College Teaching 101: Managing The Lecture Class

In February 2010, I participated in a Roundtable discussion about teaching lecture classes at Zenith. The following essay about teaching is developed from the notes I prepared for that occasion.

Why is it important to learn how to teach lecture classes well?

First of all, for many of us, lecturing will make up the lion’s share of our course load – whether you measure that in students taught (a SLAC) or courses taught (a research or state university.) Novice teachers live with the terror of a little-acknowledged fact: the lecture room is where your weaknesses, or your inexperience, are most easily revealed; it is where your expertise will be challenged most publicly, often by questions that come out of left field, questions that may be designed to undermine you -- or not. Disturbing things happen in the lecture room because students (having not yet gone to graduate school to be schooled in academic etiquette) are cheerfully unselfconscious about interrupting your meticulous outline with a question, a bag of chips or a bathroom break; challenging your authority to demonstrate their own mastery of your field; or jiggling into the room in a tube top that is barely holding in an impressive upper shelf. You could easily be lecturing on the migration of black workers to industrial centers during World War II, and a student – who took the modern United States history survey because of a passion for HBO’s endless Band of Brothers series, will raise a hand to ask acerbically: “Was this strike before or after the Battle of the Bulge?"

Novice teachers will reckon with other issues they never dealt with as a teaching assistant, or when running an advanced seminar carefully culled from a dissertation specialty. Most of these problems aren't intellectual, they are social. In fact, the lecture room can sometimes begin to seem like a sixteenth century theater, where sex workers recruited clients in the Grand Circle and urchins flung oranges to purchasers who dropped a shilling from the balcony. Until you get a grip on how to manage your classroom, students will be furtively – or not so furtively – checking their email and Facebooks, texting, chatting with their neighbors, writing funny things on their notebooks and sliding it to a neighbor, dozing, sucking down gallons of water or (inevitably) bumping across a row of people to get to the exit because “I have to go to the bathroom, Professor.”



Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But think of it this way: the lecture class is not just worth learning to teach well because you will be judged on it when you come up for tenure, or because succumbing to perpetual humiliation and stress is not an option. The lecture class is worth learning to teach well because this is where you will build your reputation as a teacher. It is where you will recruit students into your upper level seminars, into your major and perhaps even into honors work a few years hence. It is subsequent to being exposed to your intellect and charm as one of 50 to 100 people that students will muse, during pre-registration, “Maybe I’ll take Radical’s seminar on the Cold War. I took the survey and it was pretty good.” As your students fan out onto the campus, they will tell their peers, the frosh who they guide as a Resident Advisor, and their teammates that you are worth learning from. In other words, if you have a reputation as a good teacher, you will get good students.

The corollary to this is: if you have a reputation as an indifferent teacher, you will get indifferent students. Unfairly, colleagues who are working desperately hard to teach well sometimes end up as the professor of last resort for students who, for whatever reason, were disengaged and uninvested before they met you. They are the ones who are fulfilling requirements; the ones who registered too late to get into anything else; the ones who majored in X because it has a reputation as a gut major. They are the ones who come in late, doze in the back row, and don’t even try to hide it that they are playing with their smart phones. Such people not only impede your chances of being successful, they are much harder to teach, because their indifference to learning has evolved into a more general commitment to indifference.

So what do you do, dear? It's easy, really. You need to persuade students to cooperate with you in the business of learning. This is something that is often neglected in discussions about teaching: what practical steps can you take to work with your students to create a classroom atmosphere that is conducive to learning?

There are three basic principles: establish the rules; know your audience; and make personal contact.

Establish the Rules. Every social space has its own etiquette, and similar social spaces do not always have the same etiquette. While there are some things that students know they shouldn’t be doing in class (surfing the web, indulging in side conversations, passing notes) there are other things that vary from classroom to classroom (eating and drinking, leaving the room for reasons of hygiene, coming late or leaving early, cutting class entirely.) Instead of establishing a set of rules and becoming an enforcer (something that is easier to get away with when you are older and your reputation as a cantankerous old fart is well established), consider setting aside a portion of the first class to consult your students about what they think is appropriate classroom behavior.

Questions you might ask them are: How many classes should a student be allowed to cut before the final grade is affected? What is our policy on late papers? Do we allow re-writes – and if so, how much can the grade be raised? What is our policy on coming late to class? Rescheduling exams? Is it OK to leave the room in the middle of class? Do we need a reminder to turn off cell phones? You would be surprised how thoughtful students can be about what kind of classroom they would like to learn in. Often the rules they suggest are far more rigorous than yours might be, and need to be moderated. Once the room has agreed on some basic principles, emphasize that the rules are theirs and that they need to be responsible for them. If and when a student’s participation becomes a problem, it is easier, and more effective, to point out that the rules are not arbitrary: they were established and agreed to by the group.

Know Your Audience. Ask students to evaluate the class informally at several points in the semester. While the end of term evaluation that the university asks for can be helpful to some extent, its one-size-fits all quality is usually better suited to comparing faculty with each other than it is to learning detailed information about the class you actually taught. Ask students to fill out an end of semester evaluation devised by you, in which you ask them specific questions. Devise a midterm evaluation so that you can correct for things that aren’t working well before it is too late. All evaluations should be anonymous to encourage frankness, but should also ask students to comment on their own efforts to date, and how you can better support them. This encourages students to think about their responsibilities as well as yours -- something a university form, which students know will be used for a tenure evaluation, does not emphasize. Hence, students will often use that form to "grade" you in retaliation for the grade they expect to receive, rather than to reflect honestly on what they committed to the course.

I would also advocate setting aside a portion of the first or second class to pass around a short questionnaire in which you ask students a few things about themselves and what they want from the class. Ask them about their major, where they are from, and what their other interests are. Ask them what interested them in the class in the first place. Ask them how many hours a week they work, and at what.

Knowing the intellectual profile of the class can give you a good sense of where you need to pitch the work. It also allows you to do something that for many students is utterly novel: call on them as if they were knowledgeable people who had significant lives outside your class. For example,

“Stacy, you are a physics major. Can you explain to the class why Einstein’s theorem might have been so influential outside of science?”

“JJ, you are in ROTC – what ideas about leadership might have characterized the veterans of World War II as they went into the civilian workforce?”

For those of you who think this is just sucking up to students to get good teaching evaluations, think again: students who feel invested in will invest in you; students who are treated with respect are more likely to respond respectfully; students who are permitted to speak as experts will gain confidence in themselves and learn better; and students who feel like you notice them may make a special effort to get you to notice them again by being their best selves.

And this leads me to my final point:

Make Personal Contact. The hardest part of this is probably the most important: learning their names. While students will understand why this is difficult for you, it hurts their feelings when you don’t, because of course they remember your name. A particularly unpleasant version of name amnesia is when – and it happens all the time – there are, say, two black men in the class, or two Asian-American women, and the white teacher repeatedly switches up their names. (If you do this, you need to apologize privately: I can't tell you how much students are hurt by it.)

Before calling the roll, ask students to correct you if you mispronounce their names, or to say if they wish to be called by another name. Note that all students may wish to tell you, publicly or privately, what pronoun they wish to have used to describe their lived, as opposed to their apparent, gender.

Create teaching situations that help you attach bodies to identities more or less invisibly. Schedule small group work where you float around the room and ask members of each group to introduce themselves. Call the roll frequently in the first few weeks. Use a seating chart for the first two weeks, annotate it as a cheat sheet and call on people. Print out the version of the class list with pictures and keep it on your podium. Insist on meeting each student personally in the first two weeks, even if this means scheduling extra office hours. Give each student hir own appointment: this is not only courteous, so that no student is kept waiting for 45 minutes for a 5 minute session with you (their time actually is as valuable as yours), but it is sneaky. As a student walks in the room you chirp, “Hi Terry!” Actually using Terry's name is the first step to remembering it, in my experience.

