I am moved to address this question because I stumbled upon a blog post written by a student I used to know.  I am not going to comment on the specifics of this case because I know absolutely nothing about it beyond what is alleged in the post.  But I do know that I have heard this story more than once, and it sounds familiar.  I also know that it is routine on college campuses to remand charges of sexual assault and sexual/racial/gender harassment made against faculty to secret administrative processes which have little or no legal standing except in the (important) sense that institutions must act on violations of their own rules.  What is too often the case is that the person harmed by a faculty member is asked, and agrees, to keep the matter in confidence in exchange for the faculty member being disciplined.

Can such a promise be enforced? Sometimes.  For example, I have known some situations in which the promise of confidentiality by the harmed person has been obtained in exchange for the institution voluntarily paying cash damages.  In the event of a tenure case that is irreparably fouled by some kind of prejudice or prejudicial behavior, the person who has had hir life turned upside down has a good reason to keep that promise:  a paid year, or a chunk of cash, that makes a reasonable period of transition away from an institution possible would have to be returned if the agreement were to be breached.

But in the vast majority of cases in which harassment or assault is alleged, people who have been harmed by faculty members agree to confidential university proceedings and continued silence in the matter in exchange for the assurance that the university will “do the right thing.”  We probably don’t hear about, or from, the people for whom this exchange works out.  However, in many cases it does not work out, and let me tell you:  in my experience people who are ultimately accused of inappropriate, harassing or prejudicial acts are usually repeat offenders whose behaviors are well-known to other faculty and to administrators. Students, in particular, often assume that the faculty member in question will be acknowledged by the institution as a danger to all students and, as a consequence, fired.

But it is very rare that this is the case. Although the faculty member may be called on the carpet and shamed in some way, s/he usually ends up back in the classroom, and very soon.  That person may even agree with the facts of the case as alleged by the accuser, but be adamant that s/he has done nothing wrong, university regulations are meddlesome and overprotective, and that no real harm occurred. So the student is now faced with the quandary of how to deal with the fact that there has been no visible discipline, the faculty member’s continued presence on campus, and the injunction to never speak about the matter again. To anyone.

I have argued for some time that most people are not adequately prepared for the possibility that they will be harmed in some way on a college or university campus. Who includes in a college or grad school to-do list: “Think seriously about how to respond if a professor/senior colleague makes unwelcome advances”? The vast majority of students who make it to a four-year college or university have succeeded at school and tend to assume that administrators have their best interests in mind because they have rarely or never experienced anything else.

Wrong -o. Administrators are not in charge of justice or empathy, as anyone in the vocational track at your high school might have told you.  They protect the best interests of the institution, as they understand them, and will do a great deal to silence people who threaten a school’s reputation.  This includes throwing individual students and faculty who have turned into walking lawsuits under the bus and covering up faculty misbehavior many times over.  And it does not include the highly public process of breaking faculty tenure to get a creepy jerk, chronic groper or bigot off campus.

So here is what you need to ask when you are making a charge of this kind and before you agree to a confidential internal investigation:

• Do I have the right to be represented by an attorney? The answer is yes.  No university can strip you of your right to an attorney, and administrators are not released from their legal obligation to enforce institutional codes of behavior and/or report crimes just because you want an attorney.  If the answer to this question is no, or the people you are talking to give you elaborate reasons why it will be worse for you to have an attorney present, you know the fix is in.
• Will I receive a copy of the full report of the investigation of this incident, including a transcript of my original complaint and the faculty member’s defense? The answer to this question should be yes.
• Will evidence of my complaint, if it is found to be credible and if the faculty member is not terminated, be preserved in the faculty member’s permanent institutional record? The answer to this question should be yes.
• Will the faculty member be fired if my claim is found credible? What are the possible sanctions my harasser might be subject to, and under what conditions?
• How will the institution protect me from further contact with this person, in the event that s/he is not terminated? While there is no correct answer to this question, you need to thimk about whether this matters to you and what you might require.
• In the event that my harasser claims that I am perjuring myself, or that I misunderstood the event(s) in question, by what procedure does the university plan to resolve the discrepancy in our accounts of this matter?
• Am I entitled to an advocate drawn from the tenured faculty, who is trained in these matters, to serve as an advisor whose sole responsibility is my well-being? The answer to this question should be yes.

These are all very simple questions:  you should ask them, and receive straightforward (written!) answers, before you agree to a confidential process that might make it harder to seek redress in the courts or achieve a better outcome internally.

This is what always stuns me: that university officials who are all about confidentiality assume that serious accusations will not take on a life of their own, and have not done so already. People who have been harmed talk to their friends, often prior to reporting harassment claims (it is not infrequently the friends who persuade people who have been harmed to act.) Students and faculty always know who the problem faculty are already – so why be so heavy handed about the secrecy? Furthermore, if someone is being falsely accused, administrative secrecy makes the accusation seem true — if not in whole, in part, and the false accusation taints the faculty member’s reputation forever.

But the other thing that stuns me is that students, in particular, think that if they don’t keep their mouths shut, the college or university can reach out and do more damage than has been done already. You can’t be expelled for demanding a public hearing for something that you could take to the police.  Sexual, gender and racial harassment is a violation of your civil rights. No university administrator can change that — but they can undermine your self-confidence that you have rights when they pretend to be sympathetic and then hang you out to dry.

So the next time you, or someone like you, is being asked to sign away those rights in exchange for reassurance that the person in question will be “dealt with appropriately”? Don’t do it.

Today’s guest blogger is Margot D. Weiss, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT. She is the author of 2012 Lambda Award finalist Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke, 2011.)

Last month, Newsweek published a cover story by Katie Roiphe with the headline “The Fantasy Life of Working Women: Why Surrender is a Feminist Dream.” The story purports to account for the run-away success of domination/submission narratives, taking E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey as a case in point. James’s book – the first in a trilogy of erotic novels – is Twilight fan fiction turned New York Times bestseller with movie rights. Banned in several public libraries, it’s a tale of the “dark desires” sparked by the romance between college student Anastasia Steele and businessman Christian Grey. The book is a BDSM-themed Cinderella story.

