Cornel West, Love, Justice ... and Me

Well, okay. I didn't actually even shake his hand, much less get to talk with him one-on-one. But I got to hear Cornel West speak at my university today, and I was both moved and impressed.

Impressed: because he's got such an stirring delivery. If I tried to riff on the whole scale of emotion and power that he uses, I'd come across as a screeching, bombastic pedant. (Heck, I'm still trying to get comfy with wielding a microphone when I lecture!) But he's got the voice and presence to pull off the sort of oratory that's otherwise reserved for legendary preachers.

Moved: because he's not just way smarter than me, and he's not just a brilliant showman. He calls us to tend to our own spiritual maturity while committing ourselves to rooting out oppression. He takes Socrates' injunction that "the unexamined life is not worth living," mixes it with the blues, and inspires you to recommit to a better self and a better world. Actually, the better self is the bridge to that better world.

I'm not going to try to summarize all that West said. (He was giving the keynote at a conference on a founder of progressive Islam, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, a Sudanese visionary executed by his government for his beliefs, whom West grouped with Gandhi, King, and Mandela.) Instead, I'll just share a few of the lines that I found most inspiring, yet pithy enough that I got them on paper - no small thing, because the ideas were flowing so furiously.

Indifference is the one trait that makes the very angels weep. It's the very essence of inhumanity.

Optimism deodorizes the catastrophic. Hope allows us to confront the catastrophic.

These weren't just eloquent yet empty phrases. While celebrating Obama's upcoming inauguration, West called on "Brother Barack" to serve hope, not optimism. To speak out against the carnage in Gaza. To explain why he chose Rick Warren in apparent contempt of his LGBT supporters.

This, however, is the thought I've promised myself to repeat every day until it becomes part of my blood and bones:

Justice is what love looks like in public.

Imagine what the world might look like if that became everyone's mantra. Imagine how different our history would be. How radiant our future.

Of course this is way out of season, but I swear it's posted in a spirit of hope, not optimism. (The flower is a Climbing Peace Rose from early September 2008.)

The Cushy Life of the Historian?

Photo of the Staatsbibliothek (State Library) in Berlin by Flickr user NathanBushDesigns, part of his very cool Staatsbibliothek set, used under a Creative Commons license. I spent many hours there, happily engrossed in the writings of dead German feminists and gynecologists.

Who knew I was so lucky? I have the seventh-best job in America! Okay, women's studies instructors were excluded from the survey of the "best" and "worst" jobs that the Wall Street Journal reported on earlier this week. But historians showed up as #7, and that's the field where I received most of my formal training, including my Ph.D.

Topping the list were mathematicians. And man, that just gave me the giggles. What I know about our local math department is that it's full of, um, personalities. I haven't had direct contact with them, but indirectly I got to know the quirks of one of 'em a little too well. Last winter, I taught in a room in the math building with a pull-down screen. One morning, I arrived there only to find that the screen was up - and its cord was gone. I pushed a table against the wall, and one of my tallest students volunteered to leap up and grab it.

Later, I talked to one of my friends who's well acquainted with the department. From him I learned that one of the mathematicians has a vendetta against anyone who leaves the screen down. (That wouldn't have been me, but many instructors use that room.) And so he periodically snips off the cord - with wire cutters.

I'm not saying all mathematicians are looney-tunes (I know a couple of exceptions, and even I know enough to realize that my sample size is far too small). But universities in general are brimming with eccentrics. While I like eccentrics, some of them are flat-out difficult. My own colleagues are wonderful, but I recognize that lots of departments are profoundly dysfunctional, and I don't mean just the mathematicians. David Lodge's novels may be fiction. They're also deadly accurate as anthropology.

Much more importantly, most jobs in academia come with a lot of pressure. Scientists have to get the grants. Everyone has to publish. People on the tenure track face intense stress until they make tenure - and even greater stress if they don't get it. Those of us not on the tenure track are harried, too: Do we have any shot at a long-term position? Will we even be hired for the next term? How high a price will we pay to keep our careers alive? Should we think about abandoning academia altogether?

And so I'm skeptical about this survey (which you can find here). Eight of the top twenty careers are in fields where universities are the prime employers (math, biology, history, sociology, economics, philosophy, physics, astronomy). The criteria were: Stress, Work Environment, Physical Demands, Income and Outlook.

Clearly, academic positions offer a clean physical environment with few physical demands. If you make full professor, you've got a pretty decent income. But stress and a toxic collegial environment are all too common. The survey says historians work an average of 45 hours a week. I'd love to meet one who does. Possibly some practitioners of public history (working for the state, cities, etc.) might actually leave their job behind in the evenings.

