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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Days of Being Serious I Need To Post This

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

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

Sunday Radical Roundup: Policy History Conference Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

Dateline Columbus: Policy History Fun, Day 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People seemed happy and relaxed.

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

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

What to do, what to do?

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

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

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

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

See you there. And watch out for flying debris.

When The Radical Hits The Road: Dispatches From The Midwest

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned.

Sunday Radical Roundup: (Don't) Ask, (Don't) Tell Memorial Day Edition

Congressional Dems Reach Down And Locate Their 'Nads: Will long-standing legal discrimination against gay and lesbian service people be struck down this summer? We at Tenured Radical certainly hope so. Although we are more than ambivalent about armed conflict, we are not in the least ambivalent about the right to serve in the military without discrimination because of race, gender or sexual orientation. As Janet Halley argued years ago in Don't: A Reader's Guide To The Military's Anti-Gay Policy (Duke, 1999), this has not been an overwhelmingly popular item for queer activism. The fight for marriage -- by which overwhelmingly white, well-to-do queers confer rights and wealth on each other just like straight people -- has been far more popular than the right to military service, which is often the path to citizenship, education and income for people who are working-class, immigrant and of color. And of course, many of these people who want to work hard and earn a decent living via the military are queer.

The marriage campaign has also been able to capitalize on lots of cute kids saying on camera how bad they feel because their moms can't marry like other kids' parents, possibly the yuckiest but most effective tactic among the bourgeois queers who have made this a top priority and kicked other more substantial economic and political issues aside. Indeed, queers in the military pose quite the problem for activists, because dollars to doughnuts, gay and lesbian soldiers are conservative queers. Maybe, if gay and lesbian activists talked to military people, the movement would even have to stop acting as though Andrew Sullivan is the only conservative queer around.

There are many things that have distressed me about DADT, aside from the fact that every generation of my family has served honorably (two cousins of the Radical as recently as Gulf I), acquiring careers and benefits as a result of their service that they would not otherwise have had access to. Ergo, I object in a very personal way to seeing this form of national service and citizenship barred to people who find it meaningful and useful. But what has distressed me most is that, as the argument has dissipated that queers are unsuited by "nature" for national security roles of all kinds, the argument against queer military service has boiled down to the most despicable dynamic that discrimination relies on: that it is the object of discrimination who causes the problem, not those who discriminate or tolerate discrimination. Thus, the gay man or lesbian becomes the thing to be eliminated if good order is to be maintained, not the intolerance and prejudice of those around hir. This is the implication of this story (in case you needed clarity on this issue) in which queer soldiers raise concerns about whether they will be harmed by other soldiers if DADT is repealed. One noncom explains that it would be fine with him if men and women under his command were queer, as long as he didn't know about and -- what? Get grossed out?

This is why numerous GLBT students are being told by public school districts to stay home and complete their high school diplomas via distance learning: because if a queer kid is being bullied and tortured in school, the best thing to do is remove the kid, right? No matter that it is the school principal's job to ensure that no child is bullied or harmed -- just as it is the officer and NCO's job to ensure good order in any given unit.

Any officer or NCO who cannot lead when DADT is repealed should be relieved of command. It's that simple. S/he should be relieved of command because s/he cannot obey orders, and because s/he cannot lead others to obey orders effectively either. And you know what? I think this Radical may have greater faith in the officer and non-commissioned officer corps than the politicians do. Ours is the best trained military in the world, and our military personnel will do their job.

The United States military will have to undo generations of official homophobia to make this work, and they have no one to blame but themselves. I believe they can; I believe that the officer corps understands that it is their job to lead; and that they will make it happen. While there is no lack of racial discrimination in the military, there may well be less than there is in the society at large, since the principles of unit cohesion mandate resisting social forces and beliefs that undermine it (not the reverse, as conservative ideologues would have it.) But as the story I linked above points out, it is the ways in which the repeal of DADT opens the door to full citizenship and zero-tolerance for all kinds of discrimination against queers that has been the endgame all along. Much more than marriage, military recognition of gay rights will unravel structural discrimination against queers because military employment and production dominates our society -- particularly in those places, such as the south and California, where anti-gay initiatives have been used so cynically by the Republicans.

Just In Time To Repeal DADT: And by the way? If Zenith students aren't doin' it for themselves, their relatives are. Recent grad Peter Lubershane tells me that his cousin Josh Howard has made a documentary film from David K. Johnson's The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government called -- The Lavender Scare. And happy 85th birthday to gay activist Frank Kameny (pictured above, courtesy of Howard's website) -- you are as sexy as ever, and you outlived J. Edgar Hoover!

