Part ONE — § 3

These contradictions are played out in the rearticulation of the graduate program in English at SUNY-Albany. Recognizing the need for advanced (critique-al) research, the university committed itself to hiring scholars from a new generation of knowledge workers trained in the contemporary scholarship that has revolutionized the humanities since the late 1960s. It committed itself, in short, to bringing in those knowledges that have been largely suppressed and marginalized in the Department. “Hirings throughout the 1970's and 1980's” in the Department “reflected the commitment at Albany to quality undergraduate teaching and to the graduate emphasis on writing and pedagogy” (Knoblauch, “Albany Graduate English” 21). In contrast, the new hirings, in the 1990's, represented a break with the existing practices, and this “break” itself quickly became part of the rising conflict: the conflict between the newer scholars, who are theorists, and those pragmatic “teachers” who have accumulated power and privilege by marginalizing scholarship and theory and putting “service” at the center of their work. In its teaching the Group has emphasized practical matters such as classroom procedures, student enrollments, the length of time it takes to finish the degree (stressing the need to push students through quickly). Its guiding frame in teaching has been the privileging of the emotional (rather than the intellectual): teaching as “nurturing," “pleasure," and “counseling” — a form of therapy rather than critique. This conflict (rooted in the material power of the Group) is one of the significant lines of division in the Department and is much more complex and quite different from the one that the Vice-President and her advisors conveniently draw between “writing" and “literature” (May 7, 1).

To posit the existing conflict as one between “writing” and “literature” is to show a lack of historical awareness of the changing world and the way these changes are relayed through the movement of scholarship and its institutional politics in the contemporary academy. The tension between "writing” and “literature," in fact, had already come to a head in the academy in the 1970's, and by the late 1980's, it (like the old conflicts between “American” and “British” literature scholars of an earlier generation) had been transformed by the “theory” revolution. The resuscitation of the "writing” and “literature” feud as a current conflict by the Group and the Vice-President shows how the Group in the English Department and the SUNY-Albany Administration are caught up in contradictions and outdated knowledges that lead them to (re)live the cold wars of the “composition” fights and “canon” debates. It is also a telling demonstration of how the new knowledges (and the contestations they have given rise to) have been blocked by the Group. The English Department at Albany has been dominated by those who— in their defense of the status quo and the interests of big business which opposes critique-al education — are fighting phantom wars over issues that were transformed quite a while ago. They have thus turned the Department into a quaint world with a quaint list of enemies and register of friends: a world out of step with the changing realities in which Toni Morrison has received the Nobel Prize and even the slimmest anthologies of Anglophone literature have large sections devoted to non-canonic writings by women and multicultural writers as well as post-canonic (experimental) texts. Yet, in the English Department at Albany the “news," according to the Group, is about the revision of the “canon” and (a quite provincial understanding) of “experimental” writing. The local understanding of “experimental” (in the writing program) is over half-a-century behind the times. It is essentially populist, non-philosophical and entirely mechanical, based on an eclectic adoption of “imitative form” (collage, chance composition) and some warmed over techniques of traditional surrealism (automatic writing, etc.) sutured to cyber “things." The philosophical notion of experimental writing aimed at critiquing the logocentric practices of the Western imaginary is an alien concept in this quaint world which still regards busting the “canon” to be a progressive act. It is odd to still claim, for example, that “experimental” literature (of the kind practiced in the Department) is subversive when the standard anthologies routinely print stories by surfictionists and hypertextualists.

Like many conservatives, the Group is caught up in contradictory desires: its concern to “conserve” the established order (thus its preoccupation with U.S. literature, for example) and its interest in “technology” (thus the interest of some in the Group in “cyber” things as a synecdoche of the "wave of the future"). These are the kinds of contradictions that, for instance, mark the practices of such other contemporary conservatives as Newt Gingrich. He incoherently both advocates such Victorian notions as “family values” and wants to give a “lap top” to every American. The Group, on a local level, and the Republicans, on the national scene, articulate the contemporary contradictions of transnationalism. For both, “cyber” things are devices for supporting capitalism. Gingrich says: “every American will have a cellular phone, which will probably be a fax, which will probably be a modem, which will probably in some way tie them into a world — whether they want to or not, frankly, every American will be competing in the world market with Germany and China and Japan." (Rosenbaum, 1). The Group's positions, like transnational capitalism itself, is an opportunistic amalgamation of incoherences: conservative “values” and new “technologies."