Another way of making personal contact is to walk your classroom and make eye contact. Zenith’s (Not Really) New President actually does this in faculty meetings, and I have no idea whether it is deliberate or not, but it was interesting to experience the effect of something I have done for years: when students have to follow you with their eyes, they are more likely to listen actively. More important, your physical proximity to students – say, in the back row – makes it more likely that they will have to connect to your voice (and your mind) in a more intimate way even though they have chosen distance.

Be aware that students are in the back row for all kinds of reasons, one of which can be shyness. If your lecture class includes time for class discussion, you will notice that perhaps a third (or fewer) of your students actually have the confidence to speak in front of a large group. Remember that feeling of your throat closing involuntarily during your first lecture, or the first time you said something in a department meeting? Well most of the students in your class feel exactly like that: that they will open their mouths and nothing but choking sounds will come out. Announce in the first couple classes that you would like to help students speak in class, and meet them in office hours to devise strategies for them (my favorite is the canned question: write it down in your notebook, read it out, I will praise you lavishly and you are done.) Create a class blog that counts as participation if they post entries. In small group work, appoint the non-talkers as group reporters, who will present the group findings at the end of class. Ask non-talkers to read aloud an important passage of an assigned text so they can hear their own voice in the room.

Finally, do you have a troublemaker? The one who is always questioning your intellectual authority? The one who believes ze could probably teach the course hirself? The one who marches in ten minutes late, and takes another five minutes to get settled? The one who is always asking some attention-getting question that has nothing to do with what you are talking about, and is totally breaking your rhythm? The one, who you think, on bad days, is a plant from Campus Watch? Surprise hir. (Metaphorically) embrace hir. Ask hir to lunch. Find out what is going on in as subtle a way as possible, and then find some opportunity to give a compliment (even if you have to work really hard to think of one) and be explicit about what has to happen next. For example: “You are obviously very engaged with the material, and I appreciate that. But you could choose to derail this class with [named behavior], or you could make a huge contribution to its success. Which are you going to choose?”

In other words, invest in this student. Believe me, this is going to have a much better outcome than complaining to your friends about the kid over drinks, dreading it every time that hand goes up, or plotting your response to the horrible teaching evaluation you will get from hir. It’s an alternative to being defensive -- it's what we call teaching. Because the point is, even in a lecture class, each student is an individual, and wants to be treated like one. That’s when they learn best.

And when they learn, your class will be a success.

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

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

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

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

For more hints, go to The Faculty Lounge.

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

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

Go here for details and the full call.

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

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

Photo Credit.

London Calling: A Few Thoughts On The Mother Country

What -- the Radical is tracing her heritage to England? Well yes, sort of. To make a long story short, the Paternal Unit's family came to the colonies, from England, in the seventeenth century. The Mother of the Radical (MOTheR) traces her line of descent from somewhere in the Germanic middle of Europe and from Selkirks, who were herded onto ships two loaves short of starvation and sent to make a living in Canada circa 1811. The latter group, although ruined by colonialism were then, in a twisted historical accident, saved by it. As a result, my family came to identify as English in Canada. True, until Canada began to recognize that there were not only white people in the world, one had limited choices: English or French, Protestant or Catholic. Nevertheless, I have met other Scots-descended Canadian folk who identify ethnically as Scottish and do a lot of Scots nationalist things like celebrate Bobby Burns day.

Not our bunch. And we have the complete recordings of Winston Churchill's WWII radio speeches to prove it.

That said, there's nothing that makes me feel more American than coming to Europe, and it doesn't change anything that this is an Anglophone country. Partly that's because, even though technically we all speak English, I often don't understand what people are saying, or I miss crucial words. "'Oo wah' sa' ri' wi'-'at?" a waiter said to me in a Chinese restaurant the other day. I had already replied "Huh?" in a stupid tone of voice when I realized, too late, that he was asking me if I wanted rice with my chicken with black bean sauce. (Note: no Asian or South Asian restaurant I have visited to date gives you rice for free, and restaurants try to sell you water unless you insist on drinking it out of the tap.)

Strangeness and ethnic identification I am not feeling aside, I love everything about it here, and cruise the estate agents windows in Bloomsbury near my hotel looking for the perfect flat to buy or rent. Following my life pattern, my guess is I would land in the East End, site of The Women's Library, where I was doing research on the UK's Campaign Against Pornography. It's an odd part of town, with warren-like streets lined in squat, brick dwellings that suddenly give way to huge, ugly concrete and steel office buildings, many belonging to London Metropolitan University; or to Council flats, some of which seem nice and others of which look like they are made of cardboard left out in the rain. I suspect this odd layout has something to do with World War II and the German Blitz, which targeted the neighborhoods of London's working poor and the factories they worked in. Some of the old city remains, including Toynbee Hall, and the rest counted for an early version of Urban Renewal.

People say London is expensive, and that is true about real estate: it's at least as expensive as New York, if not more so. But other things are cheaper. Fruit, for example ($1.50 for six apples; 2.50 for two pints of raspberries, on special); and theater tickets (less than $50 for a nearly front row ticket to see Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in Covent Garden with James Earl Jones and Phylicia Rashad -- tonight!). But people also seem to have more fun here. For example, many of the station stops on the Underground (where trains come about every minute, Mr. Bloomberg) have funny names like Barking. "This train is for Bah-King" the lady intones every time the door closes. Today I was riding home from the LSE on the Piccadilly line, and a teenage boy with blown-forward teddy boy hair was amusing several girls around him by imitating the train lady's pronunciation of Cockfosters, "Cock! - fahsters," he would chirp, and they would all giggle wildly. Meanwhile, two girls also in this group (as I discovered when they all exited the train together) were at the other end of the car, lightly kissing and feeling each other up while everyone but me read the Guardian.

One of the teens caught me looking and said nicely, "Just a little lesbian fun."

"Indeed it is," I replied. Personally, I have rarely had more fun on a train.

But perhaps the nicest thing about England, given how routinely nasty the United States has become in the past decade, is that everyone is polite, and not just the many different people who are English: practically everyone who works here in a service position is Portuguese, Spanish or, more likely, Eastern European, and they are all lovely too, as are all of the students and tourists from all over Europe, Asia, and Africa that I've been running into at the universities. The night before last l went to dinner with an old friend, who told the waiter (as he delivered our entree) that he had failed to bring our starters. The waiter looked -- well, all I can say is, crushed, positively crestfallen at this terrible error -- which he had not made, as my friend had actually forgotten to order them in the first place. On the verge of tears, our waiter began to gather up our perfect aged Scottish beef, when my friend realized that it was his error and apologized. All was well, and the terrible moment passed.

People fall into conversation with you at the drop of a hat, and tell you anything you want to know. And it makes you realize what a very small world we Americans live in back home, and how much we gear our world view entirely to the United States and all of its petty concerns.

Oh, and by the way? They have National Health Care here, and I haven't talked to a single person -- Tory or Labour -- who thinks it isn't a spanking good deal. Perhaps I should check out the estate agent's againon my way to the theater tonight.

It's Women's History Month: Do You Know Where The Women's History Blogs Are?

OK, everyone from the Library of Congress to Coca-Cola is "celebrating" women's history month. Whaddya bet we see a commercial next week where a computer-generated Bella Abzug shares a coke with a computer-generated Betty Friedan to yuck about old times at the 1977 Houston Women's Conference and that nutty lesbian plank that made Phyllis Schlafly and Jimmy Carter just plotz!?

