Hope your 2012 is Dy-No-Mite!

Well, friends, Happy New Year and all that crap.  We’re back home on the High Plains Desert, and it’s sunny and reaching into the 50s and 60s this week.  Fun!  I will miss feeling like Jaime Sommers running at sea level for the past two weeks, but it’s time to get back into running at 4,713 feet elevation-shape again.  While I’m out, here are a few linky-dinkies to keep you amused, if not informed. 

• Kyle Smith of the New York Post asks, “Why do feminists reject their ultimate icon, Margaret Thatcher?”  Maybe the better question is why isn’t Margaret Thatcher a feminist?  “‘I owe nothing to women’s lib,’ Thatcher said, and at another point she remarked, ‘The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.’”  Duh.  I forgot:  feminists never do anything right, and everything is always our fault.  Women’s careers are never enabled by the work of previous generations of feminists–no, in fact women only profit by heaping scorn on feminism and feminists.
• From the annals of it’s all mom’s fault:  this problem has a name, and it’s mom.  Yes, 1950s middle-class mothers, in addition to being blamed over the years for causing autism, “smothering” their children, and sending a generation of upper-middle class Easterners into a lifetime of psychotherapy, are now being blamed for Public Health Menace #1:  OBESITY!  Awesome!!!  It’s like there’s nothing that can’t be blamed on a generation of women who were just following orders–doctors’ orders, as the article makes perfectly clear, but I guess “1950s physicians may have triggered obesity epidemic” wouldn’t generate as much interest.  Heaping blame on a generation of women who survived the Great Depression in childhood, answered Uncle Sam’s call to labor for the war effort in the 1940s, and then obediently gave up their factory and office jobs to returning servicemen to go home and make babies and participate in consumer society in order to combat the Communist Menace, is not just historically dubious, but it’s also just nasty and aggressive.  Someone has a mommy issue, I guess.  (Don’t miss the advice she gives about breastfeeding, which of course is the solution to all ills:  “Women should breast-feed for at least six months after childbirth or — better yet — take one year off from work and breast-feed.”  Talk about re-creating the 1950s all over again!  I need a Mother’s Little Helper after just reading this bullcrap.) 
• Tenured Radical offers a thoughtful post on “What I learned at my first job,” as she prepares to move to another institution.  Congratulations and good luck!
• Here’s a question for all of you historians and grammarians out there:  do you say or write  “a historian,” or “an historian?”  I’ve always thought an historian to be a rather affected (as well as outdated) construction, but I learned recently that a colleague of mine is telling our graduate students that an historian is correct.  (Here’s my personal beef:  no one ever considers how dumb and distracting this sounds to people named Ann or Anne, for some reason, and there are an awful lot of us who are in the historical profession.)  So I say “an historian” no, Historiann yes!  (After all–as Eddie Izzard might say, “because there’s a f^(king AITCH in it!”)

Via The Daily Beast we learn that Newt Gingrich has called for the repeal of child labor laws and for children to perform the janitorial work in their schools.  At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government!  I’m not kidding–there’s a video at the bottom of the linked story.  This makes his 1994 proposal to bring back orphanages look almost responsible and moderate. (Gingrich’s recent thoughts on child labor makes Michele Bachmann’s comments from an earlier debate this summer look positively prescient!)

I don’t know about the rest of you, but by my lights that’s really slapdash janitorial work.

What is it with these Republicans?  They respect life until it achieves a third grade education, and then it’s down to the mines?  Why don’t they just cut out the middle man and, in the words of the old Dead Kennedys song, “Kill the Poor?”

As regular readers will recall, I commented on Tony Grafton’s recent essay in the New York Review of Books, in which he reviews the current jeremiads about what’s wrong with American colleges and universities these days and called for “curious writers . . . [to] describe some universities and colleges, in detail, with all their defects.”  I solicited your views, dear readers, and am blown away by the number and diversity of viewpoints you have contributed.  So today I offer you a very briefly annotated bibliography of the responses.  Please click and read them for yourselves!

