Can There Ever Be Too Much Race In A US History Course?

05 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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African Slaves, Capitalism, Carnegie Mellon, CMU, Course Evaluations, Critical Thinking, Democracry, Duquesne University College of Education, George Washington University, History as Trivia, Independent Thinking, Native Americans, Pitt, Racism, Slavery, US History

ODing on chocolate via a hypodermic needle, January 5, 2015. (http://buzzfeed.com).

For nearly every semester in which I have taught a US history course — and I’ve been teaching them on and off since ’92 — one or two students have complained in their course evaluations that we “spent too much time on race.” Pitt, Carnegie Mellon, Duquesne, George Washington, UMUC, the refrain from this small but vocal minority has been the same. It was no different this past semester, as two students complained that there was too much about race in the course. But over the years, I’ve never seen any of these students ask themselves the question, “How do you define ‘too much race’ in a US history course?”

I guess I could look at it this way. That a small minority of my students like their US history the way most Americans like their churches — segregated and unequal. US history for them is supposed to be about the building of the greatest nation on Earth/in the history of humanity, preordained by God to dominate the world with its military, its capitalism and its brand of democracy. US history for them is the history of how Europeans escaped political persecution and religious oppression for the pristine wilderness of the New World, broke free of the chains of absolute monarchy and tyranny, and built this great country from the basement up.

John Gast’s Spirit of the Frontier (aka American Progress), with American personified by Columbia in a toga, 1872. (Jeff G. via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I guess I could teach a US history like this. A course that completely ignores the existence of Native Americans, numbering in the neighborhood of 10-15 million in what would become British North America (now the US and Canada) at the time of Jamestown settlement in 1607. A class that could gloss over the diseases, wars, starvation and constant encroachments that reduced this population by ninety percent within a century of the real British invasion. I could skip over the economic imperatives — really greed — that led to the use of White indentured servants and West Africans as indentured servants and slaves to make the colonies profitable through growing tobacco, rice and indigo. I could obfuscate the eventual creation of an institution that made permanent the connections between African skin and slavery in what would become the US, codified in law and in the US Constitution (albeit indirectly).

I guess this US history course could focus mostly on the genius of the great White men that made this a great nation, slave owners like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Andrew Jackson. I could then focus less on the crucial reliance of the US economy on the profits and products of slavery that made industrialization possible. A system that supplied the US and the UK with the cotton that would make modern capitalism — with its multinational banks, international commerce and movements of large numbers of people to cities for work — a reality. A system that so contradicted American ideals that it led to a civil war that killed and maimed nearly 1.2 million people.

Original Trivial Pursuit, Master Game, Genus Edition, 1981, January 5, 2015. (http://epicrapbattlesofhistory.wikia.com/).

And all this only gets us to 1865. There’s also Indian removal, Mexican-turned-Americans in the Southwest, Southern and Eastern European immigrants and Social Darwinism, Jim Crow segregation and lynchings, race riots, Black migration, Mexican migration, Whiteness and the assimilation of White ethnics, the early Civil Rights Movements, the Civil Rights Movement, the post-Civil Rights era. This is hardly an exhaustive list of the topics that are key ones in any US history course.

So short of deciding to only teach a US history that only focuses on great, rich White males, I have to discuss race. If only to teach this history properly and well enough to give all of my students food for thought and thought for food. Otherwise, I might as well be teaching Trivial Pursuit or change my name to Alex Trebek.

Transfer Anniversary

21 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Academic Politics, Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon University, CMU, Department of HIstory, Dissertation Completion, Dissertation Funding, Doctoral Completion, Elite Universities, Elitism, Funding, History Department, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter, John Modell, Jr., Larry Glasco, Laurence Glasco, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Politics of Academia, Transfer, University of Pittsburgh

Viewing Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon’s mall (with Hamerschlag Hall in foreground), March 29, 2003. (http://post-gazette.com)

March ’93 was an interesting month for me, to say the least. Just about the biggest thing happening for me that month was my transfer from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon (or CMU) to finish my doctorate. After nearly two years of grad school in the History Department, I knew I needed to leave. Especially with Larry Glasco as my well-meaning but sometimes absentee advisor and with a bunch of professors who never hid their disdain for me as a masters and then a doctoral student. I’d also been at Pitt for six years between undergrad and grad school, most of those focused on history, Black Studies, or education foundations and policy as areas of research.

