Remembering Del Martin, 1921-2008

I would say that I am saddened to hear of the death of activist Del Martin, except that she was 87, had been ill for some time, and lived an extraordinary and accomplished life, so I find just thinking about her uplifting. Plaintiffs in the California marriage case, (Martin is on the left with life partner Phyllis Lyon, in the above photo taken in 1972), the couple was first in line to get married when that case was successfully concluded earlier this year. Like many queer people who add constantly to kin networks soldered together with love and political commitment, I don't think that Phyllis will be alone. Furthermore, I would say that since Del Martin is an excellent example of a woman who left no unfinished business, we might even want to pause for a celebration.

Now, just to be radically perverse, I will also maintain that there is always unfinished business in a life like Del Martin's. Phyllis and Del were organizers, and an organizer's work is never complete. Martin and Lyon were on the front lines of post-war anti-homophobic activism, an activism that laid the foundation for homosexuals to enter the social and political mainstream and also -- for those of us who don't care much for the mainstream -- to stand on the shoulders of that movement to craft a radical queer politics as well. They were co-founders of Daughters of Bilitis in 1955, a lesbian homophile organization that worked with religious and mental health profesisonals to battle legal, social and economic discrimination against lesbians, and in 1960, Del became one of the editors of The Ladder, a newsletter that connected usually closeted lesbians across the United States and internationally in a support and information network. In 1972, the energetic pair were among the founders of the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club in San Francisco. The Toklas Club not only brought gays and lesbians into local politics, it created a model for formal political participation by gays and lesbians on the "interest group" model that dominated Democratic liberal politics at the time.

What people talk less about is Martin's significance as a feminist: in 1963, the couple joined the National Organization for Women, becoming the first lesbians to publicly identify with the organization. In 1981, Martin published a pathbreaking book, Battered Wives, that addressed questions of domestic violence that were beginning to provide a central focus for political feminism. Analyses by Martin and other feminists like Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon would provide a literature for cultural feminist activisms that would coalesce and become visible in the 1980's in anti-pornography, anti-rape and battered women's shelter movements.

Martin's life work is too extensive to review here. But you can read about in Marcia M. Gallo's excellent history of DOB, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. Martin saw GLBT rights as part of a larger human rights movement, something that is worth remembering as we move forward into what will almost assuredly be a new chapter in American political history.

Crossposted at Cliopatria

Why Joe Biden?

Beats me, except for voters like Mother of the Radical (MOTheR), who is a formerly Hillary-supporting Pennsylvania voter and thinks Joe Biden is the bee's knees. The comb over doesn't seem to bother her at all.

But Delaware? Who needs Delaware in a general election? Wait! I know! Except for an accident of colonialism and the fact that it is owned by Dupont, Delaware is actually a county in Pennsylvania. Don't believe it that Obama is eschewing the old "state strategy" by choosing a senator from little, insignificant Delaware as his vice president: the campaign is hoping that Joe will bring in the very important swing state of Pennsylvania (where, by the way, black politicians are not overly popular and gregarious, boot-straps white guys are.)

Of course, I didn't like any of the people on the finals list, except perhaps Evan Bayh. And I was a little afraid of the Governor of Virginia. Given this, maybe Joe will be OK. And his wife is hot. The Michelle-Jill wife ticket is one I can totally get behind.

So what do we think of Joe? Here are some highlights:

On abortion: not so good. Voted for the so-called "partial birth" ban; claims to believe life begins at conception (which is a stance that was invented so that people could fudge their position on abortion and hope Christians wouldn't notice); voted against maintaining the abortion ban on military bases; consistently voted for federal funding for contraception; claims to support Roe strongly, but has voted for a great many laws that have greatly restricted who actually has access to abortion.

Conclusion: Joe is pro-choice, but wants to placate the pro-life crowd (a group of people who are, I think, not that stupid) and is not willing to stand up for a universal right to choose.

On civil rights: voted against court-ordered bussing to desegregate schools; believes gays should be allowed to serve in the military and have civil unions. Believes that gay marriage is probably "inevitable", but that "government should not be able to dictate to religions the definition of marriage" (as if marriage were a religious rather than a political institution); voted for the Defense of Marriage Act which makes it ilegal for the federal government to recognize gay marriages enacted legally by states (because he knows marriage is a political act --duh.)

Conclusion: probably not homophobic, but caters to the homophobic on Sundays and holidays. Has gay friends.

On education: Believes that his vote for No Child Left Behind was an error (good thing his own children didn't go to public school!); doesn't think segregated schools are an issue as long as racial separation isn't enforced by law; voted no on school vouchers in DC, an unsuccessful effort to prevent draining public money into private education corporations who now educate half of the children in the District of Columbia; voted in favor of funds for abstinence education -- $75 million dollars worth -- that was under the Clinton administration!-- as well as for funds to provide information about contraception as part of a comprehensive sex ed package.

Conclusion: not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to education, but has many bases covered. Doesn't quite get it that most minority and poor kids get screwed because middle class and wealthy people of all colors don't have to go to school with them.

In case this leaves you feeling lukewarm to cold on Joe, here's the bright side. Joe received an "F" from the National Rifle Association; a 16% rating from the Christian Coalition; a 0% rating from the National Right to Life Committee (but only a 36% rating from NARAL-ProChoice America); 100% from the NAACP (but only a 78% from those centrist queers at the Human Rights Campaign and a dismal 60% from the American Civil LIberties Union). The United States Chamber of Commerce gave him an anti-business 32%; and the AFL-CIO a 100%, for his pro-union stances.

Oh and the other bright side -- Did I mention that the wife ticket is really hot?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That you are fabulous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Senior Scholars, This Is Your Conscience Speaking

Hey you.

Yeah, I'm talkin' to you. No, don't turn around, there isn't anybody else here. I'm talkin' to you -- you, with the manuscript sitting on your desk that you haven't read yet. The one that you agreed to read -- yeah, you agreed, don't pretend you didn't. Hey! Look at me! Was it a month ago? Two months? THREE?

You bastard. And it's still sitting there? You haven't even taken off the rubber band yet? And school starts in a couple weeks? You make me sick.

