UNO's Department of English History

Carrying On The First Fifty Years of the UNO English Department

Robert Shenk

Carrying On The First Fifty Years of the UNO English Department

Robert Shenk

Quotations from retired faculty members are mostly from interviews (usually phone interviews) conducted by the author during April of 2008. The quotations from Elizabeth Penfield are taken from a conversation she had with Peter Schock during that same period. Some interviews have been conducted more recently. A few quotations are taken from essays in Jerah Johnson, UNO Prisms (New Orleans: UNO, 1983).

Early UNO photos are reproduced courtesy of the UNO Archives, Earl K. Long Library, The University of New Orleans.

Many thanks, as well, to Janet Barnwell, who captured our faculty on film in 2007-08.

Typesetting and design were done by Ali Arnold.

This departmental history was completed in early May, 2009.

The Early Years It was 1963. George Reinecke got us a house in Lakeview, and Cresap Watson was the first person to knock on our door–with a Martini in his hand.

—Ann Torczon

The very first members of UNO’s English Department came from some prestigious institutions. George Reinecke had studied for the doctorate at Harvard, for instance, while Ed “King” Socola had received his PhD from Penn, and whereas George Branam had been awarded his doctorate by Cal-Berkeley, Cresap Watson had earned his dazzling robes from Trinity College, Dublin. To be sure, these four scholars had originally been teaching locally—Reinecke and Socola at Loyola; Branam and Watson at LSU. Watson arrived as chair of the English Department, while Branam came as dean of humanities (eventually he would move up to vice chancellor for academic affairs). Reinecke, a native New Orleanian, had applied to prospective chancellor Homer Hitt five days after the creation of the new university was announced in 1958, partly because he was attracted by the slightly higher salary, and partly because he thought he would be able to do more at this new school than he ever could do as a lay professor at a Jesuit institution.

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The original university faculty could (and did) fit into a single barracks building left from the old naval air station at the Lakefront, and this small size and physical nearness contributed a good deal to the noted closeness of the early university faculty. In addition, though, “There was a vibrancy, an excitement about being in at the beginning,” recalled Cooper Mackin, who came to the department in 1963. A deep sense of mission imbued most of the professors, and for years there was little of the campus politics and dissension so characteristic of long-established universities.

Malcolm Magaw, who was working on his PhD at Tulane when he began teaching at UNO in 1961, had originally planned to stay but a year or two. By the time that he had finished his PhD in 1964, however, he had gotten deeply involved in the department, the university, and the “incredible city” that was New Orleans. Despite his receiving three or four offers from other institutions that year, Malcolm decided to stay.

The great student affection toward “our university” was one thing that kept good English faculty at UNO; another was the great respect students had for their instructors. When he came to UNO several decades after the school’s inception, Bob Shenk came across an early English major running a pool servicing business in Mandeville. Shenk found instructive the way this fellow talked about his departmental experience. Where most English majors might remember their courses by the great authors or topics they had studied—“I had Chaucer, Shakespeare, and American Cooper Mackin Literature”—instead, this early UNO graduate reflected, “I had Reinecke, I had Torczon, and I had Magaw.”

These students regarded UNO as a “red-brick university,” or as a “university for the working class,” early English faculty recalled. Intended to help build a middle class in New Orleans, UNO was to prove a very different kind of place than the long-established, higher-class institutions of the Garden District. To be sure, the original students who flocked to UNO largely from New Orleans’ white ethnic neighborhoods were often naïve, and some were not up to the challenge.

Shenk ran across one bright guy of about fifty in his naval reserve unit who had eventually become a nuclear engineer.

Right out of high school, he had enrolled at UNO with three of his friends. His friends all failed their first-semester

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courses, and so—although this fellow had passed everything—he accompanied them down to the local recruiting station and all four of them enlisted in the Navy.

Although the English faculty worked very hard to build the upper-division courses in literature that were to underpin the university’s English major, then as now they taught no fewer than four introductory English courses for most UNO students: two courses in freshman composition, and two in introductory literature. The relatively heavy mandatory requirement in literature noted here was a state-imposed requirement (somehow Louisiana got that right), and it worked together with the heavy composition load to ensure that English would always be one of the largest departments on campus.

It also meant that students would always get much of their first impression of the university—and their first university habits of study—from English classes.

Reinecke, who headed up Freshman English at the beginning, was, according to Charlie Bishop, a “towering figure” in the new department, this despite his rather stumpy physique.

“George knew everything, and was always very glad to share what he knew with the rest of us.” Among other faculty, even from the early days Malcolm Magaw was known as an unusually fine teacher, utterly dedicated to his students. (Magaw himself points to Mary Wagoner and Bob Bourdette as particularly dedicated early professors whom students much admired.) Besides regular committee work, Magaw found himself serving on ad hoc committees of every conceivable kind—including the committee that decided on the architectural structure of the Liberal Arts building which still houses the English Department.

