A Jolly GayProf Fellow

Aging is usually something best done alone. Or maybe with a bottle of bourbon. Whatever the case, it’s hard to conceive that I will be 38 this week. Another year probably doesn't matter too much. Fortunately or unfortunately, my gravitas has always made me seem much older than I really am. People are always pleasantly surprised that I am so much younger than they initially think. It's sorta a compliment or something.

Speaking of gravitas, I am just not ready to part with my annual birthday post here at CoG. Who does not enjoy weighing their life accomplishments against others at the same age?

At age 38, this is the year that I would publish The Native Tribes about the East Texas Missions if I were historian Herbert Bolton. It would be my last year teaching at the University of Texas.

If I were Gore Vidal at age 38, I would be busy writing my novel Julian.

If I were Don Draper, this is the year that I would start a new advertising agency (Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce). Reaching the age of 38 would also mean that this is the year that I would finally divorce Betty.



If I were Elizabeth Cady Staton I would be working with Susan B. Anthony at the shortlived Woman’s State Temperance Society. We would both decide our efforts were better spent working on suffrage.

If I were Cher at age 38, I would be filming Mask this year.

If I were Frederick Jackson Turner, I would have delivered my career-defining “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” essay six years ago. History grad students everywhere would come to curse my name.



According to traditional sources, I would use an asp to kill myself this year if I were Cleopatra VII.

If I were Sam Steward, I would be working at World Book Encyclopedia after leaving Loyola University. I would also have my last drink this year.



If I were Dolores Huerta, I would be seated on the platform while Robert Kennedy gave his last speech before being shot minutes later.

If I were Rudolph Valentino, I would be dead. It would have been seven years since I had sex with Sam Steward in my hotel room.


If I were James Baldwin, this is the year that I would publish the essay “Down at the Cross” in the New Yorker. It would have been six years since I wrote Giovanni’s Room.
If I were Jimmy Stewart, I would star in It’s a Wonderful Life this year, a heartwarming picture about an ungrateful town that drives a man to suicide on Christmas Eve.

If I were Lolita Lebrón, it would have been four years since I led an armed attack on the U.S. House of Representatives in the name of Puerto Rican independence.


If I were 99 percent of the U.S. public, I would have no idea who Lolita Lebrón was.
If I were Frances Parkman, it would be another four years before I published The Pioneers of France in the New World.

If I were Rock Hudson, I would star in the forgettable A Gathering of Eagles this year. It would have been 17 years since I had sex with Sam Steward in a freight elevator at Marshall Field’s department store.


If I were Malcolm X, I would declare that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the “chickens coming home to roost.”

If I were Pearl Bailey, I would release the album The Intoxicating Pearl Bailey this year.

If I were Tennessee Williams, I would have just started my affair with Frank Merlo. It would last 14 years and ultimately be the longest lasting romantic relationship of my life.


If I were Ann Bancroft, it would have been two years since (!) I played the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate.

If I were Vivian Leigh, I would win my second Academy Award for Best Actress for portraying Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. My mental health would be mighty precarious.

If I were Danny Kaye, I would star in On the Riviera this year. My alleged affair with Laurence Olivier probably didn’t help Vivian Leigh’s mighty precarious mental health.


If I were Abraham Lincoln, I would be serving in my only term in the U.S. House of Representatives. It would have been a decade since I started slaying vampires.

If I were Marylin Monroe, I would be dead.

If I were William Shatner, this would be my last season on the t.v. show Star Trek.

If I were Oscar Wilde, I would be in the first year of my affair with Alfred “Bosie” Douglas. Things would not go well for me in that relationship...

If I were Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, it would be another 29 years before I had sex with Sam Steward.

If I were Lupe Vélez, I would be dead.



If I were Alexander Hamilton, I would resign my position as Secretary of the Treasury because of a scandal involving an extra-marital affair. The story would have been more interesting if it had been with Sam Steward.

If I were Gloria Steinem, this is the year that I would found Ms. magazine.

If I were either of my parents at age 38, I would have three children. The oldest would be eighteen and the youngest would be eleven.

If I were Mary Richards, I, and most of my friends, would have been fired from WJM last year.


If I were Mitt Romney, I would hopefully never be President of the United States.

If I were Jaqueline Kennedy, I would visit Cambodia as an official-unofficial ambassador for the United States at the age of 38.



If I were Saint Anthony, I would be dead.

