University Admini-o-crats

Over the past year, Big Midwestern University (BMU) has faced so many revelations and scandals that I half expected to see Kerry Washington lurking about the campus. All the elements that have played out would probably wake Nixon from the grave: stonewalling (university) presidents, leaked documents, budget smoke-and-mirrors, and even FOIA requests from faculty members like myself. Heck, if this level of intrigue keeps up, I am going to have to buy more trenchcoats.

BMU’s scandals have left us with the unsavory realization that a tier of for-hire consultants and professional administrators have finagled themselves into institutions of higher education. These are not faculty administrators, but rather companies and individuals who have found a way to profit from institutions of higher learning. Let’s call these folks admini-o-crats to distinguish them from actual faculty administrators. Admini-o-crats often manufacture a crisis just so that they can deploy their “expertise” as a solution. All the while they quietly siphon public funds into their own bottomless pockets.

Years of neglect and poor choices by the upper-level faculty administrators and a dozing board of regents essentially gave admini-o-crats a free hand over our campus. They arrived with a smile on their face and a promise to solve our shrinking resources by running BMU like a private corporation. The most recent yield from that practice has been nine months of faculty, staff, and student alienation around issues of labor, diversity, and fiscal management. Never have I been a part of a campus with such a low sense of morale. Our president’s reputation has crashed faster than a government sponsored health care web-page.

Things really started to unravel for her at the start of the academic year when her personal slate of admini-o-crats unveiled a master plan which they had euphemistically named the Administrative Services Transformation (AST). The titular “transformation” promised to change the most underpaid and undervalued workers on campus into easy scapegoats who could be sacrficed to show the administration’s toughness on budget issues. AST issued over a hundred notices to departmental staff across campus that their position had been eliminated. Most of these notices went to employees who were women clerical workers over the age of 40. Though many of them had literally given decades of service to the university for already unfairly low compensation, the admini-o-crats now labeled them as “bloat” and “redundant.” Few took solace in the university’s offer that they could apply for exciting new jobs in a centralized “shared services” center that would be located far off campus. Think of it as a glorified call center where faculty members would send HR and accounting requests without being troubled by the idea that a real person was actually doing labor.

My goddess, the faculty did not take kindly to the admini-o-crats dehumanizing their staff colleagues by referring to them merely as a set of “processes.” Dozens of letters of protest emerged from departments across the campus. The Faculty Senate and the LSA Faculty both called for an immediate halt. Our president, fully ensconced in a circle of admini-o-crats, at first ignored the growing unhappiness on campus. Ultimately, when she had no other choice, she deigned to respond to our very real concerns for our staff colleagues and the harm that AST would bring to individual departments. Her response made clear just what she thought of the faculty on her campus. She used a language and approach that made us out to be misbehaving five-year olds. AST would proceed, she more-or-less stated, “Because I said so.” Merciful Minerva!

It turns out that BMU has paid $11.7 million dollars (and counting) to the for-hire consulting company Accenture LLP for this little gem of a plan. Accenture’s salesmen appear to be ingratiating themselves with university presidents across the nation, including in Texas and California. Are you yet unfamiliar with Accenture? They are a global “advising” corporation spun off from their parent company, Andersen Consulting. Yep, the same Arthur Andersen involved oh-so-directly in the Enron scandal. Ain’t that a nice pedigree to invite onto your campus to manage tuition and state funds?

As far as I can discern, Accenture’s business model centers on chasing down ever possible public dollar to add to its private coffer. In exchange for BMU’s $11.7 million dollars, Accenture promised to return savings of $17 million/year. But, gosh, even as the notices of termination arrived to the targeted staff members, they were already acknowledging that they might have miscalculated those promised savings just a bit. By October of this past year, they scaled back those estimates to $5 million. Wait – Did they say $5 million? Maybe those numbers, they recently acknowledged, were skewed as well. Now the admini-o-crats in charge of AST flatly refuse to discuss numbers entirely. If asked directly (and I have), they meekly claim that they are pretty sure that AST will save BSU something . . . well, mostly sure . . . well. . . It’s not too hard to think that the board of regents and the president have signed up for a boondoggle that makes the Teapot Dome Scandal look like a trip to the gas station.

Faculty members continued to educate themselves about how this might have come into play. We were spurred on by a leaked details about the key admini-o-crat in charge of AST. Before joining BMU’s payroll, it turns out that this particular admini-o-crat took home a pay check from none other than Accenture. (Cue dramatic music and raised eyebrows). In addition to a remarkably generous salary of over $300,000, BMU also gave this admini-o-crat undisclosed bonus pay in the ballpark of another $100,000. In other words, this one admini-o-crat alone took home the annual salary of eight (8) regular staff members who had been targeted in the AST debacle. Faculty might not be fancy accountants, as the president points out, but it sure does seem like cost savings could be attained more easily if we trimmed the salaries and bonuses of folks at the top. Fortunately for us this particular admini-o-crat saw the writing on the wall moved off to peddle his financial snake oil at another institution. My sympathies to them.

More digging showed that the upper levels of the administration, starting at the CFO’s office, have developed a culture of giving each other enormous salaries and unregulated bonuses while starving the rest of the campus. Since this bonus pay was not considered part of their base salary, the administration did not have to provide these amounts in its public publishing of salaries. Thus the need for FOIA requests to find out just what was going on with all this unregulated pay. Over the past nine years, the amount of money spent on “additional pay” (read: bonuses) has grown from $13 million annually to $46 million annually. That would be in addition to the fact that the top base pay of our top administrators appears to be 30 percent (or more) higher than our peer institutions. Suddenly the president has started claiming that institutions that we use as peers to evaluate faculty scholarship really aren’t our peers at all when it comes to the administration’s compensation.

Top administrators, like their corporate equivalents, have justified their own large salaries and unregulated bonuses through an argument that they must pay for “talent.”

Such arguments strike me as suspect for a number of reasons. Most obviously, the market for top university administrators is a fairly closed one. With a finite number of institutions in the nation, we might well imagine that the number of qualified administrators outnumber the positions available at those institutions. Instead of a rational effort to hire administrators at solid salaries, universities have entered into a bizarre economic cold war where they hope to outspend the others in a futile effort to avoid the stark reality that we are all on the edge of financial ruin. So too does such an argument about talent presume that the individual workers on the lower levels of the university lack skills or talent worthy of adequate compensation or respect.

