June 18, 2013, 2:06 pm

Go Into Academia, Win Valuable Prizes

Where is your college president spending the summer?

Today’s New York Times has the latest revelations about New York University’s executive compensation practices. (Full disclosure: not only was Tenured Radical’s Ph.D. bestowed from those Violet walls, but my current institution recently had its own executive mini-scandal.)

As Ariel Kaminer reveals, NYU’s top execs and a few elite proffies are also offered mortgages for summer homes, “Universities in similar circumstances, like Columbia and Stanford, also have helped professors and executives with home loans,” writes Kaminer, who has been following this story for several months. “Aid for vacation properties, however, is all but unheard-of in higher education, several experts in university pay packages say.” And how many universities offer you a mortgage after…

June 17, 2013, 4:50 pm

Reasons to Quit Your Job, Part Eleventy

By Claire Potter

Try Googling “Leaving Academia” and see how many posts come up. Lots. Many of them are sad or angry. Some are very creative and talk about the real choices people have and why they activate them. There was at least one post making the rounds of Facebook a few months back in which someone struggling with an emotional disability and racism resigned, saying that it was impossible to preserve one’s sanity in the contemporary university. If you have tenure, or a tenure track job, you might want to check into these: what’s going on “out there” can really make you think hard about your own life and choices.

But then there are the other articles — the ones that the Huffington Post digs up, stories that are of “Jennifer Anniston’s Wedding on Hold” variety of academic news. Those are the ones that really cheer me up. (more…)

June 11, 2013, 10:22 am

A Dinner Party with Pussy Riot and Judy Chicago

By Claire Potter

Two members of the Moscow-based feminist punk rock collective Pussy Riot have been spotted in New York City in the last week. One of their destinations was the Landmark Sunshine Theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where they took in the premiere of the HBO documentary, “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer.” Since members of the collective wear neon balaclavas when they perform publicly, the celebrity crowd — which included Patti Smith — did not initially know that they were there. According to The New York Times, the pair also hit “the feminist bookstore Bluestockings on the Lower East Side,” met ”with leaders of Occupy Wall Street and receiving a guided tour of “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s feminist installation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.” (more…)

June 7, 2013, 2:17 pm

Pin the Blame on Daddy? The Precarious Future of Parental Leave

By Claire Potter

Wanna learn to do an index, Snooks?

Those menz! Always finding another way to game the system!

Thank heavens for research that catches them at their dastardly game. A collaborative study by a father and son team, Steven E. Rhoads (UVA) and Christopher Rhoads (UConn), argue that paternity leave allows men to jump the gender queue by giving them a chance to write while their wives actually take care of the babies. A brilliant scheme to maintain gender inequality, no? As reported last year in Bloomberg News, Team Rhoads argues that fathers of newborns would rather work than parent:

While 69 percent of the women in the sample took post-birth parental leave, only 12 percent of the men took advantage of the available leave—even though it was paid. They also learned that the male professors who did so performed…

June 5, 2013, 2:52 pm

Radical Mailbag: Writing A Good Blog Post

By Claire Potter

So ya wanna be a blogger? “Santa Rosa Sandy” writes:

Dear Dr. Radical:

Having enjoyed your blog and admired the writing (and wry humor!) for a while, I wondered if you’d be willing to address the characteristics of good blog writing. My own sense is that blog posts should be meaty, but pithy—if that’s not conflating two different food groups. They can be leavened with more personal comment, humor, and current cultural reference than—say—a journal article. I recently submitted an invited entry to a higher ed blog (admittedly, I’d gone over the word limit). But to my chagrin, the editors are making it fit by removing anything that seemed even slightly leavening, leaving a pretty bland result. (more…)

June 2, 2013, 2:55 pm

Gossip Girl: Hedda Hopper’s Conservative Empire

By Claire Potter

Jennifer Frost, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism. New York University Press, 2011. 281 pp. Index. B & W illustrations. Hardcover $31.50; Kindle $15.12.

Hedda Hopper makes the cover of Time in 1947.

Every once in a while you read a book that is pure joy, and Jennifer Frost’s Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood hits all the right notes. It’s got movie stars, it’s got intrigue, and it’s got humor, it’s got a light but effective theoretical frame. Best of all, it’s organized around a driven, ambitious woman who — if she hadn’t played herself in any number of films — could have been played by Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, or Barbara Stanwyck. If they had dared.

Born Elda Furry in 1885, the butcher’s daughter who became Hedda Hopper fled industrial Altoona, Pennsylvania, with a suitcase…

May 29, 2013, 1:52 pm

Homophobia at Harvard and Other Hideous Horrors

By Claire Potter

In the intellectual spirit of the man himself, let me ask a counterfactual: why have so many people temporarily abandoned longstanding critiques of Niall Ferguson in favor of condemning him as a homophobe?

My guess is that Ferguson is not a homophobe, at least not in the conventional sense of wanting to exclude gay men from work and public life because they are gay, or not wanting his son to marry one. Having been educated at Oxford, where, according to his Wikipedia entry, he became dear friends with right-wing queer Andrew Sullivan, I can’t quite imagine that Ferguson is uncomfortable with white, gay men like John Maynard Keynes either. I mean Oxford’s intellectual history is as gay as it gets, right? (more…)

May 26, 2013, 2:15 pm

Could Flipping the Curriculum Lead to More Jobs and Better Educated Students?

By Claire Potter

Another school year ends, and the MOOC people are happily planting stories in the media about a teaching model that, if it succeeds, is likely to kill off full time work in the liberal arts forever. How do we fight this, and the concurrent view that liberal arts BAs are simply a thing of the past?

Here’s my idea: let’s flip the curriculum. Kill the survey courses and start teaching history as applied knowledge, and as a set of skills that can tangibly enhance the careers that most of our students will actually have.

As a profession, we have, to date, mounted few successful counter-arguments to those who wish to shift resources away from teaching, and jobs, in the humanities and social sciences. One of the reasons that MOOCs may be doing so well is that they represent practically the only big idea that the academy has had in the past several decades. Many of our colleagues in the…

May 22, 2013, 4:59 pm

Being Good Web Citizens

By Claire Potter

If I were alive I would tweet Engels. Just saying.

Listen up! Vanessa Varin is trying to start a convo about ethical web practices over at the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History. She was kind enough to solicit the opinions of the #twitterstorians about the practice of live tweeting panels, and has written a couple of good pieces which aren’t getting enough attention. This may be because the comments section isn’t working. Varin’s new piece, “Being a Good Web Citizen” is also now up, and worth a look as well.

All of us who were solicited for comment came out against #snark while live tweeting a panel, you’ll be glad to know. Twitter seems to be more vulnerable to the regrettable riposte than blogging is, and since the emergence of Storify, it’s far harder to take back. Varin cites…

May 21, 2013, 1:52 pm

Annals of Recent History: The Book of Rumsfeld

By Claire Potter

Illustration credit

Don’t you think Donald Rumsfeld should be tried as a war criminal? I do. Or maybe he could be imprisoned for a decade or more, with no access to constitutional rights, while we sort the evidence against him and decide whether to bring him to trial.

But no. That’s not how we do things in the Land of the Free.

Like Henry Kissinger, Robert MacNamara and other architects of mass destruction, Rumsfeld has settled into the golden years of milking profits from his crimes. Instead of being interrogated with a wet washcloth over his face, he has authored a book that blends his life experiences into a few simple truths that we can all live by as we wait for the next lethal incident of blowback somewhere in America. (more…)