Part ONE — § 1

In March 1996, the Department of English at SUNY-Albany held an election to choose a new chair. It overwhelmingly elected (by a vote of 25 to 14) Lana Cable — the author of Carnal Rhetoric: Milton's Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire—over the candidate of an elite power Group in the Department (who was also the incumbent, Interim Chair). The election was not about personalities but about knowledge priorities, pedagogical practices, institutional reform and democratic processes in the Department. In the open forum (held on 13 March 1996),[1] in which the candidates for chair discussed their plans and priorities with the Department, Lana Cable made it clear that under her chairship, the English Department at SUNY-Albany would re-commit itself to an uncompromising standard in research in relation to the state-of-the-art of knowledges in the profession, to rigorous teaching and to an overall reconsideration of the undergraduate and graduate curricula to make them more responsive to the changing humanities and the demands of an emerging global culture. In the chair forum, Lana Cable repeatedly marked herself as a “scholar and teacher” and made it clear that her administration would be committed to the principles of free inquiry and due process, thus giving high priority to those practices that are scholarly and pedagogical and to open, democratic spaces for differences — all of which have been marginalized in the Department.

The marginalization of these discourses and practices has taken place over the years in order to maintain, in the Department, an oligarchy, which I have designated by the collective term, “the Group." While its numbers have varied slightly over the years, the “Group” is a coalition of about ten faculty members consisting of traditional Americanists, cultural feminists, creative writers and composition faculty. The Group has been the hegemonic power in the Department: securing for its members light teaching loads; high merit raises; nearly exclusive access to graduate courses and students; membership on choice Department and University committees, and depriving the majority of the faculty in the Department from access to graduate courses, equal teaching loads and any major role in decision making. Moreover, the Group has been closely allied with the dominant power networks in the University—one of its members, for example, is now the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. By Group, it should therefore be clear, I mean an institutional power structure.

The election of Lana Cable as a reformist chair set in motion a series of events that have led to the overthrow of the results of the election by the Vice-President and the blocking of reforms in the Department. The Group responded to the election by secretly planning to partition the English Department and cannibalize its resources in order to establish a new enclave of power and privilege for itself called the “Department of Writing Studies." Not only did the Group develop its proposal of “Intent to Establish a Writing Studies Department" in secrecy, but the proposal was submitted to and taken under consideration by the Administration without the knowledge of the English Department— except for the unnamed signatories to the proposal (who were reported to consist almost entirely of the members of the Group, including both the Interim Chair and Director of Graduate Studies of the Department). To this day, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Cyril Knoblauch (himself a member of the English Department and core participant in the Group) has refused to make public the names of the signatories to the secret proposal.

The extent to which the secret plan to partition the English Department was taken up by the Administration is suggested by Richard Goldman in his letter of 10 June 1996 to the Vice-President expressing his outrage over this illegal act. He writes:

Late in April, the Dean is reported to have said that partition is the only solution to our problems, that he had convinced you personally of this, that the President alone remained to be convinced, and that it was 'going to happen.' Indeed, secretaries were told that they might well be reassigned and apparently office space was being scouted for a new writing studies department. The fact that such an obviously illegal move could have proceeded to such a stage was sufficient cause for alarm (1).

Of course, there should be nothing to prevent a group of faculty from proposing to establish a new department. In fact, there is nothing either novel or unusual about establishing a “writing department” in a university since writing programs have become a marketing strategy and a selling point for the university, given the level of writing practices that the average student brings to college and the demands by big business for a workforce proficient in communication “skills." This demand, in turn, expands the academic market for those in writing and composition. However, what makes the Group's proposal unusual is that it not only does not offer any public “reason” (a philosophical or at least institutional explanation) to justify such a program, its main goal is to secure the privileges of the Group by giving it control of the Ph.D. in English (which was approved by the State of New York as a fairly complex intradisciplinary degree in English[2]), removing it from the English Department and transferring it to the proposed new department. In doing so, the Group attempts to block institutional reforms and prevent the development of new knowledges and advanced research in the humanities as these have begun to take place in the doctoral studies within the English Department. The “Writing Studies Department” proposal, in other words, is not undertaking to advance critique-al knowledges but rather is a reactionary act to prevent the production and introduction of new knowledges in the humanities. Even the conservative “Consultants”[3] hired by the Administration have not been able to hide the fact that the proposed establishment of the “Writing Studies Department” is an elaborate scheme to protect the practices of the Group from the critique of contemporary theory. The Consultants write that “According to their own description,[4] though, the devisors of the Writing Studies program want to limit the challenge of much post-structuralist theory by excluding it, and they want to limit 'English Studies' to American or even U.S. studies..." (emphasis added, Hulse, et al, “Report to the President” 14). Moreover, at a time when, we are told, there is a budget crisis and many SUNY campuses are closing or consolidating their programs and when English Studies, itself, is becoming increasingly transdisciplinary and integrative rather than segregationist, the proposal offers no coherent theory or rationale explaining WHY this new “Department of Writing Studies” is needed. Instead, the proposal has a long list of resources and degrees and journals that it wants to take away from the English Department.

