Things You Don't Know About the Radical

I am from Philadelphia.

I received my first official Phillies hat for my sixth birthday.

I went to my first game, at Connie Mack Stadium, that summer. My mom taught me to keep a box score and yell "Pitcher's blowed!" at the opposing hurler. I watched every game on TV that I could, keeping the box score for the whole season. The games that weren't on TV, I listened to on the radio. That was 1964. Do I need to explain the significance of this date? There are people in Philadelphia who are more permanently damaged by 1964 than by their own birth trauma.

I once watched Dick Allen foul off twenty pitches in a row, deliberately and with precision, as Philadelphia fans booed him lustily. This was a little-known event in the struggle for African-American civil rights, but an event all the same.

I listened to Jim Bunning's no-hitter on Mother's Day.

There was a time in my life I thought Astro-Turf was the most beautiful thing in the world.

In 1980, when the Phillies won the World Series, I started to weep as Tug McGraw faced the final batter, and I didn't stop crying for an hour.

During one of my father's hospitalizations that led eventually to his death, my mother and I would occasionally leave in the evening, and go down to Veterans Stadium spontaneously, to have hot dogs and beer for dinner and watch the game. We didn't talk much: we just watched the game.

I now live in this god-awful part of the country where the only question people ask me is "Yankees or Red Sox?" And in fact, if I lived anywhere north of here, all the way to the Canadian border, or anywhere south of here, all the way to Staten island, they wouldn't even ask. The team to the North is just as hopeless as the Phillies; the team to the South is evil. As they say in South Philly, "Whaddayagonnado?"

I vowed not to follow the Phillies closely this year, as they grimly hung in within 8 or 10 games, losing franchise players to injury and having the same slightly-better-than-average pitching rotation they always have. This year they didn't even have a Jim Bunning, a Steve Carleton, a Curt Schilling -- brilliant guys who would gut out 1-0 victories, sometimes notching RBI's to make it happen, in years their teammates couldn't hit their shoe size.

And yet. A month ago, after a small losing streak, I couldn't help but notice that my Phillies were starting to pull themselves together, as they always do in August, lighting that beacon of hope that raises blood pressure from Wilmington to Trenton, from Allentown to Princeton, causing all of us to say casually, "Oh yeah, I think I'll watch the first couple of innings tonight."

Incredibly, the Mets have gone into a Phillies-like season end collapse. This morning I found myself in the car, on my way to rowing practice at 5:15, pumping my fist wildly and screaming "YEAH!" Why?



Because I heard on the radio that the Phillies tied the Mets for first last night.

I have two responses.

Dear God, no not again. And:

If I believe in them with all my heart, somehow they might just do it. There is no choice not to commit. One more time.

Sing it, Janis; or, New Kid Hits The Perfect Note

Take a look at this post from New Kid on the Hallway. I check her pretty regularly anyway, but I went over this morning because I noticed I had gotten several hundred more hits yesterday than I usually do because she had linked a post of mine about how to become visible as a visiting member of a faculty. I knew that New Kid wrote a quality blog, but I didn't know how influential it was, or how many readers she had. Wow.

It is really a very moving post, particularly if you have been following New Kid's career lately, but more generally too, because it speaks to a condition shared by many of us -- a persistent sense, no matter what we have achieved, that happiness is just out of our grasp. Everyone on the job market should read it, and everyone who is either on a tenure-track or is tenured should read it too, because I think we all have a tendency to believe that our fate is in other people's hands when actually it is not. It is only the details that are in other people's hands.

I am reminded by this post of one of the wisest lines in The Wizard of Oz (other than "Some people do go both ways"): Glinda the Good says to Dorothy at the very end, after the dear girl has nearly been killed three or four times, "You could have gone back to Kansas whenever you wanted. All you had to do is say so." Or something to that effect.

And New Kid -- girlfriend, if this many people are reading your blog, commit yourself to being a writer who writes and publishes for a big audience, whatever else you decide to do. You've clearly Got It.

A Few Words About Books, Book Reviews, and Literary Critics Who Need to Tone It the Heck Down

Now and again I get emails from people asking what I think of this book or that book, referring to items posted in the section to the left, Tenured Radical is Reading. I rarely comply, but never for the same reasons. As a matter of fact, since I am usually reading three or four books at the same time, the book that is posted is more or less a random pick from the pile on my bedside table (a pile that is also currently sporting a copy of Bitch magazine, the title of which intrigued me so much that I bought it on the spot at the natural foods store check out line.) But to date, I have reviewed only two books, one a more or less trivial but entertaining gay novel, and another a management book that helped me think about how to navigate my little world where - as a wise older colleague said to me the other day -- "Several decades back there was a battle between the giants and the pygmies. And the pygmies won." You can see how very helpful a management book can be in this situation. (Apologies to any actual pygmies who are readers and are offended by being deployed as a negative stereotype.)

But back to what I think of the books that I appear to be reading: I don't think it is really fair to review someone's book without an editor looking over your shoulder, except in the more or less descriptive ways that several blogs do -- blogs whose purpose, God Bless them, is to let us know what we should be reading in their field. So that's my general rule, but there are also particular issues that crop up that prevent me from reviewing books.

I didn't review one book (even though I was urged to do so by several people) because I became so screamingly bored I had to stop reading it. I'm not even going to tell you what field it was in, because it is really mean to tell anyone --even someone really famous who makes a lot of money -- that they have bored the pants right off you. And it's even meaner to tell the entire blogosphere: it would be better just to drop the author a card. Too bad Hallmark doesn't have a "Sorry! Hated your book!" or a "Better Luck Next Time!" line available in the local CVS.

I didn't review Walter Benn Michaels' new book, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality because I hate the title; the premise is false and intended only to sell books because people like me have to read it and a lot of other white people have been waiting to discover a good reason to stop talking about queers and colored people, even though they have no intention of talking about class; and Walter Benn Michaels clearly never talks to people who work in the fields of feminism or critical race studies who think about class constantly (can we say "intersectionality?"), or if he does, he doesn't listen to what they say. I would say it is the kind of book that could just make you hate academics, but it isn't actually very academic. There are countless factual errors, large and small, and the book is entirely driven by an "if - then" style of argumentation that relies on these false, partial or inaccurate facts. It also relies on an extraordinarily partial reading of a period of American history that Michaels either doesn't care about or doesn't know well. Thus, I realized that it would be a lot like swimming in quickmud to even try to review it. See? That wasn't a review. It was a rant. Just like the book. But if you want to rant, you should probably blog, not write a book.

What is it, by the way, with these big shot scholars, most of whom seem to live in Chicago, that they are so into writing polemics nowadays?

Back to more pleasant topics. I am reading and enjoying the book currently posted, Ed White's novel about Stephen Crane, The Hotel de Dream, because I have read every book White has ever written. In addition, I have been invited to the book party -- or a book party, I should say, since I'm sure this is one of several -- and as it is a short novel, it seems like the least I can do is read the book, even though time to read is in short supply this week. But I won't review it. Just as I think it is arrogant of Walter Benn Michaels to think he can write history literally off the top of his head, it would be arrogant for me to review a novel off the top of my head. Right? Right.

By the way, speaking of books, of which (like the rest of you) I own a great many: I bought a new wallet this weekend, and in transferring objects from the old wallet, I discovered that I actually have nine library cards, four of which have been issued by the federal government. How funny is that? I'm thinking they might need a wallet of their very own, maybe with a little folding money to pay the fines I inevitably incur when I forget to return the books and persistently ignore the emails telling me they are due.

The Progress of the Radical

Early September: invitation issued by the Provost's Office for a meeting to be held from 11-1 (groan) on a Friday (groan), to help new chairs of programs and departments get on the same page with our friends at the office of Academic Affairs. Lunch will be served (ok, this partially makes up for coming in on a Friday and ruining a whole day for writing or any other kind of intellectual/creative activity.)

Mid-September: notice goes out that the putative meeting has been extended to three hours, 11-2. Suddenly the offer of lunch is failing to allay my sense of impending Doom. Call to unnamed administrator is made by the Radical to express sense of Doom, and is sympathetically received, perhaps because they Know Doom Well over there.

Today: Message that the meeting has been cancelled is received. Cheers break out in isolated locations around campus. Once again, Good has prevailed over Doom.

All is well once more in Zenith's hallowed halls and within her ivied walls.

