Tag Archives: Academia

Finding comfort in the rhythms of the academic calendar

Posted on by

My long-time reader Sara asked me to share a bit more about how I made it through graduate school while struggling with mental illness and addiction. I’ve written a bit about my past a few times before, particularly here and here.

From the time I was first hospitalized (in the spring of 1987, as a nineteen year-old sophomore at Berkeley) until my last breakdown (in June 1998), I seemed to have the capacity to forestall my complete collapse or most spectacular binges until I was on breaks. I rarely missed classes — either as a student or a professor — because I was in rehab or a psych ward, even though I was placed in those institutions more than half a dozen times. Most of my hospitalizations were on spring breaks or summer vacations. My graduation present when I received my B.A. was inpatient treatment for alcoholism. But as bad as my drinking was my final semester at Cal, I turned in every paper on time.

Some of this was attributable to the quirkiness of my own disease. I may have been a world-class narcissist, but as far I was concerned, there was no reason why self-absorption and a strong sense of duty couldn’t be perfectly congruent. I was rarely so miserable or so high that I didn’t have this nagging sense of responsibility creeping in around the edges. Even when I tried to kill myself, I thought carefully about how to arrange papers and finances so that my survivors would not be additionally burdened. I had a sense that self-destruction had to happen on “my own damn time”, which is why I so rarely let my disease interfere with my academic career.

That sounds, of course, as if I had more control over things than I actually did. In some sense, this ability to be a functioning alcoholic and drug addict (if by functioning we simply mean the capacity to show up and suit up for one’s obligations) delayed my recovery, because it allowed me to pretend that I didn’t really have that serious a problem. In my mind, someone who was “really sick” wouldn’t have been able to graduate on time and nail down a tenure-track teaching job at 26. But of course, that illusion of competence and control was part of the illness itself. So much of being successful was, for me, wound up in seeking approval. My sexual compulsiveness was tied to that, and my drug and alcohol use began as a coping strategy for what to do when I didn’t get that approval. I knew I’d lose approval very quickly if I shirked my responsibilities — so I found a way, or so I imagined, to work my acting out around (and in the case of my sexual relationships with my students in my early years of teaching, into) my work.

To point out the obvious: graduate school also gave me a chance to find comfort in gaining mastery of something masterable. When everything else seemed chaotic, the world of medieval manuscripts gave me order and comfort. In libraries and in seminars, I wrestled through problems that were paleographic and theological rather than psychological in nature. Tracing the careers of obscure fourteenth-century English bishops as they rose through the ranks of clerical and royal administrations allowed me to focus on something that was worlds apart from my own turbulent reality.

And it occurs to me that I’ve not been entirely honest with myself, or my readers, when it comes to explaining my academic career. In a short academic autobiography I wrote in 2005, I noted that I had been interested in pursuing a doctorate in Women’s Studies, but chose Medieval History instead out of a kind of intellectual cowardice (and fears revolving around future employability.) It is certainly true that I was always more interested in working on feminism and sexuality than I was on medieval political history and the varied ways in which the English Crown co-opted the episcopal hierarchy for its own purposes. (The topic of my dissertation). The other huge reason why I did medieval history was that I wasn’t emotionally ready to fuse my language and my life. I needed a subject which I found interesting but from which I had some emotional distance. The obscurity of the work I did gave me a kind of comfort I wouldn’t have had if I had been fusing research and activism in a more relevant field. (Another reason, of course, was that I knew that my own personal behavior fell massively short of the mark. A sexually dishonest medievalist getting his degree in history is one thing: a philandering male feminist getting his degree in Women’s Studies is another!)

The best advice I can give to those in graduate school who are struggling with issues around their own mental stability is this: first, seek out help. Make sure that at least one of your academic advisers knows about you. If I hadn’t been able to trust my intellectual mentors with the truth about my personal life, I’d never have made it to the Ph.D. Use the resources that your campus ought to have; your fees have paid for those resources, and you might as well avail yourself of them. Second, find comfort in the rhythms of the academic calendar. Schools have their own liturgical calendars: breaks and exams, welcomings and graduations. For me, at least, those predictable rituals were incredibly comforting. They gave outer order to a chaotic inner life. I’d go so far as to say that the miracle is not that I made it through college in four years and through grad school while struggling with mental illness and addiction. The miracle is that grad school itself turned out to be such a safe refuge. Had I not been in school, I might well have had a very different and much darker outcome.

