Archive for the 'Academia' Category

Perfectionism, Libido, and Older Men/Younger Women links, plus a conference

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 01, 2011
in Academia, Body, Desire and objectification, Eating disorders, Links and Older Men & Younger Women
. 16 Comments

Different websites have radically different commenting communities. This has been driven home to me in recent months as my pieces have been republished at other places. It’s not that various blogs and magazines have widely divergent rules for commenting; it’s that they often seem to have completely different readers.

For example, my post on the problem of older men sexualizing younger women attracted a storm of male criticism at the Good Men Project. What runs on Tuesday at GMP runs on Thursdays at The Frisky. Though you need to be logged in to read responses at the latter site, the largely female readership at The Frisky offered a starkly different take. Though the responses were more positive, as one might expect, many young women who are in relationships with older men were strongly critical of what they saw as my refusal to differentiate between teens and early twenty-somethings.

Jezebel kindly reprints my post on the Damaging Expectation of Higher Male Desire. It got only a handful of responses here, but about 80 so far (and counting) at their place.

And I’m very grateful to Chloe at Feministing for driving some Friday traffic to yesterday’s post “If I Were Thinner, I’d Have the Right to Expect More”: on perfectionism and the scarcity model.

And I’ll be speaking (and moderating) at the Applied Women’s Studies Conference at Claremont Graduate University tomorrow morning. The panel I’m chairing is on Feminist Masculinities, and I’ll be sharing the dais with some terrific activist men. Here’s a link to the program; come on out today (or tomorrow)!

Many of my lectures are online for download

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 23, 2011
in Academia
. 0 Comments

Reminder: Thanks largely to Mon-Shane Chou, many of my lectures are now online as downloadable audio files.

A nearly complete archive of women’s history lectures is here (taped Spring 2010).

A complete archive of my lectures for my “Beauty and the Body in the Western Tradition” course is here.

And the growing archive of this semester’s “Men and Masculinity in America” lectures can be found here.

Better than I was: in defense of seniority rights for teachers

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 15, 2011
in Academia, Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 10 Comments

It’s a month of anniversaries for me. Thirty years ago this March, I was kicked out of prep school, launching an adolescent rebellion that would continue on and off for years. 25 years ago this month, my career as a sex educator began when I started training with Berkeley’s Peer Sexuality Outreach. And twenty years ago, with the beginning of the spring quarter at UCLA, I began my teaching career as a Graduate Student Instructor in the Classics department.

GSIs (or TAs, as they were still known then) often lectured in discussion sections. I remember being so nervous before my first lecture (I was not quite 24) that I threw up in the Bunche Hall men’s room before meeting my students. Most were only two or three years my junior. I was excited and terrified, but knew after the first week of teaching that this was the life I wanted.

Two decades later, I’m still teaching. And though I don’t get as nervous as I did in 1991, I still get butterflies from time to time. More to the point, however, I’m an infinitely better teacher than I was back then. And that brings me to my point.

In the current political climate, it’s become fashionable to attack public employees — teachers in particular. Conservatives who have never been enamored of public education hope to take advantage of a weak economy to strip teachers of their pensions, bargaining rights, tenure, and other job protections. These attacks are odious and indefensible, motivated less by concern with fiscal rectitude or the well-being of young people and more by a desire to destroy the progressive public service unions.

One bit of this emerging conservative conventional wisdom drives me nuts: the idea that teachers are at their best when they are new. Complaining about seniority rules that follow the tradition of “last hired, first fired”, education “reformers” often describe older instructors as “dead wood” and the newest and most vulnerable teachers as the ones who do the most valuable work. Even some ostensibly progressive voices agree, arguing that too many senior faculty have “given up”, while the young (and less well-paid) are the ones who are still engaged.

In what other profession do we express such open contempt for experience? Do people board airplanes, saying “Gosh, I really hope our captain and first officer are new at this — enthusiastic young pilots are the kind I trust most!” Do people go to hospitals, asking “Could you please have a resident operate on my child? I’m worried that an older and more experienced surgeon won’t do the job right.” Of course not. In every other profession, experience is valued. In every other profession, seniority is seen not just as a perk for sticking around but as a resource for the entire community.