1. Roxie at Roxie’s World must be reading the New York Review of Books up in heaven, because she wrote a post fully 24 hours before I solicited her opinion on what’s wrong with modern American universities.  Her answer?  The unconscionable reliance on adjunct labor, which is after all at the heart of most Excellence Without Money strategies.  (Just go to her blog and search Excellence Without Money to read her catalog of crimes against education over the past three years.)
2. Roxie also kindly reminded me that Tenured Radical got in on the game even earlier with this post calling for faculty “to get off the Education Carousel and get to work Occupying Education.  Faculty, in particular, are becoming more like each other than not, regardless of where they work.  While some of us will age out under the old system of tenure and stratified privilege, increasingly we too must come to terms with the effects of the neoliberal education agenda (shrinking salaries, reduced and more expensive medical benefits, the destruction of entire fields of study to eliminate tenured positions, political attacks on unionized faculty and staff, higher workloads) in the here and now.”  (Just to name a few of the problems facing us in higher ed!)
3. Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar says from her perch at Crisis State University (after Walt Kelly’s Pogo) that the enemy of higher education “is us,” that is, the American voters who have consented to withdraw their support from higher education at both the state and federal levels.
4. Lance Manyon writes from Flagship Public U. that Americans in general approach university education in a way that’s too career-oriented rather than thought-oriented, and urges other faculty not to fall into the trap of buying into this vision of education.
5. Dr. Crazy, in a brilliant riff on Foucault and the repressive hypothesis, asks who’s failing and on what terms?  From her position at a comprehensive directional university where she teaches a 4-4 load (plus usually some summer courses), she thinks that her university does just fine in offering first-generation college students a fine education at a bargain price. 
6. Expat U.S. American Janice Liedl writes about her Canadian comprehensive and bilingual regional uni, and like Dr. Crazy, says that she thinks it’s doing really well for their students even given budgetary pressures.
7. Feminist Avatar, a Scotswoman now teaching in Australia, reviews the issues in higher ed in both the UK and in Oz and argues that the corporate university is not just an American thing.  She writes, “Instead of taking the lead on what the relationship between research and the economy/ society should be, [universities] are buying into the narrative that ‘growth’, ‘money’ and ‘the economy’ should be our social drivers. But, what is the point of the universities, if not to question these things?”
8. Professor Zero offers the basic math of the demands on her time and labor in teaching and advising in a Foreign Language department, noting that her teaching alone should in theory occupy 60 hours per week!  (She’s effectively picking up on Roxie’s point in #1 above, which is the burdens that fall on the “privileged” regular faculty when universities staff programs or even entire departments with adjunct faculty labor.)
9. Spanish Prof writes from a prestigious midwestern sectarian uni that she’s got it pretty good for now.  However, she notes that the fates of even private universities are tied quite closely in all respects to the local K-12 schools, which is not encouraging for American higher ed at large.
10. Flavia at Ferule & Fescue offers twin posts on this subject:  Part I is “somewhat bizarrely cheerful,” (her words, not mine) about the job her comprehensive public uni has done in promoting the liberal arts and higher academic standards, although in Part II she confides that the absence of meaningful support for foreign language teaching and scholarship at her uni bodes ill for the truly “global” university it aspires to be.  
11. Speaking of the relationship between K-12 and American post-secondary ed, Clio Bluestocking writes about her former life teaching “grade 13″ at a community college in an area in which the K-12 schools have done a poor job preparing their students for any post-secondary education.  She argues that the assumptions behind the “assessment” regime and concern about “completion rates” are more appropriate to 4-year institutions, and don’t really apply to the CC model.
12. J.Otto Pohl writes from the University of Ghana about the “reverse brain drain” from the U.S. to other nations. 
13. Leslie M-B at the Clutter Museum writes from Boisie State U. about her predominantly working-class students and their complicated lives.  Accordingly, she resents the administration’s “desire to scale up the number of students we teach, and the speed with which they graduate.”  (She also resents the low status and pay scale among the humanities departments.)
14. Jonathan Rees at More or Less Bunk also complains about evidence-free (and unpaid!) work speed-up initiatives and online classes at Baa Ram U.-Pueblo.
15. Although Undine claims that she has nothing to contribute at Not of General Interest, she writes that the amount of student loan debt that Americans carry is deeply troubling.
16. And finally, I offered just one of the things I think is wrong with American universities, or rather, with the discourses on the “crisis” in higher education:  we never talk about student achievement, and treat all bachelor’s degrees like they’re equal when I suspect that grades and real achievement matter a great deal to employers and admission to graduate and professional schools.  I teach at a State Uni (not a Flagship U.) that’s officially R-1, although my department functions more like a History department in a comprehensive university (we have only the M.A., not a Ph.D. program.  My teaching load is 2-2, although the caps on our courses are rather high:  100-120 for survey courses; 42 for upper-division courses; 15 for graduate and undergraduate seminars.)

