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

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

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

Me: "That soft thumping sound!"

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

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

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

OK, I'm being mean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Radical Opposes Boycotting Israeli Scholars In The Name Of Peace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In (Policy) Defense of the Humanities

by Jarrod Hayes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

On, Wisconsin! The Sex Prosecution of the Month

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

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

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

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

Not that this is a surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

Advanced Interviewing; or, My Favorite Martian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Will Be The "Obama Effect" for Women?

Over time the American conservative movement has actually agreed about few things. But ultimately, one might argue, it came together largely over a combined hatred of the New Deal and its children, Harry Truman's Fair Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. This hatred --which was ultimately expressed in polemic form as the need to defend the traditional nuclear family from the state -- coalesced over the course of three generations and came to embrace a broad social and geographical constituency over time.

We who are on the left, while we do not believe that the state is unequivocally our friend, also believe in the capacity of the government to legislate our protection and support as a people: national health insurance, civil rights protection, pensions and employment equity are important categories where we think government intervention has been, and will be, successful. But progressives would also do well to pause and think before they ask Barack Obama for the 21st century equivalent of the New Deal. It was the Roosevelt Administration, as Alice Kessler-Harris has noted in her book, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Pursuit of Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (2003) that, as it sought to empower working men in a capitalist economy, wrote social discrimination against women into economic legislation. Indeed, they saw this as recognizing the different role men and women already had in families and communities. Feminists who had worked for years in cross-class movements, many of whom lived with other women and believed marriage and family to be incompatible with a career, transported these ideas to Washington in 1933 (see Susan Ware, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism and New Deal Politics, a book which appears to be flying off the shelves at Amazon right now.)

One member of this network (all friends of Eleanor Roosevelt who had unique access to the administration as a result) was Frances Perkins. The official website of the Social Security Administration, where I found the above framed image of Secretary of Labor Perkins, the first woman to fill a cabinet level post, quotes her thus: "I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen." Eager to reinforce male bread winning as the foundation for "normal" families, fair labor standards, social security, the federal tax code and unemployment benefits all undermined an equitable workplace for women. And this was not just a question of gender discrimination, since although white working-class women did not have access to equal pay they did sometimes have access to unions. But women of color did not. By deliberately excluding domestic service from labor legislation, the Roosevelt administration specifically, and knowingly, undermined the economic citizenship of women of color, most of whom worked in what would now be called pink collar occupations.

And in her study of Social Security and AFDC, the two New Deal programs that, between them, "created the contemporary meaning of welfare," Linda Gordon argued over a decade ago that the state articulated poor women as widows and/or mothers, but not workers. As Ruth Crocker of Auburn University noted in a review of Gordon's book in 1995, the view that men were supported through wages and women through charity prevailed, "even though most poor women were also wage workers" (Gordon, 145) Gordon also cautioned us to remember that female policy makers, who had come out of a long middle-class feminist political tradition that saw working-class women's labor as ideally contributing to the economy in shoring up the nuclear family and raising children. As Crocker writes:

A central purpose of this history of policy-making is to explore why "welfare" or ADC programs took the shape they did -- how they emerged as one alternative among many. Black welfare thought provided one such alternative source of solutions, ignored rather than rejected by policy makers, and by historians of New Deal policy-making. Black welfare leaders were not consulted nor were their interests protected in the 1935 Social Security Act; their "alternative vision" was ignored by policy makers who also omitted domestic workers and agricultural workers from the Act's coverage. More disadvantaged than white women and disenfranchised even after 1920, black women nevertheless articulated a powerful "welfare vision" that was distinct from that of whites. Gordon provides a valuable summary of black women's welfare activism between 1890 and 1935. For African- Americans, the issue was not programs for the needy, but access for blacks of ALL classes to public services. These women organized, built, and sustained private institutions of health and welfare, defied stereotypes, asserted leadership, and struggled not as women, but as race leaders. Gordon makes the important point that for these women, welfare meant civil rights -- indeed, the assumption by policy historians of a dichotomy between welfare and civil rights stems from "a white notion of welfare" (Gordon, 119).

So in other words, it isn't an accident that we have not yet achieved equal pay for equal work, that women are more likely to be poor than men, and that the fastest ways for a woman to exit the welfare system before the state gives her the boot is to marry a man who has a job.

