"The Trials of the Academe"

NYT: "Think Again" by Stanley Fish
on Amy Gajda's "The Trials of the Academe"

"When I began teaching in 1962 at the University of California in Berkeley, I asked older colleagues about the decorums and rules of the classroom. In response, I was given the Myron Brightfield rule. Brightfield was then a very senior member of the department. His rule (and I paraphrase) was, When you close the door, there’s nothing they can do to you. Those were the days, and they had their injustices as well as their advantages. Now we have justice, or at least the demand for justice, all the time and it may, Gajda suggests, be killing us."




Strange how I feel so free while teaching in China. Stay away from the 3 T's, and when I close the door, ....
tis the Kacie Miura rule, a very junior member of the department.

obomba

Ah, don't get me wrong, Obama zhuxi is what I consider to be the closest thing to a living, breathing political hero, and it's not as if he asked for the peace prize. Perhaps in some revolting way, escalating the war is his way of achieving peace? The disgusting thing is that I ask this rhetorically.

The NYT's Peter Baker concludes his lyrical analysis of the irony of the Nobel-Afghanistan ordeal by posing these BIG 'ole questions:

With the Nobel medal staring down at him in the White House for the next three years or perhaps seven, will the designated peacemaker eventually figure out just what peace means in a land without it? Will he earn the prize he has already received?

Verses I thought were especially poignant in this tragic news song:

That was eight years ago last week and never on that night, as we watched the might of the world’s most powerful nation rain down on the primitive army of soldiers clad in rags and sandals, did it occur to us that America so many years later would still be trying to figure out how to win — or whether it even could. The journey from the rugged village of Topdara to the halls of the White House is a quintessential story about the limits of power and imagination.

The idea of clear lines and neat definitions does not apply in Afghanistan. Over the following few months, many of the themes of the last eight years would become clear. There were civilians killed by errant American bombs and intrigues among Afghans who ostensibly were our allies and common cause forged with a ruthless warlord who did just enough of the Americans’ bidding to stay on the payroll while waging his own private war for control of his local province.

And what is the Taliban, anyway? It was not just Mullah Muhammad Omar, the one-eyed master who forced women to wear burqas and banned music, dancing, alcohol and kites. It was the boys we met who fought for the Taliban because that was what everyone did. Or who did it for food and shelter. Or who were press-ganged into it without recourse to resist. The terms were binary — Taliban or not Taliban — in a country that was kaleidoscopic.

Frida

The movie, like the artist, is vivid, raw, poetic. My favorite verses: Frida's love letter to Diego and the speech Diego gave at Frida's opening show in Mexico.

On a postcard to Diego:
Dear Diego,
How are you, panzon?
Why didn' you tell me Paris was such a nightmare?
The French are the most pretentious bores in the world
I'd rather sit on the floor of a market in Toluca
selling tortillas than have to listen to the prattling
of the artistic bitches of Paris.
There really hasn't been as much interest
in the exhibition as Breton promised.
Mexican artists are nothing but an exotic curiosity here.
All in all, it's been lonely
and I crave news from home.
Diego, this letter's a lie.
Paris has been good to me,
but without you, it means nothing.
All the rage of our 12 years together passes through me,
and I'm left knowing that I love you more than my own skin.
And though you may not love me as much,
you do love me a little,
don't you?
If this is not true,
I'll always be hopeful that it could be.
I adore you.
Frida.


Diego at her exhibition:
There was this skinny kid with these eyebrows shouting up at me, "Diego, I want to show you my paintings!" But of course, she made me come down to look . I did, and I've never stopped looking. But I want to speak about Frida not as her husband, but as an artist. I admire her.

Her work is acid and tender
hard as steel
and fine as a butterfly's wing
loveable as a smile
cruel as the bitterness of life.
I don't believe that ever before
has a woman put such agonized
poetry on canvas.


For the moment, these are holding my eyes captive, and wouldn't doubt that they will arrest my dreams tonight as well:

flu to me

ummmm.
The world looks funny from this side of the sea, ten hours ahead of a reality I am aware of only via Facebook (<3). But time and space are nothing when you are flying. ummmmm.

A day of Nabokov (or more specifically, of his famous perv Hummm) and already my imagination has flown, literally flown, in a government plane named KC135, across the vast Pacific. An old friend flying fast toward a fuzzy-eyed me. Of course, not TO me, but in my direction... to those stubby, hairy-armed ancestral roots of mine, to the stubby, hairy-arms of my pride.

These spacio-temporal crossings, these high-altitude trips above unobjective truth up into the wiiiiiispy clouds of MAYBE, leave me airsick, seasick, totally unPacific. Those clouds are only wissssssspy in dreams. In the life of Us, they carry storms, don't you remember, Kacie135? ummmmmmmMaybe I am flying the "H-yi-N-yi"?