Better yet, let's look at some history blogs that celebrate women's history every day of the year.

Let's start with History of American Women Blog, written by Maggie MacLean, who also writes Civil War Women Blog. The first has a keen sidebar with links to the Wives of the Signers, and the second, wives of the Civil War Generals. Because both lists are alphabetized by first names, we learn that an astonishing 11 wives of generals were named Mary (Emily comes in second, with 7.) Mary was also the most popular name in 1776, but was tied with variations on the name Ann(e).

Next, let's drift to Women of History, "a site providing biographies of some of the fascinating women who have graced the pages of history, in addition to articles pertaining to history, and medieval and modern women." Written by "Melisende," who claims to be Australian and female (I'm not saying she isn't, but who knows?), it's eclectic and fun, moving the reader back and forth between centuries in the blink of an eye. A quick scan of the site shows that Melisende doesn't just stick to stuff medieval, her stated field, but has quite an expansive view of the world. It is just as contemporary as it is historical, but if you can handle that, you'll learn a lot.

Finally, check out the LDS Women's History Blog. It's Mormon women's history from a Mormon point of view, and written by "Erin," a Mom who is determined to dig out the herstory hidden behind all those patriarchs. Drawing on sources not available to most of us who do not have access to arcane books of nineteenth century pioneer lore, Erin's recent post was about poor 13-year old Mary Goble, whose mother died on the way to Salt Lake in 1857. If that were not bad enough, she got frostbite, and Brigham Young had her toes amputated. The point of this story, however, is that the doctor wanted to take the feet too, but Young had prophesied that she would keep her feet. You'll have to read it to learn how it worked out!

Sunday Radical Roundup: Rockin' In The UK Edition

This week’s roundup is posted from the London, where your favorite Radical has done six bookshops in 24 hours. The last two were in the company of fellow blogger and Cliopatrician Rachel Leow, of A Historian's Craft, who also led me on a terrific quickie tour of Cambridge University. We stood on a bridge and watched punters on the Cam, and she gave me the inside dope on the punt racket, which has taken a vicious turn lately. On her advice, as we traipsed through the ancient enclosures, I did not step on the grass. This practice is forbidden to all but fellows of the colleges (I have a friend who was reprimanded for walking on the grass the day prior to taking up his fellowship.) You get a real feel for England’s highly advanced visual practices for staking out hierarchy as you walk the long way around these inviting emerald squares of weedless turf. I imagined, for example, a single member of the Cambridge faculty lunging across the green, robe flapping behind and fluffy white hair rising to meet the breeze, even as lesser mortals trudge the periphery to get to the same place -- but more slowly.

While many of the colleges are open to the public, the one I wanted to see – Trinity, built by Henry VIII with proceeds reaped from the dissolution of the monasteries -- is not. But this was no barrier to an escort who may have been emboldened by our delicious vegetarian lunch. “Walk briskly and look like you belong,” she advised. “Try not to stare at the cupola as if it is anything out of the ordinary.” We marched through the gates of Trinity College, strode authoritatively past two bowler-hatted porters stationed there to keep the riff-raff out, took a sharp left past the largest stone cupola I have ever pointedly not looked at, swept by a “Private” sign, and pushed through a centuries-old door into our object, the Wren Chapel.

Ahhhhhhh. It was just as beautiful as I had always imagined. The Wren Library was, unfortunately, closed. They are redoing the electrical systems, which is probably a good thing as it was completed in 1695.

Today wasn’t just a blogger meet-up, of course: we had work to do (aren’t bloggers always working? I’m writing this on a train, for crying out loud.) Watch out for issue 22.4 (winter 2010) of the Journal of Women’s History, where a roundtable featuring May Friedman, Jennifer Ho, Ann Little, and Marilee Lindemann will be introduced by your favorite Radical and commented on by Rachel Leow.

In other news:

Lesbian Garden Alert: The Radical News Service just received news of a great new blog, Grow and Resist. It was described to me as being “about gardening, raising a baby, recipes, canning, anti-toxic households, queer politics, keeping sane, you know, radical Pacific Northwest lesbian stuff.” Well, I was hooked, and you will be too: celebrate women’s history month by adding a few well-written, feminist non-academic blogs to your sidebar, and start with this one. There is a particularly awesome post about building a raised bed with cinderblocks, which is a particularly good idea, since we aren't allowed to use pressure treated wood anymore and everything else rots and falls apart.

And Speaking of Flowers, Did You Know… That when Lynn Hunt was doing the research for her first book, she kept all her index cards in a flowered suitcase that she lugged from pillar to post? This and other delightful writing hints can be found in the most recent essay in the AHA Perspectives monthly feature, “Crafting History.” In How Writing Leads to Thinking, Hunt reveals the sordid truth behind most successful books and articles: there is no one way to do it well. Writing feels like chaos most of the time, and that if you keep working on a book or an article you will finish it eventually.

You hear that? Sending your dissertation to its room will accomplish nothing! Nothing! And finally:

"Little Gels, You Are The Creme De La Creme:" Go here to read a call for "Queer Girls in Class: Lesbian Teachers and Students Tell Their Classroom Stories," to be published by Peter Lang. The anthology "will collect personal narratives by lesbian teachers and students who speak about sexual identity and its effects on the teaching and learning process. The mission of this anthology is to provide, through personal stories, an analysis of how sexuality (specifically, how being a queer woman) can influence classroom dynamics in the high school and university setting." Deadline for Submissions: July 1st, 2010.

We're Bewitched -- By Mary Beth Norton! Friday March 5, 8 PM on NBC

Just received at the Radical News Service: "On Friday, March 5, at 8 PM on the new NBC series 'Who Do You Think You Are', Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlan Alger Professor of History at Cornell University and author of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (Knopf, 2002) will tell Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex and the City fame about her Salem witch ancestor."

In addition to being a terrific scholar, an all around good person, and a stalwart of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Mary Beth is also herself descended from a Salem witch! I think she mentions this in the book, but I definitely remember her telling me this when we were out on one of our biannual antiquing treks in western Massachusetts.

The show was taped over a year ago, and will be taped once again in the Radical house, since by the time it is on, this historian will be on a Really Big Broom, flying to London for one of those devastating research trips we have to take every once in a while.

Be sad for me as you imagine the History Police poking me down the airplane chute with a sharp stick.

Smokin' Sunday Radical Roundup: Ciggies, Spys, Sports and Sex Scandals

I Would Do Anything For Love -- But I Won't Do That: Thanks to Ralph Luker at Cliopatria we at Tenured Radical have links to articles by Robert Proctor and Jon Weiner about historians who have testified on behalf of the tobacco industry between 1986-2005. They include Stephen Ambrose, Otis Graham, Paul Harvey, and Michael Schaller. Consultants for the industry who have not testified include Herbert Klein and Irwin Unger. Out of 57 scholars there are exactly two women -- which means what? That the tobacco industry doesn't employ women, or that women told them to take a hike, since smoking is also linked to breast cancer and women are a bit more militant on this issue?

"That's Doctor Moneypenny, James": This has got to be the coolest job I have ever seen posted -- did you even know that there was something called The International Spy Museum? Well there is, it's in Washington D.C., and they are looking for a Curator/Historian! According to the ad posted on H-Net, it is "the only public museum in the U.S. solely dedicated to the tradecraft, history, and contemporary role of espionage." I don't see a deadline, so get your application in now.

I wonder if you get extra points for sending your materials in code on a microdot carefully secured to an otherwise ordinary magazine? Hmmmm?