OK, I want you to think about something. I want you to think about your first book, and how happy you were when you sent it off to the press. I want you to remember that your editor told you s/he would get back to you in six weeks, and by the time it got to be two months, you were like, "Geez, what do I do?" You were like, "Hey, I set aside August and September for final revisions, so what's up with this?" And finally after three or four months, one of your colleagues told you it was ok to call, they wouldn't reject your book just because you called. And maybe -- just maybe -- you really needed that book contract for your tenure case. Remember that? I thought you did, wise guy. And some %#$&*@ had your manuscript sitting on a desk kinda like yours the whole time. Or was using it for a doorstop, or some damn thing.

So read the effing manuscript, ok? Write some helpful comments if you can pull your head out of whatever pathetic part of your body you have it stuffed in. And don't forget to send your social security number so the press can cut the check, or send you twice the amount in books.

Thank you. You skunk.

A Sister Radical Crosses Over

Back in the early 1980's a bunch of young feminists, for different reasons, decided to attend graduate school in history at New York University. One of them was me; another was Adina Back, a public historian who later worked at Brooklyn College, among other places, and who also became the mother of two sons. Adina died Wednesday, August 6, after a long battle with ovarian cancer. We will all miss her: she had a wonderful smile, was smart, and was a sweet and generous human being. She was 50. Click here to view a brief online obituary in the New York Times.

You can read a short article that Adina, who worked on the history of schools in New York, wrote about media coverage of Brown v. Board of Education for the Radical History Review (v. 90, 2004), where she was a member of the editorial collective, here.

Internet Kudo of The Week: Canada Speaks

Knock me out with a wooden spoon, but a quick check to the sitemeter this morning elicited the information that your favorite Radical has been noted on a list of Top Academic Blogs by More.ca, a Canadian on-line magazine that describes itself as "Canada's site celebrating women over 40." The Radical is joined in the top three by two of her own favorite bloggers, Margaret Soltan of University Diaries; and her second favorite dean, Dean Dad, at Confessions of a Community College Dean(as regular readers know, my favorite dean is my very own dean.) But this is excellent company indeed, particularly for a historian, whose lack of talent for punctuation is a continual shame to her, and makes her reluctant to even send email to members of English departments, much less be put in the same category as Margaret Soltan's alter-blogging-ego, the Scathing Online Schoolmarm.

This is particularly welcome news since -- to unveil a personal factoid that has gone unrevealed on the internet up to this very moment -- the Radical is, in fact, half Canadian, and the daughter of a naturalized citizen who still prefers to celebrate Dominion Day over Independence Day.

I am, therefore, especially honored by this recognition from My People.

Tell Me What You Want -- What You Really, Really, Want: Writing and Placing the Job Advertisement

I want to begin with some bad news: if you are a search chair, and your ad has not already been placed, you may be up Hiring Creek right now, because important deadlines in many fields have passed. Just saying. And yes, one of your responsibilities as search chair is (was) to know when those deadlines are (were.) An experienced department chair will, of course, remind you of deadlines and help you meet them by facilitating the process I describe below, but as we all know, one of the joys of a successful tenure case can be the unhappy surprise of being informed you are the next chair, so s/he may not be experienced enough to have known this either. That said, let's get down to brass tacks. How do you write and place an ad?

1. Write the ad for the scholar your department has agreed it wants to hire. This means being as clear about rank and field as you can be. If you are only willing to consider people who do not have any time on a tenure clock anywhere, the phrase you want is "beginning assistant professor;" if you are willing to consider experienced but untenured folk, just say "assistant professor;" if you are willing to consider experienced people, but only those who would not be eligible for tenure immediately, indicate how many years seniority you are willing to consider: "assistant professor who has not progressed beyond the first contract." Remember, there will be people out there who, through no fault of their own, have not gotten tenure and must apply for assistant level jobs; there are others, again through no fault of their own, who have held a number of visiting positions and accumulated a significant portfolio. These people, frankly, have been through enough, and you shouldn't encourage them to apply if what you want is someone who will complete a lengthy probationary period by which they reassure their colleagues of their qualifications for tenure (yes, I'm talking to you, liberal arts colleges.) And one thing you must not do is suggest in the ad -- if it is a terminal appointment -- that it might be converted into a tenure-track line. That's the kind of news that would surely be welcome at a later date for the lucky winner, but it is false advertising to say that a terminal contract is anything other than a terminal contract.

And as to field, take a good look around your department, see who you have, and whose strengths you would not duplicate in a new hire. Now the wise applicant will do that too, but given the state of the market, candidates should not be expected to guess whether you do -- or do not -- want a second scholar who specializes in the Civil War. Your ad should have at least one line that indicates exclusions or preferences, if they exist. For example:

"Blinker College invites applications for a beginning, tenure-track position in twentieth century Russian history; scholars whose work focuses on gender and ethnic minorities during the Soviet period are particularly encouraged to apply." This is the kind of ad I like to see, because it demonstrates not just that there has been a thorough discussion about what kind of Soviet historian is desired, but it also demonstrates how such a person might meet other needs in the department. But check this one out:

"Aardvark University invites applications for a position in Twentieth Century United States history, specialty open." This is the kind of ad that can -- in some circumstances, although not all -- be careless, if not borderline unethical. Now, if Aardvark has a big department, if it is an R-1 university, if it is a senior appointment, I would believe them that they are open to anyone. There is enough turnover in such departments at higher levels, enough need for graduate supervision in the twentieth century United States, and enough demand for big surveys, that what they want is to hire someone who is going to win the Bancroft six or seven years down the line, and duplication isn't an issue. If it is a small department in a big university (State Tech) where there will only be one person covering the field, fine. But if it is a smaller school that is more like a SLAC than an R-1, but with a large history department that employs several Americanists, and that doesn't hire frequently, this isn't a good ad! In such a case, I would urge the department to specify a field it does not currently have covered with a specialist. Don't encourage applications (and false hopes) from scholars who will be taken off the table because of duplication in field.

Finally, the department and the search committee should not be in fundamental disagreement about what they are, or are not, open to. It is an inappropriate compromise to put fields in play that some people in the department will actively oppose during the hiring process, and unethical to put candidates in play who will be ammunition in an internal struggle. Make your compromises now, and keep your word about the agreement you have struck internally.

Conclusion: do not encourage applicants to put the time, effort, expense and emotional capital into an application to your school if, for some reason out of their control, they haven't got a fair chance of being considered for the job.

