Chant de la Sirène

ISSUE 2, Summer 2021

Poetics &

the University

in Crisis

A special thanks to the American literary academics and poets who joined forces with Chant de la Sirène to create the original webinar colloquy “Poetics & the University in Crisis” (March 3-5, 2021).

“Poetics & the University in Crisis” as an event was attended by over one-hundred faculty and artists from across the US and internationally. The colloquy’s success was due to the collaborative teamwork by members of the Organizing Collective, including:

Carla Harryman, Eastern Michigan University; Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Penn State University; Lauri Scheyer, Hunan Normal University & California State (L.A.); Susan M. Schultz, University of Hawaii; Barrett Watten, Wayne State University; Tyrone Williams, Xavier University.

This free, three-day colloquium was developed independently from any university.

These talented colleagues and friends also have offered written work to this issue, along with many of the colloquy’s contributors. I am grateful for the time, passion, and intelligent analyses of the Organizing Committee members and our colloquy participants.

—Laura Hinton, Editor

Table of Contents, Issue 2

“Hostility Within…” the Neoliberal University

Lyn Hejinian 

“Social Meaning in the Event of Poetics”                                                                                           

Abigail Child

“Inside the Image Vortex: Editing Ethics”

(and video clips)          

With photographs by Maria Damon and Abigail Child

What I Cannot Teach

Carla Harryman

“Why I Can No Longer Teach Kathy Acker: A Preface”

Tyrone Williams                                                                                 

“Mea Culpa: Pan-Africanism and Sisterhood Die Again”

Laura Hinton 

“On Being Title IX-ed For Reading that Passage from Claudia Rankine; or, I Was a White Woman on the Zoom Screen”

With Tarot Card “Tower” images by Toni Simon

Defeat—& Trans*formation

David Grundy

“A Voice from the UK: Poetry, the Student Movement and Defeat”

James McCorkle                                                                                  

“Field Notes towards Trans*formation”

Joe Harrington 

“Poetry in the Ruins; or Confessions of a Bad Academic at a Time Very Near the End of the School”

Dudgrick Bevins

“Civic Lessons”

(sound art)

David Lau

“To Pavel Arsenev—a poem”

With photographs by Abigail Child 

Adjunct Precarity: or, Pleasure & Hilarity in Poetry

Joanna Furhman

“Are We Having Fun Yet?”

(an introduction with two poetry videos)

Language, Relationships, Mental Health at Neoliberal U

Susan M. Schultz                                                                                 

“The Language of Care in (My) Neoliberal University                                                

Elise Niemand (pseudonym)

  “Love in English Lit”                                                  

Laura Hinton

“Neoliberal U’s Retro Social Order and the Feminist Outsider; or, the Mobber’s Discourse”

(audiotaped talk) 

Susan M. Schultz

“Administrative Parody No. 1; or, Goodbye Cartoonists”

“Administrative Parody No. 2; or You’ve Been Nominated!!! (N+7)”

With photographs by Susan M. Schultz

Race, Poetics & the University— A Conversation

Written & recorded discussions with 

Tyrone Williams, Duriel E. Harris, Geoffrey Jacques, Lauri Scheyer & Aldon Lynn Nielsen 

With audio-music poems by Aldon Lynn Nielsen

“All the Places We’ve Been—A Prayer for Gil Scott-Heron” 

“In a Class with Baraka”

Beyond University Walls

Susan Mohini Kane

“Rediscovering Living Art by Stepping Outside the University”

(essay with two music-audio presentations)

Charles Alexander 

“Chax Press, Poetics, & Being Outside the University in Crisis”

Dudgrick Bevins

“How to Make Our Own Textbooks” 

(multimedia art experiment)

With photographs by Susan M. Schultz and Maria Damon 

Introduction

Polarities of a Crisis / A Poetics Resisting Polarities

What is the university in crisis? Is the university in crisis when small liberal arts colleges across the country start eliminating liberal arts departments, or that some of them shut down entirely?

Is the university in crisis when the majority of American-college teaching faculty are now low-paid contingent workers who cannot make a living wage? 

Is the university in crisis when a board of regents in a state like Kansas votes to allow individual colleges to fire tenured faculty to ostensibly cut the budget? 

Is the university in crisis when at least eight institutions of US higher learning have been under investigation just the winter of 2021 alone by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), for violating faculty tenure agreements, faculty self-governance bylaws, and our long-held national standards of freedom of speech on college campuses? 

Is the university in crisis when janitors and cafeteria workers making minimum wage are terminated but upper-administrative positions multiply and their lofty salaries skyrocket? 

Is the university in crisis when the few remaining full-time tenured faculty across the US are now subject to relentless, non-transparent investigations and professional harm when unhappy students file what are often frivolous or meaningless Title IX complaints to the administration? 

Is the university in crisis when white faculty still dominate most departments, when so many faculty of color (if hired at all) are made to feel like unwanted outsiders within structurally racist, white-coded institutions?

