Wayne Brady, Bill Maher, and Black Men Who Remain Invisible

In this blog entry, Adia Harvey Wingfield discusses the themes and examples about black masculinity that form the basis for her book No More Invisible Man.

Several news headlines recently highlighted the relatively long-running tension between political comedian Bill Maher and actor/singer Wayne Brady. Maher, known among other things for questioning whether mogul Donald Trump is descended from monkeys and for using explicit epithets to describe politician Sarah Palin, has made several comments suggesting that Brady’s clean-cut, easygoing persona makes him antithetical to “real” black masculinity (a point Brady mocked in 2004 on an unforgettable episode of The Chappelle Show). Brady has responded by critiquing the racialized and gendered assumptions behind this statement, but also by suggesting that if Maher wants to continue this line of discussion, he would be willing to embody these stereotypes and “beat [Maher] in public.”

The dialogue between Maher and Brady reflects two of the images of black masculinity that I try to counter in my recent book No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work. I argue that in cultural imagination and even in much sociological research, black men are often cast as either tough, dangerous, and threatening, or as high-level elites who must be easygoing and appear completely assimilated. Yet these depictions represent two polar opposites, leaving the experiences, lives, and realities of middle class, professional black men understudied and ignored. No More Invisible Man attempts to correct this by drawing attention to these men who are invisible in sociological research, media, and much of America and highlighting the challenges, obstacles, and opportunities they face in professional, white male-dominated occupations.

In my book, I build on Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s classic theory of tokenism to understand black professional men’s work lives. Kanter argues that those in the numerical minority encounter certain perceptual tendencies that affect their interactions with members of the dominant group. These include increased pressures related to their performance, dominant group members’ efforts to emphasize their differences from those in the minority, and challenges subordinate groups face assimilating into the majority. In my study, however, I found that intersections of race, gender, and class, coupled with the gendered characteristics of the male-dominated occupations in which these men worked, meant that black professional men imperfectly fit the tokenization paradigm that Kanter describes. Instead, I argue that they experience a phenomenon I describe as partial tokenization, which impacts their interactions with women of all races, with other men, their performances of masculinity, their emotional performance, and their general challenges within the work environment.

This matters because we know so little about the occupational experiences of black professional men. As the United States becomes an increasingly multiracial society, it is important to be aware of the persistent challenges that remain for racial minorities in various sectors, and to be mindful of the ways that structural processes like partial tokenization may perpetuate inequalities. Having a clear sense of the ways black men experience the professional workplace can help to address ongoing patterns that make their occupational ascension more (or less) challenging than comparably situated others.

In writing No More Invisible Man, I hope to do several things. One is to add to the literature that explores the experiences black men face in the United States and to document the sociological realities of those who are not part of the urban underclass that generates the most attention. Another goal is to highlight that even though black professional men enjoy material and occupational success relative to working-class and poor blacks, they still undergo very particularized difficulties in the workplace. Finally, I hope to demonstrate that black men’s experiences at work and in society at large reflect not just race but the ways that race is shaped by gender and class, and that understanding the ways these categories overlap is essential for making sense of issues of power and inequality that persist in America today.

Why do we reflexively include a woman in an artistic rendering of a kitchen?

In this blog entry, Krista Jenkins, author of  Mothers, Daughters, and Political Socialization: Two Generations at an American Women’s College addresses how women’s roles have changed–or not–over the decades.

I’m endlessly interested in the state of gender relations in the 21^st century. The women’s movement remains with us, but its revolutionary panache has dissipated as gender equality sounds more passé than novel. Women are encouraged to live lives unconstrained by traditional gender roles, and yet when it comes to who does the lion’s share of domestic work even in households with working moms, it’s the women who remain the go to sex for cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, school volunteering, and the like. Look at the statistics. A recent Pew Research and American Time Use Survey found that within dual income households, working women spend almost twice as many hours engaged in housework and child care than their spouses or partners.

Not a big believer in stats? Ok, then consider the following: Back in April of 2010, Time Magazine included an article entitled “The Hazards Lurking at Home.” The story was about environmental toxins found in everyday household items, and was accompanied by a drawing of a home. Each room had items to identify its purpose, such as a crib in a baby’s room and television in the family room. The kitchen had the obvious items – refrigerator and sink, for example, but it also had a woman. The takeaway from this? Kitchens are unthinkable without a woman firmly ensconced in its environs.

So, what gives? If we’re almost four decades since the heyday of the modern women’s movement and women can be found in areas of life that were virtually unthinkable a generation ago, why does  a glass ceiling persist? Why are women disproportionately absent from certain high paying and high powered professions? Why do women with ambitious career goals choose to walk away once children arrive?  Why does dinosaur-ish behavior in the form of discrimination and harassment remain a part of the workplace for so many? And why do we reflexively include a woman in an artistic rendering of a kitchen?

To answer these questions, I did what social scientists often don’t do. That is, look at the forces in an individual’s life that are operative at the micro level. “Large N” surveys are the tool that’s most often used to examine the how and why behind a variety of political and social phenomenon. Although an invaluable tool, all too often we overlook what goes on at the micro level which, in the case of my book, means the influence of a mother on her daughter’s political development. Or, more specifically, what I consider in my book Mothers, Daughters and Political Socialization: Two Generations at an American Women’s College is the extent to which a mother influences whether her daughter accepts or rejects traditional gender roles.

