Current Project: Taking, Talking, and Thinking Through Career Development

I made this graphic in Canva. 

Recently I had the pleasure of joining current and former graduate students from the UIUC Department of History to discuss my experiences with career diversity and my embrace of a non-tenure track career path. Teaching can play a critical role in that path, as teaching is often (though not always) the first chance that many graduate students get to apply their skills in a different way than their writing and research, and to something that often feels like a space more within their control and more akin to "paid employment" than other aspects of their lives and work. 

  

Because of this connection between teaching and career development, I wanted to reflect today on some takeaways of that session, particularly since teaching is instrumental to that story. I've divided these into three key topics (as you may have guessed from the graphic): mindsets that in hindsight I found to be the most helpful things I did without always knowing that's what I was doing. 

A note that most of these observations are for people thinking about their place on this path, not for the people who organize graduate programs, except insofar as those people might well take the idea from this to emphasize creating space and opportunity for these things to take place. The reason why is twofold; first, this was my experience, and I can speak to it better than just about anything else. Second, at the end of the day, I am fairly aware of who makes up my readership (friends, current and former graduate students, and some of my former students, hello!), and no one is more capable, more interested, or more qualified to make the kind of decisions I made, wish I made, wish I'd made more often and in more ways, than you are. 

 

Take

 

Lots of people talk about the "tenure-track academia" path and the "not that" path as two separate ones, but there was really never a "two roads diverged in the wood and I" moment for me.* During the course of our conversation, I concocted a somewhat tortured but nevertheless illustrative metaphor about the journey. For me, deciding to go to gradschool was a bit like going to the store for apples. I knew that I was going to go in and come out with apples-- or, as a professor. As I started moving through the aisles, though, I started grabbing some other things, and realized by the end that I had a basket filled with a lot of things, which I could use in service of a lot of different goals. And every time I grabbed an extra thing to put in that basket-- that is, developed a new interest, took on a job or volunteered to do a task-- I didn't do it with a perfect grand plan in mind. It came from following my interests, trying things that sounded interesting and that I wanted to know more about. In short, you don't have to make a large decision to pursue keeping your options open-- you just have to take things and put them in your basket, knowing they might give you options later.

Talk

 

Networking isn't schmoozing, it's reciprocal and thus is tied with knowing the value of your labor. Alison Green has pointed this out in many ways on Ask a Manager, and the topic came up in our conversation as well. When someone is in dire need of a job, it can be hard for them to see the other person as a person rather than as an opportunity-dispensing machine. But most folks I know are actually interested in other people! So, approach your talk with mutual gain in mind. Most people love to know that something from their experience helped you. And if you know the value of your labor, you'll know that it can incredibly helpful for someone to be able to say, soon or far in the future, "oh yes, I know someone who might be able to fill that position/consult on that work/ direct that project." But it probably isn't something they can do immediately-- networking in this way is setting yourself up for the potential future, just the way the opportunities you put into your grocery basket are. Most folks don't have the power to just pick you up and slot you into a job, and if it worked that way it would be even more unfair than the process often is currently. It's like any other relationship you build with another human: you can't rush trust, comfort, or intimacy. You have to build it with small bits of evidence about your interests, skills, and work style. 

That also means networking doesn't have to be overly complicated or awkward. For me, networking was volunteering a couple of hours of my life to keep time during the university's teaching assistant orientation's microteaching sessions. It was joining a professional organization in a field I was interested in and attending a virtual event. It was scheduling a meeting with a graduate career advisor who introduced me to someone in a field I was interested in. It was doing a couple of informational interviews with various people who were, uniformly, happy to talk to someone about what they do. Even the things that I didn’t want to do, ultimately, were helpful. Some of the useful information I got from informational interviews was "well, I don't want to do that!" So, talk-- to anyone and everyone who knows something about something you think you might like to know more about. 

