Category: Academia

The University of Chicago discovers the internet

Lawyers, Guns, and Money directed me to this article about how the University of Chicago’s ostensible commitment to free speech ran aground against online harassment instigated by a conservative student. It includes this statement from one of the authors of Chicago’s relatively famous statement of commitment to free speech (really one committing to not being woke, as LGM says):

Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor, led the faculty committee that drafted the Chicago statement. He said that back then, the group was not thinking about how online threats could harm free expression — never mind this situation, where Mr. Schmidt simply posted a tweet with publicly available information.

Ah, yes, who could have thought that the internet could be used to harass people into silence back in 2014? What might have been happening online that might have caused someone to take a step back and consider such a possibility? We’ll never know.

One would think that a law professor of all people would understand that no right is absolute, even those in the first amendment, if one wants to preserve all the other rights that they sometimes conflict with.

Who threatens Higher Education? Don’t ask the Washington Post

Florida is currently governed by a fascist who has made it one of his primary goals to take control of higher education in the state, mold it in a way that supports his ideology, and eliminate those who oppose his policies. The most overt example is his hostile takeover of New College, which recently fired a faculty member for expressing “leftist” views. The state also proposed banning gender and sexuality studies and critical race theory from public university curricula and curtailed tenure protections for its faculty.

So I was a bit surprised to open the Washington Post this morning to see a front-page (or its digital equivalent) story on the purported threat of “cancellation” that focused on a professor at the University of Central Florida. This person was fired (and then reinstated) not because he expressed views deemed unacceptable to the far right, but rather because he seems to be a racist. Here’s a comment from a student who took his course after he came back to UCF:

Several of Negy’s students said that they had signed up for his psychology course without knowing the professor had been fired — but that he had shared it with them during his first lecture.One student, a Black woman, said she thought Negy was a good teacher. But she was disturbed by his suggestion that, “statistically speaking, minorities are just not as smart as other people. I don’t know. I feel like that’s kind of offensive.” The student spoke on the condition of anonymity because she worried about criticizing one of her professors.

Asked about the student’s concerns, Negy said that he lectures about “observed differences” among races on test scores, but that he doesn’t have “training in genes” to assess why these differences exist.

Does the Washington Post really think that this person should represent the threat to academic freedom in Florida?

The thesis of the article is absolutely true — that there is sometimes a messy tension between academic freedom and the needs of the classroom. It is not easy to decide when a professor has overstepped the line. But articles like these distort the picture of the threat to higher education in America. It is not in clunky administrative systems that attempt, in good faith (it seems from these examples), to establish some basic standards for how professors should behave with regard to the classroom environment, but rather in a direct, sustained, and systemic attempt to destroy academic freedom itself.

“Fuck you Richard Corcoran”

Nothing like ruining a few people’s careers and destroying a highly respected institution to score some cheap political points, I guess. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The issue eliciting the strongest protest was whether five professors who had already cleared the usual hurdles to achieve tenure would be approved by the board — what is normally a perfunctory step. But the college’s interim president, Richard Corcoran, had let it be known that he didn’t want those tenure cases to be approved, citing general upheaval at the college and its new direction. The board acceded to Corcoran’s wishes, voting down the professors one by one, each by a count of six votes to four, before adjourning to chants of “shame on you” from those assembled.

Ron Desantis is a fascist. Control of educational systems is key to the project as much as the bringing into line of private industry.

Napoleon Lives

Napoleon’s Tomb, courtesy Musée de l’Armée

When I teach Napoleon Bonaparte in my introductory course (designed to introduce students to the practice of history through a case study, in my case the French Revolution), I emphasize the multiple ways one might view him. Simplifying greatly, I distinguish between “Napoleon as Statesman” (the Napoleon who produce the Civil Code and settled things with the Church) and “Napoleon as Conquerer” (the Napoleon who rampaged over Europe and reintroduced slavery in the French colonies). I make clear to my students which side I think is the most important and emphasize that by leaning on Napoleon’s violence and racism they are being given what is a more recent (and often more Anglo-American) interpretation of the man than had been current in the past and in France.

