Trick Or Treat At Tenured Radical: What Will You Be Wearing?

Will you get candy -- or a rock?  Illustration hat tip.

We at Tenured Radical, normally so generous to the constituencies for whom this holiday is the apex of the year (little children, gay folk, college students) detest Halloween.  We feel foolish when we dress up.  We think candy is too expensive.  Despite the fact that we are known to consume it, we also think candy is unhealthy.  We resent the vast federal subsidies that go to an already fiscally plump sugar and corn syrup industry at a time when ordinary Americans are losing their houses and the basic requirements for living a healthy life are so difficult for the poor to access.  In 2007, the Cato Institute estimated that sugar subsidies alone would cost taxpayers $1.4 billion over a decade; and that consumers of the numerous products containing sugar would pay a $1.7 billion annual surcharge because of these price supports.  Corn, from which high fructose corn syrup is made, is the top recipient of federal subsidies, according to the Environmental Working Group, totaling almost $4 billion in 2009 alone.

And yet, despite thinking about what these dollars could accomplish for national health care, education or public transportation,  our self-righteousness falters.  We are unhappy when we think about the limits of our own politics as we turn our backs on people having fun.  We loathe ourselves as we avoid the children howling for candy on our doorstep -- children who have no health insurance, go to crappy schools and will probably have to enlist in the military to have a semi-decent life but who also just want to have a nice time one night out of the year.  Is that too friggin' much to ask?  And yes, we know that our annual Halloween donation to the American Diabetes Association is not what children consider an appropriate substitute for the pleasures of mainlining glucose that is packaged fifteen different ways.

On the other hand, we rarely stay blue for long at Tenured Radical, and we would also argue that building an entire child-centered holiday candy represents false consciousness of epic proportions.  We begin to understand why, during our over privileged suburban upbringing, cadres of stoned, vanguardist private school boys would roam the neighborhood tossing cherry bombs into pumpkins to indicate their disapproval for American capitalist investment in the sugar industry. Said pumpkins would explode in massive, pulpy orange carnage, a strategy intended to demoralize neighborhood families that would later be discovered and adopted by anti-American insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Because we are a blog that stands firmly behind non-violent strategies for change, this year at Tenured Radical we are having a virtual Halloween, in which we are giving virtual treats and tricks to virtual folk who show up in costume at our blog.  If you recognize yourself, feel free to open your bag in the comments section, or alternatively, to egg our virtual car and toilet paper our virtual trees in the comments section.

If you come to our door dressed as an adjunct instructor, you will receive:  A treat, because unfortunately you have already been tricked into thinking that, if you followed the rules and kept your nose to the grindstone, that there was a job waiting for you as a full-time university professor.  Open your bag, and we will drop inside:  a law school application (complete with a letter of recommendation from Tenured Radical -- just fill in your name at the appropriate places); a free subscription to Adjunct Nation; and a two-year site pass to The Adjunct Advocate.




If you come to our door dressed as a Zenith student activist running an anti-affirmative action bake sale, you will receive: A treat, although we can't give you a copy of Zenith's affirmative action policy, because there isn't one.  Look in your bag after you leave our door and you will find a copy of Zenith's Diversity Policy and its policy on discrimination and harassment; and a personal introduction from Tenured Radical to Morton Blackwell, the former White House Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan, conservative youth organizer and the founder of the Leadership Institute, which runs your umbrella organization, Campus Reform. You will also receive a large bag of fresh popcorn, with all the nasty burned pieces that got into your bag unfairly having been removed by our staff in advance of your visit.

If you come to our door dressed as a graduate student in the humanities going on the job market this year, you will receive:  A trick.  Laughingly maniacally, we will drop a letter-sized envelope containing a copy of your student loan repayment schedule; a post card saying that we have received your application; a credit card statement in which you will see that you have already been billed for expenses attendant to attending the conference interviews that you may or may not receive; and a brief letter stating that of the 450 qualified applicants for all the jobs you applied for, you were not hired.  That letter will be dated July 15, 2011.

If you come to our door dressed as Historiann, you will receive:  A treat!  That's right, Halloween celebrants who show up in full cowgirl garb will receive a free copy of the winter number of the Journal of Women's History, containing a round table of feminist bloggers that includes Historiann's full account and analysis of what happens when you call a really famous and very sexist historian a tool.