Income? My husband's response: "Yeah, you're making $200,000 - over a decade!" Assuming I stay employed, that'll be just about my average from 2002 onward. If the average income for historians is about $61,000, as this survey claims, they're surely not counting all the unemployed and underemployed.

The outlook for academic jobs has never been great; this year, it's dismal. The decline in new openings is estimated at 15% compared to last year, according to Inside Higher Ed. But that surely understates the scope of the problem, because searches are being cancelled left and right, sometimes so late in the game that they wreak havoc with people's lives. A friend of mine in another field had received and accepted a firm offer. It was withdrawn just as she was about to make a campus visit to sign the contract and start the process of relocating. I'm sure this isn't specific to academia, but the latest crunch comes on top of a market where the number of applicants has always greatly exceeded the openings.

I do treasure a lot of things about my work. I have a fair amount of flexibility apart from classtime, which is completely inflexible. I get to pursue my interests, and I can get blissfully lost in libraries and archives - like the Staatsbibliothek, pictured above and below. I know that the ideas I study and teach about matter. I enjoy going to conferences, though it's almost always on my own dime. Most important for my daily routine, I love working with students, and most of them feel the same about me. Since September, I even get paid a living wage for all this.

I wouldn't suggest people flood into any of those "top-rated" academic jobs, though. Academia is fraught with stress, anxiety, and snipped-off pull-cords. It's only worth it if you really, really love the work - enough to do it as a hobby, if necessary. As I've said before, it's a little like blogging that way.

The Berlin Staatsbibliothek's windows, again from Flickr user NathanBushDesigns in his Staatsbibliothek set, used under a Creative Commons license.

I'm So High School

Hmm. All my intellectual pretensions have come to this:

My friend The Smirking Cat qualified as genius-level, and she writes about hockey (among other things). Go figure.

I've written about such esoterica as early medieval restrictions on sex, a critical history of patriarchy, and how women in the FLDS aren't much better off than ancient Babylonian women. I've bloviated about embodied experience and ahistoricism in the history of childbirth. I've rambled on about all manner of obscure medical and scientific ideas, from the health benefits of ejaculation to the link between testosterone and finger length (both of which get lots of Google hits, for some reason, though not quite as many as the Duggan family and their 18 children).

I've flirted with Marx, Irigaray, and Foucault, fer goodness sake. What more does a gal have to do to get dubbed pedantic?

Then again, assuming that the algorithm looks like stuff like sentence length and structure, being decidedly middlebrow might mean that my English hasn't been permanently Germanized. So perhaps I shouldn't be miffed. After all, I don't want my prose to sound like what Mark Twain lampooned in "The Awful German Language." It's bad enough when verbs get split in two in German or pile up at the end of a sentence like a train wreck (as a grad school colleague of mine loved to say). I don't want to start doing it in my mother tongue.

If you run your blog through this little analyzer, let me know in comments if you came out as more or less dumbed-down than Kittywampus!

Academics Anonymous

One of the paradoxes of academics who blog is that we practically grovel for name recognition in all of our official work. You get published in your field and your name is the currency that helps you get a job, keep a job, earn tenure. Scientists tussle over who gets to be lead author on a paper. Yet academics who blog tend to go underground, taking on a pseudonym and often not revealing their blog to their colleagues.

It's not just bloggers who do this. Authors of personal essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education routinely use pseudonyms, too. This practice recently came under fire in the Chronicle with an article by Peter Plagens hyperbolically titled "The Dangers of Anonymity":

I understand why Valerie Plame might want to use a pseudonym, or why Larry Summers probably should have used one, but I don't understand why so many academics, even when writing fluffy little "casuals," think they have to use them. The practice is particularly common in The Chronicle's Careers section, with articles that are neither scandalous personal confessions nor heroic acts of whistle-blowing.

Plagens' argument boils down to his accusation that these authors are, in a word, "chicken." He sees no reason why people can't use their real names while complaining about leaky faucets or airing their fantasies of being a biker chick.

The specific authors Plagens attacked got a chance to respond in the Chronicle. They very reasonably said they didn't want to be Google-able from here to eternity by current students or future employers. They pointed out that academic freedom is pretty damn fragile if you're untenured, and that Plagens' proposed remedies for discrimination - suing your colleagues' asses or getting a shiny new job - are un-amusing and often infeasible. Even barring serious repercussions, these authors are reluctant to poison relations with co-workers who'd dread appearing in an essay lampooning them or their department.

