A Letter from Austin Smith to Elizabeth Tallent
Today, I, Austin Smith, am sharing a letter I wrote to my former teacher Elizabeth Tallent, a long-time faculty member in the Creative Writing Department who retired just prior to the vote that resulted in the firings of 23 Jones Lecturers. I share this letter because it touches upon many issues that lie under the surface of this calamity. It also references a novel, John Williams’s Stoner, which has been a kind of spiritual guide for me as I have grown into my identity as a teacher. I have been holding an informal book club to read and discuss the novel, both on campus and online. Feel free to write to savethejoneslecturers@gmail.com for more information on how to join (our next online session is tonight at 5:30 pm PST). One of our students, Ellen Yang, just finished the novel and has written this remarkable reflection upon it and the issues her reading of the novel raised for her: 'Stoner' and the Forgotten Point of Higher Education. Finally, because my letter, and the novel, speak to the power differential amongst different members of an academic community, I am sharing also some stats on how much teaching the endangered lecturers do in relation to that which the tenured faculty do. Thank you for reading, and we look forward to running more student letters - and creative writing! - soon.
Dear Elizabeth,
I know we haven’t had the opportunity to speak very much in recent years. Passing you in Margaret Jacks Hall, or seeing you, occasionally, at a reading, I’ve lately shivered from a certain coldness I feel coming from you, the source of which I haven’t been able to guess. So you may find it jarring to suddenly be hearing from me, a lecturer who you haven’t spoken to in so long. But before I turn to the purpose of this letter, I must congratulate you upon your retirement, and to apologize for emailing from my personal email - though this is something I’m going to have to get used to doing, considering the recent change to my employment. Now that I’ve been told I must leave Stanford, and now that you are leaving Stanford as well in retirement, this feels like an appropriate time to thank you for your guidance. And I hope you’ll understand my sense that this is the right – perhaps the only – time to share with you my confusion regarding the very different ways our careers at Stanford are coming to an end.
You were one of several teachers who not only taught me whatever material their particular classes covered, but also how to be a teacher. I count you amongst those whose teaching style and philosophy made an impact on me when I was first starting off on this journey, a journey that has been so abruptly and brutally terminated by these firings. In the two Stegner workshops I took with you, you demonstrated how to coax a conversation out of a small group who’ve read the same piece of writing but have each read it subtly differently. My time working as a TA in your short story class was the first time I began imagining that I myself might one day teach at Stanford. And, up until August 21, I have been doing just that, teaching what must be nearly sixty classes now over ten years. Of course, I’m still teaching this year, and next year as well, but, like Keats said about living beyond the death of hope, I feel as if I’m living a posthumous existence at Stanford. Now that I’ve been told by the faculty that I must leave my position – and just when I was starting to get truly good at it – I feel as if everything has a sheen of finality about it. I can already imagine the last course, the last class, the last thank you from the last student.
Strange to think of lasts after all the teaching I’ve done. Yes, I think it’s fair to guess that I’ve taught sixty undergraduate classes in twelve years, considering the extra classes my financial situation requires me to take on. I don’t mean to complain about the extra classes. I’ve enjoyed teaching for other programs at Stanford, such as Continuing Studies and IntroSems, especially because lately the administration in these other programs has been so much more supportive of my teaching career than my own faculty colleagues in Creative Writing. Alas, a new IntroSem I was scheduled to teach this fall on ekphrastic writing, called “Writing About Art,” had to be moved to winter quarter due to the fact that I have been too busy protesting the incomprehensible decision to fire us lecturers. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my teaching career to have to write to ten freshmen and sophomores who were excited to take a class on writing about art and instead of welcoming them to my class, tell them that the class was no longer being offered this quarter due to a disruptive decision made by my own colleagues. The class has been postponed until winter quarter, so all is not lost when it comes to this new course, which I will hardly have the opportunity to get off the ground before I leave. But considering the fact that these ten students’ interests and schedules will likely change by winter quarter, I suspect that most of them will not be able to take this course I was so excited to offer. When I hear Nicholas Jenkins, your former co-director of Creative Writing, and our current director (a fact that remains odd to me, considering how he isn’t a Creative Writing professor) say that these firings will revitalize our program (as if it had somehow lost its vitality), I want to tell him that the firings are already impacting the educational opportunities available to our students. But I don’t think the undergraduate student experience was very high on the list of things the faculty was considering when deciding whether or not to vote to fire us.
