A Little Diddy About Madison Jack

08 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Academic Competition, Academic Conferences, AERA, American Educational Research Association, Burnout, CMU, Collegiality, Conferences, Harvey Kantor, Jack, Joe William Trotter Jr., Michael Fultz, Milford Plaza, Mom, Narcissism, Obsequious, Self-Awareness, Spencer Foundation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yonkers

Jack-In-The-Box 3D model, April 5, 2016. (http://turbosquid.com).

Jack-o’-Lantern, Jack-in-the-Box, Monterey Jack, Colby Jack, and jackknife all have something in common with the Jack I’m writing about in this post. They’re all the kinds of Jacks that I’m not a fan of or outright dislike. They also tend to surprise me at precisely the wrong place and at precisely the wrong time. My Jack, the Jack who finished a doctorate in the School of Education at UWisconsin-Madison in the late-1990s, was one of the most competitive and obsequious humans I had ever met. What made my knowing him worse was that he never had to be cutthroat in the first place.

I first “met” Madison Jack the summer of ’95, via telephone and email. My favorite benefactor at the Spencer Foundation in Catherine Lacey had provided Jack my information. It made sense at the time. Both Jack’s dissertation and my own discussed the process of Black migration, White flight, and school desegregation, though his work involved Milwaukee and mine was on DC. Jack had gotten a small Spencer grant, and I had a Spencer Dissertation Fellowship.

Most importantly, Madison Jack wanted to put together a panel presentation for the April 1996 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting in New York. The panel would involve a group of Spencer-funded folk working on various angles of school desegregation, involving community control, racial discrimination, White anti-desegregation protests, and ideas like my own on multiculturalism and diversity. Over a three-week period between mid-July and early August ’95, we put together a panel of five presenters and a moderator. The moderator was none other than Jack’s dissertation advisor Michael Fultz. Two presenters were 1995 Spencer Dissertation Fellows (including me), and two others would become Dissertation Fellows in 1996 (including Madison Jack).

It could’ve been a powerful panel under the right set of conditions. But it was to be underwhelming by default. We had at least two too many people on the panel. Our panel’s presentation date and time in New York was on the last day of the conference, Friday, April 12th, at 8:15 am, both too early and too late at the same time. With my own troubles with my HNIC advisor in Joe Trotter — not to mention a dissertation nearly complete — AERA wasn’t exactly my primary focus. Plus, visiting my home area with my family living in temporary housing in Yonkers post-616 fire didn’t exactly help with my concentration.

A five-inch folding jackknife, perfect for ingratiating back-stabbers, April 5, 2016. (http://www.lifesupportintl.com/).

But it was Madison Jack’s obsessive competition that reared its ugly head and left a raw horseradish taste in my mouth. It was that much more disgusting because I knew it would be my last conference presentation as a graduate student. Jack and I had agreed that all five of us would have twelve minutes apiece for our presentations, leaving time for audience questions. On that brisk spring morning after a rough night at the Milford Plaza, I began the panel with my talk timed for exactly twelve minutes. With my Mom having not yet arrived and only six people in the room to start, I muddled through as if I needed a cup of coffee just to know that I needed to wake up. Mom arrived five minutes into the second presentation, one by my fellow 1995 Spencer Dissertation Fellow, where she used the term “a cacophony of voices” in describing the different sides involved in the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville (Queens) controversy over community control and racial inequality. Two scholars I knew well were in the audience — including one who was a one-time professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz School (now Heinz College). She said to Harvey Kantor, “This presentation’s ‘caca’ all right” and they both laughed, loud enough for my sleep-deprived mind to notice.

Madison Jack was the last to present. My co-organizer broke our agreed-upon rules. He spoke for more than twenty minutes, all to garner more attention for his work over myself and the other three panelists. Jack also used a slide show, another thing that we had agreed we wouldn’t do, mostly because of the time constraints on the panel. It was a classic example of narcissistic behavior at the doctoral level. By the time Jack had finished — combined with his advisor’s ten minutes of droning commentary — there were only six minutes left for questions from an audience of nearly twenty people, most of whom had missed the first four presentations. Jack fielded all but one of the audience’s questions. If I’d been in my right frame of mind, I would’ve jammed a slide down Jack’s obsequious throat.