Men, feminism, and suspicion: a report on our NWSA panel

Posted on by

I’m in Atlanta, taking a break from presentations at the National Women’s Studies Association meeting. (I also need to get away from the exhibitor’s hall, before I buy so many books that I won’t be able to fit them in my suitcase home.)

Brian Jara, Tal Peretz, and I were the panelists for a discussion entitled Men in Anti-Sexist Activism: Problems and Potential. Brian teaches gender studies at Penn State; Tal, a graduate student at USC (and former student of Brian’s) is writing a dissertation on men doing feminist work. Our panel ran from 8:15-9:30AM — which meant a 5:15AM start for those of us whose body clocks are on Pacific time! The three of us had anticipated having ten to fifteen folks come to hear and participate; we were thrilled that more than forty showed. At the beginning, we asked the audience to pose questions for us about men and anti-sexist activism. Most of the questions asked for suggestions for more ways about recruiting men into doing anti-sexist (and explicitly feminist) work; others asked about ways to address the “white knight” or “pedestal” phenomenon, the dynamic in which men expect praise merely for being males doing this kind of work.

Brian noted that he’s fundamentally suspicious of men who come into his women’s studies classes and get involved in feminist clubs on campus. This isn’t out of his territorial desire to be the only male feminist (the one who can soak up the approbation); rather, it’s rooted in his experience of seeing so many men come into this work with motives ranging from the sexually predatory to the expectation that women’s studies is an intellectually undemanding “easy A”. Tal and I echoed Brian’s concern, acknowledging our own experience encountering men in feminist spaces whose motivations for being there are less than salutary. At the same time, we stressed the importance of encouraging men to explore feminism and start doing feminist work. The point, as I emphasized in my brief oration from the table, is to frame the reality of that suspicion as a reason for more men to get involved in anti-sexist campaigns in the classroom, on campuses, and in the “real world.”

I’ve written before about the “guilty until proven innocent” dynamic, most recently in this post on the “Schroedinger’s Rapist” question. We’ve got to recognize two things, I reiterated today: first, the reasons to fear men are legitimate, grounded in tragic reality more than in unjustified paranoia. Second, that sense of being feared, of being viewed as a potential predator at worst and cluelessly insensitive at best does real damage in the lives of an extraordinary number of men. We underestimate the degree to which young men are cognizant of the way in which they are constantly viewed with suspicion, and we often fail to take account of the toll that exacts on psyches and self-esteem. A great many young men work desperately hard, with varying degrees of success, to prove their “safety” and trustworthiness to a select handful of women. (Frequently, though not always, there is a sexual agenda that drives that effort.) Few young men recognize the solution lies in transforming an entire culture; an individual commitment to being a “good guy”, no matter how sincere and consistent, will do little to change a world in which many, perhaps most, women are raised to fear — again, with good reason — a great many, if not most, men. What’s “in it” (anti-sexist work) for men is not of course just the chance to be trusted, what’s in it for all of us is freedom from sexism, objectification, harassment and sexual violence. Continue reading →

Needing a moderator

Posted on by

On November 13, I’ll be one of three panelists speaking on Men in Anti-Sexist Activism: Problems and Potential at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Atlanta. Two fine young scholars, Brian Jara of Penn State and Tal Peretz of USC will be joining me, and we had had — until very recently — a wonderful moderator for our panel booked as well. Alas, our moderator has had an unavoidable schedule conflict come up, and will not be able to participate in the conference. So Brian, Tal, and I need a new moderator. I realize not many of my readers are NWSA members, but perhaps some are; in any case, we’d love to have a new moderator! Email me at hbschwyzer@gmail.com if you’re interested or know someone who might be, and I hope to see some readers in Georgia!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged

Masculinities Week and a Call for Papers

Posted on by

Upcoming excitement:

Occidental College is hosting Masculinities Week, kicking off this Thursday with a lecture by Michael Kimmel and continuing over the following eight days with talks by Jackson Katz, Byron Hurt, Robert Jensen, and Shira Tarrant. Events are open to the public; this is a chance to hear from the leading figures in American men’s studies. I count each of these folks as a hero, and urge all who live in the greater Los Angeles area to look at the schedule and attend one or more of the talks. (I note that I’ll be speaking on a panel about men and feminism with Shira Tarrant next month at the National Women’s Studies Association meeting in Atlanta.) I love Oxy, as it is known, and have many ties to the place I count as the alma mater of both my most recent ex-wife and of Robinson Jeffers, California’s greatest poet. Here’s hoping that more colleges and universities adopt the Oxy model, and sponsor their own “Masculinities Week”. (Your blogger may be available to speak at such events as well.)

And I’ve been asked to publicize the University of Central Oklahoma’s Women and Gender Studies Conference, to be held on February 27, 2010 in Edmond. The call for papers (for 15 minute presentations) is open until December 1, and the conference theme is “Progressions.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged

“I Have No Idea Where I Got That”: the perils of being a workaholic ENFP generalist

Posted on by

As my students know, I don’t lecture from notes. When I’m teaching a new class, or one I haven’t taught in a while, I’ll show up with a few specific facts or dates scribbled on the back of an envelope, but nothing more. When I first started giving lectures as a TA (lecturing as a TA was very common at UCLA) in 1991, I wrote out my lectures in longhand; that quickly proved both tedious and unnecessary. By the time I came to Pasadena City College two years later, I wrote out bullet points for myself on lined yellow paper, but not complete sentences; the last time I used those legal pads to prompt myself was perhaps 1995.

I continue to “read in my field”, as it were. I’m a medievalist by formal training, but don’t teach my subject here at the community college level. Here, I’m a generalist, offering lectures on Hammurabi and Homer, the reign of Charles II, Puritan notions of the erotic, the First World War, the rise of the gay rights movement in 1950s Los Angeles and the theme of dysfunctional families in western literature. It would not be entirely uncharitable to describe my interests as running a mile wide and an inch deep; teaching survey courses in umpteen different subjects is much more appealing to me than taking one or two areas and exploring them in painstaking detail. And so my reading lists are eclectic as I struggle to stay somewhat current in so many different fascinating fields. The ever-growing horde of books unread might be depressing if I allowed myself time to reflect upon all that I still do not know! Continue reading →

“The thoughts of six-hundred-pounders”: professional feminism, class privilege, and the responsibility to teach wisely and well

Posted on by

Yesterday, I posted Lauren’s response at Faux Real Tho to Courtney’s Feministing piece on a day in the life of a feminist activist, and Ann’s, also at Feministing response to both. I’d rather that folks read the exchanges, but the best summary that I can offer is that these posts capture the stark reality of economic, geographic, and professional privilege — a reality made all the more stark by the dismal nature of the current global financial crisis. The discussion at Feministing (again, I highly recommend reading all the posts as well as the comment threads) has turned to what feminist life looks like in the current climate, with unemployment and under-employment and collapsing social services all around. It’s a sobering, as well as uplifting discussion.

This is in my head this morning as I read about the projected state budget deal which will strip $8 billion from California schools and community colleges. The bleak summary:

This month, tax refunds were suspended, along with payments to vendors and some welfare and college grants. And now much of state government is shutting down two days a month, furloughing most employees without pay.

Under the new budget agreement, cuts to other state services would be deep and long-lasting.

Schools and community colleges, which account for nearly half of all state spending, would lose nearly $8 billion. Only part of that would be backfilled by Washington. Several state requirements on how schools allocate their money — including on class size reduction — would be suspended for several years.

School officials say the plan could lead to the elimination of after-school activities, elective classes such as art and music, classroom supplies and thousands of teaching jobs.

