Breakups! Gates is quits with the Washington Post, and Buffet is following behind him

Breakups aren't always such a bad thing. Sometimes it is good to call it quits.

In this case, the relationship between Gates and the Washington Post has come to an end, and that news makes me wish I had a nice bottle of Champagne to pop. On top of that, Mr. Buffett will also be leaving the Company Board. I had heard from an inside source, around the same time I wrote about the sordid relationship between the Post and Kaplan, that Gates was going to call it quits with them. So you can imagine my elation at the moment! (For those of you who wish to think of me popping a bottle of champagne on behalf of the indentured educated class, go ahead and imagine hearing that cork gleefully freeing itself from its neck now).

Naturally, Donald Graham, the chairman of the Post, is one of the biggest defenders of the for-profits. I know. Shocking, right? So then everybody on the Hill reads the Post. They read problematic stories by Michelle Singletary (see here and here), and conclude that there's really not a problem when it comes to student loan debt. They are also busy convincing everyone that for-profits are necessary and good. Ha.

As previously mentioned, and picked up in a recent piece by Ms. Linda Stamato, in order to boost the reputation of Kaplan, recruiters were encouraged to tell prospective students that "'Kaplan is owned by The Washington Post, one of the best newspapers in the country, and that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’s wife, Melinda Gates, were on our board of directors.'"

Luckily, Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett have enough sense to know that they don't want their names run through the mud. Let's hear it for healthy breakups! 

 

Suicide and Murder-Suicides

The investigative work continues and I am collecting more stories about suicide and suicidal thoughts among student loan debtors. This research has led to reading extensively on widespread suicide-murders and lone suicides in the U.S. Many of these tragic events are a result of financial disaster. Suicide as an answer to economic calamity has definitely spiked in recent years. While I realize there  are a number of complex reasons for why people commit suicide or contend with suicidal thoughts, there is growing evidence which suggests that increased stress, regarding one's personal finances, has led to a number of untimely deaths. More worrisome, how many more will take their own lives because of financial ruin?

Harold Pollack wrote a piece in August 2010 about the relationship between unemployment and suicide. Here's the most noteworthy data from that piece:

- In 2007 the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline received 13,423 calls

- In 2009 the calls skyrocketed to 57,625

If you are willing to share your story about suicide/suicidal thoughts and student loan debt, I'd like to hear from you. The subject is serious and sensitive, so I will not share your name or identity with anyone.

Finally, please remember that you are not alone, and that there are resources for you. If you are considering suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline immediately (1-800-273-TALK (8255). More information is available at their site.


Related Links (AEM and other publications  by me):


"Student Loan Debtor Confesses: 'I Think About Jumping Out the 27th Floor Window of the Office Every Day," The Huffington Post (Dec 20, 2010)

Debt and Suicide (Radio interview with Shared Sacrifice; originally aired 16 December 2010)

Suicide Among Student Debtors - Who's Thought About It? (17 August 2010)

For The Indentured Class, Suicidal Thoughts Are Not Merely An Individual Problem (22 October 2010)

An Angry Mother Vents (4 October 2010)

Other Related Links:

99ers band together to save a life (27 January 2010) 

Suicide Rates Up Since Recession Began, Debt A 'Way of Life' For 99ers (26 July 2010)

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Desperate Times and Desperate Measures (28 January 2009)

The Economic Crisis Is Getting Bloody - Violent Deaths Are Now Following Evictions, Foreclosures, and Job Losses (20 November 2009)

 

If A Student Essay Falls In The Woods And No One Is There To Read It, Does Anyone Care?

They're B-A-A-A-a-a-ck!

A while back, I assigned two papers in one of my classes.  In the first, I gave a straightforward "assignment" that asked students to think more deeply about the reading they had done up to that point and use what they had learned to analyze a primary document.  In the scale of things, this is a standard history assignment. I gave the class three documents to choose from, and awaited the papers.  When I began to read them, one thought came to mind:

"GAAAAH!"

Now, let me emphasize:  they weren't bad papers.  Many of them were A-worthy; only a few received grades thought ought to have been worrisome to the recipients.  And yet, as I paged thorugh them, I dreaded grading them.  Why?  They were dull.

Subsequently, I did a little informal research among the students, and most of them admitted that they, had been uninspired and uncertain about the point of the paper.  Several things were at work, as it turned out.  Many students, especially those who were new to college, had become anxious because there was no "prompt."  It's took me years to figure out what they are talking about when they used this word, because I never assign a paper without some guidance or question, a significant difference from the practice of my own college and high school teachers.  I know this will seem strange, but back in the Stone Age, at Oligarch, professors would say that a paper was due, and you would have to figure out what to write about all by your lonesome.  We never expected to be told what to write about.  In retrospect, some people thrived and others suffered under this system.  I had one friend who, because s/he never did the reading, and was usually stoned in class, never knew what to write about either.  This made the whole semester quite a challenge, but it made picking a paper topic an impenetrable mystery.  If we were in the same class, I would eventually sort of drop a lifeline of sorts a few days before the paper was due:  "I was gonna write about this, but I decided to write about that instead."  Then we would chat about this for a while, and s/he would get by.  Not excel, but get by.

So anyway, I discovered this fall that the "prompt" is yet another product of a testing culture that strives to make all students nicely mediocre thinkers before they get to college.  When a high school teacher gives a "prompt" it means that students are supposed to answer a highly direct question, for which there is a right answer, that will demonstrate their mastery of what they have been taught.  Needless to say, not being directed towards a formulaic answer can cause the kind of anxiety that undoes our finest students, because the last thing someone educated in a testing culture should do is think critically or get creative.  What the anxiety produced in this case was a set of papers that were, to a greater or lesser degree, workman-like, safe, and all used the same f*#@king document.

Whose fault was this?  My fault, that's who.  I had given a highly conventional assignment that signaled to the students (correctly) that they were being tested (without being honest about saying so), and so the vast majority of them stayed in the right-hand lane and drove slightly under the speed limit (metaphorically speaking.)  Furthermore, I had failed for years to attend to this whole business of what students were talking about when they referred to a "prompt":  hence I had given one assignment, and they had essentially received a different one than I intended.  So the next time around, lest I should be tempted to drive a pencil into my ear while grading, I gave them complete and utter freedom.  I asked them to choose their own document and to choose it based on something they were passionate about now.  I asked them to compare their own enthusiasm for this topic to the enthusiasm expressed in the document, and to use the document to understand better how their own passion was rooted in a history of other people who cared about this thing too.  When students asked me if it was OK to write about something they didn't really care about, I said no.  Then I took the time to talk with them about what they did care about, and urged them to write about it.

This second set of papers was more or less spectacular.  They were interesting; they varied over a wide range of topics; they were far better written; and many of the papers themselves were preceded by interesting meetings in office hours during which students let me know something that helped me teach them better.

This experience prompted me to think (again) about how we actually assist in producing student work that we do not want to read through ordinary acts of pedagogy that we take for granted, and how it might be possible to change that.  Here are a few thoughts and questions as we move into the semester together:

How do you return papers?  Do you hand them out at the end of class or do you put them in a box outside your office door, where many of them sit, dolefully, for days, weeks or months?  I am very much against the latter practice, which many people I respect adhere to, for several reasons.  I think handing a paper to a student signals a two-way exchange. It is personal, and in a large class it helps me learn their names and how the people sitting in front of me actually think.  I think putting them out in the hall, on the floor, unintentionally signals:  "I am done with this.  It is trash."

