The Cruel Lure of Academia

22 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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Academia, Academic Culture, Academic Jobs, Barbara Lazarus, Bruce Anthony Jones, Burnout, CMU, Contingent Faculty, Faculty, False Gods, Family Issues, job search, Joe William Trotter Jr., Meritocracy, Pitt, Politics of Academia, Publish-or-Perish, Teachers College, Tenure-Stream Positions

Rihanna as Medusa, GQ Magazine cover, December 2013. (http://pinterest.com).

Twenty years ago on this date, I took the call that would help define my last two decades professionally. It was a call from Teachers College, Columbia University. I had made a final cut of interviewees “out of more than 300 applicants,” for a tenure-track assistant professorship in the history of education, the administrative assistant to the ed foundations department chair’s office had told me. It was my first post-PhD job call, one at the time that I hoped would be the only one I’d need.

It wasn’t my first interview for an academic position, though. That distinction went to Illinois State University, in April ’94. Two of their history professors were at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in New Orleans, screening applicants for a lecturer and a non-tenured assistant professor position. I dared not tell my advisor Joe Trotter or anyone else about the screening invite. I went, I met the two youngish professors, both of whom told me to finish my PhD before applying for another job, because they thought my work “too promising” for non-tenure-stream positions. I had also interviewed for two education nonprofit positions, both in Pittsburgh, and both only offering me only a few thousand more than the US Postal Service offered me in ’92, when my name for a job finally came up.

Burned out 40w light bulb, April 27, 2010. (http://www.iamtonyang.com).

Now I had gotten a call from one of the most prestigious education schools in the world. A school within the same university that wanted to hire a private investigator ten years earlier because they didn’t want to give a poor Black kid a four-year free-ride. Despite the irony, I was happy, nervous, and apprehensive. I was happy for the opportunity, nervous about my prospects, and apprehensive about the possibility of moving back to New York. But, most important, I was also burned out emotionally and psychologically from the dissertation process, though not as burned out as I would become in the six weeks that followed.

The interview itself three weeks later was one of the best I’ve ever done for anything. I gave my job talk on multiculturalism and Black education, and for once, professors and graduate students in the audience didn’t look at me like I was speaking Vulcan. I actually had fun on that eight-hour interview day. As much fun as eight hours of scrutiny and answering the same questions over and over again could bring.

But, I remained apprehensive. Because I knew that I had a lot of big decisions ahead if I didn’t get this position, and just as many or more if I did.

Could I pay rent or eat through the summer if I didn’t get the job? Should I go groveling back to Carnegie Mellon, so that I could teach the required World History course for the 1997-98 school year? Could I pick up an adjunct gig at Pitt, Duquesne, or one of the other universities for next year, or what if it’s already too late to reach out? Could I get help from Bruce Anthony Jones, or beyond my dissertation committee, people like Barbara Lazarus, in securing my future? These were the normal questions that an army of PhDs in fields like history faced every single year.

For me, though, the idea of being an assistant professor twelve miles from where I grew up and thirty blocks from one of the buildings I helped my alcoholic father clean made my brain twist in knots. Heck, Teachers College had put me up at the Hotel Beacon on Broadway, between 74th and 75th Street, just three blocks from a high-rise me, my older brother Darren, and my father had cleaned the carpets and floors of regularly between 1984 and 1986. Did I really want to go back to a place with so many bad and embarrassing memories?

Plus, it wasn’t just my past I worried about. Living in subsidized faculty housing wasn’t ideal for me and my soon-to-be-wife. My younger siblings could reach me by catching the 1 or 2 train, and with the recent fire at 616 and the trauma that had caused, their visits were likely to be a regular part of my routine. I had given Mom something like $5,000 in the three years before the possibility of this job, as a graduate student. As a professor, she would likely expect me to do so much more.

Charging Bull of Wall Street (or a false god), cropped, January 19, 2016. (Sam Valadi/Flickr, via http://www.atlasobscura.com/)

Looking back, if Teachers College had offered me the job and I’d of course taken it, I likely wouldn’t have earned tenure. Oh, I would’ve been a fine classroom professor, and most of my students would’ve liked, loved, or learned from me. But between me having not dealt with my Mount Vernon/NY past, my Mom and siblings and family issues, and trying to turn my dissertation into a book and churn out academic pieces, I would’ve needed psychotherapy after three or six years. But Teachers College rejected me two months later. It supposedly came down to me and one other person.

This is what academia does to its own. With too few tenure-stream jobs and way too many qualified candidates, each job interview or job earned becomes magnified, to the point where taking a position can close as many doors as receiving a rejection for a job. Combine that with the false gods of meritocracy and academic freedom, and you have a recipe for a world of competitive disappointment. Academia is a world full highly educated people working for working-class wages but with elitist expectations of themselves and of those lucky few with tenure-stream positions. Add race, class, gender, family, and intersectionality to this brew, and it’s a wonder more of us don’t experience depression or some other mental illness.

