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[robert-portfolio]

The Race

        Kimmy bends at the waist as she does it: scoops the gravel to find ground for the spoons; she pats her hands free of the small rocks and twists a spoon’s plastic stem into the dirt—a passing bike’s bell chirps—Kimmy straightens up. Her palms smart. Dusty sweat finds its way into her eyes as she examines the purpley divots and crosshatches below her pinky fingers. She knows she’s too old for this, knows that the plastic spoons won’t grow into anything (Can anything grow in Palm Springs?), but she likes to look at the grid of spoons sticking their heads out of the gravel, their translucent little shadows pierced through with curly-cues of light. The way the shadows turn throughout the day.

        Her mother calls to her from the kitchen. Always the kitchen. “Breakfast is ready!” Kimmy can see her mother through the venetian blinds, sprinkling cinnamon onto two shallow bowls of oatmeal. As she sits down to eat, her mother says, “Someone is coming to look at the house today. Did you make a mess of the yard again?”

        “What about the race?” Kimmy asks, “Won’t the road be closed?”

        “They can park somewhere off of Alejo. It’s not a long walk and they have our address.”

        “Okay.”

        “After you clean up the front yard, will you show them in? All the work I have to do is still in this area.” Her mother’s right arm extends slowly toward the counter. Cool light stretches in thin rectangles across its clean surface and bends over the counter like a man taking his tie off after work. “Have you seen our dinner knives?”

        “No,” Kimmy says and smirks. “I thought we were going to watch the bike race today. We always watch the bike race together.” This wasn’t true, though they had watched the bike race together last year, her mother sitting at the kitchen table, watching clusters of cyclists pass their window at odd intervals throughout the day. As the day wore on, her mother’s head fell until she could only see the long shadows of bikers darken a quickly-moving slice of windowsill. Kimmy paced back and forth and cheered each group as they raced by the window. She had a goopy bowl of mac and cheese in one hand and a fork in the other, which she jabbed up into the air like a drum major’s baton. Her mother’s head nodded to the side with each of Kimmy’s shouts. The race isn’t much of an event, just a fund-raiser put on by the crippled children’s center. The roads close all the same.

        “The race lasts all day. We’ll catch some of it.”

        “I wish we could go to the finish line.”

        “Kimmy, you know we can’t do that.” Her mom holds her hands to her head. “Help me with the dishes.”

        Kimmy grabs her bowl and brings it to the sink, lets the warm sudsy water fill it, float up bits of oatmeal like curdled milk. From the window she sees a young cyclist catch his front wheel in a pot hole, wobble toward the curb, speed over it, and crash into the gravel. Kimmy drops the bowl; foam spurts up, clings to her cheek. “My garden!” she cries.

        “Close the door after you!”

          The cyclist is crying and ashamed of it. He holds his bloody shin and tears make his hot, red face glister in streaks. The glittering heads of snapped spoons lie around him like the scatter of water caught mid-splash. He takes a slow breath to see if he can without it catching. It catches. He squeezes out the words, “Gravel lawns like this should be illegal,” and makes brief eye contact with Kimmy, then looks away.

        “Sure is a hot day for a bike race.” Kimmy says. “My mom says the heat’s coming early this year.”

        “Drought,” he says, still looking to the street.

        “How old are you?” she asks.

        “Thirteen.”

        “I’m eleven.” She sits down next to him.

        “Do you have any first aid stuff?” He asks, turning toward Kimmy. “I don’t see my dad anywhere. I got pretty far ahead of him.”

        “No,” Kimmy sighed. “I’ll wait here with you. Can I show you something?”

        “I’m not going anywhere.”

        Kimmy stands up. “This,” she says, gesturing broadly to the broken, dirty spoons, “is my garden. You kinda wrecked it when you crashed.”

        “These are plastic spoons.”

        “Do you wanna see something?”

        “I said ‘yes,’ already.”

        “Help me dig,” Kimmy says, smiling. She sweeps aside the gravel behind her with her forearm, revealing a swath of freshly turned dirt fringed with ragged black plastic.

        “What happened to the plastic tarp?” he asks.

        Kimmy says, “I cut it out to make room for this. Help me dig.” They dig. The rough, sandy dirt gets under their finger nails, scratches their skin. The cyclist sighs. He likes the cool of it against his skin. “Stop,” Kimmy says. “Close your eyes.” In her hand, a silver table knife glints. She rubs dirt off it with her shirt.

