A Radical History Review: A Perhaps Unnecessary, But Overdue, Tribute To My Dad

We at Tenured Radical no longer have a father to give presents to, or buy cards for, on Father's Day.  When we did have a father, this is who he was.  He probably had as many flaws as the next 1960s and 1970s Dad, but he was a very nice person, a widely admired physician, and a hard worker.  He went out of his way to make a nice life for his family and to provide the resources that made it possible for both of his daughters to have an excellent education.

Although I don't think he would have described himself this way, he was an organic intellectual who had tremendous curiosity about the natural, social, cultural and political world.  He was the Oliver Saks of internal medicine, collecting and collating information with what I can only describe as pleasure, putting it together like a puzzle until all the pieces fit. In practical terms, this meant he was a very good and thorough doctor, and would bird-dog a peculiar set of symptoms until they could be treated effectively. Once, over four decades ago, before tick-born diseases were well known to all of us, he correctly diagnosed a man who had  Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever -- a disease that was entirely treatable, but had been missed because it almost never appeared in Pennsylvania. 

We held a memorial service for Dad back in September, 1997, two months after he died so that everyone from the hospital could be there.  One of the things that was truly memorable (I do not remember a thing about the eulogy I delivered, although I have a copy of it filed away somewhere) was the number of people who got up to speak about him and revealed things I had not known about Dad.  And yet, each of these anecdotes was completely consistent with the person I did know.  For example, a developmentally disabled man whose job it was to keep the stairwells clean got up to speak in front of about three hundred people.  He explained his job, and said that every day my father made a point of telling him what good work he was doing on the stairs and thanking him for it. 

Dad really liked people, and he was interested in them:  he spent hours in the evening and on weekends talking to his patients on the telephone, often helping them make decisions about painful chronic diseases, terminal cancers or conditions that had suddenly turned scary.  I remember lots of conversations ending with him saying, "Go to the emergency room, and I'll meet you there," and he would get dressed and head back out to the hospital no matter what time it was.

When Dad retired because his own illness had advanced, he was deeply concerned about the increasingly money-driven, and litigious, world of medicine that was separating the interests of doctors from their patients and making personalized care all but impossible for many young doctors who would have liked to provide it.  As chief of medicine, he also understood that lots of different people played important roles to make the mission of a hospital successful, and that all jobs -- even the ones that other people might view as menial -- were important.  He  enjoyed teaching, he enjoyed solving difficult medical problems, he appreciated the professionalism of his nurses and he enjoyed helping young doctors make their careers.

I realized some years ago that, despite the great differences in our professional lives, I have ended up sharing many of my father's values and pleasures, even though I don't recall him ever having conveyed them except by example. One of the many reasons I am sorry he is dead is that I think we would have enjoyed talking about these things together.  So, without further ado:

Happy Father's Day, Phil Potter.  The mission continues.

I Killed My Book: And Other Highly Personal Thoughts On Writing To Begin the New Year

What would life be like if you started over again?

Sometime last fall I made decision to kill a book that I had worked on for a long, long time, a book that people still ask me about.  This is how it went.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I began Tenured Radical back in 2006 because I was in a Bad Way and trying to Work Out $ome $hit.  At the time,  I had gone through a major institutional trauma and survived it, just barely, and at a high cost to those close to me.   Central to this institutional trauma was a rather profound and vicious trashing of The Book.  Blogging became a way of returning to the book, a project that had become so utterly soiled by its use as a vehicle for expressing contempt for me that I couldn't look at it without becoming enraged or suffering a profound sense of loss.

For a time, blogging worked to jump start what constituted a rescue operation rather than what could have been the satisfactory completion of an intellectual project that I was pleased with and whose progress gave me pleasure.  I did go back to The Book; I revised nearly all of it.  But it gave me no pleasure, and somehow I could never finish it.  Every time I tried to finish it, I would get stuck and become depressed.  In the meantime, in the parallel world of public life, I was more or less bouncing back.  I was snapping out blog posts, building the readership for Tenured Radical, developing relationships with other bloggers that led to collaborations and even print publications, getting my posts reprinted and linked to by a highly respectable web trade press, starting a monograph series with a friend, writing op-eds, blogging for the New York Times, finishing academic articles and nonfiction essays. One of my articles won a prize, of all things -- an article that had been rejected by several journals before being accepted.

Mirabile dictu -- about three years ago, on a whim I do not even recall conceiving in any deliberate way, I started a new book.

I went to Kauai.  I went to Paris.  I went to South Africa. I wrote my ass off everywhere I went.

