Former D.O.C. Professor Writes Letter to TMC Faculty About Program's Problems (Confirming LZC's Criticisms)

Dear all:

Here's a letter Prof. Winnie Woodhull wrote to the TMC faculty. She is a former D.O.C. lecturer as well as an associate professor in the Literature Dept. Like the two recently ousted TAs, Scott Boehm and Benjamin Balthaser, she was 'not rehired' to teach due to her internal criticisms of the program.

Here's a preview (click HERE to read the full letter)
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Dear colleagues,

I write to urge you not to jump to conclusions based on Nancy Gilson’s account of developments in DOC over the past few years. I taught in DOC 3, the course on
”Imagination,” for five years, the last of which was under the direction of Abe Shragge, with Nancy Gilson just coming on board as well. I feel strongly that the current conflicts are not about TAs creating parallel syllabi, which no one has done, or about TAs requiring students to read short supplementary texts for discussion in section, which has long been standard practice not only in DOC and the other writing programs, in the Department of Literature and the Third World Studies Program, but also in the Critical Gender Studies Program which, like DOC, employs TAs from various departments across the humanities and social sciences. From my perspective, the graduate and undergraduate students who have organized the Lumumba-Zapata Coalition are right to claim that DOC has abandoned its original mission. Indeed, when I was teaching in DOC 3, I was constantly in the position of resisting the director’s efforts to avoid controversial matters altogether and to substitute edutainment for intellectual work.

Click HERE to read the full text