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

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

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

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

Annals Of The Law: Women And Children Can Be Careless, But Not Men

People who know me are aware that I often rise at a grisly hour of the morning to row. There are a variety of advantages to this, including being too confused for lack of sleep to have that debate about whether I should work out or keep writing. The best one, however, is that I hear the first half hour of National Public Radio's Morning Edition on the way to the boat house. I have six miles of a workout in a single scull to think uninterrupted about whatever I have heard, and I can listen to the same stories again on the way back and decide whether any of them are worthy of a blog post.

Which is how I decided to write about yesterday's closing arguments in the Rod Blagojevich trial. Blagojevich, you may recall, is the former Governor of Illinois. He is being tried on multiple counts of corruption, including attempts to sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama. Defense counsel Sam Adams, Jr. made the argument we might expect: that the government's case is manufactured and that prosecutors have twisted circumstantial evidence to make the defendant appear to be corrupt.

Blagojevich is also, according to his attorney, a compulsive talker, and says all kinds of things that he either doesn't mean or that are open to interpretation by others. ("Never tell anyone outside the family what you're thinking again.")

But what explains all the evidence, and the witnesses who testified for the prosecution? They misunderstood "negotiation" for "extortion," that's all, and maybe Blogojevich should have said less and conveyed more clearly what he actually meant. Like, "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." It appears that the logic of the defense's position is that the former governor is "insecure" and not "the sharpest knife in the drawer."

Wondering about the corny Mafia theme? I haven't told you yet about Adams' sure-fire offensive ethnic humor strategy (law students, listen up):

At one point, the bombastic attorney launched into a story about his Italian grandmother, who shoots a mule dead after it stumbled three times. "Thatsa one! Thatsa two! Thatsa three!" Adam yelled, mimicking the accent.

When her husband called her stupid for shooting the mule, she warned him: "Thatsa one!"

Is this -- or is this not -- a great Chicago story? What NPR doesn't mention is that this little parable actually illustrates political bullying at its best.

And now, as we settle in to the last month of summer, here's a little more good advice from Don Radicale:

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall: Famous Queer Scholar Refuses Prize; Keeps Salary, Named Chair

Facebook and queer blogs have been a-buzz of late with the international doings of The Famous Queer Scholar. Recently, s/he has traveled boldly to Europe on the pretext of accepting a prize (probably on the euro of the organization giving it), only to publicly refuse the prize. In doing so, s/he made a point of chastising the organization for its failure to adequately refuse racism and "homonationalism" (or the organization's actual collaboration with the German state -- the nature of the crimes isn't quite clear from accounts of this event.) Although no one wants to explain what they did to deserve this, we are led to believe that it served the bastards right.

Goddammit, I wish I'd thought of this first. The last time I was offered a prize, I just frakking took it, thinking only of the generosity of those who were awarding it and of the microraise it might pry out of Zenith. I now just feel stupid for having not refused all prizes, but I vow to do so in the future, because you just can't do enough to fight racism, transphobia and homosexual collaboration in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is, of course, only the latest of The Famous Queer Scholar's refusals. S/he has refused hir own celebrity, becoming particularly cranky in 1992 when a Midwestern graduate student created a very funny fanzine that used hir image to mock the feminist literary turn and the rise of queer academic super-stardom. In a path-breaking book s/he refused ontological gender and identity politics. Later, she refused criticism that this key text undermined a feminist epistemological praxis or the very possibility of queer politics in a democratic society.* Protesting just such a criticism in 2008, s/he responded:

“Despite the dislocation of the subject that the text performs, there is a person here: I went to many meetings, bars, and marches and saw many kinds of genders, understood myself to be at the crossroads of some of them, and encountered sexuality at several of its cultural edges.”

So there.

Refusal has been the cutting edge of queer scholarship for some time. This can, of course, leave historians a bit in the dust, since the vast majority of us are too stupid to write without falling into the intellectual trap that there are real people who did actual things. But refusing the privilege of prizes takes the struggle to a whole new level, particularly for those of us who have little or nothing to refuse. Under these circumstances, short of voluntarily giving up our jobs, refusal is difficult to achieve, so we have to just settle back into the audience and marvel at the courage of others to travel all the way to Europe and refuse things -- in German!

As an addendum, I find it interesting that The Famous Queer Scholar, who is white, is being uniformly praised by queer scholars of color for making an inferred claim to critical interventions on race and migration that do not originate with hir. Oh yes, I know Walter Benjamin said that there is no longer an original, only reproductions of it (an idea that is uncannily similar to the notion that there is no gender, only performances of it, the intervention that made FQS a celebrity in the first place, and that I now understand s/he has repudiated on the grounds of that s/he no longer believes in the predictability of its subversiveness.)** Perhaps s/he is repudiating race too, as a necessary precondition to refusing racism. That said, I do believe that the term "homonationalism" was -- I think -- coined first by this scholar of color (in collaboration with this scholar of color) who may -- or may not -- be gnashing her teeth that she has not yet been offered anything that she can refuse -- even a little credit for her ideas from The Famous Queer Scholar.

