October 25, 1995 
Dean Robert Jensen 
College of Arts and Sciences 
Hall of Languages 
Syracuse University Campus 

Dear Dean Jensen:

We are writing to record our strongest objection to the systematic trivialization of the intellectual, scholarly and critical work in the humanities by the officers of the College. We are asking that you take an active part in eliminating these practices.

In the aftermath of the sexual harassment committed by Professor Stephen Dobyns (a case investigated and condemned by the University's own committees), the University and the College of Arts and Sciences have put in motion a massive propaganda campaign to repair the damage done to that program's reputation (and thus to the “marketability” of a commodity in which the University—if the salaries and the unjustifiable, huge annual salary increases are any indication—has heavily invested). Consequently, over the last few months we have seen that space in most publications of the University (from The Syracuse University Magazine to the College's own Connections) has been monopolized by a public relations blitz: "interviews” and “features” about the various members of the “Creative Writing” program adorned with “celebrity” photos and other propaganda paraphernalia. Such a monopolization of the available spaces of transmission of information by a single program is, of course, more a damage control and marketing strategy than a matter of the dissemination of knowledge about the intellectual practices of the faculty.

This monopolizing practice and concerted effort to marginalize, denigrate, and remove from the public scene the achivements [sic.] of other faculty in the humanities has recently reached a new height. The display outside your office, in which the work of faculty members is placed for public viewing, is now segregated: one large section (almost 50%) is set aside for the privileged few (with special name tags for each) and another section set aside for the “masses." Looking at this display, the viewer will never realize that in the English Department alone (we are leaving aside—for lack of space here—the achievements of outstanding faculty in Religion, Philosophy, Foreign Languages, and other humanities departments), there are faculty whose scholarly work has been awarded the highest recognition in their field (from Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships to prestigious residential fellowships awarded by the National Humanities Center and many other research university centers), that there are faculty whose writings are published in the most prestigious international journals (PMLA, Diacritics, Cultural Critique, New Literary History, Rethinking Marxism, ...), and that there are faculty whose theoretical work is among the most innovative boundary work done on the international scene. The University's humanities research and writing—contrary to the impression given by the display outside your office—is essentially the work of scholarship and critical investigation not story-telling and mass-entertainment.

We are writing to protest that, through the public relations maneuvers described above, intellectual, critical and scholarly work is being marginalized by the College of Arts and Sciences so as to privilege texts of memoirs and novels (best sellers in popular entertainment). We are therefore asking that either you remove all special name tags from the display window for Creative Writing faculty and reduce the space given to them or provide special name tags for ALL faculty and increase the space for other faculty—we both have books which are not on display, while practically every item published by the Creative Writing faculty is. Is such a display not actually a form of discrimination against those faculty members whose critical and intellectual practices are internationally recognized but have no local institutional power, no allies and friends among those higher on the administrative hierarchy of power in the University? What is the basis for privileging a few and discriminating against the “others"? The university is a site of critical thinking and the role of the university humanities faculty is to produce critical knowledges, not works of entertainment which numb the consciousness of citizens—a numbing, in fact, that satisfies the demands of the corporate world, which turns these stories and memoirs into bestsellers, movies, and other forms of mass entertainment. The work of university humanities departments is to provide critiques of the dominant order and not narcotics for the minds of the people, in other words, to produce not amused and entertained consumers, but critique-al citizens who know what is at stake in the major debates, controversies, and problems of their society.

Sincerely, 
Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Professor 
Donald Morton, Professor 

cc: Interested members of the University and the community.