Archive for the 'Academia' Category

From friend to mentor: a short note on teaching and boundaries

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 7, 2008
in Academia, Emotional and Sexual Boundaries and Teaching
. 3 Comments

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve had a whole new batch of “older men/younger women” relationship emails come by way. Perhaps it’s seasonal: in the spring, a young man or woman’s fancy turns to love and baseball; in the fall, it turns to age-disparate relationships and boundary violations? One wonders.

I can’t post about all the emails I get, and those that simply repeat old queries are better off looking at my growing archives under older men/younger women, or perhaps student crushes. But there’s always something new to think about; “Kay” wrote to me last week:

I have (a) professor whom I adore and who I know is keenly interested in my future…he has said before how much he enjoys my being his student. I have nothing but platonic interest in him (your posts on understanding the difference between mental and physical arousal have been VERY helpful). I’d really like to be his mentee as well…but it would be more of a big brother connection as he is only 34.

The reason I am writing in is because I am not sure how to re-route our initial relationship building. The first time I slapped eyes on him last year I thought “peer.” He was still an adjunct, finishing his PhD, and applying for the asst. prof. job he currently has. He’s the same age as many of my friends, and we have a lot in common. I have previously invited him to go play trivia with a group (he declined), and when I swing by his office I talk about movies and music instead of the DSM-IV. I was trying to make him my friend, not my professor and I am embarrassed when I think of the transparency of my motives.

So, the question: What can a young female student to do help build the best and most appropriate mentor-mentee relationships? I’m sure I’m not the only person who has, after a time, realized that their initial motives in relationship-building were slightly askew. More specifically for my situation, how can I let him know that “friend” is off the agenda? Any advice would be helpful…I’ve been feeling as awkward as arse around him lately.

It’s a good question Kay asks. In both graduate school and undergrad, mentor/mentee relationships are vitally important to both students and faculty. There are few aspects of my job from which I derive more deep and enduring satisfaction than the opportunity to mentor young men and women. And looking back on my own days at Berkeley and UCLA, I’m eternally grateful to the men and women (Fred Tubach, Scott Waugh, Marilyn Adams) who served as my academic advisers and guides. Students need to be encouraged to seek out mentors from the ranks of the faculty, and professors need to be reminded that nurturing students’ intellectual and personal growth, while not always among our stated tasks, is our moral responsibility.

Where a student and professor are close in age, each can be tempted to adopt a “friend” approach to the mentoring relationship. And on one level, there’s nothing wrong with that! I talk about music with my students, I talk about veganism and politics and fashion. I understand well how “small talk” (as if veganism could ever be “small talk”!) serves as a lubricant for social interaction. A discussion of common interests doesn’t need to obscure the healthy hierarchy at work in a mentor/mentee relationship. At the same time, new junior faculty in particular need to remember that their own common unease and uncertainty about their newly acquired status doesn’t mean that the power they now exercise isn’t real. Kay’s prospective mentor has gone from being a graduate student to tenure-track faculty in the same department in which she studies — and he, as well as she, needs to be keenly aware that that upgraded role has a real impact on everyone.

If Kay’s professor seems unclear about his role, it’s not her job to set the boundaries for him. At the same time, Kay can do a lot to make clear how she sees him. Little things can set the tone: visiting him only during his listed conference hours rather than meeting him for coffee. (There’s nothing wrong with students and teachers having coffee together, of course — but usually that’s best after a very clear line of demarcation has been set up. And that line is best set up initially inside, rather than outside, the office.) While calling him “Dr.” or “Prof.” when she has previously addressed him by his first name is probably a step too far too soon, directing the conversation onto academic rather than personal topics ought to do the trick. Continue reading ‘From friend to mentor: a short note on teaching and boundaries’

“Elitism”, privilege, and competition: some thoughts on the new Deresiewicz article

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 22, 2008
in Academia, Pasadena City College, Teaching and Youth
. 19 Comments

Marian, a periodic reader, sends me a link to this William Deresiewicz article in the American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. It was almost exactly a year ago that I responded to another Deresiewicz American Scholar article in this post.

