DICKINSON PSYCH PROFESSOR DENIED TENURE
"FLARF" CITED AS REASON
It sounds like some fake news story I'd write for a laugh, but unfortunately, this is all too real.
Last month, during his tenure review at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, cognitive psychologist and Assistant Professor of Psychology Richard Abrams was denied tenure. The basis for denial as it appeared in the dean's summary was that the English department, specifically the chair, Carol Ann Johnston, and the poet-in-residence, Adrienne Su: "expressed the opinion that you have been ... advancing the interests of Flarf over other poetry initiatives at the College."
Apparently, tenure can be blocked by departments completely unrelated to your own for reasons having to do with advancement of a particular art movement.
Abrams curated the Genessee Pomfret Reading Series, which, while it did host The Flarflist Collective, also brought out Brian Kim Stefans, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Kirsten Kaschock, CA Conrad, Frank Sherlock, Betsy Wheeler, Dorothea Lasky, Laura Solomon, Sandra Miller, Ben Doyle, Dana Ward, and the Dusie Collective--none of them related to flarf in any way. During the same two-year period, the English department brought a single poet, Rita Dove.
Abrams is a popular teacher (he gets consistently glowing ratings on ratemyprofessor.com), and given that his department is Psychology, it is astounding that the opinions of anyone in the English department had any bearing on a decision regarding tenure.
But Abrams' series was noticed in a way that not much else, reading-wise, at this college had been; as Ron Silliman noted on his blog, "Carlisle is not necessarily where you’d expect the best big poetry event of the fall to occur. But there you have it. On Saturday, the Flarf & Dusie collectives will kick out the jams big time at Dickinson College."
It's tough to say whether Johnston or Su actively blocked Abrams' tenure as part of a turf war, or if they see flarf as a genuinely threatening presence. Perhaps a little of both.
Whatever the case, a very popular professor with the strongest record of scholarship and research in the Psych department was literally denied tenure, at least according to the dean's summary, on the grounds of "advancing flarf" to the apparent displeasure of the English department. It would be hilarious if it wasn't true, if it didn't involve someone's livelihood and academic future.
As long as Carol Ann Johnston, chair, and visiting poet Adrienne Su remain in the English department, Dickinson College can rest reasonably assured that poetry won't darken their doors much in the future.
posted by Gary @ 6:07 AM
29 comments
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29 Comments:
This is another bit of shocking news on a day that's had several bits for me already (nothing about me, but about others).
But I'm wondering (without downplaying the seriousness of this situation) if there are key missing pieces of information here. I've never once heard of members of one department having the right to decide who gets tenure in another department. Departments usually defend their turf very vigorously from any inroads even remotely like this. What I mean is, there's a missing piece to the bureaucratic power loop here--did his own department dislike him too? If they wrote in support of his becoming tenured, wouldn't they be furious if another department tried to derail him? Or could it be that there are several other types of unmentioned power games going on? Peer review committees, tenure boards, boards of directors? How is the Dean in question in league with these other players?
What I'm saying, I guess, is that there have to be more bureaucratic finks in this situation than have yet been identified. I don't expect that there's any way outsiders could know who they were--bureaucratic finks usually operate under cover of secrecy. In any case this situation is not simply disturbing. It's also gross.
Yeah, it seems very odd. But I would be interested in finding out what happened. Where did you hear about this?
It reminds me a bit of Catherine Taylor's situation in Ohio, where she was pushed out for being too radical in her editorship of New Ohio Review.
I'm going to take Power Games for $200.
I heard about it from Abrams.
I had heard that this was possibly going to be an issue a while ago, through someone else, who was writing a letter defending the series to the department.
There'll be more about this, in a more public space, from Abrams himself in the next few weeks.
I'm curious to hear more of the story, myself, though the flarf citation from the dean leads me to believe the issues are in part aesthetic and in part turf-oriented.
Abrams also teaches poetry seminars--and when the Flarf Collective were there visited one, where the class was invited to ask questions about our work, including our intentions, how we felt about mining certain subject matter, about plagiarizing or collage as a kind of artform, and so on.
Anyway, there should be more about this in a couple of weeks.
Also, I don't know Richard, but somebody you know must, and at least as you're describing it here, if he's still interested in keeping the job after all this he should at least consult with a lawyer. Probably he's already doing that if he really wants to stay.
In fact there's one university I know of where faculty members sue for tenure almost regularly, or at least there have been quite a few cases.
I'll take Call A Lawyer for $400.
I agree with Mark, this doesn't make much sense if you know how academia usually works. I can't imagine psychologists (who see themselves as scientists!)caring much about warring movements in poetry. Unless... they thought Abrams spent too much time on poetry and thereby his research suffered, but they would have thought that whether he wrote flarf or Shakespearean sonnets. And departments are so territorial that it's much more likely that, when they learned English was trying to get him kicked out, they would have clung to him that much more closely.