I wouldn’t have been able to write this twenty years ago, even if I subconsciously suspected or consciously knew this to be true. I was tempted by the brass ring, only to find it was really a rusty old nail bent to look like something valuable.

What Do We Tell Them Now?

23 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work

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45, American Mythology, American Racism, Civic Education, Critical Thinking, Edutainment, High School Students, Hypocrisy, Independent Thinking, Jay Wickliff, Meritocracy, Political Corruption, Presidential Classroom

One version of Presidential Classroom logo, January 27, 2014. (http://congressionalaward.org).

In all of my professional work experiences, I’ve had two stints outside of academia and more traditional nonprofit settings in which I worked with high school students. One was during my two summers as a consultant with the Junior Statesmen Foundation, where I co-taught and co-prepared an accelerated version of AP US History for students attending the JSA summer program that Princeton University hosted, in 2008 and 2009. I loved those summers with those students, even though it meant not seeing my family for a few weeks at a time.

The other one was during my time as Director of Curriculum for Presidential Classroom. Presidential Classroom, by the way, was never affiliated with the White House. Nor was it an actual classroom. From 1968 to 2011, it was a civic education program that made money by getting schools and parents to cough off dollars to send their high school kids to Washington, DC for a week. Presidential Classroom’s purpose was for students to learn about how the center of American power works from an up-close-and-personal perspective, to serve as a possible way to inspire teenagers to take up public service as adults. It was so influenced by the exaggerated sense Baby Boomers had of themselves and of their activism that was “the ’60s.”

Except that by the time I came on board as a staff person, those lofty purposes were no longer Presidential Classroom’s raison d’être. Like any small nonprofit, it was trying to make more money and compete successfully in a crowded market. Close Up had caught up with and surpassed the organization ten years before I accepted the position. As my one-time boss reminded our staff of twelve continuously, Close Up cleared 20,000 students through their programs in DC every year, while Presidential Classroom struggled to attract 4,000 students in its programs. The board of directors had decided a few years before my time at Presidential Classroom that the organization’s programming had to be more entertaining, and not just about being on Capitol Hill or asking undersecretaries of state and education cogent policy questions.

Outlook 2001, my second and last time on the Presidential Classroom annual resource guide, December 1, 2000. (Donald Earl Collins).

Across two summer cycles and one winter/spring cycle between June 1999 and December 2000, I worked with high school juniors and seniors as part of what I called “edutainment.” I held up the education end. One of my main jobs before groups of 300-400 students arrived for their week of civic education was to revise the organization’s resource book Outlook. It was my job to cover the various ideological and policy topics of the day using primary and secondary sources in the resource book. Even though the organization only expected me to cover two sides to any policy-based issue or political perspective, I knew that this was too simplistic. I often had three points of view for each topic in the resource book.

It was all to make sure that when the high school students got together to debate each other on immigration reform, reproductive rights, affirmative action, or climate change, they didn’t sound like they just quoted Jack Van Impe or Jimmy Swaggart. It was supposed to help them ask well-thought out questions when meeting with representatives and senators, or during a Q-and-A session with a cabinet member, senior Pentagon official, or an editor from The Washington Post or USA Today.

Unfortunately, what little bit of learning students gained during their week in DC translated into a confirmation of their existing ideas about American politics and civic engagement. Plus, it didn’t help that I was working for Presidential Classroom at the end of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment debacle and throughout the 2000 Presidential Election cycle. Arguments about the articles of impeachment turned into whether Monica Lewinsky seduced Clinton or whether the president used his power to obtain sexual favors from a then-twenty-three year-old intern. Six-year-old Elián González became either a proverbial poster child for “illegals” or a symbol of America’s broken promise as a melting pot. Every White student had a story about their dad or brother being screwed out of a job because of affirmative action, of course without actual evidence.

As for the three branches of government, checks and balances, and the bicameral chamber, or more importantly, the process of how a bill became law, who really cared? The students and some staff were more interested in comedy troupes in Georgetown or attracting more “Orientals” to program than in the distance between how government in DC was supposed to work and the Hill’s sorry-ass reality.

What remains of Presidential Classroom, a broken link on the Miller Center website, February 22, 2017. (Donald Earl Collins).

As hard and difficult as that job was at the turn of the twenty-first century, it would be impossible now. There’s absolutely no way I could do that Presidential Classroom job in the era of 45. I couldn’t keep a straight face while discussing meritocracy, the distinctions between the Democratic and Republican parties, or in believing that we were really exposing high school juniors and seniors to how Washington actually works. In order to do a proper debate, each group of high school students we had back then would need the full week to just focus on learning how to debate, forget about meeting folks on the Hill or engaging appointees in Q-and-A sessions. We’d have to take away their smartphones and cut off their access to wi-fi and TV to get them to concentrate. Most of all, how could I, how could any of us, have explained the ascendancy of 45 to the presidency without hundreds of center-right parents calling us for weeks afterward complaining about how often we brought American racism to John and Becky’s attention?

