Overview of the Stanford Creative Writing Lecturer Situation
I was one of the 23 Creative Writing lecturers ‘future fired’ in an an August 21 meeting with the Deans, Directors, and Professors. Here is my statement to the Stanford Daily. I’ve taught at Stanford for 20 years. Thank you to so many students and alumni who’ve written to express their dismay and anger, as well as their determination to change this decision. At the bottom of the page are action suggestions, and here is the online petition created by our amazing students.
~
As far as the August 21 meeting goes, Deans Satz and Safran spoke at great length about the excellent work the Jones Lecturers have done in building the Creative Writing Program over the last 15 years. They said they were “blown away” by the quality and consistency of our evaluations from students. And then they told us that all twenty-three lecturers would be cycled out from the Creative Writing Program over the next two years.
When we asked what ‘cycled out’ meant, they clarified that our jobs would be terminated.
Afterwards, another lecturer said, “That felt like the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones,” and I have to agree. We were brought in to discuss the ‘Restructuring’ of the overall program, and then we were all fired.
Though some of us will teach one more year and others two more years, so I suppose we were ‘future fired.’
The Deans clarified that this was not their decision, but was instead the decision of the Senior Professors of Creative Writing. These are literally our teaching colleagues of the last 5 to 15 years. And they decided in a previous secret meeting to fire all 23 of their junior colleagues.
After the meeting I logged on to ExploreCourses and counted the courseloads of these professors. Between the ten of them, they taught 13 undergraduate classes last year (and 19 overall, less than 2 classes taught per professor). For comparison, ten lecturers would’ve taught 50 classes. In fact, one professor taught one undergraduate class in three years. And yet they were given sole responsibility for determining the future of the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program. And their conclusion was to fire all of the lecturers.
The impact on undergraduates will be immense. Creative Writing is by far the most popular Minor on campus and is a critical component of the English Major and Creative Expressions. And Sophomore Seminars too. Many of the most popular classes at Stanford will no longer be taught after this year.
Classes that are unlikely to be taught again include The Graphic Novel, The NaNoWrimo Course, American Road Trip, Fiction Into Film, Inspired by Science, Nature Writing, Young Adult Fiction.
Lecturers advise 90% of the students in Creative Writing and almost 50% in English. I don’t know what will happen for those students. I got the impression that the Deans and Professors hadn’t thought about that.
It’s been amazing to see the online petition and other actions by students. A fellow lecturer was crying tears of sadness after the Wednesday meeting, and then tears of joy seeing what our students have written about us and how they are defending us. It is very moving to see. We are so grateful to our students. We want to keep teaching them of course, and in so many ways, they continue to teach us. Our students are very determined and courageous.
The whole situation is not only tragic, but it’s bizarre. It doesn’t make sense. Honestly, I got the impression that the Deans themselves were confused as to why the Professors had voted to fire us.
I may be naive, but I still believe in Stanford. I think Stanford is much better than this. I think people are looking much closer at this decision now, and they don’t like what they see. I think as light is shed on this, enough people are going to say ‘This doesn’t make our university better. It makes our university much worse.’ Generally speaking, I don’t think Stanford allows mistakes like this to stand.
~ ~ ~
If any students, alumni, parents, or other Stanford affiliates are interested in voicing their opposition to this decision, the best people to write to are in this email string:
jdlevin@stanford.edu, jsmartinez@stanford.edu, jayth@stanford.edu, lanier@stanford.edu, dsatz@stanford.edu
They are:
President Jonathan Levin, Provost Jenny Martinez, Vice Provost of Undergraduates James Hamilton, Acting Vice Provost Lanier Anderson, and Dean of Humanities Debra Satz
And the online petition is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10PoTTX9UtWr9-fCm6Rk-JyBl2tmwpInAyaFEyTSp_B8/mobilebasic