The revival of my writing life -- not as good as before but better than before, dude! -- meant that I was also able to extract myself from other bad professional dynamics that were haunting me.  If for no other reason, I needed the time to write rather than to brood on the hypocrisy and evil-mindedness of others.  I have applied for jobs, not because I was desperate to leave the scene of the crime, but because I was finally able to imagine myself as an autonomous person who was not bound by other people's unwelcome judgments and expectations.  In turn, at Zenith, I was able to extract myself from the big swirly hole of unresolved grievances.  (Here is a lesson learned:  it is often the case that academics do you dirt without ever believing it was personal, even when it was personal.  Holding this reality, and the opposite reality of deliberate cruelty you experienced or observed, in your head at the same time, can be a little mind-blowing.  But try it, because in my experience it actually works better as a strategy for getting on with life than imagining that people who dislike you through no fault of your own will apologize, or make up for, what they contributed to making your life hellish.)

You can be an academic and also be yourself. Try it.

But back to the book I killed.  I thought it was possible to write two books at the same time, particularly when one of them was nearly done, and I was so excited by the other one that the energy from Project 2 would have to leak over in some positive way to Project 1.  But in the end, it didn't.  In the end, the project that became the object of such controversy was ruined for me.  The other problem was, not only did people keep asking me about Project 1, but the effort I was putting back into bringing it back from the dead was taking away from other things that mattered to me more. 

One day last fall, I wondered how long I could continue on with the fantasy that I was going to devote a significant chunk of what remains of my life to finishing a book that had so many bad memories and bad feelings associated with it, and that upon reflection, had been written by an entirely different person.  I then went into negotiations with myself, and the outcome was an alternative fantasy that seemed viable: breaking up what I had done into five separate articles and publishing them.  By that afternoon I had pulled a chapter, re-written it, and sent it off on its long, tedious journey towards publication.

Who knows?  Maybe some day some one will say to me, "Jeez, you oughta pull those articles together into a book!"  And then I will whip out the last, aged, essay, labeled "Introduction" and preserved from hard drive to hard drive, and do it.

Sunday Radical Roundup: Gay Supreme Court Pride Edition

After our busy, busy week here at Tenured Radical, we think it is time for a calm and genteel set of items to keep you busy this Sunday. To wit:

Kagan Hearings Kick Off On Monday: Thanks to Prawfs Blawg, a group blog maintained by a bunch of guys teaching in law schools around the United States, we have the witness list for the Elena Kagan hearings that start tomorrow at 12:30 (hat tip.). While they will begin with the senators going on record at tedious length ("life begins at conception, yack, yack, yack") as if we and their constituents did not already know what they thought, testimonies to tune in for might be Lily Ledbetter, the litigant in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire (2007), called by the majority; and Stephen Presser, legal historian from Northwestern, called by the minority. Presser, who mostly writes about corporate law, can also be expected to speculate on how Kagan's confirmation to the court would affect the future of Roe and the rulings associated with it. The rest of the witnesses are pretty boilerplate, if you ask me, although the large number of military and ex-military called by the Republicans suggest they plan to bring up the scrap about military recruiters at Harvard Law School, probably as an attempt to grandstand a little about the impending repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Go here for the official web cast.

We know that Kagan will be confirmed, and resistance will only be token: she may go down in history as the SCOTUS nominee no one on the right or the left really got excited about. Kagan's own opening statement would be spiced up if she uses the lesbian drama around her nomination to take a stance on ending discrimination against queer people more generally; and since Perry v. Schwarzenegger will be boarding the train to the Supreme Court there could be interesting moments around that. But I doubt that either of these things will happen. The Republicans seem to be hinting by their silence that this one is a slam dunk. I follow Orrin Hatch's (R-Utah) Twitter feed and even he has not rattled his sword about the nomination lately.

So if you want to skip the whole thing and watch Wimbledon and the World Cup, go right ahead. Blame me if you miss the historic moment where Hatch changes his mind on school prayer, affirmative action and a woman's right to choose; or if the Committee announces that they are canceling the hearings and making a range of top-flight legal minds compete on a new reality show called "America's Got Law" instead.

Gay Pride March in NYC Kicks Off at 12:00 P.M. Today: For those of you who just think you know what you are doing, the route is shorter this year, beginning at 36th street. Interestingly, this also takes St.Patrick's Cathedral, where it is traditional that anti-gay trogladytes stand with signs telling queers they are going to hell, and queer marchers shout "Sham! Shame! Shame!"off the line of march. Interesting, no?

As the past couple of posts have revealed, celebrating gay pride is not a radical political act by any means, and in some quarters is perceived as reactionary. However, if you are just coming out it can feel pretty cool anyway. However, don't look for instructions about what to do during or after the march on the Heritage of Pride website. This organization of businesspeople that has turned the celebration of the Stonewall Riots into a megabucks event needs to hire a few tech people because their website is melting down this morning. But if you go, have fun, hydrate frequently, and pick up after yourselves please: the last time I was in the Village after the march I had never seen such a disgusting mess.