Kevin Gordon, a lobbyist for school districts, said, “For the first time, people are really going to see tangible negative impacts from cuts.”

State colleges and universities, where tuition has been steadily rising for years, would lose $890 million.

Scheduled cost-of-living increases for public-assistance recipients would be canceled, and mental health and early childhood education programs created by voter-approved ballot initiatives would be cut by over $830 million. The state would cut spending on local public transit by $459 million.

My newborn daughter is, on her father’s mother’s side, a seventh-generation Californian. I am saddened to think that she will not know the California I knew growing up, just as my parents and grandparents were (I have been told many times) sad that I would never see what the Golden State looked like in their eras. The dream that brought my ancestors and my wife’s here — from places as disparate as Croatia and Colombia, Ulster and Illinois, Austria and the Piedmont — is not now what it was, nor is it likely to be so again.

But this is not the place for nostalgia. Frankly, I’m as concerned about my students as I am about my daughter. My classes are more crowded than ever before, as a changing economy sends more and more people desperate for new skills back to the community colleges for retraining. At the same time, middle-class parents who might once have been able to afford to pay for four years at university for their son or daughter now encourage their kids to spend two years at a far more affordable (if obscenely over-crowded) community college like my own PCC. And as always happens in an economic downturn, state services are cut at precisely the same moment that demand for those services increases.

In thinking about what Ann and Lauren and Courtney are blogging about, I think about my role as a gender studies professor and feminist educator. Should how I teach — and what I teach — change, at least in some way, to address the current crisis? I take great pride, and have for years, in the number of my former students who go on to major in Women’s Studies or Gender Studies in part because of what they got out of my classes. I’ve always held that students should major in something they love, rather than something that they think will get them a job. I’ve preached the (at best, optimistic, at worst, criminally misleading) mantra that “If you do what you love, the money will follow.” That was always a questionable proposition, particularly for those students who don’t have access to the kinds of networks which traditionally provide the social and financial capital with which to turn dreams into a sustainable living. Is it even more of a questionable proposition now, as we face what could be a prolonged recession with potentially massive unemployment?

Pursuing Gender Studies as a major is obviously no guarantor of financial security. But neither is a degree in finance; look at the massive layoffs in the banking industry. A career in construction is no more promising, nor a career in real estate. (If I had a dollar for every student I knew who was working on a real estate license during the peak of the housing boom between 2004-06, I’d be able to take an entire class to lunch.) When I was an undergraduate, with the Cold War still the defining global dynamic and with Reagan in office, many people I knew at Cal were studying aerospace engineering. They figured on a never-ending buildup of arms and materiel to confront the Soviet Union; the “smart money” said a career preparing for the defense industry was a sure thing. The Berlin Wall came down five months after I graduated college, and for the next dozen years, aerospace jobs were shed like dog hair. The point is an obvious one: for a student in her late teens, looking ahead to four or five decades in the work force, there is no major at college that will guarantee a steady and reliable income. In times of great instability, a major in something “impractical” like history or women’s studies makes no less sense than anything else. It is not, I insist, irresponsible to point so many undergraduates towards academic gender work.

But I worry that my own privilege may lead me to give poor advice. Continue reading →

Where have all my roommates gone? Some thoughts on privilege and the post-college blues

Posted on by

From the “I am getting older, and here is further evidence” department: two of my former students, whom I remember as barely out of high school, are now teaching (philosophy and psychology) here at PCC. There are various markers of one’s ageing as a professor: the first students young enough to be your biological children (passed that years back), the first former students to emerge as one’s colleagues (hitting that this year.) Next stop: second-generation students, whose parents took my courses when those parents were of traditional college-age. I calculate I’m no more than five or six years away. I may be “only” 41, but I’m well into my sixteenth year of teaching here, approaching what I presume will be the halfway point of my career as a full-timer. And I say again, how lucky I was to be given a tenure-track job at 26!

