Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

I've taken off the Hugo nominee pin that I've worn proudly on my lapel since my Doctor Who episode, The Doctor's Wife, won the Hugo in September 2012, and, for now, I've put it away.

It isn't Neil Gaiman's fault that people worship him. Heck, before deconstructing his reaction post, which I find highly manipulative, let me say that I love his work. American Gods, Anansi Boys, Stardust, and The Graveyard Book, just to name recent pieces, each stunned me in their own ways as I read and re-read them. I intend to read more of his work in the future, because he is an extraordinary storyteller, and I count myself as lucky to be able to read his tales. That said, my interest in power and discourse, especially online, had led me into his blog writing on Ross and the Hugos, and I have a few thoughts. Bear with me.

I've always been a little uncomfortable with the way fan-groups worship their creative heroes because of the bleed. Our love of their work bleeds over into the love of the creator himself or herself, and then the words of the creator start to carry a kind of unimpeachable weight. When it reaches the level of Gaiman, or, say, Joss Whedon and the like, it must be very hard to maintain any kind of perspective.

Which brings me to Neil Gaiman's reaction to l'affaire Hugo (it's so much more interesting in French). To refresh: Loncon's chairs asked Neil to ask his friend Jonathan Ross to host the Hugos. Ross said yes. There was a twitter backlash. Ross stepped down. Then there was a backlash to the backlash. And here we are.

Gaiman took it personally. Who wouldn't? Not only was Ross doing this as a favor to his friend, but Gaiman feels he knows better. Ross is, in private, he tells us, a great guy, a close friend, and to have large chunks of his world - fandom - reject a friend is hurtful.

But Gaiman's own words and experiences suggest that Ross is, in fact, someone who decides which boundaries he is going to respect and which he'll disregard, because he thinks he knows best - either because the person will eventually like it, or because the "scene" requires it.  One of Gaiman's defenses of Ross as a good guy came from his documentary "Search for Steve Ditko," about trying to find a legendary hero of the Comics world.

Together, Gaiman and Ross travel to Ditko's office building, get his phone number, and Ross calls him. Ditko says he doesn't want to see him (that's a pretty firm boundary). Ross and Gaiman go up anyway without their camera crew, then come back down to report that they had coffee and that Ditko was very nice. However, they also report that Ditko now wishes he didn't have his name on the office door. This is a man who wants to be left alone. Here's the telling exchange, just after the phone call.

JR: He essentially told me to fuck off. HAHAHAHAHAHAH. but in the most polite and firm manner I have ever encountered.
JR: Ok, shall we go and knock on his door.
NG: You want to?
JR: Yeah, Not with the crew, but let's go up there to see, but let's do it.
NG: Ok
JR: Ok
JR: Me and Neil are going to upset him, but we've got to do it, haven't we Neil
NG: I am Robin to his Batman.

Does that look to you like Jonathan Ross is a man who respects boundaries, even clearly expressed ones? "Me and Neil are going to upset him." Neil goes along with it.

There's more. One of the pieces reacting to the l'affaire Hugo came from the New Statesman. It defended Ross, accused people of bullying him (and sparked my first post), and generally, as Radish Reviews noted, punched down. It was also, as Radish Reviews uncovered, written by Neil Gaiman's goddaughter, though she never disclosed her connection (this, I feel, is an unforgiveable lapse for the editors and the author. Opinion pieces are fine. I write a lot of them. Connections must be disclosed, which is why in my last post I noted I play music with Seanan's girlfriend). At any rate, Gaiman's goddaughter was able to get an interesting quote.

“What was peculiar about the attacks was they had constructed an ad hominem straw man to attack, who was sexist, sizeist, hates women and likes making everyone feel bad,” said Gaiman. “It doesn’t bear any resemblance to Jonathan. While he has occasionally said things that make you go ‘Oh god, your mouth opened and that thing came out’, he is a consummate professional.”

This paragraph contains inherent contradictions, contradictions that Gaiman delves into in his blog post.

The weirdest bit was, I understood some of the worry; I'd had it myself, 25 years ago, when Jonathan and I had first met, and he asked me and Dave McKean to be on his chat show to talk about VIOLENT CASES. I said "No, you make fun of people. This is comics. It matters to me. I don't want you making fun of it."

That's not the weird bit, that's the bit that's supposed to help you understand that people were genuinely worried, not staging it to get attention, not doing it as sour grapes, not following some agenda - genuinely worried, just like Neil was. What they didn't have was Gaiman's access and power. Ross invited Gaiman to watch him film another interview, showing him as that professional. But when Ross was confronted by angry tweets, he reacted by calling a random fan (we're not even at Stross or Nielsen Hayden or McGuire level) stupid.