Liberal Arts Building, 1961 3

Important as these and other early faculty were, there is no question that, for English, the most important individual in those formative years was Cresap Watson, a laidback character possessed of great charm who chaired the department from 1960 to 1964, and then again from 1969-1972. “He was a great chair; all the English faculty loved and admired Cresap,” Bishop remembers. Seraphia Leyda wrote in UNO Prisms that Cresap “was everywhere. Encouraging, inventing, laughing, making you believe that he believed you could do anything, soothing the angry, cajoling the hesitant … building a department.” Don Schueler (yet another very early faculty member) was impressed with Cresap’s élan, and his very smooth style. He wasn’t the only one so impressed. Apparently as a part of his departmental work, Watson visited a good deal with high school teachers in New Orleans, and the women among them Cresap Watson “all thought Cresap was the last word,” remembers Magaw.

Perhaps the Dean’s office was not universally happy with Watson, for he didn’t always turn in his reports on time.

But Cresap was key in getting English started so well, and in nourishing the great camaraderie that existed among the early English faculty for maybe a couple of decades. Again, the students’ enthusiasm certainly helped; Schueler thought his students were both excited and exciting. He recalls English faculty often talking shop about their students, about their classes, and about the daily happenings within those classes. He remembers the faculty as filled with idealism.

For years the English faculty were always getting together socially. Department members partied with each other in those early days far more they do now. “Everyone was invited” to those parties, “and everyone came,” reports Magaw.

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Another early prof recalls that “We were all friends.” The regular and frequent English faculty parties would carry on to all hours.

Admittedly, on one occasion, it didn’t go quite so well. Carol Gelderman tells the story of the “mystery dinner” that was promised by Charlie Bishop and Vern Torczon. Guests were puzzled that there were no familiar smells from the kitchen and that Charlie and Vern suddenly disappeared not too long after they arrived, but since the drinks kept coming, they all just kept talking and drinking. As it turned out, the two men had ordered a duck dinner with all the fixings for maybe eighteen from a Bogalusa restaurant famous for its ducks—but the restaurant had failed to get the dinner on the train for the trip to New Orleans. Hours later when the food finally came by van (with an apology), none of the starving guests cared how special the food might have been.

Anyway, Gelderman recalls that “we partied all the time,” and she avers there was not one person in the department who wouldn’t have given all he had for the place. Schueler, in particular, hosted many a party. But faculty met at other places than in their offices and in their homes. Several recalled that, if you happened to wander into the Napoleon House bar on Chartres Street after hours, you were likely to find yourself in an informal meeting of the UNO English Department faculty.

There might have been one minor hindrance to the social activity: most faculty members were pretty poor. Salaries have never been high at the university, and along with Education, Liberal Arts has usually been at the bottom. Yes, a little money could go a long way in those days, but some faculty could not afford air conditioning when they first came and thought it a bit difficult to invite many people over without that. Also, many of them had small children. “We were all broke,” recalls Ann Torczon, whose husband Vern had come to teach Shakespeare in 1963. She was thankful to Malcolm for discovering that when you didn’t have a dime in your pocket, you could buy coffee or a meal on a credit card down at D. H. Holmes.

According to the 1969-70 university catalog, the early English major had hefty requirements to meet in History of Western Civilization and American History (six hours each) and, strikingly, in philosophy too (also six hours). Beyond that, following their sophomore introduction to literature, English majors had to take two survey courses in English literature, and junior-senior courses in Shakespeare, Chaucer or Milton, American Literature (six hours), and several genre and period (English literature) courses. A UNO self-study reports that, in 1972, 207 students were English majors.

Fewer than ten years after it began, the department began a graduate program. Faculty hoped the M.A. that the department had developed would provide a good foundation; the best students could then go elsewhere for the PhD. Reinecke headed up this program originally, and Magaw took it over from him. The two of them taught the first two graduate courses in the fall of 1965; Magaw remembers that his course was Hawthorne and Melville. Malcolm served as the department’s graduate chair for nine years. Graduate heads to follow have included John Cooke, Carl Malmgren, John 5

Hazlett, Barbara Fitzpatrick, and Peter Schock. Originally, M.A. students had to complete thirty hours of coursework and take an oral exam, followed by the writing of a traditional M.A. thesis, with oral defense—besides having to demonstrate a reading knowledge of a foreign language. These basic requirements remained in effect until the 1990s.

The University of New Orleans Department of English, 1963 6

Transitions We were all, I think, very, very busy. I don’t think we had time to be terrifically unhappy.

—Liz Penfield

Publication was not heavily stressed at the department’s beginnings because so many other vital things were going on. Ed Socola would become dean of liberal arts twice, for instance, and Cooper Mackin would be English chair, dean of liberal arts, provost, and eventually chancellor of the university—and such administrative dedication no doubt somewhat inhibited their scholarly output.

In Malcolm Magaw’s case, while he eventually published nine or ten articles about various topics in American literature, over the years he directed maybe four or five times as many graduate theses as he published articles—and a majority of this before the English M.A. thesis was sharply cut from its original optimal length of 80-100 pages. Such thesis direction was lots of work, but Magaw loved it; he found his students were babes in the woods when it came to knowing

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what a good topic was and how to limit it, and he enjoyed giving them a helping hand. He found his students most appreciative of his help.

Ultimately, the university would emphasize faculty publication much more heavily. Some say this new emphasis was inevitable; other argue that the school could have chosen otherwise, and that there were some costs to this emphasis on scholarship. In any case, at one point within the last ten years or so, a professor was heard to argue in promotion meetings, “Recently, we have required a book for everyone to be promoted to full professor” (which was certainly not the case early on) and then went on to cite several cases. Over the past fifteen or twenty years, however, this “rule” has been broken, implying the faculty consensus that the triad of publications, service and teaching should all be taken into account for promotion recommendations.

