After Civil War, New Life for English Dept.

In 2001, the faculty of Columbia’s department of English and Comparative Literature agreed to revise the number of Shakespeare classes that its undergraduate majors could take to fulfill their pre-1800 distribution requirement.

For any other academic department, that decision would have been nothing more than a blip on the administrative radar screen. But looking back on it now, the department’s senior professors remember it as a revelation­—and a sign.

It was a revelation because it was the first collective decision that the department had made congenially in years. And it was a sign of the changes that since that time have transformed the department from an ideological battleground back into one of the nation’s most highly-regarded places to study literature.

Three years after ceding control to a department chair and a senior faculty hiring committee from outside the University, the department is a new institution, with eight new senior professors and a renewed commitment to supporting junior faculty.

As Professor Jean Howard put it, “The word needs to get out that it’s better.”

 

THE DISPUTE

Senior professors say the department’s gridlock began in the late 1980s. The field of literary studies had changed rapidly in the previous decade, when its focus on canonical texts and formalist textual analysis had come under fire from new-school literary critics who wanted to cross disciplinary lines, diversify faculties, and study literature outside the canon. Feminism, multiculturalism, deconstruction, and other new approaches to the study of literature went head to head with the traditionalism that was the department’s legacy.

As members of opposite methodological camps attempted to fill empty faculty positions, they became unable to agree on which candidates were qualified. The stalemate also stopped the department from presenting the administration with convincing cases for the tenuring of the department’s junior faculty.

Explosive personalities made department politics cruelly personal and, as one senior faculty member put it, “made collateral damage of some junior faculty and graduate students” who were pawns of senior faculty on opposite sides of the debates.

The department never failed to attract undergraduate and graduate students in high numbers and of high quality. Every year between 1995 and 2004, between 10 and 11 percent of undergraduates in Columbia College have declared majors in English. But throughout the 1990s, the faculty was effectively unable to make decisions. As faculty members retired and left for friendlier territories, the department could not agree on new hires to fill their spots. In 2000, only 37 of 46 tenure-track positions were filled.

 

“A WAKE-UP CALL”

David Cohen, who was at the time vice president for Arts and Sciences, says he intervened when the hiring logjam became a critical situation.

“The departmental difficulties began with ideological differences that then generated personal differences,” Cohen said. “Ultimately, this led to a dysfunctional situation that compromised the department’s ability to recruit and promote faculty. The number of faculty declined to a point where the department found it difficult to meet its teaching obligations.”

In response to the situation, Cohen appointed a committee of faculty from outside the University to take over senior hiring from the department. He also asked the department to nominate a new department chair, from outside the University, to spearhead “the rebuilding of the department.”

Cohen is a science person—when not serving as VP, he is a professor of biological sciences in A&S and a professor of psychiatry at the Medical School—and some English faculty criticized what one professor recently called his “lack of literary imagination.” But on the whole, the faculty believed, as Professor David Kastan put it, “that the administration is genuinely committed to the health of this department,” and they ceded their sovereignty without a fight.

The department’s new chair became Jonathan Arac, an Americanist from Pittsburgh known for his scholarly intensity—Hegel is as real to him as his friends are, other professors say—and his ability to help colleagues agree on a shared language of commitment. Arac was not a to tal stranger to the department, having visited and taught at Columbia in the 1980s, but his outsider status was important.

“The public declaration of a crisis, the bringing in of an external figure to act as chair, is a wakeup call,” Arac said. “Many members of the department had already blown the whistle on themselves. So it wasn’t against the will of the department that that was done.”

 

THE COMMITTEE

The external committee that hired the new senior faculty was made up of Columbia’s competitors, including the chairs of the English departments at Princeton and Penn, the dean of Northwestern, and professors from NYU and Cornell. Arac called their participation a display of good citizenship in the field of literary studies.

