Category Archives: academe

My father – himself a long-time academic administrator – had a cartoon he had posted on a bulletin board, featuring several business-suit wearing men, looking more than a bit terrified and bedraggled, struggling to keep themselves out of the maws of several alligators taking up the terrain below their dangling feet. The caption read “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s difficult to remember that your first objective was to drain the swamp.” These days, “drain the swamp” has a different connotation – more about corruption than heretofore unknown hazards, but the unpleasant prospect still holds. In today’s more environmentally-informed era, maybe we should preserve the swamp and other habitats – leaving the alligators to flourish in their own world and stay within safer bounds?

Hazards abound in working life – many of them surfacing with no ill-intent. The other day I got an email politely asking about when a pending report could be expected. *CHOMP* It felt as if an alligator was suddenly underfoot, even if I knew well that responsibility was on my shoulders. It had been such a pleasant 36 hours with only one immediate crisis to manage. . . .

The learning curve for serving as Director is steep. That I spent my first month in the role covering for another major set of responsibilities in the Faculty stretched me thin for time. The final straw was squeezing in prep for a new course that I ran in the fall term: Games and History.

It all worked, somehow. The course was great – it really worked well to engage students thinking about history as much as “covering” topics. They connected practices well across time and considered thoughtfully how contemporary games about historical eras were, themselves, a form of historical interpretation that was worthy to examine.

This term there’s only one new preparation and it’s a shared course, so it’s work, but not nearly as daunting. I still have many daunting parts of my director’s duties to handle, though – recruiting faculty members for urgently-needed committees, drafting necessary reports, tweaking the timetable for next year, and, yes, sometimes meeting with folks.

Speaking of which, it’s time to get cracking on prep work for meetings and more (and keep working on my French because, dang, while my written French has improved greatly over the past eight months, my spoken French is still very much my Achilles heel). Au revoir, tout le monde. Qu’il n’y ait pas d’alligators chez vous!

So much has happened in the last two years. . . let me sum up. The good news? I still have a full-time faculty job. The bad news? Too many others don’t. Yes, my university has gone through the wringer. Truth be told, we’re still in the midst of matters and it’s a big ol’ mess. Here’s the CBC story covering the provincial auditor’s preliminary report on the matter.

Those of us who remain are becoming experts at doing more with less. I’ve said too many goodbyes, among them the cheerful kind that comes at convocation where students celebrate their triumphs and share their plans of what comes next. But too many of my goodbyes have been sad ones: of careers cut short or student dreams denied. I also bid my beloved Siberian cat, Sisu, goodbye, last December when cancer finally got the better of her.

We had already welcomed Gráinne into our lives at that point. Named after the pirate queen of Connacht, she is small but imperious: a worthy successor to Sisu. Along with Kaiser, the two cats keep us busy.

I’m working, as much as possible, from my home office this summer. After being dismissed as Chair of History when our department was amalgamated with all the others in the Faculty, I’m now a sort of “super-chair”: Director of the School of Liberal Arts. It’s a fancy term for someone who’s good at signing a lot of digital paperwork and supporting students in programs from English through Law & Justice. I’m also getting to teach some of my favourite courses along with one new one: a second-year class on Games and History. Lots of reading, lots of administrivia, and a little bit of summer fun, including some counted cross-stitch, a hobby that’s sustained me through this pandemic.

After a long time working on other projects, I’m happy to be getting back into my research on early modern families and crime. The university approved my work-study application so that, starting this fall, I’ll have a student working with me to analyze Old Bailey sexual offence reports exploring how family members were invoked and involved. This should be rewarding for both of us – I’m hoping we can aim for some publishable results at the end, as co-authors. This project should also help me to focus my research and writing time on revising another family & crime history article that’s been sitting on the back burner for several years now.

Right now my focus is on preparing the way for our study – putting together the bibliographic framework, assessing how the rise of self-censorship within The Proceedings will affect the scope and analysis, etc. I don’t want to overwhelm the student or myself. The dangerous thing with a wide-open research scope is the being buried in too much material. So we’ll start small and see how far we go. Still, it’s pretty exciting. Being on faculty at a regional university means that I’m used to being the only one working on X, Y or Z. Even my graduate students have tended to work far afield from my own research subjects but this work study project will hopefully employ a student who’s equally interested in the material and aspects of the topic so we both can profit by the connection!

If you want to know what’s been consuming my life for much of the past month (besides mountains of marking, a conference presentations and many other responsibilities) it’s Women’s HIstory Week. Twenty-two years and counting, this event has been a feature on our campus. So what are you waiting for?

Join us on campus and downtown for Women’s History Week 2015 at Laurentian University / semaine de l’histoire des femmes 2015. Click either link for the full schedule of events.