So let's not make the same mistake twice, shall we? In the wake of a petition circulating in the feminist blogosphere reminding President Obama that "shovel ready" projects in construction, transportation and public works may not employ women on the scale that they employ men, this great article by feminist labor historian and committed public intellectual Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California -Santa Barbara appeared in Salon on January 16. Infrastructure is important, says Boris, who is writing a history of home care workers (many of whom are organized by SEIU) with Yale's Jennifer Klein. "But we also need to enhance the social infrastructure, bolstering not only a green economy but also the carework economy, by generating and improving pink jobs in home care, health and education." As Boris argues, this will not only employ women, who represent 46% of the work force in the United States, but it will deliver services to the people whose need for services is often enhanced in times like these: the elderly, the sick and children.

Another One Bites The Dust

Richard Perez-Pena* reports in today's New York Times that conservative columnist William Kristol, by mutual agreement with the paper, will not be renewing his one year contract as a columnist for the Op-Ed page. Kristol will be writing for the Washington Post and contributing to its blog, Post Partisan. Note to the Post, where the Radical's old buddy from Oligarch OCD days, Ruth Marcus is holding down the fort: this is almost as cute a name as Tenured Radical. But not quite.

Ah Bill, we hardly knew ye. But Kristol could not have been happy at the Times. It's one thing to see your hideous little political world go down in flames, but quite another to be surrounded by a bunch of insanely happy liberals while it is happening. Perhaps because of constant liberal crowing, Kristol has seemed increasingly delusional since the Obama candidacy became an actual presidency. In yesterday's Will Obama Save Liberalism? Kristol asserted that "conservatives have more often been right than not." Do you mean on the right, dearie? Because if you mean correct, I have to ask you why our military is in pieces, our education and health systems are a laughing stock, the constitution has taken its worst body blows since Lincoln suspended habeus corpus, a quarter of the world is in flames, more Americans lose their jobs every day, and the American economy is in the worst shape it has been in for eighty years? I have to ask that, Bill. And lest we forget, how about the December 22, 2008 column in which Kristol shrugged his shoulders about Dick Cheney's historically low approval rating (15% at the time of the inaugural) and asserted that Cheney is a just and civil man. How does Kristol know this? Because when asked by Chris Wallace about whether he had any regrets about -- not the war, not torture, not subverting the Constitution -- but about telling Patrick Leahy to "bleep" himself, Cheney replied: "No, I thought he merited it at the time. (Laughter.) And we’ve since, I think, patched over that wound and we’re civil to one another now." Kristol reflected:

No spin. No doubletalk. A cogent defense of his action — and one that shows a well-considered sense of justice. (“I thought he merited it.”) Indeed, if justice is seeking to give each his due, one might say that Dick Cheney aspires to being a just man. And a thoughtful one, because he knows that justice is sometimes too harsh, and should be tempered by civility.

Bleeping awesome, Bill. Hold the tar, hold the feathers. And have fun in Washington. I hope your party doesn't hold the Palin thing against you for too long.

As a coda, I hope that the New York Times and other liberal media outlets will re-think the informal policy they apear to have adopted over the last eight years of hiring pet in-house conservatives simply because they are conservatives. In the first place, it's not something any conservative newspaper or magazine would do, and if my small experience as a blogger is at all representative, right-wingers will never, ever be convinced of the intellectual legitimacy of anyone outside their circles. But if you must hire a conservative, to keep poor, overworked conservative journalist David Brooks (currently house conservative at the Times, NPR, and the Lehrer News Hour) company, hire one who is willing to think rather than repeat and defend the same old cant. That's what will add real diversity to the Times Op-Ed page. Kristol's tenure at the Times was ridiculous from beginning to end (so ridiculous that this is the first time I believe I have written about it) because he is nothing but an ideologue who bends history and facts to his sunny, right-wing world view. The time for such people is over.

*SOS to GayProf: how do I do proper accent marks on Blogger?

Newsflash: Ned Blackhawk to Join Yale Faculty

This latest in from our friends on the Native Studies Listserve:

On January 23 the chairs of the Department of History and the American Studies Program at Yale University circulated email announcements stating that Yale successfully concluded negotiations with Ned Blackhawk and Birgit Rasmussen. Blackhawk, a leading scholar of American Indian history whose first book Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West garnered awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Western History Association, the AmericanSociety for Ethnohistory, the American Studies Association, and the Western History Association, will join the Department of History as Professor of Native American History. Birgit Rasmussen, as scholar of early American literature, will join the American Studies Program as Assistant Professor. (Hat Tip.)

Birgit Rasmussen's work I know less well, but your Radical is a huge fan of Ned Blackhawk, and in addition to congratulating her friends in the History and American Studies Departments at Yale for pulling this off, is running up the Radical flag in celebration of soon having Blackhawk and Rasmussen as neighbors. In other Native American Studies news, anyone in the Zenith vicinity is invited to attend a public lecture by Phil Deloria, American Studies, University of Michigan, this Thursday, January 29th at 8 p.m. The talk is titled "Crossing the (Indian) Color Line: A Family Memoir," and is at the Center for African American Studies Lounge, 343 High Street, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT, 06459. Deloria is the outgoing president of the American Studies Association.