I do believe that universities like BMU indeed face tough economic circumstances that require real decisions about budget cuts. Greedy state legislatures favor tax breaks over financing public institutions. These short-sighted slashes in funding combined with a nationally ballooning student debt will inevitably cripple higher education across the nation unless we reform. Our experience at BMU, however, points to a basic question of shared values in how we will address those economic challenges. The admini-o-crats’ claims that AST is the right type of belt-tightening would appear laughable if it had not involved real working people’s livelihoods. As one last surprise twist to the story, our CFO recently announced that he would become the President of the University of Phoenix. Perhaps that proved the most telling sign of just how far off BMU had drifted from its mission. Rather than being a place where administrators worked hard to protect education and research, we allowed a legion of admini-o-crats to turn BMU into an educational McDonald's.

I Have Always Depended on the Kindness of Internet Strangers

Greetings! Over the past weekend, I jetted to an island other than Paradise for an academic conference. It was my good fortune to be on a panel with academic blogging true believers. Historiann exchanged her rusty spurs for a series of fabulous sun dresses; Tenured Radical rabble roused among the virtual; the Madwoman with a Laptop proved once and for all that her authorial prowess was not dependent on channeling a dead canine; and the Woman Formally Known as Goose (WFKG) served as the most delightful of mistresses of ceremonies. The panel, in other words, was filled with the cool.

It came at the right moment for me – and, let’s be honest, it’s always about me in the end. I had been wondering for quite a bit of time what CoG’s future might be. It has been a bit like CoG was my child. Only ze dropped out of college and has been holding up in my basement sneaking joints and watching reruns of The Big Bang Theory. My participation forced CoG into the light of day and to rejoin society. It also marked a new step for this ol’ blog. It meant that I relinquished the last vestiges of pseudonymity and “owned” it professionally. For the first time something related to the blog will appear on my c.v. Here is an image from our panel:

I'll leave it to you to figure out which one of the others wore the silver jumpsuit. *cough* TR *cough*

I had to think hard about whether to let go of my Diana Prince alter ego. With Cheetah and Giganta on the prowl, one can never be too careful. Over time, however, my pseudonym had become harder and harder to maintain. The blog occupied an uncertain place as more people came to know of it. At some point, it became awkward that half of my friends knew of the blog and half did not. So, too, I always wondered if any academics at my usual conferences ever stumbled upon CoG.
I felt like I was in the blogging closet and all my star-spangled panties were hanging around me.
As it turns out, my anonymity could be purchased for a price. That price was a trip to an island with tremendous historical significance for Spanish and U.S. imperialism. Or maybe, even more cheaply, I was lured by the fact that the conference hotel promised Piña Coladas so good that Joan Crawford once proclaimed them more enjoyable than slapping Bette Davis in the face. On the latter I cannot say; however, having sampled the drink in question, I would say that if I were a Joan Crawford dragqueen, I would probably take the swing.^* I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

Let me tell you, too, that these blogging folks can be a persuasive crew. After a few drinks with Madwoman, TR, WFKG, and a delightful Yale postdoc, they convinced me to do things that I never imagined doing. No, not tequila shots via a congo line (although. . .). Rather, I opened a Twitter account.^** Man, what did they put in those drinks?

All and all, the conference required me to ask just what have we been up to on this blog since 2005? Anonymously complaining about bad behavior in academia can be as fun as slapping Bette Davis in the face (Or so I am told). It becomes much harder to write about your colleagues’ shenanigans, though, if they have you in their RSS feed. So, what can academic blogs do other than pointing out our foibles?

I found myself disarmed that so many conference participants approached me through the weekend to say they were surprised that I was part of the“Digital Humanities.” So was I. Given that I am more than a bit dense, I had never contemplated that CoG was a version of that. It was a bit like finding out that I had secret skills as a dentist that I performed only while sleepwalking. Of course, to make that analogy work for CoG, it would be like finding out I was a dentist who left people with gaping, bleeding gums thanks to my less than skillful orthodontics.

The conference made me reminisce about when the little bloggy started. Then again, I have always been prone to nostalgia. I am a professional historian after all. My blog began at a pretty low point in my personal and professional life. The truly loyal readers out there will remember that many of the early posts conveyed self pity deep bitterness my reflections on a remarkably acrimonious break up with somebody who was truth challenged. My tenuous (and not tenured) position in a poisonously contentious department in the middle of TexAss only compounded those woes. From its start, then, the blog always had a certain messiness that blurred the personal and professional in ways that did not make me as wise as Athena. Well, if the blog’s author is a bit of mess, why wouldn’t the blog be one too? The blog became really important to me to combat the personal and professional isolation that I felt in East Texas. I did not have many other gay folks with whom to hang or other Chicano/a historians with whom to chat. Thank the goddess that those times have past. I will always remember, though, and be really grateful for the generosity of bloggers like Helen the Felon, Dorian, Joe.My.God, Tornwordo, VUBOQ, and others who reached out through cold dark cyberspace to be kind. Some are now famous, some faded. Whatever the case, I’m not sure I ever properly thanked them.

Thinking about the blog and hanging out with cool bloggeres reminded me that I still love the genre after all these years. Blogging offers tantalizing opportunities for us to write frankly about things that we see transpiring both in our immediate contexts and in the larger media. That type of writing does not necessarily align with my professional publishing trajectory as a nineteenth-century historian, but it sure is fun. So much so, I just might dust off those old comic books once more. . .


* For the record, GayProf does not endorse such violence.
** For the record, Historiann does not endorse the tweeting.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Online Learning

Some weeks ago the gentleman beau and I decided to take advantage of the sizzling merciless soul killing heat summer weather by taking a leisurely canoe ride. Doesn't that sound nice? After slathering ourselves in SPF-275 cream, we piled into a massive van of strangers to take the short ride to our launch point. Since we are both academic types, our conversation turned to online teaching as the van meander its way up the river. The gentleman beau has experience teaching online classes, but I do not. We both agreed nonetheless that online classes seem like bad news if one cares about quality education. We rehearsed the usual arguments against online courses: They reduce contact between professors and students; they reduce contact between students and students; they are often less rigorous; students are frequently left directionless and rarely put forward as much effort as a brick-and-mortar class; they compete with World of Warcraft for a student's attention; parents hate them and feel they are a “cheat” by the university. We hardly came up with novel critiques in other words. In that heat, one can’t expect me to be at my best. Just about the time that I began the inevitable claim that online classes were a harbinger of the pending demise of higher education as we know it, the stranger seated in front of me turned with daggers in her eyes. “I did my degree with many on-line classes,” she said curtly, “And they were really hard.” For a split second I swear that I could feel a slight tinge in a blood vessel in my brain as she attempted to telepathically explode my head.