My research is based on 23 paired interviews with mothers and daughters, both of whom attended the same women’s college a generation apart. They were selected because 1) their experiences at a women’s college should have made them especially receptive to the tenets of the women’s movement and 2) the mothers came from a cohort who were interviewed 25 years earlier while they were college undergraduates and experiencing the women’s movement during the peak of its heyday.

Ultimately, what I find is that mothers play an important role in how their daughters approach their understanding of gender roles. So, for example, I find a good amount of consistency between how a mother approached questions of professional and maternal responsibilities and how her daughter envisions her own life unfolding. If, despite her early career ambitions, a mother decided that caregiving was preferable for a variety of reasons to pursuing her professional goals, it was likely that her daughter would echo similar sentiments in her long term planning. This is just one of the interesting insights that I discovered through speaking with these smart, engaged, and verbose women.

Also considered is the role of coming of age during different political climates which, for the mothers, was an environment steeped in a revolutionary ethos while, for the daughters, post-feminism reigns. However, a central takeaway from my book is simply this: When it comes to the acceptance or rejection of traditional gender norms in one’s life, the apple doesn’t fall from the tree.

Mourning the loss of a pioneer of women’s history

Temple University Press is saddened to learn of the passing of women’s historian Gerda Lerner. In honor of Dr. Lerner, we are re-posting this interview from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Political Engagement as Therapy for the Intellect

By Danny Postel for The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 May 2002

The writing of one’s life can offer an “explanatory myth” at worst and an “entertaining tale” at best, says Gerda Lerner, a professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

In Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Temple University Press), she recounts the prehistory of her career in what she calls the “intellectual revolution” of women’s history, a field on which she left a pioneering mark with such works as The Woman in American History (1971), The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993).

Q: You grew up in Austria in the 1920s and ’30s. How did that experience influence the development of your political consciousness?
A: From an early age, I experienced revolution, counterrevolution, military occupation, and fascism. I was imprisoned, I was a hostage—I lived in great danger. I was essentially struggling for my life. Living through this makes you very much aware of politics as a force in life and of the need to struggle for human rights.

Q: After the war, in America, you were active in the Communist Party for a time and then left. You write that it took you some years “to think [your] way out, not of one political movement only, but out of Marxism, the theory.”
A: There was a period when, though I was disillusioned with the Communist Party, I was still a Marxist. Then, after 1958, when I began to study academically, I began to have serious problems with the doctrine in regard to women. It was my feminism that made me realize that Marxism was wrong.

Q: You went many decades without publicly discussing this chapter in your life, the Communist years. Why now?
A: Well, I’m 81 years old—when am I going to do it if not now? I felt uneasy about evading the issue based on fear. I felt that I owed it to myself and to the people who have learned from me and respect me to tell them the whole story. And I feel that there is something to be learned from my story.

Q: What, exactly, would you say that is?
A: That active political engagement is good for thinking. If you are engaged in the world, you have a way of testing your thinking. I tested Marxist thought. It didn’t work.

Q: At the very end of the book, you say that for many years you felt that you had nothing to apologize for, but you go on to say that you feel differently about this now. Why the change?
A: We learned things that we did not know at the time. I defended the Hitler-Stalin pact [over which thousands of Communists left the party] at the time, and I’m sorry I did. The decisions I made in my life seemed to have a good logic then, even if 60 years later, that logic may not stand up.

 

No Magic Bullet When It Comes to Water

In this blog entry, Stephanie Kane, author of Where Rivers Meet the Sea, provides her thoughts about the world’s water crisis.

Muhtar Kent, President and CEO of Coca-Cola, and Dean Kamen founder of DEKA Research & Development Corp, televised their plan for sorting out the world’s water crisis on Charlie Rose’s program September 27, 2012. They were followed by Gary White and Matt Damon of water.org who are also working to extend access to potable water. Impressive as all this may seem, I’ve got to spin out an alternative scenario. For a moment, put aside the video image of Africans laughing with pure joy as they fill their containers. Imagine instead, yourself, living in a coastal village in the year 2015, after the Coca-Cola-DEKA plan has been rolled out. All the rivers, wells, wetlands, and seashore have been poisoned by toxic industrial waste and sewage. But no matter! Bring your bucket to the red and white repurposed shipping container emblazoned with corporate logos in the new town square.

Never mind sophisticated energy technologies (solar panels, biofuel converters, batteries) that run the water distillery. All you need to know about are the two hoses: You can take one hose and stick into the chemical waste pond from the local industry that pollutes with impunity and then take the second hose and put your  plastic container under it to collect clean water. It doesn’t matter how poisoned the source is because the new technology is as good as nature, just like water from clouds. And since there is no point fishing anymore (no fish) or farming (rice poisoned by arsenic), you can hang out at the container, watch TV, and recharge your cell phone: a one stop technology center brought to you by corporate beneficence and facilitated by your government and international NGO’s.

Like the proverbial magic bullet, this “slingshot” technology, named after David’s mythically effective use of a simple technology to bring down Goliath, soothes concerns about the aquatic environment. Who cares? We can go on living without guilt because innovation and corporate goodwill have produced a vision of reality that does not require the extension of municipal infrastructure to treat and deliver potable water through pipes into home or to collect and treat sewage. Nor in this vision do we need to sustain healthy ecologies. Water is essential for life and so is the Coca-Cola corporation.

