QOTD (2009-04-05)

I’m reading about AIDS for gender and sexuality this week, and fuck, it’s depressing. You’ve got to wonder how gay liberation would have worked out differently if it weren’t for AIDS—and you’ve also got to mourn the dead, and all the homophobia that AIDS generated.

We’re reading this play called The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer, about the beginnings of the AIDS crisis in New York. The quote of the day is from the play, on a flyer distributed by a group of AIDS awareness activists, and it is this:

It’s 1982 now, guys, when are you going to come out? By 1984 you could be dead.

I had to stop reading to write that down. I’ve been thinking so much about this politics-of-the-closet stuff, and here I am having come of age so long after AIDS broke, so long even after Will and Grace and Ellen. Here I am in the age of same-sex marriage. What do I know of the problems the gay community faced, back then?

But I think we can all learn still from the sentences I quoted. European intellectuals back in the day used to make Catholic confessions on their deathbeds—just to be on the safe side. (God, how I rant incoherently.) I wish that no one should have to die in the closet.

Anachronisms

I am a sucker for anachronism. It probably started back in the days when I was a middle-school kid who was convinced I should have been born in the 18th century, so that I could defend Bonnie Prince Charlie to the death. Or something like that. (It’s a long story.) But now I appreciate music from 30 or 40 years ago, and political sentiments from about the same era. I relish anything that seems at odds with 2009, with the Internet, with jaded cynicism, with the Princeton Organization Kid. And that’s why I’m writing about the band that was at Terrace last night.

Terrace is an eating club, and incidentally the only one in which I will voluntarily set foot. It is also known for its regular high-quality live music, and because I am lame and because most of the bands I like are dead (see previous paragraph), it’s basically the only place I usually see live music. Last night, though, the band was something else. It was playing punk music, which I suppose is not a particularly unusual thing for a band to do; however, it was also from London (which is less usual—at least, in Princeton, and not in London), and its singer/frontman looked to be in his fifties and not quite aware of it. He was wearing ripped jeans, a be-safety-pinned black t-shirt, and glitter-festooned sneakers that would have been quite chic in the early ’80s. Most of the time, he sort of yell-chanted songs; sometimes he played the drums; sometimes he made pronouncements about the evils of religion and George W. Bush (a few people in the audience yelled “He’s gone, man!” but the frontman appeared unaware of the past six months’ events); at one point he walked through the crowd on the dancefloor holding a pair of drumsticks in front of him like a cross—trying to cast out demons, perhaps? It was unclear. He would frequently preface a song by saying “I wrote this in 1978.” He jumped up and down with an energy and agility that 50-something-year-old men aren’t supposed to have. I’m pretty sure he had more in his system than the two beer bottles standing by the amps. But he was fantastic! He was so infectiously energetic! He made me want to jump up and down and yell “Down with Thatcher!” And that was the best bit. I feel like, as someone born in 1990, I really missed my opportunity to be furious at an evil neoconservative government. I do like punk music, in general, and I find it sad and disappointing that I missed the historical era when it would have been relevant.

The other kids at Terrace though the guy was entertaining, but I don’t think they really got him. They turned to their friends, half-laughing. “What’s he doing?” they asked when he exorcised the crowd with drumsticks. One drunk-seeming kid went up to him and criticized him for declaring that “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” without attributing the quotation. “Only at Princeton,” I thought. But I really felt sorry for him. People are angry at the government and the establishment now in such different ways than they were in the ’80s, and particularly at Princeton. I think people in the audience liked him because he was outlandish, or because they were drunk—not because they really sympathized with his message. Even I felt uncomfortable to hear him criticize religion—at Princeton, that’s not the sort of controversial ground you tread on.

I was thinking about this in terms of reading I was doing for class about the role of the media in both the first Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq. It was deeply weird to read a historical account of the invasion of Iraq, because I conceive of it as a current event. Six years isn’t so long ago. I remember the day we had a debate in my 8th-grade history class about whether it was right to invade Iraq. I remember how I was the only kid saying that we didn’t know whether Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction. I remember how there were other kids in the class who thought that, but that they wouldn’t speak up, and I had to take on all the Bush supporters by myself. To my mind, we still know so little about the events and decisions surrounding the wars we’re now engaged in—not to mention the fact that we’re still engaged in them. How can we historicize them?