Also--may I just say how sick and tired I am of such pointless antagonisms from all sides of the poetry world? This is beginning to remind me of the East Coast/West Coast rivalry in hip hop--when rappers began to believe their own rhetoric and the fictional personas they constructed for their tracks, and then people ended up dying in the real world. If this story is at all true, to get somebody fired because their aesthetic threatened your own is not so different. And this applies to ALL sides, may I add.
Again, I don't doubt that this is a much more complicated matter than it would seem. And although I'm just guessing, it seems reasonable to say that Abrams is more popular with his students than with other faculty in his department.
The Flarflist Collective read at Dickinson in an event that also featured the Dusie Collective. So when "advancing flarf" to the displeasure of the English department is singled out in the dean's summary, one either has to assume that the English department just assumes Dusie is flarf or flarf-related, or that the issue here is, in part, flarf.
And, again, while I honestly believe there are many factors at play here, the very fact that advancing an art movement was included among the reasons for tenure denial, suggests a rather dismal prospect for academic freedom at the college.
"the very fact that advancing an art movement was included among the reasons for tenure denial"
But was it really? I really want to know more details about this, but it just makes no sense at all. Chiefly, mentioning an art movement unrelated to the professor's academic specialty as reason to deny him tenure is sure-fire basis for an appeal. As far as I know, tenure denials are reviewed by an institution's lawyers to vet them for exactly that kind of thing. I mean, in this case both the dean and the lawyers would have had to be utterly senile to let that go out as a reason.
Furthermore--tenure decisions go in stages. First the department decides, with no input from the dean. Again, I cannot imagine Flarf as having figured in the department's decision; and, if the department gave a positive decision on the tenure, to have the dean overrule them based on a literary matter unrelated to the prof's specialty is patently absurd.
Which is not to say that absurd things do not happen, but still. I really wouldn't panic about academic freedom, etc., until I knew more of the facts of the case.
Hi Andrei,
I understand your disbelief. Here is what Professor Abrams sent to me from the dean's summary:
"...they [the English department; specifically the chair, Carol Ann Johnston, and the poet in residence, Adrienne Su] expressed the opinion that you have been inappropriately aggressive in advancing the interests of Flarf over other poetry initiatives at the College...Overall, your efforts to persuade other professors to collaborate with you on such events as Flarf poetry readings were characterized as aggressive and ultimately unwelcome."
Professor Abrams then went on to explain: "These charges were the basis for the College's claim that I had not met the tenure criteria for service to the College; i.e., that the 'aggressiveness' cited above negated the service value of my curatorship of the Genessee Pomfret Reading Series."
I just did a search on the Genessee Pomfret Reading Series, by the way, and saw that the English Department leads off their reading series Web site with the statement: "English @ Dickinson sponsors the following reading series. The Dickinson Department of English is not affiliated with the Genessee Pomfret Reading Series."
Wow. I can see how they tried to cover their asses ("negated the service value," etc.) But still. I guess Dickinson is a small college, and requirements may be different, and more personal, than what is needed for tenure at a research university. I have a friend who teaches at such a small college, and she actually thinks she has to go out to the local pub with the rest of the junior faculty every Friday night, or else it will hurt her professionally. Sounds like hell to me. But would such a silly "service to the College" criterion be enough to overrule a department's positive recommendation? Not to mention that the Dean's summary mentions the "opinion" of English department members. Are "opinions" enough? Was the case investigated objectively? What does "aggressiveness" mean? Was he forcing people to flarf at the point of a gun?
I can't help but feel that, if the department is on his side, an appeal would be successful. Unless, of course, the chair of the English department is married to the dean or something.
To change the subject--Gary, did you get the tiny poem I emailed you a month ago or so?
What a shame that an interest in poetry could be detrimental to anyone's career. Also, I agree that poets and poetry readers fighting amongst each other is ridiculous, there are too many interesting niches out there and not enough readers as it is. Why stir up antagonism? It seems like the expression of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Gary, those details do help. And if he was teaching poetry seminars, that could mean it was the kind of small college where people get hired in one specialty but have to teach in others, in which case those other departments would conceivably have more of a say, although I doubt a huge one.
But in making the problem very specifically in the area of service, I agree with Andrei that Abrams has pretty good grounds to sue. Was he told, earlier on, in official documents, to stop running the series? If not then he has very strong grounds for overruling the decision.
Tne English department website should read: "The Dickinson Department of English is not affiliated with the concept of literature in any way."
Thanks for this breakdown, Gary.
From what you’ve posted, I would say the message Dickinson College is sending is, “If you want to be a poet, you have to be in our English Department; you can’t be letting a Psychology Professor turn you into a writer.” Which is to say, Abrams is a victim of the poetry industrial complex.