As a consequence of these contradictions, the Group, in the English Department at SUNY-Albany, still considers it “progressive” in 1997 to advocate as “new” what is elsewhere commonplace — such as teaching non-canonic literature and accepting the legitimacy of “composition” pedagogy and the use of cyber-textualities. The careerist Group has, by appropriating the means of representation in the university and “access” to the Administration, named itself “progressive." What is represented as "progressive," however, is a conservative opportunism that takes the shape of the situation in which it unfolds. The politics of the Group's “progressivism” — becomes perhaps more clear when one considers some of the institutional practices of the Group. One particularly telling incident concerns an act of "aggravated harassment” against me.

On 5 November 1996, one of the walls outside my office was covered with graffiti — the aim of which was to intimidate me into stopping my struggles to establish a democratic workplace in the English Department, one free from intimidation and harassment and dedicated to equality of labor. To put this in context: I have fought for several years to reach such goals, and during this time, I have faced hostilities ranging from being shouted down and silenced in committee and departmental meetings to receiving anonymous telephone calls harassing me for speaking out. My efforts have focused particularly on establishing equal labor relations among faculty by instituting a universal course load in which all faculty (except those with administrative duties) teach the same number of courses. The members of the Group have been stridently opposed to such equality and have over the years routinely taught course loads of 2-2 and often fewer courses a year (that is, two courses or less each semester) while the rest of the faculty have taught 3-3 and 3-2 courseloads for the year.

In the context of these struggles, the “graffiti incident” was quickly picked up by the main newspaper in Albany, the Times Union, and the Fox television news network as well as the student newspaper. The Times Union news item reported that:

University at Albany English Professor Teresa Ebert arrived at work Tuesday to find the following words drawn on the wall next to her office: “Freedom is obedience, you schizophrenic. Or should I say fool?"

A peace symbol followed the phrase. It was scrawled in black ballpoint pen.

Ebert, a Marxist, said she believes the graffiti is meant as an attack against what she is described as an ongoing fight for equity among professors and her support of an altered curriculum within the English department at the university....

"I took this as a direct targeting of me. I take the graffiti as aimed at trying to silence and intimidate me," said Ebert, who edits the international journal, Transformation: Marxist Boundary Work in Theory, Economics, Politics and Culture... (Times Union 6 November 1996).

In the English Department meeting of 7 November 1996, the incident of the graffiti on the wall outside my office was discussed, and Rosemary Hennessy proposed a motion “for the Department to go on record recognizing the incident as an act of violence, harassment, intimidation, an impingement on Academic Freedom, and to censure future actions of this sort” (Minutes of 11/7/96 Department Meeting, 2). The motion was opposed by the members of the Group—the vote was "11 in favor and 7 opposed” (Minutes of 11/7/96 Department Meeting, 2).

In response to this opposition, a group of graduate students in English wrote a memo to the President of the University, “not only to register our shock and dismay that public intellectuals have refused to condemn a hate crime against a fellow faculty member, but also to express our concern for intellectual freedom in the university." In their memo they point out that

while the police investigate an act against [Professor Ebert] which they regard to be aggravated harassment (a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison and a $1000 fine), seven members of the English faculty voted AGAINST supporting a statement for the formal departmental minutes that condemned the act as a violence. This occurred minutes after the department engaged in a discussion, led by Dean Pipkin, of hate crimes (Hawkins, et. al., “Thinking Anew," Memo 13 November 1996)[1]

Some of those members of the Group who opposed the motion to condemn the incident as “an act of violence, harassment, intimidation," identify themselves as “feminist” and constitute the core of the ruling elite in the Women's Studies Department. This “elite” has been described by Luz del Alba Acevedo, an Assistant Professor in Women's Studies and Latin American and Caribbean Studies (in her letter of July 13, 1995 to the University President protesting abuses of power in Women's Studies), “as a clique of corporate women bent on holding on to positions of power within this institution and perpetuating reductionist, racist and sexist forms of feminism which have been contested by new knowledge in feminist scholarship."[2]

