Author Archives: Claire Potter
February 17, 2013, 1:51 pm
By Claire Potter
It’s been a robust week at Tenured Radical: the stats just came in, and we topped 16,000 hits for the first time ever. Some of them weren’t very nice, it’s true, but nevertheless you came to this site from all over the world to watch the verbiage fly. Thousands of lurkers got an eye full of academia at its finest. So with that, let’s begin our President’s Day Celebration!
Tenured Radical Live — with a President! Didn’t know I was a Friend of Bill, didja? I’m talking Wisco historian Bill Cronon, that is. The Presidential Plenary from the American Historical Association — with me, (now past) President William Cronon, Edward Ayers (also a university president), Mary Louise Roberts, Nico Pfund and Michael Pollan — is now up! It cannot be embedded, but you can go here to see it on CSPAN-3. Upon…
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February 14, 2013, 1:36 pm
By Claire Potter
It appeared that my ability to join the collective hinged on my agreement with all the criticisms of my past political thinking and work, and not just a willingness to consider them….The criticism indicated that I was inferior to other members of the collective, and I wanted the opportunity to prove that I had a substantial history of work and ideas, and that I should be considered an equal. So I agreed with the criticisms in general, and said I would rethink things in light of the criticism. I thought to myself, I could always change my mind.
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Too Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (2010)
A central theme in several autobiographies of former radical antiwar activists is the role that criticism sessions played in persuading people to adopt a new world view, one that ran counter to attitudes they might previously have valued as members of …
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February 10, 2013, 1:36 pm
By Claire Potter
Shortly after yesterday’s post went up I heard from an old friend and colleague, Dr. David Shorter, who disagreed with my views about Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and wanted an opportunity to respond to them in this forum. I immediately agreed. Shorter is a professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles. His first book, We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), unpacks the biases associated with writing in educational and legal considerations of Indigenous rights. Shorter’s digital projects, his work with indigenous language revitalization, and his other research areas are described on his website.
Recently, my friend and previous colleague, the Tenured Radical herself, penned a blog posting about the matter of BDS and Brooklyn College’s defense of academic freedom. As usual, her …
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February 9, 2013, 12:38 pm
By Claire Potter
Bloomberg to City Council critics: Brooklyn is not Pyongyang! Photo credit.
As of this writing, despite saber-rattling of various kinds by donors and politicians, the Brooklyn College event featuring speakers from Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) seems to have gone off without a hitch. The Israeli state still exists; the Palestinian people do not yet have a state of their own; and the Mayor of New York has affirmed the principle of free speech in our public university system. Read about it here.
I realize that it is conventional to begin a post like this one be declaring that one is not an anti-semite, that one is a supporter of Israel — or not an anti-semite and not a supporter of Israel, and hence a supporter of Palestinian freedom (whatever that means at this moment in history.) I cannot tell you…
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February 7, 2013, 9:15 am
By Claire Potter
The first illustration of Pinocchio, by Enrico Mazzanti. Photo credit.
Today’s guest blogger is Michael Pettit, associate professor of Psychology and Science and Technology Studies at York University in Toronto. He recently published The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America. He is currently completing the research on another project tentatively entitled The Sex Lives of Animals in the Age of Kinsey.
Lies loom large over the historian’s craft. Historians devote considerable time to parsing the tensions among words, intentions, and behaviours. Reconstructing the inner lives of those who lived in the past is a notoriously difficult task. It is doubly so when you know your informants are deliberately leading you astray. And yet deception hasn’t really figured as a category of historical…
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February 3, 2013, 10:18 am
By Claire Potter
Popular author Chris Kyle, a former sniper and Navy SEAL, was tragically shot and killed at a gun range, along with a second man, near Glen Rose, Texas on Saturday. “Witnesses told sheriff’s investigators that a gunman opened fire on the men around 3:30 p.m. Saturday,” the Associated Press reports, “then fled in a pickup truck belonging to one of the victims….The newspapers said a 25-year-old man was later taken into custody in Lancaster, southeast of Dallas, and that charges were expected.”
According to the National Rifle Association (NRA) experts now littering our news shows, this should not have happened. Kyle should have fired back, successfully defended himself by killing the “bad guy,” and be here to tell the tale of why the “good guys” need to…
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February 2, 2013, 11:53 am
By Claire Potter
Our guest blogger Mary Louise Roberts is a Professor in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her most recent book, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War Two France, will be published with the University of Chicago Press in May. This essay was originally written for ”The Public Practice of History In and For a Digital Age,” a plenary session at the 2013 American Historical Association Annual Meeting. Roberts appeared with historians Edward Ayers andWilliam Cronon; editor Niko Pfund; journalist Michael Pollan and your very own Tenured Radical.
I begin with a confession. I resist change. Unlike the other people on this panel, I am a change resister. Unlike them, I have not pioneered digital or digitized approaches to historical inquiry. In fact I have consciously refused them. And when I have embraced new technologies,…
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January 30, 2013, 10:17 pm
By Claire Potter
Were Americans ever this off the rails? I mean ever, in the history of this country?
In case you thought the right wing could get no stranger, a TEA Party dude, gunnie, birther, and blogger named Nathan M. Bickel is forwarding the theory that the Sandy Hook Massacre was an elaborate deception perpetrated by the media and their shadowy liberal allies. Bickel, who calls Bay City, MI, home. has a second page on a blog devoted to the Lutheran faith. On a third blog, he identifies himself as a former pastor.
Among other feature of this grand hoax which has been an excuse to persecute people who need to defend themselves by firing multiple rounds every second, Bickel argues that:
- Adam Lanza could not have committed the murders at Sandy Hook because he had died the day before;
- Dylan Hockley, one of the murdered children, is still alive;
- supposedly grieving parents were…
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January 27, 2013, 10:34 am
By Claire Potter
In today’s New York Times KJ Dell’Antonia weighs in on helicopter parenting, speculating that one outcome of articles like his is to give some parents the warm and fuzzies. After having read about how other people’s kids wander clueless through their educations, “most readers get to give themselves a pat on the back. They would never do such crazy stuff! Therefore, they are not helicopter parents. Case closed — off to drive the kid to hockey practice as soon as I pack up his bag.”
Dell’Antonia missed the second audience for this article. College teachers and university administrators will be re-posting it to Facebook, with hair-raising stories about the heli-relllies who have been camped out in the President’s waiting room, grimly awaiting action on last semester’s Epic Fail. Parents intervening on behalf of young people who have screwed up in some dismal way or another is a fact …
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January 24, 2013, 12:31 pm
By Claire Potter
My inbox at 10:17 a.m. today.
A common faculty complaint at my last job was what we might call “failure to consult.” Whether it was a project occurring at the upper echelons of the administration, a department chair’s carrying out an initiative or, most commonly, the work of a faculty committee, rule of thumb was to imagine anyone who might be a stakeholder and then keep that person informed. In the days before email, this usually meant having frequent and informative meetings, dropping into offices as you meandered down the hall, or copying a memo multiple time and putting it in separate interoffice envelopes. My favorite form of consultation? – and I bet no one under the age of fifty has ever done this – using one interoffice envelope and instructing recipients to check their name off the memo, put it back …
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