I am still an enthusiastic professor. I’ve taught 15,000 students (at the least) since I faced that first class twenty years ago this month. Last fall, my in-class teaching evaluations were higher than they’d ever been before. Even as I’ve given the same lectures over and over again — about Cicero and clitorises, about Gilgamesh and intersectionality, about the Pauline epistles and Betty Friedan — I’ve found ways to change and refine what I say. I know I’d shudder if I heard one of my early lectures now, simply because I’ve gotten so much better at the job of delivering a good talk.

Of course, there’s more to teaching than lecturing. I am more compassionate, more patient, and much quicker to recognize when a student is struggling. (I’m also much more ethical — my infamous and inexcusable sexual relationships with students all happened early on in my career.) I can discern the difference between the lack of motivation and the presence of a genuine learning disability in a way I simply couldn’t years ago. Experience has given me these tools. And if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that no amount of youthful energy can compensate for the benefit of accumulated wisdom.

I make more money now. My first year as a TA, I was paid $1050 a month. My first year as a full-time prof at Pasadena City College, I made $27,000. I have a base salary of approximately three times that now. (Finishing my doctorate in 1999 boosted my compensation nicely.) Am I worth the salary and the benefits? I don’t know, but I do know I’m worth more than I was when I started. And judging by my colleagues whose work I know well, the same is true for them as well. As with every true calling, as with every profession, experience matters for those of us who sweat and strut in the classrooms.

It’s time we push back against the attempt to de-legitimize our profession, and to dismiss the very real benefits of seniority.

Sex work and the classroom: double standards abound

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 14, 2011
in Academia, Sex work and Sexual relationships between professors and students
. 5 Comments

Anna North has this story in Jezebel: Female Professor Fired For Burlesque Performance. See more at Inside Higher Ed.

Only the latest in a string of cases in which women have been fired from teaching positions as a result of legal off-campus sex-work, I find this story and others like it to be disheartening and maddening. Though it was a different era, the mid 1990s were not eons ago — and I was notorious on this campus as the young, untenured prof who was sleeping with a great many of his students. And as I’ve written, the administration looked the other way — as long as the women involved didn’t complain, I was golden. I slept with students while traveling to conferences on the college dime, and the most the vice-president for human resources could say when that story was “Hugo, you’re quite the rascal!”

Not that I have any intention of finding out, but I’m not sure that things have shifted all that much in the past decade and a half. But while administrators might still look the other way when exuberantly irresponsible male academics sow their proverbial oats, they are still unable to grasp the reality that a woman can be an erotic performer off-campus and still maintain her intellectual gravitas in the classroom. In 2011, that’s infuriating and shameful.

The Master’s Tools: feminism and titles on campus

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 19, 2011
in Academia and Feminist Pedagogy
. 22 Comments

I got an email last week from Abby (not her real name):

I work in a Feminist Center on my campus and we have recently welcomed a new director to our center. Upon meeting her I used her first name not even thinking about it, and was corrected by a different person who told me she would prefer me to address her as Dr. so and so.

As we work in a feminist center that focuses on outreach and education about feminist issues and ideals to students, I found her request to be addressed as Dr. to be anti-feminist and pompous. Incredibly pompous. I wouldn’t be so bothered if I worked in a center that didn’t focus on feminist ideals. It creates a very clear hierarchy, and thus who’s opinions and views are valued more – hers. It clearly has nothing to do with formality, as she is not going around calling us student workers Ms. and Mr. so and so. It has everything to do with her need for people to toot her horn. I understand she worked hard for a Ph.D, but if she really needs anyone and everyone to keep congratulating her on it by way of calling her Dr., that’s plainly arrogant.

What it says to me is: I’m a better feminist than you because I have a Ph.D. And I have a Ph.D because I had the money and the means to get one. I find all of if very reflective of her feminist philosophies. It may seem harsh, but I really question whether I can consider her a feminist because of it. It just goes against so many feminist principles.

There are a pair of conflicting ideals that appear in response to Abby’s note.

