Category Archives: You Have Nothing To Lose But Your chains

January 2, 2011, 3:47 pm

I Killed My Book: And Other Highly Personal Thoughts On Writing To Begin the New Year

What would life be like if you started over again?

Sometime last fall I made decision to kill a book that I had worked on for a long, long time, a book that people still ask me about. This is how it went.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I began Tenured Radical back in 2006 because I was in a Bad Way and trying to Work Out $ome $hit. At the time, I had gone through a major institutional trauma and survived it, just barely, and at a high cost to those close to me. Central to this institutional trauma was a rather profound and vicious trashing of The Book. Blogging became a way of returning to the book, a project that had become so utterly soiled by its use as a vehicle for expressing contempt for me that I couldn’t look at it without becoming enraged or suffering a profound sense of loss.

For a time, blogging worked to jump start what constituted a rescue operation rather than …

October 25, 2010, 2:07 pm

Department of Economics: Observations On The Lack Of Raises and Thinking Out Of The Box

By Claire Potter

As if you didn’t know

We are in a prolonged period in which suppressing faculty wages is the preferred solution (after firing the staff) to “controlling” the costs of higher education. Although paid better than many colleagues at state institutions and community colleges, for my two decades at Zenith, the faculty has come to the depressing conclusion at the end of each year that we are more or less at the bottom of our so-called “peer group” of liberal arts colleges. One year, in an attempt to raise our position, our peer group was adjusted: several larger research institutions were removed and they were replaced with smaller liberal arts colleges. This helped our ranking for a bit, but of course, university rankings — whether they are compiled by U.S. News and World Report or by the AAUP — don’t pay the mortgage.

At age 52, I make slightly more than 107K, 16K less than the median…

October 16, 2010, 7:45 pm

Why History? Four Careers You Might Want To Think About Pursuing With A History Major

By Claire Potter

There’s nothing like the Early American survey to
help you decide on the perfect spring display.

If you are as old as I am, you remember when MARHO, the editorial collective that publishes the Radical History Review, used to hand out matchbooks at the history meetings that said: ”Be A Historian. Make Big Money.” Because this is, sadly, no longer true, every once in a while the history department at Zenith holds an event for prospective and current majors where we try to explain the unique applications of the history major. (Truth in advertising: I have no idea why someone should be a history major. I was an English major, ok?) This usually involves bringing a few graduates back to Zenith, people who live in what our undergraduates like to call The Real World. A prerequisite for getting one of these coveted invitations is to have done something other than be a history professor and …

August 3, 2010, 2:01 pm

The Seductions Of Sedan Delivery; Or, Writing Your Own Academic Job Description

By Claire Potter

May 17, 2010, 12:04 pm

Who — And How Many –Paid For Your Sabbatical This Year?

By Claire Potter

So what percentage of your faculty is adjunct or contingent labor?

In the first fall faculty meeting at Zenith every year, we vote faculty privileges to a long list of people. It includes athletic staff, librarians, and a long list of adjunct or contingent labor. Some come as post-docs and visiting full-time assistants (relatively well-paid contingent labor with benefits); long-term adjuncts with benefits (mostly in the languages, although there was one women who taught in an interdisciplinary program for well over ten years as an adjunct); and then a string of people brought in to teach a course or two. Lately this budget has gotten hammered as part of Zenith’s attempt to restructure its budget to meet the financial crisis. I didn’t see the list because I was on sabbatical, but it was probably cut to about two thirds of its usual size.

But still: it’s usually about four pages long …

February 27, 2010, 5:47 pm

Smokin’ Sunday Radical Roundup: Ciggies, Spys, Sports and Sex Scandals

By Claire Potter

I Would Do Anything For Love — But I Won’t Do That: Thanks to Ralph Luker at Cliopatria we at Tenured Radical have links to articles by Robert Proctor and Jon Weiner about historians who have testified on behalf of the tobacco industry between 1986-2005. They include Stephen Ambrose, Otis Graham, Paul Harvey, and Michael Schaller. Consultants for the industry who have not testified include Herbert Klein and Irwin Unger. Out of 57 scholars there are exactly two women — which means what? That the tobacco industry doesn’t employ women, or that women told them to take a hike, since smoking is also linked to breast cancer and women are a bit more militant on this issue?

“That’s Doctor Moneypenny, James”: This has got to be the coolest job I have ever seen posted — did you even know that there was something called The International Spy Museum? Well there is, it’s in Washington D.C., a…

January 31, 2010, 2:13 pm

Sunday Radical Roundup: The Power Of The Purses In Tudor England, More Conference News, and A Fond Farewell To Howard Zinn

By Claire Potter

Book of the Week: Those of you jonesing for Season 4 of The Tudors will be able to make do temporarily with 2009 Man Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt, 2009; 532 pp.) Praised by Washington Post reviewer Wendy Smith as “a brilliant and deft antidote to the otherwise trite and shopworn” retellings of Henry VIII’s six marriages, it is truly one of the best historical novels I have ever read.

Of course, as constant readers of this blog know, I find virtually no recounting of this story trite or shopworn, and one might have to ask Smith: what do you think brings readers back repeatedly to the events of 1531-1535, when a sexy little nobody succeeded in changing the history of the western world forever? There are plenty of subplots in this bloody tale that seem to recur in our political and cultural life — not to mention in countless, anonymous, personal lives….

January 19, 2010, 7:28 pm

Guest Post From an Activist Historian: The AHA Blew It

By Claire Potter

A report on the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in San Diego guest posted by Jennifer Manion of Connecticut College.

To welcome back the start of another semester, let’s start with a multiple choice quiz:

For LGBTQ historians of an activist bent, this year’s AHA was:

a. alienating
b. disappointing
c. energizing
d. all of the above

For this activist historian the answer is “d.” So many things went so wrong in the AHA’s attempt to skirt around the local LGBTQ/labor boycott of the host hotel without appearing to support the politics of the hotel’s owner, Doug Manchester, who financed the initial petition drive to get Proposition 8 onto the ballot in California. For those of you living in a cave, the passage of Prop 8 overturned the legalization of gay marriage in California. The constitutionality of Prop 8 is now being contested by Perry v….

November 27, 2009, 10:08 am

We’re Here, Because We’re Here, Because We’re Here, Because We’re Here! Or, Why Disciplines Rule The University Roost

By Claire Potter

If you are the chair of an interdisciplinary program and see any meetings with deans or provosts in the immediate future, make sure you read University of Pennsylvania sociologist Jerry A. Jacobs’ Interdisciplinary Hype in the Chronicle of Higher Education (11/22/09). It will prepare you for every tired old argument you will have to answer about why your intellectual commitments are not worth supporting. Arguing that there is major pressure for breaking the boundaries of academic discipline (oh, would that this were the case!), particularly driven by federal money aimed at supporting interdisciplinary research in the sciences, Jacobs expresses his view that “efforts to reorganize academe based on interdisciplinary principles would have disastrous consequences in the short term—and would end up reproducing our disciplinary or departmental structure in the long term.”

There’s nothing I…

November 7, 2009, 2:31 am

Hip-hop History Channel: Alexander Hamilton Rules

By Claire Potter

Snap along with Barack and Michele Obama as Zenith alum Lin-Manuel MIranda tells the life story of Alexander Hamilton, in the persona of Aaron Burr. Awesome. Hat tip.