I was interested therefore to find myself talking with an acquaintance over the weekend who asked me what I did for a living. When I explained that I sometimes taught the French Revolution, he enthusiastically explained that Napoleon was his favorite historical figure and that he had a picture of him as his phone background. I (gently I hope) chided him by saying “you know he was bad, right?” To my surprise, I received a disquisition about the importance of the Civil Code and how Napoleon brought the Enlightenment to Europe. Clearly an educated guy, but also one immersed in a vision of Napoleon as a modernizing statesman rather than plundering barbarian. We wouldn’t expect someone to have a picture of General Lee or Andrew Jackson as their phone background.

I’ll be taking some students to Paris for a class on the French Revolution this summer and I always have to really push against this received view. The honorifics Napoleon continues to receive there (just look at his tomb) make this particularly difficult, but this conversation was just a useful reminder of how much work we have to do to revise the common misunderstanding of what this man did and how he did it.

Book Announcement

It has been a long while since I’ve lasted posted, but I am excited to do so to announce my new book, an edited collection completed with Nina Kushner (Clark University), titled Histories of French Sexuality: Enlightenment to the Present. Chapters cover a wide range of thematic, temporal, and geographic ground all in the service of showing how centering sexuality might change our understanding of French history.

From the publisher:

Histories of French Sexuality contends that the history of sexuality is at a crossroads. Decades of scholarship have shown that sexuality is implicated in a wide range of topics, such as studies of reproduction, the body, sexual knowledge, gender identity, marriage, and sexual citizenship. These studies have broadened historical narratives and interpretations of areas such as urbanization, the family, work, class, empire, the military and war, and the nation. Yet while the field has evolved, not everyone has caught on, especially scholars of French history.

Covering the early eighteenth century through the present, the essays in Histories of French Sexuality show how attention to the history of sexuality deepens, changes, challenges, supports, or otherwise complicates the major narratives of French history. This volume makes a set of historical arguments about the nature of the past and a larger historiographical claim about the value and place of the field of the history of sexuality within the broader discipline of history. The topics include early empire-building, religion, the Enlightenment, feminism, socialism, formation of the modern self, medicine, urbanization, decolonization, the social world of postwar France, and the rise of modern and social media.

Order now using code 6AS23 for a 40% discount from University of Nebraska Press!

Archives and LGBTQ+ History

Exterior of the Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris. Personal Photograph.

I’m trying to decide exactly how I feel about an ongoing debate occurring in France over the institutionalization of LGBTQ+ history through the establishment of a community archive along the lines of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. The Bay Area Register has a helpful overview in English of the debate. Essentially, The Collectif Archives LGBTQI wants to establish an archive in Paris dedicated to LGBTQ+ History. Presented with their plan, however, the French government has demanded that the archive be put under the control of the state National Archives rather than the Collective. In response, the Collective has argued that the state should be involved in supporting the archive but, considering its history of oppression and erasure, cannot be trusted to document and preserve the history of LGBTQ+ people in France.

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“Use of History” Assignment

I just revised my teaching page, simplifying it and adding some new resources. One of the assignments I included was a new one, which I called — for lack of a better name — a “Use of History” Essay. The assignment asked students in my introductory, general education Modern Europe survey to choose a news article or opinion piece from a mainstream magazine or newspaper and evaluate the ways it used history. I was impressed by the quality of the work even though I was concerned that I had not done enough to prepare them for the task. It’s relative success means that I might be on to something and with some greater scaffolding and revision have a nice way of introducing some more advanced concepts into this course.

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Reading Tara Westover’s Educated as a Professor

