This week, the Ivory Tower Boiler Room’s special Wednesday podcast-episode deals with the difficult but necessary subject of #MeToo cases at the university. Our guest, Dr. Helana Darwin–author, mother, award-winning scholar, qualitative research specialist–has entrusted us with her story of abuse at the hands of her own dissertation advisor.
Dr. Darwin is currently writing a memoir about her experience as a survivor. Nevertheless, we feel proud and lucky that she has entrusted us with helping her to broadcast her story, because it’s a necessary one. People need to know that:
The modern university may teach feminism, but is far from practicing it. Her abuser, Michael Kimmel, is, ironically, particularly well-known as a feminist scholar. He retired as soon as her allegations became public, and has suffered no civil or criminal consequences for his actions. And to this day, sociologists, both in her own department at Stony Brook and in the greater academic community, have offered silence in place of support.
People who are experiencing trauma are not ok; it’s not fair to expect them to be. As you will hear, one of the hardest things about Dr. Darwin’s experience is that it was so isolating, not just because a powerful and influential feminist scholar was abusing and gaslighting her, but also because being unable to extricate herself from that abusive relationship meant she was constantly in a kind of fight-or-flight mode. Her personal and professional relationships suffered, and that, in turn, made her more reliant on her abuser’s power and influence within her chosen scholarly field.
Speaking her truth has not been an easy road. Dr. Darwin’s story is downplayed by people who use the cover of digital anonymity. After an arduous job search, she recently found employment in the private sector. Despite her numerous scholarly accomplishments, she found, after she came forward with her accusations, that the scholarly community had callously closed its doors to her. She is also regularly subjected to death-threats and other online bullying.
When you listen to the recording, you’ll hear two distinct parts: The first part is the usual format: Adam and Andrew listening to Dr. Darwin as she tells her story, and interjecting questions and comments. Usual interview stuff. After that, Adam and Andrew are joined by Erika and Mary for a roundtable discussion in which the four of us try to process what we have heard. The roundtable discussion after Part 1 of Helana’s interview is a way for us to curate and emphasize certain themes that were brought up, but it’s also our way of engaging in self-care; of taking time to process the emotional difficulties raised in ourselves by listening to Helana’s story. We extend this invitation to our readers: as you listen, please be aware of your emotions, and don’t be afraid to listen in chunks. This recording will be too much for some people, for others it will be difficult but doable, and for others–particularly for people who have not had to endure this kind of trauma–it will be all too easy not to emotionally engage. All we ask is that you stay present as you listen, and that you give Helana Darwin the fair hearing she has been denied by the university, the greater community of sociologists, and the justice system.
A final note. Andrew and Adam reached out for comment to the administration of Stony Brook University. In the course of the roundtable discussion, you will hear Andrew, who is himself a sexual assault survivor, discuss his frustration with their response. For the sake of full disclosure, we are including all of our correspondence with the SBU administration here, with only the names and titles of our correspondents redacted.
This afternoon, we’re going to be airing an episode of the podcast that comes with trigger warnings. If you yourself are a survivor of sexual abuse or assault or a related trauma, we welcome you to listen, but recognize it may be too much. If you are not, we thank you for being a good ally and listening with us, because Dr. Helana Darwin’s story is one that needs to be told and needs to be heard.
Our main hope is that the people who listen to this podcast become emboldened by Dr. Darwin’s example to break their own silences, or to help the people in their lives to do so. In this episode, you’ll hear that Dr. Darwin did not need our help to break her silence, although the lack of support, both from her own department and from the broader community of her fellow sociologists, has been noted. But it is still our responsibility to offer any help we can–by lending her our platform and letting her talk. You will hear as you listen to the episode that Dr. Darwin is a gifted speaker. Not everyone has that particular gift, and justice for survivors should not depend on it. So we extend this invitation to all of you: if you want our help breaking your silence, telling your story, or if you just want our help pointing you in the right direction, please do not hesitate to reach out.
In the meantime, if you or someone you know is experiencing sexual abuse, sexual assault, domestic abuse, intimate-partner abuse, grooming, gaslighting, or any other sexual- or relationship-trauma, please make use of these resources. There is no substitute for a trained professional, such as a social worker, but it can feel daunting to take that step. So please reach out–to us, if not to anyone else, because being a survivor can feel lonely, and that’s a valid feeling, but it can still be true that there are people in your corner who want to help; people who know something about what you’re going through. And because our team includes survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence, we can bear witness to the value of a supportive community in helping you heal.
*For immediate help in your local area, to find SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners–forensic nurses who have received special and additional training to care for the physical, emotional and psychological needs of sexual assault victims and survivors), you can contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 (HOPE)
The Ivory Tower Boiler Room brought you a two part series about graduate school and mental health earlier this year. Here are links to those two episodes:
No one knows what you’re thinking when you’re wandering the library shelves. For me, they were a safe space when I had the kind of questions that no one could answer for me…even if I had known someone I might have been able to ask. But it was the early 90s. “Lesbian” meant atheletic, butch women like Martina Navratilova. That was definitely not me. And besides, I didn’t not like boys, I just knew girls made me feel “that way” too. “Gay” meant “men” and I definitely wasn’t one of them. And the only times “bisexual” came up were basically if you were talking about AIDS or famous people like David Bowie or Elton John. I was watching MTV with my sister one afternoon when she turned to me and said, “You know he has his right ear pierced. That means he’s bisexual. That’s gross.”