 

Think

Teaching skills-- like all skills-- can stand you in good stead in many markets, but you have to actually think about how you are doing it and why. Unfortunately, many graduate students do not feel encouraged to do this reflective work, at least in my experience and my conversations with others. They are instead told to go and do what is necessary to keep their funding and get through the semester, but they are not encouraged to develop pedagogically beyond what is "always done." As unfair as this may be, this means that most have to use the opportunities they have to make this sort of experience count through their own initiative, as rarely will anyone scaffold this particularly well for you. Going into class and telling students "discuss the reading" will not provide useful experience for you; nor will putting lots of effort into things without reflection, like painstakingly writing the same three wordy comments on every essay. 

This doesn't mean you need to agonize over every lesson or reinvent the wheel every time you open your Zoom window/classroom door/Canvas course. Instead, I suggest finding one topic, idea, or objective you want to emphasize the next time you teach and really think about how best to do so: do some research on how others have taught similar ideas, create a novel activity or assessment, and talk to your most pedagogically-minded colleagues about what you're planning, how it went, and what they do in their own courses. In doing so, you'll have created an example that you can forever use as an indication of your teaching style and your work style.

I hope take, talk, and think are as useful to you as they have been to me. And of course, you're always welcome to take from (the archives of Activities and Materials are open for your perusal!), talk to (contact info is on the right sidebar!), and think along with me. 

Notes:

*Not especially a huge Robert Frost person, but I always find myself quoting him in writing; just like experiences, I often throw little bits of language that strike me into "my basket" for later. (My favorite which I slipped into my dissertation is "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.")

Flashback Roundup: The Birthday of Bourne

There's been a lot of talk about the Spanish Flu recently for obvious reasons. While many people have varying associations with that particular epidemic, it always makes me think of radical antiwar bohemian and disabled writer Randolph Bourne, who died of it at age 32 in 1918. In honor of Randolph Bourne's birthday (May 30), I'm revisiting two posts on Bourne's lesser-discussed life and work. In addition to the sources linked below, you can read some of his writings at the Internet Archive, or listen to some of his essays at LibriVox. 

Randolph Bourne, Student Radical (originally published November 6, 2017)

I love it when my research allows me to indulge some personal curiosity I have about something. This was the case on my trip to Northampton, where I peeked in at the Helen Gurley Brown papers. Primarily, I sought information on Brown's sister Mary, a polio survivor, but also enjoyed peeking at the papers I had so longed to look at three years before, when I was finishing up my master's thesis on Brown's revitalized version of Cosmopolitan.

Visiting the Randolph Bourne papers at Columbia provided a different sort of satisfaction: getting a closer look at a character from the first Reacting to the Past game I ever encountered, Greenwich Village, 1913 (habitually shortened to GV). I looked at Bourne's papers in the hopes of finding some personal reflections on or similar to his work in "The Handicapped-- By One of Them" to use in my dissertation research about children with disabilities in the early twentieth century. However, in addition to learning a bit more about this piece and its reception (which I'll discuss more in a future post), I also found resources from Bourne's college days which shed light on some of the conflicts within the Greenwich Village game and the historical moment with which it engages. 

In GV, two factions, suffrage and labor, vie for the affections of the bohemians living in the neighborhood. The bohemians can be an unruly bunch-- loftily principled, if you think kindly on them; unrealistically flighty, if you're less charitable. One of the most focused bohemian roles is Randolph Bourne. The game describes him primarily as a young intellectual with firm beliefs in the vital power of youth to bring about social and political change. His piece "Youth" informs his speeches and writings within the game and those of other characters who wish to emphasize the value of vitality, novelty, and energy. Those who play him often pick up his voice fairly well in this respect, continually advocating for youthful energy and voices to play strong roles in the plans of the suffrage and labor factions.

One of the great additions I came across in Bourne's papers for future GV sessions was a series of replies to an editorial Bourne wrote for Columbia's Spectator while a student at the university. In the editorial, Bourne criticized university administrators for their exploitation of the women and children who labored at cleaning, book-delivery, and other "drudgery and primitive methods" he thought inappropriate for a university setting. Though I have not been able to find the full text of his editorial, it is referenced in this New York Times blurb from Feburary 26, 1913: 

Bourne's piece itself is a fantastic argument for his alliance with labor, as it showcases his interest in equitable working conditions and willingness to challenge systems of institutional authority. It could also be used to persuade him toward suffrage, as he seems particularly appalled by the degradation of women and children promoted by the university's practices and claims he and other students "blush with shame when they pass a poor, gaunt scrubwoman on her knees…or have a book delivered to them by an undersized, starving child."

