Category: Academia

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.

Good Researchers Change Topics

I’ve been fairly fascinated by the kerfluffle over the Heritage Foundation’s report on the implications of immigration reform not because the report itself was surprising in the conclusion it reached, but because of the way in which it (unfortunately?) reinvigorated a discussion on the relationship between IQ and race just after the doyen of such studies himself, Charles Murray, had visited Kenyon College.  One of the co-authors of the report, it turns out, had written a Harvard dissertation asserting, among other things, that “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against” and the U.S. should therefore institute an IQ-based selection system. I’ve been somewhat bemused by all this, not least because I was under the impression that the conclusion that low-IQ scores within certain racial groups can be attributed to genetic causes had been thoroughly discredited within the relevant social science literature (Andrew Sullivan’s continued beating on the drum notwithstanding). Granted, as someone unconvinced that IQ measures anything biologically-fixed about a person whatsoever, I would not be inclined to give much credence to studies saying the opposite either.  Ta-Nehisi Coates has a recent post on an alternative explanation for why such disparities come up when they do (and they often do).

Anyway, considering all this, I was fairly confused to see that Harvard approved a very recent (2009) dissertation making this kind of argument. There is a difference, it seems to me, between researchers at the American Enterprise Institute and those accredited by Harvard.  So I was unsurprised to read that the author of the dissertation, Jason Richwine, thanks Charles Murray as his “primary advisor.”  What continues to amaze me, and I thought it worth emphasizing this aspect of the story, was how Richwine came to the topic in the first place:

By his own account, Jason Richwine came to the Harvard Kennedy School deeply fascinated with the link between race and IQ. Richwine told The Washington Examiner’s Byron York that, as an undergraduate at American University, he fell in love with Charles Murray’s work on the topic. Murray, who will become an important player in Richwine’s story later on, is one of the authors of the infamous The Bell Curve, the 1994 book whose claims about the genetic roots of the black/white IQ gap set off the most famous public food fight over race and IQ. Richwine describes Murray as “my childhood hero.”

…

“Jason had the topic fully formed in his mind before he talked to me,” [the dissertation chair], wrote via email. “I played no role in topic selection or forming the research agenda.”This line raised eyebrows among some scholars familiar with social science dissertations. Dan Drezner is a Professor of International Politics at Tufts’ Fletcher School, an institution that’s somewhat similar to Harvard’s Kennedy School in character, who’s been following the Richwine case closely. “If I’m an advisor, and I have a student that comes to me,” Drezner said, “the last thing I would do is say ‘write this.’” They key issue is “how well formed was Richwine’s argument when he came to Borjas?” Students should come up with their own dissertation topics, Drezner said, but if an advisor didn’t sufficiently challenge them on whether it was a good, well-thought out program, that could be a problem.

Everyone who enteres a research project comes into it with certain predispositions and predilections.  Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t be that interested in doing the research the first place.  But anyone who enters a dissertation with an idea of a project (and apparently, in this case, an answer as well!) and comes out of it with the exact same idea, probably has a problem that goes beyond the lack of a primary advisor willing to challenge your assumptions. Sometimes you just begin a project that is not feasible as a grad student.  Sometimes the materials don’t exist or the research would be too expensive.  Sometimes the results come out differently than you expect or the evidence doesn’t support your initial claim or idea.  But always, always, you engage with a pre-existing literature that will inevitably reshape the contours of a topic that you initially formulated prior to graduate school. There is a vast difference between working on IQ in 1994 and working on it in 2004. The Belle Curve  itself actually has little to do with this issue; a research topic that does not shift through a four year (in Richline’s case) dissertation is one that has not developed sufficiently for doctoral research.

Indeed, this is something I emphasize to my students in “Practice and Theory of History.” We begin that course with a research proposal and the one thing I emphasize as we begin to work on it is that the final project will often not resemble the argument and topic initially posed.  Most of my students, with some resistance, came around to seeing why that might be the case and why, in the end, that is a good thing.  It signifies their ability to master even a small part of a literature and to understand the ways in which scholarship transforms and shifts over time in reaction to the work a community of scholars engages in together.  Richwine, it seems, failed to understand that very basic concept.

Productivity Tools

Two of my favorite digital humanities blogs, Profhacker and Gradhacker, are collaborating on a series of posts highlighting strategies and tools for using technology smartly.  I highly recommend that my students take a look as they begin work on their research projects.

Half of Recent College Graduates Can’t Find Full Time Jobs

In the course of my morning blog and news reading, I come across this devastating fact via Ezra Klein.  Half of recent college graduates can’t find full time jobs.  This is a major failure at many different levels of government and higher education, puts what scan only be deemed a student loan crisis in perspective, and will have major ramifications far into the future.

Want to Critique Black Studies? Read Some Books

Timothy Burke provides would-be critics of Black Studies with a required reading list.  Only required for those wishing to keep their day jobs at the Chronicle of Higher of Education.