Liberty Is Fun

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan. —Ralph Waldo Emerson on Daniel Webster

Perhaps Mr. Emerson wouldn't mind if we substituted "George Mason University" or "Ms. Amy Phillips" for "Mr. Webster." In any case, the brochure arrived, looking like a piece of junk mail. The word "liberty" caught my eye, not quite looking like the word "liberty" in the usual sense of Liberty Mutual Insurance or Liberty International Underwriters (did they have one for Undertakers too?) or Liberty Corporation (yes, it really exists) or even Liberty University, run by Baptist fundamentalists. Nope. This sort of looked bona fide.

Institute for Humane Studies (George Mason University) Summer Seminars on Liberty were free, and one of them would be held not too far away from me in Boston at Simmons College. Still, did I want to drive all the way into the city for a day-long seminar without pay? Well, I could hand out American Dissident flyers. It would, after all, be interesting to see if "liberty" students and professors would prove as indifferent to them as the poets had been. Hell, I had a large pile of them.

Thus, I filled out the application and included a required essay on “liberty.” I had tons of them. Which one had I chosen? Well, always prepared and eager to test the waters of... liberty, I'd asked myself what the Institute would likely not appreciate: “Warning: The Citizen General Has Deemed the Current Academic Culture May Be Harmful to the Spirit of Democracy” (see 10/16/08 blog). Hopefully, it would at least irritate a black-robed sycophant or two.

The Institute boasted: “Advancing a freer society by supporting students, recent graduates, and academics interested in the ideas of liberty.” Yeah, tell me about it, baby. When academics held seminars on liberty, likely what they had in mind was the liberty-for-us-but-not-for-you kind. It was akin to politicians holding seminars on truth or corporate CEOs on ethics.

A month later, I received an unoriginal automaton form-rejection letter from the director of the Summer Seminars, Amy Phillips: "I'm sorry to inform you that after careful review of this year's applications, the Institute for Humane Studies Seminar Review Committee is unable to offer you one of the limited places available at our 2009 Summer Seminars. We received a record number of applications this year, and competition was extremely tight."

There I was, editor of The American Dissident, rejected for a free seminar on "liberty"! In other words, I certainly had the credentials. I examined the Institute's website and learned that “Amy enjoys musical theater, crime novels, and grammar.” Had I made a grammatical error or two on my essay? “Amy holds a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from New York University, where she was president of the Parliamentary Debaters' Union and a nationally ranked debater." So, she wasn’t even a professor. But she was still entrenched in the academic milieu, which, interestingly, had redefined “liberty” to essentially exclude free speech, vigorous debate, and criticism, especially when close to home. Was my essay thus too serious and too close for their comfort and particular brand of “liberty”? Was The American Dissident website, which I’d emphasized on my application, equally too close for their “liberty”? Of course, I’d never know because the director (i.e., Amy) would never respond to either question. Perhaps the non response was an affirmation?

The Institute’s website also indicated that each year “Amy works to make those seminars challenging and fun…” So, “liberty” now had to be made into a “fun” activity. Imagine our revolutionary patriots sitting in on one of Amy’s “fun” seminars on “liberty”! Well, I did obtain a certain degree of intellectual satisfaction questioning and challenging those who stood for anything but “liberty,” while openly claiming how much they loved it. But was it “fun”? Not really! It was often sad, depressing, and highly disappointing to witness the state of non-liberty in academe and elsewhere in America. In any case, I wrote the director an email, mirroring her “sorry” with “I'm sorry to inform you that I’m not at all surprised you’d rejected my application. After all, you certainly wouldn't want an IMPOLITE professor like me at your seminars, one apt to speak out against the herd, even the "liberty" herd.Yet “liberty” demanded such courage, as opposed to bourgeois civility, taste, and aesthetics. Oddly or perhaps not, given Orwell, George Mason University, home of the Institute, was designated by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education as one of the worst institutions of higher learning in the entire country with regards... LIBERTY. "George Mason University: Unconstitutional Policies and Suppression of Dissent" was the title of one of FIRE's web pages devoted to the subject (see www.thefire.org/index.php/case/690.html).

How could one possibly expect GMU professors and administrators to hold seminars on “liberty,” while in practice either propagating suppression of dissent or keeping their mouths shut regarding it?

Had the director even manifested the curiosity to examine the website I’d brought to her attention? After all, “liberty” demanded a certain degree of active citizen CURIOSITY. If she had actually examined it, had it disgusted her in its lack of deference to PC ideology, the university, and tenured professors and administrators at the trough? Likely, unlike most professors and students chosen to attend the summer “liberty” seminars, I actually believed in “liberty” sufficiently to fight openly for it and to manifest the courage and willingness to even RISK CAREER for it.