In her essay, Roiphe suggests that there is a correlation between women’s rising economic power and an increase in their fantasies of submission. While some have dismissed Roiphe’s story as Newsweek’s version of trolling, many sex-positive feminists took to the blogosphere to right her many wrongs. I will leave to Roiphe’s critics the question of whether there is an increase in these fantasies, her specious correlation, her heteronormativity, and what women’s new “empowerment” might look like. I will also refrain from summarizing the research on why women read romance novels (but see Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, for one) and on how popular representations of BDSM often offer titillation without challenging a heteronormative narrative (as in the film Secretary).

Instead, I want to use the flurry of sex-positive feminist critiques of Roiphe’s story to reflect on the current impasse in the debate between sex-positive and sex-negative, or pro-BDSM and anti-BDSM, feminism. This debate is due for an overhaul, and I hope that recasting it might clear a path toward a more productive discussion about the feminist politics of desire.

While a few have picked up on Roiphe’s suggestion that BDSM (especially submission or masochism) might function as a pleasurable escape from the demands of contemporary life – and this is a decades-old debate in BDSM scholarship – most feminist bloggers have taken issue with Roiphe’s take on feminists. Roiphe writes:

feminists have long been perplexed by our continuing investment in this fantasy, the residual desire to be controlled or dominated in the romantic sphere. They are on the record as appalled at how many strong, successful, independent women are caught up in elaborate fantasies of submission…it is perhaps inconvenient for feminism that the erotic imagination does not submit to politics.

In response, bloggers have argued that feminism is about choice: “It is unclear which rock Roiphe is living under since ‘a woman getting what she wants sexually is very feminist,’” writes Shira Tarrant, quoting Shawna Kenney on Alternet. Or, as Dana Goldstein writes, “asking for what you want in bed is a feminist political act.”

Sex-positive feminism, for these commentators, is about the right to pursue sexual pleasure, about an individual’s ability to ask for and get whatever it is she wants. And BDSM’s practices of negotiation, of direct conversation about sexual likes and dislikes, and of self-exploration are empowering for many – perhaps especially for women (as a post on Feminists For Choice argues). But as an anthropologist and a queer studies scholar who has learned more than a little from the philosopher Michel Foucault, I am wary of the claim that embracing our inner sexual desires is a sure path to liberation. And, as a queer and materialist feminist, I worry about how these debates pare down politics to sexual choices. This seems to me a liberal understanding, where our fantasies and desire are private, ours alone to discover and nurture, and detached from a social or political world. Is that really all we might say about feminist sexual politics?

In the same essay, Goldstein writes that “more women than men may tend toward submission—in part because Western culture fetishizes male strength and female fragility.” Although there are plenty of submissive men in BDSM communities (pansexual, straight, and queer), I think she is gesturing toward a crucial, and often missed, point: BDSM, like all sexualities, is a product of our social environment, not an age-old, unchanging orientation. Our desires reflect and refract – even when they rework – our social relationships and historical locations. This does not mean that women are necessarily submissive and men dominant. But it does mean that gendered relations of power structure our sexual desires – even in consensual BDSM spaces (where sexist assumptions about manly dominance and feminine submission remain depressingly common).

That our sexual desires are based in our social world sounds simple until we are asked to consider the politics of those desires. This was, of course, the central issue in the 1970s and 1980s feminist sex wars – radical feminists roundly critiqued BDSM as patriarchal, racist, and imperialist, while sex-radical feminists like those in Samois understood it as a stigmatized sexual practice. But we do not have to argue that BDSM is the same as patriarchy or racism to see that our sexual desires are forged within our social world – a world of inequality, of non-consensual power. So, when we analyze a fantasy rape scene, for example, we might say that it enables us to explore our fears of rape, or that it can challenge or even dismantle rape culture. But we cannot say that rape fantasies are “just fantasies” as though this means that they are disconnected from real-world violence and sexualized gender oppression.

This point is not terribly fashionable, and in making it one runs the risk of being accused of a prudish sex-negativity that, in its worst form, disempowers women. Take, for example, Maya Dusenbery’s feministing essay. Chastising Roiphe for claiming that feminists are “perplexed” or “appalled” by BDSM fantasies, Dusenbery writes, “I am in no way surprised that many women, who have been socialized in a culture in which male sexuality is linked to domination and in which women are taught their sexual power comes from being wanted, have fantasies of submission.” Dusenbery is criticized for that line by a reader, who suspects that this amounts to “internalized patriarchy.” She responds:

I see your point, and that’s definitely not what I meant to imply! Basically, I think that everyone’s sexuality is mediated by their socialization. Generally, like on the broad cultural level, I do think that the fact that more women than men tend to have submission fantasies (even those that don’t identify as submissives) is related to the way we’re socialized to understand sexuality. Would you disagree with that? When it comes to actual individual women, I would absolutely never say that submissive desires are because of internalized patriarchy. I don’t believe that at all. As I said later in the piece, I think people–women and men–like submission because it’s sexy.

The stigmatization of women’s sexuality and the pathologization of BDSM together make Dusenbery’s cultural point a crucial one: it is not that some women are victims, deviant, or damaged (as her later interview with Natalie Zina Walschots makes clear). But in this case, the need to defend BDSM short-circuits a discussion, an analysis, and a real consideration of the politics of our sexual desires: submission is sexy because it’s sexy.

Debates about BDSM often rapidly devolve in this way. Criticisms of BDSM’s politics are countered with platitudes about how a fantasy is just a fantasy – and let’s just leave it at that. But leaving it there leaves out any analysis of the social or historical conditions for an individual’s desire, just as it leaves out the rich and complex discussions of feminism and power within BDSM communities. And so instead of asking why individuals get off on submission fantasies – or defending our right to do so – I think we need to start elsewhere.