Is the university in crisis when students no longer have access to on-campus mental-health care—counseling services that were always deemed essential to support students under psychological stress? 

When we say “the university in crisis”—part of the name of this issue of Chant de la Sirène, and also the title of the March 2021 colloquy organized by our group of six, all English faculty members from around the country—we mean a crisis of the university but also by the university. This “crisis” exists within the contemporary American university’s own structure, which is what Charles Alexander has written in his article in this issue, as he rehearses his personal-professional history of the evolution of Chax Press. 

It is also a structure that is no longer contained by American shores. It appears to be morphing and spreading abroad, thanks to the growth of neoliberal economics and the spread of an American style capitalism. It has already infected the UK’s university system, as David Grundy’s article in this issue will make clear, with damaging results.

If the university has long had a mission of offering a culturally and educationally innovative space for freedom of thought and discovery in US democracy, the university, like democracy itself, seems to be flailing. It is not living up to its grounding principles, to foster intellectual engagement, to teach critically open and new ways of thinking, to offer spaces and an atmosphere in which various fields of study can flourish and be furthered. 

*

And yet—has this version of the university ever been authentic? Perhaps it was, or has been, in some contexts. For some. Before we bemoan the current trends un-doing what we imagine has been, or could be, the university, we must remember that the American university has always been a system catering primarily to white men, mostly heterosexual men with white women as “faculty wives” to take care of their quotidian needs, while the men taught and produced scholarship. If the men were gay, they traditionally remained in the closet. 

It may have worked. For them. Kind of. And it appeared to work for the male students who followed them and inherited their positions. The men with enough wealth to attend college. 

But the university has never offered similar opportunities in the US to women and minorities. This issue will partly show, through the evidence offered, that it still does not. And as we see more women and minorities breaking through the white wealth of the cis-male symbolic façade, we simultaneously see a decline in opportunities for all. The university has always reflected the social polarities that have upheld Western cultural institutions and their false ideals for centuries based on many polarized factors: gender, race, and class. 

And as people of color and diverse genders and class backgrounds have increasingly entered the American academy as both students and professors, beginning with the post-war mid-century and those down-and-out veterans who entered college paid for by the GI bill, another phenomenon that emerged in the rear window of World War II, in this case generated at a conference in a European spa-town conference in 1949—neoliberal ideology also entered the university. Neoliberal agendas and diverse groups of college-educating citizens have been in a tug-of-war power struggle ever sense. Guess who usually wins? The polarized and conservative university structure, and those who adhere to its unofficial regulations.

Neoliberal beliefs and the resulting public-university policies (usually triggered on state-political funding levels) have been confronting the university’s growing role as the mainstay of American educational and economic opportunities for decades. Neoliberalism has tried to stop the access of higher ed as it has become made available to many more citizens. Celebrating the free flow of capital wealth, but not the actual “free flow” of ideas or social equalities in realms like education and employment, neoliberalism may have started as the germ of a post-war infection; but it keeps spreading, decade after decade, gaining power over supposedly democratic institutions. Lyn Hejinian’s fine essay in this issue describes the origins and ideological failures of neoliberalism, through her brilliant analysis of one of its key fetish terms, “freedom,” as she draws on writings from the great French linguist Emile Benveniste to do so. I will just add to her social-economic history here that “liberty” and “freedom,” as neoliberal mantras, arrived on the American side of the Atlantic decked out in cowboy hats and boots. American neoliberalism was perpetrated through media images of the 1980s US President, Ronald Reagan, chopping wood on his multimillion-dollar Santa Barbara ranch estate; and then again in the post-millennial presidency of George W. Bush riding horseback along the Texas sagebrush, or parachuting like a he-man onto a US military carrier ship in the Persian Gulf shortly after his cabinet, against most global disbelief, showed Saddam Hussein who the best bully was on the planet. 

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose for most human beings surviving global neoliberal agendas— except, of course, the uber-rich, including the US fossil-fuel companies that took over Iraq’s oil fields after the fall of Hussein, those giant corporations that steadily contribute to greenhouse gases feeding our increasingly unstable weather systems, which Joseph Harrington discusses in his essay in the issue. The new fires and killing heat waves this summer in the Northern Hemisphere continue as I write. The rich get richer; that’s the point of neoliberal ideals. And US workers cannot even get a federal law for a minimum wage raised to a mere $15 an hour. 

*

Freedom’s just another word for lack of opportunity and lack of resources for the many. And “freedom,” apparently—obviously—is not “freedom” at all, or for just about everyone else, like those students who might enroll in a public college today but can’t pay the hefty in-state tuitions that keep rising and rising. Freedom’s just another word for faculty, too, who might try to teach and challenge their students. But in an atmosphere dominated by unstated authoritarian codes that monitor personal lives, that monitor speech, that monitor classroom syllabi and book lists and even discussions, such “freedom” rings hollow.

Authoritarianism is what the neoliberal “free markets” drag along with them. Students become, to the chairs