Fast-forward nearly a decade to the 2004 AERA conference in San Diego. It was my first time attending the conference since grad school. I decided to go to the Spencer-sponsored talk (an annual tradition), to see if any of my fellow Fellows from 1995 would also be there. A couple of them did show up, which was the good part about this gathering. But so did Madison Jack. He made a bee-line toward me. I made a point of not making eye contact until he was nearly in my face with his grizzly beard and outstretched hand. I shook it as hard as I could, feeling my right hand squeeze his knuckles into each other.

A block of Monterey Jack in all its bland whiteness, January 13, 2015. (Mitch Mandel via http://menshealth.com).

A block of Monterey Jack cheese in all its bland whiteness, January 13, 2015. (Mitch Mandel via http://menshealth.com).

After I let him talk for three minutes about his professorship at some small New England liberal arts college, about his first book, and after introducing me to his wife, he wanted to know how I was doing. Or rather, if I had bested him in my career up to that point. I didn’t take the bait. Knowing that a couple of big wigs had just walked into the room, I started with small talk about my wife and newborn son. I knew. Madison Jack being Madison Jack, I knew he would walk away, with me in mid-sentence, seeking to soak wisdom and advancement out of his next unknowing victims.

With colleagues and friends like Madison Jack, who needed enemies? What made his sycophantic displays and overt attempts at dominance so pitiful was that I never cared. I was too ambivalent about my place in academia and too much in turmoil about myself as a writer to ever care. Fighting over a job or a book with a scholarly publisher? To me in 1996 and in 2004, it was a waste of time and energy.

To me in 2016, it’s also a waste of potential friendships and connections beyond the “what’s in it for me?” perspective. I know lots of folks, but few I count as friends, and only a small number of those are in academia. While much of my work is independent of others, it isn’t work I do or think about alone. Madison Jack probably knows tons of folk in high places. But with an approach to career that is me first, me foremost, and me last, I’m pretty sure that he repels more true connections in his world than he attracts. Kind of like smelling week-old Monterey Jack that’s been left out in the sun too long.

A Weak Legacy: The Acts of the Civil Rights Apostles at 50

24 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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"The Way It Is" (1986), AERA, American Educational Research Association, Brown Lecture, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Bruce Hornsby and The Range, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Class Inequality, Color Bar, Derrick Bell, Inequality, Jesse B. Semple, Legacy, Mother-Son Relationship, Poverty, Racial Inequality, Racism, Symbols, The Acts of the Apostles, Voter Disenfranchisement, Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Acts of the Apostles (book cover), 1999. (http://books.google.com).

Yesterday evening, I attended the eleventh annual Brown lecture hosted by the American Educational Research Association at the Ronald Reagan Building here in DC. The great scholar James Anderson talked for about an hour about the connections between voter disenfranchisement and state policies that created systems of educational inequality for Blacks as part of the Jim Crow era. Anderson wondered aloud that with the recent efforts to restrict voting and with the Supreme striking down Section 4(b) (and essentially Section 5) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 if this meant a return of gross educational inequality on the basis of race and class in 2014. As if the trends of inequality only rise and fall with well protected or unprotected voting rights. Voting rights enforcement is a good barometer, but hardly the only one. The last twenty years of high-stakes testing and corporate education reform provide evidence of a trend of educational inequality that has occurred despite and (in many cases) precisely because of voter participation across all racial lines.

The following, though, is my full response, to Anderson, AERA and all of those in legacy-celebration mode with the Brown decision and the Acts in 2014 and 2015. What was true in 1964 and 1965 remains true fifty years later. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts have been much more lightbulbs on a symbol of real progress — the Civil Rights Movement — than it has been an actual marker of progress. At least for those poor, Black and of color. For Whites, though, the Acts have been the sign of a post-racial America without having to work at it or talk about it. But for the adults I grew up around in Mount Vernon, New York in the 1970’s, there was a lingering hopefulness about race relations and racial equality in America that is absent these days. I don’t know if I felt it because of Archie Bunker and All In The Family or because of all those reproductions I saw of the late Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy together in the same painting over so many living-room mantles when I was six years old. Yet no matter how down or how out, so many poorer Blacks I knew back then had hope for a brighter present and future.

