Historiann

An anonymous correspondent wrote in last week:

I had an experience the other day which I’m still puzzling over.  I serve on a major university committee, and I have known for some time that a colleague’s daughter is not at home, but in residential care in Big City more than a hundred miles away, and has been in and out of hospital.   The other day I asked how her daughter was doing, and she started talking.  It turns out her daughter’s problems (and a suicide attempt) are related to two rapes in school, which the young woman didn’t tell anyone about until recently.  Suddenly my colleague stopped, and said  “I’ve just told you more than I’ve told anyone else, and more than I should have.”  It turns out they have been told that because of their daughter’s privacy rights they can’t talk about what is happening to her, so that (for instance) if I meet my colleague’s daughter some time down the road, I don’t look at her and say, “Oh, you’re the girl who was raped”.   From other things my colleague said, it sounds as if her town HS has a culture of athletic impunity – ie. The athletes can do whatever they want. 

This exchange has troubled me as a feminist on multiple levels:  Continue Reading »

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You know how there are no jobs in history this year?  Well, unfortunately for me, my friends who are Associate Professors are finding jobs and leaving Colorado!  I’m happy for them and all of the new challenges and opportunities that they’ll face in their new jobs and new lives, but really:  where is their consideration?  Clearly, they haven’t been thinking about me at all!  Seriously:  I’m looking at three friends moving out of state this summer, and a fourth friend who teaches here is shopping for apartments three states away!  (This is why I’m posting a photo of the sad monkey today.  The sad monkey is me!)

I’ve written here before about how the academic life’s peripatetic nature means always leaving friends behind.  Well, I’m now officially the friend who is being left behind!  I guess that’s a lesson to remember:  things change even when you stay in place.  I love having so many readers and commenters here–but it’s not like I can have a cup of coffee with you whenever I want to and get your advice about my research, or you could ask for my help with yours, or like I could walk your dogs for you, or stay up late with you over a bottle of wine.

There is a point to this post, aside from indulging my self-pity:  Continue Reading »

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UPDATED BELOW

Many of you have probably heard the news of the workplace murders in a Biology Sciences Department faculty meeting at the University of Alabama-Huntsville yesterday.  The murderer is allegedly Assistant Professor Amy Bishop, who was recently denied tenure.  All of the media reports I’ve seen presume that the tenure denial was the motive for the shooting.  Interestingly, the AP story and the MSNBC story I’ve seen finally discuss the role that gender plays in workplace or other mass shootings:  they both note (finally!) that men are the overwhelming majority of mass murderers and the overwhelming majority of people who kill with guns.

The dead are Gopi K. Podila, who was the department Chair, and two other faculty members, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson.  Three other victims are alive and hospitalized, but two are critically injured:  faculty member Luis Cruz-Vera is listed in fair condition, but Joseph Leahy and staff member Stephanie Monticello are in critical condition and in intensive care. 

The lock-and-load on campus crowd is already maneuvering to make hay out of this tragedy.  From the MSNBC story:  Continue Reading »

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Can I choose "none of the above?"

Howdy!  Hellsapoppin’ here.  While some of you in the East may be shoveling yet more snow today, we in the West have got more than a few stalls to muck out today, and a lot of fences to mend.  Here are some items for your delectation and consideration:

• National Politics:  What’s up with our Transformational President?  Well, not his approval numbers, that’s for sure.  Jonathan Last offers an analysis that says it’s the Clinton primary voters who jumped off the bandwagon first, and looks at the recent election results in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts from that perspective.  Michael Lind writes that the Republicans have nothin’–but that won’t stop them from winning because of Dem fecklessness, diffidence, and/or incompetence:  “Buyer’s remorse is what the voters should feel when they vote for a party that promises a bold reform agenda and then acts between elections as though it were a lobby for the financial industry. But wait — which party are we talking about here?”  Meanwhile–there are open rumblings about the incompetence of the Chicago bubble that appears to have been more effective at getting President Obama elected than they are at governing.  (H/t RealClearPolitics.)
• Local Politics:  Our new U.S. Senator, Michael “Never Won a Single Vote” Bennet is sinking like a stone against Republican front-runner Jane Norton, and even against Weld County D.A. Ken Buck.  (OK, so they’re only Rasmussen and DailyKos polls, but wev–that’s all we’ve got.)  Gee–who ever would have predicted that it might be a craptastic idea to crown this guy Senator?  Meanwhile, a guy who actually ran a few successful campaigns and won a lot of votes is now in the lead to replace Gov. Bill “The Family Guy” Ritter.  Go figure!  Historiann might be voting Republican for the first time in her life come November–unless Andrew Romanoff wins the D primary, and even then, I might vote Republican anyway.  Why should I reward bad behavior by all of the d00dly d00dz who think they run this state?  (Of course, we’ll have to see how Norton and Buck play their hands, too.)
• Literature:  Leonard Cassuto considers J.D. Salinger’s Bartleby-like retreat from literary celebrity, and predicts Continue Reading »

