Where is your college president spending the summer?

Today’s New York Times has the latest revelations about New York University’s executive compensation practices. (Full disclosure: not only was Tenured Radical’s Ph.D. bestowed from those Violet walls, but my current institution recently had its own executive mini-scandal.)

As Ariel Kaminer reveals, NYU’s top execs and a few elite proffies are also offered mortgages for summer homes, “Universities in similar circumstances, like Columbia and Stanford, also have helped professors and executives with home loans,” writes Kaminer, who has been following this story for several months. “Aid for vacation properties, however, is all but unheard-of in higher education, several experts in university pay packages say.” And how many universities offer you a mortgage after you have purchased your home — and then forgive that mortgage too?How can they afford it? And accomplish it with so little fanfare?  This article at Wall Street on Parade explains:

According to documents unearthed in a month-long search of public records, NYU Law School has created an array of nonprofits to funnel money into lavish perks for its professors. The money has been used by professors to buy multi-million dollar brownstones and condos in Manhattan and Brooklyn with portions of some loans forgiven over time. In some cases, even the interest charged on the loans has been reimbursed.

NYU’s AAUP chapter has asked for an investigation by the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau, and Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) has also got his teeth into it. (How very strange: last week, as I finished watching season 1 of FX’s “The Americans” I found myself cheering for the KGB, and now I am following Chuck Grassley’s Twitter feed. This is the same Chuck Grassley who, three weeks ago, was stupidly and ahistorically accusing the President of “packing” the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals by simply filling vacancies.)

For those of you who have not been following the story, the confirmation hearings for Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, formerly an executive vice president at NYU, cracked open a Pandora’s box of fun facts. The story began with the public revelation that Lew received a so-called “exit bonus” of $685K when he left his university position (where he had earned between $700 and $800K a year) for a job at Citigroup (where I guess he earned a gajillion or two more.)

Joe Patrice, blogging at Above the Law, suggested this was a “Nixonian moment” for NYU, and it was: remember July 13, 1973, when Alexander Butterfield revealed that there was a voice-activated tape recorder in the Oval Office? Similarly, this investigation into a former employee caused a little administrative thread to hang out at NYU. When tugged upon, the university’s metaphorical sweater began to unravel.

The hearings revealed that Lew had received a mortgage of $1.5M, of which the university had “forgiven” $440,000 (this is kind of like cutting a person a check, but not.) Now pull the thread a little harder — Lew is not alone! In March, Ariel Kaminer documented several similar payouts to administrators and so-called academic stars. She also pointed out that two former NYU presidents, both millionaires, still live in subsidized university housing. When John Sexton, the current president, retires, he expects to return to the faculty at a salary of $800K annually.

Untangling this mess could be the academic equivalent of figuring out what, exactly, was in those securitized mortgages that no one seems to understands to this day. While Congress is rightly focused on the contrast between NYU’s elites and the high tuition and loan burdens borne by it’s students, I would be interested in knowing what percentage of these obscene compensation packages is being floated by university debt, tax free bond issues, and kickbacks donations from the real estate developers on the Board of Trustees, whose corporations have been making bags of money for several decades by helping the university gobble up Lower Manhattan.

Do these kinds of loans have a place in higher education? That’s a good question. Second full disclosure: I have been the recipient of two separate below market rate mortgages, one for a little less than $100K and one for $175K, from my previous employer, and when I began my career at Zenith I rented a university subsidized apartment. These kinds of loans were intended to help faculty establish themselves, and existed long before I arrived at Zenith. However, in my final decade there, the practices changed. Zenith cashed out its real estate and now offers almost no rental housing: what still exists is rented at market rates. The university also recognized that these mortgages, paltry as they are in a Manhattan real estate world, were allowing faculty to cash out for substantial profits every time they sold a house.

In effect, even though we were taxed on the mortgage subsidy, these real estate profits were unearned — and almost always untaxed! — bonuses. Zenith, for reasons of its own, eventually closed the bottomless mortgage cookie jar: you could get exactly one loan for the duration of your employment at the university. After that, you were on your own.

Except if you got an offer from a Big Ivy. In that case, your new employer bought the house you were already living in, wrote you a mortgage on a new house, and forgave the mortgage over time. I know at least two people who cut this deal with one major research university, and one at another. Forgiving the mortgage is a way to deliver extra compensation, but it is also an incentive for the faculty member or administrator to remain for a period of time and not jump to yet another university with deeper pockets.

So NYU isn’t the only one, and one of the conversations that all faculties should be having is how much these off the books perks (which are often negotiated as part of individual contracts) make it possible to underpay that vast majority of university employees, even those on the tenure track, or with tenure, without appearing to do so. I know almost no one who has gotten a real raise, without changing jobs or getting a competing offer, in the last ten years.

Instead of high profile people (Yes, I’m talking to you, Joe Biden), blaming the cost of higher ed on “faculty salaries”what we really need right now is a non-partisan Commission on Higher Education. The NYU scandal (and it is a scandal) is one of many.  It’s time to investigate the various shenanigans by which wealthy universities retain their non-profit status; rely on vast amounts of temporary, student and non-union labor; maintain vast wage disparities between faculty; spend millions on athletic programs that are disconnected from the academic mission all the while charging high tuitions and running shell games that allow them to shovel millions of dollars towards their executives and stars.

But then there are the other articles — the ones that the Huffington Post digs up, stories that are of “Jennifer Anniston’s Wedding on Hold” variety of academic news. Those are the ones that really cheer me up.

In 2011, it was Dan Middlemiss at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia who drew my eye as I was waiting in line at the post office scanning my Twitter feed. A full professor, Middlemiss resigned because he too was waiting in line to buy his annual parking pass. It was apparently a log wait, but specifically, he resigned because Dalhousie had a habit of selling many more passes than they had spots. Not everyone comes to work every day, right? And yet, it also meant that Middlemiss was waiting in line for a pass that didn’t guarantee him a parking spot either:

After waiting for more than an hour [to purchase an annual parking pass], he decided instead to leave his profession of 31 years.

