Historiann

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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Well, I have to admit that all of you Obama supporters in the liberal blogosphere were right and I was wrong.  How could I not see that he is the Progressive Messiah?  Except, well, maybe not progressive even more awesome than I had guessed!  I mean, I’m drinking the Kool-Aid, and it’s yummy super-delicious!  And spiked with tequila.  It’s been an awesome two weeks!  I wonder what he’ll come up with next?  (That’s OK–I’m not pregnant with an anencephalic fetus, not right now anyway, and I wasn’t really using my Verizon mobile phone or my fourth amendment rights.)

Just kidding.  With all of the weeping and rending of clothing and gnashing of teeth over the past two weeks about Barack Obama’s tack to the center-right, I’d like to remind you all that Historiann called this more than two months ago!  (And, quite frankly, he doesn’t have to run as far to the right as Clinton did in 1992.  How hard is it to run against Mr. 23%, anyway?)  Don’t be surprised that Obama took Richard Nixon’s advice (like every other presidential candidate!):  run to the (left) in the primary, then run to the center-right for the general election.  Consider this a public service announcement about the dangers of Kool-Aid.  Remember, issues are more important than politicians, and as I said back in February, “one man’s political fortunes are not transformational.”  Politicians are not causes–they are a means to better ends, not the ends in themselves. 

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UPDATED BELOW, 7/7/08

Never mind that he’s a tough and cool politician now.  Never mind that he looks like Captain Scarlet’s boss, Colonel White, Commander in Chief of Spectrum.  Gen. Wesley Clark was the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO.  Do you know what that means?  Well, neither do I, at least not exactly, but I do know that that’s about the greatest job title ever.  Most of the media morons piling on Wes Clark this week aren’t fit to shine even the tiniest bar on his chestful of medals.  But there they go, like good little lapdogs, chasing after a manufactured “controversy” that benefits the Republican presidential candidate.  When questioned by Bob Schieffer about John McCain’s qualifications for the presidency on Face the Nation Sunday, Clark made the sensible point that “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”  (Here’s a good rundown of this week’s fauxtrage, h/t to Sarah at Corrente.)

Aside from proving that they’re so not over the huge crush they’ve had on John McCain since 1999, many in the media have also once again illustrated their utter ignorance of military service.  (These two things are interrelated.  Many people in the media, especially men, tend to be deferential of military service in the peculiar fashion of those who never served yet fetishize military experience.)  If Michele Norris had gone to a service academy instead of the University of Wisconsin, do you think she would have challenged Clark like this today on All Things Considered?

When you yourself were a candidate for president, you touted your own military service. And I seem to remember you saying that that was part of what made you a well-qualified candidate to sit in the Oval Office.

That’s right:  tragically unlucky Lieutenant Commander = Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO.  There’s no difference!  So, either military experience matters, or it doesn’t, yes or no, and the media is too lazy or stupid to ask useful questions or make evaluative judgments.  Apparently, the bad actors who ran Abu Ghraib have the same qualifications to run for president as Sergeant York.  I think I heard Clark’s eyeballs roll back in his head at this point in the interview, and yet he still answered Norris very patiently:

I did lead the armed force of NATO to a successful military action that saved a million and a half Albanians. I did make the recommendations on targeting. I did go to heads of state and ministers of defense and ministers of foreign affairs, the North Atlantic council, and helped hold NATO together. So I not only saw war at the bottom, but I saw war at the top.

Duh.  Can’t the media see that they’re being played like a fiddle?  The last thing McCain wants is for Wes Clark to be Barack Obama’s running mate, because McCain knows that Supreme Allied Commander beats unlucky Lieutenant Commander ever time, and Clark’s long and deep military credentials would give the Obama ticket a hell of a lot of gravitas.  This whole fracas was a masterful example of the bitch-slap theory of politics, designed to test Obama and, perhaps more importantly, to disqualify Clark as a Vice Presidential candidate.  And unfortunately, the media weren’t the only ones who fell for it this week.  (Confidential to B.O.:  Distancing yourself from the Supreme Allied Commander because the Republicans want you to makes you look weak.  You’re the one who got rolled, friend.)

UPDATE, 7/7/08:  Via TalkLeft, Digby notes that Clark is off of the Obama campaign.  Mission accomplished, indeed!  When will Democrats stop taking orders from Republicans?  When, my Lord, when?

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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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Thanks to all of the friends and family who called or e-mailed yesterday and today to see if famille Historiann was OK after the big tornado touched down not too far from Potterville, Colorado–Indyanna, Regius, Said Friend, etc.  (Our neighboring town of Windsor got creamed, however, and sadly, a man in an RV died in a campground in Potterville.  Fortunately, it was all just property damage in Windsor, without loss of life.)  We were pretty clueless in our corner of town.  The power went out for about 10-15 minutes a little after noon, but that was the worst we suffered.

