PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

I recently received an email from a younger colleague about how much pressure s/he feels to "perform" for students. This concern followed on a set of teaching evaluations that, the same email said, were the "best ever." So it looks like the great teaching evaluations, instead of bolstering confidence, made this young teacher feel as though the bar had been raised. Last semester's "good" could not be good enough this term.....oy.

I'm trying to think about how to respond to this in a constructive way, but it caused me to think of a couple other things about teaching that, when I remember them, I try to pass on to my untenured colleagues.

1. When you are really sick it is ok to miss class. I know a very famous historian who told me, years ago when I was working for her, that she had never canceled a class, ever. This made a huge impression on me, and I too decided that the show must always go on. But as I got older, I found that a sore throat was usually made worse by lecturing or running a discussion; several times I actually lost my voice for three or four days because I insisted on teaching when I shouldn't have. So my advice: have some flex classes in the schedule, and a movie sitting on your desk at all times. If you can't bear to have the departmental secretary put a sign on the door saying class is canceled, know that you can show the movie at the last minute even if you feel you must attend class.

2. Less is more. When I am observing a young teacher I know s/he is in trouble when I see four or five pages of lecture notes. I top out at about a page and a half nowadays -- the bones of the argument, and then I build on it. Having a huge amount of material that you feel you must get through wears the students out, and wears you out trying to deliver it. And assigning less reading to students and knowing they have got it is better than making really fancy, super-hard syllabi that you can turn in for third-year review - along with your teaching evaluations that characterize your classroom as one of Dante's Circles of Hell.

3. Students are not wowed by Powerpoint: they are, in fact, easily bored by it (so are search committees), and by all technology that wasn't invented yesterday. At the most, if you are a historian, use your Powerpoint to organize photographs. DON'T put your lecture up in bulletpoints: the difference between your classroom and an IBM strategy meeting instantly dissolves. Note: as far as I can tell students also hate BlackBoard, discussion boards and chatrooms (at least, chat rooms organized around your class.) Oh, and speaking of technology -- you might want to consider taking down your Friendster page unless you can honestly space it out that your students are cruising you and all your friends.

4. If you know you are performing for your students, you may be on the edge of going too far. Attention getting maneuvers are fine; doing voices (say, Eleanor Roosevelt) is borderline, as are props; and outfits are out of bounds.

5. Don't let students make out in class, even though it is awkward to make them stop. I will allow cuddling, within reason (on the theory that it is below my dignity to notice) but smooching crosses the line. My favorite technique? Throw a pop quiz. After the quizzes are handed in, you say (since the smoochers have had to part briefly to complete the assignment), "Every time I see people making out in class there will be another quiz." I guarantee you it will end that day.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

One of the things I had forgotten about being back to school is that feeling on Sunday that you could either sit down and work, thus getting ahead for the week, or you could take advantage of the fact that there is a whole day (and a nice one too) when nothing is scheduled, and you can do as you please. It's a terrible decision. But I think this weekend I have gone in the direction of seizing the day, since so far I have gone to the gym and taken Extravaganza to brunch at a local trattoria with an impressive dessert menu and it is now three o'clock.

And while I have a small break coming my way (I cleverly scheduled a movie for Monday, on the theory that it is still drop-add and the population of my lecture class is in flux), by Tuesday the scheduling part of my brain has to go back into motion. This week I must:

* write a lecture, since the last lecture I gave on the Mattachine Society was over three years ago, and I can't imagine giving the one I have again.
*write a book review that I am actually going to be PAID FOR that is due Wednesday.
*read a very hard book by Tuesday. Or at least half of it. Or at least as much as I think they will have gotten to, plus ten pages.
*pull together a conference proposal that I took responsibility for that is due Thursday.

This may not seem very difficult to those of you who have been slogging away in the trenches since September, but believe you me, if your schedule has looked like this for almost two years:

*go to the gym
*write until lunch
*eat lunch while watching TIVO'd episodes of Friday Night Lights and DVD's of Deadwood, The Wire and The Shield.
*read until cocktail hour
*have a drink and dinner.
*read
*go to bed

it is daunting. And then, of course, since I have been gone for ever, everyone wants to have lunch with me, which means I can no longer watch TV at noon. So heaven only knows how I will keep up with TV.

In other news, events suggest that it is a matter of time before I am thoroughly outed to my colleagues: in checking my sitemeter, I realize that I have been linked to several on-line sites which cater to the academic trade, one of which has a close colleague of mine as a regular commentator. The only saving grace is this: I never write mean things about my friends. That would be the main difference between me and Harriet the Spy (that and the Ph.D.), who got thoroughly trashed for her indiscretions if you may recall. And I would never skewer someone on-line who I would not skewer in person.

Yo Wuz Pumpin'?

YO WUZ PUMPIN'?

This was the salutation on an e-mail I recently received from Extravaganza. Needless to say, given certain age-related disorders, I had to sound it out phonetically, and then repeat it a couple times fast, to figure out what it meant.

I think the proper response is, "Awrite, wuz pumpin wid u?" But I feared that this would be perceived as either racist (by an unintended reader of the email) or silly (by the intended reader). It's like trying to do that five-part black power handshake, but you find yourself waving your hand in the air after he first two parts, not making contact with anything and realizing that you are just as white as everyone always says you are. So I responded with an invitation to lunch at a pricey restaurant instead, which is really more in my, shall we say, realm of expertise.

In other news, I have met the first class of both of my courses, and can report that I do remember how to teach after all. My course in women's history has, at last count, four men in it -- one of whom is actually a women's studies major, something I have not seen in a good long time. So let's have a special shout out this week for students who will still sign up for a course that has "feminist" in the description.

And isn't it strange that, when you are not looking for a new job anymore (which I am not, and promised myself I would not for the next two years - or until my next book comes out, or which ever happens first) the right job makes itself apparent? The job is this: Beyonce Knowles needs a new agent.

This is why.

Because a good agent NEVER would have allowed Beyonce to be in a movie, "Dreamgirls," where she would be so immediately and completely upstaged by a novice actress of whom most of us (or those who do not watch American Idol religiously) have never heard, Jennifer Hudson. Granted, Beyonce undoubtedly needed a start that was reasonably prestigious and not too challenging. I don't think she has ever acted before, and co-starring as a Diana Ross clone probably seemed like a good idea at the time, particularly since Diana Ross became a superstar, and Beyonce would like to be a superstar. But -- and here is where I would not have blown it as Beyonce's agent -- the Effie (Mary Wilson) role is far more complex and interesting, and Hudson grabs it by the throat in the first number and never lets it go. And then "Living Without You" -- which is the song from hell, because you either nail it and blow everyone's socks off, or you wither out there on the stage trying, is the biggest movie musical triumph since "Over the Rainbow." Or maybe "Tonight," which as I understand it, Natalie Wood was not allowed to sing. The effect is to make Beyonce's voice look less versatile and, well, thin.

Beyonce, darling, your agent should have known that. I would have, just from watching "Entourage" obsessively for the nearly two years of my leave. Furthermore, anyone who has seen "All About Eve" would have known that an actress who agreed (god bless her!) to gain twenty pounds for the role was ready to put it all out on the line. That was a sign, baby, and no one was minding the store for you.

That can be corrected. Let me tell you, just between girlfriends, I know something about your pain right now. And I am here to tell you that it is *possible* to pick up the pieces and go on after such a stunning setback. I've done it. So for you -- and only for you -- will I consider leaving my job at Zenith University at this point in my career. Call anytime, baby. I'm home.

Experimenting with a Quick Post...

.....because I bet some people who have quit blogging wouldn't have done so if they thought they could just sit down and knock off a post in fifteen minutes. That's five minutes to draft, five to check, and five to go back and re-do it because at every stage spelling mistakes, typos, and split infinitives make themselves apparent.

Yesterday was first lecture and first department meeting. First lecture left me exhausted, and a little hoarse. I had forgotten that teaching requires a form of physical fitness that is different from being in shape for, say, rowing, which is what I do to stay good looking and generate happy chemicals to wash my brain.

First department meeting was a pleasant surprise, mostly because the man who has taken over as chair in my absence, Dr. Zen, runs a heck of a good meeting, so we clipped along without getting too stuck in any penny ante struggles that often make me wish that instead of bringing my lunch I had brought a stack of papers to grade or a DVD. Also many of my younger colleagues rushed to greet me and seemed genuinely glad that I had returned. And I was happy to see them, the little sweeties.

Exchange from the meeting:

Chair: "I have been asked to report to the dean any facilities requests that any of you might have."
Dr. Forehead: "What do you mean by facilities requests?"
Chair: "Any problems with the facilities."
Dr. Forehead: (quite seriously) "You mean the bathrooms?"
Chair: (patiently) "No-o-o-o, problems with the classrooms."
Dr. Grumpo: (suddenly checking in from a nap) "I think this room is very hot."

Never say that Dr. T. Radical has lost her sense of humor about the History Department.