We have open classrooms all week long, a book launch and a keynote lecture by Dr. Jane Nicholas of St. Jerome’s University and author of The Modern Girl, who will speak on “Why the Flapper Matters: The Canadian Modern Girl” Thursday night, 7pm at the Speakeasy downtown. How perfectly appropriate is that for a venue?

I’m also excited about the open classrooms initiative that is a long-time feature of our event. There are faculty participants from Communications, Environmental Studies, History, English, Ancient Studies and more who have agreed to open their classrooms to the wider public this week. Fellow students, staff members and other profs might just pop on in as well as any one interested in seeing how the subject of women is taught across disciplines at Laurentian.

The book launch celebrates the recent biography of Madge Watt, founder of the Women’s Institutes, published by our own Dr. Linda Ambrose who brought Women’s History Week into being as well as nurturing students and scholarship in the field over the past twenty-two years.

You’ve seen the story making the rounds amongst parents and academics that correlates helicopter parenting with college-age depression. You might well have nodded along as you read the horrific stories of awful parents who dictate their kids’ university choice, major and even study habits. These are truly wrong-headed individuals who, by micro-managing their children’s lives well into adulthood, deprive them of the chance to learn how to be independent, self-reliant and find their own happiness.

That said, I take issue with a big part of the article’s claims.

As parents, our intentions are sound—more than sound: We love our kids fiercely and want only the very best for them. Yet, having succumbed to a combination of safety fears, a college admissions arms race, and perhaps our own needy ego, our sense of what is “best” for our kids is completely out of whack. We don’t want our kids to bonk their heads or have hurt feelings, but we’re willing to take real chances with their mental health?

You’re right to be thinking Yes, but do we know whether overparenting causes this rise in mental health problems? The answer is that we don’t have studies proving causation, but a number of recent studies show correlation.

The emphasis is that of Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of the book from which the article is an excerpt. The former freshman dean at Stanford candidly admits that she knows this overactive parenting culture all too well and frequently has fallen into some of the bad habits she herein decries. I’m good with anything that helps to counter the scourge of parents who treat twenty-somethings as toddlers or leads to mom or dad buttonholing profs and TAs over what’s properly the student’s turf. And don’t get me started on that smooth rhetorical slide right past the whole correlation line because we all know correlation is not causation, right? Right!

In any case, I’m troubled by the easy equation of depression in college-aged people with the evils of helicopter parenting. Yes, that can be one factor, but is it the only or even the best? I’d say no. There’s a whole raft of reasons for the youth of today to be profoundly depressed. It’s the economy, stupid! We’re destroying the planet and waging war worldwide. Even if we focus in those problems directly affecting colleged-aged people who are actually going to college, there’s still enough fodder for a real-world dystopian Hunger Games: ruinous tuition increases, student debt that’s impossible to discharge, gutted support for students, dismal job prospects and political leaders enthusiastically dismantling public higher education. Oh, that’s cheerful, isn’t it? Let’s not forget how these young people have been hemmed in by decades of “No Child Left Behind” and other onerous testing regimes in their school lives, or communities that eagerly police the practices of “free-range” parenting. When students revolt against standardized tests, how are we surprised?

But ignore that man behind the curtain, Dorothy. No, look at the bad parents here and there. Why, they’re the cause of this whole problem! Let’s just get them to change their behaviour and, sure as shooting, young, crestfallen folk across the continent will start to perk up.

That’s ridiculous! This is a small fix for only a tiny slice of a big problem. But it’s easy, ridiculously easy, to stir up popular disgust with painful parenting practices such as those described in the story. Nobody can justify those excesses, but nobody can sustain the argument this helicopter parenting the key to the real mental health crises on university and college campuses or in those peer groups beyond the ivory tower.

Depression is an illness but there are people who can help you. Depression is serious, depression is real and depression isn’t banished by condemning over-the-top parenting practices. We need to accept that helping young people manage their mental health takes resources, commitment and actually paying real attention to their concerns.

So let’s stop feeling as if condemning one particular brand of bad parenting is what we need to do to support students with their mental health issues, okay? Thanks.

As of July, I’ll be a Full Professor of History here at Laurentian University.

I had applied last July 1st, even though I was barely back on my feet after a spring sacrificed to illness and malaise. I was ill but not so ill that I couldn’t wrangle the binder full of paperwork together for the promotion application. With four publications slated to appear in the next several months, I hoped that the application would be acceptable.

It was a gamble. I definitely haven’t had the most conventional publishing career of any academic historian. But I enjoyed the support of many colleagues here and elsewhere, for which I’m grateful. I also realized that, even if I was turned down, how bad could it be? Staying as a associate professor until I could try again? Not a hardship.

So there’ll be new business cards (if those are even still a thing) this summer and, more importantly, the opportunity to do more service, research and teaching secure that the only thing I have to prove to others is what’s there in my work.