On the one hand, we live in a world where the Ph.D. (and other terminal degrees) are important markers of accomplishment. Some people feel that it’s vitally important for members of groups who have not traditionally earned such degrees (meaning anyone other than white men) to display them proudly in order to send an inspirational message. Abby’s director may believe that young women not only need to see older women with Ph.Ds, they need to see those women addressed with the kind of respect that was once reserved only for men.

And of course Ph.D.s take money. They also take sacrifice, often the sacrifice of a larger community (like spouses and parents). To refuse to use the title, some folks think, is to discount the sacrifices others made so that one member of the family could earn a Ph.D. It’s one thing to be falsely modest on your behalf, another thing altogether to be falsely modest on behalf of those who helped you along the way. Parents have long bragged about their “son, the doctor”. Isn’t it important that they be able to brag about their “daughter, the doctor” as well?

I’ve written before of my personal disdain for the title “doctor”, and my refusal to hang my diplomas on the wall. But I come from an academic family; both my parents, as well as my brother, have doctorates. My paternal grandmother earned her Ph.D. at the University of Vienna in the 1920s. We were raised to see diplomas on the wall or an insistence on titles as vulgar ostentation, evidence of “trying too hard” or “showing off.” But that’s a position of privilege rather than a universal truth, and I freely acknowledge the distinction. Those who are the first in their families to earn something — and those who are particularly mindful about setting an example to those they teach or mentor — may find that using or displaying those titles are essential ways of honoring one generation and inspiring another.

In an academic setting, where the professor has the gradebook and the student doesn’t, the use of first names may suggest a false equality. It may even strike some people as a disingenuous attempt to cover up the power differential. Using the term “doctor” may seem more honest under such circumstances. Of course, the term “professor” (which, used generally, can encompass those with and without Ph.Ds) solves this problem neatly.

But Abby has a point about the danger of hierarchies. Feminism at its best is more than just giving women an opportunity to compete in traditionally male spaces by traditionally male rules. It’s about changing those rules and reimagining those spaces. Most of us know the oft-quoted line from Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” An insistence on titles certainly smacks of the “master’s tools.” It does privilege one kind of knowledge (the sort that comes from writing a dissertation and having the money for grad school) over other kinds of knowledge. Trust me, I have many colleagues who don’t have a Ph.D. who’ve taught me far more about the business of teaching than my fellow holders of the doctorate.

While it might be fine to use titles as a sign of respect for a particular kind of sacrifice, insisting that the title “doctor” be used for Ph.D. holders strikes me as it strikes Abby: incompatible with a feminist commitment to the kind of egalitarian values one might expect in a campus women’s center. A female professor who wishes to be addressed as “doctor” in a classroom setting is one thing; to expect that in an explicitly feminist space like the Women’s Resource Center is something altogether different. A Women’s Resource Center should be a place where traditional campus hierarchies are called into question, where the focus is as much on nurturing the spirit as it is on disciplining the mind. There’s no inconsistency in being “Jane” when one is in the campus WRC, and asking to be called “Dr. Doe” in a more explicitly academic setting. And if I were able to speak to Abby’s campus director, that’s the advice I’d give.

It’s a dangerous thing to be too enchanted with the master’s tools.

My 2010 Self-Evaluation

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 03, 2010
in Academia
. 16 Comments

Just over five years ago, I wrote a little piece on faculty self-evaluations that was published at Inside Higher Education. I wrote it when I was serving on the committee that was reviewing evaluation procedures. This year, I’m actually being evaluated (for all that evaluating a tenured professor means), and am forced to write one of those very self-evals I decried (and unsuccessfully sought to alter) in 2005.

In the interests of full disclosure, what follows is my response to the evaluation questions. Doggerel is the solution to almost every administrative query, I’ve found.


Please Reflect and Comment on what you’ve done in terms of your major assignment since your last evaluation.

