Only in the course of preparing a graduate seminar session on Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters did I learn that Casanova died, far too early, three years ago at the age of 59. No one would have appreciated better than Casanova the significance of delayed uptake. But, all ironies about myself aside, I was quite moved by the memorial notices by Gisèle Sapiro for the Institute of World Literature and by Joseph Jurt for Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Here’s a brief belated tribute of my own.

Over the course of the last 18 months, Rutgers has been in crisis mode, laying off hundreds of employees (part-time lecturers and staff), imposing a near-total hiring freeze, stealing contractually agreed-upon salary increases, and generally acting like an institution which is struggling mightily to stay afloat. University management claimed that it was facing major budget deficits, and only severe austerity would carry us through: the scarifying bottom-line deficits were $58 million for FY2020 (ending June 2020), $97 million for FY2021, and now $45 million for FY2022 (ending June 2022). More than two hundred million dollars altogether! Faced with numbers like these, a casual observer might think austerity was the only choice. Certainly everyone in management, from the university president down to the dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, presented cuts as a painful necessity.

But all this appears rather different in light of the recent disclosures about the Rutgers athletics program’s finances, reported on in great detail by Abbott Kolloff and Jean Rimbach for NorthJersey.com (this link is to a follow-up story; their first report is subscribers-only). Rutgers’s athletics’ own true 2020 deficit, the report calculates, was $73 million. Years of deficits and broken promises have left the program $265 million in debt. In other words: without the financial failures of the athletics program, failures that predate COVID-19 and will, doubtless, continue after it, the university’s overall deficits in the pandemic era would practically have disappeared. So would the justification for the layoffs and the cuts to academics. It is one thing to imagine Rutgers painfully laying off workers in order to keep the classes and labs and libraries going—though, in fact, our union’s analysis showed its unrestricted reserves (around $600 million then) and its share of federal emergency funds (at least $133 million through July 2021 [edit 10/5/21: make that $365 million]) were more than adequate to the size of the emergency need. But even setting that aside, it is quite another matter to trade the livelihoods of people essential to the university for Big 10 football pretensions.

My first graduate course at Rutgers, way back in Spring 2013—innocent times, when the worst things we had to worry about were the death spiral of the profession of literary studies, rampant inequality, and climate crisis—was called “Author, Reader, Field: Literary Sociologies of Modernism and the Twentieth Century.” As that ungainly title suggests, it was a mash-up, trying to combine some kind of modernism survey with some kind of discussion of the sociology of literature, while also too-too-cleverly hinting that there is a special connection between modernism and the sociology of literature.

I’m at it again, repeating a graduate course for the first time in my career, and the more plainly titled “Author, Reader, Field” is not nearly as streamlined as the condensed title implies. Also it’s not in three parts. Here’s my draft syllabus, if you’re curious about that sort of thing. Since I recently taught a grad survey of U.S. early twentieth-century literature, this time I bracketed off the Western Hemisphere (more or less) and pinned the course to British literature instead.

But keeping things pretty insular (not totally insular) doesn’t resolve the problem of selection at all. I like literary-historical overviews, and I like theories and methodologies, and I think graduate students ought to have simultaneous doses of both, but even after fourteen years of teaching, the semester still seems too short for what I want to do. I’m less worried about the primary texts than I am about the scholarship. I spend a week on Ulysses with an utterly clear conscience. But I wanted a buffet table of “approaches,” and there’s far less on offer than I initially imagined. Since I am a structured structure functioning as a structuring structure, the spread is mostly Bourdieusian. Tuchman and Fortin stand almost alone for sobering Anglo-American empiricism—which isn’t so bad, but still.

I have just learned about efforts among staff at Oxford University Press USA to organize a union. Oxford published my first book, and so, as an OUP author, I call on the press to recognize the union. Every worker should have the right to participate in collective bargaining. Furthermore, every academic should be concerned with this unionization effort. The working conditions of university press staff—and OUP is one of the largest—are the conditions for the dissemination of knowledge. Press workers should have a say in those conditions.

As the culminating poetry reading in my Principles of Literary Study course this term, I assigned Terrance Hayes’s marvelous sequence American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (New York: Penguin, 2018). I thought it would enhance students’ reading of the poems to have a little guidance to some of Hayes’s references, since allusiveness is a key aspect of his poetics. I am copying over the annotations I compiled to this website so that others may find and use them, or—more importantly—be prompted to read this excellent poet.