The fact that Abrams is a champion of flarf is secondary. The fact that it is listed as a primary reason for his denial of tenure feels like an attempt to shy away from the fact that Dickinson doesn’t want its future poets crediting the wrong department for their success.
I’ll take Putting the Symptom Ahead of the Disease for $600.
I will happily publish all comments posted here, with the exception of those made anonymously.
To the person who just attempted to post your comment anonymously, your reasons for doing so
"Having been a part of an academic community for many years (hence my publishing this anonymously)"
would seem to underscore nothing more than that you yourself do not have much faith in freedom of speech in academia.
If you do have faith, please feel free to repost your comment under your own name, and I will go ahead and publish it.
wow. as an asian american poet AND participant in boyd's reading series (but not the flarf festival), i'm really really stunned by this. i always want to support as-am artists, regardless their aesthetics, and i of course am always on the side of experimentation and adventurousness in poetry.
if it is the case that adrienne su blocked abrams's tenure process, it would just further expose how two-faced a liberalist brand of celebrating difference (ie multiculturalism) truly is. i will appreciate my differences but not yours, or something like that. or your differences have to be intelligible to me as a sanctioned difference and then i can appreciate it. i'm really hoping she wasn't involved or that it was the dean of the english department, but it doesn't seem that way. aaargh.
i don't see what is so threatening about flarf, anyway?? it's a great idea, something that energizes writing. it's a forward and onwards. we need to have more things like that in the world.
and i'm trying to think through all this and am also an academic and writer and putting my name on this comment, and think this is a very important discussion to have publicly.
Have been following all this with alarm and interest, and am as shocked as everyone else. I wanted to address one aspect of what Oscar says, that "The fact that Abrams is a champion of flarf is secondary." I really suspect that it is absolutely primary here. It seems to be much more than a question of departmental initiative or pedagogical boundaries. Nobody feels departmentally threatened by a psychology professor who brings Jorie Graham or John Ashbery or even Alice Notely. I suspect there's a distinct level of fear and apprehension involved. Interestingly, flarf to them is repeatedly underlined as a "group" and a "movement". Their choice of these terms, in connection to the current political climate, is illuminating: "Your connection with the group . . ." "Your agressive promotion of a movement over others . . ." Here, replace "group" with the word "cell". (I'm actually not being entirely facetious here). Thus, the real question for me at this point is: just what precisely do they (the faculty members) think flarf actually is?
Also, and by the way, if you cite your "having been in academia for a long time" as reason why you have to post something anaonymously: you do a disservice to any and all traditions of intellectual vigor and freedom which we have left. You need to find a new job.
Has anyone tried to contact either of the "anti-flarfists" named to see if they have a side of the story? They might reply, in order to protect their academic credibility ... if desired, I could try contacting them from my position of Humanities Bibliographer at UC Riverside and to frame this as a collection development issue, e.g. is Dickinson suggesting that flarf does not belong in academic collections? Do people think that's a bad idea, or??
This is completely terrible, and the people involved deserve to be publicly shamed -- but I don't find it terribly surprising. I am likewise not shocked that a non-tenured academic is afraid to discuss this in public, whatever side they're on: I'm sure there are people reading this who would similarly deny tenure, if they were placed in a position to do so, to, say, Adrienne Su. We'd probably be smart enough to not to call this behavior "involvement with terrorism" in an official university document, but that's what we're thinking.
I do notice that Professor Su runs "a guerrilla poetry campaign" herself...
This is another case of academic types with little to no engagement in the medium in which they are supposed experts make wagon-circles to avoid being exposed as the frauds and hypocrites that they really are. There is no man behind the curtain, just a trembling chihuahua with a Dell laptop.
I'm scratching my head over several aspects of this-- like why was a professor of psychology curating a poetry reading series to begin with? It sounds like his professorship was more involved with the English dept. than his job title alone would suggest-- so that the involvement of the English dept. in the tenure decision becomes a little more understandable.
Nonetheless, academia power games are vicious, and I think Nicholas M's. point is well-taken-- the English dept's language really does suggest that they view, or are trying to portray, flarf as some kind of cultlike entity. The truth is out there, but fear is entirely inside your head.
This announcement might explain why Professor Abrams had the flarf crew out to Dickinson in the first place.
