Historiann

So much to blog about, so little time when one is writing pointless books about irrelevant (is it redundant to say they’re female?) people that will nevertheless destroy the historical profession!  Taking a break from my vulgar colonial schemes to corrupt the history and memory of the eighteenth century, here’s what I found recently in the twenty-first century:

• The pay gap in academia is worse at R-1s, and it starts at the moment of hire.  (Good news for those of you at SLACs, CCs, and regional universities!  Right?)  The intrepid Scott Jaschik reports that “[a]t research universities, even controlling for variables such as discipline and numbers of papers published and other factors, there is an unexplained 9 percent salary gap that favors men.”  Whoodathunkit?  Only everyone who reads Historiann.com!
• Teh funny:  via Notorious Ph.D., a blind-reviewer voodoo doll.  I’m going to buy two.
• Tenured Radical explains (with mostly small words that even the ig’nant can understand) why women’s history is important. 
• Another Damned Medievalist at Blogenspiel has two posts up about the Berks.  One features a primer about how to get ready for the 2011 conference, as well as some compliments about the conference.  (I am sure the 2011 Program Committee will be happy to build on the numbers of medieval panels, roundtables, and workshops featured in 2008!)  The other post, Transformative Conferences, features a discussion in the comments about the fracas at the panel in honor of Susan Mosher Stuard in Kalamazoo last month, when a man stood up to suggest that perhaps women’s history was too important to be left to women historians!  (As if!  Yeah, the men were going to get around to women’s history, when a bunch of women showed up and started making trouble and smearing menstrual blood all over the seats at conferences!)  Hey, medievalists:  I’ve been hearing whispers about this for weeks now–you have to let us Americanists in on the gossip, too!  (At least tell Historiann, who remembers Susan Stuard fondly from her undergraduate days, and whose BFF is a medievalist.)  I’m glad they did a panel in Stuard’s honor, and what a fitting send-off into retirement was the learned comment by the Venerable Bede there.  Nice work, dude!
• Brett Holman offers le dernier mot on this manufactured controversy at Airminded, which reminds me of that old bumper sticker:  “Against abortion?  Don’t have one.“  Don’t like women’s and gender history?  Then don’t do it, but STFU!  (It seems so obvious, doesn’t it?)  Thanks, Brett!
• 
• Knitting Clio schools Hendrik Hertzberg, and calls out a lot of the bullcrap prounouncements on African American history and American women’s history by the ig’nant class of elites who dominate our political discourse.  (That cowgirl knows her bullcrap!)
• Oh, and the sexy cowgirl picture?  This one is for commenter Fratguy, who I think has a little crush on the cowgirls here at Historiann.  Come and get it!  (Here’s a close-up; click the top one for a larger view.)

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The weather here in Potterville is gorgeous–Historiann’s roses, irises, lupines, poppies, and bachelor’s buttons are blooming–it’s almost too perfect, so let’s have a little bad news today to wash down with our daily cup o’brimstone, shall we?

• Bad news:  Frank Donoghue says that as much as we bitch and moan about our jobs (if we have them) and the job market in academia, we’re living in the not-so-golden age as The Last Professors.  He makes the daring prediction that we’re on the slippery slope to hell, and that the corporitization of the university can’t be reversed.  Says Donoghue:  “The tenure-track professoriate will never be restored. . . . [T]he hiring of adjuncts continues to outpace the hiring of tenure-track professors by a rate of three to one. It’s silly to think we can reverse the trend toward casualization when, despite a great deal of attention and effort, we can’t even slow it down. . . . Much as it pains me to say it, I never considered putting a question mark at the end of my title, The Last Professors.”
• Good news:  Via Inside Higher Ed, the Big Dog says he won’t speak at UCLA’s commencement, out of respect for AFSCME’s unresolved contract with the university. 
• Bad news:  Student newspaper shuttered after publishing photo of a buring U.S. flag.  Oh, grow up, school administrators!  What’s the point of student newspapers, if not to publish occasionally stupid and juvenile stories and photos?  Giving students a publication and then getting all hopped up because they publish something dumb is like handing kids a firecracker and then getting angry when they light it up.  Guess what?  By shutting down the paper, you’re making this story a bigger issue than it would have been had you ignored it!  Did it not occur to you that the people who write for major U.S. dailies are the kinds of people who used to work on their high school newspaper, and that they might find an otherwise silly local story like this newsworthy?  Jackasses.
• Good news: the later week/weekend forecast for Minnapolis is improving, with only 20-30 percent ”chances” of showers and thunderstorms Thursday through the rest of the weekend.  Still, those of you who will be at the Berkshire Conference are well advised to be prepared for anything–so bring your raincoat and sunscreen, too.  (For a few years after moving to Colorado, I drove around with an umbrella in my car, which made me an eccentric; after living here for a while now, I completely forget that it rains anywhere else in the world, which makes me an idiot!)

