Category Archives: academic publishing

October 11, 2012, 2:39 pm

Lesbian Nation; Or, Why MItt Romney Would Cut Off Federal Funds to Lower Manhattan

In the spring of 2013, my university is going to be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (W.W. Norton, 1963). It’s particularly fitting that we do it here at the New School for Public Engagement, I think, because a big part of our mission is to reach out to adults and non-traditional students who want to finish a college education that was foreclosed or interrupted. Although Betty Friedan was not that person, her activism and writing nonetheless caused women to finish their educations and get back in the workforce.

Betty Friedan was not so good on lesbians, however, causing people like Kate Millett and Ti-Grace Atkinson to abandon Friedan’s fledgling National Organization for Women in facor of the rock ‘em, sock ‘em world of radical feminism. Hence, let me be perhaps hte first to point out that 2013 will also be the fortieth anniversary of…

July 20, 2012, 4:27 pm

Do We Need To Write and Publish So Much Theory?

By Claire Potter

In addition to novels, I always bring a stack of scholarly books on our annual summer vacation. I bring books in my field, books not in my field, books in fields I might be ready to explore, books I might like to teach and books that I read so that I will be a better blogger.

I also bring books on vacation that are too long, or too complex, for me to be able to read in a sustained way when life is full of distraction and interruption. Sustained reading means finishing a difficult or lengthy book in a reasonable number of sittings — between one and three, or few enough to allow me to hold the parts of the argument in my head as I move toward the end.

It is in this spirit that I reached for a recently published book of theory — in my field, I was thinking of teaching it — and was disappointed within the first ten pages. I’m not sure that it was fair for me to be disappointed,…

March 19, 2012, 7:29 pm

Yes Virginia, I Really Publish On Paper Too

By Claire Potter

Today my editor wrote to say that he was actually holding our new book in his hand! It was the hardback edition, which I think is worth your eyeteeth to own if you are not on a library acquisitions budget. Soon, however, the University of Georgia Press will be rolling out and shipping copies of Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back for the mean, lean paperback price of $22.95. Reserve yours by clicking the link above; by going to Powell’s (where you can see the whole table of contents and register to win free books by commenting on ours); or Amazon (where you save no money, get no table of contents, but may qualify for free shipping.)

Better yet, why don’t you mosey into your local independent and/or university bookstore and say, “YO! Where’s that book edited by Potter and Romano…

February 20, 2012, 3:37 pm

So You Think You Can Write During the Semester?

By Claire Potter

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…

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…

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…

November 23, 2011, 12:09 pm

Radical Thanksgiving II: the Top Ten Turkeys for 2011

By Claire Potter

Back in 2007 I gave out awards to institutions and individuals in education who had gone above and beyond the call of duty to make turkeys out of themselves during that calendar year. At the time, I imagined that this would be an annual event. What was I thinking? That the Tenured Radical blog would collapse and I would never have to write such a long post again? That I would give up academia for a well-paid job as a writer for Rachel Maddow?

I dunno. But four years later, here we are at the Chronicle of Higher Education feeling inspired by the year’s hijinks. The task of giving awards is also less burdensome than you might imagine: after all, while every year in education has its turkeys, consistency would require that we only do this again in 2015. So with that, we will start with Turkey #10 and proceed to the Big Turkey in the #1 spot (as I write, the committee is…

October 21, 2011, 11:45 am

What Time Is It? It’s Time For The American Studies Association Meeting!

By Claire Potter

Cowabunga, Buffalo Bob!

Of course, ASA means something different as you age: it used to mean “Par-tay!!!” Now it mostly means jiggling a lot of appointments around the panel I am on so that I can do everything I need to do for my publishing life in fewer than two days. The restrictions on partying are fine since I no longer drink much and the closer I get to the Big Sleep, the more I need to practice on a nightly basis. My current conferencing style also means I am no longer using intellectual work to facilitate conference going, but just the opposite. Shrewder minds than mine understood this back in graduate school and they have the careers to prove it. In any case, there is only so much you can do over the interwebz and by conference call in the academic publishing biz : some stuff still requires the good old face to face, as Bertie Wooster might have put it. (more…)

October 20, 2011, 3:32 pm

When A Student Newspaper Stumbles, Who Is To Blame?

By Claire Potter

Long-time readers of the Radical know that I rarely write about my own institution. There are good reasons for this, other than getting raked over the coals by the National Review Online, which can really bump readership big time. But today I want to stand up for a student who did kind of a dumb thing. Since this was an entirely public thing, is all over the interwebz, and the student is not my student, it falls well within the boundaries of Good Taste to comment on This Bad Thing.

Yesterday a friend posted this piece about single-sex education published at Jezebel to my Face Book page. With a zinger headline you couldn’t resist, “Women’s Colleges Promote Sweatpants & Poor Tampon Hygiene, Says Wesleyan Student,” (October 18 2011), blogger Margaret Hartmann, a Wellesley grad, takes on Zenith soph Vicky Chu. A Zenith transfer student, Chu trashes the single-sex school where she …

September 24, 2011, 11:29 am

Forget the SATs. How Many Days Did Your Students Drink Last Week?

By Claire Potter

The beginning of the semester is always a time for reassessment, isn’t it? SAT scores, we hear, despite endless amounts of testing mandated by No Child Left Behind, have declined. Unsurprisingly, Daniel Luzer of the HuffPo thinks this is not a problem; William J. Bennett, former Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, thinks this is a “wake-up call” about the failure of liberal education policy; and no one, as far as I can tell, has asked a college professor whether it matters. Why we think that test scores should get better and better, and when they don’t, an apocalypse of some kind looms, is such a quintessentially American scenario. While SAT’s do, to some extent, predict college performance; high school grades predict it better; and success in a demanding and creative school is even higher on the Radical list, my best criteria for student success is: drinking.