I knew that Carnegie Mellon wasn’t an ideal situation. I was sure that had I desired, I could’ve applied to and been accepted by doctoral programs as far and wide as NYU, University of Maryland, University of Michigan and other places. All were places where history didn’t simply consist of working-class historians who believed in the supremacy of class and neo-Marxism above all else – race and racism be damned! What I didn’t know, though, was whether those departments would accept my doctoral credits, cutting my coursework time in half. What I couldn’t be sure about was whether I’d be able to move toward PhD comprehensives and my dissertation proposal within a year of enrollment.

See, these were the things that Joe Trotter, my eventual advisor and John Modell, the graduate coordinator for the department, had promised me as part of my deal for transferring across the bridge to CMU. Those promises, along with the idea of working with an enthusiastic professor whose research didn’t seem out-of-date in a department that seemed to fast-track its students toward doctoral completion. That really appealed to me at the time.

Pitt and Carnegie Mellon (with Forbes Quad & Baker Hall included) as seen from Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, PA, March 21, 2013. (http://milliverstravels.com).

When I finally broke it to Larry at the beginning of March that I’d made this decision, he didn’t exactly try to convince me to stay. I think he knew why. An audit of the program in ’98 confirmed officially what I had learned anecdotally over my six years at Pitt. That there were students in the program who’d been ABD (All But Dissertation) since Nixon and Watergate. That fully half of my cohort from ’91 hadn’t even completed their master’s degrees, and only three of us (counting myself) out of twenty-one would ever go on to complete our doctorates. That no Pitt History grad student had obtained substantial research funding from outside the university since my Mom potty-trained me back in ’72-’73. And that politically, the powers that used to be in the department didn’t take my or Larry’s work with me seriously. Even if Larry didn’t see that, I sure did.

Off then, I went. Into the unknown known of CMU, conservative, elite and elitist, not sure if I’d ever be comfortable on the lily-White and honorary-White-as-Asian campus. Still, I reminded myself that Pitt was really only a couple of blocks away at the closest point between the two campuses, that I still had lots of friends and acquaintances there. I also knew, though, that my relationship with Trotter as my advisor would be crucial to my successful navigation of this drab and stuffy world. Too bad I wasn’t clairvoyant!

Cath The Great

05 Monday Nov 2012

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

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Annual Meeting, Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon University, Carolina Inn, Catherine A. Lugg, Catherine Lugg, Conference, Conference Presentations, Department of HIstory, Durham North Carolina, Educational Policy, Friendship, Friendships, Graduate School, HES, History of Education Society, Pittsburgh, Politics of Education, Serendipity, Steven Schlossman, University of North Carolina

Catherine A. Lugg, circa 2009, November 5, 2012. (Catherine A. Lugg via Facebook).

I define serendipity as the ability of hard work to create what others would consider good luck, fortuitous chances, random opportunities for success. I’ve managed to do just that over and over again over the course of my life, particularly as a student and occasionally as a writer. But as a human being in search of real, positive, life-changing connections and friendships, serendipity has been very hard to make happen. When it does occur, at least for me, it becomes one of those moments that I seal in my mind, like a note in a time capsule.

The beginning of November ’94 was one of those weeks filled with serendipity. It started with the chair of the History Department at Carnegie Mellon, Steven Schlossman. He had decided that he couldn’t make it to the 1994 History of Education Society annual meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. But because he had already booked a room and a flight, Schlossman apparently figured that he could simply transfer both the airline tickets and room to me instead (back in the pre-9/11 days when you could do such things without creating a potential terror alert). So Schlossman met with me a week before this conference and said that I should go “to represent the department” and because he thought it “a great opportunity” for me.

Carolina Inn at night (its better side), Chapel Hill, NC, 2007, November 5, 2012. (http://booked.com).

