GenX women in higher ed from around the globe

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Empty Nest

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2013/03/16 at 23:49
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US. 

My biological sons have some time yet before they will fly into adulthood. However, I have entered the second half of my seventh year as a fellowships adviser.  My first blog for UVenus explained my state of being as Mater de facto et de jure.  In 2010, I had yet to grasp the full impact of my de facto children would play as precursors to the triumphs and traumas of motherhood yet to come.

On January 31st, I watched the first student I both taught and advised appear on MSNBC to discuss a brilliant piece he wrote for Slate.  It seems impossible that six years have passed since I spilled red ink on his seminar papers.  A poised and articulate young professional appeared on the screen before me, and I could not breathe.  A profound sense of loss accompanied my joy at his accomplishment.  He has flown the nest; he does not need me.

Next month I will introduce another former advisee at a campus event – as a fellow faculty member.  Again, as I compose my words of praise, the memory of our first meeting remains burned in my memory.  The lapsed years seem like seconds.  I know this is how motherhood feels.  I know that my babies first screams upon exiting the womb still echo in my ears as they approach puberty.  From the sublime ache associated with my students’ successes, I can only imagine the acuity of the pleasure and the pain that awaits me as my boys become men.

My mother aided other mothers as an adoption counselor.  She kept two poems framed on her office wall, which she gave me when she retired at the same time that I quit my tenure-line job to be at home with my newborn and three-year-old sons.  They still hang in our family room.

Parents’ Creed by Khalil Gibran

And a Woman who held a babe against her bosom said:  Speak to us of Children.  

And he said:  your children are not your children.  

They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.  

They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, they belong not to you.  You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts.  

You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.  

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.  

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.  

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

 

A Poem On Children by Margaret Mead

That I be not a restless ghost

Who haunts your footsteps as they pass

Beyond the point where you have left

Me standing in the newsprung grass,

You must be free to take a path

 

Whose end I feel no need to know,

No irking fever to be sure

You went where I would have you go.

 

Those who would fence the future in

 

Between two walls of well-laid stones

But lay a ghost walk for themselves

A dreary walk for dust bones

So you can go without regret

 

Away from this familiar land

Leaving your kiss upon my hair

And all the future in your hands.

My mother counseled birthmothers who let their babies leave within hours of their births and adoptive mothers who would devote their lives to the fruit of another woman’s womb.  She taught me long before I became a mother the many forms motherhood takes.  Every mother embarks on a treacherous journey of joy and sorrow.  We each want our children to thrive without us yet grieve their absence whether we part at two days or twenty-two years.

I can see a wonderful future in the capable hands of my advisees whose arrows I have already sent forth at alarming speed.  I hope I muster the strength to launch my sons into the world with similar force and survive the emotional tsunami in their wake.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Academic Abbey

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2013/02/06 at 11:14
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US.

Earlier this month, the American Historical Association announced the anything-but-shocking discovery that tenured men benefit more from marriage than their female counterparts.  My female friends and I long ago noticed that women at the top of the academic hierarchy rarely have more than one child and a marriage in the present tense.  Scott Jaschik scrutinized the higher statistical propensity for academic women to form endogamous marriages with another Ph.D. Academic men pick partners more willing or better able to fulfill Ruth’s biblical pledge, “whither thou goest, I shall go.”

Such marital politics produce the stuff of domestic dramas played out in every sector and every age. Mr. Darcy tests the waters with Elizabeth Bennet when he asks if she thinks her newly married friend lives a suitable distance from her father’s estate. Ma Ingalls packed up Laura and Mary whenever Pa got the notion to move further afield. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake captured the isolation centuries of new wives experienced when they set out to cross the Atlantic with husbands they barely knew.

Jaschik’s report appeared the day after Downton Abbey’s third season premier. Julian Fellowes’ reduction sauce of English stereotypes stirs American imaginations with matrimonial ephemera. The lord of the manor married American money but failed to breed profit or sons. The heiress must lower her expectations in order to keep her estate. The Irish chauffeur liberates his aristocratic lover from her hide-bound behaviors and stately home.