As with his essay on consensual faculty-student relationships, Deresiewicz in his current piece on academic elitism takes a good idea and promptly takes it just one step too far. His basic thesis this time around: an Ivy-league education makes you incapable of connecting with ordinary folks. His first bit of evidence? His own inability to connect with a plumber standing in his kitchen.

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this.

I know I’m often accused of making universal applications out of my own experience, but I don’t think even I have done something quite so risible as what Deresiewicz does here. The idea that a first-rate education somehow renders the recipient of that education clueless about the real world is a classic American slur; anti-intellectualism is a potent force in American politics, and has been at least since the Andrew Jackson Administration. It’s disappointing, but perhaps not surprising, that some academics who ought to know better find themselves joining the chorus of those who decry the “useless” nature of top-notch higher education.

It’s all too easy to offer counter-anecdotes. Barack Obama went to Harvard Law, for heaven’s sake. There are many criticisms that might be made of him, but an inability to connect with those who were not similarly well-educated is not one of them. And though I’ve never sent a transfer student to Harvard undergrad, I have had former students of mine go on to graduate school at that most famous of American universities. I’ve had exceptional students here at Pasadena City College who have transferred to other Ivies, such as Cornell, Penn, and Columbia. I’ve seen first-generation students from working-class Mexican-American families go “back East” and come home to put the education they received to work within their communities. Most of my colleagues could say the same. Continue reading ‘“Elitism”, privilege, and competition: some thoughts on the new Deresiewicz article’

Work, family, culture, and success: some thoughts on Asian and Latino achievement

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 16, 2008
in Academia, Ethnicity, Pasadena City College and Working
. 10 Comments

In summer school, the gap between what I want to do and what I have time to do yawns particularly wide. I’m lecturing five hours a day four days a week, and that doesn’t count prep time. I’m not complaining, mind, just sayin’ that it makes it hard to get the blogging in that I would like. I’m trying to work up a longer post on feminist Christian sexual ethics, but that’s going to be delayed for a while.

Just a quick link to an interesting Times story this morning: Trying to Bridge the Grade Divide in L.A. Schools. Hector Becerra’s Column One offering explores the wide (and, some say, rapidly widening) success differential between Latino and Asian students in California high schools. Becerra visits Lincoln High School in East Los Angeles, a famous institution with a large percentage of both Asian and Hispanic students, and interviews both teachers and kids about the “achievement gap.” At Lincoln, Asians are 15% of the student body — and 50% of the enrollees in Advanced Placement classes. Virtually all of the students, regardless of race, come from working-class, first-generation immigrant families; socio-economics alone do little to account for the disparity.

Lots of familiar explanations crop up, with differing cultural expectations usually topping the list. Continue reading ‘Work, family, culture, and success: some thoughts on Asian and Latino achievement’

“Men are more objective than women”: Second Wavers, Third Wavers, and the complexity of teaching feminism and inter-generational conflict

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 10, 2008
in Academia, Age, Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Male feminists, Mentoring and Teaching
. 3 Comments

It’s taken me far too long, but I finally finished Deborah Siegel’s immensely engaging Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. Deborah is a wonderful writer, and she’s produced the most readable summary of the last forty years of intra-feminist conflict that I’ve seen in print. I may find a way to work it into a syllabus sometime in the next year or two.

At times, Siegel visits a similar theme to the one Astrid Henry explored in Not My Mother’s Sister, a book I reviewed here. Read together, Henry and Siegel offer a sobering account of how the conflict between so-called “Second” and “Third” wave feminists emerged and has continued to play out. Both books were, of course, written well before Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House formally began, but the issues raised by her campaign make the two texts (particularly, perhaps, Siegel’s) seem positively prescient.

But what I was keenly aware of as I finished Deborah’s book was the degree to which intra-generation feminist conflict facilitates male privilege. Specifically, it facilitates my privilege as a male gender studies professor.