Jesse Jackson, an Obama election sign, and the American flag — three symbols in one picture, July 2008. (http://plus.google.com).

It wasn’t as if they contemplated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act at the disco house parties my mother would take me and my older brother to, playing with other kids while the adults danced away their troubles. No, it was the idea that finally, Blacks who looked like us could pry open a door and get an opportunity to succeed in America. Or, to quote The Jeffersons‘ theme song, to “gettin’ our turn at bat.” It didn’t matter to them that the Civil Rights Act, even with all its enforcement teeth, would benefit White women and those lucky enough to be part of Black middle class more than us poor Black folk. Or if the Voting Rights Act could be thwarted by gerrymandering and state decisions to make voting harder for us. The Acts crystallized hope, symbolized a chance, however small, for a better education, a better job, and a better life, for themselves and their families.

The adults in my life were putting on a good face, though, as I came to realize when I was a preteen. My mother had once held the hope that me and my older brother would “make it” by going to college and finding “good-paying jobs.” But by the start of the Reagan Revolution, she no longer spoke in such lofty terms. My mother was hardly alone. By 1979, Blacks like Florence Grier in Bob Blauner’s oral history book Black Lives, White Lives (1989) were saying, to “tell you the truth, I’m not hopeful that we’re going to progress in the eighties as fast as we progressed from the sixties to the seventies.”

Polling back then also reflected this sense of frustration about race and over racial discrimination among Blacks, in contrast to the White sentiment that America had move beyond its racist past. In March 1981, ABC News and The Washington Post conducted their first combined poll on the state of race relations in the US. While 73 percent of Blacks in the poll saw “deep rooted continuing racial problems and blame them on discrimination…only 46 percent of the Whites agreed.”

First page of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (bent and warped), July 8, 1964. (http://www.ourdocuments.gov/document_data/pdf/doc_097.pdf). In public domain.

The hopes and aspirations that the Civil Rights Act symbolized have eroded with the Act itself, and are all but absent for younger generations of Americans. An MTV and David Binder Research poll from early 2014 found that 48 percent of White millennials believe anti-White discrimination is as significant as discrimination against people of color, while 65 percent of the people of color they polled believe that Whites have more opportunities for success. Even my own eleven-year-old son reflects this trend. “People were more stupid back then,” my son said to me recently while we talked about the Civil Rights Movement and White resistance to integration, as if racial inequality ended with the movement.Thanks in no small part to the success of the neoconservative movement in declaring the death of racism in the 1980s and 1990s, the generation born after 1981 does not see the federal government as the catalyst for a better life or as a leveler of any playing field.

Bruce Hornsby and The Range’s lyrics from their hit “The Way It Is” summed up the weaknesses of the Civil Rights Act and its legacy well, for us in 1986 as well as today:

Well, they passed a law in ’64

To give those who ain’t got a little more

But it only goes so far

Cause the law don’t change another’s mind…

Nor, apparently, does it create a lasting legacy of racial equality and social mobility.

On My Mother’s Side – Meeting The Gill Family

05 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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AERA, Basketball, Bruce Anthony Jones, Continental Airlines, Extended Family, Family, Family Stories, Final Four 1994, Genealogy, Houston Texas, New Orleans, Poverty, Remembrance, Sports, The Gill Family, Third Ward, Travel, Uncle Darryl, Uncle George, Uncle Robert

Continental Airlines ticket stubs/itinerary, Pittsburgh to New Orleans (with Houston layover), April 2-10, 1994. (Donald Earl Collins).

This weekend marks twenty years since visiting my extended family on my mother’s side for the first time. It was Final Four weekend ’94 when I hopped on a Continental Airlines flight from Pittsburgh to Houston. To think that until April 2 ’94, I hadn’t been farther west than Atlanta or been in any other time zone seems far-fetched now that I’ve crisscrossed this country enough times to earn hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles. To think that for years I never felt I had a family to talk about at all or that what I did have wasn’t worth talking about. That all changed that weekend.

