Dear Professor Hintz,

My decision to attend the CUNY Graduate Center was based on three factors:

1)   an incredibly diverse range of faculty covering most time periods and genres

2)   a dedication to queer theory in particular and literary theory in general

3)   a collegial stance towards students that included a respect for experiment and innovation with regard to dissertations and inclusion in all aspects of departmental decision making

I was richly rewarded for my decision to attend.  I was not mistaken in any of my predictions.  I hope that the characteristics I laid out will continue to define the program.

With the increasingly dire rhetoric surrounding academia, I greatly appreciated that the program took a clear eyed (rather than a defeatist or a Panglossian) view of the possibilities and prospects for students pursuing graduate degrees in English.

Sincerely,

Jason Schneiderman, Ph.D. ‘13

Assistant Professor of English

Borough of Manhattan Community College

It would be good to see someone do the lesbian/ feminist part of sexuality studies.

It would be good to strengthen our postcolonial offerings and also have a way of relating post- colonial and American ethnic through the transnational lens ie set up a series of conversations.
How do the taxonomies work? eg Asian-American/ postcolonial/transnational etc.

And something which has been in my mind for awhile — What would a phd in theory and creative writing look like We have a number of students who come to us mfa degrees and this could be an exciting option

Open Letter submitted by the Graduate Center Composition and Rhetoric Community (GCCRC)

As Graduate Center faculty and students who focus in full or in part on composition and rhetoric, we begin this letter by briefly highlighting historical and current contributions of our specialization to the Ph.D. Program in English and to the university as a whole. We conclude with five proposals that reflect both our own needs and new initiatives that can, we suggest, ultimately lead to a more cohesive program.

Historical Precedents and Current Contributions in Comp/Rhet Scholarship and Pedagogy at CUNY and at the Graduate Center

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, CUNY faculty implemented new structures, programs and courses to bring instruction in literacy to the students and working adults of New York City who entered CUNY as part of the rapidly expanding open-admissions policy. Within a few years, CUNY faculty[1] quickly established this University as the leading center of research and innovative pedagogy within the fledgling field of composition and its new subfield, Basic Writing. Although the early open admissions university system made missteps when designing policy (such as instituting a massive system of simplistic high-stakes writing tests), university faculty across the campuses developed forward-thinking pedagogical scholarship and classroom practice. These efforts resulted in cross-campus affiliations such as the CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors (CAWS) which met monthly for over a decade. More recently, the CUNY Composition and Rhetoric Community (CCRC) has taken on the task of reconnecting these scholar/teachers. In the past few years, the bi-annual Mina Shaughnessy Speaker Series has exemplified the activities that continue to make CUNY an intellectual hub for composition and rhetoric. These latter efforts are organized and led by faculty and doctoral students at the Graduate Center.

In the mid-1990s, Comp/Rhet became an official specialization in the English Ph.D. Program. In a relatively short period of time, our group has made significant contributions to the English program as well as to the larger university system. In the late 1990s, members of the Comp/Rhet concentration coordinated and compiled “Comprehending the Comprehensives,” a study guide to the departmental required first exam. still in use today. In addition, using the central pedagogical focus of composition studies, students within the Comp/Rhet concentration have developed and led twenty-years’ worth of teaching seminars for their peers in GC programs, all of whom had teaching responsibilities across university campuses. For the last six years, the DSC-chartered Graduate Center Composition and Rhetoric Community (formerly known as GCCRC) has run a program of bi-weekly lectures, workshops, and discussions open to all Graduate Center students focusing on both scholarship and pedagogy. The members of the Graduate Center Comp/Rhet group also actively participate in student government to an extent that belies our small numbers, including multiple ESA co-chairs, conference chairs, and members of the executive and curriculum committees, thereby contributing to the work and ongoing development of our program.

The Composition and Rhetoric Concentration and the Character of the English Ph.D. Program: A Symbiotic Relationship

Since the English program’s last self-study, we have seen a welcome shift in the way we describe and present our work, especially at open house recruitment sessions and new student events and orientations. Faculty and student area group leaders speak knowingly and appreciatively of the Comp/Rhet focus in the program: speakers describe writing workshops, discuss genre choices and revision strategies from seminar paper to article to dissertation to book, and highlight reading and writing as mutually connected and important processes. We believe a thriving Comp/Rhet area group has been a major source of this shift and will continue to act as a vital component in highlighting and enhancing this particular strength of our program.