The Radical Reports In and Things Are Excellent Here in Radical Land

Its been awhile. But don't worry. I'm back, blog-dudes and dudettes.

Since I started Tenured Radical, except for vacation, I do not think I have gone six days without a new post, as I just did. I do not, as some bloggers seem to, experience guilt for neglecting my blog (one of my flaws, I have been told in my deep past by women heading out the door with suitcases in hand, is that guilt and I are not as fully acquainted as we might be.) But I do miss my audience, and I miss writing freely. I miss stealing pictures. I miss Flavia.

One of the reasons I have been absent is starting school in my dual roles as chair of American Studies and the Director of the Castle: it's a little like being Batman and Robin at the same time. There are endless small but necessary tasks to be done every day, from signing many student forms ("Holy oversubscription, Batman!") to making sure we have a proper menu for tomorrow night's Welcome Dinner for new faculty ("Thank you, Alfred.") The other reason I am absent from my beloved blogosphere is teaching. Your Radical is not only teaching the Twentieth Century United States survey to a large and interesting crowd of Zenith students, but there is -- you guessed it -- a blog for the course. This requires some attention too, and is very fun -- it's a little like writing a textbook off the top of your head. And there are also a bunch of links for the students to follow up -- our very own Tim Lacy and Chris Miller, Mary Dudziak, Clio Bluestocking,the HNN gang and the Religion and History folks. How great is this?

Why not GayProf, you ask? Because you have to earn GayProf, that's why.

A little deep background: when I last taught this course, there was no internet. Ergo, there were a great many things I lectured about that I can now assemble on a variety of electronic platforms (I would love to show you my Blackboard, but you can't get in because you don't work for Zenith. Poor you.) For example, if you click on the course blog, you will see Turner's essay on the closing of the frontier, and TR's speech on "The Strenuous Life." Presto -- primary documents delivered to a student's room. You will also see that a couple of my students have commented, and I hope more of them use it as a place to speak out. My idea -- since there are 81 souls in the class, an abnormally large group for Zenith, is that I will get higher levels of participation if students don't have to risk their throats closing in anxious spasms while declaiming in front of 80 other people. And me. And my fabulous writing tutors.

As you can tell, this class is the equivalent in size of a Small Town, with citizens, minor functionaries and a mayor (me.) Think Block Island in the winter, or Burley, Idaho. And one would in a town, we have a movie theater. That's right, all the films in the class can be uploaded to the Blackboard, so that students can go over them again if they like. We are also developing a library: thanks to Google Books, there are all kinds of texts that have been scanned, and can be linked: for free!! (Do you ever wonder how these people make money? I know -- the pop-ups. But really I feel like I am getting the best of the bargain here.) Apparently I can also post my lectures as podcasts on the Blackboard as well, although that is a tad less appealing, since frankly - I would begin to feel redundant, and I think we would be edging over into distance learning. But back to the films. Once I found out that I could upload movies and documentaries, I arranged to post my favorite Reagan-era movie ever, Tony Scott's 1986 homo-military masterpiece, Top Gun -- too long to watch in class, it is now a "reading" for week 11. Ho ho ho.

So really, the danger is not that I will stop posting to Tenured Radical -- that could never happen -- but that I will have too much fun teaching, Someone Upstairs will figure it out, realize I am not busy enough with my other two administrative jobs and four searches, and find something horrible for me to do -- like run the AP Credit Conversion Committee or something. So don't tell.

The Doctor is In: A Little Free Advice

So -- drop/add at Zenith is a little over a week old and has three more business days to run: I have learned a great many things that I did not know before. And since I have 55 advisees, I am really tired. Really. Some day I want to write up my ideas about advising (not to mention my funniest life experiences while advising) and sell them -- yes, sell them. Jesus, I have so little to sell. Even my sister writes songs -- which she does not sell, but at least she has something to sell if someone comes calling. I have a lot of old FBI files from the 1930's.

I had a terrific idea once to write an advising guide for college students, since students at Big Research U's get little or no advising (although there is a phenomenon called the Professional Advisor, which I have seen advertised in the Chronicle of Higher Education, someone who is hired to advise students and nothing else. God knows what they do when it isn't drop/add or pre-reg.) Of course the Big Secret is that a lot of students at prestigious SLACS get crappy advising too. Anyway, I just started writing this guide (to advising yourself in the absence of any, or a minimally attentive, faculty advisor) in the middle of the night once, when I should have been finishing a conference paper, and the next thing I knew I had eight or nine short, pithy chapters. And then the next thing I knew I had to finish the conference paper, and then my mind wandered, and then the next thing I knew, I had gotten a new computer and I meant to get that unfinished gimmicky-assed advising thing off the old laptop and forgot and then I put the damn computer in the trunk of my car and spilled windshield wiper fluid on the silly thing. Or rather, the jug fell over and leaked copiously, drying in gummy blue layers, over the period of months I was saying to myself that I had to get those files off the machine.

I am waiting for the next Earth Day to resolve the resulting trash situation, but needless to say, the Original Manuscript is Lost.

I am not going to reveal what I know about advising here, thank you, because in my view this is a major money-maker, and besides it would reveal to my students that I am not the Advising Genius I claim to be. But I can post a few facts learned this week, at Zenith and in conversation with faculty elsewhere.

Many advisees have a different advisor practically every semester of their college career, even at schools that hype the advising relationship. Really. People go on sabbatical even for the semester, ditch the advisees, and the advisees are never returned to them: they are passed on to someone else, who goes on sabbatical -- and the beat goes on. Furthermore, people are assigned advisees by Those Who Assign Advisees even if it is well-known that they are going on sabbatical in the next year. So a faculty member can have students in their first year and then these kids get dumped as sophomores -- surely the Eighth Grade of Higher Education, even at a SLAC-- and if they are lucky someone assigns them to a new advisor (if they are unlucky, this detail is overlooked), who often tells them something completely different than the last advisor, or maybe tells them they need to see their dean for advising.

Some students have advisors who are habitually unreachable. A couple people I saw had advisors who had no office hours posted, claimed they met students by appointment, but in fact did not return emails or telephone messages. This meant that these students' schedules were not authorized during pre-reg last spring, so they began the term with no courses. (BTW: tell colleagues this and they insist the student is lying, even if the advisor in question is well known for shirking work.) This creates a truly Darwinian situation where students who have the self-confidence, cojones or good friends to get them to another member of the faculty get classes; the ones who don't, get a random collection of classes they can actually get into or, in some cases, less than a full academic load.

I just want to say -- I talked to another colleague at another college who was steamed about this, and he thought such people should be fined. I agree. And then the money could be redistributed as a bonus at the end of drop/add to those of us who do other people's work for them. Or it could be refunded to the parents whose children are signed up for Glee Club (.5 credit), two sections of Skipping for Fitness (.25 + .25), Math for Artists, Alternative Body Art Workshop, and Poets of the Sierra Padre.

Some advisors who force students to take courses they do not wish to take, and are bored by, in the name of liberal knowledge. I ask you, stray colleague, what fucking business is it of yours if a student does not want to take Math? Or English? And why lie to them and say that they will not be allowed to graduate unless they do what you say? This is a truly freaky way to behave with a Ph.D.

There's more, but I cannot reveal it because it gets too specific, and we know that the Radical has been hung on the cross before about being Too Specific.

So I only want to add one thing, and that is advice for the advisees, who are people far more sinned against than sinners in my view, but still come in for a little advice about how to make advising a more effective part of their education. Do not come in and ask questions that you could perfectly well answer if you looked at the department web site, the catalogue, the Student Handbook, the Major's worksheet, your own academic record, or the email I wrote you yesterday. OK? I know it is not your fault: it is your parents' fault, who loved you so much that they carried you around in a down-filled basket until you were deposited on Zenith's doorstep and simultaneously made you so insecure about failure that you think that a misplaced comma on a Registrar's card could bring the whole house of cards down on your head. Do not assume you can blow me off for a week and a half, write me in the morning, and see me in the only time you have available -- 3:30 that afternoon. And while you are still a captive audience of this blog, one more piece of advice to carry into later life: don't write your appointment with me on your hand -- or any body part. Research statistics show that appointments written on skin are only kept 40% of the time in industrialized countries, and theologians can now demonstrate in new translations from the Hebrew that God gave Moses an appointment book along with the Ten Commandments.

Ok, I'm lying. But writing appointments on your arm is bush league and does not inspire confidence in your maturity. Or even that you will return at the designated hour.