If Presidential Classroom existed in 2017, and I found myself unlucky enough to be its executive director, I would forever refocus it away from Capitol Hill. I would have students meet up with policy analysts and lobbyists from K Street, Northwest and the Massachusetts Avenue corridor between D Street, Northeast (the National Republican Committee and the Heritage Foundation) and 18th Street, Northwest (where the American Enterprise Institute, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Johns Hopkins SAIS are located). I would bring in journalists from across the center-right ideological spectrum. But only after I got the so-called liberal ones to admit that their first duty is to sell a story, not objectivity and certainly not truth, and with that, exposing their center-right perspective.

Most of all, I’d show them the rest of DC. The parts of the area that have gentrified in the past twenty years. The parts of Wards 7 and 8 that have concentrated poverty and the ills that result from it. I would introduce them to the nonprofit and social justice organizations that truly give a shit about neighborhood displacement and homelessness, mass incarceration, and political corruption. In all of this, I would want the students to see not only how DC really works, but what good people who care about civic participation and public service must do to put a dent into this out-of-control, money-drenched machine.

Pitt Graduation Day, +25 Years, +25 Hard Truths

26 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Bitter Truths, Bruce Anthony Jones, Commencement, Daniel P. Resnick, Disillusionment, Graduation, Hard Truths, Joe William Trotter Jr., Lessons Learned, Marc Hopkins, Mary J. Blige, Meritocracy, Michael Jackson, Narcissism, Pitt, Prince, Regis Welch, Self-Discovery, Trust, U2

Peterson Events Center (where they do all the commencements now) University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, circa 2008. (http://www.rosser.com/).

I can’t believed that I’ve lived long enough to make a quarter-century since my end to undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh! It makes me sound old, at least to the twenty-one year-old I used to be. The one who couldn’t decide between a J.D. and an M.A./Ph.D. program. The person who worried that they would have an MA before their driver’s license. The young ‘in who believed that my advanced degree choices would define my career and life more than anything else.

That person was wise beyond his years, and yet stupid at the same time. He believed in the American meritocracy, in the triumph of hard work, talent, and a Christian faith over every obstacle. He believed that any costs incurred on the path to the MA — and later, the PhD — would be covered in the Bank of a Great Career. He believed, most of all, that professors as advisors and mentors would be there to guide his path every step of the way, the trustworthy individuals that most of them had proven themselves to be.

Me & Mark James (Cropped), Pan-African Graduate & Professional Student Association, University of Pittsburgh, February 27, 1993. (Lois Nembhard).

So much of that belief system was poisoned by the e. coli bacteria of academia and by the leaching lead pipes of American -isms. From my trials at Pitt to my tribulations with Joe Trotter, Dan Resnick, and Bruce Anthony Jones. The fact that my entire nineteen years of teaching, consulting, and nonprofit work has been cobbled together out of necessity and constantly changing circumstances, on which ground has rarely been solid. That after eighteen years and six months of payments, and I’m still a decade or so away from paying off student loans I began borrowing seventeen days after graduating from Mount Vernon High School in ’87.

If I had to talk to my twenty-one year-old self now, I’d say, get the MA in history, then get certified to teach at a high school somewhere. Spend the precious moments not in the classroom reaching high school-age students honing your craft as a writer. Jump headlong into putting down in words your experiences growing up, your times as a Hebrew-Israelite and in Humanities. Get that ms turned into a published work. Work hard at understanding the larger issues and contexts that make America the seething contradiction that it has always been, between racism and freedom, individualism and multiculturalism, social control and narcissism. Then, somewhere between the age of twenty-five and thirty, maybe, go back to school and earn that PhD in history, or in education, and take a few social psychology courses focused on personality disorders along the way.

That is the benefit of 20/10 hindsight (I’d say 20/20, but I still see most things at 20/15, and with warp speed at that!), of course. One big barrier I faced twenty-five years ago is a thorough and excoriating understanding of myself and the life I had to live. I remembered so much of my past that I never questioned the things that I’d forgotten. About abuse, physical and sexual. About deprivation, real and imagined. About people, the layers of yellow onions that most sheepishly are.

Unfortunately, I’d learn the most about what I’d forgotten in my forties, well after most people reconnect with the bitterest parts of their past (if any ever dare to). That I know what I know now is in the category of “better late than never.” Some things, though, I needed to know much sooner than 2014 or 2002. Like my discovery of my ambivalence toward academia. Not teaching or publishing per se. But the idea that I could only be taken seriously by publishing scholarly works that mostly would be read by a few dozen colleagues or when I assigned them to my students. I didn’t figure out how to make my ambivalence work for me until I was thirty-seven, and then, with me at mid-career, fighting to move forward.

