An emergency situation has arisen at this year’s Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 in which my participation is being canceled, not by conference organizer Alan Golding or his committee, but by upper admins concerned with the “appearance” of the call-out and cancel campaign that has been on-going against me, perpetuating it. Over twenty-five years, I have been a strong supporter of, and participant in, the Louisville Conference—it is my regional network of poetics and criticism, drawing from the Appalachians to the Upper Midwest, a site of conviviality and exchange. Over the years, I have presented work on twenty separate occasions [here].

Anticipation of the cancel campaign began to be heard at Louisville early last fall; sources told me colleagues had reported concerns from their “professional networks.” Already the primary motivation for this situation arises: it is not anything one thinks or feels or judges “for oneself”; it is what other people think or feel or judge—or appear to. This is the basic genetic material of all admins—not to think or feel or judge for themselves, but to worry about what those above, to the side, or below will think. The fundamental structure of authoritarianism is here—the tendency not to see decisions as autonomous, and not to respect the autonomy of judgment, but to constantly be looking around: what do other people think, feel, judge. Social media accelerates this phenomenon: when something goes viral, it is a disease of the judgment. Now everybody—in any possible world imaginable—is part of the process of thinking, feeling, judging. Gossip, hearsay, and untruth rule the day.

Back to the story: the conference committee discussed the matter, concluding the situation at Wayne State did not involve Louisville, and gave me a green light to apply. I organized a panel on a topic that is high on my agenda: “refunctioning poetics”—rethinking questions of form and genre through Walter Benjamin’s use of the term Umfunktionierung, from the “Author as Producer” essay. Panel lined up, submitted, accepted, and here it is—or would have been, had this not happened:

As has been reported, on November 12 Wayne State acted, harshly and wrongfully, to deny my teaching and mentoring and to relocate my office, on the basis of the outside investigator’s report (but not any actual charges or due process)—a procedure hastily set up after the students’ social media/mobbing campaign began in April. The reasons given are all deficient in terms of process and substance, as will be shown. The WSU chapter of AAUP-AFT immediately responded with a grievance, citing the “arbitrary and capricious” change in my employment and the lack of any due process, demanding I immediately be returned to my customary duties [here; there are now three grievances against Wayne State; see Page 07 t/k]. On or about November 26, I became aware that one of the students, in a gesture of triumphal vindication, had obtained the dean’s letter by FOIA and had tweeted it to the world at large—an act of harassment, defamation, and violation of privacy if there ever was one.

It was also an over-the-top act of aggression that, in the minds of many, began to cast doubt on the students’ motives [see here]. About the time of a second triumphal moment—the department holiday party I could not attend, as I was being interviewed by a cub reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education [here]—the petition that I be banned from Louisville went live, tweeted by the students and their immediate cohort. My impression is that the petition did not get much traction, and there seemed to be virtually no comment or retweeting after December 12. The petition also coincided with the second of three attacks on my office door in the department, suggesting an ebullient if unserious moment of harassment, of which there have been many. Another possibility is that the Louisville petition was a protective cover for the out-there vulnerability of having tweeted my letter. The truth of these events probably changes hourly, but in the end it will unfold and we shall see.

Nothing, in any case, was happening at Louisville even after the tweet of the dean’s letter and the petition (which got pushback as well). About Christmas, however, someone went over the head of the committee to an admin, alerting them to the existence of the online material. The admin then summarily threatened the support (financial and affiliative) of the conference itself. This is how one gets people to pay attention to trivial or disputable claims—aim at a higher level. As a response, I was encouraged to organize a letter-writing campaign, which I did: about twenty-five poets, critics, professors, and students wrote eloquent letters in support of my work and contributions to Louisville and against call-out and cancel culture. Some of them had first-hand knowledge of the climate in my department or specific persons in it. Over the month of January, these letters seemed to have their effect, first with the admin and then the committee. There was no retweeting of the boycott call, and the committee was drafting a position statement. We were set to go forward, and could turn our attention to what mattered: getting our papers written and looking ahead.

It was not to be. Late last week I learned that, while the committee was drafting its positive response, someone outside the committee went over their heads—to upper levels of the admin, virtually to the top. What kind of culture exists up there, I wonder? We are talking about the University of Louisville, a well-endowed public university with a famous basketball program in a cool city, a liberal enclave in a Red State—but an example of the corporate university, with its neoliberal entitlements and assessments, nonetheless. “Cover your ass” must be the team motto of the corporate university—that is what we see here. I am receiving a letter from a dean saying that Louisville will act on the basis of my dean’s letter from Wayne State (which it should have no access to or responsibility for): my participation in the conference is canceled. I will update this post with further news when I have it [see below]; meanwhile, the mobbing campaign has worked, if not by frontal assault then by devious, behind-the-scene means.

Documents: AAUP Statement on “Triggering Warnings”

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 07, “Difficult Speech @ Louisville”
Page 08, “Nonsite Speech”
Page 09, “Archive News”
Page 10, “Public Documents”
Page 11,” “Endgame Notes”

Dispatches from the Poetry Wars: “PoBiz Stock Index Update, 6 February 2020”
———: “Dispatch #49: Letter to a Student at Wayne State University”