If the Institute were at all serious about discussing “liberty,” it would first discuss GMU’s terrible record with liberty’s regard, then seek out and invite rare professors like me who had fought for “liberty” in the university against probably the very likes of the director herself, other CEOs of the Institute, and PC Deans of the university spouting their love of “liberty.” My fear was that the director would be using the seminars to further indoctrinate and otherwise corrupt student ability to think critically and individually.

In my email, I mentioned those things and also asked whether or not selected candidates for the seminars possessed websites like mine and published journals like The American Dissident, devoted to literature, democracy, and dissidence; in other words, to liberty. I also asked whether or not the director had ever RISKED her career for “liberty,” or was she, as I fully suspected, just another contented careerist lodging at a highly authoritarian institution of purported higher learning run on the corporate model of rigid hierarchy, products to sell, clients to satisfy, and growth, growth, and ever more growth? Liberty, after all, demanded RISK, as opposed to arbitrarily defined and dictated CIVILITY. What had the director ever RISKED?

Finally, a clear choice remained for the director, host of "liberty" seminars, between ignoring my criticism and questions or engaging in vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy and… liberty. Like the director of Tufts University Experimental College, she opted for the former, as opposed to the latter. I’d also suggested she have her summer conference candidates examine The American Dissident website in the name of... liberty. But, as mentioned, she’d made her choice… and it was sure as hell not for LIBERTY.

Karen Wulf

Karen Wulf, PEN New England

Martin Espada

Depicted in the cartoon above is William Bulger, former University of Massachusetts president and State Senate president, who managed to soak the state for a record pension. He is brother to serial murderer Whitey Bulger, #2 on the FBI's Most Wanted List. Bin Laden is #1. It is likely that he not only helped his brother escape the USA, but also knew his brother was a serial killer. Hell, everyone else knew! Oddly or perhaps not, the faculty at U. Mass. were big fans of his... Billy's, that is, not Whitey's... or maybe Whitey's also.

Not so long ago (11/04/08), I did a blog on the need to radically alter the academic culture that tended to fatten the pocketbooks of obedient faculty at the expense of democracy and sent it to some 40 "out-of-control campus" (see FIRE below) University of Massachusetts English professors. Only three deigned to respond, two of whom threw ad hominems at me and told me to leave them alone, while the third said he was only interested in 16th century England. In other words, to hell with democracy at U. Mass.! Evidently, it is difficult to be surprised by professorial behavior and by that of their students, considering U. Mass. former president and the tight rapport U. Mass. presidents in general maintain with political hacks. PC is a plague on campuses across the nation and especially so at University of Massachusetts. PC has a strong inherent conservative streak in its desire to hold on to power whatever the cost, including and especially to truth and integrity. U. Mass. English professors ought to be ashamed of themselves! English Careerist-Prof-Poet Martin Espada ought to be ashamed of himself for his evident indifference to Free Speech and vigorous debate, democracy's cornerstone. I just received the following letter from FIRE. It is certainly worth posting here. In fact, it is the reason for this very blog. BTW, regarding the above cartoon, I am an alumnus of Northeastern University and wrote its alumni magazine that it should be ashamed for promoting the likes of Billy Bulger and asked it to publish the cartoon, which of course it did not. So, when it sends me the ole please-contribute-to-the NU alumni fund, I stuff an American Dissident flyer in its envelope and shoot it out. Imagine, I can't even get my ole alma mater to subscribe! It just doesn't have an extra annual $20 to do so.

Dear Dr. Slone:
Multiple First Amendment violations have rocked the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus in recent days. UMass has done nothing about the videotaped theft of and, later, the student government’s official censorship of The Minuteman, a conservative campus newspaper that mocked a student government official. Worse, last night, when a student senator offered a bill to reverse the unconstitutional censorship of The Minuteman, the Senate’s speaker had the UMass police throw him out (video of this incident is expected soon). These assaults on free speech came in the wake of last month’s disgraceful episode in which a speech by columnist Don Feder was shouted down by hecklers while UMass police officers did nothing. The many aggrieved parties on this out-of-control campus have come to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

FIRE’s full press release on this case appears below.

Sincerely,

Adam Kissel, Director, Individual Rights Defense Program
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)
601 Walnut Street, Suite 510Philadelphia, PA 19106

UMass Amherst Stands by as Student Newspaper is Stolen and Censored; Student Government Senator Ejected for Trying to Uphold First Amendment on Campus

AMHERST , Mass. , April 16, 2009—Multiple First Amendment violations have rocked the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus in recent days. UMass has done nothing about the videotaped theft of and, later, the student government’s official censorship of The Minuteman, a conservative campus newspaper that mocked a student government official. Worse, last night, when a student senator offered a bill to reverse the unconstitutional censorship of The Minuteman, the Senate’s speaker had the UMass police throw him out (video of this incident is expected soon). These assaults on free speech came in the wake of last month’s disgraceful episode in which a speech by columnist Don Feder was shouted down by hecklers while UMass police officers did nothing. The many aggrieved parties on this out-of-control campus have come to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

“The situation at UMass has spiraled out of control,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “UMass’ offenses against the Constitution are legion. So far, it has done nothing after copies of a student newspaper were stolen because the paper mocked a student government official, it has stood by while the student government unconstitutionally censored the newspaper, and it has allowed its police to be used to silence a free speech advocate.”