My favorite gay pride moment bar none? Years ago, I gathered with a whole bunch of friends to march, and one of us was having a clandestine affair with a closeted corporate attorney who ran legal for a large media conglomerate. It was closets within closets, baby. Anyway, hormones being what they were -- and people who live in the closet being what they are -- this lesbian was very nervous about participating, but was ultimately persuaded that of the hundreds of thousands of people marching she would never, ever in a trillion years be spotted by anyone she knew from the network or by her equally closeted, but far better disciplined, girlfriend. So off we go, milling about, chanting and having a great time, and around 25th street or so I hear someone yelling, and it turns out to be a New York Times photographer who was going out with my dissertation advisor at Potemkin University. All the Potemkin graduate students waved and hollered, and we marched on by.

You are already guessing what happened, dear reader. The next day the telephone rang at around 7:30, and it was the Mother of the Radical (MOTheR) calling to say that my picture was in the New York Times! Right on the front of Metro section! I rushed into the hall to get the paper and yup, there we were, with Closety Custard right in the middle.

On Sin, Forgiveness and Redemption: A Few Thoughts On The Loss Of My Friend, Senator Kennedy

On July 19, 1969, Edward M. Kennedy drove off the Dike Bridge connecting Edgartown, MA to Chappaquiddick Island; the car overturned and filled with water. Kennedy managed to free himself and swim to shore, while his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, a former aide to the slain Robert F. Kennedy, did not escape. She drowned, and perhaps suffered terribly as Kennedy ran and failed to call the police or an ambulance, or even to tell anyone who might have helped Kopechne, until the next day. Whether she might have been saved or not is an open question, and because of this Kopechne is forever seared in our collective historical memory as a victim of Kennedy's recklessness, wealth and self-destructiveness. Her death resulted from a kind of privileged, masculine disdain for women that was so common that it was culturally invisible prior to the feminist activism of the 1970s. While the Senator claimed at the time that he tried to save Kopechne, those who know the tides in the area doubted that he could have dived "repeatedly" into the swift channel without drowning himself, although having seen what a strong swimmer can accomplish under adverse circumstances (lifeguards knifing into twenty-foot waves to save a drowning victim in the South Pacific), I wouldn't argue that it is impossible. You can read Kennedy's explanation to the people of Massachusetts, delivered July 25 1969 after he entered a plea of guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, here.

I begin my elegy to Senator Kennedy with this memory because it should not be forgotten. It happened, and it was a Terrible Thing. But I also begin there because it was the occasion of our first encounter. I was eleven when I watched his televised speech, and I had paid no attention to this Kennedy at all until the moment of Kopechne's tragic death. I was already a political junkie, and for me, all politics had been framed by our great expectations that the Kennedy family would somehow save America from its worst self: segregation, Viet Nam, nuclear holocaust, race riots in Philadelphia and Newark, NJ. Since I was born in 1958, Jack was my first president. I remember being told that the President's daughter Caroline and I were nearly the same age. When I saw her in Life magazine I thought how very lucky she was to have a pony of her own -- and secretly, I wanted to be John-John, viewed already as the heir to the Kennedy political tradition. I also remember my mother seizing my hand in the Reading Terminal Market around noon on November 22, 1963. As I recently recalled in a talk given at a ceremony celebrating the opening of the William Manchester Papers at Zenith University, Mummy and I were

waiting in line at a butcher or a greengrocer’s stand, when all of a sudden the adults around me erupted in agitation. My visual memory is of lots of legs in nylon stockings beginning to churn, since I experienced most adults as only legs before I grew tall enough to see their faces without effort. My mother seized my hand tightly and began to run to the car. “What happened?” I asked. She said tightly, “We have to get home. Someone has shot the President.” Knowing as I do now what an anxious person my mother is, from a distance of 45 years I regard her capacity to get us home on that day as an act of great heroism.

On June 7, 1968, my friend Mar Bodine had stayed over for the night, and my mother came in to tell us that Bobby Kennedy, a presidential candidate, had also been shot and killed; a little more than two months earlier Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis. And then, a year later, as speculation (undoubtedly carefully nurtured by Kennedy operatives) that Teddy was contemplating a run for president himself in 1972 (one Kennedy falls, the next Kennedy steps up had been the rule since Joe Kennedy Junior had been killed in an overwhelmingly dangerous air mission over England in 1944), Teddy drove off the Dike Bridge. Perhaps it was because politics as we both knew them -- me at 11, he at 37 -- was soaked in blood, and there seemed no other way to evade his own inevitably violent death than to drive into the gnarly water surrounding Martha's Vineyard.

