Extra, Extra -- Read All About It: Tenured Radical And Rupert Murdoch Agree On Something

I saw this when I stopped into the CVS a few minutes ago, and thought I would put it up for those of you who have the good luck to live outside the range of a Murdoch tabloid. Sometimes the New York Post hits it right on the head don't they? This ranks right up there with the Daily News headline after Gerald Ford declared in 1975 that he would veto any "federal bailout" dedicated to keeping New York City from going into bankruptcy: "Ford To City: Drop Dead."

Teach This Book! Judith Bennett's History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Part 3 Of A Blogfest)

Note: those of you who have not yet discovered this series may wish to begin with the post by Notorious, PH.D. (March 2), and proceed to Historiann's contribution (March 9). As a bonus, who but our very own Historiann would have the ova to refer to Lawrence Stone as a "complete tool" -- not once, but but twice, baby! I ask you. This was what Joan Scott meant when she referred to "Stone's explicit patriarchal posture" in a 1985 letter to the New York Review of Books, rendered into that earthy English patois so typical of historians working on the American 17th century.

OK, I admit it. I am one of those twentieth century feminist historians Judith Bennett is speaking to in History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), historians who have given little thought to the practice of premodern history. No -- wait just a gol' durn minute. I have. Here goes.

My first response to Bennett's assertion "that feminist history should be more attentive to premodern eras" (3) is: right on. My second is that this intervention has implications for the writing and teaching of history more generally. I teach in a program and in a department, both of which assert the importance of the distant past to the not-so-distant past. You can look at the two core courses yourself, both of which I have taught, and both of which take me out of my comfort zone. One is AMST/LAST200, "Colonialism and Its Consequences in the Americas," for which I read and teach not only colonial North American history, but early modern European and colonial Latin American history (applause, por favor.) The other, which I haven't taught in a while, but helped to revise last year, is required for the history major, "Issues in Contemporary Historiography," usually referred to by its barracks name, "History 362."

My third and more ornery response tackles Bennett's assertion that, pushed by liberal and socialist feminisms and structured by conferences (especially my own beloved Berkshire Conference), feminist history's fascination with the present is fueled by the assumption that change is necessarily transformative (62). The present is, well, more cheerful than the past, Bennett argues: we can start with the fruits of progress, and devote our research time to recording the hard-won victories that get "us" here. What we are missing, Bennett argues persuasively through examples drawn from her own research on medieval English women, are the continuities that are just as important to understanding women's lives over time -- if not more important. Bennett argues this point well in Chapters 3,4,5 and 7. However, in Chapter 6, on lesbian history, she stumbles, missing a place where she might suggest how to address the modern as a transformative moment but not be blinded by it.

Premodern history makes you smarter.

There are a number of reasons to reinforce curricula in premodern history. One that prevails at Zenith is that undergraduates are intrinsically presentist, and that this is a bad thing. We have different reasons for thinking it is a bad thing, but we all agree that it is. While you can generally get a full room for the Early American survey (which is a gateway to the American Studies major!) try getting similar numbers for a longer past -- Medieval Europe, Enlightenment Europe, or Qing China. Some of my colleagues are exactly able to fill the room by turning to feminist history (it is Zenith after all). A second route is to introduce students to the earlier periods -- and the talented people who teach them at Zenith -- by using these early periods to teach basic historical methods. The hope is that we can light a fire under a few students to focus their major coursework and senior research in fields that we value; for the rest, we hope to destabilize false notions like, as Bennett puts it, that the Middle Ages was little more than "a thousand years without a bath."(82) Everyone who teaches that course also agrees, I think, that the distant past teaches good lessons about close reading, archival work, the uses of demography and argumentation that can be usefully transported to any period. In addition, Bennett's point -- that there are many categories of difference beyond race, class and gender (147) -- while crucial to understanding pre-modern periods, is no less true for modern history but more often goes unrecognized.

What Bennett has caused me to think about differently is the point that I work hard to hammer home for my students as I introduce them to historical thought: our relationship to our subjects as historians. On the one hand, I tell my students, the people we will study are human: this makes our own human intuition a tool for our research, part of what J.H. Hexter called our "second record." On the other hand, there is a point -- usually early in the semester when some member of my class has offered up a stinging, presentist judgement on a conquistador or a plantation mistress in place of analysis -- that brings discussion to a screaming halt. I then scowl at them and say, "Please remember that the people in this book are strange to you. They live in a foreign country called the past." If a student can learn to perform these two, more or less contradictory, tasks at the same time, said student will have learned to think historically by the end of the semester.

Bennett would, I think ask me to stop thinking about this as an equivalent task. She would ask me to teach historical thought by laying heavier stress on the human continuities, and less stress on the ruptures that modern time creates in human consciousness. And while I can't say I know what I think about that at present, what I do know is that I want to teach this book in History 362 and find out, by discussing it with my students, whether I need to alter this feature of my pedagogy.

What I think Bennett might usefully consider, however, is that the decline of the earlier periods that is evident by looking at women's history does not all lie at the door of the feminist history establishment, as she argues in her introduction. There have been critical, structural changes that dramatically affect the capacity of students in the United States to do archival work in earlier periods. Studying the more recent past, while it has its difficulties, does not require the study of classical languages, in which few students are trained at present. Studying United States history does not require acquisition of a language other than English in many cases -- and fewer and fewer undergraduates are coming to college with any reading fluency in a second, much less a third language. Even if that fluency is acquired, the earlier periods have other challenges, such as faded, unfamiliar handwriting and lack of linguistic standardization within ancient and/or regional forms of a given language. Should a graduate student throw caution to the winds and acquire all of these extra skills -- guess what? There are few jobs available to them, after all that training. That publishing in the earlier periods is way down I have no doubt: but whether it is solely due to a lack of interest by a larger feminist historical establishment is unclear, in my view.

"The L-Word"

Invoking the title of this popular Showtime series, Bennett introduces us to her term "lesbian-like" to describe women-loving women prior to the 1890s. This is perhaps more ironic than Bennett knows. Most of the lesbians I know think those women are "lesbian-like" too -- and not in a good way. ("Have you ever wondered," I began to ask a colleague, in a conversation about the endless sex on the show; and she chimed in to say in unison with me: "what they are actually doing in bed?!?"

But cattiness about Jennifer Beals and the coffee bar gang aside, Bennett uses "The L-Word" to underline what she sees as the reluctance among historians to address same-sex eroticism. Within women's history, she observes, "lesbianism remains a tricky subject and sometimes an unspeakable one. Simply put, women's history has a lesbian problem." (108) While ceding the category argument (that women couldn't "be" lesbians until that socio-scientific category was invented in the 1890s) Bennett argues that to fail to recognize and name "lesbian-like" women is to allow heteronormativity and homophobia to have a continuing, oppressive influence on our practice as feminists (and as lesbians, which in the interest of full disclosure, both Bennett and I are.)

While I am definitely on board with the imperative to fight homophobia in the academy and everywhere else, and I admire Bennett for naming it, I think she pushes for continuity at a price.

Although I am less familiar with the earlier periods -- and I agree that demands for a "smoking (fill in the blank)" should not be necessary to affirm an erotic relationship between women -- literature on twentieth century lesbians is no longer in short supply. Or maybe it's the lesbians who seem to be all over the place at history conventions. I'm not sure. But the mentors are out there, the sources are out there, and the graduate students seem to be more than willing to play along. So that while I buy it that there has been tremendous pressure on women over the past forty years to downplay the sisterhood, looking at a shorter timeline suggests that there has been some progress in this department (ok, I wouldn't go so far as to say transformation.)