The proposal is, in fact, marked by an intellectual vacuity. The “unsaid” of its text is analyzed by Rosemary Hennessy (in her text of April 29, 1996):

Given the absence of any intellectual, institutional, professional, or economic justification for the inauguration of a Writing Studies Department separate from English, the only rationale for this proposal has to be seen as lying elsewhere—in political retaliation. This proposal is first and foremost a reactionary response to changes in the power structure of the English Department, changes represented most immediately by the department's selection of Professor Lana Cable as its new chair.

It is widely known that those faculty who endorsed the proposal for a Department of Writing Studies do not support the new chair and see themselves as a result of this recent structural change being displaced from the center of power in the department. Establishing a new Department of Writing Studies resituates them as the power brokers in a new place now that they are no longer in power in English. Clearly, this is not a sufficient reason to establish a new department within the University.

In their May 1 1996 memorandum to the Vice-President, the Chair-Elect, Lana Cable, and the previous full-term Chair of English, Warren Ginsberg, requested that the “proposal” for partitioning the Department be subjected to appropriate review and returned to the Department of English so that it can be openly and publicly discussed:

The 'Memorandum of Intent' is a proposal conceived in secrecy and forwarded under the cloak of subterfuge. We are convinced it is fractious, badly conceived, illogically developed, ill-timed, and, in some of its provisions, grievable and illegal. Because the 'Memorandum' entails the disintegration of the English Department, we demand an end to surreptitious efforts to bypass discussion....

The Dean received a 'Memorandum' that would lead to the disintegration of the English Department. Instead of immediately referring the proposal to the English Department for discussion, he kept it secret; when he [was] asked to release the names of its signatories, he refused. These actions are in direct violation of his duties and obligations as Dean, which certainly include assuring open discussion by the concerned parties of all matters that deal directly with the academic integrity of the departments of the College. The Dean's explicit desire to bypass the English Department's review of a proposal that affects its programs, resources and mission is indefensible and unethical. His actions... raise doubts about whether he can retain the confidence of the faculty of the College that he should continue as their Dean (2).

I have been aware since the beginning of the academic year... of tensions in the Department. I had hoped, indeed I believe all of us hoped, that the Department would be successful in resolving these differences. Unfortunately, that has not happened; indeed, I am convinced that the situation has grown worse during the year, not better (May 7, 1).

But when I asked her, what were the sources of her information since she had not talked to anyone from the majority of the Department, including any of the younger actively publishing scholars in the Department, she gave an evasive answer to the effect that she had her own sources and was convinced that the story from these sources was the true one. Quite to the contrary of the Vice-President's “convictions," however, conditions in the Department of English were in fact improving. The Department, for instance, was in the process of developing new policies to remedy existing inequities — such as creating more equitable work conditions and distribution of courseloads and forming objective, publicly verifiable policies for funding of graduate students. It had just elected, by a significant majority, a new chair from among the younger scholars in the Department: a chair who has made a public commitment to fostering free inquiry and developing a productive and fair community of differences in a Department based on due process. So again, one has to ask, what is the source of the Vice-President's “conviction” about the situation in the Department? As Richard Goldman writes in his letter of June 10, 1996 to Vice-President Genshaft:

We are also concerned by your occasional use of such phrases as 'I have become convinced....' Convinced by whom? Since two members of the secessionist group spend a good deal of time in the purlieus of the administration, we fear that what you are being given is a version of department history and current events that is to put it mildly contestable. It is, of course, essential that the chief administrative officers hear all sides of the story (1).

The Administration has sought to avoid any public discourse on the “proposal” — which aims at spending public funds for what is in effect a “private” project for preserving the privileges of an elite power Group — by, for example, limiting all information about the proposal and discussion of it to trusted hired consultants. The politics of this delimiting is the subject of Jennifer Fleischner's letter of July 9, 1996 (to the appointed chair, the President and the Vice President):

The consultants cannot be presented with the distorted view of this document as a legitimate proposal, against which keeping the English Department as a whole is another 'proposal.' To assume the need for reorganization, as implied by several memos from the administration, is already to accept the position of a special interest group within the department, comprised of an alliance of people who feel unhappy in their relations to the workings of the department as a whole. Certainly it cannot be the charge of consultants to validate the illegitimate, obstructionist actions of isolated, self-interested factions.