“For a guy like myself that lives in Lower Sackville, I have to get on the road around 6:30 to 7 to get an assured parking spot somewhere so I can get here to teach at 2:30 in the afternoon,” said Middlemiss, an expert on Canadian defence policy.

“It’s ridiculous, in my view, and the university just keeps pretending that it’s not the problem that it is.”

Middlemiss said parking has always been a problem at Dalhousie. But this time, he simply had enough.

“I went straight upstairs, I said, ‘I’m not kidding this time, I don’t have to put up with this. I’m resigning,’” he told CBC News.

I guess Middlemiss made his point: the current Dalhousie website lists him as the Acting Director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies. Maybe the job comes with its own parking spot?

This week, it’s a guy at Northwestern who quit his job because he was tired of picking up party cups and used “raincoats” left in his back yard by students:

Dr. Mark Waymack, who was an adjunct associate professor in Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern, said he’s also moving away from his home near the Evanston, Ill., campus because the students are too rowdy, CBS Chicago reports.

“The used condoms tend to show up in the back yard, actually,” Waymack told CBS Chicago, adding complaints about “the vomit, the beer cans in the hedges. I think they horse around late at night.”

Waymack is pointing the blame at the Northwestern administration.

He wrote a letter of resignation to Morton Schapiro, the university’s president, which was read at an Evanston City Council meeting on June 11 by Ald. Judy Fiske. Waymack remained anonymous when the letter was read at the meeting, but has since disclosed his name, according to the Daily Northwestern.

“My perception is there’s a culture of tolerance or perhaps indifference on the institution’s part that students will be students,” Waymack wrote. “I hold you and your office accountable for this sort of behavior.”

You’ll be glad to know that Dr. Waymack still has his day job — as associate professor and Chair of philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago. Meanwhile, will Northwestern reign in its party culture for fear of losing other faculty who don’t really work for them? Will Jennifer Aniston stop being such a control queen, realize that she is aging rapidly and work it out with Justin Theroux? Will Bernard Bailyn tweet a pic of his ripped-for-summer bod? (OK, I lied: that link takes you to Patrick Schwarzenegger-Shriver.)

Stay tuned to Huff Post College, the People Magazine for the People with a Ph.D.,  and find out.

Could I be happier to see The Dinner Party back in the news, and a revived interest in this recent past from young feminists? Probably not, since the latest book in the series that Renee Romano and I edit for the University of Georgia Press is Jane Gerhard’s The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism (see other titles in the series here, and a terrific review from publisher’s weekly here.) If you actually live in New York, you can see Gerhard and Chicago together at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on Thursday July 11 at 6 p.m. Pussy Riot won’t be there — but Tenured Radical (always recognizable in my distinctive black tee shirt) will be.

Wanna learn to do an index, Snooks?

Those menz! Always finding another way to game the system!

Thank heavens for research that catches them at their dastardly game. A collaborative study by a father and son team, Steven E. Rhoads (UVA) and Christopher Rhoads (UConn), argue that paternity leave allows men to jump the gender queue by giving them a chance to write while their wives actually take care of the babies. A brilliant scheme to maintain gender inequality, no? As reported last year in Bloomberg News, Team Rhoads argues that fathers of newborns would rather work than parent:

While 69 percent of the women in the sample took post-birth parental leave, only 12 percent of the men took advantage of the available leave—even though it was paid. They also learned that the male professors who did so performed significantly less child care relative to their spouses. Worse yet, they report that male tenure-track professors may be abusing paternity leave by using the time to complete research or publish papers, an activity that enhances their careers while putting their female colleagues at a disadvantage. One female participant quoted in the study put it this way: “If women and men are both granted parental leaves and women recover/nurse/do primary care and men do some care and finish articles, there’s a problem.”

The study recommends, therefore, that in the interests of gender equality universities restrict parental leaves to women. Download the unpublished paper here.

So I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t believe it, particularly since the sample group had only 181 subjects, which means we are talking about fewer than 18 men who may have exclusively pursued a publishing agenda while pretending to care for a baby. The research seems even more worth of scrutiny when you realize that Steven Rhoads’ parenting and marriage scholarship repeatedly comes to conclusions that are gender essentialist.

As he argues on his own website, if men and women were to accept their gender destiny, life might be disappointing — but it would be less stressful:

Understanding sex differences can bring a ceasefire in the gender wars. Once we can see that our romantic partners are fundamentally different on the inside as well as out, we will be less likely to expect them to be like all our same-sex friends. Husbands, for example, will see that women in general — not just “their crazy wife” — like to talk about problems that have no solution, and wives will see that most husbands — not just their’s — don’t care about the messes they leave in their wake and often don’t see them.

This is followed by other categorical statements related to parenting: “Mothers are worriers” while fathers, hearing the same baby cry, “are more likely to be annoyed than concerned [.]”

When fathers (who, the research establishes, become deaf and blind as soon as they enter the home) “take leave and express a desire to be the primary caretakers of their new infants, the traditional parenting differences emerge” because “[m]others are world-class nurturers of infants and toddlers, and they like to do every part of the care more.” Things women really dig doing are “caring for the child when sick, buying food or toys, even changing diapers. Even women academics with egalitarian gender attitudes like all parts of care more than their husbands.” And guess what? “Infants and toddlers prefer moms to dads for every task as well.” In 2005, Rhoads argued at the National Review Online that “the roots of these differences are biological;” by that, he meant hormonal.

This took me back — way back — to a moment in my former life when a male colleague asked for parental leave, was denied it (as he had birthed no baby), and threatened to file a sex discrimination case.  Realizing that theirs was a discriminatory policy, the university proposed to create gender equity by eliminating parental leave altogether.