And on that note, I have run to the limit of my free advice. Check in next year when I scrape the antifreeze off my old hard drive and write the Book of the Century. Or check in next week when, mercifully, the computers close and peace descends upon Zenith -- at least until pre-registration in October.

The Invisible (Wo)Man: Or, Thinking About Your Year As a Visiting Member of a Faculty

Visitors are at the top of the contingent faculty depth chart, in my view, perhaps slightly below post-docs -- unless you believe, as I do, that post-docs have become a way of institutionalizing contingent faculty. But they are right up there, status-wise. What's good about such positions? A living wage, for one thing, and health insurance. Sometimes there is a little money for conferences or research expenses. Access to a university library would be another. Gaining experience without having every false move entered in your tenure dossier, and getting to apply for what we call "real" jobs with letterhead stationary would go on the list.

In my previous post, I mentioned some things I learned from Year One as a Visitor. There was actually Year Two as well, at an Urban Ivy, that helped to catapult me into the job I have held here at Zenith since 1991. One of these days I'll write about that, because I really liked those people, and they did a lot of things right. So drawing on this experience, and on my many years of hiring visitors, I offer the following suggestions to counter the problem of "visitor invisibility."

Work in your office at least two afternoons and one morning a week. More if you can really work there. I know, I know. Your former dissertation advisor has told you to compress your teaching, stay home as much as possible, and get a jump start on your book. Well, aren't there some things you could work on in your office? If you are not there, you will be technically invisible. Because you won't be there. Shall I emphasize this further?

And how can people invite you to lunch on the spur of the moment if you are actually never there at lunchtime?

Go to Campus Events. Talks, panels, receptions -- anyplace you might be able to introduce yourself casually. Watch the university calendar like a hawk, and bookmark the websites of interdisciplinary programs where there are events listed. Go to IT demonstrations of new teaching technologies. Not only are you learning something cutting edge that you can unveil at your next job interview, but the great secret of university life is: the IT people are really smart, funny, nice people who make great friends because they are not stuck up and they can be trusted not to compete with you constantly. They are often academics who decided, wisely, that the tenure-track mill wheel was not for them. Knowing such people can ease your fear that, in the event that you do not get a t-t job next year, you will be forced to live under a viaduct selling counterfeit DVDs.

Talks, symposia and the like are a particularly good venue for a new face because, with the right touch, you can ask a question and make people curious about you. They will then come up and introduce themselves (this is after they poke each other and whisper sotto voce, "Who is that?") If you don't want to go alone, find another visitor -- or that new, tenure-track person cowering in her office -- and suggest that you go together.

And speaking of people on tenure-track lines.... At Zenith, these are the most fun people, the most socially inclusive, and the most heterogeneous as a group. Ask them for advice on the best supermarket in the area, where to go dancing, if they know a good baby sitter -- whatever you need to settle in. And a lot of these people have recently been, well -- you. In the figurative sense. And they will also be some of the best people to give you advice as you pull yourself together to go on the job market again.

Get yourself on the women's studies' program mailing list. I cannot emphasize this more strongly. Gender Studies, or Feminist Studies, or whatever they call it at your university -- women's studies programs are unfortunately not the hotbeds of radicalism that they used to be, but they have also not entirely shed a political past of including people on the basis of a desire to be included. You don't study women? OK, here are the following conditions under which you might plausibly associate yourself with the women's studies program and get on the e-list for intellectual and social events:

You are a woman; your work encompasses the fields of gender and/or sexuality; you don't work on women but you would like to; you think you could benefit from a dash of feminism; you are a man who works on gender; you are a man who is supportive of women and/or feminism and/or queer people; you are a woman whose intellectual interests do not seem to overlap with the women's studies program at all but you need to get into a feminist space once in a while; you are a woman who likes to drink cheap wine and tell dirty jokes; you are a non-sexist man who can happily sit there, talking very little, basking in the light of female friendship, while feminists get drunk and tell dirty jokes.

"But what about my career?!" you shriek. First of all, never underestimate the power of social events to make connections that will make a difference to your career sooner as well as later. You get to know people who will not only give you the benefit of their experience, they also have networks that can help you on the job market. And not just the senior people -- untenured people have lots of friends who you can call to find out about an institution, what they really want in that search, who serve on search committees, and could be the person (as was the case at one of my interviews) who grabs your arm at the on-campus interview and says, "I'm so glad to meet you! Charlie told me all about you." It won't necessarily get you the job (didn't get me the job) but this guy set aside the better part of two days to make sure that everything went ok for me during the interview process. And that, my friends, does give you a better chance of getting the job.

If someone asks you to give a talk, or fill in on a panel, or give a guest lecture -- say yes. Yes, yes, yes. If there is a writing group that you can join -- join, join, join.

Finally, I am going out on a limb here, but: the people who hired you owe you a little something because, although they have lifted you out of the kind of adjuncting that means you are holding office hours on BART, SEPTA or the Metro, you are doing them a favor too by stepping in when they need help. So the first person you should make contact with is the person who hired you; the second is the senior scholar in your field; and the third is anyone else you admire. And these people should be willing to offer you one or more of the following things:

Looking over your job letters; sitting in on a class and writing a letter for your dossier; assembling a few people for a practice convention interview; listening to a practice job talk. It is not out of line to ask someone to read your work, and if you are paying attention to the advice you are getting from the untenured people, that individual might even write a letter on your scholarship for your dossier. If you are lucky, someone will offer; but you might have to screw up your courage and ask. People are busy, and sometimes when you feel ignored, it can be the case that when asked to make time for you, they will. But not until then.

The last thing you must remember is that when you become a tenured person, and you hire visitors, remember how others treated you and improve on it. When you are untenured, and get a job, remember that the visitor in the office next door isn't someone who "didn't make the grade." It's someone who wants a chance to show who they are, and what they can do.

Just like you did.

************************
Oh yeah: and just because I would not be here without their kindness and advice, I would like to give a very belated shout out to Don, Jane, Demie, Drew, Michelle (and the other SWAPS), Carroll, Stephen, Ruth, Mike, Lisa, Evelyn and Marc.

Reminiscing: the Radical Was Once A Visiting Professor

I haven't forgotten that post I said I would do about what visitors should expect from the institutions that hire them. I even thought I might do that post tonight, as I was enjoying oatmeal with brown sugar and fresh bluberries, and a large glass of fresh squeezed o.j. early this morning at the student center. But not now, and this is why; today, as I was leaving the Castle, dead beat from a day of being chair, one of our visiting faculty came out of his office. He leaned over the bannister, gave me a big grin and said good night. Now wasn't that nice? And our other visitors are terrific too -- I can't tell you how terrific, since I promised not to write about others. But aside from saving my life, they are really great, smart people, and genuinely excited to be at Zenith, which is nice to see.

So, the night before I start my survey course for the umpteenth time, I began to have memories of being a visitor myself that I thought I would share.

In the year I finished my dissertation, I taught three classes each semester at two very different places: Upstart University, in Downtown; and Business College, which was part of the Public City System in Big City. They couldn't have been more different. At Upstart, you only taught in a seminar format, and many of the people on the faculty (of which N was one) were legendary teachers. Teaching was more or less text-based, no lecturing; there were no majors, so if you were teaching history, you had to teach what history was at the same time. I worried about prolonged silences, but they rarely occured. The students were bright and unusual: it was a little bit before massive piercings, tattoos and Goth makeup, but it was that crowd in an earlier incarnation. They were all white.

At Business College, I taught two, back-to-back sections, of the U.S. History survey, 1865 -present, each term (the present, at that time, being 1981.) It was entirely lecture format, I was expected to choose a text book and use it to deliver content that I would then lecture on as well. When I was hired, the chair of the History Department told me my class would be "diverse," my first encounter with this euphemistic word. In retrospect, I now realize that he was really saying: "White girl, do you understand that all your students will be black and Latino, first-generation college students who work forty hours a week and carry a full college load at night?" The first evening I walked into the room and realized that I had never been the only white person in the room before, ever, anywhere. The students were bright -- and unusual. And incredibly demanding. And ambitious.

At both Upstart and Business College, I had dusty little offices with other people's discarded crap in them, where I could meet my students in office hours; mostly, I just sat there and read, or prepped class. At Upstart I knew a lot of people (another story for another day), and the teaching atmosphere was invigorating and intense; at Business College, I knew no one, and even if I had, they wouldn't have been there. It was one of those colleges where a lot of great people got hired, young, in the sixties -- they expected to move on, but the job market crashed in the seventies, so they never did. Their response to this was to come to work as little as possible. And hire people like me to teach the bread-and-butter courses.

