Mrs. Ellis's Class "Equal This" Project

Mrs. Ellis's class has been busy creating their own model of Middletown for their culminating project for "Equal This". "Equal This" is a program targeted towards math.

 With this project, the students had to make a model of their town, and determine the area and perimeter of it. Their partnering school, Jack Jackter in Colchester ,also did this as well. When they were finished, students from Jack Jackter and Mrs. Ellis's class met to showcase all their hard work.

Great job Mrs. Ellis's class. You did a fantastic job!

Take a look at all their hard work!

 

How To Do Your Job: Stanley Fish, Save The World On Your Own Time

Save The World On Your Own Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Hardcover, $19.95.

Stanley Fish is a crank. An erudite crank, an influential crank, but a crank all the same. Which may be why I was inclined to like Save The World On Your Own Time, because although we are a different kind of crank, I occasionally found myself laughing and -- even when in strong disagreement -- refreshed to read someone who simultaneously cares deeply about the future of the academy and is willing to challenge us to re-think our key assumptions about our work. Even though I am not as well paid, or as accomplished, as Stanley Fish, I like to think that this blog plays a similar role and that I write in a similarly constructive spirit. Finally, I like him for being married to Jane Tompkins, who once wrote an engaging and truly wacky book about teaching, and I imagine that they must have a really interesting life together.

But the truth is that I have never read anything except an op-ed piece by Stanley Fish until yesterday, and that may change.

Fish, a literary and legal scholar, and one of the foremost authorities on the work of John Milton, first came to the attention of many of us beyond literary studies during his tenure as chair of the Duke English department, which he either ruined or took to transcendent heights, depending on where one stood in the culture wars. There, he was given an almost entirely free hand to hire and pay extravagant salaries to those who he considered to be the most cutting edge literary theorists: queer studies, for example finally got legs nationally in part because of Fish's support for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon. From there, Fish left to become the dean of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago from 1999 to 2004, which gave him an even wider scope to annoy people, and to hire a lot of really interesting people. Faculty hired under Fish's watch included Walter Ben Michaels (another opinionated literary scholar who has taken to broad-ranging critiques of the academy); and John D'Emilio, one of the finest scholar-activists in GLBT history, who had actually quit his academic job to become a full-time activist. Having read this book, my guess is that Stanley thought that was cool.

When I did a little research, I also found that Fish, who has a New York Times blog, is somewhat of an equal opportunity irritant, having been critiqued for his "radical relativism" by feminist Martha Nussbaum and anti-feminist Camille Paglia. That captures the spirit of Save The World On Your Own Time: in a hectoring tone that must have been self-consciously chosen, he gives us all a good piece of his mind, drawn from decades as a prestigious scholar and powerful administrator. There is something there for everyone, and I strongly advise you read it (particularly since, at Amazon, this little book only costs $13.00, and you can't even get most paperbacks as cheap as that.)

The book answers a simple question -- "What is the job of higher education and what is it that those who are paid to teach in colleges and universities are trained and paid to do?" The route to answering this question, in Fish's view, is embraced by three imperative that form a single ethic: "do your job....don't do somebody else's job and don't let someone else do your job."

My answer is simple. College and university teachers can (legitimately) do two things: (1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience, and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills -- of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure -- that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over.

If you think about it, that's a lot to ask.(8)

Darn tootin' it is, but by the end of the book I was persuaded that it is not too much to ask. This simple statement (arrived at without a year of committee meetings, endless jargon and documents that faculty have fought over for a year in numerous venues) has a lot of appeal in a world where the job of a faculty member has grown more and more complex. Over seven short chapters, Fish repeats and elaborates on this mantra through three basic principles: faculty should not confuse their own political commitments with their teaching mission; faculty and students should not try to run the university or ask the university to act on their political commitments; and administrators should both govern effectively and act as forceful, and if necessary, aggravating advocates for the university and its mission.

During the course of the book, Fish goes after a lot of key issues, and the politicized classroom is foremost among them. Doing, or advocating for, whatever one likes in a college classroom is not protected by academic freedom, he argues, just because the person responsible is an academic: rather, studying, critiquing and writing about whatever one likes is protected by academic freedom. The central question about pedagogy should be similar to the question one would ask about such scholarship: is it good or bad? Is it effective? Has it conformed to the principles of responsible inquiry? Political issues are entirely suitable for the classroom when studied intellectually; these are also the criteria for what would constitute "good" or "bad" teaching of any subject, field or theoretical approach. In fact, Fish advocates on behalf of detaching "explosive issues" from their "real world urgency" and "academicizing" them for deployment in the classroom.(27) One would engage the question of whether George Bush was a good or bad president, for example, not by trading ideological barbs, but by asking students to debate what it means to be a good or bad president, and on what grounds one might make such a judgement.

But the teacher would not deliver herself of an opinion on the matter, nor would s/he encourage students to develop a consensus view that leaves one group of students an embattled, seething minority. To emphasize, Fish would argue the teacher's job is not to advocate, organize, or use the classroom as a place to persuade students of a particular political point of view. (87) Fish extends this critique to what is now common among liberal arts colleges like my own: trying to persuade potential parents and donors that what we do prepares students for twenty-first century citizenship and its dilemmas in any way that is different from what we did at the end of the twentieth century. Skewering what is now known as the "mission statement," he contends that it is not the purpose of the liberal arts education to produce better workers, mold an informed citizenry, send students out to work for social justice, or advance any kind of agenda whatsoever.(55) It is merely (and he would say that this is a big job) to educate students so that they can go out into the world to decide what they will do and how they will do it. To constantly be re-thinking and arguing for the "relevance" of the liberal arts education is to ignore what may be a larger truth: that such arguments with legislators, bureaucrats, parents and education "experts" are unwinnable, foolish and a waste of time. There may be no guaranteed use or exchange value to a liberal arts education. Despite this, we can still assert that the liberal arts plays a critical role in nurturing humanness and perpetuating civilization. In other words, stop marketing the liberal arts, and focus your time, effort and resources on teaching them.