I don’t spend a lot of time in my women’s studies classes dwelling on my own maleness. I may have a robust ego, but I draw the line at a kind of pedagogical narcissism that invites the students to reflect at length on their feelings about the professor. Still, there’s no point ignoring my maleness, any more than there’s any point ignoring my whiteness or my age. We teach, after all, as embodied persons. All those who can see or hear (and all of my students can do at least one of these tasks) can sense that a man is teaching women’s studies. I’m not the only man in academia doing it (read my tribute to David Allen), but I am the only one doing it at Pasadena City College. It’s appropriate to create a forum where students can question whether a man can or should be teaching feminism to a predominantly female class, and I try and do that at least once a semester. Continue reading ‘“Men are more objective than women”: Second Wavers, Third Wavers, and the complexity of teaching feminism and inter-generational conflict’

“Teaching May Be Hazardous to Your Marriage”: Social scientists and the myth of male weakness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 30, 2008
in Academia, Divorce, Older Men & Younger Women, Teaching and Youth
. 36 Comments

Reader and blogger Treifalicious sends me a link to this PDF file of a 1999 study on college professors and divorce. Published in the journal of Evolution and Human Behavior, it’s melodramatically entitled Teaching may be hazardous to your marriage.

The abstract:

Kenrick et al.’s experiments demonstrate that men who view photographs of physically attractive women or Playboy centerfolds subsequently find their current mates less physically attractive and become less satisfied with their current relationships. What then would be the
cumulative effect of being exposed to young, attractive women on a daily basis? Would there be any real consequences to the men’s dissatisfaction with their relationships? Secondary school teachers and college professors come in contact with more young women at the peak of their reproductive value than others do. The analysis of a large, representative data set from the United States indicates that, while men in general are less likely to be divorced than women, and secondary school teachers and college professors in general are less likely to be divorced than others, simultaneously being male and being a secondary school teacher or college professor statistically increases the likelihood of being divorced We contend that the contrast effect that Kenrick et al. find in their experiments is cumulative and has real
consequences.

It’s an almost laughable study, save for the fact that it’s, well, so bloody infuriating. Here’s the initial premise:

Few occupations and professions afford greater opportunities to come in contact with
women in their teenage years than teachers in secondary and postsecondary schools. These
teachers experience the cumulative effect of exposure to young, attractive women who are at
their peak reproductive value more acutely than people in most other occupations.

I suppose that’s true enough, though I can’t say I think much of the term “peak reproductive value.” No offense intended to teenage moms out there, but in my experience, those who choose to make babies in their thirties often (not always) have more “valuable” resources (time, patience, finances) than those in their “peak” reproductive years.

But then the study’s authors lose me completely. They note that those who teach are slightly more likely to stay unmarried after they divorce, though the difference with the general population is barely significant. But then this whopper:

We believe that there are two possible interpretations for this finding. First,
subsequent to divorce, male teachers and professors may remain unmarried because they prefer
to pursue a series of affairs with female students without marrying them. Second, they may remain unmarried because, due to the cumulative contrast effect, any adult woman they might meet and date after their divorce would still pale in comparison to the young attractive women with whom they come in daily contact.

“Pale in comparison”? Continue reading ‘“Teaching May Be Hazardous to Your Marriage”: Social scientists and the myth of male weakness’

“Our presence is evidence we’ve all screwed up”: defending the community colleges against Professor X

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 28, 2008
in Academia, Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 24 Comments

Via Lauren, this stunningly depressing article by Professor X about life in the basement of the ivory tower. X adjuncts a night class at a community college — which is what I did for one year (1993-94) before I had the great good fortune to get a tenure-track job at the tender age of 26. X teaches English, and he or she is grim about it:

Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest.