I also think there is a serious problem with leaving student papers out where anyone can get to them:  it makes every student's grade available to every other student, which is a violation of privacy.  I also think that for a group of people that is always searching for new ways to police cheating, we are more or less clueless about the fact that many of those papers will be, shall we say, recycled, for other classes or other sections of the same class, in other years.

Do you write comments on the paper?  Or just grade it? Do you make yourself available to discuss students' work with them after you hand the papers back?   I can't tell you how many of my advisees show up in my office hours with a paper in their hand that has no comments on it at all, just a grade, students who also can't get the professor to met with them.  Rarely do they express anger or resentment at the grade:  they want to do better and they don't know how.

Do you write lots and lots of marginal notes on the paper, spending hours correcting everything and re-diagramming their sentences?  The truth is, although you are trying to be the opposite of the teacher I describe above, this freaks students out.  Although you have spent maybe an hour on this, feeling like you are a really caring teacher, the student may see them as a blur, as grammatical correction collides with interpretive questions, typos, basic misunderstanding of the text and long-winded attempts not to utilize the first person or appear "biased."  If a paper is really muddled, it is a waste of your time to do this:  far better to sit down with the student, ask a couple questions about what s/he intended, and describe how s/he might have gone about writing such a paper.

One common grumble I hear from faculty is:  "I bet I spent more time grading it than s/he spent writing it!"  While that probably isn't technically so, it may well be so that the paper was written at the last minute, and that the student had not done the work necessary to write the paper of which s/he might be capable.  How much better would it be to find this out in the course of a conversation?  Better yet, to take the opportunity to underline in person that a better effort over the long term would produce better written work.  A fair number of students think they "want to work on [their] writing," as if writing were disconnected from the other work in the course.

Do you actually care what they think -- and do your paper assignments encourage them to tell you?  If writing papers is just about testing whether students have completed and understand the intellectual content of the course, why not just give quizzes instead?  We have come to fetishize college writing, organizing all activities around the idea that this is the litmus test of good teaching, when in fact it isn't always necessary to write an essay to demonstrate competence.  This study, forwarded to me by a colleague, argues that testing-taking, in and of itself, "actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques."

Good paper assignments, in my view, ask students to  make an intellectual choice of some kind and commit to them.  But not all knowledge acquisition is about committing to intellectual choices:  a great deal of important work in a course is about basic mastery of a field of study that will given them a platform for creativity and/or critical analysis.  

Do you talk to students about your own writing, and testify to the ongoing vulnerability of putting your own writing out there to be criticized by others? One of the most effective things I ever did in a class was to hand out a couple pages of an article that had just been returned full of possible edits.  There were probably about twenty per page.  I then pointed out to the class that what they were reading was probably in its seventh or eight draft, had been commented on by three people already, and was still perceived by a peer as worthy of drastic improvement.  I did it on impulse, but you should have seen the shocked looks on their faces, and heard the many questions this provoked about how I learned to write, how I would respond to these criticisms, and well, how did this make me feel?  Numerous student evaluations pointed to this discussion as having made a huge impression.

Do you ask students to rewrite? OK, so it's not always possible to go through a stack of papers twice, but it is well known that the way anyone becomes a better writer is by redrafting, and rethinking, what s/he has already done.  Here's an effective trick:  have them bring papers to class.  Have them exchange papers with another student.  Give everyone ten minutes to mark up the paper s/he now has for typos, spelling errors and other grammatical errors and give it back to the writer.  Give everyone ten minutes to talk, but this time have each person tell the other person what s/he did or did not like about the paper s/he wrote and get advice on how to strengthen good parts and fix the less good parts.

Then tell them the paper is actually due in the next class and send them home to take another crack at it.

****************
 Any other ideas out there?  Leave them in the comments section!

Friday Guest Posting: Katrina Gulliver, "In Olden Days, A Glimpse of Blogging"

A French blogger, circa 1900. 

Katrina Gulliver is a historian based at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Her current research focuses on urban identity in colonial cities. You can see her website here, or follow her on twitter @katrinagulliver.

I have been blogging in various venues for over ten years. Aside from some early experiments, it has been under my own name. In that time, the history blog world has changed plenty.

The chorus used to be: "Not if you're on the market!", "Be careful if you're untenured."Some departments are toxic, and people are right to be afraid of some things. But to fear having a life online is merely to perpetuate the paranoia. Academics seem more paranoid than others about being unveiled online, and yet seem compelled to create such forms, tempting fate that they are discovered. Perhaps the solo lifestyle of academic research (particularly in the humanities) lends itself to this outcome. The panel on blogging at the 2006 AHA meeting featured audience members who were willing to stand up and be counted as bloggers, but unwilling to name their sites. Since then, the prospect of being "outed" has over the years led some to shutter their blogs, and others to self-reveal (as Tenured Radical herself did.)

Now, in this post-Facebook age, attitudes to online privacy have changed rapidly. The idea that googling job candidates is unethical or nosy (yes, people thought this) is fading away. Among blog authors there is a greater willingness to own their online identity, and see blogging as a useful adjunct to their professional, public lives (rather than a private hobby or potentially embarrassing secret). As Jennifer Ho has suggested, the blog process may not be a distraction or detraction from academic work, but assist with the drafting process. By the same token, a blog is not a private space you have a right to feel invaded if it is found by your boss, a hiring committee, or anyone else.

Therefore, Rachel Leow's notion of blogs featuring half-formed thoughts “whipping round in surprise” is disingenuous. A blog is not a personal notebook. It is a form that exists for the purpose of broadcasting one’s thoughts (fully-formed or otherwise) to an audience. It's now fifteen years since Jennifer Ringley first showed us how a woman could perform "herself" online, for a blog author to frame this (desired) audience as voyeurs invading a private space is like a stripper on stage, coyly saying “oh, silly me, I’ve dropped my clothes”. And it's a particularly disempowered imagery for a feminist blog.

Blogging has increased the profile of women historians, and helped create networks internationally. Sharon Howard was a pioneer in blogging for history, and building not just a personal blog but a web portal for resources on Early Modern history. As she has progressed through her academic career, she has offered advice to grad students, links to job ads - the kinds of career mentorship that more recently Tenured Radical and Historiann have also offered. This aspect has been an under-examined element of academic blogging: in a field in which women are a minority, and aspiring academics may lack senior female mentors, these women sharing their wisdom online has been crucial to the development of the history blog community.

Few bloggers have provided such a comprehensive service to the field as Sharon, who also initiated the History Carnival - a monthly compendium of the best history blogging. But these kinds of things are also in a transitional phase. With the immediacy of twitter, the relevance of a monthly showcase is perhaps diminishing, although the Carnival model does offer a wonderful archive (and historians LOVE archives!). And she did it all under her own name.

I don't think online pseudonymity is inherently wrong or cowardly - it can serve a purpose, of which I have availed myself occasionally. Ann Little has discussed in the latest Common-Place some of the strengths and heritage of pseudonymous presentation. But the pseudonymity of the internet allowing for gender imposture is not one much explored (for all of Marilee Lindemann's dogvoice blog). Are these bloggers really female, and does it really matter? On some level it does. Voice appropriation is not mentioned in the framing of pseudonymity as a shield, by presumably honest brokers of the blog world. For every online Silence Dogood or Currer Bell, there will be a Forrest Carter, Binjamin Wilkomirski, or Helen Demidenko. The persistence of pseudonymity in some cases seems more like an egotistical pose: much like someone who is in no danger hiring a bodyguard. And it only serves to perpetuate the (irrational) fears in academia about the dangers of the newfangled interwebs.