I like these ideas, and I think everyone should read and think about them. I particularly like the idea of administrators doing their job well so that I can pay close attention to what I was educated for: teaching, scholarship and providing sane advice on who we ought to hire, not shadowing and carping at administrators. Like Fish, the older I get the less attached I am to shared governance. In part this is because I don't think there are many examples of faculties who have exercised it effectively and usefully, and in part, I don't think it exists except as something we gesture towards. I prefer a clear set of regulations that are effectively and fairly enforced by objective parties who are truly interested in what is going on at the level of the department and willing to intervene when people are being screwed. I would prefer pay equity. I would prefer a union. I would also prefer, as Fish suggests, to get all the information possible, to make the preferences and reasons for those preferences known, and then to forget about it while a set of competent administrators settles the issue in a way that is fair.(115)

OK, so we don't yet live in that world, but I would still like to. Under current systems of shared governance, vast amounts of energy go into tasks, small and large, that are delegated to faculty committees. There, initiatives that are usually hardly bold rot for months at a time and are decided on principle, not on whether they can be practically implemented or whether they support the teaching mission in a practical, legible way. In the rare event that interesting and unusual outcomes are agreed upon, such outcomes are not put into action effectively because even when faculty have agreed to something in principle they have done so on the assumption that any colleague who disagrees can exercise "academic freedom" by opting out. Preventing a member of the faculty from opting out of a curricular mandate passed by the faculty and listed in the catalogue is viewed as treachery if done by a faculty colleague and abuse of power if done by an administrator. And what a small minority of faculty do, or do not, believe can cause an initiative to be abandoned altogether.

I think this book is right about a great many things, although I think Fish often sees issues as "simple" or "easy" that are neither thing. As a scholar who has spent his career in large universities, he doesn't see the ways in which a principle like shared governance could be rehabilitated for a small college, where it can play an essential community-building role, and where administrators are a daily presence in the lives of many faculty, untenured and tenured. The desire to make issues clear-cut hits a particular nerve when Fish describes the line between teaching about politics and doing politics in the classroom as clear, and governed by ordinary rules of appropriate speech and behavior that are well-known to all. As he writes,

if I harass students, or call them names, or make fun of their ethnicity, or if I use class time rehearse my personal political views or attempt to win students over to them, I might well find myself in a disciplinary hearing, either because I am abusing my pedagogical authority or because I am turning the scene of instruction into a scene of indoctrination.(83)

Well, true enough. But, although this isn't a bad standard by which to judge one's own behavior, that is not usually the nature of the complaint or the problem. And while Fish reserves plenty of bile for conservative critics who pick apart syllabi for "balance," and comb voter registration list for faculty names, he ignores a large middle ground of struggle between faculty and students over what constitutes useful knowledge, how people teach and learn, and what role changing students' minds about what they already believe must ultimately play in a classroom for them to be receptive to a syllabus or set of readings at all. He spends little time on the art of listening, something that is sadly neglected in most academic settings. He completely neglects what I consider a big issue when one is considering the politicization of contemporary classrooms: that many academics have been inspired by politicized classrooms and don't have much perspective on why some students might be intimidated or angered by them. Worse, very little effort is put into teaching doctoral candidates, or young PhD's how to teach, what is an appropriate classroom ethic, how one might "academicize" volatile issues that are of great importance to students, and how one might make decisions about what is appropriate in the classroom. I am not suggesting that it isn't possible, but rather, that the assumption is that smart, accomplished people don't need to be taught how to teach and that is not true.

A final thought: it is interesting to me that so much work about the politics of the academy comes from literary scholars, and I wonder whether taking these questions to people in other fields would help us with that big middle that isn't holding Fish's interest. For example, how do we academicize good and evil? Teach Milton! Easy, right? Well perhaps not for the twentieth century historian, since that big middle is often populated with subjects and people who are not easy to depoliticize: whether, for example, to use communism, fascism, Peronism or American foreign policy for your discussion of good and evil are highly politicized choices in and of themselves. And while I respect the work of literature very deeply, I do get a little tired of constantly being told how easy or effective it is to do X, or Y, or Z by teaching a poem. But that aside, whatever you have heard about Stanley Fish, read this book and talk to your colleagues about it.

It's part of doing your job.

Turn off the TV Night

Last week, students and families had an exciting night! Students were greeted with a passport filled with various activities and games to attend. Such activities included Connect 4, Uno, board games, drumming, freeze dance, looking at bug collections, drinking smoothies, and so much more! Once the students finished all of the activities on their passport, they got a glow stick!

A special thank to Jen Alexander for planning and coordinating this awesome night!

 

 

Comcast Cares Day

The sun was shining on Saturday as employees of Comcast joined teachers, students, families and neighbors for the 2013 Comcast Cares Day.

Community gardens were wakened from the winter hibernations and a brand new Born Learning Trail was installed at Macdonough School!

The Only Good Professor Is A Dead Professor: Or, Is The Decline Of Academic Labor A Health Risk?

When was the last time you stopped grading, writing, reading or writing up committee reports and went to the gym?  In "Performance Pressure," published this week in the Canadian academic journal Academic Matters, Megan A. Kirk and Ryan E. Rhodes are betting you didn't do it lately.  In "Performance Pressure" they argue that assistant professors are particularly at risk. "Being a professor is a profession that has been shown to have the longest work hours, heaviest work demands, highest psychological stress, and lowest occupational energy expenditure compared to other professional occupations," they write. Hence, among all professional workers, new faculty are most likely to become mentally run-down and unhealthy for lack of exercise:

For many, the allure of becoming a professor is the promise of a career that involves freedom of choice, national funding, opportunities for promotion, secured tenure-track advancement, and a flexible work schedule. It is no secret, however, that the path to becoming an established professor requires years of grueling, all-consuming service to prove oneself as worthy.

Assistant professors, those who have recently entered the academic profession, aim to reach tenure by spending countless hours teaching, marking, grant writing, publishing, reading, analyzing, recruiting, and presenting. Most of these “rookies” are also juggling relationships, families, and other personal goals. The reward is that once tenure status is granted, life as a professor can be absolutely wonderful. Or so we think. What if the pressure, expectations, and stress endured while trying to obtain a tenure-track position had devastating consequences on your long-term physical and emotional health?

In a sample of 267 assistant professors who had been hired in the last five years, Kirk and Rhodes found that only 30.7% were meeting a minimum level of physical activity necessary to maintain good adult health.  This compares to 50% of young Canadian professionals who are meeting this basic standard.  "The declining trend in physical activity was not independent of certain socio-demographic profiles," they note.  "Those who indicated they were married, and worked 70-plus hours of work per week reported sharper decreases in physical activity across the transition compared to those who were single and working fewer than 70 hours." Having children was also a co-factor, which will not surprise those of you out there who are parents.

One recent preoccupation of this blog and a great many other publications has been the great difficulties of life as an adjunct or contract faculty member.  But here's a question:  although there are tremendous differences in salary, security and work conditions between ladder track faculty and others, are labor conditions that have marginalized some also putting increasing pressure on those who seem to be succeeding in this narrowing labor market?  One of the things we all know implicitly is that the tremendous pressure to achieve tenure occurs in part because to not get tenure has a great likelihood of being a career-ending moment.  That is a psychological stressor, including an inducement to work harder -- even at things that will never be noticed in a review.  One thing I have suspected for a while is that there is simply more work to do than there was twenty years ago, even putting aside raised expectations for scholarly production in the social sciences and the humanities.  Colleges and universities are accepting more students; many of the students we accept are more difficult to teach for a variety of reasons; the increased demand for measurable outcomes; and the drop in full-time teaching staff who can be expected to undertake and be responsible for these tasks makes them more time-consuming.