I remember watching Kennedy's speech about what came to be known as "the Chappaquiddick Affair" on television and understanding for the first time that there were things that could happen which could alter the course of one's own life forever, errors in judgement so terrible that the punishment would be swift and permanent. It was perhaps one of my first entirely adult thoughts.

Of course, this moment was life-changing for Kennedy in so many ways: he could never be President now. Kopechne's death also revealed that he was spinning our of control in ways that could no longer be hidden, even by the most well-paid handlers. Given the chaos in his personal life that was revealed subsequently, it seems unlikely that he wasn't drunk when he drove off Dike bridge in 1969, and it seems unlikely that Mary Jo Kopechne didn't intend that her drive into the night was supposed to end in flagrante delicto with the handsome, promiscuous Senator who was trying to drink and fuck away the nightmare history of his murdered brothers.

Kennedy's claim not have been drunk, and not to have been sexually involved with Kopechne seemed false to me at the age of eleven. In retrospect, I think this was remarkable given that I knew nothing about sex, my parents were orderly suburban people, and my own first-hand acquaintance with drinking and fucking away pain (much less depression, heartbreak, adulterous affairs and scandal) was many years off. But I learned in the tabloid press that these things could happen to others, and I began to read the gossip rags avidly. Late weekday afternoons, sweaty from field hockey practice, I would be picked up by my mother. We would drop by the supermarket to pick up a few things, and I acquired my lifetime habit of reading trash in the checkout line. Not infrequently, Teddy and his first wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy, would be plastered all over the front of the National Enquirer after a public, drunken brawl; another accusation of an affair; speculation about divorce; speculation about what lecture "Jackie" (cloaked in dark glasses and vast amounts of lustrous, dark hair) had delivered lately about her martyred husband's squandered legacy. Teddy's womanizing became part of the picture I was getting about adult lives during the sexual revolution. I eavesdropped relentlessly, perched at the top of the stairs, as my parents had their evening cocktails and confided in each other about the marriages that were splintering around them. But the Kennedys were bigger, sloppier, more violent than anyone we knew -- the grainy pictures, doctored crudely in those pre-photoshop days and taken with wide lenses, were bloated and distraught.

Oh the humiliation. Oh the pain.

In 1978, Joan and Ted separated. In 1982 they divorced. Somewhere in there not one, but two, of their children were treated for potentially fatal cancers. Ted never stopped drinking as far as I know, but he learned to control it. More or less.

And somewhere in there, Ted Kennedy decided to become not just a good Senator, but a great Senator. You can look here for a summary of his career, but highlights include: managing the Immigration Act of 1965 on the Senate floor; creating the national community health center program (1966); the Bilingual Education Act of 1968; amending the Voting Rights Act to lower the voting age to 18; which preceded a constitutional amendment to lower the voting age (1970); expanding federal funding for cancer research; the Meals on Wheels Act (1972); ending military aid to Chile following the 1974 US-backed coup; the Individuals with Disabilites Act (1975); sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa (1985); the Americans With Disabilities Act (1990); the Family and Medical Leave Act (1994); the Child Health Insurance Program (1997). More recently, Kennedy was one of 23 Senators to vote against the war in Iraq. Throughout his life, Senator Kennedy made it his job to fight for the poor, the sick, the elderly, the disabled and service people. Kennedy fought for women's right to combat roles and, having watched the US go to war in Iraq, he turned his attention to trying to fund and deliver adequate equipment and protective armor to an army that was unprepared by the Bush administration to fight that war.

He fought for women's right to choose whether to carry a fetus to term. He was perhaps the earliest, and most consistent, defender of rights for GLBTQ people in the Senate. And it was Ted Kennedy who gave us Barack Obama and put every last ounce of his strength behind the election of the first black president of the United States.

What I know now is that a person can do something terrible that can change a life -- not just his own, but many lives. And yet that terrible thing can be a moment of choice. Apologies don't matter when it comes to taking a life; forgiveness is not in our own hands. But it is possible to work for redemption, knowing that redemption can never be complete, and that is what Ted Kennedy did. He did it better than anyone. Ted Kennedy didn't know me, but I believe to this day that he was my friend, and when he came to the podium, any podium, to speak about the things closest to his heart, I believed that he spoke for me.

And so, goodbye Senator. I will miss you terribly.

