English Dept. chair responds to New York Times criticism

By Dan Spinelli 03/07/15 10:00am

The English Department has received a slew of praise in recent weeks, including a No. 2 ranking in the country from College Factual, a college ranking division of USA Today. But The New York Times opinion columnist Frank Bruni did not speak fondly of the department in a Feb. 18 op-ed.

Bruni’s column cited his former professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Anne Hall, who is now a lecturer in Penn’s English Department. Hall said that course evaluations discourage professors from being rigorous and cause course curricula to be catered too much to students’ interests.

“The student became the customer who’s always right,” she said. Hall declined request for comment on this story.

English Undergraduate Chair Michael Gamer wrote a Letter to the Editor to the Times, which did not get published, but was posted on the English Department's Facebook page. Gamer acknowledged in an interview, “University administrations across the country have looked to students as customers, primarily because tuition is very expensive,” Gamer said. But what happens in the classroom is another story. “I don’t do that when I teach,” Gamer said.

Courses that were once “Shakespeare” are now “Shakespeare and Film.” In Hall’s opinion, that new course emphasizes film at the expense of Shakespeare.

Gamer, on the other hand, doesn’t find the evolution in course offerings to be necessarily harmful or contrary to a study of the English language.

“We are still teaching the traditional material — just in the context of a far more interesting universe,” he said.

Gamer added that the nature of a canon, or group of select works to be taught in academia, is constantly in flux. As an undergraduate at Claremont McKenna College, Gamer was taught mostly poetry. He had to venture outside of the curriculum to read now-standard works by James Joyce and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Making a canon is “really about class or perceptions of class,” he said.

“Poetry was considered historically to be the highest and most elite art form. My little college didn’t want to be seen teaching anything other than the most prestigious or high art,” Gamer added.

In his op-ed, Bruni singled out six Penn courses as evidence of the department’s decline in quality, including Global Feminisms and two courses on psychoanalysis.

“I'll confess I'm flummoxed, given feminism's very long literary and cultural global history. Is it the ‘global’ or the ‘feminisms’ part that's the problem for Bruni?” Gamer said.

As for psychoanalysis, “you have to wonder how something that's been around for over a century and has deeply influenced artistic production constitutes a break from the canon,” Gamer added.

The three other courses Bruni mentioned — “Pulp Fictions,” “Sex in the City” and “Comics and Graphic Novels” — have jazzy titles but still fundamentally survey periods of literary history.

“Canon issues are weird. They’re all about acts of valuation. When you’re making an act of valuation, you’re saying certain populations matter or don’t matter,” Gamer said.

Ultimately, Gamer believes the department’s strength stems from a faculty with a diversity of beliefs that cross media.

“The center of the department is what it has always been but most of us take a wider orbit,” Gamer said.

He noted the addition of more international scholars, and experts from other media — including films, comics and archival work.

“A lot of literature occurs outside the printed book,” he said.

Foremost among these scholars include Anne Hall.

“She’s a really good teacher,” Gamer said. “That’s why she’s in the department.”

As for Bruni’s argument, it’s “an understandable nostalgic gesture that seems nevertheless misguided,” Gamer said.

He added, “Literature and culture evolve and change over time and so do disciplines and departments. It’s like complaining that ‘in my day, knee surgery was done with a scalpel,’ and now they’re using this ‘new fangled stuff.’”

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