We might ask why we are encouraged to imagine our sexuality – our desires, practices, and fantasies – as private, detached from and irrelevant to our shared social world (as I try to do by theorizing sexuality and neoliberalism in my book Techniques of Pleasure). We might try to create sexual spaces where oppression is challenged, alongside the many BDSM bloggers, writers, speakers, community organizers, and cultural critics already having a far more complex conversation about desire and its politics.

Whatever we do, we need to think a bit harder about the connections between our desires and our social world. We need to challenge the known-in-advance political claims of both sides of this debate, where BDSM is from the start either feminist (because it gives one the freedom to choose one’s sexuality) or oppressive (because it reenacts patriarchal domination). And we need to admit that we do not already know the politics of our desires – a recognition that might point to new paths, new questions, and new  politics.

Is perfect public speaking really best?

I have received a lot of thoughtful reactions to the TEDx talk posted below, not only in the comments section, but in private communications as well.  Responding to one new colleague who wrote me a gracious note, I admitted that I was a little self-conscious about the “ums” and “ahs” that punctuate my performance.

The more I have participated in visual and aural media as a scholar, the harder I have worked to eliminate speech quirks that I find distracting and amateurish.  Everything is now memorialized on line, and anything not said well on the first take is recorded forever.  Some of my performances sound embarrassingly unpolished to my own ear, and are discouragingly unlike the confident, fluent PBS Newshour talking head that I long to be.  As I listen to myself, too often these non-verbal punctuations begin to sound like a drumbeat, causing me to lose track of anything intelligent I had to say while I wait for the next embarrassing “um”: “Um (blah, blah, blah); um (blah, blah, blah); um….”

In response to this revealing moment of self-criticism, my colleague kindly sent me a link to this post from the research news site Futurity.  Written by University of Illinois communications dude Steve McGaughey, “Don’t Ditch the ‘Ums’. Listeners Need Them” (January 24 2012) argues that “Speakers should think twice before eliminating the ‘ums,’ ‘uhs,’ and other speech fillers from their message if they want listeners to recall what was said.”  According to researchers Scott H. Fraundorf and Duane G. Watson at UI’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, listeners had better recall of stories delivered by speakers who ummed, ahhed and coughed (verbal punctuation known in the trade as “disfluencies”) than those by speakers who delivered the same story in perfectly polished form.  While the findings are still speculative, Fraundorf and Watson hypothesize that disfluencies cause listeners to pay closer attention to unfamiliar material: hence, audiences recalled and understood what I have just characterized as more flawed performances better.

This makes me feel better, but still dissatisfied, perhaps because of an ingrained class bias that causes me to view those “ums” as uneducated, a sign of confusion or a search for the right word (which frankly, sometimes they are.) Would something else work better?  A brief pause — in other words, a silence not filled by a non-verbal utterance — might be effective at least part of the time, as would a facial expression or hand gesture.  And yet, ought the “ums” and “ahs” to be eliminated entirely?  Does anyone notice them but me?

Readers — what do you hear when you listen to yourself?

You are sleepy...you are sleepy...you are sleepy....you want to buy this book.....

Thursday, May 3, 2012, 6:00 p.m.
The New School, 66 West 12th Street, room 510, NYC

Come one, come all, to meet Tenured Radical, with history friends David Rosner (Columbia), David Greenberg (Rutgers), and Gail Drakes (NYU) at the New School for Public Engagement tomorrow evening.  Got a recent history manuscript you are shilling? Unfortunately, my co-editor Renee Romano will not be there, however Derek Krissoff, our editor from the University of Georgia Press, will be in the house.

And if you haven’t got your copy of the book yet, it will be for sale on site.  Description below the jump:

How does writing about the recent past differ from history as it is normally understood? Join us for a panel discussion celebrating a new collection of essays which explore the challenges and pleasures of writing contemporary American history. Three contributors to Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards will speak about what is emerging as a new field of history, with its own practices and pleasures.

Moderated by David Rosner, Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and History at Columbia University, panelists will include:

Claire Bond Potter, co-editor of Doing Recent History and visiting professor of History at The New School

David Greenberg, associate professor of History, Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University and the author of Nixon’s Shadow: History of an Image (2003)

Gail Drakes, associate faculty at New York University’s Gallatin School.

Sponsored by the Department of Social Sciences, School of Undergraduate Studies, at The New School for Public Engagement.

Every time the state of Florida expresses its contempt for education you wonder how things get worse for students in that state.  But they can. Although Education Week gave the state high marks for standards, assessment and accountability, and good marks for equity, two big F’s stand out: funding and college readiness. However Education Week forgot what the F in Florida education really stands for:  football.

Steven Salzburg at Forbes reported last week that the University of Florida flagship plans to save a cool $1.4 million by cutting its computer science department. (Hat tip to Comrade PhysioProffe.) As Salzburg pointed out, this is a strange way for the state to prepare students for the demands of a 21st century technology and information economy.  ”The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science,” he writes, and is “cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.” If this doesn’t eliminate tenured faculty, it certainly encourages those who can get jobs elsewhere to do so since their capacity to do advanced research has been reduced to that of a faculty member at a mid-level liberal arts college. And while the graduate program has not been formally eliminated, top graduate students don’t come to Ph.D. programs where they would be expected to take on around $100K of debt for a degree that other universities would be happy to pay them to earn.

Simultaneously, this flagship state University will be training scads of students for well-paid employment in professional sports by dumping another $2 million into its football program. “The increase alone would offset the savings supposedly gained by cutting computer science,” Salzburg notes.

Experts in the matter of athletic programs have skooled Salzberg since the original post that these two budgets are entirely separate. Cuts on the academic side, they argue, have nothing to do with a budget increase for the football program.  Janine Sikes, of the University of Florida’s public relations office, responds huffily here that computer science is not being eliminated, only dismantled and distributed to other departments. The vast majority of savings come from eliminating teaching assistantships and the assignment of greater teaching duties to welfare queens faculty. I’m not against professors teaching a fair load, although Sikes is vague about how teaching duties are currently assigned, and how course relief is distributed to faculty under the current system. But Sikes’ clarifications don’t change the analysis, at least on the surface of things: teaching assistants are graduate students, graduate programs — where research is done — require them to staff large introductory classes where undergraduates need to have instructional help available to them one on one or in small groups.  So if this decision stands, computer science faculty who no longer have any support to do the research that provides a structure for innovative undergraduate teaching will vote with their feet.

