How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth It Is...Or Is It? The Radical Rates Rate My Professors.com

A couple weeks ago, I Googled myself. Admit it: you do it too. But it really is worth doing occasionally if you have become a blogger, because it gives you the illusion that you have some clue as to whether you are being needlessly slandered by others. Strangely, Tenured Radical itself is #5 in terms of hits for "Claire Potter," whereas a paper I gave at the University of Connecticut five years ago is on the top of the list (I suppose because the paper was about J. Edgar Hoover, who is slightly better known than I am.) But imagine my surprise when I saw at spot #3 the phrase: "Claire Potter is arrogant and inflammatory...." Whoa, now. Imagine my further surprise when, upon closer inspection, the post was not located in any place where I am used to being bashed for my politics or my behavior, but on the website faculty love to hate, RateMyProfessors.com.

Since I asked RateMyProfessors to take it down, I reproduce the text posted on April 5, 2008, in full here:

Claire Potter is arrogant and inflammatory, but also one of the most articulate people I've ever met. Her ideas and lectures are interesting, if offensive and disorganized (she sometimes tells the class she hasn't prepared). If she spent more time engaged with students and reality and less writing her blog, perhaps she'd be more palatable. Well perhaps, but not likely.

While I was at it, I took down this one from last semester:

While Potter is very engaging and clearly knows her stuff, she teaches a very biased view of history (that is, liberal feminiest[sic] history). any conservatives are always "they" and there is far more focus on liberal presidencies-with some scoffing over the kooky reagan years. If we're going to teach History, let's at least try to tell the truth. Yes let's -- like, for example that we spent a week on Barry Goldwater, and subsequently, the last three weeks of the semester on the new conservatism and neo-liberal governance. And all historical figures are "they" to me because -- well, they aren't me. You don't need to know much about object relations theory to know that.

Now, why did I have these comments taken down -- a move which is, by the way, only temporary, since permanent deletion occurs at the discretion of the site managers, who have no idea whether the comments accurately reflect an experience in my class? Well, because I consider them inaccurate and malicious, and I don't want them popping up on random Google searches. There actually is also a little matter of truth at stake here. In relation to the first comment, I have never told a class I was unprepared, although strangely, the day before this "evaluation" was posted, I had lectured the class about their uneven preparation, and given them a little in-class, surprise writing exercise. And as for the second comment I took down, also completely wrong: this strikes me as something that may well have been written by someone who knows about me, assumes that I would teach a political history class in a certain way, but was not actually in the class. This is not the first time I have suspected that people who are not my students comment on me, since several years ago I had RateMyProfessors take down a comment for a class I had not even taught. This took several tries, by the way, and the rating itself remains.

To test my theory that ratings could be posted by people who had never been my students, I went to the dreaded site, and registered myself, under my own name, as a Zenith student. Easy-peasy. The only false information I provided was a birth date that made me 19 years old (I wish!) and the box I checked that affirmed my status as a Zenith sophomore. I then successfully added a rating about myself. You can see it here: it's the anxious looking green emoticon that has the comment "interesting." I thought it only fair to add something right down the middle, neither good nor bad. Inflammatory perhaps, but arrogant never, that's my motto.

Now if I can do this, using my own name and without setting off any alarm bells on the website, what this means is that anyone can register as anyone and leave an evaluation -- for anyone -- that says anything. That's right. You could do it from prison if you had internet privileges, or from Afghanistan, if you were just farting around in between avoiding the Taliban. So think about that the next time you go into a class feeling insecure and betrayed because someone has posted something nasty about you on RateMyProfessors: it might not even be one of your students who did it. Furthermore, it makes you wonder -- when most professors have fewer than a dozen ratings, if someone has amassed an unusually high number -- sixty or seventy say -- who the heck is actually adding them? Can it really be students?

RateMyProfessors does not address the question of verification anywhere on its site, nor does it even suggest that it is possible for a person who is not actually your student to post a review of your teaching. But it does have a page where the site managers tell you what you can do to correct an unfair comment (other than post a video of yourself telling your students how wrong they are, a new feature called "Professors Strike Back" that is designed for those of you longing for your own reality show.) You can also ask that the comment be reviewed by the site managers as false or defamatory, as I did with the comments above: when it is, should they decide not to put it back up, the rating itself remains, something they don't tell you. But what else can you do? Why you can give them more publicity! As they explain:

"The best thing you can do is write an article about the site in your school paper. This ALWAYS has a huge impact on the number of ratings and makes the site become less entertainment oriented (an admission that selling advertising is the actual point of this website -- duh) and more of a resource for helping you plan your class schedule. Other things you can do is post flyers around campus, post links to the site on message boards that are school-related, and email your friends about the site."

Other than friendly advice on how to make a complete fool of yourself, this speaks to what I think is the central feature of the site. Students need to be highly motivated to use it, and normally they are motivated because they really like you or, conversely, they are getting revenge for some imagined or unimagined insult by writing something spiteful in public. The suggestion that professors themselves should mobilize students to "tell the truth" about their classroom experiences I find just bizarre and manipulative. I mean, who would do that?

But this isn't the only problem with RateMyProfessors from my point of view, or even the one that deserves serious attention. The problem is that, while accepting employment at a college or university means that you agree to the principle that your teaching will be evaluated as part of your contract with the school, none of us have any obligation to have things written about us by God Knows Who on a site that is completely and utterly commercial. Furthermore, the site can do whatever it wants with the ratings -- including, if it desires, publish a book based on the "data" it collects. The Terms of Use state explicitly that everything posted to the site is owned by the site and, while posters are warned that they may not do anything that violates civil or criminal statutes, by rules they themselves have established, RateMyProfessors claims that it may reproduce anything on the site without restriction. I'm sure that this is boilerplate copyright language, and I am equally sure that the site manager's refusal of liability is unenforceable, but the point remains that we -- the faculty -- are the ones whose work and identities are the substance of the site. And we have not been asked for our permission for "data" to be collected and published about us.

But that said, corporations are not this powerful: I think universities and individuals probably have the legal right to have themselves removed from, or to opt-out of, this site. If I knew how to do it I would, just on principle. Like Facebook, it is nothing but a crude marketing device in drag, where getting you on the site and keeping you there for as long as possible is the real point.

What Time Is It? It's Senior Thesis Time

Actually, it's past senior thesis time. I advised two wonderful honors students, read five other theses (also real labors of love -- my Zenith students never fail to impress me when they put their hearts into something), awarded a prize or two (or six, depending on who and what you are counting), and I have two more comments to write. Then I am done for this year. And of course, just as we send this group off into the sunset, the juniors start poking their heads around the doorjam and saying, "Professor Radical -- I'd like to talk about my idea for a thesis?"

It's the time of year that I am full of gratitude: gratitude for students who did their work with integrity and shared it with me, gratitude that a new group has enough faith in my powers of whatever to give it a whirl despite my obvious flaws, and gratitude -- well....

That I wasn't Aliza Shvartz's tutor at Yale!

You knew I had to get around to this story eventually, didn't you? I am proud to say, as a former member of the editorial board of the Oldest College Daily, that the Yale Daily News report on this strange event is still the best and least sensational account of Aliza's senior art project -- which may or may not have happened -- a performance piece for which she claims to have inseminated and aborted herself repeatedly. Yale says it didn't happen; Aliza says it did, although initially (apparently) she said it didn't and then she changed her mind. What we can infer is that she doesn't appear to have any politics whatsoever, since the project was all about her feelings and experiences as she turned her body inside out, but not about abortion per se.

All the same, incoherent and weird as this seems from the sparse and contradictory information that has leaked from meetings where Yale officials are ripping their hair out, subsequent media coverage has just been too bizarre. FOX quotes NARAL communications director Ted Miller's opinion that Shvartz's project "is offensive and insensitive to the women who have suffered the heartbreak of miscarriage" (since when has miscarriage been a critical issue for NARAL?); and National Right to Life Committee President Wanda Franz's view that the Yale senior is "a serial killer."

