#TimesUp at UCLA

In 2008, a history professor at UCLA forcibly kissed a graduate student, the start of years of harassment. In 2018, he was fired. Is #TimesUp finally in academia? My latest at Pacific Standard.

""I'm so thrilled I can't even tell you. There's 10 years of weight lifted off of me." These are the first words that Kristen Hillaire Glasgow says to me over the phone as she reacts to the news that the professor who sexually harassed her and other students for years at the University of California–Los Angeles is being forced from his job at the university. Today, she's feeling satisfied about how UCLA has handled her case and reassured by its procedures for addressing sexual harassment. She wasn’t always so happy. Her first experience with UCLA's Title IX office was a disaster, she says, an experience that's all too typical of the erratic ways in which American colleges and universities adjudicate sexual misconduct. Universities can, and must, do better. More recently, UCLA has changed its procedures in order to support people like victims, proving that it's possible to hold predators accountable."

Autism, Academia, and Why Media Representation Matters

Earlier in the week, Scott Weingart had a brave, essay on being autistic in academic, published in Inside Higher Education.

Admitting mental illness or neurodevelopmental disorder is dangerous, unless you're a middle-class white man diagnosed on the autism spectrum. If you're black and/or a woman, or if you have depression or anxiety, you may be deemed too unstable to work in a modern business or too dangerous to trust as a neighbor. But if you're well-adjusted white dude who scores low on the autism severity spectrum? Have a job at Google!

It's from this acknowledged position of privilege that I choose to come out, under my own name and from a non-tenure-track staff position at a major research university. According to several independent professional diagnoses over the course of my life, I am both autistic and ADHD. (Whether either or both of these actually constitute a “disorder” I leave to the reader.)

It is terrifying to admit this.

I want to highlight one paragraph in particular, under the theme - representation matters. I frequently post about the importance I place in media. Here's Weingart:

My decision to write this essay was precipitated by the CBS TV show Elementary. The show currently features a budding romance between two autism-spectrum characters, and watching it now makes me realize how much I wish I had seen it growing up. Things that have never made much sense might have been easier for me to understand. Maybe if I had seen more familiar faces going through similar difficulties, I would have sought help sooner.
So here I am, presenting my face to the world: I am an autistic academic.

Looking forward to following his work.

More on Accessible Conferences: Pryal and "Reading Aloud"

Katie Rose Guest Pryal, one of my favorite writers on hidden disabilities, has produced some awesome work lately on accessibility. She was one of many people to write about the lack of disability content at the big Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, producing fabulous pieces about the nature of accessibility. Now she's got a new piece for Vitae on academic conferences and accessibility for people with psychiatric disabilities.

Conferences are these oddly performative spaces where our work, in my field anyway, lingers in the gaps between ephemeral workshops and permanent peer reviewed scholarship. It's vetted, but not really reviewed, and performed and critiqued on performance, even as in theory it's all about the ideas rather than style. They can be hotbeds of prestige culture, gossip and critiques. I think they are very important, too, especially for small-time scholars isolated from their scholarly peers.

Pryal's column is filled with important insights, but here's the one I want to highlight today. She writes:

No more shaming for reading papers aloud. This is a pet peeve of mine. Many speakers at conferences get slammed either in private (by gossips) or on social media (by what I would consider trolls) for reading their conference papers out loud on a panel.

Now, some presenters read their papers because they lack audience awareness. They read fast to cram in all of their oh-so-important ideas, or they read the paper because they just didn’t prepare well. I’m not talking about these people right now.

I’m talking about another group of presenters — the ones who read their conference papers because they have to. Many of these people read their papers in a captivating manner. They have fabulous audience awareness. But they still read.

I am in this group of readers. We read because reading, itself, is an accessibility measure for us— for a whole host of individual reasons such as anxiety or disfluency.We read because doing so makes our participation at a conference possible. It’s makes the conference accessible.

Don’t shame presenters who read their papers. Don’t tweet snarky comments with the conference hashtag, e.g., “Ugh stop reading papers already! #conference2016.” First of all, we see those tweets. Second of all, you just might be attacking someone who reads because she doesn’t have a choice.

I am a performer, most at my ease in front of a full room with a lightly scripted text, at most, from which to deliver (or hidden in my study with the blinds drawn. It's a balance of extremes). But that performance is not the why of a conference paper.

We build accessibility into our gatherings through policies, many of which Pryal details here (I offered some others in this piece I wrote for Vitae, based on interviewing a large number of scholars who identify as disabled).

But we also built accessibility by shifting our perceptions and embracing a culture that values neurodiversity, including diversity of paper delivery styles.

Finally, to Pryal's point about conference tweeting, I'm total agreement. Tweeting shifts the temporary to the permanent, so my first rule is: Tweeter, do no harm.

Accessible Conferences - A good set of guidelines

Nice post here on Accessible Conferences. Highlights:

Incorporating accessibility into conference organizing must begin at the earliest stages of conference planning, not least of all to ensure that accessibility is a central item in funding applications. Thus, you will notice that even our CFP for the conference provided a sketch of the accessibility provisions for the conference.

And:

Note that there are guidelines for both presenters and for moderators. If there are any concerns that arise during conference events, please let the moderator know. Moderators will be asked to help facilitate accessibility during sessions. You may ask the moderator for assistance before, during, or after your talk. If needed they will be in touch with Jane Dryden (local conference organizer) or a designated student volunteer.

It's everyone's work to be accessible as possible. I now routinely describe my powerpoint slides with sufficient detail that a person with vision issues will have a sense of what I'm talking about. I use a microphone even if I feel I can project. And I try to say that explicitly to tell the audience this is what I'm doing and why, as a way to help spread the culture of accessibility.

For the guidelines themselves, which are solid, please click through to the original link!

 

Accommodations in Academia - Some positive models

As I wrote about the job discrimination ads last month for Al Jazeera America​, I kept thinking about the hashtag #ILookLikeAProfessor and Kelly J. Baker​'s work. My thesis is that the inadvertent part of this was based, at least in part, on people who had just never considered that a disabled person might be able to be a professor. So I put out a call for disabled professors who would be willing to speak to me about their accommodations and tried to write a positive piece about potential, even as I also pointed out the structural issues. I concluded:

"As long as our common image of the professor remains white, male, straight, well-off, and abled, people outside that circle will encounter both structural and direct discrimination. It’s an image that’s increasingly inaccurate. Disabled academics — like academics from so many other diverse communities and claiming so many types of intersecting identities — are here. They're working hard. And when they receive institutional support, they’re thriving. Let's work on making that the new normal."