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Go read “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” a sadly provocative essay in The Atlantic by “Professor X,” who is an adjunct instructor at a private college and at a community college.  (H/t to Lance Mannion, via Suburban Guerilla.)  The article is a report from the front lines by an instructor who teaches introductory composition and literature courses to people who frequently don’t have the skills it takes to pass hir class, let alone earn a college degree.  It’s not snarky at all–ze is a compassionate person who truly dislikes failing hir students, but ze dislikes even more the falsely egalitarian notion that college is the only path to success.  I sheepishly identify with this:

The full-time, tenured professors at the colleges where I teach may likewise feel comfortably separated from those whom they instruct. Their students, the ones who attend class during daylight hours, tend to be younger than mine. Many of them are in school on their parents’ dime. Professors can fail these young people with emotional impunity because many such failures are the students’ own fault: too much time spent texting, too little time with the textbooks.

There are some returning students and other students with more complex lives taking courses in the daylight hours, but I agree with Professor X’s point about “daylight” versus nighttime students and faculty.   There is a large class and status divide between those of us for whom teaching and learning are our “day jobs,” and those for whom teaching and learning are pursued in the second shift.  To those students and faculty, our day shift must look like beer and skittles.  Professor X continues: 

But my students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I wanted to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.

That’s right–not only are they pursuing their second jobs and educations after hours, without the company of colleagues or even the minimal courtesy of the department office having the door open and a staff member to help with the copier, or to lend a stapler or a dry-erase marker.  These faculty and students are literally working amidst the refuse that the day faculty and day students have left behind:  the overflowing trash cans, the chalkboards already hopelessly smeared with dust. 

Professor X is the George Orwell of adjunct faculty and night school students.  Ze should write a book:  Down and Out in Amherst and Madison?

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Seriously–and just in time for Mother’s Day!  Listen here, or read the story.  “Fertility seems to peak at about age 22, says Marcel Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. After that, it gradually declines, and past the age of 35, pregnancy is much harder to achieve.” 

The whole story is so utterly idiotic that I don’t have the time or energy to cover it all.  Let’s focus on the fact that it is framed as a comparison of women’s reproductive lives in prehistorical hunter-gatherer societies and today, skipping at least 7,000 years of recorded human history as though we walked out of our caves in 1960 and started popping the pill:

Women may want to have the option of delaying motherhood. But Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University anthropologist, says biologically we’re programmed to do what our prehuman ancestors did when they climbed down from the trees millions of years ago: reproduce.

Girls in hunter-gatherer societies probably did not reach puberty until 16 or 17, Fisher says. “They couldn’t get pregnant. They were very thin. They got a great deal of exercise. It’s thought that we were probably built to have about 10 years of practice at sex and love without the cost and risks of pregnancy.

“Women are no longer marrying the boy they met in high school,” Fisher says. “They’re concerned with getting a career before they marry. This takes time.”

But this is time on the biological clock that cannot be recaptured.

Commenter ej called out this idiocy a few weeks ago, but let’s take a whack at it again.  (And I’ll even leave alone this rhapsodic nostalgia for family life among the cavemen.  How many of those 22-year old Lucies lost their babies and their lives giving birth the “natural” way, not to mention the senseless deaths from minor infections, toothaches, or tetanus?  Give Historiann the most invasive, most anesthetized, evidence-based allopathic medicine, please!)  The funny thing is that this concern trolling about older mothers only started happening in the mid-twentieth century, not coincidentally with the invention of the pill, the revolutionary birth control technology that didn’t require the cooperation or consent of a male partner and which guaranteed the enticing prospect of years of “practice at sex and love without the cost and risks of pregnancy.”  (Never mind that, as Stephanie Coontz argued conclusively in The Way We Never Were, ch. 2, women only married “the boy they met in high school” ca. 1946-1960 anyway, in an era distinct in all of American history for its extremely low age at first marriage.)

Yes, friends, the “discovery” of the “problem” of “older mothers” didn’t happen until women could postpone a first pregnancy indefinitely.  Women in colonial and nineteenth-century America regularly gave birth in their 30s and well into their 40s, and through the eighteenth century ”older mothers” were even celebrated as evidence of a woman’s health and vigor.  They key difference is that most of these women had of course started having children in their twenties.  Funny how that works, isn’t it?  When women can make the decision themselves, without consulting a male partner or relying on his cooperation in family planning, we see the invention of the “geriatric primip” (or the even more horrifyingly vivid ”advanced maternal age”) as women over the age of 30 are referred to when they’re giving birth to a first child. 

Pregnancy becomes less likely over time as a woman ages, but the question is, compared to what?  Moreover, why is the timing and experience of motherhood always framed as a problem that only women face?  A 22-year old who is an obese diabetic, or whose fallopian tubes were scarred by disease, probably has a lower chance of conceiving than a healthy 30 or 35-year old.  But, taking into account all of the contributing variables to a woman’s fertility would be really, really, hard, and it might suggest that women are all different, when it’s so much easier to assume that women are all alike and all have the same urge to become mothers, so let’s just give them simplistic advice like don’t delay childbearing past age 22. 

