[warning: fragmented thinking]

One of the reasons I am thinking about creative (non)fiction has to do with the “rules of evidence” that are required in serious scholarship, journalism, legal cases, and history.  One can argue that there is much more flexibility in scholarship, of course, especially when you are doing theoretical work.  But, even (good) theoretical scholarship in the humanities has to be persuasive and at least make a case for its own significance and relevance.  The “rules of evidence” I am more concerned with here are those required in legal/institutional cases.

For example, a few years ago I had a discussion with a fellow union member at another school about how a union (our union in particular) should handle cases of faculty members–union members–who act inappropriately (e.g. make sexist or racist statements in the classroom–even if that faculty member is in their 70s and “does not realize” his/her comments are problematic), or who commit ethical violations (e.g. sleep with their students).  My fellow union member argued that as a union we have an obligation to defend our members as best we can.  I was suggesting that while this may be true, we have to think about what the purpose of a union is.  For me, the purpose of a union is to act collectively to do what is right.  If a union loses this moral/ethical principle, then it ceases to contribute to progressive change.  If a union does not do what is right, then it becomes part of the problem.  While my fellow unionist agreed in principle with what I was saying, he also pointed out that unions, and their representatives, also have a legal obligation to see to it that all members are given due process–especially when they are accused of wrong-doing.

What makes this rather abstract discussion relevant at the moment is that the “legal obligation” of the union in combination with an administration who failed to take decisive action, has taken a fairly clear ethical violation–a faculty member sleeping with his student(s?)–and muddied the waters to the point that the issue has not made it into the public discussion.  Instead of this being treated as an issue that is immediately relevant to the health and safety of our academic community, the issue has been handled behind closed doors.

Now, if information about this issue had only circulated behind closed doors, there wouldn’t be much to discuss.  However, this issue (don’t you love how I use “this issue”–referent???) got its legs first on facebook.  In my case, it was students coming to me seeking advice once this issue had been posted to facebook.  Given the fairly public launch of this issue into facebook, one might assume that there would  be some follow-up in a public way–if only for PR purposes. But more to my point is how “this issue” directly impacts the university community.  One could imagine a scenario in which “this issue” would be addressed quickly and directly in order to prevent it from poisoning the working environment or to make a clear statement to students and their parents that such behavior is not tolerated in our community.

Ethical violations such as this (yes the lack of referent once again) interfere with other faculty members’ ability to carry out their jobs (e.g. if I find out that the person who chairs a committee I work on has been sleeping with his students, his authority to lead said committee is no longer legitimate my mind–that is, his authority is seriously compromised).  And, what about all the students who know about this issue and who were or who are currently in his classes?  How does that affect them?  Or, imagine this scenario: since this issue is not officially public, no one knows exactly who knows what happened and who doesn’t.  Therefore, the elephant remains in the room and people continue civil/professional conversations with someone they know has committed serious ethical violations, because they don’t know if they are supposed to know what they know.  Wierd.

At this point, we are supposed to proceed as if nothing has happened.  We’re supposed to act as if  we don’t know what we know.  And part of the problem is that many of us-who-know, do not have evidence-that-counts-as-knowledge. Most of us have taken what we do know and pieced together a general narrative about what we believe to have happened.  However, barring direct access to all the documents that must be circulating behind closed doors, our belief is disallowed as an authoritative narrative.  In the absense of “proof” our narratives have the status of hearsay.  And, as we all know, if you act upon hearsay you are walking down a tricky road.

So, this post is already a few days old…a draft to which I’ve just now returned, attempting to write my way through and sort out lines of thought.  This space a kairotic space for sure…looking for the available means and cracks in the discursive frame.

I’ve got a couple days to figure out the exact shape of my paper proposal for the Feminism and Rhetorics conference…so you can count on me returning here soon.

Hello all comp/rhet followers.  We’re only two weeks into the semester and already it’s exciting.

As you may know, three of us–Linda Cullum, Amy Lynch-Biniek, and I were in San Francisco at MLA interviewing candidates for our tenure-track position in Comp/Rhet.  This week we begin our interviews.  On campus interviews are always hectic, but from my perspective they are one of the  most interesting parts of my job.  It’s an opportunity to talk to great people who are doing excellent work in both their classrooms and  their research.  At the very least, it’s an opportunity to build networks of connection with other Comp/Rhet folks across the country.

