Wednesday Writing Fun With Mary Beth Norton: How To Write A Trilogy

At the newly redesigned History News Network, Cornell Historian Mary Beth Norton gives great advice on "How To Write A Trilogy Without Really Trying."  What's her secret?  Don't tell anyone that you're doing it.  After publishing your prize-winning first book, jump into a new field (in Norton's case, women's history) that's raising a lot of important questions, then publish a second book that turns Early American history on its head.   Realize that you aren't done, and over the course of the next thirty years turn out volumes two and three (in reverse order, no less!), as well as numerous other books, articles and a widely-used textbook.  Easy-peasy!

As usual, Norton has chosen a great title for a great blog past that actually explains how an entire intellectual career has unfolded up to this point.  Why is it a great title, other than the obvious allusion?  Because no one who knows her would ever accuse Mary Beth Norton of "not really trying." Ever.  At anything.  You heard it here first.

Along this journey, Norton enriched her analysis by folding in new intellectual developments that were changing history as a field: she mastered the histories of gender and sexuality, as well as Atlantic Studies.  She brought the trilogy to a crescendo (a?) this month with Separated by Their Sex:  Women In Public And Private In the Colonial Atlantic World (Cornell, 2011).  "And so my unintended trilogy on the theme of gender and political power in early America is complete," she concludes.  "Research for it led me in each iteration in so many unexpected directions that I do not know what to anticipate as I embark on a new project, that long-postponed look at the years immediately prior to the American Revolution. But I do know that the book, informed by the past decades of work on the trilogy and its sidelight volume, will be very different from that I would have researched and written in the 1970s."

Stay tuned:  the end of one thing is often t he beginning of another, and I wouldn't expect the announcement of Norton's next trilogy until at least 2030 or 2040.

If A Student Essay Falls In The Woods And No One Is There To Read It, Does Anyone Care?

They're B-A-A-A-a-a-ck!

A while back, I assigned two papers in one of my classes.  In the first, I gave a straightforward "assignment" that asked students to think more deeply about the reading they had done up to that point and use what they had learned to analyze a primary document.  In the scale of things, this is a standard history assignment. I gave the class three documents to choose from, and awaited the papers.  When I began to read them, one thought came to mind:

"GAAAAH!"

Now, let me emphasize:  they weren't bad papers.  Many of them were A-worthy; only a few received grades thought ought to have been worrisome to the recipients.  And yet, as I paged thorugh them, I dreaded grading them.  Why?  They were dull.

Subsequently, I did a little informal research among the students, and most of them admitted that they, had been uninspired and uncertain about the point of the paper.  Several things were at work, as it turned out.  Many students, especially those who were new to college, had become anxious because there was no "prompt."  It's took me years to figure out what they are talking about when they used this word, because I never assign a paper without some guidance or question, a significant difference from the practice of my own college and high school teachers.  I know this will seem strange, but back in the Stone Age, at Oligarch, professors would say that a paper was due, and you would have to figure out what to write about all by your lonesome.  We never expected to be told what to write about.  In retrospect, some people thrived and others suffered under this system.  I had one friend who, because s/he never did the reading, and was usually stoned in class, never knew what to write about either.  This made the whole semester quite a challenge, but it made picking a paper topic an impenetrable mystery.  If we were in the same class, I would eventually sort of drop a lifeline of sorts a few days before the paper was due:  "I was gonna write about this, but I decided to write about that instead."  Then we would chat about this for a while, and s/he would get by.  Not excel, but get by.

So anyway, I discovered this fall that the "prompt" is yet another product of a testing culture that strives to make all students nicely mediocre thinkers before they get to college.  When a high school teacher gives a "prompt" it means that students are supposed to answer a highly direct question, for which there is a right answer, that will demonstrate their mastery of what they have been taught.  Needless to say, not being directed towards a formulaic answer can cause the kind of anxiety that undoes our finest students, because the last thing someone educated in a testing culture should do is think critically or get creative.  What the anxiety produced in this case was a set of papers that were, to a greater or lesser degree, workman-like, safe, and all used the same f*#@king document.

Whose fault was this?  My fault, that's who.  I had given a highly conventional assignment that signaled to the students (correctly) that they were being tested (without being honest about saying so), and so the vast majority of them stayed in the right-hand lane and drove slightly under the speed limit (metaphorically speaking.)  Furthermore, I had failed for years to attend to this whole business of what students were talking about when they referred to a "prompt":  hence I had given one assignment, and they had essentially received a different one than I intended.  So the next time around, lest I should be tempted to drive a pencil into my ear while grading, I gave them complete and utter freedom.  I asked them to choose their own document and to choose it based on something they were passionate about now.  I asked them to compare their own enthusiasm for this topic to the enthusiasm expressed in the document, and to use the document to understand better how their own passion was rooted in a history of other people who cared about this thing too.  When students asked me if it was OK to write about something they didn't really care about, I said no.  Then I took the time to talk with them about what they did care about, and urged them to write about it.

This second set of papers was more or less spectacular.  They were interesting; they varied over a wide range of topics; they were far better written; and many of the papers themselves were preceded by interesting meetings in office hours during which students let me know something that helped me teach them better.

This experience prompted me to think (again) about how we actually assist in producing student work that we do not want to read through ordinary acts of pedagogy that we take for granted, and how it might be possible to change that.  Here are a few thoughts and questions as we move into the semester together:

How do you return papers?  Do you hand them out at the end of class or do you put them in a box outside your office door, where many of them sit, dolefully, for days, weeks or months?  I am very much against the latter practice, which many people I respect adhere to, for several reasons.  I think handing a paper to a student signals a two-way exchange. It is personal, and in a large class it helps me learn their names and how the people sitting in front of me actually think.  I think putting them out in the hall, on the floor, unintentionally signals:  "I am done with this.  It is trash."

I also think there is a serious problem with leaving student papers out where anyone can get to them:  it makes every student's grade available to every other student, which is a violation of privacy.  I also think that for a group of people that is always searching for new ways to police cheating, we are more or less clueless about the fact that many of those papers will be, shall we say, recycled, for other classes or other sections of the same class, in other years.

Do you write comments on the paper?  Or just grade it? Do you make yourself available to discuss students' work with them after you hand the papers back?   I can't tell you how many of my advisees show up in my office hours with a paper in their hand that has no comments on it at all, just a grade, students who also can't get the professor to met with them.  Rarely do they express anger or resentment at the grade:  they want to do better and they don't know how.

Do you write lots and lots of marginal notes on the paper, spending hours correcting everything and re-diagramming their sentences?  The truth is, although you are trying to be the opposite of the teacher I describe above, this freaks students out.  Although you have spent maybe an hour on this, feeling like you are a really caring teacher, the student may see them as a blur, as grammatical correction collides with interpretive questions, typos, basic misunderstanding of the text and long-winded attempts not to utilize the first person or appear "biased."  If a paper is really muddled, it is a waste of your time to do this:  far better to sit down with the student, ask a couple questions about what s/he intended, and describe how s/he might have gone about writing such a paper.

One common grumble I hear from faculty is:  "I bet I spent more time grading it than s/he spent writing it!"  While that probably isn't technically so, it may well be so that the paper was written at the last minute, and that the student had not done the work necessary to write the paper of which s/he might be capable.  How much better would it be to find this out in the course of a conversation?  Better yet, to take the opportunity to underline in person that a better effort over the long term would produce better written work.  A fair number of students think they "want to work on [their] writing," as if writing were disconnected from the other work in the course.

Do you actually care what they think -- and do your paper assignments encourage them to tell you?  If writing papers is just about testing whether students have completed and understand the intellectual content of the course, why not just give quizzes instead?  We have come to fetishize college writing, organizing all activities around the idea that this is the litmus test of good teaching, when in fact it isn't always necessary to write an essay to demonstrate competence.  This study, forwarded to me by a colleague, argues that testing-taking, in and of itself, "actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques."

