How Did It Happen? What Does It Mean?

The outrageous and inexcusable verbal, sexual, and physical attack on a female graduate student of the Department of English, Jennifer Cotter, by Creative Writing Professor Stephen Dobyns is not an occasion for the hackneyed phrases, tired clichés, moral handwringing, and narcissistic alibis both Professor Dobyns and his supporters are putting forward, but rather a time for the English Department, College of Arts and Sciences, and Syracuse University as a whole to reassess the place of Creative Writing —and the idea of “creativity” itself —in the structure of knowledges today and to account for how such an incident happened and what it means. After all, if a University —with its publicly stated commitment and claim to national, even international, intellectual leadership —cannot provide such an explanation, it does not deserve its name and no one should listen to it or pay money to attend. Those sympathetic to Professor Dobyns appear to understand the incident as a local and isolated case and as a momentary “lapse” (in other words, not a “big deal") on Professor Dobyns's part; but those who have given any thought to such incidents, including several students who are in the Creative Writing Program, know that this case is just one of many instances in a global pattern of harassment and intimidation of women which are regularly overlooked and minimized by institutional authorities, politicians, and others in positions of power.

It is especially important to examine such incidents in relation to these larger systematic patterns: in other words, it is much more socially productive to see that Dobyns's expression of rage was not a purely personal and local "lapse” of a single professor with momentary “bad feelings” who was at the time “under the influence” but rather that his behavior was in fact (no matter what he says about it) enabled and encouraged by today's conservative cultural, social, religious, and economic backlash against women and other marginal groups that is going on today all across the US in the media, in the culture industry, in the halls of Congress, and being most vigorously prosecuted by the arch-conservative wing of the Republican Party put into power recently with a large number of votes from a particular segment of society. The Republican Party's national strategy is currently to make a direct appeal for the votes of the white, middle-class, heterosexual male who is confused and angry about affirmative action programs at the economic level and about multicultural programs at the cultural and educational levels and who now “blames” marginal groups for making him uncomfortable about “his” gender, “his” family, “his” sexuality, “his” whiteness, that is for unsettling the established and traditional pattern of “his” privileges. It is this "logic” not the “white logic” of addiction by which Professor Crowley understands the incident that is clearly traceable in this incident.

A more inclusive account of how this incident happened and what it means has to connect it to these larger patterns and must begin with a careful re-examination of the incident itself and with the confused and contradictory statements Professor Dobyns and his supporters have subsequently made about it and hope to pawn off on the academic community. His account circulated to the media and partly published in the Post-Standard claims that the incident is strictly about his “personal problem” of “alcoholism," that it had nothing to do with sexual harassment or any larger political pattern of such social behavior, and that, although he did throw a drink in the student's face, “he remembers few other details." At the same time, he told the Post-Standard reporter that the student “is one of a group of Marxist students who are trying to discredit the creative writing program." Since in the incident itself Dobyns verbally assaulted the student by calling her “Pol Pot” and “stupid Stalinist bitch” (as a witness is prepared to testify), it is quite clear that no matter how much “under the influence” Dobyns was at the time, he had specific ideas in his head to which he was violently objecting and which he was vigorously and abusively associating with the graduate student in question. It was for this reason —specifically for her ideas —that this young woman, whom Dobyns clearly says he did “not know” personally, became the target of his aggressive abuse. That such discourse as he used aimed at the violent intimidation of women generates other such discourses is demonstrated by the abusive and cowardly anonymous phone calls (containing the same kind of gross sexual statements) the young woman received at her home following the media-wide reports of her protest of Dobyns's attack. While alcohol may have played a role, Dobyns's claim that the incident is all because of his “alcoholism” is only a ploy to divert attention from his attack on Jennifer Cotter's ideas and to obscure the fact that the incident was not only a violation of her personal freedom as a woman, but also a violation of her academic freedom to express her ideas about the urgency of questions of social change and social justice, including questions about the oppression and exploitation of women, by calling her names to intimidate her into silence. It is largely because his efforts at intimidating her did not work —in fact she courageously took the risk of exposing these efforts for what they are —that other women have subsequently come forward to show that Dobyns's behavior towards her is indeed not strictly personal but apparently merely a repetition of what other women have experienced.