But none of these authors addressed what I see as the biggest barrier to using one's real name: the threat of not being taken seriously. Dr. Crazy hints at this issue in her blog, Reassigned Time:

Sometimes people want to write about the mundane. Tragically, the mundane does not generally accord one professional accolades. While it's true that one might not face profoundly negative repercussions (like not getting tenure) for writing such things under one's "real" name, one also will not receive professional accolades. In a culture of tenure and promotion that depends upon accolades, well, it certainly doesn't make sense to write about the mundane under one's "real" name. Why? Because, well, it makes one seem mundane as opposed to outstanding, which is what tenure committees even at the most lame universities seek.

Yes! And in fact, if you look at the quotation I grabbed from Plagens, you can see from his use of the term "fluffy little 'casuals'" that he doesn't just object to anonymity or pseudonymity, he's sneering at anything less than Deep Serious Intellectual Texts.

Writing about anything personal can quickly be perceived as not just mundame but frivolous. Sure, once you've achieved a reputation through more conventional channels, you may get away with publishing glimpses of your personal life. (I'm thinking of the autobiographical portions of Susan Bordo's wonderful The Male Body or Jane Gallop's Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment.) But if you're not already famous, you tread lightly. Academics and network news anchors are about the only remaining professions where "gravitas" seems to be regarded as a basic job qualification. (This is no longer even required of the POTUS, as evidenced by the Current Occupant.)

Academics who blog bump up against the prevalent academic norm that there's no such thing as "spare" time. You ought to be devoted to your job 24/7, living a sort of modern-day monastic life. Which is why parenthood and motherhood are too often regarded as crippling one's chance at a tenured position (whether that's true or not in any particular case). (Note that failure to win tenure doesn't just mean job insecurity; it often means unemployment and a strong chance you'll never work in your field again.)

There's also a gendered dimension to this. Insofar as women are still taken less seriously in many academic disciplines, there's probably more pressure on us not to appear too frivolous. We're also still more closely associated with the body, which means that if we blog about mothering or sex or anything else with a major corporeal dimension, we may play into stereotypes and again provide fodder for those colleagues who still have (usually unarticulated) problems seeing women as their equals. We're also too quickly presumed to be mired in our personal lives.

All of this can vary, depending partly on your discipline. Women remain highly marginal in many of the sciences, but indefinable bullshit like gravitas seems to matter less there. In the humanities, women are quite prevalent but a certain tweedy seriousness plays more of a role than in the sciences. (Picture the historians who appear on TV as talking heads. Doris Kearns Goodwin is the only female, and she sure does the tweedy thing.) In the program where I currently teach, women's studies, none of these intangibles seem to be very important. I'd have no problem with my colleagues reading my blog; they're wonderful and real people. But we're also marginal to the rest of the university.

Being pseudonymous can offer some nice positive benefits, too, as the Chronicle commentators point out. When you detach from your real-world identity, what you write can more easily be read as universal. You can develop a different voice than you might use in your other writing projects. You can explore personal topics frankly. You tell the truth, as you see it, without embarrassing innocent bystanders. All of these benefits apply to pseudonymous academic bloggers, too, as Profgrrrrl has thoughtfully explored.

Is this irresponsible, much less "dangerous," as Plagens suggests? Dr. Crazy notes that there's a big difference between pseudonymity and anonymity.

Pseudonymity ... is not about being untraceable but rather about taking on a traceable identity that is distinct from one's legal identity, or one's identity at birth. It's about taking on a "pen name," a name that people can follow, and by extension a way of thinking that people can follow.

If you use a pseudonym, you develop a consistent persona over time. In fact, it'd be really hard to do otherwise. You also feel a sense of responsibility to your readers. As I learned last week when I got attacked by Clintonista partisans for blogging on the O'Bleness story, I felt no less beholden to getting it right just because I wasn't using my legal name. I carefully re-examined what I'd written, and precisely that self-scrutiny let me feel confident that I hadn't distorted the truth insofar as it could be known from a sparse set of facts.

I was also grateful for pseudonymity when I started getting hateful comments. Someone who really wanted to track me down could do it, but I haven't left a trail of bread crumbs leading straight to me. If there's any danger lurking out there, it's not from "chicken" grad students and professors airing their dreams and complaints under an assumed name; it's from crazies and stalkers who'd like to put the chill on those of us they call eggheads, surrender monkeys, and feminazis. In this climate, I'm happy to share a name with the world's yummiest cherry tomato.

Gratuitous crocus photo from my garden, taken about a week ago.

