"Hey-yay, Wait A Minute Mr. Postman:" When Recommendation Season Is Upon Us

So I’ve got a pain in my side that may indicate a cracked rib. I have a sore toe, a wrist that aches halfway up my forearm, a bump on my head, a throbbing neck, a sharp pain in my lower back and at least one elbow and two knees that are puffy and sore. You get one guess – what am I?

A football player?

Nope. Guess again. Can't?

Liberal arts college professor. And it’s recommendation season. Yep, recommendation season. And as it turns out, this year recommendations are a contact sport.

This is what happened. I was going off to a country house where there was no internet. I decided to push through all my letters of recommendation – eight students, several applying to as many as nine graduate schools -- in two days. Business school, law school, social work school, political science, history, American Studies – I wrote for all of them, sometimes more than one category for a single former student. And they are good kids, really good. How many different ways are there to say that? Well, you try to find as many different ways as there are students, not just because some are applying to the same schools, but because we all know a letter of recommendation is more effective when you can tell a story that captures something unique and special about the person. It is my view that you should be able to do that for each and every student, otherwise you should not agree to write a letter in the first place. That is part of what going to a liberal arts college like Zenith should mean: that a student is taught, known and well remembered as an individual.

But back to why letters of recommendation are a contact sport: first, they require stamina. It takes about an hour to write each one, and another hour, at least, to get all the letters packaged up in different ways for different schools. Now, granted, some deadlines are not until January 1. But some of them are December 1, so I thought, what the heck? Time spent now is time saved later. So I made the big push and got them all done. (Note: all except the request I received today.)

This is where things got rough. Yesterday morning, when my car and my dog were packed for the trip and I was headed out of town, I stopped at the mailbox to drop off the final letter. I left the car running, jumped out, put it in the post box and turned around to get back in my car. What happened then was this, as the Mayor of Munchkinland says in The Wizard of Oz.

Suddenly, huge pain bloomed in the toe of one of my shoes, and my foot stopped dead while my body catapulted forward. Because I had left the car door open (the engine was running, after all), what I saw, to my horror, was the navy blue running board of my car rising swiftly to meet my oncoming head. “Dear God,” I thought, as I flipped to the ground like a two by four in what seemed like slow motion but probably took about a second, “Not my nose again.” It’s been over thirty years since my nose was broken in a lacrosse game, but you never forget that kind of pain, right in the middle of your face. First my knees hit, then an elbow, and then – almost as an afterthought – my head bounced off the car. Somewhere in there I must have tried to catch myself with my other hand – a stupid reflex that seems to be hard-wired into the brain, and often results in broken wrists.

My dog sniffed thoughtfully at my head. I mused (as more pain began to blossom at the various locations described), "I have given all I have to give for my students. I am done. There is no more." I crawled hand over hand into the car and looked over my shoulder: there I saw an odd four inches of rebar, probably left by Stupid Overpriced Electric Company, inexplicably poking above the ground next to the mailbox. This is what had caused all this havoc – that and my bifocals. I can either see straight ahead or down, but not both at once. Had I been looking down I would have seen the rebar -- but then maybe I would have missed the car.

And you didn’t think writing recommendations was a dangerous activity, did you? Hah. OK, seriously, it is not my former students’ fault that I am a bruised and battered mess tonight. It’s some jackass of a telecom worker or sidewalk layer who didn’t finish the job right – hopefully the postal workers’ union will deal with this hazard eventually. But since I can do little else today but nurse my injuries, can the Radical take a moment and complain about what a messy, non-system is currently in place for graduate school recommendations?

I know that those of you who are recommending graduate students to me at the end of their training may feel you have a harder row to hoe. And you do. But let me tell you, this is what you could agitate for to make my life easier, and it might even make your life easier too in the end.

A common application. They do this for college and law school – why not Ph.D. programs too? What is so special about all you guys that you have to ask different, equally ridiculous, questions on each, separate, application? And that is between five and seven per student – it’s not like I am sending a single letter to Interfolio, like you do.

What’s with ranking students by percentages? And in multiple categories? What does that tell you? And how the heck should I know what percentage they belong in? If you are asking about the top 1% of students I have ever taught, I am placing one person in a category that contains approximately 120 other people. For one of my colleagues, with the same number of years of teaching but at about twenty students a semester, 1% makes that student one of a group of about 30 people. Now how does this make for a useful comparison? Furthermore, I am clearly supposed to recalculate where this student stands for every application, since for some of you it is 1-2% for my career; for others it is top 5% for a period of my own choosing. This is not information. This is a crap shoot, and I don’t believe you even take these numbers seriously yourselves.