Chris Farley facing a hard truth, being hit by a 2x4 in Tommy Boy (1995), April 26, 2016. (http://stream1.gifsoup.com/).

Chris Farley facing a hard truth, being hit by a 2×4 in Tommy Boy (1995), April 26, 2016. (http://stream1.gifsoup.com/).

The silver lining is, that if it weren’t for my time at Pitt, I simply wouldn’t be here to write these words at all. The pressures and pollutions of this world would’ve killed me. Or worse still, killed my inspirations and aspirations, rendering my imagination, my sense of what makes a just and wise world, dead. I’d be as bitter as a cup of Italian roast coffee mixed with vinegar and raw horseradish.

I’m sure that even among my more successful colleagues — and even more sure among my less successful ones — their journeys since the halcyon times of undergrad and even graduate school have been bittersweet. That is life. Especially in a nation in which others encourage us to have aspirations beyond the stars, a complete contradiction to that cracked concrete-reinforced reality that is America.

But even if all of the remaining highs in my career and life outnumber the lows by ten-to-one (who knows, right?), two truths are clear. One is that most people who experience any depth of success in their lives tend to remember the lulls and ruts more than their moments at the top of the mountains. Two is that without me having climbed that first mountain, the college degree mountain, I would have a story to tell, but would lack the words to tell it. I would still be living vicariously through the music of others, whether U2, Earth, Wind & Fire, Michael Jackson (RIP), Prince (RIP), or Mary J. Blige. And for me, at least, as genius as they are — alive and dead — I still need to tell my own story.

Prince, circa 2013 concert, April 26, 2016. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images).

Prince (1958-2016), circa 2013 concert, April 26, 2016. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images).

“Glory Days”

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Youth

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"Glory Days" (1985), Baseball, Baseball Glove, Bruce Springsteen, Darryl Strawberry, Double Play, Dwight Gooden, John Tudor, Lenny Dykstra, Merit, Meritocracy, Modell's Sporting Goods, MVHS, Myths, Naivete, New York Mets, Single-Minded, St. Louis Cardinals, Talent, Varsity Baseball

There are times I wish I could have back the tunnel-vision naiveté I had to have during my Boy @ The Window years. The kind of naiveté in which I believed I could literally do anything, with hard work and talent alone. You know, that great old American myth of a level playing field, a meritocracy. It took me years to give this myth of an ideal up, despite the evidence of the lie all around me.

The American Dream Game cartoon, January 21, 2014. (David Horsey/LA Times).

Three decades ago, I believed in it. I had to. If I hadn’t, I would likely not be here to say anything about merit or any other American falsehood or truth. Where my belief in the meritocracy was strongest was in sports, where literal examples of the level playing field abounded. I was coming off a year of watching my Mets win 98 games while missing the playoffs by three games, yielding the NL East to the St. Louis Cardinals. It was really one game during the next-to-last series of the year, against the Cardinals in St. Louis. Dwight Gooden won a pitcher’s duel against John Tudor while Darryl Strawberry and Lenny Dykstra hit timely or game-winning home runs in the first two games. But we couldn’t win that final game. As unfair as it seemed, the Mets had given me a great season.

So great that it inspired me to try out for baseball that year, out of all the sports I could’ve played. It had become my favorite sport, and knowing I had more of acumen for football and basketball didn’t distract me from my master plan. But first, I needed to learn how to play baseball.

My year slipped a bit in October and November as football and baseball provided distraction, which was why I had to refocus in early December. And not just because I spent my time watching TV. Richard P. — for me an almost unknown person — had invited me to practice with the varsity baseball team. He might’ve been in my gym class or friends with Suzanne. Richard P. was a senior and a star pitcher who’d been clocked throwing a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball — absolutely awesome! Of course I said “Yes” without thinking about my reality at home. I never owned a baseball glove, never played on any Little League team, and had only used a baseball bat during softball and gym class three times between seventh and eleventh grade. I had Jimme take us to Modell’s Sporting Goods store in the city and bought a $55 outfielder’s glove.

I still needed to break it in, which would be even harder with the crooked ring and pinky fingers on my left hand. With Richard P. and the other members of the baseball team, some of the breaking-in happened pretty quickly. I went to three of their practices in October and saw the difference that the years of athletic experience I didn’t have made in the case of the varsity players. Frank dived for a ball at his shortstop position on our indoor Astroturf practice field, caught it, got up, and gunned the ball to first base. His right arm had two purple rug burn marks on it. “There’s no way I’d ever want to dive for a ball like that,” I thought. The next thing I knew I was out there with the team taking grounders at shortstop and catching balls at first base. We were practicing double-plays. One grounder came up on me faster than I expected. I got down for the ball, got it in my glove, but then it popped out as I rose up to throw it to second. The ball popped out and went right to Frank at second, who then threw to first, a real double-play. I got cheered and jeered at the same time!