This ignited an uproar among the women faculty, many of whom had been among the first cohort of feminist academics to have been hired by the university, and who had fought for that policy. That said, more than a few resisted extending it to men. A number announced that they were quite sure their male colleagues would use a parental leave to write while their wives actually took care of the baby. However, many of us argued, successfully, that you don’t cure gender discrimination by institutionalizing gender discrimination. In fact, the policy was, in the end, expanded to include men and adoptive parents as well. In the end, the university agreed.

But the appearance of Steven Rhoades’ research in a prominent business magazine should put us on alert, and  suggest that the next piece of low-hanging academic fruit to be cut will be paid parental leave. It might be an easy target too, since it isn’t clear to me that senior faculty have ever fully accepted it in the first place. I am probably not the only person who has heard a younger, female scholar confess that she was informally warned by a colleague or a chair not to have children prior to tenure. I have never heard of a man who received this piece of unwanted advice. Furthermore, university policies are deliberately confusing, leaves are cumbersome to apply for, come with strings attached, or are limited to a period of time that has no relationship to the teaching schedule.

Historiann reported on this back in 201o. A brief trip around the web will show you that, as of 2013:

• The University of Texas “does not have a separate maternity leave policy,” and requires a doctor’s note asserting “that the incapacity [of pregnancy and/or motherhood] causes the employee to be unable to work.”
• Columbia University only gives “parental workload relief” to a “primary caregiver,” requires the person receiving it to continue doing some work for the university, and expects that research will continue during the leave.
• At Dickinson College,  mothers who designate themselves as the primary caregivers can get 12 weeks (or close to one term) by pinning a 6-week medical leave to a 6 week pregnancy leave. The policy discriminates between those who “birth” and those who adopt children; and offers only three weeks of leave to the non-birthing, non-primary parent.

I suspect that a great many university parental leave policies, including the ones above, might be challenged under the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act. FMLA entitles employees in a workplace of 50 or more, and who have been in the job for a year, to twelve weeks of leave within twelve months of a birth or adoption. While it doesn’t mandate that you be paid, it doesn’t say you have to come in to advise senior honors’ theses, or serve on committees, or that you can only take a fraction of the time if you didn’t give birth. It is unlikely, however, that faculty who want to keep their heads down and get tenure will want to be at the center of a major federal lawsuit.

Readers, what are your views on parental leave? Did you have one? What have you found you were able to do — or not do — with a new baby in the house? And those of you out there who are, like me, childless: what do you think are the merits of parental leave?

Dear Dr. Radical:

Having enjoyed your blog and admired the writing (and wry humor!) for a while, I wondered if you’d be willing to address the characteristics of good blog writing. My own sense is that blog posts should be meaty, but pithy—if that’s not conflating two different food groups. They can be leavened with more personal comment, humor, and current cultural reference than—say—a journal article. I recently submitted an invited entry to a higher ed blog (admittedly, I’d gone over the word limit). But to my chagrin, the editors are making it fit by removing anything that seemed even slightly leavening, leaving a pretty bland result.

This can be discouraging, Sandy. You get an opportunity to do a little writing off the academic grid, to take a chance on finding a voice that isn’t accented by scholar-speak, and poof! You have been returned to the rules of the Ivory Tower faster than you can say “tenure review.”

What counts as good blog writing is directly connected to how the genre of blogging has evolved over the last decade. Blog, as you may already know, came into use as a contraction of the original “web log,” a phrase that described what most people were actually doing: journaling on the web.

Although blogging emerged in its more primitive forms in the 1990s, it really took off in the early 21st century as other forms of alternative journalism withered and died. Academics took to blogging for lots of reasons: one is that academic publishing is frustrating and is aimed at an audience of specialists. We hated the formulaic, stilted voices we had to adopt in order to be taken seriously. We all knew we could do better, and reach a wider audience. Blogging gave us a chance to prove it. Many of us soon acquired a “blog voice” — wry, teasing, funny —  that was quite distinct from our scholarly voice and that allowed our intellectual interests to range freely. We wrote what we wanted because we owned the blogs: some of us still do.

But blogging, as a genre, no longer guarantees autonomy for the writer, in voice or subject. Why? Because a blog can be almost anything now. Blogging software allows national publications, media outlets and professional organizations to generate oodles of free content, sell ads, and reach new demographics, all without paying for new reporting, editorial or production resources. Blogs allow people to write about something without establishing credentials first; create a “platform” for a book; advertise services; connect to communities of like-minded people; narrate weight loss, gender transition, parenthood, gardening or cooking; or complain about the horrors of academic life.

Successful blogs, like this one, get picked up by mainstream publications, but lots of good blogs don’t. Nate Silver, the pollster, started as an independent blogger and moved to the New York Times, which is kind of like becoming a journalist. With comments.

Most importantly, some blogs have active editors who seek out content, and others consist of one or more people who try to make sure something fresh is up on a regular basis but exercise little control over contributors. Rule number one: when a blog has an editor, or you are contributing to a “web feature” of a larger organization or publication, you follow the custom of the country. Curated blogs are a lot like conventional print: the editors will have set a tone, focus and style for their blog; they will create pretty strict word limits; they will chop up your complex sentences and paragraphs into readable bites; and they may eliminate the kind of snark that makes self-published blogs wildly popular (and unpopular.)

Edited blogs are also far more likely to be anxious about whether what you write is going to make them look silly. I would never include some of the words, and distinctive bloggy spellings, that I use on this blog in an on-line piece for the American Historical Association. They expect something different from me, and are generally pretty explicit about what it is without being controlling. As for being funny? A news or professional organization is going to scrutinize your recollections and speculations pretty closely, so it’s wise to monitor the occasional wisecrack for accuracy.  I have a short essay on a New York Times blog feature today in which I state: “Before resigning at 100, Strom Thurmond often appeared not to participate in sessions he chaired.” Originally, I wrote that Thurmond “snoozed through sessions for years prior to his retirement at 100.” When the editor who had commissioned the piece asked me to fact check it, I could not find a single piece of evidence that what I had originally written was so, even though I remember it quite clearly from watching C-SPAN. What I remember can go on my blog, but unless I can source it, it can’t go in the Times, even on a blog.