Barack Is (Not) Responsible For Making All Things Good: The Radical Disputes The Proposal That There Is An "Obama Effect" On Education

Much as I would like Barack Obama to sprinkle magic dust all over the country, fixing racism, poverty, and absolutely everything we hated about the Bushies, each policy question will have to be tackled thoughtfully, one by one. Today's topic is the national education agenda.

A crucial issue here is the continuing mania for using public school children as a vast pool of customers for corporations specializing in both mass curriculum distribution and in the endless testing through which students -- on pain of humiliation, summer school, and being held back a grade -- are asked to regurgitate these educational products. (I use the phrase "educational products" consciously: currently, a standard curriculum in the United States is to education what Cheez Whiz is to cheese.) The sad backstory of test scores going up in any given school are the number of students who drop out, or are encouraged to drop out, because of their low test scores.

No Child Left Behind, built around a testing mandate, is a great example of "an expensive government program" (to use a distinction our new President made himself) that does not work and ought to be eliminated. While few federal tax dollars are spent directly on NCLB, its unfunded mandates put a huge financial burden on state and local education budgets. Under systems driven by high-stakes testing, students learn by rote, rather than becoming critical thinkers, many students drop out altogether rather than be left back a grade, and we are no closer to creating equal access to a good education than we were a decade ago. And yet, today's New York Times buries this issue with yet another assertion that the symbolism of an Obama presidency, rather than radical policy interventions, will fix what is broken in our nation by lifting up the self-esteem of African-American people. Our paper of record reports that education researchers tested a group of children before and after the presidential nomination. The test before the nomination demonstrated what is commonly called the "achievement gap" between African-American and white students. But in the test after the inauguration, presumably because their self-esteem was raised by watching an African -American man become president, the African-American students stepped up their game. On that second test, racial differences in the children's test scores were "statistically insignificant."

This, the researchers imply, potentially reinforces previous studies showing that white students do better on standardized tests because they believe that they will succeed; and that African-American students do significantly less well on the same tests because they believe they will do poorly. I am sure I am over-simplifying a large body of research, but as a historian, to design one's research around such a notion seems pointless, particularly since this longstanding belief has never done anything to actually make Americans a better educated people. I am reminded of Booker T. Washington's firm belief that education was useless to formerly enslaved people until they had acquired self-esteem through physical and moral uplift (personal hygiene, and specifically proper deployment of the toothbrush, was one way to develop self-esteem; another was to learn how to make an excellent brick.) Such arguments have been by no means solely the province of African-American social scientists and educators. Post-1945 white liberals like historian Kenneth Stampp were entranced by the notion that persistent social inequalities are a result of low self-esteem, rather than ongoing racial and class inequality. By the 1940's, self-esteem arguments had moved into progressive, anti-racist social science through the black doll-white doll test designed by influential African-American psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark, used as evidence in Briggs v. Elliott (1952) and other lower court cases folded into Brown v. Board of Education (1954). As Waldo E. Martin has noted, this test was not without critics on both sides of the issue, many of whom saw methodological flaws in the Clarks' experiments. However, the gravity of the moral issues at stake, Martin writes, meant that arguments about self-esteem resulting from the study nevertheless became powerful visual evidence in what stands out as a classic liberal decision by the Warren court.1

Brown, of course, eliminated de jure segregation, which was important. But it failed to address other educational questions that contribute to what we now call the achievement gap, because the scope of the decision, influential as it was, left undisturbed the connections between segregation, institutional racism and economic inequality. Furthermore highly theatrical demonstrations, filmed and widely distributed, of serious African-American children unerringly choosing the white doll, became one of the great reproaches to liberals of interventions too long delayed and compromises too often made, just as southern whites with hate-twisted faces spitting on African-American grade schoolers is a past that conservatives will have to endure as part of their history. To this day arguments about self-esteem dominate our discussions about the education available to children of color. While not entirely unimportant, they have a tendency to occlude other kinds of questions that should be asked about why our public education system is in such terrible shape.

In the spirit of full disclosure, we at la casa Radical wish that Obama had selected someone for this important Cabinet-level position like Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond, who was briefly considered for the post and had been chosen to head up Obama's education policy working group. But things could have been much worse. Joel Klein, superintendent of New York City's school system was under consideration, and of course, there is always Michelle Rhee, a strong proponent of free market solutions for public education (read: siphon tax dollars to corporations) right outside the White House gates.