The Radical Is Reminded Of A Time When Intellectuals Were Witty And Television Talk Shows Were Smart

Because I have no time to post today; and because the pace of the semester has been ramped up to a new level of insanity this week; and because I think everything has been said about the last post that can possibly be said; and because the best way to stop a comments thread is to put up a new post to distract everyone; and because I am not feeling in the least witty, I would like to re-publish this wonderful 1971 clip from the Dick Cavett Show:



I would like to point out that it is not just the lefties (Cavett and Vidal) who are acute and funny (Mailer, although on the left, I know, was just such an ass I don't know why any of his wives didn't stab him before he got to one of them.) But Midge Decter's intervention reminds me that in 1971 conservatives had razor wits too, not to mention good manners and gender politics, which is why in high school I used to subscribe to what became neo-con publications, so that I could read people like Lionel and Diana Trilling, Decter, Normoan Podhoretz, and Irving Kristol. Oh sure, Decter's "Boys on the Beach" has to be one of the most homophobic essays ever written: I knew that at the time. But damn, it was well-written. And were not conservatives so worth having around for their erudition and wit? Once they were replaced by the lumpenconservatives who just took to thumping people crudely with lies and misrepresentations about culture, God and everything else, politics became a real drag, in my view.

This is brought to you courtesy of the intrepid, vacationing and always witty, Historiann.

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

Later: Historiann points out (kindly) that I read her post too fast: the woman in the Dick Cavett clip is Janet Flanner. Oh well. My nostalgia about witty conservatives is still for real. And my corrected misidentification adds an always welcome bisexual twist to the post.

The Radical's History Reviewed: When I Was Bad, I Was Horrid

Mostly because they have been linked by my history colleague Historiann, I have of late been drawn to the luridly enraged and cruelly hilarious posts at Rate Your Students. A blog response to the notorious RateMyProfessors.com, RYS, from my point of view, is a kind of academic pornography: it's outrageous, and it relies on cruel caricatures of students that have enough truth in them to make them universally recognizable -- the terrible students described at this blog can be found at a community college, an Ivy, or any stop in between. It doesn't stop at pillorying undergraduates, but produces the occasional post that skewers graduate students for being whining, careless little piss-ants.

You will notice that RYS is not on the list of blogs I follow regularly (see widget on the left), but in fact I do follow it regularly from a bookmarked link in my Safari navbar. While there are many blogs I follow from bookmarks, RYS is there as the internet equivalent of sliding a dirty magazine between the mattress and the box spring. I don't want to read it, but I do -- or more accurately, I don't want to want to read it. Every time I do it feels like the time a feminist colleague of mine urged me to read Jane Gallop's Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (Duke: 1997): "It's like a horrible traffic accident," she said; "You can't not look."

Yet RYS, compelling as it is, reminds me that one characteristic of the blogosphere is a kind of self-righteous rage that often gets focused on students, colleagues, institutional politics, varsity athletics, or "the administration" -- a rage that is more complex, surely, in its origins and context than whatever rant I am reading wants to admit to. Many of us are frustrated, insecure, overworked, under-rewarded, and uncertain about what the future will hold. We were told in graduate school that if we worked hard we would succeed, and we did work hard - so why are some of us teaching adjunct and some of us on a jet plane to a contract for a crossover narrative history of the Nixon presidency and a named chair? Why do some of us get up early and stay up late, publishing and teaching our hearts out in visiting positions, only to be told that we are "too far along" for the tenure-track assistant professor slot we would take despite our age and accomplishments to get our careers back on track? Why do some of us resolve every year to put our scholarship first, only to be loaded down with committee work, course overloads, and the excess grunt-work of the university?

Enter the clueless student who, through carelessness, narcissism, and often unconsciously rude and over-privileged behavior, becomes the fulcrum around which all of our rage and frustration about Planet College congeals. This is the student who disputes every grade below an A-, and tells you in the teaching evaluation that you have liberal bias; the student who walks in ten minutes late, misses every question you answered about the assignment that is due tomorrow, and expects you to repeat it all one-on-one in a special appointment outside office hours; the student who drinks pints of water in class, and then needs to leave abruptly in the middle of your lecture to refill the water bottle and, inevitably, go to the bathroom.

Well dear reader, I was once that student. Not always, or even most of the time, but sometimes. And like the girl with the curl, when I was bad I was horrid.

I was reminded of this because I was recently assigned the task of either disposing of several large boxes of personal papers (which we have hauled from home to home for almost twenty years) or finding a place to keep them other than the front hall of our otherwise gracious home. Clearly decisions needed to be made. Upon opening one box, I discovered an accordion file that contains what must be almost every college paper I wrote and -- I kid you not -- thirty notebooks full of lecture and seminar notes from the classes I took as an undergraduate at Oligarch University.

