How I provoked a boycott of the college
I’ve said that most professional relationships are superficial friendships. There are some interesting exceptions in the world of school -- close relationships that are not friendships. One of them is reading. When you read a book, you let the author into your head. You are thinking the author’s thoughts, using your head. That isn’t exactly a way of becoming friends with the author, but it is a form of closeness.
Another special relationship is teaching. Teachers can become outsized fantastic presences in the minds of their students, but that isn’t what I mean. There’s a kind of closeness in teaching and learning. If students learn nothing else from going to class, they learn about the professor; they know everything about the professor’s verbal tics, facial expressions, posture. Meanwhile, teachers usually have an exact knowledge of the patterns of attention of their students. If you know nothing else about your students, you know when they are paying attention and when their attention is elsewhere. When learning occurs, you can see it -- students taking in information, students having ideas.
It’s possible for a teacher-student relationship to be superficial, but that’s rather unusual. It would be like having a superficial relationship with your child. If you abandon your child, that’s a bad relationship, not a superficial one.
A significant exception in my personal experience is Professor Herman. She has been treating me like an enemy since 2016, but the joke is on both of us, because we used to think that we were friends. She was, at one time, my closest friend in the English department. In those days I believed that we were friends not in spite of our different values, but because of them. Each of us, I thought, enjoyed being surprised by the other one, because each was capable of saying things that the other would never have thought of saying. It was always fun to talk with her. Well, we misjudged each other. I made the mistake of thinking that she was tolerant, and she made the mistake of thinking that I was cool. We were both wrong.
Apparently Herman decided that we were not friends in September 2015, when I published an essay, “Would Vanessa Place Be a Better Poet If She Had Better Opinions?”, in the peer-reviewed journal Nonsite.
My essay was about a controversial subject. I argued that Vanessa Place’s conceptual poem Tweeting Gone with the Wind, in which she transcribed the entire text of the novel Gone with the Wind and posted it in on the Twitter account @vanessaplace, was a bad piece of writing. I wanted to know how a conceptual poem, in which there was no original writing, could be poorly written, and I wanted to know why readers were reluctant to say the poem was poorly written. That was why I wrote my essay.
I further argued that readers who accused Place of racism, of whom there were many, were being irresponsible. For one thing, Place’s declared intention was to point out the racist language and imagery in the original novel. For another, her ideas about race and racism were identical to those of her critics. Even her actions were the same as those of the people who criticized her: the same passages that she reproduced to draw attention to the racism of Gone with the Wind were also reproduced by her critics to draw attention to Place’s ostensible racism.
My essay was not nearly as controversial as Place’s poem, but there was a bit of controversy. Critics responded respectfully, and for the most part positively, in other academic journals, such as English Literary History, Critical Inquiry, and Post45, in books published by Chicago University Press and University of Alabama Press, in magazines such as Los Angeles Review of Books, and in posts on the Poetry Foundation website. There were some readers who disagreed with me. In a paper delivered at the MLA convention in 2016, Aldon Nielsen said that I was responding to a strawman argument. In addition to Nielsen, if you search Twitter and Facebook, you might find six other people who posted negative comments about my essay.
Was Herman one of the readers who disagreed with what I argued? Probably. I’m not sure what she thought. Back in 2015, when we talked about it, the criticism she offered was that she thought my essay ignored history. I replied that she and I had very different ideas about the meaning of history. It may be useful to note that history was invoked by Place’s critics in the following manner:
[Place’s] recent work with ‘Gone with the Wind’ re-inscribes the text’s racism -- she does not abate it -- in the flesh of every descendent of slaves. . . . She furthers her career on the backs of Black ancestors -- the hands that filled the master’s pockets now fill hers.
And by Place herself in these words:
I am stealing the material from Mitchell because I believe she stole it first. Neither of us has any right to the matter (as in the lives) therein: the only difference between Mitchell and me is that I already know I am guilty.