But as I prepare to start my lecture course -- and whatever else you want to say about it, the Twentieth Century U.S. survey has the distinction of being a marquee course -- I have to acknowledge that everything I learned about teaching in a lecture format, I learned that year. I would work all day on my lectures (and they were beautiful lectures: printed on a dot matrix printer, they contained everything I knew from my comps and orals), and I would come in and teach that lecture twice at night, with a fifteen minute break. It was teaching boot camp. Lecture too long? You have fifteen minutes to cut it. Students seemed bored? Jesus H. Christ, think of something! They didn't seem to get the economic issues behind the Greenback movement -- ok, how to try it a different way? In fifteen minutes.

Dig this: we had no cell phones, no email, and no internet. My computer that year was called a Kaypro, it cost two grand (which is what computers still cost), and its big feature was that it was "portable": it was like a huge, heavy metal suitcase, with a plastic handle that cut into your hand. It banged into your knee repeatedly if you carried it anywhere, like up the seven flights of steps to the top floor of the tenement walk-up where you lived. The screen was about eight inches by eight inches, and the letters were green: you formatted with all these complicated symbols, and all files -- there was no hard drive to speak of, it was all RAM, and you had to boot it with a disc -- went on four by four thin discs called "floppies."

Two days a week, in the morning, after teaching at Upstart, I would walk home to the apartment N. and I were sharing by then and stop off at the lesbian bookstore, before going home to hammer out the final draft of my dissertation; two days a week, at night , after lecturing for three hours I would take the crosstown bus home, exhausted, knowing that N had picked up Chinese food and beer, and I experienced for the first time what would be a lifetime impulse: you cut the adrenaline high of teaching with a little booze and a lot of food. (This, my friend, is one way that the unwary academic becomes an alcoholic. Not this academic, but it became quite clear to me that year how easy it could be.)

I had never worked harder in my life. And I would say that although it is not the happiest I have ever been, nor was I looking further than the next job season, I was really having fun. So much fun.

So tonight, as I try to decide what to say to my thirty-fifth lecture class tomorrow afternoon, I want to say "Thank you" -- to the first students I ever taught as a real professor, and to the people who hired me to do it. And to whatever Goddess plucked me out of the crowd to get this job: do the same for these visitors, so that in twenty five years they are looking back and saying "The first time I walked into my class at Zenith..."

Houston, The Radical Has Landed

Well, Zenith is open for business. You can read about it from New President's perspective here. Don't you think it is interesting that New President has decided to blog? I do. And I wonder if it is his very own, or if it is minded on a daily basis by the publicity arm of the university. Somehow I can't see New President having the time to check his blog every couple of hours to make sure some whack job has not left a comment that is offensive to many university constituencies. But time will tell, and the next time you scoff at the idea that the Radical is Emulated by All, think again, dear reader.

The beginning of school means that your Radical has been hustling nonstop as chair of the best major since someone invented the American university in the nineteenth century: first year students, returning students, new visiting faculty -- all have passed through my domain (or my e-domain) and I hope are none the worse for it. Everything seems to be going well -- and I have promised not to write about people I know without their permission, so I can't give you the highlights even if I could remember them. But what I like best so far about school this year is:

The new student center. Because I feel like it is really my center, and that it has been built for me.

Yes, that's right. I know you might expect some high degree of cynicism about Zenith spending a gazillion dollars it appears not to have really been able to afford. I believe the financial cock-up has something to do with bonds, the endowment, and the inflated price of building supplies since the Iraq/Afghanistan War began. There will be some connection to the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market, I am also sure. If you want to know more, ask that economist on the Lehrer news hour to do a story. But I really don't care. Whatever is wrong with Zenith's finances has been wrong since I arrived, and will probably be wrong until I retire or depart for Greener Pastures. Or Heavenly Pastures. Our futures seem to be intertwined, unless I either win the lottery or the Fickle Finger of Fate points into the pile of job applications at a major research university and says "YOU!"

Fans of the Radical might even expect snarkiness about how much the student center has increased the operating budget of the university: my sources say $1 million, but do your own research. This will undoubtedly have implications for faculty salaries, new faculty hires, and the percentage of courses taught by contingent faculty. How can it not? But here's the good part. Not only is the student center beautiful, and new, and not Methodist or faux-neo-federalist architecture, it doesn't smell like old sneakers, as the former student center did. Not only is it right behind the Castle, thus moving the Beating Heart of the University closer to Us than to Them; not only does it have a Bank of America ATM (!!!) and a fabulous computer store featuring the latest Apple products, but:

It has edible food.

Nay, I go further: the food is excellent. I say this after only two lunches, but so far, so fucking good. My first lunch was sushi and a salad, and I would like to tell you how much it cost, but for happy reasons I can't. I happened to run into a favorite administrator of mine outside the center, who had a free lunch ticket (chorus from readers: "Who says there's no free lunch?") because administrators were being encouraged to cruise the joint and look friendly. I happily joined this person, who got us lunch, thus affording scads of first year students their first glimpse of a Tenured Radical as well. The sushi was fresh and plentiful (I think there were ten pieces); the salad was a kind of make your own deal, with all sorts of groovy stuff like seaweed.

The second day, I got there before the rush and went to the bar where a nice lady makes you a fresh burrito with all the ingredients chosen by you! It was completely delicious. Then I got to the register and found out it was Free Soda Pop day for faculty and staff. Whee! What could have been a lovelier surprise? Only free dessert day, I think. Or All-The-Pizza-An-Historian-Can-Eat day. My whole lunch was a little over six dollars, and I used to pay at least that for a yogurt and an apple at the old student center, the only lunch alternative to a plate of baked transfats and deep-fried carbs.

And both times I ate outside, on a sun-drenched deck, where I can imagine working on my tan into October, Goddess willing.

So despite the fact that I have every reason to be pessimistic about the year (four searches, few faculty -- although reinforcements arrive in January), attendance at two extra conferences so that I can interview people, making a grand total of five conferences (for three of these, papers must be written in my spare time); and trying to teach and keep slogging away at various projects in process -- I am unnaturally optimistic.

And it's all because of the student center.

I'm already planning lunch for next week.

Larry Craig, The Senior Senator From Idaho Who Is A Homophobic Republican Right Winger, And Who Said That Bill Clinton Was A "Naughty Boy," Is Not Gay

And neither am I.

OK, I'm just kidding. I am gay.

BWA-HA-HA-HA! I'm not even going to try to be scholarly about this. And anyway, look how wrong I was about Michael Vick. My question is this: when Larry Craig told the Idaho Statesman that the REI sporting goods store in Boise was the last place he would go to cruise men, did he really think that all queer people do not know that Boise was uncovered as a hotbed of homosexual activity during the 1950's? His precise statement was: "I've been in this business 27 years in the public eye here. I don't go around anywhere hitting on men, and by God, if I did, I wouldn't do it in Boise, Idaho! Jiminy!" Whereas, in fact, many gay men in the Mountain West would.

Craig's statement about the REI incident -- and let me say I write with the authoroity of a person partly raised in Idaho -- is exactly the kind of thing someone from Idaho would say, whether he was telling the truth or not. The syntax is perfect. Read more from the Washington Post here.

In the interests of fair and balanced reporting, here is Larry Craig's official statement about not being gay. And in the interests of slinging mud, here is a transcript from the Bill O'Reilly show on Fox that says he is.

Oh dear, oh dear. Can it get any worse for the GOP? I hope so. Since the Democrats can't seem to stop the war or pass any of the legislation they promised us last November, we may have to settle for ritual humiliation.

Ten points if you can name the other Senator from Idaho. Give up?

Mike Crapo, of Idaho Falls.

Welcome to Relationships 101, New Professors

Hello New Professors!

Welcome to XU. Right now, your life is a rush of new knowledge, for which graduate school prepared you not at all. Sure, there are some experiences you have already had, like having to get a campus map in your head while you were unpacking and finishing your syllabus. (Actually -- have your belongings arrived yet, or are are you balancing your lap top on your bicycle rack while sitting cross-legged on the floor? That's what I thought.)

