March 16, 2013, 1:07 pm

The Custom of the Country: Investigating Email @Harvard.Edu

One of the downsides to being Harvard University is that everything you do is publicized as if no one else has ever done it.

Take the undergraduate cheating scandal, that led to the investigation of the cheating scandal, that led to a lot of students being asked to either take a leave to think about their sins or get the hell out of Dodge for good. Students (and proffies!) cheat at lots of institutions, but when it happens at Harvard it seems to be particularly news-worthy.

Why is this? Well, here’s a parallel example. When Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof, daughter of Irish activist rocker Sir Bob “I Don’t Like Mondays” Geldof, was picked up for shoplifting cosmetics last summer (and not for the first time either) it was commented on extensively; the same crimes committed every day by Joe Blow from Kokomo command very little attention. We expect Joe to shoplift: he’s a witless…

March 14, 2013, 4:12 pm

Looking for the Women on Wikipedia: Readers Respond

By Claire Potter

The Sisters of Selma Photo Credit

This post about Wikipedia’s woman problem drew a bunch of great comments, some with links to resources. It also fed into an epic flurry of announcements from Twitterati about events in the next two weeks where feminists of all genders are gathering, IRL and online, to make inroads on the He-Man Boys Club Encyclopedia. You might want to go into my Twitter feed to look for one near you.

I did want to lift one comment into this post because I thought it was so interesting. @kosboot writes:

One major, major point that Claire Potter does not mention (I feel it almost invalidates her article) is to remember that Wikipedia is a social network. If you’re invited over to someone’s house, do you immediately help yourself to food and start changing the furniture? No of course not -…

March 10, 2013, 7:09 pm

Prikipedia? Or, Looking for the Women on Wikipedia

By Claire Potter

To celebrate women’s history month, I have decided to tweet an historical fact about a woman, or women, every day in March. Silly? Perhaps. Fun? Why yes: I’m enjoying it enormously. Women’s history rocks.

So far, women as different as abolitionist Harriet Tubman, the Empress Josephine Bonaparte, and Svetlana Alliluyeva have appeared in the Twitter feed to the right of this post. I find these women by simply entering the date in Wikipedia’s search box: a list of events, births and deaths show up in an entry devoted to that day. Presto!

Well, not so fast.

You might be surprised to learn how very few items in these lists name women as historically significant figures. Sometimes there are three or four women named; sometimes it is only one. One day there were absolutely no women listed and I had to get creative: I picked a major civil rights event and did some newspaper research…

March 8, 2013, 9:14 pm

Sticky Fingers: Columbia Puts On The Freshman Fifteen

By Claire Potter

Have you gotten over the Nutella thefts at Columbia University yet?

The first news was that $5000 of this Italian spread (made of chocolate, sugar, hazelnuts and palm oil) was being taken from the dining halls every week. Meant to be put on toast, it is also commonly ingested by simply sticking a spoon (or a finger) in the jar. The HuffPo originally pegged Columbia’s losses at 100 pounds a day, which kind of makes me gag every time I think about it.

My Lose It! iPhone app pegs a cup of Nutella at a whopping 1,600 calories: eat the entire jar, and it’s 2,000 calories. This makes me think that Columbia students must be readily identifiable on the Upper West Side as the young folks with coats straining at the buttons and chocolate smeared all over their faces.

But now the Columbia administration is saying that the thefts are only about a tenth of what was originally reported on …

March 3, 2013, 8:55 pm

We Don’t Need Another Hero: One Woman’s Disabled History

By Claire Potter

Harilyn Rousso, Don’t Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 224 pp., paper $24.95.

From its title onward, New York activist Harilyn Rousso’s Don’t Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back argues against the American romance with parables about everyday heroism and triumph over adversity. Instead, this book asks: what would a public that is welcoming to disabled people actually look like? An American Studies Association panel I attended last fall, riffing off of Dan Savage’s It Gets Better YouTube campaign for GLBT youth, put it this way: what if “it” doesn’t get better? What if there is no cure, no triumphant overcoming? What if the body you have is the body you get? Can we imagine instead narratives about rich and full lives with disability?

These are crucial questions, and it is is why you …

February 26, 2013, 10:14 am

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Crowdfunding

By Claire Potter

Today’s guest blogger, Dan Royles is a doctoral candidate in history at Temple University. He is currently a dissertation fellow at the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University. Update: Due to your generosity, Dan raised almost a thousand dollars more than his goal by the deadline.

For almost a month, I’ve been using Kickstarter to raise money for my oral history project on African American AIDS activism. I’m a doctoral student in history writing a dissertation on the same topic, and as with many projects on the recent past, archival sources are relatively thin. But fortunately, although the HIV epidemic in black communities has claimed many of the very people who fought to stop it over the past thirty years, others are still around and eager to share their stories, so doing oral histories makes a lot of sense. I wanted to undertake a full-fledged oral…

February 24, 2013, 2:42 pm

Academics: Get Thin and Sexy in Only Six Hours A Day!

By Claire Potter

There are so many things I could, should, and want to be writing about, but until I get Tim McGraw out of my head, it’s not happening.

As the People magazine cover story by Alicia Dennis (February 2 2013) points out, Tim is “Sexy and Sober at 45” (and not coincidentally on the brink of his Two Lanes of Freedom tour, which launches in Vegas on March 1.) I’m sorry I can’t hook you up to the whole article, and I am even sorrier that I cannot thieve the photograph of the bare chested, tanned and chiseled Tim, with a ripply eight pack and absolutely no fat between his abdomen and his hip bones (how do I know this? His jeans are balanced slightly north of his pubes.) Check out another pic below the fold. (more…)

February 22, 2013, 10:59 am

Why The Feminine Mystique? Why Now?

By Claire Potter

Betty Friedan

Today and tomorrow we are hosting a symposium at The New School for Public Engagement in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Betty Friedan’s popular feminist blockbuster, The Feminine Mystique (1963). A gathering of multiple generations of feminists in four panels and a keynote, the event was sparked by undergraduates at Parsons School of Design. These young women, who were over 25 years away from being born when the book first came out, planned an exhibit (which opened today and will be up until March 5) inspired by Friedan’s ideas as a class project. One thing led to another, and suddenly we have An Event, with a keynote delivered by feminist historian Susan Ware, who published a wonderful book on Billie Jean King and Title IX in 2011. See our fancy announcement in The Grey Lady here.

We who…

February 17, 2013, 1:51 pm

President-Palooza Sunday With Tenured Radical

By Claire Potter

Photo credit.

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

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

February 14, 2013, 1:36 pm

Why Tenured “Radical”? And Other Political Confessions

By Claire Potter

It appeared that my ability to join the collective hinged on my agreement with all the criticisms of my past political thinking and work, and not just a willingness to consider them….The criticism indicated that I was inferior to other members of the collective, and I wanted the opportunity to prove that I had a substantial history of work and ideas, and that I should be considered an equal. So I agreed with the criticisms in general, and said I would rethink things in light of the criticism. I thought to myself, I could always change my mind.

Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Too Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (2010)

A central theme in several autobiographies of former radical antiwar activists is the role that criticism sessions played in persuading people to adopt a new world view, one that ran counter to attitudes they might previously have valued as members of …