Part ONE — § 4

Oppositional ideas and practices have been marked as social pathologies, as obstructionist and as examples of non-cooperation. At the core of these repressive distortions has been the reduction of all forms of difference to personal eccentricities.

One of us was a recipient of two years of funding based on the 'hear-say evidence' of a 'friend' of the acting graduate director at the time. Some got no funding, and there were not then nor are now clear reasons for why, other than some students were favored, some weren't. Much of what we are attempting to call into question now has this silent history that is just now being openly discussed — and meeting with great resistance (T. Montgomery, D. Kelsh, T. Nespeco, J. Torrant, Memo to Interim Vice President Judy L. Genshaft, May 14, 1996, 3).

Especially silenced in the Department have been “oppositional” theories, pedagogies and transgressive new knowledges that have played a transformative role in and outside the academy. In the late 1980's, the University deemed it essential to begin hiring new faculty from among those scholars who have been trained in the theories of the new humanities and new knowledges. Consequently, in order to receive approval for establishing the new Ph.D., the Department published a series of advertisements over several years in the MLA Job List similar to the job description for which I was hired.

I was among the first of several scholars to be hired from a new generation of scholars with a wide range of research projects and extensive training in critical and cultural theory, postmodern pedagogies, and cultural studies. The very first person brought to Albany for the new Ph.D. program was Rosemary Hennessy — a materialist feminist with extensive and rigorous work in cultural studies and queer theory. In the following years more were hired, although three of the new scholars — all theorists and critics of color — have now resigned, mostly because of the ill-treatment they received as junior faculty — a problem that even the conservative consultants have commented on (Report to the President, 4). Collectively, the work of this new generation has opened up new spaces for different knowledges and pedagogies in the Department, and consequently, put in question the founding assumptions of the practices of the Group.

The introduction of new knowledge practices, necessitated by the new historical situation, has undermined the unquestioned “authority” of the privileged Group and turned their classes — for the first time in the history of the Department—into places of emerging contestations over knowledge. These contestations have been built into the new Ph.D. program (as I will discuss at length later). In short, the absence of “conflict” in the “good old days” in the Department was not because it functioned smoothly but because it was dysfunctional: it simply did not pay attention to what university (graduate) studies were supposed to be — sites of intellectual interrogation and critique. In contrast, the new Ph.D. was conceived and subsequently approved as a program that recognizes contestations over knowledge as the core of graduate studies.

The contestations and conflicts, contrary to the Vice-President (who repeats the self-serving narratives constructed by the Group about the Department), have not been ruinous of the Department but, as Montgomery, Kelsh, Nespeco and Torrant explain, are absolutely necessary to actually restore and develop “balance” in a Department that under the hegemony of the Group has tried to prevent “other” knowledges from being anything more than the subject of gossip, jokes and parodies (see the anonymous memo, “Gnosis..."). This is perhaps the place to repeat and make more explicit what I have already implied in my references to “other” pedagogues who were teaching in the Department before the new Ph.D. Although the immediate source of the emerging “conflicts” over knowledges has been the post-Ph.D. history of the Department, the “crisis” has its deeper roots in the long standing suppression of “other” knowledges in order to protect the material privileges and power of the ancient regime. As one faculty of long-standing explains: the crisis and conflicts existed in the Department even when the new faculty were still in graduate school!

The conflicts that have come to the fore after the arrival of the new scholars, to repeat, are rooted in the material inequalities of the Department and the unequal labor relations that shape its work policy. What is commonsensically perceived to be a “crisis” and thought rather naively to have been caused by the incompatibility of “personalities” and cultural differences is, in fact, a relay into intellectual, political and cultural terms of these labor inequalities and privileges of the Group. The privileged faculty supports the status quo even though knowledges and institutional practices outside SUNY-Albany have changed radically. New modes of thinking and practices have transformed the very character of the Humanities, and this is no longer something that the Group can easily control: their students have not only been hearing about these knowledges in scholarly conventions but also can no longer help reading about them in journals and books. Knowledges have changed because the material global situation has changed. The substitution of a superficial “congeniality” ("friendly atmosphere"), which has been used thus far to try to block “other” knowledges and rigorous research and teaching, is no longer so widely accepted in the Department. Consequently both the Group and many of their students have been thrown into deep uncertainty, anger and confusion—what they consider an “unfriendly atmosphere." Rather than self-reflexively understanding the historicity of their “anger” and the institutional politics of their hostility to transformative practices, they have attempted to represent new practices as social pathologies ("unfriendliness," “monstrousness") and tried to suppress them by intimidating junior faculty: withdrawing from their tenure and review committees, pressuring them to write short, routine and “familiar” course descriptions that confirm the traditional languages of English studies rather than supporting their elaboration of philosophically complex and innovative courses (which are dismissed as too “difficult"), shouting down new ideas from the new scholars in committee and Departmental meetings. They have made sure that everyone knows — especially the younger faculty who have been struggling to expand the time and support for doctoral student research—that the highest priority is for all students to complete their work in a "timely fashion," that is in the shortest possible time, rather than undertake conceptually complex (and more time-consuming) dissertations. The absurdities of this need to control become, at times, more overtly comical: tenured “mentors” from the Group have actually criticized non-tenured younger (female) faculty for not “smiling” when walking down the corridors!