My second quibble addresses the term "lesbian-like" as an expansive category that allows us to "see" a particular kind of subject, releasing that subject from the demands of modern identity and its politics. I understand what Bennett is trying to accomplish here, and apparently some historians have found it useful. (112) But by her criteria, we might rightly think of all lesbians as "lesbian-like," because historically, few of us after 1890 have agreed on what it means to be a lesbian, and as sexual identities become more fluid, fewer of us will. We also need to take a harder look at some of the "lesbian-like" women she invokes as historical examples, such as the fifteenth-century cross dressing documented by Michael Shank: what makes this gender-bending woman "lesbian-like," as opposed to transgendered?(120-124) Here, if we invoke Bennett's category, we are creating problems and not solving them.

And here's where modernity raises its ugly, intrusive head: the opposite of "heteronormative" history is not gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender history, since all of these categories reference the normal in some way. It would be queer history. Heterosexuality and homosexuality both insist that sexuality meet a standard and join one of two categories, something Bennett loses sight of as she maneuvers to keep the "L-Word" in play as a way of describing one kind of sexual variety. What can get her out of this bind, I think, is queer history, a post-modern phenomenon that both acknowledges its modern ancestry and attempts to undo the effects of that ancestry at the same time. Bennett invokes the word queer several times, but only as a placeholder for stable identity positions, although we know because of a critical footnote that queer historiography was hovering like trouble at the edges of this chapter. (fn14, 111)

But you know what? When I put together my new lesbian history course, I'm going to teach this chapter anyway, because like pre-modern history more generally, Judith Bennett makes me smarter. And History Matters belongs in historiography courses of all kinds for the questions it asks, not just about feminist historical practice, but about what we carry into the second century of modern historical practice and why.

Next week, go to Blogenspiel where we will hear from Another Damned Medievalist; our final installment, in week 5, will feature Judith Bennett de-lurking on Notorious PH.D. For those of you who can't wait until next week for more Judith Bennett, check out this roundtable, featuring feminist history all-stars Iris Berger, Leila Rupp, Judy Wu, Ulrike Strasser and a final comment from Bennett, from The Journal of Women's History, vol. 20,n. 2, (summer 2008). Hat Tip.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

A Lesson From Minnesota Fats: Bernie Madoff Hustled the Hustlers, But Are They Victims?

I will conclude my endless blithering about my lost and recovered iPhone with the following life lesson. As we were cruising down the highway, I was squeaking through my tears, having nothing else to say about what an idiot I had been to drop this cherished item in a parking lot, "It's not fair. It's not fair. It's just not fair." My companion, in an effort to comfort me said, "I'll buy you a new iPhone." And I said, "No,no,no. That's not the point." Fast forward to a conversation on the airplane home from vacation, surrounded by pink-skinned, peeling northerners in Mickey Mouse gear. My companion asked me what I meant when I said that "it wasn't fair." I explained: knowing that an iPhone was a huge luxury in times like these, I had taken all steps to be prudent about the purchase. I had calculated the increased monthly charges, and I had paid cash (or the debit card equivalent thereof) for the damn thing. It was cash I had saved for that purpose over a period of several months and that existed over and above the money I normally budget, not just to pay regular household bills, and to put in my savings account, but for upcoming things that now count as luxuries: my rowing club membership, for example, or grooming the dog. "But despite all that," I explained, the iPhone "was just gone. For no reason. As if I had never had it in the first place. It wasn't fair."

It was only later, writing this post, that I was able to connect my horror and rage at my own stupidity to that stomach-churning scene in The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961), where Minnesota Fats draws "Fast Eddie" Felson so deep into his hustle that Felson loses all caution -- and then Fats takes him apart, cue stroke by cue stroke, leaving Felson collapsed and broke.

So imagine my surprise when I ended my week long news fast this morning and stumbled on this article about responses to Bernie Madoff's guilty plea by those caught up in his scheme, in the Business section of The New York Times. As Joe Nocera writes, the victims in this case were also accomplices to their own demise for not having inquired as to how they were receiving such out-of-scale profits for their investments. In doing so, they disregarded some basic investing guidelines that -- if your parents didn't teach you -- reading a simple investment how-to book (or the business pages of any newspaper) would. These rules include:

Don't put all your money in one fund;

If the investment manager can't explain what s/he is doing to grow your money or return profits in language you can understand, you should not invest; and

If the profits you are receiving seem to good to be true, they probably are.

The institutions and individuals who invested with Madoff disregarded all three of these rules, to their peril, despite obvious "tells" that have been documented everywhere, like quarterly reports printed on a dot matrix printer, and the employment of a single auditor for what was supposed to be a vast and labyrinthine fund. Now, as Nocera writes, many investors insist that it is the government who is primarily at fault, and that they should have access to a "victim's" fund because Madoff ought to have been scrutinized by government regulators early and often. In other words: it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair.

Now, I opened with my boring little parable, because I do not think these people should be mocked. Their pain is real, and they have been irreparably harmed. I do think, however, they need to reorganize their view of themselves as victims if, as Nocera tells us, they really think that they ought to be reimbursed by the government for their pain. In fact, they they gambled and lost. All investment, whether it is legally structured or not, is a gamble, as those of us know who have watched our TIAA-CREF fall, fall, fall.

I do hope the Madoff "victims" return to their senses soon. I, for example, fell into a yawning chasm of grief over a far lesser object that could be easily replaced. The idea that my cherished iPhone could simply disappear -- and that it was returning to me far more joy than any material object ought to return in a sane universe, had also never occurred to me, I admit. But when I returned to my right mind, did I think that someone -- the government, perhaps -- should have handed me a new iPhone because I could not resolve my grief and embarrassment over my own foolishness? No. Why? Because I had never bought the damn insurance that would have permitted this outcome: insurance was an act of prudence, one that I rejected, because never in my life have I lost or broken an expensive electronic item. But that was, on my part, a calculated judgement that the future would replicate the past.

What past did many Madoff investors believe would be replicated? Why, that the the government works in the service of the wealthy, and furthermore that the wealthy would protect each other from the inevitable failure of an overinflated bull market. They believed that they were special, and that they always would be. After all, this is what happened in the late 1920's: as any economic history of the Great Crash of 1929 will tell you, wealthy American investors knew there was something wrong far earlier than anyone else did, and began cashing out as early as 1927. That the closed club of the "classes" had, by 1990, come to include elevated members of the "masses" like the Madoffs, did not obviate our "victims'" assumption that they would be cared for by other wealthy, powerful people like themselves. Elie Wiesel echoed earlier interviews when he explained outside the court house: “it was a myth that [Madoff] created around him....that everything was so special, so unique, that it had to be secret. It was like a mystical mythology that nobody could understand.” Mr. Wiesel added: “He gave the impression that maybe 100 people belonged to the club. Now we know thousands of them were cheated by him.” (Quoted in Nocera, 3/14/09)

Many of these people who were in the club refuse to admit to this day that they are not special, only suckers after all. As touch football lingo goes, "suckers walk." But they believe they should be repaid federal taxes that they paid on "profits" that didn't exist (wrong: you cashed the checks and spent the money); and worse, they think the justice to be had here is for the defrauded privileged to be reimbursed by the government rather than accept responsibility for their own foolishness (as the poor who were suckered into bad mortgage deals and credit card debt are supposed to.) It seems to me one of the paradoxes of this historical moment that deregulation was apparently just fine -- regardless of the terrible consequences it had for 95% of the world's population - up until the point at which those who benefited from de-regulation were reaping the consequences and losing stashes of money that were either ill-gotten in this century or in previous ones.

Yes, here's the news: if you are living off of inherited wealth, regardless of what you have done in this generation, the money that supports your gracious living and your philanthropy is 19th century and 20th century blood money. You know what wasn't fair? The Ludlow Massacre, that's what. And chattel slavery. And the murder of indigenous peoples. And every CIA-sponsored coup that delayed democracy so that American corporations could pillage the hemisphere. And that you privatized the entire world, dismantled the social safety net, and sent your children to private school while the public schools were turned over to the testing industry: that's not fair either. And it's not fair that some people don't get to go to college and others get to go to Harvard because their families have always gone to Harvard (or Zenith, or Yale, or Stanford or (add the name of your favorite elite university here ___________.)