The Comp/Rhet area group, while proud of its willingness to work in a ‘service’ capacity, is also comprised of writers, poets, researchers, DH innovators, and scholars who participate in the ongoing intellectual life of our field. Comp/Rhet doctoral students have recently created the Writing Studies Tree (WST), a digital humanities project that has made a major contribution to the field of composition and rhetoric and received two Provost’s Digital Innovation grants. The WST team was also honored as a featured panel at the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and was a part of “DH from the Ground Up” at the 2014 Modern Language Association conference (MLA). Members of the GCCRC have also participated in national conferences such as the Council of Writing Program Administration, the Conference of Computers and Writing, the Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America, and FemRhet. The presence of our doctoral students at these conferences not only highlights their individual talents but also underscores the vibrant intellectual work occurring at the Graduate Center in composition and rhetoric. In addition, former Graduate Center Comp/Rhet students have assumed important faculty and administrative roles across CUNY. Mark McBeth and Tim McCormack, for example, both faculty at John Jay, have created a writing program that has won two national awards, one from the Conference of Basic Writing for Innovations in Basic Writing Curriculum and the other from CCCC for Writing Program Excellence. Finally, the English Ph.D. program has a 100% success rate of placing its Comp/Rhet graduates in tenure-track positions.

Although many of our doctoral students come to CUNY with little background in composition and rhetoric, this specialized area group of the English Ph.D. program has offered them the opportunity to develop their interests and experience. Many English Ph.D. students have combined their interests in literature and literary criticism with a focus on Comp/Rhet. This cross-concentration focus offers a particular competitive advantage to English Ph.D. students. While still in the doctoral program, many have found themselves taking on positions as deputy chairs of freshman composition, writing-across-the-curriculum coordinators, or writing center directors. Without their familiarity with the theories and practices of composition and rhetoric, it is unlikely that they would have assumed such high-profile administrative/faculty positions within their institutions.

Furthermore, Graduate Center students who develop Comp/Rhet competencies enter the job market with more than a few recognizable strengths: scholarship in their sub-field of English studies; a deep and complex understanding of sophisticated, student-centered pedagogy; and rich experience in administrative know-how. In the current job market, the program cannot overlook the importance of its Comp/Rhet concentration in producing such highly qualified graduates. The most recent MLA JIL featured approximately 60 Comp/Rhet positions, or nearly one-quarter of the advertised positions.[2] Without the influence of Comp/Rhet within the Graduate Center English Ph.D. Program, our graduates may not have the hiring advantages that they currently possess and that the program can tout to incoming candidates. For a program that grooms scholars who will, through teaching, also guide the next generation of undergraduate and graduate students in writing and literature courses, the Comp/Rhet presence within the program remains an important and resonant influence.

Five Proposals to Enhance the English Program through a Robust and Sustainable Comp/Rhet Presence at the Graduate Center

In the next five years, we believe a robust Comp/Rhet focus will continue to serve the English program, will continue to produce strong and innovative scholarship, and will continue to attract graduate students who will enhance the Graduate Center’s national reputation and make substantial contributions to our field. To support this work, we offer the following five proposals:

1. Course offerings

Goal: Restore Comp/Rhet seminars to two offerings each semester.

Rationale: Given the complexity and time constraints on teaching schedules on various campuses, it can become almost impossible for doctoral students to take Comp/Rhet seminars if only one seminar is offered. This truly limits student progress in the program for Comp/Rhet specialists and reduces access to Comp/Rhet resources for all students.

Action requested:

    A.   Offer two seminars in Comp/Rhet each semester.

    B.   Offer the option of independent study when only one Comp/Rhet seminar is offered so that Comp/Rhet students can continue to develop their expertise and knowledge as well as advance their standing in the program.

2.  Faculty

Goal: Restore the Comp/Rhet Graduate Center faculty to four members.

Rationale:  As of Spring 2014, the Comp/Rhet faculty will be reduced to three members who are available to teach and guide students (McBeth, Perl, and Shor). With Jessica Yood on a long-term leave of absence, we are, once again, understaffed. Three faculty members are not sufficient to support the work and research interests of our students nor do three faculty provide a sufficiently broad range of expertise for students looking to do research in our field. At a minimum, we need four Comp/Rhet faculty members both to support the activities described above and to maintain a robust and sustainable Comp/Rhet specialization. For two decades, the comp/rhet faculty have also served on orals and dissertation committees of students whose scholarly interests lie primarily in literature, so sustaining the comp/rhet faculty will serve not only the specific concentration but also the needs of many other doctoral students in English.