2. Be clear about what the application should look like. Do not ask for more materials than you will legitimately consider, and don't intimate that there is a minimum but you might want more. It is convention in history to ask for a letter of application, curriculum vitae and three letters of reference. I wouldn't ask for "at least x letters" as some search chairs do, because it suggests that it would be better to have more than x, and sets candidates scrambling unnecessarily to add to a dossier they thought was already complete. It is convention to ask for a writing sample: for a tenure-track job, set your limit at 40 pages because if you ask for less, grad students have to actually cut a dissertation chapter or article to meet an utterly arbitrary standard (I knew some last year who were actually engaged in this process, when it had no other purpose intellectually, and it served no other function but to impede the completion of a dissertation. And save the search committee time in their reading.)

Conclusion: be considerate of the candidates, many of whom are struggling to apply for jobs and finish dissertations simultaneously; many of them will also be teaching full or part time. Ask for what you really need to evaluate their candidacies, with an eye toward what they can give you readily and what they will be asked for by others.

3. Teaching portfolios are useless, particularly at the preliminary stage, unless you actually care more about a commitment to teaching than a commitment to active scholarship. Don't ask for them. If the Radical were the Drag King of the World, one of the things she would do is outlaw teaching portfolios. I want to say this with the caveat that I probably disagree with many of my Zenith colleagues, and friends at other institutions, in this matter. But teaching portfolios take a huge amount of time to prepare, they are almost exact replicas of each other, and they only tell me what the candidate thinks (often hypothetically) about teaching -- not whether s/he can teach well.

I don't believe any of us can evaluate our own teaching, and to ask a novice teacher to do so is particularly unkind. In my view, it takes pedagogy lightly to suggest that it can be mastered in the course of a few teaching assistantships and one or two independently taught seminars. I don't want copies of teaching evaluations (wouldn't any candidate pull out the ones they considered unfair or prejudicial?); I don't want to hear about how a graduate student centers Freirian methods (as if s/he just discovered this empowering theory, and our students were Brazilian peasants emerging from two centuries of illiteracy); and I don't want to know how your heart leaped when you entered your first classroom (ee-yew.) But I will take seriously what a member of the faculty, in a letter of reference, has said about a teaching observation as we are picking semi-finalists. I will also take seriously the record of experience, as it is listed on the cv.

Conclusion: Unless teaching skills are virtually the only requirement of the job, and scholarly accomplishments are a distinctly minor factor in the hiring and eventual tenure process, serious evidence about teaching should be provided by candidates at the semi-finalist stage, in the form of interviews and draft syllabi. Teaching portfolios consume time and money that people who do not have jobs don't have. And when evidence about teaching is solicited, it shouldn't be part of a grab-bag "portfolio" that relies on ill-defined terms like "excellence" since different teachers teach well differently. Evidence about teaching should make the candidates comparable to each other. This excludes student evaluations entirely, since they are not comparable instruments across institutions, and more important, the committee has no sense of the institutional context within which they were generated, or who the students are. Any course the successful candidate would be required to teach, and will be asked about in an interview and subsequent requests for materials, should be named in the ad.

4. The deadline for applications should represent a realistic date that both allows applicants to prepare the materials you are asking for, and allows you to evaluate their applications and generate a preliminary interview list in a thoughtful way. No application that took a day to prepare should be read in twenty minutes. No job applicant should be asked to spend money far in advance to attend a convention where s/he might not be interviewed; conversely, no job applicant who is not already a tenured professor making a good salary should be ask to spend $1000.00 at the last minute for a plane ticket and a hotel room that could have been acquired at half the price a month in advance. If you are running late, let your semi-finalists know that you are willing to interview them by phone or, if they live nearby, that the committee can meet them briefly on campus. Graduate students will make deadlines, within reason, whenever you set them -- why not set a deadline of November 1 and generate your interview list by Thanksgiving so that you are not calling candidates on Christmas eve or New Year's day?

Conclusion: treat job candidates as if their time, money, peace of mind and energy were valuable too.

5. Advertise everywhere your budget allows, and particularly on the internet, which is heavily used by younger scholars. This means definitely advertise in the job listing for your professional association, in any newsletter or e-newsletter connected to that association, and in any publication or e-publication produced by scholars in subfields that are named in the ad as areas of interest. I like H-Net, and Inside Higher Ed gives you listings by state, which is helpful for couples who are on the market. The ad should be posted on the university web page, and preferably, your department web page. You should distribute it to colleagues elsewhere who might know potential candidates, and as search chair, you should be willing to discuss the position briefly with any candidate who is unsure of whether s/he would be taken seriously as an applicant for reasons of field, (in)experience, or status of degree. In other words, is the committee willing to recommend someone who works on masculinity for a joint appointment in women's studies? A candidate who already has a book out and might wish to come up for early tenure? An American Studies Ph.D. for a history job? A person who won't defend in the spring, but could realistically take an October degree? These are fair questions to want an answer to, in my opinion.

Finally -- and here I reflect many conversations I have had with colleagues and graduate students since this post but -- keep an eye on the appropriate wiki in your field. I am on record as disliking wikis, as the information they disseminate tends to be random, inaccurate and sometimes mean-spirited. But they are a fact of life now, and they have become a fact of life because we search chairs do not give candidates full, accurate -- or sometimes even honest -- information. Rather than deploring their existence, I have decided to participate in them. The responsible search chair, in my view, will keep an eye on wikis and make sure that the ongoing search report generated by applicants is correct. If certain kinds of questions keep coming up, the way to be fair to all candidates prior is to volunteer new and accurate information to the wiki.

My last comment is that search chairs need to remember that they are advertising for candidates, and you are not advertising yourself: your institutional and departmental web page, and the reputations of your colleagues are the primary advertisement for your institution, and it is inappropriate to include sentences that characterize values -- even good ones, such as the importance of colleagueship -- as criteria a candidate must speak to in a two page letter. There is one big exception to this, in my view, and this will probably draw howls of protest. It is not altogether clear whether it is ethical for private, religious institutions to give preference to candidates who represent a set of religious or ideological beliefs, but at present it seems to be legal, and search chairs have an obligation to put that in the ad. "Christ on a Cross University expects all employees to meet its standards of moral behavior" may not be a value to the taste of some of us, but it is honest if, for example sexual preference, divorce or union activism would be actually be an issue that would exclude some candidates from being employed by your institution.

Next week: Job Seekers, What Does A Good Letter of Application Look Like?

