Why Can't We Get Anything Done? How To Run An Effective Meeting

No one likes going to meetings. But admit it: you dread some meetings more than others, don't you? And if you hate all meetings, academia might not be the career for you. As chair of a major Zenith university committee some years back, one week I was tearing my hair out because I was scheduled up to the eyeballs with meetings. "How the Hades do administrators ever get any work done if they are in fracking meetings all the time?" I railed at my companion, a former dean, as I pulled on a clean black tee shirt to greet that day's scheduling marathon in high style.

"That's how administrators do their work," she replied patiently, reaching for the Arts section of the New York Times. "They are doing their work in meetings." I was gobsmacked. Of course that was right. So maybe it wasn't the meetings themselves that were the problem -- it was the question of making -- and marking -- the progress we made in them.

This post is for everyone, no matter how unimportant you think you are. Whether you are going to be a first time chair in the fall, or chairing a committee with a small mandate, or just a member of a department or a committee, you need to be able to run, and/or contribute effectively to, a good meeting. It is one of the many failures of academic life that this is not a skill that either taught or openly discussed, nor is it one that faculty will usually admit to valuing. But actually, most do because they hate having their time wasted. From time to time, you might hear it said about someone in a tone of admiration, "S/he runs a really good meeting." It's a genuine compliment my friend: will it ever be made about you?

Never fear, the Tenured Radical is here! Here are the five things that I always think about when I am planning and participating in a meeting.

1. Every meeting requires a realistic and clear agenda. If you are running the meeting, you need to take account of what time is available, and how much of the hour you should allot to each item. An agenda should not be too full, and conversely, if there is very little to discuss, cancel the meeting: this will make everyone happy. Getting together just because you are scheduled to do so makes people feel like they are spinning their wheels. Driving people through an agenda as if the building was burning can, on the other hand, cause the group not to take ownership of decisions made in haste, or cause them to (perhaps rightly) not make decisions at all. If an item is taking longer than you thought it would, even if you have pruned out ancillary issues, consult with the group as to whether they wish to defer the item to the next meeting, or finish that discussion and defer the other items to the next meeting.

If you are chairing, you should rough out a semester of meetings in advance so that you know how much aggregate meeting time you are willing to allot to each of the items your group is tasked with. You should plan a regular weekly time so that you are not wasting time in each meeting trying to find space in every one's schedule for the next one. You need to leave some space for unplanned items that have been added to the semester's work.

It is also important to designate why things are on the agenda: is a particular item there for discussion and advice, or is it what we call an "action item" -- an issue on which, ideally, your group will produce a recommendation, request or policy?

Above all, the committee has to be encouraged to work together as a group, and each member of the committee needs to know that hir opinions (unless utterly irrelevant and noxious) are important to the process. Because of this, you need to:

2. Avoid giving speeches or monopolizing the discussion. This is definitely my worst flaw, either as a chair or a participant in meetings. If you are chair, your job is to establish the agenda, keep it moving, and end the meeting with a sense of the actions to be taken as a result of the committee's deliberations. It is also your job to listen and make sense of what other people have to say, such as asking people to clarify points. pause the discussion periodically to articulate areas of consensus and disagreement. If you are a member of the committee, don't speak in long paragraphs that are designed to foreclose alternative opinions before they have even been voiced. This can be terribly polarizing. Worse, it encourages a few strong personalities to dominate, and others to melt away.

The point of the meeting is participation. If you are talking, no one else is, and those other people are sitting there thinking: "What is the point of being at this meeting?" Reserve a few minutes for each item to make sure you have solicited the opinion of everyone who wishes to speak: many people, especially new and less experienced colleagues, will be reticent about expressing their opinions in a more experienced group. Make sure you repeat the positions voiced by these people to reassure them that you have heard what they said, and to make sure others have taken account of it too.

Finally, try to have a sense of when a discussion has gone on too long. You know this has happened when the same opinions, or disagreements, are being recycled; if people are starting to talk among themselves and crack jokes; or if the conversation is straying into peripheral issues. Bring the discussion to a close by asking the group to:

3. Make effective decisions. The best decisions are reached by consensus, in my view, but this isn't always possible. It is much harder to do in a large department, which can split over real differences in intellectual and institutional philosophy without losing their effectiveness in the institution over the short term. This can be a problem, of course, because it leads to faction. Unfortunately, large departments have no disincentive, year by year, to avoid factions, since it allows strong personalities to flex their muscles in ways that are undemocratic but efficient. But in the long term the damage can be great if these factions harden. What you then get are political struggles that overwhelm legitimate intellectual issues, cause a lack of comity and ultimately, hamper the department's capacity to do business.

Small departments cannot afford the politics of faction because unfriendly relationships or long-term struggles in a small group can be devastating as people become isolated and angry over long-term grievances. This means that, while large groups are far more likely to vote on items and move forward, even items of little importance, small groups are more likely to invest in compromises that can take much longer to reach but that every member is invested in. Over time, however, the down side of small group consensus building can be an unwillingness to take risks, or make timely decisions on small matters even when such decisions are urgent to the department's future. Disagreement with the consensus can come to feel socially fraught, causing individuals not to disagree even when it would be useful and productive.

If the small group sounds like a conflict-free zone, it isn't. Small groups can become idiosyncratic and defensive, and can be rife with the passive-aggressive behavior that the failure to have and resolve conflict can breed. But large groups -- particularly departments -- should not become too reliant on voting. It creates the misimpression that every decision, no matter how small is a matter of "policy;" and it means that factions become reified, as strong personalities constantly troll for votes and mark others down as loyal or disloyal.

As chair, you need to decide which decision-making style is best suited to the action you are seeking and the group you are in -- not simply go with what is traditional within the group because it is comfortable. Neither consensus or voting is necessarily a better method for making group decisions, although I like consensus because it allows a group that is in the minority to concede its point but still be heard on the matter. Ideally, the minority can modify the decision in a way that strengthens the outcome and invites their support of a decision which they initially opposed. Whatever method you choose (and it could be a mix) you need to:

4. Cultivate respect for the decision-making process within the group. Your meetings are not effective unless every member of your group leaves ready to support the decision or recommendation that is made and the process by which it was achieved. In the case of a personnel decision, each person who voted needs to be able to describe accurately, and in detail, to anyone who has the right to inquire, why s/he voted the way she did. In policy and governance matters, however, the best outcome is that every member of the group is ready to support the decision that has been made, regardless of whether s/he supported it in the meeting or not.

This last point is a particular issue in an academic environment where one's colleagues often assume that lingering disagreement and argument is not just the norm, but is a right and a legitimate expression of one's individualism. In intellectual matters this may be productive (although it can lead to stubborn eccentricity in a person's views), but in institutional matters it can be crippling. There is nothing more annoying than to come to a decision as a group, and then have one or more people leave the room and criticize others, or the group itself, to the larger community.

Oh yes: the one thing that is more annoying is to have the person never give up a disagreement, and divert energy from other business by constantly trying to pressure the group to reverse what it has done. Trying to undercut the decision by disseminating information in the larger community, real or false, is really bad, unless there is a matter of great ethical importance at stake. And under no conditions should people be sending each other rabid emails that pursue struggles that began in meetings, copying and blind copying them to others. Which is why you need to....

5. Discourage gossip. Be firm about which decisions require confidentiality, and why. Give clear direction on what that means: are members of the group not allowed to say anything about a decision? Are they allowed to distance themselves from the outcome publicly if they have voiced their disagreement appropriately within the group? Particularly if your committee draws on numerous departments for its membership, people may have different standards for confidentiality and these may need to be discussed.