Love, Literature, and The Art Of Making A Life In Priscilla Gilman's "The Anti-Romantic Child"

Priscilla Gilman's new memoir, The Anti-Romantic Child:  A Story of Unexpected Joy (New York:  HarperCollins, 2011), is this week's recommended reading.  It is mostly about Gilman's struggle to help her son Benjamin overcome a set of developmental disabilities that make him sound quite charming and interesting -- as well as a challenging child who gives intricate meaning to that imprecise phrase "special needs."  While she gestures at specific diagnoses, she resists the comprehensive and categorical workup with which so many of my students arrive at college.  She also refuses medication, which seems to be the go-to solution for the vast majority of kids who see a neurologist nowadays, as it seems to affect Benj’s brain chemistry in dramatic and unhelpful ways.  Intensive therapy, however, helps, and that story is going to be very instructive and encouraging for parents who are finding their way with similarly challenging children.  As the book argues implicitly, it matters less what is "wrong" with Benj than it matters to cultivate his talents and strengths as an individual, give him access and connection to a world of feeling, and give him a way to live in the world as a creative and unique person.

Benj is high end (fill in the blank -- any neurological diagnosis is a menu nowadays) which means that, with a lot of hard work on the part of his parents and therapists, a child who is clearly brilliant by any standard but lacks the capacity to interact empathetically, receive affection in recognizable ways, or function in a standard social or learning environment learns to do so by the end of the book.  The larger, and very compelling, theme of The Anti-Romantic Child, however, surpasses the particularities of Benj and his upbringing:  it is about the romance that everyone needs to have to imagine a life.  It is about what it takes to hold onto that romance and also grapple with the realities that clash with it.  Gilman positions herself as a particularly romantic person (she becomes a Wordsworth scholar), but also creates a compelling perspective on that for the reader.  The romances we develop about childhood, she proposes, are a healthy mechanism for choosing the parts of our upbringing that we want to honor and reproduce, while vowing not to pass on our own parents' shortcomings.  And while the family romance in particular sets the stage for disappointment -- since, after all, people are dealt children quite randomly, and fully able children are bound to simply be themselves rather than made-to-order progeny -- Gilman learns that romance is also really about joy.  As she watches Benj learn to live for himself, overcome simple difficulties that can be paralyzing for him, and actualize his humanity, she discovers in herself a whole new capacity for experiencing joy.

Perhaps it is no accident that Gilman has to recalibrate her romance about herself at the same time:  her marriage ends, tested by circumstance and the deepening knowledge that two adults can acquire about the nature of intimacy.  A second theme in the book is her path into, and out of, academia.  For a variety of reasons, Gilman's career as a literary scholar had seemed pre-ordained.  She gives birth to Benj while still in graduate school and, incredibly, is able to leverage a tenure-track job at Vassar as well as a part-time job for her husband.  Particularly because they have a special needs child, being near family and friends, as well as avoiding a commuter marriage, seems to be the miracle they need.  Increasingly, however, as she struggles with launching Benj, she also grapples with the knowledge that she has taken a wrong turn even as she has lived out a cherished romance about herself:

Vassar was a wonderful college, but my doubts, my dissatisfactions with academia remained.  I would find myself warning my students against my path; I couldn't in all good conscience encourage them to go to graduate school when they said they wanted to read great books all the time and teach great students like I did.  They were so idealistic; they had starry eyes and great hopes.  I wished one of my professors had been more honest and blunt with me early on; I wish I'd known what I was getting into, that being an English major bore little or no relation to being an English professor.  I was reading much less literature, especially world literature, now that I was a professor.  I had to read endless scholarly articles, book reviews, and student papers.  I had to immerse myself in the minor writers of my period.  And, of course, there were virtually no jobs; my career was an aberration, not a model that could be easily replicated.

Love for literature did not necessarily a career as a teacher-scholar make.  While having a developmentally disabled child was a huge challenge to that career, and to ordinary life, it may have also allowed her to speak the things to herself that many people feel but do not act on.

I would sit in interminable department or all-college faculty meetings where minutiae would be debated for hours, people got up in arms about the smallest matters, and both the bickering and the venom bore no relation to what was really at stake....Once I got to Vassar, I no longer had the anxiety about the unknown, but a new problem emerged; I realized that I had been so fixated on the elusive brass ring of a tenure-track job that I hadn't faced the fact that I wasn't truly suited to scholarship.....I knew what I had to do to get tenure, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

So she chucks it, moving to New York to have another literary life:

...it felt good to write to the head of the Vassar English Department and tell him I'd decided to leave academia after the coming year's teaching responsibilities were over; the father of a special needs child himself, he accepted my decision with great graciousness and understanding.  Stepping off that tenure track felt like an enormous liberation, and I looked forward to beginning at the literary agency the following summer.

Gilman's book is a must-read for anyone interested in disability studies, and a thoughtful, third wave feminist meditation on mothering, work, and the work of mothering.  But it is also worthwhile for those who have made academic careers, and are beginning to wake up in the middle of the night and wonder how they got there; those on the path to a scholarly career who may or may not have come to grips with the realities of why they want it; and those who cherish the reality of scholarly life in all its parts but have found the path to a tenure-track job frustratingly foreclosed by the poor job market.  Under what circumstances is it OK to change your mind?  Under what circumstances is it possible to live out your dream in another way?  While a special needs child might force those choices, or clarify such decisions, for any one individual, they are good questions for all of us to ask ourselves as we do the ongoing work of making a life.

Kindergarten learns the letter O!

Today the kindergarten children had a special visitor. It was Ozzie the octopus!

Is The Oklahoma Legislature Really Determined To Legalize Rape And Medical Malpractice In Order To Stop Legal Abortions?

As the New York Times reported over the weekend, Oklahoma governor Brad Henry, a Democrat, vetoed two abortion bills last week. "One measure would have required women to undergo an intrusive ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before having an abortion. Mr. Henry, a Democrat, said Friday that the legislation was flawed because it did not exempt rape and incest victims," the Associated Press report noted (I say the Associated Press because the Times does not think women's right to choose is actually important enough to report on, especially when the story is about women in a flyover state, so they simply reprinted a wire story.)

Mr. Henry said that “it would be unconscionable to subject rape and incest victims to such treatment” because it would victimize them again.

“State policymakers should never mandate that a citizen be forced to undergo any medical procedure against his or her will,” Mr. Henry said, “especially when such a procedure could cause physical or mental trauma.”