Celebrity can be quite problematic, and I have no acquaintance with it, so I am sure there must be some explanation for why, in the name of antiracism, the FQS has nicked other people's ideas without acknowledging them. Furthermore, I suppose it is hard to refuse celebrity without, paradoxically, becoming more celebrated and hence, unwillingly (but inevitably) contributing to the inherently racist, and firmly institutionalized, academic practice of appropriating the subaltern radical (or is it the radical subaltern?) In this vein, you can go here for a great video of Angela Davis at a recent conference. Although Davis is talking at length about her own ideas concerning the transformation of movement struggle through intersectionality, the clip is billed (by whomever posted it) as "Angela Davis on Famous Queer Scholar's Refusal To Accept..." (emphasis mine.)

So you can see this famous refusal for yourself, as Warner Wolf used to say, Let's cut to the videotape!

*See? I can use big words too.

**Transpeople beware: you may soon be burdened with, and have to repudiate, the charge of transnationalism.

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.

How To Afford Your First Job, Professor Bumstead: Radical Advice For The Newly Employed

We can all agree it was a terrible job market last year. And yet, some of you will be proceeding, newly hooded, into more highly paid employment than you had last year. When I was in graduate school, we used to distinguish between "a job" (something that pays better than graduate school, which could be anything from a one-year adjunct to an administrative, IT or public history position) and "a real job" (employment that offered a longer future, most likely tenure-track.) Nowadays there is also a third category that has expanded dramatically: the post-doctoral fellowship.

Regardless of what category you fall into, if you have finished your PhD and proceeded to paid employment of any kind, you may be making two to three times the money you made last year, which will make you feel giddy. For this reason, my dear, you are in need of Radical Financial Advice.

1. Find out when you will receive your first pay check, how much it will be, and how many months a year you will be paid. It is not uncommon that there is an uncomfortable to yawning gap between the end of your graduate fellowship or post-doc and the beginning of your new salary. If you have been living paycheck to paycheck (which you have) and don't have a partner who is earning, you may suddenly find yourself anywhere from two to four months without income. Most college fiscal years begin in July, but most adjunct jobs and post docs, as well as some tenure-track jobs, begin paying only after you have actually hit the ground in September. This means you might be paid at the end of July and you might be paid at the end of September. You may be paid on a twelve month schedule, or an 8-9 month schedule. Find out and plan accordingly. Sometimes it is possible (especially with a push from a kindly chair or dean) to get your new Human Resources people to re-calibrate your salary to a cycle that eases your transition slightly better. Otherwise, you need to make a plan for whatever time you will be without income. Like crawl home, live with your parents and wait tables until your prestigious university job begins.

2. You cannot afford not to have an accountant. Used to filling out the short form? Well you may be able to go back to it year after next if you are in a tenure-track job, but not this year. Why? Because poor as you may still feel once you figure out what you will actually be living on once you begin debt repayment (see below), you have leaped up the tax ladder. Listen carefully, because this is important: you will probably owe more in taxes next April than will be withheld from your salary. Why? Because withholding on your graduate fellowship, post-doc or adjunct salary was done at a far lower tax rate. So while the amount withheld from your new salary will be appropriate, the amount withheld from your servant wages will not have been, and you will owe money.

An accountant can help you plan for this by either telling you how much to have withheld in your new job, or by calculating how much you have to save to pay the Feds in the spring. The former strategy is preferred, since under-withholding is frowned upon by the IRS, but you can probably get away with it for a year.

I'll tell you right now: H & R Block doesn't count as an accountant. Go to a senior colleague who looks relatively prosperous and ask her who her accountant is. You need someone good because, before taking on the financial obligations of moving, you also need to be able to plan.......

3. Your budget. That's right, it's Blondie and Dagwood time. And this is perhaps the most important part of this post, because the first thing you will need to get a handle on is....

4. Your debts. It's no shame to have them: nearly everyone carries debt from college and adds to it in graduate school. But there is good debt and bad debt. Let me explain.

Good debt includes your massive student loans, that will kick in six months after the hood falls on your shoulders. Once you have learned from your accountant how much your monthly salary will be, you then need to lop these payments right off the top. My advice is to create a separate bank account for debt payment and have that part of your income immediately deposited in it; then have the same account make an electronic payment on a day or two later. This way you will never get your mitts on the money, and you will never miss it.

Good debt is buying a house. But, should you be in a position to do so, one conversation to have with your accountant is whether, in your income bracket, and given the volatility of the real estate market, this is a good time in your life (and the right location) for you to make that investment. Take it from one who is on her third home: buying a house is far more expensive than your cheerful real estate agent will tell you. Take the numbers s/he gives you for the first year and add $10,000. What you might find in this soft market is a rent-to-own situation, which might be attractive if you are tenure-track. In this scenario, you have the option of owning a year or so down the line, with a portion of your rent applied to the purchase price. In this case, you will need to discuss with your accountant how much you would need to save to complete the sale (there are transfer taxes, mortgage fees, and other hidden costs to house buying that are tax deductible, but must be paid up front.)

Another good debt is purchasing a car if you do not already have one and you will need one to get to school. Unlike student loan and credit card payment, paying back a car loan establishes your credit worthiness. In addition, even though you will have to come up with $1000 -$2,000 to put down on a car, it is also a particularly good economic environment for purchasing a car: I am still getting ads for 0% financing, and by July and August when they are trying to get the old model year off the lot, you might even see no money down offers.