Along with discouraging gossip, members of your group will inevitably discuss agenda items with each other outside meetings, but the caucusing to straegize a meeting's outcome is divisive and should be discouraged, as should email exchanges about business from which some members of the group are excluded. It also encourages the bullying of faculty by those at a higher rank, the creation of unhealthy personal obligations, and character assassination of various kinds. What is the point of having a meeting if everyone attends already knowing what s/he will support and unwilling to listen to those who were not part of these extra-curricular discussions? What is the point of having an opinion if you will have to inevitably fear punishment from one faction or another? Particularly in departments, this kind of informal caucusing (inevitably encouraged by strong personalities who want to run things whether they are formally in charge or not) can lead to long-term damage from factionalization, and resentment from those in minority positions.

Sunday Radical Roundup: Straights, Gays and Everyone In Between

Via the H-Women listserve: Congratulations to Ellen Samuels University of Wisconsin, Madison) for winning

the 2011 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship given by the University of Chicago Press (forthcoming, Signs 2011).

The citation reads, in part:

Professor Samuels’s award-winning essay, "Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet," is impressively

interdisciplinary....Physically joined at the pelvis, the twins were objects of curiosity, inspection, and invasion from the moment of their birth. The article situates medical and lay interest in their unique pelvic anatomy within the larger contexts of the nineteenth-century freak show, the pathologization of black female sexuality, and the complex dynamics of American enslavement and emancipation. Advancing a re-visionary understanding of the McKoys, the author illuminates dimensions of agency and subjectivity largely overlooked or misunderstood by historians to date.

Born enslaved, the McCoy sisters, pictured at right in demure Victorian garb, were treated shamefully by the people who owned, and then exploited them for their uniqueness. Eventually they became vocalists, becoming famous as "The Two-Headed Nightingale." Congratulations Ellen!

When Lesbians Walked The Earth: The online journal Trivia: Voices of Feminism (originally founded as a print journal in 1982) has dedicated its most recent issue to the theme "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" If the answer is yes, then the up side is that we grow ever-more valuable as collectibles! At any rate, it's a great bunch of essays, edited (I think) by Lise Weil of Goddard College. I equivocate on this point because it seems, from the website, that in true feminist fashion there is a collective at work on many of the issues. Dedicated to Mary Daly, Trivia will have a follow up volume on the same theme in September 2010. And if you are a lesbian of a certain age, here's a treat: an essay by Elana Dykewomon!

Take A Knee, Heterosexuality: If lesbians are going extinct, straight people aren't doing much better. Ever since it made its debut, I have looked forward every Sunday to the New York Times "Modern Love" feature. The only problem is that it has been getting dull, the stories about love simultaneously stranger and more prosaic. One suspects that, as people with less and less unique lives get contracts to write memoirs, "Modern Love" has succumbed to placements from the agents of people who have been encouraged by their 800 television channels to believe that almost anything is worth a mention: adopting outside the United States, putting the dog down, losing weight, struggling with the demands of your special needs child, house training your dog, being poor, toilet training your child, being rich, dropping out of college to go to Nepal and have an affair with a sherpa.......

And yet today's horror story, "Competing In My Own Reality Show" is both just twisted enough to command my attention and is a perfect example of why memoirs should be embargoed until readers develop better taste; or woman writers rediscover feminism, and/or learn that self-disclosure is not the same thing as insight into the human condition. Diana Spechler recounts the shallow story of how:

1. She became attracted to a student, embarking on an affair with him when she learned that he had been chosen for one of those reality shows where a "bachelor" is presented with numerous women, one of whom will be picked by the producers to be his wife. Competing, we learn at the end, may have been her sole motivation all along. (Self-disclosure: in my day, when people said "bachelor" they meant homosexual. I'm just sayin', Diana.)

2. She fell in love with Mr. Shitbird, despite the fact that he was so narcissistic and empty-headed as to genuinely think it was a good idea to marry someone chosen for him by television producers - and have an affair with Sprechler while he was doing it.

3. She fell further in love with this caricature of a man even as he continued with this process, saying things to her like "You should apply to be my wife" -- and that she would probably never be picked. Nevertheless, she "fantasized about applying," realizing only after talking over one of the actual candidates with him that she had not truly captured his heart to date because "I had made myself too available. Of course my rivals now had an edge. Because they weren't infatuated, they could easily act aloof." (Another theory? The female contestants suspected he was a homosexual, and didn't care. This reality show was only their desperate attempt -- not to find an actual husband but to break into "the business" by getting on the cover of US magazine.)

And besides, Diana, your real mistake was not seeing a therapist immediately after a) sleeping with one of your students; and b) becoming his domestic servant and f**kbuddy as he trolled for a wife on a television show. Before would have been even better. Reader, don't miss the part about her folding his underpants while he is filling out questionnaires from women who, as he tells her enthusiastically, "have standards."

4. After he gets kicked off the show (perhaps because he is a homosexual? As an active homosexual, I feel I can continue to venture this hypothesis), their relationship begins to peter out. The night before Valentine's Day, he admits (drum roll): "I don't love you." Gosh, really? And guess what?! Sprechler comes to the conclusion that it was all her fault! But not because she apparently has no self-esteem. No! It is because she is too competitive for her own good! Don't you just hate that in women? As she concludes,

In the weeks that followed, I spent a lot of time crying to friends, hypothesizing that he had signed the contract not because he longed for love (Please! Love?) but because his narcissism knew no bounds.

Of course, I was being unfair. After all, I had made myself the star of my own reality show. I had signed myself up, donned my blinders, and set my sights on winning.

And Last But Not Least: Michael Wolff on the Helen Thomas beheading.

Bafana Bafana! Radical World Cup

As those of you who were reading Tenured Radical last fall know, our household (minus the travel-averse Portuguese Water Dog) spent several months living and working in South Africa. Therefore, although work will not be entirely suspended today chez Radical, tasks will be chosen with an eye to their compatibility with World Cup football. I am also wearing my orange National Sea Rescue tee shirt for luck. I haven't gone mad, however: good wishes aside, Bafana Bafana (which roughly translates from the Zulu as "The Little Guy") has small hope of beating Mexico today.

Life is not a Matt Damon movie, my friends. And football is not rugby. Thank god.

However, football does offer more options than a Matt Damon movie: if South Africa loses, I will switch hemispheres and root for Brazil, which is easy to do, because I don't give a rat's a$$ for the United States team.

In other news, can we please not take this opportunity, in which South Africa gets to show off just a little bit, to caricature South African sexuality? Yes, along with intense poverty, sexual violence is a terrible problem in South Africa, as is AIDS. But frequent assertions in some of our best American newspapers that, because Jacob Zuma has been married five times and currently has three wives, polygamy is legal in South Africa are ill-informed. Polygamy has no legal or civil standing in South Africa. It is a Zulu tradition that powerful men keep more than one wife, and Jacob Zuma is a very well-to-do Zulu who can afford to have as many wives as he likes. Not only does it cost money to maintain each wife and her children in her own household, but one also pays a steep bride price, or lobola, to the woman's family before a marriage can take place. Zuma has been roundly criticized for his polygamous practices and illegitimate children -- five out of twenty have been born outside these marriages -- by Christian churchmen (South Africa is 80% Christian), his political opponents, and more cosmopolitan South Africans. But one suspects that Zuma's public embrace of Zulu identity is part of his popularity: polygamy is a shrinking practice, but not unusual in the areas of the country where the ANC is strongest. Illegitimate births are not particularly stigmatized either, particularly when the father acknowledges and takes financial responsibility for the child, but also because it is not unusual for parents not to wed until they can do so respectably -- in other words, when the husband can pay lobola and set up his own household.

