Category Archives: the Progress of the Radical

February 17, 2013, 1:51 pm

President-Palooza Sunday With Tenured Radical

It’s been a robust week at Tenured Radical: the stats just came in, and we topped 16,000 hits for the first time ever. Some of them weren’t very nice, it’s true, but nevertheless you came to this site from all over the world to watch the verbiage fly. Thousands of lurkers got an eye full of academia at its finest. So with that, let’s begin our President’s Day Celebration!

Tenured Radical Live — with a President! Didn’t know I was a Friend of Bill, didja? I’m talking Wisco historian Bill Cronon, that is. The Presidential Plenary from the American Historical Association — with me, (now past) President William Cronon, Edward Ayers (also a university president), Mary Louise Roberts, Nico Pfund and Michael Pollan — is now up! It cannot be embedded, but you can go here to see it on CSPAN-3. Upon…

December 31, 2012, 11:25 am

Tenured Radical’s New Media: Best Discoveries of 2012

By Claire Potter

How do other bloggers keep up the page and still find time to read and watch new stuff? How do they even manage to read the newspaper every day — and if they do, how do they find time to read anything else? And if they read, how do they find time to watch TV?

This year, I did take Facebook off my iPhone: that saved about an hour a day. I’m going to take it off my iPad in 2013.

With this caveat about how much I miss in our media-rich environment, I offer you my best discoveries of last year. Remember, to make the Radical’s “Best of” media list, you don’t have to be new — just new to me. You cannot, however, win a prize if you are my friend (which, for example, would rule out awarding best blog relaunch to Madwoman with a Laptop, so we are leaving that crown vacant this year, or best #ASA2012 panel to Historiann, Madwoman, GayProf, Tenured Radical, and The Woman Formerly Known as…

November 12, 2012, 1:37 pm

Publishing Rocks, Doesn’t It?

By Claire Potter

If Marx were alive, I know he would publish in Renee Romano & my series at the University of Georgia Press

In honor of University Press Week, your very own Tenured Radical represents the University of Georgia Press with “Small is Better: Why University Presses Are Sustainable Presses.”

For the complete schedule of the University Press Blog Tour, go here.

Enjoy.

April 23, 2012, 3:26 pm

OAH Roundup: Meating and Greeting in the Beer City

By Claire Potter

"Well, I got a proposal but it's still pretty durn rough."

The Organization of American Historians meeting, from whence I last posted, is at the absolutely worst time of year. I always begin the following week feeling less like a teacher than like a circus performer shot out of a cannon. So why is it that I also enjoy the OAH more than any other academic meeting? Here are some thoughts on that topic.

Location, location, location. This year’s hotspot, Milwaukee, was a mystery pick. I don’t know anyone in the East who wasn’t groaning about making this trip. Two big problems emerged during the planning phase for those of us who don’t have access to an airline hub: expensive fares and the lack of direct flights. And then — what’s in Milwaukee? Why did they pick it? No one knew. Friends would say he…

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…

July 29, 2011, 1:16 pm

Tenured Folk: Is It Safe To Go Back On The Job Market?

By Claire Potter

Are you chum and the job market the Big White One?

In the case of the Tenured Radical, I think we can say: most definitely yes. After two years on the job market, I recently accepted an offer of a tenured faculty position at rank. While I have not yet entirely digested the experience, I have a few reflections on it in the event that you too are thinking about going on the market as a senior person.

I know, I know. All of my advice is supposed to be for the nontenured or the jobless. But senior people have dreams too, don’t they? So after years of telling other people what to do, I put some of my own advice into practice.

(more…)

January 30, 2011, 7:47 pm

If A Student Essay Falls In The Woods And No One Is There To Read It, Does Anyone Care?

By Claire Potter

They’re B-A-A-A-a-a-ck!

A while back, I assigned two papers in one of my classes. In the first, I gave a straightforward “assignment” that asked students to think more deeply about the reading they had done up to that point and use what they had learned to analyze a primary document. In the scale of things, this is a standard history assignment. I gave the class three documents to choose from, and awaited the papers. When I began to read them, one thought came to mind:

“GAAAAH!”

Now, let me emphasize: they weren’t bad papers. Many of them were A-worthy; only a few received grades thought ought to have been worrisome to the recipients. And yet, as I paged thorugh them, I dreaded grading them. Why? They were dull.

Subsequently, I did a little informal research among the students, and most of them admitted that they, had been uninspired and uncertain about the point of the paper. …

January 2, 2011, 3:47 pm

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

By Claire Potter

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 …

September 3, 2010, 9:10 pm

The Best Laid Plans; Or, Waiting for Earl

By Claire Potter

We were going to go to the beach for Labor Day weekend but have decided not to drive into the hurricane zone after all. Although Shoreline will get the edge of the system, meriting Tropical Storm status unless something changes, our Back To School destination was (is) about twenty five miles to the west of where Earl is destined to pass tomorrow afternoon. Everyone is talking about Bob, a Category 2 hurricane which, 19 years ago, took out power lines and trees from Long Island to Hartford, killed eighteen people and caused almost $3 billion in damage. At last report, although very wide, Earl had been downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane. It’s nothing to fool around with, and it will hammer eastern Massachusetts — but, although we are battening down the lawn furniture, we should have less trouble here.

That same 19 years ago, the Radicals were in the last two weeks of a summer-long…

July 15, 2010, 8:46 am

Well If It Ain’t Vacation: Tenured Radical Hits The Road

By Claire Potter

“But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

(Don’t worry: we’ll be posting from the lake in northern Minnesota.)