Mob censorship through the theft of newspapers is a recurring problem on America ’s campuses. FIRE has acquired a video recording of the most recent such newspaper theft on the campus of UMass Amherst. Shockingly, it depicts a UMass police officer idly standing by as hundreds of copies of The Minuteman are stolen out of the hands of a student intending to distribute the paper.

One of the individuals who stole the papers, shown in a photograph as standing on a stack of papers and on video as grabbing them out of the other student’s hands, has been identified to FIRE as Vanessa Snow, the leader of UMass’ Student Bridges organization, a powerful campus organization strongly supported by the UMass Amherst Student Government Association (SGA). Snow was ridiculed by name in that issue of The Minuteman.

As if the theft was not enough, The Minuteman’s mockery of Snow also resulted in official censorship. Last week, the SGA passed a resolution demanding that The Silent Majority, the student organization that publishes The Minuteman, publicly apologize to Vanessa Snow for its constitutionally protected mockery of her, or else face loss of recognition by the SGA, which would shut down both the organization and the paper. At the request of The Silent Majority, FIRE wrote to UMass Amherst Chancellor Robert C. Holub urging that the coerced speech and threat of punishment be rescinded immediately.

But the student government outdid itself last night after student senator Derek Khanna tried to place a resolution on the SGA agenda that would have rescinded the SGA’s unconstitutional decree of press censorship. SGA Senate Speaker Shaun Robinson not only refused to hear Khanna’s resolution but reportedly threw it on the floor, soon calling the police to eject Khanna from the SGA meeting after Khanna insisted that he be heard. Video of this incident is expected soon and will be posted on FIRE’s website.

“Not only has the SGA decided to unconstitutionally censor the press, it tried to do so through the unconstitutional method of coercing speech, and then it threw out the one person in the student government who was standing up strongly for Constitutional rights. It is difficult to imagine how the SGA could have more thoroughly abused the First Amendment and humiliated UMass,” said Adam Kissel, Director of FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program. “UMass Amherst and Chancellor Holub must act immediately to rein in the SGA’s outrageous behavior before it results in further embarrassment and legal liability for the university.”

UMass’ spate of free speech problems on campus began in February, when a large group of students calling itself the Coalition Against Hate posted flyers inviting people to protest at a speech by columnist Don Feder that was to be hosted by the Republican Club. In response, the UMass Police Department pressured the Republican Club into paying an additional $444.52 for extra security at the event due to the threatened protest. The club agreed to pay the money, but the organized hecklers nevertheless disrupted Feder’s speech. (Video of the disrupted event is available online.)

Having been charged extra for security that was not even effective, the Republican Club contacted FIRE for help. FIRE wrote UMass, reminding the university of the Supreme Court’s holding in a 1992 decision that “[s]peech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob.” After FIRE also published an op-ed in The Boston Globe, UMass publicly relented in a letter to the Globe. The letter announced that UMass would return the excess fee but deceptively claimed that UMass had only charged more money because of greater anticipated attendance at Feder’s lecture.

“UMass’ deceptive claim that it charged more for security only because of greater anticipated attendance fails to mention the fact that the university knew that attendance was greater only because a large number of students attended to protest and disrupt the event,” said Kissel. “A policy of charging a group for extra security when large numbers of people plan to disrupt an event will only encourage hecklers to shut down further events at UMass.”

FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals from across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of individual rights, due process, freedom of expression, academic freedom, and rights of conscience at our nation’s colleges and universities. FIRE’s efforts to preserve liberty at UMass Amherst and on campuses across America are detailed at thefire.org.

CONTACT:
Adam Kissel, Director, FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program: 215-717-3473; adam@thefire.org
Robert C. Holub, Chancellor, UMass Amherst: 413-545-2211; chancellor@umass.edu
Shaun Robinson, Speaker of the Senate, UMass Amherst SGA: 412-545-0342; sga.speaker@stuaf.umass.edu


Tell Chancellor Holub to preserve order and student rights on campus, and tell Shaun Robinson that the SGA must follow its own rules and respect the First Amendment.