T-Minus One And Counting: The Radical Returns To Work

We arrived back in Shoreline last night around midnight, after traveling for about twenty-five hours, which is how long it takes to get back to New England from Kauai normally, and then you have to add the extra time it takes when USAir and America West merge and re-book all your tickets through different hubs and with strange layovers. Then there is the bonus of extra stress added when, although your beloved travel agent (N) has carefully booked you into aisle seats, upon the re-booking you are put in middle seats. But never mind! We are home, the house sitter did a great job, and Sailor the dog is well and happy. I am a little jet-lagged, but not fatally so. And BTW, 20 fully conscious hours is exactly what it takes to read Eilen Boris's excellent history of sweated labor in the home, "Home to Work," which I am teaching in a week or so.

Tomorrow I begin my labors at Zenith anew, although slowly – catching up to new classroom technology with one of our ITS people at 11, and talking to a couple advisees reassigned from other people in the afternoon. Probably I will end up spending most of my day sorting the mail, and figuring out what I am supposed to do in the next two weeks: I know there are job candidates coming in, that there is a tenure case, and there are undoubtedly tasks I have completely forgotten existed. Then Wednesday, I teach my first lecture class in two years.

I have been trying to think about what exactly to say to them – what would mean getting off to the right start. When I was a new teacher, I used to place a heavy emphasis on Going Over the Syllabus to see if there were any Questions. There never were. Of course not – they didn’t know anything about the course yet, or the course materials, or me – by the time they developed questions or serious reservations about what I had to offer, it was probably too late to shift to another course. Or if anyone asked a question it would be in the realm of: “Um – there are two three to five page papers? So, does that mean we should write three or, um, five?” Really. Even at a fancy school like Zenith. And I would usually deliver some kind of a serious answer, like, “Very often a shorter paper can be a better paper; blah, blah, blah....” Which did not answer the question, since the question was, "Are you trying to fool me into thinking three will be ok, when the people who write five will all get A's??" I am sure I beat that topic to death until their tiny eyes glazed over, and I never even knew it.

As I became a better known and a more popular member of the faculty, my agenda changed and I trimmed my little walk through the syllabus, not because I realized it was a waste of time, but because I would walk into rooms packed with students who were hoping to enroll sitting and standing on every available flat space. Thus, usually the first class had to also accomplish what I would impolitely call “weeding” (remember, weeds are only flowers by another name!) In other words, the class is capped at 40, I’m willing to take 50, but there are 90 people in the room. What to do, what to do? For many years I had them fill out sheets of paper about their major, class year, previous courses taken, courses needed to graduate – and then I would toil over them. I also tended then to take way too many students – sometimes people I hadn’t let into the course by my idiotic non-system, who simply got in by continuing to show up grimly until the end of drop-add, at which point I would throw up my hands and enroll them. Nowadays, I just squint at the room and say, “How many first years?” Then I toss ‘em. Or, “How many non-majors?” Toss ‘em. Takes about three minutes if you privilege speed in getting the class started over justice. And there are very few who come back to you at graduation to say, “I always wanted to take a class with you but you kept throwing me out of the room.”

So now that I have discarded all that bureaucratic hooey, what to do? What to say? I am going to try some version of what my dear colleague, La Principessa, who teaches at Potemkin University, calls (in a southern accent that is usually mild but becomes more pronounced when she is being hilarious), “setting their hair on fire.”

TR: “Howdja start your class, Professor La P.?”
LP: “Ah set their hair on fahr.”

And I’ll just bet she does. So I am going to try that, but I am going to try something else too, which is to tell them a few modest things that I hope to accomplish, as opposed to the immodest ones, i.e., get you to love history forever, rock your world, turn you into an ace critical thinker, teach you to FOR GOD’S SAKE write a PROPER footnote, persuade you to consider research as a way of life whatever you choose to do for money, and inspire you to find a career you love as much as I love mine. Here’s my list of things that might be possible:

1. Leave you better off than you were before you took this course. This could mean any number of things, and not require getting a great grade. Without necessarily excelling, or even working hard in my course, I think it would be wonderful for a student to have learned something fundamentally different than s/he had ever learned before; realize that something s/he used to think s/he knew is not what it appeared to be; or perhaps simply become more confident. Or more humble.

2. Help you to listen carefully to people and ideas you don’t like, understand them, and respond in a respectful way. And while we’re at it – we’ll work on the concept that an issue usually has many “sides,” not just two.

3. Encourage you in healthy skepticism – of me, of your education, of political leaders.

4. Persuade you by the end of the semester, if you do not know this already, that history (to paraphrase Lucy Maynard Salmon’s essay, “History in a Back Yard”) is a living thing that saturates and enriches our world and can be learned by anyone.

And of course, there is the last part, which I won’t tell them, which is to remind myself, on the good days and the hard days, that I am only a small part of their education, and that I cannot really know what they will make of what happens in our classroom or what they will choose to do with it. And that the most unexpected things happen when you teach, which is really, after all, why I love doing it.

How Is Your Book?

Fine. Thank you for asking.

I am raising this now because my writing vacation will be over in five days, and my sabbatical in seven days, and I have accomplished nowhere near as much as I intended to either a) when sabbatical began, or b) when I expressed the resolve on this blog to dig into the book again, although the year’s work has produced several articles poised for publication in the spring like little commuter planes on a runway. And there is an introduction to the book, heavily edited in pencil, sitting on the kitchen counter to my right while I write a blog entry instead. When I get back to work, there will be lots of people, whose feelings towards me run the gamut of deep affection to – well, for a couple, and only a couple, distaste – and most of these people will say at some point in our initial conversation:

“So – how is your book?”

…. And I need to have something to say. So I will say: “Fine! Thank you for asking.” Then I will gently and skillfully turn the topic to something else, like, “So…I see that Bad Italian Restaurant has finally closed.” The only people who will not ask after my book will be those poor, dear, gentle colleagues who are themselves suffering from terminal writer’s block. They would not dream of asking about my book because then I might thoughtlessly respond by asking about…oh dear…their books. Which I wouldn’t, both because I am a nicer person than that, and because Zenith is a small enough place that it is pretty easy to keep in your mind who has published lately and who hasn’t, even if you have been on some form of sabbatical or leave for almost two years.

Now if my book isn’t finished (and as you who are reading this know it really couldn’t be because I was unable to look at it for eleven months) the progress I can report is that I have been doing a pencil edit, I have located what I consider to be some serious flaws, and I know how to fix them. This last was a particularly big step, and in fact I had that eureka moment in which I was able to re-state what the book is about in one sentence.

I have also accepted the fact that that making this book really work will take a lot of labor, which I am starting to wrap my head around, because I have a new project going that is really pretty exciting and I would rather expend my creative energy there. But this progress is not insignificant: one of the things I have learned over the twenty years since I finished my dissertation is that hard work isn’t such a big deal, but figuring out how to direct it even semi-efficiently can be. And the thing I have learned only in the past few months is, having survived the Unfortunate Events, I am free to write exactly what I please. This new freedom seems to be allowing me, in fits and starts, to imagine a slim-trim, fighting fit book coming out of a manuscript that was trying to do too many things for too many people. And slowly but surely, I am getting it what that book looks like. I am now permitting myself to do something Ann Lamott describes in “Bird by Bird,” a great writing book if there ever was one, which is discard things I have written – sometimes labored over – because they don’t belong in this book. They belong in someone else’s book. Or maybe another book of mine. I don’t know: but they don’t belong in this book.

This, in turn, has allowed me to imagine why the people who have read the previous incarnation of the mss. either love it or hate it – which is exactly the range of response, by the way. There are no in-betweenies. And let me hasten to say that about 80% of my readers did love it. And the 20% who hated it – oh baby. I remember reading one review and thinking to myself, “It’s a good thing I have published a lot already otherwise I might just quit and make fence rails for a living.” Anyway, I think the 80% saw the book I am now seeing and spoke to that: I think the twenty-per centers saw some piece of it that was written to speak to them but then, in horror, saw me abandon that voice or theme, never to return to it. For them, what I now see as the core of the book was just landscape. The eighty-per centers saw the parts written for the twenty-per centers and thought, “Oh well, she’s a smart woman. This, of course, will be edited out of the final manuscript,” and then returned to the book they really wanted to read. Re-reading what reviews I have in my possession, they make much better sense than they did a year ago.

But let’s get back to the “fine” part, since it is the beginning of term, and all of us will be asked How We Are, which often means, or is hard not to hear as, “What have you done lately?” Resist the urge to make a list of your accomplishments, which will simultaneously send your brain into a mad dash about whether it is enough, or how much you regret that you didn’t finish. Look them square in the eye and say “Fine, thank you.” Because if you are still writing, if can still care about whatever major project you are working on, if you still sit down a few days a week and knock out some prose, then I have to tell you – you are fine.

This is what I learned on my sabbatical. Ta-da.

The Good Enough Dissertation Advisor

For those of you who follow Ferule and Fescue loyally (and if you don’t, ask yourself why….) Flavia has raised the question of the post-grad school relationship between dissertation advisor and advisee. You’ll be glad to know that Flavia has checked in with her advisor and received a satisfactory, if brief, response, that recognizes her continued existence in the world and her capacity for great things. And I’m glad that those of us who encouraged her to do this were helpful. Since I read the outcome of this dilemma, I have had several other thoughts, which should be taken in the spirit of reflection rather than instruction.

