Author Archives: Claire Potter

May 26, 2012, 2:04 pm

Should Someone Who Has Been Harassed By A Faculty Member Sign A Confidentiality Agreement?

The answer, in short, is no. Never. And if an administrator tells you that you must do so in order for the university to act, that person is bluffing.

I am moved to address this question because I stumbled upon a blog post written by a student I used to know. I am not going to comment on the specifics of this case because I know absolutely nothing about it beyond what is alleged in the post. But I do know that I have heard this story more than once, and it sounds familiar. I also know that it is routine on college campuses to remand charges of sexual assault and sexual/racial/gender harassment made against faculty to secret administrative processes which have little or no legal standing except in the (important) sense that institutions must act on violations of their own rules. What is too often the case is that the person harmed by a faculty member is asked, and agrees, …

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May 23, 2012, 4:38 pm

BDSM and Feminism: Notes on an Impasse

By Claire Potter

Today’s guest blogger is Margot D. Weiss, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT. She is the author of 2012 Lambda Award finalist Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke, 2011.)

Last month, Newsweek published a cover story by Katie Roiphe with the headline “The Fantasy Life of Working Women: Why Surrender is a Feminist Dream.” The story purports to account for the run-away success of domination/submission narratives, taking E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey as a case in point. James’s book – the first in a trilogy of erotic novels – is Twilight fan fiction turned New York Times bestseller with movie rights. Banned in several public libraries, it’s a tale of the “dark desires” sparked by the romance between college student Anastasia Steele and businessman Christian Grey. The book is a…

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May 17, 2012, 2:00 pm

Th-th-th-th-th-that’s All, Folks! Speech Quirks That Work?

By Claire Potter

Is perfect public speaking really best?

I have received a lot of thoughtful reactions to the TEDx talk posted below, not only in the comments section, but in private communications as well. Responding to one new colleague who wrote me a gracious note, I admitted that I was a little self-conscious about the “ums” and “ahs” that punctuate my performance.

The more I have participated in visual and aural media as a scholar, the harder I have worked to eliminate speech quirks that I find distracting and amateurish. Everything is now memorialized on line, and anything not said well on the first take is recorded forever. Some of my performances sound embarrassingly unpolished to my own ear, and are discouragingly unlike the confident, fluent PBS Newshour talking head that I long to be. As I listen to …

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May 9, 2012, 9:45 pm

Let’s Go To The Videotape

By Claire Potter

In case you missed this on April 14 2012 (which you did if you weren’t one of about 200 people at TEDx Connecticut College, “Rethinking Progress”) my talk just got posted to the TED site by the fabulous students who put on this event. Enjoy. And admit it: like me, you’re grading. You don’t want to read anyway.

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May 2, 2012, 11:28 am

Meet the Radical: Book Event for Doing Recent History

By Claire Potter

You are sleepy...you are sleepy...you are sleepy....you want to buy this book.....

Thursday, May 3, 2012, 6:00 p.m.
The New School, 66 West 12th Street, room 510, NYC

Come one, come all, to meet Tenured Radical, with history friends David Rosner (Columbia), David Greenberg (Rutgers), and Gail Drakes (NYU) at the New School for Public Engagement tomorrow evening. Got a recent history manuscript you are shilling? Unfortunately, my co-editor Renee Romano will not be there, however Derek Krissoff, our editor from the University of Georgia Press, will be in the house.

And if you haven’t got your copy of the book yet, it will be for sale on site. Description below the jump: (more…)

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May 1, 2012, 11:50 am

It’s Always Football Season In Florida: Computer Season? Not So Much

By Claire Potter

Every time the state of Florida expresses its contempt for education you wonder how things get worse for students in that state. But they can. Although Education Week gave the state high marks for standards, assessment and accountability, and good marks for equity, two big F’s stand out: funding and college readiness. However Education Week forgot what the F in Florida education really stands for: football.

Steven Salzburg at Forbes reported last week that the University of Florida flagship plans to save a cool $1.4 million by cutting its computer science department. (Hat tip to Comrade PhysioProffe.) As Salzburg pointed out, this is a strange way for the state to prepare students for the demands of a 21st century technology and information economy. ”The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science,” he writes, and is “cutting the…

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April 26, 2012, 2:42 pm

Histories of Kennedy Love: A Book Review

By Claire Potter

JFK and JFK, Jr. in the Oval Office (AP Photo/Look Magazine, Stanley Tretick)

Christina Haag, Come to the Edge: A Memoir (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011).

Mimi Alford, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair With President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath (New York: Random House, 2012).

It will be no surprise to even the uneducated reader that the Kennedy family occupies an entire cultural market niche all by itself. The Library of Congress lists over 400 John F. Kennedy items in its holdings. You can add to this number: books by and about Bobby, Ted and the other siblings; about the generations that preceded the three political brothers; about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her children (there are over 300 LOC items about John Jr. and 93 by and about the far more productive and well-educated…

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April 23, 2012, 3:26 pm

OAH Roundup: Meating and Greeting in the Beer City

By Claire Potter

"Well, I got a proposal but it's still pretty durn rough."

The Organization of American Historians meeting, from whence I last posted, is at the absolutely worst time of year. I always begin the following week feeling less like a teacher than like a circus performer shot out of a cannon. So why is it that I also enjoy the OAH more than any other academic meeting? Here are some thoughts on that topic.

Location, location, location. This year’s hotspot, Milwaukee, was a mystery pick. I don’t know anyone in the East who wasn’t groaning about making this trip. Two big problems emerged during the planning phase for those of us who don’t have access to an airline hub: expensive fares and the lack of direct flights. And then — what’s in Milwaukee? Why did they pick it? No one knew. Friends would say he…

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April 20, 2012, 12:19 am

Hey Babe, It’s OAH Day One: Public History Rock and Roll

By Claire Potter

Photo credit

I was sitting in the lobby of the Milwaukee Hilton and a civilian came up to me. “Hey,” he said: “Have I seen you on the History Channel?”

“Uh, probably,” I said. There are three different documentaries about crime in the 1930s that feature me as a talking head. From time to time, someone makes the connection: the working class family who lives across the street, a small child on the subway, and my all-time favorite, the men at the men’s shelter on Third Street in lower Manhattan. Because of this, I think the History Channel is one of the most popular enterprises ever created: not only do people love history, but I suspect that institutions – prisons, shelters, halfway houses – leave it on all the time because it is completely non-controversial.

“But you know …

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April 19, 2012, 8:44 am

Intellectual Smack Down: Kicking A$$, Taking Names

By Claire Potter

This seems to be smackdown week among the intelligentsia. Let’s have fun with it.

First of all, there’s nothing I like better than some good snark, but I can’t understand why B.R. Myers at The Atlantic felt it was necessary to do a full tilt trashing of Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown 2011). I sometimes worry that book reviews are just an arm of the marketing department, but no fear here. Myers hates, hates, hates this book. And you know what else he hates? The middlebrow reading public, MFA programs, magazines that promote novels, authors who get large advances, authors who are well-connected, readers who are dumb enough to be led to the literary slaughter by mass media book promotions, small novels that are a big hit because they have pretended to be small novels but are actually figments of some marketing department’s imagination, and people with no authentic…