Good paper assignments, in my view, ask students to  make an intellectual choice of some kind and commit to them.  But not all knowledge acquisition is about committing to intellectual choices:  a great deal of important work in a course is about basic mastery of a field of study that will given them a platform for creativity and/or critical analysis.  

Do you talk to students about your own writing, and testify to the ongoing vulnerability of putting your own writing out there to be criticized by others? One of the most effective things I ever did in a class was to hand out a couple pages of an article that had just been returned full of possible edits.  There were probably about twenty per page.  I then pointed out to the class that what they were reading was probably in its seventh or eight draft, had been commented on by three people already, and was still perceived by a peer as worthy of drastic improvement.  I did it on impulse, but you should have seen the shocked looks on their faces, and heard the many questions this provoked about how I learned to write, how I would respond to these criticisms, and well, how did this make me feel?  Numerous student evaluations pointed to this discussion as having made a huge impression.

Do you ask students to rewrite? OK, so it's not always possible to go through a stack of papers twice, but it is well known that the way anyone becomes a better writer is by redrafting, and rethinking, what s/he has already done.  Here's an effective trick:  have them bring papers to class.  Have them exchange papers with another student.  Give everyone ten minutes to mark up the paper s/he now has for typos, spelling errors and other grammatical errors and give it back to the writer.  Give everyone ten minutes to talk, but this time have each person tell the other person what s/he did or did not like about the paper s/he wrote and get advice on how to strengthen good parts and fix the less good parts.

Then tell them the paper is actually due in the next class and send them home to take another crack at it.

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 Any other ideas out there?  Leave them in the comments section!

The Radical History News: Shopping, Nixonland, Feminist Blogging and A Farewell

Yesterday I passed two milestones:  I went to BJ's Wholesale for the first time, and I finally bought an iPad.  As I was driving home, the Sister of the Radical (SORor) called, and I asked her if I was the last person on earth to discover BJ's.  "Yes," she said, not unkindly.  Well, so be it.  I was late to the game on Deadwood too, but caught up eventually.

BJ's had been recommended to me by my dentist during a prolonged procedure (he was trying to distract me from the root canal he was performing) and I must say, neither the root canal or BJ's has been a disappointment.  As I toodled down I-91 with a full trunk of loose items (they don't give you bags at BJ's, and I made a mental note to bring cardboard boxes or totes the next time) the only parallel experience I could compare it to was being allowed to visit a warehouse stocked by UNESCO, or being the patriarch of a polygamous Mormon family.  Bales of socks and long underwear were nestled next to a case of baked beans, a massive brick of TP, a bushel of garlic, six quarts of shrink wrapped OJ, and a variety of other jumbo-sized items. 

Riding shotgun was the iPad.  What can I say?  64 gigs and it's everything I can imagine. Having posted the purchase on my Facebook, I got the following link from Rick Perlstein (who is cool and funny and nice, in addition to being a terrific writer) advertising the enhanced e-book of his Nixonland:  the Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribners, 2008).  I embedded the video here:



Is that cool or what?  In other news:

Historiann and Tenured Radical have been nominated for a 2010 Cliopatria award in the category  "Best Series of Posts," for their series on Terry Castle's The Professor (You can get started reading here).  If that isn't enough, the roundtable on feminist blogging I have been promising, "Women Gone Wild," starring TR, Historiann, Jennifer Ho, May Friedman, Marilee Lindemann and Rachel Leow, is now up and rocking the house at the Journal of Women's History.

Finally, we are sad to say that the authors of Edge of the American West seem to be biting the poison pill.  Oh yeah, they say they are going on hiatus, but when and if they come back, they will come back as something else.  As one co-author said:"I’d rather take a break before it becomes a chore or I start posting pictures of cats." Another: "We associate the West with new beginnings, but also the end of the day, and maybe we have got there."

Maybe. We'll miss you, and thanks.

Journal-isms: What Would It Take To Reform Scholarly Publishing?

Well bust my britches, if the paper of record didn't put we scholars on the front page this morning! Reporting on the decision of the Shakespeare Quarterly decision to experiment with posting articles on line for open review, the New York Times reports that:

a core group of experts — what [Katherine] Rowe called “our crowd sourcing” — were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. Others could add their thoughts as well, after registering with their own names. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.

This process of online review, the Times argues,

goes to the very nature of the scholarly enterprise. Traditional peer review has shaped the way new research has been screened for quality and then how it is communicated; it has defined the border between the public and an exclusive group of specialized experts.

Well, not quite, but let's pick this ball up and run with it, shall we? While I think this is an interesting and productive shift, and that opening up the review process is a bold thing to do because it puts a dent in the Bell of Silence that scholars erroneously believe honesty requires, the practice --as envisioned by the editors and utilized by those truly brave people who participated -- adhered to tradition in important ways. First, the journal obtained promises from a "core group" of scholars that they would participate; and second, if you read down to the bottom of the article, one of the participants still felt it was necessary to secure a promise from a dean that the article would still count for tenure. (Let's give a round of applause to this young person, shall we, for participating in something new and untested? I hope you do get tenure: we need more people like you in this profession.)

My point is that traditional gatekeepers are still in place -- even though the process has become more open and, importantly, more public. Jennifer Howard's in-depth piece about Shakespeare Quarterly last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education makes this, and other, good points.

The Times also notes that peer review, although the Rosetta Stone of the tenure and promotion process, is deeply flawed. I concur. There are numerous examples one could cite of plagiarism, or poor practice, that seem to slip right through the peer review process. Add to this the fact that many, if not most, journals are famous for vetting processes that are as slow as Cream of Wheat going down the kitchen drain. Graduate assistants and faculty editors who lose track of manuscripts; readers who are given six months to complete the review and have to be pushed to complete it anyway; and the capacious use of "revise and resubmit" rather than bluntly saying the article is poor and needs to be completely rewritten -- all of these things and more are acknowledged problems with the academic publishing process that make many people reluctant to send work to journals.

Another outcome of cumbersome journal review mechanisms that many, if not most, scholars in the humanities and social sciences think are flawed, is that readers often receive manuscripts that are in horrible shape. Graduate students and young scholars are often counseled to send work out for review to -- well, to put it bluntly, get free advice from top people in the field, and to get their work "in the pipeline" in hopes that a journal will commit to it at an early stage. This is particularly true of dissertations and dissertation chapters. Dissertations are not, or are very rarely, books; and dissertation chapters are not articles. And yet, they are often sent out to readers as if they were, and the privacy of the process -- while it doesn't seem to stop readers from hemming and hawing and recommending that it be "revised and resubmitted" -- discourages the authors from being embarrassed about sending out work that isn't ready for review yet.

So I see what the Shakespeare Quarterly is doing as an important step in reforming the process. Even if other humanities and social science journals do not care for the experiment as it was conducted, they need to find some way to move towards the following reforms:

The period of time from submission to acceptance or rejection, should be dramatically shortened. Eight weeks is really sufficient; and actually, for many of us, looking at our calendar might mean spotting a free day for doing the review that is even sooner. Reviewers should be held to this date, and the date should be conveyed to the author.

Eliminate revise and resubmit. There should be two categories: accept and reject. One can give cogent reasons for rejecting a piece that do not prevent it from being revised and submitted elsewhere. One could recommend accepting an article pending revision of even serious flaws because it makes a real contribution that is as yet unrealized.

Journals should not accept articles they are not ready to put into production in the next year. Having a piece fully accepted and then delaying publication for a year to eighteen months is idiotic, and a drag on the system. It means that the value of article for the bean counters (those who are "counting" publications for merit raises, tenure, promotion) is often greater than the value of he article to scholars, or at least those scholars in the field who ought to be reading it. If it is worth reading, it is worth reading now.