Summer History Blogging Fun: Here's a terrific new history blog written by a former Zenith honors student named Molly Rosner. It's called Brooklyn In Love and War. As Rosner describes it, the blog is "about the nation’s history filtered through the well-documented relationship between my grandparents. I never knew Sylvia, but she and my grandfather, Alex, wrote hundreds of letters during the years that Alex was stationed abroad during WWII. Most posts will look at a letter that helps the story of these two people – who are both typical and unique – unfold." After leaving Zenith, Rosner went on to do a master's degree in the oral history program at Columbia University. She's a wonderful and imaginative writer, and you might want to put it on your favorites list. If you are a literary agent, you might want to get in touch with her: the blog would be a terrific platform for a book.

Positively 30th Street Early For The Train Cheesesteak Blogging

There has been radio silence for the past several days because, although she has many virtues and resources, the Mother of the Radical (MOTheR) -- with whom I have been visiting -- does not have WiFi. Fortunately, however, Amtrak now provides a WiFi connection in its Philadelphia station, and I have arrived here early enough for my Shoreline train to have a cheese steak sandwich for lunch. Hence, I am inspired, and wish to debunk the following three myths about what is known elsewhere as "the Philadelphia Cheesesteak Sandwich," or "Philly Cheesesteak."

First of all, there is no such thing as "the Philadelphia Cheesesteak Sandwich." It is called a cheesesteak, and the only place you can actually get an authentic one is in Philadelphia or its immediate environs. If you are anywhere else in the country -- with the exception, perhaps, of the portions of New Jersey that are in proximity to Philadelphia, and towns no further south than Wilmington, DE, what you are being offered is a simulacrum of a cheesesteak. But no one who actually lives, or has lived, in Philadelphia would call it a "Philly cheesesteak." The modifier is utterly and completely redundant: when you see it in use, you know you are dealing with a poseur of a restaurant (or more likely, a restaurant chain.)

Second, there are people -- most of whom have not been raised in and around Philadelphia -- who think that cheesesteaks are nutritionally unsound. This is crazy talk. The basic ingredients of the cheese steak are: American cheese; a portions of cow so tough and unwanted that they must be shaved razor-thin, frozen, fried and chopped up in order to be chewed at all; a white Italian roll with thick crust; salt; and grease. Lots of grease. I ask you -- under whose rules are these things not good for you? Particularly when you add fried onions and peppers, you have at least three parts of the food pyramid covered. In other words, you are practically done for the day in terms of nutrition, and should feel free to eat ice cream for all other meals.

Third, I have heard non-Philadelphians say that after a cheesesteak, you will be so full of calories you won't have to eat for hours. This is absolutely not true. You will need to eat again immediately. You will need a Tastykake for dessert.

This concludes today's advice from the City of Brotherly Love. Stay tuned for an item later in June on the nutritional value of Scrapple.

If You Don't Teach Well, At Least No One Dies

We at Tenured Radical are sorry to hear that Zenith alum and historian of Africa Tim Burke, over at Easily Distracted, was temporarily sidelined by a bout of diverticulitis. For the non-cognoscenti, this is a manageable, chronic condition that tends to introduce itself with excruciating pain. From here on out, it's Fiber City, Tim. Get well soon, you hear?

As anyone in our tribe might have done, Tim used this small emergency and its resolution as an opportunity to blog. In a meditation on the state of two large, amorphous industries, higher education and health care, he writes:

Academia’s issues I see from the professional’s side, medicine’s problems from the perspective of the clientele. The first perspective tends to put me in the position of an apologist, the second as accuser. Maybe between the two some kind of insight is possible, though when I add it all up, I’m left with the sense that many modern professions are simultaneously indispensable, a high water mark of social progress and hopelessly screwed up in ways that can’t really be fixed by outsiders or insiders.

In the absence of any systematic fix, as Tim notes, we are all left to meander our way through the maze of what the insurance industry and the government call our "health care options," feeling lucky if we make a good connection with a physician and get decent care, or fighting grimly to hang on when we can't seem to make sense of why we are being treated with what appears to be diffidence. Like patients in our polyglot health care system, students at university are told in many ways that they get the education they deserve: if said student goes to a large, anonymous diploma factory, s/he must not have exhibited the virtues or intelligence necessary at precisely the right moment to have been admitted to a prestigious SLAC, Ivy or flagship public U. If s/he goes to a prestigious school, and can't seem to navigate it, pick the right courses or succeed in class, s/he is told that s/he is under prepared, irresponsible, immature, lazy and failing to take advantage of the cornucopia of opportunities just beyond hir grasp.