Okay, right off the bat, that describes only half of my students at Pasadena City College. Professor X doesn’t get in his night classes the students I’ve been getting in mine for fifteen years — which include not only the academically indifferent but those of exceptional potential whose family circumstances prevent them from attending a four-year college right away. I transfer students to Berkeley, UCLA, Occidental, and USC every year, students who have figured out that taking two years at $20 a unit makes good sense.

The thing about the community college is that I get such an astonishingly wide range of students. In a typical night class of nearly fifty, I will have a few very bright high school kids of perhaps 16 or 17 years of age. I will also have retirees in their 60s and 70s, 30-ish single moms returning to school, and quite a few students between the standard ages of 18-24. Some are very bright, with the skills but not the financial wherewithal to do well at competitive universities; others struggle with learning disabilities or barely average intellectual ability. That breadth of ability is a challenge, but it is also a joy — and anyone who doesn’t find it such should be elsewhere. Continue reading ‘“Our presence is evidence we’ve all screwed up”: defending the community colleges against Professor X’

“Fly, you fools!” A simple answer to the question about where to go to college: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2008
in Academia, Family and Teaching
. 20 Comments

I’ve been getting emails and calls and visits this week from various students who, having been accepted to at least two colleges to which they have applied for transfer admission, are now trying to decide where to go for school.

Let me make it simple: all things being equal (and Berkeley and UCLA are pretty equal in most programs, as are Cal State LA and Sacramento State), go to college as far away as possible from your friends, family, and everything you have known. I don’t know if anyone has copyrighted it yet, so call it the Gandalf theory of higher education. When in doubt, and if you can possibly afford it financially, move away.

So much of a good college education takes place outside of the classroom. Disconnecting from loved ones, if only for a time, is a vital part of becoming an adult. Not everyone has the luxury of making such a choice, but if my advice is asked, my answer is essentially the same as that uttered by Gandalf the Grey in his last words before the Balrog drags him down.

I do understand that some students must live at home for financial reasons. Though I think debt and independence are preferable to solvency and enmeshment, that’s a personal cultural bias on my part, a bias others may not share. I do think that there is much to be said for spending as much time as possible in another corner of the state or country, exposed to different weather, different media markets, different social values.

And for what it’s worth, as someone with an undergrad degree from Cal and a Ph.D. from UCLA, I can say that I loved Berkeley with every fiber of my being. My attachment to Westwood never rose above the tepid. But as they say, your mileage may vary.

UPDATE: I’m bumping this up from the comments section. Daisy at Our Descent offers the exact opposite advice in a lovely post. I’d like to note that my wife shares a view closer to Daisy’s; she graduated from high school in Glendale and headed off to USC, living at home the entire time. She wouldn’t have changed that for the world.

In the end, I acknowledge that giving advice about going to college is like giving advice about whether to have sex at a young age: the right answer is contingent upon a unique set of circumstances surrounding the needs of the particular person inquiring.

I’d point out, though — and this is clearly for a future post, maybe soon — that the desire for autonomy is not evidence of a lack of devotion to family. As I’ve argued before, WASPy families in which men never do more than shake hands to show affection to each other, and where children leave home at 18, never to return, are no less intensely loving for their commitment to formality and personal autonomy.

More on that to come.

Not just a professor, but a mentor: on hiring a new African-Americanist

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 24, 2008
in Academia, Mentoring, Pasadena City College, Race and Teaching
. 3 Comments

As most readers will know, the feminist blogosphere continues to go through an unusually painful period of discussion and debate about race, sex, and intersectionality. And while it really isn’t all about me, I find it, if not ironic, oddly serendipitous that this semester finds me on a hiring committee to select a new African-American specialist for a tenure-track position. The first round of interviews unfold this afternoon and tomorrow.

Confidentiality protocol bars me from disclosing too much about the hiring process, but I can share what has already been made public. After more than two decades, my colleague Pete Mhunzi, who taught both African and African-American history, is retiring. In this depressed budget climate, we had to fight tooth and nail to get a replacement position approved; some in the administration wanted to fill the Africanist position with a series of adjuncts.

