[April 2024] What has broken the silence—or silencing—about my situation at Wayne State was the publication of a series of articles in People’s World (appearing from May to July 2023) rehearsing many of the false claims of the initial media campaign—which are still available online, as I go on to discuss. Scrolling through my search results, I can only grimace at the continued prominence of the banner display of an anonymous blog, labeled “home.org,” which I tried unsuccessful to keep from displaying, not to mention to get taken down. I have been unable to address or reach this publication, first, because of its anonymity—there is no named “author” or “publisher” of the site, thus no one to complain to about its content—but also due to the prohibition on answering student social media posts, as in my post above. I now know that the “blog,” as it is often referred to, was organized by a former student in our program living in New York (of this I am certain) and a Bay Area poet specializing in call-out campaigns (I am told but have not confirmed). About a dozen entries down, past my favorable Rate My Professor page (which I monitor and which will remove flames), was a new entry: “Safe Space Fail“—a completely new item, something like a potentially destructive virus or invasive species, which I would need to know about.
The article I found was a vicious rehash of material from the online blog, with corroboration from unnamed persons, with a muck-raking, scandal-mongering accusation that Wayne State, along with the faculty union (AAUP-AFT/WAU)—which has defended me in five successive grievances and an arbitration—has denied unnamed persons the right to “safe space” by continuing my employment and teaching. The article claimed that I am allowed to “roam the halls,” and that my mere presence in the classroom is a threat—though there are no complaints of any kind, and I continue to teach, happily, at Wayne State. The first question to ask was, Why now?—the material was ancient, and long since addressed—and then, Who did this? and finally, Why People’s World, an organ of the Communist Party that has been in continuous print since 1934, giving life support to the movement after its decades-long, worldwide decline? Are they now dipping into academic mobbing, streaming media, call-out campaigns in order to generate—what? solidarity of the precariat? new recruits? sensational reporting that gets hits on social media? One legitimate topic, as we see below, is graduate organizing, another is police reform, and I am fine with both. The article was posted on 18 July 2023; I only found out about it in February 2024. Possibly its existence was known to others (students? admins?), but no one said anything to me.
Looking further, I entered my name into the People’s World search engine and found two more articles: “Michigan Grad Students Fight for Living Wages,” 18 May 2023 (here); and “Are We Truly Considering Alternatives to Policing,” 5 July (here), which appeared right before the take-down on me, 18 July (here). What is bizarre about the first two articles is that my capsule narratives and links, rehearsing old and false claims about my teaching at Wayne State were dropped into a discussion, first, about graduate organizing at University of Michigan (not Wayne State), which was totally unrelated to my case. The second article attacks “alternatives to policing” in Detroit while making a dubious connection between police unions and tenure protections, again gratuitously citing me with no link whatsoever. The principle author of all three is one Andrew Wright, a Detroit-based activist. The argument focusing on me, however, was co-authored by a former graduate student in our program who claimed to be a “Professor” in our department, leading to speculation about their motives. Seemingly out of nowhere, I was being used as a straw man to oppose solidarities on the Left for union organizing and police reform—which then connects to an encompassing demand for “Safe Space.” Has the Communist Party really come to this? While “Safe Space” addresses many issues, one of them is the corporate university’s desire to control speech in the classroom, the limitation of content and advocacy, in establishing an in loco parentis. Its potential for misuse—as here—is great. Also left out are concerns of Due Process and tenure protection, which these articles toss to the winds.
What to do? My first response was to write a post on what it feels like to be called out, to be “named” in a name-calling event (such as has occurred often in our history, particularly for those suspected of communist sympathies), under the title “Am I That Name?” (here). And this is not the first time I have been called out on the Left; I wrote an extensive comment on “Naming Names” at the first occasion in 2014 (here), and there have been several since (particularly during volatile discussions around Conceptual Writing’s misuse of racial histories; here and here), as well as during a regrettable set-to with the poet Nathaniel Mackey (here). In retrospect, this phenomenon is characteristic of the decade in which it emerged: the 2010s, or as David Lau has called it, the “Red Decade.” This decade began with the shell-shocked precarity caused by the 2008 financial meltdown; achieved provisional community in the Occupy movement (2011), but then began to shatter into competing factions and paranoias. The onset of “calling out” I experienced from Commune Editions in 2014, then, was an anticipation of things to come; the controversy over Conceptual Writing and Michael Brown in 2015 would lead to further fracturing (where even commenting on the issue was enough to get one called out). It only took the 2016 election to accelerate the devolution of collectivity into multi-faceted shaming events, where the shame of living in MAGA America must be the predominate one. I point here to a crisis on the Left, desperately hoping to arrive at any kind of consensus, which seemed so obvious in 2011, about who are “we” (the 99%) and “they” (the 1%). This is the purely ideological moment, I believe, that led to my terrible experiences in 2018/19, and which have just been renewed again.