So I say, Madoff victims, I am sorry for your pain. And now it is time to roll up your sleeves, get to work like the rest of us and learn the lesson that most of the world knows: life isn't fair, and it's the people who learn to take care of themselves, who accept their losses and improve on them, and who build an ethical community around them who survive such withering blows. Along with the three basic rules for investing, let me offer in closing the three basic rules for how we might re-educate ourselves as a society, starting at the top and working down, as we leave the Age of Madoff behind.

Not everyone who has suffered something terrible is a "victim," nor should we be living in a Manichean world where fault is punished and innocence rewarded. The label of "victim" is over-used, in my view, and needs to be actively re-defined. "Victim" now implies that the person who has suffered The Terrible Thing has no culpability; the obverse of this is that if the person who has suffered can be proven to have made a fatal decision, wittingly or unwittingly, s/he can't be a "victim," and is therefore entitled to no consideration or sympathy. Ergo, unmarried mothers deserve no help from the government; women living off unearned income who lose it to a well-organized scam should be reimbursed by the government so that they can resume their former lifestyle. Instead, we need to realize, as a society, that all people suffer from a complex mixture of flaw, fate and fault some of which the government can correct and most of which it can't. We have good examples of how whole societies have benefitted from putting a floor under poverty, acting on the right to health care, housing, nutritous food and education. It is much harder to imagine how a society benefits from preserving the right to plastic surgery, the Hamptons, Whole Foods and Deerfield Academy.

Don't whine. You were rich. Now you are not. Pull up your socks and go on.

If you are making vast profits without working for them, and living as though that money will be there forever, you are gambling. And people who gamble sometimes lose. That doesn't make it wrong to gamble: I say this as someone who is not only in the stock market, but wagers on horses for sport, and often profit. But it does make it perilous to gamble with your food money or your mortgage, very few people make a living at gambling, and it is the gamblers who allow themselves to be so gulled by out sized winnings that they can't leave the table who become the mark.

Girls Gone Wild: Dade City Journal, Spring Break Edition

Just in case you have mistaken this for a department meeting, these are cows. They are the wives of New Gene, a white face bull, who is apparently not as unpleasant as your average bull, having been hand-raised as a 4-H project here in Central Florida.

That said New Gene (I believe that is his name, not Eugene, and vaguely I remember there was a predecessor named -- Gene?) gave my companion a run for her money as she was walking over from the guest house this evening. The cows --some twenty odd, with new calves, one born around the time we got here -- have the run of 300 acres, and they are all New Gene's wives. There is a black one, whose udder is not full yet, who New Gene seems to be following especially closely. He sniffs her hindquarters with as much avidity as an 800-pound quadruped can muster, and she stands there looking grim. If you watch Big Love on HBO you will know what I mean when I say: I believe she is on the schedule for tonight.

This is New Gene. He eats, procreates, bellows loudly and gets the group from place to place. As far as I can tell, he is an excellent administrator, and unlike his wives and children he definitely has tenure here regardless of what happens to the economy. He and his group leave vast piles of cow manure all over the place which you have to watch out for at night, but which are part of the ingredients for the soil that also produce the tasty vegetables and salad we have been consuming since we arrived at this excellent country home. Our hostess also pointed out that the piles, unless picked up and deposited in the garden, are eventually consumed by dung beetles, who drill perfectly round holes in the cow pies, lay eggs, and roll them up in dung. They then roll the ball of dung away, the larvae grow up eating the dung, turn into dung beetles, and then head for the nearest pile of dung.

To avoid another gesture at an education metaphor, I will close with a picture of Lola, the dappled dachshund. You may not be able to tell that she has one blue eye and one brown, but she does. She also barks lustily at cows, and is endlessly friendly to humans -- unless, as I discovered today, you drop a piece of steak on the floor, in which case she snags it and heads off. If you try to recover the steak (and why would you, unless this request was made by someone near and dear to you?) she makes a noise that is intended to suggest that she is willing to take your arm off at the elbow. Or keep the steak. Your choice.

Stay tuned: the Radical returns from vacation and adds her bit to the Judith Bennett Round Table.

Notes From Central Florida: Alligators and Angels Abound

Yesterday we made the long drive from St. Augustine to Dade City, with a quick stop at Blue Springs State Park. The major event of the day was the loss, and rediscovery, of my brand new iPhone. This is what happened.

We went to Blue Springs, a warm spring that flows into the St. John's River, to see the manatees. And if I had my iPhone with me now you would see the manatees too. But more about that later. The manatees, delicate, bumbling and endangered creatures that look a bit like swimming elephants, migrate into a variety of warm springs around Florida in the winter and early spring to breed and to warm up a bit. It's like manatee spring break. At any rate, there were five that we saw, all on the youngish side; there was also an outstanding sample of a blue-gray alligator mississippiensis sitting on the far bank. A park volunteer who was doing a gar census near where we were (a gar is a skinny fish that becomes as big as fifty pounds, and is distinguished by an extremely long, thin nose) handed me his binoculars and I got a good close-up of the alligator's face. They all have a fixed, insane, toothy grin that inspires the thought: "Serial killer." I myself cannot get enough of alligators, and my current hostess has promised alligators in the pond on their property. In addition to the gar, there were schools of snook, and at least one black fish as big as my head that is commonly sold in pet stores, but in a thumb size model. "Aquarium dump," the volunteer said succinctly. Apparently fish that are thrown in the rivers in Florida, or flushed down the toilet, if they survive, thrive well beyond their life span as pets. So yes, it is worth saying: probably everything you have heard about wildlife in Florida is true.

So back to the iPhone. We got back in the car and, just as we were getting back on route 17, my companion noticed that the trunk was open. I won't belabor this but: somewhere between me getting out of the car and getting back in, my iPhone slipped from my possession. Several blocks down the road, I realized this. We returned to the scene, pursued a methodical search, but to no avail. One of us went in to ask the gas station owners if it had been turned in, and they shook their heads sorrowfully. "Not a chance anyone would turn in a thing like that," one said sympathetically, "Not here." We left. There were tears. I will quietly draw a veil over the next hour or so.

Needless to say, as we passed development after development in the metro Orlando region (most of which -- if state-level statistics in Florida are correct -- are running at a foreclosure rate that is expected to run well over fifty percent before this financial crisis is over) I wrestled myself back into some version of sanity. Not only is it not fair to ruin someone else's vacation over a lost telephone, but in the midst of bankruptcies and foreclosures, to kvell relentlessly over an object that is, although beloved, replaceable, is wrong. And certainly not Radical. In comparing my pain to the pain of others, I found mine wanting.

And I promised myself I would buy another as soon as I could get to an AT&T store on Monday.

But then there was a miracle. As we drove up the long driveway to the home of the family members who are harboring us for the rest of the week, as they all came out to greet us (the youngest, a great nephew who is four, shrieking with pleasure at our arrival), my niece came out with a telephone and said that one of our other mutual nephews, who lives in Shoreline, needed to talk to me now.

