February 27, 2010, 5:47 pm
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…
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January 14, 2010, 2:50 pm
By Claire Potter
Over at ConfessionsOf A Community College Dean your favorite administrator and mine, Dean Dad, asks: “Why do people still go to grad school in the liberal arts?”
Good question. Although I have no former undergraduates making the leap into a Ph.D. program this year, the bigger picture is quite different. As Dean Dad notes, “the adjunct trend is so well-established at this point, and the economic irrationality of grad school so screamingly obvious, that it’s fair to wonder why many departments are actually experiencing record applications.” While he explores various irrational explanations — love for learning, self-delusion, and hiding out until the recession is over — there is, he argues, some rationality to the choice:
academia still offers a surface legibility. Yes, the odds are daunting, but good students have spent years rising to the top of academic competitions. There’s still a…
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July 7, 2009, 1:21 pm
By Claire Potter
In my opinion? It’s on its way out. For what Zenith spent on searches this year, we could have hired a bunch of visitors, or two tenure-track faculty. Or we could have given the faculty we have a weenie little raise. Just a weenie one, but a raise all the same. Or not cut the library budget. Or….or…..
Budget cutting is no reason to end a tradition permanently if it is valuable, but I predict that budget cutting will jolt universities to some useful reforms. Replacing the conference interview with the phone interview is one of them. We had this conversation in my department recently, and I have had it with a Zenith administrator on two separate occasions. Perhaps I have fallen out of love with the conference interview because I am finishing a book on the early years of the historical profession. I know, for example, that the origins of the conference interview are exactly the …
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June 21, 2009, 2:37 pm
By Claire Potter
“And by the way,” I wrote in a message to a young scholar whose book manuscript I would love to sign for the new monograph series Renee Romano and I are doing at the University of Georgia Press, Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America, “There’s nothing that accessorizes an interview outfit like a book contract!”
Which got me to thinking: it’s been a long time since there was any Radical Advice for the job-lorn. One by one, jobs are starting to appear on the web and in those odd paper newsletters our professional organizations still send out. So what can you do now to get ready for a new job season? Well, it depends on what kind of job seeker you are. None of the advice that follows is comprehensive, and if we are really lucky, this post will draw a lot of comments from readers willing to share experiences that will correct, amplify and enrich it.
For The Market Novice
If you have…
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May 24, 2009, 8:35 pm
By Claire Potter
Dear Graduates of Zenith:
You are done, God bless you. The clouds cleared, the sun shined, and we all sat out there and baked. Except it was more like being poached, really. Between last night’s rain and today’s sunshine, we the faculty, deans and administration cooked slowly, draped in various fabrics, wearing black velvet hats, listening to all the same speeches you heard. And they were very good speeches: (Not So) New President made a big statement about the proliferation of handgun violence and violence against women; Anna Quindlen suggested that you take a crack at fixing the world since everyone older than you hasn’t really made much of a go of it. A community organizer from Middletown read a sweet passage from E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web that made me tear up. And then you threw your hats in the air, and we all marched away. The woman I was sitting next to pointed to a line …
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February 7, 2009, 6:32 pm
By Claire Potter
“Dear Professor Radical,” wrote a longtime lurker who had finally decided, in desperation, to reveal hirself. “You told us about the job letter. About the phone call. About the conference interview. About wardrobe — even though you obviously know nothing about clothes: everyone knows you wear nothing but black and grey trousers from Banana Republic, complemented by matching T-shirts. And yet, right on the brink of crossing the finish line, you have abandoned us. WHAT ABOUT THE CAMPUS INTERVIEW, DAMMIT?!?”
Well, I’m sorry. This has been quite a dilemma for me, in part because we have been too busy interviewing at Zenith for me to attend to any of my professional responsibilities, much less write blog posts. But I had an ethical problem as well: should I actually be giving advice about campus visits when we, in the history department at Zenith, were interviewing eleven candidates …
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January 15, 2009, 6:28 pm
By Claire Potter
Sterling Fluharty, who blogs at PhDinHistory, writes (in response to this post where I urged job-seekers to stop attending panels that seemed to be only increasing their anxiety about ever being employed): “Do you really feel it is pointless for the AHA to have panels on the job market? What if ideas for reforming the market and fixing its problems emerged from these sessions?”
Well, OK, if you put it that way. And anyway, saying that those panels are pointless would be doing a disservice to those who put them together, as well as to those who benefit from them. This advice — like my advice to stay off the wikis — was only for those of you who use sessions organized by the Professional Division as concrete venues for self-destructive obsessing about your powerlessness. I hope it didn’t cause the intended audiences to run to the over-priced hotel bar instead, or prompt any of you …
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January 4, 2009, 8:35 pm
By Claire Potter
Helpful advice to graduate students: stop going to sessions about the job market. My sense is that it is simply making people unnecessarily hysterical. Yes, the job market this year is very, very bad. But whether it will be next year no one knows. I repeat no one knows.
So please, stop going to these sessions. Go home and write instead.
December 30, 2008, 1:37 pm
By Claire Potter
Baron: You’re so beautiful. It tore my heart to see you in despair like that…Please don’t cry any more…I’d no idea you were so beautiful. I’d like to take you in my arms, and not let anything happen to you, ever…I’ve never seen anything in my life as beautiful as you are….
Grusinskaya (getting up): You must go now.
Baron: I’m not going. You know I’m not going. Oh, please let me stay.
Grusinskaya: But I want to be alone.
Baron: That isn’t true. You don’t want to be alone. You were in despair just now. I can’t leave you now. You, you mustn’t cry any more. You must forget. Let me stay just for a little while. Ah, please let me stay.
Grusinskaya: For just a minute, then.
Okay, so your conference interview won’t be this exciting. But here’s hoping it won’t be so mysterious, convoluted and indirect either. Surely you are starting to get excited? Aren’t you? So let’s start to prepare for…
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December 26, 2008, 6:57 pm
By Claire Potter
Last year around this time I posted my guide to novice American Historical Association Annual Meeting attendees. This year we go to New York! So much better than Chicago, which is only good for the Chicagoans, since none of the rest of us are ever allowed to arrive or to leave on our flights as they were originally scheduled, so cursed by the goddess is Chicago and its weather.
This year you can find me at the reception thrown by the Coordinating Council for Women in History. Saturday evening I will be receiving at the soiree held by the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, an organization that is soon to be called something else (add Transgender and stir), but for now look for CLGH on the program. However, I won’t get to wander ’round the book exhibit or the convention as much as I like to because over the course of three days I will be locked in a room with a jury of my peers…
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