Lately I’ve been hearing from a lot of former students (or youth groupers) of mine who are freshly out of college. Some are in graduate school, and some are trying to find their way in the professional world. And as is so often the case, many are struggling emotionally. This struggle is especially acute, I note, in some of those young people who had the most traditional middle-class American narrative. Many of the kids I mentored in the All Saints youth program moved away to go to college; many went to private schools (Smith, Swarthmore, Elon, Pomona, etc.) which featured very small, close-knit communities. They went from feeling loved and supported in high school by a very strong youth program to feeling loved and supported in a nurturing college community. And then, wham, graduation. They aren’t living at home anymore. They’re not in the dorm. They’re living in San Francisco or Brooklyn or West Hollywood in a tiny apartment trying to make ends meet. And not surprisingly, quite a few of them feel lost and lonely.

As far as some are concerned, I tell far too many stories about my exes (perhaps I just have too many about whom to tell things.) But I learned a lot from the women I dated, married, or lived with — and I might as well mine the often painful (as well as hilarious and pleasurable) material. My generally negative feelings about older men/younger women relationships are rooted in some small part in my own experience; in 1999, when I was 32, I dated a woman ten years my junior for about eight months, living with her for four. “K” was finishing up at a private four-year liberal arts college when we started dating (having met in spinning class). She lived in a huge house with half-a-dozen roommates, all also seniors, all finishing their college careers. They were a close-knit group who provided intense emotional and intellectual support. Continue reading →

Your loyal blogger…

Posted on by

… has had his dubious recent distinction publicized in this piece in the Pasadena City College paper. And of course, I hate the picture they took of me.

I have been teased all day at school by colleagues and students alike. Part of me loves it, and part of me feels humiliated, and part of me wonders in what particular way I am supposed to parlay this trivial but interesting distinction into something useful. It’s the sort of thing that one probably doesn’t want in one’s obituary, so I’ll simply have to accomplish enough to ensure that there’s no room to stick this “triumph” in there. But I’m not so embarrassed that I won’t note it here, and enjoy the fleeting notoriety.

After “in loco parentis”: some disjointed thoughts on student mentoring and sex education

Posted on by

It’s always dangerous to write about books one hasn’t read. Still, I find that I learn a lot from book reviews. For as long as I can remember, my mother has subscribed to the New York Review of Books. Since I started graduate school nearly twenty years ago, she’s given me a gift subscription every year. I can’t say I finish every article, but I read it loyally. Like Ms. Magazine and the Economist, the New York Review is one of those staples of my youth upon which I rely still as an adult. And I learn a great deal from reading reviews about books I will never actually pick up.

I don’t read the very conservative Touchstone very often; run by what seem to be an ecumenical bunch of right-wing C.S. Lewis aficionados, most of what appears in its pages are less eloquent versions of the sort of screeds I prefer to read in First Things. (I mean, I’m not a reactionary, but if I’m going to spend time exposing my eyeballs to 14th century ideas, I might as well make sure those ideas are well-written). Still, I managed to come across this book review recently: Ploy Meets Girl, by Nathaniel Peters.

Reviewing three new jeremiads about the “hook-up culture” on American college campuses, Peters takes the predictable tactic of lamenting the ways in which feminist bogeywomen (the omnipresent forces of darkness in contemporary social conservative discourse) have misled young coeds about the proper understanding of sexuality. But to be fair, his review offers more than the usual wails about youthful promiscuity. Rather, Peters looks at the ways in which colleges do — and don’t — provide mentoring and sexual education to students.

Though even the average secular adult would argue that sex should be about more than just the physical experience, colleges and their students focus only on sexual performance. Universities with no creedal convictions feel ill-equipped to help students address metaphysical questions like the meaning of sex. They can answer only the physical questions, and those end up being the only ones discussed.

At my freshman orientation at Swarthmore College five years ago, we were told about the Sexual Health Counselors, peers who advertised the ability to help with sex toys, contraception, or intriguing permutations of positions and partners. But the college offered no help to those who might ask deeper questions, or even to those who wondered what to do the next morning with the person beside them.

