On Other Campuses: Auburn University

[Auburn University letterhead]; [Alabama 36849-5203];

Grant Pheloung;
Dept. of English
9030 Haley Center
Auburn University
Alabama 36849-5203

Dear

I am writing to you to express admiration and commitment to your political efforts in the academy and to relate my political experience of the American academic system. In order to get my PhD in English I must 'defend' and test in three doctoral examination areas (this alone seems strange and unnecessary to me as a student from New Zealand where this was not a PhD requirement). For these areas I wrote the enclosed 'defense" which I still believe was very "weak' politically. The response I received was very interesting politically. My three committee members all claimed agreement with the "ideas" contained in my "defense" but urged me strongly to change my "defense"--not because it was politically threatening--but because it would never be accepted by the Graduate Committee which in their characterization was filled with conservative humanists who would not accept or even understand what I had to say. What is politically interesting is that the "progressive" theory people on my committee can "defend" the "status quo" not by openly opposing my radical knowledge, which would express the interestedness of their own discourses, but by making reference to these "others" who are not as "open-minded" or as "theoretically up-to-date" and need to be protected from radical critique(al) knowledge.

What this shows most clearly is the strong continuum between the "theory" people and the "conservative" humanists in the bourgeois academy. Both are interested in containing radical knowledge that highlights the connection between politics and "truth." I know this may seem a trivial experience, but ... las you have written, the "trivial"] allows a "space for the recycling of those discourses required to legitimate the practices that enable the existing set of reproductions to endure."

Yours sincerely

/s Grant Pheloung