Under the ultrasound legislation, doctors would have been required to use a vaginal probe in cases where it would provide a clearer picture of the fetus than a regular ultrasound. Doctors have said that this is usually the case early in pregnancies.

The second bill "would have prohibited pregnant women from seeking damages if physicians withhold important information or provide inaccurate information about their pregnancy. Supporters of that measure said it was an attempt to keep pregnant women from discriminating against fetuses with disabilities." The Oklahoma legislature, which has passed this legislation before, vows to do so again.

Putting aside the question of why you would want to legalize doctors lying to patients, what no one has mentioned about the first bill is that it comes into direct conflict with Oklahoma's rape statute. If, in order to obtain a perfectly legal abortion, a woman must permit herself to be penetrated by an ultrasound probe -- in whatever way, or for however long, the technician and doctor wish to do so, that seems to me to be what statute 21-114 of the Oklahoma Criminal Code defines as rape by instrumentation. This act (putting an object in a vagina, anus or mouth against that person's will) is explicitly defined as rape in the first or second degree.

Coercing a woman into being raped with an object, for whatever reason, is, in fact, rape: this was first established in State v. Rusk (1979), which transformed the legal and popular view of what counted as forced sex by defining as rape any unwanted sexual intercourse, even if a man believed that a woman ought to give it up in return for the drinks and dinner he had purchased earlier in the evening. And by the way? Although it has been technically invalidated by Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Oklahoma still has a sodomy statute on the books too.

Furthermore, it isn't clear to me why, if the legislature is institutionalizing rape as the only path to a legal medical procedure, it matters that whether a woman has come to you having been already traumatized by sexual assault or not. Being raped once is "Oklahoma, OK", as they say in the song (particularly if you get your life back in return), but being raped twice is an act to which the state cannot consent?

Remember when various agents of the state-- cops, judges -- or your average college guy would suggest with a grin that you could just "lie back and enjoy it?" Or perhaps you recall those dark days prior to the feminist anti-rape movement when girls and women were routinely counseled that they only way to ensure that you would not be killed or beaten by an assailant was to be passive permit the rape to occur?

So where are feminists on this one? In our post-Abu Ghraib world, that women who have gotten pregnant through consensual sex would be imagined as candidates for rape-by-technician doesn't seem worth a mention by organizations like NARAL-Pro-Choice America (which has virtually eliminated the word "abortion" from its name) or the National Organization for Women (which has nothing about the Oklahoma bill on the portion of its web site devoted to abortion rights.) These are groups that ask for our donations in the name of preserving our access to the law. Feminists are not the only ones who have dropped the ball here. Although the AMA reported on the previous versions of the bill, struck down by court order in 2009, they made no public statement that I can find condemning the participation of medical personnel in procedures that enshrine violence against women in the law.

This is of course, the endgame of feminist lobbyists and their so-called allies in the Democratic Party having ceded the abortion debate for all but those of us who can pay to control the integrity of our own bodies. While abortion is technically legal, it is actually available to a fraction of American women who have the money to preserve their civil rights. Now abortion activists want to go after the rest of us, by forcing women to be physically tortured and verbally abused by crazy people funneling their projected fantasies about the innocent "baby" you are about to "execute."

And while we are at it, does anyone but me see see some relationship between how the Vatican and the Catholic Church hierarchy around the globe has handled institutionalized child sexual abuse, its successful attempts to constrict the civil and human rights of GLBT people and the lack of value the Church puts on women's lives by its lobbying efforts against legal abortion and birth control? And yet, organized feminism in the United States is not talking about this either.

People talk about political reform as if it could, and should, only happen in formal political frameworks. From my perspective, organized feminism has become too complicit with politics, too wedded to the business of lobbying and compromise, too interested in the forest and uninterested in the trees that make up the lives of ordinary people.

Have we given up?

Noon Update: for more observations about sexual violence in plain sight, go to today's post at Roxie's World.

Fourht Grade Visits State Capitol

 

 

Fourth grade students visited the State Capitol in Hartford. They were given a tour of the building including the senate and house chambers. While at the capitol students were lucky enough to meet Senator Paul Doyle, one of Middletown's legislatures.

Sunday Radical Roundup: White Men Do The Right Thing, California Dreamin' and Asian American Studies Fun

Department of Southern Discomfort: Think what fraternities could accomplish if they wanted to. The Kappa Alpha Order ("inspired by Robert E. Lee," says the Associated Press) has recently banned its members from wearing Confederate uniforms to "Old South" parties. Such parties are a tradition that has ended on many campuses already because of protests about the uniforms. KA acknowledges that Confederate dress may be a "tradition" but that it's a tradition that is hurtful to those students who perceive it as a celebration of slavery.

"The decision, announced in an internal memo posted on the group's website, followed a flap last year at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where a black sorority complained after a KA parade stopped in front of its house on campus. KA members were dressed in the gray uniforms of Confederate officers, and young women wore hoop skirts," writes the AP's Jay Reeves. "More than 70 alumnae of the sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, sent a petition to Alabama President Robert Witt complaining about the use of Confederate flags and uniforms on campus.

"In the memo to chapters, Kappa Alpha's national executive director, Larry Wiese, said such displays had to end.
'In today's climate, the Order can ill afford to offend our host institutions and fend off significant negative national press and remain effective at our core mission, which is to aid young men in becoming better community leaders and citizens,"' Wiese wrote."

The fraternity is also part of an important anti-hazing initiative.

Hat Tip.

Pack Up The Car and Move To Bever-lee (Hills, That Is. Swimmin' Pools. Movie Stars): Or Merced, which is nice too, and has A Job. One of my favorite and most faithful commenters passes on this ad for a one year visiting gig in sunny California: "The School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at the University of California, Merced invites applications from exceptional scholars and teachers at the Visiting Assistant Professor level in US History with a focus on Comparative Race and Ethnicity. We particularly seek candidates with expertise in Chicano/a-Latino/a topics and capable of teaching the following subjects in the 2015-11 academic year, along with an additional course in their area of expertise: The Modern United States (1877-present), Topics in the History of Migration & Immigration, and Comparative Race and Ethnicity. The anticipated start date is July 1, 2010." Click here for the full ad.

New Anthology in Asian American Studies: Thomas Chen, a Ph.D. candidate in American Civilization, announces "We would like to announce the publication of Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader (Rutgers University Press, 2010), edited and with an Introduction by Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen, a new anthology that collects both seminal articles and exciting new scholarship in the field of Asian American Studies.

"Ten years have passed since Jean Wu and Min Song edited Asian American Studies: A Reader (Rutgers University Press 2000). The Wu and Song Reader brought together essential readings in the field, and we believe it remains an excellent resource for students and teachers. However, the field has been flooded with outstanding new scholarship since 2000, and an updated introduction to Asian American Studies seemed appropriate. We designed this new anthology to be used as both a companion to the earlier anthology and as a stand-alone introduction to the field.