Action requested:

    A.   An immediate campus search to bring our faculty cohort back to four.

    B.   A national search for two senior faculty to be held as joint appointments between a campus school and the Graduate Center. These searches anticipate future retirements over the next five years.

3. New Graduate Teaching Fellowship

Goal: Establish a new fellowship for entering English students with more than 3 years’ teaching experience as CUNY adjuncts in writing, with administrative responsibilities integrated into faculty development initiatives.

Rationale: This fellowship would reward and honor teaching as an important part of a professional life in English, encourage diverse GC applicants, and expand the ability of the GC to act as an institutional hub for thinking about writing, rhetoric, and pedagogy. Offering a path out of the contingent faculty pool, this fellowship would address labor inequities and bring new voices into our conversations about how best to structure undergraduate writing and reading programs. Adding an administrative component builds on and builds up both these teachers’ experience and our learning community.

Action requested:

A. Work with the appropriate administrators to secure four fellowships, funded at lecturer salary levels, with five years’ guaranteed 2/2 teaching load at the CUNY campus where the fellows already teach. Funding would be shared by the GC and the home college. Each fellowship would also include, in years 1 and 2, participation in the classroom intervisitation project proposed below, and in year 3 the four fellows would be the lead student coordinators of that project.

4. Cross-Campus Classroom Intervisitation as Preparation for Teaching Fellowships

Goal: As part of the existing first-year research assistantship for Chancellor’s Fellows, incorporate research in pedagogy via cross-campus visitation of writing and literature classrooms. Faculty and GTFs would arrange for students to visit a range of classes the first-year students could teach in years 2-4, and in turn these teachers could visit each other’s classrooms. This intervisitation program could potentially be paired with the Teaching Practicum requirement.

Rationale: This requirement would better prepare new graduate students for teaching as well as foster cross-campus collaboration and sharing of teaching practices. It would help create teaching networks for our graduate students. As a broader practice, it would serve to reimagine observations as collaborations and teaching of teachers, rather than policing. The Comp/Rhet student community has already piloted a similar program and would be instrumental in designing and implementing a more formal arrangement, thereby establishing the critical importance of the doctoral program in the rethinking of faculty development and pedagogical practice at CUNY.

Action Requested:

A. Set up a student-faculty committee to coordinate schedules and recruit faculty/GTF participation.

5. Ongoing Commitment to an Integrated English Studies

Goal: Continue to strive for program requirements that foster a comprehensive and integrated English program.

Rationale: The core principles that make up our collective identity and vision are nowhere more concretely communicated to prospective students than in the program’s required courses and exams. While acknowledging the important work the Curriculum and Exam committees have undertaken over the past decade, e.g. to increase the flexibility of the required course and the first exam, retrofits such as one swapped-out question for Comp/Rhet students suggest a program in which a baseline knowledge of literature and critical theory is indispensable, but familiarity with rhetoric, writing processes, and pedagogy is optional. We would argue that solid foundations in all these areas of English are mutually beneficial, and that their combination is an essential part of our program’s culture and future. Reflective composing practices, pedagogical consciousness, and rhetorical savvy will help students in their coursework, research, and teaching across all their areas of specialization.

Action Requested:

A. Conduct ongoing review and revision of requirements such as required course(s), the comprehensive exam, and language exams with an eye toward more thoroughly integrating the curriculum across literary and non-literary fields of English.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Faculty

Mark McBeth

Rebecca Mlynarczyk (Professor Emerita)

George Otte

Sondra Perl

Jessica Yood

GCCRC Co-Chairs

Andrew Lucchesi

Sean Molloy

GCCRC Former Co-Chairs

Amanda Licastro

Benjamin Miller

Doctoral Students

Erin Andersen

Hilarie Ashton

Joshua Belknap

Nolan Chessman

Melissa Dennihy

Diana Epelbaum

Robert Greco

Dale Katherine Ireland

Peter Khost (alumnus)

Anna Alexis Larsson

Jesse Merandy

Mikayla Zagoria-Moffet

[1] Mina Shaughnessy, Kenneth Bruffee, Robert Lyons, Richard Larson, Ira Shor, Sondra Perl, Donald McQuade, Harvey Weiner, Charles Bazerman, Richard Sterling, John Brereton and many others, all of whom contributed to the burgeoning field of composition and rhetoric.