My first-base experience was less memorable. I caught several Richard P. throws to first in holding-the-runner simulations. Every time I caught one of his balls I wanted to scream from the pain. I needed to get calluses on my left hand fast if I was going to hang with these guys!

1980s-era Mets cap, October 25, 2015. (http://academy.com).

If given another year, with lots of practice, I probably could’ve made this baseball team. But to what end? I already had a plan for going to college, on the academic track, after all. “So what if the baseball team was stacked with Italian guys and I was better at basketball? I should be able to play what I want to play.” That’s what I thought at the time, at least.

Merit, even in sports, is never the only consideration. Egos, politics, the expense of playing a specific sport, and of course, race, all play a role in the paths that athletes take and in the decision-making of coaches as well. I was just too naive, too focused on one thing, too stupid at fifteen to allow myself to see that my raw talent was never going to be enough. Five months after that last practice, though, I did see the truth, if only for a moment or two.

Why Boston U Isn’t For Me, and Shouldn’t Be For You

26 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Academic-Speak, Boston U, Boston University, BU, Checkbox, CMU, Cosmetic Diversity, Disillusionment, Institutional Racism, Jimme, Linda Sarsour, Meritocracy, Nepotism, Office of the Provost, Racism, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Righteous Indignation, Robert Turri Vise, Structural Racism, Suzanne C. Kennedy, Timothy Barbari, Tokenism

The main classroom buildings for the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University, with the BU East ‘T’ stop in the foreground, July 18, 2010. (Fletcher6 via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Since my first job working for my father in Manhattan in ’84, I’ve probably done over 200 interviews. By telephone, through Skype or WebEx or Adobe Connect, at conferences and in person. Probably about a third of those interviews have occurred with colleges and universities, for academic and administrator-level positions. For the most part, whether the interviews went well or when I didn’t have my “A-game,” my experiences have been pleasant ones. But, after two different interview processes five years apart with Boston University — one in October ’10, the other last month — there is a higher education institution that I will not work for, will not send my son, and will not recommend for anyone I know, under nearly any circumstances.

There are only a few institutions that have been so bad that they’ve moved from my [expletive] list to my permanently-banned-from-my-life list. Even Carnegie Mellon isn’t on the latter list, and I’ve talked about their conservatism and weirdness around diversity before here. But Boston University’s treatment of me as a potential employee, well, it took my breath away without putting me in an NYPD chokehold.

Round 1, Boston University, August-October 2010

Let me rephrase. I was never a “potential employee,” because on the two occasions I interviewed for jobs there, Boston University in the end treated me as a checkmark interviewee. In the fall of ’10, I emerged for them as a candidate for the director of their Washington, DC program. They interviewed me three times: at the American Political Science Association conference in DC in August, at their old DC program headquarters (while also showing me their new one, still under construction) in September, and in person on the main Boston University campus in late October.

For that last interview, they pulled out all the stops. They flew me in, put me up in a nearby hotel the night before, and even took me to lunch. Of course, they also had someone give me a two-hour guided tour of the campus that morning, after one morning meeting, on a day with thirty mile-per-hour winds coming off the Charles River as we walked from one end of the campus to the other. It’s funny. Up until then, I never thought of a campus tour as sinister. But then I realized, if I’m spending two hours during the heart of the workday doing a campus tour with a twenty-four year-old BU grad in forty-five degree weather, what did that mean for my real chances at that job?

My final meeting was with a professor who advised political science and history major in the DC program. That meeting ended at 5 pm on October 22, with which I knew that they were supposed to make a final decision in a week or so. Despite a thank-you email and two follow-up emails, I didn’t hear from Boston University again until November 29. Roberta Turri Vise, the point person for my interview process, didn’t explain why the final decision took more than five weeks. Nor did she explain why after six weeks of correspondence, no response from my requests were returned by her or anyone else in her office.

Round 2, Boston University, January-March 2015

I decided that this was a one-off thing, that with our generation of job searches occurring in a buyer’s market, that some folks really don’t care about being professionals in their dealing with interviewees. Boy was I wrong! Even in a market where people ignore applicant materials and send mass rejection emails without a candidate’s name on it (or worse, with someone else’s name), Boston University claimed a unique crown.

Hierarchy tree of Boston University’s leadership team via the Provost’s Office, April 26, 2015. (http://www.bu.edu/info/about/admin/).

I interviewed with them again in January and at the beginning of March. This was for a position in their provost’s office, a director position managing undergraduate and graduate fellowship opportunities and advising students via those opportunities. The position was a bit beneath my experience, but they seemed interested, and I already knew from some initial research that it was a new position, so I went ahead and applied for it. My first interview was by telephone, with Suzanne Kennedy, the assistant provost for academic affairs at Boston University. It was a pleasant but underwhelming interview, and I actually didn’t expect a call back. So I kept up with my usual work of teaching, consulting, and looking for more consulting opportunities.