Since last you asked the same of me
I’ve been a loyal worker bee.
With due respect for learning styles.
I’ve paced perhaps a hundred miles
Back and forth across the room
My voice a modulated boom.
With faithfulness, still I render
Lectures on Rome and gender –
In all this, and in more
I am as in 1994
When first I came to PCC
To be that loyal worker bee. Continue reading ‘My 2010 Self-Evaluation’

Budget disaster in Britain

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 24, 2010
in Academia and Britain
. 7 Comments

My younger brother and I are both college professors at public institutions: I at Pasadena City College, and Philip at the University of Exeter in England. I’ve been teaching full-time since 1994, and Philip has been at Exeter since 2001.

California higher education is in dire straits, to be sure. But it’s nothing like what my brother and his colleagues and students are coping with in Great Britain, where teaching budgets are set to be slashed by a flabbergasting 80% by the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat government. There had been some suggestion that universities would be able to raise fees substantially in order to offset the cuts, becoming essentially private (similar to the strategy used successfully at the flagship campus of the University of Michigan). That strategy seems to have been dashed by the junior partner in the governing coalition, the Liberal Democrats.

The future is very frightening for higher ed in Britain, particularly outside of the relatively financially stable “Oxbridge” institutions. British universities don’t have strong alumni backing the way universities in the States do. If the universities have their budgets slashed by the Tories in the name of austerity, and then are prohibited by the Lib Dems from raising fees substantially in the name of fairness and accessibility, then things will be very bleak indeed.

My father did his undergraduate degree at the University of Reading and later taught briefly at York. My brother, whose heart belongs to Albion in a way that mine doesn’t, is committed to staying and raising his three kids in England. But it is a sobering and sad thing that is unfolding. And as dark as things have been lately in the Golden State, we are far from the worst off.

Finding comfort in the rhythms of the academic calendar

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 20, 2010
in Academia and Addiction and mental illness
. 1 Comment

My long-time reader Sara asked me to share a bit more about how I made it through graduate school while struggling with mental illness and addiction. I’ve written a bit about my past a few times before, particularly here and here.

From the time I was first hospitalized (in the spring of 1987, as a nineteen year-old sophomore at Berkeley) until my last breakdown (in June 1998), I seemed to have the capacity to forestall my complete collapse or most spectacular binges until I was on breaks. I rarely missed classes — either as a student or a professor — because I was in rehab or a psych ward, even though I was placed in those institutions more than half a dozen times. Most of my hospitalizations were on spring breaks or summer vacations. My graduation present when I received my B.A. was inpatient treatment for alcoholism. But as bad as my drinking was my final semester at Cal, I turned in every paper on time.

Some of this was attributable to the quirkiness of my own disease. I may have been a world-class narcissist, but as far I was concerned, there was no reason why self-absorption and a strong sense of duty couldn’t be perfectly congruent. I was rarely so miserable or so high that I didn’t have this nagging sense of responsibility creeping in around the edges. Even when I tried to kill myself, I thought carefully about how to arrange papers and finances so that my survivors would not be additionally burdened. I had a sense that self-destruction had to happen on “my own damn time”, which is why I so rarely let my disease interfere with my academic career.

That sounds, of course, as if I had more control over things than I actually did. In some sense, this ability to be a functioning alcoholic and drug addict (if by functioning we simply mean the capacity to show up and suit up for one’s obligations) delayed my recovery, because it allowed me to pretend that I didn’t really have that serious a problem. In my mind, someone who was “really sick” wouldn’t have been able to graduate on time and nail down a tenure-track teaching job at 26. But of course, that illusion of competence and control was part of the illness itself. So much of being successful was, for me, wound up in seeking approval. My sexual compulsiveness was tied to that, and my drug and alcohol use began as a coping strategy for what to do when I didn’t get that approval. I knew I’d lose approval very quickly if I shirked my responsibilities — so I found a way, or so I imagined, to work my acting out around (and in the case of my sexual relationships with my students in my early years of teaching, into) my work.

To point out the obvious: graduate school also gave me a chance to find comfort in gaining mastery of something masterable. When everything else seemed chaotic, the world of medieval manuscripts gave me order and comfort. In libraries and in seminars, I wrestled through problems that were paleographic and theological rather than psychological in nature. Tracing the careers of obscure fourteenth-century English bishops as they rose through the ranks of clerical and royal administrations allowed me to focus on something that was worlds apart from my own turbulent reality.