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I always thought that our first woman president would be a Republican.  I just didn’t anticipate that our first African American president would be a Republican, too.  (At least, not since Colin Powell said nix in ‘96.)  Here’s a good roundup explaining the policy and political FAIL:  As Melissa McEwan writes, “[y]ou know, it’s almost like progressives should have had a serious conversation about what kind of president Obama would really make, how he would really govern, when he kept telling us over and over and over that he wasn’t a progressive.  But getting shouted at that I was a stupid, racist, man-hating traitor was fun, too.”

Lyndon Johnson once famously quipped, “if I’ve lost [Walter] Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”  I don’t watch The Daily Show daily, but the last several clips I’ve caught suggest that Obama has lost Jon Stewart. It’s not just that Stewart has been critical of his policy positions (whatever they are today, anyway)–more tellingly, he’s mocking him out for pretty much everything, which suggests that our national Court Jester sees dire political weakness. I refer you to FratGuy in August of 2008: “What we need is another L.B.J., and what we’re getting with this guy is another Jimmy Carter.”

Oh well– Continue Reading »

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What’s your pleasure?  There are lots of snarling fights all over the place these days:

• Tenured Radical returns to the U.S. from her travels and mulls over the question, “How Should Graduate Schools Respond to the Bad Job Market,” and gets accused of and blamed for all sorts of crimes she never committed and things she never said.  (So does Historiann, in the comments!)  Yeah–because Tenured Radical has never, ever offered any helpful advice or a sympathetic ear (or shoulder) to graduate students negotiating the job market.  What a horrible, horrible person!
• Katherine Franke at Feminist Law Professors, in “Marriage Equality:  The Old Fashioned Version“ schools us on what’s wrong with feminism today:  “Among the things that drives me to the highest levels of frustration when I consider the state of feminism today is the way in which women, particularly mothers and wives, have given up on men. Not so long ago we had a rich, systemic and unrelenting critique of the ways in which fathers and husbands felt little or no obligation to do domestic work – whether it be taking care of kids, maintaining the household – even clearing the table – or other “reproductive” work. The fact that men felt entitled to and received a free pass when it came to this work received a thorough working over by those who cared about dismantling the second class status of women.” Continue Reading »

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Dear Readers:  I was contacted a few days after Christmas by commenter Lance Manyon*, a colleague of the late Don Belton, an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Indiana University who was murdered in his home on December 27.  Lance was, in his words, a “friendly colleague” of Professor Belton’s, and spent Christmas Eve with him at a party.  Today, he offers some thoughts about Professor Belton’s life, and the ways in which both small-town gossip and media narratives have distorted the memory of this funny, smart, and above all complicated man after his murder.  Like many of Professor Belton’s friends and colleagues, Lance is left with the “cognitively unimaginable” fact of the murder, trying to make sense of the many different versions of the story and what they suggest about the deeper town/gown divisions in his college town and in the wider world.

*”Lance Manyon” is a pseudonym for a person on the faculty in the humanities at IU.

Our Holiday Murder, by Lance Manyon

Two days after Christmas, Don Belton, an Indiana University Assistant Professor of English, was murdered in his kitchen. More precisely, he was stabbed five times in the back and several times in the stomach and the chest. Belton was a small, black, gay man with a wicked sense of humor, and could easily have been a character in a Wallace Thurman novel. He was a renowned novelist and scholar of the HIV/AIDS experience. He was gentle, thoughtful, and sweet: when he arrived in Bloomington two years ago, he asked one program secretary for a campus map, and then offered to pay her back for it. For now, his murder is a cognitively unmanageable fixture of our day-to-day.  For the foreseeable future, it will force us to think carefully about the intersection of race, class, and sex in our college town. Continue Reading »

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From a distance, of course–Potterville is about 1,137 miles away, 4,659 feet higher, and 70 degrees colder than San Diego this morning.  Damn! but I wish I were waking up in the Hotel del Coronado today.  It’s -11 here now–but it will be sunny, at least!  The sun is about the only thing San Diego will have in common today with the High Plains Sub-Zero Freezer we’re locked in until the weekend.  Classy Claude will be filing a first-person report later this weekend, if he can peel himself off the beach, shake the sand out of his drawers, and find a wifi hotspot. 

