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

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

They've been busy!  So without further ado:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take My Phone. Please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Department of Economics, Part II: Organize, Goddammit!

Illustration credit.

This is a follow up to Monday's post, "Department of Economics," which  Historiann commented on today with a brilliant post of her own.

There is an outstanding comment thread to follow at both Tenured Radical and Historiann, much of which reveals that vast numbers of our colleagues in public education and small colleges have salaries frozen below, or well below, 70K.  For those of you who say we need a union -- I am on record as saying "union, yes" as well: I would *happily* trade tenure for a union, any day, any time. But you know why we have no unions? Faculty do not believe in the collective, and they are so easily divided by self-interest, envy and shame.  Our individualism, and our fear that if we organize we will lose the social respect that came with that PH.D., bites us in the ass every time.  Hence, those of us who can cut our private little deals and leave most of our colleagues in the dust.  

We are also a little starry-eyed about employers, and a profession, that doesn't treat us very well especially when we sacrifice for them and for students.  Note the vast number of people in both comment threads who think I should be "happy" about an escalating work load and a shrinking salary, and their only reason is -- I currently make more $$ and have a lighter teaching load than they do.  Listen carefully, for this I believe:  if privileged people like me are starting to notice a shift in the compensation atmosphere, if relatively wealthy schools that have a lot invested in the "prestige" of a traditionally tenured faculty, a 2-2 load, and a bank-busting annual fee for students think they donlt have to pay us any more -- well, many of you who are at the mercy of state legislatures ain't seen nuthin' yet.

I also think this question of salary rips off the cover off the fairy tale what we are sold in graduate school (particularly by Ivy League and Big Public Uni mentors who, my friends, make 2-4x as much as I do, at an earlier stage in their career, and have annual tax-free accounts worth upwards of 6K for research and travel to conferences) that all of us, when we leave graduate school, are really playing on the same level field. We are not the same, not by any stretch of the imagination, and the folks at the top do not think any of us are the same as they are. We get sorted into the masses and the classes in the job market, we more or less stay where we are sorted, and it isn't because some people are deserving and some people are not.  It's because of how we are paid and how hard we are forced to work for it. Have you noticed that we haven't heard a peep from any big-time RI people coming clean on what *they* make to lecture twice a week, manage a stable of TA's and teach a graduate class of 10?  No, you have not.  Now that doesn't mean they don't work hard:  it just means that if you are looking for Nicholas Romanov, he doesn't live at Tenured Radical.

But let's get back to the nitty and the gritty.  In what world is it too much to expect that a professional salary for someone in her fifties, who trained for eight years in graduate school and who has put in almost twenty years at her job, should exceed 107K? Take a look at the AAUP Annual Report On The Economic Status Of The Profession: for my category of school, I am very underpaid. That said, I think many of you are *vastly* underpaid, and I am truly shocked -- by that fact, and by the resignation to being underpaid that makes itself evident in the view that shrinking faculty salaries are an inevitable outcome of -- what?  History? Shrinking education budgets because we divert so much money to fight wars and politicians do not have the stones to tax corporations?

The neoliberal economic policies that are killing education are a cynical political choice, not a natural and inevitable force.  I find it staggering, for example, that we clearly have a generation of scholars (many of you) who may not be able to send their own children to college without taking out loans because tuition, even at public schools, keep rising exponentially but their own salaries don't even keep up with the cost of living over the long term.  I find it staggering that college teaching may soon, except for a sliver of the population, be something that a person can only afford to do if s/he has inherited wealth or a spouse with a good income.  I find it staggering that many of you who have worked so hard to get where you are could easily be bankrupted by a serious illness, because your benefits are probably as $hitty as your salaries.  For this you went to school for 10-15 years?  For this you took out loans?  Aren't you angry at someone other than me?

I think the other organizing problem is this: because I am better off than many of you, your attitude is that I *should* be happy and I must be whinging because all my upper-class friends from college are coining it. We aren't going to get a thing done about any of this until some of you stand up and say, "I'm getting screwed! Royally screwed!" Don't buy the "I'm so lucky to be teaching," or "I'm from a working class background and I could be homeless or working in a factory for minimum wage, but by some miracle I don't understand I get to teach." You earned the right to teach; and with that, you earned the right to respect from your employers.  Since when did teaching college become a lifetime job at a starter salary?  And since when did the "privilege" of shaping young minds (gag) pay the mortgage?

Have I changed my tune on this, as Historiann points out?  Two years after the initial economic crisis, as shrinking faculty salary pools, cutting back benefits and eliminating tenure-track lines has revealed itself as the long-term plan for education, you bet I have.  

Department of Economics: Observations On The Lack Of Raises and Thinking Out Of The Box

As if you didn't know

We are in a prolonged period in which suppressing faculty wages is the preferred solution (after firing the staff) to "controlling" the costs of higher education.  Although paid better than many colleagues at state institutions and community colleges, for my two decades at Zenith, the faculty has come to the depressing conclusion at the end of each year that we are more or less at the bottom of our so-called "peer group" of liberal arts colleges.  One year, in an attempt to raise our position, our peer group was adjusted:  several larger research institutions were removed and they were replaced with smaller liberal arts colleges.  This helped our ranking for a bit, but of course, university rankings -- whether they are compiled by U.S. News and World Report or by the AAUP -- don't pay the mortgage.