With thanks to Stephanie Kerschbaum​ Joe Stramondo​ Heide Estes​ and Brian Kruse​ for their kind assistance, as well as the many other people who kindly contributed their experiences but who I didn't quote directly.

Adventures in Rhetorical Brilliance: Black Law Students of Georgetown and Scalia

I've been writing about trigger warnings, political correctness, and safe space issues for almost two years now (starting with this CNN piece, but extending throughout my blog, including 'trigger warnings are your friends.').

There are at least two different strains of critique of the notion of microaggressions on campus. One is from mostly male white semi-liberals who find the critique from the left discomforting. A second, though, comes from conservatives in academia who simultaneously deny that microaggressions are a real thing, while claiming that conservatives face microaggressions all the time.

I actually do think there's plenty of discrimination against conservatives in academia, which is a problem, but it's also useful to leverage these moments to talk about broader and more powerful forces like racism, sexism, and ableism.

Enter the Black Law Students of Georgetown law. First, conservative students complained that anti-Scalia discourse was hurtful to them. Then the Black Law Students Association performed a kind of rhetorical aikido I find impressive. Some quotes [emphasis theirs]:

We recognize that many in the legal community, including some in our own organization, mourn the death of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, an influential and widely respected legal mind. We also understand that his passing has left many Georgetown Law students deeply saddened and we offer our sincere condolences to these students.

One particular email response from Professors Nick Rosenkranz and Randy Barnett decries the lack of intellectual diversity at Georgetown, citing the experiences of conservative students in the wake of Professor Gary Peller and Louis Michael Seidman’s emails:

“Although this email was upsetting to us, we could only imagine what it was like for these students. Some of them are twenty-two year-old 1Ls, less than six months into their legal education. But we did not have to wait long to find out. Leaders of the Federalist Society chapter and of the student Republicans reached out to us to tell us how traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry, were their fellow students. Of particular concern to them were the students who are in Professor Peller’s class who must now attend class knowing of his contempt for Justice Scalia and his admirers, including them. How are they now to participate freely in class? What reasoning would be deemed acceptable on their exams?”

This paragraph could be edited slightly, inserting black students for conservative and libertarian students, and the effect would be the same.

In fact, this description is nearly identical to the lived and voiced experiences of many students of color at our institution.

Many Black students were also “traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry” as “22-year-old 1Ls” when the law school declined to make unprompted timely statements last school year regarding the uptick in racialized policing, law enforcement, and the lack of indictments of violent police officers.

Many Black students were also “traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry,” when fact patterns on a practice exam directly referenced the facts of the Trayvon Martin tragedy.

The letter goes on with other examples, deploying the conservative students' own words back at them,

If cultural and political conservatives accept that language has power (see: "War on Christmas") when used against them, then all language has power.

So let's get to work improving modes of representation and calling out microaggressions, wherever we find them.

REACTIONS: Discrimination in Higher Education Job Postings

Two weeks ago I saw a tweet that alerted me to a job ad for the CEO of The Arc of Texas, along with other ads on their site, that basically said no disabled person need apply. I posted about the ad, with screenshots, and started a mini social media storm in the disability community.

To their credit, The Arc of Texas had rewritten the ad by the late afternoon, put in an EEO statement, and the national CEO, Peter Berns, told me on the record that of course a blind person could be a CEO of any branch of The Arc ("seeing" had been one of the qualifications).

In the social media mini storm, though, friends alerted me to similar clauses that proliferate in tech, the broader nonprofit sector, and academia. Being an academic, I thought I'd take on the latter first. The result was a major piece for Al Jazeera America that spent a lot of days as either the first or second most viewed/shared piece on the whole site.

I wrote a followup that's just been published, with quotes from disabled academics, the EEOC, the National Council on Disability, and the few schools willing to go on record about this. I'll keep working on getting comments and accountability from these universities.

I'm pleased to say that both Lehigh Community College and the Tarrant County College District have agreed to remove the "physical requirement" language and work on EEO compliance. Others have not, yet. 

In the meantime, here are reaction posts. Let me know if you see more, please.

• Parker Malloy at Upworthy wrote up the issue and interviewed me about how a medieval history professor came to be a disability rights journalist. 
• A quick take from Inside Higher Ed.
• Here's a blog post on this issue specifically in Philosophy.
• Metafilter had a little piece on it.
• A nice piece and discussion from Balloon Juice.

Have you checked your HR department yet?

Grab Your Balls and The Problem with Blind Peer Review

Men's Rights Activists are a particular strain of misogynist who couch their hatred of women in appropriating a language of victimhood. As an avowed feminist, I have encountered them many times, including when I put a defense of feminism on a website haunted by MRAs, and hung around in the comments for a few days learning about their discourse.

My general summary is this - to the extent MRAs have identified real problems with the treatment of men in western society, the answer is always (as Amanda Marcotte says), more feminism. Patriarchy does oppress men, if not in the same way as it does women, and the only way out of that is through taking apart the patriarchy, feminism's avowed goal. I'm glad that's settled.

Last week, a medievalist went to Allen Frantzen's website to check some references and discovered a section called "New! Writing on Men and Masculinity!" Frantzen is now retired from a long career at Loyola University - Chicago, but remains an extremely important scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature. He is a pioneer of queer and gender studies of Beowulf and has strongly influenced how scholars engage this most critical text in the history of the English language.

His writing on Men and Masculinity is full-blown MRA misogynistic hate, combining the absurd and the vile. This is a donotlink to a page on "how to fight your way out of the Feminist Fog. Step one - Grab Your Balls! (GYB)" No, that's really the quote. Hashtags have included #GYB and #FemFog

Everything on the site is standard MRA material, quoting the red pill/blue pill of  MRA discourse, which is almost disappointing. I'd actually be interested, in a horror-show sort of way, to see what a brilliant theorist could do with MRA ideology. But since there's no meat to the ideology, even this great mind is reduced to nonsense.