But if you are living in a college town where you can easily bike or walk to work, consider not purchasing a car immediately. Aside from the down payment, this will probably save you around $2500 alone next year in insurance, gasoline, maintenance and taxes (if you live in a state that taxes autos.) Renting a car when you need one is much thriftier, as is offering to pay for a friend's gas so that you can both go to Sam's Club and Trader Joe's to load up on household items and frozen food in bulk.

Bad debt is credit cards. My guess is that you have what -- two? Three? My other guess is that you have been closing the gap between your actual income in graduate school and what you spend with your credit cards and that you are paying a lot of interest. Maybe you have even been accepting those offers that allow you to transfer debt from one card to another at 0% for the first six months? You did that more than once? You are paying interest on the accumulated interest, aren't you? Now listen very carefully:

You must stop. Now. Right now.

Until you stop living on credit you are not working for yourself, you are working for the bank. Credit cards are like crack. They sing us siren songs, and we love what they say because we can cure so much unhappiness today and pay for it tomorrow (and the next day, and the next day, and the next day....) Credit cards are like affairs: we tell ourselves and our friends there is nothing wrong with them, and yet we feel compelled to lie about them too. Tell your accountant exactly what you owe, and tell the truth. Believe me, s/he has heard it all -- and so much worse -- before. Then try this: when you are shopping around for a bank, find out whether you can get a fixed-rate consolidation loan to pay all your credit cards off over a period of 36 months. Compare the rates on these loans, and choose the bank that gives you the best one. Make sure there are no penalties for early payment, and then consider teaching a summer course next year to make a serious dent in that loan. In the end this will save you thousands of dollars.

Most important, until you know all the above numbers -- taxes, debt repayment, and net-net monthly salary, you will not know how much....

5. Money you and your dependents have to live on. I am going to tell you right now that even though you just got a big raise, at this point in your financial planning process this will seem like a heartbreakingly small number, particularly if you are financial obligated to parents, spouses, children or siblings. It may be a small enough number that, particularly if you are moving to a big city, you may have to seriously consider a roommate situation. But cheer up: you are not going further into debt, you have cancelled all but one credit card, you are going to pay for everything in cash from here on out and (this is the best part, after you have dealt with all your financial baggage), barring complete unemployment, your real income is most likely to go up from here on out! Budget for food, utilities (can you really afford the cable package you want?), rent (is heat included? Not an important question in Los Angeles, but vital in Boston), transportation, and clothes. And do yourself one more favor.....

6. Save something. Anything. This will make you feel powerful and in control of your fate. Make it $25 a month if that is all you have, but put it somewhere that you cannot touch it. I, for example, have a Roth IRA, where I have for years put all the money I have ever earned writing and speaking, and it has become a nice sum over two decades of employment. Look at it this way: a $250 honorarium for giving a talk locally isn't much money, but with compound interest over the course of your working life, it becomes an impressive sum on which you have also deferred taxes. If you are a highly self-disciplined person, you might want to save up your money for a bit and then put it in a CD, where it is slightly more available to you but you have to make a conscious decision to actually use it rather than fritter it away.

This advice may be more appropriate to some people than to others, but the important message is plan. Plan now. You don't have to be Suze Orman to know that one of the worst legacies of a prolonged period of debt accumulation and low income is learning to ignore the real state of your finances as you fear deprivation more than you fear living beyond your means. While this can be OK during graduate school, when your first priority is establishing yourself as an intellectual and accumulating debt can allow you to complete your studies in a timely manner, to prolong debt accumulation into your salaried life can limit your options severely down the line.

On the other hand, at a moment when you are launching yourself into life as a professional intellectual and so many things are out of your control, this is one place -- with a little prudence and self-discipline -- where you can feel powerful and in charge.

Like Sands Through The Hourglass, So Are The Days Of Our Lives: Having The Courage Not To Go To Graduate School

You would think that May would signal the winding down of things at Zenith. In fact, as we all know, the liberal arts college has a tendency to crank things up toward the end of the year. Didn't spend enough of your budget? There will be a memo asking for suggestions on how to do that. Last year, when I was chair and everyone was in ex post crash-o mentality, we saved a lot of time via a memo telling us that departments and programs were prohibited from spending down at the end of the year, although how they would be able to sift legitimate from illegitimate expenses was not clear. ("Six skateboards? Why did sociology purchase skateboards?") Prizes and various awards must be given, and we will be solicited for the names of ever-more students to receive them. Committees that have been ruminating on this or that will be rushing legislation to the floor of the last faculty meeting. These motions will be greeted with suspicion by a great many people who haven't bothered to attend a meeting all year, and who will table them: "We can't hurry an important decision like this!" they will snarl.

Subsequently, many of these ideas will die on the Island of Tabled Motions.

In the middle of all this chaos, there are the former students who write to ask for recommendations. They've been cooling their heels in Teach for America and prison re-entry programs, toiling in obscurity as paralegals at Dewey, Cheatham & Howe and Doing Good Deeds in far-flung places. Spring has come and -- guess what? There's no summer vacation! You don't get to advance to the next level of work in the fall! Furthermore, since liberal arts colleges now specialize in ginning up nostalgia (and saving money, I presume) by holding alumni reunions and commencement on the same weekend in May, the recent B.A.'s thoughts turn lovingly to:

Graduate school. As Monty Python would say, "Run away! Run away!"