[2] For information and statistical breakdowns of the MLA JIL, see the following link:

http://rhetmap.org/reports/a-report-on-the-2012-13-cr-category-of-the-mla-jil/

The GC has a dynamic intellectual life, with exciting cross-currents from other area institutions, frequent speakers and events. We have world-renowned faculty and brilliant, self-reliant students. As a place for intellectual growth it is unparalleled, and I am very grateful to be able to be here.

However, like other institutions in NYC, we are providing an incredibly rich resource with very little money, space, or time. We all have too much work. I’ve read the various reports Carrie posted, and I agree with the external review that college faculty are particularly victimized, teaching essentially an extra load at the GC (with extra students, office hours, and committees) on top of their already sizable loads at their home colleges. Both the external report and the response to it imagined a way to compensate college faculty for work on committees and exams other than directing the committee, perhaps a 1/10 credit, and I strongly endorse that.

I also very much like the idea that Carrie came up last year, capitalizing on our location in New York. It is, after all, a major reason why students come here, and if it can become a guiding principle that the Grad Center should enthusiastically take advantage of resources here and make itself a microcosm of the city’s rich, diverse culture , it can only benefit us. A New-York-centric identity (which we already have but have not fully articulated) will give us a better identity nationwide and provide a guiding sense of self as we make future decisions.

But I thought I’d use this opportunity to mention one aspect of life at the GC has come to loom bigger and bigger in my sense of the institution in recent years, and it’s one that I don’t see mentioned in any of the documents. I refer to its governance structure, which, it seems to me, could usefully be streamlined and standardized in order to keep pace with the growth of the institution. I’d be very interested to hear others’ ideas about the following issues:

1. Can we think creatively about another way of running the department, other than by a loose confederation of area groups? I understand that this works better than nothing, and that in an essentially egalitarian department, it is hard to come up with other structures. But I would love us to try to think of more imaginative ways. What has happened, in effect, is that professional fields have taken the place of governing structures, which stretches them in ways that are not necessarily viable.

The area group organization means that we are divided into little fiefdoms by period and region. Such an organization is out of sync with an increasingly interdisciplinary, global, and fluid way of understanding literary studies. It makes us look old-fashioned. It also means that we have built-in lobbying groups pushing for particular kinds of hiring and admissions, so that people are added to the program based on whether they suit the needs of a particular subfield, which risks losing people who are doing new fields or interesting interdisciplinary work, because they have no built-in group to advocate for them. It is true that we do have interdisciplinary or affinity groups, but I think my experience is typical in that I am active in my primary group (Victorian) and have little energy left for another bunch of meetings or activities for feminist studies, queer studies, etc.

I don’t really have another idea, but I’d suggest we talk to people in other departments at the GC and see what they do. Right now the membership groups push for hiring, set up Friday Forum speakers, and organize teaching rotations. Maybe we should move those functions to committees instead. Ie, the membership committee could poll the department for our needs and present plans for future hiring; a teaching committee could set up a teaching rotation for everyone.

Another idea: why not have faculty meetings? I know that many people wouldn’t show up, but it would be healthy to have monthly check-ins for those who could come. It would allow department members to be well-informed and track ongoing issues. There’s a reason most departments hold these things.

2. Can we streamline the appointment process? By this I mean: can we create a single universally-followed structure for appointing people, and also, bring college and central line appointments more into sync with each other? Problems with appointments have been a consistent source of dissension in the department over the past two years and this would be a great opportunity to fix the process.

Right now, college appointments take about three years and sometimes even longer (one year for the need to be identified and the ad to be posted; one year or longer for trial teaching; the following year for the actual visit). This takes far too long, especially when you consider that the people serving this lengthy apprenticeship are already our colleagues, whom we have known intimately, served with on committees, observed teaching, etc. The multi-year process makes it impossible to respond nimbly to departmental needs, and it means that by the time someone actually comes up for a vote, a whole new crop of faculty might be available who were not yet tenured when the original call went out. So, even when it works, it’s problematically sluggish. However, in the last few years, two or three college high-profile college faculty have undergone this process only to be rejected after the job talk, a highly humiliating result. So sometimes it’s sluggish and disastrous as well.