If interviewing candidates for one position was not intense enough, we decided to push to search for a second tenure-track position this year.  The position: Digital Literacies/Visual Rhetorics.  Our initial plan was to search DL/VR next year along with a position in Multicultural/Multi-ethnic Rhetoric.  But when opportunity presented itself to push the search to this year, we went for it.

If we are able to hire both positions this year we will have a total of 6 Comp/Rhet faculty, which will put us in an excellent position to focus on program development over the next couple of years.  The addition of a faculty member in Multicultural/Multi-ethnic rhetoric in 2010 will give our little-program-that-could further depth.

In any case, we are looking forward to an exciting few weeks!

Northland Poster Collective just released a poster commemorating the 75th anniversary of the New Deal.  Here’s their description:

Commemorates the 75th anniversary of the New Deal. The poster was sponsored by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library for the tenth year of it’s ‘Untold Stories’ labor history series. It depicts New Deal library, arts and public works programs.

The poster is designed by Ricardo Levins Morales who has done several posters for Northland.  So, in the spirit of our current economic crisis and the potential for a New New Deal once Obama takes office I think I’m getting this one for my office.

OK…so, I wrote a book review for Blue Angel: A Novel (P.S.) for my “visual bookshelf” on facebook (didya follow dat).  And that review has got me thinking about a whole range of issues…including proposing a paper for the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference @ Michigan State in October (deadline is coming up, so I’ve got to decide quickly whether or not to propose a paper…hence this entry).  In addition to the issues I raise in the review, there are a whole range of issues having to deal with creative non-fiction and it’s role in truth-telling.I’m not going to try and tackle all of that in this post, but to give you an idea what I mean by that I have been thinking a lot about Don Delillo’s Libra.  Libra is a historical novel that focuses on the Kennedy assasination (I am being reductive, yes).  When I read that text for a class back in grad school, I considered it the best history and explanation of the Kennedy assassination that I had ever read.  A lot of that had to do with the ways in which narrative allows for multiple agencies and threads…even truthS.  So, that’s on my mind.Also on my mind are several essays I read recently arguing for rethinking the faculty-student relationship prohibition.  I remember the first one being by Laura Kipnis in The Thomson Reader, which I was considering for a class (that essay was one of the reasons I chose not to adopt the text).  Anyway, to put it bluntly…I find the arguments raised in these essays infuriating.  And yet, they all seem to follow a similar logic–be they written by cultural critic or legal scholar. So, that’s what I’ve got to work with…and will be working with over the next couple of weeks.  In the meantime, here’s the review I wrote (for those of you who are not stalking my Visual Bookshelf on facebook :

Review of Blue Angel: A Novel, by Francine Prose

OK…Some context. For the past couple of years I have been going full-throttle at work (Kutztown University). We’ve rebuilt our union, organized for a strike, held a vote of no confidence against our university’s president (and were successful in getting some major agreements once the administration finally sat down with us). This past summer I moved and this fall my wife and I had a baby. In short, I was pooped and looking forward recharging and just getting some down time.

 The past couple of semesters have also been fraught with some “scandals” on our campus (academics, surprise, surprise). In one case, it was one of those faculty-student-behind-closed-doors kind of things. That one really pushed me over the edge. You see, there is no greater sin–yes, I’ll use the word sin–than for a faculty member to violate what I see as a “sacred” trust. In short, you don’t sleep with your students. You especially don’t sleep with students who are currently enrolled in your class. When such a case was brought to my (and many other faculty members’) attention by students it cut deep. You see, in my book, once a faculty member does that, they shouldn’t be teaching. At the very least, they should not be allowed to continue on where they are currently teaching. Harsh? Perhaps. But, that’s how I am wired as a professional. The power relationships between teachers and students, the psychology of pedagogy, and the consequences of carrying on a sexual relationship with a student were issues that my fellow graduate students and I at Syracuse and Miami were thoroughly briefed and instructed on when we took on our first teaching assignments. These issues are so second nature to me by now that they feel hard-wired. In any case, I’ve had this pit in my stomach this past semester because of the issue of a particular faculty member’s transgressions. I had hoped that once the issue was reported (as it was) that the process would work. That all the evidence would lead to a necessary conclusion. Good bye. But it didn’t. The process failed. And I had to get my mind (and stomach) away from that garbage for a while.

