DRAFT VERSION DRAFT VERSION

This is by far the most painful page to write, and I have been delayed. I hope now to complete the task I assigned myself—to respond to the 32 individual posts on the anonymous blog that was hastily, but calculatedly, put up at the outset of the social media firestorm initiated by two graduate students in May 2019. While most of the posts on Twitter have now been retired to the dustbin of cyberhistory, the “blog” remains—hosted by unidentified persons, somewhere in cyberspace, paid for and maintained by someone, monetized by ads. Meanwhile, in the interim, the graduate program and English department at Wayne State have diminished nearly to the point of nonexistence. In Winter 2025, for instance, there is precisely one graduate seminar in Literature/Culture/Media. Student numbers have declined, the dean’s office has imposed unworkable quotas, and students need to take courses elsewhere to satisfy requirements. In the major, the situation is just as bad: there are exactly three dedicated upper division LCM courses and two required seminars needed for completion. Content is being pushed to lower-level GenEd courses; meanwhile full professors are being assigned basic writing (composition) courses, decimating their fields of study, to satisfy the dean’s numbers.

The students sallied forth in 2019 under the banner of truth and justice: #believegradstudents was their hashtag. What resulted was nothing less than the destruction of their program and perhaps the department. There were other contributing factors along the way, particularly COVID. But in 2020 the core group was riding high: they had perpetrated their campaign; gotten media attention far beyond Wayne State in two scandal-mongering articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education; and saw career opportunities at a national level, with significant subsidiary benefits of their attack to take down a “Language poet.” There were windows of opportunity, however small, at the Louisville conference, local and bicoastal readings, invited speakers, funds for a literary magazine. In 2020, after a vindicated student posted my personnel letter on Twitter and then in the Chronicle, leading to my being banished from the Louisville conference, I fought back on the issue of Free Speech. The two students, flushed with success, would go on to make big mistakes—a scandal in the graduate union (GEOC), where one was elected President on a program of “fact-based investigations.” I am told that both were removed from the union due to an issue with another student: so much for #believegradstudents (there were other revelations, as when a highly publicized phone/text harassment case involving a graduate student and a nonstudent was overturned after she was proved to have charged the wrong perpetrator). Meanwhile incompetent administrators, having gone this far down the road to ruin, played CYA; and opportunistic faculty made what they could of the power vacuum. It was an explosion in the paintball factory: everyone got hit.

My purpose here, as above, is to create a counternarrative—I hope I have done so. But to this day everything continues to be the matter of the greatest secrecy, and nothing can be discussed to correct the story or return to normalcy—which, de jure, is supposed to occur. My purpose in a more limited sense is to provide minimal contexts for the student posts on the blog, without much detail. Of the ten students, most have either completed the program and/or had left; only the central two remain, I have been told. It is important to note also that everything I am uploading here responds to the public media campaign the students organized and continue to maintain on the “blog” (and as an attachment to the articles in the Chronicle). No records maintained by Wayne State University are involved, an important point as the principles of FERPA have been used to try to limit my response all along. (On the misuse of FERPA—the Family Educational Records Protection Act, initially intended to prevent parents from accessing student grades—see the detailed discussion of my case by FIRE: here.) But this is the point: I am only at this late date offering this response due to the anonymity of the “blog” and the stonewalling of administrators. When that comes down, so does this.

The problem with this material is that it is endless. That first of all reflects the media ecology of the cohort: gossiping, in contact around every conceivable detail, via text messaging or Instagram or at the bars. Every interaction that took place went viral. The viciousness increased as a nonstudent working as a local textbook buyer (the perpetrator in the case above) turned to gaslighting and circulating anonymous texts. The dynamic of mobbing was reflected in the form of the “open investigation,” using the mass of detail as both proof of guilt and the remedy for it: total humiliation and banishment. It would add little, then, to respond in detail to what the ten students, in particular, put on line: I would be playing to the very tactic they were using. Everything looks bad once you start throwing accusations around and there is no standpoint for defense. This was the situation I had to deal with throughout the pseudo-legal “investigation,” in the series of grievances and arbitration, and with the continuing reemergence of innuendo based on no real understanding of what really happened. The students could see this coming and played to the crowd. What resulted is a game of Whack-a-Mole that I have no intention of continuing. I will thus limit my comments to a brief summary and clarification before moving on, in the hope that all will soon disappear in purple mist.

