Wednesday Blog Roll Revision: End Of Fiscal Year Edition

We at Tenured Radical want to welcome two pseudonymous blogs to the blog roll on the left.

We Are Respectable Negroes features Lady Zora, Chauncey DeVega and Gordon Gartrelle as cultural theorists with an attitude. Want to talk about race? I mean really talk? Well, pull up a chair. A recent poll asks readers, "How man of you use a 'white' voice for phone interviews?" (56% of respondents, in case you were wondering.) This blog goes after homophobia, racism, religion, frank conversations about unusual white people, politics, African-American history and culture, teaching, music, popular culture, and other commentary on the current state of our post-racial (not) country. Read it. I have no idea who these bloggers are, but they have settled on their plot to stay.

The second blog is Breaking Up With New York. Full disclosure: I know this blogger, and she reads me, but had no idea she was such a beautiful writer. Really. Urban Exile isn't an academic, and I wouldn't be surprised if, in the end, this blog became a platform for a book. There are only five posts right now, so you have time to get in on the ground floor.

Robert Carlyle Byrd, November 20, 1917 – June 28, 2010

Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) has died at the age of 92. For the report in the Charleston Gazette go here.

Byrd anchored the conservative wing of the party for decades, but also came to hold many liberal positions, including a profound belief that the federal government had an obligation to end poverty and guarantee full citizenship. From the New York Times:

He had been in failing health for several years. Mr. Byrd served 51 years in the Senate, longer than anyone in American history, and with his six years in the House, he was the longest-serving member of Congress. He held a number of Senate offices, including majority and minority leader and president pro tem.

But the post that gave him the most satisfaction was chairman of the Appropriations Committee, with its power of the purse — a post he gave up only last year as his health declined. A New Deal Democrat, Mr. Byrd used the position in large part to battle persistent poverty in West Virginia, which he called “one of the rock bottomest of states.”

Byrd's journey -- from orphan (his parents died in the 1918 flu pandemic), to his racist past as a Klansman (he was elected to lead his Klavern in 1942), to one of the most powerful Senators of the twentieth century -- hits every theme of political history, and ever moment of social and cultural transformation, since World War II. Byrd's Klan membership -- something he regretted deeply in later years, both because it was used against him politically and because his views changed, provides an interesting insight that some historian ought to run with if s/he can find enough people to talk openly about their Klan membership. Racism provided a path to social mobility, civic membership and prominence for talented and ambitious white men born without advantages and education. As he explained in his autobiography, Child of the Appalachian Coal Fields, Byrd understood this period in his life as a time where he both acted on a dangerously bigoted world view and as a misdirected effort to demonstrate his abilities and capacity for citizenship. As he put it, he "was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision—a jejune and immature outlook—seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions."

Self-educated, he was one of the Senate's finest orators, and a sparkling example of what that body used to be famous for. I occasionally tuned in to C-Span when I knew he was on the floor, just to listen and to absorb techniques that could be translated into good teaching: dramatic pauses, modulating one's voice for emphasis or to force the audience to listen more closely, telling a story rather than making a complicated argument. Byrd had a particularly dramatic flourish, where he would whip a ragged, red-covered copy of the Constitution out of his vest pocket and shake it at his audience for emphasis. Loved that. And in his later years, when he used his prominence to oppose the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's grab for absolute power, he was one of the first and the few to tell the unvarnished truth. "This house of cards, built of deceit, will fall," he growled in 2003, when information began to surface that the administration had lied about weapons of mass destruction and material support for Al-Quaeda in Iraq.

Byrd's distinctly Southern talent for speechifying came to prominence in 1964, when he filibustered against the 1964 Civil Rights Act through the night, ending this 14 hour marathon at 9:51 A.M. on June 10. For the first time in history, a filibuster on a civil rights bill was defeated as liberals in both parties joined together to decisively change American history. According to the Senate's official history,

The clerk proceeded to call the roll. When he reached "Mr. Engle," there was no response. A brain tumor had robbed California's mortally ill Clair Engle of his ability to speak. Slowly lifting a crippled arm, he pointed to his eye, thereby signaling his affirmative vote. Few of those who witnessed this heroic gesture ever forgot it. When Delaware's John Williams provided the decisive 67th vote, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield exclaimed, "That's it!"; Richard Russell slumped; and Hubert Humphrey beamed. With six wavering senators providing a four-vote victory margin, the final tally stood at 71 to 29. Nine days later the Senate approved the act itself—producing one of the 20th century's towering legislative achievements.

Byrd became a strong supporter of civil rights and equal access to citizenship over the subsequent half century: a month ago, his office announced that he would support the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Tenured Radical is on Brief Hiatus

If you are looking for us over at the Chronicle, hang in there:  we are still unpacking. 

Sunday Radical Roundup: Gay Supreme Court Pride Edition

After our busy, busy week here at Tenured Radical, we think it is time for a calm and genteel set of items to keep you busy this Sunday. To wit:

Kagan Hearings Kick Off On Monday: Thanks to Prawfs Blawg, a group blog maintained by a bunch of guys teaching in law schools around the United States, we have the witness list for the Elena Kagan hearings that start tomorrow at 12:30 (hat tip.). While they will begin with the senators going on record at tedious length ("life begins at conception, yack, yack, yack") as if we and their constituents did not already know what they thought, testimonies to tune in for might be Lily Ledbetter, the litigant in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire (2007), called by the majority; and Stephen Presser, legal historian from Northwestern, called by the minority. Presser, who mostly writes about corporate law, can also be expected to speculate on how Kagan's confirmation to the court would affect the future of Roe and the rulings associated with it. The rest of the witnesses are pretty boilerplate, if you ask me, although the large number of military and ex-military called by the Republicans suggest they plan to bring up the scrap about military recruiters at Harvard Law School, probably as an attempt to grandstand a little about the impending repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Go here for the official web cast.

We know that Kagan will be confirmed, and resistance will only be token: she may go down in history as the SCOTUS nominee no one on the right or the left really got excited about. Kagan's own opening statement would be spiced up if she uses the lesbian drama around her nomination to take a stance on ending discrimination against queer people more generally; and since Perry v. Schwarzenegger will be boarding the train to the Supreme Court there could be interesting moments around that. But I doubt that either of these things will happen. The Republicans seem to be hinting by their silence that this one is a slam dunk. I follow Orrin Hatch's (R-Utah) Twitter feed and even he has not rattled his sword about the nomination lately.

So if you want to skip the whole thing and watch Wimbledon and the World Cup, go right ahead. Blame me if you miss the historic moment where Hatch changes his mind on school prayer, affirmative action and a woman's right to choose; or if the Committee announces that they are canceling the hearings and making a range of top-flight legal minds compete on a new reality show called "America's Got Law" instead.

Gay Pride March in NYC Kicks Off at 12:00 P.M. Today: For those of you who just think you know what you are doing, the route is shorter this year, beginning at 36th street. Interestingly, this also takes St.Patrick's Cathedral, where it is traditional that anti-gay trogladytes stand with signs telling queers they are going to hell, and queer marchers shout "Sham! Shame! Shame!"off the line of march. Interesting, no?

