A Message from WCD

On September 27, 2007, Rutgers athletic director "Bob" Mulcahy launched a contemptible charge of "racism" at a remark I'd made in a New York Times story. The same charge was echoed by Rutgers president Richard L. McCormick. Both tried, falsely, to assert that my comment had been made about Rutgers athletes. For an abridged version of an op ed that spells out the actual context of my remark, click here on Lynch Mob Without a Rope. Earlier, on September 18, 2003 I was attacked in the Daily Targum in a statement signed by Dean Carl Kirschner and thirteen Rutgers faculty members. My response appeared in the Targum for Monday, September 22: "Reply to the "Academic Oversight Committee"     Who are the BOG? Who are these people? What can be done to reverse their disgraceful vote on the Schiano-Mulcahy-Codey stadium expansion? Click here: Rutgers 1000 For an explanation of why Rutgers is losing top NJ students, and, in their place, drawing drunken specimens who scream "F-CK NAVY" when Robert Mulcahy's football franchise plays the U.S. Naval Academy, click here on "Some See Scarlet, Some See Red." If you'd like to see the catalog entry for my just-published memoir of Rutgers 1000, click here on Confessions of a Spoilsport

As most of my students and colleagues know,

(A "sleazeware" program took over my computer, locked it into a repulsive cycle of pornography sites and, when I tried to solve the problem by cutting off power to the computer, caused a crash that destroyed a manuscript I'd been working on for six years. That was the last straw. I've gone back to living among the silence of my books. It is a happy place to be.)

If you need to get in touch with me, you can always reach me at my personal address. For that address, as well as my office hours, phone number, and a map showing the way to my office, click on the picture of Toad Hall to the immediate right.

Part I of "The Dowling Report on Undergraduate Education" has now been released. This portion concerns the admissions committee appointed by president McCormick to promote "outreach" and "recruitment" of prospective students: Why "Student Recruitment" = "Confession of Failure". Members of the Rutgers community may also be interested in "Help Choose the New RU Marketing Slogan." Or, finally, in one response to the amazing TEN Architectos proposal to turn College Ave into a dreary modernist wasteland. Click here on "From Slum Campus to Futurist Nightmare."

Hello. My name is William C. Dowling. I'm a Professor of English at Rutgers University. This page tells a little about my work and interests, and about the courses I've taught.

Here is my personal history. I grew up in Warner, New Hampshire, a little town in the middle of the state. It had three white churches and two covered bridges and looked like a Currier & Ives print. When I was away at college, all the elms on Main Street died.

I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. It was a great place to be an English major because there was always snow on the ground and one wanted to stay inside in Sanborn House library and read by the fire.

English majors in my generation took a three-day Comprehensive Examination in the spring of our senior year. When we signed up for the major as first-semester sophomores, we were given a list of works and authors for which we'd be responsible on that exam. Most of the material was covered in our core English courses, but we all realized at the end that the list had an independent value: it gave us an immediate overview of the total body of knowledge -- literary periods, authors, works, intellectual background -- that constituted the English major. It shaped our reading, our thinking, and our discussions with each other about literature, during three entire years of college. At the request of some of my Rutgers students, I several years ago reconstructed the list for their personal use. If you'd like a copy in PDFformat to print down, click here on Senior Comp Reading List.

I went to Harvard for my PhD, concentrating on 18th-century English literature, early American literature, and literary theory. My dissertation was on three works by James Boswell -- the Tour to Corsica, Tour to the Hebrides, and Life of Johnson -- and the idea of the hero in the later eighteenth century. This became my first book, The Boswellian Hero.

My most recent work on American literature is Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, a book about the way the revolution in French clinical teaching shaped Oliver Wendell Holmes's later career as author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and other works. I finished the book during my recent research leave in Paris. If you'd like to see a portion of the preface, which gives a pretty good idea of my main argument, click on the link.

My account of Holmes and literary Boston takes as its center the classical republican ideal of civic virtue as it shaped New England thought and writing through the end of the nineteenth century. A work that strongly influenced my own understanding of Boston literary culture is Charles Eliot Norton: The Art of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America.