All of this, and even a summer of “experimenting” (sneaking around with a girl at summer camp,) but I insisted to myself, it was nothing, and every time I had a “wrong” thought about girls, I would go through a complicated mental series of steps involving shame, scolding myself, and forcing the thought out of my head along with a reminder about why I shouldn’t think about those things. The worst “fear of being found out” moment by far though was during my college search. In the pre-internet days, we had these huge books that listed all kinds of facts about colleges, and then there were separate niche guides for various students. My guidance counselor pulled out a book one day when I was in her office , one that catered to more liberal students and showed me various features and ratings in this book, and then she pointed out how this one described the climate on campus for “Gay and Lesbian” students (it was the 90s…no B and no T.) I had an internal freakout–how could anyone know what I’d been thinking about? I’d never actually told anyone?How could anyone assume I was a lesbian? I’d had boyfriends!!!
But the shelves of the public library, those were safe. No one knew, while I wandered the fiction section, what I might be looking for, and I could just get lost for hours if I wanted to. There was a lot of fiction to read that year, too; my Writing Fiction and Poetry class meant writing at least two response papers a week to things I’d read, but the expectation was that we would be reading more than two pieces a week. Those pages were paper sails of safety, carrying me to places I could go to figure things out for myself.
I dug in. I read Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, all six books. I read Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, enthralled and excited to read the scenes on Fire Island, where I’d spent a few summer days…although not on the beaches described in the novel. I read David Leavitt, whose books I still love, thirty years later. I read Paul Monette, Edmund White. I read “A Home at the End of the World” (which confused me terribly at the time but in retrospect, probably had more influence than I gave it credit for then.) I read Bret Easton Ellis’s books–he actually had a (male) bisexual character in “Rules of Attraction,” too. And mountains and mountains of contemporary poetry mostly relating to HIV/AIDS; I was already volunteering as a peer educator, but being queer was still an experience I was so disconnected from and so scary that I sought out other ways to understand it.
All these stories, and a few themes stand out. People finding peace within themselves and wholeness in their own identity. These were the stories of happy, out, queer people with fulfilling lives, not the tragic stories I’d seen or read before diving into queer literature. There were stories of people making peace with their families…something I craved in my own life, as a teenager in a family where some of the relationships could best be described as “volatile.” Even when parents in some of these stories struggled to understand their children as “different,” they were redemptive stories, where people were loved and accepted for who they were, the gifts and talents they had. And there were stories of chosen families, the intentional communities people surround themselves with, the communities that lift them up, that sweep them along, that carry them through the everyday. I’d discovered a little bit of this phenomenon while spending a few summers at a “Montessori inspired, progressive, liberal, hippie, creative and performing arts summer camp” (coincidentally also the site of the aforementioned summer of “experimenting” with another girl).
There’s something I noticed when writing this piece… something I hadn’t noticed before. My first plunges into queer literature, into understanding what it meant to call myself something other than straight (I had no idea what that might be at the time) and into defining what that label meant to me were completely centered on books written by, and predominantly about, men. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it was a question of what was available in the library’s collection, or what was on my radar as a reader (I picked up Bret Easton Ellis because of the film version of “Less than Zero,” and then went on to “Rules of Attraction,” and “American Psycho,” I picked up David Leavitt because I saw the film “Lost Language of Cranes”, and so on). Was I just going through the writers who had written the blurbs and forwards and things to the books I already liked? If you look at lists of what was published at around this time, books by and about gay men far outnumber those by and about women. I already had a strong feminist identity. Why not read the stories by or about women? Perhaps I just needed that distance, to understand theoretical, hypothetical things before I could really grapple with some of the bigger questions, some of the closer to the heart issues. And I did read Rita Mae Brown and Jeanette Winterson and Leslie Feinberg and others… but only after I had come out.
It was in those pages, where I could get lost in my own imagination, where I could find the safe place to begin to uncover my own secrets, to face my own fears, and to unpack my own internalized homophobia. It still took a few more years, and a lot more denial, shame, guilt and insistence that I wasn’t, as I now sometimes put it, “queer as a football bat.” I had a lot to learn, about myself, about labels and identity and about what was important to me, but in those pages, I found comfort, confidence and safe passage to take the first steps on my own journey.
Adam moderates our July roundtable, where he begins by having each member of the team provide their response to the questions: “What is a teacher?” and “What is a classroom?” What follows is a discussion on the role education plays in each of the team members’ lives. From Adam’s memories and analysis of his favorite high school teacher to Mary’s experiences teaching musical theater, to Andrew’s account of the overlap between his work in and out of the classroom, to Erika’s reflections on teaching at juvenile detention facilities and elsewhere, this episode covers such a wide range. You’ll see that we’ve shared our favorite books and movies about education, especially teaching, and we all thought about recommending one of the most infamous professors in film history, Indiana Jones. But, was he actually doing all of the grading, or were his TAs? (So many questions unanswered…)
Just a reminder to let us know in the comments section: what’s your proudest teaching moment? What’s a great teaching memory you have? Share with us in the comments–we might share your story in our episode! Also: let us know of any transformative, life-affirming, or picturesque moments you’ve had in independent bookstores.