The replies offer the opportunity to bring the discussion to another level. Most of them are strongly negative, taking Bourne to task for his exaggeration of the laborer's working conditions and his distrust of the university administration to know what is best. The writers of these replies found Bourne's ideology extreme and distasteful. Much of the Greenwich Village game is tightly wrapped in the insular community of Greenwich Village. In the Village, social cachet comes with doing something--anything-- that is daring, new, intellectual, fun-loving, or expressive. Radical ideas are the order of the day and for the most part all are trying to out-radical one another. There are some insertions of more conservative perspectives in the course of the game, particularly in opposition to woman suffrage which comes from outside the Village. These letters offer an intriguing look at everyday "college men's" opposition to ideas about labor rights in a context which affects him daily.  

Although people given the role of Bourne in GV are informed of Bourne's disability, it rarely comes up in game sessions or papers. I'm still struggling to come up with ways to promote discussion of this attribute of Bourne's life within the Greenwich Village game. I'll discuss Bourne's contributions to disability history, theory, and identity in another post. 

Related Links: 

Bourne is frequently lauded for his commentary on World War I, including his famous assertion that "War is the Health of the State."

The memory of Bourne's opposition to war has inspired continuing antiwar organizations, including the Randolph Bourne Institute.

John Dos Passos' piece about Bourne, written about a decade after his death, is often quoted (including in disability activist magazine The Ragged Edge's version of  "The Handicapped" linked above).

The Embodiment of Bourne (originally published July 18, 2018)

Randolph Bourne at typewriter.

I brought two books on my trip to Princeton to work as a teaching assistant for the Center for Talented Youth. One of these was the script for Body of Bourne, a play that deals with the life of Randolph Bourne, an antiwar thinker and bohemian. One morning I found myself sitting at breakfast in a dining hall on Princeton's campus, reading the scene in which Bourne has been accepted to Princeton but is unable to go, lacking the financial support his uncle offered only to Bourne's abled sister. Bourne never made it to Princeton; instead, he worked six years in an low-paying job and eventually raised enough money to attend Columbia University.

As you might remember, Bourne is one of the bohemian roles in the Greenwich Village, 1913 Reacting to the Past game. His role in the game is to promote bohemian ideals, particularly those of multiculturalism and the influence of youth on social change. But how did he come to care about these things? I've previously written about his college days at Columbia and the commitment to women's rights and labor issues espoused by his editorial in the Spectator. In this post, I want to explore another of his pieces, one critical to understanding the formation of his ideals and the experience of embodiment in the early 20th century US: "The Handicapped-- By One of Them."

Initially much of the scholarly work on Bourne suffered from a misleading mind/body dualism. Bourne has long been regarded for his mind, and his ideas continue to hold weight among liberal and radical thinkers-- he was even the subject of an article on current politics in the New Yorker in August 2017. His antiwar stance and embrace of multiculturalism as a boon to American life have made his ideas feel fresh to multiple generations. His body, however, has often been portrayed as either a mere footnote to conversations about his intellect or a tragic obstacle he overcame-- in other words, he is a notable thinker in spite of disability. The back cover of Bruce Clayton's Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne, for example, suggests surprise that the "disfigured and hunchbacked" Bourne "reacted to his disability not with bitterness or self-pity, but rather with exuberant love for beauty and a compassion for humanity"-- in other words, it is a pleasant surprise that Bourne was able to resist bitterness and develop a compassionate view of the world. 