So the answer to the question is: context matters, as in all writing. A blog isn’t just a blog anymore; it’s a marketing device that describes many different kinds of writing.

So what is a good post?

• It’s short. A frequent criticism of this blog is that the posts are simply too long. This post is way too long!!! A good length to shoot for is 600-800 words, since people who read on line have notoriously short attention spans. Some of the best bloggers write super short posts, often several times a day, that keep people coming back. Margaret Soltan’s University Diaries is a terrific example, as is Legal History Blog and Edge of the American West.
• It makes arguments, even complex ones, available to the non-specialist. It avoids an overly theoretical or jargony approach. I have never figured out why people blog densely-written scholarly critique, unless it’s out of some kind of fantasy that if “the people” only had access to scholarly journals they would read them.  From my perspective, that kind of writing is fine, but it isn’t blogging. It’s self-published critical theory that is created by insiders and for insiders.
• It doesn’t work out personal grudges, deplore what are essentially differences of taste or transform legitimate political disputes into on-line vendettas. Need I say more?

So one thing to think about, Sandy, is that you might have written a great blog post — but it actually belonged at another blog if you wanted to publish it in the form in which you originally wrote it. If you aspire to blogging, you also might want to try to get a regular gig at another, less “professional” blog, to give yourself a chance to play with different voices and see what kind of audience you can entice.

Readers, what is your advice? What is a “good” blog post?

Hedda Hopper makes the cover of Time in 1947.

Every once in a while you read a book that is pure joy, and Jennifer Frost’s Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood hits all the right notes. It’s got movie stars, it’s got intrigue, and it’s got humor, it’s got a light but effective theoretical frame. Best of all, it’s organized around a driven, ambitious woman who — if she hadn’t played herself in any number of films — could have been played by Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, or Barbara Stanwyck. If they had dared.

Born Elda Furry in 1885, the butcher’s daughter who became Hedda Hopper fled industrial Altoona, Pennsylvania, with a suitcase and a dream. She made a pit stop at a Pittsburgh theater company and arrived on the New York stage by 1908. Cycling through opera companies, plays and musicals as a chorus girl, Elda — now Elda Curry — kept her eyes on the prize. Later she claimed to have known that she had good looks but “no talent.” However, as Frost writes, “she was ambitious and worked hard, because if she failed she faced a fate worse than death — go home to Altoona.”

Eventually Elda landed a job in the theater company of her first and only husband, matinee idol and producer William De Wolfe Hopper, famous for his roles in Gilbert and Sullivan extravaganzas, and for dramatic readings of the epic baseball poem, “Casey at the Bat.”After marrying Hopper in 1913 she changed her name to Hedda because Elda sounded too much like the names of the previous Mrs. Hoppers: Ella, Ida and Edna. Thus, a star was born. Hedda Hopper had one son, William Jr., who would also have a decent acting career: his best role was as Paul Drake in the TV series Perry Mason (1957-1966).

The Hoppers soon divorced: DeWolfe’s infidelities were one part of the story, but Hedda’s success in motion pictures — where lack of theatrical talent was no barrier to employment — may have been another. Showing the perseverance that had taken her from Altoona to Broadway, Hedda began traveling back and forth between New York studios and Hollywood in 1915. By 1922, she had an MGM contract and was making $1000 a week. It was the equivalent of over $600,000 a year in today’s dollars, and virtually tax free. From this, she was expected to buy her own wardrobe, but it was a tidy sum. It allowed her to leave her husband and become the independent woman that she remained, despite losing her savings and her acting career during the Great Depression, until her death in 1966.

Frost’s account of Hopper’s metamorphosis from small-town, star- struck girl to celebrity gossip columnist is as lively as the rags-to-riches films that lit up the early years of New Deal Hollywood. When opportunity knocked, Hedda answered the door; when life handed her lemons, she made a pitcher of lemonade. By 1933, as her parts dwindled and she was reduced to $1000 per film, Hopper used her industry connections to bring in cash between shoots. She”worked as a talent agent, promoted Elizabeth Arden cosmetics, acted in theater” and sold real estate — something she had dabbled in during the go-go 1920s Los Angeles market.

Hopper’s studio connections had long made her an inside source for Hollywood writers, and she began writing short items herself in 1936. When she made the pragmatic decision to launch a new career with her own column, all she had to do was cut out the middlemen. Furthermore, as Frost points out, her life as an actress — she eventually appeared in 120 films — gave her a kind of street cred that her famous rival, Louella Parsons, never had. Hopper knew the industry from the performer’s point of view, and quickly became well known for the reach and accuracy of her networks. “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood” debuted on Valentine’s Day, 1938. It hit the big time a year later when Hopper scooped the James Roosevelt divorce on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Shortly thereafter, she acquired her own radio show, and in 1960 (when she was 74 years old), she was awarded her own television special.

Prior to Frost, no one has addressed Hopper’s importance as a political figure, nor has Hollywood gossip been as well analyzed for its role in popularizing conservative moral and economic values. Hopper decided what to print and what not to print, which gave her enormous power in shaping public opinion, and she often made these decisions in the interests of her political enthusiasms. Her conservatism was of the libertarian variety: given a choice, she was likely to prioritize those stories that “exposed” Democrats and leftists for the hypocrites she believed they were. She was fiercely anti-New Deal, and not part of the journalists’ circle cultivated by a publicity-conscious White House. When no other journalist would, she pursued the Roosevelt divorce story right onto “Jimmy” Roosevelt’s front lawn, where she confronted the President’s son — an executive at Samuel Goldwyn Studios — in his bathrobe.