Here's the complete listing for the Genessee Pomfret reading series:
9/30/06
Katie Degentesh
Drew Gardner
Nada Gordon
Mel Nichols
Michael Magee
Rod Smith
Gary Sullivan
Dana Ward
Scott Glassman
Marci Nelligan
film by Brandon Downing
11/11/06
Laura Solomon
Karla Kelsey
Kirsten Kaschock
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Betsy Wheeler
2/6/07
Brian Kim Stefans
Eric Baus
4/14/07
CA Conrad
Dorothea Lasky
Frank Sherlock
4/20/07
Eugene Ostashevsky (postponed)
9/21/07
Ben Doyle
Sandra Miller
10/2/07
Adam Fieled
Jessica Lee White
Christopher Goodrich
11/13/07
Erinn Batykefer
K.A. Hays
(the Stadler Fellows at Bucknell)
10/20/07
exhibition of broadsides, book art, and video by Brandon Downing and Anne Boyer and the Philadelphia-based book artist Elysa Voshell
this is frightening, especially, as many thought Dickinson was apparently hip and open to new poetries... and where it was at! how can providing a new school of poetry or poetries...or really just a great reading cause such a ruckus?
I agree with Oscar. I is, in fact, threatening, in a small town and in a small non-experimental college, to have someone outside the English Department running a "literature" reading series. That's what the English department communicaion seems to reflect.
But if it is off campus, completely off the college dime, there's nothing to be done. It is like bad community theatre as a hobby of a math prof. The mistake was asking other departments to share sponsorhip.
It is pretty clear when the terms of the discussion are changed: a psychology assistant professor teaches a freshman course on creationism; these open-topic courses are generally to get the professorate to teach gate-keeping "do the students know how to write a paper" courses. Said prof then brings creationists onto campus for a lecture series. The prof's own department, the religion dept., campus ministries, and entire sciences division refuse to fund. The prof gets some funding from the history department that the religion historians feel they should have gotten.
Ok, small town, small school, everybody's a little miffed if tenure is not involved. But make this a permanent issue by granting tenure?
Regarding tenure, I know from
experience that one can be denied
tenure for any reason.
As to a psychology professor having
an active interest in variant
poetries, that seems to me what
should be expected of a person
interested in the workings of the
human mind.
As one of Prof Abram's researchers in the Psychology department, I attended a couple of the poetry readings that he had arranged.
Although I must admit that I know little of flarf or other poetry, I can say that Prof Abrams was focussed on his research and teaching duties within his department, and do not believe that his involvement with poetry distracted from those activities.
If Professor Abrams was in conflict with the members of his own department, it would be my guess that the conflict was methodological in nature: Abrams is, if memory serves, the only Cognitive Psychologist in the department.
I personally found Professor Abrams to be the most(debatably only) effective teacher I had while majoring in Psychology, and this situation, along with my dissatisfaction with the education I was receiving from the other professors in the department were the two of the factors in my decision to
drop the major in favor of Philosophy.
I find it strange that a poet-in-residence is able to give input on a tenure review. Here at UMT only tenured faculty can review faculty for tenure.
Tenure cases are very complicated matters, involving reams of documents at many levels of the college or university (department, division, provost, etc.). In addition, there are outside letters, usually confidential, which are solicited by the department chair or dean, commenting on the candidates scholarship. At a place like Dickinson, students are also probably solicited to write confidential reviews. Various committees deliberate over this information, and sometimes, as appears to be the case here, other members outside the department are consulted. Without access to all this information, it is impossible to determine what makes or breaks a tenure case. Even for the candidate, who has access to some of the information, the reasoning can completely opaque. Often, as some have suggested here, the decision is made first then the justifications are trotted out. It's easy for armchair observers or even the candidate to assign blame or find a scapegoat, but that is still guessing.
There's now a draft of a full account of this case at
http://itech.dickinson.edu/genesseepomfret/
- Richard Abrams
I am sorry. Flarf is not poetry. I was in that seminar and was taught by prof. Abrams. Flarf is straight up plagiarism. There is nothing that makes it creative. Poetry is suppose to evoke emotion, give strong visual images with words, have a motive-a purpose. I went to both the flarf collective and rita dove. The flarists were more of an performance art, which consisted of them taking famous works and putting their "corky" spin on it. Rita Dove evoked emotion. No one left her reading as many did during the flarf collective. She is a poet. She has issues to discuss in her own poetic form. I am a poetry minor and this genre has been my passion for as long as i can remember. He was denied tenure because of poetry. He was denied because he was teaching a movement that condoned plagiarism. He would teach this over real classic poetry works. He judged our flarf poetry on how it was presented not the "original content" of the "poem"--if you can even call it that. He is not well received among his students. He is snobby and one sided. If you didn't agree with him he snubbed you. He was never able to back up his reasoning for why your opinions were wrong--he taught in a manner very much that of I am right and know more than you..freshman. He is an easy teacher, that is why he is praised on ratemyprofessor.com. He never brought poetry to Dickinson. He was a phyc teacher attempting to teach a genre he knew nothing about and one that never pertained to what poetry really is. It was a failure of a class--and the flarf movement is nothing more than unoriginal individual changing or adding phrases or words of classic works and calling them their own "original" work.
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