Think about it: as teachers, do we sometimes mistake the romance of what we do for its reality, and judge students accordingly when they don't perform? How many of us watch Gray's Anatomy because the idea of being able to get our health care at "Seattle Grace" hospital (despite the occasional psychotic shooter as in last night's season finale) is so seductive? Everything at Seattle Grace is handled by a skilled, empathetic and highly trained surgeon. People are reproached for their failings, and grow as a result of it; residents who make mistakes apologize for them. Patients get the outcomes they need, not the ones that happen to be available at the moment. (And by the way? I know this is totally irrelevant, but Cristina Yang is my idol: last night I was sucking back the tears as she found the courage to take charge of McDreamy's surgery.)

What Tim Burke points out in his post is that becoming a client can provide useful perspective on how we, as professionals, treat others to whom we are responsible. I found this extremely provocative. Long-time readers may remember that last fall I fired my primary care physician in a rage because the practice wouldn't refill my asthma meds when I was in the middle of an attack. But the larger issue was that actually making an appointment with any doctor in that practice -- much less my own -- had become a gargantuan, alienating chore. My doctor didn't think I needed an annual check-up; she preferred to phone in prescriptions without seeing me; and in the incident that resulted in the firing, refused to prescribe because I had not had an office visit in over two years and left a time for me to visit the office for my asthma on my office answering machine. I didn't get the message, of course, being sick and at home, and when I called to check about the appointment I had already missed it, and there wasn't another one for five hours. Meanwhile, I was sucking wind big time. They suggested I go to the emergency room. Practiced wheezers know that asthmatics are the last people treated in an urban ER (although at my age, murmuring "chest pains" can get me ahead of the bluish seven year-old from public housing.) Instead, I fired their asses and called my gynecologist. She fixed me up with the prescriptions I needed to help me breathe and the name of a new PCP.

Who, by the way, I love. She is funny and nice. She is younger than me (this is key, by the way, when you are in your fifties.) She does medical histories herself. She delivers all instructions in writing. She explains things. She says, "Call when you need us and we'll get you in." She watches all the same TV shows I do. If she were a cardio-thoracic surgeon, she would be Cristina Yang.

There's a lot in the story about the tortuous path by which I have found my dream doctor that hints at common frustrations about the medical system as it exists, even for those of us who have what passes for really good insurance. Doctors who are too busy and discourage their patients from coming in; staff sending patients for an expensive, time-consuming ER visit rather than taking a little extra time and care to talk to them directly and/or see them regularly; blaming the patient for not having overcome the barriers put in the way of care; the failure to make relationships that convey an ethic of care to the patient; and "managing" patients rather than establishing a set of cooperative practices between patient and physician that enhance wellness.

But Tim is right: the parallels to similar failures of professionalism in the academy are intriguing. My guess is that many undergraduates experience college with the same sense of powerlessness and frustration that I experienced in the failed relationship with my first PCP. How many of you have colleagues who have no scheduled office hours? Who are abrupt and peremptory with students in a way that discourages them from seeking help, or even making contact? Who then blame students for not having come to office hours? Who are often unavailable even if they have posted office hours? Who give assignments without saying what they are for or what the student is supposed to learn from them? Who give grades without any comment or instruction about what is right or wrong with the paper? Who deal with students who are not learning -- not by teaching them -- but by sending them to the writing workshop, the learning center or for tutoring by another undergraduate?

And the question is: how might one act on what might be conceived as a professional obligation to point these systemic flaws out and offer some comprehensive solution to them? I agree with Burke: it's hard to imagine. But perhaps not impossible. What I do know is that the testing structure, and demands by people who are not educators for what is now called "accountability" do not add up to the kind of close work and critical thought that would be necessary to re-invigorate the teacher-student relationship. The result is that some of us do what we are paid to do in generous and caring ways and others do not, and with the exception of the occasional teaching prize here and there, teaching is a set of professional obligations that one either takes personal responsibility for -- or not.

Readers?