If I were Michele Obama, I would be fabulous.

If I were GayProf, I would have achieved tenure and promotion this year. My blog would have been updated so infrequently in the past year that two birthday posts would appear on the same page. I would never have had sex with Sam Steward.

If I were Jayne Mansfield, I would be dead.

If I were William Rufus King, I would be serving as a Senator from Alabama in Washington D.C. I would soon shack up with future President James Buchannan. Our relationship, among other things, would lead Andrew Jackson to give me the nicknames “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy.” I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.


If I were Dolly Parton, this is the year I would star in the regrettable Rhinestone with Sylvester Stallone.

If I were teen heartthrob Corey Haimm, this is the year I would die.

If I were Che Guevara, this is the year that I would arrive in Bolivia in a doomed effort to foment revolution.

If I were Wonder Woman, I would age another 2,453 years before joining Patriarch’s world to fight crime.

Evaluate This

Every institution generates a class of employee determined to prove that their paycheck isn’t a reckless drain of resources. These are usually mid-level bureaucrats charged with things like “Quality Assurance” or “Systems Analysis.” Many of those bureaucrats imagine that the best way to show that they are invaluable is to create change. That change doesn’t have to make things better necessarily, but it does need to be big and splashy. If that change also includes technology in some unnecessary way, they get super bonus stars. Universities, I am here to tell you, are not immune from this phenomena.

Big Midwestern University recently experienced one such change that transformed the means by which students conduct course evaluations. Previously, professors allocated about fifteen minutes of class time at the end of the semester for students to fill out anonymous paper forms which were returned to a central office for processing. But why continue with that system when we can make it needlessly more complicated and inefficient?

The higher administration decided that moving the system to an on-line format would be so much better. Why? Well, because – um ... It means that – er . . . It will just be better! It’s on-line!

Actually, they did offer us a set of fairly laughable justifications. One was that students must want to fill out evaluations on-line if there are unofficial sites like the much reviled (and often slanderous) Rate Your Professors. The logic being that the driving force of RYP wasn’t student entitlement or a means to trash instructors who required their students to work hard. Rather, it was simply the on-line format that kept students coming back. If they could fill out official evaluations on-line, than their desire for venting about their professors at RYP would be sated. It's on-line!

Another bonus that they promised was that we professors would have our evaluations instantaneously! As soon as we submitted our final grades, the evaluations would be downloadable. Isn’t that exciting? It's on-line!

Maybe I am a bad teacher, but I can’t say that I spent six weeks pining for the return of the old paper evaluations. Why, after a grueling semester, one would want to immediately read a potential list of complaints from students, I am not certain (And, btw, this much vaunted possibility of “instant review” proved untrue as the system become riddled with problems, thus delaying the release of evaluations for about six weeks (about the same turn around for good ol’ paper evaluations)).



Perhaps the biggest jump in logic was that the administration predicted a major rise in the completion rate of evaluations. In what can only be explained as a stunning lack of understanding about students’ priorities, the administration predicted that students would race to their computers to fill out surveys with enthusiasm and vigor in their free time. It's on-line!

Now, I’m not saying the administration is totally out of touch with reality, but did they even try to imagine themselves as a student? Logging onto my computer and finding a set of four or five evaluations, each consisting of twenty tedious questions, isn’t going to look like a party on Friday night. At best, I might fill out evaluations for one or two classes that I really, really loved or really, really hated before losing interest and finding out who is on Facebook.

Moreover, removing the evaluations from the professional context of the classroom might lead to students taking them even less seriously. One has to only glance at RYP to discover that many students have no idea what a professional relationship looks like.



Lots of faculty tried in vain to explain these basic realities to the administration before this system went on-line. They answered these critiques with a massive advertising explosion on campus encouraging students to use the new system. After goddess-knows-how-much-money went into the new system, what was the result? Less than 50 percent of students submitted reviews for my classes. Comparing notes with my colleagues, I was lucky to get even that level of response. Keep in mind, with the old paper system, I almost always had a 95 to 100 percent response rate.

So, has the university learned a valuable lesson from this colossal failure? Not at all – They have placed the blame on faculty for “not encouraging” students to fill out these on-line forms. If we really cared about evaluations, they claim, we would have made filling out this on-line evaluation an official assignment.