As FOX says: We Report. You Decide. Just like on Tenured Radical.

Perhaps in an attempt to be helpful, Discover Magazine suggests that Yale test the installation (which never got installed) for Shvartz's DNA, while the New York Times helpfully notes that it could also be tested for the presence of hormones only produced during pregnancy. Oh, let's not and say we did. Maybe instead Yale could gift some DNA testing to some poor schmuck on death row somewhere, now that the Supremes have decided that death by lethal injection is not cruel after all.

Sigh. Such a mess. The Chronicle of Higher Ed has some pretty good coverage, although click here if you want to read ninety-six ways to call someone you don't know, and know almost nothing about, a sicko. However, in yet another moment where women become responsible for all the moral outcomes of reproduction, no one but the OCD is interested in pursuing the question that first popped into my head (after, I admit, "What was her advisor thinking?") which was -- where and how did she collect the alleged sperm? As Yale Daily News reporter Martine Powers explained,

"The 'fabricators,' (nice touch, Martine - sift through these articles, and you will see that I am not the only person who thinks there was no sperm) or donors, of the sperm were not paid for their services, but Shvarts required them to periodically take tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages. (Really? Perhaps because the doctor would have told her she was completely insane. Just a thought. And anyway, she had an advisor in the Art department for that kind of conversation!)

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, (ok, I'm thinking you loiter around Tang Cup practices, ask for volunteers, plastic cups are right there and can be rinsed out) as well as the number of times she inseminated herself....Pia Lindman, Schvarts' senior-project advisor, could not be reached for comment Wednesday night."

Well, I'll just bet that Professor Lindman was not available for comment. I would have been at home, cell phone at the bottom of the toilet tank, heavily medicated and wishing I had really insisted on those weekly tutorial meetings after all. And my guess is that the next time she is available for comment she will be working somewhere else. Yale -- otherwise known as Oligarch in these pages -- does not take kindly to having been made a fool of.

But my other thought is -- if Shvartz is not deranged, which she might be (it is also worth noting that academics at all levels who are otherwise sane are capable of telling giant, improbable whoppers, so it's hard to know) -- maybe the "abortions" were never the "performance" in the performance art at all -- maybe it's the rest of us responding to it that is the actual art! Now, how radical would that be?

Be Afraid of Your Wife: Feminism and the History of Everyday Rage

(Crossposted at Cliopatra)

A Vietnam-era suburban housewife is standing in front of a kitchen counter. She stares calmly and without expression into the camera, as if she is the star of her own cooking show. “Knife,” she intones, displaying a knife in her right hand. With short, violent strokes she stabs the cutting board in front of her. She puts the knife aside. “Measuring cup,” she intones, and begins to flip an invisible liquid into the face of an invisible person. “Nutcracker,” she says, holding up the new implement and snapping it together sharply three or four times before setting it down.

Ouch. “Semiotics of the Kitchen” (1975), one of five short performance pieces produced and filmed by Lynda Begler, shows how ordinary kitchen implements express a woman’s rage, or what Betty Friedan famously called “the problem that has no name.” But Friedan – and other feminist writers – are considerably better known than the many female visual artists who worked for women’s liberation from 1965 on. If you are interested in an understudied, and dramatic, cultural history of second wave feminism, run – do not walk – to see “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” an exhibit at P.S. 1 in Long Island City, New York.

Curated by Connie Butler, WACK! represents 120 artists, collectives and collaborations in an international mixed media display that stretches from the mid-1960’s into the 1980’s, with the bulk of the exhibits concentrated in the years that defined movement feminism, 1966 through 1975. Collectively, and emphasizing images of domestic objects that defined bourgeois women’s existence during the late Cold War, the exhibit centers a series of critical questions that were central to feminist consciousness raising as it distinguished itself from other New Left movements. How does women’s oppression become visible in normal and everyday settings? Under what conditions does domestic patriarchy intersect with other oppressions, such as racism and American imperialism? What do women look like – and how would we know, when images generated by consumer culture construct “womanhood” as an artifact of cosmetic and commercial perfection?

Reading the exhibit as a historian of political feminism, and not as a historian of art, I was nevertheless struck at how difficult it was for these women to be perceived as artists at all when the gritty masculinity of the Cedar Tavern crowd in downtown New York dominated the gallery scene in these years. Entering the exhibit on the first floor, I was immediately drawn to Mary Beth Edelson’s “Some Living Women Artists” (1972), a photo collage in which a spoof of the Last Supper (Georgia O’Keefe’s head placed on Jesus’ body, surrounded on either side by twelve “apostles” that include Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois and Yoko Ono), is framed by miniature photographs of sixty, less well known, women artists. Further into the exhibit, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic’s silent film “Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful” (1973) displays the dilemma of recognition for women artists, as Abramovic slashes at her thick, dark hair with a comb and brush for fourteen and a half minutes. Sometimes scraping her face and yanking at herself viciously in this “beautifying” effort, she obsessively mouths the title of the piece.

Even those with casual knowledge of the early years of women’s liberation will recognize one of its central themes, the critique of a consumer culture that urged women to perform a feminine role scripted by others. This later acquired a name, both among radical feminists and gay liberationists: “looksism,” something that women’s liberationists freed themselves from by throwing away girdles, bras, curling irons, make-up and shaving devices. Ann Newmarch’s photographic collage “Look Rich” (1975) centers a magazine clipping from a women’s magazine that urges women to “look rich” while on vacation, and to purchase expensive luggage, so that they can attract potential marriage partners. In block letters, the artist comments: “We must risk unlearning all those things that have kept us alive so long.” In “Beauty Knows No Pain” (1972), Martha Rosler cuts strategic holes in print advertisements for foundation garments and lingerie, inserting pictures of breasts and other body parts, so that the models blatantly display what these feminine garments are intended to both conceal and “sell” to men. Predictably, several exhibits – Ann Mendieta’s photographic series “Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints, 1972)” and Alice Neel’s oil on canvas portrait “Margaret Evans, 1978” – address this theme by showing women’ naked bodies in their most unflattering light, the first distorted by the pressure of glass against skin and hair, and the second distorted naturally by the final stages of pregnancy.

In another register, Betye Saar’s “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972), one of the few pieces by a black artist in the collection, shows a raised plastic cartoon “Mammy” doll, positioned in front of a background made from multiple pictures of a more comely, domesticated “Jemima” cut from the pancake box. A broom in her right hand, “Jemima” carries a rifle in her left: under one armpit is a pistol, and inset into her capacious skirt is a portrait of yet a third “Jemima,” holding a particularly anxious-looking white baby. Rising up in front of the whole collage is a brown fist, raised in a black power salute.

Although the exhibit offers much to think about, a great deal of it can be best appreciated as a commentary on a time when, as Ruth Rosen has put it, “The world turned upside down.” One series, however, bridged past and present for me by its insistence that prosperity at “home” is inevitably linked to a violent foreign policy: Rosler’s series of collages (1967-72) that contrast everyday household scenes with a parallel world of U.S. imperialism in Viet Nam. In “Red Stripe Kitchen,” two GI’s are rummaging through a suburban American kitchen, one peering around a doorjamb, perhaps looking for insurgents; the other is thoughtfully removing a rocket from a kitchen cupboard, as if it were a favorite chafing dish. In another brightly-colored collage, an American woman in a seductive pose is reflected in a bedroom mirror, but out the window and on television we can see artillery firing in black and white. In a third, a napalmed Vietnamese woman cradles her baby in her arms as she runs through a bright, sunny living room carpeted in white shag. Yet another features a photograph of a brick suburban ranch house; on the curb, a private soldier pauses in between firefights for a cigarette break.

The exhibit, in its insistence that viewers question the “normal” – or the connections between what we consider normal and the violence to self and other that the normal conceals, reinforced the intellectual links in my mind between second wave feminist theory and queer theory. But the exhibit also does the important work of linking feminism to a variety of New Left movements, and demonstrates visually how much intellectual exchange there was between feminism and other political impulses, even as feminist activists began to narrow their focus to violence against women by the mid-1970’s. As the 1969 proposal Mierle Laderman Okeles performance piece “Washing/Tracks/Maintenance” (1973), in which she described how she would live and clean publicly every day in a gallery, asked: “after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage Monday morning?”

