Leave Off Resume Or Not

[Gone 435]

Funny you mentioned that.  I am in accounting, Interviewed with a large pharmaceutical co in Memphis and during the interview process the gentleman (now on the county commission) thanked me for my service as a volunteer.  Months later while he was running for office he mentioned he was an Eagle Scout.  You just never know.   

 

You lucked out. As @@Stosh and others have pointed out, resumes are a very targeted document. You get about 4" of space and 30 seconds to catch someone's attention out of a pile of other candidates. They are usually looking for professional reasons to hire you that separate you from the stack. The "extracurricular" stuff can be done in the interview...*if* you feel it gets you anything, otherwise leave it out.

 

We all volunteers serious hours in BSA which is very laudable, however, not everyone is going to see that as a positive when it comes to business. It may, in fact, raise other questions you don't want raised. Can he work weekends if needed on short notice? How will he manage working late during the week if he has to run a scout troop? Will he travel or make excuses why he can't?

 

I *DO* think you can mention your BSA affiliation (or any other that might now make sense) by noting it generically (e.g., donate over 20 hours/month to community service, etc.). That would get the point across that you do "other stuff". Then in the interview if they pick up on it and ask you, then decide if you want to mention BSA by name or just generically.

[Scouter99 265]

The Chronicle of Higher Education had a good article about this from the perspective of people working in a field (academia) that is very hostile to Scouting's ideals and culture a few years ago when this current media storm began.

http://chronicle.com/article/Once-an-Eagle-Always-an/134136

 

 

By William Pannapacker

This won't come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. It's so obvious—the knowledge of knots, the familiarity with canoeable rivers, the interest in environmentalism and astronomy. And that's just the beginning of it. I can light a campfire in a rainstorm using birch bark, or raise a rope bridge over a raging river. I've never told any of my academic colleagues, but I can't pretend it's a secret any more: Yep, I'm an Eagle Scout.

There's a saying in the Boy Scouts of America: "Once an Eagle, always an Eagle." But a lot of us are sending back our medals and badges because the Scouts have just reaffirmed their ban on openly gay members. In effect, they have maintained a "don't ask, don't tell" policy even after the U.S. military has abandoned it. The Scouts receive some support from the taxpayers, but the Supreme Court has ruled that they have the right to maintain such policies because they are a private organization.

I was active in the Boy Scouts from 1980 to 1986, between the ages 11 and 17. It was an important part of my life, and if I had any sons I might still be involved with the organization. That will shock some of my friends in academe because they regard the Scouts as a reactionary organization; I've even heard it compared to the Hitler Youth.

As one commenter in a recent Chronicle forum discussion stated, "I would interpret the listing of Eagle Scout on a CV as either naïve or provocative." In other words, you'd have to be obtuse about academic politics—or a committed, right-wing ideologue—to risk being affiliated with the Boy Scouts now. On the other hand, another commenter in that thread observed, "If being an Eagle Scout was sufficient to eliminate me from the job, as some have professed, then that is fine. I would not have wanted to work with you anyway."

When did the Boy Scouts become so political?

The obvious answer is that the Boy Scouts have always been political; they are a complicated balance of progressive and conservative elements, and sometimes one element dominates. There is no unitary, unchanging culture of Scouting. The experience can be vastly different depending on the local culture, the sponsoring organization, the leaders and parents, and the boys themselves. The Boy Scouting I knew has little in common with the caricatures of it that I sometimes hear in academe, though I cannot offer any recent experiences of it.

Jay Mechling's On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of Making of American Youth (Chicago 2001) provides an indispensable social history of the movement. Scouting started more than a century ago during the Progressive Era, and it reflects the complexity of that time. The original Boy Scout Handbook is full of the brighter themes of reformers like Jane Addams and John Muir: hygiene, exercise, and conservation—things like soap, fresh air, vigorous hiking, learning the names of trees and birds, and respect for Native-American woodcraft. In the 1930s the Boy Scouts were also closely allied with FDR and the New Deal; many of them served in the Civilian Conservation Corps and contributed to the building of our National Park System. But the early history of Scouting also suggests some of the darker elements of U.S. culture: nationalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and more than a hint of eugenic thinking.

The history of American masculinity reminds us that the ghost of Oscar Wilde was present at the founding of the Boy Scouts of America. With the closing of the frontier and the rise of cities filled with the "wretched refuse" of foreign shores, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American manhood needed cultivation in the great outdoors in an atmosphere of muscular Christian fellowship.

You could say there is something about Scouting that protests too much on the subject of manliness. I have no doubt that, historically, some fathers used the Boy Scouts to "make men" out of sons who lacked the qualities they thought were needed to assume their place in the social order. That was, famously, the narrative of Theodore Roosevelt's strenuous rise to über-manliness: a sickly child and young adult dandy unmanned by grief, TR was remade as Badlands rancher, hero of San Juan Hill, chief of police, big-game hunter, and imperial president. He became the archetype of Scouting as masculine self-actualization for generations of milksops and 98-pound weaklings. From the group's origins, the Boy Scouts have been an institution that educates boys in the performance of manliness, which—one might argue—requires defining others as "unmanly" and worthy of exclusion and subordination.