And there are other things you know -- you have at least been a section leader at CU, or perhaps you have even run your own seminar, so you have some idea of what will happen on the first day of class. You are vowing to memorize all your students' names in the first week, and you have even written a number of lectures in advance before things get crazy. Perhaps you have been assigned a mentor, having just escaped your graduate mentor -- but what critical pieces of information have you not been given? Read on.

Your department Administrative Assistant and any other office staff are your lifeline to success. This is perhaps the most important thing I could tell you. You think it is your chair who runs the world? Ha. Your chair doesn't even want to be chair, most likely, and since graduate school has never taught administrative skills, half of us who are chairs leave as much of the technical side of running the department in the hands of the office staff as we can. Go in and introduce yourself to the staff, learn their names and remember them. Moreover, never be too busy to inquire after their well-being. Why? Well, other than the fact that it is polite, your office staff can do things for you that you can't do for yourself and, given the longevity of employment among clerical workers, they have relationships with staff around the university who can also help you. Do you have an unsuitable classroom? Guess what? So do ten other people. Your AA can most likely call the single person in the registrar's office who can get you the room you need while the requests of others are kicked to the curb.

Never yell at a member of your, or anyone else's office staff. Ever, ever, ever. And if you do, apologize, even if you were technically in the right and had a good reason to be angry. Flowers will do; candy is better.

Choose your friends, don't let your friends choose you. This was standard advice given to most children in the 1950s and 60s as they started new schools. Even though being chosen by others seems to be the dominant cultural mode, I still think it is relevant to the situation of new faculty to ally themselves to others while keeping their eyes wide open. Here's the scenario to really watch out for:



Before you were hired, you were one of many candidates in the beauty pageant and somehow you became Miss America. The tap dancing, the dieting, the implants, the hot rollers -- it all paid off. But why, exactly, did the judges choose you? "Merit!" you chirp. OK -- I'm not going to say you aren't meritorious, but really, many other people in the search were too, and the process by which you were hired cannot, and should not, be imagined as a scientific deliberation in which it became clear to all that you were, objectively speaking, Graduate Student of the Year. I'm just telling you this because it gets you ready for the big letdown when.....some senior person shimmies up to you and tells you -- confidentially, of course -- that s/he was your really big supporter in the hiring meeting, and that you really need to watch out for Dr. Grumpo, who is a big right-winger and a sexual harasser besides, and hated your work. You are, of course, crestfallen, and ready to grab at the ally who has mysteriously appeared at hand to comfort you. What do you do dear? Do you say, "REALLY???!?" and go out to lunch to hear this new "friend" (who is trying to tie you down as a departmental ally) recount the awful details? You do not. You smile warmly and say, "Thank you so much for your support. I really look forward to working with you," and you just sashay right back into your office and make a dress out of the blinds for good measure. Then, if you are feeling really self-confident, take some time to drop into Grumpo's office (prudently leaving the door open, of course) and see for yourself what this person is like.

Never betray another untenured person. And don't assume someone is a natural ally just because s/he is untenured. If you do something that harms the interests of another untenured person, no matter how unconscious or innocent it was, a lot of people will view you as a snake, and not just your peers. On the other hand, it takes a while to figure out who among your peers can really be trusted to watch your back, because some of them may actually be snakes and not innocent, powerless untenured people at all. Imagining that faculty rank parallels the class formation process, because it too is an effect of oppression, is horribly misguided. If you need any further proof of this, remember that if the class formation process actually had occurred in the United States the way Marx had imagined that it would, historians like David Roediger and Robin Kelley would not have the distinguished careers that they do.

Don't distrust someone just because s/he is tenured. I do not mean to belittle the grave concerns that many untenured people have about tenured folk making unfounded, or founded, judgements about them. But there are a great many people whose advice can be trusted, and this is how you can tell: they don't tell you what to do. They give you the information you need to make your own decision. They don't assume that your experience with a particular person will replicate theirs; they acknowledge that you will want to make your own relationships with others, that your interests might differ from theirs and that the two of you can respect and like each other despite your differences. They don't make core assumptions about you because you are gay/of color/a woman/a man/ white/southern/from the Ivy League/from England. They don't look straight at your brown/queer face and tell you that they don't "see race" or that a good family friend "is gay." OK, so what if some of these things do happen -- is this tenured person untrustworthy? Not necessarily. People who have structural power over you will occasionally make you uncomfortable, and you need to put that information in your personal data bank along with other information, gathered over time. But perform some sort of internal calculus to determine at any given moment whether this is someone who you will be able to rely upon, and for what. Someone who initially makes a negative impression on you may actually be a good colleague, or a good colleague for you, who just fumbled a first impression out of ignorance or their own discomfort. It's not up to you to deal with this, but don't make life harder for yourself by developing grudges that blind you to a person's more congenial qualities.

Do distrust someone who tells you to your face that your intellectual interests are unimportant or wrong. This person wishes you no good, and wants you to go away. Stay away from her, and cultivate a bright, empty smile for hallway encounters.

Whenever someone does something for you, say "Thank you." Saying "thank you" is perhaps one of the most underrated academic skills I know. You are not automatically owed service by anyone. No one -- I repeat, no one -- works for you, New Professor. The class dean works for the dean of the college. The departmental secretary works for the administrative assistant, who works for the chair. There are probably a hundred people who make your work possible, and it is their job to do that, but it is not their job to tolerate rudeness or serve without recognition. Look for an opportunity to pay people back: would it kill you, on the way out to get lunch, to ask the office staff if they need anything -- and to refuse payment for that $1.25 can of Coke? No it would not. Or how about this: a senior colleague has just read your article - ask if you can take her to lunch. The senior person might even say no (recognizing that your salary is a fraction of his), but although this sounds trite -- it is the thought that counts.

Do not have sex with anyone you work with this year. Wait until next year, when people know other things about you.



Never be afraid to ask a question, or ask for help. This is the only way you will learn how your institution works. And despite all the teaching centers that are now in vogue in higher ed, it is the only way you will learn how to teach. Saying to a colleague, "Can you look at my syllabus?" is a good example. This has two advantages: one is that a person who has taught the same demographic of students for years can give you good advice, rather than your students giving it to you in a cruder form at the end of the term. But the other is that it gives people confidence that you care about teaching those students well, as opposed to the students you had at selective CU, or the ones you didn't get a chance to teach when someone else got the job at Zenith. In addition to getting sound advice, here's the Bonus Track: the next time you are being reviewed, this colleague will step in and say, "Yes, we had a good talk about that class, and from what I understand...." In other words, you can counter that sense of not having a role in your own destiny by actually engaging in dialogue with senior faculty who will listen to you and take that information to their peers.

Why, is that the moving truck pulling up outside your empty apartment? Time to go! There's lots more I could say but I, um, have to go -- finish my syllabus. Good luck, New Professors, and don't forget to let your colleagues in the blogosphere know how you are doing.

While U Were Out

This is a short post to say that the Radical is back in town, and hitting the ground running at Zenith. During our vacation (it was lovely, thank you for asking), the following unexpected things happened at home:

Individual branches of our rose bushes out front crinkled up and died. My suspicion is that they were peed on. The question is -- by people or dogs? And do these individuals always pee on my bushes, but because I have been watering more or less every day I somehow rinse the bushes sufficiently? It's a mystery.

The fire alarm went off, for no reason as usual, and ADT called our neighbor, who raced over just in time to see a fireman raising an ax, with which he planned to fell our nineteenth century front door. "St-a-a-a-a-ahp!" she screamed, and he did, and all was well. Except that now I have to make an appointment to get ADT to clean the fire alarm. Again.

I ended up with 48 advisees, due to sabbaticals, leaves and resignations. This is not a mystery. I know exactly how -- and from whom -- I got them, and how -- eventually -- I will help them to the next level. Fortunately many of them are in Foreign Lands on study abroad programs.

The dog breeder, with whom we leave Breezy the dog, got usefully beside herself at Breezy's ill-behaved ways and trained her to come when called.

My favorite horse, Lila Paige, was entered in the Personal Ensign, a mile and 1/4 Grade 1 Handicap at Saratoga, where this afternoon she will face five other fillies who have breeding far superior to hers (there are two Deputy Minister fillies, and two A.P. Indy fillies, and as racing folk know, if you have A.P. Indy for your pa, you are directly descended from Seattle Slew.) I suggest you put a couple of fins on her. Lila is quite the little cinderella horse, seems to like coming from behind (and in a fast field, that is a plus) and I have won a lot of money on her. But this is only her second graded stakes ever, having come from obscurity -- at least as far as the Daily Racing Form is concerned -- to come in second in the Grade II Delaware Handicap. If she does well it will be a Big Deal.

