February 20, 2012, 3:37 pm

So You Think You Can Write During the Semester?

You actually can. But it’s going to take a lot more than just wanting to. I say this because I have navigated the rock (scholarship) and the hard place (The Job) that so many of us wrestle with in different ways over time. I have been:

The person who decided that my full time teaching job at a SLAC was too interesting, too full of new surprises, too packed with interesting students who would hold me accountable, too — well, too! — to write at all during the semester. In these years, I vowed to make the most of holidays, breaks, and summers. Bad plan! At least, a bad plan to make semester after semester, because the time off was never enough time, particularly when I failed to factor in the days spent at the beginning of these breaks watching teevee because I was so tired I couldn’t think and the days at the end getting ready to return to the classroom.
The person who decided…

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February 18, 2012, 6:39 pm

The Sunday Book Review: Elizabeth Taylor As Feminist Icon

By Claire Potter

M.G. Lord, The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness (and We Were Too Distracted By Her Beauty to Notice). New York: Walker Publishing Company, 2012. 211 pp. Index. 23.00, hardbound.

It is inevitable that Elizabeth Taylor’s death, almost a year ago this March, will bring us a number of books reconsidering her legacy. I’m glad to say that one of the first out of the gate is M.G. Lord’s The Accidental Feminist, a brief interpretive account of Taylor’s cultural and political significance. As the title promises, it gives us not new facts about Taylor — it has got to be too soon for that — but a different way to think about an actress who was celebrated for her beauty and for her numerous trips to the altar (eight husbands, if you count Richard Burton twice.)

Marrying seven different men is not a quality you associate with a feminist? Well, think a…

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February 11, 2012, 2:27 pm

On the Satisfactions of Editing a Book Series

By Claire Potter

Lately my Facebook friends are very aware that I have become a co-editor (with Renee Romano of Oberlin College) of a book series at the University of Georgia Press, Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America. Friends (and “friends”) are getting barraged daily with little items from the new author page I set up last week for Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America. Want to like our page? Go here. Want to order the first book in the series, J. Brooks Flippen’s Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right? Go here. Want to pre-order Renee’s and my new edited collection, Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back? (Of course you do: go here.)

See, you just started reading and already I have given you the opportunity to order two great books! Now…

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February 6, 2012, 2:11 pm

From Little College to Big Grad School: Reflections From a Graduate Student

By Claire Potter

By Herlin Hathaway

Today’s guest blogger is Herlin Hathaway, a pseudonymous graduate student and future tenured radical. I asked Herlin, who is in his first year of coursework, to reflect on his trajectory from a small liberal arts college and to a Ph.D. program at a top North American research university.

Heavy on the scholar, light on the activist

Little College students have a reputation for being politically aware and active. While this is not actually the case for the majority of the student body, it is also not difficult to become politicized through coursework and by joining a student organization. This is exactly what happened to me when I began studying the history of the U.S. prison system, volunteering at Little College’s Center for Prison Education and discussing race and class discrimination with older students. By the time I was a 3rd year I was in…

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February 2, 2012, 12:10 pm

Yale Could Just Say No to Covering Up Rape

By Claire Potter

In 1976, Yale women rowers drew dramatic attention to sexism on campus.

What do top university administrators really talk about when they talk about rape with no one else in the room? Maybe someone will comment on this post and tell me. I’ve always wanted to know because every time I am in a meeting about sexual assault I get so much smoke blown up my posterior that I leave the room floating upside down.

My curiosity about this has been piqued even further because Yale University, my alma mater and the object of a Title IX investigation, recently released its stats on sex crimes for the last six months and has announced that it is sobered by the news. As the Oldest College Daily reports: “’The number and scope of complaints make it abundantly clear that there is more that we must do as a community…

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January 30, 2012, 7:26 pm

Oooooooh Nooooooooo! Vassar Lays a Big Admissions Egg

By Claire Potter

One of the ways that colleges and universities have adapted to the stress that they are responsible for creating among applicants is by making information about acceptance and rejection available over the Internet. This, of course, would be better than watching the mailbox for the envelope that is fat or thin, because for several days the applicant would know that the decision had been made but be burdened with the rage and anxiety that s/he did not know what the decision was.

For those of you who were moose hunting with Sarah Palin and her family over the weekend and missed the news, imagine the surprise of early decision applicants at Vassar who first learned over the Internet that they had been accepted (yay!) and an hour later discovered that they had not been accepted (wahhhh!) As the New York Times reported it on January 28, Vassar is describing this mistake in the passive…

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January 27, 2012, 12:18 pm

What a Real Education Policy Would Look Like

By Claire Potter

Photo Credit: Associated Press

I have repeatedly complained in this blog that the Obama administration has no education policy. Part of what is horrible about the Republican presidential field turning into a political version of the Human Centipede is that Barack Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Democratic party will not be challenged on four years of education non-policy. They are operating under No Child Left Behind with a policy nip here and an administrative tuck there. And now they want to extend this non-policy to higher education. (more…)

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January 25, 2012, 4:52 pm

Slouching Toward Joan Didion

By Claire Potter

I know that, as a feminist, I am not supposed to like Caitlin Flanagan because she has made gender essentialism fashionable again. But honestly? I don’t think this makes her a bad person. She is an intellectual who has a keen eye for the role the gender binary plays in our culture, and then — her flaw is that sometimes she stops there when she should push a little harder. When she does go for the take down, she is ruthless in ways I appreciate and admire.

I first encountered Flanagan (before I knew I wasn’t supposed to like her) when she published “The Price of Paradise” in The New Yorker (January 3 2005). This is a priceless piece about the horrors of resort-style family vacations designed for couples who have little children. It’s an article that (more…)

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January 23, 2012, 11:44 am

Dude, Where’s My Classroom? And Other Random Thoughts

By Claire Potter

This is my first day at my new job. I won’t bore you with it because I can’t. I’m not there yet. I’m blogging from the train going into Metropolis, connected to the Interwebz via Bluetooth (that extra $5 a month from AT&T is worth it. Trust me.) Therefore, I don’t know anything about my first day yet, except that I am going to have a set of very important tasks.

The first will be to find my classroom, which is how I came up with this title. This gives me the opportunity to point out that I am semi-shamelessly ripping off Jack Halberstam’s funny piece on Dude, Where’s My Car? This then gives me the opportunity to say that you should read Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011). I downloaded it on Kindle last week. Which, in turn, gives me the chance to say, “F^ck you people who think eBooks are the end of the world! How else could I have purchased a…

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January 20, 2012, 6:40 pm

When In Transition, You Can Use the Washing Machine as an Extra Closet

By Claire Potter

Changing jobs has reminded me that there are lots of things I am not good at. I am obviously a good enough scholar to get another job, which is nice. I am also a good ordinary housekeeper: I cook (well); I do laundry (frequently); I cut the grass just often enough that we don’t have to make haystacks out of it afterwards; I would rather make the bed than not (and view a well-made bed as the key to an orderly frame of mind); I dash out to shovel snow before someone falls and sues the bejesus out of us; I manage to take (my) car in for regular maintenance; I get my teeth cleaned twice a year; and I occasionally whirl through my study and to put it into spic and span order after I complete the writing projects that cause it turn into a Salvation Army bargain bin. (more…)