My relationship with dissertation advisors – yes, plural – was crafted by a number of unusual things. First, was the place I went to graduate school, which was a fairly middle of the road Ph.D mill (later I discovered this too was a mistaken impression, since 2/3 of the graduate students went on being ABD forever, until they were all booted off the rolls in the early 1980’s). I chose Potemkin University because (I kid you not) it was five blocks away from my very cheap apartment. I realized that if I went to either of the prestigious universities I had been admitted to, I would have to move to more expensive digs or spend a lot of time on the train. Also I had no intention of going on to an academic career (I planned on journalism instead), AND they awarded financial aid without regard to one’s GRE scores, which gave me a big leg up since I had a B.A. from Oligarch University but – in my youthful ambivalence about my future – had arrived to take my GRE’s still mildly affected by the LSD I had taken the night before.

Lucky for me, since as a potential academic I was a real fixer-upper and addicted to making bad choices when good ones were staring me in the face, Potemkin was in a period when they were taking serious steps to become a prestigious major research university. This included colonizing my neighborhood -- why move for prestige when prestige, if given time, will move to you? They succeeded spectacularly, to the extent that others now regard my Ph.D. as being just as fancy as the Oligarch degree. Which is kind of a hoot, but also a relief, since I am not a drug-addled twenty-something anymore. It’s a lot like being Edith Wharton’s Oklahoma hair-oil heiress turned New York society queen.

But I digress.

The point is that I had three dissertation directors. The first one, a really lovely man who not only persuaded me to take myself seriously but also opened the door to what an academic career would look like, died quite suddenly. This caused me to get dumped on dissertation director #2, who treated me very badly. I used to think this was because she didn’t like me, and I now realize that wasn’t true – it was because I made her uncomfortable. Why did I make her uncomfortable? Well, partly because I was a really out lesbian, and she was a lesbian who had really struggled over coming out and did so in a way that was ultimately very public and I think cost her a lot. So the last thing she wanted was a lesbian graduate student who called attention to all of that. And this is not simple homophobia, sports fans (is there such a thing as simple homophobia?) Because her favorite daughters were *also* lesbians, something I found deeply confusing and enraging at the time. In fact, as it turned out by accident almost every graduate student recruited in Potemkin’s building phase was a lesbian. These favorite “daughters” – who were friends of mine – were femmey lesbians who you would not necessarily pick out on the street as lesbians. But I was the kind of lesbian who wore Timberland boots, cargo shorts and sweatshirts cut off at the shoulder. THAT kind of lesbian. And I think #2 found me to be – a challenge, shall we say, to be around.

But #2 also did something for me, which I am, in retrospect, grateful for: she put me up for adoption – or rather, foster care. Two particularly fabulous historians had been hired at Eclectic University, down the street, and she suggested that my dissertation would be enhanced considerably if I stopped working with her (begging her to read my work and pouting in the hall outside her office and in the TA lounge when she didn’t) and hung out with The Famous Pair for a year or so until the department had replaced #1. Which I did. And the Famous Pair were (are) two of the most fabulous people I had ever met, and the kind of people who just swept graduate students into their orbit and gave them real work to do. In my first year with them, they brought a lot of other fabulous historians over from Europe, who were kind of like a lot of Marxist aunts and uncles who really thought all intellectuals were the same, whether they had Ph.D.'s or not.

One never felt that there was a hierarchy of attention around The Famous Pair because when they ran out of time during the day they just had you over to dinner. Their famous friends would visit for weeks at a time, and you would wander into the suite of offices they occupied to eat your lunch and He would rush up and say, “Oh I’m so glad you got here early. Eric Hobsbawm wants to talk to you about your research.” Or She would pull you aside and say, “Give Theda Skocpol a call about this dissertation chapter and tell her I said she would be interested in talking to you about it.” They had the capacity which I now realize is very rare: both He and She could really make you feel, for whatever limited contact, that they were only thinking about *you*.

I think this finally allowed me to, in a preliminary way, find myself worthy of attention and care independently of one person's capacity to reassure me that I was smart -- which was, ater all, all I had wanted from #2. But it was the thing she couldn't give me, that then made the rest of our relationship dysfunctional.

Ok, so here's the advice I can't *bear* not to give - when these relationships with those up the hierarchy are not working, remember that those feelings of rage and inadequacy arise somewhere else in your psyche. Dissertation advisors are not parents, but there are moments where they might as well be. Start looking closely at your own students – doesn’t one pop up out of the crowd once in a while who wants something mysterious from you that you just can’t – or don’t want to – give? Whose constant pestering seems pointless? Who is always angry at you for no real reason? Who makes you long for graduation so that s/he will go away forever?

One day I woke up and realized that I had been that nightmare for #2, for reasons that were no fault of my own and probably not even hers.

So by the time dissertation advisor #3 was hired, I not only had the self-confidence to end my formal relationship with #2, but actually the graciousness to lie about the reason so as not to make my departure any more toxic than it had to be. And #3, as I explained to Flavia a week or so ago, is now a very dear friend. In fact she just asked me – little me! –to write a letter for a fellowship for her. Which was absolutely one of my happier moments as an academic, because normally I think that payment for favors granted takes the form of passing those favors on down the chain. How can you repay mentoring? You can’t. You pass on what you have learned to someone else.

To close – here is something I have learned, through age, and a fair amount of excellent psychotherapy. Everyone has intimacy issues, and there is something about academic life that distorts those issues, particularly in fields like History and English where reputation conferred by others within the academy is all most of us will ever have to move us along. #2 was not a bad person, although she did prove herself inadequate to what I needed from a graduate advisor. But now I would have to give her some credit for moving from the place where she wouldn’t help me to the place where she understood she couldn’t help me. And on a certain level, that was a caring thing to do. And eventually that gesture got me to #3, who was – to paraphrase D.W Winnicot – a “good enough mentor.”

And it isn’t as though #3 doesn’t have intimacy issues. It’s that we realized over time, to our great delight, that we have pretty much the same intimacy issues! Now, how cool is that?

STORMING CAESARS PALACE: SOME THOUGHTS AND A REVIEW

I was pleased to see last night that the new Democratic Congress started off with a bang by passing a bill that balances expenditures against revenues as an attempt to try to control the Crazy Man in the White House. I was also pleased to see that 50 Republicans joined the majority, demonstrating that party discipline as we have known it in the GOP has temporarily dissolved. This bill is a good example of two things. One is that a guy like Chris Shays of CT, who voted aye and said he "only wished my party had proposed" the bill really understands that he nearly got the "thumpin'" that Dubya's other retainers got in November (but Chris, baby -- you could have proposed it before...oh well, NEVER MIND!)

The other more mixed response I have is that a bill like this serves many ideological purposes or it wouldn't have drawn such wide support. The Dems and other anti-war allies now have a pincers attack available for making the funding of little George's war hurt: "You want all your defense spending? OK, then how about some -- New Taxes!?" But of course, taxes, and cutting weapons programs that are clearly unsuited to fighting wars against terrorists, are not the only way to feed the insatiable budget of this dreadful war. There are always new attacks on social programs. And this is where those of us in the so-called radical (formerly known as liberal) wing of the Democratic party may have to start paying the piper for November's election: those social conservatives who helped bring us a majority may well decide that squeezing the poor is a better idea than raising taxes whenever new funding is being requested for anything.

Uh oh.

But here's the good news: there is a fabulous, newish book out on the welfare rights movement of the 1960's and '70's that can help us think through what could happen next politically and what to do about it. "Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty" is Annelise Orleck's second major book on poor people's movements (the first is "Common Sense and A Little Fire" about women organizers on the Lower East Side of NY during the 1930's and '40's.) It is beautifully written, meticulously researched, and utterly engaging. As in her first major book, Orleck relies heavily on interviews with participants in the Las Vegas WRO to shape her narrative and move it along, and you get a real sense of these women as what Gramsci would have called "organic intellectuals." I have also learned a number of things that will help me teach this period better, among them:

- why many black women ended up on welfare in the first place, even when they had a work history of salaried labor. It was usually a result of some catastrophe, often a health crisis brought on by the conditions they had labored under;

- the political and ideological conditions that caused poor women more generally to have no access to birth control in the 1950's and 1960's, even when they went from doctor to doctor begging for it, thus respectfully refuting the notion that having large families is a "cultural choice" that Black women make out of ignorance;

-why raising children is labor, contributes to the social good and should be compensated (Orleck needs to be commended for resurrecting this old radical feminist chestnut. Why? Because it's true, dammit. Look down the hall at the circles under the eyes of any junior faculty member on the tenure clock and raising a family at the same time.)

- the conditions under which racial oppression persisted outside the former Confederate states, and why segregation particularly served the economic interests of a place like Las Vegas -- until it didn't, and then casino owners ended it;

-why grassroots movements can be simultaneously so vital and so fragile (Orleck does not dwell on this, but it is fairly clear that the empowerment and vigor of local organizations of welfare mothers was the death knell for a national WRO);

-that people who have no formal education, under conditions in which they can take action, can learn what they need to know, not just to run their own lives, but to run complex organizations with large budgets.