Americans might be interested to know that polygamy, although a hidden practice in the United States, is also not entirely illegal (although it can get you excommunicated from mainstream Mormonism), as long as other laws that regulate sexuality and the family are not broken. Prosecutions tend to occur only if the multiple "marriages" (which have no legal standing beyond an initial marriage, and almost always occur within a religious community) involve breaking other laws against incest, statutory rape, or welfare fraud; or violate the tax code.

What South Africans tend to be more concerned about are accusations of rape filed against the President in 2005, which were officially dismissed, but tarnished Zuma's reputation; and his numerous illegitimate children which, in a country where AIDS is a critical policy issue and condom use is officially promoted, sets a bad example to say the least. But these things pale in comparison to other problems; corruption, housing, unemployment, the collapse of public services, deficiencies in education and the yawning gap between rich and poor.

If you have suddenly become interested in South Africa (and I hope you have), Karen Tani has provided a good reading list at Legal History Blog. Might I also suggest Nelson Mandela's autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom? In addition to being a memoir of one of the most important activists of our time, it is an excellent short course on the political history of modern South Africa. You will also learn a few things you need to know about Zulu culture and tradition, so as not to speak about the ruling clique in the ANC with utter and complete ignorance. For a call to arms issued by young intellectuals in the new South Africa, I recommend Leslie Dikeni and William Gumedi, eds., The Poverty of Ideas: South African Democracy and the Retreat of the Intellectuals (Jacana Media, 2010).

You might also want to start following three South African bloggers, two of whom are currently in my sidebar. Afrodissident targets reactionaries, demagogues and corrupt public figures of all kinds, particularly those (like Julius Malema, head of the ANC Youth League) who pose as radicals. Khayelitsha Struggles is written by activists from inside the vast township on the Cape Flats that stretches from the Capetown airport down to False Bay; the most recent post announces a "township" of tin shacks that will be built outside the multi-million dollar Greenpoint stadium to protest dollars that were diverted from housing for, and extending utilities to, the poor. Constitutionally Speaking examines political and social issues in South Africa from the perspective of constitutional law. Although today he admits being temporarily uncritical due to being caught up in the excitement, go here for blogger Pierre de Vos's "World Cup Guide To South Africa."

Ayoba!

Today's Assigned Reading: Ayn Rand, Tony Judt and Dean Dad

I spent the first part of the morning absorbed in Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: 2009). I always thought there were two kinds of people: those who were simply mad about Rand, and others (like me) who couldn't make it through the first fifty pages of her histrionic prose and cheesy philosophizing.

Wrong, wrong, wrong (as one usually is when, as on Facebook, there appear to be only two choices: "Like" and "Dislike.") There are also those who are neither Rand worshippers or Rand avoiders, but who are just smart, like Jennifer Burns. For all the books that have been published lately about the rise of conservatism in the post-World War II United States, I would have to say Goddess of the Market is the most unusual, in that it teases apart the different philosophical strands of conservatism and libertarianism, while also connecting them to political movements and figures that themselves deserve more attention: Wendell Willkie, for example. Burns also does a terrific job of knitting Rand's philosophy of individualism into a wider intellectual world that preceded the resurgence of conservatism as a governing philosophy in the 1960s. Another bonus is that I have always felt a little guilty for never reading Rand -- and now I can once again back-burner her, but all the better informed by Burns' account. It's a win-win.

In other reading news, check out Tony Judt's column in today's New York Times, "Israel Without Cliches." I've been following Judt's memoir pieces in the New York Review of Books, which should be mandatory reading for young historians, particularly since they detail the many complex and non-academic experiences Judt has brought to his life of scholarship. They are beautifully written; and they not-so-unsubtly illustrate what it means to be a cosmopolitan intellectual. Like many feminists, I sometimes begin to foam at the mouth at Judt's uninformed (but not unopinionated)) views on the place of women in the academy (prone -- see "Girls! Girls! Girls!" April 8 2010), and everything that modern American Studies is built around ( "Edge People", March 25 2010). In "Edge People," these two targets of condescension merge. if female graduate students are most notable as fodder for sex and marriage (which makes it all better), provided almost solely for the benefit of distinguished male faculty on the loose in middle age, we learn that "the shortcoming" of "para-academic programs" like "'gender studies,' 'women’s studies,' 'Asian-Pacific-American studies,' and dozens of others" (scare quotes around these fields are his)

is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves —thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so forth.

What is it that Judt writes about again -- uh, whites? Europeans? Men? Talk about a job creation scheme that has really influenced the academy. Aren't you glad he wasn't your dean? Nevertheless, despite occasionally wanting to reach through the page and shake him for using his perch to say stupid and ill-informed things about fields -- and people -- he clearly knows nothing about, I am enjoying this series enormously. The New York Times piece,on the role of anti-Semitism in public discussions of Israel, displays Judt at his most lucid in dealing with a difficult problem that can have otherwise reasonable people screaming at each other in seconds.

In other writing news, Dean Dad elaborates on my post about voluntary retirement in academia here.

Crossposted at Cliopatria.

How To Afford Your First Job, Professor Bumstead: Radical Advice For The Newly Employed

We can all agree it was a terrible job market last year. And yet, some of you will be proceeding, newly hooded, into more highly paid employment than you had last year. When I was in graduate school, we used to distinguish between "a job" (something that pays better than graduate school, which could be anything from a one-year adjunct to an administrative, IT or public history position) and "a real job" (employment that offered a longer future, most likely tenure-track.) Nowadays there is also a third category that has expanded dramatically: the post-doctoral fellowship.

Regardless of what category you fall into, if you have finished your PhD and proceeded to paid employment of any kind, you may be making two to three times the money you made last year, which will make you feel giddy. For this reason, my dear, you are in need of Radical Financial Advice.

1. Find out when you will receive your first pay check, how much it will be, and how many months a year you will be paid. It is not uncommon that there is an uncomfortable to yawning gap between the end of your graduate fellowship or post-doc and the beginning of your new salary. If you have been living paycheck to paycheck (which you have) and don't have a partner who is earning, you may suddenly find yourself anywhere from two to four months without income. Most college fiscal years begin in July, but most adjunct jobs and post docs, as well as some tenure-track jobs, begin paying only after you have actually hit the ground in September. This means you might be paid at the end of July and you might be paid at the end of September. You may be paid on a twelve month schedule, or an 8-9 month schedule. Find out and plan accordingly. Sometimes it is possible (especially with a push from a kindly chair or dean) to get your new Human Resources people to re-calibrate your salary to a cycle that eases your transition slightly better. Otherwise, you need to make a plan for whatever time you will be without income. Like crawl home, live with your parents and wait tables until your prestigious university job begins.

2. You cannot afford not to have an accountant. Used to filling out the short form? Well you may be able to go back to it year after next if you are in a tenure-track job, but not this year. Why? Because poor as you may still feel once you figure out what you will actually be living on once you begin debt repayment (see below), you have leaped up the tax ladder. Listen carefully, because this is important: you will probably owe more in taxes next April than will be withheld from your salary. Why? Because withholding on your graduate fellowship, post-doc or adjunct salary was done at a far lower tax rate. So while the amount withheld from your new salary will be appropriate, the amount withheld from your servant wages will not have been, and you will owe money.