Another member of the Group, who is also [alleged/said] to have voted against the motion, has in fact been chairing the taskforce for establishing a harassment-free workplace in the College of Arts and Sciences.[3] His main efforts, it is reported, have been focused on establishing “civility” in the workplace — this is a telling revelation of the politics of power when that power is put in question and critiqued. The discourses of “civility” have become the ideology of an establishment attempting to suppress any questioning of its own privileges.[4] In short, “progressive," at SUNY-Albany, has come to mean: aggressive defense of one's own privilege, opposition to equity, and supporting violence against oppositional intellectuals who fight for equality in the workplace and rigorous scholarship and teaching.

This representation of the most conservative elements of the English Department at SUNY-Albany as “progressive," like similar representations of “progressivism” in the ludic academy and the culture industry, in general, follows a familiar pattern and has a recognizable structure. The opportunist-as-progressive, whom I shall call neoprogressive, enters the existing debates by first siding on safe issues — such as supporting the expansion of canonic readings at Stanford to include multicultural texts — against “extremist” paleoconservative positions. Having thus acquired “progressive” credentials by doing so, the neoprogressive then turns around and re-obtains more or less the same ideological effects that the paleoconservatives have worked for, but in a "reasonable," “nonextremist” rhetoric. For instance, in their Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy, Knoblauch and Brannon first criticize D'Souza and his paleoconservative Illiberal Education (34-47), thereby establishing their own identity as liberation teachers. However, in a second move, they attack (in a very calm and reasonable rhetoric) radical left pedagogues, such as Ira Shor, who are seen as the “real” threat to the status quo (66-73).

There are, of course, various “local” variations on this structure of representation. For example, at the height of the power of the national university, the teaching of “composition” was placed on the margins of English Departments, and consequently, the teaching of literature has been seen as “elitist." As a result, teaching “composition” and writing are represented as anti-elitist attempts to “empower students” (to get a good job for example?). Therefore, the teaching of “composition” (because it is not “elite” literature) has become, in-and-of-itself, essentialized as an “identity” (for instance, “progressive") for the composition teacher in the SUNY-Albany English Department. I put aside here the institutional history that, as Donald Morton discusses in his post of June 26, 1996 on the Internet[5] has resulted in the reversal of the relation between “literature” and “composition” at SUNY-Albany: the writers and composition persons are in positions of power (from the Deanship of the College of Arts and Sciences and several Chairships to the Directorship of Graduate Studies, and dominant membership on such central committees as Graduate Advisory Committee, Graduate Admissions Committee, Workload Committee) and thus have run the Department.

Moreover, the notion of composition and writing as marginal subdisciplines is, itself, an out-dated notion. With the emergence of transnational capitalism and the postnational university, “Writing Studies” have become the center practices. Not only are composition and writing persons now among the highest ranks in salaries because of their high market value, but they are also the favored faculty in Colleges of Arts and Sciences as far as the administration is concerned. This new centrality of composition and writing privileges the pragmatic rhetoric and practices of neoprogressivism — the opportunist-as-progressive — which is becoming dominant in the postnational university just as it has been for quite a long time in the English Department at SUNY-Albany. It is this brand of “progressivism” that transnational capitalism needs to assert its conservative agenda with a human face — pleasing rhetoric and congenial persuasion for utilitarian effects.