Monsters without Constituencies

Colleges certainly do need to be open to the likes of Ayers and Churchill (see www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/04/02/nelson). BUT the tenured radical AAUP president Cary Nelson fails to add they also need to be open to the likes of me, who openly criticize the likes of him. He, of course, conveniently chooses to remain silent with that regard and concerning the criticism I’ve sent his way over the past couple of years. Yet silence is certainly not the reaction of true proponents of vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy! Indeed, how can debate really be vigorous at all when academic editors like Doug Lederman (InsideHigherEd.com) insist on running everything through their particular bourgeois sense of taste and aesthetics prior to publishing it?

Besides outright censoring one of my comments, Lederman took four days to publish my highly critical post on Phinney’s article on tenure. By that time, who’d even notice or read it? The fact is the Censor is alive and well in the myriad hearts of the academic Ledermans… and Nelsons. Sure, they don’t refer to themselves as censors, but rather moderators or filters. Did Nelson care about that minor censorship incident or the four-day delay? Of course, he didn’t! After all, he wanted to get his article published by Lederman! Needless to say, I denounced the censorship in an article sent to him and a handful of Chronicle of Higher Education staff. Would I ever receive a response? Experience dictates that to be highly unlikely!

Criticize the Nelsons and Ledermans, and they would remain comfortably silent. After all, the ivory tower was called the ivory tower for good reason! As long as Nelson refuses to dialogue with my ilk, his words remain empty. Sure, he’ll eagerly back causes celebres like Ayers and Churchill, but not give a damn for those who have not made the headlines. That is likely the problem with the AAUP in general. Back when I fought egregious fraud at Fitchburg State College (MA), for example, the AAUP remained silent despite my attempts to interest it. Indeed, how to interest it when some of its very members were perpetrating the fraud? Sadly, Nelson could give a hoot about the Monsters without Constituencies like me. And that is precisely why free speech and expression continue their deplorable decline in Academe (see thefire.org).

“We either must stand firm against these efforts to undermine the integrity of our educational institutions or agree that academic freedom no longer obtains [sic] in America,” notes Nelson. Nice words, but it will take a hell of a lot more than nice words! It will take the likes of Nelson to stand up for the Monsters without Constituencies, and that just ain’t gonna happen for the simple reason that career and money will always be at stake, and the academic Nelsons will always choose to make that Faustian Pact.

By the way, Nelson needs to ask himself what “accomplished” has really come to mean in Academe. Does it mean “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson) and “let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine” (Thoreau)? Of course, it doesn’t! What it means is being particularly agile at turning a blind eye whenever that may help ones career, that is, to become an integral machine cog. It means pleasing ones colleagues and the corporate university, by not speaking the “rude truth.” The question, of course, remains: how does an “unrepentant radical” become an “accomplished” academic of the collegial variety?

Kevin Larimer

There is little need for literary censors these days. The writers have learnt to do a proficient job of censoring themselves.
—Ma Jian

"Daring to stand alone" is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. The independence of the writer and the artist is eaten away by vague economic forces, and at the same time it is undermined by those who should be its defenders.
—George Orwell

This morning I was pissed off, well, slightly. It was yet another gloomy, overcast, and cold New England day. On the floor by the front door lay a copy of the latest issue of Poets & Writers magazine. After microwaving a cup of yesterday’s coffee, I picked the magazine up, brought it into the tiny alcove where I dwelled, put on my glasses, checked the mail ticker on the cover, and discovered it was addressed to Jeanne. What pissed me off was that I’d mentioned P&W’s URL to her several weeks before, suggesting she look through the classifieds, find a couple of pertinent ones, then send out a chapter or two of her unfinished novel. She rarely ever sent her writing out. So, what pissed me off was that she bought a subscription, instead of simply consulting the online version. In other words, because of me, P&W had another subscriber and P&W was as established order business as it got.

An article, listed on the front page, attracted my attention and inspired this blog entry: “Nerd Alert: Where Are All the Badly Behaved Writers” by Amy Shearn. Immediately aftr reading that title, I thought, hell, I was a “badly behaved" writer and was hardly hiding out! But for Shearn—proud, self-professed nerd woman—"badly behaved" did not indicate the fury, the anger felt and incorporated into the writing provoked by the intellectual corruption and cowardice inherent in so many citizen-writers. For her, "badly behaved" did not mean bucking the academic/literary established-order, of which she was evidently striving to become an integral part., if she hadn't already become one. For her, “badly behaved” meant booze and screwing a la Bukowski, whom she didn’t mention. Instead, she noted Mailer, Thompson, Hemingway, Burroughs and Fitzgerald, amongst others. She was proficient in the art of name dropping! What she described about herself was sad, though I assumed it wasn’t meant to be taken that way at all, but rather as a kind of witty rationalization of a very sad state of mind:

“I have a particular memory of graduate school that has come to define for me the new Life of the Writer. It involved neither drunken carousing by moonlight nor frisky bedroom escapades, but rather sitting in the computer lab alongside a few of my MFA classmates and peering down the row only to realize that our wrists were all armored in similar carpal tunnel syndrome-preventing braces. Clearly we were spending too much time in front of our keyboards. Here is the mystery I've been chewing on ever since: Why don't writers get to be barely functional, substance-abusing eccentrics anymore?”