I perform a persona on my blog too, although it is "me", my blog identity is obviously unidimensional. I only write about my work, or history topics. Twitter however is a different beast. In its stream of collective consciousness form (which I find intoxicating), I drop comments about a variety of aspects of my life, or my thoughts on current events. Is the persona I perform there "me"? In some way - although I think I present a sunnier disposition online than I do in the flesh. Since joining Twitter, I have met many more historians, the vast majority using their real names. I have found conference contributors, editorial board members for a new journal, and made real friends through my online roles. Because I have lived in several countries during my academic career, I have found the online realm an invaluable network.

Yes, operating under my own name perhaps puts the brakes on some of the things I might say, but it also means I am operating without a net, without the retreat path of deleting a pseudonymous blog, with plausible deniability. Partly because I came away bruised from early rough and tumble in the electronic sandpit, I am pretty conflict-avoidant. I just don't have the patience or stamina to be fighting with internet idiots. I weakly confess I leave that to stronger broads like Sady Doyle. But I am proud to add my voice to feminist issues online, and to participate in debates that would not be taking place if it were not for the internet.

Kevin Levin wrote about the importance of having an online identity, asking Can you afford not to use social media? and for academics the answer is increasingly no.  His description of building an audience has been my experience too. I know that people have become aware of my work through my blog, I've received emails and tweets about my research, which would not have happened had I not been open about my real id.

Nothing exemplifies the value of social media to a historian more than the case of Lucy Inglis, who created Georgian London. An independent scholar and consultant, she went from starting a blog to being offered a book contract in under a year - having been found by agents and editors on twitter. Lucy conveys a breezy style (which is true of her in person) - and her blog would not have found such an audience if she were not also drawing readers on twitter. Perhaps because she is freed from ivory tower politics (or job anxieties) she is able to interlink the personal and professional on her twitter feed, and give people more of an insight to the life of someone engaged in historical research than any "academic" historian I know. That she was engaged as a "blogger in residence" by the Museum of London, the perfect outreach position for someone with such a desire to share history with the public.

The democratic levelling of blogs is something we should reach out towards, rather than shy away from. As Tony Grafton described the challenges faced by history as a discipline, being able to explain ourselves to the public should be a key focus. And as someone who works on transnational as well as gender issues, I am keen to discuss themes and ideas from historians working all over the world. Any historian who works on society should welcome a readership outside academe, and for feminist historians: I am woman, read my blog.

Want to be a guest poster at Tenured Radical?  Write with a suggestion to tenuredDOTradicalATgmailDOTcom.

On The Idea That Merit Is Actually A System: An Intervention On Behalf Of Affirmative Action

These remarks were delivered on Saturday, January 22, at the Third Social Justice Leadership Conference, organized by students at Zenith University.  I appeared on a panel about affirmative action policies and academic admissions with colleagues Alex DuPuy (sociology); J. Kehaulani Kauanui (American Studies and Anthropology); and Sonja Manjon, Vice President for Diversity and Strategic Partnerships.  The panel began with remarks by Theodore M. Shaw, Columbia School of Law and formerly head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.  The conference followed a keynote by Geoffry Canada, of the Harlem Children's Zone, given the previous evening.
 

On left, a self-identified "victim of a hate crime."  Credit.

The analysis that follows was shaped by what I observed in the fall of 2009 during a conflict provoked by some of our students over Zenith’s affirmative action policies; it was also shaped by the impressive response of other students to that provocation. As I watched these discussions unfold,  I wondered:  Which students were put in the position of justifying themselves as merit-bearing subjects entitled to an excellent education? Which students assumed that their merits were obvious, and that their presence at Zenith was not subject to debate?

As a result of these thoughts, I want to examine a word, as it relates to the role affirmative action plays in education. That word is merit, a thing we are told is part of something called "the merit system."  Merit is a word I particularly dislike. Every time I hear it, I am quite sure that something dishonest is going on that needs to be attended to.

The thoughts and analysis that follow are grounded in the following experiences and beliefs:

• Reflections on my life’s journey as a white woman, a beneficiary of affirmative action and a person whose accomplishments have grown over time in a way that does not always correlate with the assumptions of others about my merit;
•  A grounding in queer studies that causes me to question all systems – like the merit system -- that codify and normalize us;
•  My familiarity with critical race studies and feminist theories of intersectionality articulated by scholars like Kimberle Crenshaw, Derrick Bell and Lisa Lowe. Such work, I argue, helps us to understand a long American history in which “merit” is attached to some bodies and not to others. For example, Asians ineligible for citizenship were de facto outside systems of merit to which only members of the national body politic were entitled.  Enslaved people in the nineteenth century United States were not judged by whites to possess merit, honor or wisdom – any of the qualities that might have qualified them as having “rights a white man must respect.” (Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857), a stigma that attaches itself to African descended people in the United States to this day.

 I am not the only person who thinks merit is a funky concept. In 1996, Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier wrote, in response to escalating attacks on affirmative action from the right, and the failure of liberals to defend these policies with sufficient vigor:

The present system measures merit through scores on paper-and-pencil tests. But this measure is fundamentally unfair. In the educational setting, it restricts opportunities for many poor and working-class Americans of all colors and genders who could otherwise obtain a better education. In the employment setting, it restricts access based on inadequate predictors of job performance. In short, it is neither fair nor functional in its distribution of opportunities for admission to higher education, entry-level hiring, and job promotion.  

They go on to explain that most attacks on affirmative action equate merit with test scores and, in the case of admission to institutions of higher education, grade point averages, class rank and other numerical indicators of academic achievement. Fairness, in this discussion, requires assessing whether “treating everybody the same” is truly fair.1

Sturm and Guinier articulate a familiar, and solidly liberal, critique of our current testing culture, one that has been influential in the admissions process at a place like Zenith since the 1970s.  They go on to suggest alternative forms of assessment that might make the system fairer, correcting the “uneven playing field” that Geoffrey Canada spoke about last night.   By doing so, assessment would rely less on the prior acquisition of what Pierre Bourdieu would call “cultural capital,” a standard that inhibits access for working class students, many of whom are of color and/or new immigrants, from exhibiting their talents or displaying the accomplishments that middle class and wealthy students have more opportunity and support in acquiring.  In other words, affirmative action continues to work because the values being affirmed have been adjusted to measure excellence more accurately across the lines of racial, gender and class difference.


Geoffrey Canada has a related critique, but a different solution. He objects to the power of merit systems because so many children are excluded from acquiring merit through no fault of their own. Mr. Canada -- whose masculinist metaphors, overwhelming concern for boys and explicit blaming of women unsettled me as I tried to attend to his remarks -- but believes in the essential correctness of conventional merit systems. They represent, he argues, the "high standards" to which all children should be held. His solution is to direct the same basic resources to all children, regardless of their economic circumstances,resources which do not come from the state but from private philanthropy and the business sector. This strategy “levels the playing field” and allows us to then have the same high expectations of all children. Children then succeed or fail on their own merits.

Canada's view of democratic inclusion might be characterized as a neoliberal compromise, and not a transformative solution. More generally, the private non-profits that work to ready a few children for higher education rely on the following premises:

·      That because our resources are limited, we need to direct them to children, who still have time to acquire merit;

·      That the multiple generations of adults related to these children are too damaged, have become part of the problem and do not merit saving;

·      That it is possible to create a more inclusive middle and upper class through projects that select some children for cultivation and then make them visible to elite institutions like Wesleyan;

·      That some children, sometimes the siblings and neighbors of those children who have been selected, cultivated and made visible to elite institutions, are left behind because they have no civil right to access private resources;

·      That the state has proven itself incapable of the task of assisting the poor, and people of color in particular, and that state transformation is undesirable or impossible.

