Historiann

Maybe because it’s almost back-to-school time, but vaccinations are in the news on my blogroll.  Pal MD has an unintentionally hillarious post about some scandalously stupid reportage on a so-called “victim” of Gardasil.  (Longtime readers will recall that support for inoculation/vaccination are just about the only thing that Historiann has in common with Cotton Mather!) 

She reports that she went to the ER and was told she was likely having a stroke, and was sent home to return if it got worse. Now, I realize we’re getting third-hand information, but a reporter is supposed to clarify this. No one who goes to the hospital with a “stroke” is sent home to see if it gets worse.

Uhm, wouldn’t a real reporter dump the lady boo-hooing about her off-label use of Gardasil, and instead, you know, figure out which local hospital is sending home people suffering from strokes?  Now that’s a man-bites-dog story if I’ve ever heard one!  Just go read the whole thing to feel teh stupid and how it burns.  He’s got another recent post about how people with medical degrees need to take back vaccination education, instead of leaving it to the cranks, the quacks, and the religiously insane anti-vaxers.

And speaking of quacks and cranks, our friend Knitting Clio (who is not herself a crank or a quack at all) reported last week that her friendly neighborhood chiropractor–who has been of great assistance with her back pain–is now giving helpful seminars in local tea-shops about the dangers of vaccination.  She writes about the hazards of this woo-peddling:  “Take Colorado [ed. note-- please!], where the rate of vaccination (75%) is below what is needed for herd immunity.  Between 1996 and 2005, 208 adults and 32 children in Colorado died of diseases that could most likely have been prevented by vaccinations. The state spends millions of dollars per year caring for children and adults with diseases such as pertussis (whooping cough), influenza, and measles that could have been prevented by vaccination.”  (Side note:  why do chiropractors hate the vax?  I’ve seen and heard of it before, but what’s the reason for it?)

The struggle over knowledge about vaccination is a cautionary tale about the dangers of professional complacency in the face of overwhelming success.  This is a paradox:  when an evidence-based consensus emerges within a profession and there are no professionals who truly disagree with the consensus in the main, that’s when movements propelled by outsiders (but legitimized by disgruntled or marginalized insiders) feel emboldened to challenge the consensus.  It’s not just primary-care physicians who have to worry about this–it’s also anthropologists and biologists, whose professional knowledge of Charles Darwin and the significance of his theories have been vigorously challenged by people outside of universities and without any professional credentials.  Historians also have had strange ideological struggles emerge out of what was a well-documented consensus on the facts of, for example, the Holocaust, the causes of the U.S. American Civil War, and the history and meaning of the Confederate flag. 

In all of these cases, a hardy band of conspiracy-minded and/or magical thinkers was able to gin up enough popular support to convince other neutral observers that there might be a scholarly ”controversy” where none in fact existed among the actual scholars.  Does this happen because there are a few determined cranks and quacks still inside each profession, and they’re just very good at finding allies outside the profession because they no longer have allies within?  Or do political movements seize upon those few disaffected professionals, flattering them and giving them an appreciative audience so that they’ll serve as scholarly figureheads?  In all of these cases, it seems that there are a few professionals who are willing to sign on to provide a ”respectable” face to the fake controversy–David Irving in the case of Holocaust denial, for example, or Michael Behe for ”Intelligent” Design?  These credentialed intellectuals were happy to provide a presentable face to deeply disreputable, and even dangerous, ideas. 

Fight the woo, within and without your profession, and remember that things like “evidence” and “overwhelming scholarly consensus” mean nothing if we don’t continue to explain exactly what the evidence is and what the consensus means.

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Well, imagine my surprise when I returned from my recent short vacation to find this little invitation in the mail from the University of Colorado.  (While I live in Colorado and work at a university, CU is not my employer–I work at the old aggie school I affectionately refer to as Baa Ram U.)  My surprise turned to delight when I opened this fine, glossy card, to read that I am invited to meet the new president of the University of Colorado, about whom I’ve blogged quite a bit here, here, and here.  (My overall take on uncredentialed politicians who presume to lead universities is here.)  Check it out below–the party is at the Potterville Country Club.