Ross was under no obligation to be kind and reassuring in the face of the twitter storm. But he had the power to do so and he made a different choice. And I don't really blame him, because as Gaiman says:

Twitterstorms are no fun when people are making up things about you or insulting you for things you didn't do or think or say. When scores of people from a group that you consider yourself a part of are shouting at you, it's incredibly upsetting, no matter who you are. And these things spill over and get bigger -- I was saddened to learn that Jane Goldman, Jonathan's wife, one of the gentlest, kindest people I know (and the person who, with Jonathan, got me onto Twitter, back in December 2009) had deleted her Twitter account because of all this.

Yes, this is a problem with Twitter. On Thursday some random person named UnkleBob, probably English based on his accent, told me to fuck off. Actually, he said, "Fuck off Dave, you gimp." Man, that was hurtful. So I told him that the next ad hominem would result in a block, so it was his choice - we could dialogue or I could just block him. And this is the great thing about Twitter - you can just turn people off. If only that worked with my neighbors (Not really! I have the world's greatest neighbors. Three of them own snow-blowers. I love you neighbors. I was just making a point about the online vs analog world). UnkleBob and I had a pretty decent conversation after that, even if we didn't persuade the other.

I was seriously disappointed in the people, some of whom I know and respect, who stirred other people up to send invective, obscenities and hatred Jonathan's way over Twitter (and the moment you put someone's @name into a tweet, you are sending it directly to that person), much of it the kind of stuff that they seemed to be worried that he might possibly say at the Hugos, unaware of the ironies involved.

Disappointed. That's a nicely-chosen word. It's one that parents use with their kids. I'm not mad at you, I'm disappointed. Do try to do better next time, you don't want to make daddy disappointed.

I guess I'd like to know who he thinks stirred up people. I see people writing their feelings and opinions, expressing their discontent with their choices, liking to the @wossy account. Neil linked to this post, which had a guy (with 120 followers) calling Ross a "noted gratingly fatuous bell end." That's not very nice. Again, to the New Statesman piece and Neil's godddaughter.

A vocal contingent resorted to petty name-calling on the Internet. Does calling someone a “grating fatuous bellend” not count as bullying if your subject is famous? I call bullshit. Does saying horrible things about someone because you think they might possibly say horrible things about you make you the better person? In this tirade about insults and slights, nasty bullies with little self-awareness recast themselves as the victim.

I've already talked about my perception of bullying and power here, though I accept there are other ways to cast the situation. And once again I am appalled that this is someone deeply implicated in the affair writing as if they are an outside observer. At any rate, I can't believe Gaiman is talking about @TalkyMeat and his 120 followers, when he says "people, some of whom I know and respect, who stirred other people."

I sympathise with anyone who felt that Jonathan wasn't going to make an appropriate Hugos host, and with anyone who spoke about it to the convention committee, but do not believe a campaign aimed at vilifying Jonathan personally was wise or kind. And for those who thought that making this happen was a way to avoid SF and the Hugos appearing in the tabloids, I'd point to the Streisand effect, with a shake of the head.

There was no "campaign." There was a Twitterstorm. It upset Goldman, as Neil notes above, but again as covered in the last post, Goldman's specific complaints about Seanan and her daughter are unfounded. Neil knows this too, given his approximately 8 zillion followers to whom he cannot possibly respond. Maybe he thinks Seanan's 12K is like a chat around the dinner table.

But here's the real thing - Neil is saying that the only appropriate way to respond negatively is to speak to the convention committee, to follow procedure, to be polite. That's a fine policy for people with power and access. It's not how groups of people actually effect change, with one-on-one conversations, each one with the powerful person saying, "thanks for your comments." Change happens with groups. Sometimes groups function as mobs, bullies, or twitterstorms. But if you don't have power, you have to organize.

I think the process of organizing online, rather than forming an "angry mob" (see previous post), is still in development. But I see this again and again: A group of people get angry, legitimately or no, express it online, and the other side tries to invert the power dynamics by claiming victimization, legitimately or no. Much as every war is expressed as a defensive one, every online disagreement results in competing claims of victim. Pay attention to the power dynamics, are people punching up or punching down.

So let's sum up. Gaiman believes that Ross is a great guy, a professional, and is the wronged party here.   Gaiman is really disappointed in people who expressed their anger publicly rather than going through channels. He has, sadly, taken off his Hugo pin as a way of making you all feel bad for disappointing him. It's paternalistic and manipulative.

Moreover, the belief that Ross was a wildly inappropriate choice is supported by Gaiman's own experiences as he reports. He has personally witnessed Ross ignoring boundaries in order to upset someone - because he wants to, because it would be funny, because it would make for better TV. Is this someone who would make you, absent Neil's personal experience with Ross, feel safe as a Hugo guest?

So in the end, to quote a friend of mine, Gaiman is asking his fans, his often worshipful fans, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

I guess I'll go with my lying eyes this time.