Maybe this is how my high-school history teacher, a Vietnam vet, felt when we learned about Vietnam in class. Maybe this is how my mom feels, when anyone talks about the DNCs and election night results of the ’70s and ’80s that she remembers watching on TV. And maybe this gets back to what the leader of the band at Terrace last night was doing, when he assumed what seemed to me to be such an anachronistic pose. If I may put words into his mouth for a moment, as far as he is concerned, the threat of Thatcherism isn’t over. Bush II was a convenient vehicle for that ire as well. But he’s a bit lost at present for a figurehead upon whom he can thrust his dissatisfaction with the establishment. His feelings are no less real. But he’s now forced to frame them historically, not in terms of current events. That’s got to be disorienting.

Maybe my temptation is to view anachronism as quaint, sort of like one of those living history museums, just for 20th-century social alienation instead of colonial America. But on a more intellectual level, I think there’s something to be said for not relegating, say, anti-Thatcher sentiment to history entirely. As I think we learned from the Bush presidency, the same political issues, the same sentiments, the same ideological battles come up again. And again. And again. We need to be keeping feelings of outrage on the forefront of our minds, because if we don’t, there’s a very real chance that we won’t notice when the next deeply objectionable thing happens. I know that I want to study and teach history in part so that we can learn from our mistakes—but while doing that, we still need to be aware that history isn’t a done deal. Everything that’s going to happen in the next week’s news cycle is eventually going to be history. What will we remember when it comes to make decisions based on its lessons?

Why Are You [not a] Liberal?

My colleague Daniel has great post up about why he considers himself a liberal, why that political definition represents him and his values. And I was going to do the same… except I don’t always consider myself a liberal. I think I would more accurately call myself a radical.

I had a relevant discussion with someone on Monday night, while talking about our relationship with existing social structures—and specifically the institution of marriage. He said he wants to see the institution expanded to include same-sex couples. I said I want to tear the fucking thing down. To me, this is representative of what radicalism is, whether a right-wing or a left-wing radicalism. It’s about rebuilding society from the bottom up, and constantly asking questions about its most fundamental aspects. It’s about not being satisfied.

Perhaps this is just a handy excuse, but I don’t think that the fact that I’m not out in the streets every day, that I’m not a member of a communist organization or any other “revolutionary” group, renders me less a radical. I think it’s more about the questions I’m asking, and my personal utopia. About a general resistance to compromise (to which I suppose you can ascribe either a good or a bad connotation).

Well, anyway. I certainly don’t think liberal is a dirty word, but I do think I’m a little “too extreme” to use it.

Twelfth Night

I saw a quite over-the-top, not terribly fantastic, production of Twelfth Night tonight, but I’m not going to waste time reviewing it–primarily because I’m typing this on my iPod, which is kind of a pain.

What I wanted to say is that Twelfth Night is my favorite Shakespeare, and not just because of the gender issues. What I like is the nuance in the plot, and the acceptance that even in a comedy, not everyone’s fortunes will turn out well. Of course, all is roses for Viola, Orsino, Olivia, and Sebastian (which this production made eminently clear by showering the stage–and audience–with stupid rose petals), but this isn’t the case for a lot of characters. Most famous for being “most notoriously wronged” is Malvolio, of course, who by the end of the play is a highly sympathetic character. But Antonio is often overlooked, and there’s an undeniable “love that dare not speak its name” quality to his unrequited adoration for Sebastian, 300 years before the phrase. And there’s Feste, left standing alone onstage at the end. Where do all these odd folks fit in the happily-ever-after scheme of normalcy that the traditional twin marriages enforce?

Were I a better literary scholar, I’d posit why Shakespeare made that choice–but as it is I think we’ve now successfully learned why exactly this is my favorite Shakespeare.

