Stanley Fish, America's Enfant Terrible by Olson Gary A.;

Author:Olson, Gary A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

Chapter 5

The Department That Soared—and Then Plummeted

The Duke University English department in 1985 was respectable, but it had a long way to go if it was to rival institutions like Yale or Hopkins or Columbia. The administration at Duke had taken the first steps toward building a first-rate humanities presence by recruiting Stanley, Jane, Fred Jameson, and Susan Willis, but it would be up to Stanley and Jameson to follow through. Stanley would, and with a level of success no one could ever have predicted.

Well before accepting their positions and before Jane was fully on board with moving to North Carolina, Jameson and Stanley had had a long discussion on the phone, asking many questions: Is this the right thing to do? Should we go to a place like Duke? Can we make it work? Will the faculty really let us put them on the map? Or will there be too much resistance? Academic faculty often resent “outsiders” coming into their department or college and attempting to make substantive changes. By the end of the phone call, they had resolved to give it a try, to attempt to launch this promising department into the big leagues.

Some faculty members did resent the administration for hiring the foursome. They felt that the administration had been heavy-handed and should have allowed the faculty to vote on whether to appoint each candidate separately. One faculty member lambasted the dean during a chance encounter at the train station for not respecting proper process. Another approached Stanley when he first arrived and said in a mournful tone, “You’ll never be able to do anything here.” The first was laboring under the values of the old regime and was a direct recipient of the perks of that regime. Like others, he feared the potential loss of his own position of privilege and unearned departmental largesse. The second was sympathetic and had been a victim of the old regime, but he had succumbed to a feeling of resignation and hopelessness about the plight of the department and the impossibility of constructive change. He was jaded.

Stanley bided his time. The term of the current department chair, the Renaissance scholar George Williams, would be over in a year, and the tacit understanding was that Stanley would then succeed him. He used his first year to network with his new colleagues and to win many of them over, and when he did take over in 1986 he had won substantial support among the faculty.

The minute he became chair, he began a relentless effort to transform the department into the most prominent English department in the nation. The first order of business was to improve the departmental climate. Unlike Hopkins or even Berkeley, the Duke English department seemed to lack cohesiveness and community; it was not the kind of tight-knit circle of friends and colleagues that a well-functioning department should be. Some felt that it also suffered from a collective inferiority complex. While the institution perceived itself as competing with Vanderbilt and

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