Syllabus as Contract

I'm working on an essay about the corporate language in higher ed as a followup to the big response I got to this post on EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE in a job advertisement for a Renaissance English professor.

One paragraph of my draft currently reads:

Take the syllabus. Many faculty (in my experience) and some teaching or student-resource centers refer to the syllabus as a contract. This makes sense as a tactic to teach students to, first of all, read the syllabus, and second to try and create a sense of reciprocal obligation. In the contract, both sides are obligated to hold to its terms. The syllabus-as-contract can function defensively, protecting faculty from lawsuits or disciplinary action from students upset about their grades. In my experience, students actually treat syllabi more as End User License Agreements (EULAs) – something for which one glances at the first page, clicks “agree to terms,” and moves on to the product without reading any of the document.

I then go on to talk about learning-centered syllabi as better for the professor and the student, and why, and how using the business model of contract gets in the way of learning, and in fact gets in the way of the product we are actually selling: a well-structured opportunity to learn and to earn meaningful (hopefully) credentials.

Below I offer a quick sampling of online texts on the syllabus as contract, each using it as a positive metaphor. There is an equally vast, and perhaps more current, array of texts on the syllabus that explicitly reject that metaphor, but that's a subject for another post. Some of these links are aimed at faculty, some graduate student teachers, and some at undergrads.

I'll offer just a few comments at the end and please note, these are pulled out of context intentionally. No criticism of the specific posts is intended. I'm just interested in how the language is being used. Follow the links for the full context.

• On the Cutting Edge - Professional Development for GeoScience Faculty: A detailed syllabus gives students a sense of the nature of the course, what they will be expected to do in the course, and how their performance will be assessed. In many cases, the syllabus is viewed as a contract between you and the students. Whether considered a legal contract or not, a syllabus should be clear about policies and procedures related to the course. Some institutions have specific requirements regarding what should be included on the syllabus.

• The Purpose of a Syllabus (Parkes and Harris, 2002): The first purpose of a syllabus -- either explicitly or implicitly - is to serve as a contract between the instructor and the student ... Like any contract, the syllabus serves to set forth what is expected during the term of the contract - typically a semester - and to guide the behaviors of both parties.

Note - This is a good piece that weighs many models of syllabus development. It's more of a review essay.

• General Counsel at Hampton College - Constructing Legally Sound Syllabi: Remember, even though the courts do not view a syllabus as a legal document- it is safe for you to view it as a contract. View your syllabus as an agreement between you and the students. If it is necessary to make changes, do so only to benefit the student.

• Cengage Learning: The syllabus is like a contract between the instructor and the student. It is also sometimes used by the registrar to determine if a transfer course can be considered an equivalent to the course being taught at the new school. When considering these two important purposes of the syllabus, there are certain items that need to be included. Let’s begin with the essential information for the syllabus. Remember we are considering the syllabus to be a contract between the instructor and the student.

• From a bio prof at Vassar: "Your Syllabus is a Contract" Why are the contract details important? Think back to last semester. Did you have a student who turned things in late routinely or asked for extensions on assignments the night before they were due? Did your syllabus have a clear policy about late work, about extensions? If so, did you abide by your course policies? What about assignment due dates? Did you change due dates routinely? Why? A well thought-out course syllabus is a key ingredient to a successful course. This contract you make with the students will give them clear expectations, both what you plan to do and how you plan to do it AND what they need to do to be successful in your course.

• UMN Disability Services: Believe it or not, the syllabus for each class you take at the University is your passport for success. It is a contract of sorts and is filled with valuable information. By staying enrolled in a class, you are indicating that you have read the syllabus, understand what you need to do to be successful in that class, and accept the terms of this agreement. But like reading any other document, it helps to have guidelines to understand the information you find in a syllabus.

• A syllabus guide to Graduate Teaching at University of Nebraska - Lincoln: It establishes class policies, assignments and deadlines. Because the syllabus is a written document and it is retained by the student, a syllabus can eliminate misunderstandings and clarify policies, thus reducing student confusion and the incidence of the allegation, "You never told us…" Think of your syllabus as a contract between you and each student. You expect each student to abide by the guidelines put forth, and promise to extend earned rewards at the end of the course. Students expect that the guidelines put forth will not change mid-course.

• "Tomorrow's Professor" from the CTLE at Stanford: As an agreement or contract defining mutual obligations between instructor and students, your syllabus also speaks for the college and university. "You should realize that this fact gives you responsibilities but also gives you protection against complaints or challenges to your teaching. For example, the conditions, goals, and requirements you state enable (department chairs and academic administrators) to support your decisions on grades, teaching methods, readings, and topics of inquiry. That is only possible, of course, if you and the administration (and the students) have a record of what you promised and planned, and if your syllabus conforms broadly to program goals and policies" (SU Project Advance, 1995). You will need to be familiar with institutional policies regarding attendance, examinations, drop/adds, course withdrawals, learning disabilities, and academic integrity. Equipped with an understanding of the myriad ways a learning-centered syllabus can function, you can begin to use it in your course.