The process by which we were fired has been concealed under a veil of confidentiality – hopefully the appeal I submitted last week to Dean Boxer of the medical school will at least provide us the dignity of knowing how exactly 23 lecturers came to be fired by only 13% of the English Department faculty – but I know enough about the process to know that you didn’t cast a vote, despite being an original member of the voting portion of the so-called “working group.” It seems that it was a 4-1 affirmative vote by an all-male voting block: Nicholas Jenkins, Patrick Phillips, A. Van Jordan, and Adam Johnson. The sole vote against the firings was leveled by my former Jones Lecturer colleague Kirstin Valdez Quade, who, after voting against the idea to fire all the lecturers, resigned from Stanford within a year of being hired and returned to Princeton. Considering the fact that Nicholas Jenkins only took an interest in our department after Eavan Boland’s death, and considering the fact that Patrick Phillips and A. Van Jordan have been at Stanford for less time, combined, than I have been, I confess to feeling as if a group of strangers just walked into my house, a house I’d thought was locked and safe, and trashed the place. I understand that you stepped down as co-director, and stepped down from the working group, before the day of the vote arrived. I assume you would have voted against this decision, though that would have made it 4 yes votes to 2 votes against and therefore your presence wouldn’t have mattered. Amaud Johnson, another voting member of the working group and another brand-new hire, resigned even before Kirstin did, and Aracelis Girmay stepped down from the working group, hence the absence of a single female faculty member amongst those four yes votes. But because you didn’t stay long enough to cast that opposing vote, I cannot say I am certain what you would have done. Perhaps the vote would have been 5 to 1.
Since the firings – I don’t believe you were on the Zoom call, though there was a second screen where some faculty, such as Chang Rae Lee, were listening – we Jones Lecturers, a kind of family as you know, have felt as if a loved one has died. We have been whispering to one another in bewilderment as to why such a radical decision needed to be taken, considering the popularity of our classes and our excellence as teachers. If only someone had asked us what we would suggest be done about the issue of turnover from the Stegner Fellowship into the Jones Lecturership, we would have suggested numerous ideas, including growing the program to meet burgeoning student demand. Since Dean Satz stated at the beginning of the meeting that Creative Writing has recently connected with a new donor and that this cruel decision was not due to budgetary constraints, we assume this option would at least have been possible. I have come up with an alternative plan that I have shared with Nicholas Jenkins, Dean Gabriella Safran, Dean Debra Satz, and President Jon Levin that takes the turnover from fellow-to-lecturer issue into account while keeping our current cohort intact. I would be happy to share this plan with you if you wish to continue taking an interest in our program after your retirement.
If you’re interested in seeing the plan, I can summarize it here. I take Dean Satz at her word when she says that, with a connection the program has made with a new donor, there is plenty of funding for the department. Couple this with record student demand due to the fact that majors and non-majors alike love our classes and it seems there is both the budget and the demand to expand our teaching cohort, not cut it. Indeed, the deans’ confident assertion during the meeting in which we were fired (an event the media has been referring to as The Red Wedding) that they will offer undergraduates 110 courses a year to the 100 courses a year we currently offer raises the question as to who precisely is going to teach all of these classes now that the 23 teachers who are uniquely suited to do so have been so cruelly and abruptly terminated. Therefore, my plan is not a mere alternative to the original restructuring plan, but a necessity considering the administration’s stated goals. That is, unless they have no intention of accomplishing said goals.
My plan would allow experienced teachers like myself to help train new teachers, just as you helped train me both in your workshops and in your famous course on the short story. Us teachers know that there are two ways potentially great teachers become great teachers – through experience (something this decision seems to ignore) and learning from other teachers all those tricks and strategies that no one ever really manages to write down but that form a kind of collective wisdom network that a stable and fairly-supported teaching cohort organically creates. And so you can imagine our disappointment when, on a Saturday morning, on, perhaps ironically, Labor Day weekend, we learned from current and former Stegners who forwarded his email to us that Nicholas Jenkins is now inviting all people who have ever been Stegner Fellows to apply to fill our jobs. Since obtaining this email from our friends, many of us have puzzled over why a poet or writer would pack up their whole life and move to the most expensive region in the country for the opportunity to teach for a limited number of years under a faculty that has proven themselves capable of treating their more vulnerable colleagues so cruelly. These new, inexperienced teachers who will be hired to replace us will receive the same insufficient salaries we’ve been receiving for literally decades. You must be aware that, last September, we finally secured a much-needed pay correction which raised us from a salary of $57,000 a year to $82,000 a year – a substantial correction but not a full one, considering that the cutoff to be considered a low-income laborer in the Bay Area is $104,000. It seems to me that these firings replace a vulnerable but fairly stable community of teachers with an equally vulnerable and less cohesive community of teachers, which will ultimately harm both the new lecturers and future undergraduates.
I imagine here that you – or someone who has been more involved in these changes – might say that there will be jobs available for departing Jones Lecturers to apply for. Unfortunately, we have only been promised two such positions, both of which are technically outside the Creative Writing department. Even if there were more positions being made available, they would not be as relevant to me and my unique skillset, considering that I have so many years of experience doing the job I am being forced out of. And, honestly, who feels very confident applying for a position overseen by the very people who fired you on Zoom?