Nevertheless, there is no question that publication has become a much higher hurdle in the department than it ever was in the early days, a circumstance which arguably has had deleterious effects on departmental unity and morale. John Cooke argues that, with other changes, having the “publish or perish” gun put to one’s head has tended to make members of the department much more like “independent contractors” than a collegial faculty.

Still, some people published substantially even from the department’s beginning. Gordon Fleming, a Victorian, published widely, and medievalist Schueler even got an article in PMLA, the only department member ever to do so. Rima Reck was also a prolific publisher and a fascinating figure in the department—or was she in Foreign Languages?

University documentation discussing her hire as an assistant professor in 1961 refers to Reck being shared between the two departments (she would teach French for Foreign Languages and comparative literature for English), but she originally took residence in Foreign Languages on the second floor of the LA building, and remained there for many years.

However, one day Rima descended from Foreign Languages and was seen kicking an instructor out of an English office and settling in there, this because of a dispute she had had with the Foreign Language chair. Dean Socola having approved her fait accompli, henceforth Rima acted as a professor of English, even if she did attempt to get the department to change its name to “English and Comparative Literature.”

Reck wrote dozens of articles and seven books mainly about modern French literature and art; she also was a Guggenheim fellow, and for years edited a modernist book series with LSU University Press. However, she once got deeply interested in a non-academic kind of publishing. In their first year in New Orleans, Bob and Paula Shenk were invited out to dinner by Rima and her husband Richard Collin of History. On the way to an Indian restaurant, Rima was heard to remark to her husband, “Surely we don’t want to go as far as the Northshore.” At the restaurant after the meal, she and her husband seemed to be interviewing the waiters and proprietor. It wasn’t until much later that the two scholars were revealed as the writers of a column called “The Underground Gourmet,” which appeared regularly in the States-Item

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newspaper; the Shenks had witnessed the typical research phase of that operation. Reck and Collin, by the way, had published The New Orleans Cookbook back in 1975; this very successful book is still in print.

Carol Gelderman also published in unusual ways, partly in order to supplement her salary (she had to have the money, for she was raising three children). To do this, she put out New Orleans a la Carte, a collection of New Orleans menus that sold fifty-five thousand copies in Martin Wine Cellar alone. Carol also published a successful professional writing textbook, and got some additional funds for professional writing presentations she made for a local oil company.

(That company had first sent a spy out to sit in on Gelderman’s classes, to see if she was any good!) Yet one additional unusual effort of Carol’s was to write a column about stocks for the local paper—if you believe that.

Gelderman’s highly acclaimed academic writing has included a biography of Henry Ford; biographies on literary figures Louis Auchincloss and Mary McCarthy (and other books on McCarthy); and a book about presidential speechwriting, among several other things. Carol was the first department member to write regularly for trade (as opposed to academic) publishers, and to be reviewed regularly in the New York Times.

These exceptions aside, most of the early faculty (extending even through the 1970s) did not publish much, but instead focused on the committee work, teaching and administration that were helping to build the university.

Partly by design (Homer Hitt wanted to grow UNO), enrollment increased enormously at the university in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Hired to teach in the university’s writing lab in this period, Ann Torczon remembers UNO was regularly taking in students who had not even graduated from high school. “Just bring them in!” Homer ordered. At one point, maybe forty percent of entering freshmen required remedial English instruction.

John Cooke recalls a fall semester when the department hired twenty-five new instructors to help handle the teaching load. Much of this time, Liz Penfield was freshman chair, and she recalls, “we had freshmen coming out of the woodwork.” Over four thousand people were in the freshman program at one point, and some 114 people were teaching English (a figure that includes many adjuncts, without whom the department could never have handled the load). There were so many classes, in fact, that it was hard enforcing any uniformity at all in those comp classes. “For a while it was ‘Do whatever you can; just don’t scare the horses!’” Penfield remembers.

The teaching pressure lay most heavily on the department’s instructors, who mainly taught composition. Penfield says that UNO had been renowned for “chewing up instructors and spitting them out…. The load was, as I recall, three comps and one lit in the spring and four comps in the fall, and that was brutal.” Under Seraphia Leyda’s chairmanship (1976-1979), Leyda took up the instructors’ cause, arguing that many instructors would never teach a course in literature if the professors did not help. She insisted that all English professors teach a section of composition per semester. This policy 9

met with some resistance and consternation. Penfield remembers having to inform Gordon Fleming that he had to teach a freshman composition course—and he didn’t quite know what that was.

Leyda faced several other difficulties as chair, but she was renowned as a tough woman. Reportedly, a faculty member Leyda had turned down for promotion hated her so much that whenever he saw her coming down the hallway, he slammed his office door, got out a set of darts, and began throwing them at the picture of Leyda he had posted on his office wall. But Leyda soldiered on through all the flak. Penfield recalls that an instructor once was so impressed with Seraphia’s determination over some issue or another that “he raised his hand in the department meeting and said, ‘You’ve really got brass balls.’”