And it occurs to me that I’ve not been entirely honest with myself, or my readers, when it comes to explaining my academic career. In a short academic autobiography I wrote in 2005, I noted that I had been interested in pursuing a doctorate in Women’s Studies, but chose Medieval History instead out of a kind of intellectual cowardice (and fears revolving around future employability.) It is certainly true that I was always more interested in working on feminism and sexuality than I was on medieval political history and the varied ways in which the English Crown co-opted the episcopal hierarchy for its own purposes. (The topic of my dissertation). The other huge reason why I did medieval history was that I wasn’t emotionally ready to fuse my language and my life. I needed a subject which I found interesting but from which I had some emotional distance. The obscurity of the work I did gave me a kind of comfort I wouldn’t have had if I had been fusing research and activism in a more relevant field. (Another reason, of course, was that I knew that my own personal behavior fell massively short of the mark. A sexually dishonest medievalist getting his degree in history is one thing: a philandering male feminist getting his degree in Women’s Studies is another!)

The best advice I can give to those in graduate school who are struggling with issues around their own mental stability is this: first, seek out help. Make sure that at least one of your academic advisers knows about you. If I hadn’t been able to trust my intellectual mentors with the truth about my personal life, I’d never have made it to the Ph.D. Use the resources that your campus ought to have; your fees have paid for those resources, and you might as well avail yourself of them. Second, find comfort in the rhythms of the academic calendar. Schools have their own liturgical calendars: breaks and exams, welcomings and graduations. For me, at least, those predictable rituals were incredibly comforting. They gave outer order to a chaotic inner life. I’d go so far as to say that the miracle is not that I made it through college in four years and through grad school while struggling with mental illness and addiction. The miracle is that grad school itself turned out to be such a safe refuge. Had I not been in school, I might well have had a very different and much darker outcome.

Men, feminism, and suspicion: a report on our NWSA panel

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 13, 2009
in Academia, Feminist Pedagogy, NWSA 2009 and Rape, aggression and violence
. 6 Comments

I’m in Atlanta, taking a break from presentations at the National Women’s Studies Association meeting. (I also need to get away from the exhibitor’s hall, before I buy so many books that I won’t be able to fit them in my suitcase home.)

Brian Jara, Tal Peretz, and I were the panelists for a discussion entitled Men in Anti-Sexist Activism: Problems and Potential. Brian teaches gender studies at Penn State; Tal, a graduate student at USC (and former student of Brian’s) is writing a dissertation on men doing feminist work. Our panel ran from 8:15-9:30AM — which meant a 5:15AM start for those of us whose body clocks are on Pacific time! The three of us had anticipated having ten to fifteen folks come to hear and participate; we were thrilled that more than forty showed. At the beginning, we asked the audience to pose questions for us about men and anti-sexist activism. Most of the questions asked for suggestions for more ways about recruiting men into doing anti-sexist (and explicitly feminist) work; others asked about ways to address the “white knight” or “pedestal” phenomenon, the dynamic in which men expect praise merely for being males doing this kind of work.

Brian noted that he’s fundamentally suspicious of men who come into his women’s studies classes and get involved in feminist clubs on campus. This isn’t out of his territorial desire to be the only male feminist (the one who can soak up the approbation); rather, it’s rooted in his experience of seeing so many men come into this work with motives ranging from the sexually predatory to the expectation that women’s studies is an intellectually undemanding “easy A”. Tal and I echoed Brian’s concern, acknowledging our own experience encountering men in feminist spaces whose motivations for being there are less than salutary. At the same time, we stressed the importance of encouraging men to explore feminism and start doing feminist work. The point, as I emphasized in my brief oration from the table, is to frame the reality of that suspicion as a reason for more men to get involved in anti-sexist campaigns in the classroom, on campuses, and in the “real world.”