Keep ‘em coming, friends!  Be sure to send me an e-mail and/or leave a comment here if your post doesn’t track back to this thread or to the original post soliciting your ideas.  And please let me know if I’ve missed anyone here inadvertently–after all, although I know it’s difficult for most of you to believe, I’m only human, and I own and manage the ranch by my lonesome. 

(Speaking of all by her lonesome:  so long as you’re over at the New York Review of Books current issue for the Grafton article, take a look at Cathleen Schine’s review of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, a memoir of her only daughter’s life and tragically early death.  Keep a box of tissues at the ready, if you dare.  I’ve ordered a copy of Blue Nights from the library, although I’ll have to be careful about when and where I read it given the fact that I’m crying already as I type this!  I know that many people thought that Didion’s previous memoir about her husband John Gregory Dunne’s sudden death, The Year of Magical Thinking, was too much grief Pr0n.  However, I thought it was a moving and insightful look at the unwanted journey from wife to widow.)

Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the president personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that Obama “was really psyched to meet with you,” Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.

Jobs also criticized America’s education system, saying it was “crippled by union work rules,” noted Isaacson. “Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.” Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.

How do you like them apples?  That’s Steve Jobs’s great respect for American workers and professionals:  deregulate until this place runs like China, “break” teachers’ unions, and keep those schmucks on the job until 6 p.m. every night year-round.  (I guess he must have felt really poorly served by his elementary school teachers.  How much richer and more successful might he have become if they had stayed at school until after 6 p.m.?) 

Go click on the story and read the whole thing–I didn’t even quote all of the pi$$ing contest-y stuff between Jobs and Obama, if you can believe it!

From my perspective, Jobs is an odd person to lionize.  Don’t get me wrong–he helped develop and sell a number of remarkably nifty gadgets, but he wasn’t the inventor.  He was the CEO of Apple–a company that moved most of its manufacturing to China.  So all of the comparisons to Thomas Edison seem way overblown, and quite frankly, I don’t think his business model was as progressive as Henry Ford’s.  Can the Chinese laborers who assemble our i-Pods, i-Pads, and i-Phones afford to buy them themselves, in the way that Ford made sure his employees were well-paid enough to afford cars of their own?  There is all of that River Rouge business, I know, but Jobs didn’t need to call the Pinkertons in to bust up strikes.  He shipped those manufacturing jobs overseas to an authoritarian country where they don’t have to fuss with unions, or strikes, or most of the other tiresome aspects that come with employing human beings.

For a generation now, historians have been reluctant to write about capitalism. Cultural history has been the rage, even as developments in the Second Gilded Age (1980–2008)—the unleashing of private economic power, the dismantling of government regulatory controls, and the deepening of income inequality—were making clear the need for a new reckoning with capitalism as a historical force.