Now this encounter took me back a bit and not just because I imagined that she hoped to spread my gray matter across the interior of the van. First, I don’t like to out-and-out insult people in public. That’s why I have this blog – I like to insult people virtually. Second, it dawned on me that my stance on online classes belied my status working for an elite institution.

Most professors and parents continue to consider online classes dubious at best (even those who actually teach them). Up until this point, taking a majority of online course work made one’s degree seem like a modern day correspondence course. Only you didn't have to draw the image on the back of the matchbook first. Despite this, two constituent groups really love the online courses: students and administrators. If they had their way, every university would have more of an online presence than a closeted Republican member of the House of Representatives looking to get laid. What? This ain’t a blog for children.

The stark reality is that most colleges and universities are exponentially increasing their online offerings. Cluck-clucking about it as a moral crisis might be easy (and fun too!), but it will not reverse the trend. Those who followed the recent showdown between the President of the University of Virginia and its governing board know that the latter felt the former moved too slowly in promoting online classes. If one of the original “public ivies” is about to cave into this pressure we should acknowledge that online classes are to be with us for quite some time. The impulse is there for a number of reasons. First, online classes are economical. Without needing to find actual classroom space, online classes can be as large as possible while still using just a single faculty member (or, worse, a severely underpaid adjunct). Second, liberal arts colleges and small regional universities are feeling the pressure from for-profit universities. As Republican-controlled legislatures and governors slash budgets to state-supported higher education the need to compete for every tuition dollar is getting greater and greater. Small colleges and universities have no choice but to try and accommodate the impulses that drive students to for-profit institutions.

Anybody who has a penchant for late-night television has seen the ads for these shady institutions promising the ease of a college education without ever having to change out of your pajamas or put down the tub of Ben-and-Jerry’s. Those ads make taking online classes seem like a virtual slumber party complete with intellectual tickle fights. Given what my students show up wearing in my actual class, though, I am left wondering if that is a real difference. It is no wonder that students who have to work or tend to family duties would find such an avenue to a college degree appealing. They simply need the flexibility.

This is no longer a debate about whether universities should offer online classes. The question now is what type of standards we are going to expect from them. The truth is that there are some students in online classes, like my fellow canoeist, who have the necessary motivation and discipline to make such a degree meaningful. It is also true that online classes continue to have the presumption of being easier than brick-and-mortar classes. This, in part, likely generated the defensiveness to my critiques. Those two things have to be reconciled.

To my mind, humanities professors (including me) have been slow to accept the new reality. This is especially true for those of us who teach at elite institutions that have not started pushing faculty to offer at least some of their classes online – yet. No, I am not advising that we all run out and start posting online classes like a blog troll posts incendiary comments. Rather, I am thinking that we need to cede the question over whether online classes provide good/bad learning environments in favor of considering how online classes can be taught using good, ethical pedagogies. Even if we are not directly involved in teaching an online class, we are nonetheless training graduate students who are most likely going to land a job at an institution that will expect, if not require, them to apportion part of their teaching effort to online classes. It is our obligation to them and their future students to start to model ethical uses of new teaching technologies.

To that end, we need to first identify and reject the models that favor corporate profit over learning. I was recently horrified when an acquaintance of mine reported that the nearby university where he teaches had purchased “modules” from some unknown company. He, the instructor of the class, had almost no control over the content, assignments, or lectures of the class that he was “teaching.” Instead, he became a glorified tech operator and grader. This, it seems to me, is not why we hire individuals with unique specialities to teach classes.

The reverse must also be guarded against. Academic associations and unions should proactively fight administrative efforts to own online classes generated by faculty members. There is a distinct danger that once a professor pours concerted effort into creating a novel and interesting online class that the material will then be pimped out as the aforementioned “modules’ to other universities. Or, even locally, the adminstration should not be allowed to replace the allegedly expensive professor with a graduate student or underpaid adjunct who simply takes control of the web materials. The content and structure of a course should be considered a type of intellectual property that belongs to the instructor.

On the faculty side, if we are going to venture into new learning technologies, then we also need to bring with us the best practices that we now take for granted in the brick-and-mortar classroom. Over the past twenty years, for instance, flat out lecturing has come to be seen as one of the least valuable means for engaging students. So I am frequently surprised that much of the online content created for classes simply involves videotaped lectures that have been uploaded for students to watch. Trust me, unless those videos include skateboarding kittens or substantive out takes from Modern Family, the students are barely going to pay attention. Much as we now create exercises and assignments that have students proactively engaged and talking in brick-and-mortar classes, so too should we dump the prerecorded lecture in favor of things that get students engaged online. This might mean that we call upon individuals with programming and technical skills beyond the average humanities professor. One model that intrigued me, for instance, originated in Canada. Students attempted to “solve”some significant historic crimes from the Canadian past. In that instance, the online materials became part of a larger puzzle that students needed to piece together. Along the way, they happened to learn important cultural contexts that informed each crime (racial attitudes, gender assumptions, regional bias). Doesn’t that sound more interesting to you than downloading a 50 minute talking head rambling on about the Articles of Confederation? Creative technological innovations, of course, will require technological and staff investments from universities and colleges. It seems to me, though, given that these courses will ultimately generate more tuition dollars than a brick-and-mortar class, it is the least that they can do.

Don’t let the blog fool you, though. I am remarkably unsavvy when it comes to technology and probably don’t have the best imagination to tackle this problem. Nonetheless, I do think that the time has come when humanities professors have to engage online learning in a serious way. It’s not going anywhere. Our best bet is that we take control of the conversation to show the difference between a quality online learning experience and the hasty for-profit nonsense.

Collegial is as Collegial Does

A few weeks ago, Dr. Crazy had a post about collegiality in academic departments. She suggested some pretty basic notions about how one should behave in such an environment. To crudely summarize, she suggests that collegiality involves no more than simply doing your job at its most basic level: teach, research, and serve to the best of one’s abilities as outlined in your contract.

I tend to agree with that assessment. Nonetheless, it strikes me that such a straightforward mandate still confuses many professors. So, allow me to provide a simple set of guidelines to help you gauge whether you are an ideal colleague or the professor everybody wishes would just die. Think about which of the following most closely resembles what you might say in these situations.