I don’t often read memoirs (or non-fiction more generally) for pleasure, preferring to keep business and pleasure separate, but I had heard nothing but good — rapturous really — things about Tara Westover’s Educated and decided to check it out (of my amazing local library). The book vividly retells Westover’s life as a child growing up in an isolated family in Idaho, the daughter of an abusive father whose paranoia drives him to reject any interaction with the government, including, most importantly, public education. As we follow Westover’s path to college at Brigham Young University and then onward to Cambridge on a Gates Fellowship and then to a Ph.D., we witness in gross detail the mental and physical abuse that Westover suffered not simply before she “escaped” but as she worked to figure out just what escaping meant to her. Indeed, the book is particularly evocative and complex in the way it gets the reader into Westover’s head, underscoring her own doubts, struggles and, most powerfully and disturbingly, complicity in the cycles of abuse that so defined her family. In this respect, I can only compare it favorably with another memoir of overcoming struggle in order to achieve an education, Undocumented, which sometimes felt like it was effacing complexity in favor of narrative-pacing. Undocumented felt, for lack of a better term, teleological. Educated underscores how difficult is it to escape one’s past, how even as we are succeeding we may feel like we aren’t or don’t deserve to, and, most of all, that we sometimes are our worst enemies. Educated is often uncertain about its own conclusions, the memories it presents, and the finality of its story.

Obviously, the book has a great deal to say about Westover herself, as well as the social forces that created the conditions for the paranoia, mental illness, and misogyny that gave rise to her particular circumstances (in this respect, I highly recommend listening to the podcast Bundyville as a complementary story about the kind of Mormon fundamentalism that Westover’s father subscribed to). It also has a great deal to say about how one becomes educated in the first place and the complicated ways her education forces her to reevaluate her identity. Westover, it is worth noting, did not simply “choose” to go to school; she had to be pushed. Reading it on the cusp of a new school year, however, cannot help but reverse the analysis somewhat: to focus on some of the people around her, especially her teachers. 

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On Safe Spaces

I just listened to On the Media’s interview with Cameron Okeke, the author of a recent article at Vox regarding the recent letter sent to incoming students at the University of Chicago regarding “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces.” Okeke argues that it is only by providing safe spaces in which minority students can have the opportunity to engage with one another without being imposed upon by members of the majority can universities be truly fulfill their supposed goals regarding diversity. His comments about the importance of the Office of Multicultural Affairs at Chicago brought a rush of memories about my own experience with the Student Activities Office at Washington University in St. Louis. The irony of both Okeke’s and my own memories of these spaces is that they were precisely those in which we were most challenged. These were the spaces in which people you could assume were fundamentally allies could question your assumptions, push you to consider other people’s points of view, and learn about the variety of people’s life experiences. The Student Activities Office — and especially the “Spectrum Suite,” where the campus LGBTQ group met — was where I learned about the specific challenges that face transgender individuals, where people of faith and those without worked to understand why some LGBTQ folk still found value in the church or synagogue and others did not, and where I recall quite clearly being called out for an uncritical use of the word “queer” as a political stance. Despite all the various points of potential and actual conflict what was never in question was the assumption of one another’s value as not only a fellow human being, but as an LGBTQ person.

My current institution is in Mississippi, which obviously presents unique challenges to fostering a community space that values the diversity of the state that we are quite proud to reflect. A recent “Campus Climate Survey” did not provide much good news, for instance, regarding how LGBTQ and non-Christian students in particular feel about Southern Miss. In addition, like public universities throughout the country, we are in a constant state of budget-anxiety, which is not exactly conducive to advocating for the opening of new spaces for minority groups. I bring this up because, despite these challenges, the administration does seem committed to making some changes, including the constitution of an advisory committee for LGBTQ issues that would also take the lead in training community members who wish to indicate that their office is a “safe space.”  In a positive development, Southern Miss seems to committed to the creation, rather than the suppression, of at least some safe spaces.

I’ve decided to volunteer to be on this committee, but not without some ambivalence. Many people who went to college during the late 1990s and early 2000s will remember seeing little placards with a pink triangle outside faculty and dorm room doors indicating that that place was welcoming to LGBTQ people. The placards read to me too much of a period that I had thought we had moved beyond. Individual campus offices should not be “safe” because the entire campus must be; I should not have to indicate to my students that I am not a homophobe because all faculty and staff (to say nothing of the student body) should be against homophobia. The burden of the assumption seems to be misplaced in some ways. But even my last job, at a small liberal arts college in the north, where the idea of these placards would probably have been deemed passé, had a couple homophobic events during my time there (banners getting ripped down and that sort of thing). Reading and listening to Okeke and reflecting on these new initiatives reflect the continuing need for universities to take an active role in fostering the ability of their students to, basically, figure themselves out free from at least some of the constant burdens that may face in everyday life. Those who construct the straw man as a space free from intellectual or other kinds of conflict fundamentally misunderstand their purpose. It’s not to “coddle” students that such spaces are necessary, but rather to strengthen them. Perhaps that’s why those with power often seem to be so scared of them.

