Nintendo U.

““Teacher’ was the only word on both lists, and I chose it solely for that reason.”

The first grade? I can see that you have been thinking about these problems for a long time.

What does one do with “henchman”?  Henchperson, henchwoman, hencher?

I rather like the sound of “fisherwoman.”  There’s nothing ugly about that one for me. Sometimes the gender specific form is more euphonious to me than the gender neutral form. Perhaps there is something wrong with me.

I am still stuck back there with using “their” for “his or her.”  I think that it will always sound ugly, and I don’t know what to do about it.

I work with student teachers and was surprised to find that the public schools in this part of the world use the titles “Miss” and “Mrs.” to refer to teachers. (As one who came of age in the Seventies in a different part of the country, I thought those terms had vanished as no one I knew used them.) Once past my initial dismay, I observed that the women using these titles (or having the titles applied to them) were unconcerned and no less free in their lives than those of us who had fought the nomenclature battle decades ago. Perhaps for the young, these issues seem quaint (though the word “poetess” still causes shudders when I introduce it in class). 

And many languages have no gender at all, although some of these have sex marking on some nouns.   One prominent language with no gender is Japanese.  It has not been recorded that Japanese culture has a long and ancient tradition of treating men and women in ways that Western cultures people would call “equal”.

My puzzlement has long been with the word woman itself, which qualifies the word man, although in not quite the same manner as fisherman.  Perhaps we should be discussing the advisability of making the word man neutral, although I doubt using something like homan as a counterpart to woman would ever sell.

You’ve just scratched the surface.  How long until the avant guarde  takes on the words or parts of words in which “the gender-specifics” are incidental to the implicit or explicit meanings of the words.  Surely, I am not the only one who remembers the replacing of  “history” with “herstory.”  Perhaps we should refer to a present and/or past citizen of Rome not as a Roman but as a “Romeperson”? No, wait, that won’t work. Those last three letters “un/de-neutralize” the word—I guess we could say “Romeperson” or “Romeperdaughter.” And, of course, to make sure that we do not offend those men and “wopeople” who are both sons and fathers, or daughters and mothers, perhaps just we could just call them “Romers” or “Romians” or “Romites.” 

Long ago I decided that I would be guided not by the written form but by the spoken form of -man words. So “mailman” is objectionable, but the schwa sound in “fisherman” or “fireman” would make it no more objectionable than “woman” (which, after all, is what’s left of “wifman,” which was correlative of the masculine “werman” for what we call “man”).

Of course we could start writing them all with a final -myn….

In the Finnish language, which does not have grammatical gender, the word ‘journalist’ is translated as ‘lehtimies’ (‘lehti,’ meaning ‘news,’ and ‘mies,’ meaning ‘man’). I asked a Finnish-speaking friend once if the use of ‘mies’ as part of the occupation title in any way indicated to her that this occupation was better suited to men than women. Her response: How silly.

Other Finnish-speaking friends have asked me why English differentiates between ‘he’ and ‘she.’ Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone if we just used ‘hän’?

A colleague of mine works in the ministry of education of an Asian country. She takes no offense to working with their Ministry of Manpower.

All very interesting.

How about milkmaid?

I’ve been wondering what a saller is . . .

One who salls. And I am proud of you for not caving in to the pressure to make it salltress.

“And [Jesus] saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”  Matthew 4:19,  King James Version.  New American Standard Bible uses “fishers,” too.  So it’s safe to say “fisher” has been around for a while.

Gender marking in German is very important, of course.  German speakers and writers seem quite happy in simply using both marked terms when both genders are intended.  “Freundinnen und Freunden” for example.  As a German learner, I often find it tongue-twisting, but native speakers reel it off quite happily.  Interesting that the feminine version always comes first, even when referring to traditionally male occupations.   Would “Fisherwomen and Fishermen” really be so bad?

Fish-hunter! I like the sound of that.

Okay fine. Is that to sall, salls, salled, has salled, on the model of “call,” or to sall, salls, sell, has sallen, per “fall”?

Socioculturally, you might be right.  But note that it is impossible to have a language with only one gender.  A language can have no, i.e. 0, genders or it can have 2 or more, where more can be shown to exist in the double or possibly even lower triple digits. But a language can not possibly have one and only one gender. So you can rest assured that your leftist social engineering progressives will never be able to achieve that goal linguistically.