My phone had been found, by Roy and Kristine of Orange City, Florida who, when they pulled up to the gas station, were returning to their home in Orange City from celebrating Bike Week in Ft. Lauderdale. Actually, it was Kristine who spotted the iPhone in the parking lot and picked it up, perhaps minutes, or even seconds, after I dropped it, and Roy claims it is in perfect condition. They found me by calling the first number in the book, which happened to be said nephew's father, who happened to know where we were, but knew nothing about an iPhone. But my nephews -- who pay close attention to the electronic acquisitions of their nearest and dearest as well as to where everyone is going on vacation and when -- put two and two together and explained to the pater that someone had found my iPhone! Needless to say, a happy ending is underway. Roy and Kristine are going to mail me the cherished item tomorrow; theoretically it should be here Tuesday or Wednesday. I am going to mail them a lot of money, which they didn't say no to, so my guess is that it is welcome. And when you figure that I was ready to spend the money anyway for a new phone, well, it all makes sense.

So when you think of Florida, don't think of Jeb Bush: think of Roy and Kristine. As I thanked them profusely, Kristine said, "Well it's no trouble at all. I would like to think someone would do the same thing for me."

I would, actually. But now I really would. And as for the nephews: I now officially pronounce you The Boy Detectives.

It's Biker Week On The Palm Coast

Spring vacation has finally sprung. In celebration of this fact, the Radical family decamped last night to Florida. This is a state that the New Yorker described some weeks back as an epicenter of the mortgage meltdown. Other states have other sins, it’s true, and under capitalized real estate development and debt loads are the general condition of the nation's economy, as well as any other part of the world that the United States has managed to weave into its web. But perhaps only in Florida do convicted felons lose their right to vote, but retain their right take out a real estate license and set up shop as mortgage brokers. One result of this is, apparently, vast amounts of drug money being laundered through the real estate market, with “fronts” who set themselves up as house buyers, take out a mortgage, and then disappear, never to be seen again.

If St. Augustine, which bills itself as the first city in North America, is not visibly hurting yet, you can see a slow ache. Everything is on sale: every tchochke, every hula shirt, every sandal. We are at a lovely bed and breakfast right on the bay, the Casablanca Inn, which I can already recommend to you very highly. It is March, and there are vacancies.

Even the S & M leather gear that bills itself as “biker wear” was on sale (oh yes: I’m sure that in the sort of minor, motorcycle fender-bender that turns into a real disaster for whatever part of your epidermis is skidding down A1A, it will be a comfort to know, as you grab whatever is handy to slow yourself down, that your vageegee is covered.) But before I leave the subject: this is Biker Week in Daytona Beach and its surrounding communities. I have heard tell of Biker Week from my friend Phil, the Zenith men's crew coach, who trains his team in Daytona Beach over break, but to actually see it is a somewhat awesome experience. I think they must come here because of the Harley Davidson superstore on I-95 a few miles south of St. Augustine – five stories of hogs and, presumably, Harley leathers that are more suitable for the road than the bedroom. Note: I bet y’all can buy some mufflers without holes in them there too!

But there are also parking lots full of vendors selling bike gear, usually in tents that surround brew and burger restaurants. Last night, in a debate that was truncated by the lateness of our flight and hence, our extreme hunger, we stopped at such a restaurant outside Daytona Beach. It was called Saddle Jack's, and clearly offering itself as a temporary Biker Mart and as a location to park your motor home. An important observation about food in Florida: yes, there is a grease cuisine similar to other places below the Mason-Dixon line, as well as the overpriced, tasteless, I-Could-Be Anywhere food common to all vacation destinations. But if you are on either coast of the Sunshine state and avoid national chains, you more or less cannot go wrong if you order a fish sandwich. Unless you don’t like fish and then, friend, you are on your own.

At any rate, the other customers in Saddle Jack’s were all folks there for Bike Week, most of whom I would say were our age (read: between 40 and 70.) The men all wore jeans and colorful black tees that had the phrases “Harley Davidson” and “Bike Week” enmeshed in designs where skulls and flames dominated. The women were dressed to the nines in cowboy and bike clothes that were personally customized, probably by those items that they sell on television that make it possible to combine glue and sequins with as little muss and fuss as possible. I have included a picture I snapped here, and I hope it captures the true grandeur of the woman in the white cowboy hat, whose outfit was just outstanding. At another table, there were four boy bikers (younger than we) playing with their cell phones, drinking beer, leering at the wait staff, and (according to my traveling companion) passing around a plastic bag full of pills that they dipped into randomly. I did not take a picture of them. Nor, out of a sense of feminist ethic, did I take pictures of the wait staff: one was wearing black leather bikini bottoms (that said “Saddle Jack’s” in white on the ass), nylons, heels, and a black leather bra. Another was wearing pink short-shorts, fishnet stockings, and a cut off black tee that said “Bouncer” over the breasts.

At any rate, although I could be writing about the historic city, the multiple colonizations of Florida, the fact that we seem to be surrounded by evangelical Christian tourists (one of whom voiced loud disapproval of me snapping a picture of the leather lingerie), I cannot help but focus on the general feeling of Florida itself. At the fabulous Spanish fort where we were lucky enough to see an eighteenth century cannon fired at 10:45. The historical re-enactor told us that, were there a cannon ball in the barrel, it could hit the lighthouse about a half mile away. “Doubt that,” said a middle-aged biker behind me. “They oughta put a nuceler missile in it – that’d go pretty far,” a little boy said helpfully. The reenactors, dressed in some version of eighteenth century Spanish military wear entertained us as the cannon was packed with gunpowder. One said, "You know, we aren't pirates. Some people think we are. But the pirates were the bad guys, whatever you hear from Disney. We were the guys who hunted down the pirates and killed them."

Well, phew.

In conclusion (for now), whatever other industry is going down the tubes in Florida, the rhinestone biz is not one of them. And electricity use is thriving. Last night, en route to St. Augustine from the Orlando airport, we passed acres of car dealerships lit up like Yankee Stadium (and a mysterious overpass advertising the Ladies Professional Gold Association that you can see from Mars), it caused me to wonder why we in the Northeast worry so damn much about our carbon footprint, when all you would have to do is unplug the state of Florida and you could save about 100,000 acres of polar cap right there.

This was blogged to you courtesy of the Hilton Hotel and its free WiFi.

Happy Women's History Month! A Celebration, A Challenge and a Call

Of course, every month is women's history month if you are the Tenured Radical. And, if you are the intersectionally-inclined person that I am, Black History Month isn't over at the end of February either (although I'm sure organizers everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief that it is, particularly at Zenith, where a group of students organized a great calendar of events this year.)

To celebrate, a few of us in the feminist history blogosphere have been drawn into a great project initiated by Ann Little, over at Historiann. Four feminist history bloggers are responding to Judith Bennett's book History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.) One of us will write every Monday for the entire month of March and, in round table style, drop in and out of each other's blogs to comment. The first post, Should politics be historical? Should history be political? went up at The Adventures of Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar last night at midnight. So please join us!

And just in case you are starting to wonder what the relationship is between feminist history blogging and the professional world of feminist history, I am pleased to announce that The Journal of Women's History has commissioned the radical to coordinate a round table on this very subject. To wit, a call for papers:

Call for Papers: Feminism, Blogging and the Historical Profession. The Journal of Women’s History invites submissions for a round table on the emergence of blogging as a location for critical thought among women in the historical profession; historians of women, gender and sexuality; and feminist scholars who may, or may not be, historians. Participants may wish to address one or more of the following questions in an abstract of no more than 250 words: What role does self-publishing on the internet play in a profession where merit is defined by scholarly review and a rigorous editorial process? What are the intellectual benefits, and/or costs, of blogging? What are the ethics and consequences of blogging under a pseudonym? What kinds of electronic acknowledgement already correlate with established scholarly practices; which can be discarded; and which need to be attended to, perhaps more rigorously than in printed publications? If many scholarly publications and organizations have already adopted blogs as a way of spreading news and inviting conversation, is blogging itself developing rules and practices that will inevitably produce intellectual and scholarly hierarchies similar to those that blogging seeks to dismantle? Does feminist blogging offer particular opportunities for enhanced conversation about race, sexuality, class and national paradigms, or does it tend to reproduce existing scholarly paradigms and silences within feminist scholarship? Finally, are new forms of colleagueship and scholarship emerging in the blogosphere?