We'll Know What's In The Closet When We Stop Cleaning House: Faculty at SUNY-Binghamton, beset by a men's basketball scandal, are concerned that those who allowed it --nay, cultivated it -- are still in place. "Interviews with students, administrators and faculty members revealed just how corrosive the trade-offs were in Binghamton’s pursuit of athletic glory," the New York Times reports today. The "crisis of confidence" is most acute in the Department of Human Development, where 10 out of 16 players were enrolled as majors. Many of these players had come from other schools; the department accepted transfer of credit in"courses like Theories of Softball and Bowling I, and [players] were given preferential treatment to stay eligible." Such preferential treatment included running special sections of required courses, compressed into a short time frame, that would allow the players to concentrate on basketball and graduate with virtually no marketable skills. Meanwhile, ordinary requests from regular majors -- like having food available at the downtown location where their classes had been moved -- were denied.

Two questions that no one ever seems to ask in this situation: what was the point of having a high-profile basketball program at SUNY-Binghamton when the university is already well known, for its academics, as one of the finest universities in the system? And why do such scandals, minus the occasional recruiting violation that apparently caused Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma to stop speaking, so rarely occur women's programs? Despite the fact that we know that the money spent on marquee men's sports is rarely returned, even in alumni donations, administrators with dreams of sports glory repeatedly screw over faculty and students, and do so claiming that they are gilding the rose of education by trying to deliver a basketball championship. They also cynically use large numbers of athletes, the vast majority of whom will never be able to finance a life playing pro ball, and thus could really use a college degree and an actual major. It is just not true that big-time college sports make a college or university better! Sports are, and should be, a co-curricular activity: they are meant to keep students in good health, create community, inculcate self-discipline, teach competitive individuals to work as a team and produce leaders. What aspect of programs that cheat, and that elevate the interests of a few community members over the interests of the whole, teaches this to athletes or the student body at large?

But in cheerful sports news....

Silver Medal, Baby! Congratulations to my colleague, Zenith's own Head Coach of Women's Ice Hockey Jodi McKenna, who helped to lead the United States team to a silver medal as an assistant Olympic coach. Nice. Your women are lucky to have a Division III liberal arts education and such a fine example of athletic excellence.

Last But Not Least, German People Naked: Many apologies to those of you who hit the Tiny URL in a recent Tweet (which also posted to Facebook), and thanks to those friends who sent me urgent text messages alerting me that there was an issue with the link. In a mighty strange move, that click would have led you to a German amateur pornography site, where not so nice looking people were sprawled about in quite ugly ways. I really dislike it when pornography is forced on me or others against their will, and it causes my best feminist self to bridle. What is even odder is that most legit porn sites ask you to certify you are of majority age before clicking into them, thus making it a choice for all of us. Perhaps because Germans don't have the same laws we do, this one took you straight to the nasty bits. Anyway: microbloggers, check your Tinies before tweeting! I suspect this is either a glitch that the Tiny people need to work out, or a virus of some kind.

Sunday Wadical Woundup: Guns, Money and Conference News

"Hey, Amy" (Wait For It) "Where You Going/With That GunInYourHand?" For the most complete summary to date of the Amy Bishop Case, the University of Alabama-Huntsville prof who murdered and wounded her colleagues execution-style, go to today's New York Times. As we all know by now, Bishop's post-tenure denial rampage was not her first killing. However, today's story raises a pointed question. The 1986 "accidental" fratricide in Bishop's childhood home was immediately followed by Amy, then a college student, not calling 911 as one normally would in an accidental shooting, but demanding a vehicle from a car dealer, at gun point, claiming that she was being chased by an angry husband. Why did not someone, anyone, at least have her evaluated by a psychiatrist at some point after this and many other, less fatal, episodes of grandiosity? More than one person in Bishop's life was clearly not operating in the land of the real, since the final tragedy in Huntsville was preceded by numerous occasions when Bishop's behavior was violent, vicious and delusional. Added bonuses in the Times Sunday coverage are revelations about the anonymous tips after the Huntsville killings about the possibility that Amy had set a "herpes bomb" in the building; and the scary photo of Amy with hubby James Anderson, one of the people I would be pretty angry at if I had been widowed or orphaned by Bishop. Anderson is a corporate researcher who is also Bishop's intellectual collaborator -- if I were a prosecutor, or a civil litigator working for a bereft family, I would want to depose him about what he knew and when he knew it. Wouldn't you?

A final note: I know the Second Amendment lobby (several of whom are personal friends of mine) would say that if Amy's brother, or subsequently, the Huntsville biology department, had been packing, someone might have taken Amy out earlier. But I'm not sure I want to live in a world where you have to go to family dinners or department meetings dressed by Smith and Wesson. U haz gun control?

U Haz Gunz But No Research Moneyz? Ok, I'll stop. I don't know why Historiann and I think it is so funny to write in LOL cats language -- we've never discussed it -- but we do, and it sure dresses up a news item like this one. The American Historical Association has two grant deadlines coming up: the J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in American History, co-sponsored " by the AHA and the Library of Congress. It is awarded annually "to support significant scholarly research in the collections of the Library of Congress by scholars at an early stage in their careers in history. PH.D. degree or equivalent required." The Jameson, of which your favorite Radical is an alum (lesson? Classy grad school credentials not required) has a March 1 deadline. On March 15 space history weenies will want to have filed for the Fellowship In Aerospace History, "supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), annually funds one or more research projects for six months to one year. Proposals of advanced research in history related to all aspects of aerospace, from the earliest human interest in flight to the present, are eligible, including cultural and intellectual history, economic history, history of law and public policy, and history of science, engineering, and management." Up, up and away, as Astroboy used to say.

Here's a hint, Junior Historians Guild: small grants like this are not only good for pushing your work forward and signaling to your colleagues that you are serious about your research agenda, they establish what is called a "grant record," which then pushes you up the food chain for bigger, more prestigious grants.

Conference Deadlines Redux: Please note another change in the Berkshire Conference sidebar -- we at Tenured Radical are in receipt of an extended deadline of March 19 2010. Go here for the call. Having trouble getting the panel together? Ask one of the thematic sub-chairs for help, or join H-Women and troll for conference buddies in the listserve like so many other people are doing.

"I was Gonna Go To Barbados, But The Job Market Tanked": Got no plans for spring break? Why not toodle up to Harvard for the 10th annual Graduate Student Conference, "International Society and Its Discontents", March 12-13 2010? It looks like a superb conference, and even if Cambridge (like almost every other college town) has lost most of its independent bookstores, it's still one of the premier academic theme parks in the country. So drift on up, listen to some panels, meet your future colleagues, suck a little air and you will come home smarter. Guaranteed. And if it's like the graduate student conferences I remember, there will be a ton of couch surfing, so don't be shy -- tell the organizers you have no place to stay and I bet they will help you.

Don't Shoot! A Meditation on Civility

The sensationalism of the Amy Bishop tenure case, in which a University of Alabama biologist shot numerous colleagues in the head after her failed appeal, has us all unnerved and fascinated. Of course, the news reports that are piecing together a portrait of a sociopath, a ticking time bomb who happened to have become a university professor, have already helped us build distance between "us" and "her." The Bishop story, which is being reported over at University Diaries in press clippings and terse, incisive commentary (that makes you think Margaret Soltan really could produce the thriller or mystery we all long to write) is, however, countered by the more prosaic and recognizable case of Bill Reader, a journalism professor at Ohio University. Reader seemed to be on track for tenure and now -- isn't exactly. Why? There are allegations that, although he is not a sociopath, he may be a garden variety bastard (or not) who is being portrayed as a sociopath by colleagues who voted against his tenure.