And yet, when it bypasses the state and adopts a corporate framework for competitive excellence, community action raises some red flags. There is a reason why the rest of us don't rely on Bill Gates, Facebook and the Soros Foundation to guarantee our civil rights:  projects sponsored by the private sector are not required to be democratic in the larger sense that the Constitution might guarantee.  Projects like the Harlem Children’s Zone, which do a tremendous amount of good, nevertheless work within a very conservative value system.  This value system recognizes that merit translates into privilege, that it must be earned, and that in the end, the circle of privilege is a closed one.  Thus, in this model "progress" requires only widening the circle of merit -- not critiquing our idea of what constitutes merit in the first place, or understanding why certain bodies -- women, of color, queer -- have such a difficult time being perceived as meritorious even when they do meet the highest standards. 

Both the liberal and the neoliberal approach, however, by focusing on what constitutes merit and how one acquires it, are vulnerable from the left, a critique which I would like to outline below:

• That it is fundamentally unjust to withhold access to an excellent educational institution by creating hierarchies of merit.
• That affirmative action was, at its inception, a liberal compromise that allowed us to revise the racial order without talking honestly about racism; to revise the gender order without fundamentally disturbing patrairachy; and to not discuss homophobia at all.
• That radical experiments like open-admissions at New York’s City College in the 1960s were responded to by a liberal state, not by an effort to prepare and invest in all students in the Five Boroughs to receive an excellent education, but by creating barriers of cost.  This began a process of economic exclusion from higher education that has accelerated dramatically in the last two decades;
• that the blackening and browning of all public schools has loosened the commitment of policymakers to financing education, and strengthened the influence of private schools over educational policy.

Finally, I would like to say that I don’t think it really matters what happens to the admissions policy at private colleges like Zenith, although it is important to the future of the institution itself to continue to grapple with its contradictions.  But what happens to affirmative action as a national policy, and one that has a huge impact on access to public institutions of higher education, is terribly important.  However flawed it is, in a society that is not in any way post-racial, it is necessary.  Given the unequal distribution of educational resources along the lines of race and class -- not merit -- a distribution that becomes more unequal as public dollars devoted to education shrink, support for affirmative action measures that recognize the effects of inequality are imperative.
_________________
1. Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier, “The Future of Affirmative Action: Reclaiming An Innovative Ideal,” California Law Review (July, 1996).

Did anyone really see this coming? Proprietary schools pushing hard against gainful employment approach

Indentured educated servants: prepare yourself for some intense battles. With little resources to promote our voice inside the beltway, the recent developments attacking the gainful employment rule are worrisome. In addition, we have a new and despicable sheriff in town, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC). But when it comes to the attacks, I doubt anyone saw these things coming, especially with regard to the proprietary schools. They're winning, and it is a crying shame.

Foxx is now the chairwoman of the higher-education subcommittee in the House of Representatives, and she has allies in the banking and student lending industry. She is against any form of regulation, and is targeting the gainful employment rule. Pell Grants are also vulnerable.

She also hopes to slash the budget of the Department of Education, and in ways that are not good for borrowers.

It sounds like those within the Department aren't too concerned. For instance, Eduardo Ochoa, assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the U.S. Education Department, stated that the new rules will probably not be disconcerting for the proprietary schools. He added, "The regulations as they come out are going to be significantly different—I think they're going to be better, nuanced, and I think that there's a lot there that people will appreciate having other views reflected."

When someone like Ochoa uses words like 'nuanced,' that is code for the following: "we've been lobbied and pressured so hard, that we're going to cave to the demands of the for-profit industry." Well, we can all rest easy, knowing that the very schools that ought to be regulated are drafting the new rules. After all, that is the way things work these days in Washington.

If these are Foxx's plans, you can imagine what that means for current borrowers who need relief and immediate solutions. Rest assured, I'm working on angles and have some propositions out there.  

That's why we need to organize and demand answers from Congressman Virginia Foxx.   

Original source: Eric Kelderman,"Rep Foxx calls for Streamlining Regulations and Cutting Spending," The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 25, 2011 

Related Links

Kelly Field, "Obama Calls for Spending Freeze but Says He'll Spare Education," The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 25, 2011

Shame more people didn't vote that way in her district.

Obama's Metamorphosis: From Center-Center-Right to Right-Right

Last year I listened to the SOTU while driving through the South. We had to tune in by AM radio, and at times the crackling speech was as we went deeper into the south. We were headed to South Korea, and I still had hopes for what Obama intended to do for the country. While that sense of hope was somewhat of a flicker, it was still there. Today, that then dwindling flicker has been fully extinguished. Not even a faint string of smoke or the leftover hint of hot wax remains.

When President Obama delivered his last SOTU, I had even received a letter from him a few weeks weeks earlier about the student lending crisis. Of course, the President didn't call it that, but that's why he was responding to me. As of this date, the White House continues to shift the conversation back to the same sorry message. They can't get away from the safe and easy lines that relate to prospective and current students. To hell with the current debtors. Even though the outstanding student loan debt is nearing a whopping $900 billion, we're still going to talk about how we'll take care of those who don't currently carry the burden of debt. Oh, and we'll be sure to pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.  Because helping prospective students is really going to make a difference when it comes to a generation, actually generations, of people who are part of the indentured educated class. Keep up the good work! You're really making a friggin' difference.

In President Obama's last SOTU, he mentioned student loan debt at least four times. His most inspiring line was this: "In the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college."

He should have added, "well, what I mean to say is, no prospective students should go broke when they go to college in the future. To hell with those of you who are current student loan debtors. We've been convinced that you're not a problem in D.C. That's what the the associations for the universities and students are telling us. Oh, so is the College Board. I'm pretty sure I've had some dinners with Nelnet and Sallie Mae. Besides, I read the Post, and they never seem to make a stink about student loan debt. They've all assured me that you're really not a concern. So, to hell with you. But . . . please rally around me for my next election, so that I can break more promises and then bitterly complain that you are ungrateful and whiny!"

Welcome to the new age of Right-Right Obama.

Related Links

"Bitter Taste, Bad Letter," July 19, 2010

"You don't say? The President tells the Arizona Daily that higher education needs to be affordable," September 28, 2010


"Last call with the White House," February 5, 2010

"Quick Notes: The President's State of the Union Address," January 21, 2010

"The Obama Administration: Why they have failed (Part II)," January 11, 2010

"The Obama Administration: Why they have failed," January 7, 2010 

Other related links

"Barack Obama - Out of the closet," Michael Brenner, Huffington Post, January 24, 2011

"Obama's transformation culminates in Tuesday's State of the Union Address," Sam Youngman, The Hill, January 24, 2011

Olbermann calls Obama a sellout, MSNBC, December 7, 2010

Good luck, indentured educated citizens! You're on your own!

"To really learn take a test." The Times pushes its testing agenda again.

The New York Times, as part of its ever increasing drum beat for testing, printed an article on its front page called: "To really learn, quit studying and take a test." The article reports a paper published in the journal Science that says that students retained more information after being tested than they retained from studying. In the Times' logic this means, "yea tests!"