This viewpoint on Bourne is all too common; the great disability scholar Paul Longmore criticized these trends in scholars' work on Bourne in his review of Forgotten Prophet by saying "The problem with it, as with all Bourne biographies, is its fundamental misunderstanding of his experience and identity as a disabled man in a society that intensively stigmatized him." Longmore was so interested in this side of Bourne that he took up the topic twenty years later in an article with Paul Steven Miller, arguing that Bourne's experience of disability (or "philosophy of handicap," a phrase Bourne used to title "The Handicapped" when it was reprinted) was the foundation of his radicalism. (In many ways, Body of Bourne and the Longmore/Miller article are companion pieces, making harmonizing arguments through contrasting means about the role of body in Bourne's political thought.)

Bourne saw handicap as a critical part of his experience and his ideology. The category of handicap, as Longmore and Miller explain, is less about bodily function or impairment and more about social expectation. Bourne's "The Handicapped" opens by claiming that in many ways, it is easier to be "helpless" and happy with any little diversion you can get than it is to "move about freely," but with a "crooked back and unsightly face" and have to strive and work for opportunities frequently denied you. Employment, friendship, and day-to-day tasks are all hampered, as he goes on to describe, not by physical impairments but by the low expectations of others. Most successes must not only be clawed for through perseverance (akin to the can-do attitude promoted by rehabilitationists of the era) but also at some point permitted through the explicit cooperation of an abled person.

As this need for cooperation might suggest, the difficulties Bourne related were socially informed-- they did not hinge on the body's function but on others' perception and treatment of that body. Bourne could have stopped his essay and his ideology there-- i.e, "my experience has taught me that peoples' perceptions of my body affect me negatively"-- but instead, he explained that this had contributed to a broader understanding of the ways in which people's status and success were influenced by social factors outside their control.

It makes me wince to hear a man spoken of as a failure, or to have it said of one that he "doesn't amount to much." Instantly I want to know why he has not succeeded, and what have been the forces that have been working against him.

Bourne extended the idea that people had underestimated him to a consideration of the roles of others within his society-- i.e., "if I am being underestimated and blocked from success, others must be suffering the same treatment." He prized this aspect of himself, noting that the knowledge was worth anything he'd endured to gain it: "If it is solely to my physical misfortunes that I owe its existence, the price has not been a heavy one to pay." 

At first, "The Handicapped" was printed anonymously (hence "By One of Them"), which Ned Stuckey French posits may have been due to embarrassment of his disability; I suspect concerns about having his other published thoughts disregarded, and thus his livelihood and reputation affected, was the key motivator. The worry of being flippantly disregarded is key to this piece; he even cites it as one of the worst things he experiences socially: "What one does get sensitive to is rather the inevitable way that people, acquaintances and strangers alike, have of discounting in advance what one does or says." Publishing this piece represented risk for Bourne, who likely did not wish to jeopardize the success of his other political writing.

Reactions to Bourne's "The Handicapped-- By One of Them" suggest that themes Bourne raised resonated with disabled readers of the Atlantic Monthly. Some readers wrote to thank him for his words. Bourne's correspondence, held by his alma mater, Columbia University, include two letters from different women who signed their communications "Another of Them," in reference to the title of his piece. Both thank Bourne for his writing, saying that it had encouraged them. They offer brief details of their own about their lives in support of his points: one notes that she is writing both for herself, an "old woman who is learning to bless her handicaps for the insight they are bringing into the possibilities of life," and for her brother, still struggling in the "darkness, the weight of his handicaps heavy upon him." His greatest problem? The "lack of intimate friends," which Bourne highlighted in his piece; which several sources suggest was critical to both the greatest joys and sorrows of his life; and which frequently, especially at a time when socializing was much more circumscribed by place and social circles, necessitated the need of cooperation by abled friends and family.


Related Links:
An early review of Body of Bourne in Variety. It's a great intro to the man and his life, so read or see it if you can: I got the script through Interlibrary Loan, and there's an upcoming production at Oberlin College next year. You can also see an interesting image of the original performance at Getty Images.
Bourne's "The Handicapped" appears in a variety of places across the internet, including the Disability History Museum, the disability rights publication Ragged Edge Online, and The Anarchist Library. The second form of the piece can be found in Youth and Life.
Randolph Bourne at the Disability Social History Project. 
More of Bourne's writing available at fairuse.org. 
Weird connections: the New Yorker article mentioned above was written by Jeremy McCarter, author of two books: Young Radicals, about many of the Greenwich Village bohemians including Bourne, Jack Reed, and Max Eastman; and Hamilton: The Revolution.