If you come to our door dressed as Arne Duncan, you will receive:  A Michelle Rhee action figure.  As we go to press, we are not altogether sure whether this is a trick or a treat, but perhaps we will know more after the election next Tuesday.  In any case, this temporarily unemployed icon of neo-liberal school reform is sure to be a collectible item; as a bonus, she will do test prep for your children and may be willing to pay you off to give up your tenure.

If you come to our door dressed as GayProf, you will receive:  A treat!  Leaving our doorstep, you will find (to your great delight) a set of Wonder Woman bracelets in your bag which, according to our staff research assistant Wick E. Pedia, will "balance [your] Amazon strength with loving submission to the positive aims of civilization," and help you "deflect...all manner of attack."  The bracelets are a particularly critical item for women, queer faculty and faculty of color, but may be particularly useful for all of you planning to come up for tenure, or organizing your colleagues into a group capable of collective bargaining with the institution for which you work.

If these items do not please you, head over to Legal History Blog, where Mary Dudziak is giving away copies of the Constitution.

Whatever We Can Do To Help Department

Yesterday all of us in the Zenith Community received a message from (Not So) New President saying that the economic situation is grave in our part of the world, and will be for a while. Personally, I like it when someone will just admit that things are bad. It also increases my capacity for trust in the Authorities to be reassured that the people in charge feel that they know what they are doing. The message states directly that any budgets cuts, difficult as they may be to swallow, will be across the board; no part of the university will be spared or favored. "All of us," (Not So) New President notes in this email, "will be asked to make sacrifices."

This, of course, strikes me as a brilliant solution, one that neither the Obama or the McCain campaign came up with in last night's debate. But we historians in the Center for the Americas, given our hemispheric perspective, are entirely prepared for this moment. I propose that we begin our sacrifices by locating a virgin on the faculty, of any gender, and sacrificing hir in front of North College, in an appeal to the Money Gods to come to our immediate aid. Difficult as it may be to find a virgin on the faculty, it will be worth the effort, since history shows that, were we to sacrifice a more senior member of the faculty, one closer to retirement age for example, that the budgetary advantages would be outweighed by the gods' displeasure that we actually thought a gnarly old member of the faculty (someone such as myself, for example) would do in such difficult times.

Postscript: my next post will come from the American Studies Association Meeting in Albuquerque. I can be found at one or more of the locations listed in the sidebar. As usual, readers are commanded to identify themselves.

Department of Thin Skins

You would never know from this report in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the final decision on who the next president will be will not be up to our New Jersey political history colleague Sean Wilentz. I mean, give me a break. He works on the nineteenth century guys. Why would Ohio, Pennsylvania and -- from what I hear today, Nevada -- be waiting breathlessly on what a historian of the nineteenth century United States thinks? It's we twentieth century scholars you need to keep a close eye on to make sure we toe the party line.

Which I am toe-ing relentlessly, despite the fact that I too share Wilentz's doubts about the claims that are being made in the name of liberalism (if not his desire to do the Chicken Little thing in the middle of what most of us perceive as a life-or-death national moment.) And in better election news, my sky blue Obama '08 cap arrived today, along with my "GLBT for Obama" bumper sticker. When you want to have a real effect on the outcome of an election in this day and age, get yourself together and buy gear like you never have before.

Why people are so horrified at Professor Wilentz I do not know, unless it is that he gets a lot of air time in the more popular press that the rest of us would like to have. Our colleagues have done worse, after all. It wasn't so long ago that a lot of prestigious and very respectable historians signed up as consultants to a Disney project aimed (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) at turning a famous Civil War battlefield into a theme park.

Seriously, I know everyone is anxious because the Palin thing is so outrageous and it doesn't seem to be preventing a convention bounce. But it isn't a very big convention bounce. So can we just take a deep breath, put on our caps, and get out there to register voters?

A Queer Day in History: The Radical Celebrates Her Birthday By Revealing A Variety of Well-Known and Little-Known Facts About May 16

It is no coincidence that we wake up this morning and find that gay men and lesbians in the state of California have, once again, been permitted to marry legally, this time via a split decision of the California Supreme Court. This is an historic event that bitter, angry people at the grassroots in this odd western state hope to reverse by referendum, against mounting evidence that conservative heterosexuals in the United States care more about global warming, health insurance, the price of gasoline, and the failed war in Iraq than they care about Adam and Steve registering at "Tar-jay." One referendum activist I saw on the news last night was predicting that this movement would doom Obama in California, as conservative voters flooded to the polls to save the family.

Mary, please.