Oh, but I do go on. I think my brain must still be on vacation. More later.

The Radical Takes a Vacation

Because it is August; and

Because school will start in a heartbeat in a half, and there is no point staying home and dreading the loss of my freedom for the 44th year in a row (with two years taken off in the middle to work for the advertising agency, when I had no vacation at all except what I could steal); and

Because no matter how much work we do in the summer it never feels like enough; and

Because there is nothing more beautiful than a lake in Northern Minnesota:

The Radical is off on vacation with her best pal, N. Early tomorrow morning we will be flying out of Regional Airport, and barring pilot sick-outs, the collapse of the air traffic comptrollers' computer or terrible weather, we will be landing in one of the historic seats of radicalism, Minneapolis, around noon, changing planes, and flying on to Duluth, where we will be picked up by N's sister and transported to the beautiful lake in the Boundary Waters Region (otherwise known as the Iron Range) where that side of the familly has had a vacation house for several decades.

So this blog is more or less on hiatus for the next ten days. But if you wonder what I am doing it will look pretty much like this:

Wake up.
Read.
Naked swim in lake.
Breakfast.
Read.
Lunch.
Read.
Covered swim in lake in deference to the many people who will be awake.
Nap.
Read.
Before dinner drinks.
Dinner.
Read.
Drift off to sleep while listening to loons.

This schedule is occasionally interrupted by important discusions that include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

Shall we go pick blueberries today?
Should we have our drinks here, or take them on the pontoon boat and go to another pretty lake and have them there?
Will there be northern lights?
Shall we pack a picnic lunch and take the pontoon boat to a lovely beach a few lakes away?
Should someone fire up the sauna?
Will we vote for Hillary?
What are you reading?
Should we go into town and get a blueberry milkshake?

The book list is on the left, folks. Wish us luck for event-free travel. Oh yes: and I have dowloaded onto my iPod all the episodes of Damages and Mad Men that I have not yet watched, in case you were concerned that I am becoming an egg head.

Another Brick in The Wall

Well, the shrapnel has flown among the literary scholars in Shoreline, I guess. A young acquaintance forwarded Helena Echlin's Letter from Yale, first published in Arete Magazine a few years back. Boy, and they say the blogosphere is mean. Doesn't hold a candle to what editors will approve for publication. At least those of us who blog have a range of enemies who read us secretly and write nasty, anonymous comments that hold us accountable for our sarcasm; and friends who call to say gently, "Are you sure you want....?"

Not that I hold such a brief for the old alma mater, you understand (full disclosure: I took a B.A. in English there back in the New Criticism days and loved every second of it. Then went into a doctoral program in history.) One of the individuals named as a culprit for ruining Echlin's desire to get a Ph.D. in English literature is an old classmate from those happy undergraduate days at -- oh, all right, for those of you who have not guessed already -- Oligarch (Yale) University. And really, I can't believe he isn't the decent, sweet fellow he always was, and a marvelous teacher. Fortunately for all, Echlin has already left Oligarch's program, but her complaints range from the familiar (too much tongue-twisting, inpenetrable theory, not so many jobs) to some zingers that I haven't heard before: that literature professors no longer view fiction as a laudable pursuit in and of itself; that they live in the suburbs ("The bastards!" you exclaim); that you can barely hear yourself think in a room full of graduate students because of the smacking sounds of lips landing on tenured behinds; that Echlin's professors did not read for pleasure and that the profession cares so little for the written word that an Eng Lit graduate student at Oligarch can receive credit for a course in quantum physics but not in creative writing.

Well Helena, I have two words for you: American Studies. OK? Take the "English" out of "English literature" and you have a group of people that are hot-smart, but spend most of their spare time going to the movies, watching TV, and reading mysteries. They also love to party: visit the ASA meeting in Philadelphia this October if you don't believe me.

Seriously, are things that bad in English Departments that it is just theory, theory, theory 24/7? Really? See I wouldn't know. In the first place, I am a historian, and in the second place, I idolize English departments. Historians as a professional group value theory almost not at all, to the exent that when they worry that they are missing something, they complain that history doesn't have "a theory" (this is when scholars in other fields fall over laughing because the idea that there is one theory that could explain everything is incomprehensible to anyone but historians.) People write whole books about why theory is valued so little in the modern historical profession. And then people like Joan Scott, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Hayden White, brilliant and field-changing as they have been in their very different ways, have gone through prolonged periods of getting dished by other historians because what they do is so theoretical, according to their critics, it is "not history." This little drama is often played out on the departmental level as well, as many of my readers who are historians have, I am sure, observed. Unless you claim to do philosophy of history, in which case people leave roses at your door whether they understand what you have written or not. Go figure.

And of course we all know that familiar complaint by the ideologically or disciplinarily driven: "I don't understand it, therefore it is useless drivel!" as if these two thoughts necessarily follow one another. Nobody understands everything. And really, it isn't necessary to understand everything, even if it is written in English. I read French pretty well, and if I tried to read Derrida in the original my head would explode trying to decode it. As it is, when reading French theory in translation I wear an ice bag just in case.

Your Radical is not one of those who dish, you see: she is one who Has Been Dished, although without, unfortunately, becoming famous. I went through a period of reading every bit of feminist and queer theory I could get my mitts on, and now I can't because too many people are writing it. Oh yeah, I also went through my Marxist theory and neo-Marxist theory stage (people have more or less stopped writing that), not to mention my sociology period and my cultural studies phase-- both pretty theory-driven if not entirely theoretical, which is a blessing of sorts. While I am not famous or cited constantly like the luminaries noted above, I think it is fair to say that I profited from reading theory immensely, and still do when I am moved to make the effort. Because history does not seem to be receptive to producing overarching theories - except, of course, Marxism, the original Modern Theory of History -- so, like those silly birds who put eggs in the nests of other birds, we have to travel around grafting our work onto theoretical traditions produced elsewhere, especially in English departments. Where would history be were it not for theories thought up by all those birds in other disciplines? And why should the rest of us care how they lay their eggs, as long as they continue to do so?

So this leads me to my point: Literary criticism, in my view, can be a field for the masses, but you might just have to go somewhere other than Oligarch to be that scholar and get that education. Going to a school because it is famous, and not because you know that what they teach there is going to suit your intellectual desires, is a huge mistake and it is yours, Helena, and no one else's. And actually, English departments like Oligarch's do a great service, which Echlen has failed to note. While the rest of us are reading the latest Alice Munroe and catching up on our TV shows so the DVR won't erase them automatically, at Oligarch and Duke and Santa Cruz they are thinking up all those hard theories that we can just borrow and footnote! How great is that? So people should stop kicking English Departments around for -- not to mention that what they do for a living is a lot like being those people who built armour in seventeenth century Europe without knowing whether anyone would be using it twenty or thirty years hence. One does hope for a better outcome, of course, even though all culture and the history of the entire world will be available for iPod download in early 2010.

So Helena, lighten up, girl. Leave those kids alone.

Hat tip to Anonymous Untenured Colleague.

The World's Oldest Profession

Inspired by a terrific post on the Advanced Placement program from my favorite Zenith University student blog (correctly in my view, they oppose the AP, as well as everything else that makes high school such an anxious drag), the Radical wants to take up the challenge. What annoying behaviors will we who teach at Selective Liberal Arts Colleges (otherwise known as "SLACs") soon be navigating? What false information will we be forced to dispel? Misinformation for which we cannot fault the students themselves? That I am charging directly to the account of the pressure to get into college that has been created by SLACs like Zenith and their buddies in the Ivy League, and reinforced by slavish private, public and parochial schools? Read on for the Radical's pet peeves during first year advising:

1. The International Baccalaureate. I had a relative in an IB high school, in a state that is somewhere in the 40's in its national ranking in the quality of its higher and secondary education. From ninth grade on, the students were told that they were doing "college level work." What this meant, in United States History for example, was that they had to memorize hundreds of pages of a textbook every week and take long tests on the "facts" therein. OK, so even if you are coming to my survey from the United Nations International Baccalaureate School in New York -- guess what? you still haven't taken a college course. You have taken a high school course that is either really time consuming or maybe really good. Or maybe both. But it's a high school course. Tell me you took the United States survey at the University of Michigan while a senior at the public school in Ann Arbor and I will start listening. I would bet you dollars to doughnuts that the same number of people who go to International Baccalaureate programs become hookers as the proportion of the general population who choose that path independently of having tested into an IB program. Although the hookers with IB diplomas might speak a second language, I will grant you that.