Not only is the college appointment process unwieldy, but it is also totally out of sync with the procedure for appointing central faculty, which is currently based on recruitment (based on murky personal ties) and on a single day’s visit (whose format may vary wildly).

We have not been allowed to recruit central line faculty with a national job ad, which would have created a level playing field. Without that, the door is open to all sorts of favoritism, rumor-mongering, old-boy networking, and back-room deals. (Even if those things are not actually happening, members of the department perceive them to be happening, which is toxic in itself.) What’s more, central faculty appointments don’t follow a recognized procedure and tend to get made up as we go along each time, creating hard feelings. We need a democratic, transparent hiring system with accountability at every step.

In my opinion both college and central line appointments should work the same way, and that way is not a mystery: send out an ad, bring the most promising candidates to campus, have them do a visit, have lunch and dinner with department members. Have the candidate teach a seminar (sit in on someone’s course, or set up the seminar as a specific teaching opportunity and thus something exclusively attended by graduate students). Then do the job talk. If the candidate does not seem viable, we need to make a strong effort to figure that out before the campus visit. The whole thing should be done, from ad to hiring, within a year. There is a structure for appointments that departments use nationwide; why do we need to reinvent it every time, or create our own idiosyncratic version of it?

I know many people like the trial teaching semester, and I do understand that it gives grad students a real sense of faculty that nothing else could give. I like that too. But my problem with it is that, if college faculty are good teachers, we should be appointing them already, and if they are bad teachers, we should not be forcing our students to spend an entire semester with them. Would we ask job candidates to teach for us for a whole semester normally before deciding whether or not to hire them? No, and the same reasons should apply for college faculty.

3. We absolutely need to continue pushing for diverse appointments and diverse admissions; monocultures are inherently unhealthy. But that also means we cannot turn into a monoculture of one field or one period. Part of diversity is historical and international (Anglophone) appointments. Anyone who works in feminism, queer theory, etc, is continually experiencing the situation of advocates and scholars who know very little about pre-20th century formulations of these issues, which means that such scholars lack an understanding of how and why contemporary formulations of race, culture, gender, and desire originally formed, and also lack a sense of what historical alternatives might once have existed to constructs we now take for granted. Having a historically diverse faculty also means a better student body, as we attract a richer variety of applicants who can then, as students, help inform each other’s research with their own expertise. Having strong faculty in British and other Anglophone fields prevents Americentrism. A field where everyone reinforces each other’s sense of what’s important is an unhealthily closed field. I don’t want us to end up there.

We are renowned for our strength in queer theory, and I would like to make sure that continues. We have major feminist scholars here (Jane Marcus, Nancy K. Miller) and I would like to ensure that we continue strong hires in contemporary feminist theory. But we desperately need more appointments in 17th and 18th century, since those fields are currently carried by David Richter and Carrie Hintz, both of whom have robust alternative fields that they often want to teach, as well as major administrative responsibilities. We need a Latino/a specialist. We might also talk about fields other than fiction – how is our representation in poetry, drama, graphic novels, film, etc? Can students who increasingly work in interdisciplinary genres find enough people to work with there?

Sorry for the length of this letter, but I have tried to give it serious consideration. I do think that what we need above all is a) a vision of ourselves as expressing the best of New York, and b) better governance structures: more communication, standardized hiring procedures, and a set of departmental hiring goals.

Talia Schaffer

If as a program we decide to emphasize one particular scholarly focus or methodology, we should think of this focus as a meeting place for debate and conversation rather than a fixed scholarly perspective we all expect to adopt. This focus, in other words, should be one that we rally around in the spirit of both consensus and disagreement, one that will serve as a useful critical lens to some, but perhaps also as a problematic orientation for others. Given my own experience in the program, one such perspective could be the problem of history. What I mean by this focus is the attention, even tacitly in some cases, to the theoretical implications of history that I see as part of many people’s work in the program; this observation includes scholars who historicize con gusto and those who are suspicious of this endeavor. My own view is that should we coalesce as a program around such a problematic we could raise questions that would enrich everyone’s individual critical viewpoint without leading the English Program in a direction that asks students and faculty to participate in conversations outside of their own interests.