At age 52, I make slightly more than 107K, 16K less than the median salary at my rank at Zenith and, adjusted for inflation and health insurance, less than I made three years ago.  The actual number of my salary tells you little, since I am quite sure that salaries vary wildly at Zenith and that I make more than some people who have worked there for longer (colleagues are invited to contribute their own salaries, anonymously if they wish, in the comments section.)  What I also know is that we don't get meaningful raises any more, and that it seems unlikely that the wage gap will be closed except through the retirement and departure of better paid colleagues.  Two years ago, Zenith finally locked on to what the public and state schools have known for a long time:  pay your faculty less, and there isn't a damned thing they can do about it.  Year before last, we received no raises; last year I was pretty much at the top of the chart at slightly less than 2%; and this year's overall pool will only be increased by 2%.  Simultaneously, insurance costs and co-pays have risen, and our health insurers are reimbursing less than they did, mostly by fu@king up our paperwork.  Conference stipends no longer come close to covering the costs of conferences (sometimes they cover the plane ticket and that's it.) The teeny raises also mean we are getting smaller institutional contributions than we expected to our retirement savings and -- for those of us in our fifties who are at what we were led to believe was to be our peak earning capacity -- beginning to address mid-life financial responsibilities for our families with a diminished ability to meet them.

The only way to make more money is to work more:  we now have multiple opportunities to teach more classes, and be paid adjunct wages to do so.  This is called, for those of you unfamiliar with labor history, "speed up."  The idea is this:  the university needs more revenue, so regular faculty teach an extra class in our extension program, for which everybody in the class has paid $2,130.  Regular Zenith students pay $2600 for summer courses, plus a housing charge for dorm space that would otherwise be vacant.  The faculty stipend for any of these courses is around 6K (which is about 1K more than an ABD adjunct wage at Zenith and 2K less than what grad students are paid for their own courses at Oligarch); there are 15-20 people in the class.  You do the math here:  are Zenith faculty being paid a fair wage for this work?  No.  They are being paid a market wage -- and, my guess is, twice what adjuncts at the local state schools are paid.  And yet, increasingly, faculty are getting squeezed into doing this as their salaries flat line.

Here's the bottom line:  I am not unsympathetic to the financial problems in higher education, or to the important restructuring that is long overdue at my own institution.  But I refuse to sell myself for less; I refuse to sell myself for less than I am worth; I refuse to contribute to the casualization of academic labor; and I refuse to do what is essentially volunteer work for my employer.

As an aside, this also leaves your Radical -- who is, in fact, a devoted teacher, in the curious and ironic position of being asked to reverse priorities that were just recently reversed.  Having had a huge career crisis resulting from the error of over-invested in the institution to the detriment of my scholarly pace; having reversed that formula following my big crisis and entered into one of the most productive scholarly periods of my life; having had my salary suppressed as an associate because I did not publish as others did while I was institution building; guess what?  Faculty are currently no longer being rewarded for their scholarship -- unless it can be leveraged into an outside offer.  Instead, the only way to get a decent "raise" is to increasingly take on work to the detriment of one's scholarship.  I have more or less missed the train of history on this one, which is a stunning discovery, to say the least.

And yet, it is also potentially liberating and -- not to be mysterious -- it is a problem I am working on, because if I can't control the financial priorities of the institution, I can control my own choices.  If I am no longer really working in hopes of improving my economic condition, what am I working for, and how should I imagine what "a better life" means? What would it mean to exercise more choice over the job I am underpaid for, and simply create priorities that are independent of -- or selectively dependent on -- the priorities of the institution?  To do less institutional work for my flat lined salary as compensation for not getting the raises I should be getting for my accelerated scholarly activity?  To do another kind of institutional work that is wholly and completely chosen, and which gives prestige to Zenith in exchange for Zenith giving me my freedom to define my own priorities?

Or even to imagine leaving academia entirely and becoming a writer, full-time?  Stay tuned.

It's Not The Football, Stupid: It's The Dangerous People Who Misplay The Game Of Life

My partner asked me the other day why I don't really watch football anymore. There is the time factor: how many of us in academia can really set aside whole afternoons or evenings just to watch games that would be 2/3 as long if they weren't packed with ads? Then there is the concussion factor. I also stopped enjoying professional boxing when I realized that I was watching the very tip of an iceberg of men (and now women) who were being slowly battered into disability and early death in the hope of making slightly better than a working class living as an athlete.

Then there are the steroids, and the enforced obesity in certain positions, since super-sizing yourself is required for success at every level of football. There is the "these men-are-a$$holes" factor, which ultimately caused me to stop watching ice hockey, since it suddenly struck me that normal athletes do not see knocking someone out, tripping him, or breaking his nose as a viable response to someone else reaching the puck first. That my own home football team hired a convicted dog torturer as its quarterback only added to my suspicion that football is leaving me behind somehow.

However, this story in today's New York Times about Jets receiver Braylon Edwards, who was charged with a DUI after testing twice the legal limit, takes the cake. Edwards, a talented receiver who pleaded no contest to an assault charge last year, got drunk at a charity fundraiser and drove away in his car. He was arrested on the West Side of Manhattan.

“We are very disappointed in Braylon’s actions this morning,” Jets General Manager Mike Tannenbaum said in a statement later Tuesday morning. “The Player Protect program is in place for our organization to prevent this situation. Braylon is aware of this program and showed poor judgment.

“We are reviewing the information with the league and will impose the appropriate disciplinary measures.”

Edwards’ lawyer, Peter Frankel, would not directly address the charges, but he said of Edwards, “His primary concern is getting back to the Jets and doing what he does best.”

Representatives of the Jets also highlight Edwards' "poor choices" and "bad judgement" in not calling the Player Protect car service, which is fully outfitted with a TV and sound system. Intoxicated players are expected to call this service.

However, there is nothing in the story that suggests that a player getting drunk, and publicly drunk at that, is a problem for the Jets, except that it puts the player himself -- and the team's success -- in danger. Furthermore, I am astonished that no member of the Jets management or any one of Edwards' representatives has mentioned the danger to other citizens that this man posed when he got drunk, got behind the wheel of a car, and turned that car into a weapon.

