gave my final lecture for an intensive course on European History since 1789! over 7 weeks & about 100,000 words, I covered 230 years of history, averaging about 1 year per 6 mins of class time. thanks, students, for the wild ride!
cover slides & assigned reading:
1. Introduction 2. The French Revolution
– Abbé Sieyès, “What Is the Third Estate?” (1789)
– “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (1789)
– Olympe de Gouges, “Declaration of the Rights of Woman…” (1791)

“financial suicide”: this should be the first (though not the only) thing academics should say to students who ask whether they should do a PhD in the humanities or social sciences.

total loss of earning potential in 20s-early 30s, plus X years of subpar pay & costly moves. it’s not even accurate anymore to say, “there’s no guarantee that you’ll become a professor.” it is most likely that you will *not* end up with secure academic employment. the proportion of secure faculty positions is ever smaller, though the absolute number of jobs may grow.

Herbert Marcuse visited his ex-teacher Martin Heidegger in his Black Forest hut in 1947. here's what HM wrote to MH (8/28/47):

"Many of us have long awaited a statement from you, a statement that would clearly and finally free you from...identification [with the Nazi regime]" 1/ Marcuse: "But you have never uttered such a statement... I—and very many others—have admired you as a philosopher; from you we have learned an infinite amount. But we cannot make the separation between Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the man..." 2/

Herbert Marcuse explains the limits of free speech in this 1970 letter to the LA Times:

"nowhere have I argued for intolerance of all views opposed to mine... I have suggested withdrawal of tolerance from demonstrably aggressive and destructive movements on the Right..." 1/ "I have also argued for intolerance of propaganda against an extension of 'public services, social security, medical care, etc.'... the richest country in the world should not tolerate pressure [from] vested interests against better care for the poor, the sick, and the old." 2/

I will not read that article about Marx being unimportant before 1917, but I will assert a truism of intellectual history: everybody we include today in the canon of "great thinkers" has an irregular reception history, and many were unimportant until recently, for example: 1/ Edmund Burke (1729-1797) only became the founder of modern conservatism in mid-19th and early 20th centuries, as @EmilyJonesVIII has shown 2/
global.oup.com/academic/produ…

the largest labor strike in the history of US higher education starts today at the University of California: solidarity!
here’s a brief testimony about my compensation while I was a grad student @UCBerkeley in 2009–15 and a member of @uaw2865. 1/ when I started in 2009, my annual stipend was $17,000 (see above). I was incredibly lucky to find apartments at below market rate, since my landlords wanted to make them affordable to UC students: not common at all! but I still paid more than 50% of income for rent every year. 2/

fellow contingent faculty have been sharing absurd tales with me… academia has to be one of the few (only?) industries in which on-the-job experience actually disqualifies you from the best jobs. it’s like non-tenure-track faculty have the mark of Cain. / it’s mainly due to corporate mgmt, but also TT need to uphold the ideology that they deserve their success. this is less the case w younger TT who have at least experienced the post-1990s job market, but still NTT must be invisibilized in order for the tenure system to persist. /

June 30 was my last day of gainful academic employment. I was terminated after 6 years of work as an instructional faculty member, neither for budgetary reasons nor for performance, but in order to uphold the dean office’s ideology of merit: I hadn’t originally been hired in a full search, and it was decided that any further renewal of my lectureship—or promotion to senior lecturer, for which I was eligible—would send the wrong message that it was possible “to get in through the back door” (so I heard secondhand)

in this interview by @daniel_dsj2110 in @thenation, I summarize a few theses from my book NEW LEFTS:

1. historical new lefts should be understood as organizational revolts from within the social democratic & communist camps, not as external currents
thenation.com/article/cultur… 2. there were several new lefts that preceded and helped shape the global New Left of the late 1950s & 1960s, especially in Western Europe with its longer tradition of socialist mass organizations

Last wk Yale faculty were briefed by D. Swenson, manager-guru of the endowment. No recording allowed. Amid talk of "investment gods" & "institutional immortality," we learned that this 1974 essay still informs Yale's endowment ethos 1/
jstor.org/stable/1816077 Tobin was an influential neo-Keynesian economist who worked at Yale, advised the US gov't, and modeled economic sustainability. His 1974 essay in AmerEconReview est'd the "Tobin spending rule" balancing endowment distributions bt prior-yr spending & projected market value 2/

What did the feudal social order look like?

Probably not like you think (e.g., this modern and composite image of a social pyramid). 1/5 In 1992, the German medievalist historian Hartmut Boockmann pub'd an essay complaining about the feudal pyramids he saw everywhere in German school textbooks. They were inaccurate, he argued.

So he sketched out some alternative visualizations of medieval society. 2/5