They asked various authorities in Cognitive Science to comment and somehow managed to get people (Marcia Linn and Howard Gardner) who I know are anti-testing, to sound as if they were astounded by this study.

Let me make it simple for the Times: Learning is not actually about the retention of information. Of course, in school it is, but that is because school was designed to create mindless factory workers not thinkers. Real learning involves trying things and failing, and learning from one's failures. Real learning involves having a goal and figuring out how to achieve it, and learning from the experience. Real learning is about the modification of behavior and the modification of ideas.

School is about the retention of knowledge. But school is broken. Most students are miserable and could not possibly pass the tests they passed a few years after school is finished.

The New York Times has an agenda. It constantly promotes testing. I have a question for the Times' editors. Did you learn to run a newspaper in school? Or did it takes years of practice? Or does one just take a multiple choice test to become an editor at the Times?

It Gets Worse: Queer People "Volunteer" To Help To Ease The Tax Burden For Straight Families

Remember in my last post when I said it doesn't always get better?  A little bird down the street at Yale --erp, I mean, Oligarch University twigged me last week to a payroll error, because of which 61 employees will see a paycheck reduction of 33% or more for January and the subsequent two months.  Right before winter break, LGBT employees who had taken advantage of Connecticut's new freedom to gay marry received a letter telling them of a payroll error:  the university had ceased withholding taxes on the benefits received for domestic partners who had become spouses under state law -- but not federal law.  The upshot, for those of you who suffer temporary black out when taxes are mentioned, gay married people get to pay two years of taxes in one.

Homos are just more patriotic, that's all.  Photo Credit.

In many ways, this falls under the category of discriminatory behavior that allows universities to perform budget trimming immoral acts because they are perfectly legal, while insisting that it is not they who discriminate.  For those of you not familiar with what those of us who pay it call "the gay tax," homofolk whose marriages are not recognized under federal law pay federal taxes on benefits that are untaxable for  heterofolk, resulting in thousands of dollars of penalties that gay people pay.  According to Tara Bernard at the New York Times (January 11 2011):

A programming error failed to withhold income for taxes owed on the value of domestic partner health coverage....the value of those benefits are taxable (for nondependent partners) by the federal government. But in states like Connecticut, same-sex married couples are treated the same as opposite-sex married couples, and those benefits are not taxable on their state income tax returns.


“Unfortunately, the payroll system inadvertently treated those benefits as nontaxable for Connecticut and federal purposes for the entire calendar year of 2010,” said a letter, dated Dec. 22, from Yale’s payroll department to employees with same-sex partners who were affected by the error. To correct the error, the university went on to say, it would pay the tax and deduct the amount it paid from employees’ paychecks — in equal amounts over the first three months of 2011.


The university, which has extended health insurance to its same-sex employees’ domestic partners since 1994, typically withholds those taxes from employees’ paychecks over the course of the year. But due to the programming error, employees will be responsible for paying the taxes for both years in 2011.

Oligarch has offered "a more flexible repayment schedule" in the event that losing a third or more of a person's salary causes them any hardship. Gosh, do ya think? But honestly, you know what causes a hardship?  Being paid less for doing the same job than straight people are.  As Bernard pointed out last December, a provision of the federal health care bill that would have eliminated this tax on health benefits was dropped from the final legislation.  A very small number of employers (Google, Cisco and the Gates Foundation) reimburse employees for the cost of this discriminatory tax, a practice called "grossing up." Very few institutions of higher ed follow this practice (Syracuse is one -- commenters are invited to name names), and it is particularly shameful that one as well-endowed as Oligarch does not.

The university has received public criticism from the Human Rights Campaign; you can go here to sign a petition to tell Yale how stupid they are on this issue.  But while you are at it, if you are an academic, tell your own university about the anti-gay discrimination that helps them pay for essentials like football, keeping the cost of Alumni/ae weekends low, Presidential salaries in the millions and giving iPods to every entering freshman.  Check out the schools you graduated from, and let them know how you feel about a practice that writes discrimination into the law and violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Hey, I've got an idea, Yale Law profs:  how about filing a big, fat civil rights suit on behalf of your colleagues?

Battle Hymn Of The Queer Tiger Aunt: Or, How Amy Chua Made Me Think About Feminism

The official logo of the Queer Tiger Aunt. Photo credit.

When I decided that instead of reading about Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother I would read the book instead, I did so for two reasons.  One was because I had become interested in the Orientalist tropes that she launched in her publicity piece, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" (Wall Street Journal, January 8 2011) and that white women then expanded upon here and other places.

The other reason was that I had some Audible credits to use, and was beginning my daily commute again.

Am I glad I did!  Here are some things I thought about by actually reading (listening to) the book, rather than basing my judgments of it on a few salacious quotes (or Janet Maslin's review, which has numerous factual errors in it):

• What it means to be the bridge between the immigrant generation and a generation which grows up in privilege and security;
• That someone in the world is thinking about what makes girls confident and strong, rather than viewing female success as a symptom of a society that hates boys;
• That someone other than me thinks that giving young people hundreds of prizes for small accomplishments does little for them except cause them to expect prizes at every turn;
• That one of feminism's central insight in the 1960s -- mothering is a job -- is also one of the great unresolved issues on the feminist agenda.  The institutional and social desire to pretend that motherhood isn't a job may be the single most critical issue to address if we are also to address women's equality as workers and citizens in this country.

 I can also now answer question The Los Angeles Times asked today: "What's Behind Our Obsessive Amy Chua Disorder?"  The answer, I think, is that mothering is more or less a cursed profession that is analogous to being a professional homosexual, which is what I do when I am not being a tenured college professor.  As with mothers, people always feel like they must have -- nay, have a right to have -- opinions about homosexuals, regardless of how silly or unwelcome those opinions are.  The less people know about real homosexuals, the more they feel like they have to have an opinion about us.  Of course homosexuals -- like Mommies -- also have opinions about themselves that have more holes in them than Swiss cheese.  Take the "It Gets Better Project," which is run by real homosexuals, and has a lot of terrific videos by homosexuals, transpeople, and some heterosexuals.  It's purpose is to cheer up young people who are at risk from harming themselves out of despair over their sexuality.  While the videos themselves are quite nuanced and interesting, the message the media is running with is that if you are a gay kid, things will get better when you grow up and are free from your parents and high school bullies.  This is a lie.  Actually, the outcomes of growing up are quite variable.  Sometimes things get better, but sometimes they don't.  Sometimes things get worse.  Being gay might become only one of your problems, since people suffer from things like poverty, illness and disability that have nothing to do with being gay.  Or sometimes they continue to suffer because they are gay!  

Similarly, from reading Chua and reading about her, I have discovered that there is really a struggle over what constitutes good motherhood which is not likely to make any difference to anyone.  I'm not involved in the Mommy Wars:  in fact, as I am not a Mommy, I have only heard rumors of them, not experienced them first hand.  As I understand it, they revolve around:

• Men who insist on mansplainin' about what constitutes good mothering;
• Women lecturing other women about what constitutes good mothering;
• Women's ambivalence about the act of mothering, expressed as hostility towards other mothers;
• Why and when we decided that men ought to be heaped with praise for any or all acts that are similar to mothering.

I speak to all of this as an outsider, not being a mother but rather someone who has put a tremendous amount of effort into being an eccentric but caring Queer Tiger Aunt.  I sometimes succeed at aunt-hood and sometimes fail, but one of the good things about being an aunt is that there are no rules on how to do it.  No one criticizes you for being a bad aunt.  The job isn't in demand.  Have you ever heard someone say:  "The clock is ticking:  I won't feel like a real woman if I don't become -- an aunt?"