           “Open them.” She says, handing him the knife. “There are more.” The young cyclist peers into the hole.

[robert-portfolio]

The Death of a Literature Program

       You’re in a one hundred-person lecture hall, sitting at the back of the room. The lights are dim. The professor, a middle-aged, white man, is speaking in a level tone, going over the plot-points of the reading due today. He fills in some context—the reading is ancient Greek tragedy, so the context is useful—but largely he tells you things you know already because you did the reading. You’re a good student because you are smart and you work hard. The people sitting next to you are probably good students, too, but they, like you, are bored. Their laptops are open. A man to your left is on Google maps. Maybe he’s planning a trip to visit his significant other in Northern California. The woman sitting in front of you is on a food blog. Maybe she lives with six other people and has agreed to cook dinner for the house tonight. She’s nervous because she’s not sure she knows how to cook for herself yet, but she wants to make something healthy and good for her friends. The man to your right is texting. You want to get mad but you don’t. It would be hypocritical: You are writing this article, not taking notes. You only wonder why you are here.         It could be another way. For a long time, the College of Creative Studies offered another way to study literature. Classes averaged around 15 people, rarely exceeded 20. The work was hard: one professor, who retired earlier than he planned to due to disagreements with the administration, taught a course on the 19th century novel for which the reading was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Eliot’s Middlemarch, Trollope’s Barchester Towers, as well as three other masterwork’s of similar length and difficulty. A popular course taught by a current professor had students read everything by William Carlos Williams: his three novels, hundreds (thousands?) of poems, and his slim autobiography, I Wanted to Write a Poem. The work was daunting, but you weren’t worried: You weren’t graded, just assigned units for the amount of work you completed. You were free to read great books and write about them without anxiety. You could take a dozen classes with the same professor, both academic and creative, and enter into an atelier-style, artistic mentor/apprentice relationship with them. What’s more, you were encouraged to take lots of classes, hard classes, outside of your discipline in Letters and Sciences, the main college at UCSB, and could drop them at any point if you found yourself drowning in this sea of knowledge instead of swimming.

         The oral history of CCS has it that each major in the college (there are eight: literature, art, music composition, biology, chemistry, biochemistry, physics, and computing) used to function as literature had functioned until very recently: you’d take most of your classes in CCS because they were tougher, smaller classes and venture into L&S in your field for the occasional challenging fare offered there, such as a graduate course or an upper division course taught by a very good professor. The literature major is the last holdover from Marvin Mudrick’s original vision for the College of Creative Studies. The restructuring process that’s happening to literature now has already happened everywhere else.         Mudrick was an English professor at UCSB who was hired in 1949. He founded the college in 1967 was its provost (the college now has a dean) until he was ousted by Chancellor Huttenback in 1984. Chancellor Huttenback was himself fired for embezzlement of university money.         I couldn’t tell you why this current restructuring process is taking place. I’ve heard that the program’s most recent external evaluation glowed with praise, but I’ve also heard that Marvin Mudrick made a lot of enemies in Letters and Sciences when he started his own school, and that chief among them was Chancellor Huttenback. The university administration continued his antagonism, and this, I believe, is the source of the narrative that CCS needs to fall in line with the rest of the university. The current administration seems to be carrying out this legacy.         When asked at a meeting with literature students what he thought of Mudrick’s vision for the college, Bruce Tiffney, the current dean of CCS, said that Mudrick had an elitist and unsustainable vision of the college’s future, that Mudrick had envisioned “a city on a hill,” that CCS students would have their own dorms and classrooms where Manzanita Village stands today. CCS students do have their own dorms in Manzanita Village, Pendola House, and CCS does have its own building, complete with classrooms. At the annual All-College Meeting, Bruce Tiffney tells the same parable of the “five hundred pound gorilla.” CCS students are intellectual heavyweights, he says. They are the five hundred pound gorillas sitting the backs of classrooms. “Where does the five hundred pound gorilla go?” he asks. “Wherever it wants.”

