Fat, drunk, and stupid is apparently no barrier to a career in philosophy!

Via Inside Higher Ed, I learned today of the tradition of the “smoker” at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting:

Over the years, the reception at the APA eastern conference has functioned as a job fair of sorts, where, over free-flowing booze, candidates talk to potential employers.

For weeks, philosophy blogs had been alive with discussions about how women job candidates feel vulnerable at the reception, how some of them had been hit on as they talked to recruiters, and the sheer awkwardness of trying to navigate job interviews with a beer bottle in hand. While many disciplinary meetings feature departmental receptions, they tend to be for alumni gatherings and outreach as much as anything; the philosophy reception is one event where candidates say they are urged to schmooze simultaneously with hiring committees, random others, and competitors for the jobs they want.

Ugh–for all of the reasons that the women philosophers note in the linked blog posts above, of course.  But this is also clearly the bright idea of a profession in which the job market is almost entirely a buyers’ market rather than a sellers’ market.  As a tenured professor, I must admit that it would be a lot more fun for me to conduct quasi-interviews over cocktails instead of meeting in the pit in a drafty hotel basement with a sad water cooler the only refreshment.  It would also be a lot of fun for me to ask job candidates to wear silly hats, sing show tunes, and pass trays of hot appetizers of their own devise.  But then, the job interview process isn’t about me, is it? 

Ideally, the job search process in any profession should prioritize professionalism and fairness as well as the preservation of the dignity of all participants.  There are a lot of people who might well feel uncomfortable with this unseemly mixture of interviews and socializing over alcohol–Mormons, observant Muslims, and recovering alcoholics, just to name a few.  Most campus academic job interviews are fraught with enough fake-socializing events like lunches, dinners, and coffees, but most everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a purely social event on a job interview.  Furthermore, there’s more than just alcohol on the menu at those events.  (That is to say, not drinking alcohol is more typical than usual for job candidates, and asking for a soda or a hot cocoa in a cafe instead of coffee isn’t regarded as an oddity.)

Tell me your stories of job interview hell, with bonus points for tales of alcohol-fueled bad behavior, in the comments below.

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!”)

But though he played one on TV, Hitchens was not an intellectual, if the word has any meaning anymore. Those known by the somewhat awkward term “public intellectuals” can be based in the professoriate, the nonprofit sector, or journalism. They can even be politicians, like the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But genuine intellectuals, as distinct from mere commentators or TV talking heads, need to meet two tests.

First, intellectuals need to produce some substantial works of scholarship, literature or rigorous reporting, distinct from the public affairs commentary for which they may be best known to a broad public. If you do nothing but review other people’s work or write brief columns or blog posts, it is easy to appear to be much smarter and erudite than you really are.

Second, genuine intellectuals base their interventions in public debate on the basis of some coherent view of the world. A dedication to rigorous and systematic reasoning, wherever it may lead, is what distinguishes intellectuals from lobbyists or partisan spin doctors who change their views according to the demands of a special interest or a party. It also distinguishes them from mere “contrarians” — the term Hitchens used to describe himself — who attract publicity by taking controversial stands according to their whims.

Hitchens left behind no substantial scholarly or literary work, and if he had any core principles or values they are hard to discern. He denounced the Gulf War and backed the Iraq War; he supported Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz while continuing to insist that Henry Kissinger was a war criminal.

If he was not really an intellectual, then what was Christopher Hitchens? A decade ago, a British diplomat told me that he was astonished at the reputation Hitchens had attained in the U.S.: “In Britain we think of him as a gossip columnist.”

It’s funny:  I’ve been reading various memorials to the man published over the past few weeks, and even those from his admirers also reveal the slapdash, drunken, and very unserious manner by which he  pursued the “life of the mind.”  (For example, see this very odd and I think unflattering remembrance by David Corn.)  Most feminists have never had any use for Hitchens, whose one “coherent view of the world” was simply male supremacy in all things, but in arts, letters, and comedy in particular.  Me, I dispensed with him years ago on this blog when I reviewed his utterly comical psychologizing of Michelle Obama on the basis of her senior college thesis. 