Playing the Race Card

By sheer luck, two things coincided last week: I began reading Kevin Kruse's wonderful book, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2005) and I saw an unusually acerbic exchange between journalists David Brooks and Mark Shields about the McCain campaign's charge that Barack Obama had "played the race card." Obama, as we all know, said in a speech that John McCain and his people are trying to whip up fear about his candidacy because he doesn't look like the presidents featured on our currency (although given the state of our economy, I think that Obama's first presidential act should be to put a picture of George W. Bush on every denomination.)

Now, as someone who is far more progressive than Obama on many issues, including race I suspect, this nevertheless won him my sympathy, and I raced to my computer to make my first campaign donation to --as he is now called-- "the presumptive Democratic nominee."

I too have been accused of "playing the race card," more than once, and in settings various, including comments on this blog. What people mean, as I understand it, is that at moments when I have believed it was crucial to talk about racism, particularly in a situation where damage was being done, I have been accused of introducing, not naming, "race" as an issue. This has become a standard tactic of the contemporary conservative repertoire, whether in the political sphere, the blogosphere, the university, or any other setting where power sharing, rights or equality might be at issue. The outcome that is intended is that I -- and others engaged in similar work -- should be made to feel embarassed, and that I should shut up or recant so that the conversation can go on. What it then means is that we cannot speak about racist behavior as anything but an accident or a misunderstanding, when in fact we need to talk about whether institutional racism (at the very least) is at work, and what we might do to correct the problem so that we can proceed in a fair way.

But of course, as in all things bloggable, "the race card" is more complex and devious than my little life can illustrate. It is a phrase that came to national attention, we should recall, in 1995 when prosecutor Christopher Darden accused defense attorney Johnny Cochran of having introduced -- not pointed out, mind you, but introduced -- race and white racism as a possible factor in the O.J. Simpson trial. That both men were black was confusing to many observers, but shouldn't be. Rather, as Linda Williams points out in her book Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton University Press, 2001) the use of this phrase is deliberately intended to rescript legal or political narratives as melodrama. In other words, when one accuses one's opponent of "playing the race card" one deliberately diverts attention from the cultural, political and social facts of the history of race in America by claining that such things are -- well, only history. And it articulates racial discourse itself as merely a highly subjective, emotional state of mind, rather than a multi-faceted epistemology that Americans bring to their contemporary social, economic and political encounters because of their collective history.

Linguistically, and socially, the phrase plays another function as well. Some words are constricted by their past, and yet the ideas they express have not fallen out of use: hence, they require euphemisms. Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, for example, has argued in a book and several articles that there are only very selective, usually private and contextual, uses of the word Nigger that are not readily perceived as doing harm to social and economic relationships in the contemporary United States. So instead, polite company has chosen the euphemism "the n-word" which allows one to both reference and disavow the concept that this volatile word calls up. Similarly, I think it has always been unequivically rude to call a person -- as opposed to an act -- racist, even during Jim Crow. Hence, a euphemism was called for that not only stood in for the word "racist," but that could be used to describe anti-racist activists as well. Thus, when someone has "played the race card" it means that we are all acknowledging that race is in play -- the point of conflict is whether that has corrupted the conversation beyond repair (the position of the McCain camp and its surrogates), or whether by talking about race we are describing the complexity of political culture in the twenty-first century United States, as it is embedded in a long and well-documented history of attempts to limit or suppress black political participation (my position.) And despite the significance of Obama's candidacy, that history is not over.

This is where we, the people, may be fortunate in the particular personality traits that Barack Obama brings to the table as a presidential candidate. Often there is no way to respond to melodrama but -- well, melodramatically. And Obama doesn't do that. He doesn't have a melodramatic bone in his body. He seems capable of taking almost endless abuse without losing his temper; of responding to nonsense politely, and then walking away. Which returns the Obama narrative to its origins as a story about heroism, not suffering (hat tip).

What is even more interesting to me is that Obama may actually be doing something he claims to care about: changing political culture in the United States. Because of his insistence on a heroic narrative, rather than a melodramatic one, members of what is now called the MSM (main-stream media) seem to be following along and not allowing such events to turn into festering cultural sores that divert us from critical national issues. For example, in a piece that is unusually insightful for a centrist news weekly, Andrew Romano of Newsweek has called the McCain campaign's attempt to slur Obama for talking about (his own) race Playing the 'playing the race card' card, and exposed this moment as campaign strategy intended to obfuscate the issues, not political information. Furthermore, in response to David Brooks' comment on the Lehrer News Hour that "talking about race in this context [of a political campaign], I think, is the worst thing," Mark Shields snapped back, "the charge yesterday that Obama had introduced and played the race card was so over-the-top by the McCain campaign. I mean, it was truly -- it boggled the mind. And it went beyond any concept of rationality." As Shields had pointed out earlier, "Now, did he raise the race issue? The race issue is with him every day of his life. When you see his picture, the race issue is there."

Which brings me back to Kevin Kruse. As Kruse argues, the New Right's claim that their movement and ideology are "color blind" is grounded in the history of white racism. He argues persuasively that the roots of this claim are in the alternative forms of segregation whites constructed when Jim Crow was struck down by the courts and civil rights activists and urban progressives, for similar and different reasons, sought to enforce the law. By the 1970's, when massive resistance to desegregation had failed, southern whites used their economic mobility to re-segregate themselves in the suburbs. Kruse points to what I think is an interesting paradox -- that the structural successes of the civil rights movement forced whites to displace their desire for racial separation onto new social and spacial formations where racism became "invisible" because it was not written into the law. As he also argues, the strand of conservative ideology and political discourse that culminated in the Reagan Revolution was developed in a suburban landscape whose defining halllmark was the absence, except as low wage workers, of people of color. "Inside such a homogenous setting," Kruse writes, "it is perhaps easy to understand how some have accepted without question the claims of conservative activists that their movement was -- and still in -- 'color blind' and unassociated with class politics. Indeed, in the suburbs, with no other colors in sight and no other classes in contention, such claims seem plausible. How could modern conservatism be shaped by forces that weren't there?"

Kruse -- who, by the way, although he is tenured at Princeton, lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, a classic case of a city abandoned by whites when faced with demands for black economic equality (good on you, Kevin) -- points us to how someone like David Brooks, could say that while he was "fine with Obama's "grand speech" on race in Philadelphia, and that he does not think that either candidate can talk about race or racism in any other than a "demeaning" or "dirty way."