Against this background, it is significant that one of the most distinguished historians of our time, Richard White, has written a book about an epic story of the First Gilded Age: the building of the transcontinental railroads between the 1860s and the 1890s. From the moment the first of these railroads was finished at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, these immense undertakings became an American obsession, eliciting both marvel and anger. The marvel was about the technological and organizational feats required to build these roads across vast and often difficult terrain and the profound ways in which these projects transformed America—economically, geographically, and politically. The anger was about the power accruing to the men who built these roads and their consequent ability to hoodwink investors, bribe congressmen, exploit farmers and other small shippers, and engage in speculative activities so dangerous that they periodically brought the entire U.S. economy crashing to the ground. No industry did more to galvanize anticapitalist fury or to generate movements for economic regulation during the First Gilded Age than the railroads.

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White is brilliant in documenting and reconstructing the precise ways in which the Associates and others feasted on the opening the government gave them.He demonstrates how small groups of private moneymen got access to the government, formed alliances with “friends” in Congress, and conspired in the notorious Willard Hotel in Washington and elsewhere to gain favors, buy votes, and steer legislative debates to desired outcomes. White’s portrait of an American government overwhelmed by corruption is breathtaking to behold and devastating to ponder. It alone is reason to read this book.

White is not as good, however, in explaining why a democratic state, a “government by and for the people,” proved itself to be so vulnerable to the moneyed interests. Some would say, of course, that America’s political system then was democratic in name only, given that more than half the people in the United States lacked the right to vote—women did not possess it, nor did most African Americans, except for the brief ellipsis of Reconstruction (1868–1877). But even as we acknowledge these restrictions on the franchise, we must also grant that in America more people were voting, both in absolute and relative terms, than in any other polity on the face of the earth.

If only the promise of the suffragists had come true, and that extending the vote to white women had made for a more virtuous government!  Alas.  It turns out that most women are just as ignorant of their true economic interests and just as persuadable by the diversionary tactics of two-bit pols (Fluoride!  Communism!  Gardasil!  Socialism!) as most men.  Gerstle shares some ideas of his own as to why the republic has remained resistant to democratic change over the sweep of American history.  Short answer:  it’s the money, honey!

The hastiness of congressional retreat in the face of capitalists’ recalcitrance exposed a chronic shortcoming in America’s democracy: its voracious need for money. The huge number of elected officials and the frequency with which they had to run for office made this democratic electoral system expensive. The Constitution had made no provision for funding this system. Thus the political parties that arose to get their members elected and make public policy also became, by necessity, money-gathering machines. The private organizations and individuals to which the government turned for assistance in accomplishing its railroad-building aims were the same ones in a position to supply funds for congressmen and senators in need of reelection. The promise of delivering such funds—or the threat of withholding such funds or giving them to a rival candidate—deeply affected the process through which Congress awarded contracts (which companies would get them) as well as the content of the contracts themselves (how lavishly these companies would be rewarded for their willingness to do the government’s work). These are the circumstances in which the Central Pacific Associates and other circles of financiers and elected officials got rich and in which the government ceded its authority and privilege to private corporations. The corrupting effects of the transcontinentals, then, arose not exclusively from capitalist practices but from the intersection of those practices with a democratic system structurally vulnerable to moneyed influence.

White came to Baa Ram U. a few years ago to give some lectures about his current project (Railroaded, which is worth a look for its excellent title alone!) and his career as a historian overall.  This review of Railroaded is a model of how to write a review for an audience of intelligent general interest readers.  Gerstle tells readers of Dissent why they should read this book in the first paragraph, and then Gerstle explains White and his career as a historian before giving an able overview of the book and an explanation for its importance.  Nicely done.

I was in college and graduate school for nearly ten years, and in that time I must’ve had 1,000 different people tell me, “Wait until you graduate and go out in the real world,” or “Graduating next year, huh? You’ll finally be in the real world.” And every time I heard such stupidity I wanted to slam a pie in the speaker’s face. Even toward the end of my Ph.D. program, when I was working 70 hours a week and earning $20,000 a year, an occasional nitwit would say something like, “Well the party’s almost over; time for the real world.”

