Michael Shewmaker on the 23 Stanford Firings

We’ll be posting statements from Stanford Creative Writing Jones Lecturers who were ‘future fired’ on August 21. Today’s is from Michael Shewmaker

The greatest privilege of my life has been to serve my students. On August 21, in the now notorious Zoom meeting, I was told (along with 22 other lecturers) that would no longer be an option in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. To say I’m heartbroken is a sickening understatement.

By now, many people have heard about the pay raises the Jones Lecturers received last year, but few have heard that those were only meant to be a first step, the beginning of a conversation about restructuring the Creative Writing Program where everyone would benefit — the faculty, the fellows, the lecturers, and, most importantly, the students. Instead, a year later, all the lecturers were fired. The decision was made by a secret working group that we were promised we would have a voice in. We were not given that voice. There wasn’t a single lecturer on the working group. To some this might not seem that surprising, until you learn that the Jones Lecturers teach over 90% of the classes in the Creative Writing Program and over 50% of the classes in the English Department.

So much heartbreak and so much loss. I could talk about so many things here — trust, transparency, community, how Eavan is rolling in her grave. What bothers me most right now, though, is that the creative writing senior faculty had a rare opportunity to do something groundbreaking, something tide-changing in the outdated halls of academia, but instead chose the easy, the boring, the status-quo. They chose the cliché — the death of any writer. I keep thinking about something Tom Kealey said in that awful Zoom meeting. He asked Dean Satz how many programs at Stanford she was aware of that wanted to regress to how they were over 15 years ago. She didn’t have an answer, which, of course, means the answer was none.

The saddest thing of all, though, is that the group that suffers most from this decision isn’t the lecturers. It’s the students. They’ve made their feelings about this decision very clear. I’ve been overwhelmed, in the best possible way, by their love and support. (They continue to teach me what it means to be a compassionate person on this earth.) The only thing that remains is to see if the administration that was hired to serve them will listen.

Michael Shewmaker, Jones Lecturer

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Michael Shewmaker is the author of LEVIATHAN (2023) and PENUMBRA (2017), winner of the 2016 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His recent poems appear in Best American Poetry, The Believer, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Yale Review, and other literary journals and anthologies. Born in Texarkana, Texas, he earned an M.F.A. from McNeese State University and a Ph.D. in creative writing from Texas Tech University. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Emily.