If you work at another university and find yourself chuckling at BMU’s silliness, let me sober you up. Right now, as you read this, your own institution is probably planning an identical shift. My sister (there is another) reports that her college is about to institute the same on-line system (Despite comparable protests from faculty on that campus). Indeed, it must be one of those things that is recommended in this month’s issue of Unnecessary University Expenses magazine. It's on-line!

I hear you asking, “Why does any of this matter?” and “When is this blog going to be about gay porn again?” Both of those are fair questions.

It matters because the value attached to student evaluations is escalating on campuses across the nation. When student evaluations first appeared, they were intended to be a means for students to provide constructive feedback so that professors could fine tune their courses. Indeed, I think students should have a means to offer their perspective on the learning. The evaluations would also be a means to alert administration to very serious problems that would only be available if written anonymously.

Over time, though, the consumer-mentality started to infiltrate universities. Students stopped being students and, instead, transformed into customers. Inside Higher Ed recently reported that Texas A&M University is offering a $10,000 bonus to the faculty member who receives the highest student evaluations (That’s big money for a humanities prof, but small potatoes for a Wall Street executive). Apparently the idea had its origins in a conservative Texas think tank known as the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The Chancellor of A&M, Michael “Burger King” McKinney, explained the program as “customer satisfaction . . . It has to do with students having the opportunity to recognize good teachers and reward them with some money.” No offense to the fine students at A&M, but should a professor's career be determined by these guys:



So, with the new on-line evaluation system at BMU, many of us are wondering how we will fair in the consumer-oriented world. Since students are not likely to fill out these new evaluations unless they are throbbing with love or hate, it will skew the results considerably.

Faculty who recoil at comparing their classroom to the gift-wrap counter at Macy’s are disregarded, or worse, assumed to be “bad teachers” who are bitter about it. But that assumption places a huge amount of faith in students’ abilities to measure what is important in their instruction (For the record, my own evaluations are usually fine – not stellar, but not a horror show. Given the amount of work that I assign, and my inclination to give texts that are outside students’ comfort zones, I am amazed that I do as well I do).



The same article in Inside Higher Ed pointed to many problematic assumptions about teaching evaluations, including studies that refute the accuracy of evaluations as a measure of learning. One study by three economists at Ohio State found, not surprisingly, that students are more likely to give higher course evaluations if their own grade is high. They also reaffirmed that gender and national origin impacts evaluations. Women and non-U.S. faculty receive lower evaluations than their peers on average.

When those same economists charted the student’s grades in subsequent classes that depended upon content from the evaluated class, they found no correlation between professor evaluations and the learning that is actually taking place. In other words, a student might have learned a great deal, but still hated the class and given a negative review.



Student evaluations are important and I am not suggesting their demise (though we can dump this on-line nonsense). Students' goals in the classroom, though, are often about reducing their work load and being entertained. Instead of depending on their viewpoint as the sole measure of teaching effectiveness, we need to consider tools that actually measure whether students acquire new skills. Until then, do you want fries with that history class?

Enough Minorities, Minority Enough? (Part I)

Oso Raro recently had a post on teaching, experience, and racial identities in the academic world. This, along with my own entry on diversity in hiring, had me thinking about the role(s) of minority faculty who teach on race in the U.S.

Since arriving at Big Midwestern University, several Latino/a graduate students have stopped by my office to talk about their futures in the academic world. While they still have a long way to go before they become professors, they expressed an ambivalence about their expected place at universities and colleges. Many of their peers and some professors don’t view their academic pursuits in the same way as other students studying [white] topics. Although they are working just as hard (if not harder) than their colleagues, many people assume that their knowledge and ideas about Latino/a Studies are “naturally” derived from their racial identity and experiences. They have felt a pressure to enact other people's assumptions about Latino/a identity even as their intellectual creativity has been ignored. They are called upon to be the living embodiment of Latino/a oppression so that others can know.

I wish that I had some solid advice for these students. Alas, though, their estimation about minorities in the academic world is fairly accurate. My experience at my former Texas institution demonstrated the disinterest (and even hostility) that still exists for minority scholars/scholarship within certain academic enclaves. During a department meeting, the classes that I and others (Others?) taught on race and gender were dismissed by one memorable colleague as “boutique classes” that distracted from the “real” [read: white, straight, male] history of the nation. For him and his friends, such classes were a frivolous waste of precious classroom space. Our presence in the university was a product of wrong-headed affirmative action programs and political correctness run amok. Another colleague made this explicit by saying to me that hiring in Latino studies was "just an excuse to add more brown faces to the department."