When it comes time to decide the course schedule for next semester:

Best: “I am willing to teach a mix of upper level and service-oriented courses. While I certainly have preferences about scheduling, I am willing to negotiated with my colleagues to insure that we have a wide distribution of classes throughout the day.”

Fair: “I have several courses that I teach over and over. They serve some basic requirements of the department.”

Bad: “I will only teach classes between the hours of nine and noon. Teaching a survey class is clearly beneath my intellectual talents. Besides, I have a political obligation to offer an incredibly narrow graduate course that only appeals to two students every year.”

Evil: “My class enrollment is by instructor permission only. That way I can make sure that only hot, fit students ever sign up. No fatties!”

When I take the last cup of coffee from the break room:

Best: “I always make a fresh pot of coffee for the next person.”

Fair: “I be sure to shut off the burner so that the whole office doesn’t fill with the smell of scorched coffee.”

Bad: “I demand the secretary make a new pot of coffee.”

Evil: “Coffee? I replaced all that with Postum^© years ago.”

When it comes to time for committee assignments to be made, I think:

Best: “Nobody likes service, but it is a necessary part of keeping any university operating. I will roll up my sleeves and serve on committees when needed.”

Good: “If I really care about a particular issue, I am willing to serve on a committee or two.”

Bad: “Gee, I would serve on some committees, but I think that my decision to have children means that I can neglect my basic duties for which I am paid. Selfish childless people can pick up my slack. After all, what else do they have to do with their empty lives?”

Evil: “I see every committee assignment as a stepping stone to be dean one day.”

My thinking about new hires is usually along the lines of:

Best: “I consider it a basic part of my job to advocate vigorously for new positions based on my particular intellectual training. Nonetheless, I also recognize that a diverse set of perspectives and coverage is required for a really solid academic department. Therefore, I am willing to yield on hiring decisions when other priorities are clear.”

Fair: “I will work really hard to hire people in my immediate field."

Bad: “If I didn’t get my way when a job position was conceived, I will do everything in my power to sabotage this search. It’s better to have a failed search than for other people to have won a new hire.”

Evil: “If a candidate wants this job, they better invite me to their hotel room during the campus visit.”

When Running a Meeting:

Best: “I have a clear agenda and will get you out of here in an hour.”

Fair: “The agenda is set, but everybody can speak their mind on whatever topic they desire. It’s fine with me if we have to spend the whole afternoon chatting.”

Bad: “Was there a meeting scheduled today?”

Evil: “Let me tell you what we already decided as a committee.”

When Attending a Meeting:

Best: “I did my due diligence and read any pre-circulated materials before I arrived. I listen attentively and will give my opinion based on a well reasoned argument about the best needs of the unit.”



Fair: “I didn’t really have time to read up on this particular issue. Still, I’ll go along with whatever the majority has to say.”

Bad: “I would have attended this meeting, but I needed to wash my cat.”

Evil: “I am only here to point out how much I really, really, really hate the chair of this meeting.”

When I find that I am in the minority on an issue facing the department:

Best: “I will voice my opinion and give my reasons for objecting. In the end, though, I must have faith in democracy.”

Fair: “I will withhold my opinion but then complain bitterly to colleagues over drinks later.”

Bad: “I take this decision very personally. It shows that there is a larger conspiracy at play to take away my power and agency!”

Evil: “I pack a gun.”

When advising students about what courses to take:

Best: “I emphasize the strengths of the department. I also take some time to consider the particular interests of the student and their own career ambitions. My goal is always to give a student the widest range of perspectives that we offer.”

Fair: “I am vaguely aware of what my colleagues teach, but, whatever. I guess that I wouldn’t actively dissuade a student from taking a class with another professor -- if that is what they really want to do.”

Bad: “I take the time to trash all the colleagues in my unit that I dislike. A student should leave my office knowing that my department is nothing but a snake pit of dissension filled with people who aren’t half as smart as I am.”

Evil: “I take the time to explain the power of the dark side of the force and invite the student to become my protégé. Together we can topple the department chair and rule together.”

When serving on a masters thesis or dissertation committee:

Best: “I read the entire thesis/dissertation. My goal is to provide strategies for the student to revise the work to the best of hir abilities.”



Fair: “I read the entire thesis/dissertation. My goal is to get this over with as soon as possible.”

Bad: “I read some of the thesis/dissertation. My goal is to show that I personally know a lot more about this particular topic than the student.”

Evil: “I plagiarized several chapters of this thesis/dissertation. Nonetheless, I will still vote to fail the student just because I can.”

During the summer:

Best: “I drink a lot.”

Fair: “I drink a lot.”

Bad: “I drink a lot.”

Evil: “I drink a lot.”

When a hardworking undergraduate student tells me that ze is applying for graduate school:

Best: “I am supportive and offer to write a letter. Still, I do provide a candid assessment of the job market and encourage the student to think about the time, energy, money and effort that goes into obtaining an advanced degree.”

Fair: “I write a letter of recommendation and wish the student well.”

Bad: “I write a letter of recommendation but also frighten the student with horror students about the academic world. I cite the Center of Gravitas as evidence of academia's moral bankruptcy.”

Evil: “I promise to write a letter of recommendation but never quite get around to it. I assure the student that, even if the job market is terrible, they will absolutely get a tenure-track job because they are the exception.”

When a colleague in my field publishes a book:

Best: “I buy and read it.”

Fair: “I send an e-mail of congratulations.”

Bad: “Do I have colleagues in my field?”

Evil: “I tell anyone who will listen that I would have written a much better version of that same book.”

When editing an academic journal:

Best: “My goal is to give authors clear and concise feedback as quickly as possible. No journal can accept everything submitted, but I work really hard to be fair and prompt. I understand that my authors often have tenure and/or promotion pressures. Any delay only harms their research agendas and makes my journal look unprofessional.”

Fair: “I farm out a lot of my duties and depend almost entirely on others’ opinions. Still, I aim for an initial turn around of six to eight weeks. After all, I have a basic competence in my job.”

Bad: “I decide that my journal will devote itself to publishing many, many ‘Special Editions’ so that I can reward all my friends by printing their articles. Others can submit manuscripts, but they really shouldn’t hold their breath.”