Frequent readers might recall that I was critiqued roundly in the comments section of this post for suggesting that people contemplating the PH.D. might want to evaluate their chances of getting an academic job more thoroughly prior to choosing a program that suits them only for being a college professor. "I'm gobsmacked that someone who calls herself radical could publish something so reactionary," wrote one of my kinder critics. My suggestion that any person contemplating the PH.D work for a minimum of three years post-B.A. to imagine the numerous other life choices available was also rejected by many. "Why would you hold back a talented person who knows exactly what s/he wants to do at the age of twenty or twenty-two?" is a collective version of what I was asked. "If I wait, I will be almost thirty when I get my degree! Too late to start a life!" others whimpered. The most heartfelt responses were some version of: "On what grounds can you -- and people like you -- deny me the opportunity to have something precious that you already have?"

I do not yet control the fate of the historical profession, much less the academy at large, and regulating the supply of jobs to meet the demand is the committee I keep requesting, but to no avail. Give me time, why don't you?

Seriously, let me say two things: I don't think there is anything particularly radical about encouraging people to get a PH.D. in say, history or English literature. It's not like you will be educated to join the IWW, after all (although if you go into sociology you might have a crack at it), or to redistribute wealth. In addition, as I will be 52 in a couple weeks, color me silly, but I don't think 30 is too late to change direction in life, voluntarily or involuntarily. One valued family member of mine is, in her thirties, embarking on her fourth career, and I would say that each one of them has made her a more interesting and productive person.

I also don't think any education, PH.D.'s in the Humanities included, is a waste, even if it doesn't lead you to the career you thought it would. Could be a waste of money, but not time.

However: the idea that life will pass you by if you actually take time to live it (as opposed to studying it, or acquire more education to enter life at a higher level than ordinary folk) is worrisome to some of us who watch talented people graduate from our universities only to return a year later to say that they want back in. I worry that it is a symptom of being part of a generation of over-scheduled overachievers raised to believe that the sands of time run quicker if you aren't writing a memoir about your alcoholic mother, starting your own film production company or scoring big time with your new band in those crucial twelve months after graduation. The concern seems to be that living life is an uncertain proposition at best, a huge waste of time at worst. Those of us who advise contemplation and acquiring experience outside the classroom are perceived by Generation Adderall as hopelessly out of touch.

Rather than seeing me and my colleagues as gatekeepers, however, I would like these hopeful young people to do the research themselves before embarking on this journey. In particular, in the comments section of my earlier post I was initially appalled, then angered, and then moved, by the numerous bitter remarks by commenters who claimed they had been lied to by their own college professors about their future prospects as scholars. Many claimed that they were told that they should go to graduate school, and that the cream always rises to the top in the job market. Such people said they were not told, prior to enrolling in the PH.D. program, that only 4 out of 10 of them would get a tenure track job, much less at a college or university similar to the one they had attended.

One can't help but believe -- even if you think, as I do, that you shouldn't take all your advice about going into the priesthood from a priest -- that there isn't some truth to the experiences they are reporting, so I did a little of my own research. And you know what? I think a lot of them were lied to, albeit by well-meaning people. I was further convinced of this by a conversation with a lovely young person who was given exactly the wrong advice by a university mentor: the best young intellects go straight from college to graduate school; prestigious schools in your field don't care about you taking time to think it over; there will be plenty of jobs in (x) field by the time you get out in seven years. Not one of these things is true, and (x) field is literally crammed with the un- and underemployed. Looking back at the records of the professional association in which (x) field is located, I count 16 jobs in that field advertised in the last 5 years, and 182 if you count the larger fields which might accept an application from someone trained in (x). There were, in the same period 537 PH.D.s produced in the larger fields for which a person trained in (x) might have applied. If you count the other people, in other fields, who might have enlarged the pool for the more general job descriptions, that is less than a 1 in 3 chance of obtaining a tenure-track job over 5 years on the market.

I am estimating, given the job market that existed prior to the crash, and given that state legislatures will continue to slash away at education budgets for several years to come (remember: the commercial real estate market is slumping like a warm ice cream cone as 5-year balloon mortgages start to come due) that out of the dozen or so students who have talked to me about the PH.D. this spring alone, there will be academic jobs for 4 or 5 at best.

Hence, paying some attention to those who claim they were lied to about their prospects, I have responded to this by advising talented undergraduates, right up front, not to go to graduate school. Not yet, at least. And when you are making this decision, take into account the following:

Regardless of whether you like this or not, or whether it seems fair, it is simply a fact that actual graduate school admissions committees at select schools will regard your application more favorably if you take a significant amount of time off. Two to five years, I would say. Want to do labor history? Be an organizer; spend one of those years as a day laborer or a factory worker. An anthropologist? Leave the country and learn a language. Learn two. Cultural studies? Try an advertising agency or tending bar on the Lower East Side of New York. Whatever you do, engage the world of paid labor head on, and try to marry your genuine interests with a determination to get out of your comfort zone. Use this time to read, far more deeply than you have had the opportunity to do as an undergraduate, to discover what field compels you in a deep enough way to make a profoundly scary, uncertain commitment to it.

Your choice to attend graduate school, and their choice to admit you, is not a mutual contract that is designed to benefit all parties equally. Too often young people who have succeeded in school believe that schools actually care about them. They don't. Then why do graduate schools pay people to attend? In part, because it is traditional to do so. But in the overwhelming number of cases graduate students constitute an indispensable pool of cheap labor. You earn your tuition and stipend by doing hours of work for what seems like a good sum of money at the age of 22; by the time you are 29, it doesn't look so good.