All journals should begin enhancing their web presence immediately. Paper journals, at least in the humanities and social sciences, will eventually be dead -- you know it, I know it, and it is just a matter of time. Cuts in library budgets are damaging journals, but the problem is larger than that. Newspapers who spend around 80% of their gross revenue actually getting the newspaper-as-object to the reader, and I suspect this is true for journals as well. And what happens to those objects? I belong to three professional associations (two history, one interdisciplinary) who, between them, send me twelve journals a year. I just weighed the pile of journals pictured at the top of this post, and now know that 13.8 pounds of extremely good quality paper comes into my house on an annual basis in the form of journals, paper that is even more expensive because it has to be printed, transformed into a book-thing and mailed. Within the next twelve months, these high-quality and very aesthetic objects, sadly, will end up in the recycling bin, because who wants to accumulate over a foot a year of journals when they are searchable and readable on line? And when much of the material in them is not in one's field?

As an example, I would pay the same American Historical Association dues to not get a paper copy of the American Historical Review. This is not because the AHR isn't good, although there are entire issues that pass filled with beautifully researched and written articles that are so tangential to my work that I can't prioritize them in an already over-taxed reading life. But even if I did read them cover to cover, it is ecologically unsound and an utter waste of the organization's money. I have adapted to doing a significant portion of my professional reading on line and really, I wish they would use my dues some other way, like lobbying state legislatures to restore cuts in higher education and hire faculty full-time. The AHR might even consider paying the people who they engage to do peer review so they would do it in a timely manner.

Finally, moving to an all-web presence over time would permit articles and book reviews to be published in a more timely manner. They could go up when they -- or a cluster of like articles -- was ready. A regularly updated book review section could review books (gasp!) when they come out as opposed to, say two to four years later. Journals could respond to political and cultural developments in a more timely manner -- and perhaps even become relevant to a broader, educated audience.

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Since you are too busy getting ready for the new students to check out my constantly updated toolbar, before you stop reading today, check out this brilliant post on cultivating "beginner's mind" at Roxie's World. It's especially aimed at veteran teachers who might be taking too much for granted at the beginning of the semester -- and missing the joy.

Tales From The Archives: Or, Past Life Shockers

On Friday, I was happily pawing through an unprocessed collection at a famous nearby archive, when I came upon one of the little treasures that illustrate the hot-house crypto-lesbo atmosphere of radical feminism in the 1970s: the mash note.

This figure (who will remain nameless for reason that become obvious below if they are not already) had drafted a letter to the object of her affections. The letter may, or may not, have ever been sent, and was redrafted at least once. It detailed the progress of the crush over time and lingered over explicit descriptions of the feelings that the crusher excited in the crushee. Most importantly, it used the effort to unveil that-which-had-never-been- spoken as a form of seduction. A particularly fine touch was the admission on the part of the author that what had tipped the scales into full-blown lust was the Object of Affection's ravishing butch haircut. Not only does this speak to the whole question of sex roles, which was one crucial focus for radical feminist critique, but the particular style chosen by the crusher caused her, in the eyes of the crushee, to look remarkably like the popular New Age guru with which they were both spiritually involved.

Having worked in numerous collections, needless to say, I have found more than one of these documents, and I don't know what to do with them. There is the Famous Feminist who claimed not to be sexually involved with women for years -- until she left her husband and was involved with women, as if this had never been an issue. But the archive also reveals (drum roll) that from about 1970 on, she got tossed at nearly every conference. Long, admiring letters and bashful cards tucked here and there into the archive detail the intensity of these encounters for the little nobody who provided the service. The absence of a response from the Famous Feminist makes it equally clear that she had been less permanently moved by the encounter (one winsome note from a one-night stand confides that a plant had been purchased and named after the Famous Feminist, a totem on which affection could be lavished until a unnamed, and entirely unanticipated, date of return.)

Finding these documents is like being at a really cool Easter egg hunt planned for feminist historians.

But they do present a problem: what to do with past life shockers? Would anyone be shocked by them really? What, if anything, do they contribute the history of radical feminism I am working on? Do they amplify the atmosphere for my reader that will better evoke the period? Do I risk losing the trust of second-wave feminists now collaborating with me if I seem to have bad judgment? (I'm thinking the answer to this is yes.) Should you publish any document about a person of interest that you wouldn't want published about yourself? And yet, why did these women leave these love notes in their papers if they didn't want me to know?

Readers?

Monday Celebration: The 500 Posts

Today is a very special day: Tenured Radical has hit 500 posts. For those of you who think blogging is an easy-peasy activity that some of us do in our spare time, think again. You make spare time for it, dammit! And if you are really successful, people start asking you to write other things, and all of a sudden you are writing all the time, and .....but wait! That's what academics are supposed to do!

So on the occasion of the 500th post, I would like to honor a few other writers instead.



Historiann posts nearly every day. She is funny, smart, relentless and prolific. And could we have a hand for Margaret Soltan, over at University Diaries? Her posts are short, snappy, and muckraking to boot.

And how woud we know anything without Ralph Luker? If you check your sitemeter by 9 a.m., you will see that Ralph, the managing spirit of Cliopatria has already visited to see of there is anything to link to in his daily roundup. Ralph sees it as his job to link us to all things history, many of which are written by historians and public intellectuals who have published something of interest in the commercial media.

David Remnick is not a blogger, but he produced The Bridge. an over 600 page book about Barack Obama, in two years, while editing and writing for The New Yorker. It's not just that Remnick makes the rest of us look like pikers: admit it, we are pikers.

Finally, in one of the best articles I wish I had been given twenty years ago, Kerry Ann Rockquemore contributes to Inside Higher Ed's "Career Advice" column on how to pick your battles and manage your anger. It's a must-read for untenured faculty in particular. Just a hint to send you over there:

The problem occurs when new faculty members (majority or minority) respond to conflicts in one of two extreme ways: 1) fighting every battle or 2) avoiding conflict altogether. The problem with fighting every battle is that you will quickly alienate yourself from everyone in your environment. The problem with avoiding conflict is that when you push anger down, it grows, deepens, and expands. This can put you at risk of publicly exploding when triggered by a minor incident, developing stress-related illness, and/or sucking up so much of your energy that you have none left for your intellectual work....We often hear the generic advice to "pick your battles." This week, I want to encourage each of us to fundamentally rethink the idea that we have to wait until conflicts reach the stage of "battle"! Instead, let’s recognize that conflict is a normal outcome of people working together in an academic community. As a result, let’s begin to imagine ourselves as professionals who are comfortable, confident, and capable of resolving conflicts in our day-to-day lives.

Oh yes. And here's to the next 500 posts.

Sunday Radical Roundup: Inability To Type Coherently Edition, With An Addendum On A Missing Post

Due to jet lag and a persistent failure of my fingers to connect to my brain, today's roundup is confined to three items, two of which I did not have to think at all and one of which is a Serious Matter.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation: At Legal History Blog Mary Dudziak offers a few tips on how to get an article done over the summer. This will, perhaps, be most useful to old fogies like me who don't have to publish anything if they don't want to, but are always open to suggestions for how to use their time well; those of you who just finished a book and can't imagine using the summer that way again right away; or those of you who have just finished your first year of teaching and are figuring out which dissertation chapter should be offered up to the rest of us. To give you a tasty preview (that exactly corresponds with my own writing experience this spring at Zenith's wonderful Center for the Humanities:

Pick a time of day that is your writing time. Spend that time in a space that is reserved for writing. You go to your space at the designated time, and then all you can do is write. No phone, no email, nothing else. If you're at your office, put a "do not disturb/available after __ p.m." sign on your door. You might feel that you should spend 8 hours a day doing nothing but writing, but that is unrealistic (unrealistic for every day, as compared w/ days when the momentum is going, and you can't seem to stop). To really protect that time, it might need to be 2-3 hours. If you need to make a lot of progress in a short time, perhaps schedule two writing blocks during a day. But I think you'll find that if you actually spend 2-3 solid hours writing every day, with no email and nothing but writing, you will have an article by the end of the summer.

