What is Our Work? Towards A Feminist Future in Education

Ellie Smeal and Alan Alda, ERA rally
June 30, 1981.  Photo credit

This concludes a three part series on feminist education:  you may want to read Part I and Part II first.

Gender inequality occurs in educational, and subsequently professional, atmospheres in which we have substantial evidence that men and women are equally able. The gender gap in math testing is shrinking rapidly, and at the top levels, it is insignificant. But as  New York Times reporter Tamar Lewin noted in her commentary on “Why So Few,” a lack of faith in women’s abilities on the part of those who should be welcoming them to the next level of achievement may also reduce the confidence of even the top young female mathematicians. Hence, as Lewin concluded, “girls’ lesser belief in their own skills may partly explain why fewer women go into scientific careers.”

So returning to the question I asked in a different way --what is the role for a women's college in creating gender equality?  First and foremost, women's colleges create visible locations to find and connect to talented women are eager to be found and have their interests promoted aggressively.  Second, a woman's college is a critical institutional base for feminism.  Third, it is a location from which feminists have an obligation to articulate all institutional issues – scientific, commercial, political --as women’s issues.  


These are not tasks whose time has passed.  And at a historical moment where the wage gap between men and women has stalled at an average of .77 to the dollar for over four decades, the task is urgent.  The fact that this gap grows as the job itself requires more education and training makes discussion of this problem even more urgent for educators. Women's colleges have a special civic and an international obligation to be leaders in the debate over gender equality and wage gaps, in the United States and around the globe.  All feminists must support them in this task, holding conferences, creating forums, and generating policy papers that build on and reproduce feminism's successes while striving to correct its failures.

Science is just one important example of why an institutional locations for feminism matter, in the private and in the public university world. When I say “feminism,” I use that word as a historian who understands the range of political and social meanings that can have among women of different racial, class and national backgrounds. It is, by definition, an inclusive posture that articulates rights and responsibilities for women. As Nancy Hewitt has recently argued, there have been no “permanent waves” of feminism over the last 150 years, only tendencies that often compete with as much as they support each other. But all feminisms assume that the health of any social order can be measured by the status of women within it. Bettye Goldstein, who I introduced you to in Part I of this series, was an old Popular Front feminist who saw coalition as essential, even though it wasn’t something she was always good at achieving. She began NOW as an explicitly non-partisan organization, believing that feminism ought to cast its net as broadly as possibly in the interests of women’s equality. Hence, my feminism may be different from your feminism, but for the purposes of building and strengthening women’s colleges, let me make this argument: institutional feminism should be a broadly inclusive, woman-centered approach to pedagogy and community that recognizes and supports all women’s aspirations to equality.

This commitment to equality would include:

Recognizing a parent’s connection to (and often primary responsibility for) children and family. In the absence of universal daycare, it would endow a subsidized, co-operative 24-hr daycare center on campus where undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, administrators and staff could know their children would be safe and loved until they or their partners could pick them up.


Recognizing women’s rights – on campus, in the United States, in the hemisphere and around the globe – as a critical topic of study, both academically and as a co-curricular focus.


Aggressive affirmative action for demobilized veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and reaching out to women veterans, many of whom will leave the service deeply traumatized by their experiences in and around combat zones.

What this kind of agenda requires is close attention to the needs of the individual student who is seeking equality in a gendered world: it is the kind of work a feminist, women's college can do. Such spaces must be inclusive, places where feminists of many descriptions -- some of whom will be men -- can make arguments on behalf of women’s right to have access to everything.  The support of a like-minded community is important, but it is pedagogical, curricular, and practical reforms that will support women’s aspirations to scientific, or any other rigorous form of education. That might mean daycare, as I suggested, so that women can maintain an onerous lab schedule; it might mean enhancing mentoring. It might mean a center dedicated to women’s physical and sexual safety, where concerned men are included in a feminist project to prevent campus violence. It might mean a women’s gym, like Harvard has established, so that women who must limit their physical exposure to men on religious grounds may relax and be physically healthy.  It might mean a veterans’ center, where military women could be paired with mentors, have quick access to psychological support and tutoring, and from which a phone call would originate when a woman doesn’t show up for class, a phone call that would gently inquire whether she is sick, has missed her bus, or is just overwhelmed.

Equality is never a finished project. As women’s aspirations and achievements change, so do their needs. While a women’s college privileges a feminism that puts women at the center, we must remember the other piece of the gender equality equation that feminism attends to: providing spaces where men who care deeply about the advancement of women in science, or any other field, can come to recruit the best minds, to partner with them, to mentor them, and to learn from them. Gender equality is a project, and it is, as Mary Maples Dunn said to me, an unfinished one. But to believe and invest in a project like feminist education is to demonstrate optimism about gender equality by investing in the institutions that will create it. Gender equality is, in the most optimistic scenario, a feminist task that may remain unfinished as long as women continues to re-imagine and re-invent themselves to meet the challenges of their own generation.

This is, to paraphrase Katherine McBride, Our Work.

Cross Posted at Cliopatria.

A Very Sad Day

Once again a student has died violently at Zenith, this time by her own hand. She was found yesterday, badly burned, and she passed on today at Bridgeport Hospital.

You never, ever, get used to it. Ever.

The Annals of Anxiety: Constructing Velcro Parents As A "Problem" For Higher Education

This morning I have been thinking about what kinds of criticisms are attached to warnings about cultural decline, and why. For example, our friend Historiann asks today why older people are always so critical of the young. Yeah, why is that? Particularly given the fact that generation after generation, young people seem to grow up into functional workers, consumers, artists, writers and financiers, no matter how much Facebook they do; how many video games they play; and how much/little they read.

Historiann's emphasis on why cultural critique dominates, at the expense of a more relational view of cultural change and material outcomes, is an interesting corollary to William Julius Wilson's 2009 reassessment of a sociological school of thought, of which he is a prominent architect, that highlights cultural explanations for Black poverty at the expense of structural analysis. In More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor In The Inner City, Wilson argues that structural forms of discrimination that are partly racial have acted in combination with other, non-racial, forces (such as the failure to invest in urban infrastructure and education, and workforce changes associated with globalization) to increase the burdens on Black people living in areas of core poverty. These things, he argues, cannot be separated from what is viewed by critics as cultural dysfunction in the same communities, such as the apparent unwillingness to work at low-paid jobs with no benefits. In other words, choices people make about their lives (many of which are heavily circumscribed by structural obstacles) and the world-view of the poor (which actually might be reframed as knowledge) are inextricable.