Side note:  I’ve never seen an academic’s spouse advertised like a warm-up act, but I guess it’s just further proof of the different ways that politicians think compared to people in academia.  (I don’t even know if my current Dean is married, and although one of her predecessors was married, I never met his wife, even when he hosted a nice luncheon for junior faculty at his house.  And, I’ve never seen or heard anything featuring the presence of the wife of the current president of Baa Ram U. or his immediate predecessor.)  Does anyone else think this is strange?

Five years ago, I donated a modest sum to a scholarship in memory of the historian and CU Professor Emeritus Jackson Turner Main upon his death, and I suppose a good deed sent to the development office never goes unpunished, which is why I get invitations to all sorts of parties for fancy donors to CU.  As if!  It reminds me of the Christmas card I got from George W. Bush and family in 2004–I had been a major donor to Kerry, so I wonder if the Bushies were just reaching out in case I wanted to make friends with the other team in victory.  Yes–it was the official White House Christmas card.  I also wonder if they sent the card out to Kerry donors to gloat!  (Maybe that’s what Benson is doing to Historiann?  Probably not–as they old saying goes, money talks, bull$hit walks, and they don’t know about my secret identity as Historiann.)

So, anyway, back to the current invitation on my desk:  what do you think I should wear?  (The invitation says “business casual,” but I don’t even know what that is any more.)

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Call me a freeloader, but this seems totally ridiculous.  Since when is it inappropriate to use a university e-mail account and letterhead to apply for another job?  Over at the Chronicle blog “On Hiring,” Gene C. Fant, Jr., writes,

When I see applications coming in, I really like to see people using their own private e-mail accounts, home or cellphone numbers, and “From the Desk of” letterhead. The use of campus e-mail and phone numbers doesn’t spoil me on a candidate, but I have to say that, for the sake of both stewardship of resources and confidentiality, I like to see personal materials used.

Good grief!  Tom Benton had a good reply in the comments to the post above:  “There is no generally accepted rule that graduate students and faculty should not use university letterhead and email addresses for job searches, and in fact some encourage graduate students to do just that. In my view it is unethical to start setting ad hoc ethical traps for people at other institutions who are acting in good faith.”  In my first non-tenure track job, I was urged by the Chair of that department to send out applications on department letterhead–so long as I was using it for professional purposes and not my grocery list, I was told that it was not only acceptable but one of the perks of employment.  Many fellowships include an e-mail address and the use of fancy letterhead, which is a big bonus for otherwise unemployed graduate students and recent Ph.D.s–why shouldn’t an actual employer offer the same? 

Furthermore, applying for other jobs is very much a part of professional life and development in modern academia, whether or not one has tenure or a tenure-track job.  Please advise me if it’s different where you work, but at Baa Ram U., the only way to get a substantial raise is to attract an outside job offer, so the university’s own incentives clearly encourage us to apply for other jobs.

I’d also like to note something that Fant overlooks:  affiliations don’t just work one way.  I’m not just affiliated with an institution, Baa Ram U., Baa Ram U. (Sheep be true!) is also affiliated with me.  The university gets to list me and all of my colleagues on its website and use our names, publications, grants won, and areas of specialization to attract interest from students and impress the taxpayers, so I fail to see why faculty should hide their affiliations in the name of not “misusing campus resources.”  I’ve chaired a search committee and served on several others–if someone claimed to be affiliated with an institution but didn’t use their campus e-mail, contact information, and letterhead, that would suggest to me that they’ve got a good reason to seek employment elsewhere if they feel that unsafe from spies and retaliation.  It would strike me as eccentric in the extreme to see an application on blank paper with only home or private contact information from someone with a job and an affiliation.

But, let’s pretend this is just a bean-counting exercise.  Imagine, if you will, that you’re a department Chair or a Dean.  How many job applications would your faculty have to send out every year, year after year, that it would make a serious dent in your stationery budget or server space?  (Psst:  if your faculty are sending out that many job applications, wouldn’t that suggest that you’ve got bigger problems?)  Duh.

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The Chronicle’s blog “On Hiring” draws our attention to a news story there (based on a story in the Reno Gazette-Journal) about the dozens of lawsuits by former employees against the University of Nevada, Reno.  Most of the plaintiffs are represented by the same lawyer, Jeff Dickerson.  Is Dickerson engaging in pettifoggery, or is he a crusader against endemic bullying at UNR? 