As someone who has been part of the Stanford Creative Writing community much longer than I have been, I don’t need to tell you what a stellar reputation our program has always had. These firings have seriously damaged that reputation. I sensed this even before Stanford PR scrubbed the Google search for “Stanford Creative Writing” to knock the bad press down a few webpages. The entire literary world and the entire world of higher education have expressed both publicly and privately – to me and to the central players in this drama – their absolute befuddlement as to the reasoning behind this decision, especially at an institution as well-resourced as Stanford is. I have sensed that the faculty and administration have been particularly surprised by student pushback, which is manifesting itself in numerous ways – a petition that a former student created has, of this writing, been signed by well over 2000 people; our Substack project, which we came up with when we realized that student and alum letters were disappearing into the black holes of the deans’ inboxes, has nearly 300 subscribers; our students hand-wrote over 70 letters at an on-campus event last week, addressed to Dean Satz, asking her to reverse this decision, letters which will be delivered to her by hand by students themselves. While the faculty that teach only 5% of our undergraduate courses seem to be surprised at the outcry, I personally am not. I know my students and I knew how upset they would be when this decision was announced. They have expressed to me their frustration that yet again they are not being listened to. They are dismissed as “snowflakes” by the political right and by the media, but, as you surely haven’t forgotten, they care deeply about the world, a world that no longer so neatly ends at the boundaries of our campus. When they look at these firings, they see yet another example of a faceless force crushing a vulnerable one. It is all of a piece to them — more senseless unfairness in a world that is already plenty unfair.
And it is thus from a place of deep grief that I find myself reflecting on how much I have loved teaching.
I think often of (and, indeed, teach) your beautiful story “The Wilderness,” and feel I appreciate more and more, with each passing year, that scene when a student visits her in her office hours and she is stunned by her student’s beauty. Not her physical beauty, but the beauty of all students who love literature and are courageous enough to go to office hours to try to express that love. But I can’t tell if the images that come to me now come from your story or from my own memories. The oblique late afternoon California light. The joy one feels in seeing a student’s budding love for what we love. Teacher and student both instinctually leaning forward, heads bowed together, nearly touching. Then, glancing up. Nodding and smiling in agreement. Whatever it is they’re reading, it’s beautiful.
I have loved teaching. I have loved teaching the way William Stoner loved teaching. I know you’ve read Stoner by John Williams - what true teacher hasn’t? - and so hardly need to remind you of this passage, when Stoner, a gangly nineteen year-old, meets in office hours with the curmudgeonly old Archer Sloane:
Sloane leaned forward until his face was close; Stoner saw the lines on the long thin face soften, and he heard the dry mocking voice become gentle and unprotected.
“But don’t you know, Mr. Stoner?” Sloane asked. “Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.”
Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Sloane said softly.
“How can you tell? How can you be sure?”
“It’s love, Mr. Stoner,” Sloane said cheerfully. “You are in love. It’s as simple as that.”
Though our careers are ending at almost the precise same time, they are ending about as differently as one could possibly imagine, with me being fired on Zoom and you retiring. I know you must be thinking, “Well, Austin, you’re a very talented poet and fiction writer, and an experienced teacher. I’m sure you’ll find another job.”
But I shouldn’t have to tell you how much academia has changed since you received tenure. Such a path is nearly impossible for us younger teachers, which is why we were so disheartened to hear the deans talk exhaustively about returning the program to its “original intent” (the Jones Lectureships were instituted in 1946). After Dean Satz assured us that this decision has nothing to do with money (not surprising at a university with a $38 billion dollar endowment), she seemed to be searching for an explanation as to what, exactly, it does have to do with, and alit upon the word “values.” As she spoke about values, I wondered at how we’ve reached a point in academia where “values” take precedence over people. My dad, a dairy farmer, as you surely remember from my fiction, and a fantastic poet himself, says, whenever someone seems to have lost touch with reality: “Must be they don’t have enough cows to milk.” Forgive me, but it seems to me the deans and faculty simply don’t have enough cows to milk. Otherwise how could they be swayed in the direction of a philosophical concept, choosing “values” over actual, living human beings?
To return to Stoner, as I so often do, I cannot help but think of the character of Hollis Lomax in contrast to that of William Stoner. Lomax was a man who, the narrator makes clear, once loved literature, but who became soured by envy, petulance and grievance. He turned into the vituperative colleague everyone dreads. I would say, to put it more simply, that Hollis Lomax is an academic and William Stoner is a teacher. This is as significant a difference as that which exists between an agriculturalist and a farmer. One thinks about the profession, the other practices it. While my career at Stanford will be about a third as long as yours has been, I have been around long enough to notice a tipping of the scales from teachers to academics, Stoners to Lomaxes.
I suppose all of us who have the privilege of living in the ivory tower also have a grave responsibility. At some point, on the slow arduous climb up the stairs that wind up the center of the tower, every educator must ask his or herself this question, whether they’ve read the novel or not: “Do I want to be Hollis Lomax or William Stoner?”
Here we are, Elizabeth, at the high-water mark of our careers. You are retiring; I am being fired. It is time for us to reflect upon which of these two characters we have been. There is no halfway between them. It is either one or the other, and it is a choice we each must make for ourselves in privacy, even if the choice has public consequences. Despite the very different last chapters of our respective stories, I am proud of the choice I have made. Are you?
Respectfully,
Austin Smith