Why has the New York Times failed to comment on this aspect of the story?

Over and over we see the destructive outcome of athletes drinking to excess in public places, something that releases a kind of privileged arrogance in these overpaid, over-sized men. Read this account of Ben Roethlisberger chasing a woman into the bathroom, his friends holding the door shut until he was finished his half-a$$ed sexual assault, and ask yourself if it would have happened had Big Ben not been drunk out of his mind.

Edwards' arrest, so says this headline, "has cost him the start against Miami," as if the Jets starting a second string receiver is a critical public concern. What if Edwards' drunkenness had cost someone else his health or life? If the negligence of the NFL in the matter of concussions does not persuade you that this sport requires a fundamental rethinking, its lack of concern for the rest of us should.

This Is The End, My Only Friend The End: US Combat Forces Out of Iraq

Answer the following question. The closest parallel to the outcome achieved by seven years of war in Iraq is:

a. Vietnam;

b. Korea;

c. Weimar Germany;

d. Only time will tell.

Department of Radical Pedagogy: Or, A Few Easy Steps Towards Being A Good Academic Adviser

Thirty-four years ago this month, I packed an old steamer trunk, a duffel bag of jeans and tee shirts, a newish (manual) typewriter, and I headed off to Oligarch University to make my fortune. Having made a declaration of interest in the direction of the English Department, I was assigned a genteel, elderly male advisor who had wispy white hair, excellent manners and the nickname of a baby farm animal. I met with him exactly once, I think, and although he gave me very little advice he also did no harm. Being me, I also didn't really want any advice. I had been steered, by a high school mentor, to a member of the large staff that taught multiple sections of the introductory literature course to which those of us with an AP were admitted, and I cared about little else. My new professor wore sunglasses throughout our entire meeting and treated me with gravity and formality, all of which, more than anything, made me feel like I had truly arrived.

And yet my actual advisor, soon to be left in the dust, made a contribution to my first week at Oligarch that I will never forget, and it was in the grand old tradition of Men's Education. He had a little dinner party at his house about a week into the term for all his advisees (at least two of us are now teaching at liberal arts colleges, and one at an Ivy League university), at which -- in the middle of all the excitement of being at college and feeling very grown up - I suffered a sudden, acute and positively babyish pang of gratitude about spending a few hours in a real home.

Needless to say, I made some spectacular errors in that first two years and had some great successes, all of which had to do with the opportunities and pitfalls of a large university. Would things have been different with a more attentive advisor? I doubt it. It wasn't until, entirely by accident, I fell in with a group of graduate students and became invested in being regarded as -- not a good student, but scholarly -- that things straightened out for me. And I didn't really acquire the habits of organization and planning that I would have needed to become a good student until I went to graduate school myself.

Hence my investment in being a good academic adviser to the undergraduates with whom I am charged.

But what should advising be nowadays? Many schools hire "professional advisers" to guide students through their core requirements and a curriculum that is often heavily staffed with adjunct labor. A big state university where I interviewed last year has advising drop-in centers, where someone who may have never met you helps adjust your schedule. In contrast, we liberal arts colleges tend to distribute students through some system that at least gestures to their interests, and many of us also have systems of peer advising, in which upper level students attend to --- well, what do they do? I don't know. We don't seem to have them anymore at Zenith, although I had a marvelous peer advisor assigned to me once who -- to the mixed embarrassment and delight of many of the new students -- handed out safe-sex kits in our first meeting.

The truth is, however, that as the cost of education has escalated, so too have expectations from parents about what advisers will do. In one memorable telephone call, a parent told me that he expected his son to show up in my office every afternoon for an enforced study hall because the young man could not be trusted to get his work done on his own. NOT! But lest we get sidetracked on helicoptering, there are two utterly reasonable explanations for this. One is that students who have gone to good schools often received the kind of individual attention (it's called good teaching, friends) that has never been the norm at college, and won't be most places. The other is that, as the price of tuition rises, it's normal to think that you are getting something special for your money, not just throwing your wonderful kid in with all the other swimmers and hoping s/he doesn't sink to the bottom.

Of course, since faculty never agreed to these outlandish tuitions in the first place, they tend not to get the nature of the trade-off. But in getting ready to greet my own new advisees this fall, let me give you a list of five easy things you can do to get off on the right foot.

Clean your office. OK, you may not have time to clean out years of dreck in the next week or two, but can you neaten up the piles a little? Throw away the old papers you never returned? Shelve as many books as possible? Dust? While many students will feel that they have entered a special academic heaven when they enter your cluttered lair, many will get the message -- particularly if they have to move a pile of crap in order to even sit down -- that they aren't welcome. Spending five dollars on some fresh flowers wouldn't kill you either.

If the college makes student files available, pick them up and read them. Seems basic, but some faculty just don't, and not always out of laziness. One person I have a lot of respect for believes that a young person should be allowed to leave the past behind and start entirely fresh. But I disagree. Students are coming from a place where they are well-known and to a place where they are anonymous. This can be a good thing: leave a geek and arrive a star; leave a girl and arrive a boy; leave with a name you have always hated and choose a new one. But it is also really scary. Being able to greet a student by recognizing something about who s/he is can be a great comfort, and it can make that student feel welcome to return.

Try to bring yourself to have them in your home in the first couple weeks of classes. If you live far from campus, as I do, team up with another member of the faculty who lives near campus and do it together. One of the things that is newly strange about their lives is the food, and having a home cooked meal can be anchoring. Another thing I do is have lunch with each of them, individually, about a month into the semester. That's when things start getting rough academically, and a moment where a small intervention (for example, encouraging a student to visit a prof in office hours) can go a long way.