So it could have been much worse than Arne Duncan, formerly CEO (yes, that was his title) of the Chicago Public School system. Time Magazine recently characterized Duncan as friendly to several camps of school reformers. That is all good, and it will help him be effective in a highly contentious and ideology-driven professional world. But one of the challenges Duncan needs to be asked to deal with is the dominance of standardized testing as an assessment method. Under the Bush administration, high-stakes testing has been the centerpiece of education policy. Literally billions of education dollars now go into creating, administering, and grading these tests -- dollars that could go into the teaching of critical thinking; that could be keeping libraries open; that could be funneled into tutoring programs and smaller classes. Perhaps we could use a billion to provide regular dental and health clinics for children in each school so that they can see the blackboard and are not in physical pain in the classroom.

In conclusion, I would argue that the research cited by the New York Times is useful, but probably not in the way the researchers imagined. Forget self-esteem for a minute, as well as the problem of using the so-called achievements of white people (good test-taking skills) as the measure of intellectual success for everyone. If the inauguration testing experiment means anything, it certainly tells us something about the researchers. The resilience of assumptions about the importance of self-esteem in educational research design has caused them to leak information, as if it were an exciting new intellectual path, about a piece of research that even they admit is incredibly scattershot. But more importantly, this little experiment shows that testing children doesn't tell you what they actually know, and therefore, testing is failing at the most basic level that any policy or practice can be evaluated. If test scores are so dramatically affected by social and psychological factors like whether a child is excited that someone of his or her so-called racial group is President of the United States, then in fact, the one thing we know is that standardized tests are a bad tool that do not give us any reliable gauge of whether teachers are teaching well or students are learning.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

....................................

1 Waldo E. Martin Jr., Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History With Documents, Bedford Series in History and Culture (New York: MacMillen, 1998), p. 28.

The Gay Agenda

Dear Barack,

First of all, congratulations on the end of one journey and the beginning of another. We are all looking forward to your presidency, and many of us, I am sure, are thinking about how to share your burdens. So much of what happens next is about activating what already works: I was thinking about this after our third snowfall in so many days here in Shoreline. I didn't want to get up and shovel again -- but I did, because there are a lot of elderly people in my neighborhood who have worked hard to be independent and stay in their own homes, and a bad fall could end that in a matter of seconds. So I was out shoveling and scraping, along with the Italian sons, who drive in from the suburbs to make sure their parents' walks are clear; and the Black and Latino kids from the projects around the corner, who were trying to make a little money before school started. Then a couple guys came down the street and said to me "Put that shovel down Dr. Radical!" and it turned out they had been sent by my old college friend, Tim, an African-American man from Louisiana who used to play professional football, and has invested the bulk of his earnings in Shoreline neighborhoods. By doing this, a great many of his efforts go towards providing decent housing for poor people. Tim also hires guys from Shoreline who have been in prison and gives them the jobs they need, both to get parole and try to make new lives. Did I mention that Tim is busy developing land for a school back in Louisiana, and that he is particularly concerned about the educational prospects of girls?

So you see what I mean? There are a lot of people who are ready to step up, because they are stepping up already by thinking about somebody else every day and doing something about it. I think you know that, or you wouldn't be investing so much of your presidency in talking to us about it.

But I don't think you know much about the gay agenda. Oh yeah, yeah, there is one -- it's not just some right-wing scare tactic. There is. And part of what makes me think about this is the story in today's New York Times about queers of color and their allies picketing Pastor Rick Warren's Martin Luther King Day appearance in Atlanta. King's message of tolerance, protesters said, would have included gay and lesbian people. But actually, that is not true. It did not. We know that Bayard Rustin was marginalized from the movement because of his homosexuality, and only brought back to coordinate the 1963 March on Washington because of the highly-principled A. Philip Randolph, president of the influential Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

My point is that on that day when Martin talked about his dream, Bayard had a dream too, which was that the sexual acts he performed and his love for other men, Black and white, would not subject him to the double jeopardy of being a Black gay man. And that dream has also not yet been realized.

So without further ado, let me tell you what the gay agenda is:

That when anti-gay activists talk about special rights that queers are asking for, you remind them of the special wrongs we have endured. Like losing our jobs, being subject to arrest for gathering socially, being beaten and raped by the police, having our intellectual life censored, being imprisoned, being committed to mental asylums, having our children taken away, being thrown out of our homes as children and being forced to survive by selling sex acts to strangers, being bullied and beaten at school and on the street, electroshock treatment, being killed, being expelled from school, being subjected to endless public denigration and hatred as a group, having our belongings and money be stolen by the families of our deceased partners, being evicted from our homes, being excluded from hospital rooms when our loved ones are ill, being dismissed dishonorably from the military and losing our benefits, being permanently excluded from all benefits, financial and legal, that accrue to people who are married, and employment discrimination. To name a few. You tell them that, ok?

