The Gender of Tenure

Berkeley Law Professor Mary Ann Mason has written a Chronicle article on some of tenure’s hard-wired biases. It is worth a read.

Based on research that Mason and her colleagues conducted at the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security, she maintains that “women with children across all disciplines are twice as likely as men with children to work in part-time or non-tenure-track positions.” And this ghettoization, she says, isn’t just happenstance.

How fair, Mason asks, is a promotion system based on the career trajectories and lived experiences of a 19th century academic moment “when only men were professors and their stay-at-home wives cared for the children?”

Mason situates this argument within a larger discussion about the corporatization of academia and the ongoing threats to tenure. Highlighting a decline in the percentage of tenure or tenure-track faculty teaching undergraduates (vs. adjunct faculty with usually little job security or health benefits), Mason doesn’t think it is an arbitrary coincidence that the uptick in part-time/adjunct instruction has coincided with an increase in the number of women getting Ph.D’s. However, this isn’t the result of a sexist conspiracy hatched by some purposeful Patriarchy. According to Mason, it is the substantively gendered byproduct of a formally gender-neutral process.

The current ticking of the academic tenure clock pits child-rearing and professional promotion against one another. “Certainly the timing of tenure is terrible for women,” Mason writes. “Today, the average age at which women can expect to receive a Ph.D. is 34. That puts the five to seven years of racing the tenure clock squarely at the end of the normal reproductive cycle. Those are the ‘make or break’ years for female academics, in terms of both career and childbearing, not to mention the demands of raising young children. Difficult choices must be made.”

Mason doesn’t call for an end to tenure. She would push back against any talk of turning academics into another category of “part-time and contingent employees who could be hired or fired at the will and whim of the full-time corporate administrators.” Instead, she offers suggestions (including, say, extending tenure to excellent part-time faculty) that she believes might further level the tenure playing field and allow it to better foster the success of all faculty members.

The Audacity of John Hope

I still can't believe that John Hope Franklin is gone. I met him a handful of times, and each encounter was awe inspiring. He was the scholar’s scholar, always working, thinking, writing. His research was decidedly political without being polemical, an example of rigorous scholarship that changed the world with little need to self-righteously proclaim as much.

I only had one really substantive conversation with John Hope Franklin. It was about five or six years ago, on a plane ride from Tennessee to Durham, North Carolina. We had just spent a weekend on the same “advisory panel,” two of several scholars brought down to talk about the future of the prestigious Race Relations Institute at Fisk, Franklin’s alma mater.

I’m a Howard grad myself, and I’d never even visited the Fisk campus before that weekend. But I learned a great deal about the place as a function of listening to Franklin and others talk about their sense of where the Institute had been and where it should be headed in the future. (The event also featured my only meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who served as a special adviser to the group. He was already out of public office and had not yet re-emerged on the international scene with his global-warming documentary. He seemed equally awed by Franklin, which moved me, too.)

But Franklin and I really didn’t get a chance to talk at length until the plane ride back to Duke University, where we were both located at the time. It just so happened that we were seated next to one another, and I got a chance to ask him about his past teaching stint at Howard University. His response had me buckled over in the aisle, laughing uncontrollably, but maybe "just to keep from crying" (as the saying goes).

Usually, when contemporary Howard students talk about their beloved institution (and we do love HU), they have two related ways of describing the place. There is a kind of hushed reverence for bygone eras (during and immediately after segregation) when luminaries such as Franklin roamed Howard's Yard. We wonder how different the place must have been back then. The same, but different.

For one thing, there was less competition for pioneering black faculty from the likes of Harvard, Duke, or Yale. So Howard and other HBCUs had something close to a monopoly in that area. At the same time, Howard students also trafficked in a plaintive discourse about how tough it could be negotiating the institution on a daily basis. It didn’t seem very student-friendly to us. If anything, we imagined that the school’s aim was to toughen us up (and prepare us for the real world) by making our day-to-day lives more difficult than they needed to be. Tough love. Howard didn’t kill you, we said. It only made you stronger. We loved our school, don’t get things twisted. And I most decidedly still do. But we agreed with one another (when not in mixed collegiate company) about Howard sometimes making our daily lives a living hell.

Our best example was registration week. My first year, we would queue up at the beginning of semesters to register for classes on the main yard at 7 or 8 a.m. And it wasn’t unprecedented that we still wouldn't actually get to register by late that evening, when the lines closed and we headed back to our respective dorm rooms committed to waking up even earlier the following day for round two. Of course, this all predated online registration, so I’m sure current Howard undergrads don’t have to endure such an ordeal. But we kind of embraced it as a badge of honor, an example of how Howard made its graduates hardier than most, ready for anything the world might subsequently throw our way.

At the same time, we imagined that such antics were a negative byproduct of integration: that the school must have had a different ethos before then. Howard probably had more resources for staffing registration lines, we thought. It definitely could boast the most famous African-American faculty in the country. So, it probably had a different mentality vis-à-vis its constitutive community members. It must have felt (and operated) so much differently back then. Or so we thought. During that one plane ride back to Duke, Franklin disabused me of that romantic assumption before the plane took off.