Academics, like aristocrats, need certain types of structures in order to survive. A tenured professor needs pupils like an aristocrat needs servants. They exist only in juxtaposition to one another. No stately home to house the servants or no university to engage the undergraduates and the top dog (to steal my tone from 1066 and All That) ceases to have anything to stand atop.

Academics drive their marital moves, but they can only manage chronic migrations if they have a doting partner to herd their progeny towards a new destination. If a tenured academic happens upon their intellectual equivalent of Downton, he (statistically more likely) digs in his heels with a fervor that would make Lady Mary blush. Two PhDs unable to share the same Downton face a marital fate scarier than the Dowager Countess’ disapproving scowl.

If the ‘trailing’ spouse has (as is more likely among trailing wives according to the AHA) a JD, an MD, an MBA, an MSW, an MAT, or anything other than a Ph.D., someone will hire her. If the partner holds a Ph.D. (more likely among trailing husbands), he confronts a choice of adjunct instructorships and administrative positions once held by the wives of the male professoriate in preceding generations. Just as those women railed against their second class citizenship as they held aloft copies of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, no one should express surprise that the husbands of tenured wives fall short the Alan Alda ideal of household helpfulness and satisfied subordination.

We all dream of marital equality. I once cringed as a newly arrived, male administrator replied, “yes,” to the patronizing observation, “so you are the trailing spouse.” Back during my tenure-line days, my husband – while fully employed at many multiples of my salary – used to field questions from faculty wives as to his experience as a “stay-at-home dad.” I doubt he liked it any better than I did when a few years later an academic wife told me, “I thought you were just a mom.” My husband and I adore our boys. We wear our parental titles with pride. However, the queries possessed the same, internalized self-loathing that Mr. Carson exudes whenever the middling or lower classes imperil the Downton way. They indicated subordination in what we understand as a marriage of equals.

Academics devalue all other occupations in the way Fellowes’ fictional aristocrats struggle to acknowledge the worth of the world beyond the Abbey. When both partners live within such stilted walls, they can appear insurmountable barriers to professional and marital success.

For those who attempt to administer academic abbeys populated upstairs & down by peculiar personalities, we could have worse role models than the indefatigable Mrs. Hughes of Downton. She neither worships nor resents. Mrs. Hughes merely comprehends and coordinates with an admirable mix of affection and authority.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Baccalaureate Bologna

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2013/01/14 at 00:39
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US.

As a result of some cosmic hiccup, I have to register my baby boy for high school this weekend. Then, one of his friends asked me to explain International Baccalaureate programs as I drove him home yesterday evening. Already in a state of middle-aged-maternal angst, I embarked upon a frenzy of IB research last night and this morning. The following paragraphs attempt to disambiguate my parental self-flagellation and pedagogical frustration from a fledgling proposal.

First, flagellation:  IB programs provide the well-rounded exposure to languages, cultures, and intellectual apparatus all children should enjoy.  Why didn’t I place my boys in IB schools?  The answer addresses the problem: national exceptionalism.  To address the low standards of a US high school diploma by any international standard, Americans invented the Advanced Placement (AP) exams.  This was how elite students proved they had already completed undergraduate (ie Bachelors Degree) level courses while still in secondary (aka High) school.  My local school system prides itself on its incredible array of AP offerings from Multi-Variable Calculus to French.  However, the programs provide a shopping list – not a system.  By contrast, the IB programs I researched offered a systemic approach to bilingualism and integrated advanced curricula that most American school systems would be hard pressed to produce.  These schools then claim their graduates hold a Baccalaureate Diploma – or translated into English – a Bachelor’s degree.  Why would such a person wish to earn a second Bachelor’s degree granted by a university?

Second, frustration:  The hand-wringing over the utility of American bachelor’s degree seeks to answer the question above.  What is the added value of an undergraduate education?  Part of the American answer is simple.  US colleges attempt to play catch up for our erratic primary and secondary non-system.  If someone holds a BA from a reputable college, a graduate or professional school’s admissions committee has confidence that he or she has achieved International Baccalaureate levels after additional years – to quote Tom Lehrer – with ivy covered professors in ivy covered halls.  However, few question the added value of a BA from Amherst or BS from CalTech over an IB from the most elite international school, but why?