2. Helicopter parents. Why are they so called by we educators? Because they.....Hover! When the student who is your advisee does not get into a course s/he wants to take, these parents call:

a) you, the advisor;
b) the class dean;
c) the provost;
d) the president of the college;
e) all of the above.

Now I would argue that although they probably had tendencies in this direction already, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir and Monique Wittig, helicopter parents are made and not born. They are like this because they are sure that if they take their eyes off the mark for a second, their child will not get what s/he deserves. Why do they believe this? Well, because in most high schools, it's true. My observation is that every time a high school administration turns around it is enforcing some stupid district, state or federal rule such as: you can't take AP Calculus IV because you don't have enough PE credits to graduate, so you have to take swimming instead. And if you don't take all the AP credits available to you at Whitebread Manor High, in Whitebread New Jersey, where the competition for Brown and Zenith is so intense you can taste it in the water, you will probably not get into any college at all and will have to become a hooker.

3. Any sentence that begins "I can't get a C in this course because..." and ends:

a) I'm going to law school;
b)I'm going to medical school;
c)I'm going to business school.

This too is not the fault of the student: it is the fault of every gatekeeper that student has met so far, and the gatekeepers that their panicked parents have become, who have warned that student that one bad grade will bring a whole world of pain crashing down on the entire family. Possibly the whole town: it's hard to know for sure how extensive the damage will be. And that instead of becoming a lawyer/doctor/businessman, this formerly promising young person will have to become a hooker.

Not that there is anything wrong with becoming a hooker, in my view. I'm a feminist after all. It's just that most parents I know don't see it as a desirable outcome. Do your own research: ask a parent who has decided to drop by to be part of the first year advising process. It's important if you are a scholar to be clear about who thinks what, and why, and not just take my word for it.

By the way, did anyone but me read in the Education Magazine of The New York Times a week ago that the University of Chicago is hellaciously easy to get into? Who knew? Is it Chicago? Is it the lack of sports teams? Is it the fear of being swept up by Obamarama? Enquiring minds want to know. And check out this AP story published in the New York Times, about "a disheveled package" delivered to Eastern Illinois University. "The stuffed and stained envelope was strange enough that police officers alerted the bomb squad," the reporter writes.

It turned out to be a college application.

The Radical Leads the Lambs Out Of The Wilderness: Six Pieces of Random Advice For The Novice Teacher

In this post at Center of Gravitas Gayprof tells a story about having been diagnosed as color blind by a school nurse when he was but a wee Gayprof. Since the nurse explained nothing, and told him to go home and tell his parents, Gayprof -- assuming that this was merely a stage on the way to complete blindness and wishing to shield the parental units from this tragedy -- kept it to himself and merely suffered in silence until Nurse Ratched had the wit to call his home. Isn't school great?

This caused me to think, in turn, about the most peculiar thing I ever got wrong as a child. On the first day of nursery school, perhaps as a way of staving off tears from the most delicate of us, the teachers would say every once in a while: "Your carpools will be coming soon!" Now, I knew what a car was -- I had arrived in my mother's big yellow Mercury. And I knew what a pool was: I swam poorly and was terrrified of water, for reasons that only became apparent many years later. So using all the deductive reasoning that I had access to at age four, I realized that a car, which had a small, manageable pool in it -- would be arriving at the end of the day, and I might finally learn to swim in that enclosed setting as I returned to my house. And yet a carpool did not arrive. My mother drove up at noon, loaded me and a couple other children in the back, and drove us all home. It didn't come the next day, or the day after that. My carpool never came. Gradually I forgot about it much like I forgot about a career in medicine, when I encountered a lot of young men in Biology 101 at Oligarch University who were clearly going to eat my lunch if I didn't choose another major.

The moral of the story is: there are all kinds of assumptions and knowledge we never share with people because we think it is obvious, and often we don't know what we are ignorant of ourselves because...we are ignorant of it. Capice? And I think that may be a condition of school more generally, where appearing to know what you are doing can be almost as good as knowing what you are doing. Think of all those students you have who use the word "discourse" repeatedly in a paper -- wrong -- but they don't know it is wrong because they have heard it in class so many times that they have forgotten that they were faking it and never knew what it meant.

This is why -- instead of diving right in and finishing my article on the sexual revolution this morning -- I am going to compile the Six Pieces of Random Advice for the Novice Teacher (drum roll, please. Crash of cymbals!) Has anyone ever told you that you should:

1. Ask your students who they are and what they want out of the course on the first day. If it isn't a required course for their major, ask them why they are interested and why they registered for it in the first place. If it is a small course, go around the table; in a larger course, have them write for a few minutes, then go home and read what they have written. It's hard to teach well if you don't know your audience. This also gives you a chance to make personal connections in the first few weeks. Scenario: you are lecturing in your twentieth century survey. You have writtten into your lecture notes: "Charles took a course on the New Deal last semester and wants to know more about the rise of the state." You pause, look up, and say "Now, the segregation of federal buildings during World War I is a critical statemaking moment -- Charles, where are you?" Charles raises his hand. "Charles," you say,"I'm going to need some help from you. What do I mean when I say 'the state?'" You dig what I am doing here? You give Charles some authority right off the bat and you demonstrate to the class more generally that you are aware that they have valuable knowledge and you want them to share it.

2. Never keep it entirely to yourself when a course is not going well. If you are in trouble in your class, tell a trusted senior colleague and get help immediately. Not getting help with your teaching when something is going wrong is a form of denial similar to looking up the rash you have on the internet and treating it with medicinal herbs instead of going to a professional to get it diagnosed. The rash might clear up, or you might have lupus. Same with teaching. Struggling in silence is a loser's game, even though you will be worried that you are exposing yourself unnecessarily. Not only can the problem be solved by putting fresh eyes on it, but far better for some colleague, during your next review, to be able to say in response to a couple skeezy teaching evals, "Yes, she came to talk to me about it, and this is the strategy we worked out."

3. Never give a writing assignment orally. Always write it down, and then post it on your course website or Black Board.

4. Always have a course website or Black Board if your university makes it available. I wrote a post about this ages ago, but students expect that course materials will be available on the internet to such an extent that they tend not to save paper consistently anymore. It is a fact, and it is not worth getting on your high horse and forcing them to save your course materials as if they were the Magna f***ing Charta.

5. Never take excess students, no matter how hard they plead and beg. New faculty should be teaching at the course cap or under, not laboring to serve extra students. And the larger a class gets, the more difficult it is to learn names, help students individually, or have a discussion that includes more than the five most confident people.

6. Keep your promises. When you make a commitment to your class, keep it, and apologize when you can't, because this injects a kind of reciprocity into the relationship that will make them more likely to keep their commitments to you. Keep your office hours, and when you can't, put a note on the door for when they will be rescheduled. When you get a set of papers, give them a date when the papers will be returned that is not too far away. Two weeks, max, I would say, otherwise you find yourself running into the next assignment. And if you don't meet the deadline, it is really fine to say you need an extra day or two: that said, don't be so stringent about giving a student an extra day or two either. One of the things students should be learning in college is how to deal with authority in reciprocal ways. In my view it pushes this process along to find ways to exhibit your human-ness that are not inappropriate, and you also need to recognize their human qualities so that they can be honest with you and not make dumb excuses for not getting their work done. And by the way -- if they like and respect you, there is a far better chance that they will learn from you, I guarantee.

Want advice on your teaching? Want to share a piece of advice or a frustration with others? Ask the Radical: tenured.radical(AT)gmail.com.

The No Asshole Rule: A Reflection

As you know if you make a close study of Tenured Radical 2.0 in all of its features, I have been reading Robert I. Sutton's The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. And to get to the punchline quickly: you should read it too. It is short, it is well written and Sutton -- a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University -- has written a book that nicely bridges the worlds of business and intellectual work.