My husband has a passion for fishing and was raised in the northern peninsula of Michigan.  Gender-neutral language there may easily be construed as radical feminism.  When I’ve slipped in “fisher” for “fisherman,” I’ve felt almost as awkward as my in-laws, but I’ve persisted anyway, for the same reasons cited.  I like the simplicity of the verb-to-noun naming.  A doctor is one who doctors; a writer one who writes; a soccer player one who plays.  Why not move in this direction?  In another decade (or two or three), kids may be wrinkling their noses at “fisherman,” asking “Why isn’t she a fisher?”

What, if anything, is that? Is it the same thing as sex?

Perhaps the obvious isn’t so obvious…”man” is a generic term as in “mankind”. In a way it is a short form of “human”. However, overheated, yet prim preoccupation with gender identity can blind us to the simple truth that we are all (males and females) men not monkeys, not bonobos ! And when we say “men” (generically as in  ”fishermen”) we do not thereby exclude females. Of course “man” is indeed used intensively to indicate  ”a male human”, but that is clearly not a unique meaning, and it is not one that should dominate or restrict the proper and commonsense use of the English language.

Twenty-some years ago, a managing editor struggling with gender-neutral requirements for high school textbooks remarked in my hearing, “Eventually we’ll have to say ‘his or her testes’ and ‘his or her ovaries,’ but even then we’d argue about the pronoun sequence.”

One tiny burr under my saddle has always been the tacit implication that English is somehow the only language on the face of the earth with this problem.

I would rather move our discipline in the direction that Grafton and Grossman have highlighted than put my head in the sand ignoring the very real shift in how higher education is working. Of course I’d love to have t-t jobs available to fill our students’ needs and employ so many underemployed historians! But I know that wishing or lobbying or holding my breath won’t make that happen: better to ensure that those graduate students who are being trained get the skill set to prosper in the many  ways they are likely to get employment, not just for research-intensive academia!

Go back and re-read “No More Plan B” a little more closely. Aside from asking tenured profs to be nicer to those in “non-traditional” jobs or seeking them, Grafton and Grossman specifically deny that history departments need to change their curricula to train historians for a wider range of jobs. All of the work of preparing for non-teaching jobs is supposed to fall on other departments and will occur during grad students’ “free time.” This not a proposal for meaningful reform, just better manners.

This is a nice post. I think the tenure-track model is going to collapse at some point, as indeed I think the entire system of higher education in this country is going to collapse as well. It’s an unsustainable system that survives largely through the work of adjuncts that are often being financed by large sums of federal loan dollars. 

The goal in the future is going to have to be to find ways of engaging the public beyond the confines of the classroom or the narrow academic audiences of scholarly journals and small academic presses. 

Thanks, RH, for a (characteristically) thoughtful post about issues that are (characteristically) overlooked by the profession generally (and by most of academe too). 

In a way the Lemisch/Grafton dichotomy can be seen as two competing responses to the question, Who is the AHA supposed to serve?  Lemischites appear to argue that the AHA should serve the interests of people who are or want to be faculty, while Graftonians appear to argue that the AHA should serve the interests of people who are or want to be historians.  Lemischites probably would not contest the idea that history can be practiced in many ways, including public history and public collaboration, but the implicit argument is that such history can best be led by historians with (full-time tenure-stream) faculty jobs.

I admire those who take the Lemischite path to fighting for faculty jobs.  But from a wider perspective, they are the little boys with their fingers in the dike: they may hold back the flood in their own village, but up and down the coast the water is pouring in.  As RH says, the tide that created the 1960s has long since been replaced by an undertow pulling in a different direction.  Efforts to demand full-time jobs for all have had limited success, at best, and none of them have yet yielded a sustainable solution, which requires the identification of funds to replace declining public revenues.

So Grafton is right to encourage young historians to seek other sources of water – sources outside the academy — and to encourage graduate schools to give students tools to seek water rather than expecting now-dry riverbeds to spring back to life.

Historians know full well that people who react to change by denying do not survive, while those who react by adapting do.  Surely they will apply this lesson to our profession too.

tenure serves an economic purpose. Its a non-monetary reward for pursuing a certain kind of work. There are indeed other ways to guarantee intellectual freedom, but they are expensive. Same thing with attracting people to teach at liberal arts colleges in the rural midwest. First rate liberal arts colleges, like Grinnel or Oberlin probably would not have a hard time attracting and retaining faculty, but second tier schools with mediocre students in rural Iowa would have to pay a lot more to keep faculty around.

Eliminating tenure would create more job mobility. But would also see a labor market dominated by more poorly paid adjuncts with a few well paid rock stars shuffling around a handful of elite schools in search of greater salaries and perks. Offering people tenure is a way of keeping salaries down and faculty rosters stable.

