Farewell Letter from Vic Strandberg

You could call this my last will and testament.  I will begin with the testament, based on my institutional memory going back sixty years.  After earning my PhD at Brown in 1962, I taught at the University of Vermont for four years and came to Duke in 1966 in search of a higher salary and warmer weather for my family.  My new salary was $9500, a nice jump from the $7600 I got in Vermont, and I bought my first house, with two baths and nine rooms, including a full cellar and huge family room, for $22,000.  The nation’s currency has lost more than 90% of its purchasing power since then.   

The department had no Black, Jewish, or openly gay faculty at the time.  Two gay colleagues got married—and one got engaged—to women.  Those marriages and the engagement soon ended; decades would pass before these men could be their true selves in public. In the first two years, I had one Black undergraduate, C. B. Claiborne, the first Black member of the varsity basketball team.  I have always had suspicions about why he was left behind when the team went to play two games in Greensboro.  I also had one Black graduate student, named China McCabe.  It is strange how my memory, so fallible with current names, is so reliable from long ago.

The dress code was coats and ties or suits for all males, both faculty and students, and tasteful blouses and skirts for females.  I maintained the code for a dozen years until one day when, unwittingly, I shut my cat Snowflake in my closet. That night, when I opened the door, my lifelong collection of neckties lay piled on the floor, and Snowflake had pissed on the pile.  The dress code was changing by then anyway, which mitigated the feline revenge. 

Another feature of the time was the prevalence of indoor smoking. In Cameron Stadium the game was partly obscured by a blue haze, and classrooms and dining rooms likewise included scattered ashtrays.  Earlier, in a graduate seminar at Brown, I recall one agonized student saying, “Martin!  You’re not going to light up that cigar!”—which he did.  The professor, incidentally, had learned to blow beautiful smoke rings.  One pleasure I savored at Duke involved a committee meeting of young faculty in the elegant Trustees room.  We broke into their stash of cigars and every one of us (we all were men) lit up happily.  Those were the days.

Among the improvements in technology that appeared during those years, the earliest crucial one was the copy machine, which saved thousands of books and magazines in the library from being mutilated by sliced-out pages.  Then came the electric/smart typewriter and the computer, prior to which we had to re-type the whole page if a typo appeared.  The internet of course transformed our whole profession, bringing the sublime miracle of Wikipedia and Google search.  Young faculty don’t realize how lucky they are for these assets, but then again, they probably would trade these assets away in return for the job market I entered, when jobs at large were begging for faculty appointments.

My most shocking experience at Duke was the denial of tenure, by one vote, of a young woman who everyone agreed was a fine teacher and an exemplary colleague for her service and collegiality.  (We had only one tenured woman at the time, doing double duty as our only Black colleague.)   The issue came down to her book, recently accepted by the Duke Press.  All six reviewers, including two nationally eminent superstars, ruled in favor of tenure, as did her faculty mentor, then abroad.  Given no other plausible motive, I ascribed her rejection to pure misogyny, a memory which festers still after a half-century.  There was more ugliness to this story, but we will leave it there.

Soon after this episode came the most exciting development in department history--arrival of Stanley Fish as chair, along with a galaxy of superstars sufficient to get a big write-up in the New York Times Magazine. Frank Lentricchia (Critical Theory}, Barbara Herrnstein Smith (MLA President), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Queer Studies pioneer), Jane Tompkins (Feminism),  Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Black Studies, later succeeded by Houston Baker, MLA President), Fish himself, and, next door in the Program in Literature, Fredric Jameson (Marxism).  It is curious how it all imploded after around six years, with the superstars scattering to better pastures.  Even a 25 room mansion, for which Duke “picked up the mortgage,” did not suffice to keep Henry Louis Gates here.  Then again, accepting a call from Harvard is a sure sign of academic intelligence.

The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr, on April 4, 1968—a date burned into my memory—galvanized the student body into a mass protest against racism.  The President of Duke had to resign, to be replaced by a savvy politician-president, former Governor and future Senator Terry Sanford.  I have admired the work of all our presidents since then: Sanford, Keith Brodie (whom I liked most as a man), Nan Keohane, and Richard Brodhead (two fantastic fundraisers).  Vincent Price, coping with the darkest era in my academic experience, seems to be handling the crisis  wisely.