Here are four several pieces that have covered it well. After that, I'll argue that blind peer review has to go. It's a vehicle for bias-replication, and always has been.

[Update: I have been criticized, appropriately, for not quoting any Anglo-Saxonist female scholars. I am adding content. PLEASE let me know what else I'm missing. I so appreciate criticism.]

Peter Buchanan sums up the stakes for Anglo-Saxon scholars:

It is distressing for young, theory-savvy Anglo-Saxonists to see Allen Frantzen behaving like a reactionary crank because we are conscious of the fact that our field has room for us because Frantzen was one of the people who fought for our place in the field in the 90s. We’ve read his Desire for Origins and Before the Closet, and assigned chapters from them to our students. For that matter, my theory class this semester is reading a chapter from Desire for Origins. It is doubly distressing because while Frantzen has a big name in Anglo-Saxon studies, he is not necessarily well-known outside of it (unless you study same-sex desire), and so we see our late-medieval colleagues dismissing his toxicity without any awareness of how important he was/is to the field. Frantzen has also been one of the most influential trainers of Anglo-Saxonists, people who are doing/have done exciting work on gender (Mary Dockray-Miller), digital humanities (Martin Foys), and ethnicity (Stephen Harris).

Of course, this trajectory didn’t come out of nowhere, and if it has become especially toxic in recent years, there were hints of it much earlier.

[Updated material. 11 AM 1/20)] On Facebook, and quoted with permission, Eileen Joy has offered many important comments on her experience with Frantzen in particular and with misogyny and sexism in her field in particular. She writes:

I have written so many op-eds, so many manifestos, and so many essays envisioning these different universities, and I now realize that they were all drafted in the furnace of my rage and despair over how the field of Anglo-Saxon studies has been content to construct itself: scornful of other medievalists who aren't "them," scornful and dismissive of junior scholars who are not yet established or did not go to the right schools or study with the right persons, misogynist and homophobic (while also worshipping masculinity), elitist, conservative, and just plan mean.

From there she talks about persistent sexual predation and abuse within the field.[/update]

Over at The Syllabub, we get much needed laughter, where the author is just "dipping into the #femfog tweets and laughing." She then explains why mockery matters to her as much as cogent debate:

Academia is part of society, and society is structurally sexist. Which means most of us are going to come up against the misogyny in our careers in lots of horrible and awful ways. I don't have enough resources (emotional or mental) to engage with every incident of misogyny with the same vehement refusal, argument and debate.
So, alongside debate, we have mockery. And each person who contributes to the #femfog (whether with a joke, a meme, or with condemnation) is signalling that Frantzen's rhetoric is not part of the future of the academy.

Lavinia Collins writes about the underlying issue in both the FemFog post and much MRA rhetoric:

The crux of my objection to this post is that, despite claiming to be about equality, politics and freedom, it’s actually about sex. How do you get women to have sex with you without having to go to the trouble of pretending you view them as equals? Franzten suggests it is by grabbing your balls and using data.

Jeffrey J. Cohen talks about shaming:

We should be cautious about public shaming and bandwagonning, of course, but if you as a senior and respected member of my field of study are going to fill a website with hatred against women and inveigh against feminism -- the very movement that has made the field as I know and love it possible -- and if you are going to directly link your website full of verbal violence against women to a list of your scholarship that makes it clear that these are not two separate things, but that you are relying on the cachet of the latter to make the former seem learned or compelling, well then you deserve to be shamed publicly, because you are an embarrassment to the field.

There are three posts at In the Middle. Cohen on calling out misogyny. Karl Steel on medieval "whiteness." Dorothy Kim on "Antifeminism, Whiteness, and Medieval Studies." Jonathan Hsy wrote a pragmatic, and much needed, post about "lessons learned" from the #femfog episode.

Please add additional links in the comments.

[update 11:00 AM 1/20]
A number of people have linked to this statement by a group of senior Anglo-Saxonists. I'd like more information on its origins and whether any names have been made public.

Old English Literature and Anglo-Saxon Studies: By far the majority of contemporary scholars in the field of Anglo-Saxon Studies and especially Old English strive to be professional, respectful, generous, equitable and welcoming to all others, irrespective of identity, including but not limited to, gender, sexuality, race, or age. The field does not belong to any one scholar, or to any one approach, or to any single authority. It is the duty of every generation of scholars in Old English to promote our subject and make the field a better, kinder and more desirable place in which to work for all succeeding generations. [/update]

To me, revelations like this need not be surprising. We know that bigots of all sorts permeate academia, because bigots permeate society. Academia runs into trouble when it constructs itself as better than society. If the #femfog helps medievalists believe their colleagues when they discuss misogyny, homophobia, classism, ableism, and so much more, instead of dismissing such concerns as overblown, I'll be pleased.

Here's one question among many:

How many times has Frantzten, a giant in his field, been asked to review feminist readings of Anglo-Saxon literature, and been given power over the career of someone whose views he deeply hates? What do we do about it? When think about Frantzen as an outlier only because he made his bigotry public, doesn't that push us to rethink systems of peer review that conceal the reviewer's identity?

We need to re-invent our prestige systems from so many directions. Re-imagining peer review in order to protect against bias needs to be part of that process. Personally, I like removing the anonymity. Yes, sometimes that will mean people will be too nice, but I'd rather err in that direction.

Your thoughts?

The Chocolate Milk Mustache of the Corporatization of the University

From Vox, Julia Belluz has quite a story.

The University of Maryland issued a press release about a new study on the effects of a single brand of chocolate milk on cognitive and motor skill tests in high school athletes.

The story, as she documents, is that Fifth Quaker Fresh funded research, the scientists did some shoddy research and didn't even bother to submit it for peer review, the university made a splashy press release, and everyone goes home happy. Well, except for Integrity.

So here we have a milk manufacturer working in partnership with the University of Maryland to fund a sloppy study, and the university then blasts the results, persuading schools and the press that this milk works wonders on students' brains.

It's everything wrong with modern-day science-by-press-release in one anecdote.