First, the good news:  the 2010 annual meeting of the American Historical Association is in San Diego!  That’s it for the good news I’ve heard.  If you’re there and not interviewing for jobs, interviewing for jobs you’re unlikely to get, or interviewing dozens of candidates for a job at your institution, at least you can do it without wearing boots and lugging a giant coat around a big hotel because you’re stuck yet again in Chicago or Boston.  (Who’s with me on pushing the AHA to south and west, friends?  We’ll throw Denver in there too, for you winter sports enthusiasts.  How about instead of Chicago, Boston, Chicago, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Atlanta, and Chicago, we have Dallas, Phoenix, San Diego/L.A., Denver, and San Francisco?)

Inside Higher Ed reports that attendance is down at the AHA this year, because of the economy and the related dearth of open positions in history.  (There are also fewer drop-ins than there would be in major Eastern cities because of the West Coast location, too, and the additional travel expense for people in the Eastern and Central time zones especially.)  And, the AHA itself reported that it’s “A Grim Year on the Academic Job Market for Historians,” because “[d]uring 2008–09 job advertisements fell by 23.8 percent—from a record high of 1,053 openings in 2007–08 to 806 openings in the past year. This was the smallest number of positions advertised with the AHA in a decade.  To make matters worse, a subsequent survey of advertisers indicates that about 15 percent of the openings were cancelled after the positions were advertised.”  Marc Bousquet at How the University Works takes issue with the AHA report’s conclusion that the problem is an oversupply of history Ph.D.s, and says that it’s not an oversupply of qualified job candidates, but that it’s an undersupply of tenure-track jobs because of university administrators’ decisions over the past 25 years to hire more contingent faculty than tenured or tenure-track faculty proportionally. Continue Reading »

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UPDATED BELOW

The always-controversial feminist theologian Mary Daly died a few days ago.  Word spread through the feminist blogosphere, and eventually obits ran in major media outlets.  Melissa McEwan’s Shakesville, a vital feminist blog I read and link to (and which occasionally links to me) ran a brief obit and appreciation of her career.  In the fourth comment, someone wrote, “Honestly I am somewhat happy [to hear of her death] considering the transphobic bigotry of hers that I have read.”  Four comments after that, McEwan said she wasn’t aware of Daly’s transphobic bigotry, and said that it was totally OK to discuss it in the thread but please refrain from dancing on her grave.  McEwan then added an “update” to her post that “Daly’s work was unfortunately marred by a streak of transphobia. Wikipedia summarizes its emergence in her work, including her assertion in Gyn/Ecologythat transgender people are “Frankensteinian.” While we want to honor her contributions to feminist thought, we also want to note the limitations of her brand of feminism, which deemed some women monstrous, a view that Shakesville endeavors quite fervently to counter. Cait and Shaker just_some_trans_guy also note she was challenged on her racism as well.” 

Well, of course that lengthy apologia for someone else’s opinions wasn’t enough.  Did any of the very opinionated commenters who were so very concerned about Daly’s transphobia offer quotations, or, you know, any actual evidence of her grave sins against humanity?  (I mean, aside from citing Wikipedia?)  Did anyone do what Mary Daly herself did her whole life–commit scholarship by citing evidence, chapter and verse?  Continue Reading »

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This American Life recently had an episode recorded in State College, Pennsylvania–the home of Penn State University–on drinking, sports, and undergraduate culture (h/t to reader and commenter Fratguy.)  It’s worth a listen, especially for those of you (like me) who teach at big aggies or state unis and sometimes wonder what percentage of our students’ brains are occupied by academics.  Warning:  don’t listen if you’re looking for good news!

I was particularly interested in the opening story, in which Ira Glass stays up late to see what happens in perfectly nice neighborhoods in college towns because of pathological student drinking.  In my former Ohio small town, which hosted a prestigious public university, I lived in a neighborhood in which we might find beer bottles smashed into the sidewalk, piles of puke in our gardens, and/or have our front porch furniture stolen.  I really identified with Glass’s producer, who was running around trying to get the drunken students’ attention, and reminding them that “people live here!”  Of course, she was ignored (and even threatened).

But if sober undergraduate students are given to solipsism and narcissism, drunken undergraduates behave as if they’re truly the only people in the world, and as if their “right” to public inebriation, vandalism, and violence supersedes all other rights.  Unless you’ve tried living in a college town as an adult, it’s sometimes difficult to grasp the self-centeredness of these students, drunk or sober.  Continue Reading »

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