• Carnegie Mellon Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation center: To establish a contract with students by publicly stating policies, requirements, and procedures for the course.

So there's a bunch of examples of the deployment of "contract" language. Some of it is defensive (so the students can't claim they didn't know), the better texts, in my mind, emphasize the reciprocal elements of contracts - that both sides are responsible to the other. There's nothing wrong with this. I just think we do better. More on this topic to come.

Jonathan Ross and the 2014 Hugos

I decided to weigh in on the Jonathan Ross/Hugos story because of what I saw as gendered discourse in the backlash to the backlash, and because Seanan McGuire is someone I know (and I make music with her girlfriend) and deeply respect for her non-fiction writing on feminism, sexual orientation, and representation in fandom and fiction. Her fiction is great too, but that's not why I'm here.

I think angry women get dismissed as hysterical or irrational as a way of rendering their anger illegitimate and something that can be ignored. I also know that when you say something offensive, and someone gets offended, one way to take the high ground back is to accuse them of "not wanting dialogue." Both of these elements are at play in the  Ross-Hugos controversy, particularly the post-facto focus on Seanan. 

In this post I'm going to offer some examples of the accusations and vitriol leveled at Seanan, then rely on the good works of others to show why they are at best cherry-picked, and finish with a few thoughts about how to read this aspect of the whole event. But as you read please remember: at best cherry-picked. So why does she become the poster-child for "bullying" Jonathan Ross?

Here are some examples.

From the Telegraph - "It really is time people stopped hating Jonathan Ross."

The angry mob was led by Hugo-winning Californian author Seanan McGuire, who tweeted: “I’ve really enjoyed knowing that, were I to be nominated for a Hugo, the host wouldn’t see me and make fat jokes. Like, that thought has actually crossed my mind, when shopping for Hugo dresses, ‘The host won’t mock me’."

... Several things struck me about all this. First, how sad it was that McGuire inadvertently fat-shamed herself. She clearly felt so bad about wearing a posh frock that she started imagining insults being hurled at her by a generic ghastly man. That’s hurty as hell but it says more about her self-esteem than it does about Wossy.

The New Statesman wrote: "Seanan McGuire, the most vocal of the Twitter pitchfork mob."

Jane Goldman, Ross's wife and a Hugo winner for her screenwriting, took to Twitter to single Seanan out: 

“Reading all your yay! women! tweets this morning, while you rudely ignore a real, live 17 yr old girl ... whom you hurt deeply with your words, is jaw-dropping[sic].
“You falsely accuse her father of sizeism, she gathers the courage to speak to a bullying adult with 12.5k followers ... and you ignored her and casually blathered on about the Oscars. Don’t worry about the three real women whose weekend you ruined (me and my daughters).

Goldman then deleted her twitter account. The Independent called the piece in which they quoted Goldman as "family bombarded with abuse."

Throughout the pro-Ross camp, the goal has been to make him the victim of feminazi aggression, led by McGuire, when after-all Ross hasn't really been that offensive since 2008, and those quotes were mostly taken out of context (I linked to some in my previous post). Seanan and Goldman's daughter have since exchanged twitter pleasantries.

But there are some basic factual problems with these accusations, beyond the bigger context of the delegitimzation of female speech that interests me. As writer K. Tempest Bradford points out:

Why did Jane say all this to Seanan? Because one of her daughters tweeted at Seanan earlier and Seanan didn’t respond. And Jane decided that this is because Seanan is a bully and a weekend ruiner and a tear bringer.
Now, I can understand Jane being upset that Seanan did not answer her daughter’s tweets. But what’s fucked up here is that she assumed Seanan ignored them on purpose. While knowing that Seanan has 12.5 thousand followers. Perhaps Jane doesn’t understand that when you’re popular enough to have 12.5K followers, the @ mentions feed can get very full and you might miss some things. Except maybe she could have asked her husband about that since he has 3.65 million followers and must go through he same thing.

"I tweeted at him/her and they didn't respond," is, I think, the weakest accusation of bullying I've read in quite awhile. 

But there's an even bigger issue with the accusations against Seanan, encapsulated in the following image provided by brilliant reader Claire, who pointed this out to me first:

The important thing is this: Ross' announcement, the initial backlash from well-connected men and women in the SF world, and his first offer to withdraw, all happened during the day ON U.K. TIME. Seanan McGuire, wise woman that she is, was asleep for much of it. 