Another One Bites The Dust: On The Richard Blumenthal News And The Politics Of Mendacity

What is it with lawyers this week? It wasn't bad enough for your favorite Radical to be read out of the community of queer scholars yesterday for reductive identity politics by a hotshot New York law professor who does not hide her sexual orientation (which could be described as....?) There is worse news, at least for the people of Shoreline.

This morning, I scooped up the paper of record from my front porch to discover that Richard Blumenthal has lied by omission and commission about his military service during the Vietnam war. Is this a crime? No. But whether by commission, omission, or inference, coyness around stigmatizing issues -- such as evading military service to promote one's career -- is, as Tennessee Williams' Big Daddy would say, "mendacity!"

As we historians are aware, it is also sleazy. As in the even more puzzling case of Pulitzer Prize-winning Joseph Ellis, I don't think anyone has ever asked Richard Blumenthal if he served in Vietnam: he just offered it up.

Blumenthal has responded to the New York Times "that he had misspoken about his service during the Norwalk event and might have misspoken on other occasions. 'My intention has always been to be completely clear and accurate and straightforward, out of respect to the veterans who served in Vietnam,'" he said.

The yuck factor on this is pretty high, and the political costs may be too. While this event is dissimilar to the Spitzer call girl scandal (in that lying is only a crime under certain circumstances), it demonstrates a similar contempt for voters that will be hard to put aside on election day. Other than the fact that there seems to be a whole generation of ambitious white men who are now embarrassed by the strings they pulled to evade Vietnam (which is why I took particular delight in Dick Cheney's unbuttoned and nasty honesty when he snapped that he had "better things to do" than fight in Vietnam), it is stunningly arrogant that Blumenthal thought he could leave the misimpression that he was a combat veteran and not get caught eventually.

For those of you who don't keep up with Connecticut politics (and why should you? The intricacies of political corruption in the Nutmeg State are so difficult to follow that it is hard to remember which mayor was indicted for what), Blumenthal should have been a shoe-in for Christopher Dodd's open Senate seat. But this is a real blow to an already troubled campaign, because here we have another driven and competitive man who -- by lying about something essentially unimportant -- now appears to have contempt for all of us. The outcome of this may be that a state that perpetually returns a veto-proof Democratic majority to its own legislature, and where even many of hte Republicans are still liberal, may soon be represented in Washington by two conservatives: Joe Lieberman and Linda McMahon, the founder and CEO of the fantastically successful pseudo-sports league, World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc..

It is a puzzle what is wrong with Blumenthal. He has been a good attorney general for twenty years, and was believed to be unbeatable. But his campaign has been uninspired and clumsy: this is just the latest and most boneheaded manifestation of a candidate who doesn't seem to know what he is doing. And while The Daily Caller is claiming that this information about Blumenthal's false claims to comba service was fed to the Times by a McMahon campaign that is functioning like a well-oiled wrestler, my question is: why shouldn't the McMahon people have revealed this? Why turn the stigma back on them?

Who -- And How Many --Paid For Your Sabbatical This Year?

So what percentage of your faculty is adjunct or contingent labor?

In the first fall faculty meeting at Zenith every year, we vote faculty privileges to a long list of people. It includes athletic staff, librarians, and a long list of adjunct or contingent labor. Some come as post-docs and visiting full-time assistants (relatively well-paid contingent labor with benefits); long-term adjuncts with benefits (mostly in the languages, although there was one women who taught in an interdisciplinary program for well over ten years as an adjunct); and then a string of people brought in to teach a course or two. Lately this budget has gotten hammered as part of Zenith's attempt to restructure its budget to meet the financial crisis. I didn't see the list because I was on sabbatical, but it was probably cut to about two thirds of its usual size.

But still: it's usually about four pages long and, as I argue below, this is why I get to go on sabbatical. And that's just Zenith, a liberal arts college with just over 3000 undergrads. The truth is, our normal budget -- which covers a generous sabbatical/leave policy that has been fought for over time by faculty and administrators -- relies on the availability of cheap contingent labor. I often wonder, when I boot up our web page and see that Zenith boasts of a 9:1 student faculty ratio: Does that ratio include all that contingent labor? It must. Because even taking radically different course and advising loads across the university into consideration, I have two-three times more advisees and enroll between 60 and 80 students per semester in a normal teaching year.

Ain't no 9:1 in Radical country. Stupidly, I've always wondered about this.

So this morning, I received an email from one of the top correspondents for the Radical News Service, California Cathy, directing me to Confessions of a Tenured Professor by Peter D.G. Brown of SUNY-New Paltz, the tenured radical who founded The New Faculty Majority.