As the past couple of posts have revealed, celebrating gay pride is not a radical political act by any means, and in some quarters is perceived as reactionary. However, if you are just coming out it can feel pretty cool anyway. However, don't look for instructions about what to do during or after the march on the Heritage of Pride website. This organization of businesspeople that has turned the celebration of the Stonewall Riots into a megabucks event needs to hire a few tech people because their website is melting down this morning. But if you go, have fun, hydrate frequently, and pick up after yourselves please: the last time I was in the Village after the march I had never seen such a disgusting mess.

My favorite gay pride moment bar none? Years ago, I gathered with a whole bunch of friends to march, and one of us was having a clandestine affair with a closeted corporate attorney who ran legal for a large media conglomerate. It was closets within closets, baby. Anyway, hormones being what they were -- and people who live in the closet being what they are -- this lesbian was very nervous about participating, but was ultimately persuaded that of the hundreds of thousands of people marching she would never, ever in a trillion years be spotted by anyone she knew from the network or by her equally closeted, but far better disciplined, girlfriend. So off we go, milling about, chanting and having a great time, and around 25th street or so I hear someone yelling, and it turns out to be a New York Times photographer who was going out with my dissertation advisor at Potemkin University. All the Potemkin graduate students waved and hollered, and we marched on by.

You are already guessing what happened, dear reader. The next day the telephone rang at around 7:30, and it was the Mother of the Radical (MOTheR) calling to say that my picture was in the New York Times! Right on the front of Metro section! I rushed into the hall to get the paper and yup, there we were, with Closety Custard right in the middle.

Uncivil Liberties: Teaching Evaluations and A Clarification

Courtesy of Margaret Soltan at University Diaries, who draws our attention to the recent exchange between Stanley Fish and Ross Douthat on this matter, I began thinking about teaching evaluations in a more orderly fashion than I have of late. My disorderly thoughts have been sparked by colleagues, several of whom are quite experienced teachers, receiving some of the rudest and cruelest teaching evaluations I have ever read at Zenith. Sexism is also on the rise, particularly among the students of younger, female faculty (who are also sometimes presumed to be adjuncts.)

I found these evaluations remarkable because my experience in the past has been that Zenith students often go out of their way to be charitable to someone they like and have empathy for, sometimes damning their professors with faint and contradictory praise as a result. The evaluations in question do the exact opposite: students going out of their way to slam the professor in a way that is obscurely connected to the matter at hand, sometimes perversely followed by comments that describe the class in quite thoughtful ways, making it clear the student got a lot out of the experience.

What has changed? We do teaching evaluations on line now; students do them in their rooms at whatever hour of the night they choose; and they must do them in order to get their grades. In other words, teaching evaluations have just become another $hitty chore that we drive students through with a stick. You might say: why not go back to doing them on paper, on the last class? The reason is, of course, that it was time consuming, wasteful, and expensive. As our registrar explained when we switched over to the new system, at the cost of no less than 10K a semester, the old system was badly flawed. Students often confessed to having collaborated as a class to turn in a group view of the professor, faculty often received their evaluations on the first day of spring classes (giving them no time to think about structural issues in their pedagogy), and envelopes full of evaluations that were to have been walked over by astudent were often found in the student center and abandoned in the dormitories.

So don't think we will ever go back to paper evaluations. The question is, what are teaching evaluations for? Are they intended to evaluate someone for tenure? (Yes -- and this was the issue that prompted the Fish-Douthat exchange.) Are they intended to help us become better teachers? (Yes, but if we don't trust them, how do we evaluate what they say?) Are they intended to help students think about what they have learned? (Maybe -- see Dean Dad about how students often forget what they have learned once the course is over.) The bigger question that Fish and Douthat raise is whether students ought to be the experts who are consulted in high-stakes evaluations of teaching.

If you ask me, one question that is not being asked here is: why do we consult students about the quality of the instruction without also consulting them on what they want to learn, why they want to learn it, and what its relevance to the larger program of study is? We ask them to enter into a conversation about teaching in the university without any instruction about what information we need, why or what constitutes responsible assessment of teaching (for example, "the professor was only interested in his own opinions" is hardly the point -- it is the student who ought to be interested in what the professor has to offer, and consider being less anxious about having her own views validated.) Furthermore, no one consults students about how they would like to be assessed and what they want to know about their own work. Grading can devolve into a grudge match between two teams with unequal power: in response, nationwide, faculty have thrown in the towel and inflated grades dramatically. We then get our students, and I suppose our self-respect, back by telling the press loudly that our students don't actually deserve the grades they are getting.

I Have Not, Nor Have I Ever Been

My last post about what I see as the pitfalls of academic celebrity drew some cheers; one caution (my beloved Western Colleague, she of the famous Tool Post, wisely suggested that I refrain from pissing in the wind); and one personally nasty signed comment (not, I might add, anyone mentioned in the post) which listed my numerous hopeless flaws and offenses to authority. I removed the comment (see sidebar for the comment policy), because if people want to write opinion pieces about my qualifications to walk the earth they are free to do it on their own blog -- but not on mine.

The style of the comment reminded me of the opening credits to a television show from my youth:

According to the writer, I am unlettered, unread, marginal to and ignorant about the world of queer studies, snide, have no queer vocabulary and wouldn't understand what I read even if I read it, and am a liberal. My readers can decide about all of these things on about the same basis that the commenter did. However, there was one damning accusation I wish to refute absolutely.

I am not, nor have I ever been:

A social historian.

Get ready... Edu-Palooza 2010 is almost here!

It's summertime now, but the school year will be here before you know it! Time to start getting energized for a new year of teaching, and around here, Edu-Palooza's the way to do it!

Click here for more info
Register today!

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall: Famous Queer Scholar Refuses Prize; Keeps Salary, Named Chair

Facebook and queer blogs have been a-buzz of late with the international doings of The Famous Queer Scholar. Recently, s/he has traveled boldly to Europe on the pretext of accepting a prize (probably on the euro of the organization giving it), only to publicly refuse the prize. In doing so, s/he made a point of chastising the organization for its failure to adequately refuse racism and "homonationalism" (or the organization's actual collaboration with the German state -- the nature of the crimes isn't quite clear from accounts of this event.) Although no one wants to explain what they did to deserve this, we are led to believe that it served the bastards right.

Goddammit, I wish I'd thought of this first. The last time I was offered a prize, I just frakking took it, thinking only of the generosity of those who were awarding it and of the microraise it might pry out of Zenith. I now just feel stupid for having not refused all prizes, but I vow to do so in the future, because you just can't do enough to fight racism, transphobia and homosexual collaboration in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is, of course, only the latest of The Famous Queer Scholar's refusals. S/he has refused hir own celebrity, becoming particularly cranky in 1992 when a Midwestern graduate student created a very funny fanzine that used hir image to mock the feminist literary turn and the rise of queer academic super-stardom. In a path-breaking book s/he refused ontological gender and identity politics. Later, she refused criticism that this key text undermined a feminist epistemological praxis or the very possibility of queer politics in a democratic society.* Protesting just such a criticism in 2008, s/he responded:

“Despite the dislocation of the subject that the text performs, there is a person here: I went to many meetings, bars, and marches and saw many kinds of genders, understood myself to be at the crossroads of some of them, and encountered sexuality at several of its cultural edges.”

So there.

