My advisors had always told me that there is something about being a black male in academia that attracts well intentioned but often embarrassing special attention from some white faculty. I had not experienced this while at Little College because my professors seem to have been the most socially conscious, social justice oriented and culturally sensitive teachers ever. They were never patronizing or imposing and always critical but kind. Indeed, there were other professors at Little College who were known for being inappropriate or “too much” but I never studied with them. I was not prepared to not have this happen in graduate school, however.

.       .      .      .      .      .      .      

Prof. X is not so much inappropriate as he is overly paternalistic. Prof. X wants to “rescue” me intellectually, which is both nice because he is supporting my work, but weird because sometimes he talks down to me. In class, Prof. X points to me when he discusses any and all things “African American.” (This I can at least understand because my work is on the African American family but it has become a running joke in the class because he doesn’t realize he does it.)

Prof. X once asked me if I played basketball because I’m so much taller than him. I told him I used to play football. In front of the whole class, Prof. X then proceeded to tell me how he graciously helped (almost rescued) his previous inner city black student-athlete from his inability to read and write and guided the young man to become a multiple fellowship award winner (Fulbright, White House Internships etc.).

Hathaway’s experience is probably all too common given the absence of faculty of color on most faculties, let alone in top graduate programs.  As I recall, I worked with three black faculty in my decade-long college and graduate school career and no other faculty of color, compared to dozens of white faculty. 

Hathaway’s commentary is also a fascinating sociology of whiteness, particularly with respect to a major quirk among white faculty-types today:  obligatory dog companionship at all times.

I confess I’ve never been a dog person. Before I went to Little College, I had never known a friendly dog and I never knew anyone who had a dog. As a child I was taught to run or at least stay far away if I saw a stray dog because it probably had rabies or would attack me. (My Jamaican parents were convinced that there was something fundamentally different in American dogs as distinct from the dogs they owned “back home.”)

My parents and I thought it was crazy and sort of funny that on my freshman move-in day, a number of dogs were roaming the dorm halls and resting on the couches because a few students had brought their pets to see them off. (My father concluded that this was evidence of Little College’s “liberal” policies.) So, imagine my surprise when I visited my first year advisor’s office during freshman orientation and realized that her dog stayed in her office!

Advisor: Are you okay with dogs?
Me:……Sure…….

She lets the dog out of the pen and I sort of freeze up in my seat as it walks to me, sniffing my shoes and my bag. At this point I’m only half listening while my advisor is introducing herself because I’m trying to look as comfortable as possible around a dog that has quickly grown fond of my book bag. I missed most of what she said in the meeting but that day I learned that dogs are part of academic life.

Those of you who have been affiliated with a college like Hathaway’s will understand what he means.  In addition to a White Thing, the dog fetish must be a SLAC and elite school affectation–teaching at a public Aggie means that the only animals on my campus (aside from the occasional service dogs and Seminar, my commuter horse) are the patients in the off-campus Vet School emergency department and the ones hanging upside down in the Animal Science building awaiting their appointment with the meat cutting students.  In other words, animals have their uses here–and hanging out in faculty offices ain’t one of ‘em.  (And this is not the case because we on the faculty aren’t white, of course.  Like pretty much everywhere but at HBCs, we are overwhelmingly a white faculty.)

Go read the whole thing.  Good luck, Herlin Hathaway, and dog bless.

“I had so much respect for my own professors,” I tell myself. “Yet these students seem to be mocking my efforts.”

It’s easy to understand why those who have been doing this for their entire lives might get frustrated, isn’t it? It’s depressing, to think that the college experience now is so degraded, compared to how we remember our own college years, a time of discovery and the excitement that comes with acquiring knowledge.

But then he remembers how it really was, and even comes to suspect that the “respect” he had for his professors meant that he didn’t get the most out of his education.  Fear of admitting his own ignorance kept him from asking the big questions:

The student who had “so much respect” for his own professors, in fact, consistently fell asleep in his first English class — a survey of British literature that met at the ungodly hour (for an 18-year-old) of 8 in the morning. He once handed in a research paper without a works cited page because, you know, he had better things to do than edit his own paper before handing it in. He even showed up for a late-afternoon psychology lab after spending the early afternoon working on a six pack of Milwaukee’s Best and proceeded to giggle like an imbecile every time the untenured, undoubtedly overworked instructor said the phrase “sexual arousal.” The topic for the day was — you guessed it — sex, which meant that the juvenile snickering went on longer than even Beavis and Butthead would have found tolerable.