Requiring professors to teach composition even now remains somewhat controversial in the department. Originally required because of enrollment pressure as we have seen above, this policy has since been retained in part to help keep UNO’s department from being “balkanized” as so many other English departments are, especially those that retain a sharp division between peon instructors who mainly drill students in barren comp classes and aloof professors who quaff martinis while they muse dreamily about the poetry of Keats, say, or that of Robert Herrick.

A related issue that apparently first reared its head in Leyda’s chairmanship was for many years the most controversial issue in the department—the retention of instructors. The notion that some faculty members might not be “tenured” as professors are but instead “retained” as permanent instructors (possessing a middle position between professors and new instructors) is an unfamiliar concept to many universities, but the possibility was initiated in Leyda’s chairmanship—when six instructors went up for retention and one was selected. But that person turned the opportunity down.

Raeburn Miller’s chairmanship followed Leyda’s, and Miller attempted to ensure that the quality of any instructors to be kept under this program would remain absolutely top-notch. He did this first by designating that those retained would be selected on the quality of their teaching alone, and second by limiting selectees by definition to those who were “exceptionally gifted and unusually well qualified” as teachers. The latter requirement presented a very narrow gate, indeed. But under this definition, some people were retained by Miller. Since then, many instructors have gone up for retention, though only a minority have been retained. Currently fifteen retained instructors teach in the department.

For some senior or retired faculty, instructor retention has been a “hideous mistake.” In their view, instructors ought to teach and try to publish, and if they can’t publish in seven years, for heaven’s sakes, they should move on. The department needs a continuous influx of new people, they say, and permanently retaining instructors inhibits that new blood from flowing in. For other department members, this retention policy, limited as it is to retaining good teachers, helps keep

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the freshman-sophomore courses strong, for it keeps people who like teaching underclassmen and who know how to do it well.

Nothing said here will end this argument or related complaints, e.g., that many retained instructors have not been limited to teaching underclassmen but have occasionally been given upper-division courses to teach. John Cooke, chair from 1992 to 2004 (by far the longest term of any chair), says instructors literally hated the senior faculty when he arrived in 1976, and he claims the retention system has helped to repair this fracture.

From another perspective, if the great camaraderie of the early English department lives on at all, it may be found in the instructor community, whose members now have some hope of permanence, have a living wage (more or less) and who command considerable respect in the present-day department. Cooke points out that English’s instructor policy has been adapted by the rest of the university and adopted by the LSU system.

Retained instructors of long tenure in the department include Stephany Lyman, whose dedication to the teaching of underclassmen and warm advocacy of the case of English instructors have impressed many a department chairman; Barbara Gaffney and Kathryn Fiddler, devoted teachers and advocates of ESL; and Inge Fink, an outstanding teacher who for several years now has headed up the university’s Writing Center. Incidentally, for decades, the Center (originally the “writing lab”) has usually been directed by fine, dedicated English instructors, among them Bill Middleton, now retired. Other now-retired, once-retained English instructors who have made noteworthy contributions to UNO’s English Department and its students are generalists Anne Torczon, Jim Hietter, and Jan Cooke, and Bible as Literature instructor Adelaide Frazier.

Stephany Lyman Yet another transitional issue over many years has been the ability of instructors to be promoted from within—an opportunity that has always existed in the LSU system, but which English has probably used more than any other department at UNO. Of course, people hired on tenure lines who have not completed their PhDs have always first been made instructors, and then have been promoted once they finish their dissertations. However, several instructors in English (some with 11

terminal degrees, some without) have been promoted when the department recognized a need, detected a special quality in these people, and then made their case to the administration. These includes some who were first “retained” as instructors, and later joined the professorial ranks.

Promoting from within upon need and review of qualifications (without advertisement beyond the university) has its opponents for differing reasons than instructor retention does. The question that has been asked is, wouldn’t we be more likely to get higher quality beginning professors by conducting a national search than by promoting from within?

In whatever way that issue might be argued, English has promoted both literature teachers and creative writing experts over the years—and some composition experts, too. By this method, several quality people have found their way into UNO’s professorial ranks, among them the current English graduate coordinator and occasional summer Innsbruck program director, Carl Malmgren; a former chair, Liz Penfield; the present dean of liberal arts, Susan Krantz; and the former provost of the university, Rick Barton. All were originally UNO English instructors, and they have carried on the tradition of English department members moving up to become prominent university administrators.

The Creative Writing Workshop began in l981 when English chair Raeburn Miller asked then Instructors Rick Barton, John Gery, Jim Knudsen, and Joanna Leake to join with Professor Bob Bourdette to organize the department’s creative writing curriculum. That effort, which began with a consistent sequence of undergraduate offerings, eventually led to the MFA program, and the CWW admitted its first students in l991. Kay Murphy and Randy Bates joined the program’s faculty, and Carol Gelderman taught nonfiction until her retirement in 2005.

Rick Barton directed the program in its first two years, followed by Joanna Leake, who served from l992 through 2001, and Jim Knudsen took over the position until his illness forced him to retire. Jim’s death in 2004 cost the program a treasured teacher, colleague and friend. Joanna once again resumed the post of director in 2003.