Refusal has been the cutting edge of queer scholarship for some time. This can, of course, leave historians a bit in the dust, since the vast majority of us are too stupid to write without falling into the intellectual trap that there are real people who did actual things. But refusing the privilege of prizes takes the struggle to a whole new level, particularly for those of us who have little or nothing to refuse. Under these circumstances, short of voluntarily giving up our jobs, refusal is difficult to achieve, so we have to just settle back into the audience and marvel at the courage of others to travel all the way to Europe and refuse things -- in German!

As an addendum, I find it interesting that The Famous Queer Scholar, who is white, is being uniformly praised by queer scholars of color for making an inferred claim to critical interventions on race and migration that do not originate with hir. Oh yes, I know Walter Benjamin said that there is no longer an original, only reproductions of it (an idea that is uncannily similar to the notion that there is no gender, only performances of it, the intervention that made FQS a celebrity in the first place, and that I now understand s/he has repudiated on the grounds of that s/he no longer believes in the predictability of its subversiveness.)** Perhaps s/he is repudiating race too, as a necessary precondition to refusing racism. That said, I do believe that the term "homonationalism" was -- I think -- coined first by this scholar of color (in collaboration with this scholar of color) who may -- or may not -- be gnashing her teeth that she has not yet been offered anything that she can refuse -- even a little credit for her ideas from The Famous Queer Scholar.

Celebrity can be quite problematic, and I have no acquaintance with it, so I am sure there must be some explanation for why, in the name of antiracism, the FQS has nicked other people's ideas without acknowledging them. Furthermore, I suppose it is hard to refuse celebrity without, paradoxically, becoming more celebrated and hence, unwillingly (but inevitably) contributing to the inherently racist, and firmly institutionalized, academic practice of appropriating the subaltern radical (or is it the radical subaltern?) In this vein, you can go here for a great video of Angela Davis at a recent conference. Although Davis is talking at length about her own ideas concerning the transformation of movement struggle through intersectionality, the clip is billed (by whomever posted it) as "Angela Davis on Famous Queer Scholar's Refusal To Accept..." (emphasis mine.)

So you can see this famous refusal for yourself, as Warner Wolf used to say, Let's cut to the videotape!

*See? I can use big words too.

**Transpeople beware: you may soon be burdened with, and have to repudiate, the charge of transnationalism.

Mazel Tov to the BJE staff on winning the SJED SMART Board contest!

The BJE is quickly becoming a local leader in the field of Jewish SMART Board education! In addition to the many workshops and classes already offered by the BJE on our two SMART Boards, we are proud to announce that these opportunities have recently expanded. The BJE staff worked together on a curriculum by our own Linda Sonin to produce a SMART Board lesson that won a contest hosted by the SMART Board Jewish Educational Database of the Legacy Heritage Foundation, based on the Passover holiday. The prize: the SENTEO remote student interface!! Check back here at the BJE website often for more updates on our SMART Board and other opportunities to explore Jewish education at the BJE. Oh, and if you have the SMART Notebook Software, click here to download the lesson FREE!

It's Moving Day: Tenured Radical Migrates To The Chronicle Of Higher Education

Yesterday around cocktail hour the sun was slipping over the virtual mountains when we at Tenured Radical heard the sound of galloping pony hooves.  Sitting on our front porch, surrounded by boxes and half-full L.L. Bean sail bags, we squinted into the  glare and saw that it was Historiann.  "Hellzapoppin!" she yelled, in that instantly recognizable voice that is a cross between Dale Evans and Mary Maples Dunn.  She swung handily over the pommel, skirt barely in place as usual, and dropped her reins (we were impressed to see that cow pony come to an immediate halt, like they do in the movies.)  "I'm getting crazy numbers of  pings from your blog!" she said, as we put a bourbon and branch in her hand.  "When in 'tarnation were you going to tell me that you were moving?"

Oops.  There is so much going on at chez Radical we had neglected to announce that we are migrating from the Blogger site where we were born and raised to a Word Press platform hosted and maintained by The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Tenured Radical:  the 3.0 Edition will debut there shortly.

So, without further ado, I want to anticipate and answer a few questions.

Are you leaving a forwarding address?  Yes.  You should be able to click whatever link you are using and be forwarded directly to the new site.  Over time, you might want to replace that link, but don't worry about it now.

Will you be behind the pay wall?  Nope.

Will you be edited, or censored, in any way by The Chronicle?  Nope.

Will your archive move with you?  Yep:  hence the pinging over at Rancho Historiann.  The computer people have been opening the links in 723 posts to make sure they still work on the new platform.  Any problems should be reported to the management here, and we will forward them to our virtual IT friends over at the Chronicle.

Do you ever edit your posts subsequent to publication?  Yes:  I am a notoriously inaccurate typist, and frequently leave words out in my zeal to get ideas onto the screen and out to the world.  I also occasionally edit something to assuage hurt feelings: I edited a series of posts after I "came out," removing a few made-up stories that were versions of the truth.  Even though the focus of Tenured Radical has changed dramatically since those early days to avoid the personal as much as possible, I still have to edit from time to time when people mistakenly see themselves in a post.  My policy is to be attentive to the feelings of friends, students and colleagues. People I don't know, and who I haven't named, who claim they have suffered harm from one of my blog posts might want to look up "narcissistic personality disorder" in the DSM IV. 

Have you ever taken a post down completely?  There are five posts I have taken down completely.  The first was about something that happened in class, a post which rightly came back to bite me in the butt, because I had no idea that everyone at Zenith knew that I was the Tenured Radical.  I then removed three others that had the potential to do similar damage. However, I have since come to believe that it is simply wrong to write about students, or any other private person, without their permission -- this includes children, spouses, parents, colleagues, neighbors, siblings and (fill in your relationship to me here ________.) But posts about students are the worst:  written as amusing anecdotes that showcase our wit, wisdom and sorely tried patience,  they are all exploitative and mean to some degree or another.  I always make a point of telling my students in the first class that I will not write about them.

The other post I took down was, ironically, the post that originally brought me to the attention of a larger audience: "Where Credit is Due: Rutgers Basketball, Don Imus and Drive Time Shock" (April 2007.) In that post I asked why the national success of a team of African-American female scholar-athletes had caused them to be called sluts and whores by a major media figure. I compared the gender and racial dynamic in play at this moment to the significant support for the white, male members of a prominent lacrosse team, who were fighting felony charges that they had raped and beaten a stripper hired to entertain at the end of an all-day beer fest.  It was a small part of the post, but the blogging equivalent of a hand grenade: referring to the symbolic importance of a college athletic scandal I knew little about made me the object of an ongoing attack organized by an academic blogger who was writing a commercial book about the case because he believed that the charges were false.   The lacrosse players were eventually exonerated due to gross inconsistencies in the evidence, as well as multiple transgressions on the part of the prosecutor.  This public official was subsequently disbarred, and is one of several parties, including the university, who have been punished by civil lawsuits filed by the young men and their families.)

What did Tenured Radical have to do with this case?  Exactly nothing, except that the effort to achieve justice for the athletes dovetailed nicely with said blogger's campaign against so-called liberal scholars.  It was quite the experience to be sucked suddenly, and without warning, into a full-on battle against the forces of political correctness.  Members of this blogger's apparently vast audience threatened to sue me, maim me or get me fired.  They filled my comments sections with crazed invective. They left threatening messages on my voice mail.  They sent me vicious emails about what a terrible person I was, copied to numerous faculty colleagues who I am sure had no idea what a blog was or why they were supposed to care about a southern lacrosse team.  They fired off numerous letters demanding my immediate termination (often with false return addresses and written in block letters) to university officers, colleagues and the Board of Trustees.