Culture Shock

There are so many things in my life that I’m not blogging about. This week, I went to a professor’s office hours for the first time, and it wasn’t scary, so I’m over that hurdle. I’m also reading Milton for the first time, in my English class, which is this incredible experience. On Sunday, I’m going on a pilgrimage to Paterson, NJ, Allen Ginsberg’s birthplace, on a quest for his childhood homes, some form of spiritual enlightenment, and fodder for a piece I’m writing for class. I’ve been running around like mad this week, going to all sorts of things, from film screenings to quizbowl matches. It’s all wonderful, and I want to write about all of it, how intellectually fulfilling it is, how all my dreams for the future and really inhabiting this world of knowledge and scholarship are coalescing, how I’m becoming a writer as well.

But the weird thing is that what prompted me to go to my computer, go to WordPress, and write this post was the experience that turned all that upside-down. Now I’m very confused about myself and the mental place I’m at. Now I don’t know how at ease and how excited I feel about any of this.

I let some friends talk me into going to a conference on literary criticism and theory, sponsored by the English department, among other people (actually, according to the poster, by basically every humanities-centric entity in the university). And so I went, this morning, to two hours on poetry. I listened to three talks, by three very eminent scholars, standing in the back next to more presumably eminent scholars. I didn’t see any other undergraduates there, or anyone who looked young enough to be an undergraduate. That isn’t usually a problem. I’m very accustomed to being the youngest person in a room. And I’m very accustomed to academic gatherings. How many times have I fought to be able to sit at the grown-ups’ table when my parents’ colleagues come to our house for dinner?

But this was so very different, and you might already be able to see why—because I haven’t told you what those three scholars spoke about, and I haven’t told you what I learned from their talks. Because, you see, I was barely able to understand anything they were saying. I mean, I think I was kind of expecting that—I have no exposure to literary criticism; my only exposure to the study of English literature has been half a semester of Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton. But I still found myself in shock, a bit, at how the words washed over me, sort of like when I watch French-language TV and can pick out one word in three, or one word in five—not enough to piece together the overall meaning of the sentence. Or the paragraph. Or the talk. Bending my knees awkwardly to relieve the pressure of standing up so long braced against the back wall of the lecture hall, I tried to make myself “translate” more attentively, the way I do when the francophone person I’m trying to understand is not hosting a late-night talk show, but rather telling me what will be on the exam. But it was largely ineffective, and I resorted to simply seeming attentive, scribbling down notes not about the content of the talks, but about the fact that I didn’t understand.

Sometimes my parents’ colleagues talk shop when they come to our house for dinner, and then I don’t understand what they’re saying. Sometimes upperclassmen and grad students whom I eat dinner with at Princeton have conversations referencing knowledge that I lack. But never do I feel entirely out of place, there; never do I feel a genuine sense of embarrassment to lack familiarity with very obvious things like Freud or Wordsworth or a vocabulary of jargon that I can’t even remember enough to reiterate here. In the former contexts, it’s okay to just be an academic brat—in fact, that’s what I’m expected to be, when my parents’ colleagues ask them if I will study their disciplines, or I rant in the dining hall about something I’ve read in The Chronicle of Higher Education. And there’s nothing wrong with that—because that’s what I am.

Lately I’ve been cultivating this idea that I’m moving on from “academic brat” to “academic,” that I’m starting to learn higher-level ways of thinking, that I’m honing in on subjects I could study for the rest of my life, and that I’m slowly and steadily immersing myself even more irrevocably in academic culture. But what going to these talks this morning taught me—instead of anything that I’m sure was totally fascinating about the theory of poetry—was that I should stop trying to be something I’m not. That I should accept that I’m a college freshman and that therefore I don’t know shit about literary criticism or anything else theoretical, really. That I should go back to my 200-level lectures and catch up before I try to sit at the grown-ups’ table and really participate in the conversation.

