Description
A Conversation with Lecturers & Students
Recently, twenty-three lecturers in the highly successful Creative Writing
program at Stanford were summoned to a Zoom meeting where they were first
praised, and then summarily fired. One of the most surprising aspects of
this purge is the fact that it was carried out not by top-tier university
administrators, but by tenure-track faculty in the program. It was they who
decided to brutally terminate their colleagues. On this episode of the
Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with two
of the lecturers who have been told they will leave Stanford in nine
months, and one of their students, a published novelist. They explain the
devastating nature of this act and share statistics and histories that show
this was not at all necessary. Expediency for senior faculty trumped the
survival of a carefully developed and nurtured community of creative
writers.