"We also used the compiling of this new volume to reflect on the state of the field now that it has established a significant presence in the academy. What has Asian American Studies achieved? What has it yet to accomplish? Indeed, what do we want Asian Americanist research, writing, and teaching to accomplish? We include pieces that discuss critical pedagogies, provide models of effective social justice work, and raise questions that we believe the field must grapple with if it is to survive as an effective site for political struggle and social transformation. Our goal is to urge those active in the field to consider with a new sense of urgency just how Asian American Studies relates—or should relate—to the work of anti-oppressive social transformation today."

Next Week, For My Benefit, President Obama Will Play Basketball With Lesbians

What, exactly, has happened to feminism?

If Joanne Lipman's peculiar rant in yesterday's New York Times about why women should only blame themselves for the lack of gender equality in the so-called "post-feminist" world was not enough to inspire this question (see Historiann for extended commentary), read today's paper. A front-page story by Mark Leibovich features former Clintonista Dee Dee Myers wagging a finger at President Obama for playing sports with men. Forget it that a grown woman who calls herself Dee Dee, and whose job description seems to be pundit, is accusing the President of not taking female people seriously. Forget it that Dee Dee would know better than anyone that it is not always a good thing for the President to relax by playing with girls.

No, I am going to lay those issues aside and cut to the chase: who the President plays basketball with has nothing to do with key feminist issues like the right to choose, equal pay for equal work, violence, homelessness, child care, health care, social security, welfare or institutional discrimination.

That's right, you heard it here first. Back in the 1970s, feminists never really cared about whether the boys had a tree house or not, they cared about whether men were running the world and ruining women's lives from the tree house. Gender segregated social spaces, while they reinforced male privilege, were in fact only an effect and a fringe benefit of what virtually all men, of all social classes and political convictions, believed prior to women's liberation: that it was their natural, biological, divine and constitutional right to run the entire world and keep all the money, jobs, property, education and power for themselves. Men, as well as women, were encouraged to believe this by law, theology, psychiatry, and science. These fields were almost exclusively male because of schools that admitted almost no women; global churches that gave women no authority to interpret scripture; political parties that didn't promote women for public office; unions that didn't organize women or fight for their right to work; and corporations, universities, police forces, law firms, construction projects, brokerage houses, fire departments and hospitals that didn't hire women. Men hung onto their exclusive right to run the entire world until feminist politicians, attorneys and grass-roots activists (as well as male politicians who suddenly got it they could be elected by actually serving the interests of women voters) forced them to give it up by making gender discrimination illegal.

To return to the New York Times for a moment, what seems really sexist to me is the article itself. For narrative flow, Mark Leibovich relies on crude gender stereotypes of boyish boys who play sports and do guy-guy stuff; meanwhile the girly-girls at the White House plan showers and tea parties that the menz are excluded from. Describing Obama as a "an unabashed First Guy’s Guy," Leibovich notes that since he was elected the President "has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a `big rambunctious dog' over a `girlie dog' and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort."

Can I just say, Mark, that aside from the fact that they rarely get elected to anything, this would describe a lot of lesbians I know too? Or Sarah Palin?

OK, you might ask, what is Leibovich's take-away political point in this story? It is that "women" (the word feminism does not appear) will not trust the President to respect them or take their issues seriously because, when not with his wife and children, he socializes primarily with men. "While the senior adviser Valerie Jarrett is undeniably one of the president’s closest White House confidantes," he writes,

some women inside or close to the administration complain that Mr. Obama’s female advisers are not as visible as their male colleagues or, they suspect, as influential.

"Women are Obama’s base, and they don’t seem to have enough people who look like the base inside of their own inner circle,” said Dee Dee Myers, a former press secretary in the Clinton administration whose sister, Betsy, served as the Obama campaign’s chief operating officer.

Is the point of the story to remind us that Hilary Clinton is not President? Enquiring minds want to know.

For Myers, "looking like" -- or what I would call proxy politics -- would be an acceptable substitute for serious policy commitments that might promote women's rights and/or proof that they exist. But hold your horses, my friends! You might remember that Bill Clinton looked like a feminist, and he filled his administration with women. But as it turned out, he treated individual women badly (including his very intelligent and capable wife, now Obama's Secretary of State), and promoted economic policies that were bad for women around the world. Recently I made an argument that it was a strategic error to mistake the mere inclusion of "people who look like me" for intellectual and institutional transformation, but I've got to say, Valerie Jarrett and Dee Dee Myers sure don't look like me. If Obama hired Nan D. Hunter of Georgetown Law we could get closer to someone who "looks like me," but to really nail it you would have to go for....oh, a gas station attendant in a Cold War film noir.

But to get back to politics, women's liberation, as a movement, relied on structural critiques for its great successes, not social critiques or gender essentialism. The idea that men who are in the company of other men are inherently incapable of reaching conclusions that are good for women is not a correct feminist analysis, or a logical one unless you believe in universal male stupidity, and it gives a great many men a big pass for a long history of discrimination. Feminist history teaches that one can, theoretically, trust a president who is not, at all times, accompanied by a simulacrum of "me." Why? Because who the President plays basketball or golf with (and I've got to ask, I know I have bad knees, but how many women over 35 are actually competing to be bumped and stomped at lunch by a bunch of menz?) does not need to be an issue, as long as the President works effectively with people -- women and men -- who take gender equity in all spheres of life seriously.

Like much of what passes for the media's coverage of national politics, Leibovich's article masks social commentary as political news and by doing so, drowns the potential for a feminist agenda in symbolic issues and hurt feelings. In the 1970s, feminists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the ACLU understood that breaking the barriers that kept women off the basketball court and out of the policy-making room required lawsuits and legislation, not socializing. By turning feminist ideas into pragmatic political action, they changed laws and policies that prevented women from access to all forms of work and education. Gender-segregated social space became important to feminist attorneys, not in and of itself, but when it facilitated the exclusion of women from participating equally in work (holding business meetings at men's clubs), or when women paid equal dues for unequal access (private athletic clubs, where women were barred from swimming so that men could swim in the nude or restricted to tennis and golf reservations in non-working hours.)

True, men often countered challenges to exclusive social spaces and schools by waxing eloquent about the importance of male-only spaces to manhood itself, justifications that feminist attorneys countered by pointing to the critical role these spaces had in corporate decision-making and professional networking. So I admit that social space and political space do overlap, and if competent, willing female Congressional aides had been overlooked when Obama's people were picking golf and basketball companions (the article presents no evidence that this is the case, only that it might be) I would be a little pissed. But I would probably still care more about the President's position on DOMA, ENDA or the Helms Amendment. What is wrong with sex segregation is when the men involved actually believe that women are not in the room because they are less intelligent and capable, not that men (or women for that matter) might play some pick-up hoops in between a foreign policy meeting run by Hilary Clinton and a skull session on the health care bill run by Kathleen Sibelius.