Hence, the Reader case raises a set of more serious issues for all of us, in my view.

According to Inside Higher Ed, prior to his tenure case, Reader "had received nothing but glowing annual evaluations with no mention of untoward behavior in his file." But when the case was reported out of the Journalism School, with a positive but very split vote, three female faculty members who voted against the case filed harassment charges against him, citing threats allegedly made by Reader that were related to them by third parties. The rumour was that Reader "was 'out for revenge' against those who had opposed his bid for tenure." Subsequent to the filing of these charges, "recommendations by the journalism school's director, a college-level review committee and dean have all come out negatively."

It's always difficult to know what happened when reading public reports of these things. Apparently Reader was prone to nasty email exchanges, one of which, ignited over the failure of colleagues to sign a card for a departing colleague, was particularly unpleasant. I doubt that he was the only one who sent flaming e's, although he was in a position to know he could be harmed by such behavior and clearly failed to perceive it. But many people suffer failures of self-perception on email, as adrenaline and self-righteous wrath washes over their -- no, let's say our -- brains. Even those of us who don't have grievances filed against us have probably participated in terrible e-mail exchanges that we are embarrassed about in retrospect, whether we believe we were right or wrong at the time. Reader apparently isn't embarrassed about the greeting card incident, however, which tells you nothing about his suitability as a colleague, but a lot about what constitutes normal behavior at the Ohio State J-School. “I opted for vitriol," he states. "I have no regrets. Before my e-mail, there were few signatures; afterward, there were many.”

Really? Even now you are not ready to stand down about that stupid greeting card?

Inside Higher Ed sees this case as part of "a continuing national debate over the extent to which 'collegiality' ought to be considered in the awarding of tenure," and on the surface I suppose it is. But Reader's supporters, and presumably Reader himself (who was not informed or or able to respond to the harassment charges until several negative decisions on his case had already been made), say the tenure process has been tainted by these allegations. I tend to agree with this somewhat narrower interpretation. So does the Faculty Senate at Ohio, which has reversed the negative rulings, and sent the case forward to the next level. The attorneys standing outside their office sharpening their knives probably had nothing to do with it, although this is a situation where a little gentle advice from the AAUP can go a long way.

I don't know whether I would like Bill Reader or want to work with him, and it's difficult to tell from the few facts that can be gleaned from the IHE piece, of course. But take it from someone who has been bullied: what is wrong in that department goes beyond Bill Reader and points to a winner-take-all culture where there is more than one person with no commitment to civility. Although there are clearly people who believe they have been victimized, the search for authentic victims is likely to produce instead a vivid picture of professional relationships dominated by gossip, faction and spite, in which people who insist they are wedded to "procedure" manipulate it cruelly to get their way. It's not for nothing that novelists as different as Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, C.P. Snow and Ishmael Reed have spent anywhere from a semester to a career with us and consistently pointed out these very qualities.

Academia, one might say, is characterized by strong personalities out to win an argument, and sometimes the desire to win gets out of hand. The origins of the bad behavior at Ohio University, either Reader's abusive emails and threats over signatures on a greeting card, or individual faculty members trying to have more than one vote on a tenure case by launching an internal grievance process, might well be a departmental culture in which the need for authority and the disregard for appropriate behavior is pervasive at all ranks. I also find it useful to remember what every child psychologist knows: that people who bully have often themselves been bullied. I once saw an older historian who was famous for hir nastiness, public temper tantrums and contempt for colleagues, treated with such contempt and rudeness (in public and for no good reason whatsoever) by hir prestigious dissertation director of three decades ago that it literally took my breath away.

This observation didn't make me like this person any better, nor did it make me more willing to be subjected to verbal abuse by others. But it did create a little window of understanding that subsequently caused me to look around the world I live in differently; to understand the ways in which we replicate the behavior of others, often unconsciously; and to place my own actions under the lens that I used to evaluate other people's behavior towards me. The lesson, in my view? We need to model judicious and civil behavior at all costs, and speak to people honestly when they breach the bounds of civility, not wait until a high stakes moment to declare them unfit for our company. We all need to insist that our authority and reputations be taken seriously by others, but not demand it by damaging them, in turn, after the fact. It is quite possible to work productively with people one neither likes or respects, and it is possible to have one's judgement not be sustained by the judgement of the majority without going nuclear: people outside the academy do it all the time.

Valentine's Day Super Sunday Radical Roundup

Do As I Say Not As I Do Department: Yesterday, when I thought that a mysterious Web Presence was taking out my illustrations and leaving a ghastly grey hole in their place, I took a bunch of the affected pics down. This was precipitous. Further research on Websense (that I should have done at the time perhaps, but I was maxing out the archives hours) suggests that it is a network device that is location specific, not a bot at all, much less a tool of the capitalist patriarchy. Here I am sitting in a Starbucks on 93rd and Broadway (which I think is a tool of the capitalist patriarchy) and my blog hasn't been mangled by lost pictures and ominous messages at all. Still the mystery remains: why did Websense knock out a picture of that sexy Radical cowboy?

Feeling Helpless About Haiti? Have An Archives, Museum Or Public History Degree? Well, the last thing they need in Port-au-Prince are a bunch of historians coming down to help dig or rescue children (Baptists from Idaho are taking care of that, from what I hear.) But the Blue Shield is looking for archivists, restorers, curators, librarians, architects and other experts to volunteer to help assess the damage to Haiti's libraries, archives and cultural treasurers. You can volunteer on-line at the link in this post, and the Blue Shield will assess your credentials and see if you can be enrolled in this vital project.

Conference News: The Deadline for the AHA 2011 Annual Meeting in Boston is tomorrow. Unlike this year's event in San Diego, you won't have to bust through a line of angry queers with Ph.D.'s: in fact, they will be down the street getting married, since this is legal in Massachusetts. Also note a changed date in the sidebar for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians: we at Tenured Radical have been notified that the deadline for proposals has been extended to March 15. So date up your favorite chick historians now for the Best Little Conference in 2011! And feminist history menz? You haz cheesebuhgeh too. Don't be shy: apply.

Website Of The Week: Check out the Disability Social History Project. This rising field has a lot going for it, particularly in the ways that it opens up new ground in queer, critical race, and feminist history; not to mention political and cultural history more broadly. This interesting site is written by Stephen Dias, a long time disability activist who participated in the Section 504 demonstration in San Francisco in 1977, and is produced by Patricia Chadwick.

Can I Get A Witness? Are you starting out your career in religious studies? The Center For Young Scholars in American Religion is looking for you! To wit:

"Young Scholars in American Religion 2010-2012: Call for Applications. The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture announces a program for early career scholars in American Religion. Beginning in October 2010, a series of seminars devoted to the enhancement of teaching and research for younger scholars in American Religion will be offered in Indianapolis. The aims of all sessions of the program are to develop ideas and methods of instruction in a supportive workshop environment, stimulate scholarly research and writing, and create a community of scholars that will continue into the future."

Go to the website for details.

Department Of Things You Won't Learn About The Candidate In A Convention Interview: It appears that Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama prof who went postal when her tenure case was turned down, accidentally shot her brother as a college student and was subsequently a suspect in an attempted pipe-bomb murder at the Harvard Medical School in 1993. Now, I watch television and read police procedurals: suspicion in the pipe-bomb case may have followed from the fact that Bishop had already been implicated in a violent death. Nevertheless, as Margaret Soltan at University Diaries suggests, Bishop may have ended up in Alabama because Massachusetts was getting a little, um, warm.