Third, proposal: The answer lays in the use made of the second two years of college.  The IB and AP programs mean to take students through the basics of a subject – the same goal of most core requirements met in the first and second years of college.  After A levels in England, traditional gentlemen traveled abroad on their grand tour before they entered Oxbridge.  In the US, students took flight during their Junior Year Abroad to meet the same need for international exposure before specialization.  Elite schools, like Princeton, demanded a senior thesis in the fourth and final year.  These two things – a year abroad in an immersive language program and an independent research year – constitute the nature of an honors degree whether earned at Michigan State or Stanford.  Just as the IB outlines necessary elements of their primary, middle, diploma standards, we need an international standard for undergraduate education.

Final thoughts:  The European Union’s Bologna Accord attempted this herculean task.  They outlined what a Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctoral degree should mean anywhere in Europe.  To achieve this, they chopped time off the traditionally five year continental university degree to make a three year BA and if a student spent a full year abroad a four year BAPlus.  As more US students complete their BA after three years in sync with their UK cousins, US and UK institutions create new offerings for BA/MAs that concluded simultaneously at the end of year four.  Brown University recently formalized a new program to guarantee their students a BA/MA (dubbed Brown Plus One) granted with an overseas institution over five years.  If I – someone who has given public presentations on this lexical labyrinth – barely manage to translate among the options and their meanings, what will the average eighteen-year-old educational aspirant make of it all?  In my experience as an adviser, they make short-sighted decisions simply because they cannot find a sufficiently high berth from which to take in the panoramic view.  A helping hand is long overdue.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

Rules of Action

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/11/30 at 10:45

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US. 

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon rule (again) on so-called affirmative action in higher education. The details vary case to case, but the underlying fear that a person of color stripped a paler would-be pupil of an opportunity remains constant. Programs to guarantee underrepresented minorities presence in the academy make tempers – including mine – flare whether in support or rejection of their aims. I feel particularly prone to pique at this time of year. Accomplished students from privileged families apply for awards to study overseas funded by governments or foundations. They can, and they should. However, they should also remember that the rules apply to them.

Those who complain about affirmative action argue that while they or their offspring played by ‘the rules,’ darker competitors for places circumvented the rules and won the prize. A complex irony emerges from the perception that diversity diminishes academic standards.

My first year as a graduate student adviser, I enjoined a group of African-American women to speak to their faculty mentors early and often.  One of the women told me later, that she and her friends were loathe to go to office hours as undergraduates for fear of appearing less able than their peers.  By contrast, weak students from comparatively wealthy white families consider extra help from faculty their birthright.  A bad grade means a bad teacher on the right side of the tracks.

Students should come to office hours for conversation and consultation.  However, smart students genuinely at sea in new institutions stay away while those whose parents and grandparents gave them roadmaps to collegiate success in the cradle can never get enough.  I have been told that those sufficiently wealthy to have private tax accountants rarely suffer through an audit, but those of lesser means who file themselves frequently find the IRS at their door.  The haves trump the have-nots by not only mastering whatever game they play but also the best way to ‘win’ at whatever cost.

When I see applications carelessly completed by kids who think the rules do not apply to their terribly special selves, I hit the roof.  READ the directions.  No, you can NOT submit five minutes let alone five days late when others gave themselves less time to revise in order to submit on time.   If the application says three letters of recommendation, you may NOT submit four.  If the application stipulates a 1000 word essay, do NOT squeeze in 1100.  If everyone else can suffer through the final stages of editing their well loved words into oblivion, so can you.

I know this belief in rules as guarantors of fair play makes me pathetically bourgeois.  Oligarchs and aristocrats assume their connections and/or breeding will buy them leeway with such mundane trifles as deadlines.  Mitt Romney could extend and extend his tax return until it suited him to share.  Those he despises as dependents probably filed their paperworks punctually for fear of a fine.  When I evaluate applications, I become physically ill when the candidate who worked hard to assemble materials early and correctly loses out to the kid who submits an application five seconds before deadline and suffused in sloppy errors.  The latter’s accomplishment came at the cost of other’s time and effort.  The former cared enough to respect his or her readers.