At the beginning of the year, we sent out the standard notice for a new tenure-track hire. Because we are a community college, we need someone capable of handling several different intro courses: African-American history; the History of Ancient, Early Modern, and Modern Africa; modern U.S. Survey. We received a number of excellent applications, and starting at noon today, we’ll meet the most promising candidates, the one who survived the “paper screen” process.

When we were first writing the hiring proposal last year, there was some debate amongst the members of the committee about non-academic qualifications. We have only one professor who teaches African and African-American studies; the retiring holder of that position served not only as a classroom professor but also as a mentor to black students on campus, advising the BSA and so forth. Though just three decades ago, the campus was nearly 25% black, today the percentage of African-American students has plummeted to the mid-single digits. Some of that is due to the changing demographic of the San Gabriel Valley and of Southern California in general, some of that is due, frankly, to a decline in the number of African-American high school graduates who are attending any kind of college.

As far as I — and the other members of our committee — were concerned, it’s vital that the new faculty member we choose be committed not only to mentoring all students, but have a particular interest in working with young African-American men and women. Of course, this doesn’t mean we asked for or are demanding that the person we hire be themselves black. (Even with tenure, if I, as a member of a sitting hiring committee, announced on a public blog that race was a qualifying factor, I’d be in a massive heap of trouble. Heck, I might not be allowed to serve on a committtee again. Wait a minute… naw, bad idea.) Continue reading ‘Not just a professor, but a mentor: on hiring a new African-Americanist’

Trojan Traurigkeit

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 11, 2008
in Academia and Memories
. 16 Comments

So, we’ve been having a battle royale in the feminist blogosphere this week. If you read the blogs, you know about it. Heck, I’ve had over 100 190 comments on a post for the first time since last fall, before my readership dropped during my January hiatus.

But other things matter, like Russell Arben Fox’s outstanding post about “treating cultists right”. It’s about the Fundamentalist LDS church in Texas and the government’s raid thereupon; Russell is a first-rate Mormon intellectual, and his piece is most welcome.

I was very unhappy to read this in the Los Angeles Times this morning: USC Will Disband German Department. Apparently demand has fallen for German language and literature courses, and a university that aspires to be one of the premier research institutions in the country has decided to axe the program. Current majors will be allowed to finish their degrees, but questions remain about how doctoral students in other departments who need German as one of their languages will complete that requirement.

I minored in German as an undergraduate. Indeed, I am but two courses short of a bachelor’s degree in German, even though I never achieved complete fluency in the language that was my father’s native tongue. (I visit my German-speaking relatives every few years, but otherwise, I hardly ever speak it anymore). I took plenty of literature courses, particularly on 19th century novels and short plays. I developed a particular fascination with Heinrich von Kleist, and wrote — on my old manual typewriter — one of the best papers I ever produced in college about his masterful Die Marquise von O. And yeah, the fact that he killed himself and his girlfriend in a suicide pact made him especially compelling to me.

My background in German language enriched my work as a graduate student in church history immensely. So many of the secondary sources I read were in German only. Much of my dissertation was influenced by Friedrich Prinz’s wonderful Klerus und Krieg im früheren Mittelalter.

I think lots of folks should do minors in a language. Though I sometimes wish now, two decades later, that I had majored in women’s studies instead of history, I have never regretted minoring in German. It enhanced and enriched my undergraduate experience immensely, and even now, I sometimes surprise people by being able to drop a line or two from Schnitzler or Goethe in the original. I’ve forgotten so much of what I learned, as I never use it anymore in this new life — but honestly, I am a better man today for having known it once.

Modern universities began in German-speaking lands. For a university like USC, richly endowed and increasingly academically respectable, to drop such a vital program is appalling. It represents a rejection of one of the foundation stones of Western heritage, and I fervently hope that the decision is soon reversed.

I’ll be speaking with my Trojan wife, a proud ‘SC alumna, and ask her to enclose a little note with her next check. Vielleicht auf Deutsch.