Do you know how much time it takes me to fill in my name and address over, and over and over? Jesus. And why do you ask for my phone number? Not once in sixteen years has anyone called me about a graduate school recommendation I have written. Not once.

Could you all get on the same page about how you want to receive the application? Some of you do it electronically, although not all of you use the same company. Some have me send it directly to you. Others want it sent back to the student, signed over the flap, something I really hate, because then you have to worry about whether the student receives it in time, and because it is nearly impossible to produce a legible signature over an envelope flap. And how would you know it was me? Really? Do you have my signature on file? You do not. But this is only slightly more ridiculous than the electronic “signature” I am asked to produce over and over. Which is not a signature. It is just typing.

While you are mulling over all these suggestions, feel free to send me boxes of anti-inflammatories. You have my address -- it's right there, on the letter.

All I Want Is A Room Somewhere: the Radical Hits the Road

I flew out of Teeny Airport this morning, this time at a reasonable hour, which you can do if someone else has invited you for a visit and a travel agent is making the arrangements. I changed planes in Connector City and continued on to Mini Airport, which is in the middle of either a midwestern, an eastern or a southern state, depending on how you think of those categories. Or this place. Anyway, it is a super big research university, surrounded by very, very beautiful country. I am here for two days of talking to folks, and then I go on to another city, where I will meet with wads of my scholarly peers at the Annual Meeting. I will also have dinner with the Mother of the Radical (otherwise known as MOtheR, or the Maternal Unit), which I am looking forward to, as we have not had a sitdown since August. A convention is an excellent time for seeing relatives, I have found. It is not such a bad idea to break up the scholarly meeting thing to have dinner with someone entirely unconnected to academic life; and it is not so bad to set boundaries on visits with your relatives by having to return to the scholarly meeting. Otherwise you might just forget and move back in with them.

I could never figure out why, now many years ago, they moved the AHA to January from its formerly terrific date, two days after Christmas. Now it just screws up January break, whereas before it was a great reason to beetle out of the hideous hols. I am told it was the women's caucus who did this, because the professional pressure combined with the family pressure was too great. But this makes no sense. Why wouldn't women want to leave home immediately and get a lovely hotel room all by themselves after that hellish event, otherwise known as "family Christmas?" I think it must have been the patriarchy that was responsible in some way, and as usual, the patriarchy has cleverly put out the disinformation that women are to blame.

But back to the here and now -- there is a football shrine behind my hotel, which pleases me immensely, and is very exotic for those of who are used to Zenith culture and Zenith ways. At Zenith they have shrines to -- like, a Veggie Burger, or something.

Busy as I have been, you would hardly think that I would regard a road trip with great pleasure but, aside from leaving my domestic life behind for a bit too long and the inconvenience of figuring out what clothes I will need as the temperature drops steadily over the next four days, I do regard this trip with pleasure. First of all, it is just a nice break, and it's nice to be invited somewhere. I get to present some work to some people who truly seem to be interested in it, see a friend who is also a former student, and then go on to another hotel where lots of my friends will be milling around, who will have drinks in their hands as the day wears on, and who will solicitously make sure that I get one too. But second of all, there is no better way to get a lot of work done than on planes and trains, and in motel rooms. You bring a finite amount of stuff, and you just slog away at it until its done. As you finish things, you throw the paperwork away. In between giving talks and such, you read novels, catch up on all the magazines that have been coming into your house that you haven't had time for, and watch the Netflix movies that have been sitting on top of the TV for three weeks. You grade stacks of papers, with the TV tuned to ESPN. You catch up on your email. And your blog.

In fact, it has occurred to me that it could really improve my life to find a nice motel in Shoreline, and just check in once in a while. There should be a budget line devoted to this for every department or program chair, and of course now that everyone has wireless internet and cell phones, you wouldn't really even be out of touch or not working. You would just be in -- well, seclusion. Like nuns, or Howard Hughes, or the Wizard of Oz.

New President has asked for New Ideas that we can Raise Money Around, and after I see whether they will agree to making my program a department (or agree to even think about it), I'm going to offer this one up. It's got legs for anyone that is or has been an administrator, don't you think?

While U Were Out

This is a short post to say that the Radical is back in town, and hitting the ground running at Zenith. During our vacation (it was lovely, thank you for asking), the following unexpected things happened at home:

Individual branches of our rose bushes out front crinkled up and died. My suspicion is that they were peed on. The question is -- by people or dogs? And do these individuals always pee on my bushes, but because I have been watering more or less every day I somehow rinse the bushes sufficiently? It's a mystery.