The collegiate fairy tale myth supposes that I spoiled myself in early adulthood by avoiding “work” and going to college. Presumptuous garbage. Like my students today, I had in college an enormous and time-sensitive workload, social pressures, empty pockets, and little sense of physical continuity. Any psychiatrist will tell you that moving domiciles is one of the most stressful life events that humans experience, and yet we make college students move around like carnies, in and out of dorm rooms, and perhaps urging them to relocate to off-campus housing as upperclassmen. On September 13, the fraternity house of Pi Kappa Alpha at the University of Maine, where I teach, was condemned and 22 students were tossed out. My, how lucky they are to know nothing of real-world pressure!

Heh.  I agree with this guy–but I also really like his (pie) in-your-face attitude.  The only correction I would make to his screed is to suggest that students who are making good grades are probably working hard at college.  Students who are earning below a 2.8 or 3.0 GPA are probably not working hard enough on the academics, although as Martin points out, many of them are busy with jobs, families, and the usual rough-and-tumble of adult life. 

The attempt to construct college as not somehow part of “the real world” has always struck me as a very elitist fantasy, usually promulgated by people who themselves attended Fancypants U., and probably on Pater’s or Mater’s dime, too.  Maybe they were sheltered from “the real world” when they were in college, but the reality of the vast majority of American college students is entirely different:  they’re not at Fancypants U., they’re at reasonably-priced community colleges or state schools like Baa Ram U., and they’re usually juggling student loans as well as on- or off-campus jobs in order to pay for it partially or entirely themselves.  We must ask:  what is the effect of these fairy tales about college somehow not of “the real world?”  What is the intention of those who peddle these stories?  Here’s Martin again:

Young Americans don’t go to college to avoid work. They work hard in college so they have a shot at earning a modestly rewarding living. Unfortunately for these young aspirants, they’re slogging toward a labor market that older generations of Americans have sullied. Rather than insulting college students by suggesting that they don’t know what hard work is, older Americans might instead consider apologizing for the pathetic employment market staring down graduates in this country.

Go read the whole thing–he makes a strong case for the flexibility and relaxed dress codes of the faculty lifestyle, given the harsh realities of the tenure-track job market and the fact that most of who do manage to secure a TT line don’t start that employment (or saving for retirement) until we’re at least 30.  (Of course–the not-shaving and the relaxed dress codes are mostly a dude thing–but I’ve been known to teach in jeans every once in a while, or to attend a faculty meeting in my running or yoga gear.)

The last time I learned about the Columbian Exchange was in high school. Learning dates and the sequence of events, and getting familiar with maps and geography, was central to my high school history experience. As a history major in college the emphasis on maps, dates, and events diminished, as the work in primary sources came to the forefront.

I can’t imagine 1493will be much required in college history courses, as this type of historical narrative for a popular audience (written by a journalist and not a historian) probably does not conform to how postsecondary history is taught. This is perhaps too bad, as I just did not know most of the history of Columbian Exchange described in 1493.

Learning how to “do history”, to work like historians, is probably not a bad thing. But most history undergraduate students will not go on to graduate school. A book like 1493, a book with strong opinions and lots of dates, geography, people and events, might be an example of the kind of works we should make room for in our history courses.

Kim is probably right that a synthetic work aimed at a popular audience probably won’t be on a whole lot of college and university syllabi.  But why should books aimed at a general audience be taught by professional historians, when students might instead read a more challenging book with a professor on hand to guide them through it?  Students are perfectly free at any point of their college or post-collegiate lives to pick up a book like 1493 and read and enjoy it, just as Kim did.

Quite frankly, I don’t think I need to show my students how to read a book like 1493 or celebratory biographies of the so-called “Founding Fathers” by David McCullough.  (I think I personally might die of boredom–and my number-one criteria for selecting books for my syllabi is whether or not *I* think they’re exciting or interesting and can stand to read them again.)  Student can find and read the popular books on their own, and perhaps my former students will get a little more out of them because they’ve had to read other books about the eighteenth century by (for example) James Sidbury, Clare Lyons, Sharon Block, Kirsten Fischer, Jon Sensbach, and Annette Gordon-Reed.