You might rightly point out that I am the princess of the unfortunate typo.  I have fallen victim here and elsewhere to my fingers fight with my mind.  Homonyms do-si-do, and semi-colons prance where a comma should appear: too true.  This month I committed a far more egregious crime in my own moral framework: I missed my deadline.  My editors here are gracious souls.  I will likely read this piece in print.  However, I trust that it will follow anything submitted on time.  I have enjoyed every advantage the world has to offer.  Please let someone who has not go first.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Trust, Funds, and Friends

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/09/29 at 03:29

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US.

Paul Ryan is a little bit rich. That’s like being a little bit pregnant, and we all know Ryan’s stand on pregnancy. Just as Ryan thinks life begins at conception, I think wealth begins at trust fund.

I am fully aware that one of the greatest gifts my parents gave me was a college education without debt. I am a faculty brat. From 1988-1992, I attended Northwestern University for a fraction of the tuition when my father joined the faculty in 1968. As a result, I got to study abroad for a full year on the program of my choice and enter marriage not only multilingual but also debt free. My husband brought no debt to our marriage thanks to the universal university education then promised every English subject of academic ability. We were and are the lucky ones. We appreciate our good fortune.

Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney seem to have forgotten the blessings accrued them by birth. Ryan’s grandfather’s and Romney’s father’s wealth mean that neither man had to sign away his future in order to pay for his educational present (pun intended). When disaster struck, and Ryan’s father died, wealth accumulated long before his birth was able to carry him through the crisis that might have brought his family to financial ruin. It may not have been the Romney’s mega-millions, but it provided a cushion for an existential blow. That is what trust funds do. They protect their recipients from the twists and turns of fate that otherwise buffett us on life’s stormy seas. They create trust in a secure future – a personal safety net.

Romney and Ryan both have trust funds. Ryan added his wife’s to his own when he married. These men can deride the social safety net, because – whether or not they avail themselves of it – they don’t need it. When Ryan drove the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, he did so as a tourist among the working class. Poor Romney can’t even figure out how to pass a weekend among men and women who work with their hands.

Ironically, the closest either Republican scion came to children who had to pay their own way into the professional class was in that so-called bastion of elitism, college. Romney briefly rubbed elbows with ordinary Mormons at Brigham Young University. Ryan crossed the midwest to attend Ohio’s state run liberal arts college, Miami University. Much has been made of Ryan’s intellectual leadership. From what I can discern, he fulfilled requirements for two majors but neither achieved greek honors based upon his grades nor earned election to Phi Beta Kappa as testament to the breadth and depth of his achievements in the liberal arts and sciences. In short, he failed to take full advantage of the educational resources offered him.

What both Ryan and Romney capitalized upon – literally and metaphorically – were the opportunities for networking among the elite embedded within institutions of higher education. Ryan pledged a fraternity – the best way to facilitate friendships among those of like minds and similar social strata within an otherwise diverse institution. Romney must have found too few wealthy hands to shake at Brigham Young, because he finished the job at that bastion of backroom brokerage, the Harvard School of Business.

When Romney issued the patronizing claim, “corporations are people, my friend,” he meant that corporations consist of people who are his friends. This is the lesson Ryan and Romney drew from their educations. Trust funds allow you to focus on your friends. Put in another pearl of Romney wisdom, “borrow money – if you have to – from your parents.” That loan need not stop at money. A wealthy parent, grandparent, or spouse can also loan you influential friends to pave your way to wealth and power.

This is why my favorite pundit, John Heilemann, failed to predict Ryan as Romney’s running mate. He thought Romney would want to secure Ohio with Senator Rob Portman. Romney did want to secure Ohio. By selecting Ryan, he got a ‘twofer.’ Ryan brought a strong network of Ohio connections forged in his fraternity as well as his Wisconsin constituents. That out-of-state tuition may have been the wisest investment Ryan ever made.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

The Sins of Secular Saints

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/08/29 at 07:38
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US.

I was in Pennsylvania to present at a National Association of Fellowship Advisors’ workshop when Louis Freeh took to the podium and damned those living and dead who abandoned boys to Jerry Sandusky’s brutality.  Everyone at the workshop exists within the academy, and all of us expected Mr. Freeh’s conclusions.  Tragically, no one in a room of higher education professionals seemed remotely surprised by the range of power-brokers willing to feed boys to a predator before they would consider decreasing the athletic department’s profit at Penn State.