To say I am a queer aunt is obvious on several levels.  As an aunt, one occupies a role from which critiques of what stands for normal parenting can be acted upon in a complementary and/or subversive way.  Hence, to be a truly productive and energetic aunt is to be queer in relation to some child or children regardless of whether you are a homosexual or not.  It beats being a mother with a stick, if you ask me.  It's not a job, as mothering is:  it's a vocation.  Assuming the mantle of Queer Tiger Aunt has an additional advantage.  Unlike a mother, an aunt can disappear for moderate periods of time to write an article, take a dramatic trip, go on a bender, or whatever, and the kids say:  "Wow, I want to be like her!"  Because you don't own them, you don't have to worry about abandoning the children because: the Goddess gave them parents.

A final note:  it seems obvious to me from observing the Chua controversy that there is no such thing as a good mother, just a lot of women claiming to be better mothers than each other based on some floating standard. That is something feminism also needs to deal with.

Teachers can't take it any more

I get a lot of letters from people who hear me speak. Here is an excerpt from one that I received recently which I especially liked:

I listened with rapt attention to your talk. I was frustrated that it was difficult to listen and process everything you were saying at the same time. I didn’t want to miss a word so I was relieved when I checked out your website which helps immensely in filling in the blanks.

I am a former classroom teacher. One of my most major gripes is that we are not allowed to teach individually relevant curriculum (even to students who have Individual Education Plans) therefore we CREATE a host of behavior problems because students know that most of what they are learning is CRAP.

I also agree that the system is not going to kill itself. I lobby on behalf of changing public education at the local, state and federal levels and ran for public office for the first time this past fall. I didn’t win, but didn’t do too bad for a first timer with a lot of common sense reform oriented ideas. The current political climate is not much in favor of this. J

There was a time not so long ago when teachers didn't like my talks. But the last two U.S. Presidents have made sure taht taht is no longer the case.

Quick links: Our favorite gal, Sallie Mae

For those of you interested in market updates and news-related stories about Sallie Mae, I've decided to post bi-monthly updates of relevant links with annotations. Since we're all big fans of Ms. Mae, she's the first on the list for this new feature at AEM. In the future, I will also post quick links about Mr. Nelnet. If you would like me to feature other lenders, please don't hesitate to submit the names of your favorite companies! After all, we know how much they care about the indentured educated class.

So, without further adieu, let's see all the great and dismal and infuriating things that is in the news about Ms. Mae.

- "Sallie Mae Hints at Dividends," WSJ, January 20, 2011 

SLM may return cash to shareholders. She hasn't done so since 2007. They've made these promises to investors in the past, but then have failed to follow through. The best news in this article? SLM's fourth-quarter earnings are up by 45%! Great news for us, right?

- "Calls from student loan firm aggravate non-borrowers," Chicago Tribune, January 20, 2011

So this story is about a couple with the last name of Collins. It turns out they started receiving calls from Sallie Mae . . .  get this . . . non-stop, even though they were non-borrowers. I know, I know, it's shocking to those of you who are aware of the amazing quality of customer service that Ms. Company Mae possesses. She's a real lady when it comes to phone call etiquette and fair treatment. In any event, the Collins shared the same last name with one of Ms. Mae's debtors (lucky them!). Even though the couple told Sallie to stop calling day in and day out, the very next day - you guessed it - the phone would ring again and again and again and again. You get my point. And of course it would be damned Sallie on the other end of the line wanting to chit-chat. Luckily, there's a happy ending for the couple. As for the debtor, I doubt that's the case for him.

- "Sallie Mae Tops Zacks Estimate," Daily Markets.com, January 20, 2011

"SLM Corp. (SLM: 14.13 +0.31 +2.24%), better known as Sallie Mae, reported fourth quarter 2010 core earnings of $401 million or 75 cents per share, ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 72 cents. The results compare favorably with prior-year quarter’s core earnings of $268 million or 44 cents per share. Favorable results were primarily driven by decrease in loan loss provisions and gains from repurchasing debt. During the quarter, the company repurchased $1.3 billion of debt with realized gains of $118 million."

 You can count on us! We are experts in terrorizing and demoralizing the indentured educated class.

Member Notes: Meetings, Legislation, the hope of institutionalizing AEM, Inc.

It's a cold, frosty, icy day in D.C., but that isn't going to stop me from making it to yet another meeting on behalf of the indentured educated class and AEM, Inc. This time I am visiting with a non-profit organization to discuss a potential partnership.

As many of you are aware, I have been in D.C. since the 9th of January. In a matter of 3 weeks I have traveled nearly 8,000 miles, and have been on two continents (Seoul > L.A. > Dallas > D.C). Despite all the traveling, I am still energetic and setting up as many face-to-face meetings in D.C. as humanly possible. So far, I've had a lot of luck. I've met with staffers in various offices on the Hill, and will be meeting with more - as well as a Representative - this coming week. We have had lengthy discussions about the student lending crisis, and I have even been asked to provide them with feedback and suggestions on some forthcoming legislation. If we consider how much we had been ignored even a year ago, these conversations suggest that we're making headway. People here are listening. It would be nice if we could receive that sort of response from the White House. Sadly, they keep referring back to prospective students (for instance, see my post about Ms. HigginBottom here), even though that has absolutely nothing to do with current student loan debtors and the resulting crisis. If Pres. Obama does not listen to the voices of the indentured educated class, I have a feeling we might not be so keen on the idea of heading to the ballot boxes to vote for him. Why would any of us be motivated to support a president and an administration who continually ignore such a large portion of the population?

But I digress. 

I've also had lunch with several important authors, and they have provided me with enormous support. One of my friends, a renowned writer and lifelong activist, has offered to organize some events to help me spread the word about AEM and the indentured educated class. I'm not just having face-to-face conversations with authors and previous policy makers. For example, Robert Reich recently responded to several of my emails and has offered to keep an eye out for grants. He closed by saying, "Thanks for your important work."

We will eventually, I am confident, open an office in the D.C. area. When that happens, I will hire staff, pay them well, and provide them with great health insurance. So many of you know that that is my biggest goal - that's because it is important to institutionalize AEM. We've incorporated and I have a team of 8 outstanding Board Members. I did have 9 until quite recently. One of my Board Members passed away unexpectedly from pancreatic cancer on January 13th. She will be sorely missed. While we certainly cannot replace her, I am turning my attention again to recruiting more Board Members and volunteers.

There's so much going on, even more than what I've mentioned above. I am also collaborating with an outstanding scamblogger, Nando, who works on revealing the often harsh realities of going to law school, taking on piles of debt, and entering a legal industry that is crumbling. You can check out his work over at Third Tier Reality. Incidentally, Nando's blog was just referenced in a NYT article entitled, "Is Law School A Losing Game?" It is one of the few pieces that adequately portrays the problems of obtaining professional degrees and taking on astronomical amounts of student loan debt. Of course, I don't think Mr. Wallerstein, a law school debtor, is depicted in a particularly positive manner, but overall I was pleased by the content of this piece.

Moreover, I am continuing to work on my research about suicide/suicidal thoughts among student loan debtors.

Finally, we are launching a new campaign that will challenge Rep. Virginia Foxx's support of lenders and so forth. If you have yet to sign up, please do so now. Email me (ccrynjohannsen AT gmail DOT com) and simply copy this into the subject line: "Virginia Foxx: Count me in for the next campaign."