My major scholarly project at present is Ricoeur on Time and Narrative, an introduction to Paul Ricoeur's great three-volume philosophical work, Temps et Recit. In my spare time, I'm also working on two personal projects: Blossomberry Farm, a memoir of the folk-blues scene at Dartmouth in the 1960s, and The Strange Death of Literary Studies, a memoir of teaching English over the last thirty years.

Every year, Rutgers English majors ask me about going on for a Ph.D in English literature. To help answer their questions, I composed a booklet on graduate study in English for my students at Rutgers, explaining why I think the traditional English major may be doomed to extinction in the reasonably near future -- giving newly-minted English Ph.Ds no place to find work -- and why the MAT degree may be a better alternative than going on to a Ph.D program for those who want to teach English and American literature. Since I keep running out of printed copies, I've now put this up on the Web as well: click here on Graduate Study in English.

A lot of my students figure out sort of late in the day that you can't undertake the serious study of English and American literature unless you know Latin, which they didn't take in high school. For those who want to learn Latin on their own, I've composed a short booklet entitled "Learning Latin by the Dowling Method." It tells you how to become a really competent Latinist in a reasonably short period of time. Several generations of my students have used the method with spectacular success.

Until recently, I directed one or two Henry Rutgers theses per academic year. That ended when I learned that the Rutgers Dean who supervises the program is a principle member of the "Academic Oversight Committee" that attacked me for criticizing commercialized Div IA sports at Rutgers. As a small gesture of protest, I've declined to teach honors seminars or direct Henry Rutgers theses until this person resigns or is removed from office. The last Henry Rutgers thesis I directed was Ben Remsen's brilliant treatment of the problem of solipsism in the "anti-confluential" fiction of David Foster Wallace. Subsequently, in collaboration with my old friend Robert H. Bell of Williams College, I wrote a reader's companion to Infinite Jest, the extraordinary David Foster Wallace novel that is being acclaimed as the Ulysses of the 21st century. You can see a sample section by clicking here on A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest.

At Rutgers, I try to teach regularly in all the areas in which I do research. In English literature, I have taught courses in 18th-century poetry and seminars on Samuel Johnson and Boswell & Johnson. In American literature, I teach both the first half of the American survey -- "American Literature from the Puritans to the Civil War" -- and English 352:315: "American Literature to 1800." In literary theory, I have taught senior seminars in Theory of Audience and the New Historicism. When there were small individual sections of the course, I also regularly taught English 220. (For one of my 220 classes, I put up on the web a short note entitled "Who's the Narrator of Pale Fire." I'm leaving it up now for those interested in Nabokov.) Another page I wrote for one of my classes is "The Gradesavers' Prufrock," which comments on a bit of work done by an online termpaper service professedly staffed by "Harvard-educated" individuals.

For my English 219 students, I produced a handout on how to use the Oxford English Dictionary when reading literary works written in earlier periods. I've been asked to leave the handout "How to Use the OED" up on my site for people who want to print copies. It is herewith left up.

In spring 1999, the intellectual intrepidity of Rutgers English majors was memorably demonstrated when over 120 students signed up for 18th-Century Poetry, a course that covered not only standard authors like Dryden and Pope and Johnson but "difficult" poems like Dyer's The Ruins of Rome and Cowper's The Task. They were a heroic and wonderful group.

This is only part of the class. We had planned to have our picture taken by the memorial marking the spot where, when Rutgers was still Queen's College, Alexander Hamilton's artillery company covered Washington's retreat to Trenton, but there were too many cars in the huge parking lot that the Rutgers administration has installed around the Hamilton memorial, so we moved locations and some students got left out.

The class in the picture was also the latest to hear the never-ending saga of WCD, his friend Robert H. Bell, and Stephen Duck, the Thresher Poet. If you would like to meet RHB, click here on The Steven Duck Legacy.

In Spring 1998, I taught a Rutgers honors seminar on England in the Age of Johnson. Here is the amazing group of young people who took the seminar. They were from all different majors, like history and physics and political science and engineering. For a while it didn't look as though we could all get on the same wavelength. Then one day Christopher Hillary was saying something and Alexandra Sedehi began a sentence by saying, "Nay, Sir, you are to consider that . . ." Nobody remembers what Chris was supposed to consider, but we knew that we had all suddenly found the wave length.

This picture was taken outside Bishop House, which has the only halfway decent seminar room at Rutgers. We weren't allowed to actually use it -- our seminar was in Brett, right next to the big room that has the pingpong table and the TV blaring all the time -- but we were pleased to be allowed to have our pictures taken in front of the building. (WCD offers his Johnson seminar at stated intervals, either in the Honors Program at Rutgers or as a Douglass Scholars Seminar. If you would like to see the course description, click here on  England in the Age of Johnson.)

Another of the courses I've most enjoyed teaching at Rutgers was a New Historicism seminar taught in the Fall semester of 1995. Here is a picture of me with the members of the seminar.

We are all looking serious because we had spent two weeks on the concept of "structural causality" in Althusserian Marxism and didn't seem to be getting anywhere. Right after this picture was taken we had a breakthrough, so if the photographer had shown up three days later we would all be smiling.

Another wonderful course was the Mirror of Enlightenment, jointly offered in Fall 1996 by the English department and the Comparative Literature program. This was a seminar in which we studied the relations between French and English thought and politics in the 18th century, and in which every assignment had readings in English and French. Here I am with members of the seminar. We are standing in front of the statue of William the Silent in the old quad. (You can see a larger picture of the seminar with their bronze friend by clicking here on William the Silent.)

This group is a great example of why so many faculty consider it a privilege to teach at Rutgers. Look carefully at the picture. It appears, does it not, to be a group of normal, happy, delightful American university students? And it is, partly. Happy they were, most days. Delightful they were, tous les jours. Normal they were not. Every student in the picture was able to go home at night and read an hour of Locke in English, then two hours of Montesquieu in French, an hour of Swift or Gibbon in English, then an hour or two of Voltaire or Rousseau or Diderot in French. And this they did, night after night, week after week, until we had covered the Enlightenment from Locke and Newton to the French Revolution. It was, in its way, heroic. (If you look carefully at the New Historicism seminar and the Mirror of Enlightenment picture, you will see that two students, Rob Young and John Davies, are present in both. Old men forget, and all shall be forgot, but they'll remember with advantages what deeds we did those days.)

I hope eventually to teach several other seminars in two languages (English and Latin, English and German), so I am leaving the original Mirror of Enlightenment course description in place as a sort of prototype. If you have friends who are Classics majors or German majors who might want to take such a seminar -- or who are English majors able to read Latin or German at an advanced level of competence -- tell them to come to this page and click here on Mirror of Enlightenment. They should get in touch with me by e-mail if they would be interested in a similar course in their language.

In Spring 2001,I taught J.R.R. Tolkien & Oxford Christianity under the English 321 "Literature and Spirituality" rubric. The course focused on intensive study of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and other writings, but we also studied the Oxford circle of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis -- the "Inklings" -- and discussed at some length the larger problem of "literature after the death of God." This was my first attempt ever at a course meant to be accessible to students from all different majors and intellectual backgrounds. Here is a class picture we took on the last day of the course. Not everybody was there -- there were over 200 students enrolled-- but the Companions of the Quest -- the faithful souls who came to every lecture and argued with me incessantly and brilliantly about the problem of Tom Bombadil and orcs and Free Will and the meaning of pipeweed -- are mostly in the picture. They were an inspiring group, and I miss them.

In spring semester 2002  I taught a Rutgers General Honors seminar entitled "The Face of Battle," focusing on the way individuals and cultures try to come to terms with combat as an "unrepresentable" experience -- pain, death, screams, confusion, agony -- through the imposition of narrative structure: stories about heroism and suffering and honor and national purpose. The course took as its center the work of the great military historian John Keegan -- author of The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, The Price of Admiralty, and other works -- and we also read Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers, Alvin Kernan's Crossing the Line, Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth, as well as viewing Kenneth Branaugh's film version of Henry the Fifth and Stephen Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. A high point was the session we spent with Commander Charles Standard, a Helldiver -- dive bomber -- pilot who won the Navy Cross for extraordinary bravery in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. His visit came immediately after we had read Kernan's Crossing the Line, with its first-hand account of the carrier war in the Pacific. We found it a rare and moving experience to have the chance to talk for three hours with a carrier pilot who had actually lived through the events we had been discussing. It was, as one member of the seminar said, like having someone walk into the seminar room straight out of the pages of history. The picture above shows the class with Commander Standard on the day of his visit. I taught the same course in Spring 2004 as my farewell to the Honors Program, having notified the director that I would not be available to teach seminars again until Rutgers began to devote the same amount of resources to its best and brightest students that it has been devoting over the last 10 years to a handful of hired athletes on the basketball and football teams. The splendid group with whom I spent my farewell semester is pictured at right.