It is, however, a fact that May 16 is a truly magical day in the year for queer folk. For example, half a century ago today, on May 16, 1958, a baby was born in the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Her parents peered at her skeptically, observing not only her big mouth but the rather pronounced and nimble fingers on both hands that suggested she might have a future as a....typist?

"Let's call her -- Tenured," suggested the mother, recovering from an intense two hours of labor and not thinking clearly, since she had anticipated being childless for a few precious hours longer.

"You've hit it," said the proud father, who was not really listening, but wrote it down on the form for the birth certificate people anyway. He had arrived just in time from upstairs where he was attending to other, less important patients, to whom he was previously committed because of the Hippocratic Oath and whatnot. "But I want to also name her after my favorite Aunt, who oddly, has been living with my other favorite aunt, her widowed sister-in-law and a librarian, for the last thirty years." The parents mulled it over silently, recalling Favorite Maiden Aunt's Wellesley degree, her life as a social worker at the Catholic Worker settlement on the Lower East Side of New York, her friends who plunged into the battle for Republican Spain in the 1930's. "I've got it!" the father said triumphantly. "Tenured....Radical!"

And thus was the Tenured Radical born and named, almost four decades before computer technology would create the cultural niche that would make her famous. Sure, in nursery school, tiny children would say, "What's tenure?" and the Radical would respond gravely, "I have no idea, but I shall commit myself to rectifying injustices done in its name one day." That is, of course, another story for another day.

And this is but a single episode that marks May 16 as a queer holiday. Other events occurring on this queer day in history (hat tip) we might want to note are:

May 16, 1527, when Florence re-established itself as a Republic, having driven out the Medici for the second time, no less, along with their interior decorators, who kept insisting on Renaissance furnishings. The Medici were an extraordinarily queer family, whose periodic defeats only inspired them to greater feats of kitsch and camp. Among those who would begin to set the tone for gays and lesbians everywhere were Lorenzo the Magnificent, an avid art collector; Pope Clement the VII, who wore a dress and commissioned the Sistine Chapel from a girlie-man; and Catherine de Medici, the world's first successful domineering mother. She ruled through her sons Charles IX and Henry III of France, and was responsible for the St. Bartholomew's massacre in 1572, a large scale slaughter of ill-dressed Protestants with whom the French and the Italians had collectively and utterly lost patience.

On May 16, 1770, 14 year-old Marie Antoinette married the future King of France, who was fifteen and several years from being able to consummate the marriage. Needless to say, the Dauphine was mightily distressed. Although the act was finally accomplished, Louis never really took much of an interest in his wife or the French people, preferring the company of scientists instead. Soon Antoinette's attention turned to big hair (pioneering what would later become the "beehive hairdo,") decorating, and her ladies-in-waiting, particularly the princesse de Lamballe and the duchesse de Polignac. Marie Antoinette became, after her head was removed from her shoulders in an effort to stem her overreliance on credit cards, a great heroine for nineteenth century women who loved women but who had not been fully educated by sexologists to call themselves "lesbians."

On May 16, during the 1822 Greek War of Independence, the Turks captured the Greek town of Souli, and having read Homer, demanded that the Greeks become their boyfriends. The Greeks happily complied, as the Turks were so big and strong. Hence the phrase that allows queer people to respond to accusations of unnatural behaviour by saying pointedly, "What about the Greeks?" Anything Greek is a queer holiday for these and other reasons: if you don't understand this, read the collected works of Mary Renault (who was, by the way, also a lesbian.)

On May 16, 1836, Edgar Allen Poe married his thirteen year-old cousin Virginia. This was an act that would later be replicated repeatedly and in excess by a number of people in Arizona, Utah and Texas, causing periodic and exasperating shortages of pastel dresses in the American Southwest.

On May 16, 1919, Liberace was born. Why is he part of this post? "Staaahp it!" you shriek. Also in the arts, on this day in 1929, woman-identified-woman poet Adrienne Rich was born; and on May 16, 1947, lesbian feminist poet, scholar and essayist Cheryl Clarke was born and began to revolutionize African-American literary tradition on May 17.

On May 16, 1985, actress Margaret Hamilton, otherwise known as Miss Elvira Gulch (aka, the Wicked Witch of the West,) died in Salisbury, CT, after having successfully avoided houses falling from the sky for decades. She would make famous various phrases that are now indispensable to queer people in the United States: "Surrender, Dorothy;" "And your little dog too!" and "I'm melting! Melting!" Her cruelty to Dorothy Gayle would secure Judy Garland's status as a gay icon forever, and allow queer people to mutter to each other about Miss Mary Thing across the room who thinks she's hiding something, but is in reality droppping hairpins all over the house, "I hear he's a friend of Dorothy's...."