The basic problem is not about the usefulness of this technology. I’m sure it can be useful in many circumstances. Indeed, using corporate distribution networks for the public good is not in itself problematic. (Is it?) The basic problem is the definition of the global water crisis: it is not simply about expanding access to potable water through technology and infrastructure. The crisis, if we want to organize ourselves by this metaphor, is part of the larger, more complex environmental question: how do we transform our ways of life to protect and preserve water habitats, the very water habitats out of which we will draw our drinking water? Are you OK with sticking a hose into a disgusting toxic pit to get drinking water? I’m not. I don’t want an “ecosystem for life” that comes from Coca-Cola. Do you? I want to be a living being surrounded by an ecosystem (wherever I happen to be located on the planet), not a consumer of ecosystem products.

Expressing serious fears about our energy

Sherry Cable, author of Sustainable Failures  explains why we need to make some serious plans about our energy future.

I can hardly wait until this presidential election is over and done with. Yes, I’m tired of campaign advertisements. Yes, I’m tired of reciprocal mud-slinging. And yes, I’m tired of wondering about the real news I’m missing while the newshawks re-hash their campaign rehashes from the day before. But, mostly? I’m tired of not hearing anything realistic, thoughtful, long-range, or detailed about energy policy and our energy future.

Because I’m really worried. Not to sound like Chicken Little, but coal is killing us – some of us more quickly than others – and oil is running out. Natural gas is pitched as the answer to our national prayers – but is it? We need to make some serious plans about our energy future.

Energy is the first priority for economic expansion, which is related to higher standards of living, which is or can be related to greater equity. We meet the bulk of our energy needs with nonrenewable fossil fuels: the United States consumes over 19 million barrels of oil and tons of coal and natural gas every day.

Coal is burned to generate electricity and heat; it is liquefied to produce diesel fuel. Coal extraction is associated with loss of biodiversity, land subsidence, acid rain, soil erosion, occasional but catastrophic toxic flooding from failed slurry dams, water pollution from acid mine drainage, high-level releases of methane that contribute to stratospheric ozone destruction, and air and water contamination from lead, mercury, and arsenic. Black lung is not uncommon among coal miners.

Coal is the most toxic fossil fuel to burn. Coal combustion produces more than 80 percent of the nation’s atmospheric sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. It’s also associated with air and water contamination from trace elements of radium and uranium, releasing thousands of times more radioactive particles into the atmosphere per unit of energy produced than a normally operating nuclear power plant. Air is polluted from dust emissions, carbon dioxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter. Mercury particles contaminate land and water. The greenhouse gases emitted in coal combustions are a major contributor to global warming. And air pollution from coal combustion kills thousands of people each year, contributes to at least 50,000 cases of respiratory disease, and results in several billion dollars in property damage. 

As regulations increasingly restrict stack emissions to reduce air pollution, coal combustion pollutants accumulate in the solid waste disposal stream – more than 130 million tons of solid wastes each year. If coal’s health and environmental costs were internalized in the market cost, and if government subsidies from mining were removed, coal would be so expensive that it would be replaced (Harper 2008). Concerns about the environmental and health impacts of coal extraction and combustion have led to policies that are (slowly) moving the nation away from coal-fired electric generating plants.

But what really makes our economic world go ‘round is oil, the nation’s primary source for energy and fuels. It is also the source of petrochemicals, used to manufacture three pillars of society: pesticides, plastics, and pharmaceuticals.

One oil drilling platform normally drills about 85 wells and discharges into the ocean more than 90,000 metric tons of drilling fluid, carcinogens such as benzene, and metal cuttings of lead, chromium, and mercury. Flaring, the burning off of oil, produces black carbon which contributes to global warming.

And then there are the oil spills. The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill oozed out over 900 square miles, killing marine mammals and sea birds, closing fisheries, and prodding Congress to pass the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 to provide funds for cleanup. The act said nothing about spilling the oil in the first place. The largest oil spill in U.S. history began in April 2010 with an explosion and fire that killed 11 workers. By the time the well was capped three months later, approximately five million barrels of crude oil had seeped into the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil combustion releases suspected carcinogens cadmium, arsenic, nickel, chromium, beryllium, lead, selenium, and tellurium. Emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides produce acid rain. Exhaust from vehicle emissions and gas vapors combine with sunlight to form smog. And carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming.

Oil’s future? Pretty bleak. Oil supplies are diminishing and, eventually, it will be gone. We can argue about how soon oil will run out, but it’s inevitable that it will. But severe problems will arise even before oil runs out, when the global production of oil peaks. Peak oil production refers to the point at which half of existing oil reserves are gone and the remainder increasingly difficult to extract profitably or at the same pace. Peak oil is estimated to occur between 2016 and 2030. Ouch.

Now we plan to frack our way out of the mess. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal and oil and emits fewer greenhouse gases, it’s cheap to develop, and it’s plentiful here in the US of A which could make us less energy dependent on other nations.

But fracking – horizontal hydraulic fracturing – poses two problems. First, although fracking is a dirty process, regulation of it is haphazard. Huge amounts of water mixed with sand and chemicals including diesel fuel are injected under high pressure into shale rock to break up rock formations and hold open the shale layers to release natural gas. Leakage of uncombusted natural gas from wellheads and pipelines releases methane, a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Residents in the vicinity of fracking wells complain of water contamination caused by the disposal method typically used for wastewater from fracking: injecting it into the ground. A few fracking well neighbors claim that their tap water flames when lit because of the presence of methane. Some scientists have even associated fracking operations with small earthquakes. Yet no federal regulatory standards exist, leaving it to individual states.