A conference presentation proposal I put together with Bruce Anthony Jones — my unofficial advisor in the School of Education at Pitt — had successfully made it through the difficult American Educational Research Association’s review process. So me, Bruce, and two other School of Education grad students were headed to the Big Easy to take in the sights and the serious scholarship that would be discussed, ad nauseum, the first full week of April. I managed to get a layover in Houston, all so that I’d have the chance to meet my extended family for the first time. Between the letter I sent to my Uncle Robert and my first adult conversation with a Gill relative other than my mother or Uncle Sam, I hoped that someone would be at the airport in Houston to meet me.

I landed in Houston around 9 am local time. I slept well on the flight, but I had only had about five hours total sleep before arriving in Bush country. I expected a dump of an airport, but the George H.W. Bush Intercontinental Airport (it wasn’t call that at the time I think) was as modern as Pittsburgh’s then two-year-old airport. I got down to baggage claim, and there they were. Uncle George and Uncle Darryl were there, grinning and smiling as if they could see me from a mile away. “I knew it was you, with that Gill nose,” he said as he walked toward me and gave me a big hug.

Historic Third Ward, Houston, Texas, March 2012 (not the part I got to visit). (Nelson Bowman III; http://www.myhbcuinterview.com)

We got in George’s car, stopped by a gas station near downtown Houston first, to get gas and to get me something to eat and drink. Then they immediately went to the Third Ward to hang out with friends and play basketball. They only let me take three shots, and I missed all three, tired as I was. “We need real ballers out here,” my Uncle George said.

My uncles were good, but given the amount of time they spent on the court, they should’ve been. They both played basketball in high school in Bradley, Arkansas. Heck, all of the Gill boys played at least two sports growing up. My Uncle Sam played four — basketball, football, baseball, and track — and all of the others at least played basketball and football. George at thirty-two and Darryl at twenty-eight (neither of them liked me calling them “Uncle,” with me being twenty-four at the time) were still in pretty good shape, though Darryl complained about his midsection. They kept asking me, “Are you sure you’re a Gill?,” based on three shots I missed, including two that rimmed out.

Eventually I’d meet my Uncle Robert, his wife and sons, my Uncle Darryl’s girlfriend and eventual wife, and a few of Uncle George’s friends that weekend. Of all of the family meetings that took place, none was more meaningful than me sitting down to dinner that Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon with three of my uncles at one time. They grilled me with more questions than I’d get from my dissertation committee some five months later. “How big sis [my Mom] doin’?” “Do any of the kids play sports?” “What’s it like livin’ in the big city?” Even though my mother had been on welfare for eleven years, and living in poverty for some thirteen — working or not — they still thought that we were doing better than they were living in the middle of Texas. I tried, but failed, to convince them that our poverty was real.

It was a weird conversation, seeing that it was happening in the dining and living rooms of my Uncle Robert’s ranch-style house, a four-bedroom, two-bath home with a carport, backyard and decent front yard in suburban Houston. They owned four cars, and a leaky boat that needed some repairs. Pretty good for a man with a high school diploma and someone who was a shift supervisor for a local trucking company. Uncle Robert was the man, a six-five rail-thin man who looked almost like he could be his brother Sam’s twin instead of his slightly younger brother at forty-four years old. But Uncle Robert and the rest of them all assumed that since my mother hadn’t come running back to Texas or Arkansas for help that things were all right. They weren’t, as they’d learn a year later when the 616 fire left my mother and younger siblings homeless.

My Uncle, Robert Gill, Houston, Texas, received April 3, 1994. (Robert Gill/Donald Earl Collins).

Beyond that, I learned a lot about the family. I confirmed some of the stories that my mother had told me over the years, including the one about my half-Irish, half Choctaw/Black great-great grandmother who was born in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1880. I also learned that my grandmother Beulah was originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, that I really did have a great-grand aunt in Seattle, apparently New Edition lead singer Johnny Gill’s grandmother or great-grandmother, making all of us related.

