A Post from Another Substack

A piece by current student Ellen Yang from her Substack 'New Material Girl'

As we begin to feature different content on this Substack, today we’re featuring a post from another Substack, Ellen Yang’s New Material Girl (please subscribe!), breaking down why this decision to fire 23 teachers makes zero sense for our undergraduates.

On August 21, 2024, I watched Stanford’s undergraduate Creative Writing Program implode in real time. Twenty-three lecturers, who have dedicated collective decades to their students, were “future fired” over Zoom. It’s a Silicon Valley-style purge: efficient, precise, dispassionate. In the emails that followed, Stanford officials presented it as a return to "the original spirit" of the Jones Lectureships, designed as short-term extensions for the prestigious Stegner Fellows. No long-term commitments, no frills.

I’ve spent enough time in marketing and tech to recognize this type of language and behavior. It’s the same corporate-speak that dresses up firings as “transitions” and system failures as “opportunities for growth.” In a year where the humanities are withering nationwide, Stanford is making a statement. Writing is no longer sacred. It’s just a line item.

For most people, this is just another story about the “end of the English major,” as The New Yorker called it last year. But for me, it cuts much deeper. This isn’t just about a degree, or the fact that the best professors I’ve ever had won’t return next year. This is about what writing has come to mean when survival feels precarious. At Stanford, choosing to write is a choice to live.

Stanford sells itself as a machine for excellence: It churns out the engineers who build our apps, the venture capitalists who fund them, and the writers who are supposed to give it all meaning. But it’s an ecosystem driven by scarcity: Excellence, after all, needs losers. By the time I hit sophomore year, I felt like one of them.

I came to Stanford as a Management Science and Engineering major, desperate to translate the “dream” into a career that mattered. But the more I tried to contort myself into the ideal STEM student, the less of myself I recognized. After one particularly brutal set of midterms, I found myself on Wilbur Field, crying and screaming into the night because I could no longer see the point of it all. As I wrote in my letter to Stanford about the firings, “Higher education is an incredible opportunity—to attend the best university in the world is an immeasurable privilege. I could not reconcile with either opportunity or privilege because I thought that the point of college was to grow from good to great, to fashion myself into someone worthy of those two things.”

This is not just my story. It’s the story at Stanford. We lose students to suicide and we talk about mental health in emails with attached resource lists. We build apps to monitor our sleep while staying up late to meet impossible deadlines. And we wonder why we feel empty when the whole system is designed to keep us running in place.

At my lowest point, I enrolled in a creative writing class—Michael Shewmaker’s writing workshop. I had no intention of becoming a writer, but I needed a class I might actually enjoy. Something curious happened in that room: I started to feel like a person again. Writing was not a route to greatness, but a way back to myself. Words became a tether.

By the time I wrote my 50,000-word novel draft in Tom Kealey’s class last fall, two years after I almost gave up on Stanford and my life, I knew I couldn’t go back. This act of creating—of failing on the page, revising, trying again—was everything I needed. Stanford’s machine might still run at breakneck speed, but I had found a way to pause, to breathe.

Many students have been working with the Lecturers to create petitions, write letters, and mobilize. Yet Nicholas Jenkins, the Creative Writing Program’s director, recently responded to the backlash about the firings with a tone that’s hard to miss: the shift is about restoring the original purpose of the Jones Lectureships, he says. It’s not about money; it’s about values. Stegner Fellows, those emerging writers who come to campus for two years of fellowship, need more teaching opportunities. The Jones Lectureships were never meant to be careers.

Fair enough.

But here’s the thing: values shift. As I have learned through conversations with professors like Smith and Kealey, when Eavan Boland expanded the Creative Writing Program over her 20-year tenure, she understood that creative work isn’t about timelines. You don’t replace a seasoned lecturer who has guided hundreds of students through their personal and creative crises with a short-term fellow and expect the same results. And what the decision-makers at Stanford seem to ignore is that it’s not just about the number of classes offered; it’s about who’s teaching them. As Kealey noted in his coverage of the decision, between the ten senior professors that voted to fire their junior colleagues, they have taught only a collective 13 undergraduate classes in the last year (and 19 overall—so less than 2 classes taught per professor). In fact, one professor has taught only one undergraduate class in the last three years. In that same time, ten Jones Lecturers would have taught at least 50 classes. 

Fact sheet about the Jones Lecturers and their success at Stanford, courtesy of Tom Kealey.

They are truly an unparalleled group of teachers. Fact sheet courtesy of Tom Kealey.

Lecturers like Shewmaker, Kealey, and Hutchins don’t just offer instruction—they offer a way through the darkness that defines so much of the university experience. They are the people on the front lines of the undergraduate experience. 

Stanford’s decision to phase out long-term lecturers isn’t just an administrative move. It’s a signal: this university, like so many others, values what’s measurable—output, enrollment, funding—over what’s immeasurable. It’s easier to quantify the impact of a tech startup than to measure the impact of a book that saved a student’s life. But that doesn’t make the latter any less real.

For many students, including me, writing is survival. Without it, I wouldn’t have stayed. Writing gives us permission to be human in a world that demands perfection. In classrooms led by the very lecturers Stanford is phasing out, students find solace, connection, and hope. They are given space to ask the big, uncomfortable questions without being told to hurry up and code the solution, encouraging the deep inquiry and intellectual vitality that the university is founded upon.

At a time when mental health is at crisis levels, Stanford has the opportunity to lead—not just in innovation and tech, but in nurturing the human spirit. But instead of stepping up, the university is retreating, reducing writing to a temporary appointment, a stepping stone, a luxury.

I’m here because of the humanities and the lecturers who helped me understand that I wasn’t alone, that the page could hold my fear, my anger, my hope. Without writing, I wouldn’t have found a way to keep going. And I know I’m not the only one.

Choosing to write is choosing to live. If we continue to treat the humanities as disposable, what happens to the students who need those spaces to survive? What happens to the art, the stories, the lives we save along the way?

This isn’t just about the death of the English major. It’s about the death of something much bigger—the belief that writing matters, that storytelling can heal, that art isn’t just a hobby but a lifeline. It is the death of the student. If Stanford wants to be more than just a machine, it needs to remember that living isn’t about outputs. It’s about the moments we choose to create, even when the world tells us to stop.