Since the revolution didn’t come, we never got to find out – although we could probably guess, which was Okeles’ point. But for historians who are interested in what a lesser-known feature of the women’s movement looked like, this exhibit is a gem: don’t miss it.

“WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” is at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, 22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave., Long Island City, New York, 11101, through May 12. Open 12-6, Thursday – Monday. Admission is $5.00.

Return to Sender; or, the Art of Rejection

In response to recent accusations of smuggery, I would like to say that, although I occupy a privileged position in the world, I am still subject to rejection from time to time. I hate rejection. It makes me feel unwanted. I hate it when students reject me by writing mean teaching evaluations. It makes me feel misunderstood and resentful. Fortunately it doesn't happen very often.

I have had to get used to rejection, though, since between my exalted position as Chair of the Program and the never-ending project of keeping my scholarly life vital, I have to apply for things constantly -- internal to Zenith as well as external -- and, as they say, you can't win 'em all. One year, during the Unfortunate Events, because members of my department were giving me the Big Raspberry and because I couldn't really sleep, I applied for everything under the sun: five jobs, three year-long fellowships, and a tiny research fellowship that the actual fellowship committee chair at the archive had urged me to apply for. It was that last one that tore it -- I sat down on my front stairs and wept. Never, I vowed, NEVER will I apply for anything again -- not even an extension on my taxes.

I got over it. And now, because of "my privilege," as my Zenith students would put it, and because I am really an optomist, I apply for things all the time without worrying much whether I will get them or not. Jobs, fellowships, symposia where your work has to be accepted. And sometimes I do get them, or in the case of jobs, I get a nibble here and there. This is an ideal outcome, by the way, if you are already employed in a good situation: I know I am appreciated, but I don't have to move or say goodbye to my friends. Although I must admit, my friends seem to say goodbye to me with regularity -- another story, for another day.

But because I have been getting a few rejection letters myself, and because I recently sent sixty or so of them, I have been following the discussion in the blogosphere about rejection letters rather avidly. These are people being rejected for tenure track jobs -- one fellow apparently took to papering the wall of the TA lounge with them. This is what I have learned: many of you do not do such a great job rejecting people -- some of you never send a thing, assuming that time will pass and people will just get it after a while that they aren't going to be interviewed. So pay attention, search chairs of 2008-09:

1. Do not send rejections by email.
2. Do not send rejections by post card.
3. When writing a letter to candidates, if you actually met them, or solicited the candidacy, take two seconds to write a personal note. This means not having your departmental secretary sign them, of course.
4. Send rejections in a timely way: at least when the search is over, if not before. In fact, although wisdom has it that you reject no one until the chosen candidate has signed on the dotted line, truth be told, a large part of the pool is out of the running after the first cut. Why not tell the people who didn't make the semi-final cut -- say, in January, rather than April?

I suspect I get the special handling variety of rejection letters because of the rank thing, but there is no reason that has to be so. Being respectful to job candidates goes a long way, from my perspective. I would like to say that this year I got no response from one search chair, one ordinary "We hired blah blah blah..." letter, and two particularly nice letters, both from (cough, cough) women. Odd coincidence, no?

One letter - that came by email, true, but I don't really care -- said it was so good to have read my materials because there might be a position that suited me better some day (isn't that nice? It was the posiiton that didn't fit the candidate, not the candidate that didn't fit the position. Sweet.) The other said that I was not a candidate because of how the position was ultimately defined, not because of "any deficiencies on [my] part." Again -- nice.

Of course, the last letter struck exactly the right note, since this is the letter I always fear I will receive:

Dear Professor Radical,

Are you kidding? We have people defending dissertations who look better on paper than you do. And full professor? Puh-lease.

Sincerely,

Sherman Pinprick
Distinguished Tinky Winky Chair of Queer Studies
Venerable University

P.S. You also didn't get the job because of your stinking blog.

Congratulations Brian Donovan

Since the Radical is now associated in the public mind with all things tenure, I noted with pleasure last week that The Chronicle of Higher Education had linked me with this YouTube video, which is one of the most perfect visual conceits I have ever seen.

Now, I ask you -- how funny is this? Very funny. It also makes me jealous that he knows how to make a video like this and I don't. Finally, it reminds me that one of the things I love about being an academic is the wit and the high jinks. Other than professional comedians, the only group of people who are funnier are people who work in advertising.

So just in case you think the Radical has fallen into the trap common to radicals everywhere -- in other words, taking her political positions so seriously that she loses her sense of fun (North Korea is a good example of this error, as was the second incarnation of the radical feminist collective Redstockings) -- let's give a big round of applause for Brian and everyone else who made it through the tenure process this year.

And for those of you who were made to walk Spanish: take heart. Life will go on, most likely even better than before.

Thinking War, Thinking History: A Short Review Essay

(Editor's Note: every once in a while, someone who follows the Tenured Radical is Reading feature asks what I think about a book I have read. Mostly I don't say, since it would be a great burden to review everything, and because there is a reason book review sections have editors. However, as I am formally inaugurating my relationship with Cliopatra today, I though this cross-posted essay might be a good start.)

Perhaps it is an effect of the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, or perhaps it is the impending retirement of my American Studies colleague Richard Slotkin, but I seem to be reading more about war and violence this year than I have in the last decade.

Following on William A. Williams’ Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), a book that sought to understand how the project of democracy could be simultaneously well intentioned and destructive, a few scholars of the United States – Slotkin among them -- proposed that the history of violence was central to the formation of an “American” identity. Critical to this was a re-examination of the intellectual relationship between American democracy and the frontier, articulated originally by Frederick Jackson Turner (1893). Slotkin, for example, argued over the course of three volumes that it was not the frontier itself, but rather the naturalization of violence particular to the “frontier” -- on the Great Plains, in southeast Asia, or wherever Euro-Americans encountered racial “others” -- that shaped and re-shaped American culture and politics. His most recent book, The Lost Battalion: the Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (2005) explores another, paradoxical, feature of this history of national violence: the exclusion of African Americans from democratic rights in 1919, despite black soldiers’ hopes that participation in World War I might result in full citizenship.

In the spirit of what I have cited above, I would like to take special note of four books I have read recently. Each pursues important questions about the history of violence, war and nationalism that are useful to us as historians and as critical thinkers about the contemporary United States.

The first volume I would recommend is Ned Blackhawk’s Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Blackhawk is part of a generation of Native scholars who are making radical interventions in American history. Violence Over the Land demonstrates the consequences of European imperial ambitions for Native North Americans from the sixteenth century onward. But it is the Indian empires of the Great Basin, primarily the Ute, Paiute and Shoshone nations, their strategies, economies and political cultures, which are central to this history of American borderlands. It is also significant to note that Blackhawk, following Richard White’s influential The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics In the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (1991), challenges the idea of an American “frontier” that moved in a linear way. Rather, Indians negotiated their survival on multiple, overlapping frontiers. Simultaneously, intermingled Americans, English, French and Spanish colonists and entrepreneurs created the political, economic and environmental conditions for the success of a United States imperial project in the Far West well before it was fully launched in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The second book on my list is a cultural and political history of death that has already received well-deserved attention, Drew Faust’s, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.) Faust asks a critical question that could usefully be asked about other wars and different forms of social violence: what is the impact of unimaginable death on a society? And how do people assimilate, and learn to cope with, a way of dying that is new to them? Of course, this is a particularly relevant question for the Civil War because, as Faust points out, neither the United States nor the Confederacy had any reason to imagine in 1861 that death might occur on such a scale. Furthermore, the idea that family members might die anonymously far away from the comfort loved ones normally provided, that soldiers might be dismembered and/or buried in haste, was unimaginable to antebellum bourgeois Americans who idealized a “good death.” Asking us to think about the everyday consequences of war to those who bear the brunt of it seems particularly relevant at a moment in time when the United States military works assiduously to keep the dead and wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan uncountable and hidden from view.