Through World War II and the early years of the Cold War, the Boy Scouts were successful at cultivating a sense of pride and patriotism in members, for good and ill. Back then, you could see teenage boys wearing their uniforms in any major city, even in high-school classrooms. They'd volunteer to raise and lower the flag in front of the school. They'd march proudly in the town parade after the Shriners in the years before the arrival of James Dean and the culture of disaffected coolness.

Of course, that was all over at least two decades before I joined. The counterculture made the Boy Scouts seem pathetically "square" and old-fashioned, like something from the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. "Boy Scout" became an epithet. The Vietnam era turned most of the country against anything that seemed militaristic; Boy Scouts were future "baby-killers." By the 1970s, you had to live deep inside suburban Nixonland to feel secure in your association with Scouting. By the 1980s, wearing the Scout uniform in public could make one a target for potentially violent harassment in the white, working-class neighborhood in which I grew up. You would be called "gay," or other words meaning essentially the same thing. Those of us who walked to Scout meetings changed from street clothes into uniforms in the men's room, and back again for the walk home.

As I remember it, Scouting was a secret among a small subculture of boys who were "out" about it only to each other. We didn't talk about it at school or among our outsider friends without some reassurance of acceptance, such as a dropped code word from the Order of the Arrow or—I am not kidding—one of several secret handshakes. Being a Boy Scout is excellent training in the "epistemology of the closet," as Eve Sedgwick put it. The Boy Scouts of my era were different from other boys; they knew it, and they had to negotiate that difference on a regular basis.

You could say, too, that Scouting provides excellent training for a career in academe. Successful scouts learn to function according to the rules of a bureaucratic organization, and to crave public recognition. Everyone has a rank based on arduous tasks that have to be performed under the guidance of experienced mentors. There are solemn rituals affirming the values of the organization and recognizing achievements. Even though outsiders mock them, scouts think of themselves as a superior group, and there are strong incentives not to leave. The fact that I went on to earn the Eagle rank was probably a better indicator of my chances for completing a doctorate, and later earning tenure, than my GRE scores.

Nevertheless, I normally would not indicate my affiliation with Scouting in an academic context. It's something in my remote past, like membership in the National Honor Society; it seems juvenile and irrelevant.

There are elements in Scouting, as I have described, that might raise questions about the character and values of a person who would be so bold as to assert that association so late in life and in such a context. It might suggest that that person is not able to stand outside an institution and have a critical relationship with its history and influence upon him. But then again, it might not indicate that. As one commenter in The Chronicle's forum observed, academic search committees should not regard Eagle Scouts as "closet bigots." And the poster added: "If they do, on the basis of scout membership alone, then the bigotry does not lie with the candidate." In academe, the Eagle Scout is a variation on Schrödinger's cat: The person's values are unknowable without further inquiry.

Even though we learned to march in straight lines and salute the flag, my experience in Scouting was also anarchic and vaguely subversive. We admired Bill Murray in Stripes; summer camps were more like Robert Altman's M*A*S*H than Triumph of the Will. We were allies in subverting "Mickey Mouse" regulations: The rules gave us something to rebel against in relatively harmless ways. Especially for boys from low-income backgrounds, Scouting provided positive ways to become engaged with the community. We worked on countless service projects with boys from other neighborhoods. Scouting brought together what we'd now call a "diverse community"—the scouts provided the first context in which I became friends with boys of other races and religions.

It's worth noting, too, that the policies proclaimed from the top of an organization like the Boy Scouts are not necessarily what takes place "on the ground."

Scouting does not belong to a single political perspective; it never has. That's why I think it is better for people who disagree with the Boy Scouts' recent policies to stay in the organization, if possible, embracing the values they support while remaining vocal about the policies they think are wrong.

We need more places where civil debate—of the kind that liberal-arts colleges were designed, as well, to foster—can take place. The debate is not just a matter of words but also countless gestures of sensitivity and moral gentleness rather than erecting a culture of doctrinaire absolutism. Scouting as a movement is international and far older than the group's current leadership. It means different things to different people; it's a culture defined by the membership as least as much as by the centralized leadership.

While I still would not put "Eagle Scout" on my CV, I do not think anyone should be ashamed of it. I am proud of the time that I spent in the Scouts, what I learned, the community service in which I engaged, and the friendships I made. I hope that others in academe will not be too quick to make assumptions about the values of those who are connected with the Scouts. Better still, I hope some in academe will consider supporting the positive aspects of the Boy Scouts rather than abandoning the group to the cultural impulses they would reject.

[packsaddle 753]

The Chronicle is one of the last papers I expected to read here but somehow I managed to miss that article when it came out. Good article.

I am fairly open about my involvement in scouting and I know at least one other faculty member who is very visibly a scoutmaster, even to the point of gaining access to school property for troop events. On the other hand, this community is fairly provincial so everyone sort of knows everyone else anyway, plus the troops in the immediate area have mostly turned a blind eye to the membership requirements and this is mostly understood by the community (local option is the defacto norm here).

The most interesting aspect of this is on my field trips with my fleet of canoes. I ask the students to identify who might have been boy scouts and when hands are sometimes raised, I put them on the spot to teach the others various useful knots. Then there are often a lot of very nervous looks, feet shuffling  (one of those joyous moments I enjoy so much) as they admit they've completely forgotten...so I lead the entire class in the lesson (the women are much quicker studies by the way).

Edited June 20, 2015 by packsaddle