If your beloved undergraduate mentor is over age 65, you run the risk of getting really bad advice about graduate school. In fact, I would say that few of us over 35 are reliably in touch, with some exceptions. The first thing you should do is join the professional association in your field of choice. If your income is under 25K, it costs $45 to join the American Historical Association, $35 to join the MLA, $55 to join the American Studies Association. A one year digital subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education is $72.50, and Inside Higher Education is free! Hence, for under $125, a small investment compared to the loans you will be forced to take out in graduate school to eat and keep a roof over your head, you have within your grasp the best possible advice about the current state of the academic profession, the recent history of the job market, and the degree of risk you are running if you have your heart set on being an academic.

Read blogs: start with New Faculty Majority, the mother ship of up-to-date commentary about the high rate of underemployment among academics.

As for asking live people, your most important advice in this matter, particularly at a liberal arts college, is from the youngest members of the faculty, those who have been on the job market quite recently, and whose bright and capable friends are strategizing their lack of tenure-track employment. I pick out the SLAC as a particular font of poor advice in this matter, because it is here that the romance of teaching and scholarship tends to cloud the uglier realities of academic life, and it is here that there are no graduate students to set you straight as Professor Graybeard waxes eloquent about the beauties of a cultivated scholarly intellect. Your second most important advice is from all women, GLBT people and anyone in an interdisciplinary or ethnic studies field: there never has been a "good" market for us, and we tend not to think that our special experience of success characterizes the general condition.

And finally, when you are taking advice, do what sensible people do: consider the source. Check to see how many search committees Professor Graybeard has run, and whether s/he gives papers at professional meetings regularly. Does s/he contribute to the life of the profession by serving on committees of professional associations? Does s/he mentor graduate students of hir own, or sit on committees at nearby research universities? Is s/he on the editorial board of a journal? Does s/he publish? Thanks to Google, all of this information is available to you. If the answers to all, or most, of the above questions are "No" then this person may be well-intentioned, but is not a good source of advice.

Whatever you decide: take responsibility for your own decisions in this matter so that you don't waste a lot of emotional energy trying to figure out who to blame when the breaks, and the tenure-track searches, don't go your way. The damage done is not an education that isn't worth anything -- all education is worth something, particularly to creative and engaged people. It's the damage of low self-esteem and disillusion when you have drunk the academic Kool-Aid and -- through no fault of your own -- it doesn't work out.

Monday update: here's a post on the joint J.D./PH.D. from Karen Tani at Legal History Blog. While I wouldn't advise trying to jive the job market by simply attaining multiple degrees (and Tani notes that pursuing such a program is "not for the faint of heart") it is one direction for those of you with an incurable love for learning who are also sane enough to want flexible career options.

Memo To Department Of Homeland Security: You Suck

We are reading very little news from the United States while in South Africa, particularly since (thanks to my least favorite senator since Jesse Helms, Joe Lieberman) the health care bill is such a cock-up. But you couldn't log into a commercial email account without reading an account of this incident, in which a Nigerian man attempted to explode a device on board a Northwest flight from Amsterdam, just minutes outside of Detroit. Passengers and crew members are being praised for their quick response in extinguishing the device and restraining the bomber.

TSA officials are promising action, action action, undoubtedly in the form of more high-tech approaches to stopping terrorists before they are able to act. And yet, what we have so far is incredibly expensive and cumbersome security procedures that can be easily circumvented by your average Joe Terrorist. I have always wondered, for example, how metal detectors would respond to explosives made of plastic. Answer? They don't. I have also wondered why, since it is well known that one must remove one's shoes at airport, any terrorist would put explosives in his or her shoe. Answer? They don't: they sew the bomb in their underwear.

There are two machines that might -- and I say might -- have revealed the old bomb in the underwear ploy. One is the machine, which we encountered in the airport in Paris and is in a few airports in the US, that puffs air at you and analyzes the atmosphere for chemical residue. The other one is the X-ray machine, which was very controversial in the US for the prudish reason that it showed the faint outline of genitalia.

The latter machine might be ineffective in the case of a terrorist wearing fake genitalia full of plastique ("That's a joke, son"), but it strikes me that both machines ought to be in regular use. So what if they cost half a million each?

But there are a few other things worth noting:

1. This particular bomber's name had been given to the US embassy in Nigeria by his own father. And yet, despite the fact that there is now a whole group of security professionals who specialize in clearing the names of people who have ended up on the so-called "no fly list" by mistake -- a process that can take months or years -- a guy who is actually on the list was able to board a plane bound for the United States without being thoroughly searched.

2. Northwest is promising a second security check at the gate for all US-bound flights. And yet, when your favorite Radical changed planes in Amsterdam, where our failed bomber boarded his plane to Detroit,six weeks ago, there was a second check at the gate prior to boarding the KLM flight to Cape Town. At this security gate, in addition to a second search of hand luggage, there was a body pat-down for everyone. Have US passengers somehow been exempted from this extra security to date? Is it something that has been sensibly requested by the South African government? Enquiring minds want to know.

3. It was at this second search that a very polite Dutch security guard asked me to unpack my toilet kit and remove the Swiss Army knife that I had put there prior to a car trip in the fall but had neglected to remove prior to this trip. It had been picked up on a simple x-ray of my hand luggage. This knife, however, had made it through x-ray security at Kennedy airport. Explain that, TSA.