It was a strange introduction to the blogosphere.  But it was also like getting an unasked for internship in a culture war I had thought was over, and that had certainly never touched me at good old Zenith.  In retrospect, it was a little glimpse of that libertarian nest of snakes that would emerge a few years later as the Tea Party movement, and of the "gotcha" politics that would snag people far more important than I.  On the plus side, it garnered me a ton of great readers, proving once again that there is no such thing as bad publicity as long as you don't send anyone naked pictures of yourself.

So the question is, if there is so much good news associated with this moment, and it boosted me to academic blogosphere superstardom, why did I take the post down?

Was it because I was afraid of a lawsuit, as said blogger implied in a recent series of attacks at a neoconservative website?  No. I left the Rutgers post up for a long time so that the selective quotations that made me a punching bag could be put in the context of the whole argument by a reasonable reader.  However, the post came down (I still have it, actually) after a reputable source and a blogging colleague told me that the mothers of one of the accused athletes had been inconsolably distressed by it.  Subsequently, a pseudonymous contact claiming to be the wife of a civilian contractor in the Middle East and a friend of this woman contacted me.  She amplified, in a very moving way, on the distress my post had caused in a home already under strain from the son's legal troubles.  In response, I removed the post.  I asked this correspondent to convey my deepest apologies to her friend and to put us in touch if a direct apology would be helpful, something she was unlikely to get from any of the thousands of other journalists who had vilified her son and his friends.

Whether these messages ever got through, I do not know.  Subsequently, I came to wonder whether the story about the mother was real or invented, because I came to wonder who this "friend" actually was (impersonation is quite common in the virtual world, as are "sock puppets," a single person claiming to be many different commenters.)  The pseudonymous correspondent abruptly cut off contact when, as part of my effort to reach out to her "friend," I questioned the motivations and mental health of the activist blogger who had, in my view, amplified any original harm by out of context quotation and endless, public cyber-bullying of anyone who suggested that long-standing problems of violent conduct on this team had made the false charges believable to begin with.  It has happened more than once that someone, operating out of the anonymous email accounts that are so easy to open, has made and cultivated contact with me and then disappeared when I voiced my view that the manic activism of this blogger, and an over the top obsession with women and people of color as chronically unworthy and/or dishonest, might be a symptom of a personality disorder.

So what have you learned, dear?  When in doubt about whether a topic is combustible, stay away from it, and be very, very careful when treating statements made in the media as factual.  Particularly when commenting on a topic that is likely to draw unwelcome political attention, always hedge your bets with those words we history scholars use when making an argument from inferential evidence:  "perhaps," "it seems," and "although we cannot be sure" are all useful phrases that permit the blogger to revisit an analysis later, or make a theoretical argument that stands up to new facts and reinterpretation of old facts.

Know your enemy, and don't reason with people who have an ax to grind.  Easier said than done.  However, unpleasant as it was, this episode was a great turning point for my own critical thinking about why I blogged, what I blogged, and with whom I got into pi$$ing matches.

Even when you don't know them you are writing about real people.  What one academic blogger thinks or says can't really matter, can it?  The answer to that question is that it is hard to know, and every post should be read prior to publishing with an eye to how it might  be misunderstood.  It doesn't mean that you shouldn't write it, but when flame wars start, the intelligent work you are promoting on your blog is obscured. It is a hard, but true, fact that you only get one chance in the blogosphere, and that chance is in the original post:  no amount of explanation or clarification will be adequate for your critics, who are only interested in promoting their own views.  Even if we bloggers were inclined to apologize or retract in the face of unjust criticism, we live in a society that now sees every error, every slip, as evidence of severe and permanent character flaws.

Assume that you are read by everyone in your life.  Half of your acquaintances who take umbrage at a post will never tell you; and half of these people also insist they would never be caught dead reading any blog, much less yours. 

Is this the last post over at 2.0?  Yep.  The final box just went on the virtual truck.  I'll see you all over at the Chronicle in 3.0, and Historiann?  Hope that pony got you home all right last night.  Ponies always know where to go, even when bloggers don't.

In Sisterhood: Support The Strike At London Met's Women's Library

There's a long history of feminist resistance in England

Eighteen months ago found your Radical in London.  On the trail of radical feminist Leah Fritz, I had also decided to check out what archival material was available on the feminist anti-pornography movement in London.  What I found at The Women's Library at London Metropolitan University changed the shape of my research.  I discovered that, just as radical feminists in the United States had become intractably divided over the representation of eroticism, Andrea Dworkin's ideas had roamed across the pond and found both opposition and fertile ground on the British left.  In the UK, where there is no absolute right to free speech, and where skinhead violence had produced legislation against hate speech that would have violated the First Amendment in the United States, the struggle took some similar, but also different forms.

I loved the Women's Library and vowed to return to do more comparative research that pushed the nationalist frame of my project.  Imagine my shock when I received an alert that dramatic cuts at London Met would endanger the work of this valuable collection and eliminate the BA in history.  From the History of Feminism Network:

The Women’s Library is home to world-renowned collections on women’s struggles throughout history and has hosted excellent exhibitions on women workers and female led-strikes. This Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Women’s Library staff will themselves take action to ensure that London Met University continues to be a thriving centre for the study of gender and feminism.

London Met Unison and UCU have voted for a one day strike on 22nd June unless the management resolve their dispute over compulsory redundancies (200 announced so far) and the closure of 70% of courses.

These cuts are of concern to all of us working in the fields of feminism and gender studies, across UK higher education institutions. Judging the value of academic disciplines according to narrow definitions of economic viability will particularly discriminate against already marginal subjects. The History BA is among those London Met courses set to close, despite it having long been such an important focus for the study of women’s history and with the Women’s Library hosting this years Women’s History Network Annual Conference.

This is why we want to express our strong support for the Women’s Library staff and everyone at London Met taking industrial action next week.

Come along to support the picket line! Meet 8am sharp, outside the Women’s Library, 25 Old Castle St, London E1 7NT (5 mins from Aldgate East Tube).

Send messages of support to moreinfo@thewomenslibrary.ac.uk and
t.doherty@londonmet.ac.uk

As the friend who sent me this confided, "While I don't know a whole lot about the cuts, I'm heartsick that an archive like The Women's Library is in danger. This is especially troubling for those of us who are pursuing subjects that are not necessarily represented in larger archives - I fondly remember my time at that archive."  So should we all.

Mr. DeMille, He's Ready For His Close-Up: Vito Russo And Gay Liberation

Michael Schiavi, Celluloid Activist:  The Life and Times Of Vito Russo (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).  361 pp. Index, illustrations.  $29.95 hardback.

It is June, otherwise known by Presidential proclamation as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month, a time when major cities and resort towns around the country have parades and sell beer.  What we are celebrating, other than the success of GLBT entrepeneurship, is the Stonewall Riots.  An iconic event, it began on June 28 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York, following a raid on the Stonewall Inn, and continued on for days as roving groups of queers provoked, and resisted, the police.  This, it is said, was the birth of gay liberation, which is technically true.  Activists subsequently formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a group that made a definitive break with homophile politics.  For those of you who don't know this history, homophile groups were accomodationist in their strategies, trying to persuade straights and the state that gays and lesbians, except for their sexuality, were just like everyone else:  unfortunately, in this day and age of gay marriage, gay babies and gay war, this is increasingly the case.