That you put all the reports that have been commissioned over the years that have reluctantly concluded that GLBTQ people are not only as good, but better, soldiers than straight people, in the public record; and by executive order, end all discrimination against GLBTQ people in the military. While you are at it, you might remind the Joint Chiefs that people in the military do not have access to freedom of speech as civilians do. You can order them to immediately issue a standing order to all commissioned and non-commissioned officers that they will no longer be permitted to voice their opinion that gays in the military are disruptive to a good national defense. They will convey explicitly, if they feel the need to discuss us at all, homophobia in the ranks, and all forms of prejudice and discrimination, is disruptive to a good national defense.

You can solve your Rick Warren problem by getting religion the fuck out of politics. Everybody is entitled to hir own faith, but they are not entitled to bludgeon the rest of us with it, and that act should not be facilitated by the President, the Congress, or any other elected official. This is not about being against religion per se; it is about the separation of church and state. Church and state may, and should, speak to each other; they should not speak for each other.

Issue an Executive Order canceling the Defense of Marriage Act. Leaving marriage "up to the states" when the federal government does not recognize gay and lesbian marriage as a legal contract is a punt. When people cannot take advantage of federal tax laws, transport their families over state lines, keep their health benefits, or know that they can retain custody of or access to children when they move to another state, their marriages are not equal to the marriages of straight people.

Tell the IRS to immediately investigate the non-profit status of churches that are investing large sums of money in anti-gay initiatives. Tell the IRS to agree back off when they agree to stop engaging in discriminatory activity.

There's more, but you have a lot to do, my friend, so I will stop here. So as you move forward, Barack, don't be tolerant like Martin Luther King, Jr., great as he was in so many ways. Be tolerant like A. Philip Randolph, who truly knew how to accept a person for who s/he was and the talents s/he brought to this great country.

This post goes out with love to Cheryl Clarke, poet, activist, intellectual and friend. Popsie did not live to see today, but he left his great lesbian daughter to carry on the mission.

This Land Is Your Land: The Return of Educated People

Among other things we are celebrating this week is the enhanced public presence of people who actually think it matters whether you know anything or not. One of the curious things to me about many conservative intellectuals (David Brooks, Lynn Cheney, Robert Kagen, William Kristol, Phyllis Schlafly -- let's leave out folks like Ann Coulter for now, shall we?), people who were (and are) highly educated and read a lot, is that they insisted for years that it wasn't necessary to have much of an education to run the United States of Amurrica. All you needed was an "instinct" for what the people, in all their glorious parochialism, wanted. Ideas just arose from good old common sense -- like that because Saddam Hussein was a bad person who had once had weapons of mass destruction, he must have been responsible for 9/11 -- and when they didn't work out, it was, well "a disappointment." As opposed to a disaster. Although Brooks began to criticize, and then explicitly walked away from the Republican Titanic as it was going down this fall, the others have either faded away without explanation, or, like William Kristol, continued to insist that they were right, right, right, and that the last eight years have been a triumph for democracy and the free market.

Fortunately that has ended. See Michiko Kakutani's article, in today's New York Times about Obama's notion that reading thoughtfully expands a person's world. The article also includes a curious factoid that George Bush's reading was part of an ongoing competition with Karl Rove to see who could read the fastest. Dear God.

As a wonderful touch that symbolizes our return from the Land of Stupid People, did anyone but me think about what a terrific symbol it was that elderly Popular Fronter Pete Seeger sang Popular Fronter Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" last night on the Lincoln Memorial, with the President-elect in the audience? Did anyone else imagine Joe McCarthy and his tribe of egghead-hating anti-communist zealots spun in their graves, while Paul Robeson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and all the leftist intellectuals who were ruined by 1950's campaign against left intellectuals (because that is where it all began, friends) laughed and sang along?

I'm thinking of getting a sticker for my Mac that says "This Machine kills Fascists." No, maybe I'll read a book in public instead -- now that it's safe to come out of the library.

"Magnificent Wind:"* In Which The Radical Begins Receiving Excuses From Her Students Even Before The Term Begins

Yesterday I, and a number of other colleagues who work at Zenith and other colleges, began to receive a steady stream of emails from students. They said some version of the following: "Hey, Professor, I am going to Barack's inauguration and won't make it back in time for class on Wednesday afternoon. I am sure you support my presence at this historic event. Hope this is ok -- let me know if it isn't, (signed) Siouxsie Q."** I had several crabby, middle-aged responses to the emails I received, including:

"Hay is for horses" (I had a kindergarten teacher back in 1964 who was fond of this one.)