Don't be opinionated, and don't retaliate when students ignore your unsolicited opinions. Being opinionated is not the same thing as giving advice: the latter requires listening to what students think or want, and linking it to what the institution offers. For example, a student who comes to Zenith and says s/he is interested in a business major (no, we don't have one; yes, it has happened) can be guided to the economics department; to introductory courses in sociology and psychology; to the internship coordinator; to economic history; to the Victorianist in the English department who has planned a first-year seminar around Das Kapital. This is advice.

But you should not give an opinion without permission: simply asking a student "Are you asking my opinion?" will clarify whether your opinion is being solicited or not. The worst offenders, in my view, are the advisers who tell students that they will refuse to sign off on any schedule that does not meet their personal approval (as opposed, say, to curricular requirements that are mandated by the university.) I have also heard from students whose advisers go out of their way to voice their disapproval of participation in varsity sport, This is particularly thoughtless, and borderline nasty really, since athletic excellence can be a big part of an individual student's identity and self-esteem, something that creates a platform of confidence for academic achievement too.

Seeking this kind of authority in a student's life is ethically wrong, in my view. Worse, it will cause many students to avoid you and only check in when necessary.

Encourage students to do their own research about professors and academic programs and bring it to you for discussion. Perhaps your most important job as an advisor is to support students in becoming informed and authoritative about their own educations. This is what helps them learn to make good choices when you are not around to discuss them, and to eventually be independent of you. One way to launch this process is to write them before they come to school, if you can, and encourage them to explore the curriculum. Should a student come to see you with no ideas, it may not be because s/he is lazy, but because s/he has never had the opportunity to make free choices. Make sure you reserve time during advising period for such people, so that you can send them away for a few hours to do this work -- a peer advisor or RA would be good back-up. Reassure them that their preferences matter, and ask them to come back with, say, ten courses that they think would be fun.

One form of research is to send students to the college bookstore to browse the books for individual courses. It's one thing for a course to look good in the catalogue, but can the student envision spending the semester reading those books? Again, does the course look fun?

I always try to discourage students writing off a course or a professor on the basis of rumors or on-line chatter. Even when such information is not highly selective (which it is), unless you actually know the faculty member is impaired or abusive, encourage the student to try the class or section out if they would otherwise be interested in it. Many teachers that are not "popular" have a significant and devoted following, and a great many of them are wonderful teachers who teach in fields that are under the radar of many students. Many teachers with a large and devoted following of like-minded thinkers often miss having the students who will challenge, or be challenged, by them.

What's the take-away point here? Invite them in; make them welcome; find ways to indicate that you like and respect them and encourage them to come back. You can't ensure any student's success, but the best adviser is the one that the student actually wants to see.

Never Mix, Never Worry: A Brief (And Incomplete) History Of The Academic Couple

Push your way past the Katie Roiphe essay on page 2 of the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section today (yes, this conservative anti-feminist really does seem to own the column named "Cultural Studies," which is an irony, is it not, given what cultural studies represents on the academic left? Does Roiphe know this? One suspects not.) Make your way to "Modern Love," where Boston College Shakespeare scholar Caroline Bicks, who also blogs at Academic Shakespeare, writes about academic commuting. In "Is The Husband Going To Be A Problem?" she addresses going on the job market as a couple, commonly known in academia as "the two body problem." She also mentions what I think is probably a widespread experience: Bicks' husband was never asked about what would happen to her on his interviews; but whether he would be a "hiring issue" was an anxious subtext of her interviews, a question that was conveyed to her in a way that was highly informal, irregular and effective. No, no, she reassured them, via her advisor; he's not an issue. We are ready to do whatever it takes.

In case you wondered, this is how women are disciplined not even to ask for the things men just get (like being treated with respect); and how we are trained not even to think about what we might need or want to do a job and have a life at the same time, since we should feel so damned lucky to be there in the first place.

If you are about to go on the job market, or are already a young commuting couple, read this: it is a story that has its hitches, but it ends happily: they live together, in the same city, with a daughter who didn't sleep through the night until she was almost five.

Academic commuting is an historically recent phenomenon, but not so recent that universities have not had time to address the problem -- and drop the ball instead. Once women decided to stop baking cookies for their husband's seminars and type manuscripts for love and pin money, it occurred to them get their own advanced degrees (it was around the mid 1960s, when women's liberation really took off, Katie Roiphe) and have their own careers. Prior to the mid-1970s, in other words, there was no two-body problem: the wife, awarded to the husband some time after his BA but prior to his hooding as a Ph.D., came along in the moving van along with the furniture and books.

Legend has it that at Zenith, when women began to be appointed as tenure-track faculty, it was such a seismic shock to the system that no one knew what to do with them socially. The first few of these pioneer women were, legend also has it, put in the odd position of having to navigate well-meant invitations to a faculty wives' lunch club. Indeed, when Zenith alumni of my age and older recall the happy days of intimate seminars held in professors' homes, they may have only a very vague memory of the unobtrusive (little) woman who kept the children out of the way, cleaned and dusted the house, baked the cookies, and washed the sherry glasses at the end of the day.

It wasn't a pretty life for everyone. Growing up in the nexus of three well-regarded liberal arts colleges and one Ivy League University, take it from me that a lot of these women resented the hell out of their second-class status. More than a few were closet drinkers and maintained a low-level buzz all day (you know, the ones that "went to the bathroom" just a few too many times a day, and kept a bottle of vodka in a locked glove compartment in the car.) In the Mad Men era (which is exactly when I grew up) men were capable of spacing out a great deal, particularly when it was in their own self interest, but let me just say that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is worth a little look-see for you couples out there who are considering ditching wify's career in order to live and raise your children in the same city.