The article, which just appeared in Inside Higher Ed is worth reading in its entirety, but here is a clip or two:

I am also asked by tenured faculty why on earth I would be spending so much time and effort advocating for a group of "others" whose fate I have never shared. I suppose this is a perfectly legitimate question, but I do find it a bit odd. Why wouldn’t I insist that these precarious colleagues be allowed equitable compensation, job security, fringe benefits and academic freedom? And why shouldn’t I want them to have equitable access to unemployment compensation, professional development and advancement?

With a light touch that few of us are capable of, Brown argues that this this is a

scandal [that] is neither little nor secret: the vast majority of those well-educated, skilled professionals who daily teach millions of students in our classrooms are actually being paid far less than the workers who nightly clean them. Ad-cons are treated as chattel or as servants who can be dismissed at the will and whim of any administrator from departmental chair to dean or provost. And woe to those ad-cons who elicit the wrath of their campus presidents! They can be non-renewed without any due process whatsoever, simply zapped, either individually or by the hundreds. We all know this, but most tenured faculty colleagues choose to simply look the other way. C’est la vie. Tough luck. Life just isn’t fair. Keep on walking and change the subject....

It is time that more tenured faculty woke up to the fact that their entire professional existence, replete with their comfortable incomes, their fascinating research, their coveted sabbaticals, their agreeable teaching loads of less labor-intensive and more satisfying courses — all this is made possible by the indispensable efforts of a million ad-cons doing so much more for so much less.

This isn't news to the hundreds of people out there who comment on this blog during job season, with varying levels of rage. And it isn't news to me, but Brown's articulation of this problem as one that deserves a collective response has caused me to reconsider the question of whether advising young people not to go to graduate school isn't a feeble response to the state of the academy today. There are many, many things wrong with the way we do business as scholars. But thinking about it carefully, while I resent being asked to take personal responsibility for what is a structural problem (and occasionally display that resentment, to the dismay of some of my readers), the un- and under employed, and their close relatives the under-compensated and uninsured, are right to be angry at all of us who occupy tenured and tenure-track positions.

Brown is right: like the bourgeoisie everywhere, our perks, comforts and prestige rely on the exploitation of a vast reserve army of labor. Joining that reserve army is the threat held over every tenure-track person, the persuasion that molds them into conformity with the system in the very years that their ideas should be devoted to changing it. And if there were a commitment over a period of years by higher education to hire people full time, the job market would suck up unemployed Ph.D.'s like a sponge.

Here's the takeaway (other than the fact that every sabbatical I -- or you-- have ever had was essentially paid for by someone else's cheaply purchased labor. It's not that there are no jobs. There are plenty of jobs that pay virtually nothing, and higher education has balanced its budget on ill-paid labor, paid for course by course, grad student by grad student, for decades.

Sunday Radical Roundup: Timeless Questions Edition

Why Aren't There More Women In The STEM Fields? That's Science, Technology and Math, for you girlfriends and girly-men cowering in the liberal arts and life sciences. Go to Historiann to read about hazing rituals at dissertation defenses in the sciences, and everything else the AAUW was afraid to tell you. The full story is at Thus Spake Zuska, a science blog where Zuska tells the story of her own defense. Not only are grad students at many places expected to make elaborate meals for the committee, but they are then supposed to sit there and be ritually insulted --all in good fun, of course.

"The problem with research science is that it operates like little fiefdoms," Zuska writes. "Everybody in their own little kingdom, no oversight over the whole enterprise. Everybody making up their own rules about acceptable behavior and what kinds of douchebaggery will be tolerated in this lab versus that one, this defense versus that one. No one goes around observing what is taking place in each little steaming hellhole. The patriarchy of university labs is structurally much more like families, or church congregations, than like corporations. Abusive practices can be hidden in plain sight, despite clear stated norms against beating the children and having sex with them."

Kudos for moving from a train-wreck of a story to a smart institutional analysis of sexism in action, Zuska. I would add one thing: it's not just science that has little fiefdoms. What is wrong with a lot of departments that have become more or less dysfunctional could be traced to a similar lack of institutional oversight. And the lack of supervision -- even though the university administration will freely acknowledge in private that they know about (and, of course, abhor) the systemic discrimination and abuse that is occurring -- means that the strongest personalities in the department get free rein to run things as they choose. Forever. The result is a kind of Lord of the Flies atmosphere, in which these bullies hand out favors to those who are willing to accede to the dysfunction rather than have their work and careers impeded by kicking at the bricks. The dysfunction thus becomes ingrained across generations, even as administrators reassure you that those perpetuating it are dinosaurs on their way to retirement. No one can ever tell you when those retirements will occur, of course. That they will ever retire, barring a sustained inability to function at all, assumes that staying home and bullying their spouses will be equally satisfying and remunerative.

