Dear NY Times Magazine Editor ... /s Marxist Collective at Syracuse University

Dear Editor:

Francine Prose's article—which merely continues her promotion in your pages of the Syracuse University Creative Writing Faculty (see “The Brothers Wolff," February 5, 1989)—is equally significant for what it does not say as for what it does say. What it actually says to its readers is, of course, that Professor Stephen Dobyns's sexually harassing practices on the S. U. campus are quite unremarkable—merely a form of “bad behavior” which should not be taken “too seriously." And, moreover, that these practices have no implications for Dobyns's teaching which “takes women seriously." Yet, as the case of the (Marxist and feminist) woman student who initiated the case against him shows, Dobyns's harassment is connected to his retrograde intellectual views which have a direct bearing on his “behavior” as well as on his pedagogy.

What Prose neglects to mention is that Dobyns's comment on the breasts of the young woman in question was in fact preceded by an attempt to intellectually intimidate her by referring to her as “Pol Pot” and “a stupid Stalinist bitch." In other words, his decision to comment sexually about this young woman was integrally informed by his knowledge about her political and intellectual views and ideas, and his sexual harassment was part of his attack on these very views and ideas. By referring to the hearing process in terms of the “Army-McCarthy hearings," Prose very cleverly manages to cancel out the actual McCarthyist logic of Dobyns's practices which are part of the pattern of persecution of radical ideas in the university today.

This persecution, it should be noted, is not incidental to the “redefined” status of the university in general and of Humanities disciplines (such as Creative Writing) in particular. The university of today has largely become not a place of ideas and of intellectual engagement but a place of a crass commercialism and anti-intellectualism where students are taught that what is “best and highest” is what will bring in the most money. Indeed, Dobyns's “salty” language (which is intrinsic to his formal “creative” work) is an exemplary instance of this commercialized anti-intellectualism, which now markets as “profound” and “intuitive” what are in fact very reactionary (and highly profitable) views about women, sexuality, and ideas.

Marxist Collective at Syracuse University

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