Stanford Is Making a (Fixable) Mistake

Last week, if you’d asked me for an ideal model for establishing a program that employs nontenured faculty in a fair and sustainable way while serving student needs by delivering excellent instruction, I would’ve pointed you to the Stanford University creative writing Jones Lecturers program.

This week, as reported by Ryan Quinn here at IHE, it was announced that Stanford will be firing all of the existing 23 Jones Lecturers over the course of two years and replacing them with new people.

Stanford is apparently going scorched earth on what has been a model program. What is going on here?

To answer my question, in addition to Quinn’s reporting, we have a series of posts on Medium from Tom Kealey, one of the Jones Lecturers, who has been at Stanford for 20 years.

Dumbfounded, I also reached out personally to talk to Kealey, and he told me exactly what’s in his posts and his comments to Ryan Quinn: that despite being praised for their excellent work, all existing lecturers will be phased out over two years and replaced by new faculty on short-term contracts with finite limits on renewal.

I guess this is happening, but from my perspective, it makes absolutely zero sense, not for Stanford’s students, not for Stanford’s faculty or administration, not for Stanford’s reputation, not for anything.

There’s lots of stuff apparently burbling underneath the surface here that the public is not privy to and maybe isn’t even fully appreciated by faculty working in different silos within Stanford. Consider this me trying to put together some pieces in order to make sense of my own shock.

Longtime chair of Stanford creative writing Eavan Boland started and nurtured the program along with lecturers like Kealey as a quasi-personal project. Her passing in 2020 left a void that no one has filled. The small cadre of existing tenured creative writing faculty seems disinclined to do the administrative heavy lifting for a program that has grown to be a significant share of the overall offerings in the Stanford English department. According to a fact sheet provided to me by Kealey, in addition to creative writing being over 50 percent of the courses in English (90 percent of which are taught by Jones Lecturers), two-thirds of English majors choose a creative writing focus, and just under half of English majors choose a Jones Lecturer as their adviser.

In some ways, the successful growth of the program is the very thing that has it in the crosshairs.

While everyone in Stanford administration says it isn’t an issue of funding, the fact that longtime lecturers asked for and received raises last year suggests another possible complication. You know who isn’t going to agitate for a raise in the future? Someone on a short, fixed-term fellowship who knows they’re not going to be sticking around long term anyway.

I’m going to do something out of character for me and express some sympathy for the administration in this case. It’s clear that the program and the number of courses and students it serves has grown far beyond what can or should be managed on an ad hoc basis. This thing needs structure; guidelines for hiring, evaluation and retention; and sufficient capacity to administrate those duties.

I have even more sympathy for the administration. (Let’s not get used to this.)

Because of the incredible growth and development, the program has outstripped its original intention. As conceived, the Jones Lectureship was a landing spot for a limited number of the creative writing Stegner Fellows. The Stegner is the most prestigious creative writing fellowship in the country, a two-year program that requires no teaching and provides lots of time to write, along with a generous stipend (by creative writing fellowship standards). It is an incubator for future major literary writers and works. Stegner Fellows in fiction include Ottessa Moshfegh, Jamel Brinkley, NoViolet Bulawayo, Anthony Marra, Justin Torres, Maggie Shipstead, Jesmyn Ward, ZZ Packer and my old M.F.A. mate, the Pulitzer Prize winner and current professor of creative writing at Stanford Adam Johnson.

The Jones Lectureship was conceived as additional incubation time post-Stegner, including teaching duties, the kind of required experience for pursuing a tenure-track job in creative writing.

The program grew, and while it remained a launching pad for some, for others it became a final destination, where they could engage in the kind of teaching that changes student lives done by people dedicated to that aspect of the university mission. For example, Kealey co-created a graphic novel project, a novel-writing course where students complete a full manuscript over the course of a semester and the Levinthal Tutorials, a one-on-one mentorship program between Stegner Fellows and Stanford undergraduates.

What was conceived as a temp job became something else, something that has benefited students and the university. I get that this was not the intention and managing this kind of program is more involved than envisioned, but what is gained by scaling back and putting the courses in the hands of less experienced faculty who, by definition, will not be trying to put down roots and further the institutional mission, but instead channeling their energies toward their individual launches?

This has become complicated for Stanford, and maybe a purge allows for a reset, but it is strange to me that they are not ready or willing to take advantage of this amazing thing that has happened, almost by accident.

Consider the competitive advantage in enrollment among technical and professional majors who may also desire a double major or minor in creative writing and have a chance to be taught by highly experienced, highly dedicated, highly accomplished faculty.

(The current Jones Lecturers have won dozens of fellowships, prizes and grants, and the longtime lecturers have CVs that look like those of tenured faculty anywhere in the country.)

Consider the halo effect for the English department as a whole, as more students are exposed to their programming through creative writing.

Consider how the program has been and could continue to be a feather in the cap of Stanford as an institution that has the resources to not only maintain what’s been built but continue to grow and innovate.

This thing is just too good to let go, and yet that seems like what Stanford is going to do.

It’s a shame, because this looks easily solvable to me.

Yes, it needs administering, but I assume there are existing lecturers who could be tasked with those duties as part of their jobs.

Yes, it’s possible that the teaching load that was conceived for people on the career launching pad is not appropriate for those in their landing spot, but this is something easily addressed and codified in clear contracts.

Yes, there must be room for some number of Stegner Fellows to move into a lectureship. Obviously not everyone can stay forever, but not everyone will want to stay forever. Some balance between long-term contracted faculty (say, three- or five-year contracts following initial probationary periods), and shorter, limited-term faculty is entirely common across higher ed—and this is the ideal situation for that kind of structure.

Additionally, the fact sheet about the program indicates there were 314 students on the wait list for classes in spring 2023. This suggests to me that there’s room for growth in terms of student demand.

Put it under the auspices of the English department, with its own administrators who report up to the chair. Or be even bolder: Spin it off into its own program and tap into the sources of funding that have already supported creative writing at Stanford so generously.

For some reason, this feels personal, maybe because my background is in creative writing, or because I’ve seen too many examples of years of dedicated work of NTT faculty that has a direct benefit to students flushed away by shortsighted decisions. Maybe it’s because I would have (metaphorically) killed for an opportunity like a Stegner Fellowship or Jones Lectureship. (Me and my work were not up to snuff at the time.)

Maybe it feels personal because when I was an undergrad, it was one creative writing professor at the University of Illinois, Philip Graham, who cared enough about the well-being of his students to help put me on the path that has led me here. I see the Jones Lecturer program as an opportunity for that kind of experience at scale (to use a term familiar to those in Silicon Valley).

To walk away from this when there are the resources, personnel and student desire to keep it going just seems like a terrible waste.

I hope Stanford finds a better way forward.