Evil: “I regularly sit on manuscripts for over a year and a half (or longer if I can!). When I do finally get around to making a decision, it’s usually a negative one. Heck, somebody has to teach these young scholars a cold hard lesson. If the author doesn’t like it, then they shouldn’t have bothered my prestigious journal with their pitiful article in the first place.”

My office:

Best: “Is a place where I work quietly.”

Fair: “Is a place where I meet students from time to time.”

Bad: “Is a place where I can really turn up the volume on my music.”

Evil: “Smells suspiciously of sulphur.”

When a colleague in my field comes up for tenure:

Best: “I diligently read as much of the file as possible. During the meeting, I aim to make sure that every candidate gets a fair hearing by offering well informed insights on the research, service, and teaching.”

Fair: “I read the cover letter to the file and dip in and out of the other materials. Unless there are clear problems, my default impulse is always to vote in favor of the candidate.”

Bad: “I didn’t really have time to read the file. I’ll go to the meeting and try to get a sense of which way the wind is blowing and then make up my mind.”

Evil: “I met with the candidate a full year before they went up for tenure to remind them that they needed my vote to advance. If they didn’t spend the past several months groveling, it’s curtains!”

The secretary/support staff in my unit:

Best: “Are not paid nearly enough given that they do 90 percent of the heavy lifting! I support any effort to improve their working conditions.”



Fair: “Do their job well and I acknowledge that.”

Bad: “Are fine, but I don’t understand why they won’t pick up my dry cleaning.”

Evil: “Should only be paid for nine months given that is the length of the academic year.”

If I had not become an academic, I would have:

Best: “Found another avenue to share my knowledge and research with a wider public. My goal would always be to find a way to enrich our intellectual conversations.”

Fair: “Found a job that allowed me to earn much more money.”

Bad: “Run for public office as a Republican so that I could dismantle higher education as we know it.”

Evil: “Harvested the souls of the innocent.”

The role model who influenced my career:

Best: “The hardworking professors who took an interest in me as a student. They not only taught me the knowledge that I need for this job, but also what it means to be a committed educator.”

Fair: “Wonder Woman.”

Bad: “I did it on my own. Nobody ever helped me and I was always falling through the cracks.”

Evil: “Pope Benedict XVI.”

When writing a book review for a journal:

Best: “I highlight the strengths of the book and the author’s intent. I limit my critique to one or two questions at most. It is important to recognize the hard work that goes into writing any monograph.”

Fair: “I offer faint praise, but conclude with criticism.”

Bad: “Most of my review is simply critique about what the author might have written but didn't. I can only think of holes in the work and imagine an entirely different book than the one that I am reviewing.”

Evil: “Every book review is just an opportunity to ruin somebody’s career.”

When a colleague passes me in the hall:

Best: “I greet them and ask how they are doing.”

Fair: “I smile warmly.”

Bad: “I avoid eye contact.”

Evil: “I make a distinctive rattling sound.”

Cursed Cursive

Several years ago I briefly dated a man with young children. Anybody who knows me can well imagine why that relationship did not last more than a few weeks. I feel about children the way Republicans feel about taxes. They might be necessary for the continuation of society, but whatever. That, though, is not the point of this post. What did stick with me from that dating experience was that he once mentioned that his daughter was not learning cursive writing in school. After all, he argued, they do everything on the computer now anyway. Why would they need such an antiquated skill? Living in the shadow of Decaying Midwestern Urban Center, I figured that this astounding news was just another local failing in an already pretty dismal school system. The antipathy that the rest of the nation feels for this region had now cost students the very ability to communicate on paper! Not only do we not deserve jobs or a well-maintained infrastructure, but it appeared that we also shouldn’t be able to jot down a grocery list with speed! It always feels good to have righteous indignation about the nation’s uncaring attitude toward the industrial Midwest.

The past year of teaching, however, revealed that this was no local anomaly. You see I taught the U.S. History survey for the first time in many years. Consider it the jury duty of the history professorate. Since I do my best to give even freshman students an idea of what professionals historians actual do, I often assign some significant amount of writing. I began to notice that students took an unusually long time to complete even the most basic in-class essay. Even a paragraph took what seemed like a century. Then I observed that each of them always submitted about a page of neatly block-printed prose. Each letter of each word seemed like it had been crafted with more attention than John Hancock’s signature on a forged ship’s manifesto. Well, if John Hancock had never learned cursive writing. It brought me back to what the former boyfriend had mentioned about his own children. Had we reached the point where students no longer even knew how to write cursive? Little did I know it was deeper than that.



It really did not cross my mind again for another several weeks. In the meantime, I had assigned a document reader of historical sources entitled American History Firsthand: Working with Primary Sources. This choice proved imperfect to be sure. After all, this careful collection of materials lacked a single document from any Latina/o – ever. Apparently the editors imagined that no such people existed in this country despite the fact that they are now the largest minority population. But I digress.

I selected this particular reader, despite its implicit anti-Latino bias, because of what it did do: mixing popular culture, visual, and political documents in one binding. It also reproduced those documents as closely as they might have appeared in an actual archive. This, I thought, simulated the work of actual historians without having to march all my students to an actual archive. After all, the idea of 170 students descending on a manuscript collection would make any archivist sweat more than Rick Santorum in a gay sauna.



The students in this class performed quite well and showed that they had smart and savvy skills. One day, though, when it came time to discuss a series of letters in the reader, they became oddly silent. After using up the usual bag of tricks to try and promote conversation, I asked them what was the deal? With some hemming and hawing, a lone brave student admitted that he couldn’t read the documents because they were in cursive. The rest of the students, happy that he had released the shameful truth, all agreed that the letters were unfathomable. This blew my mind. I mean, it was one thing to have never mastered writing cursive, but reading it was now out of the question? To be clear, too, I did not assign colonial-era documents written with the fluff and frills of old English. That mess could screw anybody up with all those "f's" that are really "s's". No, no. These were something written in the twentieth century with a clear and simple penmanship. I became curious and asked if they learned any cursive at all. They acknowledged that they spent a few days or so on it back in grade school. It was enough to learn a signature, but otherwise, why bother? They could type whatever they needed.



I suppose that there is a logic in the demise of cursive. When was the last time any of us wrote an actual letter to somebody? Anything longer than a sticky note is generally done on a computer. Yet, I can’t explain my unease that cursive is leaving the world.