I received an email five weeks later asking me to come up to Boston for a second, in-person interview. I gave it the go-ahead, although the length of time between first interview and correspondence concerned me. So too, did my back and forth with Kennedy’s assistant over travel, as she had initially booked me at times that were very inconvenient for interviewing purposes. Not to mention, the major snow issues that Boston experienced in February.

The interview on March 4 was honestly one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had interviewing for any job. I’m including an interview in which I discovered the place was a sweatshop in Chinatown, during my summer of unemployment in New York in ’88. I had three meetings in all, one over lunch with Kennedy, and two with the two associate provosts at Boston University in academic affairs (one undergraduate, one graduate). Over lunch, the conversation was going well, until I asked the question about the level of diversity with applicant pools for Fulbrights, Trumans, Borens, and Rhodes’ scholarships and fellowships. I kid you not, Kennedy’s eyes literally glazed over as soon as I asked about diversity. Keep in mind, I had asked about socioeconomic diversity — I hadn’t touched racial or gender diversity yet. After lunch, I didn’t see Kennedy again for the rest of the interview process.

My second sign came from my third meeting. I met with Timothy Barbari, associate provost for graduate affairs. It was obvious that Barbari hadn’t even looked at my CV before I walked into his office. The first thing Barbari says to me, with him pushing his body into the back of his chair so far that his attempt to be at ease looked more like a rocket revving to take off — “so, you have a rather interesting CV.” I may not have earned all of my money as an academician, but I’ve been around academic-speak long enough to know that interesting can mean a lot of different things, mostly bad. In this context, interesting meant “not straightforward, not linear in progression, not typical in terms of whom we typically hire.”

I was already feeling a bit like a checkmark or token interviewee by the time I left Barbari’s office for Logan. But after USAirways canceled all their flights to DC that evening due to a snowstorm that wouldn’t drop a snowflake for another twelve hours, it got worse. I notified Kennedy through her assistant that I was stuck in Boston overnight from Logan, and left a message the next morning that the Amtrak to DC was my only option, as more flights had been canceled. No word, not even a “I’m sorry that you have to go through this” response. It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that Friday, nearly a day after I returned to DC, and after a third message about them needing to reimburse me, that I heard from Kennedy’s assistant.

At that point, I wouldn’t have taken the job even if they had offered it to me. As it was, I didn’t hear from Kennedy again until April 7, five weeks after a second interview, and despite a check-in to find out what happened with this director position. It’s this kind of calloused approach that leaves folks shaking their head.

Shaking Off The Dirt

I’ve made a few determinations based on these experiences. For one, if this is the way that treat job candidates who look like me, how well do they pay and treat their service staff, the most vulnerable people on their campus? Not well, at least from what I saw and have experienced. For two, the fact that for both interviews, their top concern seemed to be about competing with “schools across the Charles River” — i.e., Harvard, MIT, Tufts — was somewhere between disconcerting and ridiculous.

An elephant shaking off the dirt, circa 2012. (JD Rucker via Pinterest.com).

The fact that with tuition, books, and room and board it would run the average BU student $60,000 per year also told me what I needed to know. Boston University is a place that wants elite status and elite students, and in pursuit of this Pollyanna goal, wants to hire people they feel fit the bill. As long as those people look like everyone else running the university — mostly White, with a few people of color lightly sprinkled in leading positions at the institution. Because Boston University has what activist Linda Sarsour (Twitter, @lsarsour) calls cosmetic diversity, a genuine attempt at diversity across socioeconomic, racial and gender lines is unnecessary, at least for the powers whom run the institution.

Aside from Martin Luther King, Jr., who earned his doctorate in divinity at Boston University in the early 1950s, I’ve known or known of only one person of color with a degree from BU. She was a neighbor at 616 East Lincoln, a few years younger. Based on her description of more than two decades ago, I’d have to say that Boston University has changed for the worst. Like most universities, they seem more interested in prestige and raising money than in fulfilling their mission.

And with that being the case, why send your kid to Boston University? Especially when, for the same amount of money or less, every other school in the Boston area is either better, or at least, cares more about diversity and learning beyond the cosmetic.

Merit-hypocrisy in the Air

18 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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"Who-You-Know" World, Academia, Ageism, Bruce Anthony Jones, Daniel P. Resnick, Dick Oestreicher, Envy, Hard Work, Hypocrisy, Jay Wickliff, Jealousy, Jelani Cobb, Joe William Trotter Jr., Ken Williams, Meritocracy, Nepotism, New Voices, New Voices Fellowship Program, Nonprofit World, Presidential Classroom, Racism, Wendy Goldman

Meritocracy cartoon, October 29, 2010 (Josh C. Lyman via http://www.clibsy.com/).