My third pick is historical fiction: Pat Barker’s Life Class (New York: Doubleday, 2008). Barker is a British novelist who won the Booker prize for The Ghost Road (1995), the third volume of her trilogy about World War I. This book views the Great War through the eyes of a group of friends whose studies at the Slade are interrupted in 1914. Similarly to Faust, the grisly descriptions of soldiers’ wounds point to the horrifying details of battlefield violence that individualize death through detail: for example, the slight – but consequential -- fact that on the Western Front men died of injuries that might have healed, had dirt teeming with untreatable microbes not been blown into the wounds. One cannot help but think of the contemporary phenomenon of suicide bombers, or IED’s exploded next to groups of soldiers and civilians, during which microscopic bits of human flesh penetrate and infect the skins of those who survive the attack. But the intellectual questions the book asks also should compel historians: does war awaken sensibilities that give art depth and meaning it might not otherwise have? Under what conditions does an aesthetic approach to war trivialize its violence? And under what conditions might any of us – as one female artist in the novel does – decide not to “see” the violence of war at all, and choose to focus on art instead?

My final pick is Cathy Wilkerson’s Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), and I make this recommendation as someone who thinks virtually all memoirs from the radical anti-war movement are oddly annoying historical documents. Bill Ayer’s book, Fugitive Days, which had the bad luck to publish on September 11, 2001, romanticizes the violence and overestimates the political impact of Weatherman; Jane Alpert’s Growing Up Underground (1981) is simultaneously apologetic and too quick to pin responsibility on her co-conspirators. Furthermore, no former activist can write honestly about what happened, since there are people who might still be harmed by what is revealed. But what I love about the Wilkerson book is that it asks the question: how did someone who cared so deeply about peace and justice come to embrace violence as a political necessity? Wilkerson embeds the answer in autobiography, in an excellent social history of the New Left, and in reflections on the life-long burdens she has had to come to terms with for having chosen violence over peaceful opposition to a deeply immoral war.

The Check is in the Mail; or, What to Do With an Honorarium

Because of a lovely speaking gig in the Midwest last week, I find myself in possession of an honorarium this week. Furthermore, because I won a prize in March for my article on Miss Mary Hoover (it was the Audre Lorde prize, given by the Committee for Lesbian and Gay History, an AHA affiliate), I was in possession of another, smaller, check. But it was a check all the same, one that was not only unexpected, but really a bonus, since who ever expects to make any money on an academic article? Much less win a prize, so that now the "awards and fellowships" section of my vita actually has an award on it? Last, but not least, I expect George Bush to send me a very large check later this month, most of which will go to pay my bloated Shoreline property taxes in June, but there will still be some left over. What do you do in such a situation of excess, dear? I mean, after buying a flat screen TV so that our nephews no longer mock us because we are still happy with a twelve-inch Trinitron?

Well, I always start by saying: "Thank you." Thank you Goddess, for my good health, and the job that allows me to write rather than drive to six colleges every week to teach twelve courses a semester; and thanks to those of you who took the time to judge the Audre Lorde prize and give it to me. Thanks to the journalthat published Miss Thing after two journals rejected her. Thanks to the Director of Women's Studies at Little Midwestern College, one of the many unsung heroes of higher education who, this spring, spent a lot of time arranging my visit when she could have been doing her own writing. Thank you fate, not just for getting me a nice job, but one that pays well (my rants against tenure have revealed that many of you out there, of similar rank and accomplishment, make half to two-thirds what I do.) Thank you that I am not being foreclosed on, or paying for chemotherapy with my tax return. Thank you, George W. Bush for not spending every single dime I sent you on outsourcing the war at premium prices.

But now that the thanking is done, here's the question: what to do with the extra money? If I were a graduate student or an adjunct, I would probably buy food. But I have a salary that pretty much takes care of that, plus the utilities and the car insurance. So what to do with windfall profits?

I put them in my Vanguard Roth IRA.

You see, I had one of those old-fashioned fathers, who would not have understood the current world of credit and debt we live in: he had an American Express card, which he paid every month. He is the only person I have ever heard of who paid cash for a house (ok, Tony Soprano did, but my dad was a gastroenterologist.) The idea that you would take a loan on your home to consolidate your credit card bills would have appalled him. And he was the kind of father who said, when I graduated from college, "Just remember: when you get a paycheck, pay yourself first." What this meant was, no matter how little you can save, save it anyway. People like Suze Orman make zillions from giving this kind of advice now. My father wrote a book called A Better Life With Your Ulcer, which, despite the snazzy title, did not make zillions.

Of course, I completely ignored my father's advice for many years, and for the same reason many of you will ignore mine now: during years when I was scrounging under the sofa for pizza money, or even later when the mortgage for our first house in Zenith plus the rent in New York was more or less cleaning me out - like many of you -- I didn't have any money. Then when I did have money, I started amping up my TIAA-CREF (word to the wise: do not even open your TIAA-CREF statements for a few years. It's bad right now.) But a few years back, I found myself in possession of a chunk of cash for which there was no earthly use except perhaps to take a ski trip. Instead I bought a Roth IRA. And now, whenever I get a royalty check (always small), or a speaking fee (bigger, but not as large as Bill Clinton's), or any other unexpected windfall, I send it off to Vanguard, on the theory that $100 saved today will grow exponentially by the time a take it out at age 70. Why do I recommend this policy? Because even with the instability of the current market, I am over $7,000 ahead of my original investment after only five years of this personal savings plan. By my calculations, and adding a social security payment of a little more than two large after age 67, that is an extra three months of retirement at my current after tax budget.

And actually, Vanguard shares have only dropped four dollars over the past year, so it's really ok to open the envelope.



In other news, I am pleased to say that I have been invited -- and have accepted the invitation -- to join Cliopatra, a group history blog hosted by George Mason's History News Network. Don't read it yet? Well, if you snooze, you lose, that's all I can say. Stay tuned.

Tenure, Tenure -- Who's Got the Tenure?

Apparently not a number of women at Baylor. In yesterdays' Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik reports that in a move that is spreading through colleges and universities like the herpes virus, Baylor University administrators decided to "raise standards" for tenure this year, subsequent to the cases being prepared and submitted. They did this without informing anyone who would be affected by it, or the tenured faculty, for that matter. This means that probationary faculty who did what they were asked to do, and even those who might have looked beyond their department for a second opinion as to how to meet the bar, were hammered. Tenure denials went from ten percent to forty percent. Two-thirds of the women up for promotion were denied.

The story is a follow-up on a Monday story that features yours truly. Many hits to the Tenured Radical story linked to Scott's Monday piece, (almost 700), but no comments left: strange. However, I would report two interesting features of the comments left at IHE. They are overwhelmingly pro-tenure (fair enough, I understand that), but the comments are almost all aimed at the protection of academic freedom during the post-tenure years. Few are interested in what I think is a key question: what is the effect of the tenure process on young scholars, and how do we protect their academic freedom? Few people are also interested in unionization as an alternative. A third feature of these comments is that, as one of the commenters pointed out, that although they are overwhelmingly from tenured people, virtually all are written pseudonymously. Which suggests, as this commenter pointed out, that they don't feel that their speech is well-protected by tenure or -- that something else, a sense of one's reputation being fragile -- is provoked by even talking about tenure.

Air Radical

The Radical is once again airborne -- for those of you hoping for a sighting at the Organization of American Historians meeting in New York this weekend, no dice. I had to stay home and finish working on the talks I am giving over the next couple days. For those of you in the Twin Cities on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., you are invited: go here for details. I am also sure that super saver fares are still available for those of you who do not actually live in Minnesota but would like to come.

This visit is going to be a lot of fun: it's always nice to be wanted. The only thing I regret is that even if the Elite Eight match up between the Rutgers and UConn women's basketball teams is scheduled as the second game on Tuesday, I won't make it in time. Imagine: "I'd love to take more of your questions, really I would, but I've got to get back to my room and watch basketball." No, I don't think so. The Radical is many things, but not ungracious.