What this article best illustrates, once again, is not a political problem, but a distressing standard for what counts as good journalism in what is purportedly one of the nation's finest newspapers. Other than the fact that I am sick of the New York Times pandering to its right-wing critics by criticizing the President for something -- anything! -- and pandering to the soft news market with human interest stories about politicians, I would like to point out that in this post-JFK, post-Clinton, post-John Edwards moment, this feminist Democrat sleeps better at night knowing that, when not with his family, Obama relaxes by playing competitive sports with the boys, and is not wasting political capital that might otherwise be spent on health coverage for women and children on schtupping interns, videographers and campaign volunteers. As a feminist, I think that this is not only better for "women," but for the United States, and perhaps the world.

Terrorists With Good Intentions: A Review of American Subversive by David Goodwillie (Scribner, 2010), 309 pp. $25.00

A combination thriller and meditation on the state of radical politics in the 21st century, David Goodwillie's American Subversive, just out this week, begins inside the head of gossip blogger Aidan Cole who, inexplicably, is in hiding in a neglected vacation home. Why, we are not yet sure. But what we do know is that someone who has epitomized the often aimless spirit of the New Media is locked away, managed by "handlers." He is subsisting on radio and day-old newspapers for information about the outside world and wondering whether "putting [his story] down on paper" will help him figure out how he has ended up in this place. But where is this place, you might ask? Is he in the witness protection program? And how is it that he has been thrown back on outmoded instruments like paper and pencil?

Why indeed? And do we care?

Ultimately, yes, we do. American Subversive is a fun read, even though we come to care (and come to the fun a thriller should provide) a bit too slowly for my taste. For example, we have to slog through too much of Aidan's life among superficial, wealthy media whores. This is a type Goodwillie appears to know intimately from his own past as a journalist and an Internet entrepreneur (something he memorialized in the memoir Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time, 2006). We also slog through what proves to be an utter red herring, Aidan's ambivalence about his dying relationship with the bitchy Cressida, who has begun to break up with him by broadcasting Aidan's lack of sexual pizzazz in a gossip column she writes for the New York Times. This last is one of several odd plot details that will jolt you out of the fantasy world every thriller is obliged to create. The Gray Lady has tried to appeal to younger readers recently, with mildly pathetic innovations like the hideous boxed narrative in Sunday Styles describing the featured wedding of the week, or its "Evening Out" feature with some actor or rock band that has a really good publicist. But a regular column documenting the sex lives of its own employees?

OK, details, details. The story that concerns Our Hero is that there has been a bombing in midtown New York, at Barney's of all places. Aidan, in the midst of one of the terrible parties that punctuate his more or less meaningless life (he has major credit card debt and has gone to the event at Cressida's loft to confront her about the item trashing their sex life) receives a message in his blogger account that someone named Paige Roderick is responsible for the bombing, and that she is part of an underground network of domestic terrorists. A photo is attached, and you will not be surprised to learn that she is Very Beautiful. Subsequently, the novel alternates between Aidan and Paige's points of view to tell the story of who is responsible for the bombing, what it means, who sent the email anyway, and how the story of the two principles -- aimless blogger and committed underground guerrilla -- will come together to make everything clear by about page 100 or so.

It's hard to write a review like this without giving everything away that might ever want you to read the book, so I am not going to tell you who blew up Barney's or why. But I can tell you that I see you with this book on the beach, really I do. Although American Subversive starts slowly, I must admit that it eventually grabbed me, and I read the final 200 pages almost straight through. True, some of the plotting doesn't add up, and several of the characters are too thinly drawn for my taste. It's hard to be engaged by a character -- blogger or not -- whose narrative relies on an aimlessness finally disrupted by an accidental involvement with domestic terrorists who he eventually comes to be sympathetic to, and who ruin his admittedly purpose-free life.

Paige, on the other hand, is a character of real substance who carries the novel, and might have done so on her own. She becomes involved with the mysterious radical network (which includes elderly former Weatherman members and the Earth Liberation Front) because of grief over her brother's death in Iraq. She is compelling and nuanced, and her embrace by a gentle alternative community that turns out to have an agenda of its own seems emotionally authentic. It also seems real that a person might believe her life to have been rendered meaningless by the wartime death of a beloved sibling and her inability to absorb that death as she comes to understand that war as corrupt. Such a narrative accurately renders what many former Black Panthers and antiwar activists from the Viet Nam era have described as the sense of a world out of control in the 1960s, one that made them vulnerable to a magnetic set of ideals, and idealists, and that led to actions they now look back on with regret. Goodwillie's promise as a novelist is better signaled by his ability to imagine a character like Paige, rather than, as the publicity materials suggest, his imperfect rendering of his own life and experiences in the characters of Aidan and his friends.

Everybody in the novel is beautiful, and this bodes well for American Subversive having future incarnations that make its defects less important as it shape-shifts into other media. My prediction is that American Subversive will do better on audio books and Kindle than it will between boards, and that there is an agent somewhere who saw a so-so book but a great movie deal. I'm thinking Claire Danes for Paige, and Entourage's Adrian Grenier finally making a successful jump into anything other than playing Vince forever. Heck, there could be a television series (like the short-lived Prison Break), in which Paige and Aidan stay one jump ahead of the law, serving the people's justice on polluters, corrupt land developers, cheatiing mortgage companies, marketers of phony Green appliances, and military bureaucrats who deceive disabled veterans and the families of dead military heroes.

There are pieces of this complex narrative that don't quite hold together that I think could be smoothed out in a movie script, for example, ditching the ill-advised Weatherman subplot. As a historian, I do have a problem with that, since survivors of the group have mostly expressed sorrow for having taken up violence, not a desire to see those forms of violent subversion revived by a new generation. Furthermore, during the book's final chapters, there seem to be many more Weather folk still living underground than I can account for in total from the 1970s. And Keith, the compelling mastermind of Paige's little terror cell, who eventually becomes more or less deranged, reminds me more of the egotistical United Fruit Company bomber Sam Melville than he reminds me of the far more disciplined and ideologically-driven Weather Underground.