The courses I liked are obvious: "E. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels," I scribbled on one notebook cover, after a hasty post-lecture conference with one professor. In a different color ink, there is a library call number: clearly I actually got this book out of the library and read it. Similarly, on the inside front leaf of the notebook for a course on the Third Republic, I noted advice given to me over a beer by one of my favorite professors: "Find Charles Tilly/could be critical to future." Little did I know that fate would deliver Tilly and his wonderful wife Louise into my hands (actually me into theirs, but I am the hero of this story) when they took a position at the New School in New York. They, in turn, would invite me to join a proseminar where I spent a semester developing a dissertation on American bandit crime with Eric Hobsbawm. Wheels within wheels, man. You couldn't make this up. And it all started with a professor who liked to sit down and have a drink with his students.

Then I pulled out a notebook from a political science course called "Culture, Class, Revolution and the Intellectual," and one vivid -- but not the only -- blemish on my undergraduate past flashed before my eyes in nauseating detail. You see, we had virtually no advising at Oligarch, which means that the vast number of us chose the courses we took by a method that was governed by an entirely personal calculus. For example, my roommate and I, most semesters, signed up for a lecture course that required us to read novels: the Victorian novel, the Eighteenth Century Novel, the Modern American Novel. I was an English major, she was an Art major, but why did we sign up for these classes? Because we liked reading novels, and we liked to talk to each other about them. Duh. My other method was to sign up for courses that were either taught by people I knew to be good, or cool (a technique for making intellectual choices that my students at Zenith practice to this day), or courses that promised reading or insight on a hip topic that I knew nothing about. I also signed up for what seems now, for someone who became a twentieth century historian, an excessive number of courses in Renaissance literature, where my huge and unaccountable crush on the professor was entirely and fully satisfied by excelling at close readings of Spenser and his contemporaries week after week, and imagining how my insight and critical skills might ultimately lead to a romantic encounter with this scholar.

But until the fall of my junior year, at a certain point in every semester, I -- not very consciously -- decided which courses deserved my full attention (Spenser, for example) and which ones I could blow off. And I blew off, I'm afraid to say, more than enough courses to produce an undergraduate transcript that would raise fatal doubts about my capacity for graduate study were I to apply today.

"Culture, Class, Revolution and the Intellectual" was one of the courses I ultimately blew off. The early pages are promising: "Can intellectualism bridge the gap between intellectuals and reality?" I mused on September 13. "Look over last year's notes on [Raymond] Aron." The following week we read Camus' The Rebel: "in the final analysis," I wrote, "being an intellectual depends on autonomy -- but is autonomy possible? Is money a practical problem?" I was so deep.

By the following week things had, imperceptibly perhaps, started to fall apart. Underneath a few sketchy ideas about the role of art and artists in a revolutionary movement (I told you I was deep), I had written to a classmate: "I heard in the dining hall that a freshman tried to kill himself in the seventh floor men's room in Sterling Stacks last night. This is unsettling." No shit, Sherlock. The following week, underneath disjointed scribbles about C. Wright Mills ("the activist intellectual," "constant need for critique," etc.), I wrote: "I've got to stay awake. This class has only ten people in it, and I'm falling asleep, about to embarrass myself. Three girls across the table are doing it too -- one was really asleep for a while." And later: "She's done it again. I'm going to sleep, and it doesn't help that the two girls next to her are yawning quite a bit. How embarrassing."

Reading this ancient notebook, I was identifying entirely with the instructor, who I have to tell you, I do not remember at all. But she was a woman, teaching at Yale when there were almost no women teaching at Yale -- I probably took courses from all of them, in fact. Dear God. What a monstrous little bastard I was. I turned the page to the following week's session.

"Proposed Camp for Deposed Dictators," I had written at the top of the page, not even bothering to note what the reading assignment was -- had I done it? "Campers: Shah of Iran, Idi Amin, Somosa, Richard Nixon. Games campers will not be allowed to play: capture the flag, Monopoly. Books campers will not be allowed to read: How To Be Your Own Best Friend, The Good Soldier, Mad Magazine, Look Back in Anger. Required Reading: You Can't Go Home Again." Once an English major, always......

Oh, what a card I was. Two weeks later, I had clearly stopped listening in any meaningful way. Sketches of beatniks, gerbils and people throwing up alternated with the New York Times crossword puzzle carefully pasted into the notebook. Looking up occasionally with a feigned frown, I hoped to appear serious, present and engaged as I did battle with Eugene T. Maleska -- in pen, thank you very much, just to prove how much confidence I had in my own brilliance, despite the fact that I was now learning nothing. Oh sure, there were occasional, feeble stabs at being engaged with the course. "For next week read How Much to Catalonia (?????)," and a page of notes labeled "preparation for oral report on Bakunin" (I gave an oral report on Bakunin?) The notebook ends in mid-December with a crude cartoon of a prisoner in a cage saying: "Help! I am trapped in this class and I almost laugh all the time it is so silly!"