Hopper was not only a hard worker; when she saw a niche she jumped to fill it, and when the business environment changed, she changed too. One of the hallmarks of her career was her ability to learn new media — whether it was film, sound film, radio, newspapers, or television — and put her own distinctive stamp on it. Like many celebrity journalists, (think Ed Sullivan, another gossip columnist, who had an even more successful career as a television variety show host) she did this by creating a “character.” It’s not too much of a stretch to say that, if she patterned herself on Walter Winchell (who pioneered the use of fear and influence to get a scoop), she is the grandmother of journalists like Perez Hilton, Cindy Adams, Michael Musto and Liz Smith. If the woman were alive today, she would be a blogger.

Hopper was the whole twentieth century media package.  She had a mobile, expressive face, terrific voice control and a personality made for radio, film and TV. This allowed her to expertly blur the line between journalism and theater: the columnist spread gossip, but she also performed gossip. Frost uses several publicity photographs that show Hopper hamming it up for a national audience:  elaborate expressions of comic shock at the “news” she is receiving or writing up make these still photographs jump off the page.

Pictures of Hopper inevitably included a telephone and/or a typewriter; indoors and out, she was famous for her elaborate hats (see the clip below.) Male journalists, of course, were also known for their hats, but Hopper’s were pseudo-Edwardian monstrosities, a cross between Chiquita Banana and Downton Abbey. In the final chapter of the book, Frost includes a campy picture of Hopper and Winchell wearing each others’ hats at the 1964 Republican National Convention. As women stopped wearing hats after WWII, Hopper’s toppers — festooned with vast amounts of false flowers, bird wings and mountains of velvet ruffles — became an even more distinctive trademark. One wonders if, as with Bella Abzug several decades later, they were initially meant to send the message: “I am not the secretary!” but by the 1950s became a canny way of making herself the center of attention in rooms filled with beautiful young starlets who were likely to be bare-headed.

Frost’s analysis of Hopper’s career as a maker of popular culture is both entertaining and points us towards what may be a central truth of Cold War bootstraps conservatism:  many of its proponents were  successful self-fashioners and entrepreneurs. Alger-like, they clawed their way to the top with grim determination, believing that theirs was but one of many stories made possible in an exceptional America. Hopper may well belong in a category with Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Schlafly, J. Edgar Hoover, John Wayne and other prominent conservatives who not only became movement stars, but knew how to spin a homespun story to sell a patriotic vision.

This American Dream was, not accidentally, a fiction more generally promoted by the film industry. Performers rewrote the stories of their own lives to match their movie roles: there is no better example of this than Hedda Hopper’s contemporary, Ronald Reagan who, as a politician, promoted confusion about whether he fought in World War II (he did not), and told stories about his “life” that had actually occurred in movies.

Hopper viewed herself as a woman who had become a success in Hollywood through playing by the industry’s — and America’s — rules; as she told the story, she gracefully stepped aside as a performer when she could no longer cut it. After 1940, those rules, and her power to enforce them through print, made her a bigger player than ever. Raised in a studio system that held employees to moral clauses, Hopper excoriated actors who publicly broke the sexual codes of the day even — or perhaps especially — after stars like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton grew too powerful for studios to punish them. Frost also uses Hopper’s practice of cultivating and punishing stars to examine Hollywood’s political culture: gossip was a tool that celebrated racism as reality, and it became a route for industry insiders to collaborate with the House Un-American Activities Committee without appearing to do so.

A central argument of the book is that gossip created a political community around Hopper, one that not only lived and breathed Hollywood, but also discussed politics through an easily accessible national film culture. Frost had access to a great many fan letters that were written to Hopper: the moral and political issues she raised were expanded upon and debated by movie audiences.  Readers applauded Hopper, but they also argued with her vigorously: African-Americans spoke up against the racial stereotyping in movies that the columnist applauded, while many readers saw Marilyn Monroe’s suicide as the direct outcome of the bad publicity that was the gossip columnist’s bread and butter.

In fact, as Frost notes, Hopper understood as early as 1950 that the Hollywood she had built and defended was giving way to television and to a new political and moral liberalism. As a conservative, Hopper continued to promote a racial and gender order into the 1960s that was fast slipping away, as well as a nostalgic fiction about small town America that continues to play a central role in the contemporary conservative imaginary. By her death in 1966, the queen of gossip had seen the candidate of her dreams, Barry Goldwater, take the national stage. But she would not live to see the movement that Goldwater built come to fruition in 1980, nor would she see conservatism adapt to and overcome the post-war cultural changes she deplored. And yet, as Frost underlines in this wonderful book, Hedda Hopper and her celluloid world were part of that vision and set the stage for what was to follow.

Hedda Hopper Appears on “What’s My Line?” (1959)

In the intellectual spirit of the man himself, let me ask a counterfactual: why have so many people temporarily abandoned longstanding critiques of Niall Ferguson in favor of condemning him as a homophobe?

My guess is that Ferguson is not a homophobe, at least not in the conventional sense of wanting to exclude gay men from work and public life because they are gay, or not wanting his son to marry one. Having been educated at Oxford, where, according to his Wikipedia entry, he became dear friends with right-wing queer Andrew Sullivan, I can’t quite imagine that Ferguson is uncomfortable with white, gay men like John Maynard Keynes either.  I mean Oxford’s intellectual history is as gay as it gets, right?

Here is Ferguson’s own account of his intellectually sloppy remarks at Harvard earlier this month about having bashed Keynes, not for his ideas, but for his sexuality:

Last week I said something stupid about John Maynard Keynes. Asked to comment on Keynes’ famous observation “In the long run we are all dead,” I suggested that Keynes was perhaps indifferent to the long run because he had no children, and that he had no children because he was gay. This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes’ wife Lydia miscarried.

