'Dear Stanford': Letter 32

A Collection of Letters in Support of Stanford's 23 Jones Lecturers

On August 21st, 23 Creative Writing lecturers were ‘future fired’ in a meeting with Deans, Directors, and Professors that oversee the program. Writing against the firing and in support of their teachers, students’ and alums’ letters to the administration alike have received auto-replies and brief responses to their concerns. This Substack is a space for these letters. This one is by Anastasia Sotiropoulos, ‘24.

Dear Stanford,

My name is Anastasia, and I’m currently a coterminal student in journalism. I recently completed my B.A. in psychology with a creative writing minor. While it may sound dramatic to say a set of classes changed my life, they did, and I cannot underscore how different my education would’ve been without them. I am writing to express how Jones Lecturers were at the heart of them, and to upheave their roles in the program would be to upheave the program as a whole.

At a reading last winter, I shared a nonfiction piece I’d written in a Jones Lecturer’s class. It’s called “Dialectical Growth, or What It’s Called When a Tree Grows in an Odd Direction Because of an Obstruction.” A long name for a fun, short piece. In fact, it’s probably the most lighthearted thing I’ve written in four years. Since my freshman year, creative writing classes became a rare outlet to process the serious, dark, confusing — the topics I never imagined could be discussed in a classroom. Over time, I learned that the stories being shared were often the first time a writer was ever able to fully articulate a situation to themselves.

Year after year, I have been struck by the ability of Jones Lecturers to navigate discussions of identity crises, abuse, suicide, and other tragedies. For those who have been taught by one, they know that their workshops are inherently very vulnerable spaces. They begin with being thrown into a room of 14 strangers and morph into this agreement. Each time, a palpable trust forms to keep the stories shared in the space within the space, to be honest in our feedback to each other, and to push ourselves.

***

I took two classes with a Jones Lecturer who is the most real faculty I’ve met on this campus. And by that, I mean that he has shown me genuine care — care that I’ve excelled as a writer, yes, but also care that I’ve been in a place to be able to do so.

My class with him was in winter of 2022, the first year we were all back on campus post-COVID. That year, I found myself in one of the deepest depressions of my life.

As the end of the quarter neared, he was hosting mandatory coffee chats with each member of our class to check in on our final pieces. A few minutes into our meeting, I broke down crying. I was embarrassed; lecturers are not counselors,

and they shouldn’t have to be. But I know I am not alone in having had a lecturer make me feel seen as a human first and student second. Without hesitation, he shared about his own experiences with mental health. We can hear “you’re not alone” in university messaging everyday, but having it come from a faculty member you respect is deeply different.

Yes, the openness with which he approached this conversation helped my essay, which ended up placing first in that year’s undergraduate awards for nonfiction (thanks to his wisdom to scrap entire parts and try again). But, three years later, the thing I remember most about that conversation is, of course, how it made me feel. I left feeling like my health came first, but also that I wasn’t really special at all. At that time, I needed to hear that even those I aimed to impress had struggled deeply, and that my struggles, too, would pass.

As former Stegner fellows who have undergone intensive workshops themselves, they just get it. Caring about us isn’t something they need to be taught; it’s why they’re there. They get why relationships are so integral to a creative writing program because they’ve lived it on both ends. Their years of experience forging such mentorships with Stanford students is powerful, and their institutional knowledge is priceless.

When I heard news of the Jones Lecturers being “future-fired,” I was incredibly disappointed but not surprised. I took my second course with the aforementioned lecturer last year — which was amazing, inspiring, showstopping, all the things.

But at the end of the quarter, when it was time to complete our voluntary course evaluations, he extra emphasized the importance of submitting them. He told us that he didn’t want to be annoying with his nudges, but that these evaluations really were important. They mattered in a very practical way: We needed to show to the university that students actually do care about writing.

It’s like he had a feeling of what was coming, or at least a sense that some “restructuring” was about to be done. And it made me really quite sad at the time, that I needed so badly to write this course eval to show to a university that was originally founded as a liberal arts university first — before it was a leading research institution or anything — that liberal arts still have a place in 2024.

It’s about here that the argument could be made that the program still exists! New funding and all. The lecturers’ roles as we know them are only gone, introducing time caps of how long they’re able to stay in the department. However, this inherently changes the nature of the program.

With lecturers’ terms being capped at three years, students will no longer be able to forge years-long relationships spanning the length of their undergraduate

career. At a university with a $36.5 billion endowment, I find this approaching reality disheartening at best and insulting at worst. I say insulting because this program “revitalization” via short-term contracts follows lecturers’ lobbying for liveable wages. And now, the lecturers need to reapply for their own jobs — 23 outgoing lecturers left to essentially compete for two available positions.

The 2024-25 budget for Stanford to operate is 15.4 billion dollars. That is the exact same budget that the state of Hawaii is operating off of this year. It is more than the state of North Dakota is operating off of. And West Virginia. And Rhode Island, Nebraska, Wyoming, Iowa, Alaska, Oklahoma, Maine, Idaho, Vermont, New Hampshire, Montana, South Dakota, and Delaware. I think Stanford has the money to pay 23 lecturers living wages and not leave them to live in constant anxiety of when their contract will be up. — Or, rather, offer them a chance to really invest in this place beyond three years.

These changes are being attributed to honoring Wallace Stegner’s original vision of making space for new voices. I agree with this mission, and it’s why I believe the rotating Stegner Fellows’ Levinthal Tutorials are so incredible. However, this mission has been referenced in the same argument that generative AI calls for human creativity more than ever. Does the Comparative Literature Department, Communication Department, and greater English Department also need a cycling out of faculty? Is this not equating experience with stagnation?

The reality is, Stegner has not lived to see the latest AI (finally) learn how to spell “strawberry.” We don’t know what his stance would have been. What I do know is, in 2024, Creative Writing remains the most popular minor on campus, and we have many lecturers to thank for that.

Echoing the sentiments of so many, it is not too late.

Sincerely,

Anastasia Sotiropoulos

Stanford Psychology & Creative Writing ‘24, Journalism ‘25