An accountant can help you plan for this by either telling you how much to have withheld in your new job, or by calculating how much you have to save to pay the Feds in the spring. The former strategy is preferred, since under-withholding is frowned upon by the IRS, but you can probably get away with it for a year.

I'll tell you right now: H & R Block doesn't count as an accountant. Go to a senior colleague who looks relatively prosperous and ask her who her accountant is. You need someone good because, before taking on the financial obligations of moving, you also need to be able to plan.......

3. Your budget. That's right, it's Blondie and Dagwood time. And this is perhaps the most important part of this post, because the first thing you will need to get a handle on is....

4. Your debts. It's no shame to have them: nearly everyone carries debt from college and adds to it in graduate school. But there is good debt and bad debt. Let me explain.

Good debt includes your massive student loans, that will kick in six months after the hood falls on your shoulders. Once you have learned from your accountant how much your monthly salary will be, you then need to lop these payments right off the top. My advice is to create a separate bank account for debt payment and have that part of your income immediately deposited in it; then have the same account make an electronic payment on a day or two later. This way you will never get your mitts on the money, and you will never miss it.

Good debt is buying a house. But, should you be in a position to do so, one conversation to have with your accountant is whether, in your income bracket, and given the volatility of the real estate market, this is a good time in your life (and the right location) for you to make that investment. Take it from one who is on her third home: buying a house is far more expensive than your cheerful real estate agent will tell you. Take the numbers s/he gives you for the first year and add $10,000. What you might find in this soft market is a rent-to-own situation, which might be attractive if you are tenure-track. In this scenario, you have the option of owning a year or so down the line, with a portion of your rent applied to the purchase price. In this case, you will need to discuss with your accountant how much you would need to save to complete the sale (there are transfer taxes, mortgage fees, and other hidden costs to house buying that are tax deductible, but must be paid up front.)

Another good debt is purchasing a car if you do not already have one and you will need one to get to school. Unlike student loan and credit card payment, paying back a car loan establishes your credit worthiness. In addition, even though you will have to come up with $1000 -$2,000 to put down on a car, it is also a particularly good economic environment for purchasing a car: I am still getting ads for 0% financing, and by July and August when they are trying to get the old model year off the lot, you might even see no money down offers.

But if you are living in a college town where you can easily bike or walk to work, consider not purchasing a car immediately. Aside from the down payment, this will probably save you around $2500 alone next year in insurance, gasoline, maintenance and taxes (if you live in a state that taxes autos.) Renting a car when you need one is much thriftier, as is offering to pay for a friend's gas so that you can both go to Sam's Club and Trader Joe's to load up on household items and frozen food in bulk.

Bad debt is credit cards. My guess is that you have what -- two? Three? My other guess is that you have been closing the gap between your actual income in graduate school and what you spend with your credit cards and that you are paying a lot of interest. Maybe you have even been accepting those offers that allow you to transfer debt from one card to another at 0% for the first six months? You did that more than once? You are paying interest on the accumulated interest, aren't you? Now listen very carefully:

You must stop. Now. Right now.

Until you stop living on credit you are not working for yourself, you are working for the bank. Credit cards are like crack. They sing us siren songs, and we love what they say because we can cure so much unhappiness today and pay for it tomorrow (and the next day, and the next day, and the next day....) Credit cards are like affairs: we tell ourselves and our friends there is nothing wrong with them, and yet we feel compelled to lie about them too. Tell your accountant exactly what you owe, and tell the truth. Believe me, s/he has heard it all -- and so much worse -- before. Then try this: when you are shopping around for a bank, find out whether you can get a fixed-rate consolidation loan to pay all your credit cards off over a period of 36 months. Compare the rates on these loans, and choose the bank that gives you the best one. Make sure there are no penalties for early payment, and then consider teaching a summer course next year to make a serious dent in that loan. In the end this will save you thousands of dollars.

Most important, until you know all the above numbers -- taxes, debt repayment, and net-net monthly salary, you will not know how much....

5. Money you and your dependents have to live on. I am going to tell you right now that even though you just got a big raise, at this point in your financial planning process this will seem like a heartbreakingly small number, particularly if you are financial obligated to parents, spouses, children or siblings. It may be a small enough number that, particularly if you are moving to a big city, you may have to seriously consider a roommate situation. But cheer up: you are not going further into debt, you have cancelled all but one credit card, you are going to pay for everything in cash from here on out and (this is the best part, after you have dealt with all your financial baggage), barring complete unemployment, your real income is most likely to go up from here on out! Budget for food, utilities (can you really afford the cable package you want?), rent (is heat included? Not an important question in Los Angeles, but vital in Boston), transportation, and clothes. And do yourself one more favor.....

6. Save something. Anything. This will make you feel powerful and in control of your fate. Make it $25 a month if that is all you have, but put it somewhere that you cannot touch it. I, for example, have a Roth IRA, where I have for years put all the money I have ever earned writing and speaking, and it has become a nice sum over two decades of employment. Look at it this way: a $250 honorarium for giving a talk locally isn't much money, but with compound interest over the course of your working life, it becomes an impressive sum on which you have also deferred taxes. If you are a highly self-disciplined person, you might want to save up your money for a bit and then put it in a CD, where it is slightly more available to you but you have to make a conscious decision to actually use it rather than fritter it away.

This advice may be more appropriate to some people than to others, but the important message is plan. Plan now. You don't have to be Suze Orman to know that one of the worst legacies of a prolonged period of debt accumulation and low income is learning to ignore the real state of your finances as you fear deprivation more than you fear living beyond your means. While this can be OK during graduate school, when your first priority is establishing yourself as an intellectual and accumulating debt can allow you to complete your studies in a timely manner, to prolong debt accumulation into your salaried life can limit your options severely down the line.

On the other hand, at a moment when you are launching yourself into life as a professional intellectual and so many things are out of your control, this is one place -- with a little prudence and self-discipline -- where you can feel powerful and in charge.

Gonna Walk Before They Make Me Run: On Helen Thomas And Retirement

Because of my grown niece, a second wave feminist in a third wave body, I took an interest in Helen Thomas a few years back. Third Wave Niece, a Smith grad, is very into biographies of interesting women who have battled their way through to careers that are characterized by their maleness -- journalism, politics, and whatnot. So I purchased a copy of Thomas's Front Row At The White House: My Life And Times (Scribners, 2000) and read it. A lively account of her career with UPI, it's a great history of journalism from one woman's point of view. But it's also graphic example of all the ways women were locked out of professional life in structural ways until federal legislation, and lawsuits filed under that legislation, literally permitted them in the room. As Thomas (a not particularly ideological feminist) broke down those barriers in political reporting, women streamed in behind her. I remember back in 1979, thinking that we at Oligarch's college newspaper might just elect the first woman to chair the editorial board less than a decade after women had been admitted to the university at all. It was not to be, and we elected a fine man. But the woman we didn't elect, and numerous others (including Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post) went on to fine careers in journalism through the doors opened by Thomas and her contemporaries.

But over the years, Thomas -- who had a reputation for asking "tough" questions -- became less of a reporter than a nostalgic symbol of what journalism used to be. This was particularly the case after she quit UPI and signed on as a columnist for Hearst. She was cultivated by successive White House press secretaries as a kind of mascot and news-granny, an annoying but beloved old cat that is always leaving fur in your favorite chair. Helen asked the tough questions, sure, but because only Helen asked the tough questions, presidents and press secretaries were also able to reply to them as if they were eccentric. Perhaps you remember --as I do -- spinmeister Ronald Reagan responding to a much younger Thomas's questions with an indulgent smile and a "We-e-ell Helen (a-heh-heh-heh) I don't know whether (a-heh-heh)...."

