Memo, November 6, 1995

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November 6, 1995

 

Dean Robert Jensen

College of Arts and Sciences

Hall of Languages

Syracuse University Campus

 

Dear Dean Jensen:

We are attaching a copy of our response to Tobias Wolff, a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program who has taken it upon himself to respond to our letter to you of October 25, 1995. We hope that you break your silence and respond in your own voice, rather than allowing Wolff (and other beneficiaries of the University's largess to the Creative Writing Program) to speak for the College and the University. Thus we are looking forward to your reply, since Wolff's is by no means adequate and since (we trust) his voice is not that of the College or the University but that of a special interest group within the Department of English.

Wolff's response is not a serious engagement of the issues we have raised because in his “humorous” defense of his local interests and institutional perks, he does not understand the two main points of our letter to you of October 25, 1995. His reading of our letter is founded upon a common sense that is dominant not only in the culture at large but also in the University; and it is therefore possible that some of the College's officers (those who, for example, have put up the display window outside your office in the Hall of Languages without a careful consideration of its ramifications) may share that common sense. In view of that possibility, we want here to unpack once again the main points in our letter of October 25, 1995.

1. Our letter—you will recall—raised the issue of the University's relentless public relations campaign in support of the Creative Writing Program after the recent case of Dobyns's aggression against and sexual harrassment of Jennifer Cotter and the question of the high intellectual and scholarly cost of this support for other humanities programs in the College. There is, for example, the pedagogical cost associated with the space devoted to the Creative Writing Program in the Syracuse University Magazine and Connections, which foregrounds entertainment and places the critical humanities in eclipse. Wolff responds that the interviews we refer to were done before the sexual harrassment case against Stephen Dobyns and thus “misses” our point entirely. The question is NOT when the interviews themselves were done, but rather when (under what historical circumstances in the wake of the Dobyns affair) they were published and became material historical texts which exercized institutional influence by foregrounding and celebrating the Creative Writing Program's pedagogical practices and agenda at a time when serious ethical and pedagogical questions about the Program had arisen.

As we mentioned in our previous letter to you, we are not the only humanities faculty concerned here, but when—for instance—was the last time Connections published any news about our numerous books and essays? About the first-rate reviews we get in international journals (see attached review)? Why is it that while we are rendered pretty much invisible and given below average salaries after years of distinguished teaching and publication, the College/University provides the Creative Writing faculty with publicity megaphones and megasalaries? Why, for example, was Donald Morton—who spent a substantial amount of time helping to develop a new hiring policy for the Department of English systematically excluded from the actual hiring committee? Why is the chair of the English Department sitting by passively and observing the collapse of all serious intellectual practices? It is the foregrounding of entertainment and the eclipse of critique-al thinking that legitimates the English Department chair's consent in suspending—for two years, under various managerial alibis—the requirement for English majors to take a course in critical thinking (ETS 241). It is the climate created by privileging a corporate mentality and writing that justifies such acts of intellectual marginalization. We have raised these and other questions and we too have been marginalized as “uncollegial” people. It is the climate created in the English Department by un-thoughtful Wolffian pedagogy that has allowed any act of intellectual opposition and critique to be regarded as “uncollegial." When critique-al intellectuals are excluded because of their critiques, this says a great deal about the institution which allows that exclusion. Why was Morton excluded from the hiring committee? Because he has a critical view of the chair and of the practices of the Department's Executive Committee? Why is ETS 241 suspended? Because these are the only courses in which students are taught critical and theoretical thinking? Does collegiality mean remaining silent in the face of an anti-intellectualism that rises daily with institutional collaboration and support? Is productive citizenship in a university where thoughtfulness is supposedly valued just the exercise of suburban “niceness” or the practice of critique? Is the English Department a university department or just a small business enterprise?

Why is it that Wolff receives so much money that he can fantasize in public about shutting his opponents up in mental hospitals? Once again, we are not talking about WHEN the interviews took place, but WHY they took place and WHY it is that the College sets the Creative Writing Program as its absolute priority in the humanities. Are our questions merely “non-questions” because we are part of an intellectual opposition that does not “go along” uncritically with business as usual so as to “get along"?

We look forward to your response to these questions since we would like to open a space for such discourses in the College. We would like to have an open, democratic debate about a college which is called the College of Arts and Sciences because it is the site for basic research and critical thinking.

2. Following the ruling common sense and literal logic, Wolff also completely misses our point about the Creative Writing Program's occupation of the display widow outside your office. He seems to think that such occupation is justified to promote a conference. Much more than a conference is at stake in this display window and in the College's practices: this occupation is SYMBOLIC of the way that College is willing to marginalize, put aside (in a form of “ecrit-cide") critical writing and intellectual work to foreground the popular and the entertaining. We are saying: there are many other spaces in which books for conferences can be displayed. The fact that they were displayed by means of de-displaying critical books says something about priorities in the College of Arts and Sciences.

We are looking forward to your own response because we would like to respond to your response in the public space of the College and the University at large. We would like to discuss in public the issues we have raised in our texts to you and to Tobias Wolff in order to create a free, open, and democratic debate about the College's priorities. We want a PUBLIC not a private exchange—with your views, our views, others's view, about the intellectual agenda of the humanities now at Syracuse University.

Sincerely,

Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Professor

Donald Morton, Professor

cc: Members of the College's Faculty Council; Chancellow Shaw; Vice Chancellor Vincow; Interested members of the University and the community.