The program has graduated over a hundred and sixty students who have published over twenty books, and both students and graduates have enjoyed considerable success. CWW students have won the National Student Play Writing Award an unprecedented two times: Shirley Sergeant for “Father’s Prize Poland China” and Rebecca Basham, for “Lot’s Daughters.” Both plays were performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. M.A. graduate and CWW participant Bill Loehfelm won the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest for Fresh Kills, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Joseph Boyden, winner of the 2008 Giller Prize, Canada’s top literary honor, is the author of Born With a Tooth, a short story collection, and the novels Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce. Amanda Buege-Boyden is the author of Pretty Little Dirty and Babylon Rolling, which was published by Random House in 2008. Joseph and Amanda are not only CWW alums, but also now teach in the program as writers-in-residence.

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At the beginning of the 1980s, the curriculum of the English major was much like what it had been in the beginning. Then a series of revisions broadened the curriculum, gave English majors some choices beyond literature, and diminished somewhat the original emphases upon great authors and toward English as opposed to American literature.

In 1985, under Penfield’s chairmanship, a “concentration” or “track” system was introduced, which offered majors the opportunity to concentrate some coursework in one of several different areas including creative and professional writing. Relatively new courses in technical editing and an internship in English were made use of in these tracks, and at least one Randy Bates additional faculty member was hired to help make this program work. Majors still had to fulfill a very strong prescribed curriculum in literature, but at least they were made aware of other options related to their major.

Several senior faculty opposed the “track” system from the start, and it fell into disfavor for a while. Perhaps not all the tracks fulfilled the goals for which they were designed, but several students did take advantage of the opportunity to begin careers in technical and professional writing, some of which have now lasted twenty years. These students included two English majors (Carolyn Nicholson and Lucille Griffin) who graduated summa cum laude at the university, and went on to become expert technical writers.

A few years later, another curriculum change required that majors take courses beyond the traditional English and American literature that, heretofore, had always been the center of the UNO English curriculum. Each major was required to choose a course in “cross-cultural literature,” on the one hand, and a course in rhetoric, professional writing or creative writing on the other.

Yet another change initiated by the department and approved by the university in Spring, 2008 has cancelled these last two requirements, and has reinstituted concentrations or tracks as options for majors—specifically, concentrations in professional writing, journalism, creative writing, New Orleans regional literature, and pre-law. The hope here (as before, 13

with the original institution of tracks) was that such a change would advertise many of the sub-specialties the department offers beyond traditional literature, and would attract new majors. Students in the major will still have to take a very strong literature component, studying both American and English literature and going into various periods in some depth. However, for the first time at UNO, since the fall of 2008 English majors may graduate without having a course specifically in Shakespeare, let alone Chaucer or Milton.

In the graduate program, substantial changes in UNO’s M.A. requirements in the last twenty years have included the replacement of the original oral exam by two written exams; a large reduction in the required length of the thesis and a change in its focus; and the option of doing additional Carolyn Hembree coursework in place of a thesis. Partly because of this last change, relatively few students are writing theses anymore. A review of the graduate program took place in 2008-2009.

Decisions approved by the graduate faculty and the university include (1) allowing those students who decide to do a thesis to omit taking one of the exams (this will perhaps attract more students to the thesis option); and (2) changing to a track or concentration system in the graduate program (as well as in the major), so that students must now decide to concentrate in one or more of the following tracks: American literature, British literature, professional writing, and teaching. Four core courses will be required of all students in the graduate program: an introductory course, a course in British literature, a course in American literature, and a course in writing or rhetoric. Also, in the latest department-voted alteration of the graduate program, students can opt out of the language requirement by taking two additional graduate courses, reinstituting an option to learning a language that had been offered briefly in an earlier English M.A. curriculum.

As for the freshman program, noteworthy features include a strict proficiency exam at the conclusion of the second main composition course—an exam which was instituted in the early 1980s following on a mandate from the University Senate—and a transfer proficiency exam that ensures transfer students can write with a basic competency (for not every school is as insistent on writing standards as UNO). On the other hand, with the institution of higher admission requirements at the university in the early 2000s, remedial and English as a second language courses have almost totally disappeared.

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The position of freshman chair, incidentally, often has been a stepping stone for faculty to go further in the department or university. Of recent chairs, Liz Penfield, Linda Blanton and John Cooke all headed up freshman English before becoming department chair, and Joanna Leake did so too, before beginning her long term as head of the Creative Writing Workshop.

But in many ways, the job of freshman chair in itself is as challenging and important as any job in the department.

Among other things, whoever takes it on has to be willing not only to explain department policies over and over again in emails and in person, but also to hold the line and say “no� recurrently to students who believe that they are somehow privileged to leapfrog the course requirements, their placement in classes, the transfer exam, the grading of their papers, and many another perceived difficulty. Current freshman chair Kim McDonald (yet another former instructor) reports that the load is sometimes lightened when she can find a way to help a deserving student circumvent unnecessary hurdles.

But most administrators agree that the negative aspects of this job often predominate. And one describes this administrative job in particular (rather than also describing other department administrative positions like undergraduate head and associate chair, so often ably manned by uncomplaining colleagues like Kris Lackey, Dan Doll, Les White and Anne Boyd Rioux) in order to remind readers yet again of the key role of the English Department’s teaching of freshman composition. When one points out that the director of freshman composition every semester must oversee several multi-section courses that enroll (altogether) some two thousand students, one is also commenting from yet another angle upon how vital the composition roles of the department and its faculty are to the university and to its students.

