The Point: Retirement of former FSU President Rachel Rubin
9/19/2024
This week’s Point was written by our emeriti colleagues Professor Judith Smith and Arthur MacEwan to commemorate the retirement of former FSU President Rachel Rubin. Professor Smith was graduate program director in American Studies and Professor MacEwan taught in Economics and was FSU President directly preceding Professor Rubin. Professor Rubin retired during the spring semester of 2024 as a result of a diagnosis of early onset dementia. Any messages to Professor Rubin should be sent to her via her partner Professor Jeff Melnick jeffrey.melnick@umb.edu)
When Rachel Rubin applied for a position at UMass Boston in the spring of 1996, one of her recommenders told the search committee that her interdisciplinary scholarship in music, literature, and history had the potential to transform our American Studies department. This turned out to be absolutely true. Rachel arrived at UMass Boston with two PhDs , one in American Studies and one in Slavic Languages and Literature. With a multilingual and transnational vision of American literature and culture, she was particularly attuned to how cultural expressions travel across borders. Rubin’s cultural literacy in Russian, Yiddish, African-American, Latino, and Appalachian literary and musical traditions enabled her to recognize diverse ethnic and racial origins as well as appropriations that did not respect ethnic or racial boundaries. In her second semester at UMB, Rachel taught a workshop for American Studies faculty on “Using Music in the Classroom,” helping us to identify vernacular racial, ethnic, class and regional accents that could challenge institutional authority: throughout her career at UMass, she opened our eyes and our ears to a breadth of cultural production far beyond what many of us had been exposed to.
In American Studies, we were the beneficiaries of Rachel’s wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, vitality, and generosity. All of these qualities are well-documented in what she published during her UMB teaching career: four single authored books—Jewish Gangsters in Modern Literature (2000), Well-Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture (2012), a series of annotated interviews with a wide range of radical producers of film, literature, music collected in Creative Activism (2018), and a short volume in a music series unpacking Merle Haggard’s mostly misunderstood song, Okie from Muskogee (2018). Her wide-ranging interests are also on display in her scholarly edition of Polly Adler’s memoir recalling her years as New York City’s most famous madam, A House is Not a Home (2006), in the coauthored Immigrants and American Popular Culture (2006), in American Identities: An Introductory Textbook (2005), and in her co-edited American Popular Song: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century (2001) and Southern Radicalism Since Reconstruction (2006). Before her retirement, Rachel had begun another major project exploring the origins and international reach of the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, established in 1960, to train emerging leaders from non-aligned countries. Her research took her to archives in Moscow, and to Ghana, South Africa, the West Bank of Palestine to interview national leaders who had been educated at the university. She was just beginning to present and publish this new research in recent years. Could there be a more intellectually stimulating colleague?
Rachel’s work in and for American Studies was generous and unstinting and took many forms. She designed new courses for American Studies: a seminar in music and 20th century literature; an upper-level course on Latino/Latina border culture, a labor-oriented seminar on Work, Society and Culture. She also designed two other new courses for the Honors College, an Appalachian Cultural History course, and a well-enrolled course on hip hop that she co-taught with the Boston area musician, Akrobatik. She advised many MA students, 50 at last count, many of whom were very excited by the cultural interactions they discoveries in their work with her. She guided CLA’s Center for the Humanities, Culture and Society for several years; she served as needed on personnel committees in Applied Linguistics, Labor Studies, Women’s Studies. Small departments require a lot of administrative work from their faculty: Rachel took over as Acting Department chair three times before she had tenure, also taking over as Graduate Program Director for four semesters, two before she had tenure. She also served as Chair for three additional years after tenure. Beyond UMass Boston, area listeners got lucky when Rachel went on the air. She conducted interviews for Commonwealth Journal on our own WUMB, for five years from 2011-2016. In roughly the same period, she also served as a weekly commentator adding insights and perspective on cultural controversies in the news on The Callie Crossley Show (NPR affiliate WGBH Boston) from 2010-2013, then continuing as a commentator for WGBH’s program Under the Radar. Rachel also served on the editorial collectives of the academic journals Radical Teacher, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Science and Society.
Beyond her stellar academic career, or perhaps because of it, Rachel has been committed to active social and political engagement. One of the ways she manifested this commitment at UMB was through serving a stint as president of the Faculty Staff Union (FSU). In 2005, when the FSU needed a new president for the coming three-year term, Rachel’s name came up as a possible candidate. Her deep involvement in academic work, however, suggested it might take some arm-twisting to get her to take on this time-consuming union responsibility. Yet, when asked if she would be interested in the position, Rachel immediately responded: “Yes, I think I’d like to do that.”
And do it she did. Rachel led the union through the next three years. This meant, first, organizing lobbying at the state house in 2006 to get the legislature to fund the most recent contract, and, soon after that organizing the negotiations for the next contract. Then there were the ever-present issues of assuring the security of the non-tenure track faculty, coordinating actions with the UMass Amherst section of our union, working with our parent union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, aiding in the work of the FSU’s grievance officer, keeping the membership informed of all this through the FSU newsletter, implementing ice cream socials along with FSU membership meetings, and, of special importance, hiring an new staff person, Lorenzo Nencioli, who is still ably running the day-to-day business of the FSU office to this day.
Unlike academic work, union leadership does not leave a tangible record of accomplishments—no scholarly books or articles demonstrate a union leader’s success. Rachel’s success as president of the FSU lay in keeping the union moving forward, dealing with the problems as they arose, and assuring the members that their interests were being secured. Rachel, along with the members of the FSU executive committee maintained and continued to build the union as one of the central pillars on which the university functions.