As if by a miracle, the New York Times printed a back-to-school article today which prompts a meditation on blaming and on anxiety about cultural decline. It's about those apparently pathetic dweebs -- late-boomer parents -- who cling to their children relentlessly when dropping them off at liberal arts and Ivy League colleges. Mocked relentlessly as "Velcro" or "helicopter" parents, they are the stuff of campus legend, to which hours of summer strategy sessions are devoted. They decorate their children's dorm rooms. They attend orientation. They book themselves into hotels for days, supposedly to help their children settle in, but in reality to help themselves separate. Extra deans are hired for the first week of school to hand out cheerful tee shirts and coffee mugs that say: "Get a life!"

OK, I'm kidding about the deans and the farewell tschochkes. But for a over a decade, residential colleges have operated under the assumption that late boomer parents are unnaturally traumatized about the loss of their babies, that they are likely to cling in annoying and unhealthy ways, and that their departure must be strategized like the draw-down from Iraq. Hence, the increasing importance of "'hit the road' departure ceremonies." My favorite is the one in which students and parents are placed on opposite sides of the room, and college speakers greet the students while literally turning their backs on the parents.

Here's your hat, what's your hurry? Don't forget to leave a check. Meanwhile, as you can imagine, we faculty are observing the scene of tearful departures and having a conversation that sounds like this:

"My parents just helped me carry my $hit upstairs, and then they left, and me and my roommates fired up the old bong-a-roony."

"My parents just unloaded my $hit on the $idewalk and drove away."

"My parents just put me on the red-eye with a duffle bag and a six-pack of beer."

"My parents just threw me out of the plane when it was circling over Harvard Square."

Silence.

"That's cold, man."

"Yeah, really cold."

"That's the way it was, man. Gotta learn to survive. Gotta grow up. Look at these pussies."

OK, that's also not true. But it is true that few of us in higher ed who decry the programming done around move-in day would admit what forces of repression had to be mustered to get through the experience of leaving for school. Which of us can recall accurately how the time between the arrival at college and our family's departure as a new and different unit that would go on forever (sob!) without us passed with time-warp speed? Or what it felt like to be left in a place, no matter how much we had desired it, where -- except for the kids who had gone to boarding school -- we hardly knew how to feed ourselves, much less find classroom buildings with strange names?

In fact, stories that critique parents for loving their children too much make me ask cultural and structural questions. One is: are today's parents yesterday's neglected children who are simply trying to do a better job than their own parents did? Is it perhaps better that parents and children are closer and more expressive with each other? In other words, to what extent does the devotion to children among late boomers demand reflection on changes in parenting styles during the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which bourgeois adults were putting their toes, and then their whole feet, in the waters of self-absorption at some cost to their children? A period in which vicious critiques of "momism," as arch-conservative Philip Wylie put it in 1942, gave way to parental detachment and teenage autonomy? Remember the live and let live middle class ethic of Bill and Pat Loud, of An American Family (PBS, 1973) whose children used their southern California ranch house as a crash pad while their parents floated in and out of the house on a diet of alcohol, cigarettes and extra-marital affairs?

To what extent are parents who we criticize for over-parenting simply reflecting, whether realistically or not, on how neglected they felt as they were booted out of the nest?

So that's the cultural argument that requires some investigation, but it is one that is almost exclusively focused on the middle and upper classes, as is the critique of helicopter/Velcro parenting. A more embracing, and structural, direction for research would look at a broader class analysis of college attendance. It would take more seriously the fact that leaving one's teenager at a residential college is an atypical experience nowadays, always has been, and because of the high cost of higher education, becoming more so. The vast majority of high school graduates who matriculate this fall will be attending community colleges and branches of the State U., living at home, and working between 20 and 40 hours a week to pay their expenses. I suspect this has always been a bigger part of the story than the middle class bildungsroman tells. A few years ago, I read a memoir by a working-class gay man from the Left Coast. One of the things he wrote about was applying and being admitted to one of California's then-stellar and inexpensive research universities without speaking to anyone in his family about it at all. The night he packed his ramshackle car, terrified that they would do something to prevent it, he told his parents he was leaving for college. To this man's great relief, and sorrow, no one in his family appeared to care about his departure at all. ("Wow," said a friend with a Ph.D. and a good teaching job, who also attended California schools, when I told her this story; "That's what happened to me too.")

Hence, we might ask, are generalizations about "parents," and how they behave when separating from their children, valid at all if they do not take into account the large number of generationally similar people who have a very different experience? We might ask: has "going away" to college ever been the typical, or even the most desirable, experience? We also might ask, given that tuition and fees alone at a residential college averages, according to the College Board, $7,020 (public in-state) $18,578 (public out-of-state) and a whopping $26,273 (private), whether there isn't an awful lot at stake for parents. I'm not just talking about the money: I'm thinking about the saving, the sacrifices, and the second mortgages parents are asked to take out to finance an education; the corollary investment in making the right choice, one that is not going to result in a year that has to be repeated because of getting off on the wrong foot; and the years of intangible investment in the teenager's readiness to attend college in the first place.

We have too little knowledge about what the high cost of college is really "costing" those who undertake it. Furthermore, why do we assume that the four-year residential college experience is the norm, when it no longer is -- and perhaps never has been? According to Department of Education statistics released in 2008 (see the summary report with reported data here) out of the 16.4 million students enrolled at four year post-secondary institutions that year, 12.6 million were enrolled in public institutions, 2 million of whom were enrolled part-time. Of the remainder, 3.4 million were enrolled in non-profit private schools and 1.6 million were enrolled in private for-profit institutions (an increase of 1.2 million students, reflecting the privatization agenda that was enabled, albeit poorly and at great cost to the taxpayers, under the Bush administration.) The student demographic that is growing fastest is students matriculating at community or junior colleges: in 2007, seven million students attended two-year institutions, and over half of those students were enrolled part-time, so we can safely assume that they too were working.

This is only to emphasize that, while the number of students attending four-year private schools is a healthy 3.4 million, it is at least equalled by those students who are working, attending classes at a local school part-time or on-line, and probably living at home. When you then add the number of students who are working and going to school full time; going to public or private schools and living at home; and attending non-residential for-profits, in fact the parental departure scenes depicted in the Times are suffered by relatively few students.