 So, what does all this have to do with Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel? Way too much as it turns out. You see my wife’s family and I do a polyanna for Christmas (you know, “secret santa”). I put a range of “academic novels” on my list as a way to get some perspective on academic trials and tribulations. If you’ve read Richard Russo’s Straight Man or Jane Smiley’s Moo, you know that there are some great academic satires out there–most of them written about English departments since that’s where most creative writers are housed. That kind of satire was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to read over break. So, I searched for other “academic novels” that I hadn’t read or even heard of. I didn’t spend a lot of time reading reviews or anything–back covers were enough for me; I wanted to be surprised.

 My list included David Lodge’s A Small Place, James Hynes’s A Lecturer’s Tale, and Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe. And it also included Francine Prose’s Blue Angel. [I also suggested these books to my ENG 502 students as some good "break" reading] My polyanna couldn’t find the first three in the bookstore. He did, however, find Blue Angel. So, that’s where I would begin. On the day after Christmas I dug in and looked forward to my little literary vacation. As fate would have it, Blue Angel was not going to be a vacation. It was going to take me right back, smack dab in the middle of the faculty-student-behind-closed-doors all over again. Another chance to revisit the issue. Yes, Blue Angel is about a English department faculty member who “falls in love” with one of his students. Theodore Swenson is not only the faculty member in question, he is the narrator. So, we get to inside the head of this man as he “falls in love with,” or “is seduced by,” or “is manipulated by” (all incarnations included in the novel) a young, gothic-esque student with facial piercings (believe me, you hear about them a lot in the novel). Yes, it’s a story of a fall from “grace” (although given the pathetic nature of Swenson, it’s not a very far fall). Unlike the real world, however, Swenson DOES fall. The Administration at his college DOES pursue charges against him and fires him. The system worked (despite Swenson’s repeated chastising of the Women’s Alliance and political correctness). Unlike the real world, the system worked. There was clear wrong-doing and the university fired the faculty member, his wife left him, and his daughter (the same age as the student he sleeps with) is outraged. Again, this is fiction.

The thing is, I had no sympathy for this character. None. I found his internal dramas pathetic. His indecision annoying. His lack of critical consciousness shameful. And his willingness to paint himself as a victim embarrassing. Perhaps some of those faculty members who have chosen to sleep with their students might have insight into Prose’s portrayal of her adulterer narrator. I’ll leave it to them to make that case. I, however, found it infuriating–a kind of anti-feminist, pro-old boys story about their Paradise Lost. The student in question, Angela Argo, is also positioned not only as the instigator (that little temptress) but as a cunning manipulator who crafted Swenson’s downfall. We even get Eve imagery…like the Garden of Eden and the Apple…not exactly a soft touch here.

In short, there is so much I want to say about this novel (I’ll add more), not so much for its literary achievement, as for allowing me to revisit the real in a fictional form.

 For now, I’ve got to log off. More to come!

The Department of Writing & Rhetoric at Colgate University invites applications for an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Public Speaking and a related field in Rhetoric, to begin Fall, 2009. We seek a colleague with teaching experience who has completed a PhD in Rhetoric or Communication Studies by the time of the appointment but no earlier than 2005, and who does not currently hold a tenure stream position. We are especially interested in candidates who plan a career in undergraduate teaching and research, and whose scholarly program is focused on public speaking/oratory with the goal of combining practical pedagogies with rhetorical theory and criticism. This is a two year fellowship, contingent on successful completion of the first year; the Fellow’s time will be divided between designing and teaching the equivalent of three courses, and conducting a personal research program in public speaking/oratory and/or related fields in Rhetoric. The Fellow will be invited to contribute fully to the life of the department. Compensation for 2009-10 is $42,000 plus benefits. Financial support for research and travel will be available, and mentoring will be offered by a senior member of the department.

Applicants should send a cover letter, curriculum vitae, a statement of teaching philosophy and a statement of research objectives to Prof M.F. Darby, Chair, Department of Writing & Rhetoric, Colgate University, 13 Oak Dr, Hamilton, NY 13346. Under separate cover, arrange for three confidential letters of recommendation to be sent to the same address.

Review of applications will begin February 2, 2009, and continue until the position is filled. Colgate University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer; women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply.

Developing and sustaining a diverse faculty, staff, and student body further the university’s educational mission.

Please let me know if you need any further information or if you have any questions regarding this position announcement.

With many thanks and my warmest regards,
Suzanne B. Spring