The fire alarm went off, for no reason as usual, and ADT called our neighbor, who raced over just in time to see a fireman raising an ax, with which he planned to fell our nineteenth century front door. "St-a-a-a-a-ahp!" she screamed, and he did, and all was well. Except that now I have to make an appointment to get ADT to clean the fire alarm. Again.

I ended up with 48 advisees, due to sabbaticals, leaves and resignations. This is not a mystery. I know exactly how -- and from whom -- I got them, and how -- eventually -- I will help them to the next level. Fortunately many of them are in Foreign Lands on study abroad programs.

The dog breeder, with whom we leave Breezy the dog, got usefully beside herself at Breezy's ill-behaved ways and trained her to come when called.

My favorite horse, Lila Paige, was entered in the Personal Ensign, a mile and 1/4 Grade 1 Handicap at Saratoga, where this afternoon she will face five other fillies who have breeding far superior to hers (there are two Deputy Minister fillies, and two A.P. Indy fillies, and as racing folk know, if you have A.P. Indy for your pa, you are directly descended from Seattle Slew.) I suggest you put a couple of fins on her. Lila is quite the little cinderella horse, seems to like coming from behind (and in a fast field, that is a plus) and I have won a lot of money on her. But this is only her second graded stakes ever, having come from obscurity -- at least as far as the Daily Racing Form is concerned -- to come in second in the Grade II Delaware Handicap. If she does well it will be a Big Deal.

Oh, but I do go on. I think my brain must still be on vacation. More later.

The No Asshole Rule: A Reflection

As you know if you make a close study of Tenured Radical 2.0 in all of its features, I have been reading Robert I. Sutton's The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. And to get to the punchline quickly: you should read it too. It is short, it is well written and Sutton -- a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University -- has written a book that nicely bridges the worlds of business and intellectual work.

What occasioned my purchase of this book? Well, it doesn't really matter, does it, because I loved it and I wish something like it had been available to me years ago. I would also say that the bulk of my labor this year will be administrative, and because there is no formal mentoring in this kind of work, I do what I can to learn management techniques, either by observing adminstrators at Zenith closely and seeing why they do or do not succeed, or by reading. This is the point at which the post could sprawl and take all morning but let me give you a few highlights that should get you to read this book, whether you are an administrator or a faculty member, whether you are an administrative assistant, a full professor, a student or a dean.

First, Sutton emphasizes that we can all be prone to acting badly, and that it is important to distinguish between temporary assholes who exhibit nasty behaviors occasionally (losing one's temper, telling a gossipy story as passive-aggressive revenge or as a self-agrandisement strategy, glaring at and belittling others, yelling) and certified assholes, who deploy bullying, intimidating and demeaning behavior toward others as a matter of course. He also notes that the first step in thinking about this is to categorize oneself. Be honest: are you an asshole? What have you done in the past that resembles this behavior, and how often in the course of daily life do you behave like an asshole? One of the differences between temporary and certified assholes is not just frequency of behavior, but that temporary assholes have enough objectivity and empathy to perceive the effect they have on others, understand that what they have done is wrong, apologize and change. Certified assholes believe that they are always right, often do not remember what they have done, and if they do, justify it as a normal response to being in struggle with stupid people who are a threat to them, their values, and the good of the institution. They don't change: they force the rest of us to accomodate to them, and because of this, create an atmosphere of fear and loathing among both the direct objects of their bullying and those who observe it second hand.

We'll start here: I can be a real asshole. Read some of the posts on this blog, prior to the 2.0 edition and when I thought I was anonymous, if you don't believe me. Better yet: don't. Just believe me.

But that said, I am not a certified asshole, and because it is too self-congratulatory -- even for me -- I'm not going to tell you why I know this. But here are some asshole behaviors that are particular to the academy, in my experience, and at one time or another I have been guilty of several:

1. Yelling at people to win an argument or force everyone to do things your way. Now, we all yell at people occasionally -- often when provoked by an asshole or an airline employee -- but not uncommonly yelling occurs in meetings, because that is where faculty do most of their business. Certified assholes use this as a consistent tactic, and it sometimes extends to tantrums. I have a friend elsewhere who has described a colleague that, when on the brink of losing his temper, begins to turn a different color, become physically tight and tense, and then, immediately prior to the explosion, appears almost to levitate. The threat of what is to come, she argues, is as oppressive to the atmosphere as the eventual outburst itself, and often results in people strategizing what they say in order to prevent the tantrum, not to discuss the issue at hand in the most open possible way.