Hypothesis? The vast majority of students working towards a B.A., while they may be living at home, may be separating from their parents just fine, thank you. Research, please.

Department of All The News That Fits, We Print

Your favorite Radical has an opinion piece in the web version of the New York Times today.

What's the Answer to Higher Education, Gertrude?" "Alice, What Is The Question?*

Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – And What We Can Do About It. New York: Times Books, 2010). 271 pp., index; $26.00 hardcover.

For those of you have aspirations to publish for a popular market, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s contribution to the contemporary national debate about higher education does a lot of things right. The title poses a question and answers it – enticing you into a text that proposes to tell you the details that link the two. It has been cannily released in what is normally a slack summer book season (in other words, after the Summer Reading List issues of the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker; and right before these same publications announce what should be on your agenda for the fall.) Best of all, it is designed to freak out all the parents who are about to write their first $25,000 check (or some combination of cash and I.O.U.’s) to the college of their child’s choice, and the parents of rising seniors who are about to begin the College Admissions Derby. Imagine all these parents buying this book to find out that they are, or will be, paying for – nothing!

Full disclosure: although I am not quoted in the book, I had a very enjoyable phone interview with one of its authors. Furthermore, like Jesse Lemisch over at New Politics, I found that many of its themes speak to real issues in the academy: the casualization of teaching labor, the lack of curricular direction, ginormous corporate salaries paid to top executives, the failure of faculties to reform their own practices, and the high cost – in dollars and mortgaged futures – are but a few things that deserve more attention than they are getting.

My problem is this: Dreifus and Hacker treat the diverse field that is higher education with such a broad brush, and are so vague as to what the structural causes of the problems they identify are, that it is hard to know what we should take away from this book, why it asserts the things it does, or who the authors think the agents of change for higher education are supposed to be. They offer a vast range of critiques – many of which are the topic of regular debate in the education literature – but the agenda for reform is vague except for the familiar, free-market notion that parents can create change by taking their education dollars elsewhere.

Higher Education reserves some of its harshest criticism for a few of the most selective schools (which are referred to as the “Golden Dozen,” a term I can honestly say after a lifetime of working in universities I have never heard) and spends less time than it should on public schools like Evergreen (Washington State) and New College (Florida), which are truly innovative, teaching-oriented and inexpensive. The authors have a tendency to compare the apples over here with the oranges over there, spreading their analysis of schools over all the chapters. Because of this, even a professional educator like myself ends with very little sense of what a formula for a good college education really looks like, or how I, as a scholar, might contribute to a reform agenda (except by giving up research and writing, and returning my salary.) Worst, Higher Education gives non-professionals very little sense of how the different facets of university life work might, and sometimes do, work together to produce a good undergraduate education.

Hence, the biggest point Higher Education misses making is that the flaws in, and expense of, an undergraduate degree have evolved as a result of a privatization agenda that shifts a variety of costs formerly undertaken by government and private industry (through taxation) to students and their parents. Without this larger context the book's most salient points (that an undergraduate education is nearly unaffordable, and that the liberal arts are being de-emphasized for undergraduate training that can be immediately converted to a paying job) are far less meaningful. Privatization explains the shift towards what the authors identify as "The Triumph of Training” in chapter 6: students believe that their BA’s should certify them for the career that will pay back their bank loans; and corporations can hire workers for low-level corporate jobs without the expense of training them.

(Short irrelevant question: did Barbara Ehrenreich and Jonathan Kozol read this book before they blurbed it? Or were they in a particularly ecumenical mood when they did? Because Hacker and Dreifus's argument is more or less the exact opposite of what Ehrenreich and Kozol have argued on behalf of for years.)

Higher Education’s most consistent point throughout is that a college education costs too much (I agree); that students graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in loans (I agree – although the authors should have devoted a chapter to the consequences of this); that administrators are being hired and paid on a corporate scale (I agree); that college faculties rarely explain why they do what they do, or what an undergraduate education ought to look like (I agree); and that colleges and universities are providing vast numbers of services, entertainments and extra-curriculars that are driving the cost of higher education up without improving the quality of education (I agree.) There’s also quite a nice chapter at the end of the book that remarks on schools that they thought were exciting, and that advises parents to “think out of the box” when helping their children put together a list of potential colleges. My one caveat is that while they mention the establishment of “honors colleges” at Arizona State and Ole Miss that offer a liberal arts experience at a public school price, my question is: what is so innovative about creaming off 20% of an incoming class and giving them something “special” – while letting the remaining 80% flounder? It’s called tracking, and it’s not reform unless everybody gets access to the same small classes and high standards.

But the things that I liked about this book were too frequently negated by discussions that I found hasty and ill informed. I found Hacker and Dreifus’s grasp of the state of affirmative action thin, particularly since they mostly address admission to the “Golden Dozen.” Their views about the role race plays in higher education more generally are partial at best and incoherent at worst. The way in which this subject is glossed without any reference to social class or a family history of higher education also leaves the false impression that all Black students need “help” of one kind or another in the admissions process; and opposes this to stereotypical notions of an Asian “model minority."

Another problem – given that the real focus of the book is on a consumer-driven model of education -- is that many of their discussions assume a more or less one-to-one relationship between tuition dollars and university spending on a variety of things that, they rightly argue, have nothing, or little, to do with the classroom. Interestingly, this mirrors the current Republican position on the national deficit, as if the national deficit and social programs have a direct relationship to each other that is separable from tax policy and military spending.

Without a more nuanced discussion of why university budgets operate the way they do, what student needs are, how services support classrooms, what drives the perceived need for administrative staff (particularly in student services), false assumptions about lavish spending on unnecessary frills leap out. For example, when they cite the high cost of scientific research, Hacker and Dreifus don’t make it clear that although the money for research is often frontloaded by universities, scientists are expected to earn it back in the form of grants (many of which are corporate) – and that not infrequently, patents from their work and overhead extracted from grants go back into the university’s coffers as profit. As a second example, many faculty members would agree that management is top-heavy and overpaid: but who exactly is going to handle the 10,000 + applications received at every liberal arts school? Who will support the mandate to provide accommodation for the disabled? Who will raise the private and foundation dollars to replace lost federal and state dollars? And who will manage the infinitely more complex budgets that result? While it appears that numerous faculty were interviewed for this book, it is rare that we hear from an administrator, except when s/he is doing something fabulous, like refusing a salary over 400 K.