I see this (as Belluz does too) as a consequence of the university as a profit-center. When said institution is a public university, the science is especially suspect, and the corporate sponsorship especially visible, then it's easy to mock. Most university scientists seem to spend their careers lurching from funding source to funding source, their jobs (and the jobs of their staff) contingent on outside money. It's structural and leads to ... well ... being told that a specific brand of chocolate milk is good for athletes.

Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine?

What Is The Good Life? - Scenes from a Dystopian Job Market

The lucky winner of this job will be in an excellent position to opine on the Good Life.

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida invites applications for the position of lecturer to teach the Humanities Common Course, IUF 1000: What is the Good Life?, to begin August 16, 2016. As part of the UF Core Curriculum, IUF 1000 is a multi-disciplinary humanities course, taught in collaboration by the faculties of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the College of the Arts, and the College of Design, Construction, and Planning.

This is a full-time, renewable, nine-month, non-tenure accruing position. Duties include teaching two sections and up to six hundred students per semester while supervising up to ten graduate teaching assistants, and contributing to development of course content and assessment of course delivery. Minimum qualifications: experience teaching multi-disciplinary humanities core courses, and a Ph.D. in a humanities discipline in hand by the time of appointment. Preferred qualifications: experience teaching large lecture courses with comparable course content, and supervising graduate teaching assistants in such a course. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience and include a full benefits package.

The Good Life does not have tenure.
The Good Life has a student-professor ratio of 600:1
The Good Life does come with benefits
All grading in The Good Life is done by graduate students who, upon completion of their PhD, will also be in an excellent position to opine on The Good Life (without tenure, with benefits).

Who comes up with this stuff?

Post-Book Academia: Leaving Academia.edu

Guy Geltner, a medievalist, has written an important piece on why he is leaving Academia.edu, a site that encourages academics to upload their work (skirting copyright laws by calling them "drafts" in some cases), and deploying various algorithms to connect people, encourage discussion, and so forth.

I joined and put two papers online. One - "The Material Culture of Medieval Venetian Identity," contains  a big meta-thesis about how pre-modern Venetians shaped their culture, plus the use of "vectors" as a controlling metaphor to discuss it. I think it's a pretty nifty article and a significant idea. I'd like people to read it, so I uploaded it. It's been viewed 577 times, which is pretty good. I don't think the article gets nearly as much attention if it just sat in Mediterranean Identities, even though it's the first chapter and even though the collection is terrific! In fact, it's precisely the type of collection I expect to see destroyed by Informa, now that they've bought Ashgate.

Of course, Academia.edu isn't doing this for free. They want to make money, and as they get bigger and bigger, both their costs and their expectations for revenue intensify. From Geltner's piece:

The venture capitalists behind Academia.edu, like those backing ResearchGate, did not invest in a charity. (Mendeley is now owned by the publicly traded Elsevier and SSRN is produced by a privately held corporation; incidentally, its advisory board appears to be all male). As such, they are steering it towards an Initial Public Offering or IPO, as I was told in no uncertain terms by Price. Their working and very plausible assumption is that an enterprise needs to be profitable or show much promise of profit, for its IPO to be an attractive option, and they are presumably pressuring Price and his team to prepare the ground for it before a new round of fundraising. I speculate that under these circumstances, new publishing-related services offered by the site will likely begin to cost money, especially in the form of Article Processing Charges or APCs.

Geltner then discusses APCs for a few important paragraphs, at least if the issue is new to you, including the key lines:

For-profit conglomerates like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Sage, and others are seeking to protect their income streams under growing pressure to make publicly funded research, of which they often hold the copyright, freely accessible at least to those who funded it. To these publishers, Open Access (OA) is not an ideology but a business model meant to keep profits as high as possible.

I've long been troubled by the way that "open-access" shifts costs on to individual academics. It might work to charge APCs to groups of researchers who can write APCs into their grant costs, but they are equally likely to close off open-access journals to small-school scholars or even big-school American scholars where such team-based and grant-based projects are rare. It's important (as Geltner notes) that the new Open Library of the Humanities is NOT relying on APCs, although Public Library of Science (PLoS) does. Maybe science, with its grant mechanisms, can soak the costs? I'm certainly no expert on science-publishing. Meanwhile, my business school colleagues talk about "pay-to-publish" and have APC costs built into their annual budgets (for non-open access publications, usually, hence getting revenue from two directions).

Geltner finishes with an attack on contemporary academic information culture [EDIT: Note - I am not endorsing the "laziness" angle here. I think that's totally NOT what's going on with academic SEARCH. But that's a subject for another essay].

Scholarly activism would be a welcome change to the laziness that has characterized our modus operandi on this front. It may be unpleasant news, but Academia.edu’s success is based on our woeful tendency to search for information (including scholarly articles) on Google, and almost nowhere else; a tragic irony given that our role in society is to find an independent voice, not blindly sail down the stream. With every intervention or publicly funded article we give to those who will eventually trade it (or leverage it to turn a profit), we are contributing to the subordination of science to the whims of financial or political elites. The recent sale of Ashgate Publishing to Informa, the parent company of Taylor & Francis, is only the most recent case in point. (I do accept that university presses can be an exception to this rule, at least in the sense that they are meant to support their institutions, and by extension underwrite independent research). It is time to stop being naïve, and do something for the freedom of scholarship. Open access to scholarship should be a human right, not a business model.

Do something.

But what?

I don't have any answers. Post-book academia is hard.

My Campus, Like Your Campus, Is Probably Racist

UPDATE: Dominican Star article on the protests. Administration has been speaking out in solidarity with the students and we'll see what happens. Meeting today at 8:30 of Faculty to discuss actions.

Last week African-American students at Dominican University protested racism on campus. Here are two videos. The first is a short protest in the cafeteria. The second is long and outside the office of our President. Both videos are shared with permission of one of the protest organizers.





So what are the issues on our campus? That's a bit complicated. We've had several incidents of racist graffiti in dorms and at least one racist epithet uttered on campus by one student to another in a public space. These have been scattered over the years (and were well publicized on campus in both our student media and official condemnatory statements from administration). Students also speak of micro-aggressions in the classroom, from faculty, although I don't have permission to share these details. I expect in the week to come to have more information, hopefully a statement with demands detailing issues and demanding change. I promise to share them as appropriate, always mindful of the students' right to control their own narrative. I'm not a disinterested journalist here, but a white male tenured faculty member.