The second problem posed by fracking is that the future of reliance on natural gas is unclear. Natural gas could be just the ticket – it could serve as a cheap and effective transition to the development and use of a variety of renewable energy sources. Or, natural gas could serve as yet another excuse to retain energy short-sightedness.

Hence, my frustration with the presidential candidates and my worries about our energy future. Candidate Mitt Romney advocates more oil exploration, faster permitting, and state control of exploration on federal lands. And now even President (candidate) Obama is willing to drill, baby, drill.

Shouldn’t we be conserving our nonrenewable energy resources and developing renewable resources? The policies we have aren’t about conserving non-renewable energy resources – they’re about continuing to exploit those resources. There is no meaningful energy policy – only economic policy, with only short-term planning.

<sigh>

Oh, well. Let’s ditch the news and watch a re-run of a re-run of 30 Rock.

Commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Title IX decision

This week, recent voices reflect on the impact of Title IX following the 40th anniversary of this landmark decision. Here are some interviews, opinions, and articles on the effects of ending sex discrimination on federally funded education programs.

Nation Public Radio’s Scott Simon, host of Weekend Edition, talked to Nancy Hogshead-Makar, co-editor of  Equal Play (Temple University Press) about the impact of the law that opened competitive sports to millions of American girls and women.

 Listen to the interview here: http://www.npr.org/2012/06/23/155622564/in-sports-opportunities-women-still-lag

 

The Chronicle of Higher Education published two pieces this month on Title IX.

Title IX at 40: Have Colleges Done Enough?

 By Welch Suggs

Sometime in 2002, while working as a reporter, I was on the phone with an athletics director talking about Title IX. He asked to go off the record—and proceeded to vent.

He understood Title IX, the 1972 amendment to the Higher Education Act that forbade sex discrimination at institutions receiving federal funds. He got it. But what could institutions do if there simply weren’t enough women interested in playing sports at the college level? His daughters had played sports happily as elementary-school students, but after they turned 12, their and their friends’ interests turned elsewhere. What more should he do?

To read more of this article, visit http://chronicle.com/article/Title-IX-at-40-Have-Colleges/132581/

40 Years of Title IX: Leadership Matters for Women in Academe

By Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh

Forty years ago this month, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 became law, requiring an end to gender discrimination in admissions at educational institutions that receive federal money. Since then, progress in attaining gender equity for women has been heartening, but there is still considerable work to be done, particularly in the areas of faculty and leadership.

In the 1980s—in little more than the blink of an eye—women surpassed men in admissions on most college campuses. And now, unlike their parents and grandparents, these women are increasingly likely to be taught by women. This is good news, and we have Title IX to thank.

To read more of this article, visit  http://chronicle.com/article/40-Years-of-Title-IX-/132311/

The Nation published this piece last week:

Don’t Like Sports? Three Other Reasons to Be a Fan of Title IX

By Bryce Covert

This Saturday marked the fortieth anniversary of Title IX, the civil rights law that prohibits discrimination in education on the basis of sex. To say I’m not sporty may be an understatement. True story: I fulfilled my high school team sport requirement with a short-lived stint on the bowling team, during which I devoted more attention to my calculus homework than to perfecting my strikes and spares. I am about as likely to hit a baseball as to hit the lotto jackpot. I am far from a poster child for the common perception of a Title IX beneficiary: one of the girls who entered school sports in droves. The number of girls participating in sports in elementary and secondary schools rose from 295,000 the year Title IX was enacted to 3.2 million in the last school year.

But there’s a lot more to love about the law than the paths it cleared for women of the sporty persuasion. If you’re like me and not a fan of what Mitt Romney and I call “sport,” here are some other great reasons to be on board—and push for enforcement of the law to go even further:

To read more of this article, please visit: http://www.thenation.com/blog/168553/dont-sports-three-other-reasons-be-fan-title-ix?rel=emailNation

 

Academia now operates more like a corporation than an ivory tower.

Losing Our Faculties

The Fall of The Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and why it Matters. Benjamin Ginsberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn. Randy Martin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.

The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Gigi Roggero (trans. Enda Brophy). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.

Reviewed by James M. Saslow

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It’s hardly news that academia is in perpetual crisis, but to judge from a spate of recent books, we’ve reached a tipping point. The latest books on the state of higher education evoke both sadness and anger, particularly for a gray-bearded baby boomer with enough historical perspective to remember when everyone respectfully called my boyhood friend’s father, a professor at a tiny local liberal arts school, Doctor Rockwood. When I went off to an ivy-covered Gothic Revival campus, the stained-glass windows glowed with the quasi-sacred dignity of the life of the mind, and the soaring arches seemed the portal to a fulfilling life of thoughtful and cosmopolitan citizenship.

As that quaint vision recedes, critics of higher education fall into two camps: those who believe that the university has shortchanged society and those who think that society has shortchanged the university. The books surveyed here align with the latter faction. Their common core is an urgent wake-up call to the subversion and usurpation of faculty power and autonomy. While acknowledging that our syndrome has many symptoms, most focus on one cluster: the professoriate’s progressive loss of authority over curriculum, hiring, tenure, and promotion; over institutional purpose; and over our own working conditions. The authors range in tone from impassioned political analysis (Randy Martin) to ironic bemusement (Benjamin Ginsberg). Ginsberg provides frequent anecdotes from his own experience, while Gigi Roggero eschews examples for a jargon-heavy and historiographic but blistering sociological critique. All concur that academia, once widely treasured for its perch above worldly pressures, now operates more like a corporation than an ivory tower.