One of the hardest ideals for me to give up on in all of my life has been the idea of meritocracy. Even when I couldn’t spell the word, much less define it or use it in a sentence, I believed in this ideal. It was the driving force behind my educational progression from the middle of fourth grade in January ’79 until I finished my doctorate in May ’97. The meritocratic ideal even guided me in my career, in both academia and in the nonprofit world. Only to realize by the end of ’09 what I suspected, but ignored, for many years. My ideal of a meritocracy is shared by only a precious few, and the rest give lip service to it before wiping it off their mouths, concealing their split lips and forked tongue with nepotism instead.

Being the historian I am — whom people like Jelani Cobb joked about on Twitter as a curse — I am programmed to look back at situations in my own life to look for root causes, to understand what I can do to not repeat my own mistakes, my not-so-well-planned decisions. I’ve thought about my advisor Joe Trotter and my dissertation committee of Trotter, Dan Resnick (husband of education researcher Lauren Resnick) and Bruce Anthony Jones. The biggest mistake I made was in putting this hodgepodge committee of a HNIC advisor, racial determinist and closeted wanderer together to help guide me through my dissertation and then into my first postdoctoral job.

Aaron Eckhart as main character in movie I, Frankenstein (2014), August 12, 2013. (http://sciencefiction.com/).

Of course, I didn’t know enough about these men to describe them this way, certainly not until I’d graduated and couldn’t find full-time work for more than two years. The signs, though, were there. Trotter’s unwillingness to recommend me for any job before my completed first draft of my dissertation was really complete (it took me two weeks to revise my dissertation from first to final draft). Resnick calling my dissertation writing “journalistic” and saying that my nearly 2,000 endnotes and thirty pages of sources was “insufficient.” Bruce pulling back on his schedule with me even before taking the job at University of Missouri at Columbia in July ’96.

None of this had anything to with my work. It was about me, whether I as a twenty-six year-old had suffered enough, had gone through enough humiliation, to earn a simple letter of recommendation for a job. When Trotter finally decided it was time to write me a letter of recommendation, it was December ’96, and the job was University of Nebraska-Omaha, “subject to budget considerations,” meaning that it could (and it did) easily fall through. Resnick flat-out refused to share anything he wanted to write about me, with all his “confidentiality” concerns, while I wrote all my letters for myself for Bruce. It was a disaster, and none of it had anything to do with the quality of my work as a historian, educator, or academic writer.

The work I ended up getting after Carnegie Mellon was the result of my dissertation, my teaching experiences, and my networking. The idea that I’d earned my spot, though, was still lacking in the places in which I worked. Particularly at Presidential Classroom, where I was the token highly-educated Negro on staff, and working at Academy for Educational Development with the New Voices Fellowship Program. In both cases, I had bosses whose racial biases only became clear once I began working with them. The then executive director Jay Wickliff never cared about the quality of my work or my degrees. Wickliff’s only concern was that I should keep my mouth shut when he acted or spoke in a racist manner.

My immediate supervisor Ken, on the other hand, wanted all the credit for work I did under him, except in cases when he deemed my methods “not diplomatic enough.” Even before his bipolar disorder led him to a psychological breakdown, Ken regularly accused me of gunning for his position, sometimes turning red whenever he heard about my latest publication, teaching assignment or conference presentation. I had to fight to keep my job and to move on within AED in those final months of ’03 and early ’04, a fight that had zero to do with merit.

Dixie Biggs, Lip Service teapot, April 19, 2015. (http://pinterest.com).

I say all this because the one thing that every one of these folks had in common is their lip service to the belief that hard work and results are the keys to success and career advancement. Yet for every one of them, the merit that I had earned didn’t matter. My relative youth, my age, my race, my heterosexual orientation, even my achievements, either scared them or gave them reason to have contempt for me.

I say all of this because in the past eleven years, I have been very careful about the company I keep, about the mentors I seek, about the friends I make, personally and professionally. I went from not trusting anyone as a preteen and teenager to trusting a few too many folks in my twenties and early thirties. All because I believed that my hard working nature and talent mattered more than anything else. What has always mattered more is who you know, especially in high places like academia and with large nonprofits and foundations. So, please, please, please be careful about the supposedly great people you meet. Many of them aren’t so great at all.

That’s why the idea that academia is a place full of progressive leftists is ridiculous. Yes, people like Dick Oestreicher, Wendy Goldman, Joe Trotter and so many others wrote and talked about progressive movements and ideals while I was their student. But fundamentally, they couldn’t have cared less about the actual human beings they worked with and advised, particularly my Black ass. Their ideals stopped the moment they ended their talk at a conference or wrote the last sentence of a particular book. They only cared about people that they could shape and mold into their own image. And that’s not meritocracy. That’s the ultimate form of nepotism.

ETS Using Test Results To Justify Its Test-Filled Vision

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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"America's Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future", Closing the Achievement Gap, Common Core State Standards, ETS, High-Stakes Testing, Income Inequality, Meritocracy, Millennials, OECD, PARCC, PIAAC, SAT, STEM Fields, Testing

America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future (cover), February 17, 2015. (ETS).