College on $50 a Day: It's a Great Way to Fly

In "The Skies Are Alive With Fees", the New York Times' Joe Sharkey writes about Irish airline Ryanair's cutthroat pricing system. Boasting fares as low as $30 round trip on some European routes, Ryanair is also "the world champion among airlines in generating extra cash by charging customers fees for services and products that most airlines include in the ticket price: checked bags, beverages and — for a time before the idea was dropped amid public outcry — even using a wheelchair." What is called in business-speak "differential pricing," I believe, is not unknown to American travelers. Recently United offered me the opportunity to pay $25 extra for more leg room; there are special travel categories where travelers who pay more are checked in faster; and instead of the cute meals in little plastic dishes we used to get before 9/11, as Sharkey points out, flight attendants sell snack boxes that are full of all kinds of things only David Sedaris would eat.

Sounds undemocratic, doesn't it?

But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. This is a concept worth thinking about at the corporate university. Given rising tuition, faculty salaries that are barely keeping pace with inflation, and the inevitable accusations that some faculty work harder than others -- how about differential pricing for college students? Is it not true that some students do not ever feel the need to go to office hours? Is it not true that some faculty advise many students while others advise none? Is it not true that some faculty come in one day a week and others are on campus three to five days a week? Differential pricing could resolve all of these issues by creating a base price for college, and then giving undergraduates the opportunity to pay more for the frills. Those fees could then go directly to the faculty members providing the various services, thus permitting those faculty doing the most work to get paid for it.

The benefit to the budget-conscious student would be clear, since we know that many students' college experience is more about their friends and co-curricular experiences than any contact with faculty. How many generations of budding scholars have said romantically, "I learned so much more from conversations in the dining hall than I ever did in class?" Well, let's use this insight, and the Ryanair business model, to produce the leaner, meaner university. At Differentially Priced U. faculty attention would be a commodity, separated out from meals, dormitory, student fees, and whatnot, that students would pay for as needed. Not going to graduate school? Why pay for letters of recommendation you won't be using? Never go to office hours? Why should your tuition go to pay faculty to sit in their offices so other students can get help? Don't really give a damn about the comments on your papers? Well, why pay for them? Have the paper read quickly and processed for a grade, at the low-low price already included in your tuition.

You can see what I mean: this is a brilliant idea. And the reason this is a perfect system for students is that faculty who never attend their own office hours, don't put comments on papers anyway, and can't be trusted to write a letter of recommendation because they don't know your name -- won't get paid for it. Those who do know your name and can write for you will get paid. This also makes it the perfect system for popular faculty besieged by requests for letters of recommendation, whose only reward for teaching well is more students, and who complain that they are overwhelmed by grading and advising while other colleagues, who blow their students off, are home writing articles and getting more merit pay as a result.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Conversations With My Spam File

When you have several different email accounts, you get different kinds of invasive email -- otherwise known on the Mac as Junk, and on most commercial email servers as Spam. I have also noticed, since returning from the Sunshine State, where I did a whirlwind four day tour of relatives, that several of my posts have been hit by something I am told is a Spambot -- something that trolls around looking for blogs to invade, and that leaves ambiguous posts that must be intended to entice people to click on the fake blog identity and give up their IP addresses. The spambot's comments say things like "Wonderful post!" and "Great blog!" Little do they know that on an academic blog, this gives them away immediately -- what academic do you know who can confine hirself to 3 words or less in a blog comment? Huh?

But the spam also differs from account to account. What I have noticed is that on my Zenith account, spam normally advertises fake journals. The other thing it notifies me about are international conferences, that are usually being held in Zagreb or Targovishte, conferences that I am being specially invited to attend for an immediate deposit of only a few hundred dollars (credit cards only, please. Or better yet, a money order!) On my Earthlink account, it is brand-name medications that are being offered by these kind strangers: Viagra, Xanax (Yeah, baby!), Ambien, Cialis. Little do these spammers know that right now, having just gotten off a plane (where I sat next to a woman in pink who sneezed a lot) and having just spent a lovely long weekend with several sick or recovering people (which included an otherwise darling three year old who had light green snot flying out of his nose periodically) what I would really like is a flu shot and some prophylactic erythromycin. And three more days to get ready to teach next week.