The answer to Shearn’s question was egregiously evident: the mass of MFA writers were simply not taught, let alone encouraged, to stand up as individuals in contradiction, if need be, to their very colleagues, friends, and family. Instead, they were being taught to beggar for letters of recommendation and the favor of literary influence peddlers, which would enable them to climb the literary ladder of dubious “success” and likely take a spin on the ole tenure track. So what the hell was the big “mystery”?

To say the least, Shearn’s article was an irritant. Evidently, that wasn’t such a bad thing for if it hadn’t irritated, I wouldn’t have written this and sent it to her (mail@amyshearn.com). Few things were more satisfying for a rude-truth writer than shoving criticism under the snouts of self-vaunting established-order poets, writers, editors, academics, and artistes.

“After a while it became clear that the writers who were going to make it—the ones who were getting the grants and publications and cushy fellowships—were those who buckled down and worked hard,” wrote Shearn, “the nerds in the wrist braces who filled out paperwork with the diligence of accountants. As for me, I forced myself to stay on a prudent schedule and wrote a few hours every day before heading to my day job.”

Rather than “make it," why not instead flip burgers, drive a cab, or teach adjunct courses on Navy destroyers and, at the same time, keep ones DIGNITY as a writer and human being. DIGNITY meant not groveling, not writing for an audience, not writing to get published, not writing to make a fucking living, but writing, as Orwell once stated “because there is some lie [...]to expose.” Yet how could someone so indoctrinated like Shearn ever understand? How not to vomit upon such a shadow of a human being? When was the last time she’d ever taken a RISK, even just a RISK of upsetting or offending someone… with a good dose of truth? Perhaps, if not probably, NEVER!

How to make those like Shearn realize they were becoming, if they hadn’t already become, an integral part of the problem (i.e., the writer as co-opted entity of the Great Business Machine). While they wrote their cutesy horseshit AND got published (whoopee!), the nation continued spiraling down the toilet bowl of tie-and-jacketed corruption, censorship, professorial speech codes, multicultural inanity, war, greed, massive self-censorship and, especially, citizen worship of fame and wealth, as opposed to democracy. “It wasn't sexy, but it worked,” wrote Shearn about her writing career as a literary beaver. “My first novel was published last summer.” Yes, whoopee. And this summer, buy it for $.01 on Amazon.

Shearn probably got paid $500 or more for her innocuous article, since P&W received thousands of dollars in public grants from, amongst others, the National Endowment for the Arts (http://www.theamericandissident.org/NEA.htm). It also must have been making thousands of dollars from its classified ads. P&W was a business and its writers of the “accountant” mentality. What Shearn succeeded in doing in her article was further propagate the myth of the writer and poet as godlike and, in that sense in a most perverted way, bolstered her self. In America, self-vaunting had become far more pervasive amongst writers than truth telling. The websites of Shearn (www.amyshearn.com/checkindesk.html) and most every other writer in the country proved the point. They were as unoriginal as it got. Where were the ideas on those websites?

How to make those like Shearn realize that “so well behaved” meant a hell of a lot more than simply not boozing and not screwing. What it really had come to mean was not bucking the system. And when a nation’s mob of writers chose not to buck the system, then that nation was surely in trouble. “This carefree denial of the meaningful role of an artist in society is a blight that inflicts great numbers of China's unofficial cultural elite,” had noted writer Ma Jian. Well, the same goes for America’s cultural elite, official or unofficial.

In an effort to rationalize her lame behavior as writer-nerd, Shearn quoted Cornell University creative writing professor J. Robert Lennon: “It's getting harder to make a living writing, so many of us now have jobs teaching, and you can't go around getting drunk if you're trying to get tenure.”

Of course, what Lennon should have written, in a much more honest vein, was "you can't go around speaking truth if you're trying to get tenure." But that would have implicated him as someone not encouraging freedom of expression. Lennon was likely making $100,000 or more per year teaching students that acquiring proper bourgeois tastes and manifesting proper bourgeois behavior were far more important than, to paraphrase Emerson, going upright and vital, and speaking the rude truth in all ways, especially with regards Cornell, the creative writing department, and its cocooned professors. Evidently, if Lennon had followed Emerson's advice and been a really good role model to students, he wouldn’t be feeding so nicely at Cornell or at any other institution of higher education, where truth telling was the last thing a professor, tenured or not, would be apt to do. Unsurprisingly, the others Shearn had interviewed concurred with Lennon. “I basically work four jobs.... There's little time for me to indulge in any­thing rehabworthy," noted Ed Park, editor of Believer. What crap! If he had had any guts, Park would have rather said “indulge in anything truth telling.” Let him at least stand up and declare his cowardice!