Homophile groups like Mattachine, ONE and Daughters of Bilitis were not, however, conservative, a charge made by the GLF at the time that scholars like Martin Meeker, Marcia Gallo and David Johnson have effectively refuted.  They laid a critical foundation for community building and formal legal action that would produce a gay rights movement of the 1970s that would seek to extend basic civil rights to people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender status.  GLF, on the other hand, adopted the confrontational stance that had become characteristic of the black power, anti-war and radical feminist groups with whom many of their members were, or had been, associated. GLF was to the homophiles as the Black Panthers were to the Urban League. 

We are long overdue for more books that look at this historical moment at the level of the individual life, as Michael Schiavi, associate professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, does in Celluloid Activist.  Vito Russo was one of the gay men who came to Greenwich Village as a young gay man to embed himself in its queer counterculture, and he quickly became involved in radical activism after Stonewall.  But Russo is even more famous for his path-breaking book, The Celluloid Closet:  Homosexuality in the Movies, originally published in 1981 and re-published in a revised edition in 1987.  Born in 1946, this founder of gay cultural criticism should be signing up at the social security office this year, but like many men of his generation he contracted AIDS and died in 1990.

Schiavi's is an authorized biography, which may account for its emphasis on Russo's achievements (which were many) and its less sure touch about the complexities of his personality.  Schiavi has a keen sense of Russo's place in the gay men's culture that flourished in the 1970s, organized around uninhibited sexuality, and known colloquially as "the party." Schiavi's difficult task of situating Russo in his social world, and interpreting him through it is largely successful, and caused me to wonder whether, for certain figures, group biographies are almost necessary.

Russo had a network of deeply devoted friends, who were attracted to his evanescent personality and sharp intelligence, friends whose patience he often tried.  Russo's love life is a particular minefield: he seemed to be both a little bit of (what we used to call back in the day) a star f**cker, and he very much enjoyed being the object of star f**king.  While relationships were not the strong suit of many queer folk in those years, in part because relationships were either not the point or they were wide open, Russo seemed to have a particular penchant for falling in love with beautiful, helpless, unemployed boys; pledging undying devotion to them; moving them into into his apartment; and then getting really, really sick of them and kicking them out.  It didn't make me not like him, but it did make me think that there was some deeper insight that Schiavi was avoiding here, perhaps out of tact and deference to the family.

Russo's work on the Celluloid Closet (which was made into a documentary after his death) came from a public lecture he put together over the years, in which he demonstrated, through film clips and analysis, how unnamed but very obvious "gayness" in films produced, and shored up, the idea of "heterosexuality."  This is such a basic tenet of queer studies now that it is hard to recall what a stunning insight this was in the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly since there were not so many gay or lesbian books.  Russo came to this analysis from his formal academic training in film and a lifetime of fandom.  Like many gay kids, Vito seem to have been born a movie queen and a fan of the great divas:  Stanwyck, Crawford, Davis.  He was one of those guys weeping in the front row as Judy Garland, in her late years, stumbled drunkenly over her lyrics mid-set.  He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of classic Hollywood film making and acquired a rather large collection of movies (Schiavi suggests that some of these may have been stolen) prior to the days when such things were available on VCR, and delighted in showing them to friends.

Vito maintained a rather tenuous economic existence, even though he worked constantly as a journalist and operated on the edge of show business, a world he clearly adored (one of his great thrills after his AIDS diagnosis was an introduction to Elizabeth Taylor.)  He was friends with Bette Midler during the Divine Miss M's Continental Baths days, and then not so much when he insisted that she identify with queer activism after her mainstream success, something she clearly viewed as exploitation and he viewed as her selling out the people who had made her career in the first place.  (I think they were both right, although it isn't clear what Schiavi thinks.) Vito's relationships with other celebrities endured, however, particularly his friendship with Lily Tomlin.  One of the interesting parts of the book which should push another scholar to get going on her, is Tomlin's development of comic characters that were clearly queer, her struggles over coming out, and her regret, voiced at the end of the book, that she did not do so earlier.

Vito Russo was in the first great wave of men to be diagnosed in the portion of the AIDS epidemic that swallowed communities of urban gay men in the 1980s.  One of the triumphs of this book is that it articulates what it felt like to be at Ground Zero in downtown New York, as one's friends died slowly of horrible diseases that could just barely be treated.  I found these chapters enormously difficult to read, as the lists of men who had peopled the early chapters of the book were diagnosed and died.  Schiavi also depicted, quite accurately in my view, how those years felt. I recall sick men taking care of sick men; the halls at NYU hospital where deathly ill people waited for a bed for days; parents unable to comprehend the cataclysmic, sudden death of a child; scattering ashes in favorite vacation spots.  People behaved far better than you might ever have imagined they could, and they behaved indescribably badly.  I recall watching an age peer wander around the room incontinent and unable to find the bathroom, the rest of us not knowing that his brain was being eaten by toxoplasmosis because his lover (who was also infected but didn't want anyone to know) insisted that our friend had been tested (he hadn't) and didn't have AIDS.  All of this is in the book, and Schiavi describes it with a sure narrative touch.

One reason to read, or to teach, this book, is that it links lots of different things in the life of one person:  gay community, activism, the emergence of a gay intellectual sensibility, the party, and the party's end.  Because of this, when it comes out in paper, you could easily use it as a text for a post-1945 GLBT history course.  But honestly?  It's also a good read -- not always an easy one, but a good one -- and you might want to have it on your bedside table when you are done with Gay Pride and ready to return to gay life.

Sunday Radical Roundup: Fathers' Day Edition

The new social media has made Father's Day an even odder event than it ever was when it was only about neckties, Lacoste tennis shirts and greeting cards. Facebook and Twitter are alive with paeans to fathers past and present: dead fathers are assured that they will never be forgotten, husband-fathers that they are truly appreciated. The Radical household does not engage this, as we have no fathers ("Down with the patriarchy!"): the last one crossed over into the Great Beyond over a decade ago.

So imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times, turned to an article about end of life decisions and instantly burst into racking, inconsolable tears over someone else's father. In "What Broke My Father's Heart" Katy Butler details the role played by fee for service medicine in ripping every shred of dignity and peace from her parents' final years. An ill-informed decision to put in a heart pacemaker (because a doctor refused to do emergency surgery on a painful condition without it) extended her father's life far beyond what he had intended: as he descended into stroke induced senility, blindness, and disability, his wife valiantly tried to care for him and the device beat relentlessly on no matter what. Worse, the doctor refused to disable the pacemaker, even though the patient's health proxy dictated that he be refused treatment at this stage.

Doctors pushing life-prolonging (and fully reimbursed) procedures on patients who have explicitly said they do not want their lives prolonged is one important theme; elderly partners and children whose life and health are shattered by the work necessary to care for a person who wanted to be dead, and would be dead were they not being artificially sustained, is another. The failure of the medical profession to deal with this ethical problem is the most serious issue raised, because it is impossible to plan well enough to make one's own end of life decisions in all circumstances.