Naturally I want to end it in the larger sense; I will remain engaged in public discussions and work in poetics. At Wayne State, I have answered thoroughly and responsibly to specific complaints, though I contested them as well. But in this case, there was only one response. After a short delay—during which my close friends and colleagues Lyn Hejinian and Tyrone Williams had died—in consultation with my attorney, we sent a demand for retraction to People’s World dated 12 March 2024. The opening and closing paragraphs of that letter are cut and pasted below. What resulted was an immediate withdrawal—within 48 hours—of all material concerning me from the first two articles, along with a notice of their removal, along with a complete take-down of the content of the longer piece about me, as well as its subtitle, which was likewise indefensible. The former graduate student who claimed to be a “professor” had her credentials removed, though Andrew Wright has survived to write on topics where he is on more solid ground. Along with the retracted claims were also removed the digital trail of sources—specific persons writing on the anonymous “blog,” two articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the purloined letter from the dean that was obtained, violating Michigan law about confidentiality of personnel files, and published by the student. Enough. The implications of this provisional victory for me, after five years of torment that is truly unprecedented, are substantial. In posts that follow, I plan to further explore the facets of this bad history, from the intervening years after being silenced in 2020, continuing to what remains out there now.
Document
From attorney Mark Clark to People’s World et al., 12 March 2024:
This is a demand for retraction to the addressees listed above made under Michigan Compiled Laws 600.2911, relating to three articles which appeared last summer in People’s World referencing Wayne State University Professor Barrett Watten.
Before detailing the offensive content of these three “hit pieces,” it is worth saying something about Professor Watten’s life, career, and reputation.
Barrett Watten is an internationally known, award-winning poet and critic. His work has been translated into numerous languages, including Russian, where his work has a wide following since his visit to then-Soviet Leningrad in 1989. A Vietnam-Era war resister, he has a personal experience of revolutionary upheaval and politics from his time at Berkeley in the 1960s, where he obtained a BA in 1969 before attending the Iowa Writers Workshop in the early 1970s.
Returning to the Bay Area, he worked as a typesetter in a federally funded arts projects and as an academic editor while being an organizer and publisher of avant-garde writers. During this period he was heavily attacked by neoconservative critics in venues such as New Criterion. A nontraditional student, he obtained his PhD at Berkeley while serving in a staff position.
Since coming to Wayne State in 1994, he has educated hundreds of “first in the family” students of the working class and of color, resulting in fifteen dissertations. Students under his direction have written about Marxist literary theory, gender and sexuality, queer subjectivity, literary depictions of class and labor, postcolonial border politics, and the racial politics of Detroit.
He is expert not only on avant-garde poetry and American culture but on Soviet and post-Soviet literature and on the literary legacy of fascism and authoritarianism in Germany, where he co-organized exchange programs with the Bavarian-American Academy. His work is rooted in the Marxist tradition of Critical Theory after Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin.
It is important, also, to call out the political “pitch” and opportunism of these three articles. The principal author is a Detroit-based police abolitionist who conflates police unions with tenure protections for professors. His call to weaken tenure protections against the kind of anonymous mobbing attacks Professor Watten experienced is deeply ironic, given the importance of tenure protections in shielding Left and Communist professors from McCarthyite Terror in the 1950s. Such attacks on tenure have accelerated in the past few years.
The 1940 AAUP “Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure” is a fundamental protection for the culture and politics of the Left. Why then would People’s World host a gratuitous attack on tenure, validating a vendetta against Professor Watten by a disaffected community organizer, a former graduate student who falsely claims to be an English Professor, a student whose seminar paper was overdue (linked to your article, where he publicizes the issue), and the trivial, disproved claims of the present president of the Wayne Academic Union (also linked), who has a conflict of interest known to many.
The defamatory content of each article and demand for retraction for each article are presented below. This litany of falsehoods, both major and minor, leads to the concluding false argument in your third “hit piece”: that Professor Watten is a repeat “perpetrator” who has a “long history of violence.” We demand the removal of this and each falsely corroborating claim leading up to it. [Objections to 34 specific false claims follow. . . .]
Finally, a large photograph of Professor Watten is displayed under the heading “Protecting Perpetrators.” This photograph, from Professor Watten’s department page and copyrighted to the photographer, is used without permission and must be removed.
The bottom line is that you did no investigation into the information reported in this targeted hit piece on Professor Watten. The malice, or at best the reckless disregard for the truth, is evident. [. . .]
Demand is made for a retraction of the above identified false statements after each bullet point prior to April 1, 2024.
Notes and links
Image: Bill Irwin as Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, American Conservatory Theater, 3 June 2012; link here.
Links: Page 01, “Breaking My Own Story”
Page 02, “What Is Mobbing?”
Page 03, “The Aye of Poetry”
Page 04, “My Literary Controversies”
Page 05, “Questions of Unreason”
Page 06, “Defend Louisville!”
Page 07, “Difficult Speech @ Louisville”
Page 08, “Nonsite Speech”
Page 09, “Archive News”
Page 10, “Public Documents”Entry 57: “Am I That Name?”