That’s not entirely fair. I’m nearly two decades older than Mr. Peters; I came of age sexually in the Reagan years, when the media predicted a full-blown heterosexual AIDS epidemic. But in those conservative times known as the mid-1980s, I worked as a sexuality educator at Berkeley. Yes, we taught folks how to use condoms, and we even “demonstrated” the not-always ridiculous dental dam. We talked about masturbation and STDs and gave little primers on what was then known as HTLV-III (the forerunner, by name, to HIV). But we also talked about values, and about relationships, and about feelings. We faciltated discussions in dorms and sororities and co-ops about faith, ideals, and romantic longing.

I remember helping to lead a panel discussion (back in 1988 or so) on the question “Why Have Sex?” It was a strange title, and it drew a good-sized audience. The premise of the talk was that too many discussions about sex talked about why folks shouldn’t have it (at least until marriage), or about how to have it properly — but no one was talking about the perfectly reasonable question of why one ought to do it in the first place. The easy answer, of course, was “it feels good.” But that raises the question — what feels good? Is it arousal? Is it anticipation? Is it emotional closeness? Is it orgasmic release? What one person likes best about sex isn’t always what the person they’re being sexual with likes best. Continue reading →

A long post about Western Civilization, story telling, my mother, Robinson Jeffers, and rejecting narratives of exceptionalism

Posted on by

In this post last week, I suggested that I was going to take a couple of months away from blogging about animal rights and veganism. I asked for suggestions as to what I ought to blog about, and my former student Paul threw in “Western Civilization.” (I just threw back the famous, and perhaps apocryphal, Gandhi crack about it being a very good idea.)

Each semester, I teach six classes, and offer four different subjects. Every term, without fail, I offer women’s studies and a second Humanities or Gender/Sexuality history course. I also teach my Ancient Western Civilization and Modern Europe courses. These latter two are my “bread-and-butter” offerings, and between the two segments of Western Civ, I have far more students in these intro level classes than I do in my two (slightly more advanced) Gender Studies courses. But I don’t blog very much about teaching Western Civ.

I grew up familiar with the traditional narrative of Western Civilization. My mother taught philosophy, humanities, and religious studies at Monterey Peninsula College until her retirement in 2003. For nearly thirty years, she was a key component of MPC’s legendary Gentrain program. Gentrain (General Education Train of Courses) was and is an interdisciplinary program in Western Civilization, from its Mesopotamian origins down more or less to the present day. My mother started teaching in the Gentrain program in the mid-1970s, when I was about eight years old. And like so many teaching parents, she gave her children the same lectures she gave to her students. On long car trips (in our 1975 Ford Pinto), my mother would regale my younger brother and me with stories she had learned from her colleagues in the program as well as her own material. I don’t know what other kids heard on their car rides, but we heard lectures about Socrates, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, and even Abelard and Heloise. (The last of these became my favorite of my mother’s lectures. For better or for worse, I have a heavy dose of Peter Abelard in my soul.)

My father and mother were both professors; they had met in the graduate program in philosophy at Berkeley in 1962. My father thought very deeply; his lifetime work was on the philosophy of language, and he wrote papers (and one well-received book) on Kant, Wittgenstein, and nearly impenetrable topics like “Sentience and Apperception.” My mother, a Gemini like her firstborn son, was and is a generalist — she liked great sweeping narratives. Though she wrote a fine dissertation to get her Ph.D (on Hobbes), she loved teaching intro classes in Western Civ more than anything else. And she passed that love on to me.

Of course, we never had any sense growing up that there was something superior about Western Civilization. Unlike many of the reactionary voices one finds in academia today, my mother never suggested that 5th century BC Athens or 15th century Florence or 18th century Paris were somehow more important than their counterparts outside of Europe. I never got lectures from her on medieval Mali or the Han dynasty, but she made clear that was because the West was her area of expertise. For my mother, bless her liberal heart, familiarity did not breed delusions of superiority. And it was from that tolerant but focused perspective that I narrowed in on European history in my leisure reading as a boy. Continue reading →