A misleading article published in the Sunday Advocate Nov. 9 caused some short-lived resentment toward Chancellor Mark Emmert from faculty in the English department.
Gerard Shields, Advocate Washington correspondent, began his column with a joke that Emmert opened his comments with.
“Two scarecrows are propped up in the middle of a corneld talking about their college degrees when one turns to the other and says: ‘English Lit – and you?'”
According to the Advocate, Emmert was taking part in a roundtable discussion with representatives from business, labor, academics and media at a Washington symposium. He said the point of his talk was to stress the importance of having a combination of liberal arts and technology educations.
Emmert said the joke came from an old cartoon in the New Yorker, and because of its placement in the column, it was taken out of context.
“That was terribly unfortunate, and I guess Shields started off with that because he thought it would sound good,” Emmert said. “But what he didn’t report was that the most common degree of Fortune 500 executives is a history major. I was making the point that liberal arts majors are a solid foundation and that we do not only need a good technology foundation.
“The column sounded opposite of what I was trying to say,” Emmert said.
After faculty members voiced discontent with the column, Emmert was contacted by English Chair David Richardson through an e-mail.
“The chairman wrote to me so I wrote back to him about the context of the joke and to apologize,” Emmert said.
Richardson said he did not see the story, but someone came to him the following Monday morning and told him about it.
“A couple of people clipped it out and said, ‘I thought we’d made an agreement with the Chancellor and made our peace with him,'” Richardson said. “But he sent a fairly long e-mail back to me and asked that I forward it to the faculty.”
The agreement he referred to was in reference to the latest instructor cuts to the English and math departments. He said the English department had just signed an agreement outlining the future of the department.
He said there have been mixed feelings among faculty in the department because of misunderstandings about what would happen within the English department.
“Like so much of this, it’s an element of bad timing,” Richardson said. “The story about the cuts came out two weeks before the faculty knew what was going on, and there were rumors about cutting English 1001, and then this.”
He said although some faculty members were initially upset with the column, any bad feelings blew over fairly quickly.
“It really wasn’t much of an issue, to tell the truth,” Richardson said. “No picket lines or threats of public immolation. A few people got upset for half a day and then the issue went away.”
But to some faculty members, like English instructor Renee Major, the issue is not completely forgotten.
“People were angered at rst and very insulted, and I guess it blew over quickly, but the gist of [the joke] seemed to be representative of having a [literature] degree as foolish and useless,” Major said.
She said even the English department makes jokes about their majors, but the Chancellor’s decision to say the joke to that particular group of people was off-color and unwise.
“It was unfortunate timing and to that forum, after he’s just been talking to us about what’s going to happen in the next three years,” Major said. “It felt like a betrayal.”
She was one of the faculty members who showed the article to Richardson, and she said he registered a quick protest to Emmert.
“[Emmert] sent us an e-mail, but in the apology he said if he’d known there was going to be a reporter in the room, he would not have said it,” she said. “That didn’t sound like a heartfelt apology. The joke itself is a small thing, but what it has done is add to the mistrust.
“I think it damages the working relationship between the Chancellor and the English department, especially now,” Major said. “We have to make the first of 14 cuts this Friday. That’s going to be very difficult and the joke didn’t help.”