One of the reasons I justified to myself attending these talks was that I volunteered to write an article about them for The Nassau Weekly, Princeton’s foremost student publication (of course). But now I’ve no idea what to say. I can’t talk about the substance of the talks because I didn’t understand them, and the self-deprecating essay on academia that I’d considered seems impossible to write in the context of my voluminous bubble of pride and pretentiousness being burst. So I guess I’m just going to have to start catching up, and maybe give the scholars who spoke this morning the respect of understanding what they were talking about a few years from now, when I’m not such a boorish and philistinic (?) freshman.

Reading QOTD (2009-03-22)

From my gender and sexuality reading, a list called “What Every Young Girl Should Ask!” drawn up by the High School Women’s Liberation Coalition—no date, but I’m guessing sometime in the ’70s; please comment if you know specifically! I don’t have much to add, just thought it was worth quoting in full because of its relevance to modern high-school girls:

1. Can you play basketball, soccer, football?
2. Were you ever taught to use a saw?
3. Did you ever pretend to be dumb?
4. Do you babysit? What do boys do for bread?
5. Do your brothers have more freedom than you? In what way? Why?
6. Are your brothers asked to help clean house?
7. Is education more important for you or your brothers? Why?
8. How many boys are there in your typing class?
9. Would you be interested in birth control information as a service in your school?
10. Did you discuss masturbation and lesbianism in your sex education class? Did you discuss intercourse? Orgasm? Abortion?
11. Would you know what to do if you needed an abortion?
12. What do you want sex education to be?
13. How many famous women do you know about (not counting Presidents’ wives and movie stars)?
14. How many paragraphs (pages) cover the women’s suffrage movement in your history texts?
15. Who are Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mother Jones, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth?
16. How are women portrayed in the books you read?
17. How do your classes react to “ugly” women teachers?
18. Have you noticed that there are college scholarships that discriminate against girls (football scholarships!)?
19. In extra-curricular coed organizations, do girls make decisions? Or do they take minutes?
20. Did you ever hesitate to speak up in a coed organization?
21. Are girls with boyfriends winners? What did they win?
22. Did you ever lie about having a boyfriend? Why?
23. Do you ask boys out? If not, why not?
24. Do you believe boys get sexually aroused faster, at a younger age, and more often than girls? Who told you that?
25. Are you hung up about being/not being a virgin? Why?
26. Should boys be more experienced sexually? Why?
27. Do you ever hug or kiss your girl friend?
28. If you were in a dangerous situation would you rather have a man defend you or defend yourself? Can you defend yourself?
29. Are you the teenybopper, bitch, cheater, foxy lady, or “honey”-type portrayed in rock music?
30. Are you flattered by catcalls on the street?
31. Do you like your body?
32. How much time and money do you spend on your makeup? Why?
33. Why did you start wearing nylons and bras?
34. Will you be a failure if you don’t get married?
35. Do you think of unmarried women as “bachelor girls” or “old maids”?
36. Are these the best years of a woman’s life? Why?
37. Is your mother an oppressed woman?

Well, I certainly can’t speak for my mother, but a lot of these questions ring very true to me, even maybe 35 years after this document was written. Personally, I’ve felt insecure about a lot of these things, especially body-image and sexuality issues. We might not have typing class anymore, and we might learn about Harriet Tubman and the 19th Amendment in school, but you try to find me a teenage girl in a mainstream school (public or private) who’s never felt insecure about her body or her sexual expression. I think it would be very, very hard.

I had another conversation tonight with another young woman my age who doesn’t feel that “feminism” as a word, as a cause, as an ideology, or as a set of goals applies to her. From what she said, I got the impression that it seemed outdated, and too radical to be relevant or appealing. But I think that if today’s girls and young women were to look within themselves very seriously and ask these questions of themselves, maybe they might find reasons why “women’s liberation” is relevant and important in the 21st century. Like I said, things haven’t changed that much in the high-school hallways.