I’ll say it again, in the event you’re a 24-year old who’s fearful that she’s over the hill:  All of Historiannn’s friends who wanted children had their children in their mid-30s and early 40s (anecdotal sample size approximately 25).  Everyone is happy and healthy.  I’ve got only one friend who did IVF, and two friends who took ovluation-enhancing drugs (but nothing more invasive or expensive).  I’ve also got friends who don’t have children, and have perfectly interesting and fulfilling lives.  None of this is to say that infertility doesn’t exist, or that it’s not painful and heartbreaking for those who want children.  But, let’s take a look at the reality of situation, which is that there is no “crisis of infertility,” and that children are not in jeopardy if their mothers are 35 or 40 and in the paid workforce.  Rather, it’s children whose mothers are young, undereducated, and unemployed, who are at a much greater risk of not having health insurance, of living in an abusive environment, and poverty.

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The Denver Post has a curious and lengthy front-page article today on the failure of higher ed in Colorado to serve and graduate Latino/a students.  This is a serious concern, because more and more of our college-age population are Latino/a.  To wit,      “[s]tatistics show Latino students are less likely than any other group to graduate from high school, and at most Colorado four-year and community colleges, they are more likely to leave before finishing a degree than their white counterparts.”  David Longanecker, the “executive director for the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education and former assistant education secretary under President Clinton, said the higher education system has to change.  ‘In many respects, it’s provided a sieve to differentiate the able from the less-able students,’ he said. ‘We need to take students and teach them what they need to know rather than weed out the wheat from the chaff.’”

The curious part of the article is in the discussion of possible solutions to the problem.  For the most part, universities tout special mentoring programs, but however well intended, we all know that those are “solutions” run on the cheap and that they have more PR value than actual value.  (The effective pre-college mentoring programs the article discusses look good–but the people who run them admit that they can’t serve the tremendous need in the state.)  The article claims–without any documentation, and apparently, without any actual research–that “[g]one are the days of 250-person lecture halls.”  Oh really?  Historiann’s lower-level surveys are capped at 123, and she has to make-do with only one graduate TA (and that, friends, is a very new development.  Most of our survey courses have been taught by people without TAs or graders, and most often by adjuncts or “special faculty” who teach two or three sections of their surveys per semester, in addition perhaps to one or two upper-level courses for a total of 300-400 students per semester.)  Does that sound much more hands-on and student-centered than 250-person lectures?

We all know what works, but I’m quite confident the people of my good state won’t want to pay for it.  What works is what Amherst College and other elite liberal arts colleges have done for 200+ years–small classes where faculty and students can hold each other accountable for their work.  Capping all classes at 30, especially lower-level introductory classes, centering courses more on reading, writing, and disucssion rather than on passive listening to lectures, and asking faculty to teach no more than 2 classes per semester, will ensure that students at all levels of the curriculum will get the attention and mentoring they need and deserve.  No responsible faculty member ever said, “I think teaching works best when I’m in an auditorium on a stage where I can’t see past the third row of students, and where students are very confident that I don’t know them and won’t notice that they’re not attending class.”  In my career, I’ve never heard someone make the argument that that style of teaching was their pedagogical ideal.

Education at large state universities is higher education on the cheap, and quite frankly, you get what you pay for.  This system works acceptably well for middle-class and upper-class students who went to good high schools and whose parents attended college, because they have an educational background and parental expectations and resources to help them get through Freshman and Sophomore years when they’re in the large, impersonal General Education classes.  (The system certainly isn’t ideal for them either, but they’ve got a cultural and material cushion that most first-generation college students don’t have.)  And by the way–paying faculty a living wage for teaching two classes capped at 30 students each also means that universities would have to wean themselves of adjunct and “special” faculty who teach four or five classes per semester, plus the equivalent load over the summer.  It goes without saying that faculty teaching four or five classes of thirty students each will be stretched too thin to offer the kind of support that their students need.  Reading, thinking, writing, and discussing should be at the center of higher education, and they are activities that technology can enhance sometimes, but can never replace.  And there’s no way to do it on the cheap unless you’re satisfied with Wal-Mart results.

The fact is that our current regime of higher education works for the wealthy, who can always pay $40,000-$50,000 a year for private colleges and elite universities for their children.  In fact, by refusing to allow state universities to offer a comparable education and forcing them to operate on the cheap, the system enhances the value attached to a private college or university education.  The privilege they’re paying for, in part, is the exclusivity of their degrees.  Why should state governments enhance the caché of Amherst College or of Stanford University, instead of trying to offer the students at their state universities a comparable experience?  Enough of this welfare for the wealthy!  Enough!

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