Perhaps. But the rest of us can, and I think it will be a central role for historians to play in this campaign to do so. And while you are doing your research take some time to go here and do what I did: play the race card. Give a few dollars to the Obama campaign.

Return from Vacation: A Dirge, With Variations

I return from vacation to find that:

The Phillies are back in first place. Didn't you know the Mets had to crumble? (Note: in many years, to reverse the team names in this sentence would be an accurate rendition of the state of Baseball Nation.)

It's stinko hot, as it often is in the East in July, and I have a zucchini as big as a (fill in the blank) in my garden, and far bigger than some.

I have 85 emails, after deleting the ones telling me that Zenith is going to elminate my email account unless I send my password immediately.

In my absence, and in the middle of the night, someone tried to steal the copper down spouting from the Castle, only to be foiled because New President or one of his family members heard suspicious noises. Apparently, Zenith maintenance wants to replace the damaged down spouts with PVC pipe , but they can talk to the historical commission about that one, baby.

I am determined to retool my golf skills so that there is at least one sport I can do with my teenage nephew. It was supposed to be tennis, but my orthopaedic surgeon has banned me from running, twisting, pounding and turning on hard surfaces. And yet, I used to be a formidable golfer in my youth (it's true), and although it is an embarrassing skill for a Radical to have, I think I can revive it for the sake of a sports-smitten boy.

There is still three weeks before I have to turn to schooling the young. Make the most of it, all of you.

What Do You Do, Dear? The Radical Announces a Series of Posts on the Upcoming Job Season

A message from the home security company, received this morning on my cell phone, reminded me of what I know too well: my vacation in the North Woods of Minnesota will be over on Wednesday. They also reminded me that I had forgotten to reset my fire alarm, which is a significantly better message than "Oh, your alarm went off and no one was home, so the fire department broke down the door to investigate." And despite my best efforts to leave the blogosphere to its own devices until I return, this brush with the real world caused a post to begin to form in my head.

So today I present the first in a series of posts about the upcoming Job Season. It will be a "how to" if you will, intended for those of you who are chairing a search, applying for jobs, interviewing (from both sides), and all stages up to and including making -- and responding to -- the offer. I will also want to take some time to speak to and about the overlooked -- candidates who, despite their best efforts, are left at the end of the job season looking for a visiting post and wondering why their best wasn't good enough. What I hope is that these posts, and the conversation they generate in the comments section, will act to put a lot of us in conversation about the hiring process, expose us to each others' practices, and make the system more accessible for job seekers.

So let's begin. You have been asked to chair a search -- I've done three so far, and am about to embark on my fourth. I've probably been on about seven or eight search committees, and watched other chairs do their work. What are you responsible for?

The ethical conduct of the search committee.To the best of my knowledge there is no book or article that describes the horrific things that many job candidates have been exposed to during the process, although those stories are readily available in the blogosphere and in conversations with colleagues. But ethical conduct includes a number of categories we will elaborate on later in this series. It includes creating an ad that says, as specifically as possible, what qualities the right candidate should have, or stating explicitly when the field and qualifications are open. It includes public notification if the search is canceled. It includes the search committee coming to some internal agreement as to how candidates will be evaluated, both in the reading of their dossiers and in the interviewing process. And it includes being explicit with your committee about what kinds of conduct are and are not appropriate, both internal to the committee, in committee members' communications with others in the department and in interactions with the candidates.

Making sure that the search process is compatible with university regulations and with the guidelines of your professional association. What will be tricky is if these two standards are not compatible with each other -- which they might not be, for reasons that are not in the least sinister. But now is the time to find out. For example, I discovered last year that in anthropology, by decree of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), it is standard practice not to ask for letters of recommendation until the committee has decided the candidate is of interest. This strikes me as eminently sensible and humane, and yet it is not standard practice in most other fields, and our practices at Zenith tend towards giving the letters of recommendation equal weight with the other materials in the decisions that lead to the preliminary interview. So this was something that needed to be reconciled early on in the search, prior to the ad placement, so that all candidates (we were searching with several departments) had similar dossiers.

Creating, and managing, a timetable for the search. Every member of your committee deserves to know before school starts when they will be expected to get their reading done, around when the meetings to pick semifinalists and finalists will be, and what weeks the interviews will occur in. This information allows them to figure out how they will accomplish the other things they need to do this year without the search putting undue burden on them, their families or their students. Furthermore, it is not unlikely that members of the committee will be contacted by colleagues elsewhere about when decisions will be made, and they should be able to respond to such questions. As chair, you will receive anxious emails from candidates about the search timetable -- how much better to be able to tell them in their first message from you, the response that acknowledges that the application itself has been safely received and is under consideration, when they might hear from you again? Which leads us to our last item for today:

Communicating with the candidates in a timely and responsible way. Given the state of the job market, there is very little that is more important than this, as far as I can tell. First of all, dear reader, you would be shocked at how many job applications go entirely unacknowledged -- no note that it has been received, no note informing candidates who did not receive an offer who was hired. Nada. More commonly, general wisdom on searches is that you don't communicate in any way with the candidate pool until you have made an offer and the offer is accepted -- probably some time in March or April. I think this is wrong. I think that a search committee should meet twice before selecting semi-finalists, and the first meeting should be to weed out candidates that you wouldn't hire under any circumstances, and let them know. That should still leave you with a sufficiently large pool (in 20th century United States history,probably 100 people or more) so that even if you needed to go back into the pool for some reason, you can. Then, after semi-finalists are chosen, write to everyone else and tell them that they are not semi-finalists at this time. Worst case scenario, you have to go back to them and say, "Actually, our idea about this hire has shifted, and we would like to interview you after all." Same with the semi-finalist pool: let them know they are not finalists. And you know what? If someone came to me late in the process and said, "Guess what? We do want to bring you to campus after all!" why wouldn't I be pleased about that? Particularly if I had the pleasure of saying, "Gee, it's too late -- I've accepted another offer. But good luck to you!" That would be one for the scrap books.

Next Week: Writing And Placing the Advertisement.

Vacation -- And Not A Minute Too Soon, If You Ask Me

You would think this Radical did nothing but vacation: not so. For the past two weeks, since my return from History Camp, I have been involved in the most intense negotiations of the most delicate kind. And they were successful. So if I had not already planned a vacation, I would take one.