For more hints, go to The Faculty Lounge.

Cool (Or Cold?) Conference Announcement of the Week: Well, I'm going with "Cold War Cultures," Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives Conference at the University of Texas at Austin September 30 - October 3, 2010. Perhaps an excuse to go to the Berkeley of the Southwest doesn't strike you as a reason to participate, but the CFP might:

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then Cold War politics can be seen as a continuation of war by other means. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore these means in the context of global encounters between states and "Blocs" as well as engagements with "East" and "West." Indeed, after the end of the Second World War, a new kind of "war" continued and expanded as governments and/or interest groups created and continually reshaped institutions, media, popular
culture, and various elements of social and political life. Globally, these broad-based transformations took place in the shadow of Cold War politics, especially as expressed through rhetoric of threat and mutual annihilation. In particular, cultural phenomena shaped by Cold War power conflicts take on myriad forms in a host of geographic contexts, both in and outside the Bloc, from iconic public representations to distinctive media advertising, memorable political speeches, world expositions, spy novels and films, and a plethora of official and popular modes of expression. In some places, of course, military or paramilitary conflagrations translated Cold War politics into "hot" wars, which further fueled the fire of Cold War imaginations.

Go here for details and the full call.

Department of Blog Revisions: Early in my blogging career, I took down several posts about my life at Zenith that, when I became more experienced in the genre, I came to believe might cause students and colleagues to worry that none of our interactions could be private. For a different reason, today I removed a post from late February, 2010: Annals of Contemporary History; or, Queering the Klan. The post was illustrated with a mock photo of "Klansmen" dressed in lavender robes, and -- in blogger tradition -- I linked to the sites I was drawing evidence from. It was a discussion of homophobia on the far right wing that relied for its evidence on a website and a discussion board maintained by US-based white supremacists. However, comments I have received in my Gmail account (and several that I removed from the comments section) caused me to retire the post.

The misunderstandings that prompted these negative responses were, in my view, a symptom of what everyone who writes on-line knows: people read blogs and other web texts hastily and are not always fully aware of the author's tone and intention in sensitive or controversial matters. Clearly this phenomenon was a particular liability in a post about right wing extremism that relied heavily on irony to make a point, delivered in the last line, about homophobia among mainstream conservative policy makers. People who do not read my blog regularly (and perhaps did not even make it past the first link), many of whom appear to have viewed the post through forwards from Facebook and Twitter followers of Tenured Radical, were offended and injured by what they saw as my obliviousness to the real harm white supremacist groups do and have done over the course of the last century. I got a few --er, lively -- emails from them upon returning from my research trip last night. Therefore, although I don't think the post supports the view that I take violence, racial discrimination or anti-semitism lightly, in the interests of not putting my scholarly or moral integrity needlessly at risk, I have removed Queering the Klan from public view. Tenured Radical is, and always has been, an anti-racist blog. While I believe in free speech, the principle at stake in the post -- that the absolute stigmatizing of queer people by the "respectable" Republican mainstream is far more extreme and less nuanced than it is among their counterparts on the openly racist and anti-semitic unrespectable right wing -- my experience in the blogosphere is that some posts are worth fighting for and others are not. And for the edification of other, less experienced bloggers: if a post has to be explained at length, it probably wasn't well-crafted in the first place.

Photo Credit.

Writing An Honors Thesis: It's A Big Frakkin' Deal

I just finished editing the last senior honors thesis chapter I have, although I imagine a few conclusions may come my way in the next 48 hours. My three seniors are pretty much on their own now. I have located as many split infinitives as I can find, and written primly in a comment for each somewhere along the line: "Never use a ten dollar word when a five dollar word will do" (where did I learn that? My grandfather? The Andy Griffith Show?) When I edit the same habits come up over and over again: at a certain point I hit one repetition, one misplaced semicolon, one odd word choice too many. "Eliminate this word wherever you find it!" I hiss from a red comment bubble; or, "History is written in the past!!!!!"

Editing theses at this stage is about the trees, not the forest; it is about wanting all the hard work to be shown to its best advantage; it is about teaching writing intensively at a moment when students are open to learning it in a way they may never be again; and it is about coming to terms with what the work, in the end, will be -- not what it could have been. For my students, at this point, it is about stamina. And with most of the thesis, even though you are busy pruning the trees at this point, you can see the shape, texture and significance of the forest emerging all the same.

But after I had finished everything I had on my computer, I took the dog for a walk and thought about how proud I am of all my thesis writers, every single one I have ever worked with. At my age you get very sentimental about things like this. Here I am nearly fifty-one years old -- my guess is that I have advised forty or more of these things, which signifies forty relationships that will always be special, forty people out there with whom I will always share the special bond of having seen through this scholarly achievement.

Since I have this bully pulpit, I just want to say to all of you, past, present and future thesis writers: it is a great privilege to be able to be part of the process of watching you grow and become defined as an intellectual. It's a huge achievement to complete your first major piece of writing, regardless of whether it is borderline publishable or whether it isn't exactly what you imagined it would be, but it is finished all the same. This year's group -- a passionate and committed trio of feminist scholars -- probably don't know that there are a whole crowd of spirits (The Ghosts Of Thesis Writers Past) cheering them on, but there are. These are, of course, real people, who have gone on to have a variety of careers, but no matter how grown up they are, or how far away they go, I feel that their spirits gather at this time of year to clap and cheer you new ones across the finish line. Eight of you are academics, three with tenure and two coming up for tenure this year; one is a very famous erotic writer and sex educator; one works in education policy and another -- her husband (and they met outside my office waiting for their thesis tutorial appointments) -- is a journalist. Three others are politically committed attorneys, at least two of whom are practicing law in the field they wrote their thesis in, and one of whom has devoted his life to defeating our nation's love affair with capital punishment.

So take heart, Zenith thesis writers of 2009! You are almost done. And it's a big frakkin' deal that you tried, that you stuck with it, and that on Tuesday your commitment to yourself will be complete when you turn the damn thing in.

The Radical Goes To A Genteel Academic Conference (Disguised As A Blogger Meetup)

I just got back from the Little Berks, which is a weekend conference composed of the group of people who organize the Big Berks every three years. One of the things we do in the meeting immediately following the conference is elect the new President. I am happy to say that the results of the election can now be revealed: the new President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians is Kathleen Brown, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She replaces Ruth Mazo Karras, Professor of History from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Ruth has done a great job, and Kathy will too.

There were many highlights of the weekend, but Yours Truly had the pleasure of being on a history blogging panel with Clio Bluestocking and Knitting Clio. It was a real pleasure to meet both of them, and Knitting Clio really does knit. She was working on what looked like a baby blanket while she was there, and braved a cold to participate. About Clio Bluestocking I cannot write, as she is pseudonymous, but suffice to say it is always a special pleasure to find out who someone "really is." Heather, at least, I had googled some months back. Both women have a dry sense of humor, and the panel was a great success.

(By the way, one of the big topics after the panel, when we were all sprawled on queen-sized hotel beds waiting for the new Tina Fey sketch on SNL was: who is Ambrose Hofstadter Bierce III? You may be gone, but you are not forgotten, old man. I was grilled as to whether I had ideas as to who he might be: I do, indeed, have ideas -- good ones, I think -- but explained that it is not only against the Blogger Ethic to divulge names, but that it is equally wrong to provide clews in the form of speculation as well.