Although it is highly illuminating to connect this local incident to national and international patterns of the intimidation of women, it is also very instructive to pose another question: why in particular did this happen here in the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program? After all, the party where the incident occurred was given by a Creative Writing student and was largely attended by Creative Writing faculty (from Syracuse and elsewhere) and by Creative Writing graduate students. Of course such incidents are not unique to Syracuse, but this one is nevertheless symptomatic both of the history of and the current climate in the Syracuse Creative Writing Program. Historically, writing programs are not just places where writers “write," but where writing is “taught”—that is, where some conceptual understanding(s) about what writing is are presented in a thoughtful pedagogy. As Ms. Cotter has pointed out in one of her public letters, however, the idea of “creativity” in the phrase “creative writing” seems to have undergone a redefinition in such abusive practices by which “creative” behavior is nothing more than “letting it all hang out," that is, as she writes, creativity has become “a license to express in a blatant and unrestrained manner all one's prejudices, biases, frustrations, hatreds, appetites, and fears." In defense of his behavior in the past, Professor Dobyns has reportedly told colleagues that the “free expression” of his biases is for him a matter of settled policy for resisting what he understands as “political correctness” which hampers his “creativity." Thus this attack on a Marxist feminist student was just one episode (no “big deal") in a larger war on “political correctness." Of course, this local war on “political correctness” (like the national one being undertaken by Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and all the reactionary white, middle-class, heterosexual male voters to whom they appeal) is nothing more than a desperate and violent maneuver to contain the forces of progressive social change under the alibi of protecting a writer's “freedom” to “spontaneously” express his personal “impulses." It is by such “logic” that a Creative Writing Program — often proudly called the “Iowa of the East” and that is supposed to be the home of some of US culture's most “civilized," “sensitive," and “humane” persons is being set on the road to becoming a bastion not just of a profound anti-intellectualism but in fact of explosive Redneck hate-speech and action.

Only a few years ago the Creative Writing Program of Syracuse University prided itself on being the “Iowa of the East," but with a significant difference. It was proud that its students took not just the routine professional “creative writing” credential (the M. F. A.), but the MA in Creative Writing which actually required more work than was required of their literature M. A. counterparts (they took the M. A. in literature and added the creative writing on top of that). Which is to say, they got rigorous intellectual training in literary and cultural studies—in ideas—as well as workshops in creative writing. The recent changes in curriculum to give creative writing students the M. F. A. set in motion a defensive trend towards “intellectual and academic separatism” that now helps to shield them from having to undertake serious intellectual and conceptual work at the very time when contemporary literary and cultural studies have undergone vast changes that can only be understood by very rigorous theoretical inquiry and conceptual analysis. This trend toward “professionalizing” the Creative Writing curriculum, which has helped to insulate creative writing students from philosophical and theoretical issues and investigations into contemporary intellectual shifts in the name of defending their “creativity," has not only accelerated the commercialization (Stephen King-ization) of creative writing at Syracuse University but also encourages a dangerous intellectual and pedagogical provinciality and insularity. In response to the current crisis the Creative Writing faculty may in fact accelerate this insularity and make the Creative Writing Program a wholly independent “fiefdom” on its own. As an indication of the anti-intellectualism and self-interestedness underlying this drive for autonomy, certain graduate students have seconded this “separatist” bid by calling for, among other amenities, their very own “lounge." Such an immediate “run-for-cover” response to the current crisis is the opposite of the thoughtful examination of the situation that should be given to these events. This drive for a new level of “autonomy” in the face of critiques of their practices only repeats on another level the reaction of Stephen Dobyns to a young woman with ideas that evidently challenged his. In turning the story into a soap-opera narrative of alcoholism, Dobyns and his supporters are trying to evade a serious and thoughtful examination of the kind of pedagogy he has been practicing: which is, as Ms. Cotter has very thoughtfully pointed out, a pedagogy of “immediate impulse” unrestrained by any thoughtfulness. It is of course understandable that a wife would come forth to defend her husband, but, unfortunately, in her own comments to the press and in her capacity as a faculty member on this campus, Isabel Bize merely restates Stephen Dobyns's disastrous basic pedagogical principle: “I don't think much before I talk," she is quoted as saying. That is certainly what, it seems, Stephen Dobyns has sometimes been teaching young women of Syracuse University to expect from him as a professor and what young male apprentice writers under his tutelage have been given to emulate. It is that principle so abusive not only to students but to the whole community that Ms. Cotter was basically protesting in this incident.

In the recent past, the University has treated the Creative Writing Program rather cynically: it has allowed it to become the quasi-private fiefdom of some highly paid writers and paid little attention to what was happening in the Program while it manipulated the celebrities of the Creative Writing faculty to enhance the University's reputation. Equally cynically, the Creative Writing faculty, which has evidently known for some time about Dobyns's behavior, has suppressed public knowledge of that behavior just to shield its very “sell-able” “reputation." It is this pathetic self-serving cynicism which says: “Only if some student is willing to do our job for us will we ever act!" To make the Creative Writing Program a separate department now would only be to further insulate its practices from University and public scrutiny: the Creative Writing faculty would then be answerable only to administrative, managerial “overseers” who are paid to worry primarily about the University's “reputation." Instead the entire University community must make time and space to urgently examine the practices which have come to light in this incident and repudiate —as forcefully as possible —the reactionary and hateful sexual harassment of all women, including women with ideas, to whose well-being the University claims to be unshakably committed.

April 10, 1995