“I have a strong Pollyannaish streak, and this for me was immensely good proof that there is indeed a professional ethic that still can be found,” Arac said. “And they did a tremendous job. Once the committee members took on the job, they weren’t going to be known as the people who shipped off to Columbia a bunch of losers.”

The committee solicited hundreds of academic résumés and interviewed scores of potential new senior professors. They brought all the short-listed candidates to campus to meet with the department. In only one instance did the faculty feel wholly negative toward a candidate.

Professor David Damrosch called the intervention, and infusion of resources for several new faculty lines, “a real vote of confidence” from David Cohen’s office.

“This was a critical point,” Damrosch said. “Either the department was going to shrink away or it was going to be strongly rebuilt. And they chose the latter.”

Rutgers’s Bruce Robbins—whom Arac described as “a 19th-century star, but someone who we also thought of bringing incredible strength in 20th-century, even late 20th-century, transnational things”—was the first new appointment. Paul Strohm and Susan Crane replaced retiring medievalists Joan Ferrante and Robert Hanning. Alan Stewart arrived to teach Renaissance studies, and Clifford Siskin came to teach 18th-century and romantic studies. Americanist Ross Posnock, 19th-century British and French literary critic Sharon Marcus, and modernism and women’s studies specialist Marianne Hirsch joined the department. And Brent Edwards came as a visiting scholar this year, teaching transnational and African diasporic literature.

 

SEA CHANGE

These new senior faculty members remember entering a department that seemed friendly and functional. Before the hiring was over, the newly expanded department was making changes to its programs and policies—such as the revision of the pre-1800 requirement. And the next year, the faculty agreed to take on new responsibility to individually supervise senior theses.

“What I have seen is real goodwill and enormous respect,” said Robbins, who is now director of graduate studies and in his third year at Columbia. “It seems to me that there’s been no taking of hostages on either side.”

But according to Kastan, “although we are very clear that that was what the outside committee did, it’s not clear that what it did was completely necessary.”

Although most are reluctant to discuss details, many faculty say that the committee’s assembly and the new hires coincided with the departure of two particularly vehement and incendiary faculty members and that their absence made the department a significantly less hostile place.

Howard said that the presence of the new professors themselves made a difference as well.

“The people that the external committee helped to hire are by and large people who are good citizens,” Howard said. “Now, people don’t feel that a few faculty members are wielding a lot of power over the department but actually aren’t pulling their weight in terms of work. It’s a citizen culture as opposed to a queen bee culture.”

 

NEW JUNIOR HIRING AND TENURING PRACTICES

These days, senior faculty say the best thing about their department is its junior faculty, many of whom came to Columbia under a revised hiring system that hires only people who the department considers tenurable.

“Columbia has historically imagined itself on the model of Harvard and Princeton: you hire young people, and you assume that they won’t get tenure,” Kastan said. “But it’s a model that in various places has been mostly discredited now. It’s demoralizing—home-grown faculty are inevitably dispirited—and it’s bad ecology.”

In the past five years, Kastan says, Columbia has moved toward the better junior faculty hiring model pioneered in Berkeley and Michigan’s departments: “hiring wonderful people, allowing them to thrive, and promoting them.”

In practice, this has meant bringing to campus all short-listed candidates for junior faculty positions, so that everyone in the department agrees on the caliber of the new faculty before they arrive for good. And once junior faculty are hired, it has meant investing more energy and resources into the retention of junior faculty, so that Columbia is not, as Arac says that Harvard has been, “a place where you don’t get tenure and where it’s not happy to be a junior colleague.”

“All the non-tenured people we’ve hired in the past half-dozen years have been people we thought would deserve tenure,” Professor Edward Mendelson said. “And our judgment seems to have been surprisingly good. My private feeling now is: ‘Tenure them all, and then we won’t have to think about hiring senior people for a dozen years.’”

Assistant Professor Amanda Claybaugh, who specializes in the transatlantic 19th century, won the University’s Presidential Teaching Award, which is very seldom given to junior professors, earlier this year.