On a related note: I think a lot of folks don’t really consider claiming or reclaiming ideology terms when they hear them. A young woman, for example, might hear someone else or someone else’s actions described as “feminist,” and think, “I’m not like that person, and I wouldn’t commit those actions. Therefore the term ‘feminist’ does not apply to me.” But feminism has had as long and varied a history as has adolescent womanhood. It’s been adopted by moderate liberals and radical leftists alike, women of every race and culture and sexuality and ideological position. “Feminism,” other than generally meaning equality and fairness for women, means whatever you want it to mean. I mean, I like overturning the patriarchy and subverting the heteronormative ownership paradigm, but if your main goal is to feel at ease with your own body, or to have a leadership role in an organization or a business or a political group, that’s totally cool too. “Feminism” is a term that should be accessible to every woman—and, well, it’s a crying shame that a lot of the young women my age whom I talk to don’t feel that way.

Reading QOTD (2009-03-21)

For school, I read Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, one of those too-cool “non-fiction novels” of the ’60s, which tells the story of the anti-Vietnam March on the Pentagon in October 1967. One of the major events in the book (and generally historically speaking) is the hippies’ show of attempting to levitate the Pentagon, engineered by Abbie Hoffman and emceed by Ed Sanders, the frontman of The Fugs. After reading Mailer’s rendition of the happening, I thought it was about time I familiarized myself with the Fugs’ music, so downloaded an album called Tenderness Junction. I was shocked to hear, right in the middle of the album, the recording of what Ed Sanders said to “exorcise the evil spirits” from the Pentagon:

In the name of the amulets of touching, seeing, hearing, groping, and loving, we call upon the powers of the cosmos to protect our ceremonies, in the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis, God of the Dead, in the name of all those killed for causes they do not comprehend, in the name of the lives of the dead soldiers in Vietnam who were killed because of a bad karma, in the name of seaborne Aphrodite, in the name of the Magna Mater Deu Madea, in the name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Jesus, Yahweh, the unnameable, the quintessent finality of the Zoroastrian fire, in the name of Hermes, in the name of the beak of Thoth, in the name of the scarab, in the name… in the name of the Tyrone Power Pound Cake Society in the sky, in the name of Ra, Osiris, Horus, Nepta, Isis, Hippocrates, Hera, in the name of the flowing, living universe, in the name of the mouth of the river, we call upon the spirit TO RAISE THE PENTAGON FROM ITS DESTINY AND PRESERVE IT!

Which dissolves into a general chanting of “Out, demons, out!” and a fairly traditional exorcism-type thing that I can only juxtapose ironically with the only other famous exorcism I can think of offhand—what’s in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. I wonder what was going through the minds of Abbie Hoffman and the Fugs and all, then, when they planned this. I don’t know enough: how much political sarcasm lay behind the acided-out, freewheeling flower children? Mailer certainly shows us how the “beautiful people” front was perverted by soldiers who brutally attacked the protesters, which is an interesting and disturbing image, especially given the way that the hippies are so often mocked for their avoidance of the harsh reality that the soldiers faced in Vietnam.

Nevertheless, what I get out of that ridiculous speech, especially after hearing it spoken, is darkness behind its absurdity. The March on the Pentagon, of course, was an overtly political event, but even Woodstock had its political overtones. These aren’t just acid freaks, you know? They knew what they were doing.

Kink For All New York City

It’s been ten days now since I went to Kink For All New York City, the first of what will hopefully be a series of sexuality-related “unconferences” run along an open-source, democratic model. Basically, KFANYC was a conference—a vehicle for members of the various sexuality communities in New York to come together, talk, and learn from each other. Quite a lot of people presented about quite a lot of different things, sometimes simultaneously, so I wasn’t able to see everything. I chose to attend, in particular, presentations which focused on the younger generation of sexuality activists (like myself!) and on addressing questions about defining identity, coming out, and how all this gets worked out in an increasingly technologically networked and therefore public arena. My own presentation, which I titled “The Politicization of the Closet,” dealt with similar issues, raising questions about when it is necessary to come out and whether one must do so to be an activist. (pdf of my notes, if you’re curious what I said. There’s an audio recording too, but I’m a little too embarrassed by how I sound on recordings to link to it).