Many of these things I have always assumed to be true, but what is impressive about Orleck's book is that she shows, very gracefully, how it works, with evidence and testimony that makes the story jump off the page. She also demonstrates -- in a way that I have never seen in another book -- how Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven's theories about poverty and poor people's organizing actually worked to convince a range of people of what they needed to do to create change, from welfare mothers themselves to organizers to lawyers working for pennies to design successful strategies for making the state deliver resources to the poor.

The central theme of the book, however, is that conservatives have been cutting social programs relentlessly, both legally and illegally, since they were originally framed in the second New Deal, and that some of the "reforms" of the 1990's were originally tried out at the state level back in the 1960's. Welfare was always expendable because lawmakers have always hated it, and employ gate-keeping social workers to give out as little funding as possible so that a reserve army of cheap labor will always be available. They then disseminate vile images of the poor to a middle-class public that seems to believe much of what they read and see on TV because otherwise they would have to engage the idea that we live in a cruel, hierarchical society where a few of us benefit from the immiseration of the many. One of the things that struck me, then, when I saw the Pay as you Play legislation in the news last night (and I have to ask -- what part of what the government is doing right now constitutes "playing?" Could we get back to talking in serious words about the state and its activities?) was that the first thing Nixon did to fund the expansion of the war in Indochina in 1971 was to go after welfare benefits. So let's watch out -- keeping our mitts on the White House's military purse strings is an excellent idea, but I think we know from past experience that if W. wants to expand the war through a "surge" he will and that he will pay for it on the backs of the most vulnerable Americans if he can.

Read this book if you have a chance -- welfare rights organizers did change their world, for a while, and this would be a good moment to start reminding ourselves and our students what it might mean to restore a sense of humanity and responsibility to our political culture, and to start assuming that people who -- by all the values of our materialistic society have "failed" -- have a lot to offer themselves and us if given even the smallest amount of encouragement.

And imagine if the $1 billion we will spend on the war in Iraq today went to the public it was taken from in the first place for hospitals, schools, housing, day care, or job training. What then?

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE HAOLE

Like Jamaica Kincaid’s island birthplace in the Caribbean, Kauai is a very small place. You can’t circumnavigate the island because of the Na’Pali coast at the northwest corner, a set of towering cliffs surrounded by dense forest on one side and ten foot waves on the other. In between, according to my Hawaiian friend J whose family lives here, there are all kinds of sacred native sites and graves, so even though the map says you can hike through she warned us it would be stupid, rude and dangerous to do so. But if you could drive all the way around, minus the difficulty of driving through jungle and over cliffs, it would take maybe three hours. That’s how small it is.

Currently, I am in a coffee shop in Kapa’a, on the eastern coast. The shop and its inhabitants could have been lifted out of Mendocino county in the 1970’s, with the same grungy look; same excellent coffee; the same oddly gendered straight white boys with long dreadlocks, dreadlocked wives and dreadlocked babies; and same girls behind the counter in tank tops with nothing underneath left to the imagination. Except of course, they are not the same, so it all delivers a healthy uncertainty as to where exactly I am anyway, and what the date actually is. And I am sitting here posting to my blog through a wireless connect, which could not have happened even ten years ago.

One of the features of traveling anywhere is a heightened sense of not being where one is supposed to be, and therefore an uncertainty as to how to be, what to do, and who everyone around you actually is. And one of the features of traveling here is that there are lots of white people with lots of opinions about how the island is developing, all having rather disparaging things to say about someone else. They share these things with me in a variety of ways because I am also a white person. One of the most frequent things I hear from other whites is how it feels to be a “minority” here, and how you can get almost anything you want if you are a person of color, but as a haole (which is Hawaiian for white person) you are constantly running up against racial discrimination.

That this utterly flies in the face of reality is not the point: reality includes the fact that native Hawaiians on Kauai are often living twelve or sixteen to a two bedroom house or – something you can see in the neighborhoods around Kapa’a – people erect one of those sheds you can buy at Home Depot in the back yard as a way of adding an extra room. Native Hawaiians are also sometimes homeless, and living in a tent at one of the state parks. And much of the island is actually owned by very wealthy whites that run things through local proxies, often from great distances. Big chunks of the island have been developed for the second home market, and this has spiraling consequences for everybody born into ordinary circumstances on an island where space is ultimately limited (look at Martha’s Vineyard!) We were informed that a house quite near our rental, which is completely empty, as its occupants have returned to southern California, is on the market for 8.6 million dollars. Another house that we can see from our lanai (terrace) is owned by a physician who comes to the island six or seven times a year; otherwise the house also sits empty.


This is not to say that all white people on the island are rich. This is far from the truth, and there are white folks who were born and raised here who also cannot afford a place to live, and find that their claim to a “home” here – as most people experience their place of birth -- is consequently quite fragile. Or people who came here more than a decade ago to get away from it all, surf, work as little as possible and opt out of the rat race who now find that the rat race has come to them and pushed them to the margins. A subset of these white folks – men – focus their rage on tourists at the slightest provocation, which I suppose is a step up from focusing it on a mythical group of Native and Asian-American oppressors. In the times I have spent here I have never been spoken to rudely by a kanaka maoli (Hawaiian) resident, but I have been verbally attacked repeatedly by stressed-out white guys for crossing them in some way I could not have predicted. For example, last time we were here, N and I were getting ready to check out of a supermarket, and I asked a spaced out little girl with a shopping cart whether she was in line. She said no, so I moved my cart forward and started unloading stuff. The next thing I knew, I heard a loud male voice saying, “It’s people like you who wreck the spirit of Aloha!” It was a tubby, dreadlocked white guy who then started to yell at me like a New York cabby while his daughter cowered behind the candy shelf. Despite the fact that I conceded the place in line immediately, loaded my stuff back into the cart, told him that his daughter had said she was not in line, and subsequently kept my mouth shut when it appeared to be useless to say more, the guy refused to see it as a misunderstanding rather than as a deliberate insult and kept yelling at me until he left the supermarket.

I have had enough encounters like this with ragged looking, enraged white men that I would venture to say it is a general phenomenon of island life in which an ordinary middle-class college teacher like myself immediately becomes a “rich person” by having spent the money to come here on vacation in the first place. Beyond that, it doesn’t matter who I am or what my intentions are. This is something I simply accept, and really, it isn’t so hard. But it is also worth noting that it is a complex feature of a colonial economy that relations become complicated far beyond our capacity to explain them in terms of the causes and consequences of social conflict back in the North American metropolis.

Part of the cause of the disparity between rich whites and poor whites, and undoubtedly the rage of the white resident for the white tourist, is that there is very little work here that is not part of the service economy, and almost no work, I suspect that is well-paid. I don’t doubt that there is vast resentment among everybody, white or not, who labors for the rich on Kauai. But white Americans are not used to living without the illusion that, no matter how poor they are, they can’t move up in some way and achieve control over their own lives – this is why Ronald Reagan was so popular, even as he created the conditions for transforming good working class jobs into poorly paid service economy jobs. And of course the historic consequences of that are that mobility mostly doesn’t happen in a service economy. I think that is probably clearer in a small place than in a big place like North America, where the possibility that prosperity is just a game show away still lurks. I imagine a lot of white people come here from the other 48 states confident that they are choosing an easier life where they can get along with less money when, in fact, they have chosen an economy that is more expensive and thus much harder to get along in without working all the time, and working for people who appear not to work at all, and probably treat them rudely as a matter of course.

Meanwhile, I have to get off the internet, since the several cups of coffee I have purchased have had their predictable effect, and as soon as I leave this table it will be snapped up by the sprawling white hippie family that appears to be living on the beach with their multiple babies and who came here to get out of the rain. And yes, they all have dreadlocks. And maybe even trust funds.

A SHORT HISTORY OF HAWAIIAN SOVEREIGNTY

As you realize by now, I am sure, your Dr. Radical has left the building: not just the building, but also the state, the continent and – I believe -- the hemisphere. I am approximately half way between North America and Australia, on one of the smaller islands in the Hawaiian Archipelago, Kaua’i. It took twenty-two hours to get here from New England – but then, if you compare that to how long it took those whaling ships to get here from New Bedford in the early nineteenth century, that isn’t very long.

There are lots of reasons not to come to Hawaii as a tourist, chief among them colonization, genocide, land theft, and the warping effect that tourism has on an economy and on an indigenous people. The illegal occupation by the United States dates from the overthrow of the constitutional monarchy by Sanford Dole and his associates, most of them the children of missionaries who arrived in the 1830's and then made it big in the sugar and fruit industries. The illegal regime was recognized by the American government in February, 1893, after a short political blip in which Grover Cleveland almost returned the country to its rightful owners, and the reorganization of the islands into a US territory was completed in 1900. The Hawaiian people have never conceded their sovereignty, having been recognized as a nation by the international community for several decades before the overthrow, nor have they assigned any treaty rights to the United States government since the writing of the 1887 “Bayonet Constitution” signed by King David Kalakaua while Sanford Dole was holding a gun to his head. This treaty was then repudiated after David's death by his more right-on sister, Liliuokalani, who was then deposed and held under house arrest for many years thereafter for having stood on principle rather than on the practical, and probably unworkable, business of staying in power to see what evils she could hold off (see photo above.)