At a higher level, for many years courses in composition theory and rhetoric have been regularly offered to majors or graduate students, often with prospective teachers in mind.

Another form of writing instruction for teachers is a program of Les White community outreach that the English Department has run for 15

decades: the Greater New Orleans Writing Project (“G-NOWP,” for short). GNOWP is an outgrowth of the National Writing Project that originated at Berkeley in 1974, an institute of teachers committed to exploring and promoting the best modern practices of the teaching of writing. Upon hearing of this national project not long after it began, Cresap Watson convinced UNO’s English Department to initiate a New Orleans version, and this became one of the very first community offshoots of the national program. Cresap himself taught the first several years of the program.

The core of GNOWP is its summer institute. Through a federally funded grant, each summer some sixteen teachers from New Orleans schools representing several academic disciplines and a variety of grade levels (from Kindergarten on up) are enabled to take a five-week intensive course of instruction by which they each earn six hours of graduate English credit. Having completed this seminar, they immediately take their new knowledge back to classrooms throughout the city.

As the program is now in its thirty-first consecutive year, graduates of GNOWP now include several state administrators and many school principals. Mainly, however, they are innovative and dedicated teachers, one example of whom is an algebra teacher who attended the program not long ago. According to Ken Rayes (the current GNOWP seminar leader and coordinator), this fellow now has his students composing rap and hip hop lyrics that explain algebraic functions—so as to help his students better understand those functions. He comes back to current seminars to explain what he is doing and why.

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Katrina

In mid-August of 2005, the opening fall faculty meeting of English found a large party of professors, instructors and graduate students gathered in LA 140. They were raucously greeting old friends, listening to a witty department chair introducing new people, and were all wisecracking broadly, looking forward to an exciting new semester. Within two weeks, department members were scattered from California and Oregon to New York and New Hampshire, having been glued to astonishing new sights hourly on every station of national tv, and feeling bewildered, stunned or heartsick.

Although some lived on the Gentilly Ridge or in unflooded portions of Metairie, many English faculty (and English retirees, too) lived in nearby Lakeview, and lost everything in 11 feet of water that took weeks or months to be pumped out.

Some faculty went through the very worst of the storm personally. Vainly attempting to move his manuscripts out of the reach of the floodwaters, poet and scholar Niyi Osundare with his wife Kemi eventually fled to the attic of their bungalow, where they spent 26 hours before being rescued. Then they were shuttled from one evacuation center to another until Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire (who had given Osundare an honorary degree in 2001) located him and made him a visiting professor.

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Among other things, Osundare lost 300 unpublished poems, written in longhand over twenty years. He also lost all his books, which had been collected over a lifetime in Nigeria and elsewhere. Not only Osundare, but poet Kay Murphy and American literature expert and writer Kris Lackey were among UNO English department writers featured in a Wall Street Journal piece about the literary losses from the water that inundated the city.

Chair Peter Schock relocated to a brother’s farm near Chicago and there made use of the computer in his nephew’s bedroom while his nephew was at school and in the evening after he Niyi Osundare had finished his homework to contact faculty, and get them to report. When, after a couple of weeks, Dean Krantz told him the UNO administration was gathering in Baton Rouge and planning to restart the semester, Schock planned a truncated semester schedule of about fifty different courses, most of them online and offered in multiple sections: freshman composition, sophomore literature, upper division and graduate literature, and technical and creative writing courses.

Says Schock, “The most exhilarating moment of the period—when I was told on the phone that we had enrolled 7,000 students—was followed by the worst moment, the nightmare when I realized that the courses in Blackboard had been set up without enrollment caps so that the first two or three sections of each freshman and sophomore class were flooded with hundreds of students. I had to delete students one at a time from those rosters and add each of them to another section”—all this and much more on his dial-up bedroom computer facilities.

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The thing Schock is most proud of (he thinks Katrina was the department’s finest hour) is that no faculty member complained that it was too much to ask to go back to work while sorting through the wreckage of a home—instead, the characteristic response to his emails was “give me something to do.” Only one or two faculty took leave without pay that fall; everyone else taught.

Of course there have been major impacts on the department from Katrina. The declaration of financial exigency resulted in the loss of the small linguistics program of the department—faculty, expertise and courses that had been added since the 1980s. Otherwise, faculty attrition took place entirely through voluntary resignations and retirement, though considerable anguish was involved here and there (one faculty member wanted to reconsider a tendered resignation, but could not). Ultimately, the senior faculty and the instructor ranks contracted by nearly one-third. As for students, after the storm the M.A. program initially saw almost a fifty percent decline (though M.A. enrollment is now back up to about threequarters of what it was before the storm), and where there were some three hundred English majors before Katrina, there are a few more than two hundred now.

Hence the department is focusing on student recruiting (looking for prospective majors at local high schools) and program revision and enhancement. Anticipated, though, are the retirements of several senior faculty, so that staffing problems loom large. At the same time, a sadness that no doubt English is not alone in facing is the phenomena of many retired faculty having moved permanently out of New Orleans because of the storm, and of other faculty now planning to retire in some state other than Louisiana.

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Then and Now

Some things in our department have changed since UNO’s creation, while others remain as at the beginning.