Most those gathered were coaches of a sort.  We know all too well the pressure to ‘win’ at all costs.  Certain awards count more than others just like men’s football and basketball count more than men’s baseball or any sport a woman plays – Title IX anniversary or not.

Football and basketball coaches make more money, live in bigger houses, and garner higher praise than those who work with scholar-athletes for whom professional play – if possible – would never air on prime time tv.  They receive public ovations of which chaired professors only dream.  Football coaches bask in glory reserved for Nobel Prize winners among the professoriate.  However, Nobel Prize winners in physics don’t claim to deserve the Peace Prize as well.  Championship coaches find themselves sainted – as if multi-million dollar contracts and subsidized mansions ensured their ethics.

The National Association of Fellowship Advisors promotes holistic practices.  We vow to put the student’s personal development above any particular win.  I call it academic matchmaking.  I want to find the opportunity that best serves the student’s long-term goals, and I want the application process to be instructive on its own terms.

Of course, we would all love a ‘win’ to be an extra bonus at the end of a beneficial exercise.  No one offers us TV contracts or seven-figure-salaries, nor should they.  When the coach becomes the center of attention over the scholar or the athlete, we have all failed.  Our institutions exist to serve those enrolled as students not to aggrandize those hired to help them.

Long before the Penn State tragedy came to light, I attended another conference in Pennsylvania at the center of the current storm: State College.  I wandered into town from the conference site and tried to find token gifts to take my family.  I should note neither my English husband nor my Anglo-American sons follow football.  I was out of luck.  I think the closest comparison would have been a medieval Cathedral town full of market stalls hawking relics.

I felt uncomfortable then.  I have respected colleagues and mentors on the academic faculty and was at the conference with fellow authors from a collected volume published by Penn State Press.  Their contributions to learning found no place among the piles of Nittany Lion and Paterno paraphernalia.  I didn’t really know who Joe Paterno was.  I concluded that he was the patron saint of Penn State.

Saints forgo high salaries and private planes for the common good.  Saints seek a heavenly reward.  Coaches cash in on retirement perks.  We all see now what should have been glaringly obvious then: Joe Paterno was no saint – nor is any coach.

A great deal is at stake in this distinction.  Saints are without sin.  We believe them incapable of it.  Humans mistakenly portrayed as saints will – like Paterno – put lives on the line in order to protect the delusion.

This problem – unlike the deep-seated sources of Sandusky’s pedophilia – has a simple solution.  Cults of personality serve no one well.  Keep coaches off billboards and bobbleheads.  I am not suggesting hair shirts and gruel.  Respect and reasonable remuneration can and should belong to whomever serves the common – in this case collegiate – good.  But when the individual blinds us to the collective, beware.  We can’t eradicate evil, but we can prevent powerful people from shielding it in a selfish desire to avoid shame.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Pride, Prejudice, and Publication

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/07/18 at 02:13
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US.

Just as the Bennet sisters had a season in which to find a spouse, academics have a season in which to cement their editorial couplings for the coming year.  Each summer, hotel conference rooms and university campuses around the globe house those who write and those who edit as they perform a series of anxiety-ridden dances.

First, you fill your card.

A year before the conference begins nervous writers apply to appear with panels.  Apply for too many and you may end up like Lydia, a cheap tease.  Apply for too few and you may spend the summer like Mary, with atonal contributions to recitals meant for others.  The perfect panel stretches you just enough beyond your comfort zone to demonstrate new accomplishments but not so far that others outshine you.  Elizabeth Bennett shines brightest when accompanied by Jane and Charlotte Lucas.  Neither Caroline Bingley nor Kitty improves her lustre.

Upon arrival, you survey the registration hall for familiar faces with whom to pass time before your first dance.  Friends exchange updates on their lives, share knowledge of the other attendees, remark upon notable absences, and down coffee in anticipation of the mental aerobics to come.

With panel partners located and caffeinated, you proceed to the appointed space for your performance.

Historians struggle with a particularly stiff line dance.  We rise in turn to read our papers.  The panel chair punctuates our proclamations with introductions of individual speakers.  Then the nervous cluster holds its collective breath and waits for the commentator’s critique.