That my uncles were and remained close was heartening, and that they managed to get decent and good-paying jobs was encouraging. It also gave me some sense of reassurance, if not pride, in the fact that they had put their lives together in Houston without any real guidance from family. By the time I boarded my flight to New Orleans that Sunday evening, I felt like I knew enough to talk about my family, mother’s and father’s side, for the first time.

Walking In New Orleans

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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1994, Absolut Vodka, AERA, American Educational Research Association, Armstrong Park, Bruce Anthony Jones, Career Development, Citron Lemonade, Conference Presentation, Identity Issues, In The Closet, New Orleans, Pralines, Presentation, Travel, Trips, Tulane

My AERA 1994 annual meeting program for New Orleans, April 11, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Only in the past two decades have I done any travel worth mentioning (see “My First Vacation, Valedictorian Included” post from March ’12). When I have traveled, it’s mostly been for work or for career.

Some of my most significant career-related trips have been as a result of presentations at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meetings, which will be in Vancouver, British Columbia (I won’t be in attendance this year — too expensive, and other reasons beyond that). It is just about the largest gathering of academic professionals that I know of in the US/Canada, with 15,000-20,000 attendees and presenters.

Over the years, I’ve attended six AERA conferences, and presented at three (in ’94, ’96 and ’07). The first one, though, was the most memorable, for a variety of reasons. For one, I actually spent my first two days of this nine-day trip in Houston, as I managed to arrange a layover before heading out to New Orleans to visit the Gill side of my lineage for the first time (see my “We Are Family” post from April ’09). That was strange, mostly in a good way, as I could see my mother reflected in the eyes and accents of my uncles and cousins.

Holiday Inn, French Quarter, New Orleans, 2012. (Google Maps), where folks stayed for AERA 1994.

But New Orleans was a unique experience beyond my two days with my extended family in Houston. The night I arrived, there were five homicides, including at least two in the French Quarter. About an hour after I check in at the rundown Holiday Inn in which I roomed with my professor Bruce Anthony Jones, another professor, and a doctoral student from Pitt’s School of Education, we went for a walk on Bourbon Street. It was a nice, warm and breezy night for the walk, at least until I saw two people doing ballistic vomiting on a corner about two blocks from our hotel.

The next day, that Monday afternoon, was our presentation on multicultural education. We went and met up with another Pitt education doctoral student at some restaurant a couple of blocks away for lunch, all dressed up and ramped up for our presentations. It was sunny and warm at midday, the perfect day to eat outdoors. When we ordered, I hadn’t really noticed the fact that all of the drinks on the menu were alcoholic ones. I asked Bruce about the Citron Lemonade, and he said, “That’s a good choice.” Despite years around my alcohol dad, I didn’t know that the Citron part was Absolut Vodka with a lemon twist.

Apparently, neither did my fellow grad students. I was on my second one when I felt a serious buzz, before I

1-liter bottle of Absolut Citron Vodka, April 11, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

slowed down to savor the taste of lemons, sugar and vodka on my tongue. The other two students seemed similarly relaxed. I said to Bruce, “[y]ou didn’t tell me that this drink had vodka in it!” Bruce said to all of us in response, “but you’re all relaxed now, right?,” in reference to our presentation. His comment reminded me to look at my watch, which showed that our presentation was in fifteen minutes. We hurried to pay our bill, walked quickly to the Marriott, and did what turned out to be a solid presentation.

The business part of the week was over, but the rest of the week in New Orleans became a learning experience. I did an informational interview with two professors from Illinois State University, who told me to finish my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon. Barbara (one of the two Pitt doctoral students) and me checked out the blues and jazz bars in the Quarter, and went to Armstrong Park for an Afrocentric event that Saturday. I took the trolley out of downtown to the Tulane district and then back to experience more of the city. And I bought pralines on behalf of Kate Lynch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, who apparently loved the stuff.

But the most disturbing part of the trip occurred between that Friday morning and Sunday morning. The other Pitt grad student had been acting a bit strange during the week, spending less time at AERA, sleeping in late at our hotel, and showing no interest in hanging out with the rest of us. Then, he just disappeared. He packed up and left without a note and without paying his share of the hotel bill. We didn’t know until the following Tuesday that he had spent the weekend in Biloxi, Mississippi, allegedly hanging out on the beach.