My contribution was entitled Tenured Radical Speaks; or, What the Historian Learned When She Went to the Blogosphere, and it should be thought of as both an early blogiversary post, and a big, thankful shout out to all the real and virtual friends who have encouraged me along the way. I reprint excerpts below:

Almost two years ago, I started writing a blog called Tenured Radical. This means that today I am fast approaching what is known among my kind as my second blogiversary. In that first post, on October 17, 2006, I assumed that every academic would understand the title of the blog as an ironic gesture. Nonetheless, I explained to an as yet unknown audience that “long ago, when the new right decided to undermine the intellectual foundations of the nation, one of the big charges made by radical neocons was that universities were full of ‘tenured radicals’ who were indoctrinating the youth of America. The not so big secret, of course, is that universities and their faculties are far from radical, and that tenure is one of the features of university life that makes academics cautious at best, conservative at least. We need to change that….if you keep reading this blog,” I promised, “you will get some insight into the mysteries of the system, and what kind of people folks turn into if they don't keep ironic distance.”

“That's why I'm blogging,” I concluded. “Ironic distance….Because frankly, boys and girls, being an academic isn't as much fun as it used to be, and I think we need to do something to change that.”

Going back to read some of those early posts, I am amazed that a forum was created in my lifetime that allowed a person to announce an agenda and begin to self-publish for free; mildly embarrassed at some of the things I put up and the reasons I put them up (although some of the same things are wicked funny), and more than a little proud of what I have accomplished as a writer and a public intellectual over the last twenty-four months. I have learned a great many things that I never would have learned had I not started blogging, including how to sit down and knock out a piece like this in a few hours, do a couple quick revisions, and feel pretty good about putting it out there for a lot of people I respect to critique.

I also think a great deal more than I used to about how technology alters public culture and provokes democratic change, as well as about what it means to create accessible literary arenas where people can disagree about important ideas. I think about what it means to compile an electronic archive that one can re-write almost indefinitely (in fact, Nancy Cott, Director if the Schlesinger Library, is currently working with her staff on a project to archive feminist blogs permanently, which will cause a blog like mine to ultimately be “fixed” in a way it never will be while it is up on Blogspot.) I think about anonymity, since most bloggers and many people who comment on blogs, are anonymous. I myself began blogging anonymously, and then stopped, something I will say something more about later if you are interested – and while I have a strong position about the dangers of anonymity, it also has an important place in academic life in allowing senior people to hear things they would not otherwise be told....

....Not inconsequentially, my persona as the Tenured Radical (who also calls herself TR) was launched during a period in my life that I would characterize as a moment of professional crisis and self-doubt, a time that I happily no longer feel any need to dwell on. But my flippant call in my inaugural post for “ironic distance” and “fun” was as close as I could get at the time to saying what I really felt, which was that if I couldn’t resolve my anger and frustration at how my writing had been purposely trashed as part of a departmental political struggle, I would need to do something else for a living that did not require publishing or writing, and fast. I can hint at the extent of this existential crisis by adding that, in addition to exploring the blogosphere, I was also having lively conversations with the dean of admissions at the Yale Law School.

Now, some of you are going to say “Aha! Just what I thought! Blogs are not writing, or scholarship. They are therapy!” Well, no. I was in therapy, and lots of it. What I needed to do was to learn to write all over again with confidence, grace, authority and wit. I needed, in short, to learn to have fun again. And that was one of the most important things this historian learned when she went to the blogosphere.

Blogging is, first and foremost about writing, and writing in a way that foregrounds play as well as intellect. This makes blogging fundamentally different from how we were all brought up to write in history school, which is that writing was first and foremost “our work.” Think about it: one of the earliest conventions we learn as graduate students is to greet a person we don’t know, not by asking “what are you writing?” but, “What are you working on?” In a book I would recommend to all of you, which I read shortly after I began blogging, Ann Lamott’s Bird By Bird, Lamott (who is not a blogger, but sort of writes like one) goes on at often hilarious length about the difficulties of taking on a writing life as one’s work. They are all difficulties that are very familiar to historians and, I would wager, often accentuated by the general condition of being women working in institutions that are sexist to a greater or lesser degree (something by the way that we don’t talk about much any more except by sharing anecdotes.) Among the difficulties addressed in the book are being simply unable to write because of an incident, or incidents, of writing trauma in the past (check!); ordinary forms of attention deficit disorder that cause you to interrupt writing to feed the dog, do the laundry, watch TV (check!); the problem of getting useful, accurate, and swift feedback so that you can tell whether what you have written is good or bad (check!); wanting to have fun instead (check!); and difficulty in keeping a continuous focus on one’s work, a focus that cannot be achieved if one does not write every day (check! And check!)
Now, part of why this book appeals to me is that Lamott talks about very difficult things (like having someone tell you for malicious reasons that what you have written is a horrible book when in fact you are fairly sure it is a good book) in a funny, and not a tragic, way. That was very helpful to me because it wasn’t just that I had been traumatized by such an incident, it is that there is virtually no academic script that doesn’t relate obstacles in one’s writing career as having a tragic and permanently damaging outcome. Such outcomes might include the indefinite delay of a well-deserved promotion, as in my case; but there are also worse outcomes: people lose jobs, or –worse, if you really imagine yourself as a writer – you never write again, even if you do keep your job. And what Lamott argues is that there is no way to solve this problem but to write.

Write everyday.

Blogging helped me do that. As I did I began to write little essays about the condition of our lives and the work we do, and people responded to them: essays about teaching, about the dilemmas of the twenty-first century university, about what it meant to be a good senior colleague, and most of all – some of my most popular posts – the evils of the tenure system and a job market clogged with good people who can’t find work. One result of these essays was I got something from blogging that I never anticipated: new colleagues! For surely, part of the trauma of my temporarily derailed professional life was discovering that there were a small number of people I worked with who were really willing to take the time to really damage my reputation as a writer and scholar if they could – not just take the time, but commit to that project. Then there were the bulk of my colleagues at Zenith, who really came through for me, but over a period of years, paradoxically became yet another reminder that I lived in a world that was perhaps permanently divided between friends and enemies.

What blogging allowed me to do primarily, however, was to think seriously and productively about what brought me to this profession in the first place, and work specifically to make that thing happen in a new way. For me, what I have referred to elsewhere as “my second career at the same institution” has also caused me to think seriously about how I got to this point and what I want out of writing. Most important, because of blogging, I write every day, something that makes it possible to be a writer all the time, not just on weekends or on sabbatical, as I often did when writing was the “work” that came last because it required so much more focus than everything else. And this has reshaped my writing habits substantially. Time spent doing other things (teaching, say, or chairing) is time when I am taking a break from writing, not the other way around. Even if large projects are completed slowly, to write every day is to keep continuity in my creative habits that nurtures a sense of connection to my writing as primary work – not work that gets done when my work for everyone else is finished.

As a blogger, I also get to be a historian who engages regularly with contemporary history, which is a messy and exhilarating business. Those of you who follow Tenured Radical, know that in addition to writing about the past, I get to be a cultural critic, essayist, unrepentant goad to right-wingers and faux Dear Abby for young historians. That said, this kind of cultural work on the internet is considered highly suspect by many scholars I know, in part because there are virtually no rules that govern blogging, and the university world is obsessed with rules and the respectability that comes with following the rules. Blogging is also an activity associated most strongly with the young, which makes a middle aged scholar-blogger even more suspect as serious intellectual. I have had conversations with some of my colleagues in which you would have thought they were talking to someone who had taken up competitive skateboarding at the age of fifty.