As I will argue in the following sections of this text, the Vice-President's views are not only quite partisan but also out-of-date and completely uninformed by the current scholarship in the new humanities. They are, most importantly, totally unhistorical—the time frame for her views are "since the beginning of the academic year” (May 7, 1), “in more recent years” (May 16, 1), “over the past five years” (May 7, 2). It is not clear what makes the “last five years” in the humanities different from the last ten, fifteen or twenty-five years. The intellectual roots of the debates that are now taking place in the English Department go back (in their contemporary formation) at least to 1966, to the watershed symposium at Johns Hopkins University on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man." What “last five years"?

The Johns Hopkins symposium ("Les Langages Critiques et les Sciences de l'Homme") was held at the Johns Hopkins University during the week of October 18-21, 1966. It was the prelude to a two-year series of colloquia and seminars on the state of the humanities. The papers discussed in the symposium were later published as The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970).

The symposium was the first major “problematization” and, in some cases, “deconstruction” of the “foundations” of the main ideas and assumptions ("first principles") that at the time dominated the humanities in both Europe and the United States. These assumptions, in one form or the other (from the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and the views and practices of Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism to the anthropological texts of Levi-Strauss; the literary criticism of Todorov and Barthes; the psychoanalytical theories of early Lacan, and even the grounding notions of Anglo-American “New Criticism") were all based on what might very broadly be called “structuralism." They all adhered to the view that texts operated — as Derrida put it in his groundbreaking paper for the symposium, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences”—as structures beyond structurality: that is, structures as a “point of presence” with “a fixed origin” that protected the text-as-structure from the “free play of the structure” (The Structuralist Controversy 247-48).

In other words, the “text” in the humanities was thought to bear a “meaning” that endowed it with “self-sameness” and an “identity” beyond the “play” of signs and the slippage of language. The purpose of the structuralist theory of “meaning” was to provide what Derrida called “a reassuring certitude” (248). Structure without “center” was, therefore, unthinkable in the humanities whose main goal (during the cold war period) was to secure “certain” meanings and thus constitute a closure that put meaning beyond a critique of its foundations. “Meaning” is made of language, and language is, in Derrida's words, a field of 'freeplay', that is to say a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble” (260).

Derrida's text, as well as some of the other papers in the symposium, marked the process of questioning, what Macksey and Donato in their 1971 prefatory remarks to the book called, "the very existence of structuralism as a meaningful concept” (ix). It is important to keep in mind that the deconstruction of structuralism and the emergence of “post"-structuralist theories were not the outcome of a centered critique “outside” structuralism, but the effect of the economies of supplementarities and aporias within structuralism itself. These economies have turned the identitarian centered “meanings” that underpinned the humanities into playful “disseminations” of indeterminate signs and, in doing so, have deconstructed “reading” and “writing” — the constitutive practices of the humanities.

Composed thirty years after the symposium, the Group's proposal for a “Writing Studies Department," which has had the tacit support of the Administration, still conceives of “writing” quite conventionally. It is a counter-progressive and reactionary move to turn back the clock. It seeks to contain the deconstruction of “reading” and "writing," as even the consultants have made clear, and return to the certitude of centered meanings beyond the critique of poststructuralism. It treats “writing” as a “craft” and returns to the notion of “reading” and “writing” as securing “experience," the “emotional," and the “personal." It excludes any philosophical examination of the constitution of these in language or in materialist history. Like all returns and reproductions, however, “Writing Studies” represents itself as a “new” move ("the wave of the future") and points to its use of new learning technologies such as the computer and (especially in “Creative Writing") cyber-and hyper-texts. This technologism only superficially conceals the underlying preoccupation of writing studies with centered-structures and the certainty of meaning. In his essay, “Gutenberg Galaxy Expands," Umberto Eco hints at this relation and writes:

The real problem of an electronic community is solitude. The new citizen of this new community is free to invent new texts, to annul the traditional notion of authorship, to delete the traditional division between author and reader, to transubstantiate into bones and flesh the pallid ideals of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. (At least this is what I have heard said by enthusiasts of technology. You will have to ask Derrida if the design of hypertexts really abolishes the ghost of a Transcendental Meaning) (36).

In her dealings with the English Department, the Vice-President has demonstrated a disturbing lack of historical understanding of these issues and an unfamiliarity with the theoretical and “disciplinary" contestations and arguments in contemporary humanities. The Vice-President thus has framed the institutional contradictions and knowledge conflicts in the English Department at SUNY-Albany in a simplistic way as one of “tension between literature and writing” (May 7, 1), echoing the views of the Group.