Physically, although English remains housed in the Liberal Arts building, some furnishings have been upgraded since Katrina, and in place of the ditto machines that had been a department staple even up to the late 1980s, we now have copy machines and, of course, computers. Faculty members regularly use the UNO website; electronic mail has replaced most of the paper documents that used to proliferate in mailboxes; and several composition and technical writing classes are taught in newly outfitted computer classrooms. When the Liberal Arts college offices moved to the old Business Administration building in 2008, English offices took their place, moving up to swank locations on the second floor.

Instead of being spread across the campus as they were during the 1980s because of the university expansion, all English faculty now have offices in the Liberal Arts building. And instead of two or even three instructors being crammed into one office, now all instructors and professors who want one have an individual office.

Funding remains a major constraint on the department, as it always has been. Salaries remain low at all levels in English, and funds for travel to conferences are not plentiful (for a long time, they were nonexistent). Moreover, since the beginning, English has seldom had the money to bring job candidates to campus for interviews. That is, whereas virtually 21

every other English department of any size conducts interviews both at the Modern Language Association meeting and on campus, until recently, UNO’s English Department has only done the MLA interviews.

As a result, not only have chairs or other interviewers had to make decisions on the basis of short interviews in a small hotel room, but so have job candidates. Way back in 1968-69, Charlie Bishop had a little more information. He was to fly to New York from Europe for his brief interview with UNO, but before he did he found somebody who had interviewed with UNO the year before to talk to. This fellow had been shocked that the person who interviewed him had been drinking bourbon at noon.

On two or three special occasions, the department has found money to bring candidates to campus. When Ed Socola was Dean, the English Department was asked to take over the journalism courses from Drama and Communications and to hire and supervise the Driftwood advisor. Somehow lots of money for hiring came with this change. It was a good thing it did. After a very successful daylong interview with one candidate, that evening Carol Gelderman took him to dinner, and before the other faculty arrived, he decided to have a drink. More and more drinks went down. The English faculty who ate dinner with him decided they already had enough drunks on the faculty and didn’t need another one.

Peter Busowski The department did, by the way, permanently take over those journalism courses and the hiring and housing of the Driftwood advisor. Consequently, the student newspaper—whose editors often take on as their missions in life such goals as to “Get rid of the Driftwood advisor,” or even to “Get rid of the Chancellor”—has been the responsibility of English chairs ever since. Occasionally this supervisory job has created headaches, but over the years, besides UNO students from across the campus, dozens and dozens of English majors have written for, interned at, or served as editors for the campus newspaper. Moreover, several majors have gone on from Driftwood (and their English courses) to work in one or another form of local journalism—that is, as public affairs experts for local companies, as editors of employee newsletters or academic magazines, as writers for community newspapers, and (in one or two cases, at least) as writers for The TimesPicayune. Noteworthy Driftwood advisors since the 1980s were David Womack and the fine New Orleans writer and journalist Don Lee Keith.

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In whatever way they were hired, many English faculty of the past two decades have proven outstanding scholars, publishing widely on a great variety of topics, and being recognized for their achievements both within and beyond the university. Zhaoming Qian, for instance, teaches and writes about such subjects as American modernism and the interconnection between American modernism and the Orient. The five books he has published since coming to UNO include Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams, and The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens. For his work, Qian has received scholarships, honors or visiting professorships from prestigious institutions both in the United States and in China. He recently has been named a Chancellor’s Research Professor.

Qian earlier had been designated a University Research Professor for his research efforts, as Rima Reck and Carol Gelderman had been in their day. Kenneth Holditch (now retired) also won this award several years back; his research largely focused on Tennessee Williams and other New Orleans literary figures. Carl Malmgren, a specialist in contemporary American fiction and postmodern literary theory with books and many articles to his name, has earned this designation too, as has Nancy Easterlin, a Romanticist who also does intensive work in literary theory and publishes widely. In 2008, Easterlin was named a Guggenheim scholar.

John Gery, a prolific poet and a teacher in the Creative Writing Workshop, like Easterlin has been both a University Research Professor and Guggenheim scholar. In addition, since 1990, Gery has done research on Ezra Pound and directed the Ezra Pound Center for Literature, a UNO-sponsored program whereby students can, for four weeks of a summer, take a seminar on Pound and other courses from Gery in an absolutely breathtaking setting: Brunnenburg Castle in the Italian Alps. (Brunnenburg was Pound’s home late in his life and is still the home of Pound’s daughter.)

And Niyi Osundare, who teaches Caribbean and African-American literature for the English Department, is a native Nigerian poet and scholar with a truly international reputation.

Nancy Easterlin 23

Osundare has authored over ten volumes of poetry, two books of selected poems, four plays, a book of essays, and numerous articles on literature, language, culture, and society. For his work, Osundare has received many prizes, including the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Prize, the Cadbury/ANA Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and the Noma Award (Africa's most prestigious book award). Also once designated a university research professor, Osundare more recently has been named the university’s Endowed Professor of Africana Studies.