What occasioned my purchase of this book? Well, it doesn't really matter, does it, because I loved it and I wish something like it had been available to me years ago. I would also say that the bulk of my labor this year will be administrative, and because there is no formal mentoring in this kind of work, I do what I can to learn management techniques, either by observing adminstrators at Zenith closely and seeing why they do or do not succeed, or by reading. This is the point at which the post could sprawl and take all morning but let me give you a few highlights that should get you to read this book, whether you are an administrator or a faculty member, whether you are an administrative assistant, a full professor, a student or a dean.

First, Sutton emphasizes that we can all be prone to acting badly, and that it is important to distinguish between temporary assholes who exhibit nasty behaviors occasionally (losing one's temper, telling a gossipy story as passive-aggressive revenge or as a self-agrandisement strategy, glaring at and belittling others, yelling) and certified assholes, who deploy bullying, intimidating and demeaning behavior toward others as a matter of course. He also notes that the first step in thinking about this is to categorize oneself. Be honest: are you an asshole? What have you done in the past that resembles this behavior, and how often in the course of daily life do you behave like an asshole? One of the differences between temporary and certified assholes is not just frequency of behavior, but that temporary assholes have enough objectivity and empathy to perceive the effect they have on others, understand that what they have done is wrong, apologize and change. Certified assholes believe that they are always right, often do not remember what they have done, and if they do, justify it as a normal response to being in struggle with stupid people who are a threat to them, their values, and the good of the institution. They don't change: they force the rest of us to accomodate to them, and because of this, create an atmosphere of fear and loathing among both the direct objects of their bullying and those who observe it second hand.

We'll start here: I can be a real asshole. Read some of the posts on this blog, prior to the 2.0 edition and when I thought I was anonymous, if you don't believe me. Better yet: don't. Just believe me.

But that said, I am not a certified asshole, and because it is too self-congratulatory -- even for me -- I'm not going to tell you why I know this. But here are some asshole behaviors that are particular to the academy, in my experience, and at one time or another I have been guilty of several:

1. Yelling at people to win an argument or force everyone to do things your way. Now, we all yell at people occasionally -- often when provoked by an asshole or an airline employee -- but not uncommonly yelling occurs in meetings, because that is where faculty do most of their business. Certified assholes use this as a consistent tactic, and it sometimes extends to tantrums. I have a friend elsewhere who has described a colleague that, when on the brink of losing his temper, begins to turn a different color, become physically tight and tense, and then, immediately prior to the explosion, appears almost to levitate. The threat of what is to come, she argues, is as oppressive to the atmosphere as the eventual outburst itself, and often results in people strategizing what they say in order to prevent the tantrum, not to discuss the issue at hand in the most open possible way.

2. Physical intimidation. This means getting in someone's personal space while yelling, saying intimidating things that threaten someone's future directly or obliquely, commenting on someone's appearance and/or weight relentlessly, and inappropriate or unwelcome touching. It can include telling people to shut up, interrupting, name calling, and persistent profanity. It can also include trapping people: demanding that someone "report" to your office, or entering theirs (worse in my view), and closing the door without permission.

3. Describing people as "not smart," and dismissing their intellectual work because you don't like them or you don't like their politics or they are in a field of which your disapproval is so vast that you read nothing in it. I am sorry to say that people on the left are just as guilty of this as people on the right, with the difference that people on the left --perhaps as the residue of feminist consciousness raising, historic leftist sexism and homophobia and Marxist criticism/self criticism sessions -- do it to each other as well as to their political opposites, whereas people on the right, in my experience, are willing to excuse a range of sins within the group in order to keep everyone who is conservative voting together.

4. Lying. Certified assholes use this as a consistent strategy to get what they want, which includes lying on behalf of their allies to promote their interests over the interests of those who are not their allies. They excuse it because they think what they want is always right, and when other people get in the way, they should be defeated by any means necessary. George W. Bush and Nanny Dick are like this, I think. And let me say -- I think lying can sometimes be a subset of gossiping, because often when people spread gossip, for whatever reason, they are often spreading damaging information that is not true, or has been twisted for a particular effect. When I was a newbie at Zenith, a friend told me that she made it a point never to gossip, and although I thought at the time it was kind of prissy -- I was in an information-gathering stage of life after all and needed gossip desperately -- much later in life I came to understand that this was, in fact, a highly ethical position. And by the way, if you are well-known as an indiscriminate gossip, you will also be well-known as someone who cannot keep a secret and should not be brought into a position where secrets need to be kept.

5. Accusing someone else of lying, publicly or to a third party, without confronting the other person privately. This is also something of which I do not believe I am guilty, but I have been accused of lying by others, and I have seen other people accused. At its best, it is a careless act; at its worst, I think it is one of the nastiest things one academic can do to another because personal integrity is so crucial to the scholarly world. Now, if someone has committed a serious ethical breach, that is one thing, but the things I have most frequently seen classified as lies are often far better characterized as misunderstandings, miscommunication, or someone leaping to a conclusion. Most frequently, in my experience, it is faculty accusing administrators of lying, in a conscious or unconscious move to disempower and humiliate in retaliation for some real or imagined slight.

6. Hitting on people sexually when they have evidenced no interest in either recreational sex with you or romantic love towards you. I would extend this to hitting on people sexually who have expressed this interest, but are interested in a kind of short-term personal gain or thrill that you know perfectly well will lead to tears. I would extend even this further to the whole question of responding to advances from those -- students, very junior faculty -- whose attraction to you is really an attraction to power, or some idealization of what you are or could be in their lives. Long-time readers might recall a series I did on the Pokey Chatman case, in which Chatman, a very talented basketball coach, appears to have had her resignation forced because a tangle of affairs with players and assistants came to light: click here and here. Several of my readers chastised me for not being hard enough on Chatman for this: well, I still don't think she should have had to leave her job. But there is no question that she was an asshole, and that LSU was willing to tolerate her messy love life until it became public information. That's the part that I think is a little more complicated, and needs to be examined and discussed, because Chatman may not have been an asshole in other ways. And other asshole behaviors persist at LSU that are not stigmatized, including what is commonly called sexual harassment, because the institution clearly tolerates assholes -- as nearly all academic institutions do.

7. Students can be assholes, to each other and to their teachers: it is a large, and ugly, subtext of the academic blogging world. And of course, some graduate students are assholes in training, and they learn to do it by watching professor assholes gain advantage over others through the range of tactics described here. Student asshole behaviors include: passing notes, giggling and whispering while other students are talking; repeating what someone else just said as if it were your idea; directing their remarks only to the teacher and not acknowledging the other students; interrupting; telling other students that something they have said is "wrong" or interrupting with a loud "no" when someone else is talking; publicly calling someone a bigot as a routine way of commenting on their lack of sophistication, their analysis or their apparent ideological position; saying thoughtless things about identity groups represented by people in the room; delegitimizing other students' right to speak because of their identity position or lack of sophistication in the field; and -- my favorite --anonymous, cruel attacks on others that are justified by a self-professed or actual lack of social power in a given situation. There is no justification, except perhaps being invaded and/or colonized by a foreign nation, for an anonymous attack, and what it expresses is rage and fear of the consequences, not actual powerlessness.

What is great about The No Asshole Rule is that Sutton's examples help identify the asshole behavior that is particular to one's own workplace, how to identify it in oneself, and how to resist it. He also demonstrates the damage caused by assholes, several of which seem particularly relevant to academic institutions, in my experience. One is that asshole behavior is contagious: if effective interventions are not made, people who are not certified assholes become more prone to temporary asshole behaviors as they try to resist domination and seizures of power.

Potentially, entire departments and faculties can be taken over, by assholes and by people who are forced into asshole management. Another crucial point -- and of course this resonated to my experience during the Unfortunate Events -- is that people who must resist being constantly demeaned and emotionally battered pay a terrific price in their energy and creativity, and do less and less well professionally, are less able to write, and often less able to function as teachers, scholars and colleagues on a day to day basis. Thus, what is often touted as a hierarchy of merit can also be a hierarchy of - can we say oppression? - where decent people are subject to the rule of the ruthless, and as a result their talents become hidden or submerged, and their capacity to function as university citizens who can and should be rewarded is severely eroded. Very often they simply withdraw and focus their lives at home: they come in, teach their classes and leave; do not come to meetings; and are not available for the work of running a department or a university. One of the benefits of going through a period of being bullied relentlessly by assholes is that you develop a kind of compassion for people who of whom you may have been previously dismissive.

Sutton can be visited on line at his blogs: click here and here. You might also want to look at a report on a conference on academic leadership, where a colleague of mine is quoted on the topic of "academic bullies."