Archival Citations:
Another of Them to Randolph Bourne, September 1911; Randolph Bourne Papers; Box 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 
Another of Them to Randolph Bourne, September 14, 1911; Randolph Bourne Papers; Box 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.  

Flashback Post: Because You're Mine, I Walk the Line

In honor of the anniversary of the 2018 strike of the Graduate Employees' Organization at UIUC, I'm reposting my piece on it from last year. In the past year, we've seen incredible numbers and incredible results from teachers' strikes, and I continue to believe that one of the best things we can do for education-- no matter what our connection to it-- is to support the labor rights of those who deliver it. Even Miss Othmar agrees. 

Graduate workers marching during strike, surrounded by bubbles. Photo by Jeff Putney.

As you may know, the Graduate Employees' Organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is currently on strike (at eight days and counting, the longest in UIUC history). There have been a lot of beautiful letters and posts floating around about the strike, making articulate and reasonable arguments in favor of protecting tuition waivers, raising graduate wages, and making clear to the administration their dissatisfaction with their unwillingness to bargain with graduate employees. I myself did the opposite last week, canceling my usual weekly post both in solidarity with the strike and to give myself more time to participate in pickets and rallies. This week, I want to jot down just a few messy reflections on the possibilities for learning that the strike has presented (while encouraging you to also read some of the cogent arguments in favor of the GEO presented in a variety of places like the Undergraduate-Graduate Alliance and the fine folks on Twitter.)

Most obviously, the GEO strike has presented a lot of opportunities to reevaluate the value of graduate labor for people at all levels, even surprising graduate workers themselves. I know the value of my own labor, but did I know about the ESL courses that every international student is required to take under the guidance of graduate workers? Not before last week. Undergraduate allies of the GEO are reflecting on the role that TAs and GAs have played in their own coursework and highlighting these experiences in letters to the provost.

For me, the strike has also sparked thoughts about labor history and the way we teach it. US history courses often cover the labor movement, and for good reason-- as we are wont to say, their efforts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries changed the landscape of work in this country (at least, I am wont to say so). An eight hour day, a weekend, restrictions on child labor, a living wage, workplace safety-- all things that the labor movement envisioned and made real. We do a lot of activities designed to highlight this contrast-- reading John Spargo's observations of child laborers and their dismal working conditions. We emphasize the differences in various union ideologies, bringing up a lot of unions with a lot of acronyms, like the IWW and the AFL and the WTUL and maybe even the ILGWU if we get really rowdy.

What most of us haven't explored so fruitfully-- what is hard to approximate in the classroom-- is the mixed emotional bag of labor activism. The strike has brought on for me an appreciation of how complex the decision to strike is-- both dreaded and celebrated. It has highlighted the spirit of joyfulness that the strike brings, and that as it goes on, you become closer to those around you. When teaching strikes and unions, I had been painting a picture of iron-jawed determination, but what I've seen in the past week has been more lighthearted-- a determination to win, yes, but also a celebration of community. I've heard this newfound appreciation of community from many people this week, and I've said it myself-- "This might sounds cheesy, but all that solidarity stuff-- I get it now."

It also takes you outside of yourself a bit. I saw a pretty apt sign last week that said something to the effect of, "Things are so bad even the introverts are out here!" The person that you are on the picket line, shouting chants and encouraging strangers, is not the person that you are every other time of your life, when you fear talking to other people or just wish you could go to your office without seeing anyone. Most weeks, I avoid campus when I don't have to be there-- last week, I was there every day.