The protests came as a shock to some of my colleagues, judging from comments on social media, and even more so to alumni who viewed Dominican as a safe, nurturing, space. We are a relationship-centered university. We form close bonds among students, between students and faculty/staff, and are proud of our community. We are, or will be soon, a majority Hispanic institution, with 65% of this year's first-year class Latina/o. Our ties in the Chicago Latina/o community run deep (as I wrote about in this piece on our president's leadership on immigration reform). We also proud of our commitment to social justice. To be told of a campus climate of racism jars against our sense of self and mission.

It's also certainly true. There's no reason to question the lived experience of others, especially students taking the risk to protest publicly. Moreover, Dominican, like all institutions, partakes of the hierarchies of the society in which it exists. There is no ivory tower. Racism permeates Chicago, Illinois, and America (and beyond). Why should Dominican be exempt? Moreover, to acknowledge its truth does not erase the good things, the real change that our students undergo as a result of their education here, or the intense efforts of faculty and staff to make our campus safe, inclusive, and welcoming. Structural change is hard!

I take these protests as a moment to self-examine, first of all. I know my values and I know how I want to behave. But I, too, partake of the hierarchies in which I live. The pernicious nature of micro-aggressions is that the aggressor can be fully ignorant of his or her actions and be fully of good will, yet still turn a campus into a hostile space.

The inequalities run deep. Here are two recent pieces on structural racism in American universities, both written by African-American women with PhDs. Stacy Patton, for Dame Magazine, writes about the ways that American colleges and universities were never designed with racial equality in mind.

The irony is that many predominantly White colleges and universities appear to have the signs of progressive campus cultures with healthy race relations, especially in comparison to their 1950s predecessors...The problem is that they are signs of an alleged commitment that is rarely realized, and they give the false, and dangerous, impression that race relations on campus are much better than they really are. It is no wonder that so many universities lack even the basic data on faculty diversity or a plan to address systemic racism (much less define it). 

Tressie McMillan Cottom, in The Atlantic, writes:

Given the history of racism, wealth, and institution building on which all U.S. universities are constructed, the debate about Calhoun is specific but not unique. It may also be missing a larger point about the relationship between memory and politics. The legacy of racism is not just carved into the facades of university buildings; it is found in the persistence of inherited privilege that shapes the composition of the curriculum, the student body, and the faculty.

These things are true at Dominican University, for all its lack of fame and money. It's in a fantastically wealthy mostly white suburb of Chicago (River Forest), surrounded by West Chicago (Austin neighborhood), the African-American suburb of Maywood, and the heavily-Latin suburb of Melrose Park. Our buildings are gorgeous and gothic. As the forest preserve to our west adopts the fall colors, the campus glows in the late afternoon with reflected sunlight. We should not be surprised with our African American students articulate ways in which this environment is less than perfect for them.

I am grateful to these students for speaking out and for letting me share these videos. More to come.

Conferences and Cost for the Precariat

@Lollardfish Rly like that you took on "boondoggle" issue. By def'n not a boondoggle for those who have to pay our own way much of the time.

— Carrie Schroeder (@ctschroeder) May 6, 2015

Yesterday at the Chronicle of Higher Education, I had a new piece defending academic conferences. I talk about the kinds of benefits I've seen from conferences. I critique a recent New York Times piece that argues the conference is a boondoggle that nevertheless fills the author with ennui. First, let me share Carrie Schroeder's tweet (by permission), then explore the an aspect I left out of my CHE piece (I only had 1000 words) - cost - and talk about it a little more.

Conferences are expensive. If, indeed, they are necessary and important as I argue in my CHE piece, then we have to be concerned about the way those expenses fall most heavily on adjuncts, graduate students, and people at low-paying jobs without adequate conference funding. I have a low-paying job in comparison to other tenure-stream faculty, but we happen to have excellent conference funding, and it's made all the different in my career. I know most people aren't so lucky.

I have written repeatedly about the need to strip the hiring fair components out of academic conferences, and that at least would help remove some mandatory costs from the process of seeking academic work. But if conferences matter for scholarship and growth, as I argue, then that's not enough. We also have to work as hard as possible to keep costs low or even zero for people who have the least money.

Here are three steps:

First - lower fees for adjuncts, independent scholars, and graduate students (EDIT - And low-compensated NTT folks like many post-docs). Many conferences do that already. Here's a petition asking conferences to do lower fees. Consult your particular scholarly organizations and make sure that they have an appropriate fee range, zeroing out costs as much as possible for those who can least afford it.

At Midwest Medieval History Conference, which I ran last fall and of which am now president, we lowered costs for adjuncts, grad students, and independent scholars, and gave a $150 stipend to our graduate student presenters. That, of course, has financial implications for the group and probably bumped everyone else's fees up about 5$. I'm comfortable paying that extra 5$.

Second - Valorize things that replicate the function of conferences (sharing work, getting feedback, networking) but that don't require physical travel. Organizing and hosting a serious ongoing online discussion on Twitter (or wherever) about academic issues is certainly as important a work as organizing a panel in meatspace. Moreover, sharing works in progress and receiving feedback can be done virtually. I am, obviously, a defender of the conference, but let's make sure that if people find other, more affordable, ways to replicate their function, we treat them as "real."

Third - I think it's vital that when people do go to conferences, their experiences are meaningful. The vast majority of responses to my questions spoke positively of conferences, talking about how important it was - whatever stage or status my interlocutors had - to engage with scholarly community. The few dissenting voices, though, spoke of hierarchy. They felt ignored and alienated, isolated from the conversational and scholarly centers in the cliques, and not provided with the kind of connections that I talk about as so important in my Chronicle piece.

That's a real problem, especially if one is spending out of pocket to attend the conference, hoping to gain feedback and network. I think it's vital for conference organizers to be intentional about this sort of thing and for people at the top of the hierarchy to go out of their way to talk to grad students, adjuncts, and the broader precariat.

This is also why small conferences matter to me much more than big ones. An all-plenary conference of 50 people provides me with vastly more new connections and exposures to new ideas than a conference with 5000 people and 20 competing concurrent tracks of sessions. When we're all spending a few days working together, sharing coffee breaks, with a finite group of people, it tends to erode social hierarchy. Or at least it can. We can all be more intentional about making sure that conference experiences are meaningful for everyone who attends.