The best part is this: if you belong to such a department, are drained by watching various indignities and injustices occur, and spend a lot of time figuring out how to defend yourself from the hideous internal dynamics that are sustained by these people, you then get to walk around the university listening to other members of the faculty tell you what horrible people your departmental colleagues are, as if somehow it was your responsibility to fix it.

Why Do We Always Talk About Lesbians At Tenured Radical? Because at Tenured Radical we are just obsessed with lesbianism. Everything lesbian compels us. We have a lesbian Barbie. Although we draw the line at watching Ellen DeGeneres on American Idol, we watched every episode of every season of The L Word, no matter how terrible, no matter how confusing the sex scenes, because we are so about lesbians here.

So we are really curious as to why Katherine Franke, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia, who was quoted extensively in this story about Elena Kagan (strategically placed near the wedding announcements in today's Sunday Styles section of the New York Times) chose to address the SCOTUS lesbian drama in this way:

being single in your 40s or 50s still “remains something that has to be explained.” And until the legal profession makes it easier for women to get ahead while, at the same time, having a family, the attitude will persist.

About six months ago, Ms. Franke said, a group of female graduates of Columbia’s law school gathered to discuss their law careers. One of the questions posed by the older lawyers was whether younger lawyers saw themselves as feminists. Many said they did not. “The older women were aghast,” Ms. Franke said.

The problem, the younger lawyers explained, was that their older peers told them they could easily balance the demands of work and family, but didn’t explain how. “They think there is a glass ceiling,” Ms. Franke said of some of the young students. “They see it as, ‘I have to make a choice not to have a traditional family.’ ” For those who remain single, though, “the reason should not have to be explained.”

It was an utterly reasonable answer, I suppose, under some circumstances. But why didn't Franke point out that being in a non-traditional, lesbian partnership is one viable way to be fully supported in one's emotional, sexual and professional life? I never publish anything without two sources, but with people like you punting on this one, Professor Franke, no wonder ambitious lesbian legal scholars are still in the closet.

Does Maureen Dowd Really Think That This Was Helpful? Enquiring Minds Want To Know. And by the way? My lesbian niece, a future attorney who does not go to an effete Ivy-League law school and would be a terrific candidate for SCOTUS, told me once that the National Enquirer is always right when it comes to printing people's secrets because this gossip rag has been sued so often in the past. My niece was way out ahead of me on the John Edwards love child thing for this reason. So unless Elena Kagan outs herself, there is no lesbian story as far as I am concerned until I see it in the grocery store. I may, however, continue discussing sexism and homophobia until the cows come home.

Why Is May 16 A Holiday Celebrated By Queer People Everywhere? Pick the most appropriate answer:

a) 14-year old Marie Antoinette married 15-year-old Louis-Auguste who was unable to consummate the marriage for years, but became the King of France anyway. Subsequently, both were beheaded, and Antoinette was dogged by charges of lesbianism ever after.

b) Edgar Allan Poe married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia. This was either queer, illegal, incestuous or just not very nice, depending on your point of view.

c) Pope Benedict XV canonized the transgendered Joan of Arc as a saint.

d) It is the birthday of Liberace, Adrienne Rich, Cheryl Clarke, Tori Spelling and the Tenured Radical.

e) All of the above.

The Radical Did Not Go Out With Elena Kagan, But Other Ivy League Grads Did: This Week On The Elitist Supreme Court

Last night when Jim Lehrer asked David Brooks and Mark Shields, "How do you see the Elena Kagan nomination now? It's over a week," this Radical moved to the edge of her seat. Which commenter was going to say the L word first?

No, no, not liberal.

Instead, after the normal reassurances that Kagan will be confirmed, just try to find something wrong with her, she was a good dean, she has no opinions about anything, blah, blah, blah, suddenly Shields and Brooks went on a tirade about SCOTUS being an elitist institution. (What, you thought it was a good thing that the highest court in the land was peopled with the best legal minds in the land? Think again, mister. Or sister.)