These diagnosticians probe three sore points: power, ideas, and money. First is the mushrooming of powerful administrators and their creeping takeover of the higher education agenda. This is Ginsberg’s strong suit: The Fall of the Faculty brims with absurdist cynicism over managerial bloat that has come at the expense of actual teaching. He labels these newly created administrators “deanlets”: professional managers who often do not come from an academic background and thus favor public relations over pedagogy.

In the region of ideas, according to Ginsberg, what hurts are the sweeping changes in curriculum and teaching, mainly toward vocational courses and instructional technology, initiated by those deanlets in response to outside pressures. The debate is between education and training: is college an apprenticeship for informed public participation or a store selling competitive private credentials? The pain lies not only in the changes themselves—which reflect a major shift in public perception of education—but in the fact that it is no longer educators who decide what students should know, as opposed to what the business model wants them to know (or not know).

As for money matters, business forces are restructuring the college workplace, aiming to turn the ivory tower into a factory. Salaries stagnate even as demands increase for accountability, spawning time-consuming forms and reports and the dreaded insistence on “outcomes assessment.” And that’s for those with a “real” job. The drastic reduction in tenured positions has reached the point where, at my school, more than half of all classes are taught by adjuncts.

What needs to be understood, if any headway is to be made in countering these trends, is that this infection in the US academy is but one outbreak of a broader epidemic: the penetration of American society by the values and methods of the increasingly global, late-capitalist social-economic order. Roggero’s analysis of mounting inequality in labor relations uncovers similar processes in Europe and Israel. Wherever they look, these authors find the same problems, and they use common terms for understanding this brave new world:

• Privatization: The transfer of universally accessible public services into the realm of private enterprise for profit, largely through cuts in government budgets.
• Corporatization: The increasing tendency to define every enterprise as if it were a profit-making corporation competing for a market of consumers. Hence colleges, like beer or baseball, strive for brand recognition, bragging rights, and customer satisfaction.
• Managerialism: The mode of organization intended to maximize productivity in all sectors of an enterprise by coordinated oversight and evaluation based on unquestioning faith in quantifiable “outcomes.” In the interest of efficient control, governing structures are hierarchical, bureaucratized, and secretive.
• Deprofessionalization: A new attitude toward specialized knowledge, which aims to discredit or eliminate all independent expertise and subject it to management-generated criteria. Insurance companies now overrule doctors; deanlets ignore faculty recommendations.
• Contingent labor: The result of the transformation of jobs that once promised full long-term employment into part-time positions adjustable to changing demand. Martin calls this process “casualization,” underscoring “the minimal commitment of institution to employee.”
• Precaritization: The deliberate creation of permanent insecurity and anxiety among workers by cutting jobs and reducing salaries along with health care, pensions, and other benefits. See also: proletarianization, Dickensian, social pathology.

This new regime is repugnant to academics not only for self-interested economic reasons but also viscerally, because it blasphemes the values and practices of the university, traditionally conceived as a service to the common good. Deconstructing the battles over workplace culture reveals profoundly different goals, philosophies, and worldviews. Just ask yourself which side you favor in James Truslow Adams’s venerable adage, “There are two types of education: one teaches you how to make a living, the other teaches you how to live.”

That difference is between two models of human interaction and power relations—the corporate and the cooperative—which embody mutually hostile conceptions of human nature and potential. The hierarchical, mechanistic managers mistrust every individual as fallen, lazy, and selfish; they seek power over the anarchic masses. In contrast, the idea of a college—a term, like colleague and collegial, rooted in “bound together” for common purpose—is collective and communitarian. It is grounded in the belief that people are basically good and should be given power to bring out—“e-duce”—their unique potentials, thus maximizing the shared welfare of all. In this guild paradigm, one is a long-term, active member, not an alienated part-timer, and a faculty, whose integrity is safeguarded by our commitment as an honorable “profession” (a religious term) to maintaining public trust, is granted autonomy and influence based on its specialized expertise.

Most academics I know have some sense of that “vocation,” of being called to a higher purpose. We wear the same robes as our clerical forebears when celebrating our secular priesthood of knowledge and reason. But for preaching that education is for public citizenship, not private productivity, we are now besieged by an inquisition-cum–hostile takeover. The managerial strategy is to surround and blockade, cutting off all aid and supplies to propel surrender in the face of starvation. For the ivory tower, that means choking off public funds, stripping us of the robes of authority, and undermining public sympathy for the professoriate, represented as a bunch of expensive, meddlesome, and unaccountable slackers.

Examinations of academia are often long on diagnosis and short on treatment. What do these researchers prescribe? Ginsberg is pessimistic about the future; both he and Martin seek to balance adjustments that both faculty and administration might reasonably make. All three offer a limited menu of suggestions, which probably have mixed chances of success. Mary Burgan, in her 2006 book What Ever Happened to the Faculty, usefully introduced two principal arenas of action—college governance institutions and labor unions—and all of the authors under consideration here take professors to task for their disengagement from faculty senates, committees, and other sites that offer at least some platform for both meaningful cooperation and resistance. They’re right. Most of us avoid such service—and not only because we know that despite lip service to “community,” it won’t get you tenure. Many are bitterly frustrated to discover that their local managerial juggernaut is already unstoppable. I once chaired a task force to investigate whether faculty were unduly pressured into, and inequitably rewarded for, prestige research—even as our president was planning to ratchet up those demands. In our campus survey, most felt teaching and service deserved greater weight, and I duly reported the junior faculty’s message that, if quotas increased, they would seek work elsewhere. Madame President’s blunt reply: “Let them try. There’s nowhere else to go.” Such snarling realpolitik is engendering a rise in union activism: if they are going to treat us like labor, we need to respond like labor.