"I think that the shrinking opportuni­ties for publishing—print publishing, I mean—have something to do with the new, super fit, goody-goodness of writers,” suggested Uni­versity of California (Santa Cruz) professor/writer Noria Jablonski. “Unless we are the especially attractive author of ‘Special Topics in a Heartbreaking Work of White Teeth,’ we need to become adept at marketing and self-promotion (writing articles such as this one, and saying 'Yes, feel free to quote me' in articles such as this one)."

Again, how not to barf? “We abide by deadlines and focus on self-promotion,” concurred Kate Torgovnick, author of 'Cheer! Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders'. No, I didn’t make that title up! Clearly, two kinds of writers existed: the generally safe established-order types accorded public monies and prizes and given voice in articles like Shearn’s and those against the established-order and normally not given voice or money. The latter, of course, existed as a tiny minority. They would never achieve accountant-like “success” with their writing because they chose, unlike Shearn, to “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson) and indeed to let our lives “be a counterfriction to stop the machine” (Thoreau).

Shearn summed herself up quite accurately, quite deplorably. After all, the article was really about her and her generation of bourgeois-kowtow writers. It was an unabashed confession in the same light as the coward who always dismisses herself by openly, if not eagerly, declaring she's a coward, as if somehow that excused her cowardice. “I’m a nerd, and thus easy to work with. I re­spect authority. I aim to please. I fol­low rules. I don't drink to excess—not even coffee. I can be trusted to behave, if at times awkwardly, at least never salaciously in public, which is a salient new requirement of the writer. My personal life is pleasant but probably boring to the outsider, and (thank­fully, for me) in today's literary climate no one cares very much either way.”

Again, how not to spit in the face of this MFA product! “These are lean times, for literature and everything else,” noted Shearn. “The public isn't interested, and no one has money to throw around. And thus we writers are pretty much left alone to the eerie light of our computer screens, to our too-many commitments, to our fin­gers tingling with the friendly hum of tendinitis.”

Yet clearly these were not "lean times" at all for Poets & Writers magazine, the recipient of its $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize, or for the MacArthur $500,000 poet grant recipients, or for the MFA professor-writers with their $50,000-$100,000 salaries and life-time job security, or for the NEA poet and publication grant recipients, or for the Pinskys, Snyders, Angelous, and Giovannis with their $100,000+ salaries and $10,000+ speaking fees, or for Poetry magazine with its $175 million endowment, or for the censoring Academy of American Poets (www.theamericandissident.org/AcademyAmericanPoets.htm). They were only “lean times” for those few of us who dared go against the grain that Shearn had so willingly been sucked into. Shearn was nothing more than another Good-Housekeeping marm with a pen. Sure, she possessed an MFA, three glowing letters of recommendation, and was cutesy, witty, and in-vogue nerdy and even published in Poets & Writers, but she was a failure as a writer.

Finally, the title for this essay was inspired by Ma Jian’s observation that under Mao’s rule, intellectuals had been branded “The Stinking Ninth”—the last and the worst category of class enemy. In America, intellectuals (writers et al) tended to be quite the opposite, that is, humble friends of the ruling class, thus The Fragrant Ninth.

The Education of Oronte Chum or How to Feed at the Academic Trough

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and will always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.
—Eugene O’Neill

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty helps us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.
—Edmund Burke

The cartoon above was inspired by a minor encounter with a minor academic, John Griswald, on InsideHigherEd.com, which I received via email several times per week. Upon one occasion, I was actually censored by IHE for a comment I’d made on a rather lame poem by Laurence Musgrove, associate professor of English at Saint Xavier University, in Chicago:

Syllabus

On the first page just after the required novels

And before the list of learning outcomes

I’d paste a photo of me from ‘73

Scraggly hair and wire-rimmed glasses

And then torn from my long gone journal

Some half poem or worry on the day

So they might see me and not me

Who could be their dad or worse

With these handouts and so much to read

How jealous I am I am almost crying

How much I love them.

My commentary was the following. Sure, I suppose, I could have been politer, more bourgeois in tone, more collegial, as they liked to say, but should the comment have been censored in a democracy? You decide.

“Why publish such a lame poem? Well, it is indicative of the general state of professors in higher education today, where few have the courage to openly question and challenge the various hands that feed and otherwise fatten them into submissiveness. Democracy is at stake in America today, so let's write a poem about the syllabus! For poems et al decrying the state of higher ed that Inside Higher Ed would likely never publish, see www.theamericandissident.org. Vigorous debate is the cornerstone of democracy... but not in higher ed, where speech codes, collegiality, and cutesy wit rule!”