Owing to this institutional history, in which new knowledges have been blocked and marginalized and service has taken the place of scholarship, the Department in the early 1990's (when it started to rearticulate its graduate program) did not have any systematic research program in the new humanities nor did it have any rigorous pedagogies based on the new ground-breaking theoretical reunderstandings of humanities (poststructuralism, Marxism, postcolonialism, New Americanism, Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, postmodernism, materialist feminism, New Historicism, critical race theory...). The Department (under pressure from the Group worried about the lessening of its power) has been conducting its teaching in a different era and zone of history than the one that has informed active scholarship. To be more precise, for a considerable time now, there has been a “disconnect” between what is being done in the Department by the Group and the active world of scholarship. Not only the issues but also the mode of inquiry itself tend to belong to a pre-theoretical era and are thus non-self-reflexive and commonsensical. For example, the Group has defended its work against the demand for intellectual rigor by repeating the old clichés of cultural feminism that “rigor” is a “masculinist” trait and thus is not appropriate for a “nurturing” pedagogy. In their unself-reflexive defensiveness, the members of the power Group fail to realize that what they have represented as a defense of women is actually a retrograde, patriarchal form of reifying and essentializing women as non-conceptual and as non-thinkers who can, at best, tell “stories” about their “experiences” and have no capacity to analyze them rigorously and relate them to the socioeconomic conditions that have, in fact, produced them.

As Luz del Alba Acevedo has put it: “in the name of supporting women, a new form of anti-feminism has been instituted...an anti-feminism that suppresses the work of progressive women." This anti-feminism, she points out, is the result of the dominance in the University of “a clique of corporate women bent on holding on to positions of power within this institution and perpetuating reductionist, racist and sexist forms of feminism which have been contested by new knowledge in feminist scholarship” (for the full text, see endnote 10).

In the dominant retro-pedagogies, experience is taken to be a transcendental “given," and everything else is seen as deriving from it. Some of members of the Group and their students have called this rejection of rigor “deconstructing” rigor: however this populism represented as deconstruction further reveals how the Group has controlled and limited knowledge of the contemporary critical vocabulary — let alone theories — in the Department. There is little self-reflexive awareness that, for example, Derrida's deconstruction of “rigor” is a philosophical and not a populist, experiential and opportunistic undertaking — that it is itself a highly rigorous analytical work. Rigor cannot be dismissed by appeal to “experience," but “experience” is all that the Group's pedagogy has offered.

Of course, throughout this time, there have been other pedagogues and scholars in the Department who have insisted on the necessity of “other” knowledges, for example, Helen Elam has taught the “literary” not in the traditional sense of reflecting experience but as the site of the undecidable and the indeterminate, the space of heterogeneity and difference. This critical de Manian notion of the “literary," however, has been at odds with the idea of literary/aesthetics of the Group who have understood aesthetics in the traditional logocentric sense of textual harmony— the fusion of language and experience — that De Man calls “aesthetic ideology” or in terms of the old avant-garde idea that simply reversed the view of the “beautiful." The “literary” in Elam's practices has long been marginalized in the Department by the writing faculty and its allies, who have tried to protect the “sameness” of their practices from the “difference” of the “literary” in its radical de Manian sense of the alterity of the rhetorical.

Similarly, Richard Goldman's pedagogical practices — which have insisted on a double-reading of the traditional and the new and thus have opened new discursive spaces for establishing subtle and layered set of relations between heterogeneous and non-identical textualities in history and their “aesthetics” and “literary” counter-memories — have, like Elam's pedagogy, been simply placed on the margins.

Other “differences” have been marginalized as well. Warren Ginsberg, for instance, has taught literary history in light of Bakhtin and Foucault, and Diva Daims has foregrounded the concept of class and class analysis in her pedagogies. Moreover, in “rhetoric” only the sanctioned version of the conventional writing faculty has been recognized as valid knowledge. For instance, the work of Lana Cable in contemporary rhetoric (as in her reading of Milton) has been the “other” of the dominant notion of rhetoric in the Department and has thus been excluded. “Rhetoric," in the English Department, has only one meaning: the logocentric view that underlies the work of the hegemonic Group. Although the Department has declared its “interest” in matters of gender and race, the psychoanalytic study of these questions, as in the work of Jennifer Fleischner and Eleanor Branch (who recently resigned from the Department), has been considered, for the most part, beyond the purview of the accepted study of these issues. Since, as I just hinted, inquiries into “gender” have for the most part been monopolized by the Group, such texts as Sandra Fischer's feminist reading of Ophelia (which was given prominence when recently reprinted in an anthology) has never been recognized for its analytical nuances.