People who know me well might assume that I am vividly recalling my own father's death from cancer, his frustration at not being able to die when he wanted to, and my mother's long struggle to run their household and sustain him. True, perhaps, and I see a great deal of my mother in the story, particularly her own unwillingness to relinquish him to the care of strangers despite the cost to her health. My father wanted to die months before he did, but had left it too late to take care of this difficult task himself. I was too cowardly to help him when he needed it: my parents lived in a state where the anti-abortion folks and the Catholic Church are as fierce as they come and I am ashamed to say that I was afraid to go to jail for something I believe in profoundly. Go here and scroll to p. 1017 for my father's views about how physicians could help patients choose the limits of treatment as patients and their families grappled with fatal disease.

But I also knew Katy's parents -- they were people of unsurpassed dignity, and they seemed to love each other very much. Jeff Butler was a distinguished History Department colleague and Val, his wife, was an artist, a teacher, and one of the most beautiful, gracious people I have known. They were cultured, kind and had a carefully chosen life. I suspect, although I do not know, that one of those choices was to separate from their homeland, South Africa, during the worst of apartheid. The history of the apartheid state was what Jeff wrote about, after all, and such people were frowned upon under Afrikaaner rule unless they had the right views. I arrived at Zenith the year after Jeff retired, usually only encountered him at the mailboxes, and would never say we were close. But he was the epitome of the cultured, high-achieving academic that liberal arts colleges prided themselves on in the late twentieth century. He had a sparkly smile, the look of a former athlete, and whistled ever so slightly when he talked. He had a broad South African accent that you might mistake for British, but once you have been to South Africa you never would. Jeff was always ready to offer congratulations on a recent achievement, and encouragement for the next one. As an older woman, Val was still stunningly beautiful, and always put together, with lovely white hair that was tied back in a knot. In contrast was Jeff's look of being slightly mussed and askew, a presentation that was accentuated by an empty sleeve pinned up to his shoulder or chest due to an arm lost in World War II.

Katy's story is very graphic, spare and sets out the problem of end of life decisions - and why it matters to grapple with them in a comprehensive way that forces doctors to the table -- in a precise way. Read it.

Box Tops for Macdonough Party in First Grade!

Box Tops for Education has helped America’s schools earn over $525 million since 1996. You can earn cash for Macdonough by clipping Box Tops coupons from hundreds of participating products. Box Tops also offers easy ways to earn even more cash for your school online.

 

Macdonough students are always encouraged to bring as many Box Tops for Education to school as possible and we had a contest who could bring in the most in all year.

 And the winning class that brought the most box stops is Mrs. Walsh's first grade class!

For their prize, they enjoyed popcorn and a movie this afternoon.

 

 Thank you to everyone else who participated and helped Macdonough!

 

 

Summer Celebration!

Today, Macdonough students celebrated their last week at Macdonough until the fall! Kindergarten through third grade enjoyed different stations such as freeze dance, parachute, bubbles, and side walk chalk. While the fourth and fifth graders had a blast playing kickball and tie-dyeing shirts!

What a great way to welcome the summer season!

 

A Radical History Review: A Perhaps Unnecessary, But Overdue, Tribute To My Dad

We at Tenured Radical no longer have a father to give presents to, or buy cards for, on Father's Day.  When we did have a father, this is who he was.  He probably had as many flaws as the next 1960s and 1970s Dad, but he was a very nice person, a widely admired physician, and a hard worker.  He went out of his way to make a nice life for his family and to provide the resources that made it possible for both of his daughters to have an excellent education.

Although I don't think he would have described himself this way, he was an organic intellectual who had tremendous curiosity about the natural, social, cultural and political world.  He was the Oliver Saks of internal medicine, collecting and collating information with what I can only describe as pleasure, putting it together like a puzzle until all the pieces fit. In practical terms, this meant he was a very good and thorough doctor, and would bird-dog a peculiar set of symptoms until they could be treated effectively. Once, over four decades ago, before tick-born diseases were well known to all of us, he correctly diagnosed a man who had  Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever -- a disease that was entirely treatable, but had been missed because it almost never appeared in Pennsylvania. 

We held a memorial service for Dad back in September, 1997, two months after he died so that everyone from the hospital could be there.  One of the things that was truly memorable (I do not remember a thing about the eulogy I delivered, although I have a copy of it filed away somewhere) was the number of people who got up to speak about him and revealed things I had not known about Dad.  And yet, each of these anecdotes was completely consistent with the person I did know.  For example, a developmentally disabled man whose job it was to keep the stairwells clean got up to speak in front of about three hundred people.  He explained his job, and said that every day my father made a point of telling him what good work he was doing on the stairs and thanking him for it. 

Dad really liked people, and he was interested in them:  he spent hours in the evening and on weekends talking to his patients on the telephone, often helping them make decisions about painful chronic diseases, terminal cancers or conditions that had suddenly turned scary.  I remember lots of conversations ending with him saying, "Go to the emergency room, and I'll meet you there," and he would get dressed and head back out to the hospital no matter what time it was.

When Dad retired because his own illness had advanced, he was deeply concerned about the increasingly money-driven, and litigious, world of medicine that was separating the interests of doctors from their patients and making personalized care all but impossible for many young doctors who would have liked to provide it.  As chief of medicine, he also understood that lots of different people played important roles to make the mission of a hospital successful, and that all jobs -- even the ones that other people might view as menial -- were important.  He  enjoyed teaching, he enjoyed solving difficult medical problems, he appreciated the professionalism of his nurses and he enjoyed helping young doctors make their careers.

I realized some years ago that, despite the great differences in our professional lives, I have ended up sharing many of my father's values and pleasures, even though I don't recall him ever having conveyed them except by example. One of the many reasons I am sorry he is dead is that I think we would have enjoyed talking about these things together.  So, without further ado:

Happy Father's Day, Phil Potter.  The mission continues.

Tell Me How You Really Feel, Dude: Prof Said To Have Peed On Colleagues' Office Doors

We at Tenured Radical have been alerted by our pals in the legit educational press (Inside Higher Ed) that there are many more reasons than we knew to hire more women in the STEM fields. Tihomir Petrov of the Cal State Northridge math department is on the lam after having failed to appear in court to answer two charges of public urination, a misdemeanor.  Where did he pee?  In his department, apparently.

It sounds like revenge urination to us, and a unique way of showing contempt for colleagues that we feel lucky to have never encountered.  Imagine coming to work and finding a big puddle of man-pee in front of your office. According to the Los Angeles Times, "In early December, Petrov was captured on videotape urinating on the door of another professor's office in Santa Susana Hall, according to authorities. School officials had concealed a camera nearby after discovering puddles of what they thought was urine at the professor's door, officials said."  It seems that Petrov might have an ongoing problem with either retention or rage.

Although the evidence seems strong, Petrov has pleaded not guilty, and there is no sign of him anywhere on the department web site.

Call 1-800-FEMNIST: Would Publicity About Unnecessary Genital Surgery On American Children Get Women Off Their Asses?