I have never been able to get this sort of worldview-altering enthusiasm into my discussions of labor history, because I didn't really know it myself. The discussion is about that iron-jawed determination I mentioned above-- the ideals of Marxism, the rational reasons why one would want to work a manageable number of hours or have their children attend school instead of picking coal. I've never focused on the community building of unions and strikes, the human motivations of union leaders or members. Even the Greenwich Village game, which approximates so many lived experiences and ideas well, also fails to get across this experience of the labor faction-- its focus is on ideals among bohemians, not engagement in actual labor activism. How much more sense do the various enthusiasms of Leah Schwartz, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn make when you've actually seen a strike in action?

So, one of the nice things about this strike, in addition to the solidarity it has fostered, is the insight it can offer not only into our present but into labor history for teachers and students alike. I like to think that the next time I walk into a classroom on this campus to talk about unions and labor, there will be a great deal more familiarity with these concepts among my students, and more appreciation of who exactly it is who organizes, strikes, pickets, and makes change throughout history-- people very much like us.


Related Links:

Title Talk-- I Walk the Line
A few links on the GEO strike: News-Gazette, Socialist Worker, Chicago Tribune, Daily Illini.
For the monetarily inclined, a link to the GEO Strike Fund.

Current Project: Connecting Nonprofit and Charitable Labor Then and Now

The idea that nonprofits are a highly sought-after but problematic place to work has been at the corners of my consciousness for a while, but I had never fully appreciated the historical continuity of these issues before delving into my own research. Along the way, I've encountered a variety of materials in which charitable organizations presented negative portrayals of their own workers due to existing labor disputes or the mere potential that workers might demand better treatment. Though this is not the main point of my project, it does present enough interesting connections to the present that I wanted to draw them out a bit here.

To work for a certain sort of nonprofit is often a way for one to ally their personal or political commitments with their career-- to work towards a social dream while also working towards a paycheck. Yet as good as this sounds-- or as good as the goals of an organization based on helping, giving, and changing society can be-- the idea of these organizations as the best possible solutions to social problems has also been challenged. The group INCITE!, for example, in their collection The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, presents critiques of the goals of these organizations as mere sustainers and beneficiaries of social inequality, and usurpers of the momentum of grassroots movements.

Moreover, these organizations aren't always good to their workers, expecting long hours for low pay with a cheerful countenance fueled by one's passion for the work. This can lead to implicit or explicit inequities in selection for such positions; for example, a person who doesn't have the family support to take a very low-paying but status building job, or the recent case in which a federal program that funds workers in temporary community service positions engaged in discriminatory hiring practices, rescinding offers after demanding disclosure of medical information. Moreover, they can be actively antagonistic to organizing-- it took Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains months to cease fighting to prevent their workers from organizing.

As the introductory essay to the INCITE! collection hints, many of the problems with nonprofits' impact and their relationships with clients are rooted in the origins of the nonprofit industrial complex, which stem from the tax evasion and wealth accumulation of Gilded Age aristocrats as well as Progressive Era tendencies toward approaching reform as an individualized, controlled, and hierarchized project. (Indeed, what American problem doesn't have links to one or both of these? But I digress.) In my research on disabled children in the early to mid twentieth century US, I often examine sources from the perspective of Progressive-minded social workers and philanthropists, who saw their roles as being improvers of the race, and thus passed judgment on their clients with abandon in both public and private records. Linda Gordon's Heroes of their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence and Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare are great secondary resources for getting a sense of this rhetoric (these links offer some interesting reviews of both).

I was oddly unaware, however, that tensions existed between workers and management within charitable organizations before the late twentieth century, perhaps due to my uninformed assumptions that these were largely made up of volunteers. My trip to Minnesota's Social Welfare History Archive was the first on which I really noticed the anti-labor sentiment of some of the private charity organizations. 

Several of these were affiliates of Christian churches or denominations, and relied on religious sentiment to critique workers' interest in higher pay and better benefits. The Lutheran Orphan's Friend, for example, reported on recent staff turnover by narrating a brief cautionary tale: "Word once reached us that one of our workers ventured the opinion that if we all got together, they could all get more. She got out. How can such a person serve Christ at a place like this!" The very idea of organizing with coworkers was not only troublesome to management; it also indicated that such a person did not understand the mission of the organization or even Christian charity itself. 