In other basketball news, it appears I am flying to Minneapolis with the Winona State University Men's basketball team, the new NCAA DII champions. Pray god this doesn't mean that I am part of a story that will be turned into a tear-jerker of a movie some years hence about how a small, gritty Midwestern school rebuilt its basketball dynasty after a tragic accident, a true American story of adversity turned to triumph. And of course they would make the movie that way, even though a far more popular plot would be the American Studies program that turned tragedy into triumph, conducting a search through a haze of tears, after the horrible plane crash that took the life of its dashing, brilliant chair. I understand it's a niche market, but imagine the great scenes you could shoot:

1) The president, provost and deans, weeping openly and unashamed as they authorize a new search for a tenure-track person, a search that suddenly reduces by half the budget allocation for my line.

2) Former enemies vowing to forgive all, and wishing only that there was time ("Goddammit! Why can't we have it to do all over again?!") to promote me to something beyond full professor -- Duke, perhaps; or fullest professor.

3) The heroic search comittee in the hotel room at American Studies Association, knowing they cannot possibly replace me without me there to help, but that they must, against all odds, try. Here, I think, we would need a pep talk from the search chair insisting that the committee go on, no matter what, because the Radical would have wanted it that way.

4) Campus visits, complete with the tension of not knowing whether an appointment will be made -- and if so -- will the provost sign off on it?

You see what I mean. I think it should be written by Mouse, produced by piggybank blues, and directed by Gayprof.

The Wacky World of History

If it isn't bad enough that it is increasingly difficult to find a publisher in European history, the Bushies, in their infinite wisdom, are going to make it more difficult to write European history too. It has just been brought to my attention that the work of European historians at the Library of Congress is to be interrupted indefinitely so that the Library can put up an exhibit on a Republican president who might perhaps divert us from thinking about the current one. Yes, we are about to have more Abraham Lincoln knowledge inflicted on us, courtesy of an administration whose only intellectual or political connection to Lincoln is the suspension of habeus corpus. As Michael Sizer of the Maryland Institute College of Art recently wrote for a post that did not make it onto H-France in its original form:

"I have just been informed that the Library of Congress has decided to close the European Reading Room. This is expected to happen quite soon - perhaps within a month, so that an exhibition on Abe Lincoln can be set up. They have made vague promises to reopen in the future, but this would be in a smaller space, and only after extensive renovations that may in fact not happen due to budget and logistical issues. So it is quite likely that the closure will be permanent, and even if it is not, it will only be after a long time that a new, reduced European Reading Room would be opened. The current space is set to be converted to another exhibition hall, which would bring in more visitors and revenue, but would continue to move the Library's institutional emphasis from assisting scholarly research to serving as a tourist destination.

"As someone who has done extensive research in the European Reading Room, and who has benefited from the excellent assistance of their dedicated staff (who fear that their jobs may also be cut), I consider this to be a very sad decision. Even if you haven't conducted research in the European Reading Room, I hope that you would agree that it is vitally important that our national repository of knowledge maintain a Reading Room dedicated to European Studies. The Library of Congress has more foreign-language materials than English ones, and the European Reading Room serves as an example for foreign visitors (who come through the room frequently on special tours, etc.) of the continuing interest that Americans have in learning about European culture and history. The French holdings at the Library are enormous, and include many titles difficult or impossible to find anywhere else in the United States. While they will still be accessible to readers in the Main Reading Room, the country-specific reference materials, databases, and, of course, the European specialist librarians will be less readily accessible.

"I would encourage members of the list to protest this decision to your congressperson, and also to James Billington, the Librarian of Congress. Previous efforts to close the African and Middle Eastern reading Room, which has fewer scholarly visitors, have been thwarted by protests from the scholarly community before. The Slavic studies folks (the most extensive users of the European Reading Room) are already organizing to express their displeasure. I urge French scholars to do the same!"

I, of course, imagine (wholly without evidence, which is to say it's Not True) that my old Oligarch college nemesis, Chicken Hawk and Bonesman Robert Kagan, having been irritated (but if I remember him correctly, probably not embarassed) by the failure of his lovely Middle Eastern war, is probably responsible for this. You know, he did write that mean book about Europe, also available in large print for elderly McCarthyite conservatives. But in the Wacky World of History, anything is possible, so let's not exclude the possibility! Thanks to Jack Norton, of Northwestern, for passing this story on: Jack tells us that you can click here to join a group of activists organizing to save the reading room.

Make Mine A Double, Please

The Hartford Courant informs us that there was a big meeting at Zenith over the weekend to discuss measures Connecticut colleges are taking against binge drinking and other forms of substance abuse. If you dig to the bottom of the article, there is a quote from New President who, like the rest of us, is against binge drinking.

What do I hate about binge drinking? On the weekends the students throw up behind trees and bushes and sometimes when I am walking my dog on Monday she.....well, I will stop there. She is a dog, after all. I bet this is what New President hates most too, it's just that it isn't a very Presidential thing to say to the newspapers, so he had to say the other thing.

Here's my historical question about binge drinking: why and when did it become a distinctively different college practice from what used to be known as drinking? I remember a lot of drinking at Oligarch, back in the `seventies. We had these things called "happy hours," which started at around 10 or 10:30 P.M. In other words, you left dinner, went to the library, and then rolled out of the library and went off to a happy hour. I remember the schedule like some people remember the Stations of the Cross: Tuesday, Pierson; Wednesday, Jonathan Edwards; Thursday, Calhoun. And then it was the weekend. There were Red Cups at Mory's -- or Green Cups, or Gold Cups. There were pitchers at Rudy's (and stealing people's pitchers at Rudy's so you could take them back for the deposit and buy another pitcher.) There were the bongs; and the speed; there was the spurious knowledge that it was fine to do cocaine, because it was non-addictive. There was Tang Cup (drinking beer at the speed of light, something women almost never did, except for super cool straight girls); and there was beer pong. There was Bladderball. Oh God, there was Bladderball.

So I hope I have demonstrated that I know A Few Things about college drinking. And I am old enough to remember that if you were having a really great conversation in seminar, you could walk downtown for a beer, and the seminar topic would stretch into other stuff, and you would start to really get to know something about what the other students, or the TA, or on really special occasions a professor, thought. But what I was not aware of was anybody dying from drink, or getting their stomachs pumped, or going to sleep and not waking up. This I don't remember, and frankly, I don't think it was a regular feature of college life until colleges, pressured by the government (and probably lawyers and insurance companies), started to crack down on underage drinking in the early 'nineties.

Don't you love the way the Republicans got government out of our lives?

But because I actually do remember how much we drank (a lot), and that we just got drunk-drunk as opposed to fatal/sick/lousy/brain-damaging drunk, my guess is that there is probably way more drinking going on at Zenith and other schools than I can possibly conceive of. And my guess is also that there are professionals on every campus who are coming up with very creative responses to this worrisome trend: many types of engaging alcohol-free events abound, I am sure. But here's a radical idea for you.

Let's get rid of the experts and go back to drinking with students. Let's stop forcing them to drink in secret as if we adults on campus thought drinking was actually a vice. Let's tell them it's normal to want to drink, talk to them openly about drinking, and then -- if we have the strength -- show them how. This is a plan, no?

We should lobby our state legislators as educators to lower the drinking age to eighteen; if the state won't do it, we can at least stop enforcing the draconian anti-alcohol policies that seem to have accelerated student drinking. Why not? I think what we have done is drive drinking underground, out of sight of all adults, and it means there is no reliable barometer for most students to know when, or for what reason, you should stop drinking. At Oligarch, half the time you had a drink in your hand there was a member of the faculty around, and even though you might get drunk, you wouldn't get so drunk that you would throw up on her shoes. And if it looked like someone was getting that drunk, friends would quietly remove that person.

The Master of my college did not believe any of his charges should be allowed to graduate without learning to mix a proper martini. Did you say, "How civilized?" I thought you did. And if you didn't know it before you were invited to martinis at the Master's house, you learned, under adult supervision, that one martini was enough in polite company. Because that's all he gave you. And it was enough. You didn't have six martinis and look back on it the next day and say, "I wonder if I should have had five instead?"

