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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September 1, 2012, 10:23 am
By Claire Potter
Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in a new Huffington Post feature called HuffPost Live. My segment — on marriage equality — was hosted by Janet Varney, who once had a part on one of my all-time favorite shows, Entourage (2004-2011).
I can’t figure out how to embed the video (perhaps because it is unembeddable?) but you can access Tenured Radical discussing the question of whether the government ought to get out of the business of marriage altogether here.
As you can see if you click on the link, it’s a web broadcast with a live chat feature on the right. There is a central studio in Los Angeles, where they sometimes have sit down guests: our feature was done via a Google+ Hangout, a video chat feature that allows up to nine people to join a conversation.
One obvious feature of doing a digital media event — aside from the fact that it is fun — is that in a …
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September 17, 2011, 1:46 pm
By Claire Potter
"Danger, Will Robinson!"
This is the first in a series of posts that addresses labor conditions in the academy, and the potential problems attendant to replacing people with machines.
In case you have wondered where Tenured Radical has been in the past week, we have been getting our classes up and running. One of the things we have been thinking about, as we worked 14 hour days (probably a modest 6-8 on the weekends) during the first two weeks of school, is that we do not even work close to a 40-hour week during the term.
Do the math: at minimum, I would say that we are currently clocking a 90 hour week, which leaves us no time for blogging, reading, going over the copy edits for the new collection, going to the gym, or cooking those gourmet dinners that some of our friends like to post…
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May 15, 2011, 3:37 pm
By Claire Potter
Yesterday the Zenith network went down. While the message that informed us that things were working again said something about a hardware upgrade, it is difficult to believe that they really intended to take the whole system down during finals week. I suspect that, although tinkering may have been part of the issue, the network was also overwhelmed.
This happens periodically because of two institutional impulses, neither of which is inherently bad, but which together can create havoc: putting as much of our work on-line as possible and cutting the university budget. It is only a guess that these two things are related, but I can’t recall a year during which we have lost our online services abruptly so very many times (the last occurrence was in the middle of uploading senior honors theses.) Here’s a lesson for you, if you are an aspiring administrator: money saved by implementing…
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September 15, 2010, 12:44 pm
By Claire Potter
Many years ago, when I was commuting between Zenith and New York, I tried what were then called “books on tape.” At that point in time, every car had a “tape deck,” a now defunct technology that was, from time to time, carved out of the dashboard of one’s car by enterprising youths on the Lower East Side. Books on tape would arrive in the mail, much as Netflix do today, but in a large padded envelope. Contained within would be a large plastic folio with multiple cassette tapes in numbered order (usually 8-12.)
Listening to books was, and is, a project about which I am conflicted. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I dislike being read to, and prefer to have text be a starting point for inserting myself in another narrative world (is this why the young enjoy video games?) On the other hand, when I first tried listening to books in the 1990s, I had a highly literary and elderly…
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September 19, 2007, 12:35 am
By Claire Potter
Its been awhile. But don’t worry. I’m back, blog-dudes and dudettes.
Since I started Tenured Radical, except for vacation, I do not think I have gone six days without a new post, as I just did. I do not, as some bloggers seem to, experience guilt for neglecting my blog (one of my flaws, I have been told in my deep past by women heading out the door with suitcases in hand, is that guilt and I are not as fully acquainted as we might be.) But I do miss my audience, and I miss writing freely. I miss stealing pictures. I miss Flavia.
One of the reasons I have been absent is starting school in my dual roles as chair of American Studies and the Director of the Castle: it’s a little like being Batman and Robin at the same time. There are endless small but necessary tasks to be done every day, from signing many student forms (“Holy oversubscription, Batman!”) to making sure we have a proper …
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August 1, 2007, 1:15 pm
By Claire Potter
In this post at Center of Gravitas Gayprof tells a story about having been diagnosed as color blind by a school nurse when he was but a wee Gayprof. Since the nurse explained nothing, and told him to go home and tell his parents, Gayprof — assuming that this was merely a stage on the way to complete blindness and wishing to shield the parental units from this tragedy — kept it to himself and merely suffered in silence until Nurse Ratched had the wit to call his home. Isn’t school great?
This caused me to think, in turn, about the most peculiar thing I ever got wrong as a child. On the first day of nursery school, perhaps as a way of staving off tears from the most delicate of us, the teachers would say every once in a while: “Your carpools will be coming soon!” Now, I knew what a car was — I had arrived in my mother’s big yellow Mercury. And I knew what a pool was: I swam…
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January 30, 2007, 2:22 am
By Claire Potter
PERFORMANCE ANXIETY
I recently received an email from a younger colleague about how much pressure s/he feels to “perform” for students. This concern followed on a set of teaching evaluations that, the same email said, were the “best ever.” So it looks like the great teaching evaluations, instead of bolstering confidence, made this young teacher feel as though the bar had been raised. Last semester’s “good” could not be good enough this term…..oy.
I’m trying to think about how to respond to this in a constructive way, but it caused me to think of a couple other things about teaching that, when I remember them, I try to pass on to my untenured colleagues.
1. When you are really sick it is ok to miss class. I know a very famous historian who told me, years ago when I was working for her, that she had never canceled a class, ever. This made a huge…
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