The Academic Conference - A Defense

Yesterday a professor at Princeton saw fit to ask in the New York Times "What is the purpose of the conference?" She meant is as a setup for a rant about how boring they are all are, writing:

If everyone is content with the conference as a legitimate custom, why do post-conference sentiments typically range from disappointment to total rage, always expressed in hushed tones?

Yes, sometimes papers are boring and people ask bad questions. I loved Mallory Ortberg's piece "Every Question in Every Q&A Session Ever," which makes some of the same points as this NYT piece and is, in my opinion, much funnier (Ortberg is one of my favorite comedy writers online).

I'm going to say more about this NYT piece later, but let me ask you this.

1. Do you leave a conference typically filled with disappointment to total rage? 

I never have. Rage, really? Sometimes the papers are better than other, but I always leave conferences ready to work, to be a scholar.

2. Are most questions, in your experience, self-aggrandizing or distracted mutterings? 

In my experience, I think something like 98% of all questions are good ones. In fact, I am hard pressed right now to remember a bad one (I do remember bad papers, but they are by far the tiny minority).

But that's just my experience. Maybe I've lived a charmed life. What about you? Rage?

Academics Talk About Money

Recently, I've seen a positive trend - Academics talking bluntly about money.

Talking about money doesn't besmirch intellectual activity; rather, being paid fairly enables more and better intellectual activity.

We exist in a profession in which talking about money is gauche. We're supposed to work because we love it (read this essay on the exploitation built into the concept of "do what you love") and, of course, our institutions' financial structures positions tend to be secretive and haphazard.

I believe that silence about money keeps academics from thinking of their work as work. Wanting to be paid fairly for our work is not betraying a higher intellectual calling; rather, being paid fairly is what enables us to pursue our callings.

Here are some recent pieces on this theme. I don't agree with everything said in all of them, but I'm thrilled the conversation is happening:

The conversation is being driven, appropriately, by people writing about the non-tenure-track and alt-academic careers. They have no choice but to think explicitly about finances, but are still part of a culture that discourages it. That's why we, as a profession, are so fortunate to have such outstanding alt-academic and post-academic writers.

I start with excellent column by Katie Rose Guest Pryal​ (one of my absolutely favorite Chronicle writers) on "the university as a client" for "freelance academics." Pryal writes:

It begins with a shift of mindset—from that of employee to that of freelancer. As a freelancer, your institution is just one of your many clients. That means you need to spend your extra time and energy on projects that earn you money and respect outside of one particular institution. 

I love the "one of many clients" language for the freelance academic. The relationship may be different for the full-time professor, in that we may have fewer clients, but even so, we can think like a savvy freelancer and benefit from it, as discussed in this next piece.

Pryal's call was taken up in another Chronicle piece (not by me) on marketing yourself as a freelancer while a tenured professor. The author, a humanities professor writing under the pseudonym "Sam Johnson," talks about the tenured entrepreneur.

Here’s the line in [Pryal's] essay that really caught my eye: "If you are a tenure-track professor … and you’ve noticed that higher education might not be able to sustain you either, then I’m also talking to you."
I came to that exact realization a few years ago, after receiving my last promotion and struggling through several years without so much as a cost-of-living raise. The resulting epiphany has changed the way I look at my work, revitalized my career, and improved my life immeasurably.

Once Johnson realized that their skills - "teaching, training, speaking, writing, editing" - had monetary value, marketing followed, then significant income. The piece writes about making the leap both conceptually and pragmatically, including how one draws boundaries between oneself and one's main employer.

Meanwhile, "The Tenured Radical" wrote a blog post called "How we make money from books." She seems to be responding to debates about how stringently to fight for a bigger advance/royalties from academic publishers. Her argument is - don't. Academic book publishing is structurally designed not to make money for authors in almost all instances (not textbooks), but she's not saying we should write for love. Rather, books make us money in other ways - i.e. getting jobs, speaking fees, etc. What I like about this piece is that the basic premise - money matters - isn't in dispute. The question is how to maximize one's returns, and that's a fine subject for debate.

One problem in academia is that we valorize certain kinds of money making activities and not others. Clearly, the pseudonymous Chronicle author is concerned that their outside activities might violate a contractual position on secondary employment, even as their wages stagnate and expenses mount. Or maybe, they just don't want to get criticized for "selling out." Here's my advice to artists and intellectuals - sell out. You'll do better art when your bills are paid.

And it's not confined to academia - writers of all types have been posting essays on getting paid. I think it's health. Here's Jim Hines, an SFF novelist, posts his writing income every year. Ann Bauer, at Salon, talked about the way her writing is supported by her husband's salary and why it's essential to be open about that. "Who pays writers" is an anonymous crowd-sourced list of rates from Scratch Magazine. There are others, but that's a good sampling of the kind of non-academic writing on money that's out there.

I am a freelance journalist. It took me ages - dozens of essays - to embrace the word freelance, because freelance suggested that I am writing for the money.

I am not writing for money. If I were writing for money, though, that would be fine, as we could use the money. I could recite long list of unimpeachable expenses relating to child and elder care, but I won't, because frankly if I were writing to make money to make car payments on my HumVee, that would be fine too (seriously people, I do not have a HumVee. I drive a 1997 minivan with 200K miles on it).

I started writing because I thought I had some things to say and I found venues to say them in, almost all unpaid. I finally learned to ask the question, "what is your rate for freelancers." It turns out that almost all publications have them, they are not negotiable at my level, but they're mostly fine. And when people say they can't pay, no matter how interesting, I don't write for them (I do sometimes allow them to re-publish my blogs).

This has all made it easier to do more writing. I am a disciplined writer because it's work. I market myself, increasing my visibility, and thus making it possible to land more visible writing gigs. I work harder for $400 essays than for $100 essays (that's basically the range for me), especially in terms of the research and interviews that lie behind them.

Being paid has helped me invest in my writing - a better phone for interviews and recording conversations. I'm going to buy a better voice recorder soon though. A landline for when I am intereviewed. Cable (I'm reviewing some cable TV shows). Books with relevant information.