Finally there has to be a base level of tenured faculty to keep most universities running. The tenured faculty does perform valuable work for things like accreditation, assessment and outreach. I am not sure the adjuncts would do that work, or you’d have to hire classified staff to take it over.

Matt,

Ask Professor Alan Kors above, founder of FIRE, if tenure is intended to primarily serve an economic purpose, or if tenure’s primary purpose is to secure academic freedom, which it does by way of an economic function.

That is, remove the need for academic freedom, and ask, is the economic function of tenure needed and best supplied through the tenure process?

For example, I suspect tenure does not keep the total costs of salaries down — I suspect when added in through the non-retirement of senior faculty and the associated costs after they retire, that tenure raises salary and total costs of employment.  I would be curious to see studies showing that tenure brought salary down.

I would believe that initial pay for a tenure track position is less than that of a non-tenure track position, but actually I find that hard to believe to, if only because the tenure track position is much more prestigious, it would seem that paying initial tenure track candidates less would be contrary to that.  But possible.

Have comments at this blog been disappearing?  Seems like it.  Maybe Disqus is having a problem today?

If for three decades or more there have been far more history Ph.D.s than appropriate positions for them (however defined), why have schools not cut back on the number of graduate students they train? Why have professors not advised their undergraduates considering graduate school that they may enjoy it and find it intellectually enriching but should expect to make a living doing something other than academic history? These are not rhetorical questions. As a non-academic, who did enjoy good “there are no jobs” from my college English professors three decades ago, I’m genuinely curious how such a mismatch between supply and demand continues over such a long time.

Here’s my answer to the question: Schools have not cut back on the number of graduate students they train because grad students are a cheap supply of labor. As teaching assistants, they can handle much of the grading workload of full-time faculty, and as they move along they can work as adjuncts for a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time faculty member. 

To your second question, some professors do give this advice to undergraduates. I think Tenured Radical and Historiann have written in the past about how those seeking to go to grad school should only do it if they can get into a top program and get a scholarship to cover their cost of living while pursuing the degree. But the reality is that a lot of young people, who may not be making the best decisions for themselves, choose to go into a crowded, unrewarding field anyway because they feel an intellectual calling to do so, and because they see dismal job prospects out there for those with a college degree in the Humanities. Spending several extra years pursuing a doctorate allows them to push off the day of painful decisions. The fact that student loans stay in deferment until a student leaves school provides additional motivation to stay in school for as long as possible.

This is why I think the whole model of higher education in this country is going to collapse, in a manner similar to what happened to the housing market a few years ago. It is only being sustained because of the ready supply of federal loans. I know adjuncts in my department who are pursuing degrees who owe the federal government well over $100,000, and they have no expectation of ever being able to pay off the loan. I suspect we are going to see a lot of defaults on these loans in the coming years, which will force lenders to scale back on their lending, which in turn will enable fewer students to go to grad school. This self-correction, however, will create a problem for academic departments around the country who have come to rely heavily on cheap grad student labor in order to teach a majority of courses. When this all comes crashing down, it’s not going to be pretty. Remember that there is more student loan debt in the United States today than there is credit card debt. The day of reckoning will not be pleasant.

Actually, at my public research university the administration has cut way back on the numbers of students admitted to graduate programs in the College of Liberal Arts.  In my own department, we admitted about 12-15 students per year in the late 90s, we now admit 5-7 graduate students.  Part of the reason for this is anticipating a different kind of academic job market, one that has greatly contracted  Another reason is that central administration decided that graduate students are too expensive because their tuition is paid for either through TA jobs or University Fellowships.  This means far fewer grad students and adjunicts are now teaching undergrad courses. 

As for sutdent loans, in our graduate program, we only admit students if we can come up with financial packages through a combination of TA positions and fellowships.  If our students are taking out loans, it is to supplement the low wages they get through TA’ing.  Of course, I know that not all graduate programs provide these kinds of packages and do expect students to come up with the money.  What I would be interested in knowiong is how these funding packages work in different univrsities — the Ivies and other privates, publuc research U’s, etc.   My sense from reading Sheila Slaughter’s work on research universities is that there are great disparities between these institutions, and while public research universities may take a big nose dive, many of the Ivies are doing quite well.   

A Ponzi scheme, really? I don’t know any graduate students in the humanities who are paying tuition, at least at the doctoral level. Most have a full ride from their institutions, either from work-study, teaching assistantships, or fellowships. I would seriously question the judgment of ANY student who paid tuition for years to get a PhD in the humanities!