Friday is here, and there’s a lot going on for us here in the Ivory Tower Boiler Room. Our most pressing and exciting piece of news is that we have a sponsor (you might have heard us mention as much one or two… hundred times in the last week). The sponsor is Words Matter, which is a bookstore, almost a year old, based in Pitman, New Jersey. So stay tuned for news on our collaborations, including an OPEN MIC PARTY, hosted by Words Matter, to celebrate our 1-year anniversary as a podcast. Any past guest or writer, and anyone who donates money to our operation, is enthusiastically encouraged to attend–in person, if convenient, or via Zoom, if it would be prohibitively inconvenient to fly in from Idaho, or Hong Kong, for example.
That may be our biggest news-item, but it’s far from our only one. Andrew and Erika just crossed an item off their respective bucket lists by getting to interview Lev Raphael (normally Adam does the interviews with Andrew, but this was one of Erika’s favorite writers, so it was a no-brainer). Look for that interview to get posted sometime in coming weeks. And today, Andrew, Erika, Mary, and Adam will by recording a roundtable where they discuss their experiences as teachers. Look for that to get released tomorrow (July 10).
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Now a bit of a call-back. For those of you who appreciated “The Closet in the Library,” which was not only our first book-launch, but also a solid good time sitting down with our guests from the Broadview Press and nerding out about books, you’ll be happy to know that one of the editors, Kate Flint, sent us her responses to the questions we ask every interviewee. We published Jason Rudy’s answers a few days before the podcast came out. Please enjoy perusing her thoughts and feelings and, perhaps, most importantly, her recommendations. And if you haven’t listened to the podcast episode featuring Kate and Jason and their brand-new baby, the Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Volume 5, make sure you check them out. Andrew and Adam had an amazing time recording that session, and the enthusiasm really comes through when you listen. Don’t forget that the anthology will be released just a few days from now, on July 13.
What are you listening to, reading, watching?
Kate Flint: Mostly I listen to our local independent radio station, Radio Free Santa Fe (where yesterday I heard and enjoyed tracks from Grace Pettis’s new album), or NPR. Reading – I’ve just finished Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl, and am now reading Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground and Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot (you can tell it’s summer). Plus academic stuff about eco-art and environmental change, and biographies of nineteenth century nature writers in the UK and the US. Watching? Most recently, England beating Ukraine 4-0! Further back – and not counting the Rachel Maddow show – I much enjoyed Mare of Easttown.
2. Do you like to cook? What is your favorite thing to make?
KF: I think of myself as enjoying cooking, but pandemic exhaustion set in a while back, and I’m not yet back into the excitement of trying something new or complicated. So I’ll recommend the simplest of chicken salads – buy a rotisserie chicken, cut it into small pieces, and mix with chopped shallots, small avocado pieces, arugula, cilantro – can be served on the side, if, like me, you live with someone cilantro-averse – and lime juice. Salt, pepper. The lime is essential.
3. What is something you have read and loved, and wish more people would read?
KF: I’m always convinced no one else reads Vita Sackville-West’s fiction, which is witty, poignant, closely observed …
4. Did you grow up with video- or computer-games? What were/are some of your favorites?
KF: Um, no. But I played a lot of Racing Demon and Scrabble when growing up. I’ll do the NYT Spelling Bee on my phone – I doubt that that counts! – and occasionally Woodoku to calm my nerves (as when watching a depressing segment on Rachel Maddow, see above).
5. You’re taking a sick-day from work. What movie are you putting on.
KF: If I were taking a sick-day, I doubt I’d feel up to watching a movie!
6. What’s your favorite excuse for why you have writer’s block?
KF: I can’t claim that I’ve ever suffered from writer’s block, luckily, though I’m practiced at procrastination. I do find taking a shower a very good place to Have Ideas, and I’ll think things through on long walks.
7. What’s a book everyone says you should read, but you either read it and hated it, or haven’t read it.
KF: I’ll confess to a blind spot when it comes to science fiction of all types. I like the idea of it, and of course absolutely see its theoretical, speculative possibilities, but just as I had a low tolerance level for fairy stories when I was a kid, I always get stuck once it starts to seem improbable. I am committed, however, to reading Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower this summer – it’s an embarrassment not to have done.
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So. When we’re not podcasting or writing or editing, what are your humble servants in the Ivory Tower Boiler Room doing this week to keep themselves occupied?
Adam is visiting family in the wild and wooded country north of New York City, and managed to hit up a local bookstore to the tune of:
–The Collected Stories and the Stories for Children by Isaac Bashevis Singer (he already owns both of these, but with some books, don’t you want to have just a few extra copies, so that if someone you know hasn’t read one, you can assign them homework then and there? No? Wait–really no? Then… how do you make sure your friends are reading the right books and not the wrong ones?)