That said, most people will not be troubled by these historical details, Goodwillie is a decent writer and there are parts of the novel I really liked. By about page 50, it begins to move more swiftly, although I continued to be semi-impatient about Aidan's chapters -- he is more or less swept along by events -- and I looked forward to the chapters that documented Paige's ongoing, far more morally thoughtful, transformation. There is an important Betrayal, and a somewhat surprising twist towards the end (I won't wreck it) in which, more or less, All Is Revealed. It is also worth your interest that a novelist has gone out of his way, however imperfectly, to imagine what a principled resistance to capitalism and the contemporary war machine might look like in a post- 9/11 world. Simultaneously, Goodwillie also makes the case that human imperfection and the necessary isolation of underground groups creates the possibility for amoral megalomania. Whether principled, targeted violence to prevent unjust violence is justified or not is also not a task the novel resolves: that violence inevitably destroys lives is, I think, an argument the novel makes, and perhaps that was his principle goal.

From Bathrooms To Board Rooms: Is Being Transgender A Promotion Problem?

Faculty at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, a public university in Durant, OK, think it has been, and in an act of solidarity are helping a trans colleague grieve her tenure case.

Rachel Tudor, who teaches American and Native American Literature, Modernity and Theory, Humanities, Composition, and Philosophy in the English, Humanities and Languages Department has, according to our informant, "been denied tenure at our university and informed that her employment will be terminated effective May 31, 2011."  Tudor is said to have had overwhelming support from faculty colleagues at every stage of the process because of her outstanding record as a scholar, teacher and colleague.  The tenure case has been turned back by the dean and the Vice President for academic affairs.  To support the appeal sign the petition here.

Professor Tudor's supporters say that they

have compelling evidence that this denial and dismissal are due to discrimination against her for being transgender. In a mess that has gone on for nearly two years, the administration at our university has repeatedly and egregiously violated established policies and procedures. The Faculty Appeals Committee has found in favor of Rachel twice, and the Faculty Senate has passed a resolution in support of her. Meanwhile, the VP for Academic Affairs and the President arbitrarily re-wrote the Academic Policies and Procedures manual in the midst of the process, in order to allow the VP for Business Affairs (!) to overrule the decision of the Faculty Appeals Committee. 

A press release sent by Tudor's supporters tells the following story, with assertions of trans discrimination highlighted in blue:

After transitioning, Dr. Tudor was instructed by SOSU’s human resource department to only use a single-stall handicap bathroom on a different floor than where her office is located. She presumes the direction came from Dr. Douglas McMillan, the vice president of academic affairs, who reportedly had also inquired whether Dr. Tudor could be terminated because her lifestyle “offends his Baptist beliefs.” Human resources denied his request to terminate her but did direct Dr. Tudor to use the separate bathroom facility.

Assistant professors at SOSU are given seven years in which to obtain tenure, with the initial probationary period ending after five years. It is not uncommon at SOSU for applicants to pursue more than one application before being granted tenure. Dr. Tudor knows of two examples of active professors at SOSU who pursued multiple applications before obtaining tenure including the current chair of the Faculty Senate’s Personnel Policy Committee.

Applications for tenure are considered and voted on by a faculty committee. When Dr. Tudor applied for tenure in 2009 she was recommended by the Tenure Review Committee by a vote of 4-1, subsequently her department chair also recommended her for tenure and promotion. However, the dean and the vice president of academic affairs disregarded the committee’s recommendation and denied tenure, but refused to provide any explanation for the denial. The dean regularly refers to Dr. Tudor by the incorrect pronoun (i.e. “him”) although the dean is well aware that Dr. Tudor is female. Dr. Tudor filed an appeal with the Faculty Appellate Committee claiming that the dean’s and Dr. McMillan’s office did not provide her due process in explaining why tenure was denied. The Faculty Appellate Committee found in favor of Dr. Tudor, and directed the administration to provide Dr. Tudor with the reason(s) for its denial of tenure. SOSU’s administration determined that the appellate committee’s ruling was merely a recommendation and was not required to comply.

Dr. Tudor planned to re-apply for tenure in the 2010. However, before the application period began she received a memo from Dr. Doug McMillan stating that she would not be permitted to apply for tenure, alleging that Dr. Tudor’s application would “inflame the relationship between the administration and the faculty.” However, the timing of the memo immediately after SOSU was informed that Dr. Tudor had filed a discrimination complaint with the US Dept of Education suggests retaliation was the true cause of the administration’s action. Dr. Tudor is not aware of any other case in which an otherwise eligible professor has been forbidden to reapply for tenure. Dr. Tudor filed another grievance with the Faculty Appellate Committee, which again found in her favor. The decision was presented to the president’s designee, Mr. Ross Walkup. The president’s designee did not concur with the Faculty Appellate Committee’s decision, and Dr. Tudor appealed to the president of the university, Dr. Larry Minks. At the time of the filing of Dr. Tudor’s grievance the policy of SOSU provided that the Faculty Appellate Committee’s recommendation be given to the president’s designee who would in turn relay the recommendation directly to the president. However, the president’s designee, Ross Walkup, an employee in the university’s business office, refused to affirm the recommendation of the Faculty Appellate Committee. The administration amended the grievance policies to permit the president’s designee to issue his own separate recommendation to the president. Meanwhile, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution, without a single opposing vote, calling on the president to allow Dr. Tudor to apply for tenure. Eventually, the president issued a letter to Dr. Tudor denying her appeal citing, inter alia, a supposed lack of precedence for professors reapplying for tenure after denial (a fact readily regarded as untrue).

Dr. Tudor has exhausted her remedies at the university level. There is no other appellate process or avenue to pursue her grievance. Complaints are pending with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Oklahoma Human Rights Commission.

Tudor's own account of her path to termination can be found here.   She is currently appealing her case to the State Board of Regents

While no outsider can speak with authority on a tenure process occurring elsewhere, such dissonance between faculty support for a colleague and administrative disdain for that same colleague is pretty compelling.  Furthermore, transphobia aside, if this account is accurate, the university has violated its own policies to rid itself of a single professor, which is clearly illegal.  As in many cases, administrators are probably betting on it that she will run out of resources before they do. 

What can you do to help Professor Tudor? Meg Cotter-Lynch, Associate Professor of English asks you to:

1) Write a letter to the Oklahoma State Board of Regents asking them to direct President Minks to respect the decision of the Faculty Appellate Committee and the resolution of the Faculty Senate, renewing Rachel's contract and allowing her tenure case a fair, unbiased hearing. Their contact information is on Rachel's blog, linked above.

2) Spread word about this to interested colleagues and contacts, and ask them to write, as well. We are hopeful that public outcry may influence the Regents to reconsider President Minks' decision.

3) We would be particularly grateful for any contacts in the media and/or legal profession who might be willing to help.