A commenter over at the Chronicle’s news story provided a handy link to a database that summarizes all of the complaints and their status or outcomes.  There are a number of unlawful termination suits (in particular against the Physics and Economics Departments and the Medical School), first amendment lawsuits, and suits over gender, age, and disability discrimination.  There’s even a lawsuit over a hidden camera!  Yikes.  Many of the lawsuits filed in the early to mid-2000s were settled; some were won, others dismissed or are still on appeal.  Many of the more recently filed cases have been dismissed, while most are still pending.  (This is based on just a brief skim of the summaries, not a systematic investigation–those of you who are lawyers will undoubtedly have better informed opinions about this.)  I don’t think it’s incriminating that one attorney is representing most of the plaintiffs here–Nevada is a very small state, Reno is a small city, and if you had a claim against the University, wouldn’t you want to go with the guy who’s proven his mettle in going up against the U?  Attorneys live or die by word-of-mouth recommendations (or warnings away), so it makes sense to me that plaintiffs would sign up with Dickerson since he’s had some modest success in suing the U.

As regular readers can probably predict, my instincts are to side with the little guy against large institutions, and given the difficulty of proving any discrimination claims or violations of first amendment rights by an employer these days, I’m wondering if we should shine up a chestful of medals for counselor Dickerson.  It’s possible that the guy is a pesky pettifogger–but then, that’s what a guilty university would say, wouldn’t it, when trying to explain to the taxpayers why $1.7 million of its money has gone to fighting and settling these lawsuits?  As many of us know from bitter experience, Universities aren’t always grateful to whistleblowers who let them know where the problems are.  They count on having more time and money to pursue these claims than any individual has, which is why they win so often.

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When I first heard about Stanley Fish’s new book, Save the World on Your Own Time, I though, oh great:  another book perpetuating the myth that most professors are Leninist ecoterrorist feminazis.  He agrees that the vast majority of us are much more worried about teaching our students to think and write more clearly, and to master the basics of the Regency novel, the Scottish Enlightenment, or the Smoot-Hawley Tarriff Act, than we are about forcing our ideologies on them.  In an interview with Inside Higher Ed published today, Fish says:

I think the perception is that college campuses these days are populated by liberal/radical faculty who are always imposing their loyalties on the students in an attempt … to recruit students into a political agenda.

The reality is that the percentage … who do something like that is perhaps small, I would say, at the most, 10 percent, probably more like 5 or 6 percent. But the success of the neoconservative public relations machine has implanted in the public mind this idea of a university simply permeated by political ideologues masking as pedagogues….

Well, maybe writing a book called Save the World on Your Own Time isn’t the best way to puncture that myth?  (But that title will probably move more books off the shelves than a book called Faculty Are Just Doing Their Jobs, So Just Leave Them Alone.  You can’t say the guy doesn’t know his marketing!)  But, being Stanley Fish, he’s just full of surprises.  I particularly liked his advice for public universiity administrators seeking funding from state legislators.  In short–do it the Chicago Way:

My response was, look, higher education administrators go hat in hand … they’re always in a begging or petitionary posture, and that just doesn’t work. People don’t in fact respond well to that, and I found what they did respond well to was confrontation of an aggressive kind…. If you say to state legislators, “You guys don’t know what you’re talking about! What if I came to your offices and told you within five minutes and without having any experience … what it is you should be doing, you’d throw me out, laughing me out of the room.” Well that’s what we should be doing…. “What do you know about 18th-century French poetry? …”

If you embarrass people … if you make them afraid of you, you are in a better position than you are if you go to them on your knees.

BAM!  I love it.  After all, what do public universities have to lose?  As Fish notes at another point in the interview, “The interesting thing, or actually distressing thing … is that at the same time that the legislature of many states takes the money away from universities, the legislatures seek to impose more and more curricular and faculty control over the universities, so it’s a very unhappy situation in which colleges are being told we’re going to take your money away and we’re going to increasingly monitor every single thing you do.”  Personally, Historiann thinks that the major state universities in Colorado, which now receive between 9 and 11 percent of their funding from the state, should strip the word “Colorado” from their names and offer up the naming rights to any person or corporation who’s willing to fork over 20 percent of our annual budget.