Now Thomas has, as Jonathan Ferris coined the phrase in And Then We Came To The End, been "made to walk Spanish." Or rather, she has abruptly retired, after having gone on record as anti-Israel (in a particularly cruel way) with Rabbi David Nesenoff after a White House Jewish heritage event. View the video here courtesy of RabbiLive.com. George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer made sure that Thomas's remarks got out to the mainstream media; Bill Clinton's former press secretary (talk about a job from hell) Lanny Davis followed Sunday with a statement that "Thomas, who he used to consider a close friend, 'has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot.'"

Do we think maybe none of these guys really liked Thomas after all? She resigned from Hearst on Monday.

Gone the special chair, the distinctive red dresses, the ritual first question. Of course, what happened was nothing new. As most reports of the incident note, Thomas -- the daughter of Lebanese immigrants -- has always been a sharp critic of Israel and of U.S. support for Israel's foreign policy. What pushed things over the edge was not her anti-Israel statements, but her colossal error in judgement in suggesting that the people of Israel "go home" to Germany and Poland. Oh -- and to America, which would be a better idea because there weren't any extermination camps there.

Surely it was a set-up: beware of clerics carrying video cameras, is my advice, and do your best not to say noxious things when you are being taped. I do agree with the many people who are arguing that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh say horrid things in public all the time, and no one is calling for their resignation. Yet if, at the age of 89, Thomas is no longer able to distinguish between suggesting that the descendants of Holocaust survivors return to the site of their ancestors' murder and appropriately partisan political statements about Israel's neo-imperialist policies in Gaza and the West Bank, one suspects that it is long past time for her to go.

Why hasn't someone had the kindness to make that happen before now? Answer: it takes guts to remove an iconic figure. Few people do it, even when they know they should. This is, of course, a common problem in the academy. Venerable professor famous for irascible personality and eclectic remarks goes right over the edge one day and has to be forcibly retired, when in fact the signs of ineffectiveness and mental decline have been clear to close colleagues for several years: inappropriate remarks, fits of rage and/or confusion, memory lapses of gargantuan proportions. And yet, you go to the administration and say, "Hey, I think we have a problem" and administrators claim their hands are tied because of tenure, academic freedom, blah, blah, blah. I have a friend who made this lonesome trek year after year, recounting numerous horror stories that appeared in the teaching evaluations or were related by befuddled students about Famous Professor X, and was repeatedly sent away with a condescending lecture about age discrimination. In one of these meetings, an administrator said to my friend sharply, "Are you a doctor? What makes you think you know what is going on?"

"Oh," s/he replied casually: "Venerable Professor doesn't recognize me anymore, and s/he recently asked the administrative assistant who she was and why she was robbing the department office." Needless to say, nothing happened until said faculty member let loose a blistering stream of muddled hate speech at a stunned group of first-year students who fled the room weeping and dropped the class en masse.

The argument that prim little Ari Fleischer made about ejecting Thomas from the White House press corps is that she has lost her objectivity. The truth is that Thomas has not been objective for years -- she has been strongly opinionated, a useful foil who allowed conservatives and neo-liberals alike to articulate themselves against her. That has in many ways made her an asset, especially to conservative presidents, and to a White House press corps that either doesn't like to ask the hard questions, or doesn't really care to report or think very hard about the answers. The real problem is that Helen Thomas has lost her good judgment -- and while this is not the case for everyone who is 89, we should all see this as a lesson about retiring before we do something awful that allows people to give us the old heave-ho.

What a value added it was for Republicans to make Obama kick the little old lady out of the White House too! If he would only return Bo to the breeder while PETA films his weeping children, a Republican sweep in November will be assured.

But the real moral of the story is for everyone over 50: age narrows most of us more than we can possibly be aware of. It trims away the subtleties and politesse that can make the most extreme things we believe bearable to others. It causes to overestimate our authority, and underestimate the destruction our words cause. It makes us arrogant, because younger people don't want to tell us that we are finished, even as we become caricatures of ourselves. My advice? Pick a retirement age now and stick to it, knowing that you will get out while people still remember you for the best things that you were. Keith Richards says it better than I ever could: this is for you, Helen.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Disobey The President: Transforming The Military In Historical Perspective

We move forward into a summer of political negotiating that might end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the Clinton-era policy that lifted the ban on gays in the military, provided said gays pretend to be straight (and, as an ironic touch, created a phrase popular among the sexually dishonest who claim to be in sophisticated open relationships when actually they are just cheating like everyone else.) Policy makers and GLBT lobbyists wishing to lift the ban might usefully consult Beth Bailey's America's Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Harvard, 2009) as they consider how to present what is perceived by many to be an unprecedented alteration in the United States Armed Forces. As Bailey observes, the transition from the draft to an all-volunteer Army was a political decision made by the Nixon administration in 1970 that military brass resisted vigorously despite what they perceived as the poor quality of the draftees they were receiving. Appealing for volunteers to what the Army viewed as a narcissistic and indulgent youth culture, rather than relying on compulsory service and the traditional disciplinary measures designed to subdue individuality, was a system that had been in place since World War II. Despite what many perceived as the difficulties of instilling good discipline in unwilling warriors, and an Army War College study that argued the draft was unsustainable, the Army was comfortable with the system it knew.

Bailey reminds us how dramatic the changes designed to recruit an all-volunteer force were at the time: allowing common soldiers to grow their hair, decorate their rooms with psychedelic posters, live off-base with their families, hiring contractors to cook and clean, and allowing the consumption of beer on post all seemed to signal Armageddon to traditionalists in the 1970s. It is not insignificant, I think that it was in the 1970s that gay civil rights activists imagined that the bars to GLBT service passed during the Truman administration might fall in such a liberalized atmosphere. But this goal was eclipsed, first by Reagan's DOD Directive 1332.14 stating that homosexuality was "incompatible with military service," and then by the mobilization of gay activism to force the federal government to act in the AIDS crisis.

One critical thread that runs throughout the book is fear that the bodies who would find the volunteer military attractive would be ungovernable under any conditions, a conversation that centered primarily on race. Would the Army be more Black as it designed its appeal around employment and educational opportunities that would be attractive to the motivated poor? Or could the Army potentially be less Black -- as those who were either afraid to arm and train African-American men at the height of the Black Power movement, or who saw the failures of Vietnam as the failures of Black draftees -- hoped. This is important because it demonstrates that integration of the military had, over two decades, not eliminated racism (although no one advocated a return to segregation); and that military policy was perceived as critically linked to the social and political fabric of the nation, where conversations about Black exploitation vied with demands for Black opportunity. It also illustrates the tendency to elevate concerns about the failures of the common soldier to perform are not infrequently elevated over more appropriate concerns that would focus on leadership, command, training and the political viability of a wartime mission that is faltering.

Two other things strike me here, both related to the comparison that is often made between ending DADT and racial desegregation in the military, initiated in 1951 three years after Harry S Truman's Executive Order 9981. Black officers, most notably Colin Powell, have resisted this comparison, a stance that has been viewed as purely homophobic by gay activists. And while it is a homophobic stance, what was less well explained during the 1993 debate that resulted in DADT was the extraordinary difficulty of implementing racial integration and dismantling racism in the services, a project that continues to this day. I repeat: desegregation was not even initiated until three years after Truman's order, and race was an extremely contentious policy matter two decades later (as Bailey points out graphically in America's Army.) Was the compromise of DADT -- which is no different from a ban from the point of anyone who is queer -- actually a compromise after all, rather than a political punt by the Clinton administration? This might be worth taking a closer look at.