And Finally.... In case you didn't already know that Duke History Dude Timothy Tyson is a rock star, the movie based on his book Blood Done Sign My Name goes into release this week. Here's a nice interview on NPR where this southern anti-racist progressive scholar discusses the personal roots of this civil rights story. I wonder what ever happened to the other book about justice in the Carolinas that was supposed to be a major motion picture?

For Valentine's Day: A Snapshot From The Men's Movement, Circa 1988

Just found this in the archives and I liked it so much I thought I would share it. In discussing how it is that some men became committed to feminism, John Stoltenberg told the 13th National Conference on Men and Masculinity, held at Seattle University on July 8, 1988:

“I’m thinking of men whose loyalty to a particular woman in their lives – a mother, a lover, a cherished friend – has brought them to an intimate, almost insider’s view of what life for women is like under male supremacy – and these men have made a personal vow to stand behind her and not abandon her, to wholeheartedly be her ally.”1

One can't help but think that Stoltenberg was thinking about his love for and commitment to his life partner, Andrea Dworkin, as well as making a more general observation about the other feminist men he had worked with over the years.

In other news, a bot or webtool of some kind, called "Websense," that is intended to find and eliminate stolen illustrations improperly posted to blogs, made off with the photograph of the town crier attached to last Sunday's Roundup. Fair enough. But it also took down my profile picture, taken by me and, I presumed, owned by me. Very strange. Perhaps I am wrong and I did steal this photograph of myself from someone else. I would be grateful to anyone who can explain this phenomenon, but until then, I will simply assume that it is the patriarchy doing its insidious work once again.

I have, however, replaced the stolen picture of myself which I apparently do not own with an informal shot of J. Edgar Hoover, taken in Miami Beach, which I am quite sure I do own (or at least in a limited way), since I paid Corbis-Bettman a fortune for it. So until I can find a new picture of myself, in the immortal words of Joan Crawford, "Don't fuck with me, fellas."

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1 See John Stoltenberg, “The Profeminist Men’s Movement: New Connections, New Directions,” a speech given at the 13th National Conference on Men and Masculinity, Seattle University, July 8, 1988; reprinted in Changing Men, #20, Winter/Spring 1989, 7-9.

The Sunday Radical Roundup: Libraries, Lefties, and Lonely Lovelorn Ladies

This Week In Library Fun: Amidst the excitement about the reopening of the St. Agnes Branch of the New York Public Library, other libraries in the system are slashing their hours on February 16 in response to budget cuts from City Hall. (Why does the mayor always take out the neighborhood libraries in a budget crisis when he could fire twenty or thirty cops and get the same $$? I ask you.) Changes affect nearly all branches except those on Staten Island and the privately endowed research libraries in Manhattan. Go here for new hours. At least for now, scholars and organized crime families will continue with the service they have, but there could also be no starker example of the distance that is growing between the actual public sphere and the privatized public sphere.

On The Left, On The Left: Tom Manoff, a former civil rights activist who has been the classical music critic for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered since 1985, has a terrific interview with feminist author Jane Lazarre up on his website. Lazarre, the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, is currently working on a book about her father Bill, who fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Not only is Lazarre (the author of Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons) her typically thoughtful self about writing, race and politics, but the interview also gives a few hints about what I predict (you heard it here first) will be a blockbuster book about the American left. Want to interview Lazarre yourself, or better yet, book her for a reading during Black History Month or Women's History Month? You can reach her through her agent, Wendy Weil.

While We're Still On The Left: Go here to sign the petition to the American Historical Association Council, asking them to use INMEX, a conference booking group that works with unions "to ensure its clients are booking their events in destinations that are free from labor disputes and helps steer professional associations away from meeting venues that are likely to be disrupted by a boycott, a picket line or a strike." I know this makes INMEX sound like a protection racket, but trust me! It's the right thing to do. If this works, all we need now is to make conferences more affordable -- I know more than one graduate student who bled green in San Diego without being offered a single flyback. And has anyone looked at the rates that are being charged for rooms at the OAH annual meeting?

That Ever-Elusive M.R.S. Degree Just Got Tougher: I am waiting for Historiann to fire with every muzzle-loading fowling piece at her disposal on this story by Alex Williams from today's New York Times. It's about the the woes suffered by female college students who can't find a boyfriend because -- there aren't enough boys on many campuses to go around! At the 60% female University of North Carolina, Saturday night "has grown tiresome: they slip on tight-fitting tops, hair sculpted, makeup just so, all for the benefit of one another, Ms. Andrew said, 'because there are no guys.'" And the ones that are available, it appears, are a little soiled, since they are either previously owned or are cheating on the girl friend they have. Tales of taking what you can get and having the man you did catch snapped up right under your eyes help Williams sing the heterosexual blues: "Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box." Worse, girls feel terrible pressure to -- what do they call it now? Give it up? -- in order to seal the deal.

I mean, please, Alex: this is a throwback to Cold War domesticity, where we pretended there were no gay and lesbian people on campus and that if a girl didn't leave college with a ring on her finger she was damaged goods. In the face of budget cuts, tuition increases, a market crash that took college savings with it, and a crisis in lending to college-bound students, could you have written a more shallow piece about higher education? Could you? And girls, if the details of what you are doing at college are not as (or more) important than what you are doing on Saturday night, and you really can't do without a man, swap that English or psych degree for a Physics major, why dontcha? Boys never make passes at girls who sit on their asses. Or do what both genders do at Zenith and other liberal arts colleges -- keep the English major and trade in your sexual preference for a couple of years. Or trade in your gender!

Finally, For Those Of You Not On The CLGBTH Listserve: How many times do I have to tell you to join? Sheesh. This week, we have a CFP for a conference in Vancouver, BC, “'We Demand': History/Sex/Activism In Canada," August 25-28, 2011. From the organizers:

On August 28, 1971 over two hundred lesbian and gay activists gathered on Parliament Hill to demand the federal government bring an end to laws and practices that criminalized, marginalized, and stigmatized lesbians and gays. Acting in solidarity with their central Canadian allies, Vancouver activists staged the same action on the steps of their city’s Court House. It was the first recorded national political action undertaken by gay liberationists and lesbian feminist activists in Canada.

”We Demand” marks the fortieth anniversary of the 1971 action. The conference seeks to showcase current work on all aspects of the history of sexuality in Canada, from pre-contact to present times.

Keynote speaker: Ann Cvetkovich, author of An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures.
Other confirmed speakers include Mary Louise Adams, Karen Dubinsky, Gary Kinsman, and Steven Maynard.

We are currently accepting proposals for panels, individual papers, roundtable discussions, poster sessions, and other means of communicating ideas and generating discussion. We welcome submissions from scholars, archivists, educators, public historians, and past and present political activists from all sexual fronts.

Panel and round table submissions should include a session title, a brief description of the panel or round table, abstracts for each paper of no more than 250 words, and a brief biography or one-page c.v./resume for each presenter and for the session chair. Individuals should submit a 250-word abstract plus a brief biography or one-page c.v./resume. Those submitting proposals for other types of presentations should contact the organizers for further instruction. The deadline for submission is 1 June 2010.

Please send queries and submissions to: wedemand2011ATgmailDOTcom.

A New Deal For Higher Education: Start With More Small Classes For Everyone

Because I have the advantage of a faculty fellowship at Zenith's Center for the Humanities this semester, I teach only on Thursday. All Thursday morning I prepare for class; all Thursday afternoon I teach it. It's very tidy, and also very satisfying. Because of my blogging ethic I can't tell you what happens during class, but I can tell you I like our meetings immensely. I can also tell you that I have fewer than ten students enrolled. To be honest, there are six.