Grade inflation first appeared as a response to the Vietnam War. Male students who flunked out were subject to be drafted and sent into combat.  It was unethical to protect these students when their replacements would be young men not lucky enough to be in college, but it happened anyway. When I came to Duke, the average grade at Duke and elsewhere was a C or C+.  A few students would get B’s and maybe in a class of thirty there would be one A or A-, or sometimes none.  As with the national currency, once inflation gets started, it becomes very hard to stop.  Competing with each other for students, the elite universities kept nudging the scale a little higher, and no one professor or university could press it back down on their own.  So here we are, with an average grade of A.

During the Vietnam War, Duke established the Officer Education Committee to supervise our ROTC programs, intended to prevent the backlash against ROTC prevalent on many other campuses.  I served on this committee for thirty-plus years, the last half of them as chair.  When Trump assumed office in 2017, I remarked to the Army commander (who for professional reasons could not reply), “I hope Trump does not take it in mind to play with his toy Army.”  In his second term, he has taken it in mind, to the world’s sorrow.

My other main contribution to University affairs was a four-year stint as the editor of The Faculty Forum, a publication (then on paper) that went out to the whole campus community.  Having a lot of blank space every month, I filled it with my own research in issues of general interest.  The centerpiece of it all was a slightly acidic portrait of famous figures—Freud, Jung, JFK, Hemingway, Martin Luther, Richard Wagner, Tito, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault (the last two were mighty big names in their heyday).  All white men, by the way—diversity be damned.  I gathered these portraits under the title Crackpots on Parade & Transgressive Deconstructions: The Nether Side of Genius.  Anyone who wants a few minutes of  fun with some of this can look it up under my Duke Workspace venue online.

I ask my colleagues to indulge one monomaniac appeal for change.  Even while acknowledging their necessity, I have always been skeptical of hierarchies  because of the terrible leadership I have witnessed in every venue—in government, religion, business, military command, and yes, academe. So my stance is to have as little hierarchy as is necessary.  In academe, that process got underway soon after I got my first job.  My beginner’s rank, with PhD in hand, was Instructor.  About three years later, that rank disappeared from our profession, and beginning faculty were designated Assistant Professors. That was a good move but did not go far enough.  My argument is that there are only three faculty ranks that matter—untenured, tenured, and distinguished; the distinguished get chairs. In my opinion, the untenured should be Associate Professors, and the rank of Professor should accompany tenure.  Maybe some day.

Hyperbolically perhaps, but not cynically, Henry Adams declared that a teacher affects eternity.  What a privilege it has been to spend my years teaching great literature to some 10,000 Duke students, sometimes in various auditoriums on our two campuses or at times in a seminar with four or five students in my office.  The privilege extends to meeting, and  dining with, the likes of Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison (whom I twice introduced to a packed Page Auditorium), John Updike, and Robert Penn Warren. My other greatest professional pleasure is the correspondence I have received from writers who have been greatly pleased with what I wrote about their handiwork.  They include Didion, Oates, Warren, and Cynthia Ozick. 

My greatest disappointment has been the growing reluctance of students to read novels.  Three decades ago, my course in Faulkner—whom I consider our greatest American writer—topped out at 125 students.  Seven years ago it enrolled 17.  The last time I offered it, the enrollment was zero.  Apparently, my mistake was to list the seven novels they would have to read.  But I feel sure that the innate greatness of Faulkner’s oeuvre will ensure resurrection , as happened to Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, and others.  I put Joyce Carol Oates on that list as well.

I cannot in good conscience conclude without a word of gratitude to the department officers who have devoted so much hard work, time, and talent to our collective benefit.  Over sixty years, there have been too many names to list, but let me say that our chairpersons--some more successful than others—deserve our thanks for the heavy responsibilities they have volunteered to shoulder (their load of email alone makes me shudder).  Among other offices, I recall one chairperson looking down the hall at the DGS office and saying, “I’m sure glad I don’t have that job.”  My own contribution was two turns as DUS, the earlier one without secretarial help but also without today’s bureaucratic hassles.  

So much for my last testament.  Now, on to my will. I bequeath to all my department colleagues my strong wish for your success in coping with a disappearing grading scale,  the troublesome onset of AI, trump/ism (no sic; the small t is deliberate); and whatever future monstrosities might come over the horizon . I extend my best wishes to those of you striving to earn tenure and my congratulations to those who have it—a mighty precious commodity in these precarious times.

In closing,  I remind everyone that, in this period of extreme political hostility toward higher education, we are blessed to be in a place as secure and wisely led as we have been at Duke University.  The splendid student body; the excellent faculty; the beautiful campus, including the Gardens and Duke Forest; the abundance of fascinating events on campus; and the thriving cultural and economic health of the greater Durham community—these features make me grateful for the long life I have been allowed to enjoy here.  I hope each of you will enjoy something similar as well.