Secondly, to avoid getting stuck on the comparison between African-American civil rights and GLBT civil rights (a difficult conversation that inevitably becomes a distraction) Congressional and GLBT advocates might wish to focus instead on the difficulties of transitioning to an all-volunteer force in the 1970s, and the fact that they were overcome. In 1970, when Nixon proposed this shift, officers and noncoms almost uniformly believed that accommodating and encouraging individualism in daily military life (not to mention expanding the number of women in the service) would be a threat to good order. We see the same issues arising as are being addressed today: the capacity to ready troops for battle, and that altering the gender order would undermine structures of authority and the unquestioned obedience necessary to success in field operations.

What should be pointed out is that, not only was this transformation successful over time, but that it was also initiated in the midst of a long, difficult and inconclusive war. And yet, because this transition was ordered by the President, General William Westmoreland put the full weight of his authority behind it. Although, as Bailey writes, Westmoreland shared many of the reservations common among all the officers he spoke to on October 13 1970 at the Army Commanders Conference, he also believed that it was his --and their -- job to make the transition work if the President so desired it. As Bailey writes, Westmoreland "believed he must carry out the orders of his commander in chief to the best of his ability. And that day, he declared an end to debate. 'The decision has been made,' he said. 'I expect your full support.'" (51) And he got it.

So what's the lesson here? All institutional transformations are difficult. Achieving domestic partner benefits has not eliminated homophobia in the academy, and white people -- even when they are gay -- often are the direct beneficiaries of racism and class prejudice. Making comparisons between oppressions, in other words, invariably leads us into murky and difficult territory, even if the moral point is similar. But we can, in fact, point to specific moments in which limitations on military service have been lifted, and draw two conclusions. The first is that the successful outcome of that transformation, by which I mean the full integration of the group into military service in a way that is perceived as non-problematic, will come many years down the road. As Bailey notes in a later chapter, the idea that an all-volunteer Army might be more black was still distressing in the 1970s to numerous constituencies, some conservative and some liberal, twenty years after integration had commenced. The second is that the military both resists change to its practices and has, perhaps, the capacity to effect change better than any other American institution, because of its culture of obedience.

After Days of Being Serious I Need To Post This

Go here for Historiann's report on this year's Little Berks. As everyone has inferred, I missed the Little Berks -- one of my favorite annual events -- for the Policy History Conference. In Historiann's honor, even though she came east without telling me, ahem, I am posting a video from Garfunkel and Oates, the girl version of the Smothers Brothers.

Take it away, girls, on "Pregnant Women Are Smug!"

Sunday Radical Roundup: Policy History Conference Summary

Because I can only be one place at a time, and because I left Columbus at noon yesterday, my view of the Policy History Conference has necessarily been partial. But one of the thing I learned Friday night at the reception sponsored by the Miller Center at UVA is that the sponsoring organization, The Institute for Political History, is relatively young. Founded in 2000, it "supports the training and research projects of graduate students interested in American political history." As Matt Lassiter explained to me, the organization was responding to a sense that the field was losing ground, but an ironic outcome has been that many of those drawn to the organization are intellectually committed to bringing other fields associated with cultural and social history to bear on politics. As Lassiter put it, it's "all good." That would be my take too.

Closer investigation reveals a somewhat entrepreneurial intellectual venture. There may or may not be a connection between the fact that the founding gift was given by (or on behalf of) someone named Thomas Critchlow, and the journal ("committed to an interdisciplinary approach to policy history since 1989) it puts out is run by historian Don Critchlow -- who is also Director of the Institute. As one editorial board member put it when I was praising the conference, "Don basically runs things. I mean, it's a democratic organization, but he tells us what to do."

Well, if so, he's doing a good job. And although I have heard that Critchlow is a conservative scholar, the stimulating ideological diversity of the conference makes me wonder: what kind of mileage do we actually get from labeling ourselves or others? Is it just a symptom of our tendency, as academics, to distinguish ourselves from the herd or, more unfortunately, excuse what we are afraid others will perceive as our shortcomings? Interesting scholars are interesting scholars, and it dumbs everything down to put people in boxes - or worse, choose a box and proclaim loudly that it's the best box there is.

Speaking of diversity, I did want to run the question of gender up the flagpole for a second. Women -- and to some extent scholars of color -- were well-represented at the conference, and that' a heartening thing to see for a middle-aged scholar who has experienced the dismay that by gender alone she was often disqualified from being perceived as a political historian. It is also gratifying to see, as Lassiter observes, that the methods of cultural history are now an acknowledged tool for doing political history, because that simply wasn't true when some of us began that project several decades ago. It is also true that panels with women and scholars of color were well-populated. That said -- the panels that were actually about gender were placed at times where it was likely that they would have small audiences: in my case, this was at 8:30 Saturday morning. The Petigny panel was in the first slot Thursday when many people had not yet arrived, and the panel on ERA was Sunday morning. For the last, obviously it is going on as I speak, and I have no idea how many are there. This is particularly odd, since a significant amount of Critchlow's work has been on the political history of gender, including a very well received book on Phyllis Schlafly and another on abortion.

One thing that has occurred to me is that political historians are delighted to hear from women -- hearing about women, gender or sexuality and imagining them as vital political topics is still a hurdle to be crossed, as is hearing about those topics from women since the Petigny panel on Thursday was quite well-attended.

So that's something to think about when planning for the 2012 conference begins: my guess is that this is a phenomenon I noticed because of the size of the conference, but for the same reason, it could be easily addressed.

Oh, The Joy Of Political History! Day 2 at Policy History Conference

Why do we go to conferences? Most of us end up asking this question, perhaps as we are finishing up a paper or a comment later than we wanted to, or packing hastily the night before a flight that is too early. I was certainly asking myself why I ever leave home for any reason as I contemplated the fact that, for the second morning in a row, I had no hot water at the Holiday Inn. Fortunately it is summer, and becoming chilled first thing has no lasting effects; my spirits were raised even further by unexpectedly locating a branch of Au Bon Pain a block and a half away where I could have a nicer breakfast than I had had yesterday. ("Do you know that the graduate students at Harvard refer to your chain as A Big Pain?" I overheard a senior scholar who was trying to arrange a table for twenty ask the manager conversationally. "No, I didn't!" the cheerful Midwesterner replied, as if my colleague had just made his day.)

Here's a link on why we go to conferences by Karen Tani at Legal History Blog entitled "Networking" (say what you mean why don't you, Karen?) Readers should note that while these hints are particularly helpful to graduate students, they are good to work into your repertoire at all stages of life, particularly if, as many of us might agree, you don't work at an R-I and people don't automatically brighten, regardless of who you are, as they do when they see "Princeton" on a person's name tag. More importantly, we go to conferences to exchange ideas, and unless you are into stealing other people's ideas it is good to be able to attach a name to them in your citations when they make a difference to your thinking. There is nothing more aggravating than hearing someone in the audience mention her interesting research during the Q & A, and then have to dodge others as you dash over before s/he leaves the room because s/he didn't identify herself. As Tani points out in this post, one of the points of coming to a conference is to get feedback on your work, but another is to make connections that might lead to more formal scholarly collaboration as well.