The round table will consist of a short introduction, several essays of 2 - 3,000 words, and a concluding comment/response. Abstracts should arrive no later than July 15, 2009, and can be submitted electronically to Claire Potter at tenuredDOTradicalATgmail.com. Final submissions are due October 1. Pseudonymous bloggers may publish under their pseudonyms, but must be willing to reveal their identities to the editor of the round table and the commenter. Bloggers based outside the United States are particularly encouraged to contribute.

Excuses, Excuses....Excused: The Teacher Learns A Lesson

When I was a young faculty member, I had a comedy routine that went like this. I would cup my hand to my ear, look intent and say to a colleague, "Listen! Do you hear that?"

You would answer, "Uh -- no. What?"

Me: "That soft thumping sound!"

You, listening hard: "What do you think it is?"

Me: "The sound of grandparents hitting the ground."

I am, of course, referring to the grandparent holocaust that strikes around midterms and finals, grandparents whose sudden death causes their grandchildren to be unable to take their exams or turn in their papers. Some students have been known to lose more than one grandparent in a single semester; others seem to have more than four elderly rellies who slip in and out of comas, are sometimes miraculously healed (Praise the Lord!) or suddenly take a turn for the worse -- just when we thought that paper was going to come in.

OK, I'm being mean.

And I would have to say something strange has happened to me with age, which is not just that I'm not as mean as I used to be, but that I seem to have more students who have genuinely bad, documentably awful things happen to them and to their family members. I don't know why this is. Maybe I'm less of a cynic, having suffered my own share of bad things over the years, and I'm just noticing more. Or maybe it's just the accumulation of years. There are students managing chronic diseases, young people who have to learn more things about their bodies by the age of twenty than I have learned in over twice that time. Students whose fathers leave Mom -- in the company of their daughter's best friend from high school. Students who are descending into madness, living inside kaleidoscope brains that make reading, thinking and speaking a nightmare. Students whose parents are diagnosed with terrible invasive diseases; or students who have a parent or a sibling who has battled cancer for over a decade and announces that s/he is giving up treatment and is ready to die. Students who have a suicide in the family. Students with a loved ones in the hands of the judicial system, or with friends who have died violent deaths at the hands of other human beings. And this is not even counting casualties and stress to students and their families from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, something that I am sure is far more visible at institutions other than Zenith.

The predominant health issue at Zenith nowadays is nothing unusual. A vile illness is going around: a nasty, juicy cold that metamorphoses into a hacking cough and/or an ear infection. Everyone has it: job candidates, students, colleagues, administrative assistants. Walk into my office presenting those symptoms, and you can get an extension on anything -- guaranteed. Yesterday after class I was transformed into my visiting nurse persona, roaming around from student to student, urging them to go to the health center because I know three separate people -- one adult and two students -- who have been diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia in the last week. Who wants to drive a student to death's door just to make a point about getting a paper on time? Not me, buster. I can't even grade when I'm sick, much less write.

I have noticed, however, that sometimes the students who have the worst problems are the ones who never tell you what's wrong if they can help it: they are the ones who grit their teeth and soldier on, taking care of personal business without making an excuse or asking for an extension. Those are the students you have to really keep your eyes peeled for. Once, about ten years ago, I demanded that a student who had handed in absolutely no work all semester, and had evaded me with increasingly transparent lies, come to office hours to explain herself. She sat down across the desk from me as I began my stern lecture about taking responsibility, the importance of trust between teacher and student, the multiple excuses -- and then I noticed that she was trembling, tears sheeting down her cheeks as she sobbed quietly. "What's the matter?" I said. She whispered something I didn't understand. "What?" I said, now more urgently.

"I cut myself," she said, eyes squeezed shut in shame, leaking fresh rivers of tears. She pulled her cardigan off and dropped it onto the floor, revealing hundreds of fine, white, healed scars crosshatching her forearms, biceps and shoulders, fresh razor marks sketched like capillaries over the old wounds. "I thought I could stop but I can't."

Moments like this have made me a gentler person, even a person who sometimes imagines the worst when actually there is nothing more or less wrong with a student that an appointment book and a weekend without partying wouldn't fix. But it has also taught me that students who keep insisting on a family emergency that they won't explain often aren't fibbing. Often they have instead a fierce sense of privacy, are ashamed, or are witnesses to human pain that is far too awful to tell to a stranger -- such as a teacher. Once I had a first-year student who finally stopped promising to hand work in and admitted that she was flunking out because she slept twenty or so hours a day. Depression, I thought, and sent her to the office we call Behavioral Health. Over Christmas, I got a call from the Dean's office. My student had suddenly died, had gone to sleep one day and not woken up: it turned out she had been in liver failure, probably for over a year, and had had liver disease for far longer than that. Undiagnosed, untreated, liver disease -- not the freshman blues after all. I have never forgotten this.

I have a friend of over twenty years duration who is a dean, and who is simply one of the wisest people I know when it comes to thinking about the young. I am always calling her for advice even about students she isn't in charge of for this reason, and because I don't always know what it means to be my better self as a teacher. I asked her why a student, who has been faced with a particularly horrific family emergency, simply disappeared rather than drop an email to explain the multiple absences and arrange for extensions. "Don't they trust us to do the right thing in the face of something truly terrible?" I asked.

"Perhaps not," my friend said. "Or perhaps they think that if they don't tell anyone their lives can still be normal."

Or perhaps we just aren't as important in the scheme of their lives as we, perhaps unconsciously, believe we are.

The Radical Opposes Boycotting Israeli Scholars In The Name Of Peace

I have received numerous emails from progressive colleagues in the last three weeks about a proposed boycott of Israeli scholars. This move is intended as a protest against the recent, devastating illegal Israeli incursion into Gaza. Several messages I received this weekend cited this article by David Lloyd, professor of English at the University of Southern California. As Lloyd reminds us, the boycott strategy is not only a response to the long history of illegal Israeli interventions in the region and the Israeli government's continuous undermining of the peace process, but a response to the vicious attacks from the American right on U.S.-based scholars who question or oppose Israel's self-perceived national destiny in the region. Lloyd writes:

It is on account of this climate of intimidation and the lockdown on political discourse that we resorted to calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions in the context of an international call for divestment. Where there is no access to the political process, those who seek justice must once more do so by appealing directly to the conscience of the public.

In response to the call from Palestinian civil society and from more than 500 courageous Israeli citizens, we urge a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, not only to protest their utter silence in the face of the ongoing destruction of Palestinian educational infrastructure, but also because we believe that the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions still can influence Israel’s public opinion and avert a catastrophic outcome. Boycott, by using the moral force of non-violent means, strengthens those elements in Palestinian and Israeli civil society that are seeking a just resolution to the conflict without resort to violence, ethnic cleansing or destruction. An institutional boycott neither targets individual scholars nor seeks to silence genuine dialogue. It calls for a moratorium on “business-as-usual” with Israeli institutions that have turned a blind eye to the destruction and disruption of Palestinian schools and universities and to the denial of academic freedom. Their institutional silence is the true death of learning and of intellectual exchange. It is Palestinian, not Israeli, institutions whose isolation must be challenged: For the former it is lethal, for the latter it can be short-lived.

For decades, Israel has been in defiance of international law and humanitarian norms. Israel has claimed to engage in negotiation while continuing to extend its network of illegal settlements and roads that segment Palestine and destroy any prospect of a viable Palestinian state. It continues to expropriate Palestinian lands and to build a separation wall that denies Palestinians their right to freedom of movement. It continues its resort to overwhelming military force and the use of weaponry illegal in civilian areas. In all this, it feeds and encourages the extremists and fuels the cycles of violence and hopelessness. None of this would be possible without U.S. material support and without the impunity assured by the United States’ blind acquiescence.