Associate Professors Rachel Adams, Nicholas Dames, Julie Crawford, and Sarah Cole will be up for tenure review soon, and many of their senior colleagues volunteer the opinion that they are all unusually deserving. And last week the department saw its first tenuring success since the committee was assembled: Martin Puchner, Columbia’s 19th- and 20th-century drama and modernism specialist, has been promoted.

His colleagues see it as a mark of their department’s health—and of Puchner’s commitment to it—that when Cornell had offered Puchner a tenured professorship before his own Columbia tenure process began, he turned it down.

 

GRADUATE PROGRAM CHANGES

The department’s newfound cooperation has also allowed it to overhaul its Ph.D. program. Last year the department’s graduate committee changed more than 50 aspects of the program, from the language requirement to the structures of oral exams.

To give graduate students more experience teaching in their own fields, the committee decided to require undergraduates enrolled in large lectures to participate in small, weekly, graduate student-run discussion sections.

Robbins believes that having teaching experience will give graduate students “a very serious advantage” when they are seeking professorships later. But he also emphasized that the change will be good for undergraduates.

“It’s not the Columbia tradition,” Robbins said. “There’s a certain amount of resistance to sectioning, because it’s not built into people yet. But it’s a good thing.”

Matthew Zarnowiecki, a fourth-year Ph.D. student, is teaching a section for Strohm’s Chaucer class. The first few sessions, he said, were like teaching a language class in the meter and pronunciation of old English: he would say a line, and the undergraduate students would repeat it back.

“As far as the responsibilities go, it’s significantly more time,” Zarnowiecki said. “But that time is offset by the rewards of actually teaching your own subject matter in the classroom, which you may or may not have a chance to do at Columbia as a graduate student.”

 

A “COLUMBIA SCHOOL”?

Having achieved relative stability, Columbia’s department has had more time to think about its own position among the nation’s other top English programs.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Yale had party lines on literary criticism: formalism, and then deconstruction. Berkeley’s department in the 1980s was an institution of New Historicism. And although, in 2005, Columbia’s department is emerging from its period of conflict with a resistance to party-line thinking, its members do have commitments in common.

Robbins called it “a historical and ethical department.”

Historical readings of literature, Howard added, “have made us open to postcolonial approaches and to feminist approaches. But there is no one school, and that’s a good thing.”

Kastan said his department is united around the idea that “literature exists in the world: it is vitally alive in and to the world.” Damrosch agreed that Columbia faculty have always “looked at literature as a social phenomenon”—even as critics like Gayatri Spivak and Andrew Delbanco have approached that goal from radically different angles.

It is also a department that is deliberately aggressive toward barriers of period and discipline.

“At Oxford, teaching outside my field was tolerated as eccentric behavior,” Strohm said. “Here at Columbia, teaching across boundaries is encouraged.”

Assistant Professor Frances Negron-Muntaner, who is also a core faculty member with the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, emphasizes that “the way that the fields are moving is toward interdisciplinary work” and that the English department has given her space to participate in that process.

There is still room for growth, in both demographics and coverage.

Howard notes that during its difficult years the department did not tenure professor David Eng, a junior Asian Americanist who has since left Columbia, and that the department “definitely needs to go back and try to fill that position.”

And with the death of Edward Said, Columbia lost a critical voice in postcolonial studies. The department is looking to fill one more senior faculty position in that area, but the expansion of coverage will not touch the gap that Said has left. The loss is still palpable in the department, where over the course of a 15-minute conversation on any subject—from department politics to talking to reporters—nearly any senior faculty member is likely to quote a line of Said wisdom.

Faculty members cite Said’s legacy as one more reason they have stuck with Columbia over these years of difficulty and progress.

“We all get e-mails once in a while saying, ‘Would you be interested in a job at...’” Kastan said. “And that’s nice, but I don’t know why anybody would want to be anywhere else.”