I’ve been dismayed (but unsurprised) to see lefty-types embrace Hitchens for his aggressive atheism, forgetting his stupendous lack of judgment (or perhaps his tremendous cynicism) in going all in for the nonexistent WMDs and the war in Iraq a decade ago.  But, as many people besides Lind have noted before, none of those numb-nuts pseudomacho armchair warriors has paid a price–in fact, they were most of them richly rewarded.  But, whatever.  I’m sorry Hitchens died a painful death, but I am glad that Lind has pointed out the obvious: 

[Hitchens] had more in common with Walter Winchell than with Walter Lippmann. A gossip columnist of genius, Hitchens escaped from the ghetto of little-known leftist writers when he discovered that he could become a celebrity by denouncing bigger celebrities. That strategy for self-promotion, in my opinion, explains his over-the-top attacks on Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana and Bill Clinton (Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga were spared the Hitchens treatment). When Princess Di and Mother Teresa died within a week of each other in 1997, I remarked to a friend, “I wonder what celebrity Hitchens will make a career out of denouncing now?” We soon found out: Bill Clinton and the biggest celebrity of all, God.

(I have another theory which might help explain Hitchens’ success in the U.S.:  Americans are still suckers for plummy English accents, and we don’t care if they were acquired at university.  People with those accents get taken seriously in the U.S. for saying things which, if said in a rather flat Kansan dialect or a Texas twang, wouldn’t seem all that smart or insightful.  I’m kind of amazed that this is true of American academics, who like to think of themselves as cosmopolitans, but I’ve seen American academics give something said in an English accent credit for being at least 30% more intelligent than something said in an ordinary American accent.) 

Michael Lind’s column is much funnier and more condemnatory of Hitchens than these brief excerpts suggest, so go read the whole thing.

Too funny.  But I must ask you:  what’s appealing or sexy about this guy?  His name means “baby goose,” and he looks like a pretty average looking mope to me.

Graduate students!  They’re always impressing me with their ingenuity and creativity, aren’t they?

Nice use of the subjunctive, but please correct punctuation!

Tenured Radical offers more thoughts on academic honesty, plagiarism, and cheating this morning in the form of an imagined conversation with her imagined spawn as she sends the child back to college after Thanksgiving break to complete hir exams.  Go read, and send it on to your students. 

It’s pretty much the exact conversation I’d have with my imaginary child or children too, except that I think the conversation would start around the time that the child was assigned to write reports based on original research–say, around the second or third grade.

Make my day!

Flavia at Ferule and Fescue wrote recently about snagging some plagiarists in an upper-level class for majors, and she writes about how sad it makes her although of course she’s standing up for fairness and academic integrity.  Go read the whole thing, but here’s a little end of term/exam week plea for students:

[T]his is what I’d like to tell my plagiarists, and what I wish they’d hear and believe:

“You did something unethical, and you knew it was unethical; ‘giving you a break’ would be unfair to your classmates and it would be unfair to you; it’s my job to enforce academic standards and to see that you wrestle honestly with tough intellectual tasks. You’re selling yourself short when you think that you can’t come up with good ideas or write a good paper on your own. You will fail this class and the academic dishonesty charge will go on your record. But if you repeat the class, the ‘F’ will disappear, and if this is your first violation–and you never have another–you’ll get to stay at RU and there will be no indication of this on your transcript. “This doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a person who f^(cked up, and there are consequences when you f^(k up. But you can make things right over the long term, if you want to.”

This $hit breaks my heart.

Message to students:  We care.  Please don’t f^(k up.  But know this:  we will work you over if you f^)k up, and it will hurt you more than it hurts us, for realz.  In my experience, it never pays to give a plagiarist a break.  Hang’em high, regretfully if you must, but hang’em high, friends.

Dear Historiann,

I’m just totally curious:

• Should CVs include lists of places where one’s book has been reviewed?
• Should CVs include lists of other articles/books that cite one’s own work?
• Should CVs include lists of articles/media outlets where one has been interviewed?

I have seen all of these things recently and I was sort of shocked, but maybe this is the way of the future?  What do you and your readers think? 

Your Pal,

Classy Claude

Wow, Claude–I don’t think I’ve ever seen a CV quite like any of the ones that may be coming across your desk, but I haven’t been on a search committee since 2004-05, or in terms of the evolution of technology and trends in the profession, since the War of 1812.  I can see including a list of media outlets or articles whose reporters have interviewed you about your work, because talking about your work if it’s timely or relevant to the news is a form of service to the community, and many hiring departments and other historians think that’s important evidence of professional engagement.  But listing every single book review one gets, or (stranger yet) listing every book or article that cites one’s work?  That seems over-the-top. 