Finally, I disagree with Kim’s construction of popular history versus academic history–a history “with strong opinions and lots of dates, geography, people and events” on the one hand, as opposed to the dull, primary-source based history that professional historians write and teach on the other.  (Wait a minute–I thought one of the problems with academic history is that it’s all just facts and dates and geography.  Clearly, history is too important to be left to the historians, but we’ll go with Kim’s complaint that there aren’t enough strong opinions, facts, or dates in academic histories.)  As I suggested above, strong opinions are central to my interest in books and in assigning them to students.  How much stronger an opinion can you find than (for example) Ramon Gutierrez’s forceful argument that berdaches are not early modern heroes of gay liberation but rather were more likely conquered enemies and victims of rape?  How about Annette Gordon-Reed’s awesome smackdown of the Thomas Jefferson biography industry of the past two centuries?  I don’t know what Kim read as a History major in college, but maybe he should have looked for more interesting or more challenging courses.

Kim should perhaps hie himself over to a history classroom at Dartmouth, where he is not a History professor but rather “the director of learning and technology for the Master of Health Care Delivery Science Program at Dartmouth College” and “has a Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University.”  I’m pretty sure that the History faculty over there would be surprised to hear Kim describe their work in these terms.  They probably think that showing students how to “do” history with primary sources is important for developing their students’ critical and literary faculties as well as central mastering the discipline even as an undergraduate major.

Why do we never hear calls for science faculty to ditch their lab sections?  Does anyone seriously think that books by Atul Gawande and Robert Krulwich should supplant the lab- and research-based curriculum in science department, in spite of the fact that few science majors will go on to earn Ph.D.s in their fields?  I mean no disrespect to these authors, whose work I enjoy.  But I don’t for a minute think that they are working scientists.  And if I were a student or a parent of a college student, I’d sure as heck want to be trained (or have my child trained) by a professional, not by a collection of popular books on the subject.

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Remember when smog meant jobs?  Now I guess we’re looking at jobless smog!

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A U.S. postage stamp from 1956:  “Labor is Life.”

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Wages will go up!, courtesy of the International Workers of the World.

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Welcome home, girls and boys!  The jobless rate for young veterans in 2011 is about one-and-a-half times the overall unemployment rate.

Done your back-to-school shopping yet?

Busy day here at the ranch, but there’s lotsa news and views in the education world.  Read on to hear more about online education, the availability of technologies like pencils and crayons in some Colorado classrooms, and the aggressive pR0nification of student life at some elite colleges:

• Via Inside Higher Ed, It turns out that you can’t fool more than a third of the general public all of the time, but college presidents are much, much better at fooling themselves.  According to a Pew Research Center study on “The Digital Revolution and Higher Education,” here’s the verdict on “[t]he Value of Online Learning. The public and college presidents differ over the educational value of online courses. Only 29% of the public says online courses offer an equal value compared with courses taken in a classroom. Half (51%) of the college presidents surveyed say online courses provide the same value.” 
• But of course, it’s possible to have “Excellence Without Money,” right?  The State of Colorado and a “scholar” at the Hoover Institution argue that money can’t possibly fix the problems we have with P-20 education.  They’re shocked, shocked at the implication that money has anything to do with the quality of education we offer through our schools and universities!  (Funny how money fixes problems for banks, and car manufacturers, and hospitals, and no one ever patronizes them by calling it “throwing money” at their problems.) 
• Meanwhile, back in Colorado’s rural elementary schools, here’s just one fourth-grade teacher’s lived experience:  “Some of the most compelling testimony for the plaintiffs came from Matthew Keefauver, a teacher in Cortez who choked back emotion at times describing how poor his students are and how his district doesn’t have enough resources to help them.  The free lunches and breakfasts at school are frequently the only meals they have, he testified.  ‘They actually race to the classroom in the morning for breakfast because some of them are so hungry,’Keefauver said.  He paid for his fourth-graders’ field trip to a local archaeological center out of his own pocket.  ‘It’s kind of an expensive thing, but I started a business on the side literally to use some of that money to enrich things in my classroom,’ Keefauver said, explaining that herbs he sells at the farmers market also buy pencils, crayons and other items his kids’ families are too poor to buy themselves.”  Who do these fourth-graders think they are, demanding expensive technologies like personal PENCILS and their own CRAYONS for their classrooms, and luxuries like field trips?“  Cortez had better examine Mr. Keefauver’s test scores to ensure that his students are making their Adequate Yearly Progress, because clearly it will be all his fault if they don’t.
• And finally, via commenter Shaz, we have a lament from Lisa Belkin about the pR0nification of college life that even high-achieving women collaborate in.  (Ariel Levy wrote about this in much greater detail in Female Chauvinist Pigs a few years back, as some of you may recall.)  Much as I agree that the absence of young feminist outrage is disappointing, this seems like nothing new in feminist history.  Nineteenth-century suffragists were also appalled by the middy-blouses and the co-ed badminton and bicycle-riding in vogue among their New Women granddaughters and daughters; New Women were shocked by the bared-knees, jazz music, and petting enjoyed by their flapper daughters, who were in turn shocked by (and maybe a little envious of) the miniskirts and birth-control pills enjoyed by their daughters and granddaughters.  Having been a college student in the 1980s and early 1990s, I recall quite clearly conversations about how my generation saw itself as “postfeminist” and we were accused of blowing it again already, according to the Second Wavers.  (Does anyone else remember those conversations about whether Madonna was feminist or antifeminist?  That sure was big back in 1987, along with our hair.)