OK, I know I haven't blogged about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico ($20 billion? Not enough, Barack -- and do not point your finger at me to show how "tough" you are. Hyper-masculinity pisses me off.) I have also not blogged about the closing arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the California case that will nominally decide whether Prop 8 is overturned, but that will really decide that GLBT marriage will go to the Supreme Court sooner than activists on either side intended (see Georgetown law prof Nan D. Hunter at Hunter of Justice for updates.)

What I am thinking about a lot this summer, however -- since I am writing a book on radical feminism in the 1970s -- is: what could happen to kick women in the United States out of their torpor and provoke a feminist political revival? Specifically, what could get women to care about female genital mutilation here in the United States, rather than condemning people in the Islamic world as if Americans were not culturally obsessed with their children's genitals too?

Try this.

Although Cornell University's Institutional Research Board might easily demand authority over an oral history project, it appears that the medical school IRB has signed off on a research project in which pediatric urologist Dix Poppas (who holds a named chair at Weill Cornell Medical Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital) is performing clitoral reduction surgeries on little girls. Presumably, because none of the subjects is identified as having a dangerous condition (like cancer, which can also cause clitoral enlargement, or a blockage of the urethra) the subjects are being chosen because they had the bad luck to be born at a teaching hospital, and in possession of either a distinctly unladylike clitoris or a micropenis.

The so-called "medical condition" under study by Dr. Poppas and his team at Weil is called "clitoromegaly." Naming is a common strategy of the medical and pharmaceutical industries to declare something found in nature and non-lethal to be unnatural and of grave danger to one's health. See, for example, today's article in the The New York Times about the marketing of flibamserin, a new pill for "female hypoactive sexual desire disorder," or "female sexual dysfunction." Girls, after taking flibamserin daily for weeks, which may make you nauseated and cause you to feel faint, you may want to have more sex. Woo-hoo!

My guess? Poppas's research, which is about preserving urological "nerve bundles," will really find its market in prostate cancer surgery, which has a truly rotten record of success (surgeons also lie about the rate of prostate surgery complications, by the way, since somewhere between 8 and 50% of men suffer from permanent post-surgical incontinence. ) It will probably also be useful in female to male transsexual surgery, for which recipients pay cash as such surgery is specifically excluded from health insurance policies, even though transsexuals do often suffer from clinical depression (an actual medical condition) when they are denied treatment that adjusts their bodies to their felt gender.

The real question is: who cares if a child has a clitoris just like Mommy's? I mention this because one powerful rationale for male circumcision, another unnecessary medical procedure performed without consent, is that boys won't grow up right unless they look like Daddy. Although it appears that having a clit just like Mommy's are also prevalent among pediatric surgeons, opinions about what constitutes a "normal clitoris" vary widely, from something smaller to a pencil eraser to half the length of your thumb (I wish.)

How many women do you know who can report losing or gaining physical self confidence as teenagers from comparing vageegees in the shower with Mama?

As usual, researchers are pushing this on parents for their own reasons, when in fact the kind and ethical thing to do would be to tell parents and their growing children the truth: having genitals that are off the norm is no big deal unless the child hirself decides, later in life, that it is, or unless it indicates a life-threatening medical condition. As Dan Savage reported yesterday, because Poppas is promoting this as a "nerve sparing surgery" for children who may be intersexed, it also involves follow up examinations in which the children are stimulated with a vibrator on the clitoris and groin and asked to report their sensations to the researchers. See clinical findings by Poppas, Jennifer Yang (a Cornell graduate currently at UCSF) and Diane Felson here. Known as cliteroplasty (as opposed to "female genital mutilation," which is what we call it when people who are not First World physicians do it), the candidates for the study ranged in age from 4 months to 24 years old. Clearly, however, most of the people in the study required parental permission, as the mean age was 4.6 - 6.8 years.

Why do children need this surgery? Why, to ensure "normal sexual development." What could be more important?

This strikes me as a moment where women on the right and on the left might join forces to address both the reform of human subjects research, and the question of why children have no right to informed consent when their sexuality is under scrutiny by researchers and health providers. True, we might not agree on what constitutes "normal sexual development," gender norms or about the rights of parents over children more generally. But we might agree about the right of medical researchers to decide whether a child's genitalia look correct, and whether it is OK to give young parents false, coercive information. Women might agree that in this kind of research children are being harmed. They might agree that such surgeries are an adult vanity project masquerading as science. They might agree that invasive and artificial forms of gender construction should not be performed on children too young to give their consent, and that researchers gathered around a child, manipulating hir genitals, and asking questions about it promotes child molestation by scientists -- not "normal sexual development."

You thought genital surgery without informed consent was all over when John Colapintoexposed John Money and David Reimer's long-term research at The John's Hopkins University, in which boys with small or damaged penises were surgically transformed into girls? Think again. Although the National Organization for Women defines female genital mutilation done for religious and cultural reasons as a human rights violation, I have not found a single statement on their web page that addresses the question of surgeries done on female children, or children thought to be better off female by American medical researchers. The theme of this year's conference, by the way is "Loving Our Bodies, Changing the World."

For more information on this issue from the adult activists who have organized around the violation of their own rights as intersexed children, go to the Intersex Society of North America web page. This page includes a helpful guide for parents who, as the Colapinto book shows, can easily be frightened into "choosing" invasive surgery and research protocols on behalf of their child in the confusing and vulnerable hours following birth by being told that their child has a "medical condition." It includes this important advice:

If the doctors are offering genital surgeries to change the way your child’s genitals look, ask: Why do you think my child needs this genital surgery? What evidence do you have that this will help my child in the long run? If your child needs a surgery to save her life, obviously it is a good idea! If your surgeon wants to do a surgery to change how your child looks, pause and consider waiting. What we know about people who grew up with “ambiguous genitalia” tells us on average they do well! You may understandably worry that your child will be emotionally hurt by having something other than average-looking genitals, but the evidence suggests your child won’t be, especially if you’re open, honest, accepting, and supportive. Surgeries may leave your child with diminished health, diminished sexual sensation, scarring, a poor cosmetic outcome, and an unintended message that your child needed to be “fixed” to be accepted by you. So consider waiting and letting your child decide whether to take the risks. You may discover your child is fine with the way your child is, especially if you let your child know you are.

This should be required reading for every parent prior to giving birth. While comparatively few children are born intersexed, those that are are overwhelmingly healthy and more likely to remain so without surgical intervention and early childhood sexual experimentation.

Why Can't We Get Anything Done? How To Run An Effective Meeting

No one likes going to meetings. But admit it: you dread some meetings more than others, don't you? And if you hate all meetings, academia might not be the career for you. As chair of a major Zenith university committee some years back, one week I was tearing my hair out because I was scheduled up to the eyeballs with meetings. "How the Hades do administrators ever get any work done if they are in fracking meetings all the time?" I railed at my companion, a former dean, as I pulled on a clean black tee shirt to greet that day's scheduling marathon in high style.

"That's how administrators do their work," she replied patiently, reaching for the Arts section of the New York Times. "They are doing their work in meetings." I was gobsmacked. Of course that was right. So maybe it wasn't the meetings themselves that were the problem -- it was the question of making -- and marking -- the progress we made in them.

This post is for everyone, no matter how unimportant you think you are. Whether you are going to be a first time chair in the fall, or chairing a committee with a small mandate, or just a member of a department or a committee, you need to be able to run, and/or contribute effectively to, a good meeting. It is one of the many failures of academic life that this is not a skill that either taught or openly discussed, nor is it one that faculty will usually admit to valuing. But actually, most do because they hate having their time wasted. From time to time, you might hear it said about someone in a tone of admiration, "S/he runs a really good meeting." It's a genuine compliment my friend: will it ever be made about you?