Then again, the purpose of the CV is (after all) self-promotion, so I can’t think of any particular reason not to include it.  (Or rather, I personally wouldn’t kick you out of a pool of candidates for a job or a fellowship if you did this.)  I can absolutely see the temptation if your book were reviewed in the New York Review of Books to drop that casually into your CV, but seriously:  if your book is being reviewed in outlets like that, there’s major buzz about your work and professional historians already know it.  I have it on good authority that even people born in the 1940s know how to do a Google search, and they’re doing them for all job applicants in case there’s something you might have neglected to include on your CV, like a high-profile arrest, embarrassing FaceBook photos,or a blog.

I can’t see any reason whatsoever to include a list of works that cite your work.  That just strikes me as defensive and/or a little desperate, as though you lack confidence in your own work.  (Whatever the truth, I just assume that my work is important, and it seems like it’s getting cited pretty regularly in places where it should be cited.)  But maybe this is the wave of the future.  What the hell do I know?  I keep humming “The Battle of New Orleans” in my head.

Readers:  take it away!  And Claude:  stay classy.

Are u ready for some football?

I began my career at Penn State and spent seven years there, getting tenure, before I moved on.  It’s been awful to watch the events of the last month play out.

Most of the commentary about the child sex abuse allegations against the former football coach and the administrative failure to stop it have focused on the corrupting influence of football — on the health and safety of women and children; on academic affairs; on the budget as a whole.  These critiques are important.

But I never had a lot of contact with the football program.  No football player ever enrolled in one of my classes, but perhaps that was because of the courses I taught, which are about gender and poverty.  (Not so popular with male athletes?)  Football wasn’t a world I knew well.

I did, however, have contact with the university administration, and the way I see it, it deserves more attention in the analysis of what went wrong at Penn State.

The administration is incredibly powerful at Penn State.  I’m certainly not the first person to note that.  While I was there it was a constant subject of discussion among the faculty.  As so many of them observed over the years, the Penn State administration is deeply hierarchical, a thoroughly top-down affair.  From my perspective as a new faculty member, the signature feature was the department head system, rather than a chair system.  Chairs are elected by and represent the faculty in their departments.  Heads are hired by the deans and are responsible, strictly speaking, to them alone; they serve at the pleasure of the dean.  Department heads are thus arms of the administration and departments are its functional appendages.

The head system symbolized the way power works at Penn State.  It is highly centralized and concentrated in relatively few hands.  So, too, is decision making.  The faculty senate at Penn State holds no real authority.  Faculty members are rarely consulted and have relatively little influence.  Staff members hold no power, either.  They are not unionized.  And the geographic location of Penn State in the center of an enormous and depressed former industrial region means that the university is the only game in town.  Few on staff are in a position to challenge power.

From what I saw as a junior professor, the powerful, hierarchical administration produced some questionable outcomes:  a department head dismissed with minimal procedure; hires that did not meet my professional organization’s standard practices for searches; and excessive administrative control over general research agendas (several journalists have alleged this regarding Penn State’s close connection to the natural gas companies and its generous support of research ok’ing the controversial practice of “fracking”).

What happened when the Penn State administration, including the President, failed to act to stop sex crimes against children was indicative of a lot of other less horrifying failures, too.  In a place where there is little policy, procedure, or culture to encourage consultation or shared decision-making, bad things can happen – to students, faculty, staff, or the public.  None of it is good for the university as a whole.

There are so many good people on the faculty and staff at Penn State who want to participate and have tried to dent the walls of power.  And their greater participation would undoubtedly make a difference.  As Penn State English professor, Michael Berube, pointed out in the New York Times, it’s hard to believe that the alleged crimes of the assistant football coach would have been covered up by, say, the faculty senate, if it had been consulted.

I know that Penn State is not unique in its hierarchical administration.  Many other universities already follow Penn State’s model or are heading in that direction.  But the alleged crimes and cover up at Penn State should give them pause.

Historiann again here:  I don’t have anything to add, except to observe that the more I hear about “Happy Valley,” the more it sounds like a cult.  Why do people fall into it?  What do non-athletes and “fans” get out of the mass delusion that football should be a big part of their lives?  Why do university administrators feed this delusion? 

And finally, why am I ultimately unsurprised to hear that football culture and authoritarian management style go hand-in-hand?

Used and discarded by the king!

In “The Dissenter” in the current New Republic (h/t RealClearBooks), Kevin Carey has written a fascinating article on professional education reformer Diane Ravitch.  As many of you may recall, she has switched sides recently from being a conservative supporter of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, and vouchers, to identifying those very reforms as part of an intentional effort to “destroy” public education.