I said to Bruce, “[m]aybe there was just too much testosterone in the room for him.” Bruce didn’t say anything, as he looked completely confused. I knew that at least one of the professors with whom we roomed was gay, and that Bruce was in the closet as well. I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that my grad student roommate bugged out because he needed a release from the tension he felt being around these professors. Me being heterosexual and spending the week at AERA and on the town, I didn’t notice that my fellow grad student was gay until after he’d disappeared himself.

It was a sad way to end such a wonderfully strange trip. New Orleans was a great city with a diverse culture and history, and despite Katrina and the city’s Whitening, maybe it still is. I just have no desire to return, as once was enough for me, good and bad.

A “Keepin’ It Real” Cover Letter

06 Monday Dec 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic, race, Work

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AERA, American Educational Research Association, Chappelle's Show, Cover Letter, EEO, job search, Keepin' It Real, Race, Social Science Research Council, Strikethrough, The Urban Institute, What You Know, When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong, Who You Know

When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong - Vernon Franklin, Screen Shot from Chappelle's Show, December 6, 2010. Donald Earl Collins. Though this image is subject to copyright, its use is covered by the U.S. fair use laws, because this image is used as the primary means of visual identification of the article topic and is of sufficiently low resolution to not be counterfeited.

Dear Human Resources:

I am applying for the Program Officer, Postsecondary Reform position with the XYZ Foundation, as advertised by the Chronicle of Higher Education ~~UselessJobSite.org~~ webpages the week of 25 October 2010~~, enabling you to fulfill your EEO requirement~~ ~~by giving you the rare opportunity to interview a Black guy with a Ph.D. who’s not yet middle-aged~~ ~~and your curiosity regarding my career background~~. My work in the nonprofit sector and in higher education has provided me with significant skills in program development and management, strategic planning, technical assistance, collaboration, and grantwriting/grantmaking, making me a viable candidate for this position, except with The Urban Institute, Social Science Research Council and the American Educational Research Association (AERA), who prefer Yes People to critical thinkers, who want people who look like them or only people they’ve drank a Bud Light with in an important job.

My overall work history includes ten years of project management in various capacities with projects funded by the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Lumina Foundation. For more than four years I served as Deputy Director for the Partnerships for College Access and Success Program (PCAS) at the Academy for Educational Development (AED). ~~I know that you don’t know what AED is, but please keeping reading, dummies~~. PCAS was an initiative that assisted community partnerships in addressing college access and success issues among low-income youth and youth of color nationally. This work put me in contact with school administrators, college presidents and deans, high school and college students, and executive directors of nonprofits. Yeah, I know I haven’t done much work with boards, CEOs and admissions officers, but don’t you think it’s idiotic to suggest that I’d need to work with all of these people in order to manage a project?

Over the past thirteen years, I have also honed my curriculum development skills as either a project manager or adjunct professor. This includes my work as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University, George Washington University, and the University of Maryland University College. ~~But I know that none of this matters, since I haven’t taught at nor attended an Ivy League school (at least as a full-time faculty member – I did teach at Princeton for two summers).~~ I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses and worked with talented high school youth, first-generation college students, adult learners and graduate students. ~~What? Never been chair of a department or have managed a student’s dissertation process? I guess having taught 2,000 students since 1991 has made me as inadequate as you.~~

My work history also includes five years of technical assistance ~~— I know, I know, what’s that? It’s acting like a strategic planning consultant, except I actually know what I’m doing~~ work through AED New Voices and AED PCAS.

I also possess seven years of experience conducting research-based interviews, developing interview and survey instruments and protocols, developing profiles and case studies, and coding qualitative research. But you dumb asses only want to hear about quantitative research, crunching numbers, multivariate regression analysis, as if this is the end-all and be-all of doing work on education reform and social change. God, being able to tell people what these numbers mean is so much more important than the numbers themselves, but you Vulcans won’t listen.