Here's my proposal: I think we need to take a leaf out of the book of the safe-sex people. Sex education is based on the notion that telling people not to have intercourse until they are ready for mature, committed relationships doesn't work, so instead the dominant practice at places like Zenith is to teach young people how to have sex without hurting themselves and each other by making fetuses they don't want, or by spreading diseases that range from being inconvenient to fatal. Why shouldn't we teach them to drink responsibly too? Show them how to get moderately drunk, and not so drunk that they forget how to care for themselves, or leave their dinner behind a bush. And we can't do that unless we are allowed, or even encouraged, to drink with them.

Spring Has Sprung: The Last Six Weeks of School

Right about now we all wander the halls saying to each other, "April is the cruelest month," as if no one has ever heard that before. But I wonder if that is just history departments, and whether in English they just start throwing things at you if you say something that dumb? Those of us who went to Oligarch back in the day sneak up on each other and whisper, "Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote..." and crack up. They probably don't do this in English departments either, even Oligarch alums, but for historians and other social science types it's a funny memory of the Path Unchosen on the way to the Ph.D. Oh, the English Lit. degree that might have been.

Anyway, to use another corny metaphor, this is when the chickens come home to roost, guys. Pre-registration for next year; recommendations for study abroad (hint to new profs: everyone who gets the application in on time gets in, and all they want to know is that the student isn't bonkers); applying for visitors for next year; applying to fill lines next year; getting your NEH grant in; helping students finish honors theses (to line edit or not to line edit -- that is the question); evaluating finished honors theses; two more assignments to grade; helping students figure out how to finish the class in a respectable way when the first two assignments didn't go so well; student demonstration (hint to new administrators: if it gets warm early, there will be student activism); meeting about things we forgot to meet about all year; getting courses into the curriculum for the people we just hired....and so on.

And meanwhile, there is still the garden to get in. One of the most dramatic ways my life has changed in the last fifteen years, as I progressed from probationary newbie to full professor/Drag King of the World has been less and less time available,not just for gardening, but for talking about gardening. For the first five or six years after I came to Zenith, there was a group of us who tracked each other's gardens with great care. We swapped seeds, we discussed mulch and cold frames, we talked about whether it really made sense to plant the peas on St. Patrick's day, given how wet our springs are in Zenith. We left overgrown surplus tomato seedlings on each other's doorsteps. We commiserated with each other the years that we did plant the peas on St. Patrick's day, and it worked, and then a late April windstorm destroyed the trellises and the vines that were on them.

Screw common intellectual life: it was a really nice way to know people that seems to have disappeared along with those dinner parties where we sat up half the night drinking and dishing, and still came in the next day and taught, goddammit. Mary McCarthy coulda written about it.

Now of course, we live hither and yon: some of us have summer places, so planting a New England garden no longer makes sense; all of us have more work every spring than we can hope to know what to do with. And some of us have children who are old enough to go to college next year. But you know, every time there are complaints about how Zenith has frayed as a community, or how we have to do some kind of structured activity so that we can cohere as a community, or what have you, what I really want to say is, "Look. We have too much work. Way too much work. Maybe we need fifty more faculty lines; maybe we just need to spread out the work more fairly among the people who work here already. But you know what? We used to plant gardens in the spring...."

Notes on the End of Spring Break

Spring break is almost over: in fact, you could say it is over, since around mid-afternoon, various beloved family members descend on our normally secluded life. So, much as I would like to write something fun for everyone today, I have to take a stab at doing some of the things I have left until the last minute. Although I am pleased to say I have accomplished much over break (in addition to screwing up my right knee, so that until I got a lovely shot of cortisone under my patella I spent several days on a cane imagining myself lurching aggressively around Zenith for the rest of my career, like an academic version of Dr. House.) An yet, there are a number of items that remain on my list.

Like grading my midterm exams. Some things never change, eh? Even though I am at a stage in life where I have a grader to help me I still can't pull myself together to finish. Only my compulsive over-identification with students who actually took the exam two weeks ago will get me to do it at all before Tuesday, when I see them again.

I have, however, taken the time to add Easily Distracted, otherwise known as Timothy Burke, to my blogroll. Burke is a cultural historian at Swarthmore College. Those of you who read the comments as well as the posts at Tenured Radical will have already taken note of Burke's sane and thoughtful blogging style. If blogs had editors, I would make him one of mine. The other reason to add Tim is that both of my parents went to Swarthmore, and like nearly all Swarthmore graduates, believe that neither of their children have been entirely successful because we both eschewed invitations to attend the Pomona of the East as a way of saying that we wanted to carve out distinct lives of our own. This may or may not have been an error. Only time will tell. But in addition to enjoying Tim's posts, and believing that you will too, mother would want me to link him.

Department of Odd Coincidences

So after yesterday's post condemning tenure (again) I get back to work on the talk I am supposed to give on pornography (again) and I drift off onto the internet (again), clicking around to the sites listed on my sitemeter from whence people arrived at Tenured Radical. Eventually, I come up with a story from the Chronicle of Higher Education about:

Pornography and Tenure.

Go ahead. Make my day!

To make a long story short, a married couple out at New Mexico State University was just denied tenure, and they are charging racial bias. What they also reveal, however, was that shortly before they were denied tenure, John -- the husband part of the married couple -- received an e-mail from an associate dean that contained a "graphic sexual image." He complained to the dean; and shortly afterwards, the chair of the couple's department decided that neither member of the couple should receive tenure (in what world does the chair make this decision all by himself?). The implication -- as both the dean and the chair have stepped aside pending an investigation -- is that the two men were in cahoots in the porn e-mail cover-up, and clumsily trying to get rid of the only other people who knew about it. Well almost the only people -- apparently someone else in the department is a witness to the harassing e-porn too. S/he will probably have to be killed, since denying people tenure clearly does not shut them up in New Mexico.

Confusing, isn't it? Almost as confusing as the most recent governor of New York, David A. Paterson, letting us know, minutes after the swearing in, that he and his wife have been having affairs (in an ungentlemanly moment, towards the end of the story, Paterson suggests that Michelle, his wife started it.) And in case you were concerned about it, he did not use campaign funds to rent hotel rooms, only the campaign credit card. And the affairs ended a year or so ago, and everything is alright now in their marriage, thank you very much.

But back to the couple who didn't get tenure in New Mexico. I have to say, I think it was clever of the dean to send the pornography to the husband, not the wife, because it means he can't be charged with sexual harassment. Unless it's gay porn, in which case the dean is way out of luck and should consider being nominated for lieutenant governor of New York, because his academic administrative career is over. And in case you think, because of my last post, that I have lost my sense of humor about tenure (I never lose my sense of humor about pornography), read the comments at the end of the CHE story. Comments, written by ordinary people like you and me who are supposed to be working on a talk or something, are often the best part of odd stories published on line. This is the one that cracked me up: a guy who calls himself Art Vandelay (perhaps because that is his name) writes,

"isn’t that the way it always goes in academe? you open your email and …there it is…porn from your dean. you know what that means: no tenure. that tragic scenario is, unfortunately, repeated hundreds of times each day."

Conquest; Or, Why Do We Still Think Tenure Is A Good System?

The truth is that many of us don't think tenure is a good system, and would prefer to be in a union. Tenure is, in fact, a more or less abusive system, and one that reproduces power hierarchies as they exist in society and in the university. Many of us who make it through the tenure process with the lifetime sinecure that is promised often do so because we are really good at repressing what actually happened. It is true that women, queers and people of color are not always turned down anymore just because our presence makes others uncomfortable, or just because the kind of knowledge we produce is actually critical of what more senior people in the department do. But it is also true that the people who control tenure nearly always make us hurt for it, even when we get it. I was lucky: I got to put the hurt off until I was being reviewed for full professor.