These two statements are not making sound historical arguments. (The first statement, from an open letter signed by 2,000 poets, writers, and professors of creative writing, is barely coherent. Its defects should be a lasting embarrassment to its signatories.) It is nonsense to say that Place, in 2015, reached into the past and injured “Black ancestors” by wounding them, exploiting them, or stealing from them. (On this point, see Walter Benn Michaels, “Victims of New Historicism.”) So, no, I don’t think I am the one in this controversy who appears ignorant of history.
Anyway, that was all we said about the content of my essay.
Meanwhile, Herman wrote emails denouncing my essay to the dean of the college and to Professor James, the department chair. I don’t have copies of these emails, but it appears that she did not denounce my essay for ignoring history. According to her interview with the workplace investigator, she forwarded the essay to Professor James with the comment that “there was a problem” and that “Kunin’s essay was causing a scandal at the college.” According to Professor James’s interview, “[Herman] told him the article was receiving unwanted national attention and that Kunin’s take was bad. She told him people read the essay as racist.”
James and the dean seem to have been perplexed as to why they were receiving these emails. James told the investigator that “he was not even sure what a chair was supposed to do with such information.”
Herman sent numerous emails about my essay to the dean’s office over the years. It’s striking that her emails never say anything about the argument of my essay or whether she disagreed with it. What she mostly says is that other people disagreed with it. “People,” she said to anyone who would listen, “read the essay as racist.” In a 2019 email, she wrote, “One of my African Americanist colleagues in the field referred to his [Kunin’s] writing as ‘hate speech.’ Another famous Black poet and theorist whom I will not name had unprintable things to say about him [Kunin] and his writing.”
To Herman, the controversy over my essay looked enormous. She told James that my essay “was receiving unwanted national attention.” She told the dean that my essay was “reprimanded on a national scale.” (In that email, superstitiously avoiding my name, she refers to me as “someone hired after me, whose writing has been reprimanded on a national scale,” and “the person who directly caused me to go on my current disability leave.”) Elsewhere this claim evolved into the fantastic story, which she repeated in a number of emails, that the college had been boycotted, perhaps more than once, in response to my essay. For example, she told the dean that I had “a history of publishing material that provokes boycotts of the college by Black artists.”
Note the word “history,” which seems to have a private meaning for Herman. Where in history were the boycotts recorded? Who organized them? What did the organizers demand as a condition for ending the boycotts?
As far as I know, only one writer ever turned down an invitation to speak at Pomona College because of my essay. (The writer was Punjabi, if ethnicity makes any difference.) The writer sent me a note three days after my essay was published:
I do suddenly remember our conversation about Lynda Barry.
In that other time.
Aaron, I read your essay today, online. Having read it, it no longer feels possible to come to your college to – unfold: an imaginary: with [Professor Sylvia].
I was very excited by it.
Now impossible.
I was disgusted. My reply was conciliatory.
If you ever reconsider, or have further thoughts, please let me know.
For the present, I hope that you have identified the right enemies.
Best wishes
Aaron
In this instance, Herman was an unreliable historian. Did she believe there was a boycott? Did she think that a Punjabi writer was a guild of “Black artists”? Was she exaggerating? Was she deliberately lying?
I have previously observed that delusion and dishonesty are not separate processes. It didn’t matter so much whether Herman herself disagreed with something in my essay. What was important to her was the fact that there was a disagreement somewhere. The disagreement seemed uncomfortably large to her, and it kept growing: poets were boycotting the college because of my essay, the nation was condemning the college because of my essay.
She might have forgiven me for our disagreement about history, but she could not forgive the fact that six people posted obnoxious comments about my essay on social media. If those six people disagreed with me, they might associate her with the disagreement, and she could not support that association.
Why was Herman so distressed by the possibility of disagreement? I don’t know. I completely misjudged her motives in the past; there’s no reason to think that I understand her better now.
[Edited to make a correction: the MLA convention in Austin was held in January 2016 rather than December 2015. AK, 2/4/2024.]