There are a variety of reasons that colleges and universities have never come to some comprehensive solution to the two-person academic career, a problem that is now acknowledged to include queer people. None of them are good, and none address the stress induced by commuting academic careers that invariably falls hardest on women. A partner hire is most frequently thought of as an exceptional event akin to a prize: in order to get "him," you shoehorn another department or program into taking "her;" in order to keep "her" in the face of an outside offer, a department is cajoled into interviewing "her." The best possible scenario is the one least available to most of us: to be thought of as a "power couple" in the field, a kind of academic Ferdinand and Isabella scenario where 1 + 1 = more than 2.

Why can't we solve this problem? Well, two reasons.

Adding tenure-track faculty lines is far down, and in many cases not even on, the list of institutional priorities for most universities. There are very few exceptions to this rule, and the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Franklin & Marshall, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, which often agrees to create an extra half line for partner hires. Each member of the partnership is tenure-track and each occupies 3/4 of a line. Who is the big winner here? Franklin & Marshall, of course: they get two faculty for the price of 1.5 -- and who knows what it means to work 3/4 time at a liberal arts college? My guess is that both members of the couple are working full-time for 3/4 pay. Franklin & Marshall also gets to keep faculty who might otherwise want to escape Lancaster, PA, because what other schools have any partner hire policy at all?

Add to this the following fact: the bad job market is not a natural phenomenon. It is not going to magically correct itself when the economy improves. The bad job market has been entirely manufactured by colleges, universities and state legislatures who are unwilling to create the number of full-time positions that they need to teach the students they have. Until there is some kind of effective social movement of students and faculty to correct this, Boards of Trustees and administrations will continue to shrink faculties, particularly in the liberal arts. In this atmosphere of scarcity, the idea that faculty lines would be created for two-career couples is unthinkable.

The fiction that academic hiring is, and should be, a meritocracy in which those awarded jobs and tenure are understood to be the "best." Hiring, particularly in an expanded market, could be a mix of competitive searches and opportunity appointments -- which, in fact, is now the case at the most senior levels and at the lowest adjunct levels. But right now there is no constituency advocating for this, except the people who are running to the airport on Thursday at 3:30.

The worst offenders, in my view, are departments, who think the world is going to come to an end if they hires a 19th century economic historian rather than a 19th century political historian; or if the political historian spouse turns out to be an African Americanist ("Shriek!!! We've already got one of those!!!!") Departments are usually utterly unwelcoming to candidates -- no matter how promising -- who do not fit an exact niche that has been decided upon in endless department meetings, received the dean's stamp of approval, been searched for, and been vetted as part of a vast pool of candidates -- by them. Being a spouse of someone already on the faculty can hurt you as a candidate, because it launches grumbling about whether the department will be "forced" to take you. The hiring mentality often includes a form of magical thinking that goes like this: if, out of 100 candidates, we picked Assistant Professor X -- then we can be assured that s/he is the best!

You are getting my point here? "We picked hir = s/he is the best." If you don't go through "the hiring process," no one can be certain that you are the best.

But graduate students have drunk the Kool-Aid too, and are just as invested in the idea of meritocracy as faculty are, if not more so. Take a look at the job wikis, if you don't believe me, and the number of people who seem to honestly believe that they were objectively more deserving of a given job than the person who actually got it. How is it that people think they know they were the best candidate? Gave the best talk? Wrote the best dissertation? Wore the prettiest shoes? I dunno. I suppose this kind of hubris is a good way of maintaining your self-esteem in a brutal job market, but it is also insane. Thus, one of the constituencies that is most harmed by the "two-body problem" is also not likely to accept a solution in which people are awarded jobs without clawing their way to the top of the application pile and being brutally hazed by search committees first.

So good luck to all of you on the market this year. And by the way, if you are on a search committee, you might want to know that what happened to Caroline Bicks during her interview process is not just sexist, it's against federal law: asking about, or considering, a candidate's marital status part of the selection process is a major-league no-no, regardless of the candidate's gender and sexual orientation. Here's a complete list of things you can't be asked at an interview.

If You Can't Be Good, Be Careful: Or; Why Is It So Hard To Make Lesbian Movies?

If you want to read the glowing review of Lisa Cholodenko's lesbian family flick The Kids Are Alright go to A.O. Scott (New York Times, July 8 2010). Michelle Solomon, in The Guardian (July 23 2010), is slightly more reserved, dubbing it a "relationship movie" and noting that the high-profile actresses will allow it to "[avoid] being pigeonholed as a 'gay movie.'" (Thank god for this, that's what I say.) If you want to read the intelligent review by a queer scholar, that will actually get into it why this is a lesbian movie, go here for Jack Halberstam's "The Kids Aren't Alright" (bullybloggers July 15, 2010).

My review follows: it is a terrible, awful, embarrassing, piece of crap film. I could have had a better time had I saved $11.00 ($22.00 + dinner for two actually); spent the same two hours reviewing some critical, and hideous, months in my own life; and then had a friendly dinner with my companion where we reviewed vivid memories of my own bad decisions and personality flaws in action.

For those of you who would rather hear about the film, Halberstam (who has what I consider to be an admirably high tolerance, and a keen intelligence, for schlocky pop culture) provides a concise plot summary to anchor the analysis:

"The Kids Are Alright" is a soul-crushing depiction of long-term relationships, lesbian parenting and mid-life crisis. Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are mushed into one category by their kids Laser (Josh Hutcherson) and Joni (Mia Wasikowska) who call them “moms” or “the moms.” The moms have merged into one maternal entity and although they have distinct personalities, their parenting function is depicted as one amorphous smothering gesture after another. The kids suffer through the over-parenting but crisis ensues when Laser decides to track down his sperm donor dad, Paul, played by Mark Ruffalo. Once Paul rides onto the scene on his classic black BMW motorcycle, bearing organic veggies and good wine, the cracks in the façade of lesbian domesticity appear and a rather predictable cycle of betrayal, infidelity and domestic upheaval begins.