The story of US colonization in Hawaii is a long and ugly one, which intersects with the extension of U.S. power beyond the continent in 1898, the last phases of the displacement of indigenous peoples in the continental 48 states, and the rise of new forms of scientific racism that emerged during the period known as Redemption, during which southerners and northerners came to tacit agreement about the supposed superiority of white people, and were more or less able to end the Civil War and the bad feelings that remained from it by agreeing to oppress both African Americans and other peoples of color in the hemisphere in the interests of “civilization” and “progress.”

Only small amounts of land have been returned to native Hawaiians over the years under the arcane and racialized provisions of something called the Hawaiian Homes Commissions Act, passed by Congress in 1921 to stem the disastrous depopulation of native Hawaiian communities. Thus, throughout the islands, there are small amounts of land set aside as Homesteads for people who can certify that they are at least 50% native Hawaiian. Many more people than this claim a Hawaiian identity, since Hawaiian cultural history recognizes genealogical descent rather than modern notions of blood quantum. Thus, a legally enforceable claim to “Hawaiianness” continues to rest, erroneously, on the question of whether one's ancestors had, and acted on, a concept of racial purity that would have been foreign to them (Hawaiians welcomed exogamy, in fact), and which many sane people now understand to be utterly constructed.

The Akaka Bill, which is currently floating around the Senate and is sponsored by Daniel Akaka, proposes to right this wrong by making Native Hawaiians self-governing in the same way that Native Americans are, thus, among other things, ratifying “Hawaiianness” in blood quantum terms as other federally recognized tribes currently must do. (By the way, this is a very big issue among Native American activists more generally, some of whom refuse to enroll and claim tribal status because it involves accepting the notion that you are only a real Native person if United States law says you are.) Hawaiian Homesteads on all the islands would thus become the legal equivalent of Reservations on the continent, although one important difference would be that at least Hawaiians would be in their historic homeland, whereas many indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada are in places to which they were forcibly removed, or forced to flee.

There are many things wrong with the Akaka bill, but chief among them, as I understand it is that this bill would ratify Hawaiian dispossession, making US occupation legal and the ownership of the bulk of the land in the archipelago a moot point. Currently, it is contestable because of the international recognition that predated the overthrow of the monarchy, the illegality of territorial status and statehood, and the legal possibilities for reviving all these matters since President William Jefferson Clinton’s apology to the Hawaiian people several years ago for US collaboration in the illegal Dole coup.

But then, why is Dr. Radical in Kauai? I am working on this problem. There are several important things to say, one of which is that your Dr. Radical needs a little peace and quiet to get her writing (and her head) organized before going back to work at Zenith, and a little sunshine, sleep and fresh fruit don’t hurt. But more serious is a fact worth knowing – I am not ideologically pure as the driven snow, and mostly do not do symbolic politics because inevitably they are false to some degree. Another is that I somehow don’t think we deal with the effects of American colonialism by not looking at it – it’s a little like thinking you are coping well with your alcoholic brother by not visiting him or answering when he calls completely sloshed in the middle of the night.

The most important answer is that I am an historian, and history is a messy business. Whether any of us like it or not, we are snarled in our connections to the past, which does not mean running around whining about our guilt over things we never did (although our ancestors may have.) It seems to me that if native Hawaiians whose great grandparents were dispossessed by Sanford Dole and his cronies in Washington can grapple with history in the intricate ways that they are doing, those of us whose great-grandparents ate the sugar (or came here from Italy and Poland in hopes that they would) could pitch in and grapple with them, even if it causes us a little discomfort.

So my grappling will consist of a few posts from the former domain of Prince Kuhio, a relative of the last Queen of Hawaii, Liliuokalani, who fought the process of colonization until her death. Oh yeah, and N. and I are writing a big check to the American Friends Service Committee, which does powerful and thoughtful work on behalf of Native Hawaiians.

Books to read: Noenoe Silva, “Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism” (Duke, 2004); and a forthcoming volume to keep your eye out for in 2007, also from Duke, by Kehaulani Kauanui, which has taught me, or caused me to learn for myself, practically everything I know about Hawaiian sovereignty and its history. And if you want to think about the politics of tourism, try Jamaica Kincaid, “A Small Place” (1988).

And have a Happy New Year!

MY MESSAGE FROM JOHN EDWARDS

News Flash: I am in receipt of a forwarded email from John Edwards saying he is getting ready to launch his presidential campaign, which will be centered on ending the war and helping the neediest among us (hell, that might even mean graduate students, since the government has been robbing education about as fast as it has been robbing the poor.) Word on the street among active Democrats here in Shoreline is that he is announcing next week in Chapel Hill. Anyway, if you want to identify yourself to the campaign as a potential supporter, write him at JohnEdwards@readytochangeamerica.com.

And have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

fondly,

Dr. Radical

Taking Stock Prior To My Return To The History Department

Everyone in the academy of a certain age remembers that great line from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” where the young mathematics professor asks George what department he is in, and Martha lurches over and sneers, “Ge-o-o-orge is in the….HISSS-try department.” Well, much as my spiritual home is in American Studies, so am I, and soon I must return to my duties in the Zenith University Department of History, site of the Unfortunate Events. It had to happen someday, no? So the past week has in part been occupied by putting my mental house in order in preparation for my Comeback Tour.

But here’s the good news: I probably haven’t explained that we don’t live in Zenith anymore – we did until about three years ago, when I began to worry that I would start to rot from the inside out if we didn’t move (N was still based in Big City, and I was feeling more like an exile than the moderately well-known and successful scholar that I am.) We bought a house in Shoreline, home to four or five other institutions of Higher Education, one of which is the prestigious Oligarch University. Moving was a far bigger struggle than it should have been or that I can possibly say; it included a house renovation from Hell, putting things in storage, massive loans taken out, and so on. But it is done, I love living here, N is starting to feel at home outside Big City, and this holiday season we are beginning to know that we are truly settled for the first time in years. Maybe ever. And one way we know that is that we are having quite the social season this December.

Last night we had a small dinner party with a nephew, his wife and their three children, who came from the north en route to their destination, which was to spend Christmas in Big City. Then we also had DJ, Extravaganza’s middle brother, who was invited by special request of one of his cousins, but is the sort of person who should be on the top of the guest list anyway because he – like his brothers -- fits seamlessly into any group. DJ is an incredibly good-natured, sparky boy of eleven who is liked by nearly everyone he comes in contact with and could have a conversation with a complete stranger who only spoke Bosnian if they were suddenly thrown together. The most insightful thing I can say about that is that he is incredibly nice, but that doesn’t explain his almost universal popularity and excellent social aplomb. He’s kind of got the Bill Clinton appeal without the Bill Clinton ego. And frankly, they could really use him in the British Royal family, except that we all have higher ambitions for him than performing one of those useless prince jobs.

Anyway, as the children thundered around the house with Sailor (and then occasionally fell ominously silent, although mostly I think they were playing Scrabble, devising elaborate standardized tests and searching my study for clues about my mysterious life) the grownups sat downstairs and talked about Work. Two of us had physicians for fathers, and we both agreed that the major lesson we had learned from these semi-absent men was that working hard could be fun. All the adults sitting at the table agreed that our own lives had pretty much replicated that model, and that because we all really had work we loved, it wasn't a burden. The next part of that conversation was: how do you communicate that to children, in a world where so many people seem to do work that they hate -- or work that is so alienating they are not wrong to hate it? How do you teach kids that no matter what it is -- Chaucer or plumbing -- work isn’t something you just do so that you can finance small amounts of fun – go on vacation or retire early – but rather that it is part of a life that is more generally satisfying, where work, leisure and relationships all complement each other? Or that you might choose not to be as prosperous so that you can be a writer, scholar, or artist? Or a gardener?

This seems important to remember now, when the blogosphere has recently been jammed with the burdens of teaching. Reading other people’s often hilarious reports on grading, students from hell, and grad programs that may be more of a burden than a blessing, as well as getting re-involved with Zenith prior to my triumphant return to the History Department, has reminded me a bit too much of the Dark Side. There is a Light Side as well: the fun of this. Making a life with books. Days in the classroom that really do seem to make a difference. Really finishing a piece of writing rather than just grinding away at it. And the fact that more people read my blog every week now than have probably ever read one or two of the articles I have published.

And the children clearly ruffled through all the fabulous history books I left around the study in neat piles in hopes that they would snoop. The books are now in heaps, which is how I know. And someone was clearly fishing around in the book manuscript I “forgot” to put away. Hah.

So Happy Holidays to all and to all a good night: the next time you hear from me, I will be broadcasting from a house on a beach in South Sea Archipelago. N and I have invented what we call “the writing vacation” (see my Paul Fussell post) – both to get away from the distractions of home that do inevitably interfere with finishing things and to celebrate the other fabulous thing about our chosen work in scholarship and teaching: the month long winter break!

Dean, Dean -- Who's Got The Dean?

One of the biggest laughs I ever heard in a Zenith faculty meeting was several years ago, when a member of our administration was explaining a number of strategies the institution was exploring for raising extra cash. The final one was a patent on discoveries made under the auspices of the institution. A colleague from one of the humanities departments said she didn't understand (thinking, "Hmmm- I wonder if my examination of the Lack in contemporary French poetry is worth more than I know?"), and the administrator said, "Well, for example, the discovery of a new gene." Drat.