–A Passage in the Night by Sholem Asch
–Wandering Stars by Sholem Aleichem
–Tales of Hoffmann by E.T.A. Hoffmann
–Last Stories by William Trevor
–Antígona González by Sara Uribe
He has been watching Little Things on Netflix, which is a show about two young people co-habiting in Bombay. It’s a really gorgeous and often funny show, and everyone–yes, everyone–should watch it. Also, he has now seen the movie The Prestige. It is good. That’s all.
Music recommendations are the same as they ever were, because if 17th-19th century European classical music helps you stay sane, and staying sane is even somewhat of a priority, it’s not that hard a decision. This week’s choices, though, are astonishingly recent: Le Tombeau de Couperin and Gaspard de la Nuit, both by the 20th century composer, Maurice Ravel. Gaspard, apparently, has the distinction of being the most difficult piano piece ever written, narrowly edging out “Islamey” by Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev.
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Andrew is listening to Just Above my Head by James Baldwin on Audible. His review is pretty succinct: “wow, it’s incredibly powerful.” Listening to Baldwin’s narrative read aloud has helped him to understand what makes his writing so prophetic. Not only are Baldwin’s characters’ complexity on display, but the way he writes eroticism is, Andrew feels, unmatched.
As far as music goes, Andrew is currently listening to the different curated mixes on Spotify that match his fascination for the 70s. Here is the playlist Andrew is currently loving and listening to:
Sheila Liming’s What a Library Means to a Woman and Lev Raphael’s My Germany are two reads that Andrew can’t wait to dig into. These are books related to an Ivory Tower Boiler Room interview. It is exciting for Andrew (and the team) to be able to meet the authors. So far, Andrew does not plan on using either of these works for his dissertation but you never know!
Andrew will be visiting his local AMC movie theatre this weekend to see (finally) Cruella. It has been described as The Devil Wears Prada meets an action (especially heist) film. Andrew is curious to see how this mashup will look like, but, as Andrew says, “any film Emma Stone is in is usually a good time.”
Andrew also has an update from last week’s watch. He finished Cruel Summer, so if you haven’t seen it you might want to skip this part because SPOILERS! Andrew did not realize that the narrative was centered on a vice principal grooming his female students (gross). He says it was “a little soap opera-y…ok a lot, but the serious subject matter was full of nuance and demonstrated how manipulative grooming is.” We are preparing to release Helana Darwin’s interview, and Andrew feels Cruel Summer deeply resonated with Helana’s account of how the abuser manipulates their victim. Like Helana’s courage to share her narrative, Cruel Summer shows how powerful it is when the gaslighting of a victim ends.
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Erika is skimming through the Jacobellis vs Ohio Supreme Court decision to try and better understand the lines between obscenity, porn, erotica and “just a plain old sex scene.”
Erika is skimming through the Jacobellis vs Ohio Supreme Court decision to try and better understand the lines between obscenity, porn, erotica and “just a plain old sex scene.” She’s still involved in her critically reading erotica project and has discovered a tremendous amount of free ebooks of questionable quality. In addition to some very bad erotica, she’s read Lev Raphael’s “Secret Anniversaries of the Heart” to prepare for the interview with the author, and she’s waiting for the arrival of Sarah Schulman’s book “Let the Record Show,” for an interview next month, too. Erika has also downloaded, and will make her way through The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure, too.
In the ongoing quest to figure out where the lines are between porns, erotica, obscenity and just a regular sex scene, she’s been listening to the Bawdy Storytelling podcast. Midnight Oil has been on the playlist this week, And because it’s summer vacation, and the incredible summer camp that Erika (and Adam, too) attended has put a whole lot of programming online this summer, Erika has been checking into the camp’s radio station, which is run by a friend of hers.
Erika has discovered Emily D Baker on YouTube, and has been watching because the legal analysis can be interesting, but also because she likes Emily’s live hosting style and is hoping to pick up a few skills and tricks before the Ivory Tower Boiler Room’s first birthday celebration next month. Netflix has brought the fourth and final season of Atypical out this week and coming up very soon, will also be the second season of Never Have I Ever.
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Mary is still reading through various research materials for the Gainesville Ripper because, in her words, “there is a SHIT TON of it!”
While she is also listening to research materials such as The Last Podcast on the Left and True Crime All the Time, she has also been listening to the podcast Some Place Under Neith (which she has mentioned previously). The podcast recently completed a six-part series on an extremist religious group called the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP). This group’s members contain stars from TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting– the Duggars. Hosts Natalie Jean and Amber Nelson discuss the recent discovery of Josh Duggar’s crimes. For those of you who don’t know, a used car lot owned by the Duggars–that Josh was previously working for before he was arrested–was raided by special agents. Josh is currently being charged with multiple counts of downloading child sexual abuse materials, but that is as far as she will go, because this, and his other crimes (that have sadly surpassed the statute of limitations), are extremely disturbing and traumatizing. If you want to look more into it for yourself, Mary warns that the materials are easy to find but extremely difficult to digest. As of this moment, Duggar’s trial is scheduled for November of this year.
