Big Moves, Big News, and Thoughts on SB 202
An update, since it's been a while.
Roughly 80 percent of the emails I’ve sent this past year have started with some version of “I’m sorry for not responding sooner,” and this message comes with a similar sentiment attached.
As you may have noticed, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a newsletter—since December 2022, in fact. These past fourteen months have come with an avalanche of major life changes, including leaving Indiana University, starting a new job at the University of Wisconsin, settling my kids into a new home and a new school, and finishing my latest book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, which comes out June 4, 2024.
All that upheaval has given me a chance to reflect on why I started this newsletter and how best to use it going forward.
My original goal was to empower those struggling to navigate an often opaque and hostile institution—to offer the kinds of insights that might help grad students and others in academia feel more confident and less alone.
Academia, however, is far from the only institution that’s leaving people flailing, isolated, and unmoored. And my plan for the future of this newsletter is simply to broaden our conversation—to continue talking about academia’s hidden curriculum while also talking about broader systems of inequality and the challenges of trying to confront them on our own.
To that end, I’ve also changed the title, from the admittedly boring Grad School to The Hidden Curriculum, a newsletter aimed at making institutions and inequalities less opaque. (The URLs for old posts will remain stable, in case you’ve bookmarked any for reference).
I’ll kick things off here with some thoughts on Indiana’s Senate Bill 202 and its implications for higher ed, followed by a bit more info about my latest book (and how to get free stickers for the book in the mail).
What “Intellectual Diversity” Really Means in Higher Ed
For those who don’t follow higher ed news in Indiana, it’s been a wild couple of years, including threats against striking graduate students, smear campaigns against professors who perform abortions, sanctions on professors who support pro-Palestinian student groups, and legislation stripping the world-renowned Kinsey Institute of state funding for its sex-focused research.
Last week, with the state legislature’s passage of S.B. 202, Indiana took yet another step in its efforts to curb and muzzle higher ed. The bill hasn’t yet been signed into law. But given that Republicans control every top-level office in the state, along with both houses in the state legislature, it’s unlikely to face official opposition now that it’s waiting on the governor’s desk.
To summarize: the bill erodes the protections of tenure, threatens faculty whose teaching might be seen as too politically one-sided, and turns students into an active force of surveillance for the state.
More specifically, the bill will require public colleges and university to:
Review tenured faculty members every five years,
Discipline (and potentially terminate) any faculty member who hasn’t “helped the institution foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity,” “introduced students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks,” and “refrained from subjecting students to views and opinions concerning matters not related to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction,”
Create and promote mechanisms for “students and employees to submit complaints that a faculty member” has failed to meet the criteria above, and
Report back on their findings to the state.
Not surprisingly, the bill has drawn criticism from Indiana’s public university faculty, as well as from the AAUP. And yet, there may be little that faculty or even administrators can do to resist these changes, because, in Indiana, the boards of trustees of these schools are primarily made up of members appointed by the governor of the state.
Reading the bill, I can’t say that I didn’t see this (or something like it) coming. And I can’t say that rumblings of these sorts of changes didn’t play a role in my decision to leave last year.
What I can say, though, is that I’m worried about the future of public higher ed in Indiana and across the redder parts of the US. At Indiana, I taught nearly 3,000 students in courses like Introduction to Sociology and Social Problems and Public Policy. We talked about systemic racism, gender diversity, climate change, abortion, and gun control. And while my student evaluations were generally glowing, my classes weren’t universally adored. At the time, however, I had the protection of tenure, along the with the protections that White privilege affords.
Once S.B. 202 is signed into law, instructors who teach courses like mine will have much more to risk in doing so. And I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them choose to cut more contentious topics from their syllabi or even look for the exit door. Because there’s only so much that any individual can do to fight official hostility, especially in the absence of a sturdy social safety net and in a staunchly anti-union state.
A Bit of Book News
My new book, Holding It Together, reveals what that kind of DIY society costs American families and how the engineers and profiteers of the American economy exploit the unpaid and underpaid labor of women to maintain the illusion that we can get without a net.
Through portraits drawn from over 400 hours of interviews with families across the socioeconomic, racial, and political spectrum, the book makes clear that, without women, the US social safety net would simply collapse. Combining original survey data with media and policy analyses, I also show how we trap women in this system of exploitation—leaving them either with no choice but to do the work of the social safety net or with the morally fraught choice of pushing that work onto others more vulnerable than them. And I highlight the myths that the engineers and profiteers use to divide us and prevent us from fighting together to build the kind of net that would better support us all.
The book is available now for preorder, including from the publisher, from independent bookstores, and from online retailers like Amazon. For a bit of hidden curriculum insight, I’ll share that preorders matter for authors because they determine eligibility for things like bestseller lists and shape publishers’ decisions about how to promote the book and how many copies to print.
To that end, if you preorder Holding It Together, I’d love to send you a bookmark from my publisher, a sticker I designed,1 and a signed name plate, along with my sincere gratitude. I have enough to send to 200 people, but I’m running this giveaway myself, so please bear with me and follow the steps outlined below.
How to enter:
Forward your electronic preorder receipt for Holding It Together to HoldingItTogetherBook@gmail.com. Include your preferred mailing address in the email.
If you have a printed receipt but not an electronic one, email a picture of the receipt to HoldingItTogetherBook@gmail.com, along with your preferred mailing address.
If you preordered from an independent bookstore and don’t have a receipt, send the name of the bookstore and your preferred mailing address to HoldingItTogetherBook@gmail.com.
Print books, ebooks, and audiobooks preordered by June 3, 2024 all count for the giveaway, which will continue as long as supplies last.
And remember: We’re better off holding it together than trying to hold it together alone.
The stickers show an embroidery hoop I stitched with the quote “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.” That quote is the beating heart of the book, and it’s from an interview I did with Anne Helen Petersen during the early stages of Covid-19. The idea for the sticker giveaway comes from writer Lyz Lenz, whose powerful new book This American Ex-Wife was published last month, and which you should definitely read.