In any case, I’d since written perhaps harsher comments, which were not censored. Perhaps my email to the editor in protest of his censorship actually served to sensitize him to the proliferation and harmful effects of censorship in Academe vis-à-vis Democracy. Apropos, in the ivory tower, the censor was not referred to as a censor, but rather as a moderator.

In actuality, my grievance was really not with Griswold, but rather with self-proclaimed tenured radical Cary Nelson, president of the established-order Association of American University Professors. Griswold had written a hagiographic piece, “Cary Nelson, Provocateur.” Thus, I challenged him on it. Also, I mentioned the incident of censorship to him. He was of course, as a pup at the InsideHigherEd trough, entirely indifferent to it and did not respond with its regard.

Was Griswold’s vignette (see www.insidehighered.com/blogs/the_education_of_oronte_churm/cary_nelson_provocateur)
an example of what “provocative” or “provocateur” had come to mean in Academe? If so, the corporate co-optation of the University must surely have become a fait accompli, instead of simply in progress. The castration of terms like “provocative” and “radical” served that co-optation well as an integral part of the rationalization process of far too many Academics.

Regarding Nelson, the question, of course, remained and, of course, was not raised: how did a radical become a tenured, bourgeois, faculty cocktail-party attending president of the established-order Association of American University Professors? Kowtowing ones way up the ladder was how it was normally done in Academe, while truth telling was the normal way straight out the freakin’ door… or rather out the window on to the ledge of chronic unemployment. Did Cary Nelson possess some secret formula to do it otherwise? If so, why hadn’t Griswald even posed the question?

Nelson’s website, Modern American Poetry, was anything but radical or even remotely “provocative,” or even at all necessary. Well, it did have a Soviet-Union looking sketch of a worker holding a sledgehammer on it (www.english.illinois.edu/maps/), but how did that make it different in substance? Nevertheless, I had to give Nelson kudos for being somewhat unusual in academe for his being somewhat open to criticism; he’d actually posted the satirical cartoon I’d done on him on his webpage (see www.cary-nelson.org/nelson/cartoon.html). Just the same, his was really but a rehash of Academe’s canon. Where was the hardcore questioning and challenging of that largely bourgeois canon? How did twisted thinking (discoursing in oxymorons, castration of vocabulary et al) become so seemingly prevalent (the norm!) in Academe? Now, that would have made a great subject for a doctoral thesis! If I hadn’t already done mine, I’d get to work on it right away.

Finally, Griswald aka Churm, scribbler of the dubious Nelson tribute, needed to ask himself how his education (i.e., the Education of Oronte Churm) had failed him so royally. How had it succeeded in blocking the natural flow of his intellect, placed it into a state of paradigmatic paralysis, where politeness and collegiality, not to mention obsequiousness, hagiography, and rampant self-vaunting, were far more pertinent than truth telling, and indeed rendered his intellect utterly incapable of raising the simple—though truth unearthing—questions and points underscored here? The quip and silence were academe’s favorite rhetorical weapons of choice for dealing with uncomfortable truth jams. Perhaps this time, Griswald would simply choose silence.

BTW, Griswald actually prefaced his Churm blog with the above quote by Edmund Burke. It was, at least for me, difficult to comprehend professor/writers like him... and so many there were! Was his simply a matter of some deeply unconscious inability to perceive reality? Clearly, Griswald was not into the "wrestling" Burke rightfully praised; he rejected it outright. For him, "our antagonist" was not our "helper" at all, but rather someone to be ignored and buried. If he really agreed with Burke, he would not have eschewed "wrestling" (i.e., vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy) with me. Granted, he did respond, regarding this blog entry, though not in the comment area. Nevertheless, his brief email was hardly evidence at all of a desire to "wrestle": "Thank you! Where do you teach, Tod?"

Now, why did he wish to know where I taught? Did he want to contact the deans in the hope of getting me ousted for un-business-like (i.e., pro-democracy) behavior? Why else would he want to know? Again, it was difficult to understand such professor/writers.

Nikki Giovanni

It is an easy thing for so-dubbed “internationally acclaimed writers” like Soyinka, Gordimer, and Coetzee, to decry the incarceration of writers abroad, but a very difficult one for them to decry the inherent corruption of the diverse hands feeding them cash, prizes and accolades here in the USA.
—P. Maudit

Dear Pen Staff (Michael Roberts, Executive Director; M. Mark, Editor Pen America; Caro Llewellyn, PEN World Voices Festival Director; Stacy Leigh, Readers & Writers and Open Book Director; Anna Kushner, Freedom to Write Coordinator; Sarah Hoffman, Freedom to Write Associate; David Haglund, Managing Editor, PEN America; Alena Graedon, Executive Assistant; Nick Burd, Literary Awards Program Manager; Linda Morgan, Development Director; Larry Siems, Freedom to Write and International Programs Director; Stefanie Simons, Readers & Writers Associate; Jackson Taylor, Prison Writing Program Director; Elizabeth Weinstein, Public Programs Associate; Michael Welch, Planning and Finance Director):

Having just read an article by Chinese dissident Ma Jian, I thought of you and decided to write in the hope that perhaps one of you would actually respond… and not simply in the polite bureaucratic sense, as in an out of office autoreply. [Of course, not one of them would ever respond!]