La famille Radicale is going here, to this beautiful place, where we have been many times before. We are visiting people who take the most exquisite care of us by alternately giving us things to eat, chatting in intelligent and genial ways, and ignoring us completely so we can wander off to read and nap.

Here's the radical part: I am not taking my computer. Though they have several computers there, so I can blog from vacation, and I am -- well, taking my thumb drive, just in case I should be left alone with a computer for an hour or so......Happy July, everyone. I'll be home by payday.

As It Turns Out, This Year's Campaign Is Not Going To Be Revolutionary After All

One of the things that is great about being on the Zenith faculty is that my students (and I use this term broadly, since I teach relatively few of them) can always be counted on to be amusing. Well-behaved, not so much, but I don't care about that most of the time, and don't even really value it (as anyone who knows me or follows this blog could testify.) But amusing is essential. Among their habits is providing a helpful public service. They sift through the gunk that proliferates on the internet to come up with the funniest things -- things that will lift our spirits; things to provide blog content over the weekend when we faculty should really be writing for those stuffy folks who publish words on paper. And my students provide this service at no charge whatsoever - whereas they are charged for everything they get from me through annual payments of almost $45K. I find this remarkably generous of them, don't you?

See the latest contribution, via internet content producer Jib Jab:

Hat tip.

Bodies That Matter:* When the Scholar Becomes the Text

I admit it. Every once in a while I go on a Facebook binge. What triggered it the other night I truly do not recall, but I sent friend requests to former students of mine with whom I had worked closely, as well as one student I never taught, but know pretty well because we had a fellowship at a Zenith Humanities Center and we are both now bloggers. I added a colleague from the Economics department who I've always liked for her dry wit (what was she doing with a Facebook page? What am *I* doing with a Facebook page?) and it was only after I clicked the Friend request that I thought, "Aw -- what if she doesn't actually think of me as a friend? I mean, I think I was on the Executive committee when she was chair of the faculty, but committees do not friendships make." She friended me back. Phew.

Then I started looking for colleagues outside Zenith. After a bit, I typed "Judith Butler" (who I have met, but do not really know) into the search engine.

Oh my god. In the first five pages I came up with nine Facebook sites dedicated to Judith Butler the philosopher (as opposed to Judith Butler of Leeds, England; Judith A. Butler of Wilmington, DE; or the Judith Butler who has posted a photo of her corgi as a profile picture, which is the kind of thing Marjorie Garber might do, but Judith Butler would not.)

There's the Free Judith Butler page. It claims to have Michel Foucault as one of its "friends," and states that "it's time to free her eminence Judith Butler from intempestive, systematic and unappropriate quotations, misunderstanding and misinterpreting discourses. let's set Judith free. now." (Sic.) There's one called Judith Butler Come To Our School that has only seven members and is somewhat neglected: my sense is that it is devoted only to the desire -- well, that Judith Butler pay them a visit. Or go teach them. Or something. But you know, come up with an honorarium and an invitation, and she probably would.

These are the more benign ones. The pages start to "cross the line," as my students would say (the full quote, in an exasperated voice, is, "But Professor Radical, where does it cross the line??") with a fan site, simply called Judith Butler, as if it were in fact her page, where one fan has written on the Wall, "I am amazed by the fresh and relevant theory of this amazing individual!!!" and another, from Chile, "Excelente página, con textos no solamente de Judith Butler." Then there is Judith Butler is My Homegirl, with 1,340 members, that seems to be a place where people go to link other websites and blogs devoted to -- you guessed it, Judith Butler -- and is also a kind of virtual hangout for genderqueer folk inspired by the early work of (sigh) Judith Butler. But whatever.

Slightly more offensive is Lovers of Judith Butler United: The Judith Butler Appreciation Society, the title of which implies that these people (all 51 of them) are Dr. Butler's ex-lovers. Or current lovers. But in fact, they are actually just "people who know that Judith Butler is the most amazing academic to grace the face of this earth. Anyone who thinks she talks a lot of shit in a stupid style can bog off because they are clearly just thick." I think these people are also British, given the slang. "Additionally," the site managers go on, "this society is for anyone that loves Jude's hairstyle and believes that she is the epitomy (sic!) of the subversive perfomer."

And then there are two more that I am not linking to because the titles are so hostile.

One thing that this odd phenomenon -- making a celebrity of a scholar so that you can trash her for being a celebrity -- caused me to think about was if anyone has written about 'zines as a kind of cultural prelude to blogging and social networking sites. Butler is the only academic I have ever known who has also been the subject of a satirical fanzine; because of this and the Facebook sites, she may become the first academic to be written about -- academically -- as a pop cultural phenomenon as well as a knowledge producer (although I bet Stanley Fish is right in line, and in the conclusion to his most recent book, Walter Benn Michaels has written about himself in the third person as if he were already a cultural phenomenon.) About fifteen years ago there was an undergraduate from the University of Iowa who went under the moniker "Miss Spentyouth." She published several issues of a xeroxed fanzine called Judy! that were reproduced and recirculated everywhere, much as one now links to other blogs, or quotes from them on one's own blog. At the time I thought Judy! was extremely funny, in part because I thought feminist literary theory was really important, but also often really absurd in its claims, vocabulary and syntax. Scholars would go into rooms, listen to utter gobbledygook written by the lowest graduate student to the fullest professor, and then walk out, having understood very little but looking anxiously at each other and saying "Wow, I wish I were that smart." So that's the cultural critique I thought Judy! was, as they say, performing.

As I understand it from a second or third-hand account that percolated through the Differences crowd (which leads me to believe it was true, since Butler was, and is, well-published there), Professor Butler did not think Judy! was funny at all. There was a little kerfuffle about it between issues I and II of the fanzine in a now defunct (probably because it was so hip) publication called Lingua Franca, in which Butler rebuked Miss Spentyouth and was rebuked in turn by others who accused her of not having a sense of humor. There was the panel I attended where Butler snapped at an anonymous graduate student, "Don't call me Judy!" (note: don't.) But as I indicated above, what was missed by all its critics was that the 'zine wasn't really about Butler at all: it was about the way poststructural theory and cults of personality had saturated the world of feminist intellectuals, and English studies in particular. So it could have been called Michel! or Jacques! and the same point would have been made.