I wasn’t so sure, with the HES meeting being held in a mansion-turned-hotel, not quite on the University of North Carolina campus. Once I arrived from Pittsburgh on that first Wednesday in November, though, I felt at least free from the burdens of grad school at Carnegie Mellon. The weather was perfect, in the low eighties, and my World History sections for that Thursday and Friday were being covered by other teaching assistants. So I gave myself a tour of Chapel Hill, all the while wondering why didn’t I apply here for graduate school.

That was only the prelude to the four-day conference that began that Thursday. And since Schlossman had charged me to attend four sessions and to take notes on them on his behalf, I went to as many conference offerings as humanly possible. Back then, I had a much higher tolerance for boring academician-speak. So I was easily able to take detailed notes. I asked questions on topics in which I knew little. I even smiled and introduced myself to the mostly over-fifty White male crowd.

By Saturday, I had one mandatory session to attend. It was something about education in Japan and Germany post-World War II and how Japanese textbook makers left Japanese atrocities during World War II out of the nation’s history textbooks. During the Q & A, I asked what I thought was a pedestrian question, pedestrian because I forgot it five minutes after I asked it. Yet several people afterward told me that I’d asked a great question, as if I had some unique perspective or something. “It’s not even my subject matter,” I thought, adding in my mind that “Maybe some of these folks thought that the Black guy in the room didn’t really know anything.”

History of Education Society 1994 Annual Meeting program, November 3-6 1994, November 5, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Or, as it turned out, my dedication to Schlossman’s charge made me seem 1,000 times as enthused about the HES meeting as anyone else attending. For two women did in fact notice me during that session. That Saturday evening, during beer, wine and spirits time in a cramped conference/ball room space, after pleasantries with a couple of older professors, I bumped into the two women again. They immediately engaged me in conversation, because they wanted to know how I managed to remain upbeat during such a boring ass conference.

Barbara and Catherine were both grad students in the School of Education at Penn State, as it turned out. Both were also PhD candidates in the midst of doctoral theses, and because of my being only twenty-four, couldn’t believe that I was a PhD candidate also. What I thought was going to be just another one of thirty conversations with older White male professors and kiss-ass grad students turned into a nearly ninety-minute discussion of research, pop culture, the HES conversation, and the ironies of life, and all with a snarkiness that only someone like me (or Rachel Maddow) could fully appreciate.

It might’ve ended there. Except that Barbara and Catherine’s research on federal education policy and achievement gap data for Latinos (especially Mexican immigrants) dovetailed pretty well with my work on multiculturalism and Black education in Washington, DC. Plus, the three of us saw an opportunity to use next year’s HES meeting as an opportunity to expose the hypocrisy of the old boys’ club and their petri-dish sense of educational issues for women, for communities of color, and for immigrants. We titled it, “Educational Historiography and Diverse Populations: Why Research Isn’t ‘Bringing a Pet to Class’.” Somehow the powers who ran HES accepted our proposal, giving us a chance to present at HES in Minneapolis in October ’95.

A skunk (something a teacher shouldn’t bring to class), November 5, 2012. (http://animal.discovery.com).

By that time, though, Barbara couldn’t make it, having recently married and having moved across the pond to the UK. Catherine ended up taking her place, and ended up doing two presentations in less than twenty-four hours. She’s been there for me as a genuine friend in academia and in my aspirations as a writer ever since.

The HES meetings were the start of an eighteen-year friendship with Catherine, one that actually survived despite the tendency of the academic life to kill more friendships than one could ever start. I think we’re friends still because we share a same sense of the world, and both are willing to snark our way through the madness of it all.

My Take on Carnegie Mellon University

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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47 Percent Video, Affirmative Action, Alumni Association, Barbara Lazarus, Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon University, CMU, Conservatism, Disappointment, Exclusion, Fundraising, History Department, Isolation, Joe Trotter, Mitt Romney, Pitt, Silent Treatment, University of Pittsburgh

View of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon lawn, Pittsburgh, PA, October 22, 2012. (http://www.broadwayspotted.com/).