From the transcript:

MARK SHIELDS: I have to tell you, I mean, I am so tired of Ivy Leaguers. I really am. I want somebody who went to a state university, who didn't grow up in the Eastern time zone, who worked nights, maybe, to pay for their own books, who either was in the enlisted ranks in the United States military or knows somebody who was, somebody who just really didn't -- is west of the Hudson, and east of Malibu.

MARK SHIELDS: There's a great country out there with an awful lot of people in it, and maybe somebody who went to night school once. I mean, why do we -- why do we restrict it to this pool that -- you know, I really just think it is terribly elitist. I mean, it sounds like the British ruling class.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Well, Mark and I should be happy that it's all Catholics and Jews on the court now.

JIM LEHRER: You guys are covered. That's easy for you to say.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: Personally, I'm the only New York Jew not on the court, so I'm a little pissed off about that.

But I actually agree with Mark. I think the politics of it are bad, by the way, for exactly that reason. People look at it, oh, another Harvard Law. And, you know, they're very smart people and they're very fine people. But it is true that it would be nice to have somebody from the heartland of the Midwest, you know, Chicago, for example.

No, I'm just kidding.

(Editor's note: David Brooks went to the University of Chicago, something his audience is rarely allowed to forget for more than a day at a time.)

DAVID BROOKS: No, I agree -- I agree with Mark, somebody, you know -- it is -- and this is true, by the way, of the Obama administration in general. There's a lot of Harvard and Yale there up and down the ranks. And it is a narrow slice of America.

MARK SHIELDS: When Lyndon Johnson was just absolutely rhapsodizing about how brilliant Jack Kennedy's Cabinet, President Jack Kennedy's Cabinet was, Sam Rayburn -- you know, there were all these Ivy League pedigrees and everything else -- Sam Rayburn said, "I just wish one of them had ever run for sheriff, Lyndon."

Well, I just wish somebody had run for sheriff who was nominated to the Supreme Court, who had been out in the political process and put their name on the ballot.

I've got a good idea: what about Harriet Miers? Didn't she run for sheriff or something?

I mean, please David and Mark. Elena Kagan did not grow up in a bubble, she grew up on the Upper West Side when it actually wasn't such a tidy place as it is now. Remember the 1970s in New York guys? Furthermore, unlike her male peers, if Kagan hadn't been so out of control smart and hard-working she wouldn't have gotten a chance at anything, especially not that Princeton B.A. In case you think being in the right eating club separated her from reality, it is also relevant that except for Elena and her father, everyone in the Kagan family is a public school teacher, and Kagan herself went to public school prior to college.

But let's look at the rest of this elitist court. Granted, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy have very suspicious credentials. But Sonia Sotomayor's single, working mother got her through school at the top of her class so that she could be plucked out of the crowd to go to Princeton. And if you are thinking affirmative action, just stuff it, will you? Any of us who actually work in elitist institutions know perfectly well that people of color and women, in order to be even eligible for affirmative action, have had to be better, smarter and more hard working than anyone else.

Let's look at that consummate elitist Clarence Thomas, who was abandoned by his father, had a mother was too poor to keep him, and was raised by his working class grandparents. His grandfather hauled ice and coal for a living: there's a soft life. Or let's take a gander at Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was turned down for a Supreme Court clerkship in 1960 because she was a woman (and was also, as a woman, treated abominably by Harvard Law School, as all women were until well into the 1970s.) I suppose it couldn't matter less that Antonin Scalia's father immigrated from Sicily, and worked his way through college and graduate school. Scalia only went to a parochial high school because he was on scholarship and, as an Italian-American of a certain generation, was also probably the object of horrible discrimination (despite being valedictorian of his class, he was not admitted to Princeton.)

In other words, when working- and middle-class people work hard, and are recognized for their success by being welcomed into the nation's top schools, we should probably pass them over for positions of public trust and leadership. I cannot help but think that this sudden concern about SCOTUS being packed with pampered, out-of-touch elitists has something to do with the fact that Obama has now nominated two women in a row. As always, when too many women show up, deep concerns about declining quality suddenly emerge: this is perhaps the most twisted version of that conversation I have yet heard, and from two men who should know better. And readers -- can you really imagine a woman or a person of color being nominated for the Court who did not have a top-drawer Ivy League resume?

Ova There! Ova There! Send The Word, Send The Word, Ova There!