Although Dreifus and Hacker both teach, they don’t dig very deeply into a variety of other reasons that higher education, particularly public colleges and universities, have become so much more expensive, and so much less invested in the liberal arts. The most important of these would be the end of the Cold War, which slashed funding for a variety of fields that were critical to the arts and social sciences, from Anthropology to Russian. Twenty years of other federal cuts to universities followed, cuts that have also been made by state legislatures even in the most flush economic times. At the same time, the same legislatures, and their State Boards of Regents, have amped up and failed to supervise lavish D-I sports programs that have a use ‘em and lose ‘em attitude toward students. For example, the New Jersey State Legislature just cut Rutgers University’s budget by 15% -- having authorized in the past decade the creation of a multi-million dollar football program, with a new stadium. As another example when, in 2009, Connecticut basketball coach Jim Calhoun publicly gave Governor Jody Rell the finger in response to her request that he accept a 10% cut in his multi-million dollar salary like every other state worker, what politician – the governor included -- demanded that he accept the cut?

Those who follow Margret Soltan's University Diaries will be glad to know there is a whole chapter on why big-time college sports are a waste of money, but this chapter also misses crucial details. For example, Dreifus and Hacker never mention that athletics at many public schools are partly funded by a mandatory “student activity fee,” which every student must pay even if s/he is working 40 hours a week to finance her education and would never dream of going to a football game. They also do not mention that there are viable ways to keep a sport competitive and fun without tremendous expense to others: the club sport model, on which the school contributes a token amount and the athletes raise the money themselves. Or that to some of us, commitment to athletic excellence is a sign of character and often correlates with academic achievement, particularly in women.

Perhaps my greatest disappointment with Higher Education is that the authors are over the top disparaging about the work of most faculty, much as the collapse of the auto industry is often blamed on the greediness of auto workers, rather than the failures of management. This is also a place where collapsing all schools great and small, public and private, truly undermines their argument because their targets are salaries and research. Worse, it is faculty who – in many ways – need to be rallied to produce change, and the book does its best to alienate them. Hacker and Dreifus offering little, or selective, explanations for the following assertions:

Faculty members are, by and large, elitist and selfish, consumed with their research, and uninterested in their students. While Dreifus and Hacker offer a few good examples of faculty who are devoted teachers, the book emphasizes that indifference to students is the state of play. While Zenith didn’t make it into the “Golden Dozen” (thank God), I have to tell you – we are not that different from Amherst and Williams, who did, and the vast majority of us who work at small colleges care deeply about our teaching and our students. Some of us stay in our jobs despite our discomfort with the high cost of private colleges because our teaching is nurtured, rewarded and encouraged there. We don’t all agree on what “good teaching” is, it’s true – but on the other hand, neither do the authors. At the beginning of the book, they chastise faculty for not making contact with their students; towards the end they seem to think distance learning from adjuncts is a pretty good solution to ameliorating high tuitions. So which is it that we strive for, guys -- the magical relationship with the prof or the magical and thrifty relationship with a grader and a video monitor?

Faculty members are overpaid. This, I would have to say, stung, particularly in a year where I received a raise far below COLA, after having received no raise the year before because of the recession. Where Dreifus and Hacker got the idea that “education is a public service job,” or that faculty are all prancing around in designer clothes paid for with hard-earned tuition dollars, I don’t know. When they count the hours we “work” they count classroom hours: not the time planning classes, meeting with students, keeping up with our fields, writing lectures, grading papers (no, most of us do not have assistants who do this) planning and running majors, chairing departments – the list goes on. While there are a vast number of adjuncts who are -- as Carey Nelson the original Tenured Radical, would say – working for food, I don’t think $100,000 a year is too much to pay someone after ten years of education, eight years of probationary service, and between five and ten years at the associate ranks. And, although this is the salary that is cited over and over, the fact is that the vast number of full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty make well below 100K. Gaps at rank at the same institution, and even within the same department, can be enormous. On what basis would our salaries be decided? That isn’t clear. And why should education professionals at the peak of their career be working at a wage that might otherwise be earned by a social worker, priest or Teach for America trainee?

Scholarly research is unnecessary. Hence, sabbatical and research funding is unnecessary (the sarcastic crack about spending a year that the bulk of us spend writing and doing research in Tuscany “recharging” was just nasty.) Where advanced knowledge in the humanities and social sciences is supposed to come from, who will support it if universities don’t, or what we will actually have to teach undergraduates twenty years from now if everyone with a Ph.D. stops doing research and writing, is not clear. The vast majority of us can’t get a commercial publisher to give us the time of day, so big advances like Higher Education got are out as a source of funding. Dreifus and Hacker’s suggestion -- that people interested in research should be at think tanks instead of teaching in a university, or that they can use their “three-day weekends” for their scholarship is, frankly, just thoughtless.

Faculties neglect the teaching of basic knowledge, teaching specialized courses out of their research so that they won’t have to work hard. It is simply not a fact that a departmental curriculum that offers numerous specialized courses is invariably neglecting its responsibility to core knowledges, offering students a variety of trivia instead that give them no clear view of the field. The authors do not even come close to proving that it is, or that students find this to be a problem. Two of the oddest critiques in this vein were the assertion that in an introductory English class students ought not to be asked to read a little Foucault (theory, in general, is perceived here as extraneous to the needs of an undergraduate); and the assertion that if one Chemistry class is required of an undergraduate, it should be a survey of the field – not the introduction that might lead students into the major.

I found these strange because both are highly arguable and other points of view are not articulated. Like him or not, Foucault changed the field of literature, and learning to read theory is a skill, just as calculus is, that is useful to pursuing a variety of majors. And as for Chemistry – most of us non-scientists would say just the opposite: make students take a real science course that does what other introductory courses are supposed to do, which is give a student entrée to a major. Don’t have them take one of those B$ “science for poets” courses that they know perfectly well is to “satisfy a requirement” and “make them well-rounded” – not to challenge or stimulate them. Students can see through this kind of curricular window-dressing in a second.