The commentator will tell the potential editors in the room whether he or she thinks the samples just shared merit further investigation as journal articles or monographs.  If the speakers approximate Elizabeth Bennet and the editors Fitzwilliam Darcy, the commentator fills the terrifying role of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

If the commentator damns with faint praise or skewers with a rapier wit, any recalcitrant editorial Darcy in the audience may slide out the back in silence.  If the audience contains a persistent questioner, Wickham, you might draw Darcy’s attention despite Lady Catherine’s condemnation.  How you reply to Lady Catherine and Mr. Wickham plays as serious a role in Darcy’s evaluation as quality of your initial performance.  If you demonstrate incisive intellect as you respond to critique with poise or to praise with humility, you may just halt Darcy’s departure.

What every writer wants is an invitation to an individual dance – the magic moment when the editor solicits your work solo.  A sentence that begins with “your paper” not “your panel” sends the authorial heart into a swoon.  For Mr. Darcy to like the ladies of Longbourn in general would offer no special hope to Elizabeth, who needs him to settle upon her in particular.

Of course a successful relationship requires Lizzy to see Darcy’s merits just as Darcy must see Lizzy’s.

An inept proposal or reply can bring the courtship to a premature end.  An aloof editor from a high end house poses as many problems as an overeager one from the local historical society.  The former might let your prose languish at the bottom of a pile until your colleagues have preempted your finding and made your book redundant.  Poor Caroline Bingley’s waits for Darcy’s attention in vain.  The latter may push your piece into print before it receives needed editorial polish.  Lydia elopes with Wickham before she has read the fine print of his proposal.  If like Lizzy, you spurn the aloof editor too soon, you might miss his potential for an attentive partner.  Darcy had more depth than she imagined.  Set your cap at an editorial Wickham, and you will find he has run off a younger, more naive scholar behind your back.

With luck, a Georgianna Darcy can facilitate the final match.  A third party who knows the perils but sees the potential in a tentative romance can assuage lingering doubts and nudge the couple towards the altar.

It is, after all, a truth universally acknowledged, that a scholar in possession of a manuscript, must be in want of an editor.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed .

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In Loco Parentis – Luxus?

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/06/01 at 00:59

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US

When skyrocketing college tuition becomes the target of public critique, I tend to think about the recent study of spoiled American middle class children as opposed to academic salaries.

I’ve known a few faculty to flaunt their wealth with ostentatious automobiles and sumptuous square-footage.  Most, however, hold true to a lifestyle that shares more with Jane Austen’s genteel poverty than Donald Trump’s outlandish ostentation.

Undergraduates are an entirely different matter.  The one percent have not only monopolized the admissions process but also set the material expectations for the student body at large.  Even their classmates on work study and substantial financial aid flash pricey gadgets as they fill out paperwork for need-based scholarships.  I suppose they have imbibed the advice to ‘dress for the job you want not the job you have.’  They carry the cell phones for the jobs they want upon graduation.  Despite public discourse about cutting back in the wake of the ‘great recession,’  students remain committed to their stuff.

Institutions comply with this materialism as a means to recruit.  Our definition of how to improve higher education too frequently hinges on dorm room connectivity and coffee shops per capita.  Somewhere along the line, the furniture of the mind got shoved against the wall as an impediment to social mobility.  Socialization to the professional class via swanky dorms and sports clubs (whoops I mean centers) outstripped reading Socratic dialogues in dingy basements while digesting stale cereal.

As we discuss how to bring the next generation of high school kids to college and launch them into careers, the focus remains on mimicking the lifestyles of the lucky few as opposed to building an intellectual framework upon which to hang the rest of their lives.  Building projects garner money from wealthy alumni who want to see their names carved in stone lintels and to imagine future generations passing beneath them.  Money for tutorials on Montesquieu for mechanical engineers or particle physics for playwrights proves harder to raise.

I understand the need to train students in decorum.  Come to my home on a January weekend and you will likely find students eating off my wedding china while they explain grand schemes to illustrious strangers.  Grammar of all sorts has fallen by the wayside in our schools.  Our kids arrive in college – even the most elite – unsure as to the appropriate use of ‘I’ versus ‘me’ and unaware that you ought not proffer a handshake if the palm is covered in snot.  Neither of these skill sets requires a smartphone to learn.  Indeed, the gadgetry distracts from lessons at desks and in dining rooms.

I grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s accounts of her days in a one room schoolhouse and hearing my grandmother’s tales of the same.  Sentence diagrams and washed hands featured in both.  Neither Wilder nor my grandmother could dream nor would wish to deny their progeny the incredible laboratories and libraries this generation takes as a birthright: common resources held for the common good.  I wonder, however, what they would make of ubiquitous SUVs and iPhones.

Even the spoiled Oxonian scion Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited treasured his worn teddy bear above his more glamorous goods.  When universities began to educate aristocrats as well as clerics, it seemed a sound idea.  Let the rich but dim Sebastians subsidize the broke but bright like Charles Ryder.  The stuff of tragicomedy ensued.  Read or watch Porterhouse Blue; listen to Kenny Chesney’s “Keg in the Closet.”

In the centuries since the collegiate clergy welcomed the wealthy into their midst, the relationship changed.  Middle class parents now mortgage themselves to the hilt in order to gilt their offspring’s protective cages in a close facsimile of one-percent opulence and expect their colleges to follow suit.  If the child manages to escape and can’t control his or her underdeveloped wings, the shocked elders sue.  The college has failed to maintain its promise to serve In Loco Parentis Luxus.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed. 

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Sex, Stars, and Stripes

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/04/24 at 02:25

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US.

The Big Bang Theory and the Republican Primary have more in common than one might think. The comedy follows a Caltech particle physicist’s pathetic attempts to deal with the irrational world around him. The fictional physicist, Sheldon Cooper, is pure. He wishes only to understand the physical order of the universe without the messy passions that pollute other people’s lives. In Sheldon’s atheistic ideology, disorder replaces sin. Thus, disorderly passions prove repugnant rejections of the good life.

While I adore the program, I struggle with its depiction of academic women.  The men are laughable stereotypes too, but the women bother me more.  Rick Santorum’s opposition to contraception and a group of Republican governors’ affection for trans-vaginal ultrasounds has a lot to do with it.

Sheldon, the academic superstar, surpasses pure.  Pure implies that he has never sullied himself with sin, which is true.  However, Sheldon never suffered temptation in the first place.  His friends’ interest in “coitus” confounds him. Sheldon, like Santorum, wears a uniform.  Rather than sweater vests, Sheldon goes in for graphic tees.  Like Santorum, Sheldon rose from working class roots and loathes the educational institutions that make his rise possible.  Like Santorum, he fails to grasp why people reject him.  Santorum lost his Senate seat.  Naturally, he should dream bigger and run for president.  Sheldon got fired from his postdoc.  Surely, he will win over the Nobel Prize committee.

Not so the woman with whom he would like to create a subsequent generation if immaculate conception were possible.  Poor Amy Farrah Fowler, brilliant neuroscientist, lusts after Sheldon and the buxom blond across the hall.  Her boyfriend is asexual; she suffers acutely as an unsatisfied bisexual.  The joke is at her expense.  She wants to have sex with everyone, but no one finds her physically attractive.  They all respect her brain, but give her half the chance — say with government-subsidized contraception — and she might just live out every insane fantasy Rush Limbaugh harbors about the whorish inner desires of educated women.

Sheldon’s roommate, Leonard Hofstadter, suffers the enduring damage of his “Tiger Mother.” For this high-flying harridan, a postdoc at Caltech seems humdrum.  This female Ph.D. resents the children she bore.  Her insult-ridden mothering leaves him with low expectations when looking for affection among female physicists.  One wishes to use him for “coitus” on a semiannual basis.  The series begins when the uneducated but pneumatic Nebraskan, Penny, moves in across the hall.  She has a sexual past Sheldon and Santorum scorn, but the aspiring actress offers unconditional friendship.  Dr. Hofstadter falls head over high-energy in love.

Why does this make me think of trans-vaginal ultrasounds?  Because their premise assumes that if only the cute but dim, knocked-up girl understood what grew inside her, she would never want an abortion.  She would either get married or give her offspring to another woman with a wedding band safely on her hand.

