Janell Watson Minnesota Review

Experiment in Democracy: Virginia Tech & Carnegie Mellon University
"LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE" or PC LEADING THE INDOCTRINATED STUDENT BODY?

Janell Watson, French professor at Virginia Tech, has just replaced Jeffrey Williams, English professor at Carnegie Mellon University, as editor of The Minnesota Review, which seeks to publish “provocation,” “politically-engaged criticism,” and “committed writing.”

The foreign-language faculty at Virginia Tech and English faculty at Carnegie Mellon University were thus contacted and invited to comment on this blog (http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2010/01/blog-post.html) or via email in the name of vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy. As expected, not one of them responded. Careerism, fear of speaking out, turning a blind eye, requisite sycophancy, collegiality, indifference to democracy, and creative rationalization for such traits are sadly widespread in academe today.

Notice of this blog was also sent to the editors of the student newspapers of Tech and CM, though my experience has been that most such papers are run by student-editor sycophant shadows of their English professor advisors and equally indifferent to free speech and vigorous debate. Indeed not one of them responded.

What really irks me, as an American citizen/poet, are hypocritical literary journals boasting political engagement. Potomac and Guernica come to mind. The editor of the former, Charles Rammelkamp, noted regarding the quotes I’d sent him authored by, amongst others, Thoreau, Orwell, Havel, Emerson, Solzhenitsyn, Mandelstam, Zola, and Mary Harris Jones: “what a laundry list of tired ‘revolutionary’ quotations.” As for the editor of Guernica, Joel Whitney, he favors publishing interviews of established-order poets, including Pinsky and Collins (see cartoon at www.theamericandissident.org/AdHominem.htm).

What provoked me to submit several caustic reviews on Poets & Writers Magazine and the Pushcart Prize Anthology to The Minnesota Review was the following statement in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Paul Buhle called [The Minnesota Review] ‘the standard-bearer for dissenting views on American literature and culture,’ read by his students at Brown with ‘near-religious fervor,’ outlasting ‘nearly all of the journals of its type founded in the 1960s and 70s.’” When my reviews came back rejected with not a comment, not an iota of interest or even combative questioning and challenging from editor Janell Watson, my mind automatically began cogitating an idea for a literary cartoon. At first, I was going to depict Buhle, Watson, and outgoing-editor Jeffrey J. Williams. But when I hunted for a photo of Watson, I came across her website, which depicted Delacroix’s famous painting of Marianne, symbol of the French Revolution.

Interestingly, the painting was truncated to avoid exposing Marianne’s breasts and with Janell Watson’s name brandished upon it. So, here I thought we have a professor pairing herself with the symbol of revolution but fearful of OFFENDING (i.e., censoring female breasts). On further examination, I noticed all of the French professors in her department used the same truncated Delacroix motif. Did they have a choice?

Moreover, Virginia Tech with Stalinist-poet Nikki Giovanni (see cartoon http://www.theamericandissident.org/LitToons/Giovanni.jpg) was known for its PC-professorial brigades and indoctrination programs (see http://thefire.org/case/25). Thus, the cartoon was created. My purpose is simply to expose fraud and brandish TRUTH, as opposed to avoiding at all costs inflicting sorrow upon the spineless and easily offended. If The Minnesota Review had any courage and interest in real controversy and provocation, it would publish the cartoon. Of course, that thought is simply a pipedream.