I do not obsess about these things since I truly believe if there is a disaster with my name on it I can't do much about it. What I do object to is that airline passengers are put through endless delays and inconveniences on behalf of security precautions that don't seem to work very well. They confiscate your scissors, make you take your belt and shoes off, and then let someone on the plane wearing an exploding jockstrap. The one piece of good news, I suppose, is that American passengers no longer assume -- as they did prior to 9/11 -- that cooperation and meekness in the face of jihadi fanaticism will give them the best chance of survival.

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.

Rainy Day Academics #12 & 35

Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good,
They'll stone ya just a-like they said they would.
They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to go home.
Then they'll stone ya when you're there all alone.

Today's meditation follows along the lines of the above career advice, given by Bob Dylan to a young academic who happened, at the time, to be wearing a leopard-skin pillbox hat.

As for me, after generic academic rainy day moments, instead of getting stoned --er, I mean being passive-aggressive (though, `tis the academic way) -- I have learned to try to tolerate the discomfort attendant to actually confronting abusive people. Until the Unfortunate Events, I had almost never taken this approach to inappropriate, hostile or aggressive behavior on the part of colleagues. In fact, it was part of my recovery from this (now blessedly long ago) period in my life to learn to screen out other people's craziness, to dodge other people's crap more adeptly and not worry about things I couldn't change. I have colleagues who do this very, very well, and although it can be frustrating for those of us who sometimes need them to engage at key moments, I learned to understand why it buys them peace of mind.

But sometimes crap is unavoidable, given the personalities of academics; it gets delivered to the door, Federal Express, and you are asked to sign for it. So I also worked hard on becoming more adept at responding to crap maturely, directly and with dignity. My repertoire now includes a private conversation where I say, "Hey, this is what you did/what seems to be happening; this is why it isn't ok; you need to have respect for me." Or whatever. Email can follow under some circumstances, but the initial private conversation, uncomfortable as it is, is essential. Best case scenario is that the person tells you something you need to know that allows you to understand why they are behaving badly, even if you don't accept it, or think it is your fault; worst case scenario, they continue to behave childishly and begin once again to abuse you with their contempt and bad manners.

The results of my attempt to deal directly with the most recent unpleasantness fell somewhere between these two outcomes, after which the offender sneered in a parting shot, walking away, "Why don't you blog about it?"

Oooooooh. It's tempting, isn't it?

Sunday Night Follies: In Which The Radical Answers Four Questions

And now, to lighten your Sunday night of grading, lecture writing and sorting your socks for the coming week, here are four answers to urgent questions, none of which have been asked by my fans.

What Zenith college publication is still available in a printed copy?

One of you got it right, but yesterday's post gathered fewer guesses than I thought it would, so I'll tell you. The answer is: the telephone directory, which can be requested; they print one up for you and send it in the next day's office mail. This solution to an otherwise intractable problem was reached after a colleague of mine made an impassioned, and utterly sincere, plea on behalf of his departmental secretary, who was distraught at the change in her work environment wreaked by the loss of a printed Zenith telephone book. I was terribly grateful, and ordered one specially printed up too. Why? Because I can never remember how many people are in the Zenith history department, that's why. There is actually a list in the back of the printed version that allows me to count them up periodically. And I was grateful because sometimes I can't remember someone's name, but if I remember that person's department and look at the list of people in that department, it jogs my memory. And because if I don't remember a person's name, I can't look that person up in the Directory if I need to give them a call, can I? I can't. At least, not easily.

What do you do when you are not working, Professor Radical?

I read, blog, work out, and search the internet for television shows that feature beautiful teenagers and their very complicated lives. In my favorite ones, the teenagers live in southern California, but I adore Friday Night Lights, and those people live in Texas. I like these shows in part because the teenagers, whatever their class background, are concerned with more elevated things than money and grades: for example, they easily navigate complex love affairs, fidelity, being demoted to QB2, pregnancy out of wedlock, what to wear to Blair Waldorf's coming out party, wedlock triggered by pregnancy, whether to lose your virginity at 13 or 14, and terrible, backbiting gossip that would cause the rest of us to bend or break. Furthermore, all of these kids can be turned to in a pinch to help adults solve problems like alcoholism, bad marriages and chronic unemployment. Most seem to do quite well when they are more or less abandoned by their feckless mothers and fathers to live independently while still attending high school. I want to be more like them, and I want to be able to teach my students to be like them too. I also watch American Idol and try to imagine how job searches in history could be more like American Idol.

Why, after having taken a four-year break, are you once again watching American Idol?

Because the older I get the more sympathetic I am to Simon Cowell, who at his age must have to work very hard to keep the body he pours into that sweater for every show. But I also think people just think they can kick Simon around, and they do not see that he is a real person under that nasty exterior. For example, last week when that flaky chick who was at the bottom said she did not care what the judges thought about her performance during the previous week, my first thought was, "Well up your nose with a rubber hose, my dear, you cannot just care what they think when they say what you want to hear. Show business is a school of hard knocks. Get used to it, dearie." My second response was to identify heavily with what a slap in the face that was to Simon. I did not wish I was a free spirit like Flaky Chick and rush out to get an armful of tattoos. No sirree. My third response was, "Flaky Chick, you can't be on this show and just take, take, take. Have you learned nothing from Paula Abdul? If this is the case, then I do not care about you either." Simon thought the exact same thing as me and, expressing this for both of us in the most effective way possible, did not use his "save" for her.