I'm clicking "like" on this one, and the only place I would disagree with the review is that whereas Halberstam describes Jules as "dowdy" further down, that didn't bother me. Face it, at this age many of us are fighting dowdy. It did bother me that Jules was dorky, and I thought if she asked one of the other characters if s/he wanted to "process" something one more time I was going to scream.

Like the son Laser, who periodically asks questions that no one answers, I often needed more information, despite the fact that I am a practicing lesbian, hung my shingle in 1975, and have been in practice continuously since then. If Jules had a gardening business, why did no one take the opportunity to make a leering joke about mowing the lawn? Why did the "Moms" watch gay male porn -- and porn from the 1970s no less? Is Annette Bening's vulva located somewhere around her navel, as it appeared in the excruciating rug-munching scene? Why did Jules insult, and then fire, the Mexican gardener (who seemed handsome and sweet) instead of having an affair with him? How did Paul manage a restaurant if he was as stupid and disorganized as he seemed? How do heterosexuals keep from getting concussions from smacking into the walls and furniture? Should heterosexual adolescents be counseled to wear helmets during sex? Why is Julianne Moore in so many gay movies? Why did Nic think that her son skateboarding -- without a helmet -- was less dangerous than her daughter riding a motorcycle with a helmet? Should I quit my day job as a tenured professor and make myself available as a Hollywood sex coach/stunt dyke in case bad lesbian movies really take off?

You have time to make lists like this when a movie is really, really bad. So instead of reviewing "The Kids Are Alright," I would like to suggest a few plot changes that would have made it better.

1. If Paul, the sperm donor, had been gay. Then, when he started boffing Jules, they could have done a whole thing about why a gay man and a gay woman might find themselves attracted to each other, and avoided the un-tense tension of whether Jules had joined the other team. What would have made this even better is if Paul had had a boyfriend who didn't want children and had been adamantly opposed to Paul making contact with the kids, but Paul went behind his back to do it.

2. If Paul, the sperm donor, had been better looking and/or an interesting person. Sorry, I think Mark Ruffalo seemed abnormally physically gross. Fortunately, I had a local informant who has played for both teams, and she explained to me that heterosexual women are attracted to men who look dirty, smelly and ungroomed; and who say almost nothing when they speak. This piece of information is what twigged me to the fact that this was not really a "lesbian movie."

3. If Nic and Jules had been "Nick" and "Julie." Is there anyone but me who thinks this originally came in to the studio as a treatment about a heterosexual couple and the sperm donor, and Cholodenko made it about lesbians to get it produced? What would have been even better would have been if Paul had been gay, and Paul and Nick had an affair! Now we are getting somewhere.

4. If Paul were transsexual, and had only donated sperm to finance the transition to a life as Paula. At sixty dollars a pop this would have taken a while, but added to a small inheritance it might have worked. What would have then been cool is if Paula was a lesbian, and had affairs with both Nic and Jules, and Paula knew where everyone's vulva was, and could mow the lawn like nobody's business, and after the awkward moment of truth where the affairs were revealed Nic and Jules agreed this was a good arrangement because she had revitalized their sex life, and the kidz ended up banging their heads against the wall because all their stupidity and brainless interference with their parents' lives had only given them a third mom after all.

4. If Paul had not agreed to meet the kids, but actually was their neighbor, and had been part of their lives, and of the household, all along, and no one found this out until the end when Laser needed a liver transplant after falling off his skateboard. Here is where I have to ask you: in what legal world would a sperm bank take a verbal assent over the telephone from the sperm donor as a go-ahead to release contact information to the children? But putting that aside, what would have been cool about this is that it would have put the question front and center: why does it matter to know who your father is? And under what conditions do intimate bonds form between adults, and adults and children, that surpass the conventions toward which we are all encouraged to gravitate? (I just threw in the liver transplant thing for fun.)

5. If Nick and Jules had been gay men, and Jules was living with HIV, and the children went looking for their bio-mom and she turned out to be a closeted lesbian running for governor of California on a family values platform and had to decide whether to sue the Dadz for custody; kill the children to keep them quiet and continue with her life as a conservative; or have a change of heart, convert the Tea Party to a full GLBT rights platform; then become the first woman president of the United States and cause Sarah Palin to have a complete aneurysm. Do I have to tell you that we are now cooking with gas?

Please feel free to add your own plot suggestions in the comments section, or get on with your day, whichever seems more appropriate.

Don't Shoot! A Meditation on Civility

The sensationalism of the Amy Bishop tenure case, in which a University of Alabama biologist shot numerous colleagues in the head after her failed appeal, has us all unnerved and fascinated. Of course, the news reports that are piecing together a portrait of a sociopath, a ticking time bomb who happened to have become a university professor, have already helped us build distance between "us" and "her." The Bishop story, which is being reported over at University Diaries in press clippings and terse, incisive commentary (that makes you think Margaret Soltan really could produce the thriller or mystery we all long to write) is, however, countered by the more prosaic and recognizable case of Bill Reader, a journalism professor at Ohio University. Reader seemed to be on track for tenure and now -- isn't exactly. Why? There are allegations that, although he is not a sociopath, he may be a garden variety bastard (or not) who is being portrayed as a sociopath by colleagues who voted against his tenure.

Hence, the Reader case raises a set of more serious issues for all of us, in my view.