My bet is that college students today will end up mostly just embarassed by their behavior (not to mention their hairstyles!) in ten years’ time or less, when they enter the paid workforce and rediscover why all that feminism they should have learned more about might be useful when they see how the world outside of schools and universities operates.  The success that young women have had in the past fifty years in going from a minority to a majority of college and graduate students shows how successfully the world of education has levelled the playing field, by and large, for women and men.  The first meaningful experience with discrimination most young women have will occur after they enter the workforce and see men with less education and less experience paid more and  promoted ahead of them.  (This is not to say that our students don’t experience or haven’t witnessed sex bias–rather, that the first time sex discrimination hits home tends to be in the workforce and not at school.  As Belkin’s article suggests, until one sees the material effects of discrimination, those 7,000 years of patriarchy can seem pretty theoretical.)

But pantomiming gang rape in a formal entertainment meant to honor high-achieving Princeton grads?  Srsly?  Here’s my so-not-with-it, ridiculously predictable condemnation of the fun that college kids these days like to have: 

Late last spring, Princeton hosted 1,300 alumnae for a weekend celebration of progress called “She Roars.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor was there. (Justice Elena Kagan could not attend.) So was Meg Whitman, former chief executive of eBay, and Wendy Kopp, chief executive and founder of Teach for America, as well as two members of Congress, a few best-selling authors and heads of corporations and universities. The first night, student a-cappella groups performed, and for one song the all-male Nassoons serenaded one lone member of the all-female Tigerlilies, who pretended to have wandered, lost, onto the stage. Keeping the rhythm, the men pantomimed unzipping their flies and thrusting their pelvises.  In an essay in The Christian Science Monitor soon afterward, the singer Tina deVaron, who was in the audience, compared the performance with mimed gang rape, and told the story of her own rape by a fellow student when she was at Princeton in 1973. What the performers onstage that night saw as ribald fun, she wrote, was at the root of statistics like “one in four women will be sexually assaulted on a college campus.” 

The response to Ms. deVaron was as mixed as that to my student interviewers. Many readers were appalled and wondered where these students’ parents had gone wrong. Others saw it as no big deal, and even suggested it was a response to the prissiness of earlier generations, who saw every male and female interaction as symbolic rather than fun. 

Now, that’s just tacky at best, and outright aggressive when one considers the eminence of the audience and the history of coeducation at Princeton.  (Would Princetonians put on a show for high-achieving male grads that pantomimes raping men?)  But what the hell do I know?  I just turned 43, and I keep forgetting that gender and sexuality have no history and sex was invented sometime in-between Nirvana’s Nevermind and the final episode of Friends.