When you are not obsessing about what it would be like to hold the copyright to American Idol and make gobs of money, what do you obsess about?

I obsess about how at a certain point I made a wrong turn in my life and did not become a Native Americanist, which happens to be just about the most happening field there is in American Studies and in United States history at this moment in time. This actually dovetails with my other life question which was why, when I had the chance to apply myself to an intro Anthropology class in college, I wrote a long abstruse paper on James Joyce instead. This decision, which netted me an "A" in Joyce and a "D" in anthropology, caused me to become more generally allergic to all courses related to anthropology, such as ethnohistory and Native American Studies. It also caused me to pursue an English major, from which it took me a long time to recover.

To learn more about the intellectual grounds for my regret on this count, go to this link for a podcast of a March 25, 2009 interview of University of Michigan History and American Cultures Professor, Philip J. Deloria (Note: if I were a Native Americanist, Phil Deloria and I might be best friends, but instead we are mere acquaintances, which is another burden I will have to bear for having obsessed about Joyce rather than paying attention when the TA was explaining kinship structure and cross-cousins for the fifth or sixth time.) The interview was done by my colleague, Kehaulani Kauanui, on her radio show "Indigenous Politics: From Native New England And Beyond," which originates at WESU (Middletown, CT). You might want to bookmark this site for more of Kauanui's interviews of critical contemporary figures in Native American Studies: they are really good, and because of the internet, they have a national audience.

A Letter To the Academic Proletariat

Many well-wishers wrote in to sympathize with the hazards I encountered mailing recommendations to Ph.D. programs: thank you, I am better. Nothing was broken, and the bruises are fading.

But the pain is only beginning elsewhere. The thought that I was sending more unlucky holders of the B.A. down the chute to the slaughterhouse of graduate school raised this question for frustrated job-seeker and blogging comrade Sisyphus. "Do you ever feel like you shouldn't be sending students on to grad school and contributing to the whole PhD ponzi scheme?" asks this industrious young scholar, who applied for over 60 jobs this year, fifty of which have fallen to budget-cutting. "Esp. when there are all these dire predictions about even undergrad degrees becoming priced out of affordability for the middle class? I'm trying to get an academic job right now and bad as this year is compared to other years, people keep telling me it will just get worse [from] here on out."

I guess my first response is no, I don't feel bad about it, because all education is useful even when you can't extract profit from a degree in the way you originally planned to do so. And my advice is to stay away from these doom-and-gloom types who tell you your life is over without suggesting any viable alternative, particularly if they are members of your dissertation committee. They are only bringing you down at a time you need optimism more than ever.

But back to the question of our mission as educators, which is really what you are asking about, my dear Sisyphus. On Monday, (Not So) New President addressed the value of an undergraduate liberal arts education and its role in creating an innovative, flexible, critically-minded citizenry. "A liberal education remains a resource years after graduation because it helps us to address problems and potential in our lives with passion, commitment and a sense of possibility," he argues. "A liberal education teaches freedom by example, through the experience of free research, thinking and expression; and ideally, it inspires us to carry this example, this experience of meaningful freedom, from campus to community." In this vision, undergraduates become cultural and political workers who fan out into industry, finance, education, community organizations, and all kinds of labor to renew the nation. It isn't just places like Zenith who articulate the value of what they do (because they must, really, it is such a great financial sacrifice for many of our students to come to expensive private schools.) Look on the web pages of most colleges, public and private, and there will be some carefully crafted rationale for the larger social value of an undergraduate degree in fields the chattering classes view as useless: philosophy, literature, classics, women's studies. Individual departments, and professional associations, often feel the need to rethink the answer to questions like: "Why Study History?"

In other words, the liberal arts education is not a trade school, but it prepares students to undertake many trades all the same.

So what happened to graduate schools? When did they become trade schools that prepared students for one thing, and one thing only, teaching college and university? Tragically, perhaps, although colleges and universities have had several periods of dramatic expansion since the 1880's, that has not been the norm: college teaching, I think it is fair to say, is in a prolonged period of stasis interrupted by repeated declensions. Recently, this is because education does not hew easily to neoliberal market models in which an industry only grows through supporting itself and reaping profits for investors. I think it is not insignificant that the university job market flat-lined and then began to shrink in the 1970s, at around the same time when public transportation and the Post Office, two essential public services, were forced to compete in the free market. And then, government more or less abandoned -- then gutted -- higher education in the 1980s as part of a multi-faceted Republican strategy for disempowering young people who had effectively organized as college and university students to promote social and political change after 1945.

That was the end of your job market and the birth of your voluminous adjunct market: the first year I went on the market, 1990, there were three jobs in my field advertised in the American Historical Association's Perspectives. Three. And yes, I taught adjunct for two years before landing a job at Zenith.

I think that it is also worth saying the vast majority of Ph.D. programs do prepare their students for other useful work in the world outside the university, but a handful do not and should probably be held accountable for it by their professional associations -- either that, or the professional associations need to be held accountable for their lack of leadership on this issue. Among this handful of fields that hand out a tin cup with the hood are history and literature; not unreasonably, it is the jobless holding these advanced degrees who have the most to say about their immiseration. And so I feel compelled to answer the question as posed by Sisyphus, who must continue to find some way to feed that darling kitty on her profile page next year.