There were more tornados sighted in the area this afternoon again.  This is really strange, since we live close enough to the mountains (in what they call the “rain shadow”) that we miss out on a lot of the weather that hits the Eastern plains.  We have occasional tornado warnings, but rarely does anything touch down this close to the mountains.  Rest assured, I’ll keep the radio on this weekend so that we can stay abreast of weather news.

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Andrew Stephen in The New Statesman.  Just read it.  (H/t to Corrente.)

The one point I don’t agree with is his claim that Obama is “perhaps the least qualified presidential nominee ever.”  That seems to be hyperbolic at best, living as we are in the shadows of the wreckage of the George W. Bush Presidency.  (Obama, wasn’t a drunken partyboy until the age of 40, and didn’t have a father whose wealth and connections he could coast on.)  But I think Stephen’s analysis of this primary election season’s dynamic is dead on.  And, I suspect his prediction that “history. . . will look back on the past six months as an example of America going through one of its collectively deranged episodes” will come true, sooner rather than later.

While I am not an American political historian (as the field is traditionally defined), the political uses of gendered rhetoric are an important part of my intellectual agenda.  My first book was a study of how ideas and language about gender and the family were used to describe people’s observations and experiences of cross-cultural warfare and politics in seventeenth and eighteenth-century North America.  So, I know quite a lot transhistorically and cross-culturally about the ways in which ideas about gender are interwoven into political discourses in the modern West.  (And, as an “early modernist,” please understand that “modern” here means post-1492.)  People reveal themselves in the language they use, consciously or unconsciously.  Both Cotton Mather and Chris Matthews are spokesmen for their time and place as people favored by an eminent position in the culture.  We should listen to the words they say, not because they’re necessarily intelligent or “true,” but because they can tell us a lot about ourselves.

In many ways, the misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton this year–the blowback of which will probably be felt by women in all walks of life for years to come in thousands of discouraging ways–is part of an old story best documented by Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler.  Somerby has been on the case of the insular corporate media since 1999, when he noticed the power of the preferred media narrative about Al Gore’s candidacy for the Presidency, and its curious imperviousness to the facts.  And as Somerby points out regularly–you’ll never see or hear the media tell the truth about its own role in shaping our political and cultural discourses.  (John Judis’s recent admission in The New Republic that the media hated Clinton and picked Obama as the Democratic winner is one of the few times when we’re permitted to see The Great Oz operating behind the flimsy curtain.)

In my adult life, the corporate media has repeatedly gone off the rails and created an alternative universe that bore little resemblance to reality.  First, in 1993, it was the cheerleading for NAFTA, and the insistence that fair trade would lift all boats equally.  Then in 1998-99, it was with l’affaire Lewinskyand the impeachment of Bill Clinton, in which the corporate media convinced itself early on that Clinton was a goner.  Then in 1999-2000, it was the internet bubble, and Dow 36,000, and the breathless insistence that the U.S. economy was a perpetual wealth-making machine that had figured out a way to grow forever.  And, of course, we were told what a vile fabulist Al Gore was.  When Bill Bradley failed to beat Gore despite Bradley’s favorable press advantage, the media entrusted the task of destroying Gore to George W. Bush.  The consequences of this media echo-chamber/bandwagon became more serious than ever, when in September 2001 the corporate media told us that Bush was Winston Churchill reborn, the greatest “war President” ever.  With the runup to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-03, no dissenting voices were permitted to be heard, either from expert commentators or among the obedient stenographers in the press corps themselves.  This bubble was only burst by the malign–nay criminal–indifference and incompetence of the Bush administration’s response to Hurricaine Katrina in 2005.  This winter, with the nutcrackers, the comparisons to monstrous fictional characters, the unwarranted attacks and blatant disrespect (”you’re likeable enough,” “Sweetie,”), all backed up in perfect harmony by the ”iron my shirt” and the “bros before hos” chorus, it all felt too sadly familiar. 