Here's a much more detailed Storify of the unfolding of events on twitter, where most of this "happened." Using the time stamps on the tweets, which are not necessarily reflective of local time for anyone. 

• 4:15 AM - Farah Mendlesohn, member of the concom, resigns over Ross before the online announcement goes out but after news was released to staff. She writes a livejournal post (since gone private)about her concerns. So the concom should have known the storm was coming. 
• 4:16 AM - Loncon announces.
• 4:21 AM - Charlie Stross, author, relays his response to his 20,000+ followers. "Fuck." No one calls him hysterical or accuses him of leading a mob.
• 5:07 AM - Patrick Nielsen Hayden, "master of Tor," asks Loncon, "Are you out of your mind?"
• 5:41 AM - Ross (3+ million followers) responds to a fan expressing dismay (with 95 followers) by calling her stupid.
• The conversation continues, lots of people weigh in, lots of dissent and dismay, some reasonable responses by defenders, Ross himself is pissy at detractors (celebrities doing things for free expect to be thanked, not castigated).
• 9:37 AM  - Ross reveals he has already offered to withdraw.
• 10:32 AM- Six hours later, Seanan wakes up, hears about Ross, and begins tweeting to her 12,000+ followers. Like Charlie, her first post says, "Fuck." Like Charlie, later posts are articulate about her dissent.
• 11:31 AM - Ross resigns.

The only time Seanan actually tweeted @Wossy was to acknowledge that Ross' onstage persona was likely more caustic than his off-stage one, that he was probably a nice person, but has a history of making fun of people. Like me, I'm sure Seanan knows that this is endemic to British chat-show laddish culture. Like me, I'm sure Seanan knows that it's a culture that pushes women off the air, restricting their public voices (obligatory link to the amazing Mary Beard essay, again, just in case). No one (well, not these famous people) is saying that Ross is, deep down inside, a bad person. 

But they are saying that as part of his job as a host he has relied on sexist commentary to get a laugh. He could have gone on twitter saying, "I'm excited about the Hugos, I know sometimes I get a bit mean on the telly, but I just can't wait to be part of your community at Loncon" or something similar (no doubt more witty than I can construct). Instead, he called a fan "stupid" for questioning him. 

Charlie Stross and Patrick Nielsen Hayden are pretty high profile members of the community. Other artists and authors weighed in. The voices of the fans were many. But somehow Seanan has become the focal point even though Ross had offered to resign before she was even out of bed that morning. 

Hence my continued reading this through the lens of gender. Seanan is a queer, articulate, outspoken, feminist. She is the kind of woman who doesn't accept "I was only joking" as an excuse for sexist discourse. She's a woman who wants the SFF community to be a safe space. I'm standing with her on this.

Here's one more tweet from Seanan (and the storify) to finish:

@ferretthimself Apparently, because I was articulate and upset, I am now the poster girl for why he withdrew from the gig.
— Seanan McGuire (@seananmcguire) March 1, 2014

So to sum up:
1) The fixation on Seanan doesn't meet the facts or the timeline.
2) Jane Goldman's accusations of Seanan shaming her daughter don't stand up.
3) Given the role of powerful  men in the SFF community in this, the media and fannish fixation on Seanan reflects the continued power of patriarchal norms in shaping our response to events - consciously or unconsciously.

So knock it off.

The End of Higher Education

Texas A&M University - Kingsville is hiring an early modern English Professor. A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, alerted me to this.

This is what the end of the world (of Higher Education) as we know it looks like. Here's a screenshot. 

According to this, the most important aspect of the professor's job, the one meriting all bold capitalized letters, is to - PROVIDE EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE.

This is what happens when HR and MBAs takeover the academic world. This is what happens when corporate forces dig their claws into universities, imposing their attitudes and alleged efficiencies (even as administrative positions bloat, siphoning scarce resources into middle management while demanded we all do more with less.

But the worst thing about this is this notion of the customer, that we are selling a product, that we are employees. I am a teacher (and a scholar, but let's leave that out for more). My syllabus is not a contract but a plan. I like the core questions of assessment culture - what might a student learn and how would you know if they have learned it - but not the demand for false quantifiable metrics, the reification of numbers above qualitative relationships.

I do not provide service to my students. When I am at my best, and let's face it, I am not always at my best, I drive my students, encourage them, plead, cajole, debate, critique, and praise them. This is not service. And importantly, while our relationship is enmeshed in broad systems of exchange, we are not in an exchange-based relationship. Instead, we co-exist in a community of unequals, but a community none the less, governed by expectations and feedback, evaluations and conversations, and overlapping goals.

Students are not my customers and thank goodness for that, because the responsibility of a teacher to his or her students is far greater than the employee to the customer.