I suppose it is irrelevant that, unlike the Florida Gators football team (whose members accrued 251 traffic violations last year and have developed a disturbing record of violent criminal behavior since Urban Meyer was hired to turn the program around), the computer science kids are talented and accomplished. Out of 1500 programming teams around the globe and 227 in the United States assembled to compete against each other recently, UF’s “Joe Thuemler, Jason Fisher, and Cheran Wu finished 1st in North America and 13th in the world,” according to the department website.

In contrast, Gator football went 7-6 last year, and was third in the SEC. The team may start its season without star tight end A.C. Leonard, who has just rejoined the team after an arrest for assaulting his girlfriend.  Leonard, according to the victim,”grabbed her by her hair and dragged her toward the front door, ripping out chunks of her hair and breaking a necklace in the process. The woman said Leonard then grabbed her by both feet, dragged her out of the apartment and locked the door[.]” Sweet.

If I were provost, would put my taxpayer money on the computer geeks.

But wait, let’s be fair. We may discover that the extra $2 million for football has come from a television contract or a private donor, since we are reassured that these are entirely separate budget lines.  But if this is the case, why do we still assume that high-profile athletic programs and college education still have any relationship to each other? Why does the football program claim to represent a university at all? And why pretend that the revenues accrued from BCS football benefit education? Because they don’t.  In fact, they seem to be detracting attention from the accomplishments of academic departments.

Over the weekend, as I mulled the Thomas Pynchon novel that big-time college athletics have become, it occurred to me to wonder whether it might not even up the playing field a little bit if football programs were evaluated in the ways academic departments are in today’s accountability culture. Here’s a little sketch of what that would look like:

• Football programs would be asked to track how the training they deliver translates — not just to college degrees — but to actual jobs that students are hired for after they leave college. According to Business Insider, 2% of NCAA baseball players go pro, and that’s as good as it gets for any sport.  We might add to that dismal figure that, perhaps because of their lack of exposure to education, a significant number of men who do have a chance at a successful professional career as athletes go broke. But if there are claims to be made for the importance of football to a young person’s education, how might those be documented?
• Football programs would be asked to account for how the financial aid they spend translates into college degrees and into careers.
• Football programs would be asked to account for how many students who enter the University of Florida intending to play football are coached successfully enough that they make the traveling squad. Let’s compare the lack of attention to this issue to the current, and entirely justified, attention to why 40% of students who enter college intending to major in a STEM field drop science altogether. What is the attrition rate for football? And how many of those laddies suited up for home games (you will see as many as 125 of them on the sidelines, and between 40 and 50 fewer for away games) are walk-ons who never see playing time but need to be equipped and coached at university expense all the same?
• Football programs, like history departments, would be judged on how many student-athletes have the resources available to them to graduate with the BA in four years. Currently the NCAA allows five years of athletic financial aid, which allows players to lighten their academic load and — crucial for football — a redshirt year during which the player can undergo intensive training and learn the playbook. Do history majors have access to five years of full aid? Enquiring minds want to know.
• Football programs would have a mission statement, a set of criteria for excellence, and a rubric for measuring whether they have met their goals.
• Football programs would be reviewed by an outside panel of experts regularly. Academic departments typically do a self-study followed by an outside review on a regular basis:  Amherst College legislation requires this every ten years, Princeton every 5-7 years. Here are Grinnell College’s guidelines for review.  If football programs are this important to universities, why is there no expectation that they will meet rigorous standards of review?

Readers, what other forms of scrutiny to which academic programs are held might usefully be applied to football?

JFK and JFK, Jr. in the Oval Office (AP Photo/Look Magazine, Stanley Tretick)

Christina Haag, Come to the Edge: A Memoir (New York:  Spiegel & Grau, 2011).

Mimi Alford, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair With President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath (New York: Random House, 2012).

It will be no surprise to even the uneducated reader that the Kennedy family occupies an entire cultural market niche all by itself.  The Library of Congress lists over 400 John F. Kennedy items in its holdings. You can add to this number: books by and about Bobby, Ted and the other siblings; about the generations that preceded the three political brothers; about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her children (there are over 300 LOC items about John Jr. and 93 by and about the far more productive and well-educated Caroline; about the assassinations of and conspiracy theories concerning Jack and Bobby.

In addition to the books, there are countless movies and made for TV dramas. The literature about Planet Kennedy ranges from serious literary and scholarly work to base, degrading, and money-grubbing books that can be purchased for $22.95 in the store and, like taking a new car off the lot, are worth  about one cent online as you hit the sidewalk with them.

Mimi Alford’s Once Upon a Secret and Christina Haag’s Come to the Edge fall somewhere on the high end of the “tales told out of school” subgenre of Kennedy books. Both were either very well-written to begin with or have been expertly edited, and each woman has an instinct for a good story. However they entered women’s history at distinctly different moments. Haag, an actress who has had a better than modest career on stage, television and film, shared JFK Jr.’s private school world in the 1970s and seems to have come within a hair of being the Mrs. John Kennedy who was killed when John lost control of his plane near Martha’s Vineyard in July 1999. Alford, on the other hand, met President Kennedy as a White House press intern in 1961 and was one of many women to have had a not-so-secret affair with him. Recruited out of the secretarial pool by White House aide and pimp-in-chief Kenny O’Donnell at the age of nineteen, Alford continued to work as an intern while being flown around the country to have sex with JFK, in the White House and elsewhere, for almost two years.