Most of the proposals offered by these authors are well intentioned but small bore. We can’t solve the structural problems of higher education within the gates of our own quad; our only hope is to change priorities in society at large, ultimately a political task. Faculty unions have already marched with labor coalitions to demand our shared goal of economic justice, as my City University of New York group did recently. But educators also face a more abstract lobbying challenge unique to our job description. Martha C. Nussbaum’s eloquent defense of traditional liberal arts in Not for Profit argues (in the publisher’s pithy blurb) that “we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world.” Amen—but how do we “broadcast our pitch” past the corporate-sponsored and radically segmented mass media? How can we convince our students, legislators—indeed, anyone who will listen—that knowledge is not a product, college is not an assembly line, and students are not just future worker bees? For what is at stake in the current academic wars is, quite starkly, the nature of our still nominally democratic society.

It is clear from these books that, if the present disease metastasizes, our national prognosis is cancerous inequality of education, wealth, political agency, and overall opportunity, squeezing the mass of citizens closer to the desperate misery that drove a Tunisian fruit vendor to set off last year’s Arab Spring by immolating himself. Our society is increasingly sacrificing the long-term future of all, disinvesting in sources of public well-being like education while enabling huge short-term profits for a few. Perhaps this backward step is feeding the current pop-culture fascination with the vampire: an unfeeling aggressor who sucks the lifeblood out of others so it can feast forever. There’s a name for such societies: “banana republic.” A good working definition, adapted from the one offered by the late social critic Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, is a country operated as a commercial enterprise for private profit, reinforced by collusion between the state and favored corporations, through which the profits from private exploitation of public resources remain private property and the debts incurred become public responsibility. Because of corporate manipulation, the government is unaccountable to its citizens, and the legislature is for sale and functions mostly as a ceremonial rubber-stamp.

Sound familiar? That’s why so many people occupied Wall Street (and beyond) last fall, trying to broadcast the pitch that the corporate-technocratic 1 percent are stealthily entrenching a system in which no one will be able to challenge their greedy domination. They have already driven America’s universities, once a magnet for students from around the world, down the path toward becoming underfunded, micromanaged trade schools that fewer and fewer can afford. Soon the 99 percent won’t have any education in the full sense, not to mention a secure job or social safety net, that might enable them to look up from the struggle for survival and survey the causes of their plight. How ironic that, in a nation whose political rhetoric and institutions are unusually religious, the elite should be so contemptuous of Judeo-Christian ideals of equality, charity, and brotherly love. There are no Good Samaritans on Wall Street. Unchecked, they will transmute faculty into “human capital,” students from citizens into robots and consumers—all sucked dry, by ceaseless worry and crisis, of the energy for social activism. Anyone else remember the chilling line from Star Trek, intoned by the bionic Borg invaders? “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”

While writing this, I turned sixty-four, which summoned to mind the old Beatles song: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” Four decades ago, I eagerly donned the pipe-and-tweed habit of what was then a respected confraternity, but the new abbots of that monastery, rebranded as a McJob-training center, don’t need or want us outdated veterans. As for feeding, my oft-frozen salary keeps shrinking with inflation, and impoverished younger coworkers (no longer “colleagues,” being adjuncts) have no place else to go.

Though sixty-four isn’t so old today, I yearn to retire as soon as my precarious 401(k) may permit. I can’t bear any longer my front-row seat at the relentless boxing match between the corporate deanlets and us dwindling holdouts. They haven’t yet scored a final knockout, but we’ve been up against the ropes for years, continually punch-drunk from the latest dictatorial, wrong-headed, or merely superfluous “innovation” that management keeps jabbing at faculty. I used to be an honored professional, with valued expertise and integrity certified by peers. Now educators, like everyone else, are being beaten down to lazy unreliables who must be monitored and kept hungry and ignorant of everything outside our assigned task. I only hope we still have strength enough to fight off these pandemic assaults.

James M. Saslow is professor of art history, theater, and Renaissance studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has lectured and published widely on sexuality and gender in Renaissance culture and is the author of four books, including Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality and the Visual Arts. His e-mail address is james.saslow@qc.cuny.edu.

Reprinted with permission from the May-June 2012 issue of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors.

Asking how and why industrial hazards persist

In this blog entry, Dangerous Trade co-editor Christopher Sellers discusses industrial dangers, past and present, and how people have sought to discover and correct these hazards.

Over the past few months, a burst of stories have made headlines in the New York Times and elsewhere about dangers of what we buy and use have posed to those in foreign lands. First came a harrowing report last December about what was happening to car batteries that Americans had used up and discarded.  A growing business has emerged of shipping these batteries to Mexico, where around disassembly plants, lead has been steadily escaping into the air and soil, to poison neighborhood children. Then came the coverage of China’s Foxconn, manufacturer of Apple’s i-pad.  We learned that this latest, dazzling digital wonder, brought to us by one of America’s most respected and successful firms, had come with a cost none of us knew about or had bargained for.  Workers in China had paid, instead, with lengthy work-days, exploitative and sometimes toxic working conditions, and distress that could reportedly turn suicidal. 