Because the book is so broad brush, the question Dreifus and Hacker never ask is: what would be a fundamental set of values to re-organize higher education around? How can we make it affordable? How can we restore the "public" in public education? Why does it matter to have private and religious schools in the mix, and what are we willing to do as a society to support that? What are curricular models that students and faculty, together, find powerful – and why? Why have the choices in higher education narrowed so dramatically in the past twenty years, and why have so many progressive colleges become so conventional?

And what would a greater national commitment to higher education look like that actually put the interests of students first?

*This riffs off of a famous, and probably apocryphal, exchange that is said to have occurred between between Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein on Stein's deathbed in 1946.

The Seductions Of Sedan Delivery; Or, Writing Your Own Academic Job Description

It's difficult to think about it while we still have three to four precious weeks of summer left. But on behalf of all the people who will begin full time teaching in the fall, I ask you to conjure -- for a second -- a week in mid-semester. Feel the pain as you stay up half the night to grade your papers! Experience the fear as you go into class half prepared! Recall being fatally short of sleep as you sit, dazed, through yet another search committee meeting, having driven yourself unsparingly through 100 applicant files the day before! Conjure the self-righteousness and hypocrisy, as you lecture yet another student that s/he could get hir work in on time if only s/he would get organized!

Yeah, baby. The problem is, there is almost no one I know in academia who has a job description that would give them a reasonable sense of where a professor's job begins and ends. Couple this with the reality of being tenure-track (or worse, a full-time visitor), which often seems like an endless exercise in pleasing everybody, all the time, in every way we can. Top it off with the fact that we learn early on not to complain about being overworked because some jackass will look at us piously and say, "You just have to learn to say no to things!" (subtext: say no -- except to me) as if you are overworked because, somewhere along the line, you forgot to say your safeword.

The result is that even many of us who actually have tenure end up hard-wired to do far too much, far more than we really want to do or are capable of doing well, even though we don't really have to anymore. We believe that we are powerless to keep unwanted responsibilities in check, that there are no grounds -- not to say no, but to figure out what and who to say no to -- and the result is a work overload. Inevitably, our health, our peace of mind, our good temper and emotional availability at home, and the pace of our scholarship takes the biggest hit. If you are like me, these marathons of overwork and frustration can produce moments when you start to hear Neil Young warbling:

Sedan delivery is a job

I know I'll like;

It sure was hard to find.

Hard to find a job!

Hard to find!

But never fear. Your Radical is here, with the fruits of a recent rigorous self-criticism. How can this year can be different? How can you create a plan of action that will make this year different? The answer is: Take charge. The answer is: Write your own job description, using these principles.

Knowing your appropriate load allows you to know your overload. In consultation with a senior colleague, figure out what are the minimum number of bodies you are expected to manage, and what the department average is for each category and at each rank of the faculty. In the category of "body management," I am counting major advisees, non-major advisees, enrolled students, honors students, and any other person you need to manage (postdocs, graduate students, other faculty.) These categories can overlap -- but count them twice when they do (for example, a thesis advisee who is also a major advisee = two bodies, as these are distinct activities that cannot be folded into the same hour of your time.)

Whatever the category is, count it and stay at, or preferably under, that number. Anyone extra is an overload. This is the basic outline of your job description, because whatever people say, a full-time teaching job is primarily about the students. That said, you have to come up with a strategy for how -- particularly if you are a popular teacher, or are teaching in an underrepresented field (more on this below) -- you are going to say no to students that you don't have time for; and you will send them away to someone whose job it is to help them. Liberal arts colleges have chairs, field advisors, and honors committees whose job it is to help these students; research universities usually have a Director of Undergraduate Studies as well. Whether you are new faculty or a full professor, don't kid yourself that you are turning a student out like one of the little lost animals of FarmVille if you refuse to take hir on as an overload.

If you have a joint appointment, total the activities of each part of your appointment and divide them in half. This means that you don't do all things in either place except go to department meetings, for which you should repay yourself by taking one fewer thesis, or two fewer advisees. You have to figure this out annually, and you must do so with both chairs in the room; if you are tenure-track, your mentor should be part of the conversation. The reason that joint appointments usually end up as more burdensome is because it is often assumed that "full participation" means full participation in both "homes." Not so. It means doing the equivalent of one job in two places. You did not decide the terms of your appointment: the university or college did, and it is up to them to make their expectations clear without, as they say in factories, "speed-up." If one chair needs more participation from you for a reason, the other chair needs to graciously give way. There may also be years when a particularly large amount of activity in one home pulls you away; that can be repaid the following year.

If you are a visitor or a post-doc, do your job well and politely decline to do favors or spend time on anything institutional you have not been hired for. Read your letter of appointment carefully, and have a meeting with the chair at the beginning of each semester to go over your responsibilities. You should also know that most students don't know the difference between permanent and temporary faculty, so that although their desire for your attention is a great complement, it should be firmly and kindly resisted. Don't take on advisees of any kind unless you have contracted to do so; don't go to department meetings, even if you are invited to them (believe me, no one really wants you there); don't agree to meet with job candidates unless they are friends of yours who need the inside skinny; don't get involved in campus or faculty politics; don't let an extra body into your class; don't have unlimited office hours with students who love,love, love you; don't listen to veiled hints that if you go the extra mile for this person or that person that there might be a job authorized in your field this year and you would be a great candidate (this is a lie); and don't bust your a$$ to be the best-est, most creative, Mr. Chips-iest teacher on the planet.

Limit the number of recommendations you agree to write, and be clear with students what they need to do for you. Inevitably, we end up writing recommendations off the clock, and you must set aside some time in your schedule after October 1 for getting this work done at the office within business hours. When done correctly, a recommendation takes between an hour and two hours to write; tailoring an old recommendation for a new purpose takes at least half an hour; and uploading a completed recommendation to an electronic system takes about ten minutes for each school. Insist that law school applicants use the services provided by the Law School Admissions Council. It is also worth your while to have a document, either on your web page or that you can send to students, that tells them exactly what you need, what they must do, and what lead time you need to get the recommendation done.

Inevitably, those of us who teach more students and have more advisees end up writing more recommendations too. This is because students have good reasons for seeing us as allies; because they are comfortable asking for something which is part of our job but that many colleagues treat like a favor; and because -- well, pretty much all students need recommendations for something. But the fact that you are already working too hard, and have no time, does not oblige you to write recommendations that you also do not have time for. Develop criteria and stick to them (for example, that you only write grad school recs for people who have done advanced work with you.) Be honest with a student when you have no basis for an evaluation, or if you can't honestly write a good one. Do not write recommendations if you are not a permanent member of the faculty. Do not "feel bad" when you have reached your fixed and immutable limit and must say no: that's what the other faculty are there for.