One night this week, Mary’s boyfriend put on one of her favorite movies–Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Mary can’t fully understand why she loves this movie so much. On one hand, adding fantasy creatures such as vampires to a historical narrative is not usually Mary’s cup of tea. But on the other hand, the movie was done just so damn well (in her opinion). The acting by Benjamin Walker, Dominic Cooper, Anthony Mackie, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead is absolutely superb. Mary can’t help but gush: “Benjamin Walker truly embodies this strange take on Abraham Lincoln by combining elements of Lincoln’s personality with those of a badass vampire hunter. I just love this movie and I can’t wait for the Steelbook copy I ordered to get here!”
Summer is here already, and while some people are thinking “vacation,” we are still hard at work here in the Ivory Tower Boiler Room (sometimes we are working from a sunlit folding chair). A last minute change in plans meant that last week, instead of our Writers’ Round Table, you heard Adam and Andrew talking to Dr Natalie Morse about whether you should go to grad school. And so this week we’ll bring you the Round Table, where the four of us sit down and talk about our theme for the month. If you would like a preview, take a look at Adam’s Big Think for July, which kicks off our month-long look at teaching and public scholarship with a discussion about what it means to be a good teacher. On Saturday you’ll hear all four of us address the topic again, as well as an important one for our group: what does it mean to teach in a public setting rather than in a university? We’ll talk about teachers–the great ones, the terrible ones, the oddly memorable ones. And we’ll talk about learning too; learning, after all, doesn’t stop at the classroom door.
The thing about being in this collective, about being a part of the intentional community, is that we are always immersed in a teaching and learning environment, though an informal one. Each of us will bring up examples of things we learn from the other. For example, Andrew used the phrase “embrace the and” the other day, as a shorthand for accepting differences and disagreements as a natural part of friendship; but also as a shorthand for accepting paradoxes and inconsistencies within one’s own personality; of course he gave credit to Erika for putting that phrase in his mind. Where did this exchange of ideas come from? Not from a classroom certainly, unless our group-chats are a classroom. Which, in some ways, they are.
So come join us in our Round Table discussion, and if there’s anything you would like to add to the conversation, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Have a story about a teacher–or about being a teacher–that has stuck with you? Because part of the mandate of public scholarship is that we want to learn something from you.
On that note, we’d like to announce that our public scholarship project is about to get a lot more public, thanks to our first official sponsor: Words Matter Bookstore in Pitman, New Jersey. We’ll give you the details of what that means soon, but for now: they are an independent bookstore, who are just about a year old (they’ll celebrate their first birthday a few months after we celebrate ours,) and we are over the moon at the prospect of being able to collaborate with them. We are also excited to announce that the denizens of the Ivory Tower Boiler Room are gearing up for an interview with Lev Raphael this Friday (release date tba)!
Let us know in the comments section: what’s your proudest teaching moment? What’s a great teaching memory you have? Share with us in the comments-we might share your story in our episode…we’d love to hear more stories from you. Also: let us know of any transformative, life-affirming, or picturesque moments you’ve had in independent bookstores.
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Big Cat, Little Cat
Words by Adam Katz, photo by Erika Grumet, starring Frob as Big Cat and Widget as Little Cat.
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Description: Two cats, both alike in dignity. On the left, a large orange with darker orange stripes takes up half the frame. On the right, a small grey with darker grey stripes, takes up less than a quarter. The orange smiles down at the grey and asks: “Little cat, do you ever feel impostor syndrome?” The grey looks out of the frame with an air of weltschmerz as he answers: “You mean the sinking feeling that my friends aren’t really my friends, and my supposed accomplishments are the empty mummery of a two-bit charlatan? Uh. No. Why? Do you?”
Last month was a lot. We in the Ivory Tower Boiler Room are justifiably proud of our continuous coverage of Pride Month. And just because the month is over doesn’t mean our queerness and allyship, respectively, are over.
This month’s theme at the Ivory Tower Boiler Room is public scholarship, with an emphasis on teaching. What is public scholarship? In short, when Andrew gives a lecture to his undergraduates or writes an article for a trade journal like English Literary History, that’s scholarship. When we make a podcast or write a blog post, that’s public scholarship. It’s a matter of where you’re sharing the information, and why.
One thing the four of us–Adam, Mary, Erika and Andrew–have in common is that teaching is a huge part of our lives in one form or another, from Andrew’s lectures at various museums and libraries to Mary’s nannying and her relationships with other writers, to Erika’s social work and also her current gig as a mother, to Adam’s various teaching and tutoring jobs. So let’s kick July off with something simple. Each Big Think this month will answer the question: what does teaching mean to me? And, because we’re coming up on our one-year anniversary, we will be unable to avoid talking about how this blog and this podcast have helped us to grow as teachers.
And in the comments sections, we would love for you to share with us your answer to either or both of the following questions
What does teaching mean to you?
What is one of your proudest moments as a teacher? Obviously it doesn’t have to say ‘teacher’ on your tax return; there are lots of types of teachers.
So. I have a lot of thoughts on the subject of education. Sometimes I’m in the mood to take one idea and just poke at it, but at present I’m more of a mind to go through a bunch of different ideas too quickly to do any of them justice.
Ready?
Item the first. For some reason, I often think back to this one psychology class I took, freshman year at Columbia, in which the professor said: “Every science has a theoretical discipline and an engineering discipline. So what is the engineering discipline of psychology?”
Pause for responses. Someone raised their hand and said: “therapy?”