In the end, it sounds like the book has some very good advice for faculty, even if he picks out some obvious targets for criticism (Ward Churchill and Larry Summers in particular).  He says “the three-part mantra which organizes the book” is “[d]o your job, don’t try to do someone else’s job and don’t let anyone else do your job.  And I think that if we as instructors … would adhere to that mantra, we would be more responsible in the prosecution of our task and less vulnerable to the criticisms of those who would want to either undermine or control us.”  And that seems like a really good place to start.

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Every time I post on bullies, I get linked to by national blogs (thanks Chronicle of Higher Education, Suburban Guerrila, and Inside Higher Ed!) and the outpouring of misery is disturbing and sobering.  The hair-raising stories recounted in the comments here, here, and here have really touched me, and I hope all of you are on to better jobs and much happier lives, and if not, that you will be very soon.  For the rest of you, my wish is that you’ll all be on the lookout for incipient bullying in your workplaces, and that you’ll intervene on someone else’s behalf to preserve the collegiality and mental health that are the bedrock of all functional academic workplaces.

When I titled my posts on bullying earlier this week “Don’t sue–run for your lives!” I did so somewhat prankishly (as in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with King Arthur and his army always screaming, ”run away! run away!”)  Some commenters here and over at the Chronicle here thought that I was giving blanket advice–that people should not try to improve things and that they should just resign from a bad job.  Of course, everyone has to make hir own calculations about whether to stay and fight, or whether just to “run away” as fast as possible.  But, I was disturbed by the judgmental tone of some of the comments that implied that “running away” was irresponsible, and your stories have convinced me that “running away” is not such bad advice after all.  (At least, you should consider putting it near the top of your list of options if you’re currently being bullied at work.)

I didn’t say this in my initial post, but it took me four years to “run away” from my bad job–four years of telling allies about the aggressive things that people said to me, four years of confronting one chair and then another when they said demeaning and hostile things to me, two years of having one chair either blow up at me or give me unsolicited advice about my personal life, two years of another chair telling me that “you need to teach more broadly,” because of three student evaluation forms that complained that all I ever talked about was “blacks, women, and Indians, not American history,” two years of that chair threatening my tenure, two years of meeting with the dean, only to be told that “you have to understand, Historiann, that you’re a very intimidating person.”  That’s right:  Historiann, the youngest and most junior person in that department was told that she was intimidating to tenured professors a decade, or two, or three older than she!  I was told that my self-confidence and (very modest!) successes made my senior colleagues uncomfortable, so maybe I should try inviting them out to lunch to make nice!  What did I get for my four years of trying to draw attention to the problems in that department?  Like most of you have testified, the only thing most of us get for following the faculty manual and reporting bullying behavior is retaliation!  At that point, I started to photocopy my Vita and send out letters of application.  Thank goodness someone wanted me–so I packed my wagon and drove it west as fast as my horses could run!  (That’s me pictured above!)

As enraging as my story is, the comments many of you have left (here, here, and here) were filled with truly hair-raising stories much worse than my own.  While I still think that everyone has to make hir own decision about what to do about an abusive workplace, because of all of your comments, I now believe that “run away” is actually pretty good advice, especially for untenured people.  Because I lived in a household with a second income, because I had wonderful friends at another local university who were my sounding board and refuge, because I am a highly self-confident person, and because I was still an Assistant Professor, I had a lot more options than many other victims of bullying have.  (I’ve noticed the tendency for bullies–male and female alike–to prey on unmarried/un-partnered women, women who don’t have the back-up plan of another household income, and who therefore are perceived as economically and emotionally vulnerable.  My second household income gave me the liberty to resign even if I hadn’t found another job.)  Given the lack of support from department chairs and deans reported by so many of you in your experiences of being bullied, it seems that leaving sooner rather than later, before you lose sleep, sanity, and good health, before you’re committed to a lifetime of happy pills and therapy, before you jeopardize (or lose) your relationship, your family, and the rest of your career, is not such bad advice after all.