Several department members have produced writing texts for use in university classrooms; one of these is Linda Blanton. Possessed of a doctorate in linguistics, Blanton has published a groundbreaking and long-lasting series of basic composition texts, among many other things, and served as a noted UNO administrator. Her experience as English freshman chair and then department chair was capped by several years as director of the UNO Honors program before her retirement. (Blanton, incidentally, followed fellow English colleague Mike Mooney, a fine Shakespearean, in the Honors position.) Blanton’s record is proof that, though it may be difficult, one can be both a successful administrator and publisher. So is the record of former provost (and former assistant dean and dean of Liberal Arts) Rick Barton. Somehow, Barton found time despite his administrative responsibilities to have published four widely-reviewed and widely-praised novels along the way.

Others who have published successful writing texts of various kinds, by the way, have included Liz Penfield (her Short Takes: Model Essays for Composition will shortly go into its tenth edition), Mary Ruetten, Regina Smalley, Joanna Leake, Jim Knudsen, Gabi Gautreaux, Bob Shenk (his long-lasting text on the writing done in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps is the only one of its kind), and from way back, Don Schueler. Moreover, over the last several years the department has asked Gabi Gautreaux, Inge Fink, Kim McDonald, Reggie Poché and Sarah Debacher to edit or write texts (such as the anthology Reading Matters) for the university’s freshman courses. In such a way, because of UNO’s large freshman English enrollment, the department has managed to accrue thousands of dollars yearly which otherwise would have found their way into the profits of publishing companies. Most of this money is dedicated to enabling English faculty to travel to national and regional conferences to give papers on composition.

However, lest someone believe that all this publishing and administrative work must have taken its toll on the classroom, the contemporary English department would claim with considerable justification to be the finest teaching department on campus. Not only are instructors retained purely for teaching excellence—which means many freshman and sophomore classes are unusually well taught—but the department puts more genuine emphasis on the evaluation and mentoring of teaching than you’re likely to find anywhere. Departmental administrators visit classes in instructors’ first and then again in their third year, and they supervise teaching assistants with even more care (affording them special mentors, for example). Then, during the evaluation of both instructors and assistant professors for retention or tenure and promotion, English teachers’ classes are visited by virtually everyone at the rank above.

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“I was astonished when I came here. My classes were visited twenty-nine times,” reports associate professor Kevin Marti. But Marti thinks those visits were very helpful (“I learned something from every one of the people who came to see me”), and he thinks that the department’s comprehensive coaching, review, and general emphasis on teaching has had excellent results. “Whatever we’re doing, we ought to bottle it and sell it. I think we’re good at it.”

Maybe because of all this emphasis, UNO English professors have been awarded the UNO International Alumni Association Award for Excellence in Teaching (which is given at Commencement) fourteen times since 1988.

Moreover, over the years, three English professors— Malcolm Magaw, Dan Doll and Earle Bryant—have received university honors for their teaching twice.

And should someone say, “Well, they get those View of the Liberal Arts Building anchoring UNOʼs campus, circa 1964 awards just because English profs are good writers who know how to make somebody sound good on paper,” one might answer, “No doubt English profs are very good writers, too.”

One should point out in addition that, over the years, several English faculty have been chosen to teach for the UNO honors program. In particular, one thinks of three people not mentioned elsewhere in this history: the late, generous Mary Fitzgerald, and current honors teachers Catherine Loomis and Lisa Verner. Yet another person noted for her good teaching is Nancy Dixon. For some fifteen years, the English department has awarded a price for excellence in teaching freshman composition. In that time, Nancy is the only faculty member who has twice won that particular award.

Finally, unique challenges the department faces as of this writing—in the fiftieth year of the university—should be mentioned. Toward the beginning of 2009, large budget cuts required the department (with other programs in Liberal Arts) to let go all adjuncts, enlarge the size of freshman and sophomore classes, and to impose higher minimum enrollments for classes to “make.” These cuts, additional expected budget cuts of major proportions, and other changes threatened by the

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current recession have already have begun to wreak havoc with our efforts to reshape and rebuild the post-Katrina department.

The university administration plans to avoid layoffs and major salary cuts for faculty. However, no salary increases are likely in the near future, new hires have recently been frozen, and additional forced economies are very likely. Even in their least-ominous aspects, such circumstances (when combined with other post-Katrina troubles) pose challenges unequaled in the department’s history. Already, considering last year and this, the department has lost one expected growth position in American literature because of an untimely resignation, and a professor in nonfiction writing who was hired after an extensive search has, after one year, requested a year of leave without pay, leaving his return or replacement uncertain at best. The plans of several senior faculty members to retire in the next two or three years coupled with the strong possibility of more budget cuts could almost eviscerate the department.

In the face of such challenges, the English faculty vows that, nevertheless, the department will always house a very professional and strongly academic rather than a mere “service� program; that standards within freshman and sophomore courses will be strictly upheld; that the major will be reinforced and reinvigorated; that the graduate program will be retained and expanded; and that scholarship, teaching and service will all continue to be rewarded.

In this effort, the department can draw on the history of the past, on the wonderful example of retired and emeritus faculty, and on the dedication of present faculty (most of whom still regard New Orleans as a very special place with a unique heritage, a heritage they are proud to be connected with). Particularly in light of imminent retirements of senior faculty, the presence within the instructor community of outstanding teachers (several of whom hold the PhD) may prove a valuable resource in this period as it has been so often in the past. Ideally, faculty will find these challenges invigorating, as did English faculty at the beginning of the university, and the spirit of the department will freshen and be renewed in community.

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UNO始s first commencement, 1962