And in retrospect, I suppose the issue at stake for many feminists, and I suspect Butler herself, was that it wasn't any of these men who were being lampooned, now was it?

But I actually think these Facebook pages take it to a whole new level, whether they are intentionally nasty or not. In part that is because they are so easy to put up, they distribute themselves via Google in a way no 'zine author could distribute her work, and they don't require the kind of attention to composition or actual wit that a 'zine relies on to persuade others to reproduce and distribute it spontaneously. Because of negative experiences I have had on the web (and this is only one example) they disturb even me, and I am disturbed by very little on the internet -- not even the e-mails I get from the conservative online newsletter Human Events that say things like "The Recession May Be Good for You" and "Secret Plan Behind Obama Move to the Right." And they bother me, I guess, because the last time I looked, Judith Butler was a real person (perhaps the point my acquaintances on Differences were making years ago) and not some phony symbol who makes herself available for trashing like Brangelina or Brittany by generating publicity for every private moment. The down side, or acceptable collateral damage, of this chosen life in public is that we all know every time a pound is gained or lost, a baby (or two) born, and a DWI traffic stop occurs. And while we academics who blog enter into a pact with the internet devils that means we may fall victim to a public trashing at a moment's notice, all Butler does is write, teach, publish and occupy the cutting edge of her field. And yet somehow she has become the object of ressentiment on a grand scale, undoubtedly because of the effect of the job market (particularly in English studies, where her work has been so influential) on the nerves of highly educated graduate students and adjuncts who are simultaneously over- and underemployed.

But what I think is even stranger, in a more abstract way, is when someone who studies culture becomes culture. In other words, if "Judith Butler" can be reproduced so easily, and her image and reputation bent to whatever iconoclastic purpose a given individual chooses (to draw on the work of Judith Butler, not to mention Walter Benjamin) -- is there really a "Judith Butler"?

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

*with apologies to the author for rampant theft of a classic title. Unless "the author" is actually dead. The author was dead, but since I haven't kept up with my reading in philosophy or literary theory, I don't know if the author is still dead.

G-L-O-R-I-A! Gloria!

Have you ever wondered why the books on the sidebar widget, Tenured Radical Is Reading, stay up so long? No, it's not because moving my lips while I read is so tiring. It's because I am reading other things at the same time. Keeping three or four books going simultaneously is one of the few advantages of ADD.

Anyway, when I was at at history camp a few weeks back, about six or seven people asked me if I had read Amy Erdman Farrell's fabulous book Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). And after a while I just said yes -- why? Because a) Amy was actually at history camp, and I was afraid she would find out; and b) it was clear by the third time I said "no" that I should have read it ten years ago when it first came out; that it was a problem that could be easily corrected when no one was looking; and that having not read it portrayed me (falsely) as a profoundly ignorant person.

OK -- so I just finished reading Yours In Sisterhood. And you should read it too if you haven't, if only because you will teach second wave feminism better -- whether in a whole course or in a single lecture -- if you do. By focusing on Ms., Farrell is able to address the apparent "fragmentation" of feminism in the 1970's as an effect of its success; as well as an effect of the difficulty of creating a distinctively "feminist" media presence in a patriarchal commercial environment. Farrell helped me, in particular, figure out why it might be OK to jettison all the labels that describe different strands of the movement in the 1970's, and look instead at what people did on the ground, as opposed to what they claimed as their theory or ideology. As she shows, not only did multiple feminist constituencies discover "feminisms" that were useful to them, they were able to debate them with each other -- and with dominant voices in the movement, in the pages of Ms. As Farrell shows, the magazine became an arena for conflict, as well as for imaginative identification, among feminists -- and she does it without being too heavy-handed with her theoretical framework (this is a compliment that becomes significant later in the post.)

But why the Patty Smith headline? (Yeah Baby, just hit play while you read the rest of the post):

Because on p. 125 Farrell reproduces an utterly priceless quote from a Gloria Steinem interview, in which Gloria trashes academic feminists who were, Farrell tells us, sending all kinds of irrelevant articles in over the transom that no one wanted to read, much less edit into colloquial English. As Steinem said to journalist Cynthia Gorney of Mother Jones in 1995:

Nobody cares about [feminist scholars.] That's careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted, they think. If I read the word "problematize" one more time I'm going to vomit....But I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ration to its usefulness.

So think of that the next time you want to use the word problematize, friends. Or the next time someone suggests to your women's studies program that you might want to invite Gloria Steinem to campus to get an honorary degree or be a distinguished speaker.

Crossposted at Cliopatria

Saturday Queer Blogging

Some of you cat blog, I queer blog. So here goes.

For you social scientists and political activists, there is a non-profit called IssueLab: this month their CloseUp is on LGBTQ youth. IssueLab is a free online archive of nongovernmental, nonprofit, and University research on all sorts of social issues. You might find it useful when looking for research on almost any subject. This months CloseUp includes articles from nonprofits like GLSEN, Advocates for Youth, and Youth in Focus. (Hat Tip to Vanessa Beck who seems to be getting the word out about this valuable resource through blogs and websites like this one.)

Historians can also benefit from the many emails I receive from Karen Krahulik, of the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History (an American Historical Association Affiliate that, the last time I looked, was moving to change its name to be more inclusive, but either that decision isn't final yet or the website hasn't been updated. But if you are bi or trans, don't be freaked out -- it's in the works.) Karen wrote on May 19, 2008 that:

"Rainbow History’s site now includes ten new pdf documents of the gay left in the 1970s, including issues of Come Out Fighting, Red Flag, and Gay Left. Also online are two Lavender & Red Union readers. The documents can be accessed from this site. All recently added archival documents are listed on the home page."

Karen has also notified us that GLAD has developed a series of historical podcasts; this page will also link you to a blog page where readers are invited to share their memories of the senior prom. (Mary, puh-leese!)

And by the way, you can get emails from Karen too if you join the CLGH. It only costs $5.00 if you are a student, and you can be a lifetime member for only $150.00! What a steal!

And now for something completely different.

If you are in the mood for a little queer procrastination, go take this test to see how you would rate as a husband or wife in the 1930's. Since I wrote a book about the 1930's, and we seem to be entering a major re(de)pression, I couldn't resist. You have to pick a gender: the test doesn't assign you one. But frankly, it's queer whomever you are and whatever marital assignment you choose. And as it turns out:

114 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Superior Take the test!

