Untold Academia
By Fall 2021, I had taken 26 graduate courses in 2 MAs and 1 year of my Ph.D. I wrote the poem below in 2 days. It recounts my frustration at the dogmatism and orthodoxy I experienced.
One year into my Ph.D. in September 2021, I typed 25 stanzas on September 20th and 21st in our garage…into my Notes app. Not intending to write a poem, the ideas just…flowed. Word patterns coalesced into rhymes. Lost complete track of time. Composed now of over 30 stanzas, it viscerally describes the campus-imposed identity crisis and pressure I’d felt for 7 years in 2 graduate programs and my FT/PT academic jobs. In the coming months, I’ll explain each stanza’s allusions and specific references. Overall, it captures the cynicism and disillusionment I unexpectedly came to feel on college campuses from 2015 til 2021 (and that I still feel today, though I have hope).
Once I wrote this in 2021, I realized I had accepted and grew numb to regular insults and sophisticated bigotry passing as scholarship and acceptable classroom discourse: ranging from the anti-religious, anti-Christian, anti-rural, anti-white, anti-male, to the anti-American and anti-Mormon. If I merely hinted I dissented from the prevailing socially just belief by asking a penetrating question about some limitation or flaw in a method or theory, I was immediately castigated as white supremacist, a backward thinking bigot “from Kansas”, and just plain ignorant. An unbeliever. A heretic. English Studies: a once subversive discipline, now conformist.
Where I was once encouraged to find the gaps in scholarly research and identify the unobvious realities of our society and world, to disconfirm assumptions and hypotheses, I was now discouraged from doing so. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that after a few years of this, I eventually put my head down, took the cue to shut my mouth rather than ignite the classroom inquisition, and directed my ‘divergent’ thinking to my personal journals where I wrote in silent isolation.
But no longer. This poem voices those silent moments. Replying to the subtle bigotry of smooth demagoguery.
Killing all our consciences
waking to new discourses
Is there no counterweight
to dispel Critical hate?
Dogma and orthodoxy
don’t permit the moxy
Of marginal agency
and heterodoxy
Filled with our self-scorn, we are now reborn
Convicted of all our guilt, do whatever thou wilt
For thine is the kingdom and the Power and the 1619 story
Question you’re majoritarian?
you must be contrarian, or at least republican
Blinded by your privilege and your ‘hard work’
Becoming a Racist jerk
A pandemic of perceptions
We progress to deceptions
Of verbal virtuosity
By Experts with their guarantees
While collecting all their fees
But they do not know me
My individuality
That’s the true minority
Professor, don’t you see
Don’t tell me who to be
With your ‘learned’ authority
Knowing what is good for me
While you commit perceptual perjury
And say Their body needs surgery
I will speak for myself
Put your hatred on the shelf
You took the givens and the truths
Yet you still call us rubes
when we don’t get your truths
Bout how all I have is ill-gotten
When facts make your theory rotten
You use Saussure to be so sure
That what you mean does not demean
yet even Derrida can not unravel
Truths from your progressive gavel
In this courthouse of new culture
Where the past is prosecutor
In this Church I hear the chatter
That intention does not matter
Let’s use Nietzsche as the teachuh
Cuz let’s face it, you da preachuh
In this seminary, jokingly
We still call a university
He said our man-made categories
Only tell man’s silly stories
Whether science or religion
It’s all metaphors we live in
As we classroom-congregate
About your theories contemplate
one thing you do Dissimulate
The reality that is self-hate
For although said by Burke
in Identification did lurk
conflict and division,
Yet in intersectional DEI-vision
If you’re not left, then you’re alt-right
The purity contained alright
And all the rest is garbage
According to categorical verbiage.
None of your truth is fickle
Cuz it’s made by the hammer and sickle
Cutting and dividing
Making us wary
As you deconstruct platonic binary
Yet impose a new duality
A ‘liberating’ metaphor
Of oppressed and oppressor
Designing dichotomy
To see all this leprosy
White skin the sinful scales
Of minoritarian tales
Is this distressing?
Then you’re multiply oppressing
Sit with your discomfort
feel the systemic hurt
Th’only source of your unease
To be absolved on your knees
Confess your culpability
To remake society
Now with hierarchical authority
You demand conformity
Choking rhizomatic reality
With your will to power
Atop your ‘non-ivory’ ivory tower
Eradicating the viewpoint flower
Castigating all who cower
Got the wrong identity?
Get back in your category
Maintain the partisan Purity
While we accrue Assurity
Drunk on our authority
Derived from a tautology
Where if I say I’m not racist
Then I am for sure racist
On this Kafka trap basis
Rests my social stasis:
absence for safe spaces
For the truths you do spout
Carry institutional clout
Compelling belief and assent
Denying conscious dissent
Buried Neath your Bigotry
Guilt-based geometry
Shaping not comity
But truthful triggernometry
And normative heresy
Effects of critical pedogogy
Without a hermeneutics of suspicion
You demand total contrition
To a subjective Universal
A dominant Reversal
A turn without difference
Compelling semantic silence
Quashing innate intelligence
What was true is no longer
Yet for Truth you still hunger
Where to not be white
Is to be in the right
And to not be a Dem
Is to not be a victim
Making skin-folk
The Kin folk no longer
And likeness of whiteness
as true as the Lochness
When they cackle
Like a Jekkyl
You better Hyde
Unless like Handsel and Grettel
Your outside will be their inside
Their Truth Appetite satisfied
Racial Definitions gon be bona fide
In Kendi they are codified
Civil rights become denied
Smoking all that Democrack
don’t vote Biden? you ain’t black
Only one key Demo-graphic
Givin donkeys DC traffic
Truth is, South went west and east
That’s the nature of this beast
You oppose social justice?
Then you’re Them, not Us
Unclean white supremacist
Blind to being antiracist
We who see all bigotry
Whiteness on the daily
A cultural commodity
that’s in punctuality
Any kind of normalcy
And that’s now normal, see?
State your name and pronouns
Confess for all to see
Your oppressive villainy
Borne of your biology
And cultural patriarchy
To claim your debased renown
Believe Us to liberate
Others from their fate
Forged from he/him hate
So verbally self-flagellate
State your name and pronouns
We only heard your name
Don’t evade the shame
All men are to blame
Your conscience We will claim
State your Pronouns.
And claim your role
In being Omni-culpable
- This is all I’m good for
A male scapegoated savior
Using the Good Book
To be anti-Christ
A conceptual crook
For a cultural heist
Take our great MA
A 4.0 gpa
for a Ph.D
A novel new study
A research award
And be rest assured -
Not recommended
Missing a ref’rence
on final draft revision
Insufficient def’rence
To the One True vision
Desks all in a line?
You we will confine -
Not recommended