Two things interest me about this (other than, having had a wife and at least some intercourse, the economist might be easily described as “gay.”) One is the notion that Keynes did have a “child,” when in fact the fetus was not carried to term. This is a very peculiar view, but it is a common conservative fantasy (see Sara Dubow’s prizewinning Ourselves Unborn, 2010). The second is his statement that  ”it is obvious” that childless people “also care about future generations.” My guess is that some do, but others — for example, queer literary scholar Lee Edelman, the elderly voters of Florida and California who refuse to pay taxes adequate to funding their public schools — don’t.

However, for my money, if we put the homophobia aside, both  statements guide us back to ongoing and widespread  criticisms of Ferguson’s scholarship. This is a man who has made a great career out of beautifully written, sweeping, lengthy books that ask big questions about the history of “the West.” However, except for his first book, they are far too thinly researched to stand much scrutiny, ignore most of what historians have learned about empire over the last several decades in favor of conservative cultural politics, and write off the history of colonized peoples as inconsequential to world history. As a result, although Ferguson’s narratives are compelling and readable, his arguments are highly ideological, Whiggish, and increasingly, not particularly original. Furthermore, the man was a paid advisor to the McCain-Palin campaign and has been an ongoing champion of neo-imperial interventions like the (failed and illegal) war in Iraq.

I think the gays will survive this moment: let’s get back to the real disagreements we have with Niall Ferguson, shall we?

If You Displease Me, I May Destroy You (If I Don’t Forget About You First, or Don’t Have Some Other Place To Be That Is More Important, Have Washed My Hair and Am Also Finished With My Book.) Among the more peculiar exchanges that appear from time to time in this comments section and on my Twitter feed, are those that presume I am entirely self-serving, vengeful and without ethical fiber.  A few (presumably younger) scholars seem to harbor the fantasy that I am on the brink of punishing them for disagreeing with me about this or that, despite the fact that I don’t seem to know them.  Occasionally I look at the bits of information in an online profile and deduce that, were I so inclined to actually punish someone who has written a critical comment or blog post, I would have to take a few days off; travel; devise an elaborate, ruinous scheme; and enlist the aid of numerous senior colleagues at other institutions.

Honestly? I think anonymous critics just want to be rude, they aren’t actually interested in what I think, and they want to bloviate without being accountable to professional standards of behavior. I recently pointed out to an anonymous Twitterstorian that s/he is capable of putting anything about me into public circulation, no matter how ridiculous, without any consequence, because I am well-known and s/he is pseudonymous. She responded that anonymous speech was a correct and necessary defense against ruthless senior faculty like me: “At this moment, there is no doubt in my mind that you, if you knew who I was, would try to retaliate,”  s/he tweeted.

Fight the POW-uh!

Seriously, this exchange reminded me of  a passage I read in a letter written by the normally lucid lesbian-feminist and peace activist Barbara Deming. It dated from the mid-1970s, when feminists were grappling with applying theories about male violence to their encounters with sexism and patriarchy. She explained to a prominent male editor that all female writers understand that if they quarreled with a man’s intellectual decision he might rape them. Not that the editor (who was flummoxed and a little crushed by the suggestion) was known for raping dissident female writers, mind you. But, as Deming explained, because he had a penis, he was capable of rape, and any relationship he had with a woman, of any kind, had to begin with the “fact” that he might use that penis to enforce his will.

In the eyes of some younger correspondents, apparently, tenure is my figurative penis (following Simone de Beauvoir, one is not born tenured, one becomes tenured.) Forget it that I have no reputation for using my tenurepenis to control other people. If you believe that senior scholars in your own workplace are likely to rape you with their tenurepenises, that’s one thing. But what kind of adult would go out of the way to seek out tenurepenis-holding people on the Internet, insult them publicly, and then insist (anonymously) that they live in fear of being ruined by people to whom they are only tangentially connected — if connected at all? It makes no sense. Furthermore, why would I  – or anyone like me — take time out from reading, writing, blogging, research, watching teevee and engaging in other cheerful activities, to concoct elaborate plots to destroy people I don’t know?

Could we be a little more practical with our readings of Foucault? Power may be everywhere, but the will and energy to wield it is not. As blogpal Lesboprof suggests in a recent piece, while bad things do happen to good people, asserting fear of harm, powerlessness and victimization seem to be all too pervasive in the academy.

Mind Your Manners, Buster Brown. In case you are thinking of leaving a snarky comment about queers, Keynes, Niall Ferguson, the British Empire, and/or me, not so fast. Check the American Historical Society website first: Vanessa Varin whipped up a roundtable over Memorial Day weekend about civility on the web, featuring me, John Fea (The Way of Improvement Leads Home), Ann M. Little (Historiann) and Ben Alpers (US Intellectual History Blog).  It’s in front of the firewall, but I did not see a comments box until I logged in. You may need to be member to join the conversation over there, but this is the blog where membership is always free!

Here’s my idea: let’s flip the curriculum. Kill the survey courses and start teaching history as applied knowledge, and as a set of skills that can tangibly enhance the careers that most of our students will actually have.

As a profession, we have, to date, mounted few successful counter-arguments to those who wish to shift resources away from teaching, and jobs, in the humanities and social sciences. One of the reasons that MOOCs may be doing so well is that they represent practically the only big idea that the academy has had in the past several decades. Many of our colleagues in the humanities have played defense for so long it’s hard to know what a good, solid curricular reform would look like.

The song goes like this: liberal arts BAs are valuable in and of themselves. They don’t need to be justified in concrete, practical terms — and in fact, those of us who work in private education may think it is beneath us to explain why centuries of art, literature and culture are critical to an education. Sound familiar?  Well, it’s a losing argument, not because the liberal arts don’t have transcendent value, but because we have been unable to make a case that is compelling enough to stop the loss of full-time jobs, much less get back the positions that have been lost since the 1970s.  In a time of high tuitions and stagnating middle-income jobs, our critics, those who urge students to simply get trained for work and get cultural enrichment on iTunesU, appear to be more responsive to conditions on the ground than we who imagine ourselves as dedicated to producing lifetime learners.