The instructor nodded and said: “Sure. But there’s an even bigger one.”
Pause again for responses. Barely a sound in a lecture of more than a hundred.
Finally, the professor said: “Education.”
It’s now been a bit more than fifteen years since that class, and I wonder why it stuck in my mind the way it did. I also wonder if he’s right. Part of the problem with his answer is that it’s a cheat. Psychology is part of everything; mathematicians and computer programmers who work with other people must also incorporate psychology into their work; politics and economics could reasonably be described as engineering disciplines of psychology. But he’s also not wrong. The way you actually help to shape a person’s mind–or at least not get in the way of how it wants to shape itself–is through teaching, no matter the venue.
I guess it breaks down to what you think of as ‘teaching.’ There’s how to teach, and there’s what to teach. The latter isn’t really governed by psychology, unless you are teaching psychology; the former more-or-less is. This is turning into me listing grievances against an offhand comment some professor made during the Bush administration. But another thing that bothers me about what he said is that it leads to overthinking. A lot of people teach just fine without knowing their profession is the engineering discipline of psychology; whereas how many mechanical engineers don’t know that their work is related to physics? And as a rule, a teacher is unlikely to think: ‘what is the correct psychological principle at work here?’ when they’re teaching; they’re more likely to think: ‘how to get through to this person?’
It turns out that a lot of the qualities that make a good teacher are the same qualities that make a good person: -Read a lot. -Take things slow; give instructions and explanations at the other person’s pace, not your own; and in a way designed to reach the other person, not necessarily in the way that feels comfortable for yourself. -Try to be honest, both factually and emotionally. -Be willing to change your mind. Be open to learning, both in and out of the classroom. -Guard your down-time. -Above all, believe in people more than in rules. -Always be willing to add to the list.
It’s possible that my biggest misgiving with the idea of education as applied psychology is that it depends on what education is for. I went to college to learn stuff; to grow as a person; to find out what I wanted to do with my life. Psychology aplenty in those reasons. A lot of people go to school to meet the right sort of people; to break into a higher socio-economic set; or, as the case may be, to confirm themselves in a higher socio-economic set. I remember being at college and meeting fellow-students who were dogmatically set in their opinions and thinking: already? You’re already calcified? You poor idiot. I wasn’t that charitable in my opinions of other people back then. But I stand by that one.
Item the third. The one thing I think every good teacher has in common is the wish to divorce issues of education from issues of economics. Too many students fail at school, or go to the wrong school, or never make it to school at all, simply because they can’t afford what they need.
Item the fourth. Too many schools teach one thing with their books and another with their actions. One example should suffice. While I was in college, my alma mater used methods both fair and foul to enact a wholesale takeover of the Manhattanville neighborhood in West Harlem, just north of campus. The very same year I was learning from my Contemporary Civilizations professor about how John Rawls argued that one should treat other people as if one had been born into their circumstances, I was learning from Columbia’s administrators that it’s fine to pay millions in legal fees to get an area labeled ‘blighted’ so that you can buy it up through eminent domain, displacing the longtime residents and their businesses, all in the name of progress. The really messed up part was that Columbia was the landlord for much of the area when they got it labeled ‘blighted.’ So whose fault was the blight? I can’t think of an event that shaped my growth as a teacher more than watching from atop my little hill, powerless to stop the bulldozer of progress from flattening the supposed blight of working-poor and lower-middle-class families of color.
Item the fifth. Gleaned from years of teaching English to non-native speakers. Something I’ve been hearing a lot online lately that has put a bee in my bonnet. I know that poor people and PoC can speak for themselves; but they shouldn’t always have to, so here is your daily reminder that: -African American Vernacular English -Indian Standard English and other varieties and dialects -English as spoken by immigrants, et al. are perfectly grammatically correct in their respective contexts, and maybe stop making fun of how poor ppl and PoC talk under the guise of correcting people’s grammar. Or just go for it. Keep policing all the variety and spontaneity out of the language; insist that there’s exactly one way to speak English; actively make people feel bad for having a less prestigious education than you. Just the way people in the 1400s-1700s did with Latin. And then Latin faded and died, which I’m sure is just a coincidence. And yes, the fact that none of the sentences in this paragraph is grammatically correct, but the overall effect is still perfectly intelligible, was done by design.
Ok, where were we?
Item the sixth. The use of education as a social climbing tool (however understandable) is only the most unfortunate aspect of the truism that it’s not what you know, but who you know. There are more positive aspects of that truism. If you learn little or nothing from a class, but you make a friend, one could argue you have succeeded beyond the most difficult and exacting standards of the course.
courtesy of publicdomainreview.org
An anecdote. I took two music theory classes with Roger, better known as the chorus teacher in my high school. To this day I can rattle off the different inversions of a 7th-chord; and western classical music, from Bach to Shostakovich, is still my go-to genre and time-period. But I value those classes, not for any particular thing I learned, but for the conversations he and I had over Chinese takeout, or the time things were getting serious between me and the woman I was seeing, and Roger was the one I went to for advice. Or the time Roger had to go to the hospital for an emergency surgery and I was the person he picked to be the substitute teacher in all of his music theory classes. I was 17 and it was both my first teaching gig and my first music gig. Or the time, during the darkest part of the pandemic, when I discovered that a piece Roger had written while I was in high school had received its most brilliant and sensitive performance in Korean translation. Listening to it brought me back to that year, 2001-2002. If I close my eyes, I can still see the haze that hung over the southern Manhattan skyline for months. I can still hear the drumbeat of war, abetted by opportunism in the media. Persian people in my town were being screamed at nonsensically: “go back where you came from!” If I had not been able to sit in chorus and make harmonies, and sing things that helped me process my feelings, I think the panic and uncertainty would have crushed me.
