Part ONE — § 5

In calling the situation in the English Department a "crisis," the university administration and its allied faculty in the Group are using apocalyptic terms to justify their own extremist actions that violate the democratic principles of faculty self-governance in the university and repress intellectual dissent. This “crisis” in the English Department is an invented “crisis." It is the story of a panic — a panic story of a loss of power represented as institutional “crisis." The concept of “crisis” is not deployed by the Group-Administration to lay bare the material contradictions of social relations in which the Department is located (as part of the university, which is, in turn, part of the larger global structures of the socioeconomic order) in order to understand and then change them. On the contrary, the Group and the University Administration deploy "crisis" in order to (mis)represent the real material contradictions in the English Department as simply “personal” issues. By inventing a “crisis," (a panic story), the Group-Administration contend that the normal course of events have been disrupted by “personal” conflicts: issues of, to use the Vice-President's words, “intellectual differences” and “their attendant emotions” (Vice President, “Memo” May 16, 1996, 1). In short, this is a “crisis” invented to conceal the roots of material contradictions in the English Department (and the University). By invoking a crisis-situation, the Administration is able to justify taking extreme measures to contain progressive changes in the Department and to suspend democratic processes in university governance.

In the July 11, 1996 “open forum” in the Department, Diva Daims analyzed the Administration's mystification of reforms in the Department as a "crisis" and explained that there [have/has] been no institutional disruptions, breaks or discontinuities: the work of the Department (e.g. Faculty Advisory Committee and other committees) has continued; the Ph.D. program has operated as expected; classes are proceeding, and not a single Ph.D. examination or dissertation has been affected by the debates and contestations. Her critique of this “crisis” story made it quite clear that what is being called a “crisis” has nothing to do with the functioning of the Department. The “crisis," in other words, is being used to designate as “abnormal” and “extraordinary” that which is not in the interests of the power elite of the Department and their allies in the Administration. In this “panic story," anything that questions the dominant power is represented as a sign of “crisis” in order to justify taking extreme measures to suspend democratic processes. The “crisis” story told by the Group and the Administration at SUNY-Albany is quite similar to the ones commonly used to justify military coup d'etat and the overthrowing of lawful, due process: "there was a 'crisis,' we had to take charge."

What the administration calls a "crisis" is the surfacing, in a Department divided over the years, as Sandra Fischer has explained, by privilege, by material contradictions between the “haves” and “have nots” and the relay of these differences into cultural and political conflicts. These privileged faculty members have regularly been teaching course-loads of 2-2 or (quite often) less each year (that is, 2 courses or less each a semester) while the others have routinely been teaching course-loads of 3-3 or 3-2 courses each year. The English Department is also divided by considerable salary inequities, and it is worth noting, according to a text circulating on campus in the summer of 1995, that the signatories to the partition proposal include some of the most highly paid faculty in the University: faculty who have received, over the last few years, merit raises that have put their salaries in the range of 90 thousand dollars (faculty who have not published a single work of scholarship since the mid-1970's—except editing anthologies of other people's writings) while the salaries of many others in the Department remain in the 30 and 40 thousand range. These same privileged faculty are frequently, even routinely, teaching (more than one) graduate course a year, while other faculty are denied access to graduate courses. The privileged have blocked new knowledges since these critical reunderstandings of the institution threaten their security and identity. The material privileges that divide the faculty are duplicated in the graduate student body. The funding of graduate students is, as Montgomery, Kelsh, Nespeco and Torrant explain, quite arbitrary (memo of May 14, 1996). There is no public accountability, no objective criteria, and no publicly verifiable and uniform policy. This is especially troubling since so many students are unfunded. The graduate students, like the faculty, are divided between the “haves” and “have nots." These are some of the causes of the “crisis." The “political” differences “and their “attendant emotions” are relayed symptoms of these material causes.

As a result of the material differences, the English Department has become an incoherent workplace — intellectually, pedagogically and professionally. It is a workplace in which what one says is in sharp contrast with what one does. This is a department in which, as a humanities scholar, one teaches “equality” for all but one lives under severely “unequal” conditions. This is a department in which one teaches “freedom of ideas” but one is severely limited in what one can say in the course of daily life: the “minutes” of the Department are closed to dissenting ideas and voices, and the ideas that are expressed through public texts, memoranda, committee meetings and notes that do not conform with the party line of the Group are marked as “obstructionist."

The “crisis” is invented to mystify these material contradictions as merely “cultural” — as “intellectual differences” and their “attendant emotions." This is not a sudden cultural eruption but the surfacing of material contradictions that have developed over a long period and within an increasingly thick institutional context of politics and its history. These conditions, in other words, have not come about overnight or because of the “ideas” of one or two or five or fifteen people — contrary to the stories that are floated around. These personalizing stories are now routinely circulated to the popular media, which is more interested in sensationalizing events according to the logic of the status quo than in rigorous analysis of the historical process. It is reported that on one local talk-show, for example, the audience was recently informed that “One Marxist” has ruined/can ruin/will ruin an “English Department." These narratives, which personalize historical processes and demonize and scapegoat progressive intellectuals,[1] have a long tradition in the anti-intellectualism and the fear of the “other” in U.S. history. This fear and anxiety, of course, has had its most violent outburst in recent times in McCarthyism and the persecution of intellectuals it legitimated. The story ("One Marxist....") derives its plausibility from this panic about the “other," and like all panic stories that demonize individuals, it aims at justifying the existing power relations and thus represents material contradictions as cultural and political differences.

McCarthyism—contrary to the official view — is not part of a dead past. It is a very active presence informing on-going practices. In the “vision” statements that various faculty members of the English Department prepared for the Consultants, for example, one faculty states that the "crisis"—the move to partition the Department — is the consequence of “disruptions" caused by “the Marxist agitators” and asks the Consultants to use their “considerable authority” to advise the Administration on how to silence these oppositional intellectuals. Since the Administration is concerned about the lawsuits that will inevitably follow if it "reassigns" or “restrains” dissenting tenured faculty, he/she asks the Consultants to “advise the Administration about its rights and authority with respect to tenured faculty members” and to teach it how to get around “tenure” protection by using “tactics employed by businesses to solve personnel problems...without producing protracted lawsuits." The writer, however, is not satisfied by simply getting rid of "Marxist agitators” among the faculty. She/he wants all dissent silenced and requests that:

The consultants will advise the administration about ways of deterring a few particularly vocal graduate students (utterly unrepresentative of the entire population of MA and Ph.D. candidates) from engaging in department discourses and governance — since the students don't have tenure, this should be easier than solving the problems posed by tenured faculty.