But it is on my Gmail account, possibly because of the sexual resonance of "gmail" (g-spot, g-string, gee whiz), that the spammers address me up front about what really troubles me. Hence, the following conversation, drawn from the subject lines of spam received in the last five days on Tenured Radical's account, and responded to in reverse order of its arrival.

Spammer: "Your new sexual world is waiting for it's leader."
TR (jolted from normal, slightly out of it state): "Huh?"
Spammer: "How's tricks? Come on, Tenured Radical, you need to beef up your cock a little."
TR: "Uh -- okaaaaaaaaaaay....But what will that do for global warming?"
Spammer: "Darling Tenured Radical, men everywhere are enlarging their dicks, so why don't you?"
TR (who loves to be called darling): "I dunno. Maybe because...I'm not a man?"
Spammer: "But now it's a snap with MegaDick!"
TR: "Well, if you say so. What's the advantage, though? As a lesbian, I've never been quite clear."
Spammer: "Tenured Radical, you can sweep her off her feet when you flop out your super dick!"
TR: "Huh. See, I always worried that a super dick would have the opposite effect - that she would run in horror. And I worry that larger dicks actually contribute to global warming because of the increased friction."
Spammer: "Hello hello, Tenured Radical, let's talk about the size of your cock. Small, ain't it?"
TR: "Which one? I mean -- hold on just a minute here, buster. What the hell business is it of yours, anyway?"
Spammer (with patience: clearly wants to begin all over again): "Sir Tenured Radical, be the center of attention among all the girls. Enlarge your cock."

Well, if they call me sir, that's another thing entirely, I guess. And like other academics, I love to be the center of attention.

OK. I'm all ears.

Pass Go, Collect $200: the Paradox of the Radical or, Where the Grills Are

One of my most popular (ever) posts was on academic debt, unless you count all that negative attention I got from the Southern Cult of Balls (and Sticks): the debt piece got linked everywhere, and it had responses so numerous and interesting that I did a follow-up that also got linked elsewhere. One of my next most popular posts, only a week ago, was on publishing your first book: that has made the rounds big time, and comments keep dribbling in, days later, when everyone knows you get almost all your comments in the first 24 hours after a post.

Clearly I am on to something. What do these posts have in common? In different ways, they address the barriers to success, and the anxiety about whether those barriers are -- or are not -- surmountable.

So before I attack my Writing Work today, I would like to let you know a few things I have noticed about my own life that I would call Signs of Success, or the Paradox of the Radical. When you see them as charcteristics of your life you can begin to relinquish anxiety about certain kinds of defeat, and begin to to focus on the things not in your control (like unexpected debilitating illness, terrorism, the national debt and approaching senility). I have written them out in a meme titled:

YOU KNOW YOU ARE SAFELY BOURGEOIS WHEN:

You find yourself re-scheduling your shrink appointment to keep an appointment with the dentist. Both visits are paid for by insurance.

You do not reschedule the shrink appointment for Friday, because you must be home all day waiting for the gas grill to be delivered by Home Depot.

You are paying Home Depot $75 to assemble and deliver the grill because it seems like too much trouble to return the truck the salesman offered to rent you for $20.

You buy a shredder at Staples because you are the kind of person whose identity could usefully be stolen.

You think taking a series at the local university theater for next season, without using your credit card, is within next month's budget. You also imagine that this might be a nice way to meet gay people in your new community. As opposed to hanging out in a lesbian bar, where things do not get interesting until long after you want to go to bed.

You buy a three-hundred dollar cell phone rather than renewing your contract with the free phone because you are annoyed by dropped calls.

You pay the bills when they arrive, rather than at the end of the month when your paycheck magically appears.

You have a paycheck that comes all summer when you do not go to work.

You use the dry cleaner that is more expensive because it is right next to the highway entrance and because you would rather spend the money than take the time to make a special trip and because you don't want to iron your own shirts anymore and because you have to wear ironed shirts because you have to go to meetings and look Respectable.

You find yourself sitting on the back porch, as the sun sets and the Confederacy goes down in flames, grasping a bottle of Absolut in your fist, shaking it at the Divine Presence, and shouting "As God is my Witness, I'll never drink Smirnoff again!"

You could have an equally knowledgeable conversation with Martha Stewart about granite vs. Corion, as you could have with Allan Brinkley about the rise and fall of liberalism.

You tell your shrink about the gas grill and he says, "Welcome to the bourgeoisie."