Barbara Jeanne Fields, one of my professors at Columbia. When I picture the word ‘teacher,’ this is one of the faces that comes to mind. Photo from Columbia.edu
So no. These are not idle thoughts. Teaching is a matter of life and death, and which kind of education you get, whether it’s the kind that teaches you to love learning and questions and connections for their own sake or the kind that teaches you to hobnob with the right people so you can get a cushy job when you graduate…those are matters of life and death, too. Part of why I like doing what I do for the blog and the podcast is: it feels like driving a truck past the cold networking of an Ivy League institution and back to what networking should be: people with overlapping interests getting together to talk about things that make them better people; things that may even make the world a better place.
Item the seventh. For me, the pinnacle of teaching is editing. Don’t get me wrong; I love to write. I love to share my work. But when Erika wrote her personal history of the AIDS epidemic I can’t imagine I could have been any prouder of that piece if I had written it myself; especially when the compliments from distant acquaintances started pouring in. For me, editing combines the best of writing and teaching. When I edit a piece, it feels as though I am helping a person achieve the best version, not only of their writing, but of themselves. This feeling relates back to the belief I shared earlier: that most of what is required to be a good teacher overlaps with what is required to be a good person. And I like trying to be a good person, and sharing my time with people who are trying to be good people.
It took the pandemic to make me realize this about myself: that I do actually like spending time with people.
Ok, with some people.
Some of the time.
I had spent the last few years in a demon-rush to finish my dissertation. Then I was equally driven to put out a work of scholarship so that I could start applying for jobs at the university level. But somewhere along the way I stopped and thought to ask myself what I actually wanted. The answer surprised me a little bit. I don’t hold any particular animosity for people who go the traditional scholarly route; jealousy, perhaps. But the upshot is that for the first time (*checks notes*) ever, I’m where I need to be. As more readers and writers incorporate our site into their lives, we will naturally have more for me to edit; more people for me to talk to about writing; more people’s finished writing for me to read and share and kvell over. And, hopefully, people for me to nerd out with about Spenser and Marlowe and T. H. White. I can’t imagine anything better.
Postscriptum: Reading over what I have written, one observation I will make is that my thinking has become a lot more positive in the last few months. It’s sufficiently noticeable in my writing as to warrant comment from my colleagues, so imagine how vertiginous, how sudden, how painful, at times, has been the change as I have experienced it, firsthand. I think the change comes from the need to be contrary; a certain stubborn individualism, for better or, more frequently, for worse, has not ceased to be a mainstay of my personality since I was two, much less since I was thirty-two. But what does a contrarian do when living through the literal apocalypse? The answer; my answer, is apparently to smile.
This has been held in The Ivory Tower Boiler Room’s vault since February, and Adam and Andrew had such a wonderful time chatting with Dr. Natalie Morse, founder of For the Love of Grad, on a wintery Saturday night. Natalie discusses why she founded her academic consulting business and how to navigate problems faced in graduate school. Adam and Andrew enjoy another STEM and Humanities cross-disciplinary discussion, and of course, they try to show off their math knowledge to Natalie. While mostly a professional minded discussion, the discussion eventually centers on Andrew questioning whether to date or not, Natalie’s romantic academic days, and Adam thinking about going out on a date instead of recording on a Saturday night.
Many people have Monday off, so it’s an extra long weekend to spend time with family. But if you need to go for a walk by yourself, please feel free to take a look at our newest episode–or at some of the back-catalogue. In the mean time, here’s what our team has been paying attention to this week:
Andrew is getting ready for the launch of his upcoming “Andrew’s Bookshelf” feature on the blog and is very excited to feature Ula Klein’s Sapphic Crossings. Just in case you haven’t listened yet, Ula was one of the guests featured on our June 19 episode, “Two Writers are Better than One.”
On screen, it’s still self-care cinema time for Andrew, and so he’ll soon be going out to a theater to see Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Just because he’s going out to a real theater for the first time in a while though, he hasn’t forgotten what’s streaming at home, where he’ll be watching the mystery thriller series Cruel Summer.
For music, just because Pride month officially ended on 6/30 doesn’t mean the celebration has to stop, so Andrew still has a Pride 2021 playlist on Spotify that he’s listening to. Andrew is also using Audible to revisit Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, by turning to Lev Raphael’s Rosedale in Love which is read, wonderfully, by Robin Siegerman. Raphael pays particular attention to Simon Rosedale’s (Jewish) perspective, and Andrew’s working hard to get ready for the upcoming interview with Lev Raphael and can’t wait to share space with a fellow Wharton fan.