And yet, in a moment when flexibility and innovation is being called for, if we look at all but the top-tier, four-year colleges, what do we see in a history curriculum? Survey after survey. They are a basic curricular staple, the courses one must take before having access to anything relevant. They are the courses anyone can teach (there is a whole army of people out there who will teach any survey offered, regardless of their own training.) The survey becomes more and more prominent as we move down the ladder of prestige to the two-year colleges, where generic curricula make it possible to hire and fire part-time faculty without worrying about losing “coverage.”

Surveys are, of course, the easiest way to process large numbers of students: administrators love them for this, even though they don’t want to pay more than a pittance to have them taught. For scholars, the survey fetish lies in two dated (dated to about 1880, in fact) and unproven beliefs. One is that students need to acquire general knowledge as a prerequisite to assimilating specialized knowledge; the second is that students who are not going to pursue a liberal arts major need to be force-fed cultural capital, however disconnected from their present and future the course materials are. Our bias towards the survey feeds the ongoing process of adjunctification: such courses make it easy to hire the cheapest, most generically trained labor, and allow employers to invest nothing in further professional development. Current forecasts are that the ideal academic laborer of the future may not even need a Ph.D., since s/he will not teach, but simply help to manage, enormous courses packaged and sold by Ivy League for non-profits. Employees’ work will be Taylorized by companies like Turnitin.com, which currently offers drag-and-drop comments as part of its GradeMark option.

Getting rid of the survey will not mean rejecting technology; rather we will have to run toward technology, new media, old media and the digital. This will cause all of us to think in counterfactual ways, to embrace futures that we cannot be certain of. This will require facing the nature of our ambivalence about the relationship between scholarship and progress. For example: we admire technology, but we do not understand it well enough to use it well, and we fear the speedup and proletarianization it seems to facilitate. We are sentimental about the intellectual traditions that made us who we are, the masterful lectures delivered by world-class scholars, but we know that these forms of learning aren’t working for students any more. We yearn for a more embracing vision of what our discipline can do for today’s students and a good argument for why real faculty in real classrooms should do it — but we are unwilling to risk our professional prestige by trying  out hands-on pedagogy that prioritizes civically engaged and community scholarship over the big national questions that make us star lecturers.

Dumping the survey course would be a huge step towards reimagining a curriculum for the 21st century that could employ more, and better professionalized, scholars. But many of us don’t even know how to get started with making change at the most basic level: ourselves, and our own courses. So if you are one of those people who wants to try something new, here are some sample ideas as you plan your next teaching year.

Organize a class around hands-on work in a local archive. I did it this year, and I will warn you of one thing: it’s hard. Peter Knupfer’s “Consultants in the Classroom: Student/Teacher Collaborations in Community History” (Journal of American History, v. 99 no. 4, March 2013) gives you a little hint as to the rewards and the difficulties of this kind of teaching. I had the good luck of partnering with the New York Public Library, which was an awesome experience for me, for the students and (as I understand it) for the librarians we worked with. Here’s the trick: you ditch general knowledge altogether. You begin with the archival work, rather than secondary reading in the field, and because students have no other choice, the research questions emerge from the archive itself. If you can, hold at least a third of the class sessions in the archive, so that you can actually go from student to student answering basic questions and talking to them about what they are finding. Going on site has the added advantage of demonstrating that public archives are for public use, rather than a special resource for majors, honors students, or elite undergraduates.

Knupfer had all his students working on a single collection; my students chose their own collections, which was a tad more chaotic. But the result, I would argue, is the same: students learn the skills associated with archival research,  and they learn how any project they might be interested in pursuing — whether activist, media-oriented, artistic, business-related, or professional — can be enhanced researching and activating its history.

Show students that popular culture and history are intertwined fields. If you are interested in incorporating performance or media in your teaching of history, or vice versa, consider contacting actor/writer/director Adam Lazarre-White of Los Angeles. Lazarre-White, who has a BA in Government from Harvard and is living proof that a liberal arts education can be transferred successfully to other fields, can teach your students how good narrative history can make powerful arguments to big audiences. For a small fee, he can come to your campus to do a workshop organized around his short film, “200 years” (and before you start saying that there is no money, how many consultants did your administration hire last year?) The film, which is organized around a descendant of enslaved Africans purchasing the plantation upon which his ancestors labored, raises a number of powerful themes about the institution of North American slavery, most importantly the links between literacy and social power.

Instead of a general survey, imagine teaching college students the history or literature of what they plan to do. As I was lying in the hospital, I was cared for by numerous kind and skilled people, nearly all of whom were immigrants and nearly all of whom had entered the US higher education system through a community college. 100% of them said that although they regretted not having made more of their liberal arts credits, that the courses offered had little to do with their primary goal: graduate and get into advanced training or the workforce. Increasingly, this is true of students doing four-year degrees as well. As students disidentify with survey courses, the true purpose of MOOCs becomes clear: allowing large public systems to shift the burden of required, generic courses that no one wants to take or pay for on-line. Students can log these (unwanted but necessary) credits at a low, low cost to the taxpayers, and to themselves, while these systems cut even more jobs in the humanities and social sciences.

And yet, the only reason MOOCs are an alternative at all is because of the vast number of schools who are all teaching the same survey courses. Why aren’t faculty becoming more creative about how liberal arts credits can be fulfilled, and doing it in a way that makes our courses difficult to replace with online versions? If we believe that the purpose of the liberal arts requirement is to teach everyone the rudiments of critical thinking, would it not be a good idea to ask students preparing for a professional career to take a topical course in, say, the  History of Medicine, the History of the Office, the History of Finance, The History of the Oil Industry — rather than what we currently offer: comprehensive histories of the United States sliced in half at 1865, Western Civilization surveys and whatnot? If you must have the Civil War, what about different sections of the course that speak to different aspirations: nursing, military strategy, social work, the law and accounting?