Scientists and scholars who have followed these industrial dangers for years have to applaud the media’s new in the distant hazards imposed by our own consumer purchases.  The rising awareness suggests the prospect that, finally, more effective ways of mobilizing and intervening against them may arise.  Those of us who have followed this kind of issue, and sought to dig up its history, have to conclude that these sporadic reports offer only a visible tip of what is likely a global iceberg.  International studies suggest that occupational diseases alone kill more throughout the world than malaria.  These numbers do not include the many additional casualties from contaminants in the air, water, and soil.  With rebounding economic growth throughout the world, this toll is no doubt on the rise once again, especially in the developing world.

A starting point for understanding how and why these dangers continue to recur is to recognize that this problem is far from new.  Dangerous Trade: Histories of industrial hazard across a globalizing world, is the first book to take a genuinely global approach to their history, one that encompasses both the developing and the developed world.  

Dangerous Trade explores the contours of this kind of problem not only in our contemporary world, but historically, through the past century and more of what has been a long-standing trade in industry-derived dangers.  In every period when international trade has picked up, the most hazardous industries have tended to cross national boundaries, to gravitate to where regulation and awareness of the attendant hazards remain less.  Looking at examples from colonial Malaysia’s mining industries to the extraction of oil in Mexico, this book’s essays offer rigorously documented accounts of just why and how these dangerous industries arose where they did, and the ways in which locals strove to cope with them.  As these essays make clear, the ways and means by which dangerous activities travel has nevertheless been shifting over the last century. As technology has changed, nations especially in the developed world have come up with new and more effective ways of recognizing and correcting the worst hazards.  The result, however, is hardly one of unadulterated progress. Instead, these hazards endure, if in changing and ever more wily ways. They get shipped elsewhere, where the companies that rely on them, and the consumers who give these companies their business, can once more put their dangers out of mind.  Hence, the resurgence of poisonings from lead, perhaps the longest known and most studied of industrial hazards, but still sickening workers and children from Uruguay to Mexico in our contemporary world.  

This collection constitutes a first effort to ask how and why these problems have persisted, even decades after new efforts have arisen around the globe successfully to identify and address them. A central concern of the collection, as well, is to generalize cross-nationally, about the evolving repertoire through which people in different times and places have sought to discover and correct these dangers, once they arise.  From the early health departments to worker compensation laws of the early twentieth century, to the environmental legislation starting in the sixties and seventies, to latter day campaigns to ban a dangerous substance like asbestos, the tools and targets of those who would ameliorate these dangers have constituted a work in progress.   Often it is precisely the loopholes in an earlier system of control that make a later one necessary.  But a key theme as well is that amelioration has not been a given even once the hazards became unmistakable to the experts and officials in charge.  Expert activism was often important in calling attention to new hazards, but as if not more important in stirring real change was the mobilization of the inexpert.  From the workers in Mexican oil fields to the environmental agitators in late twentieth century France and Uruguay, those who were themselves the victims of these exposures also had to mobilize, to marshal the available political tools to induce governments as well as scientists to consider their problems. 

If these histories suggest just how persistent industrial hazards like lead or asbestos can be, together they also offer many grounds for hope.  Not just failures but success stories abound here, of mobilizations fighting asbestos and lead battery-burning and pesticides and liquefied natural gas facilities. In addition to elucidating these problems’ persistence, these essays thereby offer an abundance of models that may inspire today’s practitioners, activists, policy-makers, and citizens, and on which they may build.

The Top Five Myths in Nursing

In this blog entry, Lisa Ruchti, author of Catheters, Slurs, and Pickup Lines  debunks assumptions about intimacy, race, gender and caring in the nursing industry.

With popular television shows about nursing today, e.g. Nurse Jackie and HawthoRNe, one might think that we know all we need to know about nursing. Even if we don’t watch television, we probably think we understand nursing when we consider how often we or our loved ones find ourselves under nursing care. The truth of the matter is that we couldn’t possibly understand nursing the way a nurse does simply because nurses hide many aspects of their work as part of their job. They know that patients and family members don’t need to be bothered with the specifics of nursing when patients are really interested in their own illness and recovery.

In my research for writing Catheters, Slurs and Pickup Lines, I found that most people did not understand nursing. Even the president of the hospital I studied said, “I don’t care how they do it; I’m just glad they do!” But after years of intensive study of nursing and eight months in a hospital setting, I can honestly say I understand some of the ins and outs of nursing. 

 Check these out. You might be surprised.

 One:  Patients are too weak to want sex.

 I know it is hard to imagine a patient sexually grabbing a nurse, making lewd comments, or even having sex with their visitors. We don’t tend to think of patients as anything other than needy so it might be hard to imagine that patients can exhibit sexual desire. Yet, in an eight month study I conducted, nurses consistently reported these behaviors to me. I found that if nurses were successful at gaining trust of patients, patients sometimes felt entitled to service, attention, or even sex. Interestingly, when patients engaged in sexual behaviors toward nurses, many of which were legally defined as sexual harassment, most nurses did not define these acts as sexual harassment. While new nurses were surprised at sexual behaviors from patients, experienced nurses negotiated them as part of their daily work.

Two:   Patients are never mean.

The majority of the 45 nurses I interviewed avoided describing patient care as involving conflict. They used words like nurture, kindness, and compassion to make it seem like nurses “being caring” was a natural personality characteristic characterized by goodness. Feminist philosopher Eva Kittay discusses this in her work: patients are not usually described as anything other than “needy,” and we don’t tend to think of needy people as causing conflicts for those who provide their care. In my study, however, I found that patients – “ordinary” patients, not “psychiatric” patients – yelled at nurses and even hit them. My focus on identifying conflict is as much about seeing patients clearly as it is about seeing the work of nurses clearly.