Adam, just finished Terry Prachett’s Mort and is now revisiting The Lies of Locke Lamora by Peter Lynch; next, he plans on reading something by Amy Levy, the queer, Jewish novelist from the Victorian period. You may remember she was one of the centerpieces of our June 26 episode, “The Closet in the Library.” Lute music has been on the playlist as he’s listening to lute works by Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (ca 1580-1650) played by Paul O’Dette. He’s been (re)viewing Kim’s Convenience, too.
Erika’s lists overlap with both Andrew and Adam this week-that may be a first. She’s watching Kim’s Convenience, and is sad to see the show end at the end of the current season. She’s also been watching Season 2 of Feel Good on Netflix, which is also slated to end at the end of the season. Erika was excited to hear that Good Omens was renewed for a second season and is looking forward to Sandman, and to the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which has wrapped production recently.
The playlist has been very retro this week still, with Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing, some celtic sounds with the Dropkick Murphys and The Pogues and lots of Midnight Oil, shuffling between “Diesel and Dust,” “Blue Sky Mining” and “Earth, Sun and Moon.”
Erika’s reading list has a little overlap with Andrew’s lists; she’s reading Lev Raphael’s work this week as well. She’s still struggling to write a sex scene; for someone who taught as many human sexuality classes as Erika has, the difficulty with this is actually amusing. She’s been reading erotica with a critical eye, and has discovered that reading erotica as a critical reader is a very different experience from just reading it for fun. She’s mostly gone back to the things she fell in love with in her twenties (concurrent with the timing of the short story where the to-be-written sex scene will go) and dug out work by John Preston and Carol Queen (The Leather Daddy and the Femme has always been a favorite, with its entertaining gender play), Patrick Califia’s Doc and Fluff has come off of the shelf, along with Laura Antinou’s entire Marketplace series (both the original books and the anthologies of Marketplace stories by other authors.) For more current content, she’s gone through Zachary Zane’s Substack, Boyslut. Zachary Zane is a “bisexual mega influencer” and columnist for both Men’s Health and Queer Majority. A couple of favorite non-subscriber pieces that Erika enjoyed were An Ode to Spin the Bottle: Where Closeted Boys Can Kiss Boys and When the sex advice columnist needs relationship advice, what does he do? When Erika chatted with Zachary Zane before making these recommendations she really appreciated seeing how “a real writer” still got really excited that someone was sharing his work like that. One day this sex scene might actually get written… before then, there will probably be some kind of commentary or essay on the experience of reading erotica from this critical perspective.
Andrew’s anxiety that books will soon overcome him…
July? Already? It’s disconcerting to realize that in some places, people are suffering through the worst heat wave ever in the area, and at the same time, back to school sales are starting.
I love back to school sales; fresh notebooks, new pens. It’s so exciting. One day I will find the perfect combination of pen and notebook…maybe. I suppose if I’m going to be a writer, just like any other kind of artist, I can be fussy about my tools, Adam’s commentary about violins notwithstanding. (Adam got really annoyed when he had to edit this joke, so… mission accomplished.)
A new month means we turn our attention to a new theme in the Ivory Tower Boiler Room and we get to sit down for a new Writers’ Round Table, too. We consider a theme, select a Big Think subject and take time individually to reflect on it, ruminating over time as we discuss, write, rewrite, revise and edit. It’s a way to focus our unique, individual perspectives on things. But the round table lets us bring those same perspectives together in real time, and sometimes to challenge each other.
So what is the theme for this month? It’s public scholarship. And if you don’t know what that is, we’ve been having the same conversation: What is a public scholar? What is the value of scholarship (biographies, documentaries, public readings and discussions, and, of course, podcasts and blogs) when it’s directed at the public instead of (or as well as) at other scholars?
As a team, as a community, we are always learning, and always teaching. When I wrote my Big Think for June and made a connection between the movie Mean Girls and a line from a Walt Whitman poem… that’s so clearly Andrew’s influence, pushing me to look differently at the works of Whitman… and the fact that I could write the piece I did, that’s Adam’s influence, having spent countless hours letting me annoy him as I discover things about my process. I know I’ve done my share of teaching, too.
You’ll get a clearer picture of our July and August themes (they’re inseparably interlaced, the way your fingers are when you first hold hands with someone you’ve got a crush on,) tomorrow, along with a sneak peak and what works of fiction, poetry, music, television, and yes, scholarship, the group is perusing now. Keep reading, keep listening, and share your recommendations; we’re always looking for new things to read, to see and hear.
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Big Cat, Little Cat
Photo by Erika Grumet, words by Adam Katz, starring Frob as Big Cat and Widget as Little Cat.
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There are three identical panels, each depicting a large orange cat looking down contentedly at a small, grey cat who is looking out of the frame with a pinched and put-upon facial expression. Big Cat says to Little Cat: “Little Cat, what do you do when you have writer’s block?” Little Cat responds: “I don’t know. My solution to most problems is to go outside.” Big Cat asks: “To walk?” “Sure, Big Cat,” Little Cat answers. “If that’s what you call murdering innocent songbirds when I’m not even hungry.” Big Cat wonders out loud: “Does that work to get the juices flowing?” Little Cat shrugs: “I guess. Worked for Hemingway, right?”