Some combination of an excellent program committee, my good luck, and the nature of the conference has made this event, now in its second day, particularly fruitful. While I haven't seen Karen networking, I did see her give a superb paper this morning on a panel called "Ironies of Legal Liberalism: Political Surprises in the Histories of Welfare, Civil Rights and Feminism." Karen is a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and is finishing a history Ph.D. at Penn on the long history of welfare rights. She was followed by Sophie Zee, of Penn Law School ("Rights on the Right: The New Deal Origins of Conservative Rights Constitutionalism, 1950-1980;" Deborah Dinner, of Harvard Law School, on "The Costs of Life: Feminism, Choice and the Debate Over Pregnancy;" and Hiroshi Okayama of Keio University. I didn't get the title of Okayama's paper, but he is proposing an interesting correction to Steven Skowronek's influential argument that the state of courts and parties gives way to a Progressive vision of state centralization. Instead, he argues, judicialism works its way into the state informally, as Progressive administrators imagine that the commission system might take the place of courts as the primary arbiter for rights. The entire panel, as Eileen Boris commented from the audience (following an excellent comment by Gretchen Ritter, a professor of government at UT-Austin), should cause us to think about whether historians' fascination with the complexity of post-Goldwater conservatism has made us a little lazy about thinking about divides in liberalism. General consensus seemed to be that this was right on. In addition to running the panel in an uber competent way, Matt Lassiter of Michigan suggested that a law degree and a history degree, which Dinner, Zee and Tani are all wrapping up, seems to be just the ticket.

This conference is particularly marked, from my point of view, by the quality of the scholarship presented and the quality of the discussions. That many of the presenters I have heard are also quite young scholars is a great credit to the conference organizers for having the courage to reach out to doctoral students, and it is an argument for why we need to be fighting for tenure-track positions to place these talented people. One of these rising stars is obviously Marsha Barrett, of Rutgers University, who appeared earlier in the 8:30 time slot on a panel called "Examining Alternatives: Reconsidering the Republican Right." This session also featured fine papers by Zenith's own Leah Wright, Timothy Thurber of Virginia Commonwealth University, and a comment from Paula Baker. Barrett is working with David Greenberg at Rutgers, and presented an outstanding piece on the implications of Nelson Rockefeller's intervention in the 1960 Republican Party platform. Political history wonks would, of course, find this interesting, but Barrett's presentation was so compelling that it suggests she will get a lot of attention.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

Dateline Columbus: Policy History Fun, Day 1

The Policy History Conference is in the Columbus Hyatt, which is also currently housing a bunch of men's college rugby teams engaged in tournament play. For those of you who are at the conference but were unable to get a room at the Hyatt, this proliferation of apple-cheeked lads may explain the shortage of accommodations at a time of year when Columbus seems to be otherwise deserted. Because the rugby tournament headquarters are near the PHC book exhibit, this means that there are occasional moments when the public areas are full of (mostly male) academics in suits giving way to a flying wedge of sweaty, strapping and polite young men who have tiny shorts and legs of steel.

My first panel this afternoon was, as I promised, "Feminism: The Changing Status Of Women In The Age Of Eisenhower," the Book Forum on Alan Petigny's The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965 (Cambridge, 2008). Susan Hartmann of OSU was the chair and discussant; additional comments were offered by Beth Bailey (Temple) and Jennifer Burns (UVA), both of whom also have new books out. The Permissive Society argues that the 1950s are a time of transformation, rather than a time of complacency. Petigny proposes a re-periodization of the sexual revolution, re-centering the forces of change attributed to the 1960s around the earlier social and sexual upheavals of World War II and its aftermath. While the discussion focused on only two chapters that discuss feminism and sex, in his introduction, Petigny noted that religion and psychology are two critical fields where attitudes towards women and sexuality became dramatically more liberal in the 1950s, laying the groundwork for all of the transformations that feminism claims to have achieved in the 1960s. These intellectual corrections, he noted (mansplainin' alert!), are something feminist historians are resisting strongly, despite the evidence he has mustered.

Petigny (who was just officially promoted to tenure at the University of Florida two days ago) then sketched out what we might call the Mad Men, or "Don Draper" theory of history: that we can best understand the 1950s not as a time of discrimination and oppression, but one in which "norms" and "values" were in tension, particularly in the realm of sexual freedom and women's status in society. These two categories got a little tangled from time to time, and it wasn't clear to me whether Petigny himself believes that female sexual freedom = female power, or whether that was a misunderstanding. Norms, as he defines them, are the dominant social rules; values are what people actually act on but won't cop to publicly. Cultural history has gotten it all wrong, Petigny proposes, and his correction to that draws on the "hard" data of polling, surveys and the census. By the 1960s, this tension between norms and values had become unbearably stretched, he concludes, and norms had to adjust: but how people behaved, and how history and historical subjectivity had changed because of it, was a done deal. The sexual and gender revolution was essentially over by 1961.

Forget the Pill, Title IX, the decades-long campaign to end gender segregation, and equal pay for equal work. Forget Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the ACLU's gender equality project: none of that mattered. Forget that women's history is not only cultural history, but has embraced the practice of political history for decades. As I write this, what I suspect is that this book is yet another argument against affirmative action. Its rejection of structural discrimination as the cause of gender inequality in the twentieth century positions The Permissive Society as an explicit argument against the historical importance of political feminism (as Burns pointed out in her comments.) Because my skepticism about the book's argument and methodology is running very high only on the basis of what its author said about it (and because he engaged critical questions by simply reiterating the arguments he had already made) I'm going to stop right here. But let me say, as far as I could tell, my reservations about The Permissive Society were shared by others on the panel. Or, at least they didn't contradict me when I voiced those reservations in the session. Since I am so familiar with their work, Bailey and Hartmann are people I already admired, so I would say that the most unexpected pleasure of the afternoon was Burns, an assistant professor whose book on Ayn Rand, Goddess of the Market is being reviewed everywhere. She has a very keen mind, and my guess is that there will be a lot of competition over her in the coming years.

The remaining work of the day was "State Abortion Politics And Policy," which was interesting and followed by a great discussion; and a plenary session on "The Media and Politics," in which the topic was the crisis in journalism and the threat to democracy it contains. While this kind of conference might not be everyone's cup of tea, I am quite enjoying it, in part because the participants speak more spontaneously and forcefully than they do at your average conference. While there is a mix of reading prepared material and speaking from notes, it is the right mix; furthermore, in the Petigny panel, there was an undercurrent of strong disagreement that didn't seem to cause people anxiety or cause them to censor themselves in any unpleasant way. The plenary, which featured two academics and a senior editor at the Columbus Dispatch (who really hates the internet, and had a lot to say about the ways it has cheapened journalism and public culture) was an outstanding example of how academic historians can bring their expertise to a contemporary problem.

Tomorrow? I'm thinking "Examining The Alternatives: Reconsidering The Rise Of The Republican Right;" "Disaster Politics In Historical Perspective;" "The Republican Party In The Post-War South;" "Governing Out Of Sight: An Enduring Pattern of American Political Development;" and maybe, if I'm still standing, "American Economic Crises in Historical Perspective."