It is peculiar that I should think such a thing since I have actually always struggled with my penmanship. In grade school I had only one Achilles heel to an otherwise spotless academic record. After all, I played well with others, never ran with scissors, and only occasionally ate library paste. Yet, my report card always listed a “carrottop” for handwriting. For those who did not attend Albuquerque Public Schools, a carrottop was this symbol: ^. It basically meant a “D”, but apparently educational theory in the 1980s suggested letter grades would be too demeaning to a third grader. A carrottop must have sounded so much more pleasant. It’s something you would give Peter Rabbit on his report card. Well, if Peter Rabbit’s future education hung precariously by a thread because he appeared functionally illiterate.

Forever after that point teachers would usually have only one complaint about my school work: “The boy’s handwriting is so messy and small that I almost went blind trying to read it.” It would not be until my freshman year in college that my handwriting improved dramatically. Oddly enough, it was a semester of Russian that turned things around quite a bit. While I can do nothing in that language other than ask directions to the Bolshoi theater, attempting to learn Russian had an odd side effect of transforming my penmanship. Having to learn an entirely new script meant that I also indirectly relearned how to write in cursive in English. This is not to say that I now write in calligraphy (I still field many complaints about my writing), but it is a vast improvement.



This peculiar knowledge about writing cursive puts an odd generational divide between my students and me. For instance, I will have to remember when I grade their papers to block print my comments. Oh, look at me, thinking they would actually read my comments on their papers! Silly, optimistic, GayProf. Nonetheless, it feels quite weird to have such a big gap between them and me. I am not that much older.

True, there are many other things that I do that would seem totally anachronistic to them as well. I proudly drive a car with a manual transmission – Anything else really isn’t really driving. I grill only with charcoal – Anything else isn’t barbequing, it’s just cooking outside. I still pay almost all my bills with actual checks – Anything else seems like a one-way path to identity theft. I therefore long ago accepted that I fell far behind in the social/technological world of my students. I would know if I was tweeting, right?

So it makes me a bit sad to think cursive is at as great a risk as Lindsay Lohan is for a relapse. If you remember this blog then you already know that I am more than a bit inclined to nostalgia. This morning’s coffee has already become a treasured bittersweet memory of something now gone.



The loss of cursive, though, really leaves me blue. It only speeds us even faster to becoming a cyborg nation. As much as I struggled with cursive, I do remember that learning it felt like a rite of passage on the way to adulthood. My mother always had to translate the notes or birthday cards that my grandparents sent in the mysterious scroll. Learning to write (even feebly) in the same manner felt the same as breaking the code of the Rosetta Stone to my nine-year old self. Now it appears that later generations will find the code forever locked to them.

Poor Life Choices

Lately I have been thinking about graduate education in the humanities. Perhaps it would be a bit extreme to say that I have been having a moral crisis. Like St. Thomas, though, I sometimes have my doubts.

It’s not that I give credence to right-wing attacks on humanities research. Nothing drives me up the wall more than to switch on some local news story about an illiterate state legislator claiming that the humanities are irrelevant and a waste of tax payer money. I have written here and elsewhere about how critical an engagement with the humanities is for an informed and responsible citizenry, mostly to keep them from electing illiterate state legislators. Ethnic studies research also has a critical role to play as the nation’s demographics continue to shift. Ironically (in an Alanis Morrisette sorta way) it is at the very moment that companies and government agencies are desperate for individuals who can intelligently engage with minority communities, especially Latinos, that many universities are slashing their ethnic studies programs. I am looking at you, University of Texas system.



My concerns about graduate studies in the humanities are a bit more pragmatic. I have wondered about the wisdom of churning out armies of Ph.D.’s when the opportunity to land a traditional tenure–track position is becoming more and more remote. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" or something . . .

Do we have any ethical obligation to resist the temptation to admit graduate students when we know this to be the case? How do we balance that obligation with an equal investment in insuring that new research on critical topics like race, gender, sexuality, class, disability studies and other fields moves forward?

Sadly, I have no answers to these questions. Instead, I can only think about the type of advice that I would give to newly admitted Ph.D. students in the Social Sciences or the Humanities. Hopefully you already received some clear-cut guidance before you applied to these programs. If not, here are some things to consider as you start a new program. It might be harsh, but it’s only because I love you.

1. Do not expect to get an academic job. Surely I can’t be the first person to mention that the academic job market is beyond miserable. A few very lucky folks land a coveted tenure-track position, but then a few lucky folks also win the lottery. Many others are placed into some mighty abysmal working arrangements as part of the adjunct machine. Universities and colleges, regrettably, know that they can acquire cheap labor and offer no guarantees because there is a surplus of Ph.D.’s on the market. Only you can decide if you want to work those long hours for minimal pay (and probably do without health benefits). It seems wiser, though, to prepare yourself to walk away from the t-t market. Consider obtaining an advanced degree as the opportunity itself. You have six years (or so) to really delve into topics that interest you. That is a luxury that can be enjoyed on its own.

2. Learn to combat feelings of being an intellectual imposter. If you find yourself feeling like everybody around you is a bit smarter or has read more, don’t worry. They are all thinking the exact same thing. I won’t deny that admissions to a graduate program depends upon a range of subjective criteria. Nonetheless, you would be surprised by the level of consensus that usually forms around candidates during admissions. This means that you should rest assured that you are just as bright and capable as any other student in the program.



3. Learn to combat feelings of being an intellectual superior. This is the flip side of number two. Indeed, many students vacillate between these two extremes. Graduate school can turn you downright bipolar. You have talents, to be sure, but they do not surpass those around you. It has seemed to me that once graduate students go down the path of hyper-ego their minds close faster than a vegan restaurant in Texas.

4. Use the gentle cycle on the washing machine. Have you looked at your stipend recently? You better make your existing wardrobe last because there are no trips to the mall in your future. It’s either that or join a nudist colony by your fifth year.



5. Remember that being a graduate student is a remarkably privileged position. This might seem hard to imagine given the brutal hours that you spend toiling away in the library. Nonetheless, you are now part of a tiny educated elite in this country whatever your economic or social class prior to admission. Estimates suggest that only 3 percent of the nation’s population holds a Ph.D. There are many mighty smart people who would have jumped at the chance to continue their education, but circumstances prevented it. This isn’t to say that the stress you feel is not real or that institutions can’t do better. Still, remember that you aren’t exactly shoveling coal for a living either.