Sexism in fandom and Bullying (in which Jonathan Ross calls me a [poor] journalist)

Lately, thanks to a long and thoughtful thread on Steve Brust's blog (which you should read), discussions about sexual harassment in fandom, the fake geek girl issues, and so forth - I've been thinking a lot about online bullying, gender, power, and the speculative fiction community. Especially in the SFWA (Science-Fiction Writers of America), issues pertaining to gender and representation have lately been especially acute, and if you don't already know about them, you can google it.

At the end, I'm going to say something that I think is VERY important about women and speech and the ways men (in particular) try to render it illegitimate. So please just skip to that.

Over the weekend, another episode broke out in which British TV Host Jonathan Ross agreed to host the Hugos, the major fan-voted award for sci-fi/fantasy, at the coming worldcon in London. A number of people, including friend of the blog Seanan McGuire, reacted angrily and publicly. You see, Ross has a history of making fun of his guests, especially his female guests, as well as a history of fat-shaming humor. *NOTE - Correction here, see bottom *

Here are some examples, not to mention "Sachsgate," in which Ross and Russell Brand called a famous elderly actor to leave messages about having sex with his granddaughter. In the examples, I'd like you to notice how Ross renders his female guests as their body parts: breasts and vagina, as objects of his sexual desire, and how he seems to expect them to laugh along. 

But I keep coming back to bullying, as defenders of Ross see this as internet bullying, as feminanzis winning another victory for intolerance, as something unfair. Ross sees it that way too, as you can read on Storify. Here are highlights.

Dear Fandom: A rich white man famous for being mean to people on tv is not bullied by people being mean to him on twitter
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 2, 2014

@Lollardfish well, that's not what I'm famous for really, is it? But convenient for you to claim that. Very poor show from a journalist.
— Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 2, 2014

I mean, first of all, a famous guy called me a (poor) journalist. I've arrived!

@wossy Well, I don't write about entertainment. But it's true, you are famous for many things, among them making fun of people. (1 of 2)
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 2, 2014

@wossy And that's fine, comedy involves offense sometimes. But then it's ok for people to be offended and not want you part of an event.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 2, 2014

@Lollardfish never said it wasn't. But perhaps they might have started a dialogue instead of a witch hunt. Shows them in a poor light.
— Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 2, 2014

So there we have it, it shows "them" in a poor light that they didn't choose to start a dialogue with the person who offended them. That's a common dodge in these circumstances and merited a response - and an important one, because I hear that a lot when I talk about language. I get angry, but it's my job to initiate dialogue with the person who has angered me. So I wrote:

@wossy It's not the obligation of the people being insulted to be nice to those who insult them. It helps, but it's not their job.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 2, 2014

Here he wrote a few tweets about having only offended people accidentally, and apologized, and tried to learn from it, and maybe that's true. I can't say whether he's learned or not. But I feel it falls into the "I'm sorry you got offended" not "I did wrong" type of apology. At any rate, we ended up in more interesting places.

@wossy Interesting you mention witch hunts. Now as an historian (I'm not a journalist), I know something about witch hunts (1 of 2)
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 2, 2014

@wossy (2) Accused witches tended to be powerless outsiders under significant pressure from the powers-that-be. Does that describe you?
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 2, 2014

@Lollardfish I think you know what I meant. In that the evidence cited was opinion based. Some of it, fittingly, was mere speculation.
— Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 2, 2014

This is interesting. It's the use of "Witch hunt" to mean falsely accused, but that's not what a witch hunt is about. Similarly, the word bullying is used to mean insulting or the rallying of lots of voices to a cause.

@wossy That's again fair. But the language of witch hunt, like the language of bullied (being used by defenders), refers to relative power.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 2, 2014

Power matters. The witches were, generally, the other, limited in power, limited in access to power, limited in recourse, scary, outsider. Jonathan Ross is the consummate insider. Heck, even in fandom, he's a friend of His Royal Highness Neil Gaiman. He may or may not be falsely accused on any given charge of abuse or offense, but it's not a witch hunt, and it's not bullying.

One could make the argument that the Hugo organizers were bullied into changing their minds, and that's interesting to think about. Go read Steve Brust's thread on bullying if you've a mind to think about leveraging mass opinion to change a decision, for good or for ill, and consequences of doing so. 

But I think calling Seanan McGuire and others bullies, women and men who, offended by Ross (rightly in my mind), spoke publicly about it, got angry, got angry in public, and effected change, is a way to render their speech illegitimate. When Rich Johnston, for example, founder of the fan website "Bleeding Cool," writes: "Yes, he can be acerbic, but he works the room. Any mocking is truly done with love, and clearly so. It’s flattering," he's saying that we should stop taking these jokes so seriously, to lighten up, he was only kidding. This is the language that harassers have relied on for decades.