 Working around the clock for the indentured educated class! If you are able to do so, please donate to All Education Matters, Inc. AEM depends upon generous donations.

The New York Times is Schizophrenic on Education

Sunday there was an amazing case of the New York Times not even reading their own newspaper and drawing the obvious conclusions about education. Kristof was writing his usual nonsense of how the Chinese education system is better than ours and why. (They score higher than the US does on tests and we should all worry, is now the mantra of New York Times apparently.)

But, in a different section there was an article about Amy Chua, the so-called “tiger mother” who wrote a book about how Chinese parents get their kids to do well at tests. As she is an American, a Yale graduate, and she mothers like her parents did, which means she forced her kids to do well in school. Americans are officially horrified by this book, while at the same time extolling the Chinese for doing so well on tests. Do we want nice parenting or parents who are into test prep? The Times is on both sides of this one.

In yet another section of Sunday's Times there is an Op-Ed piece on how Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, which uses a very bad word (one which wasn’t so bad in 1880) should now be taught in college as opposed to teaching it in high school and deleting the bad word. The idea that it should be taught at all is never discussed. Why shouldn’t it be taught at all? Because of the bad word? No, because novels shouldn’t be taught. What is the reason for teaching novels? Are we trying to create a culture of literary critics? I love Mark Twain but hated him in high school. I hated any book I was forced to read. Why do we force kids to read books that don’t interest them?

Maybe it is because they will be on the tests? How about if only Chinese students were to read them since they like tests so much?

Old Racism, New Clothes: Middle Class Child Abuse Is Not An Asian Thing

White women can be good mothers too, Amy!

It isn't news that Yale Law prof Amy Chua has written a book about what she calls her "Tiger Mother" philosophy of parenting.  Most of us would never have known about it if her publicist had not arranged to have an op-ed placed in  the Wall Street Journal called "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior."  It went viral, at least on academic Facebooks, almost immediately.  Re-packaging the model minority thesis as a tough love philosophy, rather than the genetic predisposition to excellence that ignoramuses talked about for years, it raises a fascinating set of questions about the social construction of race as it intersects with ideologies of parenting.  It has also, according to ABC News, caused Chua to receive death threats from readers who were outraged at parenting techniques that include yelling at her children, forcing them to practice the violin for hours until they get it right (withholding bathroom privileges as an incentive), referring to them as "garbage" when they disappoint her, never accepting less than an A in anything, and not permitting a range of indulgences that might expose her daughters to the wrong influences, make them fat, or cause them to take their eyes off the prize.

I don't find the Chua book particularly shocking, I guess, because terrible things happen to middle-class children that no one talks about.  I'm not talking about sexual abuse, but the forms of narcissism that are not as outwardly abusive as Chua's techniques but can be damaging int eh long term all the same. I'm talking about kids who are forced to apply to fifteen different colleges, when in fact you can only attend one in the end; kids who are raised by alcoholics who can keep life pinned together enough so that no one calls the cops; kids who are forced to conform to gender standards that are unnatural to them because the make everyone else so uncomfortable; kids that are hit in secret; kids that are constantly put on diets; and kids who are academically unremarkable but are pushed to excel in conventional ways when they might be happier devoting themselves to sports, art, dance, cooking or hedge fund management.

And I'm just getting going.

However, the part that really fascinates me is that Chua's desire for rote forms of perfection are being derided in a society that is, in fact, devoted to increasingly unimaginative ideas about what counts as intellectual life.  My generation and the several that have followed have mostly gutted anything that counts for progressive education.  As if that was not enough, we have even taken what used to be fairly standard and unremarkable forms of critical pedagogy and gutted those in favor of a national standardized testing agenda.  Languages, classics, art and music have been stripped from secondary curricula.  Students no longer read for fun; they read to satisfy the AP requirement.  We talk, talk, talk about excellence -- but we can't say what it means, beyond winning admission to a "selective" school.  Although Chua isn't a person I would choose to be my mother (is there a world where you get to choose your mother?) what she describes actually reflects our current winner-take-all philosophy of what education should look like at its best.

What I am also intrigued by is this idea:  if Chua were black or Latina, would what she is doing count as racial uplift?  We don't know, because in the binaries that usually define racialist discourse, mothers who aren't "Chinese" or "Western" aren't part of the discussion.   In fact, it is only when compared with an entirely fictional standard of "white" parenting, in which standards are maintained by silently encouraging children to make the "right" choices, that Chua comes off as cruel.  Author Ayelet Waldman has responded to Chua in the WSJ with an article entitled "In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom," in which she 'fesses up to having allowed her children to drop their music lessons because she was too embarrassed when they were outperformed by children who really practiced.  (Take that one  to the couch, kids!) But Waldman is no pushover.  When one report card came home with defects,

I pointed at the remaining two grades, neither a solid A. Though there was not the "screaming, hair-tearing explosion" that Ms. Chua informs us would have greeted the daughter of a Chinese mother, I expressed my disappointment quite clearly. And though the word "garbage" was not uttered, either in the Hokkien dialect or in Yiddish, it was only because I feared my husband's opprobrium that I refrained from telling my daughter, when she collapsed in tears, that she was acting like an idiot.


The difference between Ms. Chua and me, I suppose—between proud Chinese mothers and ambivalent Western ones—is that I felt guilty about having berated my daughter for failing to deliver the report card I expected. I was ashamed at my reaction.

OK, Ayelet.  You are not ambivalent:  you are passive-aggressive.

Subsequently, describing a dyslexic daughter's struggle to read, she describes a daily, self-imposed regimen in which the child's "face would be red with tears, her eyes hollow and exhausted.

Every day we asked her if she wanted to quit. We begged her to quit. Neither her father nor I could stand the sight of her misery, her despair, the pain, psychic and physical, she seemed far too young to bear. But every day she refused. Every morning she rose stoically from her bed, collected her stuffies and snacks and the other talismans that she needed to make it through the hours, and trudged off, her little shoulders bent under a weight I longed to lift. Rosie has an incantation she murmurs when she's scared, when she's stuck at the top of a high jungle gym or about to present a current events report to her class. "Overcome your fears," she whispers to herself. I don't know where she learned it. Maybe from one of those television shows I shouldn't let her watch.


At the end of a grim and brutal month, Rosie learned to read. Not because we forced her to drill and practice and repeat, not because we dragged her kicking and screaming, or denied her food, or kept her from the using the bathroom, but because she forced herself. She climbed the mountain alone, motivated not by fear or shame of dishonoring her parents but by her passionate desire to read.

In my view, Chua wins the battle here, not because she is the better mother, but because she is honest.  What is shocking to me is that we seem to have nothing more interesting to say about educating children at this stage of history than either of these women, or their critics, are able to articulate.

Department of Snark: Or; Who Put A Tack On Gordon Wood's Chair?

Where did people get illustrations before the interwebs?

Historiann famously stepped in all kind of horse pucky by calling out one very dead white man as a tool.  She comments on this episode in our fabulous Journal of Women’s History roundtable (winter 2010/11), hot off the presses from its new home at SUNY-Buffalo. Read it, and you'll understand that it's been done by a pro and even if a person were willing to put up with the flak, it would only be imitation from here on out.

But on a related note:  did you know a group of very senior and live white men in a prominent East Coast history department referred to themselves informally, until quite recently, as “the Barons?”  Presumably this is how they distinguished themselves from women and more recent arrivals in the department.  One can’t help but believe that one of these good old boys could have been Gordon Wood, who recently heaved up a toxic review of Jill Lepore’s  The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).  Others have commented on it here and here.  Go here for the Facebook page (!) devoted to discussing this peculiar and unattractive essay.