"If I am not going to the inauguration because I have a prior commitment to be at school to advise you on Tuesday, and teach you on Wednesday, why shouldn't you actually have some commitment to be there and receive these services?" As the Mother of the Radical (MOTheR), a font of wisdom on matters of playground justice, would say, "So who told you life was fair, Radical?" Point taken.

"In the twenty-four hours between the end of the swearing in ceremony (which you will be watching on a Jumbotron, simply another kind of TV) and my class at 1:10 the following day, you could get back from San Francisco, London, and perhaps even Moscow; you can certainly get back to my classroom from the District of Columbia, so actually you are staying so you can party all night and not get up at the crack of dawn to put your sorry, hungover behind on public transportation." Now this is something I could have sympathy for, as opposed to the claim that affordable and timely travel arrangements are impossible.

"Oh grow up Radical" (said to self) "Who gives a crap what they do? Particularly when it offers you a topic for a blog post?"

Then I sent an email to my class telling them that I expected to see them there at 1:10 sharp on Wednesday, and I went to a lovely dinner party where we talked about what a relief it was to finally hear a (prospective) cabinet member say, in so many words that water-boarding (aka, simulated drowning) "is torture."

But I do wonder whether the Bush administration's penchant for acting like mutual obligation was a waste of time and money, for telling obvious lies as if they were true, and pretending that bad decisions represented the only possible option, has infected all of us in some indefinable way that will take time to recover from, no matter what breed of dog the Obamas eventually adopt. As a much younger colleague from another institution who was at that dinner party agreed, this kind of exchange is common between teacher and student nowadays, at least among those of us who teach at elite private colleges. "I have to go to the inauguration, which unfortunately conflicts with your class," is yet another version of, "I just found out I can't be in class tomorrow because my parents want me to come to Paris for the weekend" (I mean, whose parents really tell them on Wednesday that they expect to see them at dinner in the Marais on Friday?) Or try this one: "I need to take the exam early because my dad's travel agent bought me a non-refundable ticket to L.A. and I'm leaving the Tuesday before break." But my favorite one is this. Every once in a while students at Zenith organize a campus strike to raise consciousness about some serious issue. Inevitably, I am then asked -- well-known left-winger that I am -- whether I would please cancel my class so that my students can go on "strike" and not have to worry that they will miss anything that will affect their final grades. Some of you, dear readers, might say that there are students less interested in the political issue at hand who have actually (I know this is gross, but I am going to say it) paid for that class, and might think I have an obligation to teach it if they plan to be there. This is one good point. But a second is that the point of a student strike is to interrupt business as usual, and it doesn't work if business as usual has been, well, canceled, by lefty profs sympathetic to the cause.

All of these interactions have several common themes, in my view: powerlessness over one's own schedule; an assumption that the activity to be substituted for the academic obligation is not a preference or choice, but an unavoidable conflict with fixed parameters; and the request that permission be granted, after the fact, so that the student can feel good about the choice to do something fun that displaces the obligations attendant to being in school. "I hope this is ok" is another way of saying "what kind of unjust person would you be to kick me out of a course I need for my major just because I went to DC to party my butt off at this unique, historical moment for partying?" I agree that probably would be too steep a penalty for missing the first day of class; but it would also be fair to let you know, that I know, that for $15, you can catch one of many Fung Wah Bus departures from the District of Columbia after 3 P.M. Tuesday. Tickets are still available!

I could kick them out of class if I wanted to, but they are banking on it that a reasonable person would not do such a thing. Looking on the bright side, it is even a compliment that I am perceived as a reasonable person. But the corollary to that, in my view, is that I should not be required to endorse their failure to meet their obligations to me; or to reassure them that meeting these obligations was clearly impossible, given the odds stacked against them. This last can be tricky when, for example, we all know that there are parents who are exactly so narcissistic that they make fixed, and expensive, plans without consulting their children at all; and that, because of various divorces, joint custody arrangements and remarriages, children who are not at all wealthy are buffeted by impossible scheduling demands from an early age and might just find it easier to submit to family demands. Yet, would not some of those parents be able to hear it, and even be impressed at the sign of new maturity, if Biff responded to the notice from the travel agent by saying: "Gee Dad, I'm so sorry you are going to have to change the ticket, but this economics midterm is just too important to me to screw it up. And it isn't fair to the teacher to put her to the trouble of making up a new exam and setting up a proctor just for me. If you want me to pay the difference, I can, but next time, could you ask me?"