Last year I published about 45 essays. I would have had to publish about 350 essays to make anywhere near my current salary (which is very low on the AAUP scale of what professors make).

I am now learning to quote a speaking rate comparable to other journalists, though between you and me, I'm always ready to undercut myself and come talk to anyone who wants to listen. If you have the money, though, you should pay your speakers well.

Again, here's the principle - Fair pay for work makes it possible to do more and better work, and there's lots of work that needs doing. Academics need more blunt talk about pay.

Academics: Say Nothing if you Want a Job.

A new survey of chief academic officers is out from Inside Higher Education. Among the findings: Provosts really care about civility and think it should be part of the framework for hiring and tenure.

I see this as potentially troubling. When the Steven Salaita controversy broke, I wrote a piece for the Chronicle called "Don't Speak Out," in which I read the Salaita affair through the lens of my interest in public engagement for academics. I said that the lesson for academics was that if you ever wanted a job, or might want to move from one job to another, don't have strong opinions about things.

We need more public writing, not less. We need to open pathways for more academics to speak out in public, not punish Salaita for doing so in ways that have provoked such strong feelings. But we can’t ask scholars to embrace the risks of engagement in a system in which partisan bloggers and local papers can push timid administrators to fire, or in this case unhire, academics who leap into public debates.

In theory, Provosts agree with this and support public scholarship. At the same time, from IHE:

Generally, provosts expressed concern (with little difference by sector) about civility. Asked if they were worried about "declining civility among higher education faculty," 27 percent said that they were very concerned and 44 percent were somewhat concerned. Only 5 percent were not concerned at all.
But in more detailed questions, provosts had varying perspectives on where faculty civility is lacking.
Generally, they feel more confident of faculty civility with regard to students than to fellow professors or (in particular) administrators. And provosts typically believe that their institutions display more civility than higher education as a whole. (A pattern in Inside Higher Ed surveys of administrators is that they think their institutions are doing better in many respects than the rest of higher education.)

So they think their institution is fine, but others aren't so much. They think faculty are civil to students (which is as it must be, due to the power dynamic at work there). But about 80% of all provosts, across all sectors, (download the whole survey here), believe that civility is appropriate to consider for hiring and tenure/promotion.

So that's it. It's a massive majority. And so we're stuck back where I started this post.

If you ever want to get a job in higher education or be considered for another job in higher education, don't speak out on important controversies. Stay cautious. Stay silent. Stay detached.

This is not what the academy needs. It runs counter to the message we share with our students. It runs counter to the NEH call for more public humanities. It runs counter to everything I've been writing about for the last year.

But the data is clear. So be careful out there.

Contingent Faculty and #FreeCommunityCollege

For the next few days, Community Colleges will be in the news, thanks to the president's proposal. #FreeCommunityCollege was the top trending hashtag in the U.S. yesterday. There are lots of news reports and surely hundreds of think pieces to come.

My basic assessment is that it's a good plan that if enacted, because it's not a "last dollar" plan (i.e. the money only comes after other means have been exhausted) will make 2 years of college more affordable for many Americans. It will undermine the for-profit market as well as the Frankenstein ASU-style for-profit wing of non-profits. The devil is in the details, but I'm pleased.

And now, dear fellow academics, here's the thing for which we must lobby.

These new students need to be taught by full-time, salaried, faculty.

If we're going to claim that Community College is a pathway towards a better life, better wages, better education. If we're going to claim that public education is a public good. If we're going to invest federal money in making higher education accessible. Shouldn't we then demand that the people doing the actual teaching are fully supported? They must make a living wage. They need health care. They need access to faculty development. They need offices.

We do this for the students. And we're going to hear a lot about the students in the next few days and weeks.

We do this for basic economic justice.

We do this for the profession.

We have to demand that this new investment in community colleges arrives with an appropriate investment in instruction.

My baseline, at the moment - Any school receiving funding for the America's College Promise must have 80% full-time faculty.

This is one of those moments in which a unified voice can have an impact, so let's start speaking up.

Update: Thanks to New Faculty Majority, I got a link to this report on the state of community colleges as of 2012. A shocking 70% of all faculty are part-timers. Yes, some of those will be people who only want to teach a course or two while working at some other profession, but most are adjunct profs trying to scrape together a living.

Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan, public intellectual

Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education I have a profile of Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. I'm interested in his work as a public intellectual and defender of the traditions of liberal learning. There are lots of other people who make similar arguments (which is not a criticism. They are GOOD arguments!). But few have the kind of influence over one of the elite institutions of American higher education.

Since I wrote my profile, Roth wrote this for The New Republic (before it imploded):

In the nineteenth century, Emerson urged students to “resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism.” He emphasized that a true education would help one find one’s own way by expanding one’s world, not narrowing it: notice everything but imitate nothing, he urged. The goal of this cultivated attentiveness is not to discover some ultimate Truth, but neither is it just to prepare for the worst job one is likely to ever have, one’s first job after graduation.
Instead, the goal of liberal education is, in John Dewey’s words, “to free experience from routine and caprice.” This goal will make one more effective in the world, and it will help one continue to grow as a whole person beyond the university. This project, like learning itself, should never end.

The criticism of Roth will be that this is all easy for him to say, but that first-generation college students need jobs! College is too expensive! Also jobs! All of which is absolutely true, and Roth acknowledges these issues in his other work. But he does seem to want to get us to agree on what the ideal should look like, and then we can work on cost issues.

Roth is also working at Wesleyan to encourage his faculty to do more public work. When I interviewed him, I asked about how this worked (in the context of my piece, But Does it Count?) I believe that if we want academics to engage, and I think we do, we have to make it count. In a followup email, Roth wrote:

We established a faculty task force to examine how to evaluate “non-traditional scholarship.” The impetus came from wanting to acknowledge public and engaged scholarly work. There was genuine buy-in by the tenured faculty, though we still have not determined genuine formulae for quality. There probably aren’t such formulae, in my view, and we will have to proceed with evaluators and metrics on a case-by-case basis.

This seems right to me. That you establish the principle to valorize public work, you deal with it case by case, and then those cases provide precedents for going forward. I think, as I've said elsewhere, that senior faculty members have to go first. They apply for promotions, sabbaticals, and grants based on public work, then those can serve as precedents for junior faculty to do the same.