Lucky for this professor that a semester must, eventually, come to an end, eh? And how lucky that this was prior to the routine use of teaching evaluations. And yet, having carefully documented all my misbehavior as if it was a rational response to her poor teaching, I don't recall the professor ever treating me with the disrespect I clearly deserved, calling me out from behind the crossword puzzle, or taking revenge of any kind. Maybe she knew she wasn't teaching well, or maybe there was more of a laconic attitude towards seminar work among Oligarch undergraduates than I recall and there was nothing she could do as we withdrew singly and as a group. Maybe the deadening, tortuous pace of this class was not something she felt she had much power over. Who knows?

Strangely, a quick look at my Oligarch transcript, also in the box, shows an A- for the course. Must have been the oral report on Bakunin.

As I say, I don't remember this professor at all, which in a way is truly horrifying -- only her last name survives on the outside of the notebook. If she remembers me, and wants to report me to RYS in an ex post facto kind of way, I think it would be fair. But I would like to close by remembering, very briefly, another class that I blew off: the first gay and lesbian studies course I ever took, taught by a famous gay poet, who we queer students all admired because he was handsome and witty and smart, was publicly involved with another famous gay poet, and appeared to be having the romantically perfect intellectual life that we all craved. Inexplicably however, or at least inexplicably to the youthful me, I did all the reading for this course but could sometimes not bring myself to actually go to class for a week or so at a time. Now, of course, it seems very clear that I was more than a little conflicted about my own sexuality, blah, blah, blah; and what that had to do with me taking the class in the first place, blah, blah, blah. But I worked very hard to compartmentalize that knowledge then because it would have interfered with my pose, which relied for its effect on a feigned indifference to the emotions and responsibilities felt by ordinary, boring people; my biting, sarcastic wit; and what I (tragically funny this) believed was my intellectual uniqueness.

At one point, when I had missed about two weeks of classes in a row, I ran into my professor on the street.

"Sorry I haven't been in class," I said in what I thought was a sophisticated and nonchalant way, "I've been very ill." This professor, to my surprise and horror, turned around and fell into step with me, thus enhancing my discomfort. He encouraged me to talk in detail about the illness that had kept me home from class, day after day, and yet left me free to roam the streets only an hour or so after the most recent meeting. Quickly regaining my composure, I drew on some details of illnesses that I was, in fact, regularly plagued by, hinted at the possibility of a walking pneumonia, trips for chest x-rays and what have you. The more I talked about it, the more convinced I was that I had pulled myself back from the brink and was, in fact, on my way home from another tiring trip to Radiology.

"Hmmm," he said, and stopped walking. "Well, let me give you a piece of advice. I don't mind if you lie to me about why you aren't coming to class. I expect it, really. But don't lie to yourself. That's a very bad habit to get into. See you next week." And then he walked away, leaving a rather stunned and humiliated me behind. I didn't miss any more classes.

I suppose there should be a moral to this story, but I don't think there is: it's probably unwise to draw morals from partly digested snippets of one's own life anyway. Speaking bluntly to students as if they were adults doesn't always work, which I know better than anyone. In fact, it almost never works, because we are often speaking about something important that only time can reveal to them. But I do wonder about the motivations of those who convert their classroom experience to raging, mean, (often hilarious, I admit) posts on Rate Your Students. Often we have no idea what is going on behind the facades erected by students who use politeness and good behavior to fend us off while they collect their average or better than average grades. But we might learn something about good teaching from the students who fail, the ones who go out of their way to flout our authority. Or at the very least, we might see their rudeness as an opportunity to teach to more than the text once in a while. And if we understand their arrogance, their bravado, their selfishness, their narcissism and their cluelessness as critique or resistance, we might even gain some insight as to what we have at stake in our role as classroom authorities in the first place.

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

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

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

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

Bye-Bye, Mom and Dad; or, Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out

These are the days when academics begin to float back to campus to get ready for the onslaught. If school didn't start this week, it starts next week. You can feel the energy start to rev up. People just beginning new jobs seem to be incredibly excited, and I admit that as I hit my 45th year of beginning school, I am too. I ran into (Not So) New President yesterday, and he seemed to be practically levitating, so excited was he about the arrival of the new class at Zenith and the return of the upperclass-people (at Zenith we do not gender our students against their will, thank you very much.)