And here's a nugget of advice: develop boilerplate recommendations for the B.S. credentialing letters that study abroad programs require. All they care about is that the student can pay, and that s/he is not nuts in some way that will cause harm to self or others.

Do not volunteer, stupid. You know who you are -- whatever your biological gender, you are a girl. You are the one who finds the silence insufferable when the chair has asked for someone to step up, and you think it is your job to make everyone feel good again. Why you? And why now? At least go away and consult your job description before you go all Do-Bee on everyone. It isn't your job to see to it that everything gets done -- it is the chair's job, and believe me, s/he will figure out how to do it.

Underrepresented faculty in underrepresented fields have no obligation to extend themselves without end to under-served students. Sometimes I look around me and it is so frackin' obvious why the scholars who are perpetually sicker, angrier, more exhausted, and frantic about meeting deadlines for their scholarship share certain characteristics. We are queer, we are of color, we are international scholars, we are women, we are feminist men. We are the ones who, in order to make space for what we care about in institutions, do it ourselves. We invent the programs, then we chair them. This is what Jean O'Brien and Lisa Disch write about in an article I strongly recommend (and that partly inspired this post) "Innovation is Overtime: An Ethical Analysis of 'Politically Committed Labor,'" (Aiku, Erickson and Pierce, Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories from the Academy Minnesota, 2007.) We are the ones that advertise our universities' "diversity" when we labor outside the classroom. We are the ones who students seek out to teach the things they never had a chance to learn in high school. We are the ones who students "like us" and the ones who hold similar political commitments flock to in droves.

Face it: certain faculty lines and programs have come into the academy as add-ons, and there is no intention at most schools to use what we interdisciplinary scholars know to transform the disciplinary paradigms that 95% of faculty are hired to support. There aren't enough of us, our faculties aren't diverse enough, and the culture wars of the 1980s permanently intimidated university administrations from appearing to be "too radical" by allowing what we do to impinge on core curricula. As an individual, yoy can't fill that dissonant gap even if you worked 26 hours a day trying to do so. It isn't your fault that there are too few classes in x; that the program in y is underfunded; that you are one of three z faculty. You didn't make the decision to grant a line to the Underwater Basket Weaving Department for a replacement who will teach ten students a term in the traditional field of Renaissance Wooden Needles that the administration just can't conceive of mounting a curriculum without -- while you are faced with sending forty students away from your Native Studies survey. Worse, the generative political urgency in the various fields that make up American Studies, Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies often moves us to throw our personal energy at immediate needs that are actually the result of long-term institutional dysfunction that our sacrifices help to maintain. Don't make up for the deficiencies of the institution by taxing yourself. Don't. The academic world is littered with broken and bitter people behind who thought that institutional neglect was only temporary.

The best thing you can do for your field is get your damn writing done, get tenure, become famous, acquire influence at your institution in a way that all those suits in the administration understand, and go someplace where the institution is committed to your intellectual commitments.

Which leads me to my final piece of advice for writing your own job description:

Your scholarship is part of your job. Schedule between 25 and 30% of the time you allot for work during the week to keeping your scholarship going. You know you should do this -- and yet, many of us see our writing as the thing that we have time for when our family, teaching and committee responsibilities are done. Which means it can get put off -- sometimes fatally -- for months at a time, causing us to get out of touch with projects we care about and go without sleep at various points in the semester to meet a commitment that has now become a burden.

So the next time you get angry about your perception that you are doing more work than other colleagues, remember: their "normal" is guaranteed by your overwork. Write your job description -- write it now, knowing that you will have to revise it and rewrite it as you figure out how to balance your life. Leave some space for things that may, in the end, be necessary tasks -- and if that space doesn't fill, use it for writing. And while you are performing that exercise, listen to this:

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

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

No, no, not liberal.

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

From the transcript:

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

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

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

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

DAVID BROOKS: Yes.

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

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

No, I'm just kidding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's In Your Pocket? A Graduation Guide For Living In The Age Of Debt

A few weeks ago, one of my friends was sorting a box of stuff that had gotten thrown into the garage prior to a kitchen renovation years ago.  She found an historical artifact that she swears she is going to send me for a future lecture on the recent economic meltdown.  It is a flier from one of those advertising mailers that usually has coupons for a few things you really want (like laundry soap), as well as ads for a few local gardening centers and siding contractors.  This particular ad was for Countrywide Financial, one of the lenders whose dishonest practices figured prominently in the home loan bubble.  Countrywide offered to refinance her home if she just filled out the coupon and sent it back, no credit check required.  "Imagine!" she said to me, as if she had found a poodle skirt in the closet. "Refinancing your home through an advertising mailer!"

But that was exactly how it happened in those days.  And despite everything, that's how it is still happening, except that the banks are shifting their lying ways away from a market they have already destroyed and towards consumers who have not yet had an opportunity to go into bankruptcy.  This market is working class and middle class college students from prestigious institutions who will actually become paid workers (as opposed to the people who take massive loans out for on-line degrees and for profits, who default at the highest rate and often don't get a degree either.) A graduating senior who went to a mandatory financial aid exit interview informed me that, as part of this counseling session, a representative from a major corporate bank was available to explain to them how important it would be to sign up for a couple credit cards to establish a good credit rating.  This would assume, of course, that these students had not already signed up for credit cards from the people who shill these instruments in the student center. 

Part of what amazes me (other than the fact that colleges allow these snake oil salespeople on campus) is how persuasive the banking industry can be in convincing us that what is good for them is good for us too.  Got debt?  Here's a great idea:  you need more! Because actually, paying back a college loan that is the equivalent of one or two down payments on a house, or four or five decent used cars, does not give you a credit rating at all.  This was what I discovered when, prior to buying a house and after having paid back a small but significant graduate student loan, I tried to get a car loan.  Oh sure:  they were willing to lend me the money, but not at a good rate of interest.  Why?  Because I had no credit history, even after having made payments of over $20,000 in principal, interest and fees.