Other organizations dropped the religious emphasis, but kept the anti-organizing sentiment. The superintendent of Sheltering Arms, a convalescent hospital in Minneapolis, noted that their concern was financial. In an item slipped at the very end of her Report for September of 1947, Superintendent Josephine Poehler noted, "Sheltering Arms is included in the Twin City Hospital Council's meetings regarding the nurses' demands, which will result in UNION tactics on the part of nurses and higher salaries. We will do everything possible to keep costs down!" This drama continues throughout several months of reports, though I have not had the chance to look more deeply into the outcome of the nurses' bargaining.

There is, of course, an irony to all of this. Why would people who set out to provide aid to others have no interest in providing compensation to their own employees? I see this in part as a weird side effect of the professionalizing of expertise, particularly medical expertise, in these sorts of institutions. The charitable model is in some ways built on the idea of free labor, on volunteerism for no reward other than the satisfaction of doing the right thing. However, if your organization was going to keep up with the times, you needed to include professional experts, and many of these trained experts wouldn't labor for free. Some doctors volunteered their visits, but nurses were needed consistently, not on a "pop in when you have time" sort of basis; they were also not earning wages high enough at any position to allow them to do things on a voluntary basis at other hospitals. Despite this reality, I suspect that those in charge of these organizations resented the idea that anyone would not only demand payment, but fair compensation for work that they felt should be volunteered in the spirit of charity. (This was likely a particularly acute issue at Sheltering Arms, which had spent sixty years as an orphanage before moving into the medical arena in 1943 in response to increasing concern about poliomyelitis.) These qualms are not dissimilar from modern arguments about one's lack of commitment to a cause or organization if not willing to work free overtime, be on call at all hours, or accept wages below the poverty line.

Although these cases are both from the 1940s, these tensions precede the midcentury era. Upon seeing the sources discussed above, I reflected anew on a source I'd already seen, some organizational documents from the Blanche Van Leuven Browne Hospital-School in Detroit in the 1910s. Blanche Van Leuven Browne, a polio survivor who opened a home for "crippled children" based on her own experiences of disability, demanded quite a bit of investment from the nursing staff she hired. Perhaps the first list item of her employee policy is the best example: "Absolute, unquestioning loyalty and obedience." Of course, Browne's position is a bit more complicated-- it's likely that her demand for respect was in direct response to the difficulty she faced having her expertise taken seriously, as her qualifications were based in having been a disabled child rather than a medical professional. I plan on exploring these tensions in greater detail as my project develops.

These sorts of connections are interesting, of course, but I think they're also a useful thing to highlight in comprehending our own career choices in the modern world. The problems that many of my students will face in choosing their career trajectories, particularly if they want to choose careers in charitable, nonprofit, or other professions associated with "service" or "helping", will have echoes of these tensions. Often historical context reveals to us just how long problems have been happening. This can crush our hopes that things will just get better on their own, but it can also spark us to critique and to action on our own behalf. 

Any suggested readings on the history of labor and philanthropy/charity, the rise of the

nonprofit, and the relationship between these things and governmental social welfare programs? Any themes or incidents seem familiar to you as a volunteer, a worker, or a client? Let me know in comments!

Thanks to the amazing folks who helped with sources and encouragement for this post in response to-- you guessed it-- an Internet Ask. Special H/T to Greg Butchello and Caitlin Dryke for their source suggestions.

Archival Citations: 

Lutheran Orphan's Friend, Oct. 1941. Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota.

Superintendent's Report, Sheltering Arms, Sept. 1947 . Board Minutes 1943-47, Box 1. Sheltering Arms Records, 1882-1983, SW-95. Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota.

Blanche Van Leuven Browne, "Policy of Van Leuven Browne Regarding Employees 1917 Dec." Box 1, Folder 8. Blanche Van Leuven Browne Papers, 2017039 Aa 2.  Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Blog Note: This will be my last post of the year-- thanks for sticking by me through 2018. If you have favorite posts, items you'd like me to revisit, or themes of the year that you've noticed, I'd love to hear about them. Otherwise, I'll see you all in the new year!