I understand people’s concerns that if bullied people just go away, that workplaces will never reform themselves, but criticizing victims for throwing in the towel is monstrously unfair.  There is a big industry now selling advice about how to deal with workplace bullies–and the people in that industry can’t sell as many books as they’d like to if their advice boils down to “get out as fast as you can.”  They’re selling hope to people in a bad situation, and some of their ideas for combating bullies may prove useful to many people.  But suggesting that the victims of bullies have the primary responsibility of cleaning up the mess after suffering the bullying seems, well, bullying!  Bullies are the ones who need to change, and their enabling co-workers are the ones who need to force those changes on the bullies and in themselves.  What do you think a victim of bullying owes the department or institution that is bullying hir?  (Hint:  that’s a rhetorical question!)  My answer?  Jack crap! 

Workplaces that tolerate bullies and do little if anything to assist the victims don’t tend to generate a great deal of loyalty or affection.  (My bad job was at a religiously affiliated university, which loved to deploy the rhetoric of family and community when it came to extracting unpaid work from staff and faculty.  But somehow, we weren’t all “family” or “community” when staff and faculty needed redress, or when students were raped on campus.)  If victims want to assist in a Great Reformation, then by all means they should.  But of all people in abusive workplaces, victims are the ones with the least responsibility for making changes.  Most of us tried.  Most of us were repaid with  more abuse.  So, I think it’s more than OK for most of us to resign and say, “happy trails!”  (Or, you could write a book about your experiences in a bullying environment like this guy!)

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PART II OF A TWO-PART SERIES

This post is a follow-up to yesterday’s post, which was about workplace bullies and the ways in which they can come to dominate a work environment by driving away some people while turning those who remain into bullies themselves.  According to Robert Sutton, “[R]esearch on emotional contagion, and on abusive supervision in particular, finds that if you work with or around a bunch of nasty and demeaning people, odds are you will become one of them.”  This describes many of the people I worked with in my first tenure-track job, which I resigned seven years ago.

My major foe at my former university was someone who was tenured but simultaneously (and humiliatingly) denied her promotion to Associate Professor.  She had published a book after all in a department that didn’t require a book, whereas men in the department had recently been promoted to Associate Professor before tenure and, in one case, without a book at all.  (That’s right:  men without books?  Can’t wait to promote you!  Women with books?  Wait a year or two, then apply again.)  There was a whole class of women assistant professors who got that treatment right around the time I was hired, either within their department or at the college review level.  Need I point out that the curious creature known as the tenured Assistant Professor was a pink-collar only rank?  Unfortunately, this individual’s experience resulted not in anger and radicalization, but in shame and internalization, which was then directed outward not at the people who caused her misery, but at other targets below her on the hierarchy. 

This was a pattern that repeated itself many times in that department.  People were filled with ressentiment about the way they were treated, and most of them either became bullies or apologists, explaining that “don’t worry, you’ll still be tenured.  That’s just the way we do things.  Everyone goes through it, so you’ll just have to suck it up.”  There were a few good people who tried to make changes–but they have been easily defeated by the others.  Those who were my friends and allies were valiant in their optimism and their commitment to change, but in the meantime, what a life:  stomping out flaming bags of poop that someone else is leaving on yet someone else’s doorstep. 

One of the effects of this kind of work culture is that it stifles new ideas, fresh methodologies, and innovative research and pedagogy, because of the rate of turnover among those who leave, and the inner turmoil suffered by those who stay.  (Bullying academic departments tend not to allow Assistant Professors to follow their own bliss, either in the classroom or in their research agendas.  This is sometimes the very motive for the bullying:  many departments really don’t want anything–or anyone–new or innovative around.  And, scrutinizing other people’s work to belittle it is one of the pleasures of academic bullying!)  Unsurprisingly, women’s history and histories of other not-dominant groups and historically marginalized perspectives have a hard time gaining purchase in an environment like that.  For example:  Historiann was hired to be the American women’s historian in that department, a position that had been a tenure track line for thirteen years but one that had never seen anyone progress to tenure.  (Historiann was number five in the long line of historians who had held that position.)  And guess what, girls and boys?  Twenty-four years later, no one yet has been tenured in that line!  That’s right:  success beyond anyone’s wildest antifeminist dreams in 1984, when the position was first established.  Of course, the fact that that position was the only line dedicated to women’s history was doubtless a major factor behind the abuse and harassment suffered by all of the historians who hopped on and off that merry-go-round.