Fly, flew, flu........
forget, forget, forget

nellie bly

Nellie Bly -- a world traveler (literally), the investigative journalist who triggered a reform of mental institutions, and also the woman who inspired my days at the HA & TH. I am thinking that she'll make a great topic for our first women's group session. :)


www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/world/peopleevents/pande01.html

perverse progress

NYT mag: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04FOB-wwln-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=magazine

October 4, 2009

The Way We Live Now

The New Gender Gap

By LISA BELKIN

At first blush, the history of women in the workplace seems a trajectory of success. From the assumption that they would be secretaries to the expectation that they can be C.E.O.’s, they have crashed through ceilings (though not enough of them), made workplaces more flexible (not completely, but significantly) and transformed the face of work. They have gone from holding 34.9 percent of all jobs 40 years ago to 49.8 percent today. They are on track to hold more than half of them any moment now; it might have happened while you were reading this.

Under other circumstances, that would be cause for celebration. But women have gained this latest bit of ground mostly because men have lost it — 78 percent of the jobs lost during this recession were held by men. So not only is it unseemly to rejoice over a larger share of a smaller pie, it is also unsettling to face the fact that so much of the history of women in the workplace (both their leaps forward and their slips back) is a reaction to what was happening to men.

That was the case in the 1930s, when working women were dismissed so that they didn’t take jobs from able-bodied males with families to support. During the 1940s women were invited back in, a replacement work force when the men went to war. By the 1950s and into the ’60s women lost their higher-paying blue-collar jobs and took lower-paying ones in the expanding retail and service sectors or returned home; in the 1970s the most ambitious among them rebelled — a period when women truly commandeered the train and drove it forward, often sacrificing dreams of children to get ahead. By the 1980s mothers worked because of the growing feeling that households needed two incomes, and the realization dawned that the workplace was designed to fit the life of a man with a wife at home rather than a woman juggling work and family.

The next two decades brought adaptations — words like “telecommuting” and “flextime” entered the vocabulary — and because times were good, companies saw the benefits of going along. Also because times were good, some women who could leave did, opting out of a system that fit women only marginally better than before.

Now they seem to be returning. Women will soon be the majority of workers because some are opting back in, and many others, who never left, are more likely to find and keep their jobs than men. Once again, the reasons for this are not a function of the clout of women but of the predicament of men and less a sign of how far women have come than of how far they have left to go.

“The things that traditionally hold women back in the work force are working in their favor now,” says Heidi Hartmann, a labor economist and president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “but those obstacles remain.”

Primarily, women are still cheaper. They earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by a man, and in a flailing economy employers see that as an attractive quality. Women who are returning to the work force after several years at home raising children are particularly cheap. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, has estimated that the penalty is 10 percent of income for every two years out of the job market, a loss that is never recouped. From the hiring side of the table, that may be a good bargain.

In addition, women are concentrated in lower-paying industries, like health care and education, where there have been fewer layoffs, rather than in higher-paying realms, like finance, construction and manufacturing, which have contracted. Why this is true has long been an economic chicken-and-egg question — are these professions less lucrative and prestigious because they are predominantly held by women, or are they predominantly held by women because men are less likely to take them given their lower pay and status? But whatever the cause, the end result is that the “female” professions have not suffered as much this past year.

Women also benefit from some employers’ presumptions that they will settle. When choosing among overqualified applicants for a position, employers often seem more comfortable hiring a woman for a step-down job. Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, says women might be seen as less resentful about taking a job with less money and authority, and they might also be less likely to bolt if something better comes along. Especially “if a woman is coming back to work and has had difficulty finding a job, the assumption is she is going to be more grateful than the man,” she says.

The point that the increase of women in the workplace is not somehow a victory for women is driven home by the fact that the most successful and highly paid women are losing their jobs at the same rates as successful and highly paid men.

There is also the fact that equality in the workplace has not translated into equality in the home, where women still do decidedly more of the work, on average, than men. That may change as more men are domesticated by unemployment, or it may become an additional burden of this new economy, because there is a different kind of tension in a home where a man is out of a job.

Adding to that tension is the fact that the scaffolding that women have struggled to build to help manage their lives over the years is eroding. The most recent numbers from the Society for Human Resource Management show that families are getting less help from their employers — in the form of flexible work options and other work-life benefits — at a time when workers arguably need them most.

Cataclysms are often classrooms. What we are learning from this one is that women have not reached parity, no matter what next month’s jobs data say. It is not good news when women surpass men because women are worth less. Perversely, real progress might come when we reach the place where a financial wallop means women lose as much ground as men.

Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer and the author of the Motherlode blog. She last wrote for the magazine about women and philanthropy.

hottest man alive, now even hotter