Supporters take note:  Professor Tudor's tenure case is surely not unconnected to other retractions, and standing limitations, of civil rights in Oklahoma.  Is it any accident that Oklahoma is also way out front on eliminating a woman's right choose by banning all abortions after 20 weeks, and making it illegal for private insurers to cover "elective" abortion? That the Oklahoma House just voted to put an affirmative action ban on the 2012 ballot?  That Oklahoma is one of four states to still list homosexuality as a criminal offense?  I think not.  So if you don't think trans issues are your issues, think again.
 
A final note:  I and a great many of my friends who are trans-identified are very political people, and are very dedicated to social justice issues.  But the vast majority of transpeople have many fewer resources than professional people do, may not have radical commitments and may simply want to live unremarkable lives.  The kinds of humiliations, harassment and prejudice visited on one college professor are reproduced over and over again in places where human rights violations get significantly less attention than they will in any university, no matter how conservative it is.  Trans kids spend whole days in pain because trips to the bathroom at school are so traumatic, and trans people are routinely discriminated against when trying to access housing, employment and the right to govern their own lives.  So the next time you think it is "enough" progress to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) without full protections for transpeople, think about this:

The path to Professor Tudor's dismissal began by barring her from the women's bathroom.

I'm OK, You're (Really Not) OK: Memories of "An American Family"

Tonight HBO rolls out "Cinema Vérité,"a movie, starring Tim Robbins and Diane Lane, about the making of the TV series "An American Family" (go here for a trailer.)  My students can't imagine a world without reality TV, endless channels where you can test the authenticity of your own life and emotions against the appalling things that other people say and do.  However, they probably also can't imagine being fifteen in the winter of 1973, as the Vietnam war was coming to its grisly end, and having the Loud family combust live, every Sunday night, on PBS.  This is how one archive describes the series:

In 1971 filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond spent seven months documenting the day-to-day lives of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, CA, including parents William C. “Bill” and Pat Loud and their children Lance, Kevin, Grant, Delilah, and Michele. The resulting 12-hour documentary, "An American Family," debuted on PBS-TV in early 1973. The show captivated millions of viewers worldwide with its then-unconventional depiction of middle class American family life that encompassed the "real-life drama" of marital tensions and subsequent divorce, a son's openly gay life, and the effects of the changing concepts of the American family structure. Breaking apart from the traditional American family model of harmony and ideality portrayed in fictional television sitcoms of the early 1970s like "The Brady Bunch," the novelty and innovation of "An American Family" not only pioneered reality television, but also set the tone for the more complex family models exhibited in later shows such as "Roseanne" and "The Simpsons."

There was really nothing like it, I swear.

Nowadays, few people would ask, "Why would they do such a thing?  Allow a film crew to follow them around for months?"  Back then, that was part of the fascination.  In the suburbs of Philadelphia the answer was arrived at quickly:  the Louds lived in Santa Barbara, and people in southern California do all kinds of crazy $hit.  Everyone knew that.  But part of what was amazing about it to a teenager was the intimate glimpse of adult lives spinning out of control in exactly the way you knew they were spinning out of control down the street, or upstairs, but that no one was ever allowed to talk about.  This was a moment in history where feminism was changing everything, but suburban women did not actually quite dig feminism.  The sexual revolution and its attendant changes showed up a different way.  Instead of doing consciousness raising, or succumbing to quiet despair, women had extra-marital sex with the tennis pro (male or female), drank a lot, and maybe left their marriages when their husband's drinking and screwing around finally got to them.

In the 1970s, women sometimes just left without telling anyone.  I knew the parents of one friend were getting divorced, but one day, around the swimming pool I heard one mother whisper to another about the event that tipped the scales:  "I've never heard of anything like it.  She took off her shoes, walked down the beach with the lifeguard, and never came back."  The image has stayed with me forever.  Similarly, a college friend described her mother's departure from the family home:  "Mom said she was going out to mail a letter," my friend said, after a few beers.  "When we located her a month later, she was living with my social studies teacher."

On "An American Family" we got to watch things that were not unheard of, but were talked about in whispers if at all.  They were things like: a son coming out as gay to his parents, heading off to live at the Chelsea Hotel and hang with Andy Warhol (wow! dude!); Pat Loud talking to her friends and to the camera crew about finding evidence of her husband Bill's affairs, since she was the book keeper for his business and paid credit card bills for trips he went on with, ahem,  "Mrs. Loud;" the kids getting stoned; and Pat telling Bill, in front of a national audience, that she knew about his affairs, she was filing for divorce, and she was kicking him out of the house right now.  

So needless to say, what surprised me about "An American Family" was not that these things happened, but that my parents let my sister and I watch them happen.  Here is an important factoid about the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which culture was in terrible flux, and parents could say they didn't "approve" of The Rolling Stones and more or less enforce it:  if it was on public television, it was OK.  Seriously.  Anything on public television was inherently safe to watch, whatever it was, even in Republican houses (which, by the way, ours was.)

But there was nothing safe about the Louds:  nothing.  That was why it was so cool, and I hope that  "Cinema Vérité"captures that.  For any number of uptight suburban kids it was our weird little Stonewall, the moment when we realized that not conforming, shucking the school uniform, was an option.

Department of Good People Prosper: Elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

I just found out today that my Zenith colleague and mentor Richard Slotkin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This is so cool. Richie has been a special kind of mentor to me -- the volunteer kind of mentor. Prior to his retirement, he had an office down the hall from me and would occasionally wander down to check in. "How's it going?" he would say, which often led into a conversation about -- well, how things were going: how a book or article was coming along, how I was managing to chair the American Studies program with no faculty, how to solve a particular problem in my home department, strategies for recovering from the Unfortunate Events. I was once involved in a --ahem -- volatile encounter with one of Richie's dear friends on campus (over a matter of some importance, actually) and told him I was about to pull myself together to apologize so that the conflict wouldn't drag on and wreck future collaborations. "Don't apologize," he said nicely and firmly. "You were right."

Everybody who is in Richie's very wide circle of friends has a zillion stories like this so I won't go on. For my own part, it was astonishing to me to work for almost two decades with a scholar who is productive, brilliant, sane and generous.

The list of AAAS elections can be found here. It includes historians Ervand Abrahamian (Baruch), Greg Grandin (NYU), Carla Hesse (Berkeley), and Heinrich von Staden (Institute for Advanced Study).

Fantastic Friday Fun!

On our day back from vacation, students at Macdonough were enjoying many fun activities! Students attended a SURFS Up Assembly where new students and faculty were greeted, Unified Sports and the first grade marathoners were recognized with awards, and Mr. Romeo read a book "It's Ok to Be Different." Afterwards, students, faculty, and parents went outside to take a group picture that says "I <3 MAC" (can be seen on our main page.)

Next, students were divided into different groups, with different teachers ,where students learned the importance of accepting our differences.

Finally, students enjoyed a movie in the gym along with a fruit smoothie or fruit snack.

What a great way to end April vacation!