Those of us who have come to the office to get ready for the boots to hit the ground next week meet each other as we cross campus on our way to the library, to pick up departmental mail, to get sandwiches since the campus center isn't open yet. At Zenith, hornets buzz around sluggishly at ground level, rising only to dive bomb our Diet Cokes as we cluster in groups of three or four on late-summer lawns soon to be colonized by students. Yesterday several of us were reminiscing about being dropped off at college. The big topic was: "How did you get them to leave?" -- them, of course, being parents. Not everyone, of course, had this problem. Parents used to the boarding school routine knew what other parents did not: that it was only a precious nine weeks to Thanksgiving; they literally dropped their offspring on the curb with a stereo, a typewriter and a duffel bag, and gunned it out of there. Several of my friends who came East (or went West) to school remember just being put on a plane with a couple suitcases. My parents, however, made the ritual drive to Oligarch. When it looked like my mother was about to start ironing my socks in a strategic ploy to not return home without me, my father said brightly, "I could really use an ice cream!" and spirited everyone onto the street. After that, wrapping Mom in duct tape and putting her in the trunk was a cinch. And I was free! Good old Dad.

It's more difficult to get rid of parents in a timely way now. Administrators in charge of this crucial life transition have responded to parental hovering by creating formal, structured activities for the (soon to be) bereft grown-ups so that there can be an equally formal transition to the moment they are asked by other grown-ups, firmly but politely, to leave. Now, please. This means that being dropped off at college is now at least a two-day event, if not longer, where the moment between meeting your roommates and one of them saying happily, "Who wants to get high?" has been prolonged indefinitely. And it appears that the conservatives are right: masculinity has been eroded. Whereas we used to rely on those fathers with fabulous boundaries to snip the old umbilical, they too are organizing the tee shirt drawer and claiming that there seems to be something wrong with the fan belt that requires another night at Ye Olde College Inne.

But it has gotten worse. I now know, because of this morning's New York Times, that some parents never leave at all. Fortunately, the real estate industry -- those great, great folks who also brought you the sub-prime mortgage with zero down -- has stepped in to deal with that pesky problem of parents tenting in front of their childrens' dormitories. In Following the Kids to College Louise Tuteleian tells us about Jim and M.J. Berrian of Westport, CT. Jim and M.J. exemplify a new phenomenon whereby parents are "following their kids to college. From South Bend, Ind., to Oxford, Miss., from Hanover, N.H., to Knoxville, Tenn., they are buying second homes for themselves near campuses where their children are enrolled." For many of these special people, it is because their children are athletes: having never missed a single game of Trixie's field hockey or Chipper's football season, they aren't going to let something foolish like geography get in the way. No sirree, Bob. For example:

Paula Olsiewski and John Healey of New York City had already played musical hotel rooms in South Bend when their older daughter, Georgia, was at Notre Dame. By the time her sister Vivian, 19, decided to go there, they didn’t want to be frustrated again."

"I said to my husband, 'Let’s just buy a place out there,' Ms. Olsiewski, a program director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, recalled."

What a good idea Paula! And do you know there is now a name for you? First we had "helicopter parents" (why? 'cause they hover!) and now we have "boomerang parents" -- that's right, those parents who leave their kids at college only to come back again. And again. And again.

Myself, I would call them "kangaroo parents." Except even Mrs. Kangaroo has to get it that someday Junior must leave the pouch. Experts warn that students and their parents will have to set very careful boundaries when Mom and Dad launch their second, so much more fulfilling, college experience (Really? Why?). One young person quoted in the article says that initially she gave her parents a lecture about making their own friends, but soon found herself coming over to do her laundry when she knew her Mom would be there so they could hang out (Perfect! This way the student can ease up about making her own friends, which can be stressful and a huge time-waster).

Helen E. Johnson, a "parental relations" consultant employed by colleges and universities to manage this problem, and the author of Don’t Tell Me What to Do, Just Send Money: The Essential Parenting Guide to the College Years, warns "that parents should make sure they’re buying a [second] home for the right reasons." (Which would be......?) This would involve answering the following questions: “Would I like to be in this town even if my child wasn’t here?” and “Does this have more to do with my need than theirs?” (Answers: no, yes. Why pay for therapy when you can read Tenured Radical?) In conclusion, Johnson warns such parents, “You might be making your child more fragile, not less.”

I mean really, what is wrong with people? We in higher ed have seen a number of such changes over the years, each more unbelievable than the last. We know students who go home every weekend. We know college students who send their papers home so that their parents can edit them (much better than going to see your professor); students whose parents walk into advising sessions with them and have to be asked to leave; students who interrupt advising to call Mommy or Daddy on the cell phone to ask whether they should take this course or that course; and parents whose response to an ordinary academic or social problem is to pick up the phone and call a professor, a dean, an administrator and demand an explanation. One parent called me not so long ago to tell me he wanted his daughter to come to my office for several hours every day so that I could supervise her "homework."

I could go on -- so could you, dear reader, I am sure, if you are a college professor from a certain kind of institution. But I won't: why be such a grump at the coolest time of the year? Let's just say, for the 44th year, I am completely excited about the start of school, and I can't wait for the parents to go away so my students and I can get down to the business of teaching and learning -- not to mention growing up.