That’s all a serious reduction/abridgement of what actually went on at KFANYC on March 8, 2009. But, given that this is both a personal blog and a vaguely academic-oriented blog, I do want to mention what I found most personally rewarding about the unconference. I’ve been to conferences before, sure, but this was my first time presenting, my first time “giving a talk.” As someone so steeped in academic culture, this was kind of an important milestone for me. My parents and most other adults I know have been giving talks at conferences all my life, and doing the same was a big indication to me that I’m becoming an adult. The fact that the talk was by no means a failure also suggested to me that it’s something I can do, and that in 10 years’ time I’ll be able to do the same thing at a conference in my academic discipline, or indeed to teach a class.

But perhaps I overstress the academic aspect of KFANYC’s relevance to me, because I think that a lot of what was exciting about it is the way that the format combines academic and non-academic modes of talking about sex and sexuality. The “conference” is an academic model in a way that many existing modes of social interaction for sexuality groups aren’t, but this conference didn’t presume any academic background or qualifications and didn’t have the same standards of format and presentation that academic conferences do. I, as a first-year college student, was able to participate, but so were people who didn’t finish high school and people with graduate degrees. KFANYC very nearly, I think it’s safe to say, made academia accessible to everyone, which is an important thing that those of us entrenched in the ivory tower should be doing. Academic modes are a sort of subculture of analyzing and presenting information, but that doesn’t mean they have to be elitist—just different from, say, journalism, or casual conversation. I think that as much as KFANYC bridged gaps between disparate sexuality communities, it bridged gaps between different registers of discussion, taking academese down a peg while applying a theoretical and philosophical level to more casual conversations.

All around, it was one of the most positive experiences I’ve had recently, both personally and communally validating. If you’re interested in learning more about the Kink For All model or even organizing one in your city, do check out the website.

The Youth of Today

Brooks’ “Organization Kid.” That one NYT Magazine article that produced the college essay contest. That dude from Yale who couldn’t talk to his plumber. These articles about the country’s elite universities and the kids who attend them (the first two articles are about Princeton and UChicago, respectively). I know that when these articles came out, they provoked a lot of conversation among their subjects, those kids of privilege whose lives are on track from the best high schools to the best colleges to the best jobs, not stopping to look around, so overscheduled, so grade-obsessed, so politically moderate and so shallow. That portrayal is what provokes the outrage, anyway, among the Ivy League kids who read these articles. “I’m not like that!” they say.

I said that too, to all three articles. “The Organization Kid” was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 2001, when I was 11, but I read it some years later, when I was in high school. And when the NYT Magazine article came out in 2007, and William Deresiewicz and his plumber in 2008, I was still in high school, and I was applying to those colleges. As I applied to Princeton, UChicago, and Yale (among other places) and eventually came to choose Princeton, I hated these articles. They were so unfair, so one-sided, so unreasonably polemic. I dismissed them angrily, as the age-old phenomenon of the older generation unilaterally decrying the younger.

We read “The Organization Kid” in one of my classes at Princeton last semester, and I had occasion to go back and re-read the other two articles today. And after a semester and a half right in the center of the phenomena all three authors are talking about, I find that my knee-jerk reactions are very different. Instead of saying “Those colleges aren’t like that,” I find myself saying, “I’m not like that. Don’t lump me into your judgment of what Ivy League kids are like. I’m different.”