.       .        .       .      .       .      

So, though I respected their obvious intelligence and valued the insights [my professors] shared with me, my own admiration for them prevented me from asking them the questions I knew they could answer. My fear of looking foolish caused me to choose ignorance.

As a professor and as a human being, I’m very aware of how ignorant I remain to this day. And I know, now, that those professors I idolized — and idealized — must have been aware of how limited their own knowledge was, and were probably plagued by the same doubts that plague me. Part of being an educated person, of course, involves acknowledging how much we don’t know.

I admire Bradley’s honesty.  And, by the way:  that was me, too in college, only maybe worse:  the Friday afternoon Western Civ lectures I attended only once in two semesters Freshman year; the evening seminars I blew off to go visit a boyfriend in the city; the 9 a.m. Art History course senior year (SENIOR year!) in which I regularly dropped off shortly after the lights were dimmed for the slide lecture.  What a callous, self-centered jerk I was–and I was a scholarship kid, too! 

Cue Bill Cosby’s bit about children, only substitute “college students” for “children:”

(The bit begins around 1:30 in this clip.)

Doesn’t President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Michigan remind you of the time that George W. Bush went to Notre Dame and Bob Jones and told them to stop being such one-issue whiners about abortion?  Or like that time he went to Haliburton and lectured them about keeping costs down, otherwise he would de-fund the National Security State?  Yeah:  just like that!

Personally, I liked this response– mysteriously, it was the final paragraph in the Denver Post this morning, rather than the lede:

We had one suggestion–and only one–from a student who suggested that next time we might consider offering the course with one man and one woman professor, instead of two women.  Right–because our male colleagues are just lining up to teach this course, and it will be soothing and more objective if a male professor is in the room.  (I occasionally get comments like this about the sex of book authors on my evaluation forms that went something like this:  “I thought that this course was biased because we read mostly female-authored books, but then we read some books by men that seem to agree with the women, so I guess the books in this class aren’t biased.”  I really must ask my male colleagues if they ever are informed that including women-authored books on their syllabi is reassuring because it means that the information presented by a male professor and male authors isn’t biased after all.)

A few students suggested that next time we don’t talk about rape so much, but then they didn’t like the one book we assigned that focused on married heterosexuality either.  But the truth is that none of the books in the history of sexuality are super-sexy, because the historiography of sexuality is very Foucaultian and is therefore about the distribution of and challenges to power, challenges that frequently hurt the challengers more than the reigning system of power distribution.  I think the students were surprised that studying sex could be so depressing, although I warned them from the beginning that I think I teach the most depressing courses in the Baa Ram U. history curriculum.

I think the problem is that most modern college students experience sex as liberating, and they don’t want to think about the constraints on sexuality or even the sexual abuse that was a much more widespread experience of most people transhistorically, even in the present.  (I know that’s how I would have thought about these issues as a 20-year old, so I’m sympathetic to this view.)  I get it that the class turned out to be kind of a bummer for them, even if the reading assignments hadn’t been so heavy.  (But quite frankly, the last thing I’d ever want to be accused of is a lack of rigor when teaching anything, let alone a pilot class on the history of sexuality.)

Plagiarists have no idea how much they don’t know, and no clue about how much we know about our own subject as well as how much we know about what they don’t know.  The ones that always amuse me most are the students who think they’re being clever by using a book 80 or 100 years old.  Google books is now making that scheme pretty transparent, but it just kills me that 1) they think that academic interests and writing styles aren’t subject to change over time, and 2) that it’s not patently obvious when they plagiarize something written by a fusty academic writer from the 1920s or 1930s (or even earlier) and try to pass it off as work by an early twenty-first century college student.

Effective plagiarism requires more dedication and ingenuity than just completing the assignment honestly.  I sincerely wish my students would take the easy way out and just write an honest paper!

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.

Lesson one, just begun:  growing up is not much fun.

I had a lovely e-mail out of the blue from a former student from 16 years ago recently.  He wrote, “[y]ou encouraged me to drop the use of the word ‘seminal,’ which I have done!”  Victory is mine!!!

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.