Claire, it boggles the mind that you think my proposal for a WPA for historians simply constitutes “expansion of the system as it currently exists.”" Huh? I think we all agree on opposing existing hierarchies and snobberies. Having said that, preparing people for non-academic jobs which, like academic jobs, don’t exist, is a dead end. My concern is for creating jobs for historians. Maybe you ought to remind yourself of the wonderful things that WPA did in history, e.g. Historical Records Survey, State Guides, Slave Narratives Collection, etc.

Jesse, welcome to Tenured Radical!  We do agree on a great many things, and you may be surprised to learn that I am a longtime fan.  And yes, a WPA would be great (although not happening under neoliberalism in either party, I’m afraid.)  But as a New Deal historian, I would argue that these rich programs emerged as only temporary from the start, and that the New Deal itself operated to shore up and re-stabilize a capitalist system in crisis.  Part of what interests me about several of these comments is the assertion that “public history jobs don’t exist” so we shouldn’t train people for them.  Pardon?

First, I’m not sure how anyone knows that is true:  the AHA does not “count” jobs in other fields, and it will admit that it easily loses track of PhDs who are no longer employed in higher ed. Second, we have not explored the ways in which a history PhD leads to work outside the traditional scholar-teacher model: public history has been perpetually degraded by established academics, so graduate students are overwhelmingly reluctant to even admit to having an interest in non-traditional work. I don’t see how the WPA model actually has an impact on this.  Third, we know that academic jobs do not exist! Why would reorganizing the profession around being more, rather than less, inclusive of the many forms of scholarship there are be a bad move?

Finally, I am also curious about another critique of Grafton that has emerged in other comments:  that history grad students work hard enough and shouldn’t have to undergo more training in order to be employed full time as historians.  Part of me wants to say:  Tell that to the Boeing machinist who is retraining because his/her job no longer exists! But also: tell that to practically every historian in digital humanities that I know has re-trained in order to stay afloat as an intellectual or pay hir bills as a poorly supported graduate student unwilling to take out loans. Or the historians who have gone to law school, gotten Museum Studies, or Information Management degrees; or done MA’s/certificates in archives, public history, digital history or oral history. Tell that to the historians who are now working for publishing houses, oral history projects, political organizations, or as journalists. Tell that to the American Studies or Gender Studies PhDs who are doing extra coursework in a discipline so that their scholarship is “recognizable” to better supported departments.

There is much work to be done in relation to helping expose and reorganize exploited teaching labor so that people who want to teach can do so humanely, and so that college is reasserted as a humane and liberal institution for students that is staffed by knowledgeable, committed faculty.  And I agree wholeheartedly that public funding ought to be part of that. But there is also much to be done in terms of making the economy as it is work better for us.

Wish I were going to be in Chicago….

This just in from Jesse Lemisch through my gmail account:

Thanks, Claire. I will present on a WPA for historians at the AHA on January 6 in a session on “Jobs for Historians” :

http://blog.historians.org/annual-meeting/1502/jobs-for-historians–new-session-at-the-126th-annual-meeting

For a recent update of my thoughts on this project, see my “Occupy the AHA: Demand a WPA Federal Wrtiers’ Project,” posted on Portside, Truthout and History News Network:
http://hnn.us/articles/occupy-american-historical-association-demand-wpa-federal-writers-project

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-american-historical-association-demand-wpa-federal-writers-project/1322689827

http://lists.portside.org/cgi-bin/listserv/wa?A2=PORTSIDE;ada0b896.1112b

“Similarly, adjunctification is a terrible problem, but wouldn’t a whole
set of viable employment options outside the academy be good competition
for colleges and universities, the way it is in the sciences and the
social sciences?”

The existence of such options in the natural and social sciences is overrated as an influence on the academic labor market and doesn’t ameliorate the attitude that the only “real scientists” are tenure-track faculty (or the small number of permanent staff at national laboratories).

Wonderful post!  I agree completely about Grafton and as a historian working happily in a so-called “alt-ac”  position in a university (and yes, making good $, doing collaborative/digital scholarship and public history), I do believe we are on the cusp of a revolution in the humanities and in history.  I also appreciate how you’ve analyzed the Grafton-Lemisch conversation; it might turn out that by expanding the notion of what “counts” as meaningful work in which the historian’s skills can be deployed, we might eventually usher in some of the revival of the public sphere that, as I recall, Lemisch argues for.  Anyway, thank you for writing many things that I’d been thinking while following the Grafton/Grossman pieces from the AHA very closely.