There have been some grim and abrupt firings at Stanford's creative writing program recently, threatening to upend the writing institution founded in 1946 by Wallace Stegner. The firings are a blow not just to the individuals who have been reshuffled and up-ended, but to Stanford's writing program overall, where the lecturers are vital members.
Recently, the English department gathered twenty-three of the Creative Writing Department's Jones Lecturers over Zoom, and announced that they were terminating their current positions and moving them all to short-term contracts within the next two years.
The aggressive reorganizing is targeting the Jones Lectureship, positions created soon after the writing program's founding. The Lectureships are awarded to some Wallace Stegner Fellows—another Stanford program—and allow fiction and poetry writers time to work on manuscripts, as well as to teach and support students in the English Department.
The abrupt change shocked the lecturers, who were also startled at the cold, corporate-sounding jargon they were met with from colleagues and fellow humanities academics. Lecturer Tom Kealey reports that, "When we asked what 'cycled out' meant, they clarified that our jobs would be terminated."
Another lecture told The Stanford Daily that they felt treated, "like we were garbage…They didn't even acknowledge how difficult this news would be, and when they did give us time to ask questions, the way they fielded the questions...was just very cold and very dismissive."
Stanford, in its description of the lecturer positions and the recent changes, takes great pains to emphasize that the Lectureships were always intended to be temporary, describing them as "limited, fixed-year teaching appointments" aimed at helping people "transition to a longer-term teaching career elsewhere." Within this framing, the school sees its firings and reorganization as "restoring the original intent" of the Lectureships.
The problem is that the positions have become more than short stops for writers, with many lecturers being renewed for longer than the four-year time limit.
The timing of the terminations also corresponds to the loss of Eavan Boland, a poet and the head of the creative writing program for 20 years before her death in 2020.
Boland oversaw the expansion of the program, leaning on the lecturers to grow student interest and broaden course offerings. Another lecturer, Edward Porter, told Inside Higher Ed that despite the one-year contracts, the lecturers, "kept getting renewed," saying that "it's true that Boland did move the lectureships away from their original intent—but that it was beneficial for students, teaching and the program."
As Kealey told Inside Higher Ed, "Eavan was just a fierce defender of the program."
And it's that program that's likely to suffer. In a blistering open letter, Dr. Christopher Kempf, Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and former Stegner Fellow, described his disappointment in Stanford, emphasizing the important role that the lecturers and their institutional knowledge play, and how destabilizing it will be to shift to precarious, short-term contracts:
You will already be aware, of course, of the obvious impacts of this decision: that lecturers advise over ninety percent of students in Creative Writing and teach over fifty percent of the classes in English; that two-thirds of English majors select a focus in Creative Writing; that current and past Jones Lecturers have been among the most committed and longest-serving members of the faculty in English; that, through the work of these lecturers, thousands of Stanford undergraduates have been able to experience real individual attention as writers and as people.
More than just a blow to the department, the timing of this seems possibly retaliatory—this "restructuring" is, as the kids say, sus. An open letter asking the University to reconsider the changes includes the damning detail that,
The change comes less than a year after several Jones Lecturers petitioned the department for fair compensation, benefits, and a pathway to permanent teaching posts, considering that — until last year — many had effectively taken pay cuts to continue teaching at Stanford and were considered "very low income" by the state of California's standards.
Kealey also writes about the sense of betrayal many of the lecturers feel: "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."
Everyone except for the Stanford administration seems to agree that this move, "fundamentally threatens the core of the creative writing program itself." There are efforts to pressure the University to reconsider the changes, including an open letter from students and alumni and an Instagram meme account, @ripstanfordcw.
To my eye, the decision seems motivated by money and power: a revolving door of temporary, lower-paid lecturers are cheaper and more pliable than longer-term, more enmeshed members of the community. But as the school year gets underway, it's unclear to many what the program will look like going forward. Stanford is losing a vital cohort of writers and educators, advocates and advisors for students, and numerous "classes that are unlikely to be taught again" including The Graphic Novel, American Road Trip, Nature Writing, Young Adult Fiction, and more. But most of all, Stanford is eroding its reputation as an institution that is home to an English Department that can provide an excellent writing education and foster the next generation of great writers.
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