Additional relevant experiences include:

▸ Previous experience in conducting a grantmaking process, including a request for proposals, selecting a suitable selection committee with extensive academic/professional knowledge and field experience in their respective fields, and sending members of the selection committee out in the field to interview the potential grantees. ~~What? I’ve never worked for a foundation? My bad – I thought that skill sets were transferable! Oh, that’s right – I lack the I know lots of important people skill set!~~

▸ With PCAS, foundation relations/fundraising work raised $1.2 million for PCAS. ~~Surely I should’ve raised more, right? At least $10 million? But I know you won’t hold that against me, right? Yeah, right!~~

▸ Have published works on multiculturalism and diversity, race and identity, education, and social justice including my book Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience (2004) How scary! Another angry Black male sticking it to the Man with a book about diversity. Of course, this shows how little people who react to the title think about educated folks of color anyway, looking for any excuse to confirm their own ignorance as wisdom, as well as articles and reviews in Black Issues in Higher Education, The Washington Post, History of Education Quarterly, Radical Society, Teachers College Record, and Academe Magazine. ~~Dude, you’ve fallen short — where’s your New York Times op-ed or Atlantic Monthly piece?~~

I believe that my experiences in the nonprofit sector make me a qualified candidate because they have provided me a rich understanding of nonprofit management, social justice, policy advocacy and program development in the transition to higher education. I look forward to hearing from you soon. ~~But in some cases, I’d die from asphyxiation trying to hold my breath.~~

Sincerely,
Donald Earl Collins

#####################################

I’m hardly bitter about my experiences in the job market. But working with people who are clueless, dishonest and obfuscate at every turn can make looking for another job frustrating beyond belief. Maybe this is too honest, even for me. In the past seven years of applying and interviewing for a bunch of jobs, I’ve learned so many times after the fact that I wasn’t selected because I wasn’t a friend of the director or a certain senior program officer. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, they say. Which explains why there are so many people with questionable skills in high responsibility jobs.

Lies and the Lying Liars in Job Searches

16 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Politics, race, Work

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AERA, American Educational Research Association, Deceit and Transparency, Head Hunters, Hiring Process, Jackson & Associates Consulting Services, job search, Nepotism, Robert W. Jackson, World of Work

Al Franken's Lies Book Cover, November 16, 2010. Donald Earl Collins. Qualifies as fair use under US copyright law because the photo is being used for illustrative purposes only and is a low-quality crop of original book cover.

Below is a set of emails I received regarding a job I applied for about a month ago. I filled out a thirteen-question addendum to my original application for an initial phone interview, and authorized them to contact all six of my references (which they did) before being offered an interview:

11/09/10 5:24 PM
Dr. Collins – would you be available this Thursday or Friday to come to AERA in Washington for an interview? Please let me know.

Best regards,

Bob

—
Robert W. Jackson, Partner
Jackson & Associates Consulting Services, Inc.
“Excellence in Human Resources & Marketing”
Manage your most important resources – your employees
Tel. 703 450 8567
Cell 703 203 0293
rwj11601@gmail.com
jjacksonhr@aol.com

11/09/10 6:01 PM
I believe we will take about two hours of your time. Perhaps two and a half. It is possible there will be a final interview either next week or at a later date. Hope this helps.

Best,

Bob

11/10/10 8:03 AM
Dr. Collins – Due to travel schedules I need to postpone your interview so I won’t need you to come in to AERA this week. I will be back to you next week with next steps.
Thanks very much.

Best,
Bob

11/16/10 4:13 PM
Dr. Collins – I regret to inform you that AERA has selected another candidate for the Program Manager position. The position was offered to the lead the candidate yesterday and he accepted this morning. Thank you for applying for the position and for the time you spent discussing it with me. I wish you the best of luck with your career.

Sincerely,
Bob
—
Robert W. Jackson, Partner
Jackson & Associates Consulting Services, Inc.

Now, no one likes being rejected for a job, especially knowing that it was most likely an insider — someone who knew the people at the other end doing the hiring. Still, it’s acceptable that it’s who you know, and not what you know, that matters in a high-level job search. But a blatant lie, a delay tactic so that the American Educational Research Association (or AERA) could hire someone with an inside track to the position? Shame on both AERA and Robert Jackson for not having enough transparency and ethics to let me and other applicants know that we were never in line for the job!