At which point the semi-comatose Dr. Grumpo awoke, came to full consciousness and shouted from the back, "WHAT? CAN'T HEAR YOU!" The administrator repeated himself. And Dr. Grumpo shouted, "AH! I THOUGHT YOU SAID YOU'D DISCOVERED A NEW DEAN!" Needless to say, everyone howled and added to the fun while the administrator fidgeted and waited out our capacity to act like your average eighth grade. We haven't heard of *that* plan again.

But here is what is not so funny. As followers of this blog may recall, the Zenith faculty is organizing for better pay and benefits, and finally doing a good job of it. We may even start an AAUP chapter which, as denizens of other schools know, can -- despite the Supremes' precedent setting decision in re. Yeshiva -- serve as a bargaining unit when a school or university agrees to treat it as such. Despite constant reassurance from Zenith's top brass that we really are paid fairly because we are paid what they can afford and not what the market might establish as fair, a newly organized faculty continues to push forward in its efforts. We had a big meeting the other day at which the university continued to insist, despite the fact that they have come up a little in next year's offer, that they simply haven't got the money to pay us decently, nor have they got the money to give administrative staff a raise that will even cover inflation next year. And they say this even when presented with figures that suggest the longer all of us have to work at Zenith to ensure that we aren't living off dog food in our nineties, the more it will cost the university in the long term. In fact, according to members of our math and economics department, it will cost them about half a million dollars per tenured faculty member not to pay us more now so that we can retire decently when we are 67.

Sometimes they also say that if they pay us more the only place they can get the money is from the financial aid budget, and if they want us to admit stupid, rich students we should just give them the word.

And here's the kicker: they seem to create well paid administrative positions a mile a minute. This fall they hired two new deans in Student Services, brand new positions, probably at 80-100K each. Now, everyone knew they were hiring one new dean, a much talked-about position to try to stop the students from pulling racist and homophobic pranks on each other, and talk to them sternly when they do. But it appears, as I see from a recent announcement, that they have broken this position into two positions-- one for co-curricular programming and workshopping, and one for what they are calling "academic support."

Hence, I would argue -- they do have money. They are just spending it elsewhere.

Can I say that this pisses me off a little? Heck, it's my blog -- I will! And it isn't just these deans -- we have added vast amounts of staff in our development office, in academic affairs, in admissions (because Zenith has so succeeded in making itself sought after *and* exclusive that we are barraged with applications every year), our continuing education department and in our finance section. If I were to guess, I would say that our administration has doubled in my 15-plus years at Zenith, while the faculty has not only not expanded but our salaries have slowly crept to the bottom of our comparison group.

Meanwhile, all these bureaucrats have raised our quotient of busy work unbelievably. Almost non-stop, we file reports, requests for research money, justifications for spending the research money they gave us, course justification forms, and we write endless "recommendations" for our expanded study abroad programs and the internships prestigious universities make available through alumni. An untenured colleague, who has courageously joined our movement, observed, "Of course they give us more to do for them -- they have to justify their own jobs. And it used to be you had to stuff envelopes to require the faculty to do an administrative task. Now you just hit a button and send them an email. There's no pain for them in that." On top of all this extra bureaucratic hoo-ha that comes our way, a great many faculty I know are also teaching extra courses because the cost of living ordinary middle-class lives is not keeping pace with salaries.

In a big meeting the other day which, I am proud to say, about 95% of our faculty attended, the current VP of Finance (yes, everyone has a corporate title now) berated us by asking how we could dream of asking for a bigger raise when the university had to pay such unexpectedly high energy bills last winter. What nobody said was -- so did the faculty! With the result that several people I know had to teach a summer course because they used their property tax money to pay the oil company instead. That is how little money people can save because they are not paid enough, and because the prudent among us are committing as much as we can afford to pensions that the university hasn't committed enough resources to.

Can you tell that Dr. Radical is getting revved up for a return to the trenches?

Hillary vs. Obama: Why?

I was at the gym this morning, cycling away in place and reading a story in the New Yorker about the Bratz doll, which is currently cutting into the Barbie market like no doll has done before because little girls are increasingly identifying with multi-racial sex pots who shop, rather than strangely proportioned but highly educated women with perky tits and perma-loft heels. I was musing about the Christmas I spent driving around my state of residence looking for Barbie's Mini-Van because four year-old Extravaganza wanted it (and because no one else would buy it for him), when I saw the topic of a related CNN discussion on the television above me: "Hillary Vs. Obama." And it made me think of a few other things that have been on my mind.

1. Why do we use *her* first name and *his* last name? How has she just become "Hillary"? It is true that unless you are George W. Bush "Barack" rhymes with "Iraq" but so what?

2. More importantly, why is this the race that is so talked about, when there are a number of serious Democratic candidates out there who actually represent what the voters asked for in the last election? Granted, having a woman president would break the barrier, but this woman president would not necessarily be a mark of progress (more on this below). The first black president would also break a barrier, but this one -- although clearly smart as a whip and as quick a learner as either Bill or Hill -- has even less experience in government than George W. Bush did when he came to be president. And that if your guiding assumption is that with all the problems we have now, what matters most is to elect someone black or female -- well Sister, let me tell you that there are highly experienced, thoughtful, effective candidates who are women, black or -- my god, black women! -- who are never going to get the call because for some reason all we seem to care about is star power.

Race and gender do not policy make, my friends, which is lucky for us, since my conspiracy theory is that "the woman" and "the black" are being put up against each other so that one knocks the other out, and whoever is left will still lose against whoever the white male candidate is because -- ta da! -- s/he is a woman or black. My best hope for '08 right now is that more progressive candidates (Vilsack, Edwards) than either Hillary or Barack are hanging out offstage waiting for each campaign, or one of them, to implode.

3. My current least favorite question is, "Why don't women like Hillary?" And I'll tell you why: first of all, I do like Hillary. In many ways, I think she is a class act. I just don't want her to be President because she is too conservative. Is it too much to ask that this distinction be made? She cleaves to the most regressive feature of the Democratic Party, which is being willing to alienate progressive voters like me by promoting these idiotic values agendas that the right put into play and the Democrats have now latched onto to try to pry conservative voters away from the Republicans. Hillary Clinton has made a point of positioning herself as a person who can make deals with conservatives (the Lieberman strategy) but not with progressives: like, for example, putting every possible obstacle in the way of gay and lesbian people to have access to the rights that accompany marriage, or not coming out and saying that No Child Left Behind is a disaster as a concept, not as legislation poorly implemented by Republicans. Through Bill, Hillary is also linked to some of the worst Democratic initiatives we have seen since Woodrow Wilson segregated all federal facilities: the Defense of Marriage Act, welfare reform, the reconfiguration of health care around HMO's, the restriction of abortion rights, expansion of capital punishment and the "don't ask, don't tell" military policy. Unless and until she can explain how she is going to reverse these things, I do not want Hillary to be president.

4. Unlike Hillary, Barack has done nothing. Nothing. Not sponsored a bill, not co-sponsored a bill, not put his name on any initiative whatsoever. All he does is write books and run for office. This doesn't mean he is a bad person -- it means he is a blank slate who doesn't want to be pinned down (in this department, I find much of his hemming and hawing about racial identity disturbing too.) Remember the last time we elected a blank slate? I remember citing experience as an issue when Bush was elected, and people would say, "How bad can he be? He's a blank slate!" And I kept saying, "Yeah, but don't you worry that someone who signed off on an execution every week or so and says he never lost sleep over it has no capacity to care about other human beings? Don't you think such a person might be dangerous?"

And why would we elect someone president who, when asked by a reporter why his way of speaking shifted depended on whether he was speaking to a white or a black audience, could not come up with a better answer than that he adapts to whatever environment he was in? If it is true, it is disturbing on a number of levels. But what is more disturbing is that the answer should have been something like: "That's a really racist question and it doesn't belong in politics."

This Radical is backing a white, straight man right now: John Edwards. Why? Because he can use the words "poor" and "people" in the same sentence, which neither Hillary or Barack seem to be able to do as they weave and wander through the polls and focus groups that politics has become. I have raved about a number of topics in this post, many of them queer and feminist, and in neither case are these issues on the top of "John's" list. But despite what you read in the newspapers, the biggest problems facing LGBTQ people today are economic justice issues: escalating debt; the wage-income gap; access to housing, education and health care; the right to organize in unions.

And -- BTW -- what would it be like to have the voters decide who the candidate is in the primary, rather than CNN or the DLC? This is an important question, with historic implications. Back in 1964, the radically conservative Republican Phyllis Schlafly wrote a book called "A Choice, Not an Echo," in which she articulated a conspiracy theory that East Coast "kingmakers" were manipulating the nominating process to produce liberal national candidates who did not represent the wishes of the party base. OK, so she didn't get Goldwater elected. But this book -- distributed out of her garage -- and the insight it contained is seen by many to have inspired the birth of the modern conservative movement. Unless we are going to just put up with this "Hillary vs. Obama" nonsense for the next two years, progressives need to make a similar move. Because say what you like about my gal Phyllis, the little book worked, didn't it? We should send everyone in Iraq a copy.

Tenure Party

Two nights ago we had a Tenure Party.