Georgina Adlam

This was Victorianist from another university system who is no longer in the program. She had three complaints: I insisted on using Dropbox (rather than Blackboard; Canvas had not been introduced) to upload course readings; I held a class in my loft to screen Blade Runner 2049 after the department screening room proved not to be working (and, she claims, where beer and snacks were served); and I was biased in some way to the two complaining students, as a couple. None of these trivial complaints were sustained after their airing to the investigator.

Marie Buck

This was a student that I intensively recruited to our program, along with her partner, in the hope of building a group working in poetics. She got caught up in department politics and started looking for an exit (she complained I would not write a letter for that purpose in her first semester, though I said I would). In 2008 she texted me, out of the blue, saying she decided she did not want me to be her advisor, accusing me of holding my career interests above those of students. I was offended primarily because we had no such understanding. The phone and email exchange that followed is, from my perspective, regrettable. She made a detailed log of the interaction and showed it to numerous people, for instance Jonathan Flatley, who took it turn to the chair. I was not informed of this record until the Kathryne Lindberg incident, when I was chastised for it. This was in 2010. Slightly before the mobbing campaign kicked in she completed a disseration under Flatley. In 2019, she uploaded the record as a part of the “blog,” where it is still accessible. I have asked her to take it down in an open letter, which I attach for public interest here. She is likely one of the two architects of the “blog,” though she now denies being in touch with whomever is maintaining it.

Tara Forbes

Tara Forbes uploaded her highly “colored” account of the events at the WSU teach-in following Trump’s first election in 2016. The mood among students and faculty was, without question, highly sensitive and even traumatized. I spoke on “The Authoritarian Personality.” Sitting in the back row, she misheard my response to a question and thought I was yelling at the student who asked it; rather, I was speaking loudly in a room with no microphone. She mistook, as well, the following interaction with the partner of Tracy Neumann, and later with Neumann herself. None of this detail matters as Forbes was already primed along department faultlines, was intensely involved with alliances among grad students, and was sure she would never have me on her committee (she ended up doing her dissertation with Jonathan Flatley but has since left the profession for union work). I met with Tara and another student to try figure out what happened; we shook hands and she withdrew her complaint, but came back later with her account in the most aggressive manner possible. The investigator heard her out in detail and her complaint did not advance.

Isaac Pickell

[t/k]

Kelly Polasek

This was a promising student that I believed I would be working with on a dissertation project, which was confirmed on a number of occasions including a meeting devoted to that end. We also had a summer-long directed study on the postmodern novel that was very successful. Outside that interaction, I am sure I would never have read Tom Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Later, however, she decided to change advisors to Jonathan Flatley and informed me of the fact in a precipitous and unsettling manner. I was upset and in fact hurt but kept my response to a bare minimum. When the social media campaign began, she became intensely partisan. This was very unlike her otherwise scrupulous conduct as a student and manners as a person. It is a real tragedy that she got caught up in the tissue of lies circulating among the cohort.

Ted Prassinos

This was student also caught up in sectarian politics, between me and Jonathan Flatley. I have to think he must be a bit of a flirt, because at the end of a directed study and seminar we did in 2014, I find this email concerning meeting to discuss his paper and, likely, the question of whether I would continue to work with him: “I would love to, but I had to take my car in to get new brakes this afternoon. I get it back tomorrow afternoon. Will you be around campus any time next week? I teach mornings on Mondays and Wednesdays this spring/summer which means that on those days I will around for lunch. Does any of that sound reasonable in the first half of this coming week?” The account online claims that I was somehow pressuring him in an offensive way; this is false, Ted. This person was lying to play to the mob, full stop.

Molli Spalter

[t/k]