So, who says cheaters never prosper?  Bullies may not be happy people, but it seems to me that they get what they want, and that really sucks.  (The woman described above is probably one of the unhappiest people I’ve ever had the misfortune to know–a truly wretched creature.)  But what might suck more is staying in an abusive job because you’re determined to be SuperProf who’s going to vindicate herself and save her department of its destructive culture.  We don’t encourage people in abusive relationships to believe they can make the abuser change–why should we expect people in bullying work environments to stick around and try to change the culture, when they have little if any power or influence to force reform?

The million-dollar question is, of course, how can anyone turn a bad department into a good one?  Who can get control over bullying work environments and force change upon them?  My sense is that it takes a strong-willed dean who’s not afraid of the bullies and who’s got a healthy budget to clean house with brutal post-tenure reviews (including perhaps buyouts), and to support lots of new hires.  But–in the arts and humanities–what deans have that kind of time or money, outside of elite universities and SLACs, where the humanities are central rather than marginal to the identity of the institution?  My guess is that most departments have to shift for themselves, so how do good people leverage their goodness to isolate, marginalize, and/or drive out the bad?

Resources:

• The Workplace Bullying Institute
• Bob Sutton’s “Latest Tips for Surviving Workplace A$$holes:”  offers some very useful ideas.  Your three best friends are documentation, documentation, and documentation.
• Academic Leadership on “The Bullying Boss.”  This description of bullying behavior is more specifically accurate to the academic workplace.
• Dealing with Bullies in the academic workplace.  This article emphasizes the importance of establishing civility and of calling out infractions quickly and non-confrontationally.  (It won’t work with determined bullies, but it may help preserve a pleasant, rancor-free work environment.)

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PART I OF A TWO-PART SERIES

Robert Sutton, author of The No A$$hole Rule (which has been mentioned previously at Historiann.com), offers some interesting commentary on proposed anti-bullying legislation being considered now in New Jersey and New York (h/t to Bullied Academics.)  He writes, “[e]ssentially, the idea of these bills is to punish employers that allow ‘equal opportunity a$$holes’ to get away with doing their dirty work, thus going beyond current laws against race and gender-based workplace abuse.”  What’s not to like?

Well, the problem is the way that lawsuits work in real life, where institutions and corporations have infinitely more time and money than individuals.  As Sutton points out, the more damage you can show, the better your case will be.  And the more damage you suffer, the more damaged you are!  This is hardly a recipe for health and happiness.  Sutton explains: 

So, the more you lose – - the deeper your depression, your anxiety, and your financial losses, and the more physical ailments you suffer –- the better your case. The implication for me is WHY NOT GET OUT BEFORE YOU SUFFER TANGIBLE DAMAGES IN THE FIRST PLACE?  Or at least why not  get out  with as little damage as possible, and get on with your life?

He also notes that a lawsuit means reliving the abuse and damage.  I hate to admit it, because it offends my sense of justice, but bullying work environments aren’t the playground, and there are no recess supervisors or hall monitors to appeal to who will ensure that the bullies get their comeuppance.  Grown-ups have to make the best lives for themselves and their loved ones they possibly can, and staying in an abusive job (like staying in other abusive relationships) to make a stronger legal case seems like a risky plan.  Prof. Zero made this point more eloquently than I in a post last spring, asking why we’re so judgmental when victims of domestic violence don’t leave immediately, whereas victims of a toxic work environment are counseled to work on the bullying relationships:  if only they’re nicer to their colleagues, if only they’d invite their colleagues out to lunch more often, if only they worked a little harder, they’d be able to fix the abusive environment.

Sutton also points out one overlooked risk of staying in an abusive work environment:  you will be assimilated.  “[R]esearch on emotional contagion, and on abusive supervision in particular, finds that if you work with or around a bunch of nasty and demeaning people, odds are you will become one of them.”  This rings true–how else do some academic departments get reputations for being abusive environments?  They’re very good at spitting out or driving away those who won’t conform, so that those who stay by definition become abusers (or enablers) who will do unto others as they were done unto.  Historiann has seen this happen–so that, in her former job, the people who behaved the worst to her had themselves been abused as junior faculty (or, in fact, were still being abused by others themselves!)

Historiann will enlarge on this point about adopting the corrupt values of an abusive work environment more tomorrow, in Part II.