Here's one more, a comment from a blog, and only the responsibility of the poster:

And here we go again.
i, Jonathan Ross, a Brit TV personality and sf fan, volunteers and is selected to host the Hugo Awards at Loncon.
ii, The Usual Suspects rake over his comedy and declare that he doesn’t kowtow enough to their brand of ideology for their liking.
iii, Seanan McGuire in particular goes on a tweeting rampage culminating in expressing her fear that Ross might look out from his stage at the Hugos, point at her personally, and call her fat. ‘Cos, you know, it’s all about her.
iv, Ross starts reacting to the shitstorm and heatedly tweets back about people being stupid.
v, The Usual Suspects point at his heated tweets as proof that he’s dangerously unstable. McGuire, I assume, is lying on a fainting couch somewhere while her fans try to reassure her how brave she is.
vi, Ross pulls out.
vii, The Social Justice Warriors notch up another glorious victory.

I read this comment, which the poster has subsequently denied was sexist, in the context of Mary Beard's incredible essay on the public voice of women in the western tradition, as well as the class on medieval women and gender I've been teaching this year. "Rampage" - the notion that women are irrationally angry, hysterical (womb wanderers), angry, non-logical, not like a man. "Fainting couch" - again, gendered obviously, but here suggesting as well that her hysterics were faked, that she was just trying to get her ideological way, and never felt that Ross hosting would make her feel unsafe.

And this is the big picture and the thing I watch for - the many ways in which those who dominate, patriarchy and its many voices (male and female), render the speech of those who oppose it illegitimate: hysterical, irrational, intolerant.

Bullying is a real problem.
Cyber-bulling is a real problem.
Leveraging the internet to combine voices and effect change? That's called organizing.

*Note: I have not in fact found the alleged fat-shaming jokes and I apologize for this (But don't want to edit out my mistake). I assume that the people upset saw him using his female guests' bodies as weapons of comedy and extrapolated, as is their right, but I want to note I made a mistake here.

Academics in Public (belated response to Nicholas Kristof)

Last year, as I recounted in this Chronicle of Higher Education essay, I submitted a book manuscript to a publisher, turned in my tenure file, and started writing for public media. It happened by accident, driven by the unlikely medieval relevance of the surprise papal resignation and enabled by my friendship with Bruce Schneier. CNN and the Atlantic wanted medieval commentary briefly. Bruce helped me with my writing and gave me the needed contacts and the essays (and this blog) all followed.

Over the weekend, as all my online academic friends know, Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed on academia and public engagement. It relies heavily on stereotypes and people from Ivy Leagues and their ilk. It's been widely critiqued, from Corey Robin's long, detailed, analysis of the structural reasons that keep academics out of public discourse, to Laura Tennenbaum's short, pithy, comment that perhaps teaching thousands of students might be a form of public service of equal merit to writing for the Times, to countless other short and long responses.

Because as Kristof well knows, lots of professors are online and engaged with each other, if not "the public," as Kristof defines it. In fact, I sort of feel like he was trolling us, then enjoying retweeting the outrage (without actually learning anything from it).

The issue is that there is a real problem here. Academics do know a lot and are not encouraged or able to engage the public. But mostly I'd recommend reading the Robin piece, as it's great and says so many of the points I would want to make. Adjunctification, the changing nature of the university, the pressures to publish, the people who WISH they had pressure to publish, and so forth - all of these are driving academics out of the public sphere far more than Kristof's straw men and women.

Here are, however, a few key additions to the broader conversations that I think I can make.

One: When I started writing more regularly for CNN and The Atlantic, the first questions I would get (phrased delicately) are: Does it count? Does it pay? My answers - It sometimes pays, but not mostly. It definitely wouldn't count if I was trying to count it for tenure or promotion.

 Last fall I had a long conversation with a Dean who noted that she would be delighted to count public engagement as a factor in tenure/promotion decisions. At her university, however, faculty make these decisions, so faculty have to take the lead in crafting standards (perhaps through organizations such as the American Historical Association, Modern Language Association, and their ilk).

I have no idea how to make that work, especially at an R1 school. The structures there are entirely based around peer reviewed formal publications and grants. Does a "well-read" (whatever that means) blog equal a conference presentation? Do 6 op-eds for national media equal a lower tier journal article? What about local op-eds for local papers, something we should all be doing (as it's easier to get published). Does it just nebulously count as a marker for "impact?"  How would you count public engagement in your field and institution? I'd love to hear your ideas, no matter how vague or specific to your institution.

Two: In my Chronicle piece, I wrote this:

Meanwhile, the general public perceives faculty members as isolated from reality, holding cushy jobs, and uninterested in open communication. The public has little access to the broad diversity of knowledge, experience, and background inside higher education, because those academics who do achieve broader platforms generally come from only the most elite universities. Although many of those public intellectuals are brilliant writers and speakers, they represent only a tiny percentage of the expertise available in the academic world. That expertise lies not just in our subject fields but also in the habits of mind we bring to bear on countless other kinds of issues.