Three: Race does not matter in the provision of care.

Women of color nurses worked harder to negotiate racism and xenophobia from patients.  For example, sexual harassment of women of color nurses incorporated multiple aspects of their identities. It is one thing for nurses to manage sexually explicit language or touches; it is quite another when those are combined with racial slurs and epithets.  Imagine that a nurse not only walks in to check on a patient and sees him masturbating, but she is also called a “dirty foreigner.” Or, a nurse is giving a patient a bath, and the patient says you remind him of his mammy.

Four:  Male nurses aren’t as caring as female nurses.

My study shows that men feel called to care and also care well. All the male nurses I interviewed were in the job because they cared. I watched male nurses take great care with their patients. I also observed male nurses have what seems like a “knack” for care, but is actually simply skilled expertise. My findings on men challenge the idea that men don’t want to care or can’t care just because they are men.

Five:    You can’t teach someone how to be caring.

A lot of people, including nurses, think that the quality of care cannot be taught in nursing school. My study maps how experienced nurses care so that it can be taught in nursing school. When I first began the study I was not sure if and how a nursing student could be taught what is typically seen as a “caring quality”. But after the study I am convinced that if new nurses know to expect conflict on the floor and learn how they can negotiate those conflicts they will be better able to care.

Challenging dominant stereotypes of young people of color

In this blog entry, Bindi Shah, author of Laotian Daughters, describes the impressions formed about an unlikely group of young Laotian girls who became advocates and leaders for social justice and community change.

In the late 1990s I began field work with Asian Youth Advocates, a youth program for second-generation Laotian girls in Richmond, California run by the environmental justice organization Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN). This excerpt from field notes on one of my early research visits portrays them as ordinary inner-city American teenagers interested in fashion, music and boys:

It’s a cold, crisp but sunny Tuesday afternoon in February. As I walk in almost everyone looks and smiles or says “hi.” The front room of this small house in Richmond, which serves as LOP’s offices, is packed today. Twenty-one of the youth members are here, waiting for the Whole Group Training on campaign options to start. Bryanna and Huk are sitting close to the radio, tapping their feet to Eminem rapping “My Name Is…” Once the song ends Bryanna turns the dial to a station that plays alternative and R&B music. Two girls are sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, sharing thumsom, a green papaya salad. Others are sitting on the chairs placed in a circle, munching on nachos, burgers, burritos, and sipping on soda.

A lot of the girls are dressed in black today, black flared trousers, black tops and black jackets. Others sport blue or white flared jeans, short T-shirts or shirts that hug the body, and platform shoes or sneakers. This ‘70s retro style transports me back to my own dress preferences as a teenager, though I wore luminous pink crimplene trousers. In the 1990s, these girls are wearing muted colors, which often bear the logos of Tommy Hilfiger, The Gap, BeBe, Nautica, or The Old Navy. Bryanna wears an oversized orange rain jacket, nylon pants that bunch up around her ankles, and sneakers. Others resemble the style of the majority of their peers in the urban multicultural neighborhoods, blue jeans, long T-shirts and sneakers or high-tops.

Their conversations revolve around boys, school, and clothes. My by-now-trained ear picks up both Black English and standard English, with a smattering of Mien and Lao words that I don’t understand.

At first sight this group of teenage Laotian girls appear unlikely candidates as advocates and leaders for the Laotian community in west Contra Costa County, California. In Laotian Daughters, I unravel popular images of young people of color and draw attention to their engagement with political activism and community building.

Politicians and journalists have tended to portray young people, particularly those growing up in poor, urban neighborhoods as social problems and as experiencing moral decline. For example, a media report on a 2001 University of California study that found Laotian high-school girls had the highest teenage pregnancy rate in California and the highest number of teen births was ominously titled “Asian Teen Mothers, a quiet State of Crisis”. Despite a steady decline in youth crime and violence over the last few decades, we continued to hear from the media, politicians and other professionals that young people were “at risk”, with proclivities for teenage pregnancy, gang involvement, violence, drug addiction, and reliance on public assistance. Such constructions provided a rationale for increased surveillance of and intervention into young people’s lives by schools, police, health services, and the juvenile justice system. In April 2001 Governor Gray Davis of California approved $3.3 million for juvenile crime prevention in Contra Costa County. One of the programs that the funding financed was a program that places probation officers in selected high schools and middle school to provide supervision and services to youths with problems ranging from truancy to major criminal offenses.

It is important to examine youth programs with a social justice agenda because such programs can help challenge such representations of young people of color and reveal how citizenship is not just an adult experience. In a community that is linguistically isolated and lives in a region experiencing extensive environmental pollution, APEN hoped to empower and engage the bilingual second generation to act as advocates for the health of their community and to organize around environmental justice, reproductive health, and broader community issues such as inadequate academic counselling resources in schools and the political challenges to bilingual education. Asian Youth Advocates was a broad, integrated youth program that aimed to nurture a new generation of women leaders, in a community where authority is traditionally vested in elderly Laotian males, as well as address issues of adolescence and cultural identity experienced by the teenage Laotian girls.

In Laotian Daughters I show that if we dig beyond the dominant stereotypes of young people of color, particularly young women of color, we can unearth political engagement and the construction of active citizenship amongst this group. Through political mobilization around issues faced by a new immigrant community, these teenage Laotian girls both re-fashioned Laotian culture and demonstrated that young people can be a positive voice for change. In the process they forged a sense of belonging for Laotians in the American nation.