Hat Tip. And no, princess, it isn't wrong to want to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer all day. If you are in an English department, you could even get away with calling it work.

A Meditation on Change: the Radical Wears Her Administrator's Hat

Recently I have been involved in one of those academic negotiations that involves calling on powers of persuasive argument normally reserved for one's scholarship (sprucing up old ideas with new evidence, adding a dash of original thought culled from new reading) in an attempt to make a case for intellectual and institutional change. It is a case that I have made before, many times, sometimes to great applause from allies of various kinds. It is a case that others have made before me, and along side of me. But it is a case that, although partial results have been won over time, has never succeeded as it should. It is a change that makes sense, but it fails -- over and over -- to be approved. And what I want, although it seems to have puzzled some people at Zenith over close to two decades, doesn't puzzle me -- and in fact is not an unconventional feature of institutional life elsewhere. In other words, Other People Do It. Smart People. Prestigious People. Why Not Us?

As I am now fifty, and have approximately thirty years left to live (thirty-five if I am lucky and careful) a maximum of fifteen of which will be spent at Zenith, I am at the stage of life when it seems reasonable to question any expenditure of energy that seems not to be getting results. Or at least, if I am going to dedicate myself to something difficult, maybe it should be finishing final revisions on the book that got trashed during the Unfortunate Events: better yet, world peace, racial equality, universal health care, the global refugee issue, affordable higher education, world hunger, an end to illiteracy in my community, or a full-frontal attack on the standardized testing industry. All of these issues could use another set of hands, a quick wit and a big mouth.

And yet I continue to work on This Thing (not, of course to the exclusion of other things, as I write, teach my courses, and occasionally contribute my energies to stumping for a political candidate), in part because This Thing is so close to being successful. And yet it is not successful.

As the steamroller of administrative labor caught up with me this week, the scholarly work I am supposed to be doing in what is a remarkably short summer got sand kicked in its face by the institutional version of the Bully on the Beach. The Bully is not a person, but an unwelcome problem -- the kind of task they pay me to do as chair, that has to be done whether I like it or not and that can crop up unexpectedly. And part of how I got dragged into this set of negotiations is not just because it is work that Must Be Done, but because it involves changing This Thing -- my own personal Sisyphean task. As I considered buying myself a Charles Atlas course of some kind so that in the future my ninety-seven pound weakling of a writing self won't be chased away from my bathing beauty scholarship by a big, strapping administrative task, my mind wandered to how difficult it is to change the system.


To say that I wish to change the whole system by doing This Thing would be going too far. I don't have that fantasy. After all, I know the system well, I work it fairly effectively, it benefits me to some degree, and barring revolution, it is the system we have. But as I said, the rub is this: although the change being proposed has been presented in many long documents it is considered in many places not to be terribly radical. As a matter of fact, I know it isn't even radical at Zenith, because the mode of response has shifted from resistance to avoidance. In other words, it has been acknowledged that this change is something to which no one is opposed, intellectually or practically. And yet, Change fails to occur. Why?

Now partly I am being discreet about the issue under discussion because negotiations of various kinds require discretion, and also because History Shows that people dislike being written about without permission. Temporarily, at least, I would prefer to retain my status as well-liked. But partly I am being deliberately abstract, because if I told you what the issue was you, Dear Reader, would do what all academics do, which is offer solutions for that particular problem, your sympathy, or similar tales of woe (I actually have a friend who, every time s/he writes a request that addresses a similarly long-awaited change tells me "Yeah, I sent in the tale of woe again.") But I'm also after something grander here. Why is Change so difficult to achieve in the academy?

Oh go ahead, blame tenure. But I think we need to think more creatively than that.

One place I would start is a colleague of mine, now retired, who was a Very Famous Scholar. He was also a conservative in the grand old meaning of the term before it got highjacked by David Horowitz and Pat Buchanan. A Goldwater conservative crossed with a Buckley conservative, if you will. I would be in meetings with Dr. V.F. Scholar, and someone would propose some kind of change -- say, in the sequencing of courses, or in how one might simplify the form that admitted a student to honors work. And he would smile gamely, as if on the brink of tears, and say, "I don't think that is a good idea at all. You might be right -- it could be better to do it that way. But it might be worse." And with that, we would usually abandon whatever petty reform we had embarked on and leave things as they were.

As time moves on, however, I find that my former colleague was unique only in the sense that he was honest and open about his belief that change -- in and of itself -- was not necessarily a cause for optimistic anticipation. Instead, it was -- well, ominous. Because if things begin to change, where would it all stop? Would untenured scholars begin to say what they really thought, and write what they really wanted to write? Would it become possible to have an idea that was worth pursuing, publishing, building a program around, without it being vetted by eight anonymous referees, six university committees, a self-study, an outside review, sending it to a seventh committee and requiring a vote of the full faculty? Might students insist, as they did during that Terrible Time we call the 'sixties (even though a lot of it happened in the 'seventies) that they wanted some authority over what and how they learned?

Yes, these things might happen. Alhough probably not, particularly now that students have been so completely cowed by the college admissions process that they too regard change as something unobtainable and punishable by exclusion from the Elect; and untenured scholars are so bullied by the job hunt and tenure process that they would write on the sidewalk if we assured them it was the only way to acquire health insurance and secure their livelihood as intellectuals. More and more, I think my former colleague hit the nail right on the head. When you make a change it might be better. Or it might be worse. And there is no way to know.

Except to try.

In Every Cloud A Silver Lining

I thought today was going to be a crappy day. Not only did I not get the New York TImes for the second day this week, but instead of the Old Grey Lady I received instead a copy of that excrescence otherwise known as our corporate-owned "local" newspaper. Then my car almost got towed (as we have not yet renewed our neighborhood parking sticker) except that I ripped out to the sidewalk, partially dressed, and got it started before it was hooked up to the truck. Then the lawnmower broke, so half the lawn is sticking up at crazy angles and the other half looks like a neat little Marine.

But things are getting better. I have just been notified by Fiona King, of Online University Reviews that the Tenured Radical has been named one of the top 100 blogs written by liberal arts professors.

Since I have just been roaring around the house complaining that I can't get to work, I'm going to make this short, but let me say that it has been a bumpy but pleasurable ride in the past eighteen months, and I look forward to the future. Thanks, Fiona.