According to Inside Higher Ed, prior to his tenure case, Reader "had received nothing but glowing annual evaluations with no mention of untoward behavior in his file." But when the case was reported out of the Journalism School, with a positive but very split vote, three female faculty members who voted against the case filed harassment charges against him, citing threats allegedly made by Reader that were related to them by third parties. The rumour was that Reader "was 'out for revenge' against those who had opposed his bid for tenure." Subsequent to the filing of these charges, "recommendations by the journalism school's director, a college-level review committee and dean have all come out negatively."

It's always difficult to know what happened when reading public reports of these things. Apparently Reader was prone to nasty email exchanges, one of which, ignited over the failure of colleagues to sign a card for a departing colleague, was particularly unpleasant. I doubt that he was the only one who sent flaming e's, although he was in a position to know he could be harmed by such behavior and clearly failed to perceive it. But many people suffer failures of self-perception on email, as adrenaline and self-righteous wrath washes over their -- no, let's say our -- brains. Even those of us who don't have grievances filed against us have probably participated in terrible e-mail exchanges that we are embarrassed about in retrospect, whether we believe we were right or wrong at the time. Reader apparently isn't embarrassed about the greeting card incident, however, which tells you nothing about his suitability as a colleague, but a lot about what constitutes normal behavior at the Ohio State J-School. “I opted for vitriol," he states. "I have no regrets. Before my e-mail, there were few signatures; afterward, there were many.”

Really? Even now you are not ready to stand down about that stupid greeting card?

Inside Higher Ed sees this case as part of "a continuing national debate over the extent to which 'collegiality' ought to be considered in the awarding of tenure," and on the surface I suppose it is. But Reader's supporters, and presumably Reader himself (who was not informed or or able to respond to the harassment charges until several negative decisions on his case had already been made), say the tenure process has been tainted by these allegations. I tend to agree with this somewhat narrower interpretation. So does the Faculty Senate at Ohio, which has reversed the negative rulings, and sent the case forward to the next level. The attorneys standing outside their office sharpening their knives probably had nothing to do with it, although this is a situation where a little gentle advice from the AAUP can go a long way.

I don't know whether I would like Bill Reader or want to work with him, and it's difficult to tell from the few facts that can be gleaned from the IHE piece, of course. But take it from someone who has been bullied: what is wrong in that department goes beyond Bill Reader and points to a winner-take-all culture where there is more than one person with no commitment to civility. Although there are clearly people who believe they have been victimized, the search for authentic victims is likely to produce instead a vivid picture of professional relationships dominated by gossip, faction and spite, in which people who insist they are wedded to "procedure" manipulate it cruelly to get their way. It's not for nothing that novelists as different as Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, C.P. Snow and Ishmael Reed have spent anywhere from a semester to a career with us and consistently pointed out these very qualities.

Academia, one might say, is characterized by strong personalities out to win an argument, and sometimes the desire to win gets out of hand. The origins of the bad behavior at Ohio University, either Reader's abusive emails and threats over signatures on a greeting card, or individual faculty members trying to have more than one vote on a tenure case by launching an internal grievance process, might well be a departmental culture in which the need for authority and the disregard for appropriate behavior is pervasive at all ranks. I also find it useful to remember what every child psychologist knows: that people who bully have often themselves been bullied. I once saw an older historian who was famous for hir nastiness, public temper tantrums and contempt for colleagues, treated with such contempt and rudeness (in public and for no good reason whatsoever) by hir prestigious dissertation director of three decades ago that it literally took my breath away.

This observation didn't make me like this person any better, nor did it make me more willing to be subjected to verbal abuse by others. But it did create a little window of understanding that subsequently caused me to look around the world I live in differently; to understand the ways in which we replicate the behavior of others, often unconsciously; and to place my own actions under the lens that I used to evaluate other people's behavior towards me. The lesson, in my view? We need to model judicious and civil behavior at all costs, and speak to people honestly when they breach the bounds of civility, not wait until a high stakes moment to declare them unfit for our company. We all need to insist that our authority and reputations be taken seriously by others, but not demand it by damaging them, in turn, after the fact. It is quite possible to work productively with people one neither likes or respects, and it is possible to have one's judgement not be sustained by the judgement of the majority without going nuclear: people outside the academy do it all the time.

Playing The Blame Game: Or; How Should Graduate Schools Respond To The Bad Job Market?

Over at ConfessionsOf A Community College Dean your favorite administrator and mine, Dean Dad, asks: "Why do people still go to grad school in the liberal arts?"

Good question. Although I have no former undergraduates making the leap into a Ph.D. program this year, the bigger picture is quite different. As Dean Dad notes, "the adjunct trend is so well-established at this point, and the economic irrationality of grad school so screamingly obvious, that it's fair to wonder why many departments are actually experiencing record applications." While he explores various irrational explanations -- love for learning, self-delusion, and hiding out until the recession is over -- there is, he argues, some rationality to the choice:

academia still offers a surface legibility. Yes, the odds are daunting, but good students have spent years rising to the top of academic competitions. There's still a path, there are still hoops, there are still rules. They don't really work very often anymore, but they're there. As the rest of the economy has become less legible, this holds real (if misguided) appeal.

I think this explains some of the wounded indignation people express when they can't get the tenure-track jobs they wanted. In many other lines of work, it's simply understood that the climate of opportunity fluctuates, and you'll get both good breaks and bad. But academia holds tenaciously to the myth of legibility. When you follow the rules for twenty years, only to find nothing waiting for you at the end, it's easy to move to angry disbelief. Academia likes to tell itself that it's immune to economics, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. It's supposed to be clear and fair, economics be damned. So some people hang on for years on end, waiting to redeem what they think they're owed.