        The specific vision of CCS’s new Literature and Writing program has been kept relatively hidden. However, one thing seems to be certain: literature courses will by and large not be taught within the college. Instead, students will study literature in its cognate departments within Letters and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature. This model works well in the sciences. A Creative Studies physics student takes a rigorous, two-year introductory series within CCS that rivals the undergraduate sequences at CalTech and MIT. The rest of his or her UCSB career is spent taking specialized upper division courses, such as Non-Linear Dynamics, and advanced graduate coursework, like Quantum Field Theory, and, of course, doing research. The upper division courses average twenty-five to fifty students and the graduate courses average ten. This model works so well for two reasons. One, discussion isn’t necessary in the process of learning science. An undergraduate physicist doesn’t have his own take on rotational mechanics. If they do need to talk to the professor about the material, it’s to answer an assigned problem or to seek help in answering it. In the humanities, discussion is the essential component of learning. It’s not until I’ve talked out my ideas about a poem or a novel with a peer or a professor that I feel I know what my ideas are, let alone can asses their strengths and weaknesses. Two, graduate level coursework in the sciences, at least in the first two years, is essentially very hard undergraduate coursework. As a beginning grad student, you are still learning things about the universe uncovered by the great minds that came before you, as well as the tools they used to discover them. The same is not true of literature. In most graduate courses, students don’t read primary sources (i.e. novels, poems, and short stories) and instead read books of criticism (the assumption being that students have already read a great deal of primary source texts and are constantly reading other primary source texts in their spare time and for their research). You’d be hard pressed to get a literature degree without reading any literature.         At a Q&A that the College of Creative Studies administration had with its literature students, we were asked what our favorite parts of the literature program have been. I said that my favorite part has been the literature coursework taught in CCS because we do much more reading than in L&S courses and the discussion we have in these courses is at such a high level. Other students agreed. The administration asked, “Have you tried doing extra work for these L&S courses?” Their vision is that future students will read extra books and write extra papers for unchallenging L&S courses, and will be evaluated on this work in their senior portfolios. In other words, students will take worse courses and pickup the slack themselves.

         CCS remains a great place for the sciences. A Weighted Companion Cube—a reference to the popular Portal games—hangs from the ceiling outside of the computer lab. The dean wears a purple wizard’s hat when addressing his students at the All College Meeting, a yearly introductory meeting for the entire college, and at graduation, along with his formal academic regalia. The message is clear: nerds can feel safe here. Students’ posters explaining their scientific research line the walls of the building’s one, long, maze-like hallway. Along with the five hundred pound gorilla parable, Dean Tiffney also tells the students each year that the building is ours to do with what we want, “aside from structural changes.” There used to be scraps of poetry and art between the science posters. Last year they got taken down. I tried to put up more poetry. It, too, was taken down. The official line is that little scraps of paper hanging from the walls are a fire hazard. I believe this. Still, the message is clear: “Artists are not welcome here.”         The demographics of CCS confirm this. There were close to one hundred literature students when I entered UCSB five years ago. Now there are twenty-four. This is largely a product of the halt on admissions put on the major for the past two years. However, the population of the college as a whole has not dropped. More scientists have been admitted to take the place of the literature students. The largest effect this has had isn’t to make the artists feel outnumbered (though it does), but to make women outnumbered.         This wouldn’t be so alarming (STEM fields are heavily dominated by men) if this demographic shift weren’t also mirrored in the faculty. I know of eight professors who have left CCS over the past few years either because they were not asked back or because they found it too difficult to work with the present administration. Five additional professors did not leave or left for unrelated reasons. The three of these professors who did not leave are working at half time and with reduced or eliminated benefits and have been working under these conditions for over a year. The other two left this summer, but never experienced a reduction in benefits or pay. These two professors are white men. Of the three that remain, one is a white woman, one is a white man, and the other is a black man. Of the professors who have left because of the administration, three are white men, four are white women, and one is a black man. Women and black men in literature have only ever been mistreated by the current administration. I’m not saying that Bruce Tiffney has gone out of his way to be misogynistic and racist. Nobody but he can know whether or not he intentionally made life harder for women and black men than he did for white men, or, if like the overpopulation of CCS with men, these sexist and racist results are a result of his implicit biases.            These changes to the literature program are being made in the name of intellectual diversity. The program’s biggest failing in its detractors’ eyes is that it is “too insular.” Students take too many classes within CCS and are therefore deprived of the diversity of ideas found in L&S. But students avoid L&S classes because they aren’t rigorous enough, and these reforms have lead to less literal diversity. The good news here is that nothing is set in stone. The program hasn’t yet been re-opened for admission. Good, hard classes, women, and people of color can still be a part of literature in the College of Creative Studies if we want them to be. All it takes is for Bruce Tiffney to listen to us.

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