I’ve written before about the “guilty until proven innocent” dynamic, most recently in this post on the “Schroedinger’s Rapist” question. We’ve got to recognize two things, I reiterated today: first, the reasons to fear men are legitimate, grounded in tragic reality more than in unjustified paranoia. Second, that sense of being feared, of being viewed as a potential predator at worst and cluelessly insensitive at best does real damage in the lives of an extraordinary number of men. We underestimate the degree to which young men are cognizant of the way in which they are constantly viewed with suspicion, and we often fail to take account of the toll that exacts on psyches and self-esteem. A great many young men work desperately hard, with varying degrees of success, to prove their “safety” and trustworthiness to a select handful of women. (Frequently, though not always, there is a sexual agenda that drives that effort.) Few young men recognize the solution lies in transforming an entire culture; an individual commitment to being a “good guy”, no matter how sincere and consistent, will do little to change a world in which many, perhaps most, women are raised to fear — again, with good reason — a great many, if not most, men. What’s “in it” (anti-sexist work) for men is not of course just the chance to be trusted, what’s in it for all of us is freedom from sexism, objectification, harassment and sexual violence. Continue reading ‘Men, feminism, and suspicion: a report on our NWSA panel’

Needing a moderator

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 19, 2009
in Academia
. 0 Comments

On November 13, I’ll be one of three panelists speaking on Men in Anti-Sexist Activism: Problems and Potential at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Atlanta. Two fine young scholars, Brian Jara of Penn State and Tal Peretz of USC will be joining me, and we had had — until very recently — a wonderful moderator for our panel booked as well. Alas, our moderator has had an unavoidable schedule conflict come up, and will not be able to participate in the conference. So Brian, Tal, and I need a new moderator. I realize not many of my readers are NWSA members, but perhaps some are; in any case, we’d love to have a new moderator! Email me at hbschwyzer@gmail.com if you’re interested or know someone who might be, and I hope to see some readers in Georgia!

Masculinities Week and a Call for Papers

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 12, 2009
in Academia
. 2 Comments

Upcoming excitement:

Occidental College is hosting Masculinities Week, kicking off this Thursday with a lecture by Michael Kimmel and continuing over the following eight days with talks by Jackson Katz, Byron Hurt, Robert Jensen, and Shira Tarrant. Events are open to the public; this is a chance to hear from the leading figures in American men’s studies. I count each of these folks as a hero, and urge all who live in the greater Los Angeles area to look at the schedule and attend one or more of the talks. (I note that I’ll be speaking on a panel about men and feminism with Shira Tarrant next month at the National Women’s Studies Association meeting in Atlanta.) I love Oxy, as it is known, and have many ties to the place I count as the alma mater of both my most recent ex-wife and of Robinson Jeffers, California’s greatest poet. Here’s hoping that more colleges and universities adopt the Oxy model, and sponsor their own “Masculinities Week”. (Your blogger may be available to speak at such events as well.)

And I’ve been asked to publicize the University of Central Oklahoma’s Women and Gender Studies Conference, to be held on February 27, 2010 in Edmond. The call for papers (for 15 minute presentations) is open until December 1, and the conference theme is “Progressions.”

“I Have No Idea Where I Got That”: the perils of being a workaholic ENFP generalist

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 26, 2009
in Academia and Teaching
. 4 Comments

As my students know, I don’t lecture from notes. When I’m teaching a new class, or one I haven’t taught in a while, I’ll show up with a few specific facts or dates scribbled on the back of an envelope, but nothing more. When I first started giving lectures as a TA (lecturing as a TA was very common at UCLA) in 1991, I wrote out my lectures in longhand; that quickly proved both tedious and unnecessary. By the time I came to Pasadena City College two years later, I wrote out bullet points for myself on lined yellow paper, but not complete sentences; the last time I used those legal pads to prompt myself was perhaps 1995.