After reading a critical piece in the New York Times about the booming market in Ivy League ova earlier in the week, Radical Correspondent Oklahoma Annie writes that she was "incensed" by it:

What’s going on, in summary, is this: Agencies who traffic in human ova are seeking the highest achieving young women from top universities as donors, and are offering them upwards of $10,000 to donate their eggs.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which set the $10,000 cap on payments in its guidelines, is now “concerned” that young women may be lured by excessively high payments to become donors “against their own best interests.”

Now, excuse me, but we’re talking about the top percentile, crème de la crème of American elite universities, and we’re afraid they won’t be able to make informed decisions about their own health and finances?

Well, OK, so we’re also talking about 22 year olds, so there may be something to that. But hey, this is the first time I’ve heard it argued that women are being exploited by being paid too much.

I think it’s a load of paternalistic crap. (I want to see the gender and age distribution of the members of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.)

What really aggravates me is, here is one thing in which women are uniquely positioned to make more money than men, fair and square, and we don’t want to let them fully exploit their advantage “for their own protection."

Couldn't agree more, Annie. Go to this this California sperm bank and you will see that inseminations start at under $500, which means that the donors can't be getting more than a hundred dollars a squirt. Methinks you are onto something, so let's investigate further.

When you read the whole article, you will see that Annie's outrage is well founded on several levels. Egg donation, as it turns out, is not to be undertaken lightly, since the primary damage cited for women is psychological -- only several paragraphs lower does the author mention that the procedure itself, which includes stimulating the ovaries with massive amounts of hormones as well as surgery -- has medical risks. In other words, an egg is not an egg: it's a pre-baby! And for the rest of their lives, these poor women will be haunted by the specter of "their" babies out there in the world.

Not inconsequentially, the notion that every egg is a complete soul would be the position held by the Catholic Church, the LDS Church and numerous evangelical Christians, as they wrap numerous forms of contraception into their jihad against abortion. Furthermore, Annie's point about how threatening it is to the cult of true motherhood when women game the market in white designer babies has a longer history. Remember when Mary Beth Whitehead refused to hand over Baby M to William and Elizabeth Stern in 1986, and the papers kept referring to her as the "surrogate mother" -- when, in fact, she was the actual mother? And do you recall that when working-class Whitehead demonstrated true grief at giving up the baby, she was reminded repeatedly that she had no right to her feelings because the baby had been bought and paid for? That it was upper-class Elizabeth Stern who really had the right to grieve?

Clearly there are big stakes here. As Annie observes, even a liberal newspaper seems committed to constantly instructing women as to what they should think and feel. I can't help but notice that in its handling of this issue the New York Times also invokes the specious claims among anti-choicers that abortion, at any stage of gestation, inflicts lasting psychological damage on women. "Temporary feelings of relief are frequently followed by a period psychiatrists identify as emotional 'paralysis,' or post-abortion 'numbness,'" reports the conservative Elliot Institute (as if paralysis and numbness are technical terms requiring scare quotes.) "Like shell-shocked soldiers, these aborted women are unable to express or even feel their own emotions. Their focus is primarily on having survived the ordeal, and they are at least temporarily out of touch with their feelings."

Note the use of the phrase "aborted women," which cleverly conveys that these failed mothers are grieving for the privileged access to womanhood only childbirth provides, a maturing process that can never be complete once they have terminated a pregnancy. If a woman believes that she is not distressed following an abortion, it is simply proof that she is "out of touch." On the other hand, this anti-abortion website goes out of its way to urge women that they can trust their feelings and maternal instincts during the process of bringing a pregnancy to term and giving the baby up for adoption; and that they will always feel good about themselves for making this decision to give a close relative to complete strangers.

I would add a final comment: if the egg donation procedure has risks for women (and all surgical procedures do, including egg implantation), then why aren't we concerned about the routine use of these hormones and surgeries on women who are trying to use their own, or other people's, ova to grow babies in their uteruses that they cannot conceive without technology? The women who, if they are successful, often end up carrying high-risk multiple pregnancies? Because it's a multi-billion dollar industry, that's why, in which all of the money goes into the pockets of fertility docs, for-profit labs and Big Pharma! Ever wondered whether Elizabeth Edwards' battle with cancer has anything to do with the "miracle" of giving birth to twins at an age when most women are completely infertile? When was the last time you saw a front page article about the long-term risks associated with thirty-something and forty-something women juicing up their ovaries with dangerous chemicals over a period of anywhere from one to five years?

But that's cool because they become mothers, as opposed to becoming unnatural, selfish women whose only goal is to pay for college and graduate school.