Questioning En-title-ment

The latest tactic out of the Clinton camp has got me laughing (not out loud - it's more of an internal snicker). They're questioning whether Obama has the right to say he's been a "professor" at the University of Chicago. As summarized by Salon's War Room, here's the accusation on Clinton campaign's website:

"Sen. Obama consistently and falsely claims that he was a law professor." The item referenced a Chicago Sun-Times article that stated, "'Several direct-mail pieces issued for Obama's primary [Senate] campaign said he was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He is not. He is a senior lecturer (now on leave) at the school. In academia, there is a vast difference between the two titles. Details matter.' In academia, there's a significant difference: professors have tenure while lecturers do not."

This is true up to a point. Beyond the assistant professor rank, professors have tenure. As a rule, professors are at least tenure-eligible, though my university also has a special category of non-tenure-line professors. University administrators like that, because they can be fired capriciously.

Personally, I can't call myself a professor, because I'm a lowly instructor. This is a theoretically less secure spot than the non-tenurable professors, as I'm hired only on a quarterly basis, but practically speaking, I'm more secure since I'm the cheapest labor they've got. I'm a captive "trailing spouse" - an awful term that always evokes snail trails for me - but I keep adjuncting for the love of it, even though Wal-Mart, our only other large local employer, might well give me better benefits. Seriously. That's assuming that Wal-Mart would even hire me, a dubious proposition since they'd smell subversion as soon as I walked in the door. Anyway, the administration really loves people like me, and they'd probably be happy if we had 95% of all teaching staff in my category, with the other 5% reserved as actual professorships for Famous People who teach only a reduced load anyway.

But that's the true and ugly story of how the more academic branches of academia function. As War Room points out, in professional schools such as law and medicine, the titles get blurry and don't map onto the rest of the professoriate.

It's not too suprising, then, that the University of Chicago has issued a statement in full support of Obama calling himself a professor:

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers have high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.
(I'm not sure how permanent this link will be; sorry if it's not stable. For more detail on this, see also FactCheck.)

Pretty clear, huh?

So Clinton and her cronies are playing a game that I recall from my time hanging around German universities, where everyone is closely scrutinized to make sure they haven't appropriated a title they don't deserve. I remember early on during my research in Berlin, I referred to the director of an archive as "Herr Doktor So-und-so," and his secretary - who was scandalized! - told me I'd better refer to him as "Herr Doktor Doktor So-und-so" because he had two doctorates. And as horrified as she was, I was grateful for the correction; the guy made me nervous as it was, with his waxed mustache and his grandson-of-Bismarck demeanor.

So that's why I had to snicker at the absurdity of Clinton's tactic. It reminds me of some of the pettiest jockeying for respect in academia. You wouldn't think it could have legs in politics.

And yet, it's not funny in the least if you recall how the Republicans and the media pigeonholed Al Gore as a serial exaggerator. The title of Clinton's press release? "Just Embellished Words: Senator Obama’s Record of Exaggerations & Misstatements." Eek. Wanna bet on whether the press is smart enough to sniff out the real exaggerators and mis-staters in this kerfuffle?

LOLcat by me, featuring my own dearly departed Grey Kitty, at I Can Has Cheezburger?

The State of our Statements Is, ummm, Strong

... if by strong you mean - in a brilliant Orwellian twist - weak.

Today the president of my esteemed university delivered his State of the University address, proclaiming some great news: "I am very happy to report to you today that the state of our university is strong."

Yeah.

If by fiscally strong, you mean that we haven't yet heard what academic programs will be slashed to stanch the hemorrhaging budget.

If by academically strong, you mean that the university's leadership has promised that faculty salaries will rise to match our peer institutions' - but not delivered on this - and some of our brightest professors are being lured away by competitive salaries elsewhere.

If by athletically strong, you that mean our handsomely paid football coach hasn't been busted for DUI since the end of 2005.

If by ethically strong, you mean that administrators' awkward efforts to spin the publicity around a plagiarism case have now spawned civil litigation.

If by equitably strong, you mean that adjunct instructors with Ph.D.s earn $5000 in gross pay over three months with no access to health insurance for teaching two courses per quarter (a half-time position), numerous janitors have been laid off, and administrators continue to receive handsome annual raises.

If by democratically strong, you mean that the provost has not signed a single resolution sent to her by the Faculty Senate since the middle of spring 2007.

Say, this strength meme really rocks. All the embattled autocrats are grooving on it! I haven't heard if Putin has picked up on it yet, but it's been a constant drumbeat in Dubya's State of the Union addresses since 2002, as the Daily Show found out. (The player may be very slow to load, sorry 'bout that.)



In that Orwellian vein, I could sure use a limp shot of weak whiskey.

Image of OU President Roderick McDavis from his official university bio.