The whole portrait of Ravitch is worth the read.  Like many women of her generation (Ravitch was born in 1938), she achieved her graduate education only after marrying and starting a family.  Even then, she couldn’t win acceptance into Columbia’s doctoral program in History–she was deemed too old (at 34!) and too female.  But Carey makes it clear that hers is really the career of a polemicist, not an academic.  More important than graduate school is the fact that she volunteered for six years at The New Leader, “a small but influential publication of the anti-communist left, [where she] asked for a job. When the editor, Myron Kolatch, said he couldn’t afford to hire her, Ravitch offered to work for free.”  Carey continues:

The New Leader was where Ravitch received her true education. The small staff was crammed into one room on the fourth floor of an old building. Then and future luminaries like Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer would drop by to turn in their latest essays; strong argument was prized. “This is where she learned how to write,” says Kolatch. Ravitch worked intermittently for The New Leader until 1967, when she took a part-time assignment from the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation to report on the city’s school system. 

.       .       .       .       .

Curious about the origins of [contemporary heated debates about education], Ravitch looked for a comprehensive history of the New York City school system and discovered that none existed. She contacted Lawrence Cremin, the esteemed education historian at Teachers College, Columbia University, and floated the idea of writing one herself. A book-length history was way beyond her capacity, he counseled—better to start with a few essays instead.

Ravitch ignored his advice and spent the next five years researching her book, usually writing after she’d put the children to bed. During this time, she applied to the doctoral program in Columbia’s history department, only to be turned away, she says, on the grounds of being old (she was 34), female, and interested in the unimportant subject of education. She obtained her Ph.D. through the university’s College of Arts and Sciences and Teachers College instead. Although her book was a work of popular history and not an academic one, the college allowed her to use it for her dissertation. 

Interestingly, Carey suggests that a big part of her turn against conservative reform efforts may be the personal grudge he says she harbored against former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein, who refused to retain her partner, a former public school principal, who had been hired by the previous schools chief to run a new principal training program.  (I’m personally a little skeptical of this portion of his story.  He makes liberal use of the old stereotypes about powerful and influential women:  “aggressive,” “angry,” “her righteousness can be breathtaking.”  Carey says he FOIA’d e-mails between Klein and Ravitch in this portion of the essay, although he admits that they were heavily redacted.  Therefore he appears to have relied on the anonymous talking walls of the NYC schools at the time, sources liklier to be friendlier to Klein than to Ravitch.) 

Jeanne had her revenge in history.

In any case, Carey pretty thoroughly documents her voltes-faces, suggesting that she understood her value to the opponents of her former preferred brands of reform:  “Her identity as an academic gave her an implied expertise and impartiality; her government service gave her credibility. Added to this was the assumed integrity of the convert.”  I seriously wonder if she would have proved so malleable if she had been trained in a History department rather than granted a degree at Teacher’s College.  I don’t think it’s a bad thing to change one’s mind in the course of a long career.  Because of my conviction that historians are bad polemicists because we tend to be splitters devoted to nuance rather than lumpers devoted to political advocacy, I believe that a history education makes one more immune to intellectual fads, and there appears to be nothing more faddish than education research and education policy, in my view.  Then again, if she had become a historian, she would have probably led a much more obscure professional life.  (The long view is just not politically useful these days, I’m afraid.)

Carey is himself more than a bit of a polemicist, and someone who writes very clear, magazine-style argument-driven essays much like the ones that Ravitch learned to write at The New Leader 50 years ago.  He concludes his essay thusly:

Under the mountain of Ravitch’s firmly held opinions, it is difficult to locate many enduring intellectual convictions. Only two stand out: the value of a common, core academic curriculum for all students and the role of public education as a pillar of democracy. These are fine things in which to believe. But they are nothing close to a comprehensive philosophy on which to base a lifetime of inquiry into something as complex as public education. 

I asked James Fraser if, as a historian, he could locate any consistent intellectual point of view in her work. He thought for a while before saying: “No. And that’s an interesting ‘No.’ I can’t really think of anything at this state, beyond her ability to use historical narrative in illustrating various points—sometimes hugely contradictory points!—about current debates in education.” 

The most consistent thing about Ravitch has been her desire to be heard. In many ways, she has never left the cramped, argumentative office of The New Leader in the 1960s. Her genius was in the construction of a public identity of partial affiliation—a university-based historian who never wrote an academic dissertation, a former government official whose career in public service lasted less than two years, an overseer of the national testing program with no particular expertise in testing, and a champion of public school teachers who has never taught in a public school. She enjoys the credibility of the sober analyst while employing all the tools of the polemicist.

Meanwhile–here’s something that’s worth 75 seconds of your time: