Rutgers English Then and Now

The following letter was sent to the chair of the Hiring and Personnel Committee in the Department of English at the end of the academic year 1996-1997.

 5 May 1997

Dear -----------:

Two years ago I urged that the English department resolve to make its next six Assistant Professor appointments on the basis of literary competence -- that is, candidates whose primary commitment was to literature as an object of study.

I want to make that plea again, on the grounds that the situation I then described has now become urgent, and that we have done nothing about it in the meantime. The following considerations strike me as compelling:

1) The department is now amply staffed in every area but literary studies as such. Our list of tenured faculty includes numerous teachers of feminist ideology, queer studies, African-American literature, postcolonial writing, minority literatures, popular culture, and cultural studies.

2) Students are increasingly experiencing the situation as desperate. Undergraduates with an interest in the areas named above have no trouble finding courses: a Rutgers English major who wants to study feminist ideology or queer theory or African-American writing is well served. For students whose primary interest is in the "literary study of literature," however, there is very little to choose. With approaching retirements, the situation can only get worse.

3) Now, at a time when we have elected a new Chair, seems to me to be the perfect opportunity for a policy decision of the sort so urgently needed. There will never be a better moment for the Department to resolve that it will make no appointments in other areas until 6-8 "literary" appointments have been made.

4) The important volume Reading in an Age of Theory, edited by Bridget Lyons and just published by Rutgers University Press, will be drawing renewed national attention to the long-established association between the Rutgers English Department and "close reading" as the basis of the literary study of literature.

With the appearance of this volume, our appeal to the very brightest and most promising new PhDs with a specifically literary competence will be at a height. One or two stellar appointments in this category would make the momentum very easy to sustain. Rutgers would, in short, be known as a department out to put itself back on the map in an area in which it was until very recently recognized as one of the two or three best departments in the country.

One final consideration. We have always until now treated "219 competence" as a standard for hiring at both the junior and senior levels: roughly speaking, could a candidate, given a Donne poem and a class of Rutgers English majors, bring those students to a genuine comprehension of the poem in the course of a class period?

It is a simple measure, but one that I think we must now start using as an absolute sine qua non. In a word: if a candidate would be helpless when left alone with a roomful of beginning English majors and a responsibility to teach a poem by Wyatt or Shakespeare or Donne as a poem, we must be prepared to say that they simply do not get appointed at Rutgers.

I'm writing this now to put in people's mailboxes because the term is ending and I will be on research leave in the fall. I needn't say how pleased I would be to return in January to learn that the department had officially and unequivocally voted to make six to eight "literary" appointments before hiring in other fields. I want to urge you personally to lend your voice to the enterprise.

With all good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

W.C. Dowling