Alford and Haag also have cross-generational similarities that point to how one got close enough to a member of this political clan to end up as a lover (or in Alford’s case, a friend with benefits.)  Each came from a family that was not as wealthy and powerful as the Kennedy clan, but was upper class all the same. They both entered the Kennedy orbit through private school networks. Haag was part of a clique of New York kids who clustered around young John and viewed themselves as a protective social cushion for him. This group of friends became a kind of privileged entourage as he proceeded to prep school, Brown University, law school and New York high society.  Shrewd about the dangers attendant to becoming involved with someone as troubled and charismatic as JFK Jr., Haag was at least as focused on her own career as she was on becoming the next Mrs. Kennedy. This may actually have taken her out of the bridal derby. Jackie — who kept her son on the shortest possible leash and would call Conrans to come and decorate whatever apartment John was living in — also had very formed ideas about what kind of a wife her son should have as he took his place in the public world.

It’s not really clear in the book why the relationship fell apart: this leads me to propose the theory that Jackie, while she came to embrace Haag, ultimately found an ambitious actress unsuitable as a Kennedy wife.  But Haag alludes to serial infidelities, narcissism, temper tantrums and John’s general lack of seriousness about adult life that must have caused her to doubt him.  Haag tells several particularly disturbing stories about John’s penchant for taking physical risks that sets the stage for that final flight to the Vineyard, under conditions for which he was not yet licensed or properly trained. After one incident, in which John nearly killed Haag in a kayak twice on the same day, he “paced the beach muttering something, his eyes wide and to the ground.`Don’t tell Mummy, don’t tell Mummy,’ he repeated like a mantra to no one.”(208)

Alford, several generations older, was far less assertive than Haag, and less able to take care of herself when things got ugly. Enchanted by the Camelot moment, she seems to have drifted into JFK’s bed with eyes both open and shut.  Unlike Haag, she also never planned on becoming Kennedy’s wife, since he already had one. Instead, she lived parallel lives for the duration of the affair, and was shuffled off to Buffalo when she told JFK she had become engaged.

A post-feminist woman, Haag had the advantage of being sexually sophisticated, self-confident and focused on her own career: she appears to have rebuffed a romance with John Jr. several times, insisting that they both formally end relationships with other people before embarking on their own romance. In contrast, Alford drifted naively into an affair with a much older man that was simultaneously exciting and isolating. A visit to the White House facilitated by Miss Porter’s School, also Jacqueline Bouvier’s alma mater, led Alford to a brief encounter with the President. This was followed by an invitation to become a summer intern in the press office, which in turn led to a dip in the pool, a cocktail, a tour of the family quarters and losing her virginity on Jackie’s bed.  It appears that JFK saw Miss Porter’s as a kind of farm team for pretty, well brought-up girls who could be recruited into a discreet, informal, preppy harem. This meant that someone, who was far too well-bred to tell and saw boffing the President as an opportunity not to be missed, was always available for a quickie. The Miss Porter’s alumnae club also included a pair of friends known as Fiddle and Faddle who I had thought were a figment of novelist Jed Mercurio’s imagination.

Apparently not.

In contrast to presidential mistresses like Marilyn Monroe, or Monica Lewinsky, these women were well brought-up and knew never to step out of line when given instructions by a man.  ”In all our time together,” Alford writes, “it never once occurred to me to call him Jack.  Even in our most intimate moments I called him Mr. President….To do otherwise would seem inappropriate.” (77)  Alford would be picked up by an aide, either at the office, her college dorm or in the hotel room where she was stashed on a Presidential trip, and transported to the President for the sole purpose of sexual intercourse. “I don’t remember the President ever kissing me,” she writes, “not hello, goodbye, not even during sex.  Instead, he greeted me with a cheery hello, seeming almost surprised that I was at the door.” (81)

Sounds fun, doesn’t it? What did JFK think he was doing? What would he have said about it if asked? Enquiring minds want to know. Mercurio’s fictional Kennedy believes he can control the symptoms of Addison’s disease — nausea, cramping, bloating, and back pain among others — through frequent ejaculation.  Periodically, he abstains from his normal activities, growing more and more ill until he returns to his regime of sex therapy.

More interesting than the question of what JFK thought he was doing is what this gaggle of sexually liberated but pre-feminist young women thought they were doing.  Passing Fiddle at her desk one day, Jackie noted to a reporter from Paris Match, in French: “This is the girl who is sleeping with my husband.” Did she use the word “sleeping” or something cruder? Did she say “girl” or “slut”? And do we not believe that Fiddle’s Miss Porter’s French was good enough to know exactly what was being said, whatever it was? Only in retrospect does Alford realize that there was a reason why Jackie was rarely in residence at the Frat White House, and virtually never seen in the West Wing.

And yet, this is where Alford’s book is more interesting than I thought it would be.  She freely admits that she had no idea, really, what she was doing. She had been raised, not to choose, but to be chosen — and she had been chosen by the most powerful man in the world. Intoxicated, she pretty much followed directions after that, including fellating Kenny O’Donnell as JFK floated next to them in the pool.  She claims that she later refused similar instructions aimed at helping brother Ted “relax” and that this refusal was “the moment that our relationship truly began to wind down.” (124)

Controlling information about the affair, first on Presidential orders and then at the command of a shamed and enraged man who learned that his fiancee had been shtupping the President throughout their courtship and engagement, is the central theme of Once Upon a Secret.  Alford was finally “outed” in 2003, after her marriage — which began with her husband raping her following the confession — had collapsed. Historian Robert Dallek had dropped a hairpin in a comprehensive biography in that year, and in May Alford came home to find a diligent reporter camped on her doorstep. The memoir was her way to seize control of her own story, and I think she did.

It is anyone’s guess why Haag wrote her book. While Come to the Edge is a good read, it seems only to raise old questions about JFK Jr.:  was he really any more than a charming, handsome, well-brought up ne’er do well with a tragic past and an uncertain future? Although he went to good schools, he took little advantage of them: since he wasn’t a star athlete, taking a post-graduate year at prep school means that his grades were so bad that even being a Kennedy couldn’t get him into Brown without a little penance. There are numerous warning signs in the book (other than the fact that we know from the beginning that Haag and Kennedy never marry) that John’s life is a disaster waiting to happen. For example, after Haag receives Jackie’s stamp of approval, John reports that his mother had lectured him that it was now time for him to “be a man….to grow up, to take charge and protect me.” (140) You’ve got to wonder how worried Jackie must have been about a self-destructiveness and promiscuity that was all too familiar to her, coupled with the charm and good looks that meant no one ever said no to him.