The Challenges of Being an LGBTQ Historian

Mary Louise Roberts recently published a short article describing some of the results of the recently completed American Historical Association LGBTQ Task Force Report. The article brings our attention to a number of issues facing both LGBTQ academics and academics who research LGBTQ issues (note that these two categories do not necessarily coincide). Roberts’s piece made me reflect a bit on my own experience as someone who inhabits both categories and has been lucky enough to have found himself a tenure-track position in a supportive department.

First, Roberts is right to emphasize the need for all universities to include relevant language protecting both sexual orientation and gender identity in their nondiscrimination policies. After a recent “religious freedom” law was passed in Mississippi, I was personally relieved when the president of USM reaffirmed our own non-discrimination policy. That said, universities also play a role in the broader community and have specific social missions; they should therefore actively promote the passage of legislation protecting their students and employees. It is not enough, in other words, for institutions to claim they do not discriminate when the actual law provides them with the opportunity to do so. In addition, universities are central players in local economies and they should fight the ability of businesses that rely on them for their very survival to discriminate against their students and employees.

Second, I think we tend to overestimate the impact of doing LGBTQ work on our success and failures on the job market. The examples Roberts provides of people feeling that their research on LGBTQ issues shaped their job market experience are largely anecdotal. So too, it is worth saying, are my own impressions, but I never felt that my specific research in the history of sexuality is what held me back in the four years I was on the market. Rather, I think it is more the case that people doing research in LGBTQ history or the history of sexuality run up against a much more general preference for “traditional” research interests within history departments. This preference reveals itself in many ways, sometimes in a desire for people doing particular kinds of history, sometimes for particular kinds of historians. This speaks to a broader traditionalism that has discriminatory effects on both the work that historians produce and the historians that get hired. Certainly, LGBTQ history has particular connotations and problems, but I see no reason to play oppression olympics with my friends and colleagues who have also struggled to find permanent employment. What we need is greater investment in the humanities and social sciences in order to enable departments to provide their students with a broad range of expertise, while also encouraging history departments to value new approaches and objects of study. I would argue, in fact, that these two issues are interdependent: the lack of resources is precisely what encourages departments to retrench and fear taking a chance on what they see as “new.”

But historians of sexuality also need to do more to showcase the importance of our research, even as we are often received with greater skepticism than is usually warranted. I hope to explore this issue more fully both here and in print, but put simply, I think that it is incumbent on historians of sexuality to begin moving beyond the kinds of identity-based histories we have become accustomed to completing. It was only, it seems to me, when many women’s historians moved to gender history that the field began being taken more seriously by the wider profession. This is not simply because this shift allowed for a wider range of inquiry, but because it also showed how gender is “a useful category of historical analysis.” We have to show that sexuality is as well. Doing so will gradually open space for departments to recognize that a specialist in sexuality is necessary to providing a well-rounded curriculum while also showcasing how the study of sexuality is actually necessary to understanding political, intellectual, and economic history (to name just three examples) as well.

Finally, Roberts reports on the unique frustrations of those who present differently or stand as the sole LGBTQ person in a department or even university. As a member of a department with significant lesbian and gay representation, I have not been as affected by this issue as my colleagues elsewhere (in fact, I am more unique for being Jewish than I am for being gay). That said, the two issues situate the struggles of LGBTQ folk in relation to the broader need for increasing the diversity of the professoriate and reshaping the culture of academia, which is more conservative than people on the outside tend to realize. I was particularly struck by the respondents who recognized the particular service roles that minority scholars end up playing, a phenomena that has been talked about in other contexts. The growing movement for social change in campuses around the country should be a source of empowerment for LGBTQ academics even as it is a call for us to engage in the broader range of issues affecting minorities in the professoriate. The AHA Task Force was hopefully a first step toward institutionalizing historians’ role in that process; as historians it is our responsibility to not only analyze change, but to enact it as well.