We take no position on the outcome of negotiations. We do fear, however, that those Israeli and Palestinian commentators who believe that the two-state solution has been deliberately undermined by Israel’s illegal settlements and fragmentation of the occupied territories are right. The outcome will either be a state where Israelis and Palestinians, Arabs and Jews, can live together in full equality or a terrible repetition of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The latter solution is discussed openly by Israeli politicians and academics and has become all the more likely with the recent electoral successes of the racist party, Yisrael Beiteinu. Never have the prospects for a negotiated settlement seemed so fragile, and never has it been so urgent for the American public to exercise its moral force.

There comes a time in every struggle for justice when measures that have been unthinkable and unspeakable become morally imperative. In the struggle for justice for Palestine, boycott and divestment are now such measures.

Now, I want to say I find Lloyd's argument one of the most moving and persuasive that I have heard to date. But I am still profoundly opposed to boycott and divestment for the following reasons.

It does not address the real problem in the region, which is that states -- primarily the United States, Russia, and former Soviet-bloc countries -- continue to cynically pour weapons into the Middle East, as if it is possible to arm resistance fighters and the Israeli government to the teeth and also negotiate for "peace."

It does not address the fact that the United States government has been a bigger investor than any corporation, through annual foreign aid packages that have been, or are, used to (depending on the date and the issue), among other things, support illegal Jewish settlements colonizing Palestinian land, and bolster policing of a system of partial citizenship for Palestinians within Israeli jurisdictions that would be illegal in the United States.

It does not address the hypocrisy of American academics' call for a boycott at a moment in history when universities and their faculties in the United States have done nothing effective to halt (or even impede) a ruinous, illegal American war policy in the Middle East that is now expanding, illegally, into Pakistan. There has been no coherent, effective or even visible challenge to the expansion of the American military state; or to the federally-mandated military recruitment of our children, adolescents and young people in educational institutions receiving federal funds (which is virtually all educational institutions.) And our horror, as progressive intellectuals, about the atrocities committed to secure Israel's border, seems to be neatly separated from the atrocities committed against Central and Latin Americans in the name of American "homeland security:" security walls, shooting to kill by American border police, denying life-saving benefits to those without documents, strip-searches at the border, the separation of families, the deportation of children entitled to citizenship with their undocumented families, and the incarceration of undocumented people in secret, private prisons. Among other things.

Despite the fact that this boycott is clearly aimed at the Israeli state, not individual Jewish scholars, and despite the fact that false charges of anti-Semitism have been used to silence critics of Israel, the ethical mandate so movingly described by Lloyd and others does not mitigate my fear that a boycott of Israeli scholars opens the door to a revival of anti-Semitism in American academic life, and in American life more generally.

Intellectual boycotts profoundly violate the idea that a scholarly community is defined by the free exchange of ideas: this is the essence of what makes scholars different from ideologues. That the free exchange of ideas has been inhibited by groups like AIPAC does not alter my belief that we must cherish this principle and oppose all efforts to undermine it on the left or the right.

In other words, I think David Lloyd's article is sentient and elegant on the ethical issues involved, both at home and abroad. But I think boycott is wrong-headed. And I think a divestment policy that does not address foreign and military aid to Israel, American culpability for the current crisis in international relations, and the international arms trade that is feeding weapons to both sides, is fatally flawed.

In (Policy) Defense of the Humanities

by Jarrod Hayes

A month ago, Stanley Fish wrote in his New York Times blog about the rise of the corporate university and the dark future for the Humanities. Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the legislators in the State of Georgia object to funding faculty research 'deemed unnecessary.' This trend is disturbing and damaging, not only to the finest university system in the world, but also to the ability of universities to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

The Humanities and the varieties of research areas that arise out of these traditions are valuable in their own right, utilitarian concerns aside. Would we be better off today without the work of philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant or Bertrand Russell? This point is not my central concern here however. What Fish laments, and the comments of the Georgia legislators imply, is that there exists a sense that the humanities—philosophy, history, literature—do not serve a utilitarian role, that they are 'unnecessary.' This belief could not be further from the truth, and I make this claim, not as a scholar of the humanities, but as a scholar of international relations—a social scientist.

The claim that the Humanities do not serve a utilitarian or policy purpose is rooted in the belief that human societies can be managed without regard for the very things that make them human. Societies, and the people within them, are influenced and shaped by their individual and collective pasts and the ideas generated within and without society cemented in poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. Utilitarian efforts to understand and explain policy, the mechanisms of governance, and the interactions of societies cannot be undertaken independently of these humanistic elements. We in the social sciences—particularly in the study of International Relations, that most policy-oriented of the social sciences—rely on the work of the Humanities every day.

An example is in order. Iran, having just launched a satellite, is forefront in the news today. I am certain the Georgia legislators would find necessary research in International Relations focused on how the United States, and the international system, should deal with Iran. But, can we answer this question without understanding Iran's history and how that history is propagated in society through texts, art, and songs? This history, as well as the arts and literature that perpetuate and propagate it throughout society, shapes how Iranians see themselves and how they see the outside world. These views are fundamental to understanding why Iran acts as it does and what effect—constructive and destructive—various policies may have on Iran's future choices and behavior.

The Humanities play a critical role in a wide variety of disciplines. Today, we struggle to grasp how to deal with the economic crisis. In our effort to find a solution we turn to history: the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt's policy response in the form of the New Deal. Without historians to study that era and its lessons, we would have precious few intellectual resources available to bring to bear on our current crisis. Even in the natural sciences—physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy—so seemingly divorced from the humanities have learned valuable lessons about the process of scientific investigation and discovery from the work of historians like Thomas Kuhn. Engineering, a field defined by its utilitarian purpose, depends at least in part on the imaginings of science fiction literature for ideas about what might be possible, and how society might make use of those possibilities.

The United States has the finest university system in the world. It is the finest because scholars study the entirety of the human experience and existence. For-profit institutions of higher learning—Fish cites the University of Phoenix—are not true universities but trade schools in a new guise. There is nothing wrong with that; we need trade schools as much today as we ever did as technology progresses at a lightning pace. However, we should not confuse the contributions to society of universities and trade schools. Universities generate understandings and explanations of where we have been, where we are, and where we might go. The Humanities are integral to that process, and we need to defend them and their funding both for their own value and for what they contribute to more utilitarian pursuits.

Jarrod Hayes is a PH.D. Candidate and a Bannerman Fellow in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. You can respond to Jarrod in the comments section, or at his email address: JarrodDOTHayesATuscDOTedu.

This is the first of what I hope will be many guest posts at Tenured Radical. If you have a piece you would like to submit, please send it to the gmail account listed above for consideration.

Goodbye, Neoliberal Kitty-in-Chief: Socks Clinton Moves To The Next Level

I understand that Friday is the traditional day for cat blogging, and I should have provided this link yesterday. But the Radical, being cat-less (and also being a lesbian, so that all associations with cats provoke the specter of unwanted lesbian-cat jokes) is not a cat blogger. So as in all things, she does what she wants.

Click here for an outstanding story by Michael Schaffer about Socks Clinton, who passed away last Thursday. While you are at it, bookmark Obit, the online publication is appeared in yesterday. Edited by Zenith alum Krishna Andavolu it is one of the freshest reads there is, and the advice column is to - uh -- die for. If you are as lucky as I am, you already get it delivered to your desk top. If not, you can arrange for it, I am sure. Tell them the Radical sent ya.

Tomorrow: a response to Stanley Fish from guest blogger Jarrod Hayes of the School of International Relations, University of Southern California.