I use the problem of history here only as an example for the way I’m advocating we should approach adopting a single focus for the program, should we even makes this collective choice. However, if we entertain an attention to the historical, along with its problems, as our hypothetical methodological meeting place, consider what our different theoretical and subject-based areas of study could say. What could affect theory or an attention to aesthetics say to those in our community who consider themselves new historicists or Marxists? How does a Medievalist approach the historical in ways that are different and distinct from those studying early-U.S. texts or 20^th-century European literature? And, how can all of these different perspectives enliven discourses about the historical and its role in literary scholarship?

 Thinking along these lines, of establishing an intellectual meeting place for our program, provides us the opportunity to unify around one conversation, or one set of conversations, while minimizing the risk of leaving members of our large and diverse program out of the vision we are outlining this year. Hopefully, this kind of meeting place would use the size an scope of our program to our advantage, but it is important to emphasize that this choice would embrace opposing views. Another permutation of this idea that may work would be to choose such a different perspective each academic year as an intellectual problem that we will all work on. This holds the possibility of maintaining fresh conversations that continually unify the program.

Each year our program is asked to complete a short assessment process and report on one aspect of our program requirements and activities. We have already looked at our first exam, and the dissertation process.

At the GC, assessment is refreshingly faculty-driven, and the Provost’s Office asks us to define our own process for completing assessment—and it has proved helpful in the past in helping us examine our policies and procedures.

This year, we have an opportunity to revisit our 2007 Self Study/ External Periodic review, to see how we are doing in terms of our own goals emerging from that study and the external reviewer’s recommendations (those reports were sent to students and faculty in the program earlier this week). Above all, we will be asked to answer the question: “What are the program’s primary goals for the next five years?”

That is clearly a question that requires a wide conversation involving all members of the program, and one that relies on engaged participation from everyone. I have been working with the ESA Co-chairs, Paul Fess and Justin Van Wormer, to start this conversation.

We’re excited to receive “Open Letters” on any aspect of the future direction of the program.   We are particularly interested in hearing thoughts about how to build on our common program culture while not eliding or glossing over differences of opinion and approach.  While we are all very committed to, and immersed in, our own methodologies and literary periods, this is a chance for us to think about common strands of inquiry across periods and methodologies, and to speak with each other about our collective identity and vision.   What are the current strengths of the program, and how should we build on them?    Can we envision ways to connect our program more fully to the life of the city, and ways of connecting our program to other CUNY schools, and embody CUNY’s historic mission of diversity and access?   How do we conceive the purpose the English Program as in conversation with 21st-century disciplinary trends and critical methods? Are there arguments to be made for foregrounding the distinctiveness of how we structure and practice “English” (i.e., periodization, national formation, formalism, literary history, etc.)? What are the qualities of our program and our collective scholarly work that will draw applicants to our program?  What are we (and what should we be) “known for” nationally?  Should the program develop around a single concentration of strength, or along multiple strands? How can our curriculum, program events, and mentorship best serve our students?

The deadline for contributing an “Open Letter” will be January 25^th.

From those “Open Letters” Mario, Paul, Justin and Carrie will bring members of the program into conversation on two panels, held on Feb 14^th at 2 PM and March 7th at 2 PM.  The concerns of those panels will be based on patters we see emerging from the “Open Letters.” We will be endeavoring to represent as many points of view as possible, and to place members of the program in conversation with each other.

The Open Letters can be found here:

https://openletters.commons.gc.cuny.edu/open-letters/

Justin Van Wormer

There are doubtless a great many factors that we might identify as contributing strengths to the English Program.  I think, though, that we might also trace many of those factors to a single ultimate source and might find that each factor arises in close relationship with New York City.  Rethinking the Program in relation to the City can be generative path toward identifying and intensifying desirable traits of the Program and refocusing on local sites of critical inquiry and action.  This focus helps define a critical space in which to be effective teachers and scholars.  As a Program we can engage in “cutting edge” projects and fulfill the historical mission of CUNY to be of service to the often underserved people of New York City.  I envision New York as an organizing principle for the Program in three different, but interlinked areas: resource, diversity, and what I am calling sites of critique.