Part of what I would like to salvage from these encounters -- which in the end, mean little in terms of a semester's work -- is what they have to teach us about the changing climate for instruction more generally, both in elite schools like mine and at schools where students are more highly conscious of the conditions by which hard-earned cash is exchanged for knowledge and credentials. And how do we talk about these things as faculty without trashing students, and in a way that examines our own responsibility to meet students where they are? Part of what is shifting dramatically, and what we do not know how to talk about except in the crudest, most reactive terms, is the notion that a college course represents some kind of fixed, but unspoken, contract between teacher (authority) and student (subject), in which the student is bound to a particular schedule, and a social relationship, that respects the traditional power imbalance between teacher and learner, grader and gradee. It is very rare that I find myself enforcing all the terms of my syllabus nowadays; but it is also rare that more than a few of my students feel bound by the terms of the syllabus, or that any expectation, great or small, cannot be altered to accommodate their "needs," great or small. How, and why, these power relations between professors and students are shifting; what constitutes a successful negotiation about expectations between teacher and student; how electronic communication has facilitated and/or ameliorated those shifts and how we speak to each other about them; and how new expectations about power and authority play themselves out in daily, casual encounters between teachers and students -- all of these things deserve a great deal more thought as we enter this bright and shining new day.

* According to Wikipedia, "Magnificent Wind" is a loose translation of "Fung Wah." Perfect, no?

**This is an amalgam of several, surprisingly similar emails, received by me and other colleagues. The emails were so similar that I actually went to the Obama-Biden Transition Team web page to see if there was a standard excuse being made available to students skipping class to attend the inauguration.

On Jobs and the Jobless: Listening To The Underemployed

Sterling Fluharty, who blogs at PhDinHistory, writes (in response to this post where I urged job-seekers to stop attending panels that seemed to be only increasing their anxiety about ever being employed): "Do you really feel it is pointless for the AHA to have panels on the job market? What if ideas for reforming the market and fixing its problems emerged from these sessions?"

Well, OK, if you put it that way. And anyway, saying that those panels are pointless would be doing a disservice to those who put them together, as well as to those who benefit from them. This advice -- like my advice to stay off the wikis -- was only for those of you who use sessions organized by the Professional Division as concrete venues for self-destructive obsessing about your powerlessness. I hope it didn't cause the intended audiences to run to the over-priced hotel bar instead, or prompt any of you who were interviewing to spend what remains of your latest student loan on Yodels and Ho-Hos rather than on getting your shoes shined.

Oh Sterling, I'm just pulling your leg. Because I now know that you participated in such a panel, and that you posted your contribution on your blog. For those Readers of the Radical with too little time to click on the link, I have pasted in Sterling's summary of the situation currently facing historians who are, who are soon to be, or who have been, looking for a teaching job:

It should go without saying that the vast majority want to become tenure-track history faculty. Let me describe how difficult this process is before I tell you why the overall goal is impossible. Did you know that only half of the students who entered humanities doctoral programs between 1992-3 and 1994-5 completed their degree within ten years? By comparison, the dropout rate is 10 to 15 percent in business, law, and medicine professional programs. Now let's focus on those who survive their history doctoral program. According to the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF), nearly half of the assistant professors who were hired between 1999 and 2003 had earned their PhD in history five to nine years previous. The average time between graduation and the time they landed their current tenure-track position was 3.3 years. Academic job seekers in history now have to prove themselves worthy to job search committees by spending several years after graduation teaching and publishing. Furthermore, my analysis of NSOPF data shows that only 31 percent of all the individuals who earned a PhD in history between 1966 and 1992 were tenured faculty as of 2003. Some of these doctoral recipients may have left academia by that time, but even the AHA agrees that only about one third of history PhDs will ever achieve tenure. One reason why this is happening is that the overall proportion of college faculty who work without any chance of tenure is now at 65 percent and keeps rising. The academic system is rigged against PhDs in history, and the rest of the humanities for that matter.

The essay, which I do recommend you read in full when you have a chance, concludes with a series of excellent questions:

How long will we continue to blame students in and graduates of history graduate programs if they don't succeed? Are we denial about the structural changes that have happened in higher education over the last several decades? How long will be persist in doing history that brings us prestige rather creating history that has value in the eyes of undergraduates and the public? Are we content to teach an ever decreasing proportion of college undergraduates? Do we believe that we can expand our associates and masters programs? Are we willing to let tenure-track positions disappear? Will we fight back against the for-profit colleges that started this trend of hiring the cheapest teachers they could find? What will it take to learn the skills of public and digital history? Can we make our type of history relevant to the American public once again?