Then I was not so lucky. And frankly, even though I have my job and my promotion, and I more or less have my career back, I am still angry about those three lost years. It didn't have to happen, except that some people who don't like me very much -- and others, who were insecure enough that they longed to be perceived as having "standards" -- decided it should. And that year, not a single woman was promoted, either to tenure or to full professor. There were five of us. And there are people who still think that was just a coincidence.

Go here for a wonderful post by Oso Raro at Slaves of Academe on the Andrea Smith tenure case at the University of Michigan. Oso inspired the thoughts that became this post. He is right: Smith will get tenure somewhere. She is brilliant -- I mean, really brilliant. She has written a book called Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide that many of us use, and she was once on a panel that I organized, and the rest of us were more or less blown away by the intensity and depth of her intellect.

But each complicated tenure case -- and we have had several at Zenith, to which I can only allude that much, since there are still people who are angry at me for writing pseudonymously about peripheral features of these cases -- leaves endless circles of damage in its wake. The number of walking wounded out there is staggering. I traded some email with someone this morning who told a familiar story: working in a department where so many people had been turned down for tenure, the senior people had forgotten how not to be abusive as a matter of daily practice. Not only does a tenure case gone bad hurt the person who has been denied, it creates havoc for supporters of that person. Furthermore, relationships crack open when an entire narrative is built up around the failed case by supporters and by opponents that, in the end, bears almost no relationship to the truth of what happened.

Years ago, when I still lived in Manhattan part time, I was out walking my dog one morning when I encountered a man, also with dog, and the dogs began walking around in circles sniffing each other's behinds, as dogs do. The companion man and I exchanged a few words, and in seconds he was blowing his stack -- not at me in particular -- but at Zenith, because 'lo and behold, he had not only failed to get tenure at Zenith, but had failed to get tenure in my very same department some ten years previously. What were the chances of that? And if he talked this way to strangers...well, you get the point. This guy's tenure case had changed his life forever. For the worse.

Who else is hurt by tenure? All the people who are friends, lovers, children and companions of those who come up for tenure. People who get tenure are harmed by tenure, often because they have had to bow and scrape for so long before The Man and the women who are also The Man that they don't know how to get back up again. Or they are so damaged by the process that they turn around and do the same thing to the next candidate coming up the pipeline.

Each tenure case, successful or failed, is an object lesson to the next cohorts coming up. Untenured faculty watch them like hawks, trying to glean information. What should I do? How many shall I write? Was K really turned down because s/he didn't live in Zenith -- went to the wrong dinner parties -- published in the wrong journals? Didn't publish enough? Did they count the articles that were out at journals when s/he was hired? Did the book come out too late -- too soon? Was s/he -- lower your voice to a hush -- "difficult?"

Of course, we are not allowed to tell. As Oso argues in his post, that would wreck the only thing that really makes tenure valuable: its mystery.

I have argued against tenure for several reasons: that it destroys mobility in the job market. That we would do better financially, and in terms of job security and freedom of speech, in unions. That it creates sinecures which are, in some cases, undeserved. That it is an endless waste of time, for the candidate and for the evaluators, that could be better spent writing and editing other people's work. That it creates a kind of power that is responsible and accountable to no one. That it is hypocritical, in that the secrecy is designed to protect our enemies' desire to speak freely -- but in fact we know who our enemies are, and in the end, someone tells us what they said. But here is another reason that tenure is wrong:

It hurts people.

If At First You Don't Succeed: Getting A Visiting or Adjunct Teaching Gig -- And Do You Really Want One?

Since the dollar is crashing, the Democratic nominee for President is as yet undetermined and Eliot Spitzer has gone home to either a divorce lawyer or years of couples therapy, it is time to return to those unworldly things that are preoccupying us as academics. And what's at the top of the list for the next two months?

Hiring, or getting hired as, a full-time visitor or adjunct.

Yes, now is the time that unexpected resignations are upon us. Searches have folded without a hire being made. It is the time of year that grants have come through for us, but perhaps not for you. It is the time of year that – for those of you have been on the market – you know now (or strongly suspect) that you won’t be interviewed for any of the jobs you applied for, or that someone else has been hired for the job for which you did get an interview. *Sigh.*

After a year of being on several search committees, I have read a lot of curriculum vitae, so today’s post is for those of you who have gathered the strength to be dusting off your c.v.’s, checking them twice, trying to figure out whether they make you look naughty or nice. You should be adding the things you have accomplished since the fall, updating the status of manuscripts out at journals and listing conference panels that have been accepted for next year. In other words, you are generally trying to make yourself look even more accomplished than you were back in September. So here are some things to check for.

Make sure your contact numbers are listed clearly at the top of the c.v., and that you are easy to reach. If you don’t feel comfortable listing your home telephone number, list your cell phone. There is nothing more aggravating than not being able to get hold of someone about a job, or having to leave a message on an office voice mail box where the message might not even be picked up until Monday. For a tenure-track line, if we are already interested in you because of your scholarship, we will take the time to track you down. For visiting and adjunct work, we may simply go on to the next person. Believe it or not, this kind of conversation happens around the country during Adjunct Season:

Chair of department (who is dishing off work to the newly minted associate prof. who needs to begin learning to do these things but, more importantly, is available to do it): “OK, so start at the top of the list of candidates we liked. The first one to answer and give a reasonable response gets the job.”
NMAP: “What if no one answers?”
Chair: “Leave messages. First one to call back and give a reasonable response gets the job.”
NMAP: “What if they don’t call back for a day or so?”
Chair: “Go back into the files and call someone else. Use the brains the Goddess gave you! We need to get this done before the administration pulls the funding.”

Now that we have it straight that you need to answer the phone, what does your c.v. need to do for you to generate that call from Opportunity U. in the first place? I have but two more pieces of advice, and they are very simple:

Your dissertation title, and the members of your committee need to be clearly listed at the top of the first page. You might be shocked at how many people fail to do this, or how many people make search committee members hunt through the various documents in the application trying to figure out this very basic information. Do not forget this one important fact: you are not you. You are (insert famous professor’s name)’s student, and you have worked with (insert the names of other famous people.) Given your limited teaching experience, knowing who you have been trained by gives us a better idea of what you might be able to do for Opportunity U. Indicate clearly which member of the committee is your primary advisor and – since the real job season is over – you can now be honest about when, realistically, you will be finishing the dissertation. In fact, you must be clear about this point, because if you are hired, you will be asked to provide proof: Ph.D.’s are paid at a different rate than ABD’s. If you had been hired in a tenure-track job, you would have finished the diss. in a long, ugly final push that would have warped your relationship to your work forever. Now you not only don’t have to finish, but you shouldn’t – you are crafting the document that is really going to get you a job next year. Take your time, for God's Sake.

The category “publications” should not be lumped together with any other category of scholarly activity. Best case scenario: it obscures the fact that you are quite well published for an ABD; worst case scenario, you look like you are trying to hide your insecurity that you have not published at all, or enough. Presentations of your work, at conferences or elsewhere, are not the same as publications, and when you bury that single paragraph you contributed to the Dictionary of Lesbian Painters in a collection of miscellaneous scholarly activities it does not obscure the truth: that you really have no publications to speak of. If you haven't really published, be brave and let it all hang out. More importantly, if you are applying for adjunct or visiting work, your publication record doesn’t really matter because we are more concerned about what you will do in the next twelve months than in the next seven years. In fact, this once, switch the section of courses you have taught and T.A’d with the list of articles you have published or that are in process. Courses you are willing to teach will go in your cover letter.

But here’s the other piece of advice I will give you. It is a real question whether you should get a full time visiting teaching gig; or whether you should stay away from teaching for a year, delay submission of your dissertation until April, and get some articles out to journals. If you can teach and write at the same time, fantastic. But also know that full time teaching is often consuming, even for a veteran teacher, and it is also really interesting, which means that you will want to spend time on and with your students that should probably be spent on your writing at this stage of your career. If you do not yet have publications and/or a polished dissertation, writing is a better use of your time in the long run, as long as you can find some other way to feed, house and clothe yourself, and as long as your committee will agree to keep you on the books for another year.

