I rarely take advantage of commercial credit now except for expedience, such as charging up reimbursable professional expenses (warning: when reimbursed, do not go out and buy a TV instead of paying the bill.) Mostly, for internet purchases and low-cash situations, I use my handy debit card (warning: if you pay for monthly expenses on a credit card and have no savings, you need to wean yourself to this system gradually, otherwise you suddenly run out of money in the middle of the month, as you are paying for everything twice in a single thirty-day cycle. And never give a hotel a debit card at the beginning of your stay, as they will put a hold on your checking account for a substantial sum of money that takes weeks to release.) But I also make enough money that I don't have to rely on credit to go on vacation, pay a medical bill or a car repair, the kind of thing that can put an ordinary person (an assistant professor paying student loans, for example) behind the eight ball for several months. As a household, we have a great, fixed-rate mortgage we can afford, and we have enough savings that we can make up a month's budget shortfall from our other resources, even in the midst of this great crash. But my own experiences doing business with (read: getting screwed by) huge interstate commercial banks do give me cause me to believe that the de-regulation of our financial system has made a great many people into permanent debtors by locking them into multiple "agreements" with banks that they cannot possibly understand, "agreements" that are deliberately altered in arcane and unpredictable ways to fool people into violating the terms they have "agreed" to. That I keep receiving such offers every day, and multiple offers over the internet, to consolidate my debt into one low, low payment when I am simultaneously hearing on the news that small businesses cannot get the loans they need to maintain inventory, suggests to me that we are still swimming with the sharks economically; and that as a nation, we are a long way from grappling with the corrupt corporate practices designed to take money from those who can least afford it and siphon it upward.

As Wall Street Tumbles, Herbert Hoover -- er, John McCain -- Claims That "The Fundamentals Of The Economy Are Still Strong."

Well, thank you Mary Sunshine.

Seriously folks, the economy hasn't been sound for a long time, making it even more bizarre that John McCain made this claim yesterday, shortly after Lehman Brothers went down the tube. Even if -- as at least one source correctly asserts -- this phrase was part of a longer speech that acknowledges the current situation as worrisome, how can McCain float this fantasy when economists of all political persuasions are asserting that the economy has not hit bottom yet? That the worst may be yet to come? (Even the Radical, who does not pray often, is praying for you, AIG. And for you, WaMu.) Click here for video posted by CBS News that shows Obama finally getting aggressive; click here for video posted by FP Passport, a web log published by the journal Foreign Policy, that shows a longer clip from the McCain speech than I have quoted above.

The Radical keeps imagining that she and other historians of the Great Depression will begin to have their phones ring off the hook, so eager will news organizations be to hear their wisdom about the current crisis and the comparisons between John McCain and Mr. Hoover. But I suspect it is not to be. The Lehrer News Hour will keep going back to those tried and true Presidential historians, Michael Beschloss and Richard Norton Smith. Once more, stardom will elude me ("Mr. DeMille, I am ready for my close-up!")

Among those whose faith in the stewardship of the Republican party seems to have been shattered for the time being is conservative columnist David Brooks, whose piece in today's New York Times, "Why Experience Matters" seems to be a sincere attempt to bring the Republican base down to earth about what the "vote for the guy you want to have a beer with" attitude has bought for both the masses, as well as the classes. "The issue starts with an evaluation of Palin, but does not end there," Brooks writes. "This argument also is over what qualities the country needs in a leader and what are the ultimate sources of wisdom." Although Brooks acknowledges the critical importance of tension between elite conservatism and popular conservatism, he condemns the Bush administration for its ineptitude, and warns that votes for "ordinary people" are not, in themselves, a path to good government as populist demagogues claim. He continues:

Experienced leaders can certainly blunder if their minds have rigidified (see: Rumsfeld, Donald), but the records of leaders without long experience and prudence is not good. As George Will pointed out, the founders used the word “experience” 91 times in the Federalist Papers. Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

Nicely put, David, and a very gracious way of admitting that things have gone tragically, fatally awry under the Presidency of that guy a majority of voters actually did not want to have a beer with, but the oil industry and the financial industry did. And in case anyone has noticed, there is a growing movement of conservative intellectuals who are turning on the McCain candidacy because of his choice of Sarah Palin, her lack of seasoning, the ethical questions about her policies as governor, and the kind of cynicism about the electorate that the choice of such a person represents when there were so many better qualified people (many of whom were extreme social conservatives, many of whom were women.) Some of us might argue that this cynicism about the voting public is only the Reagan candidacy carried to an extreme, but as someone who is studying that period, I would say the jury is out on this one. Perhaps the great untold story of the first Reagan administration is how people around the president rejected social extremism, over and over again, while simultaneously pursuing the kinds of changes in the nation's regulatory structure that ultimately produced the crisis we are living with this morning. It is a complicated history to say the least.

Um, Jim -- I'm in the office all day if you want to give me a ring.

But let's get back to the Second Great Depression, and to its more local effects. Many of us stopped opening our investment report from TIAA-CREF over a year ago, although I am heartened to see they have not yet been mentioned in this collapse, difficult as it may be to imagine that they too are not implicated in the subprime mortgage market scandal. However, we in the academy can't begin to understand yet how the current crisis will affect us. One of the things I wonder is how many students will begin to find that their highly leveraged parents are unable to pay the bills? And do places like Zenith have anywhere near the resources to plug the gap for students who are suddenly in need of financial aid packages? And I am not just talking about the children of the super-rich, of which we have a-plenty. How about the children of the secretaries and administrative assistants and janitors and coffee vendors of the super-rich? We aren't seeing many photos of them leaving Lehman Brothers, are we? (Although, since those photos and video look more like a perp walk than anything else, that may be ok.) Their children go to Zenith too. And we are going to have to come up with the money to help all of them.

Some people are frantic right now about the future: I'm just thanking my lucky stars that I am healthy enough and young enough to work for a couple decades. And kind of fascinated that what I began thinking about as a dissertation field back in 1984 is happening all over again.

And hoping that the American people get out there in November and vote for Roosevelt, not Hoover.