To focus on perhaps the least significant of these questions: I don't know who the "we" is who "blame" the unemployed -- although the stream of advice that emanates from blogs like mine, and the invective towards candidates who do risible or weird things during interviews that has appeared elsewhere, certainly implies that one's success (or lack thereof) on the conventional academic job market is determined by doing the "right" things. And for all I know graduate advisers emanate displeasure towards and begin to avoid the unsuccessful. But certainly those of us who have jobs know perfectly well how many good candidates never even get a chance to strut their stuff; how many of those who do end up unemployed failed to get a job for reasons entirely out of their control; and how, when departments are ranking lists in post-interview mode, many people vote to hire in complete ignorance, or disregard, of the scholarship and credentials the candidates have worked so hard to display. It is often said that one of the great, ghastly, come-downs in academic life is observing the chaos and insane, internal power struggles attendant to the first hire after you yourself have been hired: "How in God's name," you think, "did this department ever get it together to hire me? What awful things were said? What worthy people were sent packing as if they were so much trash? Who here smiles to my face but really hates me??!!"

But it is true more generally, and not just in academia, that people who are unemployed do, in the end, blame themselves even when they know it isn't their fault, or that the odds are heavily stacked against them. Acknowledging this latter point is where, despite the ways Fluherty's essay will be controversial, I think he makes a particularly useful intervention. Using a couple of excellent graphics, Fluharty argues that according to his data, fewer than half of history Ph.D.'s can expect to either be on a tenure-track or to have full-time work teaching history over the next decade. Is this a question of overproduction of Ph.D.s by doctoral programs? Not necessarily. It is also the effects of history itself: the increasing disregard of "history" as an influential force in national politics (hell, for the past eight years the White House couldn't even cope with the present); the marginalization of the humanities in higher education more generally, and particularly in the two-year colleges attended by most post-secondary students; and what Fluherty suggests is a close link between widespread, or narrowed, interest in history among undergraduates and the condition of our democracy more generally. I find this last point particularly intriguing and wish he, or someone, would write more about it.

The point is, however, that given the actual numbers -- Ph.D.'s versus full-time teaching jobs -- it isn't possible for everyone with a PH.D. in history to have full time work, it never was, and it won't be any time soon. The profession needs to deal with this reality, as opposed to putting all its energy into workshops on interviewing, grooming, and putting together the best dossier. Fluherty has two concrete proposals in the attempt to turn the conversation away from the question of what is fair, to the the question of what is possible. One is that the AHA create a searchable data base into which graduate students could upload their materials and a new personality test which measures the " non-cognitive qualities that make a historian successful in the world of work," and which could be used colleges and universities to fill available jobs; the other is that historians need to be trained for and imagine themselves working in sectors of the intellectual market that are actually growing, specifically the digital industries.

The data base idea is not a horrible one, and god knows, searches as they are currently structured are possibly one of the most inefficient activities of an inefficient profession. They are huge time-wasters for everyone involved, and cost vast amounts of money that could be better spent actually educating students. But right now most full-time faculty can't even wrap their heads around why you would hire in fields that actually represent the cutting edge of the historical profession, much less altering the arcane, prejudicial processes of the traditional search, through which "the best" historian out of a pool of several hundred well-educated candidates is seen as deserving of a job. So good luck with that one. And actually, I don't believe in testing, or that what it takes to be a good teacher and colleague can be quantified, much less in any non-biased way. So I would scrap this one.

However, that the historical profession has not responded adequately to real changes in how what we do can be packaged and sold (sorry to be so crude, but that's the actual trend in education, not just a way of talking about it); that, as a profession, we in the humanities continue to sell the romance of careers in classroom teaching to graduate and undergraduate students, despite the fact that we live in a world where other forms of learning, formal and informal, are increasingly dominant; and that as educators, we haven't responded in a proactive way to new forms of digital democracy that might make the liberal arts usable of accessible to a broader group of consumers than those currently enrolled in four-year colleges, is spot on.

What we continue to do, according to Fluharty, is react to shrinking possibilities in a college and university world we thought we once knew, a world that we keep imagining will return some day. Fluharty not only argues that this world isn't coming back, but that it never existed in the first place, and that endless tinkering will not make that so. These ideas will be contentious ones, but they are well worth putting on the table. And if I don't entirely agree with his solutions (which revert to a kind of pragmatism that the essay itself undermines), I think the critique is a sound one. In fact, I think he should be nominated to the professional division on the basis of this essay alone.

And by the way Sterling, good for you for dropping your anonymity, thus allowing others who will find these positions contentious to argue openly with a real person. I don't know whether you did this on principle or not, but one way for young scholars to get some credit for the academic blog world that they are the principle contributors to and innovators in is to start telling us who they are so we can start including in professional and institutional conversations that cross the boundaries between conventional and unconventional career paths.

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