It is this crazy glitch in the system that allows the credit card lady to encourage people who are already massively indebted to take out more loans and not be locked up for the liar that she is.  The only thing more un-American than having a bad credit history is having no credit history: hence, much of the information young people are being given as they exit college in debt is, in fact, aimed at helping them to take on more debt.  We have to remember that this counsel is coming from a business class that contributes gobs of money every year to politicians who howl about a national debt that they claim is out of control, not because of war, runaway medical costs and tax breaks for the wealthy, but because of education and services to the poor, elderly and disabled. This national context makes it particularly bizarre that there is advice all over the Internet (probably written by former English majors now working for Bank of America at $10 an hour) about how to raise your credit score by maintaining a "healthy" amount of debt all the time and paying it off over the full term ("small amounts every month" is the phrase that recurs constantly) so that the banks can haz maximum interest the borrower can demonstrate good consumer citizenship.

So here's the Radical financial aid exit interview for those of you coming out of college or graduate school who are looking down that financial shot-gun barrel:

• Paying off your college loans early saves you lots of money in interest.  This may seem inconceivable to you, but making one extra payment a year will save you thousands of dollars in the end.  Figure out how much extra that is every month (if your loan payment is $500, that's less than $50, or one Saturday night bar hopping in lower Manhattan) and add it in.
• Everyone needs one credit card to buy plane tickets, and to cover some kind of emergency. By emergency, I mean realizing that a new transmission is in the cards, and you need that vehicle to get to work.  A new couch on sale at Crate and Barrel is not an emergency.
• If you are consistently carrying credit card debt you cannot afford to live the way you do.  It is one thing to use a credit card to buy a couple thousand dollars worth of clothes that you will need to start your job; another entirely to be buying your groceries and gas with a credit card while your paycheck dribbles away on other things.  Create a realistic budget, compare it to what you actually spend, and adjust accordingly.
• You don't "need" to buy your home; hence, you do not "need" to build a solid credit rating in your first few years out of school.  You may never need to buy your home.  You may want to buy your home; it may fulfill a lifelong dream of domesticity to own your home; but it is actually not necessary.  In fact, owning your own home is far more expensive than any real estate agent or loan officer will tell you:  yes, the property taxes and the mortgage + the mortgage deduction will come out to less than renting in most places.  But, utilities and energy costs aside, what about the part where a tree falls on your roof, or the old drunk upstairs leaves the bath tub running?  So don't kid yourself that taking on all kinds of new debt following graduation is part of your long-term financial plan.
• Consider getting a second job to pay off your student loans.  One or two shifts a week as a food server, with tips, would actually allow you to double your payments and -- get this -- pay off that debt in far less than half the time, because you are whacking away at principle at an astonishing rate.  The biggest lie about student loans is not the idea that the education you went into debt for is worth having, but that you should be able to graduate and just have a normal life like rich people do that has no pain in it.  Paying off debts often hurts, and requires sacrificing leisure if you are going to do it expeditiously.  But you might want to do that to become debt-free.
• Debit cards are worth it if you pay attention.  If you don't pay attention, your bank will charge you all sorts of fees for using a debit card, but if you do pay attention, you don't have to worry about carrying wads of cash around and using your credit card just because you have neglected to go to the bank.  That said, having an unmeasurable access to your money makes it more likely that you will spend it in unplanned ways.  Cash is better.
• When establishing a bank account after graduation, look closely at smaller banks and credit unions.  Any institution that has to work for your business is going to be more competitive in its services and fees, and credit unions are established for the benefit of the membership, not shareholders.  One thing to remember is that you can change banks if the one you are patronizing doesn't serve you well, although online banking practices makes this infinitely cumbersome.  I have been planning to leave Bank of America for years (the account that I originally opened was at a local bank that was eaten by larger banks in the go-go eighties, and eventually by BOA in 1995) and I have put it off because I would have to re-enter all the payment information for my monthly bills. Dumb, eh? But my point is this:  bank fees change all the time, and banks count on it that you are not paying attention to them.  That extra $35 you are being charged for this or that is a big chunk of that extra student loan payment you want to make every month.
• Suze Orman is a highly grating personality but she is right about almost everything.  One of her, or someone else's,  money management books should be on your summer reading list.  Her basic message is a good one:  show yourself a little tough love, don't indulge yourself with a life you can't afford, free yourself from high interest debt, and you will liberate yourself to make the choices you want to be able to make in life.  You might not become rich -- but you will be dramatically less coercible.  You won't have to stay in a job you hate just to pay the bills; you can save money and support a life doing underpaid labor (like college teaching, for example); you can change careers; you can drop out of the workforce for a few years and raise your kid/travel/try to write a novel.

And while you are at it?  I know this is anathema, but go talk to your parents about money.  You would be surprised what they know, and if you are really lucky they will share their mistakes as well as the things they think they have done right.

Here's A Place To Begin Reforming Health Care: A Letter To My (Former) Primary Care Physician

Dear Dr. PCP,

I called your office this morning at 9 a.m. because I realized this morning that a cold I had yesterday had triggered an asthma attack. I am currently on maintenance medications for asthma (Singulair and Zyrtec), which means I am almost never actively asthmatic. The corollary to this is that when an asthma attack commences I know that the situation is potentially serious, and I explained this to the woman who answered the telephone at your office. I asked for a prescription refill for an albuterol inhaler and an Azmacort inhaler, and told the administrator that my history of asthma, and the drugs I have been prescribed in the past (including these) could be found in my file. This is what followed:

I offered to come in to the office if a doctor wished to see me before refilling my prescriptions.

The administrator said that you were out of the office, but that there was an appointment open at 9:45 with another doctor if I wished to come in.

I said I had no need to come in, but that I was free all day (and certainly at 9:45) and she should ask whatever doctor would see me if he wanted to see me prior to prescribing (since we are all being told, because of H1N1, to stay home when we have undefined flu-like illnesses) and because you yourself advised me not to come into the office when I called with a high fever less than three weeks ago. The administrator said she would call me back and let me know whether to come in or not, and she took down all the information necessary to prescribe.



At 10:15, having heard from no one, I assumed the doctor had simply called the prescription in. I called Walgreen’s because I could tell my asthma was getting worse and I needed to begin to treat it more aggressively before it became more critical. After 15-20 minutes of being on hold at Walgreen’s I discovered that no prescriptions had been called in.

I called the office back to ask about the office visit and the prescription, and was told that because I had not been in the office for four years (which I actually do not think is true, as I have seen you at least twice since Dr. X left, but I realize I could be wrong about this) the doctor could not prescribe without me coming into the office.