Sure, these courses can be replicated as MOOCs too. But if faculty made an effort to revisit their curricula every 4-7 years to make sure that it was still relevant to the work non-majors were interested in, MOOCs would begin to lose their profitability because they would have to be revised too frequently.

Readers, what interventions and curricular reforms do you have planned for 2013-14?

If I were alive I would tweet Engels. Just saying.

Listen up! Vanessa Varin is trying to start a convo about ethical web practices over at the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History. She was kind enough to solicit the opinions of the #twitterstorians about the practice of live tweeting panels, and has written a couple of good pieces which aren’t getting enough attention. This may be because the comments section isn’t working. Varin’s new piece, “Being a Good Web Citizen” is also now up, and worth a look as well.

All of us who were solicited for comment came out against #snark while live tweeting a panel, you’ll be glad to know. Twitter seems to be more vulnerable to the regrettable riposte than blogging is, and since the emergence of Storify, it’s far harder to take back. Varin cites Kathleen Fitzpatrick of the MLA, who expressed concerns earlier in the year about academics shaming other academics on Twitter  (bless you, Kathleen! Now let’s move on to colleagues posting #mean$hit on Facebook, thinking that you won’t ever see it.)  Tim McCormick responds to Fitzpatrick’s call for civility here.

But it’s all publishing, right? The difference is that it’s DIY and we have no editors. Every twitterstorian thus has to be a writer, editor, copy chief and liability lawyer simultaneously. Responding to Vanessa’s question about tweeting panels, I suggested that we all ask permission before we do it, something I did for the first time ever this year: any other form of recording for broadcast would require a signed form of some kind.  ”If etiquette dictates a tweeter should ask permission before broadcasting a panel, should a blogger do the same?” Varin asked in a follow up. “Furthermore, if we ask tweeters and bloggers to ask permission, should any historian who is taking notes during the session do the same? How do we remain consistent?”

Yes to the blogger question: it’s the same as tweeting because it is very public and it is a form of broadcast. In fact, when Twitter began it was described as a micro-blogging platform, even though it has now become it’s own thing. But taking notes seems like a different genre entirely: it’s a private activity, not a public one, and doesn’t broadcast anything. We also know that to use anything heard in an AHA session without citing the presenter (something which often involves soliciting the paper, or asking if it is to be published imminently) would definitely be a violation of professional standards.

One way to think about web ethics is to compare them to IRL situations and ask yourself: is this technology fundamentally different? If so, why? If not, are there practices we already agree on that apply?

Illustration credit

Don’t you think Donald Rumsfeld should be tried as a war criminal? I do. Or maybe he could be imprisoned for a decade or more, with no access to constitutional rights, while we sort the evidence against him and decide whether to bring him to trial.

But no. That’s not how we do things in the Land of the Free.

Like Henry Kissinger, Robert MacNamara and other architects of mass destruction, Rumsfeld has settled into the golden years of milking profits from his crimes. Instead of being interrogated with a wet washcloth over his face, he has authored a book that blends his life experiences into a few simple truths that we can all live by as we wait for the next lethal incident of blowback somewhere in America. Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life (Broadside Books, 2013) is structured by a series of homilies along the lines of “everything I needed to know about being a world leader I learned in kindergarten from Mrs. Frumplefoos.” Unfortunately, the book was not enough, and has led to a book tour, as well as appearances on major media outlets. This will bring the two-time Secretary of Defense and the architect of two paradigm-changing illegal wars into our living rooms nonstop, where — if we can’t find the remote immediately — we will once again have to disentangle his weird syntax and disconnected moral perspective.

When I first started listening to Rumsfeld’s press conferences almost a decade and a half ago I simply could not attach the words that were coming out of his mouth to the political problem at hand. Describing the bogged-down, violent mess he and the President had created, word salad would pour out of his brain and into mine. There would be ideas that you almost recognized — but not; statements that were spoken with truthful vibrato — which were clearly false; and pronouncements that seemed meaningful — but that quickly revealed themselves as irrelevant.

In skimming the Book of Rumsfeld, I am having similar problems of cognition even though the sentences, undoubtedly parsed by a skilled writer, are reasonably grammatical and in the right order. But what he says still makes no sense, given who the man really is. One of Rumsfeld’s life lessons, for example, is “Put Yourself in the Other Person’s Shoes.” This could lead to reflections like: I wonder what it feels to have a bag over your head, be swaddled in a diaper, chained to the floor and on a transatlantic flight to God Knows Where? Instead, Rumsfeld explains that adopting another person’s point of view might smooth out a car purchase, a diplomatic negotiation, “or even resolv[e] a problem with a neighbor or youngster.”

It’s not that these examples do not seem like reasonable opportunities to adopt someone else’s point of view, but one then wants to ask: would not adopting the point of view of an Iraqi citizen who was about to be killed in an illegal attack on her country also help avert a decision to move a dictator out and grab his country’s oil? How about imagining yourself as a legless veteran, a bereft family, or the victim of a drone strike?

Imagine the outcomes for American foreign policy if the Rumsfelds of this world actually were able adopt another person’s point of view!

Skate through this book at your local store and you will see endless howlers for the irony-minded, as well as numerous obfuscations and diversions that make me think there is a PR firm, somewhere, buffing history as fast as it can. One of my favorites is Rumsfeld’s deep insight that large bureaucracies often produce uncritical thinking. This is followed in the next paragraph with “When I served on corporate boards….” rather than, say, “The yellow cake uranium lie was so awesome!” The cognitive dissonance required to write — or even to sign off on a ghost-written manuscript of — this book is just staggering. One is reminded of Albert Speer’s 1944 meeting with Karl Hanke, “a man of sympathy and directness” who, as Speer recalled, “advised me never to accept an invitation to visit a concentration camp in Upper Silesia. Never, under any circumstances.”

You can’t say that was not good advice, now, can you?