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As we here in Potterville pull on our boots and get ready for the big rodeo and ”western celebration” coming to town, I’m happy to report that a few of you are getting out of your towns to attend conferences and conduct some research.  Here are some interesting museums featured on a few blogs I read regularly:

• Anxious Black Woman is just back from the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting in Cincinnati, and gives us a great report on the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a new museum there.  I’m particularly grateful for her review, because Historiann lived in southwestern Ohio when this museum was being planned a decade ago, and she was a little skeptical of the concept.  (White people in and around Cincinnati are really into the Underground Railroad, and every little town has at least two or three mythological sites or houses that people commemorate as alleged stops on the UGRR.  Historiann was always suspicious that this was a means for white people to re-write the history of slavery and to cast their ancestors in heroic roles as slavery resisters, rather than in the much more likely role of slavery enablers, especially because African Americans were enslaved in southwestern Ohio, contrary to the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.  I lived in a town near the Ohio-Indiana border I’ll call “Boxford,” which likes to pretend that its proximity to the authentic Quaker town of Richmond, Indiana somehow retroactively turns all nineteenth-century Boxfordians into abolitionists.)  ABW’s verdict on the museum?  Disappointing in its interest more in masters than enslaved people and in its erasure of women, although the introductory movie was good.  (But go read her more thorough treatment yourself!)  The good news is that the NWSA itself was a great experience–I’m envious that I wasn’t there!
• If your summer travel plans take you to Cincinnati, the Cincinnati area has all kinds of new museums–for example, the Creation Museum of Hebron, Kentucky, just a few exits down the road from the Cincinnati airport, is another museum that was just under construction when Historiann lived nearby.  It’s a creationist extravaganza of imaginary natural history–tell them Bing McGhandi sent you!  Here’s a reality-based review of the CM.
• Professor Zero is in Lima (Peru, not Ohio!), and went to the Museo de Pedro Osma, which sounds like an interesting palace filled with colonial as well as twentieth-century art.
• Do any of you have recommendations for interesting fine arts, history, or other museums in your home towns (or that you’ve encountered on your travels) for summer vacationers? 
• Finally, for those of you in the academy who are public historians, or work with public historians, what’s your sense of public history’s relationship to non-public history (frequently referred to somewhat condescendingly as “academic history,” as though public history is an inferior intellectual pursuit)?  My sense is that there used to be more conflict or resentment among “academic” historians, but that these distinctions (well, snobberies, actually) are fading.  Is Historiann (who is not a public Historiann) overly optimistic?

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(Ali G glossary here–scroll down for “respek.”)  One of the disturbing issues raised in the li’l women’s history and Berkshire Conference hoedown we’ve been having around here lately is that of respek–or the lack of respek, more properly–afforded not just mid-career and junior schmucks like Historiann and Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar, but even to senior women scholars.  Go read here and here (in the comments) for descriptions of the two sessions last month at the 2008 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in honor of the career of Susan Mosher Stuard (h/t to New Kid on the Hallway–thanks, baby!), one of only two women’s historians that Historiann worked with in her entire undergraduate career.  (And Stuard taught at Haverford College, while Historiann majored in History at Bryn Mawr!  Shocking!)  Read those descriptions, and gaze in wonder at the obnoxiousness of a few men, young and old, who are just full of advice for the first generation of women’s historians! 

Have you ever met Merry Wiesner-Hanks?  Do you really want to be that guy who thought he was schoolin’ MW-H?  Or Connie Berman?  Or Judith Bennett?  I don’t think so.  Because even if I could imagine an alternative universe where you would be more right than them about women’s history, you’d still look like a jerk.  Come to think of it, you’d look a lot like Ali G!  “I was finkin’, that women history, right?  Is pre’ty much th’history of bonin’!  Of womens being boned by the mens, right?  And then servin’ the mens tea, or wha’ever.”  It’s funny how our profession, which is supposedly so hung up on rank and authority, isn’t so much when it comes to women with rank and authority.  Tips for toads:  if you don’t know too much about a particular field of inquiry, then maybe ask an informational question rather than tell the people who invented that field of inquiry what they need to do to satisfy your demands.

Respek, man.  Fink abou’it.  Peace, out.

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