April 5, 2013, 11:48 am
By Claire Potter
January 18, 2013, 10:23 am
By Claire Potter
Why celebrate 900 posts? Because by my estimation, at 3 posts a week, it’s going to take me the rest of the year to get to 1000. Between now and then I could win the lottery, be rolled over by a bus, or asked to run the Department of Education because President Obama so admires this blog.
I need gratification now! So let’s celebrate 900 posts with some news about campus sex.
No Sex, Please, We’re Irish. One of the more puzzling stories in the news this week features a star football player, Manti Te’o, from Notre Dame, who had a long-distance romance with a woman he never met. The woman claimed to have been diagnosed with leukemia and then “died.” It turns out she was an imposter, and the case is being investigated as if all of us — and not simply Te’o — are owed an explanation.
I am far…
Read More
November 24, 2012, 11:25 am
By Claire Potter
That can’t be my story. That’s only a start. I’ll say that a ZEBRA was pulling that cart! And that is a story that no one can beat, When I say that I saw it on Mulberry Street.
Dr. Seuss, 1937
This time last year, I was getting ready for the big change that brought la famille Radical to the People’s Republic of South Brooklyn. I was finishing up an almost twenty year tenure at Zenith University and getting ready to sell our house during one of the worst real estate markets since World War II (fun fact: not one home in our Shoreline neighborhood had been sold in 2011.) I was preparing to relinquish practically everything I knew to embark on my fantasy job/adventure, a future which I could only partly imagine at the time.
So how is it going? Very well, thank you. Here are a few observations about the experience of the last…
Read More
November 4, 2012, 10:26 am
By Claire Potter
Clap your hands if you believe in associate professors! Photo credit.
Is going on the job market as a tenured person a loser’s game?
Today’s crie du coeur is from hist1969, an associate professor who is itchin’, as I was a couple years back, to put on the travelin’ shoes. I edited the question slightly to give more space for a response.
What do you know about the experiences of historians who returned to the market as tenured associate professors? I have looked around, but it seems that in my field people who are moving to other universities have been personally invited to apply. I have received some invitations to apply for positions in the last two years. However, the searches were canceled, or I ultimately felt that such invitations were only intended to “furnish” the searches. By now, I think it’s…
Read More
September 19, 2012, 6:08 pm
By Claire Potter
This piece of pedagogical advice is for all you faculty out there who are well into the semester and feel as though things are not going as well as they could be:
It’s OK to change your syllabus once the semester has begun. In fact, I recommend it. You can’t change everything, but you can change some things, and it might result in a better class.
Most people feel committed to the syllabus they handed out on the first day of class. I understand this. You worked hard on that syllabus and it represents your mastery of a field. It is a symbol of your intellectual authority and autonomy. Finally, even if you want to change it, you may not think that you are allowed to change it. Many faculty and students regard a syllabus as a contract between teacher and student that should not, and cannot, be changed.
But syllabus isn’t a contract: it’s a guide, and a set of appointments you keep…
Read More
August 8, 2012, 5:06 pm
By Claire Potter
“What’s the point of trying to finish my book now!!?!”
It’s getting to be That Time of Year.
That’s right: it’s back to school and whatever isn’t done, isn’t done. That long lovely summer you were looking forward to in May? Over. Or nearly so. Except for those of you who are still watching ribbon gymnastics and beach volleyball in preparation for your research sabbatical, summer’s ending. What to do, what to do? How to break out of that nasty transition stage where you are just shuffling paper around your desk but unable to to accomplish much — whether it’s your own work or anything remotely connected to starting school — because in a few short weeks the students will descend?
I can’t do anything about the calendar, but let’s try to cheer up with a few Radical solutions to the end of summer blues! For …
Read More
July 2, 2012, 2:14 pm
By Claire Potter
Photo liberated from Tina Brown
One good reason to maintain a Yahoo email account is that the opening screen is chock full of useless information that you wouldn’t acquire just by sticking your nose in a book or reading Tenured Radical. Today’s news is that Michael Jordan’s son was arrested for some kind of misbehavior at the Olympic basketball trials; and Rupert Murdoch tweeted something nasty about the Scientologists (a struggle between a behemoth conservative corporate media empire and a behemoth conservative corporate church should be fun to watch.) Last but not least (drum roll): Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, has come out as gay.
Awesome. I always like it when someone comes out, particularly older people like Anderson Cooper, who is 43.
I always thought Anderson Cooper seemed a little…
Read More
March 21, 2012, 3:13 pm
By Claire Potter
Photo Credit.
When I was an undergraduate at Oligarch University I, and I suspect many of my peers, had three desires that were utterly in conflict: to be invisible, to be free and to be special.
Against the advice of my mother, who wanted me to go to a liberal arts college where faculty would pay attention to me, I wanted to attend a school that was so big that no adult could exert any authority over me whatsoever.
I got my wish.
Soon I discovered that a major research university where undergraduates were expected to be autonomous had possibilities I had never imagined. Not go to class? Who knew if there were 500 people in the room? Sit in the back of a dark lecture hall as one Great Masterwork after another flashed up on the screen and take a little snooze? Why the heck not? Turn in all th…
Read More
December 31, 2011, 1:51 pm
By Claire Potter
Today is the day I go off the payroll of Zenith University, the institution that gave me my first job. Tomorrow I officially go on the payroll of another university in Metropolis, the city where I went to graduate school. If all goes well, we will move in mid-summer.
OK, so Zenith wasn’t actually my first job. I had a fair amount of work experience before I began my twenty years there in July 1991. Prior employment included: aluminum can recycling; substitute receptionist at Philadelphia’s CBS affiliate; popcorn stand attendant at a neighborhood movie house (the summer Jaws was released, no less); stringer for the Hartford Courant; administrative assistant and general dogsbody at a boutique public relations firm; writer/editor at an advertising agency; bicycle messenger; teaching assistant, research assistant, assistant to the Dean of the College; proofreader at the SoHo…
Read More
December 19, 2011, 1:05 pm
By Claire Potter
Meet Anthony Grafton, the AHA's Jonathan Swift
Have you followed American Historical Association president Anthony Grafton’s serial meditation on how graduate schools might respond to a bad academic job market? A market that has, since the the 1970s, been either stagnant or getting worse? A market with whose effects the blogosphere is obsessed?
If you haven’t, you need to catch up. For “No More Plan B” (October 2011) and “Plan C” (November 2011), both co-written with Jim Grossman for the AHA newsletter Perspectives, go here and here. For an article about “Plan B” by Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed (October 3 2011) go here; and for a response by graduate student Dan Alloso (UMass-Amherst) go here. (more…)
Follow @TenuredRadical
Follow Tenured Radical through your favorite RSS reader: SUBSCRIBE