This, I suppose, is what Calista Gingrich would have done had she not had access to contraception during her extramarital fling with Newt.  Oh wait.  Maybe she had the other problem.  She was a smart woman with access to contraception, which meant her unbridled libido lead men astray.

When I contemplate television’s or the Republican party’s fictional women, my own sense of reality becomes blurred.  I know that before the Victorian era portrayed women as revolted by “coitus” à la Dr. Cooper, centuries of Catholic clerics envisioned every woman as a dangerous Eve poised to drag her man and the world away from Eden.  Perhaps Santorum absorbed a bit too much medieval dogma when he moved toJustice Scalia’s parish.  His highly-educated wife, who bore him eight children, doesn’t seem that dangerous to me.  Then again, neither does Amy Farrah Fowler.  At least we can agree that Sheldon Cooper would make a marvelous monk.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed. 

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What If You Could Do Anything?

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/03/16 at 04:23

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US

I ask students this all the time. If money and geography were no object, where would you go and what would you do? My job is to help their wildest dreams become reality. This week someone asked me what I would teach, if I could teach anything. I panicked.

First, just as students doubt my veracity, I doubted my questioner. He didn’t really mean anything. He meant within the bounds of the curriculum. To be fair, I don’t mean queen of the fairies or king of the world when I pose the question. I mean architect in Amsterdam, soprano at La Scala, zoologist in Zambia, etc.  Even so, freedom is terrifying.

Second, my mind raced. Here was my chance “to dream the impossible dream.” Don’t blow it! Say something unbelievably creative and compelling, right now!  I recited courses I’d taught before and the standard array of material I’d proven myself qualified to teach in graduate school and more recent scholarship. Woo hoo! Who is this boring woman? I posed a slight stretch comparative course that would necessitate a colleague’s participation. I’ll give myself half a point for that. I dared to share my fairy queen fantasy – a course on Bollywood, which we agreed belongs in another school altogether. My La Scala moment eluded me, and I’m still mad.

I embarked upon this blog in hope that I would arrive at a delayed answer via my virtual re-visitation of the conversation and my inadequate reply. I want students to step into the past with me and embrace its unexpected lessons. I don’t care who begat whom among the high or low born. I like to pass among the ghosts and see the world through their eyes to the extent I can. When that happens as I read a poignant diary entry or detailed newspaper description, the veil of eternity lifts. I want to share that. Guess what? It’s hard.

I want to take my students through the portal to the past so they will not stand on a Florida stage at some future date and proclaim opponents’ staffers “bad historians,” because they disagree over chronology while utterly incapable of making the empathetic leap into others’ lives themselves. I want my students to enter other real (not fictional) people’s lives and ensure that they look at rioters and riot police as beings with mothers, lovers, dreams, and despairs similar to their own.

To achieve this goal with greatest efficacy, I would need a time machine. Although my sons are at work on a device to break “the space time continuum,” I can’t build it into the curriculum just yet. Instead, I must rely on an assortment of old documents, contemporary discussions, and pedagogical alchemy to transport students through time by different means.

Wither? When I’ve taught before, we’ve galloped across sixteenth-century Europe and crisscrossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as I’ve attempted to guide my charges through the world that was and in many ways still is.

Certain episodes make my task easier. Three Sovereigns for Sarah allows them to experience the Salem witchcraft trials acted expertly by Vanessa Redgrave with the actual documents for her script as opposed to the exponential fiction of Daniel Day-Lewis ulcerating in The Crucible. Few historical moments demonstrate social-political self-destruction with such visceral impact, but it feeds the fantasy that all the world was New England until 1776. It wasn’t. Puritans just produced more words per person than most.

I want the rising generation to meet Conrad Weiser as he moves across an ocean, up the Hudson and down the Schuylkill in conversation with Natives and Europeans of multiple tongues but few printed words. I want students to enter the lives that desperate widows and runaway wives patched together in the colonial countryside.

So many men, women, and children flit though my mental landscape from Portland to Pune all while I realize that I’ve missed millions more who could shed light on the delights and dilemmas of the human condition. If I could do anything and teach anything, I would visit them all with students in tow.  I just need that machine….
This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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