Never fear, the Tenured Radical is here! Here are the five things that I always think about when I am planning and participating in a meeting.

1. Every meeting requires a realistic and clear agenda. If you are running the meeting, you need to take account of what time is available, and how much of the hour you should allot to each item. An agenda should not be too full, and conversely, if there is very little to discuss, cancel the meeting: this will make everyone happy. Getting together just because you are scheduled to do so makes people feel like they are spinning their wheels. Driving people through an agenda as if the building was burning can, on the other hand, cause the group not to take ownership of decisions made in haste, or cause them to (perhaps rightly) not make decisions at all. If an item is taking longer than you thought it would, even if you have pruned out ancillary issues, consult with the group as to whether they wish to defer the item to the next meeting, or finish that discussion and defer the other items to the next meeting.

If you are chairing, you should rough out a semester of meetings in advance so that you know how much aggregate meeting time you are willing to allot to each of the items your group is tasked with. You should plan a regular weekly time so that you are not wasting time in each meeting trying to find space in every one's schedule for the next one. You need to leave some space for unplanned items that have been added to the semester's work.

It is also important to designate why things are on the agenda: is a particular item there for discussion and advice, or is it what we call an "action item" -- an issue on which, ideally, your group will produce a recommendation, request or policy?

Above all, the committee has to be encouraged to work together as a group, and each member of the committee needs to know that hir opinions (unless utterly irrelevant and noxious) are important to the process. Because of this, you need to:

2. Avoid giving speeches or monopolizing the discussion. This is definitely my worst flaw, either as a chair or a participant in meetings. If you are chair, your job is to establish the agenda, keep it moving, and end the meeting with a sense of the actions to be taken as a result of the committee's deliberations. It is also your job to listen and make sense of what other people have to say, such as asking people to clarify points. pause the discussion periodically to articulate areas of consensus and disagreement. If you are a member of the committee, don't speak in long paragraphs that are designed to foreclose alternative opinions before they have even been voiced. This can be terribly polarizing. Worse, it encourages a few strong personalities to dominate, and others to melt away.

The point of the meeting is participation. If you are talking, no one else is, and those other people are sitting there thinking: "What is the point of being at this meeting?" Reserve a few minutes for each item to make sure you have solicited the opinion of everyone who wishes to speak: many people, especially new and less experienced colleagues, will be reticent about expressing their opinions in a more experienced group. Make sure you repeat the positions voiced by these people to reassure them that you have heard what they said, and to make sure others have taken account of it too.

Finally, try to have a sense of when a discussion has gone on too long. You know this has happened when the same opinions, or disagreements, are being recycled; if people are starting to talk among themselves and crack jokes; or if the conversation is straying into peripheral issues. Bring the discussion to a close by asking the group to:

3. Make effective decisions. The best decisions are reached by consensus, in my view, but this isn't always possible. It is much harder to do in a large department, which can split over real differences in intellectual and institutional philosophy without losing their effectiveness in the institution over the short term. This can be a problem, of course, because it leads to faction. Unfortunately, large departments have no disincentive, year by year, to avoid factions, since it allows strong personalities to flex their muscles in ways that are undemocratic but efficient. But in the long term the damage can be great if these factions harden. What you then get are political struggles that overwhelm legitimate intellectual issues, cause a lack of comity and ultimately, hamper the department's capacity to do business.

Small departments cannot afford the politics of faction because unfriendly relationships or long-term struggles in a small group can be devastating as people become isolated and angry over long-term grievances. This means that, while large groups are far more likely to vote on items and move forward, even items of little importance, small groups are more likely to invest in compromises that can take much longer to reach but that every member is invested in. Over time, however, the down side of small group consensus building can be an unwillingness to take risks, or make timely decisions on small matters even when such decisions are urgent to the department's future. Disagreement with the consensus can come to feel socially fraught, causing individuals not to disagree even when it would be useful and productive.

If the small group sounds like a conflict-free zone, it isn't. Small groups can become idiosyncratic and defensive, and can be rife with the passive-aggressive behavior that the failure to have and resolve conflict can breed. But large groups -- particularly departments -- should not become too reliant on voting. It creates the misimpression that every decision, no matter how small is a matter of "policy;" and it means that factions become reified, as strong personalities constantly troll for votes and mark others down as loyal or disloyal.

As chair, you need to decide which decision-making style is best suited to the action you are seeking and the group you are in -- not simply go with what is traditional within the group because it is comfortable. Neither consensus or voting is necessarily a better method for making group decisions, although I like consensus because it allows a group that is in the minority to concede its point but still be heard on the matter. Ideally, the minority can modify the decision in a way that strengthens the outcome and invites their support of a decision which they initially opposed. Whatever method you choose (and it could be a mix) you need to:

4. Cultivate respect for the decision-making process within the group. Your meetings are not effective unless every member of your group leaves ready to support the decision or recommendation that is made and the process by which it was achieved. In the case of a personnel decision, each person who voted needs to be able to describe accurately, and in detail, to anyone who has the right to inquire, why s/he voted the way she did. In policy and governance matters, however, the best outcome is that every member of the group is ready to support the decision that has been made, regardless of whether s/he supported it in the meeting or not.

This last point is a particular issue in an academic environment where one's colleagues often assume that lingering disagreement and argument is not just the norm, but is a right and a legitimate expression of one's individualism. In intellectual matters this may be productive (although it can lead to stubborn eccentricity in a person's views), but in institutional matters it can be crippling. There is nothing more annoying than to come to a decision as a group, and then have one or more people leave the room and criticize others, or the group itself, to the larger community.

Oh yes: the one thing that is more annoying is to have the person never give up a disagreement, and divert energy from other business by constantly trying to pressure the group to reverse what it has done. Trying to undercut the decision by disseminating information in the larger community, real or false, is really bad, unless there is a matter of great ethical importance at stake. And under no conditions should people be sending each other rabid emails that pursue struggles that began in meetings, copying and blind copying them to others. Which is why you need to....

5. Discourage gossip. Be firm about which decisions require confidentiality, and why. Give clear direction on what that means: are members of the group not allowed to say anything about a decision? Are they allowed to distance themselves from the outcome publicly if they have voiced their disagreement appropriately within the group? Particularly if your committee draws on numerous departments for its membership, people may have different standards for confidentiality and these may need to be discussed.

Along with discouraging gossip, members of your group will inevitably discuss agenda items with each other outside meetings, but the caucusing to straegize a meeting's outcome is divisive and should be discouraged, as should email exchanges about business from which some members of the group are excluded. It also encourages the bullying of faculty by those at a higher rank, the creation of unhealthy personal obligations, and character assassination of various kinds. What is the point of having a meeting if everyone attends already knowing what s/he will support and unwilling to listen to those who were not part of these extra-curricular discussions? What is the point of having an opinion if you will have to inevitably fear punishment from one faction or another? Particularly in departments, this kind of informal caucusing (inevitably encouraged by strong personalities who want to run things whether they are formally in charge or not) can lead to long-term damage from factionalization, and resentment from those in minority positions.