Tenure parties can be a lot like weddings, actually – all the younger folk were yucking it up and celebrating; a few undergrads were there, thrilled to be drinking with the faculty; and the older folk made witty toasts, smiled benignly, and huddled in the corners reminiscing about tenure parties past, noting that suddenly they had become the Senior People in the Room -- and when did that happen? This party was a double whammy of reminiscing for me, since it was held in the house of a colleague who was for many years really famous for the parties she held – sometimes one or two a month – and it was at her house that I met most of my friends in my first few years at Zenith. She hasn’t lost her touch, and we fell back into old habits easily. I served as sub-host, which I often did in the past because N was living in Big City so I was temporarily uncoupled, and my friend is single so she doesn't have a partner to help so that she can enjoy her own parties. Every once in a while I policed dirty dishes, refilled empty bowls of olives, and circulated to make sure people didn’t get stuck with someone they didn’t want to talk to all evening. This also allowed me to get out of conversations: "Oh yes -- hold that thought, will you? We seem to need more crostini!" And as she always had in the past, the hostess muttered sotto voce as I entered, “The good stuff is in the freezer,” meaning a really fine bottle of ice-cold vodka was stashed away from the madding crowd for our exclusive use.

One of the best-remembered parties was for a colleague in the history department: another untenured person threw it with me. We had everyone bring a bottle of champagne – the theory being that this provides enough champagne for everyone, and there is No Mixing (Remember the Albee lines from "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf": Martha -- “Never mix, never worry!” George -- “Rubbing alcohol for you, Martha?”) At any rate, the party was just starting to wind down around 11 when our newly promoted colleague’s fabulous new boyfriend showed up from Big City with – a case of Moet White Star! Needless to say, the party acquired new life, and everyone untenured was skulking around campus the next day mainlining H20 and aspirin, looking as though they had been run over by trucks.

December used to be the season of tenure parties, and it no longer is for several reasons that my friend and I speculated about as we sipped vodka on the porch and she "snuck" a cigarette. Tenure cases seem to take longer than they used to – our T&P committee has morphed into this weird Spanish Inquisition, which means that you now send in a perfectly good case that ought to zip through and they start getting stuck on all kinds of things that are tangential and unimportant. Better you should send in a plagiarized manuscript and hope it will fool everyone than to have one or two students write in their teaching evaluations, "I sometimes felt my opinions were not important enough to the professor." Nowadays no case is complete until the committee is done requisitioning documents, asking endless questions that have to be answered in writing in 48 hours or less, asking for new letters, and so on. So this means that very often when you have a great case what used to be a sort of gathering celebration of the younger colleague that culminated in a party is now a grinding struggle fraught with anxiety and unpleasant, unnecessary conflict, and you are just mighty glad that sie wasn't burned at the stake instead.

This is Zenith’s version of No Child Left Behind: that if you pummel the bejesus out of a candidate, and sie stills look good at the end of it, then you have assured yourself of excellence.

What this also means is that, as far as I can tell, the untenured faculty have distanced themselves from an admittedly vile process as much as possible, to the point of also detaching emotionally from colleagues who are up for tenure. As my friend pointed out, these parties used to be hosted by the candidate's friends, and the senior people came by invitation – a kind of Mardi Gras-like moment in which the bottom rails got on top and everyone had an evening of being “out of rank” because of course only the senior people who were liked and trusted were invited. Now the parties are held by the senior folk (the parents!) when they are held at all, and I was shocked to see that a lot of untenured colleagues we expected to see there didn't come. The only explanation we could imagine is that they are up for tenure too and going to someone else’s tenure party was incompatible with however they are managing their own anxiety about their own process. And that they didn't want to see senior people, much less eat and drink with them. And none even called their friend to say “I would like to come, but I just can’t bear it – can I take you out to lunch?”

But things change, don’t they? When they put me in charge of the world, perhaps we can return to a saner time when we don’t terrorize untenured people so completely and unnecessarily, and tenure seems like an accomplishment again rather than the end of a marathon that you have barely survived. Those who came to the party all had a wonderful time, and everyone got sloshed as in the old days – your Dr. Radical almost never drinks anymore, and was quite under the weather yesterday. And no, I will not be posting pictures of our newly tenured colleague in the tiara and scepter.

Sunday Morning Blogging Down

Excuse me, but did anyone else see in the Newspaper of Record today an article about books that have been written and published (on paper, mind you) from cobbled together blog entries? And that people are calling them "blooks"? Why not call them books? I ask you.

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Virtually the whole day stretches out before me as a possible theater for changes, great and small. Will my attempts to return to The Book remain a series of forced, semi-artificial acts (transcribing notes, translating files, fiddling with punctuation and topic sentences), punctuated by the kinds of events that make a Radical feel like she has really accomplished something (for example, going to the supermarket)? Or will I cross the line into Real Writing, productive hours that result in Pages that can be Printed Out? Pages that are ready for my audience (“Mr. De Mille, I am ready for my close up!”)

Only time will tell. On top of re-tackling the opus, I have to prepare to return to teaching like the rest of you, something I have not done in close to two years. The closest I can come to imagining this, as a reality, is in the form of a variety of anxiety dreams that are particular to academics. No, not the underwear one. The ones in which:

1. I have to take an exam, usually in math or science, with the knowledge that I have not attended the class all term and will probably fail.
2. I am getting ready to graduate, but realize to my horror that I have not signed up for enough credits in my final term and will have to explain to my parents why I am not marching with my class. My parents, God love it!
3. I have come to the point of graduation and realized that I have failed to complete sufficient credits in – you guessed it! – math and science to meet the distributional requirements.
4. I am desperately trying to go to a class I have been cutting, but cannot find it: nevertheless, I wander a maze of complex halls, unable to find the right classroom, but sure that it is right around the corner. Eventually I realize I am hopelessly lost and the class is almost over anyway, and I wander out of the building with sinking heart.

By the way, this last dream – which, like all the others is one in which I am dealing with Fear of Failure for reasons that probably have directly to do with The Belated Book and my reasons for putting it aside for so long -- is a reflection of real life experiences. Not only did I cut a fair number of classes as an undergraduate, but the buildings at nearby Oligarch University, my alma pater, are gothic and labyrinthine, having been built by ambitious captains of industry to resemble the old European universities. Compared to the neat, rectangular brick squares of Zenith University (built by tidy little ministers on a budget) they are a horror show of interlinked passageways, towers, and peculiar numbering. One monstrosity I took many classes in had two halves, since an older building had had a second glued on to it at a later time, and the floors on each half were numbered differently. Therefore, thanks to the generosity of Donor #2 and the ineptitude of Architect #2, you could pass horizontally through a door and suddenly find yourself facing a new set of room numbers altogether. But some buildings were just designed peculiarly from the get-go. The other day, I went to look up an Oligarch American Studies colleague for lunch, got into an elevator to get to the second floor, and suddenly found myself in a dormitory.

You’ll notice that I have no anxiety dreams about showing up in class with no lecture, or trying to teach but having no words come out of my mouth when I speak. This confirms my belief that it is not teaching I am concerned about.

Nevertheless preparations for the classroom must be made: syllabi drawn up, books ordered, reserve librarians to wrestle to the ground and berate into violating copyright law. Yesterday was the pleasant task of buying back to school clothes: two pairs of Levis 501’s, pre-faded and preshrunk; four black tee shirts from Banana Republic; and a pair of waterproof cowboy boots – brown Durango ropers, to be precise, for wading to work in the driving rain and snow. If you can think of anything else I need, just leave it in a comment.

What Would Paul Fussell Do?

First: thanks to all of you who left comments on my last post. You are nice people, and I appreciate it. And as I look at your blogs, I must say I am very happy not to be grading as you are right now. The idea of having a task that has a real beginning -- more importantly, a real end -- is so seductive. But I guess I'll have to experience it vicariously for now as I re-tackle this project that, as several of you pointed out, will put a final stake in the heart of the Unfortunate Events.

So yesterday, with nothing left to clean and No Laundry Left Behind, the larder packed with groceries for a long winter, my hair cut, and the bills paid, I started in on the Final Revisions. I think there are going to be several weeks of good days and bad days before I get into a rhythm, but yesterday I did a few things to get the old engine running.

I discovered that having switched computers over the summer -- nay, switched systems, to a Mac, I need to translate a great many research files on the old computer into Word so that I can use them without re-typing everything. So I sucked it up and began translating three of the most important folders of archival notes and put them on my new computer. And no, I can't use the old computer, because it is so slow it drives me nuts. And every once in a while I think it is going to crash completely and require a surgical intervention.

I then lit into a stack of books that I have read since the last revision and transcribed those notes where they still seemed pertinent, larding them into the end of chapter files so that when I can once again bear to read my own writing they will be there to help me. This is, by the way, a modification of a trick I learned from a Paul Fussell essay many years ago -- if for some reason you can't write, for example because you have no time or no peace of mind, or you are getting divorced, you can probably still read. In my case, reading is actually therapeutic, so I am likely to do more of it under conditions which pretty much preclude writing.