It is the best kind of middle-aged crisis, I think. While blogging has involved me in some dicey interactions in the university world, it has also included me in a diverse intellectual circle of people, most of them younger than I, and many of whom are graduate students or working adjunct. In other words, my new colleagues are people I really wouldn’t know otherwise, and I have to tell you, I learn a lot from them. This, in turn, has allowed me to re-engage with my old colleagues in a freer, and sometimes pleasantly detached, way, and with a sharpened sense of consciousness about what higher education ought to be doing.

Blogging also allows me to write short pieces, work on form, voice, and getting complex ideas across to an audience that I need to entice in order to keep them reading. I sometimes compare it to a pianist playing scales: to the extent that blogging is not, perhaps, the most serious scholarly form, to take it seriously is to become a better writer. But best of all, I am read every day and my readers write back. They tell me what they think, and sometimes they tell me that my writing made a difference to them. Sometimes they get angry at me, and because of that I have become a keener listener and also grown a tougher hide. I have come to terms with something that is often difficult to face in the scholarly world, particularly given our systems of high-stakes evaluation: that sometimes there are people who really hate what you think is your best work. This, I will say in conclusion, has made me a braver writer.

And it has made me a historian who is once again having fun.

Dream A Little Dream Of Me: Six Easy Steps to Writing a Great Job Letter

Last year I was in conversation with a fine scholar and a caring mentor from an excellent northeastern university. Since I have no graduate students, I expressed surprise -- given how much more emphasis is being placed on readying candidates for a tight market at institutions like hers -- that the quality of job letters in a recent search was so uneven. She rolled her eyes. "If my students would only show me the letters they write," she said. "The problem is they tend only to show their job letters to each other, and they repeat each other's mistakes."

So this is where we need to start, as you ready yourself for the job season by drafting the letter you will use as a template for your job applications. Don't write your letters in isolation, and don't get advice from other people who don't have jobs yet. The letter is what introduces you to search committee members: not your recommendations, not your vita, not your writing sample, not your teaching portfolio. And while writing a great letter won't get you the job, it needs to perform a single function well which is to get you a preliminary interview.

The letter should, in other words, say to a search committee:

"I'm fabulous. I am your fantasy hire. Dream about me"

Pay attention to the following basic principles, and you will have a good chance of writing the letter that makes you some committee's Dream Baby. Or at least, one of ten or twelve Dream Babies who will get preliminary interviews.

A good opening paragraph delivers complete and relevant information. It should answer the followng questions: What job are you applying for and where did you read about it? (Yes, there may be more than one search in the department.) In one sentence, how do you describe yourself as a scholar and what are your major and minor fields? (It's best to do that in some way that makes an immediate and logical connection to the job that is advertised and the department you are applying to, don't you think?) Then you need a sentence that describes where you are in your career. (When do you expect to/did you defend? Where are you teaching now, and on what basis? Do not tell the committee that you just lost your job; your referees will handle this for you. And do not offer any explanation for why you are leaving a tenure-track job after two years. It is none of anyone's business at this, or any other, stage.)

Then you need one sentence that describes the writing sample you have sent, and that relates it to the topic of your dissertation/manuscript. This should be written in such a way as to cause the reader to think: "Ooh! How interesting!" as opposed to, say, "How early is it okay to eat lunch?" And please note: if you have not yet defended it is a "dissertation;" if you have defended it is "my book manuscript." And if, like many recent degree holders, you are silently twittering, "I have such trouble thinking of it as a book!" please remain silent on this point throughout the process. In my fields, history and American Studies, graduate students write dissertations; people with Ph.D.s write books. People who get hired are people who can project the image, at least, that they are people who view publication of a book in the next three to six years as realistic.

The penultimate sentence should state what is included in the application that you have sent, and a final sentence that says who the committee should expect to receive letters from and which of these people is actually your current/former dissertation director. Remember, you have no parents. You are directly descended from your graduate advisor. And you are helping the search committee cultivate a lovely fantasy about -- you!!! "A Smartypants Breathtaking student!" they want to be able to say to each other, with little stars flying out of the corners of their eyes, as if Professor Breathtaking herself will be coming to the department in your body.

But to return to a more serious tone: you want to be clear about who you are and what you do. Every sentence needs to contain basic and relevant information that will cause the committee to proceed with interest in and great openness to your candidacy. You do not want committee members to keep reading after a sigh of exasperation that they are going to have to tease the information they need out of the rest of the application (some people are too lazy to do this. Sorry, but it's true.) You can certainly recapture interest, but why come from behind when you could start by throwing the long ball and scoring first? Which is all to say, writing a letter is no different from writing anything else: the opening paragraph should contain the structure and information your reader needs to understand you as you mean to be understood.

That you are fabulous.

The next two paragraphs should describe the argument of your current major work; say why it adds to the literature; and characterize the research you have done. One paragraph for the argument and its significance to the field; one paragraph for your sources and methods. This is the part of the letter that can be reproduced verbatim for any job, because this is the one thing about you that won't change. In paragraph two, you will want an opening sentence that tells me this: if the archive, data, literary tradition has been written about a lot, why are you going back to it? If, however, your research is quite new, emphasize this. Remember, particularly at small colleges, or in small or mixed discipline (say "humanities") departments at large universities, there will be people on the search committee who aren't in your field or perhaps even in your discipline, or may -- I am sorry to say -- not be very active scholars: it doesn't hurt to draw everyone a map. And don't forget to add a closing sentence that lets the reader know what has already been published from this research and where; or what is under review.

The fourth paragraph should characterize your teaching experience, and why it, and your scholarship, makes you the person they should hire for this job. Don't make the committee figure this out on its own; better yet, don't force the person on the committee who is enthusiastic about your scholarship and field have to make the case to his co-committee members that you should have made to all of them about why they should pursue your application. This paragraph is the place to say you have actually taught the Victorian Lit survey, or to say that you haven't, but you have included a syllabus that you have thought up for the occasion (this, my friends, is where the teaching portfolio can do you some good; and if you don't have a teaching portfolio, include this syllabus in your application anyway.) This is the place to say that you offer something special: that although a microbiologist, you have taught sections of Freshman Comp for the last three years and you would love the opportunity to teach young science majors at a small liberal arts college how to write; that although a historian, you have a master's degree in anthropology, and would love to teach a course in ethnohistory, or oral history methodologies.

Eliminate jargon. This is so important I wish to repeat it.

Eliminate jargon. By this, I do not mean eliminating language that is part of being a specialist, although you might take the trouble to prune it a bit so that you can demonstrate your ability to make your work accessible to the vast number of non-specialists you will work with and teach. Nor do I mean shelving the theoretical perspective, and its attendant language, that places your work in its field. But I do mean that you have to make yourself clear, and it is a sign of scholarly immaturity to not be able to express ideas in a way that most other people with Ph.D.'s will understand. Confusing people, and creating a big mystery about what your work really is, is not fabulous. If you are in a marginal field, and you use jargony language, you reinforce ignorant prejudices about the unimportance of your specialty to the larger field rather than persuading the committee that universalist paradigms, to paraphrase David Liu, need to speak to minority knowledges, and vice versa. If you are in a field that is central to the discipline, don't make that field unrecognizable to those who know it well by putting it in a fancy party dress: say clearly why your work adds to a powerful and interesting set of questions that are in circulation. Jargon doesn't make you sound smart, and it can have the opposite effect of making you seem inaccessible and unaware of how you are perceived by others, the last thing one would choose in a teacher or a colleague.

Know your audience. Before you re-draft your basic job letter, go to the website for that department and see who works there and what they teach. This should guide your choices about what you emphasize as your minor teaching fields, or a specialty course you could offer. Extra points for calling attention to the fact that you have done this homework, e.g. "An intensive seminar I would like teach on gay liberation might ideally be positioned as an upper level elective for students who have taken the Theory of Social Movements course already offered by the department." This not only marks you as a person who is aware of others (see above), but as a person who takes initiative as part of a team.