2. Physical intimidation. This means getting in someone's personal space while yelling, saying intimidating things that threaten someone's future directly or obliquely, commenting on someone's appearance and/or weight relentlessly, and inappropriate or unwelcome touching. It can include telling people to shut up, interrupting, name calling, and persistent profanity. It can also include trapping people: demanding that someone "report" to your office, or entering theirs (worse in my view), and closing the door without permission.

3. Describing people as "not smart," and dismissing their intellectual work because you don't like them or you don't like their politics or they are in a field of which your disapproval is so vast that you read nothing in it. I am sorry to say that people on the left are just as guilty of this as people on the right, with the difference that people on the left --perhaps as the residue of feminist consciousness raising, historic leftist sexism and homophobia and Marxist criticism/self criticism sessions -- do it to each other as well as to their political opposites, whereas people on the right, in my experience, are willing to excuse a range of sins within the group in order to keep everyone who is conservative voting together.

4. Lying. Certified assholes use this as a consistent strategy to get what they want, which includes lying on behalf of their allies to promote their interests over the interests of those who are not their allies. They excuse it because they think what they want is always right, and when other people get in the way, they should be defeated by any means necessary. George W. Bush and Nanny Dick are like this, I think. And let me say -- I think lying can sometimes be a subset of gossiping, because often when people spread gossip, for whatever reason, they are often spreading damaging information that is not true, or has been twisted for a particular effect. When I was a newbie at Zenith, a friend told me that she made it a point never to gossip, and although I thought at the time it was kind of prissy -- I was in an information-gathering stage of life after all and needed gossip desperately -- much later in life I came to understand that this was, in fact, a highly ethical position. And by the way, if you are well-known as an indiscriminate gossip, you will also be well-known as someone who cannot keep a secret and should not be brought into a position where secrets need to be kept.

5. Accusing someone else of lying, publicly or to a third party, without confronting the other person privately. This is also something of which I do not believe I am guilty, but I have been accused of lying by others, and I have seen other people accused. At its best, it is a careless act; at its worst, I think it is one of the nastiest things one academic can do to another because personal integrity is so crucial to the scholarly world. Now, if someone has committed a serious ethical breach, that is one thing, but the things I have most frequently seen classified as lies are often far better characterized as misunderstandings, miscommunication, or someone leaping to a conclusion. Most frequently, in my experience, it is faculty accusing administrators of lying, in a conscious or unconscious move to disempower and humiliate in retaliation for some real or imagined slight.

6. Hitting on people sexually when they have evidenced no interest in either recreational sex with you or romantic love towards you. I would extend this to hitting on people sexually who have expressed this interest, but are interested in a kind of short-term personal gain or thrill that you know perfectly well will lead to tears. I would extend even this further to the whole question of responding to advances from those -- students, very junior faculty -- whose attraction to you is really an attraction to power, or some idealization of what you are or could be in their lives. Long-time readers might recall a series I did on the Pokey Chatman case, in which Chatman, a very talented basketball coach, appears to have had her resignation forced because a tangle of affairs with players and assistants came to light: click here and here. Several of my readers chastised me for not being hard enough on Chatman for this: well, I still don't think she should have had to leave her job. But there is no question that she was an asshole, and that LSU was willing to tolerate her messy love life until it became public information. That's the part that I think is a little more complicated, and needs to be examined and discussed, because Chatman may not have been an asshole in other ways. And other asshole behaviors persist at LSU that are not stigmatized, including what is commonly called sexual harassment, because the institution clearly tolerates assholes -- as nearly all academic institutions do.

7. Students can be assholes, to each other and to their teachers: it is a large, and ugly, subtext of the academic blogging world. And of course, some graduate students are assholes in training, and they learn to do it by watching professor assholes gain advantage over others through the range of tactics described here. Student asshole behaviors include: passing notes, giggling and whispering while other students are talking; repeating what someone else just said as if it were your idea; directing their remarks only to the teacher and not acknowledging the other students; interrupting; telling other students that something they have said is "wrong" or interrupting with a loud "no" when someone else is talking; publicly calling someone a bigot as a routine way of commenting on their lack of sophistication, their analysis or their apparent ideological position; saying thoughtless things about identity groups represented by people in the room; delegitimizing other students' right to speak because of their identity position or lack of sophistication in the field; and -- my favorite --anonymous, cruel attacks on others that are justified by a self-professed or actual lack of social power in a given situation. There is no justification, except perhaps being invaded and/or colonized by a foreign nation, for an anonymous attack, and what it expresses is rage and fear of the consequences, not actual powerlessness.