But wait -- you will say: fewer than ten students? Have you become unpopular? Does your dean know? How is that a good use of the university's money?

Well, the truth is, normally my classes are overenrolled, so I consider this to be some kind of cosmic payback for years of overwork in the classroom and elsewhere. For a variety of reasons, plenty of my colleagues teach fewer than ten students per class all the time; this is an uncomfortable fact in an economic climate where teaching more, more, more is being subtly but persistently urged on all of us. At Zenith, open up what we call the "curriculum tools" to work on your course descriptions for next year and you will find that seminars and colloquia that were always capped at 15 have been bumped up to 17 or even 19 by some anonymous person (happily, you can just lower these numbers again and hit "save.") Nineteen, as everyone knows, is the magic number, since in its annual rankings the U.S. News and World Report uses classes under 20 students as part of the algorithm that moves a school up - or down. Lecture classes that are in high demand (translate: their parents call the provost when they are shut out of a class) are also expanding. Surveys and introductions to the field that have, in the past, been capped at 40 have been bumped up to 45 or 50 by the same invisible hand. And two or three times a semester, our faculty is offered the opportunity to teach a fifth, perhaps a sixth course, at the same wages we pay adjuncts: there is a small M.A. program in liberal studies, there is the new summer school for undergraduates that is intended to offer an intimate learning experience and stop the budgetary bleeding, and there is a special pot of money that would increase offerings of small classes in the curriculum.

Put aside the question of whether an optional 3-2, or 3-3, or 2-1-2, counts as speed-up during a time when there are thousands of jobless Ph.D.'s dying for work. Try, if you can, to ignore the pensions that have tanked, and the flat-lined faculty salaries that have made colleagues everywhere desperate for additional income to keep up with the financial responsibilities they have. There is something positive to pay attention to here. In its own, oblique way, Zenith is recognizing something that real educators -- as opposed to people who make policy about education and have never taught, or legislators who see education budgets as low-hanging fruit -- have always known: small classes are better, and there should be more of them. Discussions, in which the teacher can both model and encourage critical thought, are better venues for learning than lectures.

Why do we teach large classes if we know students learn better in small classes? Because, given the economic and pedagogical philosophies that govern education now, we must teach large classes. They allow us to standardize part of our curriculum. Large classes make it possible to require gateways and foundation courses that, in turn, permit us to control the size of a given major through a minimum grade or aggregate grade (not to mention congratulate ourselves for "having standards.") Large classes are economical: we process more students with fewer faculty, and often those faculty can be extraordinarily ill-paid and inexperienced but still do the job. For example, any graduate student who has passed her comps can teach the United States history survey. Perhaps it won't be a transcendent experience, as it would have been with the late Howard Zinn, but if the point is content delivery and a level of energy that will keep a room full of teenagers engaged, graduate students can do it as well or better than your average mid-career history prof.

But why, you might ask, is a small class better intellectually? And what counts as a small class?

The second question is an important predicate to the first. A seminar of 19, or even 15, is a small-er class, but it doesn't count as a small class nor does it count as an intimate learning experience except by comparison to fifty or eighty minutes spent in a lecture room with 99 other people. But what possibilities does a class of 10 or fewer students open up? Let's take student writing, something most faculty claim they care about, and which is the object of large annual budget appropriations to help students do it well. Whether writing centers actually accomplish this task is hard to know, but they have not changed one thing we do know: that the average 4-5 page essay, of which somewhere between two and four will be assigned for each class, is currently a drag to assign, a drag to write, and a drag to read. Students either learn to churn them out or they don't, and if they don't, it becomes a terrible emotional burden for them as well as an imagined learning disability that affects the pleasure they might otherwise take in learning.

How about those of us who read these essays that are often the academic equivalent of forced labor? Everyone who views teaching students to write as a professional commitment (which isn't everyone, as we know) is aware that it takes a minimum of 30 minutes -- and often more like 45 minutes -- to read, think about and make intelligent comments on each paper. For a class of 15, this means somewhere between 8 and 12 hours, minimum, will be spent on a set of papers to give students even the minimal feedback they deserve for their thoughts. Hence, grading those papers becomes a full-time occupation for between one and two working days.

And for what? So that students can receive a grade at the end of the course. Ask your students how many of them enjoy their writing; imagine writing as something they might do for a living; or if they can recall a college paper they have written that was a real learning experience. And ask your students how many of their teachers, perhaps as a way to get off what they view as a hamster wheel of evaluating papers that no one wanted to write in the first place, return their papers with a letter grade and a one-line comment that is nice, rude or indifferent.

Talk about alienated labor. And yet, there is a solution to this problem: an increase in small classes that is not part of a general plan of university speed-up. Fewer students per faculty member could lead to more, and better, attention to each student by intellectuals who are freed up to be truly interested in what students bring to the table as people, as opposed to how students can be more efficiently processed.

The professor who had ten or fewer students might be encouraged to take student writing seriously if s/he actually had time be interested in it, and time to know the students well enough to care what they think. When you see ten students in office hours, rather than twenty, you can teach each student where s/he is, rather than where the curricular matrix dictates s/he should be. When you receive ten papers rather than twenty, you could actually read, think about and respond to each one -- rather than grade them, hand them back and move on. You could assign enough writing to help a student develop a set of thoughts consistently over the course of the semester that were uniquely tuned to that student's interests. Students might be encouraged to enjoy, and invest in, their writing more if they truly believed that it was part of a more intimate learning experience rather than merely a vehicle for assigning a grade.

Of course, the truth is that students really want to talk to us and talk to each other. The smaller the class, the more fully engaged and spontaneous class discussions can be and the less likely it is that the room will be taken over by a minority of learners who have the confidence to dominate, and silence, a room full of people. In a seminar of ten or fewer students everyone gets to speak, and better yet, will develop the interest in others that will facilitate respectful, engaged exchanges among people who disagree. The professor, in turn, will have a better opportunity to notice, accommodate and use to advantage the differences in learning styles and intellectual interests that make each student unique.

A commitment to smaller classes could transform higher education, not just by creating a better classroom experience for learners and teachers, but because it would require an enhanced commitment to the hiring of more faculty rather than more technicians, tutors and administrators to cope with the problems and dissatisfactions that large, alienating classes produce. There are many reasons why the job market is glutted with well-educated Ph.D.'s who are dying to teach, but one of them is that over time our tolerance for large classes has grown dramatically over time, even at elite liberal arts colleges that have the resources to do better. Currently, colleges want to have it all: they want the option of growing class sizes even further and lay claim to a spirit of innovation that promises individual attention to each of 19 -- no, 25 -- no, 50 -- no 150 -- students. That individual attention is often actually delivered, not by faculty, but by tutors, math centers, writing centers, teaching assistants, learning centers, computing centers, academic deans -- many of which come at a significant cost, in personnel, in new buildings, and in an ongoing commitment to maintaining infrastructure and technology.

Why not just make a commitment to funding small classes?

Sunday Radical Roundup: The Power Of The Purses In Tudor England, More Conference News, and A Fond Farewell To Howard Zinn

Book of the Week: Those of you jonesing for Season 4 of The Tudors will be able to make do temporarily with 2009 Man Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt, 2009; 532 pp.) Praised by Washington Post reviewer Wendy Smith as "a brilliant and deft antidote to the otherwise trite and shopworn" retellings of Henry VIII's six marriages, it is truly one of the best historical novels I have ever read.