Proofread your letter. Let it sit on your desk overnight. Then have someone else proofread it. You also need to eliminate basic mistakes like: putting the wrong name in the salutation (I have seen, bizarrely, a colleague from another institution being greeted; and I have seen "Dear Professor Zenith.") If no one is named as the chair, "To the committee" is graceful (although I do not care for the laborious and outdated, "To whom it may concern"); and if someone is named, "Dear Professor Radical" will do (not "Dr. Radical"--I'm not a real doctor.) And for a variety of reasons, in this day and age I think it is wise to avoid gender completely in the salutation.

And for God's sake, proof that first paragraph! It shouldn't say you are applying to Zenith when you are actually applying to Potemkin; it shouldn't say you are applying for a job in twentieth century United States history when the job description said "post-1945 United States."

To sum up: Let the letter represent you in all your fabulousness. It is true that brilliant people write bad job letters, and people who write bad letters get jobs (a friend of mine once hired someone who sent a job letter that was not only confusing, but written on a piece of theme paper. This former job candidate -- who turned out to be Fabulous -- is also now Very Famous.) But although you can get through to the next stage with a job letter that doesn't represent you well, why leave it up to chance?

Next week: For the scholar with everything, why ask for more? Applying for a job when you already have one, and -- for the search committee -- how to evaluate a candidate pool that contains scholars with different levels of experience.

Return to Sender; or, the Art of Rejection

In response to recent accusations of smuggery, I would like to say that, although I occupy a privileged position in the world, I am still subject to rejection from time to time. I hate rejection. It makes me feel unwanted. I hate it when students reject me by writing mean teaching evaluations. It makes me feel misunderstood and resentful. Fortunately it doesn't happen very often.

I have had to get used to rejection, though, since between my exalted position as Chair of the Program and the never-ending project of keeping my scholarly life vital, I have to apply for things constantly -- internal to Zenith as well as external -- and, as they say, you can't win 'em all. One year, during the Unfortunate Events, because members of my department were giving me the Big Raspberry and because I couldn't really sleep, I applied for everything under the sun: five jobs, three year-long fellowships, and a tiny research fellowship that the actual fellowship committee chair at the archive had urged me to apply for. It was that last one that tore it -- I sat down on my front stairs and wept. Never, I vowed, NEVER will I apply for anything again -- not even an extension on my taxes.

I got over it. And now, because of "my privilege," as my Zenith students would put it, and because I am really an optomist, I apply for things all the time without worrying much whether I will get them or not. Jobs, fellowships, symposia where your work has to be accepted. And sometimes I do get them, or in the case of jobs, I get a nibble here and there. This is an ideal outcome, by the way, if you are already employed in a good situation: I know I am appreciated, but I don't have to move or say goodbye to my friends. Although I must admit, my friends seem to say goodbye to me with regularity -- another story, for another day.

But because I have been getting a few rejection letters myself, and because I recently sent sixty or so of them, I have been following the discussion in the blogosphere about rejection letters rather avidly. These are people being rejected for tenure track jobs -- one fellow apparently took to papering the wall of the TA lounge with them. This is what I have learned: many of you do not do such a great job rejecting people -- some of you never send a thing, assuming that time will pass and people will just get it after a while that they aren't going to be interviewed. So pay attention, search chairs of 2008-09:

1. Do not send rejections by email.
2. Do not send rejections by post card.
3. When writing a letter to candidates, if you actually met them, or solicited the candidacy, take two seconds to write a personal note. This means not having your departmental secretary sign them, of course.
4. Send rejections in a timely way: at least when the search is over, if not before. In fact, although wisdom has it that you reject no one until the chosen candidate has signed on the dotted line, truth be told, a large part of the pool is out of the running after the first cut. Why not tell the people who didn't make the semi-final cut -- say, in January, rather than April?

I suspect I get the special handling variety of rejection letters because of the rank thing, but there is no reason that has to be so. Being respectful to job candidates goes a long way, from my perspective. I would like to say that this year I got no response from one search chair, one ordinary "We hired blah blah blah..." letter, and two particularly nice letters, both from (cough, cough) women. Odd coincidence, no?

One letter - that came by email, true, but I don't really care -- said it was so good to have read my materials because there might be a position that suited me better some day (isn't that nice? It was the posiiton that didn't fit the candidate, not the candidate that didn't fit the position. Sweet.) The other said that I was not a candidate because of how the position was ultimately defined, not because of "any deficiencies on [my] part." Again -- nice.

Of course, the last letter struck exactly the right note, since this is the letter I always fear I will receive:

Dear Professor Radical,

Are you kidding? We have people defending dissertations who look better on paper than you do. And full professor? Puh-lease.

Sincerely,

Sherman Pinprick
Distinguished Tinky Winky Chair of Queer Studies
Venerable University

P.S. You also didn't get the job because of your stinking blog.

Saturday Blues: Of Postings, Powerpoint, Periodontia and Presidential Candidates

The good news is that, as of last Tuesday I published my 200th post. The bad news is that I have had no time or inclination to post since last Tuesday, and then only a video. OK, it was a funny video, you've got to admit. Hence, although I cannot report bloggers' guilt (some of my fellow internet pioneers do claim to feel these burdensome obligations to their readers), I do have the Saturday Blues. If I had had time to either practice my guitar, or go to the lessons I was gifted for Christmas at the Neighborhood Music School, I would set this to music, but a post will have to do.

The Saturday Blues often follow a long, difficult week, after which I look back and have trouble remembering anything I did that met my own life goals and ambitions. But the Blues can also be connected to the temporary necessity of -- in addition to abandoning exercise, decent sleep, and therapy -- stepping out of my life as the Radical. One of the downsides of blogging, for those of us who lock onto it as a creative and intellectual outlet, is the loss of blogging when life closes in, as it can do for academics engaged in the sundry tasks for which we are responsible. When there is no time to blog, the absence of an intellectual and creative life is felt perhaps more keenly than it would otherwise be, were blogging not a solution to the evasiveness of intellectual and creative life that accompanies the often endless bureaucratic tasks of a senior member of the faculty.

Do I make sense here? Does it resonate?

In fact, I just had time a few minutes ago to sort the mail received at the house this week. In addition to the bills and offers to use my terrific credit rating to go into debt, I have: at least six flyers from the Clinton campaign (two women do live here after all) and none from the Obama people (which makes me think they are thrifty in some ways that could be good for the national government); a (small) check from my mother repaying me for a Christmas gift that we all agreed would be better purchased locally; and a tiny postcard informing me that the Radical Family (two aging lesbians and a dog) is being offered congratulations for having been selected as a "Nielson household." We are told that we should expect to be called shortly to respond to an exciting survey.

See if I answer the phone this week. As if a household that watches only Netflix, HBO and Showtime programming, Friday Night Lights, The Lehrer Hour, and re-runs of CSI is honestly worth talking to anyway. We have a television with a twelve inch screen. Call my nephews instead with your faux social science.

Now, I do have to admit that other good things have happened in the past five days as the mail and the blues accumulated: it's just that I have been too overwhelmed to notice and appreciate them, so without breathing space am I (imagine my brain as an overstuffed closet full of other people's coats, tennis rackets, book bags and outgrown boots.) And as I pause to write about them, even the bad and depressing things that happened this week have a good side. To wit:

*An article that I knew wasn't very together when I sent it was definitively rejected by the journal that solicited it in the first place. Of course, other than rejection, the unhappy side of this is that two anonymous readers may think I am stupid rather than overworked. Up side? None of that namby-pamby "revise and resubmit" nonsense: I respect this journal so much for rejecting me outright I may send them another piece some day. In addition, I don't have to do extensive revisions on a tight calendar at a moment when I have no time to think, much less restructure an article. Instead, the manuscript can sit in my inbox and ferment, along with the last half of my book manuscript. And maybe someone else will finish both of them when I am not looking.

