April 15, 2013, 9:45 pm

John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Paul Revere, 1768

Love you Boston.

April 14, 2013, 1:34 pm

Can We Have A Conversation About Political Conversation?

It appears that decent, ethical people associated with Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) are speaking out about the nastiness, personal attacks and other silencing tactics that currently characterize the debate over the Israeli Occupation. My trusty RSS feed reports that Columbia law prof Katherine Franke and San Francisco attorney and mediation specialist Frederick Hertz are asking pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli partisans in the United States to share queer intellectual and political space in a more productive way. You can read a report about the call to dialogue at Electronic Intifada.

Clearly, I have some skin in this game. Readers of Tenured Radical will remember an ugly week, not too long ago, in which my expression of doubt about the ethics and efficacy of a cultural boycott against Israel (a view which is not unique on the left, and does not represent an endorsement…

April 12, 2013, 9:10 am

Labour MP Glenda Jackson Leans In On Margaret Thatcher

By Claire Potter

In the midst of the gauzy tributes to Margaret Thatcher, Glenda Jackson kicks it in the House of Commons. Imagine if any United States politician had possessed the onions to deliver a similar summary of Ronald Reagan’s political and social legacy. Hat tip.

April 11, 2013, 11:26 am

The Art of Losing Isn’t Hard To Master

By Claire Potter

The final results are in for grants filed by Tenured Radical last fall: of four requests for funding to support my sabbatical, exactly none succeeded. Over the last few weeks I have been fielding communications from various foundations that express profound regret at this situation.

I would like to point out that this regret, unlike so many other forms of regret, was avoidable. But that said, I want everyone who spent the time reading my grants and discarding them to know: I forgive you! And to everyone whose grants were chosen when mine was not? I forgive you too!

To the thousands of people who have been opening the same form letters as I have opened in the past few weeks: take it from a fellow loser, you did good to even try. I know you feel like the Whack -A-Mole. So do I. However, need I point out that you will only ever have a chance of success of you are willing to risk…

April 8, 2013, 9:53 am

What A World Without Women’s Studies Looked Like

By Claire Potter

Before women’s studies, these signs were invisible.

Mariam Chamberlain, one of the founding mothers of women’s studies, died last week at the age of 94. A Ph.D. in economics, as a program officer at the Ford Foundation she disbursed around $5 million in grants to identify key areas for curricular change, as well to establish research on women through institutes like the Center for Women Policy Studies.

It’s easy to forget how important women’s studies was to reshaping what knowledge looked like. In part this is because there are fewer and fewer of us who remember what universities that were almost entirely run by and for men looked like. But the success of women’s studies has led to its transformation — into feminist studies, gender studies, queer studies — and to inevitable (as well as important)…

April 6, 2013, 1:00 pm

On Political Correctness, the Media, and “Sporting” Behavior

By Claire Potter

But not always.

Back in 1973, Tricky Dick Nixon and I were hanging out on the porch at San Clemente, drinking scotch and tinkering with the enemies list. He said, “Radical,” (that’s what he called me, because “TR” made him think of 26′s big scary teeth); “Radical, never cover anything up. Things only get worse when those politically correct fa**ots find out.” (Have I ever told you that Dick had a neat way of inserting asterisks in words, and lengthy silences in sentences, even while speaking? It was really quite the party stunt.)

Since I tweeted Joe Nocera’s opinion piece in today’s New York Times about the belated firing of Rutgers basketball coach I’ve been mulling over this fictional but highly formative moment in my life history. Like Woodward and Bernstein, Nocera suggests we follow the money to…

April 5, 2013, 11:48 am

Good News Friday: Teaching is FUNdamental

By Claire Potter

Eve Arden as Our Miss Brooks

It’s rare that you hear anything good about educators nowadays. If they aren’t huddled in the closet boosting students’ standardized test scores with an eraser and a number 2 pencil, teachers are pulling the Miss Jean Brodie thing, being charging little kids with assault and battery, or being arrested themselves for organizing extended, unnatural nap times. Oh sure: every once in a while there’s a magazine feature about a hero teacher in a burned out district of a major American city who teaches sends former gang members on to MIT by running his advanced calculus class as a hip hop poetry jam, but the next day we are back to stories about middle school teachers who are so despised that their students conspired to poison them with hand sanitizer.

So imagine my surprise and…

April 2, 2013, 1:46 pm

Hot News From Louisiana: Fired Faculty Sue the U.

By Claire Potter

Remember this 2011 story in which we reported budget cutting in the University of Louisiana system? At the time, the doctoral program in Cognitive Science was being shut down. Close behind was the French department, a bachelor’s program: 14 full-time instructors were let go, while tenured faculty were protected (despite newly enacted policies which justified the firing of tenure-line faculty.)

Our correspondent in Cajun Country, Istvan Berkeley (University of Louisiana-Lafayette) reports on what has happened since at Southeastern Louisiana University: ”The two terminated faculty members from Cognitive Science had their positions saved, due to some heavy leaning from the AAUP National Office, although the program is still gone.”

The Faculty Formerly Known As French Professors have not been so fortunate. “Southeastern University terminated three French professors,” Berkeley …

March 31, 2013, 2:19 pm

Feather and Tar Me, But Get Me To The Court On Time

By Claire Potter

Jack Russell Terrier wedding cake toppers

Remember the scene from My Fair Lady in which Liza Doolittle’s no-good, anti-marriage, alcoholic father (who, in the first act, has tried to sell his daughter to Professor ‘Enry ‘Iggins) effects a vast change in his circumstance by getting a wealthy widow to put a ring on it?

Poor and working class people had few options in Victorian London, and marrying into the middle classes was one of them. Both marriage models are represented in My Fair Lady: Liza marries for love, while her father marries for money. Inviting his drinking pals to “feather and tar me” on the eve of his nuptials, Alfred Doolittle inveighs against the marital state, kisses his many girlfriends goodbye, and orders his friends to “get me to the church on time”:

If I am dancing, roll up the floor,
If …

March 22, 2013, 12:50 pm

While The Mice Play: What We Are Reading on Vacation

By Claire Potter

Even Radicals must rest someday, although like all academics, for this household going on vacation generally means finding another, nicer, place to sit down and read. Hence, we have removed ourselves to the island where Christopher Columbus, that murderous wretch, first set foot in the Americas in 1492. So what are we reading here in the land formerly occupied by the Taíno people?

Well of course, we are obviously still online:

Mandy Berry, who has raised Facebook to an art form, comes out about the Grumpy Cat March Madness Tournament, organized and orchestrated by Mandy Berry herself. I managed to get in by insinuating myself shamelessly, bumping aside an actual friend of Berry’s in the process, following a Facebook announcement that there was only one spot left in the Grumpy Cat Bracket. But hello? I picked Harvard over Arizona Mandy Berry. Why I picked Harvard do not…