What is great about The No Asshole Rule is that Sutton's examples help identify the asshole behavior that is particular to one's own workplace, how to identify it in oneself, and how to resist it. He also demonstrates the damage caused by assholes, several of which seem particularly relevant to academic institutions, in my experience. One is that asshole behavior is contagious: if effective interventions are not made, people who are not certified assholes become more prone to temporary asshole behaviors as they try to resist domination and seizures of power.

Potentially, entire departments and faculties can be taken over, by assholes and by people who are forced into asshole management. Another crucial point -- and of course this resonated to my experience during the Unfortunate Events -- is that people who must resist being constantly demeaned and emotionally battered pay a terrific price in their energy and creativity, and do less and less well professionally, are less able to write, and often less able to function as teachers, scholars and colleagues on a day to day basis. Thus, what is often touted as a hierarchy of merit can also be a hierarchy of - can we say oppression? - where decent people are subject to the rule of the ruthless, and as a result their talents become hidden or submerged, and their capacity to function as university citizens who can and should be rewarded is severely eroded. Very often they simply withdraw and focus their lives at home: they come in, teach their classes and leave; do not come to meetings; and are not available for the work of running a department or a university. One of the benefits of going through a period of being bullied relentlessly by assholes is that you develop a kind of compassion for people who of whom you may have been previously dismissive.

Sutton can be visited on line at his blogs: click here and here. You might also want to look at a report on a conference on academic leadership, where a colleague of mine is quoted on the topic of "academic bullies."

Envy

I need to say that Kenneth Ackerman's new book, noted on Mary Dudziak's Legal History Blog, makes me want to scream. This book is in chain bookstores everywhere and will be purchased by the thousands.

Do I want to scream at Mary Dudziak for shilling this book? No. I admire her. And I have many reasons to be grateful to Mary Dudziak, only one of which is that she has mounted this great blog that helps us keep up with what is coming out in the fields of legal and political history. The other reasons will have to remain a Mystery as they have to do with Very Secret Professional Business.

Back to Kenneth Ackerman's book. I'm sure this is a fine book, but its very appearance plays to an ongoing trauma of mine. My trauma is this: I cannot tell you how many more or less general books have -- and will be -- published about the FBI. It is like the Civil War: there is literally an endless market for such books, and they are mostly all the same. And they sell many copies before they go out of print.

So why has my book about the FBI, a first book, but all the same quite different from the rest, one that has some spiffy stories in it and weaves a particular period of the Bureau's history into the New Deal state making project -- why has this book never sold like hot cakes? I ask you. Hence the screaming part. And actually, this Ackerman book makes me scream less than some of the rest -- he actually did what I did, took a chunk of J. Edgar Hoover's life that was very underwritten and explored it thoroughly. There is at least one book out there, aimed at a very popular market for which, as far as I can tell, the author read my book and then re-wrote it with conversations that he pulled out of his head, and without an argument that would serve only to confuse the general reader. That one made me want to scream and cry. And maybe sue.

You are now wagging your virtual finger at me and saying, "Stop the whining Radical, you got tenure with this first book, didn't you?"

We-e-e-ll, yes.

"And isn't that worth a lot of money over the years?"

I guess so.

"And you get a little check once a year that is usually between $100 and $200, don't you?"

Uh-huh.

"Isn't it the case that many authors never see a dime beyond their advance money?"

Yup.

"Have you ever gone out of print in nine years?"

No (feeling small now).

"And if you look at the Amazon site, there are 53 people selling your book from $2.73 on up. At Labyrinth, an independent bookstore where you should always be shopping, you can get it used for $6.98, $15.02 off the cover price, damn it! Doesn't that suggest that a lot of people are actually reading your damn book? Maybe adopting it in their courses? And that they don't feed it to the pigs afterwards?"

Yeah. So?

"And doesn't a graduate student run up to you once in a while and -- in an appropriately breathless way -- ask if you are, in fact, the actual author of this book?"

Yes. But I wanted fame and lots of money and to be on the Lehrer News Hour. And to be desired by all. I especially wanted to be desired by all.

"Hush up and get back to work Radical. You know, Tinkerbell isn't writing your second book while you work on blog posts, you nitwit."

OK. Bye. You are right. I've stopped screaming now.