I keep using spatial metaphors – the language of place, sites, spaces, paths, etc. – because the placeness of New York itself is the greatest resource the English Program has.  This is a practical matter or sorts.  Lots and lots of people would like to live and work in New York.  Lots and lots of people do live and work in New York.  We can add on to this all those institutions and places in New York that support our work as humanists and critics.  I want to make sure that by advocating the orientation of the program to more fully engage with New York City going forward I do not therefore advocate for a purely contemporary or Americanist vision of the English Program.  Part of the placeness of New York is the fact of multiple archives and the space to read them; the massive simultaneous reading of multiple texts is at the heart of the culture practice that New York projects as an identifying characteristic to the world.  This idea of place includes everything from archival collections like those at The Morgan Library and The Schomburg Center to the simple fact that no other city in the United States can boast the sheer density of poetry readings and black box theaters that New York has.  New York can, does, and ought to support committed scholars across disciplinary, periodization, and geographical boundaries.  Shakespeare has a home here, so does Milton, so does Toussaint Louverture, and so does Bayard Rustin.  We are the City University of New York; we are, as they say, in the thick of it.

What does it mean to be at CUNY?  It means serving a racially, intellectually, and socioeconomically diverse set of students that reflect and represent the city itself.  The geography of the CUNY system itself reflects the fragmented and compromised nature of the city’s past and present.  Our campuses, like subway stations and expressways, are one way to trace the contours of the City and its flow of bodies and information.  Our undergraduate students exhibit a diversity of an almost world historical scope for college students; and they move into and through the city on ancient lines of trade and migration.  They also move in the space constructed for them by neoliberal capitalism.  Uniting a consciousness of both historical circumstance and struggle with contemporary critical understanding of the political economy of the classroom and the city means having a clearer picture of CUNY.  The Program itself ought to reflect that, too.  We should concentrate on bringing CUNY undergraduates to the GC, attracting a diverse faculty, and enrolling a diverse student body from other sources.  New York, the people who live here, and the people who would like to, allows us to use the program to help the professoriate look a little more queer, non-white, and female and better represent the voices and views of the people who live here.  We should look like the City, we should look like CUNY, and we should be a place in which our academic projects engage with the diversity of the City.

New York City in its diversity provides several sites of critique, places in which to engage critically with culture and politics.  The necessary work of institutional critique of the university in America can find no more fruitful grounds than CUNY where militarization, neoliberalization, and corporatization vie with a long tradition of activism, engagement, open admissions, and a mission to serve all of New York.  Occupy Wall Street was an object lesson in the practice of different kinds of radical pedagogy, politics, and protest.  Both of these necessarily implicate the ongoing privatization of public space in New York; what does it mean to be a public person in a privatized realm and what kinds of citizenship are available to us when we negotiate these spaces.  There are not only site of critical contestation and struggle, but also sites in which to anchor projects of critique, advocacy, reading, and imagination.  There are multiple diaspora literatures with presences in the City, composition and rhetoric as practiced by both teachers and students in our constituent colleges, and large and vital queer communities and communities of color.  The history of New York also provides ample opportunities to read multiple literatures and histories, from Edgar Allan Poe’s magazine editing to W.E.B. DuBois’s influence on the Black Arts movement to the rise of queer activism and the GAA in the 1960s.  None of these are objects to be analyzed through a microscope or a telescope, but places and practices in which we can anchor critical inquiry and examine the possibilities, ambiguities, and contradictions of politics, identity, and representation.

This concatenation of characteristics represents a web of mutually supporting factors which points in the direction the Program ought to move.  We can focus student and faculty recruitment to increase diversity in the Program’s members, offer those faculty and students access to the cultural institutions of the City, and develop a strong focus on the kinds of critical inquiry that are vital to the future of the humanities and the academe.  To do this, we ought to commit to expanding diversity and being responsible to the CUNY-wide mission to educate the disparate communities of New York City.  This means creating an environment in which our program comes to look more like the city and responds to the conditions of the city.  We ought to expand our capacity in diaspora literatures from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Global South generally.  The CUNY Pipeline is a wonderful program, but I believe that more faculty diversity – and diversity of areas of study – will beget more student diversity.  We ought to search out scholars whose work is also representative of and responsive to the critical questions that arise out of the milieu of the City.  This is not to make us an Urban Studies program, but to move toward those scholars in all areas and periods of literature who work with and within the resources of New York City, be they a physical archive, a performative practice, a diasporic literary tradition, the financialization of the university, or the problems and possibilities of composition in New York City’s classrooms.  Orienting this way will rely on existing strengths of the Program and CUNY, position the Program to move forward in fruitful and diverse ways, and fulfill the historic institutional mission of CUNY to educate and advocate for the people of New York City.