Because honestly? Showing that you are a mature scholar who can see an article through to publication and a person who has a clear sense of how the dissertation will become a book is going to help you far more than a year of teaching when, in the fall, you pull out your c.v., dust it off again, and go back on the market.

The Pain of Privilege; Or, You Thought College Admissions Couldn't Get Any Sillier, Didn't You?

Having created a ridiculous problem, which is that high school students have to build a resume and a transcript worthy of a Rhodes scholar to get into a selective four-year college, you will be glad to know that these coveted institutions and gatekeepers to success have found a solution to the stress this causes to young people. The answer is to throw money at it, imply that the students and their helicopter parents are pathological, and urge the admitted students not to matriculate until they have rested and feel less emotional and cynical about the whole thing.



That's right. Do not re-evaluate what you are doing that is causing kids to show up at college as nervous wrecks, and sometimes even leave after a month or two because they are so burned out and care so little about real learning anymore. Do not admit that, because of you, young people are running themselves ragged with multiple after school activities, course overloads, AP examinations, science fairs, commuting to college classes while still in high school, music lessons, meeting with their tutors, tutoring others less fortunate, and being three-sport varsity athletes to get a shot at going to a half-way decent school. Instead, denounce the fact that they are burned out after having done what you insist they must do to gain admission to your expensive university and encourage them to pay you even more money so that they can take a year off doing something enriching in a foreign land. By doing so, you can also help create a new class of experts -- in addition to the private athletic coaches, college application consultants, and SAT tutors who are already flourishing because of your ridiculous so-called "standards" -- who can be paid to help an Ivy League-bound teen relax in just the right way, get away from those pushy parents and regain her shattered peace of mind. All over the country gap year planners will help your child attain the maturity he had no opportunity to develop, so pressed was he with fulfilling his parents' ambitions -- not, mind you, competing realistically to get a place at a selective college or university.

That's right: as Alex Williams reports today in the New York Times,

Princeton unveiled plans to send at least a 10th of its incoming students abroad for a year of social service before starting at the university. High schools now hold gap-year fairs to teach students about the option, and companies and consultants that place students in gap-year programs (guitar-building in England or caring for injured sled dogs in Canada) are proliferating.

Full disclosure: I have had, and will have, a number of young people in my family who have suffered from the effects of what I now call the College Derby, who are actually quite privileged by comparison to most of the young people growing up here in Shoreline, and I think this story is just gross.

In addition to Williams' failure to acknowledge that it is a little nuts for the students in question to be so strung out in high school (something which is perhaps not entirely her fault, since selective colleges -- like the ones she researched for the story -- perceive all problems, even one the colleges are directly responsible for apparently, as having originated in high school or at home), the story also doesn't acknowledge that this year off costs an arm and a leg, effectively adding a fifth year of college fees. Nor does it acknowledge that working and poor people have another way of taking time off before college. It's called military service, without which they cannot hope to pay for higher education, but because of which they might leave all or part of their brains over in Iraq or Afghanistan, and thus perhaps be rendered less likely to make the most of the college experience.

I hate the war so much that it is rare for me to express the sympathy and compassion I feel for the men and women who are fighting it, and for the families who struggle financially and emotionally while soldiers are deployed. But is there a better expression of the "two Americas" that John Edwards put at the heart of his Presidential campaign than a story like this?

So some American kids will take their year off at cooking school in France, and some will take several years off (more, if the military exercises its option to keep them indefinitely; less if they get blown up or become deranged) in Kabul.

The Radical Stays Home For Spring Break

It's spring break. At last. Time to clean up my study and get back down to work; time to go through the 250 emails in my in box and figure out how to clear them all before I return to school. Time to remind myself why I do this for a living: as I have said before on this blog, "It's the vacations, stupid." It won't work as a campaign slogan, but it does work as a life plan.

Yesterday was also the day to make the annual pilgrimage to our accountant: he's a former IRS special agent, which gives me loads of confidence in whatever strategy he suggests to keep as much money as possible out of the hands of the government. He manages to project limitless optimism and good cheer, a feature that I am sure helped him be successful at the IRS too. I can imagine those he investigated being utterly captivated by his personality and leading him around the house to show where they stowed the large paper bags of money they never reported. He also believes in positive reinforcement: he congratulated me on how much money I made this year in speaking, writing and consulting fees (this prevents the federal government from declaring my unreimbursed research and writing expenses a "hobby," a truly fine irony given how crucial this virtually unpaid work is to my professional advancement); and he noted with pleasure how much of my total income I managed to tuck away in various tax-deferred accounts. One of the reasons I am glad that Mike Huckabee is apparently not going to be President is that if he closed the IRS as he had promised to do, then I would have no reason to visit this lovely gentleman to be told what a clever person I am for not having used the equity in our house as an ATM as so many Americans have done. And I would miss the traditional self-indulgent stop at Trader Joe's N and I make afterwards to reward ourselves for being such thrifty and, as our guy also pointed out, well-organized, people.

For all the younger faculty out there: save, save, save. The ability to retire from your full-time job at a reasonable age and live your life precisely as you wish to is something you need to think about decades in advance.

Because it is spring, it is also time for a little blogroll updating. I have taken a few people down who never seem to post anymore, but added the following history blogs:

Edge of the American West Do not be dismayed by recent chaos, which caused a single post on a Civil War battle to be reposted several times. This is a group blog, coordinated by Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman: you can read about them here. I am also long overdue in adding Rob MacDougall's blog, Old is the New New, which is really well-written and interesting.

Breakthroughs in Education Department

My partner N pointed me to this article in today's New York Times about a new charter school in the Bronx where one of the innovations is: teachers will be paid well. The idea is that you could get high quality teachers to commit to teaching secondary school by paying them as though they were intellectuals who did valuable work.

Jeez, why didn't I think of that? Teachers should be paid professionals, rather than robots reciting a set curriculum. Or recent college graduates looking to do a little social service before law school. Or grown-up lawyers who have made their bundle and think that teaching is going to be a snap after thirty years of doing wills and trusts. Each of these solutions, regardless of what their individual merits might be, relies on paying teachers as little a school district can get away with.

"The school," writes reporter Elissa Gootman,

"which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most generous districts nationwide.

The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high salaries will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial ingredient for success."

Now, I would just like to say that these teachers will be making twice the salary of a beginning assistant professor, and more than many (most?) full professors at private colleges and universities. It's 25% more than my base salary, and I have been a history professor for eighteen years. Of course, secondary school teachers work harder than I do too: ten months a year, five days a week, and more or less dawn to dusk. (Well, actually, that is exactly how hard I am working this year -- but I don't have to spend all that time with twelve year olds, a job for which I am not temperamentally suited. So I will take the pay cut, thank you.) And the energy that secondary school teachers have left over for other kinds of professional development -- conferences, writing -- is miniscule. So for this reason alone they should be paid as much or more than college teachers.

But I think this raises another point too, which is what we have not been willing to think about as a path to resolving the job crisis in the humanities more generally and in some of the social sciences: giving up the status distinction between different kinds of educational careers. Why shouldn't people with Ph.D.'s be teaching at the secondary level and be respected for it? Answer: because many of us in so-called higher education regard such teaching as low status work that returns few benefits. So instead we complain endlessly about the quality of students entering college today, and help new Ph.D.'s who don't get jobs put together tenuous strategies for staying on the job market as long as they can reasonably afford to do so. Those who do not make it into a tenure-track job move around the country for one year positions, put together brutal adjunct teaching loads, and so on. Then, when that stops working for them, these intelligent, outgoing people who really wanted to be teachers go to law school. What if teaching high school or middle school were actually regarded as high status work that did not close the door to a university job in the future? I'm thinking.

A very high salary that rewards the quality intellectuals who are already teaching in public school, and that draws more quality intellectuals who have been educated to teach ideas rather than tests -- would be one step towards thinking about education as a continuum, and dismantling the professional "tracking" system that stigmatizes community college and secondary school teachers as second-rank or failed scholars.