Of the two books, Once Upon A Secret raises the most interesting questions, and not because it is about la vie Kennedy. These questions are about sex and power, and they are conveyed through a devastating portrait of a privileged woman so trapped by class expectations and compulsory heterosexuality that she had no reference point for making her own choices in a White House transformed by the sexual revolution.

Once Upon a Secret also left me thinking that there is a category somewhere in between sexual consent and sexual harassment, as we currently understand these concepts, that no one talks about to this day. Alford had only a vague sense of her own agency, but she wasn’t powerless either. She was very aware of Jackie as a person, but failed to be aware that she was complicit in a dynamic that must have caused the First Lady great pain and embarrassment. Instead, at the time, she rewrote her affair as some version of national service: one of the weirdest moments in the story is when Mimi is flown down from college to offer the President needed support during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

OK, I’ll say it, even though she doesn’t: he treated her like a whore. Alford’s memoir is about more than this, however. It is about the consequences of being treated like a whore, about being persuaded by her husband that she was damaged goods because of it, and her tenacious struggle to become a person who could participate in real intimacy decades later.  Telling her secret (particularly to her daughters, who rallied to her support) and writing the memoir has been part of a healing process that has led Alford to a second, and happier, marriage. ”I am no longer the sheltered nineteen-year-old Mimi Beardsley, who entered a relationship with the most powerful man in the world,” she writes. “Nor am I the scared, emotionally crippled Mimi Fahnstock who spent a lifetime living with and struggling to overcome, the consequences of that relationship.” (9) In fact, when you consider the emotional damage JFK did to a White House intern, you wonder if the story Haag has to tell in Come to the Edge could not have been even a little different if the President had been a better husband himself.

JFK could not have cared less about Alford, although she makes a point of it that he was perfectly nice to her. But the open secret of the President’s compulsive f^cking suggests a radiating circle of contempt for others, including his family. An analysis of this contempt might usefully be turned to thinking about the similar and more ordinary abuses of  power that are enacted through sex, gender and privilege in our own institutions.

"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 helpfully: “Beer?” as we conferenceteers grumpily stuffed clothes and unmarked student papers into a carry on, luggage which would subsequently be seized by airlines like Delta that only fly tiny little planes into MKE.

Travel in and out of Milwaukee was awful from beginning to end, although the trip home was the worst.  The connection out of Cincinnati was overbooked, and an Oligarch University colleague and I were instructed to wait while they looked for volunteers to take a later flight.  At a certain point, the woman at the desk looked at us and said, “What are you doing here?” as if she suspected us of having established an Occupy encampment at her gate. It turned out they had found seats for us, but neglected to announce it.

The other problem is that small planes on short trips don’t fly very high, and on an overcast day that makes for a rocky passage.  At one point I went to the teeny bathroom at the back of the plane, and a mortified little boy came rushing out.  I entered and was momentarily confused at the public health disaster that confronted me until I realized that the poor child had lost his balance and had urinated all over the chamber as he bounced off the walls.

However, except for the part about getting there and back, I discovered that Milwaukee has many pleasures.  I would even venture to say that it is a delightful city, even if the conference center (like all others) is cavernous and cold.  I had three excellent dinners while I was in town, although the vegetarian options (for those inclined) were really limited. Meat, meat and more meat was the theme. Want a beer with that meat?  A buddy and I landed at a restaurant on Friday night in the Historic Third Ward where the bartender handed us a forty page beer menu.

Almost everyone I met in Milwaukee made me feel right at home.  However, for those graduate students out there who are supporting yourselves waiting tables, here’s some free advice: when you are working a table with two extraordinarily butch lesbians sitting at it, addressing them repeatedly as “ladies” is a poor choice (as in “Good evening, ladies;” “Can I get you something to drink ladies;” “How is everything, ladies?” and “Are you ready for a dessert menu ladies?”)  We have no idea who you are talking to.

My only truly weird dining experience (except for realizing at one bistro that the only vegetarian option was cheese and beer soup) was Thursday night. A friend and I — two white people actively in search of local red meat options — attempted to go to a five star barbecue restaurant and the (also white) cab driver refused to take us. “Is ghetto,” he kept growling in a thick European accent over our protests.  Although I encourage you not to generalize from this one experience, the only other place where a driver has refused to take me to a black neighborhood was Johannesburg.

The program. The OAH program is either consistently outstanding or, because it isn’t as sprawling as either the AHA or ASA programs, I have an easier time making decisions about what sessions I want to go to.  I would also say that the lack of business (particularly interviewing) and the lack of proximity to Christmukkah may free up time and good humor all around.  This year’s decision to buddy up with the National Council on Public History was inspired. It was particularly useful to those of us who are interested in the future and substance of employment for historians who work outside university walls and the status of public history within the tenure system.

Rarely do I attend more events on the program than I do at OAH, and this year was no exception. In addition to the roundtable and the panel I was on, I attended six other events over three days. It may be true that I simply prefer smaller meetings.  The Southern Historical Association and, most recently, the Policy History Association, have induced a kind of camaraderie that encourages interesting conversations among complete strangers.  I know it’s a good meeting when, at some point, I begin fantasizing about getting back to my desk.  That happened about two-thirds of the way through Alice Kessler-Harris’s outstanding presidential speech on Saturday afternoon, during which I temporarily satisfied the urge to work and listen at the same time by ordering her new biography of Lillian Hellman over my iPhone.

The Friday memorial for David Montgomery was well-structured, evocative and a community-building experience.  As one of my friends said afterwards, “What other conference can you go to where a session ends with a room full of tenured faculty holding hands, swaying, and singing Woody Guthrie’s ‘Union Maid’?”