Finally, Roth is still very much a faculty member in some ways, especially intellectually. I think this runs generally against the grain of university presidencies. For example, Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester, wrote for Inside Higher Education that, "The days of faculty participating as a matter of course in admissions decisions or of presidents being drawn regularly from the ranks of the faculty at their own institutions are over." That's a pretty bold statement from Rosenberg, and I believe Roth serves as a counter-example.

So I asked Roth about what he thinks about faculty becoming presidents. He said:

It is probably important to have had some time in administration, just so one is informed about budgets, fundraising.. and the other systems of governance. Most faculty never have to deal with these things.

Most administrators never have to deal with teaching, and this can be a big problem in the presidential role. Presidents should see themselves as educators as well as administrators. Faculty members can surely do this. I suppose most wouldn’t want to, and many faculty leaders see themselves as antagonists vis a vis the administration. I certainly did. Perhaps this is why some boards of trustees are skeptical about faculty members as presidents.

But university leadership is educational leadership — and I wish that more professors would be interested in it. A friend said to me when I took my first job as president: "you’ve written books, how about trying to build a bookcase?" You don’t build a bookcase if you don’t love books.

And Roth, I am sure, loves books.

Social Media in the Workplace, especially Academia

I have a meta-thesis about academic culture: It's no worse than anywhere else, but we tend to think we're better, and that's where the problems come in.

Usually I'm talking about race, class, or gender. We think we're immune to the dominant trends of American society, so generally resist being told to change our ways. In today's essay for Vitae, I talk about power and social media. I think academics, particularly senior folk, are loathe to think of themselves as managers, as bosses, as supervisors, so end up treating their junior colleagues as ... colleagues. Except they are also simultaneously judging their senior colleagues and exercising all sorts of power over them. Our practices on social media need to reflect this reality.

The essay tells the story of Jane Smith, a young professor with kids, who received a Facebook friend request from a Dean. I explore what it meant for her, interspersed with commentary about social media and the workplace in this age of never-ending work-life integration. I wrote:

We live in a world in which our social and professional identities entangle so easily. The rise of the Internet and email, followed by the ability to access both from our phones, has stretched the hours of expected contact throughout the day. Many of us choose to habitually broadcast our lives on social media, placing our quotidian activities into a strange public-private record. We can, of course, avoid social media. We can choose not to allow our colleagues into our private online space. Such choices come with social costs and perhaps even missed professional opportunities.

What we need, instead, are clear guidelines for how to handle such interactions in the best possible way. Here are my rules, rephrased to try to be clearer:

1. DO NOT EVER SEND FRIEND REQUESTS TO YOUR SUBORDINATES.

Is that clear? Don't do it. Don't ask them. They will find you and send to you if you want to do it. When you send a friend request, you are pretending that they can accept or reject if they want to. They can't.

I think we know this with our students, or most of us do anyway. We need to be mindful of these power dynamics with our colleagues as well.

2. Accept 100% or 0% of friend requests from subordinates.

Make a rule. Stick to it. Don't make it personal.

3. Be mindful of power.

In an amusing addendum, my Dean sent me an email asking, "What about Twitter?" I responded:

I think Twitter has a different public/private dynamic (unless you have a private Twitter account, then the same applies). When you say something on Twitter, it's intentionally a public utterance. Not everyone realizes that, of course and people tweet out private thoughts that later get them in trouble. Still, reading someone's tweets, even hitting follow, is different than friending. The Facebook "Friend" suggests a kind of intimacy and a private space. It's also transactional in that when you send a friend request, the other person has to respond. Not so on Twitter. You tweet, the world decides whether they want to listen.

The Follow does have a kind of status to it. It says - I think you're worth listening to, but the intimacy of Facebook isn't there.

 What do you think?

The Empty Room - Indifference to Disability is Ordinary

One of my absolutely favorite writers on disability, Lydia Brown, is at Georgetown. She's an increasingly well-known voice on disability issues and, not surprisingly, was asked to provide a training to student organizations about accessibility. She agreed.

No one showed up.

In a powerful post, Brown explains what the empty room means.

Nothing demonstrates more clearly the utter disregard that disabled people face every day at Georgetown than this. That of literally hundreds of student organizations with hundreds (possibly even creeping into the low thousands) of students involved on their boards or other leadership positions, not even one person deemed it worth their while to learn about access and inclusion.

She then acknowledges that yes, people at Georgetown are busy (aside - also jaded if they turn down free pizza), but it was a huge pool, and not one person decided that disability issues might possibly matter to their groups.

There is hate and scorn for people with disabilities out there, yes, but that's not the problem. It's the casual, structural, ableism, in which disability issues vanish, in which when we talk about diversity on campus, we mean race, gender, and class, not ability. Even when we throw ability into the list, we don't actually act on it. When we act on it, unless it's mandatory, no one comes. When we make it mandatory, we build resentment, hate, and scorn.

Here's how Brown finishes:

The empty room means that our fight is less against willful hate and more against the easy ignorance cloaked in the privilege of never having to live a disabled experience -- the privilege of never being guilted and shamed into going to an event that you lost the spoons for but had requested an interpreter for beforehand -- the privilege of never having to decide days in advance whether you will go to an event or not -- the privilege of never having to wonder whether you'll be able to access the handouts, presentation slides, or speech of the presenter -- the privilege of not worrying whether other attendees' perfumed products will induce an allergic reaction, meltdown, or physical illness -- the privilege of not sitting on edge in case something triggers a seizure -- the privilege of not thinking about whether something will surprise you by triggering a panic, anxiety, or PTSD attack -- the privilege of not having to think about whether you can even get into the fucking building -- the privilege of being able to go to any event you like, anywhere, with little difficulty or inconvenience except perhaps finding parking --

The empty room means that this state of affairs, a state of affairs in which our completely avoidable and unnecessary yet routine exclusion from programming on campus is simply ordinary.

I don't have an answer except to share Brown's writing and to share her frustration. Right now, I am editing our ADA documents to try and make them more robust. We will end up with stronger rules, clearer guidelines, and more resentment for the "special perks."

Today, I have no solutions for this.