In “No Thanks for the Memories” (New York Review of Books, January 13), Wood signals a thumbs down on Lepore’s attempt to juxtapose what she calls the “fundamentalist “ historical vision of the Tea Party movement – in other words, activists' belief that the Founding Fathers offer us an unchanging and eternal set of guidelines for political life – with what seems to me the unquestionable fact that the Founding Fathers were very different people from us and could not have known who we would be.  Better yet, these elite white gents disagreed profoundly with each other, changed their views on key issues, were ambivalent about the totems of modern right-wing movements (religion, for example), and were downright clueless about what it would mean to enfranchise an electorate across lines of race, class and gender.  They argued among themselves and made unhappy bargains when producing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  They believed that the Revolution marked a period of change rather than the production of unwavering truths to which Americans ought to adhere until the end of time.

Wood opens his critique with the pronouncement: “America’s Founding Fathers have a social significance for the American public,” as if this were not actually the topic of Lepore’s book, or as though such a thought was a general and incontrovertible fact about all "Americans." Lecturing Lepore this way is a bit like saying to a religion scholar, "You know, God is no piker."  However, my guess is that everybody in Amerika is not absorbed with the founding fathers, and from reading this book I think Jill Lepore might agree with me.   (I don’t just believe this because I'm a gay woman either, Big Guy.) Furthermore, the point of Lepore's book, as I understand it, is that history is a highly public project whether we scholars like it or not.  It cannot be confined to the archival work, truth seeking and critical methods that we historians see as fundamental to our craft, and we have some responsibility to grapple with and shape those larger belief systems.  As the public latches on to history as a way of discussing their political concerns, they develop fetish objects.  For the Tea Party activists in particular, the Founding Fathers operate as fetish objects, as well as intellectual touchstones for a set of political beliefs that are at least as presentist as they are located in any coherent eighteenth century intellectual world.

What is particularly puzzling is Wood’s contempt for a highly acclaimed scholar whose main crime seems to be that she writes for a broader educated public. This causes him to radically misrepresent and belittle the book, rather than engage in civilized disagreement with it.  Perhaps the most offensive charge he launches is that Lepore’s main mission in this book is to mock Tea Party adherents’ senseless need for timeless truths. ”It is very easy for academic historians to mock this special need,” he writes; “and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, as a staff writer for the New Yorker is an expert at mockery.” Other than being puzzled about what is so sacred about this "special need" that, if it turned up in his Brown University classroom or any other academic setting, might be considered risible by Wood himself, what I am truly confused about is whether Wood actually read Lepore's book. Referring to the accounts of the revolutionary past interleaved with Tea Party renditions of that past as “scatter shot” he maintains that Lepore “makes fun of the Tea Party people who are trying to use the history of the Revolution to promote their political cause. …The fact that many ordinary Americans continue to want to ask about the Founders evokes no sympathy or understanding from Lepore.”

In my view, the book is well structured, well argued, fun to read, highly teachable and very respectful of the Tea Party activists Lepore encountered as she thought through these issues.  I can't imagine why Wood finds the book “confusing,” and  a “meandering meditation on history with bits of information on topics, sometimes relevant, sometimes not.” He writes, “Throughout her book Lepore’s implicit question remains always: Don’t these Tea Party People realize how silly they are? They don’t understand history: they need to learn that time moves forward.”

At times Wood himself is incoherent, so deeply does he dislike The Whites of Their Eyes.  Lashing out at Lepore for criticizing originalism as “bad history,” he concedes that although originalism is actually bad history, it is simultaneously good law.  We know this, not because Wood feels he has to explain this odd contradiction, but “because it has engaged some of the best minds in the country’s law schools over the past three decades or so” and the Federalist society was founded to promote it.

How it is that incorrect history can provide the foundation for good law in a Constitutional system based on precedent boggles me, but it is also not to the point: originalism is, in fact, a highly historical theory of the law.  It suggests that the passage of time does not alter basic truths of the human condition that was fully conceptualized in the past.  To say it is not historical would be like saying the Bible is not historical.  Why do I think Wood's point about the "best minds"is also flimsy, as well as contradictory?  Here are three movements that have been based on what seemed to be universal truth, engaged excellent minds and yet failed to produce anything but injustice:  Stalinism, South African apartheid, and the Iraq war. 

Wood ends on a note of unbelievable condescension and sexism by suggesting how Jill Lepore could be a better historian: take a course from the venerable Bernard Bailyn! If only she understood the interactions between history and memory as Bailyn has, and had solicited “advice” from him, Lepore would be a better scholar. “She might have been able to display some of her scientific credentials as a historian,” Wood concludes, “and written a less partisan and more dispassionate account of the Tea Party movement to help us understand what it means.”

It’s rare that I have read such a rude review that so nakedly displays the fault lines and the rivalries in a field, not to mention the condescension some men feel free to display towards women that they would not dream of displaying towards a man. But here’s the worst thing about this review, from my perspective: it is a gross misrepresentation of what Lepore has done, and offers no evidence from the text to support these nasty charges. Here are a few quotes for you from the book that suggest these charges of Woods are entirely invented:

• “This book is an argument against historical fundamentalism. It makes that argument by measuring the distance between past and present.” (19)  Here we have a statement of argument and method that actually does map the rest of the volume.

• Reporting on a conversation with two Tea Party activists in a Boston bar, Lepore describes one as “quite” and the other as “frustrated” and “dismayed by the passage of national health care, but “courteous and equable” as he described his desire to put a democratic process into motion to overturn it. (90-91) In fact, I would defy Wood to point to any section of this book where Lepore mocks her informants, either openly or by implication.

• Rather than describing Tea Party activists as racist, as many do, Lepore instead describes the lengths that many go to marginalize demonstrators who are deploying racism and racist symbols, particularly in relationship to President Obama. In the analysis that produces the title, she sees the Tea Party love affair with a set of mythical Founding Fathers as a utopian desire for an Edenic democracy without racism, sexism or any kind of special interest. “The Founding Fathers were the whites of their eyes, a fantasy of an America before race, without race.” (95) Inevitably, Lepore must put this in contrast with what even Gordon Wood surely knows: that although deeply divided over slavery, the FF’s allowed it to survive; and that female citizenship was not just an oversight, it was unimaginable.

“”What would the founders do?’” is, Lepore argues from the point of view of historical analysis, "an ill considered and unanswerable question, and pointless, too.” (124) Although Lepore doesn’t bring it up, the female characters that she weaves through the book speak to Wood, but he can’t hear them. There is a reason why Tea Party folks don’t sit around asking what Abigail Adams thought about this point of law or finance, Lepore implies, or what Phillis Wheatley might have argued Bakke. It isn’t because they don’t care: it’s because women and black people didn’t matter politically in the eighteenth century, and that is kind of a problem in a day and age when ideas about citizenship have to draw on the complex and contradictory pasts that make up American history.

I didn’t finish this book loving it, as I have loved some of Lepore’s other books. But it’s a good book, I liked it, and it is one that helps us think about how we will weave the Tea Party movement into our classes, as inevitably we must.  The Whites of Their Eyes could give students an energizing introduction to the relevance of the past to our political present. For the rest of us, it could help ease our minds about the Tea Party: compared to Gordon Wood, they seem like truly lovely people.