"There You Go Again:" Republicans Condemn Sex, Slash Education Budget

Arguably, it was Ronald Reagan shaking his head in the middle of a presidential debate with Jimmy Carter as he chuckled ruefully, "There you go again," that created an emotional turning point in the 1980 campaign. It's what we remember, anyway, that and the explosive, derisive response from the audience as Carter stood there unable to respond. This moment became symbolic of what many voters, not just right-wing voters, had come to think of Democratic governance: that the same old strategies, strategies that had not yet resolved a single social problem, were being presented as if they were new and innovative.

Well, it looks like no one is immune from regurgitating old, tired solutions to economic malaise. Having, for almost three decades, tried to deflect attention from the damage their economic policies have had on the vast majority of Americans, Republicans are once again turning to the vilification of gay sex, and knowledge about gay sex, to divert us from their past and present incompetence. I predict that future historians will find documented proof that such attacks are cynically intended to deflect the public view from the real consequences that cuts in public spending will have on education more generally. And just to give you some perspective, dear reader: for the price of incarcerating twenty undocumented immigrants for a year, you could probably fund four women's studies programs granting the BA.

Attacks on women's studies, sexuality studies and queer studies in the Georgia public university system are but one example of an urgent issue that few journalists, politicians or academics, for that matter, seem to care about yet. In the face of declining state revenues, right wingers are once again "Mapplethorping" the public. They are shilling their ideologically rigid view that even more school privatization, and deep cuts in higher education, are an appropriate fix for a plunging economy that has been jointly devastated by pirate capitalists, corporate lobbyists, and decades of neoliberal fiscal policies. How can the dismantling of higher education be turned into a happy thing, you might ask? Because you can get rid of fields of knowledge that students don't need to know, and that might even harm them, like queer and feminist studies, while preserving the teaching of "universal values." And by doing this, you can divert attention from the real consequences to real people of policies that are turning our public universities into a simulacrum of the wretched, privatized Postal Service .

A faithful reader sent this clip from CNN.com about queer-baiting in Georgia:



For those of you too impatient to watch the video, Georgia Republican State Representatives Charlice Byrd and Calvin Hill, according to this website, have launched a campaign to rid the University of Georgia and Georgia State of faculty teaching a range of classes from queer theory to the sociology of sex. Public tax dollars, say these education-savvy lawmakers in an original argument, should not be going to faux scholarship that teaches students about immoral subjects that the public, in all its wisdom, would not support. Well good, because this is where the state of Georgia can really save the big bucks. To date, university officials are defending the right of the university system to hire and promote its own faculty, as well as the principle of academic freedom, without interference from the political classes. But of course, the legislature does pass the budget for these cash-strapped institutions. So administrators, in an old right-wing tactic, are being given the choice as to whether they will get back to the difficult matter of running the university or spend their time defending queer scholarship.

I find that administrators can be a weak reed at moments like this, but we'll see. And in case you are a reader from an effete, private Eastern institution, and you think that witch hunts against queer and sexual studies curricula cannot "happen here," think again. This article about Zenith, published by the Hartford Courant in May, 1999, ushered in what is known technically by administrators as a "s**t storm" about a class on pornography, taught by a tenured member of the faculty who was well-known on campus for her pedagogical rigor. In response to a vilification of the university that quickly went viral, otherwise sane Zenith administrators launched an unprecedented investigation into the course. Furthermore, when it was discovered that the faculty member who had taught the course -- an extremely shy and highly professional scholar, a popular and dedicated teacher who had worked at Zenith for over three decades -- had been awarded a coveted teaching prize prior to the scandal, all hell broke loose. Your very own Radical who, as a former recipient of the same prize, was on the committee, was pressured relentlessly (and unsuccessfully) to collaborate in an administrative decision (made where it was never clear, since no one would admit it and they sent a very polite and friendly bag man to try to talk me into it) to rescind the prize.

I don't say this to gin up old struggles which are long past, but as an object lesson to all: yes, it "can happen here," as the John Birch Society used to say, if it could happen at fruity-kazootie Zenith. Academic freedom, feminism and queers go on the block when the words "sex" and "education" appear in the same sentence: add a devastated economy, and it's all over, Baby Blue. And of course, in police states like Arizona, proposed cuts of $243 million will cripple the only education system Arizona has. And where do you go to make that kind of cut? Recent news items that show women's studies programs being targeted at Florida Atlantic and San Diego State University suggest that the first place Arizona administrators will go is to eliminate one of the most vibrant Women's Studies departments in the country, and one of the few that grants the Ph.D.

In conclusion, given the fact that the Right has been Wrong about pretty much everything in the last eight years, expect attacks on the intellectual classes, and on public funding for education to intensify, as conservatives haul out old strategies for obfuscating their incompetence and intensifying public ignorance. And expect those strategies to be aimed at women and queers first.

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

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



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

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

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

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

On, Wisconsin! The Sex Prosecution of the Month

Despite everything I had to do today, I could not help but read this article in today's New York Times. As a historian who is working on late twentieth century federal campaigns against pornography in the United States, I read anything with the phrase "Sex Predator" in the headline. When that headline also includes the word "Wisconsin," as in "Sex Predator Accusations Shake a Wisconsin Town" -- well, hold onto your hat, Harry.

Anthony R. Stancl, a good student who particularly loved political science, was expelled from Eisenhower High School last fall when he emailed a bomb threat to the school. Oh yeah. Can we spell "federal domestic terrorism laws?" Left with time on, and perhaps something else in, his hands, Anthony set up a Facebook page, using a female pseudonym and a fake profile (also actionable, as a recent verdict in a cyberbullying case establishes.) As a "woman," Anthony then solicited nude pictures and videos from male classmates: 39 folders full of these images were found on his computer, although there are only 31 counts against Anthony and 31 boys from Eisenhower currently being "counseled."

"But," as the Times write, "the authorities said Mr. Stancl did not stop there. In addition, they said, he threatened to release the photos to the victims’ friends or even all of Eisenhower’s 850 students if the youths who had sent them to him did not agree to perform sexual acts he demanded. The tactic was successful, officials said. Mr. Stancl is accused of using it to sexually assault seven boys."

Not surprisingly perhaps, as it is Wisconsin, folks at Eisenhower High, "opened in 1969 and known for its championship sports teams and above-average test scores" (not, I guess, for raging homosexuality) don't have much to say. What is quite peculiar is that none of this would have come out if Anthony were not a guy soliciting guys: in other words (and read the article for yourself, folks) teenage girls and boys emailing nude pictures of themselves to each other, as well as videos where they expose themselves, seems to be Standard Operating Procedure in boy-loves-girl land.

Not that this is a surprise.

I understand the focus on criminalizing Anthony: he has a very peculiar sense of humor. And he's not what you would call a nice boy, although I would argue that enough faggy men in United States history have suffered from the humiliations imposed by "normal," supposedly nice, boys that there is a kind of cosmic justice here. I would also say part of what I find peculiar about Anthony being charged as a sex predator is that the seven boys who are admitting to having had sex with Anthony had another choice. They could have gone to Mom and Dad and admitted what a humongously stupid thing they had done by mailing beefcake to a total stranger in the first place. But they didn't. They thought it was a better idea to have sex with Anthony instead. This means that these boys are either dumber than anyone wants to admit, or that they actually wanted to have sex with Anthony when given the opportunity. Anthony is not, after all, being charged with assault, kidnapping, false imprisonment, or felony rape.

Which leads me to my main point: it is a big, nasty, open secret in American high schools that there are more gay boys in any given student population than will reveal themselves until they are much older; and that there are lots of straight boys who think it's hot to have sex with gay boys.