Another semester is starting up, and we’re all looking forward to an engaging academYOUR INTERNET CONNECTION IS UNSTABLE

That’s not the only thing that’s unstable, but it seems we’re carrying on, and I am teaching two courses this spring. Early Twentieth-Century Fiction is one of my regular offerings, irregularly happening in spring rather than fall. I used to teach Principles of Literary Study as a narrative-only course, but it is now a multi-genre course, and I have had fun dreaming up a compressed introduction to poetry for the first half of the syllabus, and equal fun rejiggering the narrative half of things. I didn’t kill my darlings, but I did add a Raymond Chandler story, which is about the same.

[These are the remarks I delivered today to a special meeting of the faculty of my school.]

[Adding this, the next week: the resolution I proposed at the meeting after making these remarks carried in the subsequent vote by 482–46, but the status of the laid-off staff and faculty remains uncertain.]

Let me remind you why we have called this meeting: across Rutgers, since March, hundreds of staff have been laid off; several hundred part-time lecturers lost their teaching; your raises, due this past July 1, have been withheld. Two weeks ago, Old Queens made an unprecedented attempt to eliminate all PTL courses from the English department’s writing program, a move to, in effect, terminate seventy instructors. And plans are still underway to lay off 15–20 staff members in SAS, with at least nine already having received notice.

Let me remind you that our collective response has already had an effect: since this meeting was called, some part-time lecturer courses have been restored. I would like to acknowledge that, in helping to restore veteran PTLs to teaching this spring, Dean March has demonstrated that he understands the importance of more secure working conditions for part-time faculty.

However: staff layoffs are still happening; many part-time lecturers still face complete uncertainty under the hiring freeze; our contractually guaranteed raises are being held back on the basis of a baseless “fiscal emergency.”

You have heard from David Hughes that neither the overall financial situation of the university nor the budgetary situation of SAS justifies these austerity measures; you have heard from Amy Higer about the hardships created, now more than ever, by eliminating PTL courses and leaving instructors in uncertainty.

So the question is not: How much should we all sacrifice?

The question is: Why are faculty and staff being asked to sacrifice in order to fill deficits in auxiliary enterprises like athletics?

The question is: if austerity budgets were planned on the assumption of $350 million in state funding, what will be done with the 437 million—$87 million more—that the state is actually appropriating for Rutgers?

The question is: will decisions about priorities at Rutgers be made by managers through budgeting mechanisms, or will they be made by faculty governance?

When we petitioned for this meeting, Old Queens was not simply micromanaging English courses on the basis of enrollments: Old Queens was attempting to direct the Writing Program about which courses could be offered and who could teach them. And the Writing Program is still being forced to limit its more advanced offerings.

Right now, you may say, this issue is local to the Writing Program and the English department. But its implications are global. If we concede that a vice provost or a vice president can meddle in a particular department’s course offerings, we no longer have faculty autonomy in the matter of instruction. Undergraduate and graduate program directors will have no more freedom in assembling and staffing a curriculum.

Dean March’s September 30 letter to chairs speaks of “using the teaching capacity of full-time instructors more efficiently.” But I submit that questions of what courses to offer, and which instructors should teach what, are best decided, as they have customarily been, within departments. It is department officers and committees who know colleagues and students best: who has the expertise? who has the experience? where are enrollments likely to go? where are low-enrolling courses nonetheless essential to programs of study?

“Efficiency” cannot justify interfering in the academic affairs of departments to rewrite curriculum. “Efficiency” cannot cloak layoffs that undermine research and instruction. And “efficiency” cannot excuse decisions that, by harming the quality of our classes, ultimately harm our students.

So I think we need to pause and re-evaluate priorities across Rutgers and within SAS in particular. If additional state funds are now available, we can re-examine budgeting decisions. We can say: No to layoffs. No to PTL cuts. And we can say: Faculty expertise, and not “efficiency” as interpreted by administrators, decides about curriculum.

So I have a resolution to introduce. It begins with a series of motivating statements that amplify what I have just said, and then it proposes a way to re-evaluate priorities within SAS.

I’ve just taught the first meeting of my fall 2020 graduate seminar, “Science Fiction and Cultural Capital,” so it strikes me that I could now post a link to the syllabus. I suppose I could have tried a little harder to find and assign SF in which people can only connect with others by video link; my hazy and distressing memories of Asimov’s The Naked Sun made me balk there. Anyway, the motto of 2020 is: You do what you can. In this case, what I can do includes assigning a Star Wars novel and making students read about omnivorousness. That, and The Dispossessed.

Back to Stevens:

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Since news of professional developments is slow to cross into my relatively social-media-free information bubble, I have only just learned of the transformed MLA Job Information List, and I have an opinion.