In every one of these cases, not only was the corporate media wrong, but in most cases it was wrong in ways that were disastrous for people who aren’t the blow-dried, pancaked, made men (and women) of the corporate media.  That is to say, all but about 500 Americans.  All of them have high-paying jobs, with health insurance.  None of them lost their jobs because of NAFTA, or lost their pension plans and 401K’s as a result of the stock market bubble bursting.  None of them marched off to fight a war designed more to prop up George W. Bush’s poll numbers and help him win re-election than to make any part of the world safer, freer, or more just.  None of them saw their houses and families drown in New Orleans.  This year, with Bush’s approval ratings in the toilet, the corporate media decided that it didn’t want Hillary Clinton to be the next President.  That may be the decision Democrats would have come to on their own through the primary process–but her tremendous success at playing it to a draw suggests that with even occasionally fair press coverage, she may well have been triumphant.  Sadly, Democrats haven’t defended one of their own candidates–too many of us stood by and enjoyed the drubbing Hillary was taking because it benefited our preferred candidate, and many of us piled on too, repeating and amplifying some of the most vicious lies about Clinton that the “vast right-wing conspiracy” ever dreamed up.  As I have argued here repeatedly since February, that was short-sighted at best, given Somberby’s documentation of the preferred corporate media narrative for all Democratic presidential candidates for the past thirty years.  And yet, we have let the corporate media choose our candidate, when they have been so wrong, so consistently and disastrously wrong for the past fifteen years.

This post is not an argument for the flawless perfection of Clinton as a candidate, nor is it arguing that Clinton is the only or most important victim of this poisonous misogyny, nor is it suggesting that all Obama supporters are guilty.  (Historiann has said repeatedly that there are plenty of good reasons to prefer Obama for the Democratic nomination.  This blog has never trashed him, but rather has come to his and Michelle Obama’s defense several times.)  It’s a Jeremiad lamenting the fact that once again, Democrats have permitted a corrupt and wrong-headed media to select our candidate instead of insisting on the sovereignty of Democratic voters, and that we’ve allowed them to do this using language and ideas that the vast majority of us officially repudiate.  (Aren’t we the party for feminists?  Isn’t this party the one that defends women’s bodily sovereignty and civil rights?  Whisky Tango Foxtrot?)  We don’t know yet what all of the consequences will be for this media blanket party for Hillary Clinton in 2008.  We surely know, from bitter experience, what the consequences were for the media takedown of Gore in 1999-2000.  Remind me again:  how’d that work out for us?

UPDATE:  Gee, could this be a problem?  I dunno!  (Via Echidne.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A few weeks ago, in one of my posts on the abuses and bullying that are endemic to the tenure system (see here, here, here, and here, for example), I wrote about the spike in tenure denials this year at Baylor University.  At the time I wrote, based on the information provided here, “and guess what, boys and girls?  The 40% rejection rate this year worked disproportionately to disadvantage female tenure candidates–six of the nine women up for tenure were denied.  Surprise!“ 

Yesterday, Historiann correspondent Andrea left a comment on that post that I want to highlight here, because she reports that the situation is worse than even those pathetic numbers suggest.  Andrea is someone who is close to the situation of women faculty at Baylor and she has given me permission to post again on this topic, but Historiann is sworn to protect her true identity.  (Think of me as Commissioner Gordon to her Millionaire Bruce Wayne.)  She writes,

Being someone close to the situation at Baylor, please let me provide some more accurate information for you. There were 12 of 30 faculty (40%) denied for tenure at Baylor in 2008. SEVEN of eleven women were denied for tenure (64% of women) and 5 of 19 men (26%) were denied for tenure. Is this a coincidence? No, I think not. Is there evidence of discrimination? Yes, at every level from departments through administration. Does it affect just those denied for tenure this year? No, in my opinion, Baylor has perpetuated a culture of discrimination for many years.

Small sample size or not, those numbers are significant and speak to a larger institutional problem.

Still, sex alone appears to correlate with being denied tenure, especially in the Dean’s or Provost’s office.  Hewitt related some recent tenure cases involving some of her former students.  The details varied, but all three women were denied tenure by administration higher-ups even after winning departmental support (and in two out of three cases, it was a unanimous vote by their departments.)  I’ve heard dispatches from the front that sound quite similar, and Squadratomagico has blogged about the same disturbing trend in her department’s recent tenure cases.  Hewitt followed up in further comments that “it seems clear that there is a growing backlash–especially at the dean’s and provost’s level–against women faculty and women’s history [or] women’s studies at many institutions.”   

It looks like Hewitt’s comments were eerily prescient.  Chilling climate, much?  I like Andrea’s point that the tenure decisions at Baylor this year don’t just affect the 64% of women and 26% of men who were denied tenure, they reverberate across campus and send a powerful message that women’s work and achievements won’t be fairly evaluated and rewarded.  At least this year’s tenure decisions have cleared some things up about the tenure process at Baylor:  rather than the nameless, unreasoning doubt that shrouds the tenure process, women faculty members at Baylor now know that there’s a 64% chance of getting the shaft.

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