At this point, I became exasperated and asked why she had not called me back and told me that so that I could have come in at 9:45. She said she had left a message on my office voice mail. In fact, she had never asked me where I could be reached; my office is in Zenith; and I was at home (sick) in Shoreline. She told me that there was an appointment at 1:50 and I could have that. I told her I was having an asthma attack now, it needed to be treated, and that wasn’t good enough. She put me on hold.

The administrator returned to the telephone to ask me if I was insured, something a look at my file would have clearly revealed (as well as the fact that she had just left a message at the job listed in the file), but which seemed more than insensitive given the circumstances.

Subsequently Dr. XY got on the phone and explained that was the best that could be done, and that if my asthma was really so bad that I could not wait three hours, I should go to the emergency room. He too reproved me for a four-year gap in visiting the office. I recounted the sequence of events in which I had attempted to come to the office earlier in the day and had not been contacted by the office, and he failed to acknowledge that this had even happened. I told him to forget it, that I would obtain an emergency prescription from my gynecologist, Dr. XX of Zenith, who makes it her business to be aware of my total medical profile; that I was inclined to find another physician because of my experience today; and that I thought I was at least due an apology for how the office had bungled this. He declined to apologize for the non-responsiveness of the office, reiterated that the responsibility lay with me for not having come to the office recently enough, and reiterated his advice about the emergency room, suggesting that I call 911 if I was truly in distress.

Now, from my perspective, what went wrong here?

I had offered to come into the office twice in the first phone call, and it would have been the work of a moment for your administrator to look in my file and discover that office procedures would prohibit the prescriptions being refilled without an office visit. I would have made the appointment and come in immediately, without asking for a callback.

The administrator might have put me on hold, talked to the doctor briefly, and asked me to come in; or just asked me to come in, as a precaution, without talking to the doctor.

Failing either of these, the administrator ought to have ascertained, at minimum, where I could be reached in person. For all she knew, when she left a message I was blacking out for lack of oxygen and unable to reach the telephone. I have never heard of a doctor’s office not asking where a patient can be reached. I have never heard of a doctor’s office simply leaving a message on a machine after having been notified of an ongoing, potentially serious, medical condition and not making an attempt to reach the patient at another number listed in the file.

No one seemed to be inclined to look at my file.

Because of errors made by your office, had I not had an attentive gynecologist who makes it her business to know the state of my health, what could have been cared for in a short office visit might have ended in an hours-long, expensive visit to the emergency room. I have never had a physician act as though seeking emergency care from Shoreline EMS and local hospitals was a reasonable way to resolve a health problem that could be at least temporarily resolved without emergency care.

I was not asking for opiates or any drug that might indicate a substance abuse problem: I was asking for asthma medications as a patient whose condition is documented at your office. They could have been prescribed at the time of my second call when it was clear that the administrator had not reached me. If Dr. XY felt he needed to see me, I would have been happy to come in at 1:50 to consult. But that was not offered as an option, and instead I was treated as though I was cruising around town trying to score asthma medications (for what reason I or any other person would do this, I am not clear.)

No one in the office, from the administrators I spoke to up to Dr. XY, seemed inclined to admit that I had any reason to be distressed about how the situation was being handled (which I was, very much so.) Even when I told Dr. XY that his staff person had inexplicably left a message on my office voice mail and had never asked where I could be reached he did not acknowledge that the office had made a mistake; nor did he indicate that he or I had any reason to really be concerned about my asthma short of an attack so severe that I would end up in the hospital. Rather, it was the clear inference that I was unreasonable in my demands, and he too reproved me for not having been to the office recently enough. And yet, consider the following:

When I scheduled a physical with you, Dr. PCP, after Dr. X left town, I asked if I should return yearly. You said no and were vague as to when another physical would be prudent: the clear inference was that you would be reluctant to see me unless I was actually ill. Your office has never contacted me, on the telephone or in writing, to ask me to come in for another wellness visit. My other physicians do tell me when it is time to schedule an appointment, and I see my gynecologist (at her request) once a year.

If it has been four years since my last office visit, I have called at least four times to have my asthma maintenance medications renewed for 12-month refills, and your office has complied. Although I do recall one person I talked to noting that I had not been in to the office for some time, she did not tell me that this was a significant issue for my relationship to the practice. At no point have I been told that it was necessary or desirable to come in for an office visit, even though I am clearly being treated for chronic asthma.

Several weeks ago, I had a sustained fever of 103 for several hours and called your office for an appointment, because at that point public information was that this might be an indicator of an H1N1 infection. I received a prompt return telephone call from you, in which you told me that since the fever had subsided there was no need for me to come in. Again, this would have been an opportunity to suggest I schedule a wellness appointment with the office.

Asthma is one of the underlying conditions that can cause a potential H1N1 infection, or any flu-like illness, to become deadly, even in an otherwise healthy middle-aged person.

In short, rather than being treated like a patient today, I was treated like a problem, and a person who has neglected her responsibilities towards your office – when, in fact, I have not been encouraged to visit the office, even when I call to say that I am ill or need prescription refills. Only once was this mentioned, and it was in the form of a reproof that I did not know how to interpret.

I am sure it was very unpleasant for the administrator and Dr. XY to have to talk to me today once I became upset. I would be inclined to offer an apology of my own, but for their failure at the time to acknowledge that I had reason to be distressed, or that I had a right to care short of a critical medical situation that might require attention on an emergency basis; and that today’s delay in treating a developing condition had been caused by them. Their continual insinuation that this was really all my fault for not having met a responsibility to the practice was insulting and hurtful, as was what now seems like the desire to dispose of me altogether if I turned out to be a person without insurance.

I realize that the current state of medical care is difficult for all of us, doctors and physicians: as the daughter, granddaughter and niece of physicians I am well aware that the state of play has changed in a way that benefits neither patient or physician. But that does not alter what seems to me a series of problems I have encountered with this practice since Dr X’s departure, and Dr. XY treating me as though I were a potential litigant rather than a sick person in need of assistance. I do not trust your office to deal with a routine, but serious, health matter appropriately and sensitively. Please mail a copy of my records to:

(my home)

Sincerely,

T. Radical, Ph. D.

A copy of this letter has been mailed to Dr. PCP. Names have been changed to protect....uh, me.