1. Yes, sometimes I do feel that I should not be sending them on to graduate school, given the bad market. Like your local rabbi, I refuse them three times before accepting them to the faith. And yet, I find that without the help of many History or Lit departments rethinking their role in the world at all, many of my students have made some practical choices. Some are applying to history programs that combine the Ph.D. with a J.D.; others are applying to history and American Studies programs that offer a certificate in public history, museum studies or archives. Some students have used the history or American Studies degree as a leg up into a social science, public health (very popular these days) or a social work degree. In other words, while some of these young people will go on to teach, others will become public intellectuals of one kinds or another.

But I do wonder: how is it that this conversation about the terrible job market has been unfolding for over two decades, and cohort after cohort of graduate students find out to their great surprise after enrolling that there are no jobs? It's never been a secret. But it is something you ignore because you want to be a scholar. Hang onto that, because it is an important thing to know about yourself whatever happens next.

2. Ponzi schemes are utterly fraudulent; graduate school is not. Because the Ph.D. cannot automatically be converted into a cash job reproducing knowledge as a professor doesn't mean that you were cheated of those years. I think one of the toughest things about a bad market is that some people will get jobs, and other, equally qualified, people will not. And frankly, this will be the first time any of you will have failed. That it isn't your fault doesn't lessen the sting and self-doubt that will linger. What is somewhat fraudulent, I would argue, is the failure of graduate schools to adjust your expectations prior to you going on the market, and the lack of responsibility many universities feel for your unemployability while they continue to churn out fresh cohorts of you with equally narrow training and expectations. This is something undergraduate institutions would never get away with: if you leave a private college with a B.A. but without the credentials or skills to get a job, it will be because you successfully evaded an army of well-paid professionals whose only job is to help you do that.

3. Who are these people who are telling you it will get worse? Having all but (by my calculations) 8% of the jobs in your field pulled from the market is pretty bad, in my book, and no, I don't think it will get worse. I think it will get better. Remember that when a job is established, or re-filled, it is budgeted on the understanding that X amount of endowment is available to fund it and/or on projections from the next budget year, and everything is pretty volatile right now. But that doesn't mean things will be good soon enough for you, I'm afraid: you know as well as I do that the half-life of any person on the market is limited. Yet, this is what could change: that beginning at the top -- the Harvards, the Yales, the Princetons, the Michigans -- graduate departments admit that their own hiring processes are discriminatory, and that they discard wonderful applications from people whose only flaw is that they have been on the market for several years. That then might jolt loose a conversation among undergraduate institutions about why we more or less discard applications from people who have never held a tenure-track job, or who have failed to get tenure somewhere else, but whose scholarly record is actually good enough to get them tenure at our institutions had they entered at a conventional time.

Obviously, Sisyphus, this is a complex problem, and I have hardly begun to answer your question. But perhaps my readers will finish the job for me? And don't forget -- you are an amazing writer. All of your readers know that: that is not an unmarketable skill.

And The Jury Is In: Professors Have Little Effect On Students

Just a day before the election, another piece of scaffolding invented out of whole cloth by conservative liars -- I mean, intellectual activists -- crashes to the ground: the notion that liberal college professors are indoctrinating their students. So sayeth the New York Times. According to an article in today's paper about a book just published by the Brookings Institution:

The notion that students are induced to move leftward “is a fantasy,” said Jeremy D. Mayer, another of the book’s authors. When it comes to shaping a young person’s political views, “it is really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15,” said Mr. Mayer, who did extensive research on faculty and students.

“Parents and family are the most important influence,” followed by the news media and peers, he said. “Professors are among the least influential.”

A study of nearly 7,000 students at 38 institutions published in the current PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association, as well as a second study that has been accepted by the journal to run in April 2009, both reach similar conclusions.

A second study, co-authored by conservative researcher, Matthew Woessner, confirms these findings. The bad news from my point of view is Mayer's view that changing the mind of anyone over fifteen is difficult. So much for the importance of Western civilization -- or any kind of civilizing influence -- in a college curriculum, something that has been a mainstay of conservative and liberal curricular conflict for several generations now.

Honestly, despite my naturally liberal desire to gloat, I find this all a little difficut to believe, which may mean these researchers are also wrong about me not being a radical ideologue who indoctrinates my students. In truth, the whole conversation is -- and always has been -- hogwash, intended to divert most of us from the great economic rip-off of America engineered by Republican operatives (oops! liberal cant! keeps slipping out!) Just try teaching Barry Goldwater's Conscience of A Conservative to an average group of undergraduates. They love it. They don't love it, however, because he was a conservative, or because he wrote about things that were eternally true, or because Goldwater appeals to the political sensibilities of your average fifteen year-old, but because the ideas are so fearless and it was such a bold attempt to alter the political landscape. Students want to do something that significant too.

And you know what? Students respond approximately the same way to the work of radical left intellectual Angela Davis, who was once fired by Ronald Reagan for being a bad ideological influence in her university classroom. This all leads me to the (unscientific) conclusion that most students are more interested in how to grow up to be significant, unique people who are effective citizens of the world than they are concerned with where to place themselves (or their professors) on an ideological spectrum defined by conservative academics.