But Fussell's real point about reading is not that it is therapy, rather, his point is: improve the day. Make use of time in whatever way you can, and for God's Sake keep moving forward. Fussell has written a great many books, and as I recall it from that essay, for much of his career he read during the school year and then went to the Cape in the summer, ignored his family for a chunk of each day (if he was like my father, probably all of it) and wrote for three months, gradually using all the notes taken during the year. This doesn't really explain how he wrote so very many books, but there you go.

In the meantime, the Evil Book Gods are trying to stop me, and in each case I have said to myself, What would Paul Fussell do? Since I resolved that I would re-launch this project which is 90% done, the following obstacles have appeared in my path, and I have attempted to resolve each, using an imaginary conversation with Paul Fussell as a way of finding a way to step nimbly around them:

1. Some details of a personnel case were directed to me because of my expertise in the field. I fended off this request for assistance successfully with an email that said "Can't ANYONE else who is NOT on sabbatical handle this?" Someone could, of course. And did. I am sure that is what Paul Fussell would have done under similar circumstances.

2. A much younger historian has called me in tears to try to schedule lunch, where there will probably be more tears because *this* career at *this* institution is about to end (this is one of those institutions where one's career always ends, so that one can go on to a Higher State of Being Elsewhere. My task? To persuade in a finite amount of time that it is time to Move On (sometimes it is wise to do as I say children, and not as I do.) I have accepted this challenge, even though I am not sure Paul Fussell would have done so, because I have to take time off and go to school next week anyway to see if the IT folks can translate the rest of my research files for me. BTW, you wouldn't find Paul Fussell sitting at home cutting and pasting between WordPerfect and Word screens. Two problems solved!

3. I received a peculiar document in the mail that calls itself the "Zenith University Strategic Objectives Matrix," in which there are four boxes labeled faculty, students, finance and administration -- as Paul Fussell would tell you, this is bad news already because only three of these boxes (or two maybe) represent people, and one represents money as if it was a person. This is also the kind of document calculated to launch a string of phone calls and emails designed to derail writing: an administration that really cared about scholarship would issue no documents or reports at all. Anyway, there are two objectives in the faculty box which boil down to "hire good faculty and pay them whatever" and "faculty should teach well;" and five in the administrators' box which support the already popular idea "hire more administrators and give them more control over everyone." None of the boxes address the fact that our faculty is close to the bottom of its comparison group for faculty salaries, and that a third of the faculty teach about two-thirds of the students. Or that the students are all on Ritalin this time of year whether they have ADD or not. But never mind! I know -- and Paul Fussell would know -- that this is just a ploy on the part of the Evil Book Gods to persuade me I should go to the faculty meeting next week instead of staying home to write. No way baby! I am so on to you guys. I threw it away. As Paul Fussell would have done.

4. It has snowed, so Sailor the dog comes into my study repeatedly pretending she has to pee, but when we go out what she really wants is to drag her snout along the sidewalk, whuffing up new snow and sneezing it out again, and to snag the odd frozen roll left out to help the various urban vermin get through the winter. Here I am stumped. I do not know what Paul Fussell would do, except perhaps set the dog to doing something more useful like checking footnotes or looking over the entire manuscript for the proper use of "who" and "whom."

Ok. So Paul Fussell would not be writing this blog. But I had to write something this morning, and I'll get a fresh start after lunch.

Going Back to the Book

So here are the critical facts about the Unfortunate Events that led both to my acquisition of altered consciousness about academic life and the idea that I might write a blog.

1. Fact: the Events happened over the course of three years while I was coming up for full professor at Zenith, a promotion which was opposed by people in my department who claimed that since tenure my work had suddenly become shoddy and my "pace" was off because I had not yet published a second book.

2. Fact: until my promotion process, almost no one in the Zenith History Department had ever had a second published book as part of their case for promotion to full professor; rather (as the department hand book says) one is supposed to have written a few articles and present a big chunk of book manuscript.

3. Fact: there are aged and not so aged full professors in my department who have published little and/or not for a long time, but that is another blog for another day.

4. Fact: the first time I tried to come up, because my counselor did not bring my materials to the meeting, several full P's declared they did not believe that there was a second book mss. (which there was, a fully revised one), and ruled that I could not be promoted that fall. She asked if she could return to her office to get it, and they said no, called the question and voted in the negative.

5. Fact: the second time I came up, my counselor took the book (a second revision now) and articles, published and in draft, to the meeting, and these same people voted to give me "advice" that I not come up until the book was actually published.

6. Fact: I declined their advice and came up anyway, winning a majority vote because actually the referees liked my book a lot. The bad news was that a minority of the full P's declared that it was their right to disregard the letters, as well as advice from colleagues in my field, and use their own judgement. None of these P's were in my field.

7. Fact: they fought the case through many stages of the process, causing many delays and many reviews and appeals to be convened. This made the next year very unpleasant, in part because it was clear that the entire thing was personal, and in part because, when fighting injustice in universities one must constantly be producing documents, which is time consuming and useless work.

8. Fact: In the end I was promoted by administrative fiat, and received an extremely large raise from Zenith which helped assuage pain and suffering incurred as well as a long sabbatical.

You may ask, Why do this over a promotion to full professor? Everyone who does not work at Zenith asks me this. The answer is that these are very small people, with very small minds, and they were punishing me for flouting their will on a variety of matters on which, as they perceive it, my behavior was Very Radical. Like paying attention to the university's adherence to EEOC in hiring matters, and teaching classes in queer studies in my post-tenure incarnation.

OK, but here is why I finally decided to stop being a tease about the Unfortunate Events: because vicious and unfair criticism of my book became the mode for attacking me, I have been unable to look at it much in about eighteen months. Blame the victim, eh? A manuscript that I researched and wrote for five years has just sat there in the corner for my entire leave. I have written several articles, finished a couple more in the pipeline, done a wad of research on a new book project, gone into motion to get a contract on a neat little textbook on the ERA. But I haven't even been able to look at my book.

I know this isn't what Marx meant by alienated labor, but that's what it has felt like. This morning, after sticking the last article I had had in the pipeline in the mail, I realized I could either write a new article or finish the damn book. I chose the book.

So tomorrow I am going to start final revisions-- two months from sabbatical ending, I am going to begin the final revisions so I can get it to the publisher by May.

Wish me luck.

I'm Rubber, You're Glue: Tenure, Privilege and Reputations

Combat Philosopher has a provocative post up this week about crazy colleagues: he apparently has one, who is currently torturing one of his friends. You can get to CP's blog from mine easily, and I recommend that everyone read this for three reasons. First, he raises the question: why is it that a woman, no matter what her reputation for lunatic behavior, can make charges against a man of a sexual nature, and have them stick instantly? Second, it is a good reminder never to have sex with a colleague without thinking about it for a very long time and getting advice from at least two friends (I'm just saying, CP). And third, I think it raises the more general question: we all have at least one, probably more, colleague who is erratic to say the least, maybe crazy, maybe senile, maybe an alcoholic. And no one ever does a thing about it, even to the extent of saying to that colleague, post-egregious behavior: "That was wrong."

This is not just on my mind because of Combat Philosopher's pal, who is in a tight spot and I wish the fellow well in his ongoing struggle to get rid of a woman who is clearly remaining attached to him by the simple strategy of calling various police agencies to complain that *he* won't leave her alone. She is, I am sure, doing this in the desperate hope that he will begin to contact her to try to work it out, and from that, their relationship will somehow flower - or she will be able to stem her grief about the loss of a relationship that is probably standing in for *some other relationship in her life.*

The point, however, is that CP's pal is in a struggle to save his reputation, and it is a terrible position to be in, particularly when someone else holds all the cards. This reminds me of a tough situation that arose this week at a friend's institution, which a number of people there are scrambling madly to cover up. Thank the Goddess for email attachments! Apparently there was a nasty letter from one person who voted on the case accusing the candidate of being unsuited to the job because s/he is a bigot. And when asked by a colleague why, the author responded that there was no damage intended.

Oh. OK. I get it now.

Character assassination in the university is not a new thing, it's just that it is usually done where it belongs, in the bathroom or in a department meeting. It is almost unheard of that anyone writes such a thing down and makes such an evil, stick-to-you-like-gum charge part of an official report. My friend does not think it will do any damage -- apparently the department, one and all, was appalled across political and ideological lines, rallied around, etc. And I'm sure they are eating baskets of Tums over at the various administration buildings, praying that the case just zips through and that all is forgotten. But here is the thing: at the risk of the candidate finding out this horrible hurtful thing, I don't think my friend's department should forget about it or hide it. And I think there is something very wrong about the tenure system that practically everyone I have discussed this with has said, Yes, it was dreadful, but nothing can be done in such a situation.

It is also worth saying that it is my friend's view that this is one in a long string of horrible things this crazy man has done, and when called on it, he claims that he is only being attacked for his conservatism by liberals who want to marginalize him. Ergo, he also believes that it is his task to go after "liberals" (your Dr. Radical is actually referred to publicly by a colleague as "the department radical," acompanied by similar claims that this is merely descriptive.) My feeling is that we all have tolerated such bad behavior because it could be managed, and because it happens in private. And because everyone acknowledges that such people are crazy, we lose perspective on the damage done.

What say the rest of you to this grisly tale? And how do we reconfigure the idea of tenure to link its privileges to a set of ethical responsibilities?