I actually like the Educational Testing Service (ETS). I’ve done work for them as a consultant and as an AP Reader over the years. I enjoyed most of my testing experiences with them, especially the AP US History Exam of 1986. I like many of the conferences that they host and sponsor, and they beat almost all with the spreads of food that they provide at their events. Yet even with all that, ETS’ agenda is one of promoting the ideal of a meritocratic society with a repressive regime of testing that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt the socioeconomic determinism of standardized assessments. Or, in plain English, tests that favor the life advantages of the middle class and affluent over the poor, Whites and assimilated East Asians over Blacks, Latinos, and only partially assimilated immigrants of color.

Such is the case with a nearly unreported new report from ETS. They had scheduled a press release for the “America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future” on Tuesday, February 17th at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The organizers postponed the event, though, because of the phantom snow storm that was really a typical snow shower. So I didn’t get to ask my preliminary questions about the findings of researchers Madeline J. Goodman, Anita M. Sands, and Richard J. Coley, that despite the educational gains of the generation born after 1980, they sorely lack the skills they need for life and work in the twenty-first century. My questions? How could anyone have expected millennials to develop independent thinking, critical thinking, innovative thinking, writing and other analytical skills if they spend precious little time in their education actually doing any of these things? How would the constant barrage of high-stakes tests from kindergarten to twelfth grade have been able to instill in students ways to think outside the box, to look at issues with more than one perspective, to stand in opposition to policies based on evidence, and not just based on their gut or something they picked up from a test?

Mass of students taking high-stakes test, September 4, 2014. (http://newrepublic.com via Shutterstock).

Well, the report is worse than I thought. Goodman, Sands and Coley put together an argument that makes circular reasoning look like a Thomas the Tank Engine episode. The authors produced this first in a series of reports for ETS, relying solely on “data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).” The PIAAC, developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is a survey that assesses the skill levels of a broad spectrum of people between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five, the primary working population in most developed countries (meaning the US and Canada, the EU, the Baltic states, Australia, Japan and South Korea). ETS and the authors claim that this survey instrument is better at assessing how far behind millennials in particular are when compared to “their international peers in literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments (PS-TRE)” than the international testing of high school students alone. And as such, the authors concluded that

PIAAC results for the United States depict a nation burdened by contradictions. While the U.S. is the wealthiest nation among the OECD countries, it is also among the most economically unequal. A nation that spends more per student on primary through tertiary education than any other OECD nation systematically scores low on domestic and international assessments of skills. A nation ostensibly based on the principles of meritocracy ranks among the highest in terms of the link between social background and skill level. And a nation with some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world houses a college-educated population that scores among the lowest of the participating OECD nations in literacy and numeracy.

I don’t about anyone who reads my blog, but I find these conclusions smack of so much hypocrisy that they’re stomach-ache-inducing. Really? Years of promoting testing at every level of K-12 education, everything from state and district-level assessments to PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessments, and it’s only because of growing economic inequality that US students-turned-adults don’t score well in the super-advanced, highly skilled categories? Not to mention, the SAT, AP exams, GREs, LSATs, GMATs, MCATs, Praxis I, Praxis II, and so many other ETS exams that it would cause the average psychometrician’s head to explode? Seriously?

Terrier dog chasing its own tail, March 3, 2015. (http://webmd.com).

This is yet another case of the dog chasing its own tail. A case where the $3-billion-per-year nonprofit just outside Princeton, New Jersey is sounding a clarion call for a crisis that it helped create. Not the one on the rapid rise of inequality, though its promoting of a false meritocracy through constant testing has served to lull affluent America into an intellectual coma. But in the cutting of history and social studies, literature and art, theater and music classes, from kindergarten really all the way through a bachelor’s degree program.

In the promotion of testing as the way to address achievement gaps, to deal with the so-called education crisis, so much of what was good about K-12 and even higher education has fallen away. Reading for the sake of reading and learning has drifted away, with more English and less literature in schools and at many colleges and universities than ever. Want to teach someone how to express themselves in writing, to express their numeracy in proofs? That thinking runs counter to what goes on in the Common Core school systems of 2015, meaning most people will either never develop these skills, or, if lucky, might develop them somewhere between their junior year of college and in finishing a master’s degree or doctorate. We emphasize STEM fields with billions of STEM dollars without realizing that great STEM is much more than equations and formulas. It’s also imagination, applying the ability to break down pictures, ideas, words and sentences contextually to the world of numbers and algorithms.

And don’t give me this whole “the SAT now has an essay section on it” spiel! Fact is, everyone knows that expressing their words on paper, on a screen or in speech is critical in modern societies. After almost seven decades of testing, ETS figured this out, too? What they haven’t figure out yet, though, is how to make standardized high-stakes testing a necessary for the entire working adult population in the US. Believe me, that’s where they want to head next.