6. Avoid having sex with faculty members in your department/immediate field. In my time, I have been propositioned by faculty who outranked me and also by graduate students. I don’t mention this to make claims about my innate hotness (Although . . .), rather it is to suggest that such things are a common turn of events in the academic world. It seems to me if you are a woman or a gay man, your chances of fielding unexpected/unwanted advances are pretty high. For some gay men, it’s how they say hello.



It might also be the case that you are occasionally dazzled by a faculty member who really pushes your buttons. Never, though, does it seem like a particularly good idea when there is such an obvious difference in power. Coming up with polite ways to decline is your best option.

Feel free to have sex with faculty members in departments far removed from your own. If you are in the humanities, there is no reason not to take a tumble with somebody in civil engineering should the mood and opportunity appear. I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

7. Learn the metric system. Okay, this doesn't really have much to do with your success in the program. Still, it's embarrassing that the U.S. is far behind on converting to metric.

8. Summers are not vacations. Take a poll of your department’s junior faculty and find out how they spent their summer months. Chances are you will hear things like “researching,” “writing,” “visiting archives,” or “field work.” If you hear the word “vacation,” generally it means they have dragged their significant other along with them in a simple attempt to appease them. “Yeah, I really needed to spend some serious time at the Iowa State Archive,” one might say, “so I took my husband and we made a vacation out of it! I don’t care what they say, Des Moines has lots of summer surprises.” By “vacation,” they really mean that their spouse got to spend time with them late at night and on the weekends when the archives closed. The spouse’s “surprise” was that they found themselves being a dedicated xerox operator the rest of the time.

This is a window into the life of an academic, especially one who is early in hir career. The demands of the regular academic year generally permit only scattered time to focus on a research agenda. Summers become precious opportunities to really bare down and work. If you plan to spend the four months lounging around a pool without cracking an academic journal or book, save yourself some heartache and drop out of graduate school now.



9. Tend to your personal life. Sacrifices will inevitably have to be made, but try not to let grad school take complete control of your life. Have plans to get married? No reason not to do so. I mean, you’ll still end up divorced eventually, so why not get the clock running now? At least this way you’ll still be relatively young when your first marriage goes south. Want children? Go for it (Although, as always, I would suggest that one think carefully about the larger environmental implications of producing another weapon of massive consumption). Don’t have a family plan? Rather frequent bathhouses? As long as you have an endless supply of condoms, I say make it a weekly ritual if that’s your thing. In other words, there is really not a reason to delay doing other things simply for graduate school. This doesn’t mean that you don’t still need to do the actual work, but I haven’t seen any reward come to those who put off their personal life.



10. Keep an eye on the liquor consumption. It’s hardly an original story when one turns to gin when feeling a bit stressed out. I am not a teetotaler (trust me), but it is always well worth thinking about how much liquor you consume. Avoid the binges or drinking every day. Besides, it’s an expensive habit and that money could go to other extravagances – like protein. An ideal scholar ends up with a classroom building named after hir; a less than ideal scholar ends up with the boardroom at Tanqueray named after hir.



11. Come to terms with the fact that you will not likely live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston, or another of the nation’s great cities. Back in the nineteenth century, when most of this nation’s universities started, popular thinking associated cities with vice, pollution, and unhealthy living. To insure that young adults remained morally and physically in shape, the logic went, universities needed to be as far away from urban areas as possible. Better that they hang out with the cows. That was before the nation faced the epidemic of bovine gangs. Personally, I blame the alfalfa black-market.



Now we reap the legacy of nineteenth-century discourse as most of us in the academic world live in small towns rather than metropolises. This, I think, is one of the hardest things that we have to come to terms with for this job, especially if you’re gay (where the number of other gay people is necessarily going to be quite small). I have no solution to offer, which is probably why Tanqueray named that boardroom after me.

12. Learn how to communicate your ideas to a wide audience. There are good reasons to delve deeply into a particular subfield or methodology. Nonetheless, you’ll be taking your dissertation on a road tour before you know it. If you find yourself at conferences getting asked questions about your main argument (or, worse, not getting asked any questions at all), it’s not the audience’s problem. You have to know how to pitch things in a way that is approachable from a wider range of disciplines.

Keep your chin up. In the end, graduate school is mostly about sticking through it.

Ethnic Studies is for Everyone

Arizona’s legislature and governor recently decided to try to end ethnic studies within the state’s public schools. While it might be easy to ridicule Arizona (fun, too), we should be careful about assuming that the Grand Canyon state is anomalous in these efforts. It is merely one piece of an increasingly reactionary right-wing effort to control education curriculum. Far-right members of the Board of Education in Texas also recently attempted to alter that state’s “social studies” standards with a similar philosophy as Arizona: Students shouldn’t learn anything about this nation’s past that might make them feel bad.

One of the more astounding elements in the Texas changes is that they sought to downplay Thomas Jefferson’s role within the curriculum because of his critique of Christianity. That’s deep, man. How much more conservative can Texas get? When you start thinking that one of the slave-holding, elite “founding fathers” was just “too liberal” you know you’ve crossed into a new horizon of crazy. I imagine that the only place further to the political right you could go next would be to start arguing that George III wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Next thing you know, the Texas school board will be suggesting that the U.S. war for Independence was just some socialist conspiracy, what with their demands for a government that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.



Leaders in Arizona couched their animosity to ethnic studies as really being about defending the ideals of the nation. Tom Horne, the architect of Arizona’s measure, pulled off a neat rhetorical trick that the right has found so useful these days. He posited that programs initiated to combat institutional racism are, in fact, the “real racism.” “The most offensive thing to me, fundamentally, is dividing kids by race,” Horne stated to the New York Times. Tucson’s ethnic studies programs (where Latino/a children make up 56 percent of the students enrolled) particularly irked Horne. He claimed that existing Mexican-American classes “are teaching a radical ideology in Raza, including that Arizona and other states were stolen from Mexico and should be given back.” Of course, Horne never bothered to actually attend any of these classes or find out their daily content. Nope. Why worry about things like that when you are ceratin you are right?

Really Horne gives ethnic studies teachers/professors too much credit. As I often say, I can’t convince my students of the need to use the spell checker before they submit their assignments, much less alter their political views about the nation (nor is that my goal).

Horne wants a new curriculum that depicts his fairytale version of the nation with an education focused on the “individual” How one can talk about a nation only through individuality seems to be a paradox to me, but what do I know?