It’s a stupid reaction, isn’t it? It’s a perfectly egotistical reaction, exactly the one that one of those self-centered and spoiled brats would have. Maybe the Ivy League is working its evil spell on me, changing me so that I am one of Brooks’ overscheduled kids, Perlstein’s apathetic kids who aren’t like yesterday’s UChicago students, or Deresiewicz’s grade-grubbing, careerist kids, and maybe it’s closing my mind and my sense of perspective so much that I can’t see how these words of warning apply to me. But yeah: when we read “Organization Kid” in my freshman seminar last semester, and kids were saying how they didn’t think it was a valid assessment of Princeton culture at all, I found myself thinking “Are you blind? Have you not eavesdropped in the dining hall during weekday lunchtimes, or done the same in the eating clubs on Saturday nights? Aren’t you aware of the people around you—and indeed yourselves?” And then I am so insulted to see myself, as an Ivy League student, lumped in with Deresiewicz’s derision. I am not a grade-grubber (as I’ve said before); I don’t consider myself entitled. I went to an average public school and I know some great plumbers with interesting things to say. And I am also downright furious to read Deresiewicz characterize legacies (the children of alumni) as people “who aren’t up to standard to begin with.” Yes, technically speaking, I am a legacy at Princeton. But I went through way too much self-doubt because of it last semester to sit here now and be told that I’m not up to standard. I know that I’m qualified to be at Princeton and I know that I’m benefiting from the education in every conceivable way. Deresiewicz has no right to brand me with that iron, if that’s the metaphor. I’m sure it’s not. (But my legacy status can’t be blamed for my ineptitude with metaphors.)

Well. I meant for this to be a coherent essay, and I think it kind of got off-track. It’s quite a bit later in the day than when I started writing it, and I’m very tired and burned out. But I can tell that my life in the Ivy League is going to be a very long and winding road indeed. If my academic ambitions stay consistent, I could remain in the Ivy League for the rest of my life. But yes, I will keep my soul and my personality; yes, I will still get on quite well, thank you, with tradespeople; and yes, the radical fire still burns within me. So I’m going to stay true to form and keep blogging about why columnists are wrong about who I am. Oh hey, and if there are any columnists out there reading—next time you want to write an Ivy League article, pretty-please hit me up for an interview?

Campus Dailywatch (2009-03-17)

I totally missed an article about scandal in Brown’s international studies program the first time around, but now it’s been the subject of some outrage in the Brown Daily Herald‘s letters section, so I gave it a reread. To summarize, the article is critical of the new director of the Watson Institute for International Studies, David Kennedy, because of a new legal studies program that he’s established and because of the faculty in it. The paper indicates, with some degree of shock and alarm, that many of the Watson Institute’s new hires have Harvard Law degrees, like Kennedy, and that two of these Harvard Law people, hired for the new legal studies program, who—gasp!—don’t even have PhDs, are a former student of Kennedy’s and someone with whom he “is in a romantic relationship.”

This last reference drew the most ire. Kennedy himself wrote into the Herald to observe that “My partner Dan Danielsen and I were pleasantly surprised to learn in your lead story… that our relationship remained ‘romantic’ after more than 20 years together.” Peter Andreas, a political science/Watson Institute professor, was slightly less sarcastic in his disapproval, writing that he was “dismayed by both the tone and content” of the article—most notably the whole “romantic relationship” thing. And I really have to applaud Andreas’ point here—obviously, I don’t know the details of the situation, but Andreas is absolutely right that it was absurd to insinuate that “that there may be something improper about their involvement,” when, as Kennedy said, he and his partner have been together for more than 20 years. Andreas goes on to bring up spousal hires, which of course do happen in academia; a desirable job candidate is going to be a lot more likely to move to a new university if his partner is offered a job as well. This happens fairly frequently, or so I understand, and in fact I think Brown should be applauded for extending its spousal hiring policy to same-sex couples, despite the fact that same-sex marriage is not legal in Rhode Island.

My mother says that I have a one-track mind when it comes to picking out the LGBT angle in news stories, and yeah, I probably do—I don’t think I would have noticed this story if I hadn’t noticed Kennedy’s letter to the editor first. But doing so does lead me to a larger point about what appears to be the Herald‘s desire to make news where it doesn’t really exist. Campus dailies are a great training ground for aspiring reporters, so I hope that the folks involved in this article do a little academia fact-checking—and yes, because I have a one-track mind, stop insinuating things about Kennedy’s (gasp!) same-sex partner. Would the Herald have made the same insinuations if Kennedy were married to a woman? You have to wonder.