Goring, Goring, Gone: OK, this has nothing to do with policy history, but doesn't the end of Al and Tipper Gore's 40-year marriage deserve a moment of silence from historians? That they announced it over e-mail deserves another moment of silence, since of all the ways to let people know you are splitting up this strikes me as both very efficient and mildly appalling. As usual, Michael Wolff at Newser has a few oddball insights, not the least of which is that Gore has always struck him as "emotionally fragile." Another is that "nobody's marriage survives middle age (even those that appear to survive, probably haven't.)" Are there heterosexuals who find this as peculiar a thought as I do? The notion that marriages just don't last is either cynical or liberating, I can't decide which. Perhaps the tougher truth is that relationships often do not survive moments of change or transition, like retirement, where two people who have been intimate for years discover they want to count down the decades to the grave in very different ways.

That the Gores are in their early sixties and that Wolff is describing them as middle-aged is heartening for those of us in our early fifties.

My guess? They actually do love each other. However, Al has a whole second career in which he gets to be as wonky as he wants to be, and chunk up besides: it is a true fact that if he were having an affair he would have gotten a personal trainer and lost weight, ok? Tipper wants to stay home and have a private life and was kind of hoping that after all these years of being on the road that he did too. If this is true, then I feel bad for both of them. Tipper: I forgive you for the censorship stickers on the CDs. Al: I forgive you for Love Story.

It's a Twistah, It's A Twistah! More Notes From The Heartland

So far I have been in Ohio for a day and a half, and I'm impressed. The little college town that was my first stop was a time-travel experience. People leave their doors open when they are away from the house for an errand or a stroll around the neighborhood. Children walk home from the school bus. Slightly older children ride their bikes around town, walk to the main shopping area, go from house to house, finding their friends and hanging out in a generally unsupervised and benign way.

People seemed happy and relaxed.

Between Cleveland and Little College Town is farmland; when I left LCT today to drive to Columbus (about a hundred miles due south), I passed more gorgeous farms, many of which are run by Amish people. The road rolled gently up and down hills, and was lined on both sides with nicely painted white fencing and the occasional family dairy operation. I drove by several horse and buggy outfits: in one, a woman in a long cotton dress and a bonnet was selling fresh strawberries. Well-kept barns, fields full of beef cattle (some of which were newly born), horses, pigs and the occasional llama or goat were nicely laid out around well-painted nineteenth century wood, and sometimes brick, houses trimmed with gingerbread. Periodically I would pass through a little town: one clapboard municipal building had a sign identifying it as the Town Hall and Garage. Signs advertised an Elks golf outing, or a Saturday pancake breakfast benefiting the volunteer fire company.

It's all very different from Shoreline, I must say. Leave your front door open there to go meet your kid at the bus stop and all your furniture will be gone when you return. But one thing we don't worry about much in Shoreline is tornadoes -- although there have been a few in recent memory: in 1989 three twisters converged on the Cathedral Pines in Bantam and turned them into mulch. So tonight as I was driving south through central Ohio, imagine my dismay when the country music station was interrupted by a terrible screech, followed by a tornado warning.

What to do, what to do?

I've been in a similar situation before, where I was a stranger in an unfamiliar weather zone and had no idea whether to take a disaster warning seriously. Once when we were in Kauai a tsunami alert interrupted our TV show: I spent the next six hours sitting out on the lanai waiting for the sea to draw back to Indonesia and then come rushing back to crash down on our heads. Didn't happen then either. But the truth is, although I have always wanted to see a live tornado, as the vicious thunderstorms began to sweep across the highway at alarming speeds, the car was battered by sheets of water and lightning crashed down around us, I was conflicted. My deep concern about whether I should just pull off the highway (something I would have done in the Nutmeg State) was in conflict with my concern that I would just be a sitting duck when a twister tore straight up the highway at me. I admit, I was also a little miffed that the iPhone has no video function, since a video of a twister ripping up the highway towards me would have been a cooler conference souvenir than the tote bag we usually get. The traffic crawled along and I scanned the sky from side to side, as the National Weather Service periodically urged me to take cover and avoid flying debris.

But where would I take cover? Should I stay in my car? Abandon the car and dive in a ditch? (This is the correct answer, as I later discovered.)

Fortunately I never had to figure that out. Although I did see what I learned are called "cloud drops" -- dark cloud formations that appear to be dipping to earth and sometimes turn into tornadoes, there were no actual tornadoes. Lightning hit a house in Pataskala, and power is out all over central Ohio, but I did not have to pull over to the shoulder, abandon the car, rush over to kick the nearest storm cellar and scream "Auntie Em! Auntie Em!" This is the only thing I know how to do in the event of a tornado, and I wondered whether the good people who live in Ohio all the time have better ideas. This is FEMA's idea of what you should do.

Anyway, despite the fact that I did not see a live tornado (at a safe distance), I have had more fun in my first 36 hours in Ohio than should be allowed. Tomorrow: Day One of the 2010 Policy History Conference. My picks for Thursday? Probably the Book Forum on Alan Petigny's The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965 (Cambridge, 2008); and either the Book Forum on Julian Zelizer's Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From World War II To The War on Terror (Basic Books, 2009) or "State Abortion Politics And Policy."

See you there. And watch out for flying debris.

When The Radical Hits The Road: Dispatches From The Midwest

Big Regional Airport is ever so mildly fogged in. But it is very, very full of post-Memorial Day travelers as I embark on a journey to the Buckeye State for the annual conference of the Policy History Association, where I am to appear on a panel organized in honor of the fabulous Jane DeHart. Yesterday I was cursing myself for having booked a seven a.m. flight since Defending Our Freedoms mandates a 4:30 wake-up time. Never mind the 4 A.M. "courtesy call" from Orbitz telling me that my flight has been delayed twenty-two minutes.

Thank you for that courtesy. I always forget that Orbitz is going to do me the favor of warning me about things that I can't act on in any way, something that this has particularly bad consequences for early flights. As anyone who uses online travel services know, a delay short of having one's flight cancelled completely is followed by a cheerful reminder that the check-in time is still the same. In other words, your plans have not changed, except that you will have an extra half hour to lie awake and obsess about the possibility of missing your Detroit connection. Orbitz also calls three hours ahead of time to tell you that you have nothing to worry about and your flight is on time. These little courtesies shave off just enough sleep that I have to endure the rest of the day feeling slightly stupid and sedated (in fact, I am sedated, since ensuring that I go to sleep promptly the night before requires a Mother's Little Helper.) There isn't enough coffee in the world to replace that lost half hour of sleep when you are in your fifties: in fact, coffee produces stupid + buzzed, an un-pretty combination that causes involuntary teeth-grinding, and Mindless Blogging Syndrome (MBS).

Other people waiting at Gate A11 are clearly affected as I am by this phenomenon of corporate courtesy: we are a passive and slightly out-of-it group this morning, nodding happily any time a TSA or airline official asks something of us. Strip to your underwear? Sure! At Big Regional they have taken to announcing things left behind at the security checkpoint, an interesting set of items that cause the historian's befuddled mind to imagine the various stories that will result from these losses: a laptop computer, a green hat, a Zip-Lock bag of toiletries and -- my favorite -- a key to a BMW! These things are announced over and over, the owners summoned back to the checkpoint to reclaim their lost items. The idea of arriving home at Big Regional, or worse, at a destination elsewhere in the United States where there will be no hope of knowing where the car key was dropped, and being unable to actually get home, fills me with sympathy for the unlucky (but wealthy) traveler.

In any case, I am likely to get out before the thunderstorms hit (which is why, of course, I book the first flight of the day in the summer months despite the courtesies showered on me by Orbitz.) After an overnight stay and a little work with my collaborator in a lovely college town near Cleveland, I will begin blogging the Policy History Association meeting from Columbus, OH on Thursday.

Stay tuned.