Such talk left me wondering how those Texas colleagues fantasized about me. Stereotypes about my perceived racial identity must have intermingled with equal stereotypes about my sexual orientation in their daydreams about my classroom. By the way they discussed my classes on sex and race, I figured that they imagined that most of my time at the lectern was spent in drag, wearing a long billowy skirt, whirling in a circle while I played the castanets. Then, after I finished with the ritual dance of my people (gay or Latino (take your pick)), we all ate tacos together and drank tequila. While I might actually enjoy that type of class, it’s not really how I choose to teach – most days.

African Americans, Latino/as, and Asian Americans in the humanities often have to walk a complicated tightrope between expectations about their racial identity and their academic scholarship. Many (Most? All?) departments depend upon positions focused on minority scholarship as the major (only?) method to increase the racial diversity of the faculty. Minority scholars are therefore viewed with suspicion if they are seen as not sufficiently “academic” enough and “distanced” from their subject matter. If minority faculty advocate for increasing the role of Latino/a Studies or African-American Studies, they are seen as “pushing an agenda” or simply wanting to hire their friends. The intellectual value that comes from a more diverse faculty is not seriously considered (much less the need to reinvent the way that we all teach U.S. history at the university level).



Yet, minority scholars are caught by equal pressure from the other side. At times, minority scholars have to prove that they have as “authentic” a racial identity as the people that they study. Certain white faculty position themselves as the arbiters of that authenticity. Since joining the academic world, I have been astounded at the number of white faculty (most of whom considered themselves “liberal”) who were willing to pass judgment on whether certain African American colleagues had “legitimate” claim to hip-hop styles based on their perceived economic class. With tremendous authority (but almost no knowledge), they felt certain that they could tell which of their colleagues had known “real” struggle and which had not. Likewise, I have heard other colleagues try to determine if certain Latino/as were sufficiently invested in a metaphorical salsa (either the dance or the food). Did the Latino/a faculty add enough zesty spices to the academic pot to warrant their continued employment?



From my own experience, I have numerous stories about my expected/ perceived/ desired racial identity being drawn into my professional position(s). The loveliest of my former Texas colleagues, for instance, accused me of being too identified with Latino/a students during my first year evaluation. They alleged that I catered to Latino/as and didn’t care enough about Anglo students.

For the record, not a single colleague ever came to observe my classes first-hand or ever spoke with any of my students in my entire time in Texas. In other words, they had no real evidence that Latino/as were getting better service in my classes. That didn’t matter. It sounded plausible enough that a Latino historian probably favored his Latino/a students that it made it into my official tenure file as something that I needed to work on (!).

Perhaps they felt threatened because they imagined that my classes were about “insider” knowledge to which they could never be apart. If I was teaching Latino/a History and receiving positive student evaluations for it, they reasoned, I must have been secretly conspiring with my race. It was surely a plot to take Anglo jobs and (possibly) replant their gardens (Also for the record, my classes on Latino/a History have never been filled with exclusively Latino/a students).



That wouldn’t be the only incident in my fledgling academic career. In other moments, some of my colleagues have questioned whether I am Latino enough given my mixed ancestry (Note to new readers: My father was Mex Amer and my mother was Irish Amer). My entire life in New Mexico, this was never raised as an issue by the Latinos who surrounded me (like, you know, half my family). Some white faculty, however, want to be sure that they got the “real deal.” Being “mixed” is suspect to them. It seems the power of whiteness grants them the unquestioned ability to decide the appropriate measure of everybody else’s racial performance. This is ironic given that Mexican identity has historically been imagined as mestizo.

These types of identity concerns would not be expressed to a scholar working on medieval Italian history. Nobody wonders if they are catering to students who are of Southern European extraction. Nor are they asked if they are “medieval enough.” It might be more interesting if we did hold them up to that type of criteria. Not wearing a hair shirt? Do you like to take baths? Have you never suffered from the plague? Clearly you aren’t a fully legitimate medieval scholar.

What is astounding about all of this is that it has nothing to do with our actual jobs. It is obvious (or should be) that identifying as Latino/a does not mean that one is ready to step into a classroom and instantly start teaching Latino/a history. It takes years of studying, reading, and thinking. True, being identified as Latino/a might predispose somebody to take up that challenge because of their experiences in our society. One’s experiences might also give one a political and intellectual perspective in writing that history. That, though, is hardly the end of the story.