*I have been invited to take part, along with two other people who I have always wanted to meet, in an Exciting Event that will garner National Attention. I cannot reveal what it is, however, nor be completely happy about it, because I am not sure it will happen. Yet.

*After watching The Wind that Shakes the Barley last night, a movie I had looked forward to, I am disappointed to say that I thought it was boring and poorly plotted, although in addition to narrating the brutal British occupation of Ireland following the uprising of 1918, it is probably quite relevant as a thought piece about more contemporary colonial occupations -- say in Iraq, just to pull one out of my hat. Other up sides? No matter what happens to me this semester, I will not have all of my fingernails pulled out with a pair of rusty pliers while Cockney noncoms shout at me to give up the names of my accomplices. Which of course, I would never do, since if my associates are like the good people in the movie, they would shoot me on the heath afterwards, honoring only my wish not to be buried next to the English lord they had executed a moment before. In fact, I am happy to say that the names of all my accomplices are already printed in an alphabetized list in the faculty directory. Some with home addresses! No interrogation necessary, thank you!

*I finally used Powerpoint in my classroom. Frankly, it was not an entirely emPowering experience, and left me feeling dull and listless, which I do not feel when I know I have taught a Very Good Class. But the up side: I have broken through the psychological Powerpoint barrier and, although time will tell, I think it will help rather than hinder my teaching in the end. Like everything else, it takes practice, doesn't it?

*I finally made it to the dentist, an appointment that I have had to reschedule twice because I have had No Time. This is a good thing, because it still weighs on me what damage I did to my teeth -- and how much money I ended up spending on them -- because I had no dental insurance in graduate school, and hence, never went to the dentist. Of course, going to the dentist also pretty much wrecked the only free day I had this week. Furthermore, the dentist comped me on some Sensodyne toothpaste, a sure and depressing sign, from my perspective, that I am on the Downhill side of life (memo to self: do those revisions on the Untogether Article sooner rather than later.) Up side: I did not have cavities in the places where I was feeling pain; am not being scheduled for gum surgery, the latest payment plan for sending the children of dentists on to college; did not have to replace an aging, cracked filling with either a new filling or a thousand-dollar crown; and the fact that my jaw dislocates from time to time is not due to incipient bone cancer, but rather, as the dentist reassured me, "probably nighttime tooth-grinding due to stress." Well, yay. The other piece of good news is that the way my jaw dislocates is all good. Dislocating forward makes it possible for me to snap it back in on my own (actually it feels more like a mildly painful "thump" than a snap), whereas were it dislocating in the other direction, my mouth would be stuck open and I would have to have surgery. Double yay.

*I lost my Presidential candidate, John Edwards (many thanks to those of you who wrote in sympathy), which was a royal bummer. Once again I have had to come to terms with the fact that if Americans care about resolving poverty, they see it as a mere happy side effect of giving more goodies to that "middle class" we hear so much about, and/or tax cuts for the wealthy, and/or the enhanced capacity of the poor to attend wealthy universities and SLACS while their families stay home and try to figure out how to eat, heat their homes, get child and health care, educate the other children and reduce the number of jobs they hold to the desirable "one job." But the up side? As Paul Krugman noted in yesterday's New York Times, Obama and Clinton have been pushed to the left because of Edwards, toward better social policies, or even speaking about social policies in a comprehensive way, and that is a good thing. Another up side is that, dreamer though I am, I knew perfectly well that the Edwards candidacy was not going to make it and that I was going to have to shift my allegiance in the end. Who I will vote for on Super Tuesday will provide grist for another post: I have decided that question definitively even though my heart is with the undecided at this point. And as it turns out, Connecticut will matter after all!

And finally, one of the two Commencements I have missed in my years at Zenith will have Teddy Kennedy as the main speaker. I have always wanted to meet Teddy, and even more so now, since a former Hill staffer I met in the park the other day in Shoreline told me that Teddy takes his Portuguese Water Dog Splash to committee meetings and hearings and whatnot. Up side to missing this once in a lifetime, glorious event? While everyone else is either broiling in the sun or dripping in the rain at Zenith, I will be in Paris celebrating my receding gumline -- er, I mean, my fiftieth birthday, and the end of a long and difficult year.

The Radical Reports In and Things Are Excellent Here in Radical Land

Its been awhile. But don't worry. I'm back, blog-dudes and dudettes.

Since I started Tenured Radical, except for vacation, I do not think I have gone six days without a new post, as I just did. I do not, as some bloggers seem to, experience guilt for neglecting my blog (one of my flaws, I have been told in my deep past by women heading out the door with suitcases in hand, is that guilt and I are not as fully acquainted as we might be.) But I do miss my audience, and I miss writing freely. I miss stealing pictures. I miss Flavia.

One of the reasons I have been absent is starting school in my dual roles as chair of American Studies and the Director of the Castle: it's a little like being Batman and Robin at the same time. There are endless small but necessary tasks to be done every day, from signing many student forms ("Holy oversubscription, Batman!") to making sure we have a proper menu for tomorrow night's Welcome Dinner for new faculty ("Thank you, Alfred.") The other reason I am absent from my beloved blogosphere is teaching. Your Radical is not only teaching the Twentieth Century United States survey to a large and interesting crowd of Zenith students, but there is -- you guessed it -- a blog for the course. This requires some attention too, and is very fun -- it's a little like writing a textbook off the top of your head. And there are also a bunch of links for the students to follow up -- our very own Tim Lacy and Chris Miller, Mary Dudziak, Clio Bluestocking,the HNN gang and the Religion and History folks. How great is this?

Why not GayProf, you ask? Because you have to earn GayProf, that's why.

A little deep background: when I last taught this course, there was no internet. Ergo, there were a great many things I lectured about that I can now assemble on a variety of electronic platforms (I would love to show you my Blackboard, but you can't get in because you don't work for Zenith. Poor you.) For example, if you click on the course blog, you will see Turner's essay on the closing of the frontier, and TR's speech on "The Strenuous Life." Presto -- primary documents delivered to a student's room. You will also see that a couple of my students have commented, and I hope more of them use it as a place to speak out. My idea -- since there are 81 souls in the class, an abnormally large group for Zenith, is that I will get higher levels of participation if students don't have to risk their throats closing in anxious spasms while declaiming in front of 80 other people. And me. And my fabulous writing tutors.

As you can tell, this class is the equivalent in size of a Small Town, with citizens, minor functionaries and a mayor (me.) Think Block Island in the winter, or Burley, Idaho. And one would in a town, we have a movie theater. That's right, all the films in the class can be uploaded to the Blackboard, so that students can go over them again if they like. We are also developing a library: thanks to Google Books, there are all kinds of texts that have been scanned, and can be linked: for free!! (Do you ever wonder how these people make money? I know -- the pop-ups. But really I feel like I am getting the best of the bargain here.) Apparently I can also post my lectures as podcasts on the Blackboard as well, although that is a tad less appealing, since frankly - I would begin to feel redundant, and I think we would be edging over into distance learning. But back to the films. Once I found out that I could upload movies and documentaries, I arranged to post my favorite Reagan-era movie ever, Tony Scott's 1986 homo-military masterpiece, Top Gun -- too long to watch in class, it is now a "reading" for week 11. Ho ho ho.

So really, the danger is not that I will stop posting to Tenured Radical -- that could never happen -- but that I will have too much fun teaching, Someone Upstairs will figure it out, realize I am not busy enough with my other two administrative jobs and four searches, and find something horrible for me to do -- like run the AP Credit Conversion Committee or something. So don't tell.