“There is little need for literary censors these days,” noted Ma Jian, regarding China. “The writers have learnt to do a proficient job of censoring themselves.” With that regard, how not to think of America and her proficient self-censoring poets and writers? Why did PEN America seem to avoid that egregious reality? By pointing almost always to injustice abroad, it seemed to be acting as a propaganda arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It possessed a Freedom to Write and International Programs Director, but not a Freedom to Write and National Programs Director.

Last August, I wrote Pen New England, which chose not to respond. In vain, I’d brought to its attention the fact that here in Massachusetts, as a highly critical dissident author and publisher, I had been ostracized and was being punished. The Concord Cultural Council, for example, enacted—because of me—a new provision excluding from public funding any proposal it subjectively deemed to be of a “political nature.” The Massachusetts Cultural Council simply refused to respond to my questions. For example, why did it fund Agni, which was published by Boston University, a private institution with over one-billion dollars in its endowment fund, while refusing to accord any monies at all to The American Dissident, the journal I publish?

Also, in America, as I’m sure PEN was aware, writers could indeed be arrested and incarcerated. For example, I was arrested and incarcerated in Concord for a day, yet all I'd done was speak freely (www.theamericandissident.org/WaldenPondStateReservation.htm). Surely, other American writers, not of the "internationaly acclaimed" variety, had much more serious tales to divulge. Sadly, Pen of New England didn’t seem to give a damn about mine. What about PEN America?

On another—though really always the same—matter, as a rare dissident poet at the Festival International de la Poesie de Trois-Rivieres (Quebec) in 2001, I was highly critical of that festival’s management and had not been invited back since. Management oddly, or perhaps not, prohibited debate during the festival, while invited poets, both Canadian and international, lamely acquiesced. In the context of its Pen segment, I was even invited as a known dissident to read a translation of a Kenule Saro-Wiwa poem I’d prepared. Needless to say, I’d end up sending a complaint to Pen Quebec, which simply did not respond. In 2004, I mentioned this to Pen America, which responded with hollow empathy: “In general, we at the PEN America Center have no involvment [sic] with events that take place in Canada. It sounds like your experience has been unfortuanate [sic].”

I’d also asked how I might become a PEN member, so that I could help bring to light the rampant, though often subtle, censorship existent in America, thanks to its army of obsequious writers, academics, and other luminaries. PEN responded thusly: “Regrading [sic] your query about joining PEN, currently membership is by nomination (either internal or external) and is entirely voluntary.” Well, that didn't sound very democratic at all.

Being a harsh critic of poets, writers, editors and academics in America, I now found myself unable to find full-time employment as a professor of English. When employed at American colleges and universities, I tended to “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson). For that, I now found myself at the end of the line. On another note, the Academy of American Poets, sponsor of National Poetry Month, censored and banned me from participating in its forums a year and a half ago. With that regard, I’d contacted each of its tenured-professor chancellors, each of whom evidently favored censorship (www.theamericandissident.org/AcademyAmericanPoets.htm). More recently, InsideHigherEd.com censored my comments.

Finally, Ma Jian wrote: “A savvy young Chinese writer who spoke in London recently was asked about his views on the Tiananmen massacre. He said with a self-satisfied smirk that he was asleep in bed when it took place, and that he never joined the marches because he found them exhausting. There is a word in Chinese that describes this attitude: xiaosa. It means imperturbable, detached, nonchalant. This carefree denial of the meaningful role of an artist in society is a blight that inflicts great numbers of China's unofficial cultural elite.”

Again, how not to think of America and her OFFICIAL cultural elite (e.g., multimillionaire Toni Morrison), funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and promoted by, amongst others, the Library of Congress and Academy of American Poets? Hopefully, Ma Jian would become aware of the hypocrisy here in America before some American university ended up purchasing his soul. Indeed, American universites were quite adept at the art of soul purchasing. Think of Beatniks Ginsberg and Snyder, as well as dissident foreigners Yevtushenko, Wole Soyinka, and Dennis Brutis. As for Nikki Giovanni, another PEN-favored writer, she made a blatantly racist statement, though of PC variety, that “Black students will inevitably run into some white classmates who are troubling because they often say stupid things, ask stupid questions and expect an answer.” I challenged her on it. She remained silent.