The middle part of Broken English Departments is unexpectedly generic in its descriptions of what happened to you on a university campus in Texas—the harassment, the loss of your tenured professorship, your forced resignation and departure. Why not be more specific?
That’s a natural question to ask. Actually my first few drafts of that manuscript included the names of everyone involved and was quite specific about when things occurred. But eventually, as an experiment, I tried omitting the names of people and the dates that incidents took place. I was surprised at the power the narrative suddenly gained. Without the distraction of individuals’ names and the exact date of each development, it became a paradigm for the playbook the far Left has utilized to seize department after department across the country. I was thus telling the story of hundreds and hundreds of other English professors who genuinely wanted to teach about literature and writing. My experiences—all of them true—became representative of how a discipline has ceased to be a discipline. The omissions of names also eliminated any impression that I might be motivated to publish my personal account for purposes of retaliation. The lack of identifications made it clear that I had a different, higher, goal in alerting the public to what has transpired too often in our colleges and universities.
The events and the harassment you describe midway through Broken English Departments occurred in the early 1990s. Why did it take you so long to write this account of the ordeal you underwent?
Actually I protested the unfair ostracism and persecution at the time I was being subjected to them, and I recounted examples of the continual tormenting in a number of interviews as I was leaving that university. But after that I was swept up into my responsibilities on another campus as a department head, classroom instructor, publishing scholar (I needed to set an example for my department), and father of a household. There was little free time for anything else. Upon my retirement and while confined to my study during the early months of the pandemic, I finally was able to concentrate on a book that enlarged upon my personal experiences and painted a larger picture of what had happened to a once-reputable field of study. Additional time was required to document the bizarre and twisted theories that had captivated the people who seized most of the English departments across the nation.
Why did you not include accounts of how other professors were similarly exiled or compelled to retire early (or even denied tenure at the outset of their careers)?
Well, of course, those would appropriately be their stories to relate. Without their express permission I had no right to endeavor to describe their own ordeals. Frankly, I did approach quite a number of people who had left the profession when it was not their preference or their choice, but in every instance these men and women felt so damaged—and were still trying to restore their self-confidence and professional standing—that they implored me not to subject them to further retaliation by providing an account in print of their unjust treatment.
Broken English Departments: The Repair Manual 