Now, I haven’t been involved in Arizona’s ethnic studies programs, so I am as ignorant as Horne to their particular content. It would be foolish to comment about it without more first hand knowledge. So, the rest of this post is not about the Arizona public schools in particular.

I do know ethnic studies programs broadly, though, and can imagine that Horne is operating off of some pretty outdated notions of Chicano Studies. Most Chicano/a Studies programs would indeed encourage students to question the intent and results of the U.S. Mexican War. In doing so, they aren’t offering a radical reinterpretation of historical events, but instead offering students opportunities to think critically about hotly contested issues that were, in fact, alive in the nineteenth century (even Abraham Lincoln believed the U.S.’s rationale for the war to be dubious). But when was the last time that you heard any Latino/a scholar, politician, or activist invoke Chicano nationalism (the idea that the U.S. is unredeemable and Chicano/as should break off to form a separate nation)? That form of Chicano nationalism has dropped out of the popular discourse so much that I have to explain the very idea to my students when we reach the sixties and seventies. Otherwise they assume “Chicano nationalists” were deeply patriotic toward the U.S. So, you might say that Horne and his ilk are battling the Ghost of Chicano Past.



These recent moves in Texas and Arizona suggest that the far right is looking to win votes by appealing to people’s worst intentions. Apparently hating the gays isn’t the vote getter that it used to be for the GOP, so they are reverting back to the tried-and-true in U.S. history: exploiting anxieties about racial difference.

All of this comes at the same time that there has been a lot of hand wringing at Big Midwestern University about the future of its own ethnic studies programs. The omnipresent budget crisis that exists across academia has led some to suggest that ethnic studies programs are unnecessarily costly. This is somewhat absurd given that ethnic studies programs’ operating costs aren’t even a drop in the bucket of the whole university. Nonetheless, cuts must be made somewhere. Proposals have ranged anywhere from eliminating Chicano/a Studies and other ES programs entirely to creating a monolithic ethnic studies program that will “include everybody.” While most scholars (and anybody who thinks for more than five minutes) discount the idea that we now live in a “post-racial nation,” some are nonetheless suggesting that individual ethnic studies programs have passed their prime. Previous arguments that the individual units each provide much needed and distinct service to the campus by providing diversity no longer hold. The message has been clear: The ethnic studies programs must adapt to the current model of consumer student demands or die. BMU wants to see students in seats. With all of these attacks on ethnic studies programs, we may well ask, have ethnic studies programs become anachronistic?



Readers won’t be surprised to learn that I think it is premature to dig a grave for ethnic studies. Besides, when the time comes, ethnic studies would much rather be cremated.

Ethnic Studies Programs still address key needs within the nation’s schools and universities. Rather than shirking from these attacks or going on the defensive, it may well be worth the effort for ethnic studies programs to reevaluate their core missions and goals. For my part, I’ll talk specifically about Latino Studies.

No single history or literature class can cover everything about the United States in great detail. Added into that is the fact that many (most?) U.S. history professors and teachers continue to omit any mention of Laitno/as at all in their course content. Specific courses on ethnic groups permit us to consider unique experiences within the U.S. They provide basic knowledge that all citizens in the U.S. can use. Had he taken a Latino Studies course, for instance, Vaughn Ward, the Republican congressional candidate from Idaho, might not have made the huge gaffe of declaring Puerto Rico a separate country.

As many attempted to point out in the Arizona case,“heritage” students do find education more rewarding and personally relevant if they are able to engage with materials related to their own sense of cultural and racial identity. Ethnic studies units provide support and a fundamental knowledge about the histories, experiences, and artistic expressions of groups that are not often discussed.



It is a mistake, though, to assume that ethnic studies programs can (or do) only serve “ethnic” students. Horne and others erroneously imagined that the existing Chicano/a studies programs excluded non-Latino/a students (which they did not). On the contrary, regardless of a student’s personal racial identity, ethnic studies programs provide a cultural and intellectual competence to think critically about this increasingly diverse nation. Race-studies units work in partnership with women’s studies and LGBTQQ studies to provide alternative perspectives on the history and experiences of various groups within the United States.

Much to Horne’s dismay, ethnic studies programs reveal that this country wasn’t (isn’t) always a fair place. Certainly the nation has given Horne a good ride, a nice standard of living, and political access. Had he learned more about ethnic studies, though, he would learn that his individual experience cannot be translated to an entire nation’s worth of people. Racism, homophobia, sexism, and other forms of social inequalities have prevented the country from living up to its self proclaimed goals. Indeed, he might even ask the historical question, “If the U.S. is a land of such opportunity and egalitarianism, just why did Chicano/a activists ever advocate breaking off from it?” Chicano/a activists in the sixties and seventies developed cultural-historical narratives that were therapeutic at the time, but as mythical as Horne’s imagining of a race-blind U.S. He could condemn Chicano/a activists if he likes, but their experiences and strategies are nonetheless part of U.S. history.

Providing exposure to the unique experiences of ethnic groups remains a key element of ethnic studies programs. To expand their usefulness and explain their value to those seeking to trim the budget, ethnic studies programs will need to establish themselves as providing key support for students in a variety of careers. While politicians and scholars are losing sleep about the future of ethnic studies programs, professionals in health, law, education, and marketing are already well aware of the potential value of ethnic studies. These are fields that see first hand the rapid transformation of this nation and the emergence of Latinos as the nation’s largest minority. These are also fields that are desperate for professionals who have the cultural competence to enhance their services to diverse populations.

To end, I’ll say that I am always surprised when folks like Mr. Horne accuse professionals in ethnic studies of being irrationally angry or “hating America.” Where do I hear people saying that we should hate the government? It seems to me that these days that message is much more likely to come from the right wing Tea baggers. They tend to ignore that the current government was elected by a hefty majority of voters or that their radical views are far outside of the mainstream.

Ethnic studies, women’s studies, LGBTQQ studies, disability studies, and others do remind us that the nation has lots more work to do before it can claim to be governed by the consent of the people. People on the right are mistaken, however, if they imagine that these units are fueled by anger. On the contrary, these units actually have a tremendous optimism that the future can be better than the past for everybody in the country. Pointing out institutional inequities isn’t the end game for ethnic studies. Ethnic studies programs also interrogate the variety of strategies that various groups have employed to battle and transform institutional inequalities. Scholars in those fields have faith that learning from the hard work of previous generations will ultimately lead to the nation becoming the egalitarian republic it pledges to be.