Here, as the mighty Bruce Holsinger noted, I was suggesting that academics at non-prestigious institutions (like mine) are an untapped resource. I want, in Holsinger's words, "to democratize" the notion of the public intellectual. But there are few pathways available for people like me to reach larger audiences - I just happened to have a friend who is a world-renowned security expert, a writer, and a man willing to forward my essays to major editors. That's random, and letting randomness determine whose voices gets heard leads ... well, it leads to mostly white folks, mostly men, mostly from the Ivy Leagues, being the only voices in the room. Kristof's column exemplifies this: He talks to LePore at Harvard, Slaughter at Princeton, McCants at the Brookings Institute, and Bremmer at Stanford.

Three: Some academics are in fact snobs. I have received many reflexive "compliments" about my public work that are dripping with snobbery, assumptions that I am not "serious," and other condescensions. And look how I introduce myself as a public writer. I note that I already have tenure, that I have a "real book" with a "real university press," on the way, and then I talk about my writing. It's a defensive posture. In fact, my public writing has been great for my career. I've been invited to give both scholarly and non-scholarly talks at R1 universities as a result of my writing. I have nothing to complain about.

This is a fundamental problem with the prestige economy. I think it is is changing though as the younger generation is generally highly aware of the random forces at work that fling us through the job market (and the lie of meritocracy) and the more senior generation engages online. I'm very optimistic about this particular problem fading over time.

If you've read this far, thank you. Now weigh in on point one. incentives matter. Money matters. Tenure and promotion matters. How do we make public engagement count?

Batgirl

For the 100th day of school at my daughter's pre-school, students were supposed to come as their favorite superhero or princess. My daughter is the batgirl on the left. My daughter's teacher is the superwoman on the right.

My whole theory on parenting against the grain is to try and create space for my children, for all children, to make choices rather than being pressured to conform to defaults. This feels like winning.

 

The key here is that we didn't say, "be a superhero," but say, "You can be anything you want to be ... including a superhero." She can read and saw the word princess, but said, "I want to be batgirl!" And so it was.

Debating Abuse - Your Role

My book is done in terms of the writing, but there are still many tasks to do until I ship it to the publisher (and then later there will be edits and proofs and so forth). Now I am dealing with the mountain obligations I let slide as I did my writing, but I hope to ease back into regular blogging in the next few weeks.

I'm here this morning because people are still debating the Woody Allen - Dylan Farrow sex abuse allegations. I see it on blogs, in formal publications, and of course permeating social media.

Here's the message, borrowing from a comment made by Scarleteen. We don't get to know what really happened between Allen and Farrow. But we all know someone, likely many someones, who was sexually abused. When we debate whether or not to believe Farrow, we tell those people that if they come forward, we will debate the truth of their statements as well.

And they will not come forward.

So I can't tell you whether or not to believe Farrow's story. I will not tell you whether or not I believe her.

But if you don't, rather than broadcasting your skepticism throughout your social world, perhaps you might embrace silence, so that if someone who trusts you is ready to talk, they will believe you are ready to listen.

Cult of Compliance: Times Square Edition

In September I wrote about a mentally-ill man who was shot at by police for not listening. He ran into traffic in Times Square so they shot at him.

Well, today he was charged as responsible for the people that the police shot.

“The defendant is the one that created the situation that injured innocent bystanders,” said an assistant district attorney, Shannon Lucey.

The two police officers, who have not been identified, have been placed on administrative duty and their actions are still under investigation by the district attorney’s office, law enforcement officials said.  They also face an internal Police Department inquiry.

Mr. Broadnax’s lawyer, Rigodis Appling, said Mr. Broadnax suffered from anxiety and depression and had been disoriented and scared when the police shot at him. He was reaching for his wallet, not a gun, she said. “Mr. Broadnax never imagined his behavior would ever cause the police to shoot at him,” she said.

So here we have someone who didn't comply and "forced" the police to start shooting. They missed, but have charged him with forcing them to shoot at him.

I've talked a lot on this blog about the criminalization of non-compliance, starting here, but you can follow the tags. It's not a problem that's going away. It needs to be understand on this meta-level of a veneration of compliance and a fury at those who will not bow down. Then, we need to act on the specific level - precincts, principals, politicians, victims, and so forth. But the meta-level is critical.

And in the meantime, this feature on my blog will continue.

6 week hiatus

I have posted an entry for about 185 days (a few times I double posted). I am now taking a 6 week break to finish a book. I'll see you next year!

Ok, I lied. I'm totally going to post from time to time, but less regularly until the book is out the door.

Part of work/life integration is knowing when you let something go for a bit. You can always pick it up later. For me, later is mid-January.