He regaled me with memories about his years teaching at Howard, and he laughed about how difficult the administration made his everyday life. His funniest line was about how they made him feel like he had the unbridled “audacity” (his word) to actually want his checks from payroll. He joked about having to consistently march to the administration building in search of them, stopping in office after indifferent office, inquiring humbly about where his money might be. And all the while, he said, they acted like he was being a nuisance, a pain in the butt, for needing to eat and pay bills and maybe even squirrel the little remainder away for later.

As someone who obviously matriculated through Howard much, much later than Franklin taught there, it was hilarious to hear him wax comedic about his tenure at the place. In many ways, his experience struck me as quite authentically Howard, and not all that different from the kinds of hazing processes that we lovingly complained about in the 1990s, especially if we had successfully run the gauntlet and made it to that graduation stage.

photo courtesy of dukenews.com

Obama on Holder...

Holder
(image at Newsday.com)



One Brainstorm reader, gh, says that "Obama threw Eric Holder under the bus a few days ago for race-baiting."

This weekend, The New York Times published an article that represented Obama's take on Holder's "nation of cowards" comment. Obama says that "if I had been advising my attorney general, we would have used different language."

Obama did concede that Americans are "oftentimes uncomfortable with talking about race" and "probably [need to] be more constructive in facing up to sort of the painful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination."

Here's how the article ends:

Mr. Obama was asked whether he agreed with Mr. Holder. He hesitated for five seconds before responding.

“I’m not somebody who believes that constantly talking about race somehow solves racial tensions,” Mr. Obama said. “I think what solves racial tensions is fixing the economy, putting people to work, making sure that people have health care, ensuring that every kid is learning out there. I think if we do that, then we’ll probably have more fruitful conversations.”

Indeed, to read Obama's books carefully is to anticipate just such a response. Such a position served as one of the very organizing principles for his election campaign.

In the LIFE coffee-table book The American Journey of Barack Obama, published earlier this year, I describe Obama as a "racial optimist," someone with the "audacity" to "hope" that we can transcend race by listening carefully to one another and finding points of commonality. His early exploits in Chicago demonstrate his capacity to do just that. He intends to show Americans that we can believe in one another, to convince us that trusting across racial lines is well worth the risk.

But he does believe that dealing with health care, putting people to work, and improving our schools are the first orders of business. Does that imply that he considers America's racial issues epiphenomenal, mere byproducts of these more decidedly material realities? Is that a fair characterization? Is he right, or is there something sui generis about the logic of racial reasoning that makes it irreducible to these other issues (even as it clearly intersects with them)?

Moreover, does his take on how we should deal with race/racism imply that he has thrown Holder under the bus and derailed the new Attorney General's attempt to provoke more explicit cross-racial dialogues?

Linda Jones in Pain

Duke University's Mark Anthony Neal discusses "the greatest singer you've never heard," Linda Jones.

In 1967, at the tender age of 22, Jones recorded a powerful song titled "Hypnotized." Jones died in the early 1970s, but her singing style made quite an impression on subsequent generations of vocalists.

Neal wrote an intriguing essay on her ability to represent physical and emotional pain through her stylized and sophisticated vocalizations. Jones suffered from diabetes and painful diabetic seizures, and Neal uses Elaine Scarry's Bodies in Pain as his inspiration for an argument about the extent to which Jones's "harsh" and hypnotic sound represents her concerted attempt to render that pain acoustically and aesthetically.

Her singerly choices (her skillful attempts to "bend and break notes"), he says, demonstrate a profound recognition of language's inadequacy as a mechanism for capturing otherwise inexpressible pains. "There was no language for [her] pain," he claims, and so Jones used the non-semantic and phonetic materialities of language to articulate "heart aches and pains" that outstrip language's semiotic/representational powers.

Neal's essay can be found in the new book Best African American Essays, edited by Debra Dickerson and Gerald Early.

And you can hear him talk about Jones during a recent WUNC interview. The interview is short. And its worth a listen. Neal makes a compelling case for Jones presages contempoary figures like Keisha Cole and Mary J. Blige.

(Photo from Chancellorofsoul.com)

My op-ed on the "nation of cowards" comment

Lately, I have been trying to write about the kind of heavy-lifting that understanding race/racism actually demands of contemporary Americans. I used the Holder comment as an excuse to enter the fray again, and publicly, with an op-ed in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. I try to flesh-out a bit of Holder's argument, and I link it to that controversial chimp-shooting cartoon.

In the op-ed, I do say that we are all cowards. I think that Holder got that part right, even as I agree with the claim that any invocation of cowardice runs the risk of alienating more people than it brings to the multiracial table.

Still, Holder isn't just singling out white Americans, and negotiating our fear is an inescapable part of what it means to be human.

So, why are we so afraid of being called out for being afraid?

Don't Let the "Deal or No Deal" Suitcase Fool You!