Current Project: Because You're Mine, I Walk the Line

Photo by Jeff Putney.

As you may know, the Graduate Employees' Organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is currently on strike (at eight days and counting, the longest in UIUC history). There have been a lot of beautiful letters and posts floating around about the strike, making articulate and reasonable arguments in favor of protecting tuition waivers, raising graduate wages, and making clear to the administration their dissatisfaction with their unwillingness to bargain with graduate employees. I myself did the opposite last week, canceling my usual weekly post both in solidarity with the strike and to give myself more time to participate in pickets and rallies. This week, I want to jot down just a few messy reflections on the possibilities for learning that the strike has presented (while encouraging you to also read some of the cogent arguments in favor of the GEO presented in a variety of places like the Undergraduate-Graduate Alliance and the fine folks on Twitter.)

Most obviously, the GEO strike has presented a lot of opportunities to reevaluate the value of graduate labor for people at all levels, even surprising graduate workers themselves. I know the value of my own labor, but did I know about the ESL courses that every international student is required to take under the guidance of graduate workers? Not before last week. Undergraduate allies of the GEO are reflecting on the role that TAs and GAs have played in their own coursework and highlighting these experiences in letters to the provost.

For me, the strike has also sparked thoughts about labor history and the way we teach it. US history courses often cover the labor movement, and for good reason-- as we are wont to say, their efforts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries changed the landscape of work in this country (at least, I am wont to say so). An eight hour day, a weekend, restrictions on child labor, a living wage, workplace safety-- all things that the labor movement envisioned and made real. We do a lot of activities designed to highlight this contrast-- reading John Spargo's observations of child laborers and their dismal working conditions. We emphasize the differences in various union ideologies, bringing up a lot of unions with a lot of acronyms, like the IWW and the AFL and the WTUL and maybe even the ILGWU if we get really rowdy.

What most of us haven't explored so fruitfully-- what is hard to approximate in the classroom-- is the mixed emotional bag of labor activism. The strike has brought on for me an appreciation of how complex the decision to strike is-- both dreaded and celebrated. It has highlighted the spirit of joyfulness that the strike brings, and that as it goes on, you become closer to those around you. When teaching strikes and unions, I had been painting a picture of iron-jawed determination, but what I've seen in the past week has been more lighthearted-- a determination to win, yes, but also a celebration of community. I've heard this newfound appreciation of community from many people this week, and I've said it myself-- "This might sounds cheesy, but all that solidarity stuff-- I get it now."

It also takes you outside of yourself a bit. I saw a pretty apt sign last week that said something to the effect of, "Things are so bad even the introverts are out here!" The person that you are on the picket line, shouting chants and encouraging strangers, is not the person that you are every other time of your life, when you fear talking to other people or just wish you could go to your office without seeing anyone. Most weeks, I avoid campus when I don't have to be there-- last week, I was there every day.

I have never been able to get this sort of worldview-altering enthusiasm into my discussions of labor history, because I didn't really know it myself. The discussion is about that iron-jawed determination I mentioned above-- the ideals of Marxism, the rational reasons why one would want to work a manageable number of hours or have their children attend school instead of picking coal. I've never focused on the community building of unions and strikes, the human motivations of union leaders or members. Even the Greenwich Village game, which approximates so many lived experiences and ideas well, also fails to get across this experience of the labor faction-- its focus is on ideals among bohemians, not engagement in actual labor activism. How much more sense do the various enthusiasms of Leah Schwartz, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn make when you've actually seen a strike in action?

So, one of the nice things about this strike, in addition to the solidarity it has fostered, is the insight it can offer not only into our present but into labor history for teachers and students alike. I like to think that the next time I walk into a classroom on this campus to talk about unions and labor, there will be a great deal more familiarity with these concepts among my students, and more appreciation of who exactly it is who organizes, strikes, pickets, and makes change throughout history-- people very much like us.


Related Links:

Title Talk-- I Walk the Line
A few links on the GEO strike: News-Gazette, Socialist Worker, Chicago Tribune, Daily Illini.
For the monetarily inclined, a link to the GEO Strike Fund.