It’s the conference where everyone knows your name.  You concentrate a lot of Americanists in one place and something good has to come from all that nationalism, right? I met a lot of people who I did not know before, and a great many of my old friends, across generations, were there. This included two former students, several former mentors, and a rather significant number of people from my graduate school cohort.  Things get even better when your editor and his staff goes to all kinds of lengths to get your book out in time for the meeting. Thank you University of Georgia Press!

(Have I given you an opportunity to purchase my new book yet?  Just checking.)

So congratulations to the program committee, and we’ll see you next year in San Francisco, where the waiters know who is – and is not – a lady.

Photo credit

I was sitting in the lobby of the Milwaukee Hilton and a civilian came up to me.  “Hey,” he said: “Have I seen you on the History Channel?”

“Uh, probably,” I said.  There are three different documentaries about crime in the 1930s that feature me as a talking head.  From time to time, someone makes the connection:  the working class family who lives across the street, a small child on the subway, and my all-time favorite, the men at the men’s shelter on Third Street in lower Manhattan. Because of this, I think the History Channel is one of the most popular enterprises ever created: not only do people love history, but I suspect that institutions – prisons, shelters, halfway houses – leave it on all the time because it is completely non-controversial.

“But you know what’s weird?” my new acquaintance said. “I’ve seen two or three other people in this hotel who I’ve seen on the History Channel and on PBS.  Is this a –history convention?”

Roger that.  Day One of the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting has just ended:  this Radical finished her day at Mo’s steakhouse with a former student, a filet mignon and an Absolut rocks.

After a rocky start (a 6 a.m. flight that required getting up at 4:00), it’s all good here in history land. The hotel is comfortable; coffee will be delivered in the morning; there seem to be an ample supply of restaurants three or four blocks away; there is no shopping to distract us; and the University of Georgia Press seems to have snagged an outstanding location at the front of the book exhibit where you can buy Renee Romano and my new edited collection, Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back. Of course, if you don’t want to carry it home, or you aren’t even in Milwaukee, you can always order it here.

Did you go to any panels, Radical?  Why yes, I did: because the National Council on Public History is meeting jointly with us, I attended a great round table on “Tenure and Promotion for the Publicly Engaged Historian.” I learned a lot, and here are the high points:

• When public history scholar-practitioners are reviewed for promotion, the difference between evaluating the person and evaluating the projects they have done is far more porous than when a conventional scholar’s written work is being reviewed.  The vast majority of senior scholars, used to reading footnotes,  don’t know how to peel away the layers of an exhibition or digital project to see the dense archival basis of the work. In fact, the three traditional categories – teaching, colleagueship and scholarship – can merge and blur when colleagues don’t know how to “read” or take seriously publicly engaged work.  Things can get even worse when the case leaves the department.
• Public historians are often hired by departments who genuinely want them, and who think civically engaged scholarship is valuable.  But because review processes are designed for books and articles, these candidates are not infrequently told by well-meaning colleagues to put off their public work until the book and articles are complete, or they actually have to do more:  mount exhibitions, websites and other tangible projects and write.
• Public history is collaborative, and collaboration is not a universal value in a field that celebrates the individual labor of the monograph.

I learned a lot of really good stuff too: Many of us aspire to collaborative, public work but we don’t really know how to do it.  I wondered how things might change for tenure-track public historians if, as they are “required” to produce conventional writing, every conventional historian were required to execute one public project prior to tenure.

Here’s a final note before I sink into the Hilton’s pillow top mattress.  Why are conferences in such soulless venues?  When were all these beige boxes built in the middle of cities? We seem fated as a profession to meet forevermore in hotels and conference centers that are linked by long passageways, complexes that require employees to be posted at various points to keep us from getting entirely lost in tunnels that all look the same.  A pair of roller skates would be ideal here, except that they would probably pick up a lot of fuzz from the carpets and eventually come to a grinding halt. The only thing that is intriguing about this one is that there is something called a “water park” right in the middle, which did not seem to be open today.  But I might check it out tomorrow.

Challenge:  there is a button at the top of one escalator that says “press for a polka.”  Do it.  I double dog dare you.

Want to see the Radical? Tomorrow at 1:30 I will be on a roundtable with David Chang, Albert Camarillo, William Chafe and Gail Dubrow called “Politics, Economics and the Future of the Profession,” 101-A, Frontier Airlines Convention Center.  Be there or be square.

First of all, there’s nothing I like better than some good snark, but I can’t understand why B.R. Myers at The Atlantic felt it was necessary to do a full tilt trashing of Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown 2011). I sometimes worry that book reviews are just an arm of the marketing department, but no fear here. Myers hates, hates, hates this book.  And you know what else he hates? The middlebrow reading public, MFA programs, magazines that promote novels, authors who get large advances, authors who are well-connected, readers who are dumb enough to be led to the literary slaughter by mass media book promotions, small novels that are a big hit because they have pretended to be small novels but are actually figments of some marketing department’s imagination, and people with no authentic education or taste who read a book just because a friend recommended it.

Be careful buddy: that last criticism could put The Art of Fielding in a category with game-changing novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962). Even though I liked Harbach’s book enormously and think it is far more complex than Myers does, I don’t think it reaches the standard of high art. On the other hand, should I be embarrassed to have liked it just because “everyone else” did? Please.

Words Myers uses to describe Harbach’s novel include “shallow,” “trivial,” and “high school-level.”  Given the prominent role that an intergenerational gay romance plays in the plot (the younger lover is a brilliant multiracial student and the older lover a bisexual, white college president), and that Myers dismisses the depiction of this intellectual/sexual bond as on the level of “young adult fiction,” you have to ask: is homophobia at work? Is the seamless blending of this love affair into a plot where love appears in many complex forms intolerable to Myers?

By the by, what young adult fiction can you name in which a teacher and a student are having a hot affair? Enquiring minds want to know.

Can we explain how Chad Harbach wrote such a terrible, and yet successful, book? Why yes.  The proliferation of graduate writing programs. “Obviously the nation’s M.F.A. programs still teach no solution to the main problem facing today’s young ‘social’ novelist,” Myers asks: “How to offer a realistic portrayal of the most garrulous generation in American history without boring the reader?”