I didn’t know anything about her before the end of last year, and I still haven't seen her do stand-up. But I listen to Claudia Jordan every Friday evening on Jamie Foxx’s Sirius/XM radio show , The Jamie Foxx Show, and she is one of the funniest things about the program, especially when Foxx is off shooting a movie or recording/promoting a new album.

At first, I just wanted to listen to the Foxxhole show so that I could catch Jamie Foxx strutting his comedic stuff. I’ve been laughing at his crazy antics ever since his days on Fox’s In Living Color sketch comedy show. Listening to Foxx live and uncensored was worth the cost of Satellite radio all by itself. (And I have to admit that I am closely following the breaking story about Liberty Media trying to save a cash-strapped Sirius XM with a $530-million investment, especially with the future of the Foxx show hanging in the balance.)

Even now, I get most of my black popular culture from Foxx and his comedy crew. Who knew that Katt Williams angrily challenged “King of Comedy” Steve Harvey to a New Year’s Eve battle royale? Where else would I hear an Oscar-winning superstar tell Tavis Smiley that he was acting like the kind of antebellum slave that would have gotten killed by other slaves before they executed their escape plans (because Foxx considered Smiley an early “playa hating” against Obama). I even had the nerve to get some of my inauguration coverage from the crew. They took the historic moment very seriously, but some bursts of comedic brilliance were sprinkled throughout the festivities anyway.

Foxx and his no-holds-barred crew (including Johnny “M...F...” Mack, Felicia “O.G. Poetess” Morris, Speedy, Lewis Dix, Chris Spencer, and Michael Collier) go at each other (and the day’s top stories) with reckless abandon. You should have heard them deconstruct Chris Brown's alleged assault on Rihanna. And everyone gets some gut-busting zingers in there.

Of course, it isn’t for the kids, or the faint of heart. They can get quite “blue” and explicit about things. This is pay radio, remember. But Jordan always seems to hit the hardest. They constantly offer up a “joke of the day” award, and as far as I can tell, she’s usually the recipient.

Jordan’s problem, however, is that she also boasts a model’s physical beauty, which might be a kind of death sentence for any serious comic. Her movie-star looks landed her a spot as eye candy on NBC’s Deal or No Deal. And she’s probably going to gain a ton more fans after her stint on this season’s Celebrity Apprentice, also on NBC . If the producers let her do her thing, she will be hilarious amidst the competitive chaos of that reality TV show.

Of course, you can’t see her on the radio. But what you hear, consistently, are some of the funniest unscripted one-liners and witty rejoinders anywhere. Trust me. Don’t let the Deal or No Deal suitcase fool you. Claudia Jordan is one of the quickest comics in America.

_(Photo from Photobucket.com)_

The Man of Steele?

The Republican National Committee chose former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele as its new chairman. Steele is the first African-American to hold the post and, arguably, yet another beneficiary of the “change” in electoral politics that Barack Obama’s historic victory signifies.

Steele beat out five other candidates after six rounds of voting and backroom dealing, which culminated in a late come-from-behind victory over South Carolina’s Katon Dawson.

With the GOP still reeling from its loss of the White House and several more seats in Congress, Steele is being asked to radically redefine the Party for a decidedly new electorate. Many pundits have been arguing that Republicans need a massive transfusion of new blood after the thumping they took this past November. The choices of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate and “Joe, The Plumber” as a kind of last-minute (and decidedly misguided) Hail Mary signaled, for detractors, a desperate attempt to appeal to a “base” that no longer exists -- or that represents a smaller portion of the American electoral pie than ever before given both our country’s much-discussed demographic “browning” and Obama’s massive voter registration efforts.

Obama beat McCain with respect to just about every ethnic group in the country, including African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and Asian-Americans. He didn’t win the white vote, but he didn’t need to, especially since his campaign made a point of helping to get those newly registered voters to the polls on Election Day.

America’s days of all-white-male Presidential/Vice Presidential tickets is over -- at least for the foreseeable future. People say that we have a lot more “firsts” on the political horizon (and that’s whether or not Hillary Clinton runs in 2016). We’ll see if such talk proves prescient, but one thing seems sure. The RNC’s decision to entrust Steele with its top spot means that they probably see the “writing on the wall” vis-à-vis “old school” political tactics that now alienate many more Americans than they attract.

I don’t know much about Steele, and most of what I think I know comes from hearing bits and pieces of his punditry during national news programs. I’ll start to listen more closely now. But the unscientific impression I have based on what I’ve already heard is that Steele might actually represent the same commitment to thoughtfulness and open-minded debate that Obama seems to embody on the other side of the aisle. Neither figure is post-partisan, but they both appear to privilege ideas over ideology, careful consideration over cultivated inattention, and healthy skepticism over blind faith. Indeed, Steele could turn out to be the perfect political foe in an Obama era. If President Obama has become a kind of otherworldly political superhero for the Democrats, Steele might just be up to the task of playing an equally matched archrival.