My most recent work as an eighteenth-century scholar has been on the English verse epistle. This is the subject of my book The Epistolary Moment, which is also about the concept of "internal audience" in literature. In early American literature, I have been working on literary Federalism. Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut  is about the Connecticut Wits, a group of poets who thought of their poetry as a form of "symbolic action" that could change the course of history. Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson, which is about the literary opposition to Thomas Jefferson and "American jacobinism," has just been published.If you feel an irresistable urge to pre-order a copy, you may do so by clicking on the cover.

My most recent work in film studies is an essay on my favorite director, John Ford: "John Ford's Festive Comedy: Ireland Imagined in The Quiet Man." I'm also at work on an essay on the turn-of-the-century school stories of Arthur Stanwood Pier, about whom I've put up a Web page for other people who might be interested in Pier's writings.

In literary theory, my best-known book is Jameson, Althusser, Marx, an introduction to Althusserian Marxism and the work of the American theorist Fredric Jameson. It has been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese and Korean. I keep a copy of the Korean translation in my office so that Sean Yoon and Alicia Kim and my other Korean students can read it and tell me what I said. I am a member of the Twin Oaks Theory Seminar, for which my most recent paper was "The Gender Fallacy." In published form, it appears in Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Daphe Pata and Will H. Corral (Columbia University Press, 2005).

My most recent publication in literary theory,  The Senses of the Text, concerns the relations between semantic theory and the problem of determinate meaning in literature. It concentrates on Chomskyan linguistics and the work of Jerrold J. Katz (The Metaphysics of Meaning) in philosophy of language. Some of my influences in literary theory may be found on my Saints & Heroes page.

I am a member of ALSC, the Association for Literary Scholars and Critics. It was founded only recently, because there was no organization for scholars whose main intellectual interest was in literature. Literary scholars reading this page who might be interested in joining ALSC can find out how to do so by clicking here on All About ALSC. Since many ALSC members and others have asked me for offprints of my article "Scholarly Publishing in the Age of Oprah," I asked permission from The Journal of Scholarly Publishing to post a copy here on my Web site. I have also posted a copy of "Literary Studies v. Cultural Studies," my letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education concerning the same general problem, along with "Manfred Mickleson Applies for an 18th-century Job," a letter that I found in my files from an 18th-century search run by my department some years ago. More recently, after reading about the controversy at surrounding Cornel West's newly-released hip hop CD, I did a bit of research on earlier members of the Harvard faculty who had combined a career in popular music with eminence as teachers and scholars. By way of providing context for the West episode, I'm making available to the general public an excerpt from Doo Wop Days: the Inside Story of 50s Rock 'n' Roll, a little-known book I was lucky enough to run across in the used bin at Micawber's.

In a recent issue of PMLA, Professor Wendell Harris predicts that in the next 10-20 years, most English departments will either become departments of Cultural Studies or divide into separate Departments of Cultural Studies and Departments of English. Since this seems to me a prediction with important implications for Rutgers, I've put up a page on "Literature & Cultural Studies" that tries to visualize its possible consequences.

In recent years, I have done a good bit of research on standardized testing and college admissions, in preparation for a book about American democracy and the "consumer model of education." My most recent substantial article on educational policy was "Why America Needs the SAT," published in Academic Questions in Winter, 1999.

I am proud of my membership in the Drake Group, which was founded at the Drake Conference on College Sports Corruption, a historic national meeting on ways to save universities from being swallowed up by the TV-revenue-driven behemoth of professionalized college sports. n response to requests from Drake Group members, I've put up a copy of my review-essay "Big Time Sports as Academic Prostitution," originally published in the journal Academic Questions, and "Sports and Ressentiment: Why the Boosters Run Ohio State," which appeared in Social Science and Modern Society. Between 1993 and Spring 2003, I was also associated with Rutgers 1000, a student-alumni-faculty group that attempted to reverse the trend of commercialized college athletics at Rutgers.

Another educational policy issue that concerns me is teaching evaluation forms, which I regard as "customer satisfaction surveys" that encourage students to adopt a "consumer model" of education. To understand why I see the commodity model as the single biggest danger to genuine education in America read my Targum op-ed column "Why We Should Abolish Teaching Evaluations." Another short guide I've composed on the "consumer model"is posted on my web site. Click here for "5 Ways to Tell If You Go to a Third-Rate University." Several semesters ago, my students told me about an unspeakable web site called "Rateyourprofessors.com." It inspired me to propose a similar site for use by professors. To read the proposal, click here on Ratemystudents.com

Some of my students think it's pretty funny that I detest the constant interjection of "like" into sentences uttered by undergraduates, and that I annually give out a Likosaurus Award to those who make the greatest progress in their battle against Lykelyke Syndrome. Michael Sun drew this caricature of me reacting to a bad "like day" in class. He thought it was pretty funny. (He did not laugh so hard when he found out what  he got for a course grade, ho ho.) Another student, Tim Steffens, thought it was funny that I loathe and detest television and keep telling my students to smash their TV sets and fill their rooms with books. (I actually do think that the people in Hell watch TV. Also that people who watch TV here on earth -- instead of reading books and learning Greek and arguing with their friends about Aristotle or Milton or Tocqueville -- are in Hell and simply haven't realized it yet.) I've put Tim's caricature of me exhorting a class to throw out their TV sets on a separate page, so that you can see how funny he thought he was being. (Tim was taking 18th-century poetry. He flunked the course.) Last of all, some students think it's funny that I keep telling them that students who misspell words and won't learn the elementary rules of English punctuation are doomed to be total failures in life, no matter how admirable they may be in other respects. I've put the "No Bull" exhortation that I hand out to my classes up along with Michael and Tim's caricatures.

Some personal notes. My wife and I have recently moved to Manhattan, but for the convenience of friends and old students I've retained my longtime PO Box in Princeton (Box 1181, Princeton, NJ, 08542). Mail sent there is regularly forwarded to me. My favorite pastime outside of reading and studying languages is training for marathons. Until I got injured several years ago I ran the Marine Corps Marathon every fall and the Vermont City Marathon in Burlington, Vermont every spring.  For a picture of me in marathon trim, with my amazing mother Lillian Dowling and my younger brother John, click here on Vermont City Marathon. I am hoping that my injury will get better and I will run marathons again. My favorite contemporary writers are Patrick O'Brian and Elmore Leonard. My favorite "personal" writer is Parson Woodforde, an 18th-century Norfolk clergyman who kept a five-volume diary covering most of his adult life. I also play blues guitar -- my heroes are Hubert Sumlin and Mance Lipscomb -- and listen to jazz (Miles Davis, Bill Evans) and classical music (Vivaldi, Corelli, Handel, Mozart). Another of my musical enthusiasms is gospel, and here at Rutgers, I am a huge fan of the Liberated Gospel Choir.  (For the story of how my students have been expanding my musical and cultural horizons, click here on Jerry Garcia.)

With Mrs. D, I spend part of every year in Paris. A few years ago, I began doing restaurant reviews for the guide Bon Sejour. For a review of my favorite Paris restaurant, click here on Le Refuge du Passe.

During the Vietnam war, I was principal organizer of the New England Resistance, whose role in breaking the will of the Johnson administration has, until recently, never been given its due by historians (mainly because the story of the antiwar movement has relied on the accounts of those who spent the Vietnam period hiding out behind student deferments or Peace Corps exemptions or other Bill Clinton-type dodges for "opposing" the war while remaining perfectly safe). Now the story has been told in Michael Foley's book Confronting the War Machine. It will make a lot of so-called tenured radicals unhappy, but it is going to have a marked effect on the way future generations understand the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Just because I opposed the war in Vietnam does not mean that I consider all wars the same. They can be quite different. I helped my graduate school friend Chip Szalkorski compose a page explaining why the War in Iraq, for instance, is being fought for entirely different reasons than the Vietnam War. My contribution was research on the Constitutional amendment -- the one that gives every American a inalienable right to drive an SUV no matter how many American soldiers are dying for Mideast oil -- that makes the war perfectly legal.

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