I continue to “read in my field”, as it were. I’m a medievalist by formal training, but don’t teach my subject here at the community college level. Here, I’m a generalist, offering lectures on Hammurabi and Homer, the reign of Charles II, Puritan notions of the erotic, the First World War, the rise of the gay rights movement in 1950s Los Angeles and the theme of dysfunctional families in western literature. It would not be entirely uncharitable to describe my interests as running a mile wide and an inch deep; teaching survey courses in umpteen different subjects is much more appealing to me than taking one or two areas and exploring them in painstaking detail. And so my reading lists are eclectic as I struggle to stay somewhat current in so many different fascinating fields. The ever-growing horde of books unread might be depressing if I allowed myself time to reflect upon all that I still do not know! Continue reading ‘“I Have No Idea Where I Got That”: the perils of being a workaholic ENFP generalist’

“The thoughts of six-hundred-pounders”: professional feminism, class privilege, and the responsibility to teach wisely and well

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 12, 2009
in Academia, Books, Feminist Pedagogy and Money
. 74 Comments

Yesterday, I posted Lauren’s response at Faux Real Tho to Courtney’s Feministing piece on a day in the life of a feminist activist, and Ann’s, also at Feministing response to both. I’d rather that folks read the exchanges, but the best summary that I can offer is that these posts capture the stark reality of economic, geographic, and professional privilege — a reality made all the more stark by the dismal nature of the current global financial crisis. The discussion at Feministing (again, I highly recommend reading all the posts as well as the comment threads) has turned to what feminist life looks like in the current climate, with unemployment and under-employment and collapsing social services all around. It’s a sobering, as well as uplifting discussion.

This is in my head this morning as I read about the projected state budget deal which will strip $8 billion from California schools and community colleges. The bleak summary:

This month, tax refunds were suspended, along with payments to vendors and some welfare and college grants. And now much of state government is shutting down two days a month, furloughing most employees without pay.

Under the new budget agreement, cuts to other state services would be deep and long-lasting.

Schools and community colleges, which account for nearly half of all state spending, would lose nearly $8 billion. Only part of that would be backfilled by Washington. Several state requirements on how schools allocate their money — including on class size reduction — would be suspended for several years.

School officials say the plan could lead to the elimination of after-school activities, elective classes such as art and music, classroom supplies and thousands of teaching jobs.

Kevin Gordon, a lobbyist for school districts, said, “For the first time, people are really going to see tangible negative impacts from cuts.”

State colleges and universities, where tuition has been steadily rising for years, would lose $890 million.

Scheduled cost-of-living increases for public-assistance recipients would be canceled, and mental health and early childhood education programs created by voter-approved ballot initiatives would be cut by over $830 million. The state would cut spending on local public transit by $459 million.

My newborn daughter is, on her father’s mother’s side, a seventh-generation Californian. I am saddened to think that she will not know the California I knew growing up, just as my parents and grandparents were (I have been told many times) sad that I would never see what the Golden State looked like in their eras. The dream that brought my ancestors and my wife’s here — from places as disparate as Croatia and Colombia, Ulster and Illinois, Austria and the Piedmont — is not now what it was, nor is it likely to be so again.

But this is not the place for nostalgia. Frankly, I’m as concerned about my students as I am about my daughter. My classes are more crowded than ever before, as a changing economy sends more and more people desperate for new skills back to the community colleges for retraining. At the same time, middle-class parents who might once have been able to afford to pay for four years at university for their son or daughter now encourage their kids to spend two years at a far more affordable (if obscenely over-crowded) community college like my own PCC. And as always happens in an economic downturn, state services are cut at precisely the same moment that demand for those services increases.

In thinking about what Ann and Lauren and Courtney are blogging about, I think about my role as a gender studies professor and feminist educator. Should how I teach — and what I teach — change, at least in some way, to address the current crisis? I take great pride, and have for years, in the number of my former students who go on to major in Women’s Studies or Gender Studies in part because of what they got out of my classes. I’ve always held that students should major in something they love, rather than something that they think will get them a job. I’ve preached the (at best, optimistic, at worst, criminally misleading) mantra that “If you do what you love, the money will follow.” That was always a questionable proposition, particularly for those students who don’t have access to the kinds of networks which traditionally provide the social and financial capital with which to turn dreams into a sustainable living. Is it even more of a questionable proposition now, as we face what could be a prolonged recession with potentially massive unemployment?