Of course, as constant readers of this blog know, I find virtually no recounting of this story trite or shopworn, and one might have to ask Smith: what do you think brings readers back repeatedly to the events of 1531-1535, when a sexy little nobody succeeded in changing the history of the western world forever? There are plenty of subplots in this bloody tale that seem to recur in our political and cultural life -- not to mention in countless, anonymous, personal lives. What is greater -- our empathy for the discarded Queen Katherine, or for a vain king who justified his middle-aged lust for a canny woman with a dubious insistence that England required a male heir? Do we admire Ann Boleyn for using the one bit of power she had (as Shakespeare would put it, the purse) to deny the king the fulfillment of his lust until he brought her and her scheming family to power? Indeed, one of the more interesting and subtle questions Mantel raises in this novel is whether the male heir that Henry Tudor claimed was his sole desire was truly necessary. The extent of the king's folly is pointed up by the fact that he not only already had a female heiress, the Princess Mary, who was the descendent of a powerful reigning queen of Spain; but a healthy bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, who would have been more easily legitimized than Katherine was divorced.

In fact, in Wolf Hall what is at stake is a form of legitimacy that we are far more familiar with in the modern world: the political legitimacy of the state. Thomas Cromwell, usually the scheming villain of the tale, is the hero of this one as he carefully pries the state away from an increasingly dissolute nobility and towards its modern foundation in capitalism and the law. Why is this a different Cromwell? The answer is linked to previous authors' dedication to his villainy. In Wolf Hall, Cromwell is a template for what the English middle class (it was Napoleon, following Adam Smith, who would fatally underestimate the state born at this moment as a nation of shopkeepers) would become, as it first seized the reid of credit, and then power, in the face of the solipsism, hypocrisy and vanity of its nobility and the Catholic Church. As Christopher Taylor of The Guardian writes:

Mantel's Cromwell is an omnicompetent figure, "at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." Fluent in many languages, learned, witty and thoughtful, he's also an intimidating physical presence; Wolsey fondly compares him to "one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes". This makes him an ideal emissary for Wolsey's project of liquidating some smaller monasteries to fund a school and an Oxford college. But self-advancement isn't Cromwell's only motive. He's disgusted by the waste and superstition he encounters, and takes a materialist view of relics and indulgences. The feudal mindset of Wolsey's rival grandees seems equally outdated to him: jibes at his lowly origins bounce off his certainty that noble blood and feats of arms now count for less than lines of credit and nicely balanced books.

As Henry Tudor steers the ship of state unthinkingly towards political and economic disaster (egged on by the Howards and and Ann Boleyn who steers the monarch's reason southwards), Cromwell steps in to guard England's borders, keep the country solvent, rein in the nobility by literally putting them in his debt, and become the architect of a new secular law that reins in the King's worst excesses. The interior Cromwell is beautifully drawn by Mantel, as is his strategic insinuation into the King's confidence following the death of their mutual mentor in statecraft, Cardinal Wolsey. In her search for a new political story, Mantel also links Cromwell to the revolution of the domestic sphere that the break with Rome would unleash. A skillful sub-theme of the novel is Cromwell's dedication to a new kind of shared authority within his family, to female autonomy and intelligence, and to the importance of love in marriage, all hallmarks of the political consolidation of the bourgeoisie. Cromwell, more generally portrayed as a political despot by historians and novelists, is perceived by Mantel as a nationalist who worked behind the scenes to relieve the effects of despotism, in public and in private, and lay the groundwork for the future of enlightened government.

And have I said it is an outstanding read? In other news:

Extended Deadline for submissions to World History Association Annual Meeting, 24-27 June 2010, San Diego: Why do I know this? Because the WHA would particularly like more LGBTQI submissions. Go here for the CFP. The dual theme is "Gender in World History" and "The Pacific in World History" (extra points for intersections between the two, I imagine.) The deadline has been extended to February 28th, 2010. In fact, while you are at it queer historians, help take our work to the next level and re-imagine those nationalistic conference proposals that compare three lesbian bars in three different United States cities (sometimes changed up with a paper on a Chicana softball league in San Francisco) for all your submissions to Meetings of Learned Societies. Just an idea.

Margaret Fuller Conference: "Margaret Fuller and Her Circles, April 8-10, 2010, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA." OK, I'm such a sap that I go to the MHA just to drink in the atmosphere, but I also have to say that they do a great mini-conference. I went to a New England American Studies Association Meeting there a while back and it was one of the most fun conferences I ever attended, with small groups of people meeting in an intimate setting and carrying over an increasingly more complex conversation from session to session.

Just Received in the Mail: NYU Latin American historian Greg Grandin has the cover of this week's issue of The Nation on The Pentagon's New Monroe Doctrine that maps US military deployment in the Caribbean basin and the eastern Pacific.

And of course, if you think as I do that Grandin's combination of political savvy, scholarly acuity and ability to write for a general public is of star quality, you will also have spent a moment this week saying:

Farewell to Howard Zinn: A historian who was the essence of cool in a generation of pretty cool historians. Once again, The Nation has a nice obit with some video of the man.

On Behalf Of All Wimmin: An Open Letter To Steve Jobs About The iPad

Dear Steve Jobs,

For months I have been looking forward to the release of Apple's new tablet computer, as I look forward to every new product released by your company. I have put off buying a Kindle, even though all of my friends have them; or even speaking to my sister about her beloved Sony Reader, for fear that I will become so envious that I will have to go into therapy about why she gets everything nice even though she is the youngest. So imagine my dismay when I heard that you were naming this new product the iPad.

Now, this ill-chosen, sexist name did not immediately make me think of a menstrual pad, but since other women have begun to make this obvious connection between a personal computer and a personal hygiene device, I have not been able to get over how crushed and mortified I am. I don't know if you have ever tried to write something on a menstrual pad, but believe me, it is not easy: the pen sticks constantly, little bits of fluff stick to the point, and there is really no room for more than a paragraph anyway. And because I loathe my body completely, well, anything that makes me think of vaginas or menstruation disturbs the creative process. I can't even imagine taking the iPad into a faculty or department meeting. There I would be, trying to work on curriculum or responding to the latest dictat about the budget, and thinking vagina, vagina, vagina. How can I work in an environment where I am being sexually harassed by my own computer?

What is worse is that I have now begun to imagine all your products, formerly beautiful to me, as the gross, sexualized items you have secretly intended them to be all along. It's so upsetting I can't tell you.

For example, there is the iPod, which makes me think of seed pods, which makes me think of testicles. Ee-yew.

Or the iBook, which makes me think of the Book, which makes me think of Leviticus, which inevitably leads to thoughts of bestiality. Double ee-yew!

You see the problem, I am sure. As a committed and long term feminist, I have learned many things about the condition of women from the kinds of critique that are being aimed at this new product of yours: I have learned about patriarchy, the ownership of my own body, and the work that gender does to distribute power in society. This latest insight -- that a personal computer could fix in my mind, indelibly, visions of menstrual pads and vaginal walls at their most unattractive has been more distressing than I can say. On the other hand, hearing from my sisters everywhere on this matter has also been a critical step in what it might mean to move to the next level of consciousness as a feminist. I intend to spend the rest of the day writing manufacturers of bed pads, pads of paper, paddles, paddleboards, paddle wheels, padlocks and pad thai noodles, demanding that they immediately remove their products from the market and rename them, or face a feminist boycott of unprecedented proportions.

Sure, I have other things to do. But feminism is a commitment that goes beyond the self to our responsibility for a collective sisterhood. Since the battles for equal pay and women's right to the integrity of her own body are already won it is time to address the oppressive patriarchal impulse behind the naming of consumer items that is holding women back and shaming them in the workplace.

Thank you for your attention,

The Tenured Radical