And in looking for illustrations for this page, I discovered just how many boys and young men upload naked and semi-nude pictures of themselves to web pages, I guess because they think it is fun. Some pages let you vote on who is the "hottest guy." It seems to be a common practice, even beyond Wisconsin, that our Anthony tapped into: try Googling phrases like "Beefcake," "hot boys," and "hot men" and see what you get. My favorite was a calendar featuring Mormon boys back from their two years of evangelizing. There is a picture of each one in his normal black tie, white shirt and nameplate getup, accompanied by a bunch of photos of them bare chested! Yay! The calendar is called: "Men on a Mission." Buy it here. Isn't that hilarious? Well, the Elders don't think so: apparently the creator of the calendar, Chad Hardy, was excommunicated by the LDS church.

But back to Wisconsin. Unfortunately for Anthony, he is eighteen, and I suspect that several of the seven boys who had sex with Anthony are not. This means that Anthony is also not as smart as he thinks he is, and will be charged under a set of enhanced statutory rape, internet and child pornography laws that make this bit of trouble at least as serious as the bomb threat to the school (how did he beat the federal terrorism rap? Enquiring minds want to know.) Fortunately Anthony has an attorney who, presumably, is pleading down these charges in exchange for not publicly exposing (heh, heh) the defensive backfield and/or the senior class president and/or half the student council of Eisenhower High as a bunch of raving queens. But Anthony's lawyer will have to agree to something in order for the many law enforcement agencies now in pursuit to forget about this. My recommendation is that all charges be dropped in return for the following:

a) Anthony stops telling people he is from Wisconsin;
b Anthony goes into therapy;
c) Anthony leaves town immediately;
d) Anthony gets an agent and attends to his true calling, writing memoirs for Oprah's book club.

Advanced Interviewing; or, My Favorite Martian

"Dear Professor Radical," wrote a longtime lurker who had finally decided, in desperation, to reveal hirself. "You told us about the job letter. About the phone call. About the conference interview. About wardrobe -- even though you obviously know nothing about clothes: everyone knows you wear nothing but black and grey trousers from Banana Republic, complemented by matching T-shirts. And yet, right on the brink of crossing the finish line, you have abandoned us. WHAT ABOUT THE CAMPUS INTERVIEW, DAMMIT?!?"

Well, I'm sorry. This has been quite a dilemma for me, in part because we have been too busy interviewing at Zenith for me to attend to any of my professional responsibilities, much less write blog posts. But I had an ethical problem as well: should I actually be giving advice about campus visits when we, in the history department at Zenith, were interviewing eleven candidates (for three jobs) this spring? I decided no. There are too many people out there who claim that they take my advice. My fear was that I risked actually appearing to be giving directions for how to get a job in my very own department at Zenith. If I were Drag King of the World, that would be all right, but actually I have upwards of twenty other colleagues who (tiresomely, I know) also have a vote in these decisions, and they may have different quirks than I. In fact I know they do.

So in lieu of giving bad advice to candidates, I thought I would give advice to those people who were doing the interviewing instead. And it's a particular kind of advice: how not to look like a fool when interviewing what we now call a "diversity candidate." Now for the sake of brevity, let's say the candidate is either a man or a woman (technically all women are diversity candidates), but may also be either of color or queer (technically queer people are never diversity candidates. Unless they are -- for some other reason.) Because these categories are too internally various, and because in fact there is surprising overlap in some of the ways you could possibly offend the people who occupy them, let's call them: Martians. And we'll assume for the sake of clarity in what follows that "you" are not a Martian, and that "I" am. Are you ready? Let's begin.

1. Do not tell irrelevant stories about your friends who are Martians, or that your daughter decided to come out as a Martian last year and how great you feel about it. I understand that you are doing this to make us Martians feel as though we are among friends, and to demonstrate your absolute lack of Martianophobia or your committed anti-Martianism. I appreciate that. Really, I do. But you know what? It suggests just the opposite. It suggests that the Martian in your presence, who is me, is making you uncomfortable, and that you are bravely overcoming it. We Martians are used to being in the minority, but it makes us impatient to have other people remind us of it all the time -- in the name of pro-Martianism, no less. So we will all do better during the interview if you stick to scholarship, teaching and what the actual requirements of the job are.

2. Do not take me to a Martian restaurant for dinner. First of all, a Martian restaurant that is not on Mars, or in a place with a significant Martian population, is likely not to be any good. It will serve Martian food cooked to the taste of the non-Martians who populate your planet. So I will find this depressing. But furthermore, it suggests that I, as a Martian, am in danger of feeling alienated on your planet because I may not be able to access my "culture." Though a Martian, as a scholar and an intellectual, I probably feel I am a little more cosmopolitan than that.

3. While we are at dinner, stay away from topics that betray how invisible the other Martians on campus or on your planet are to you. Telling me that I may wish to live on the planet one light year away because it has a larger Martian population is one way of conveying this, as is: explaining that retaining single Martians is so difficult because it is so difficult to meet and other, marriageable, Martians on your planet; or announcing that, incredibly, there is a Martian Episcopalian church that serves the entire planet right in your canyon! So even though there aren't many Martians on campus, there will be a terrific community for me. On Sundays. (Did I say I was religious? Did I?)

4. Admit it if your college does a crappy job of recruiting and serving the needs of Martians. Most colleges and universities that are not on Mars do -- it's not up to you to apologize for it. As in (1), don't tell me about the one Martian who graduated Summa and won the department prize twelve years ago. And although there may be serious Martian politics on campus, don't assume that I share your view of what it means to be progressive on these issues, even -- or especially -- if you are a fellow Martian.

5. Refrain from hinting to me coyly that there is someone I "really need to meet" but not telling me why. This is the most frequent way that people have of dropping a few hairpins that I am a Martian (duh), and this other person is a Martian, but being a person who doesn't really "see" or believe in interplanetary differences, you aren't going to say the word "Martian" (wink, wink.) Most Martians find this tiresome. We aren't at a job interview to meet other Martians: we're there to get a job. And if meeting another Martian on campus is important to me, I'll tell you so.

6. Try to police your references to Martian stereotypes, whether social or intellectual. Don't ask me, for example, why I ended up a historian and not a flight engineer; don't tell me that the special barber I need to cut the hair around my antennae is in the next town over (we don't all have antennae, ok?); and don't, for heaven's sake, if I am interviewing for a Renaissance Literature position, reassure me that the Martian Studies program is very welcoming. Don't put the chair of Martian Studies on my schedule without asking me, if I am not interviewing in Martian Studies, or set up lunch with the one other out Martian to talk about how I might like to work up a Martian survey once I get a firm grip on the courses I am actually being hired to teach.

And last of all -- if you make any of the above errors, please forget about it and move on -- don't embarrass all of us by dwelling on your faux pas and trying to repair the damage. Martians are used to being in the minority, and we can take care of ourselves, thank you very much.

Call For Papers: Conference On Undocumented Hispanic Migration, Connecticut College, October 2009

The Radical received in her inbox this morning (from colleague Frank Graziano, chair of Hispanic Studies at Connecticut College):

CALL FOR PAPERS & PREREGISTRATION: Undocumented Hispanic Migration: On the Margins of a Dream. Connecticut College, New London, CT 06320 / October 16-18, 2009. A multidisciplinary conference featuring presentations by Peter Andreas, Linda Bosniak, Leo R. Chavez, Jorge Duany, Nancy Foner, Judith Adler Hellman, Juan F. Perea, Alejandro Portes, and Saskia Sassen. Also includes presentations by immigrants; by educators, social-service providers, and attorneys who work with undocumented Hispanics; and by border-enforcement officials. Preregistration is now open. The deadline for paper and panel proposals on migration, border enforcement, and undocumented life in the United States is April 1, 2009. For further information contact Prof. Frank Graziano, fgrazATconncoll.edu.

If you go to this link you can download the long call which, in addition to adding to your interest in this event, will give you a truly beautiful poster.