Pursuing Gender Studies as a major is obviously no guarantor of financial security. But neither is a degree in finance; look at the massive layoffs in the banking industry. A career in construction is no more promising, nor a career in real estate. (If I had a dollar for every student I knew who was working on a real estate license during the peak of the housing boom between 2004-06, I’d be able to take an entire class to lunch.) When I was an undergraduate, with the Cold War still the defining global dynamic and with Reagan in office, many people I knew at Cal were studying aerospace engineering. They figured on a never-ending buildup of arms and materiel to confront the Soviet Union; the “smart money” said a career preparing for the defense industry was a sure thing. The Berlin Wall came down five months after I graduated college, and for the next dozen years, aerospace jobs were shed like dog hair. The point is an obvious one: for a student in her late teens, looking ahead to four or five decades in the work force, there is no major at college that will guarantee a steady and reliable income. In times of great instability, a major in something “impractical” like history or women’s studies makes no less sense than anything else. It is not, I insist, irresponsible to point so many undergraduates towards academic gender work.

But I worry that my own privilege may lead me to give poor advice. Continue reading ‘“The thoughts of six-hundred-pounders”: professional feminism, class privilege, and the responsibility to teach wisely and well’

Where have all my roommates gone? Some thoughts on privilege and the post-college blues

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 08, 2008
in Academia, Relationships and Teens
. 17 Comments

From the “I am getting older, and here is further evidence” department: two of my former students, whom I remember as barely out of high school, are now teaching (philosophy and psychology) here at PCC. There are various markers of one’s ageing as a professor: the first students young enough to be your biological children (passed that years back), the first former students to emerge as one’s colleagues (hitting that this year.) Next stop: second-generation students, whose parents took my courses when those parents were of traditional college-age. I calculate I’m no more than five or six years away. I may be “only” 41, but I’m well into my sixteenth year of teaching here, approaching what I presume will be the halfway point of my career as a full-timer. And I say again, how lucky I was to be given a tenure-track job at 26!

Lately I’ve been hearing from a lot of former students (or youth groupers) of mine who are freshly out of college. Some are in graduate school, and some are trying to find their way in the professional world. And as is so often the case, many are struggling emotionally. This struggle is especially acute, I note, in some of those young people who had the most traditional middle-class American narrative. Many of the kids I mentored in the All Saints youth program moved away to go to college; many went to private schools (Smith, Swarthmore, Elon, Pomona, etc.) which featured very small, close-knit communities. They went from feeling loved and supported in high school by a very strong youth program to feeling loved and supported in a nurturing college community. And then, wham, graduation. They aren’t living at home anymore. They’re not in the dorm. They’re living in San Francisco or Brooklyn or West Hollywood in a tiny apartment trying to make ends meet. And not surprisingly, quite a few of them feel lost and lonely.

As far as some are concerned, I tell far too many stories about my exes (perhaps I just have too many about whom to tell things.) But I learned a lot from the women I dated, married, or lived with — and I might as well mine the often painful (as well as hilarious and pleasurable) material. My generally negative feelings about older men/younger women relationships are rooted in some small part in my own experience; in 1999, when I was 32, I dated a woman ten years my junior for about eight months, living with her for four. “K” was finishing up at a private four-year liberal arts college when we started dating (having met in spinning class). She lived in a huge house with half-a-dozen roommates, all also seniors, all finishing their college careers. They were a close-knit group who provided intense emotional and intellectual support. Continue reading ‘Where have all my roommates gone? Some thoughts on privilege and the post-college blues’

Your loyal blogger…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 04, 2008
in Academia, Pasadena City College, Ratemyprofessors, Teaching and Vanity
. 6 Comments

… has had his dubious recent distinction publicized in this piece in the Pasadena City College paper. And of course, I hate the picture they took of me.

I have been teased all day at school by colleagues and students alike. Part of me loves it, and part of me feels humiliated, and part of me wonders in what particular way I am supposed to parlay this trivial but interesting distinction into something useful. It’s the sort of thing that one probably doesn’t want in one’s obituary, so I’ll simply have to accomplish enough to ensure that there’s no room to stick this “triumph” in there. But I’m not so embarrassed that I won’t note it here, and enjoy the fleeting notoriety.