It’s with extreme disappointment in which I write my latest post, this one on Carnegie Mellon University, or as the locals and attendees call it, CMU (sorry, Central Michigan University folks). But I feel I have little choice, given the amount of crap I’ve received over the past few months from my doctoral institution. The alumni association and the fundraising people at Carnegie Mellon ask me for money at least twice a week, and don’t seem to get it when I say “no” or “never” or even “when Hell freezes over.” I’ve known creditors less persistent about getting money out of people than the fundraising arm of Carnegie Mellon.

The last straw for me, though, was last week. I received three emails on the same day, not to mention a letter in the mail, all asking for donations. One also included an alumni survey, which I dutifully filled out and rated Carnegie Mellon at the low-end of every category in the survey. “Not only do I not mentor my students or aspiring college students about Carnegie Mellon,” I said. “I go out of my way to make sure that they do not ever consider applying to or attending Carnegie Mellon,” I added at the end of the survey.

Romney in 47 Percent Video, September 18, 2012. (Joe Pompeo/http://capitalnewyork.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright Laws – cropped/low resolution.

I don’t think that the alumni association or the fundraisers really understand the depths of my disappointment regarding my four years at CMU between ’93 and ’97. I found the university culture about as welcoming as going to a Mitt Romney fundraiser in Boca Raton, and with many folks from the same crowd as well. Anytime your campus refuses to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a holiday, or insists on having Dinesh D’Souza give a two-hour talk on race without an opposing viewpoint, it’s a stifling place. A campus in which the College Republicans stage marches while not having a strong College Democrats or progressive group in place is a bastion of conservatism, not just politically, but socially as well.

In four years, I became friends with a very small group of students and professors. I would’ve made more of an effort, if I hadn’t been told practically from day one that my master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and my other achievements meant little because, well, I had a degree from Pitt. And these sentiments came from my professors!

From my fellow students — who often walked by me as if I were a ghost until I forced them to say “Hi” — there was the impression that I must’ve gotten into the History program under some “special dispensation,” as one White guy put it. Yeah, my M.A. — earned in two semesters with a real committee examination — and a year of PhD work had nothing to do with my ability to write rings around my fellow students!

All in all, my Carnegie Mellon experience only worked out as well as it did because I reached out beyond my department and beyond the university to maintain connections and friendships with real people. My list of good folks at Carnegie Mellon is pretty short. The late Barbara Lazarus (see my post “Ladies and Gentlemen, Dr. Barbara B. Lazarus” from July ’09), Susan McElroy, John Hinshaw (who himself didn’t talk to me for two years after I’d gotten a Spencer Fellowship), and “My Friend Matt” (September ’12). The Black Graduate Student Organization (or BGSO), the graduate students of color/women graduate students working group that Barbara headed, and our group of fourteen doctoral students of color (the total number of non-White and non-Asian PhD students at Carnegie Mellon). That and playing intramural and pick-up basketball as much as three times a week were the sum total of my positive people and experiences at CMU.

Carnegie Mellon’s University Center, or “the new sanitarium,” October 22, 2012. (via Wikipedia).

I spent the majority of my non-classroom time on Pitt’s campus hanging out with friends there, working on my dissertation, meeting with some of my former professors, or otherwise enjoying my status as an alumnus. If anything, I needed to walk across that bridge between Carnegie Mellon, Schenley Park and Pitt as much as I did in order to keep my sanity, to make sure that I was essentially the same person I’d been while going to grad school with comparatively less uptight folk.

Of course, I could also go on about how my experiences with Joe Trotter as my advisor (see my “Outrage, Maybe” post from May ’10) turned me into an anti-Carnegie Mellon advocate, or how the sanitarium look of the university buildings could leave Polyanna depressed. But for those involved in alumni fundraising and related tasks at Carnegie Mellon, get this. I will never, ever, ever, give CMU one penny of my hard-earned dollars. I’d sooner give my idiot ex-stepfather a penny at his grave before you could pry a cold copper piece out of my hands, alive or dead. As far as I’m concerned, you owe me for four years of unnecessary anguish in the midst of my determined success.