I find this very persuasive, particularly since I am not a huge fan of rational choice arguments, and Dean Dad's explanation addresses the rational and the irrational. I speak as someone whose success as an academic was relatively unplanned, and in fact, a great surprise. My original decision to go to graduate school was both wildly irrational (I had a very hazy idea of what the outcome would be) and pretty rational (I knew I was good at school.) I believed that becoming more knowledgeable would push my plan of being some kind of intellectual ahead, but I just wasn't sure what kind of intellectual that would be. What I now consider in retrospect to have been wildly good luck on a really bad job market (the year I got the job at Zenith there were exactly four tenure-track openings advertised in my field in the entire nation) meant that I never committed emotionally to having a tenure-track job prior to getting one; nor did I have to make a difficult decision about what to do if I were not employed as a university professor.

Furthermore, I went to a graduate school that had many flaws but at least one signal virtue: it supported us by putting us to work in a surprising variety of ways. When I first matriculated we had an entrepeneurial chair, a historian of the Jacksonian period, who believed in and operated by the spoils system. Whenever financial aid allotments to the department were insufficient, he called in favors and found ways of stashing us in jobs all over the university that gave us stipends and whatever degree of tuition remission we required. As a result, my graduate school cohort includes people who now work in film, archives, libraries, labor organizing, museums and administration as well as in full-time tenure track lines. It wasn't just that no work was beneath us, but that many of us found that we actually preferred and chose intellectual labor that occurred outside the classroom. Why? Well the reasons differ from person to person, and the job market was terrible in the 1980s -- but the fact is we had the chance to try out many ways of using a history degree.

Because this happens to be my own experience, and because I work with a lot of intelligent, intellectual people at Zenith who are employed in IT, athletics, arts administration, academic administration and whatnot, I must be honest about one thing. While I am deeply sympathetic to those whose dreams of a teaching life are discouraged and perhaps dashed by a foul job market that gets only fouler, I am entirely unsympathetic to claims by disappointed job seekers that they have been lied to and bamboozled by the schools that admitted them to the Ph.D. because they were not cautioned at the very beginning of their education that they might not succeed in finding a tenure-track job.

In fact, I don't know a single form of professional education that guarantees its graduates a job, whether the market is good or bad, and why Ph.D. granting programs have a special moral responsibility to do this is unclear. But on the job wikis and the blogs there is an emerging consensus that the jobless should have received a waiver of liability with the letter of admission (which Brown University actually used to send its graduate students in English back in the sad old 1980s, and most of us who knew someone who received one were horrified by the practice.) Resentful job seekers , in other words, speak in the language of fraud rather than regret. This I find astonishing, given that an hour of research prior to applying, or accepting an offer of admission, could tell any prospective graduate student what their academic job prospects might look like six to seven years hence.

The only thing that makes this phenomenon less astonishing is that today's prospective graduate students were yesterday's undergraduates, and undergraduate education has been trending towards nanny-ism and false guarantees for several decades. But what is it that graduate programs and professional associations could do to intervene in this situation? I have three suggestions.

Ph.D. programs should not allow graduate students to matriculate within three years of having attained the bachelor's degree. This would significantly reduce the number of young people who use a Ph.D. program to prolong a love affair with books and ideas, or who are bored by the ill-paid, entry level jobs they are eligible for immediately following graduation. My students who go on to graduate school in history or American Studies usually contact me for a recommendation within four or five months of graduation, when they have barely had time to think about work at all or how they might make an intellectual life without an advanced degree. Interestingly, and perhaps because of the greater financial investment involved, my students who go on to a professional school in the law, business, or the health professions average a 2-4 year gap between the B.A. and matriculating for a graduate degree.

Ph.D. programs should consider devoting at least one year of graduate support to administrative labor. This would have several advantages, the primary one being that everyone with a Ph.D. would have some idea of how a university actually functions and how to participate in faculty governance in a responsible, business-like way. Over time, it could reduce the mutual contempt that often exists between faculty and non-faculty laborers. But a third advantage would be that administrative work would become a viable option for Ph.D.'s who cannot find a tenure track job, who need to work in a particular region because of family responsibilities, or who find that teaching and writing are not all they were cracked up to be. Plenty of administrative jobs require the Ph.D. now, and there are in all universities talented administrators who have hit the ceiling because they lack the degree, or are not tenurable. University presses would also be an outstanding place to spend this fellowship year, since becoming a book editor, a writer or a literary agent is a viable (and often more vital) way to perpetuate an intellectual life.

Professional associations, particularly in history and literary studies, need to think about accreditation of graduate programs. More surveillance is not necessarily a good thing, I know, but there are too many Ph.D. programs that are perpetuated, not because they are a path to a career, but because the faculty in the department want to teach graduate classes and have teaching assistants. I'm not saying that all programs with poor placement records should close, but many of them (including some very prestigious ones) might want to retain their accreditation by creating multiple career paths within the Ph.D. One of the reasons my cohort at Potemkin University was as successful as it was in finding employment for everyone was that we had thriving Public History and Archives programs. A program might consider certificate programs in oral history, publishing, museum studies, public policy, speechwriting, journalism -- be creative! Ph.D. students could enroll; other students might matriculate for an M.A. and be full payers. This would acomplish three things simultaneously: create tenure-track jobs, generate the money to pay for them, and expand opportunities for post-graduate employment and consultancy.

While I don't think Ph.D, programs are responsible for unemployed graduates, they could do a better job of imagining what an intellectual life in the twenty-first century looks like and how the university can connect to the public sphere is more vital ways. While the vast majority of Ph.D. candidates are clear they want an academic job, it is simply a fact -- and not a secret -- that fewer than half of them will be able to get teaching jobs for the foreseeable future. But one might also add the following: not everyone should be teaching, not everyone wants to become good at it, and there are few people who are brave enough to admit that in an atmosphere where the teaching career is the only stamp of approval for an intellectual. This is the world that graduate schools may not have made, but it is the one to which they must respond.

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.