I can’t quite imagine what was in James Bennet’s mind — or more properly, the mind of the Atlantic’s book review editor — to publish such a piece long after Harbach’s novel became a bestseller and after the hot buzz about it had largely subsided.  Perhaps this smack down was meant to anticipate the possibility that The Art of Fielding would win the Pulitzer?

Well, no chance of that, since Ann Patchett has the Pulitzer Board on the mat over at the New York Times for their failure to award a fiction prize this year: see “And the Winner Isn’t” (April 17 2012).  Interestingly, in naming all the novels that might have won this prestigious award, she does not mention her own State of Wonder (Harpers 2011).  Acknowledging that the failure to award a Pulitzer is not unprecedented, Patchett nevertheless insists that the marketability of fiction at this perilous moment requires the publicity that the honor confers. “The brick-and-mortar bookstore,” she writes, as a part owner of one, “is not exactly a thriving business model… and the publishing industry, especially since the Department of Justice has decided to be Amazon’s bodyguard, is struggling as well.”

And yet, is this a reason to give a prestigious national award when no one book seems to emerge as a clear winner?  I think not.  As a veteran of numerous academic prize committees, I can’t tell you how quickly a committee can want to cave and make the award to two, or even three books. People who you would never imagine as vulnerable to spasms of empathy often want to confer honorable mentions to spread the love around just a little bit more.  I heart Ann Patchett for many reasons, including her work and her sometimes sharp tongue, but here we disagree.

Our final smack down is over at Bully Bloggers, where the BB’s take on “Failure and the Future of Queer Studies.” It’s definitely worth your time to read this (although I would say to my fellow Bloggers, hey, a blog is not a journal where you publish a whole panel and expect that a lot of people will make it to the end.  Break it up into a series.)

Celebrating Jack Halberstam’s new book The Queer Art of Failure (Duke, 2011) the fabulousness of which I have shilled earlier at Tenured Radical, the group (Halberstam, Lisa Duggan, Gayatri Gopinath, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini) also takes on Michael Warner’s recent queer studies retrospective in the  Chronicle of Higher Ed (“Queer and Then,” January 1 2012).  Writing to commemorate the end of Duke’s Series Q, which published many early classics in the field (is it un-queer to say a text is classic?) Warner speculates on how queer studies continues to make distinctive contributions.  However, queer scholarship has drifted from its political origins, acquiring many of the characteristics of a conventional academic field while at the same time ceasing to be a common project:

Queer theory in this broader sense now has so many branches, and has developed in so many disciplines, that it resists synthesis. The differences have often enough become bitter, sometimes occasioning the kind of queerer-than-thou competitiveness that is the telltale sign of scarcity in resources and recognition. That impulse can be seen, for example, in the title of a special issue of Social Text called “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” And given queer theory’s strong suspicion of any politics of purity, it is ironic that queer theorists can often strike postures of righteous purity in denouncing one another. The Gay Shame Conference at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2003, for instance—to discuss aspects of lesbian and gay male sexuality, history, and culture that “gay pride” had suppressed—featured a remarkable amount of mutual shaming, as though everyone had missed the point.

I’m not sure that Warner’s article is really intended to announce the death of queer studies, although I may have misread it.  The central issue that the Bully Bloggers raise, other than declaring that they’re not dead yet, is whether it is possible to create a field of study that is so revolutionary that it can insist on its scholarly chops and simultaneously makes everything that constitutes conventional  ”academia” irrelevant. In other words, as Halberstam notes, Warner’s

pronouncement [is] premature and even immature! Not only is queer studies not dead, but it was never trying to be the kind of thing that would eventually be bypassed or made redundant later. That notion of a set of ideas that have currency until they are replaced is part of a straight temporality that queer studies has tried to upend and decenter.

It’s worth thinking about, at any rate. I don’t entirely agree with all of the premises stated in the Bully Bloggers post:  for example, the claim that queer studies is a more free field of inquiry because it has the unique distinction of never having coalesced as a discipline is debatable. I think there is plenty of evidence that queer studies has all the trappings and conventions of other fields that straddle numerous disciplines and practices, beginning with the fact that one selects referees in the field as outside experts in tenure and promotion cases. We might also take the existence of this interesting panel as an example that queers studies has institutionalized itself, albeit as a minoritized discipline.  Scholarly talent in queer studies has clustered in a highly meaningful way at and around New York University, as it did several decades earlier at Duke, through multiple distinguished appointments. Numerous creative collaborations also intersect at NYU: the journal GLQ, Bully Bloggers, the editorial board of Social Text and the NYU Press Sexual Cultures series. That this intellectual center is porous and open to transformation makes it no less visible as a location for intellectual authority and a set of recognizable techniques and methods.  Identifying as a discipline also doesn’t mean that a field of study must become one “the zombies of intellectual life” as Lisa Duggan asserts in her own compelling contribution, nor is it necessary to be anti-disciplinary to be intellectually flexible and playful in the ways that Halberstam’s work promotes.

One might make an analogy — as Muñoz does playfully and skillfully — between queer studies and academic formations like the Frankfurt School, formations that were fully disciplinary and yet pathbreaking.  Is Jack Halberstam the queer Adorno? Muñoz asks.  (I hope so — I never knew the other Adorno and it’s cool to get a second chance.) In other words, some kind of disciplinary claim is perpetually being made in the guise of no-claim when queer studies scholars start arguing about what they do and it is this that is worth watching.

Although I’m not sure it was necessary to kill off Michael Warner to declare the Eternal Life of queer studies, this Bully Bloggers post showcases some of the best writing and argumentative styles that the “field” has to offer.  This multi-authored manifesto is worth a read: if it is capable of such an efficient smack down, queer studies is definitely not dead yet.

We at Tenured Radical are blogging a mile or so up in the air and hoping that failure might be put off until a safe landing in Milwaukee is achieved.  Tune in for news for the Organization of American (Zombie) Historians Annual Meeting, held in conjunction with the National Council on Public History, April 18-22.