In an out-dated manner, the Vice President represents as a “disciplinary” matter what is at root a historical and material contestation. The theoretical debates and conflicts in the profession at large or their continuation on the micropolitical level in individual “departments” are always, in the last instance, contestations over the material practices in culture and institutions. The “tension” in the English Department at SUNY-Albany is no exception. The Group has used an old-fashioned humanities founded upon centered structures to protect its own institutional privileges. In what the Consultants have called the “renewed strength in the literary and cultural studies that is emergent in the faculty — especially in the ranks of the associate professors” (Hulse, “Report” 5-6), the Group has seen the threat of the new "theory" to its entrenched privileges and decided to contain the new theory by, to again use the Consultants' words, “excluding” new knowledges (Hulse, “Report” 14).

As Sandra Fischer explained in a “chat” on the Internet with David Schwalm, Vice-Provost for Academic Programs at Arizona State University (June 17, 1996):

The English Department here for years has been run by virtue of old-fashioned privilege and governed by elitist practices. Those who have been willing to engage in careerism have managed to gain themselves cushy political sinecures and scandalously light teaching loads, basically subsidizing their free time with the hard work of the other faculty—the other faculty being primarily literary scholars, although careerism cuts across the usual boundaries, and the privileged elite here have been writers, writing theorists, old fashioned feminists, and a few old fashioned literary history types. A couple of new faculty are cultural theorists, Marxist feminists. They have joined with the exploited literary scholars to critique and challenge the nondemocratic elitist operation of the department. They have done so vociferously and relentlessly, so some have labeled them trouble-makers, but they, let me reiterate, are joined WITH the majority of the department. We recently elected a chair, overturning the elitist structure—their candidate didn't win. So they secretly formulated a schism petition, bypassing all democratic and intellectually valid procedures, and tried, without the knowledge of the English Department, to take with them in a “new” department (again, comprised of a textual editor of literary documents, a couple of creative writers, a couple of old-fashioned feminists, and a couple of composition theorists) all secretaries, AND the doctoral program. The grand irony is that this Doctoral Degree is supposed to be based on a Nexus of Discourses, self-aware critique of one's place in the discipline. When the critique began, these people fled. So please, don't try to make this into some sort of writing vs. literature political situation or turn the Marxist feminists into the heavies. It isn't and they're not. It is about elitism, privilege, power, and disregard for the work of one's colleagues, all of which the majority of this department have tried to fight. When we began to succeed to question the old practices, the privileged faction ran.

But, the so-called “crisis” in the English Department is not simply a subjective matter: a question of intellectual differences and emotional discord. Or to be more precise, these intellectual differences are rooted in the objective material conditions of the workplace. One of the major inequalities in the Department is the labor relations. There is an oligarchy (signatories of the “proposal” for partitioning the Department and establishing a “Department of Writing Studies") who routinely teach a course load of 2-2 or (usually) fewer courses a year (that is, two or less courses each semester) — under various procedural alibis that are not made public and in spite of the fact that most of them have not published any books of scholarship for a decade or more. The rest of the Department has regularly been teaching course loads of 3-3 and 3-2 courses a year (that is three courses each semester, or three courses one semester and two courses the other). In the 1995-96 academic year after a series of meetings and public texts and debates, the Department's Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC) instructed the interim chair to appoint a committee to examine the course load situation and draw up new and equitable plans and specifically to make recommendations concerning a universal 2-2 load.[5] The interim Chair formed the special committee in a memo of April 22, 1996. However, after the May 7 meeting with the Vice President, the outgoing interim chair set aside the committee (under a procedural alibi that one member had resigned) and reinstated the old preferential arrangements (14 May 1996 Memo from Judith Johnson, the outgoing Interim Chair).

The May 7 meeting with the Vice-President, in other words, was not so much an inclusive discussion with faculty on the knowledges and institutional practices in the English Department as it was a signal that the interests of the Group will be protected. The message was quickly translated into action by the interim chair (whose resignation was requested by faculty after she was said to have signed a proposal to partition the Department). The May 7 meeting, in short, was aimed not at a debate over priorities but at showing “who is the boss” on this campus.

The “boss” not only overthrew the newly elected chair of the Department and “appointed” her own chair, but, through the appointed chair, largely kept the existing power structure in place. The non-elected chair immediately re-appointed as Director of Graduate Studies in English a faculty member who is said to be among those who have signed the proposal to partition and dismantle the Department of English and break-up its integrated Ph.D. program. In other words, a faculty member — who is said to have formally advocated to the Administration (by signing the “Memorandum of Intent to Establish a Department of Writing Studies") the removal of the interdisciplinary English Ph.D. from the English Department—is now (after the administrative coup d'état of June 1, 1996) put in charge of the English Department graduate program and supervision of its Ph.D.! The coup d'état, in short, re-secured the oligarchy. As Helen Elam writes, "the administration [has] turned the English Department into an occupied zone—occupied precisely by the forces that are against change and against the improvements that change would bring” (June 7, 1996 letter to President Hitchcock 2).