On his first day teaching this fall, Austin Smith drew some stares while walking to his poetry classroom at Stanford University. He carried a poster that read, in marker: “$tanford Creative Writing is firing me for being a great teacher.”
He’d been spreading that message constantly since he learned in August that he and 22 other creative-writing lecturers, several of whom have worked at Stanford for more than a decade, are being pushed out of their Jones Lectureship positions within the next several years.
The endowed lectureship was created to give alumni of the creative-writing program’s renowned Wallace Stegner Fellowship a chance to teach undergraduates. The current cohort of Jones lecturers will gradually rotate out and the lectureship will be limited to one-year appointments, with the possibility of renewal up to five years. While Jones lecturers have always been on one-year contracts, those contracts have been annually renewed in practice.
Smith said he will carry the sign with him everywhere until the change is reversed. “I couldn’t imagine going to campus walking around as I always have as if nothing’s happened,” he said.
The decision is personal and perplexing to the lecturers. Their senior colleagues voted for the change, though the precise details remain hazy — a vacuum of information that has stoked speculation. Dissatisfaction still lingers in newsletters, on social media, and in the halls of Stanford.
Smith described his workplace as “emotionally unsafe” and says his faculty colleagues have “destroyed our ability to have a normal school year.” Tom Kealey, a Jones lecturer since 2003, said he’s avoided the program’s office space because of the negative atmosphere. A few said they are bracing themselves for awkward encounters with faculty members on campus.
“Many of them voted to terminate us, so I don’t have any problem looking them in the eye,” Kealey said. “They may have a hard time looking us in the eye.”
In their plight, the lecturers and their advocates see problems much larger than departmental decorum: a deprioritization of teaching and unfair treatment of adjuncts. “This tiered system in academia of the safe, secure, tenured faculty and the untenured, vulnerable adjunct needs to end,” Smith said.
They’re writers, so of course, they have their metaphors: an unruly yet beautiful rainforest that’s been clear cut, a smoking ruin, a statue that needed a chisel but got a hammer. One lecturer compared the saga to the ship of Theseus. The ancient thought experiment asks: If all the parts of a ship are stripped away one by one, is it still the same?
Stanford says the controversial changes will return the Jones Lectureship to its original design: a one-year teaching gig for early-career writers who just completed the program’s highly competitive Stegner Fellowship.
Under the longtime director, Eavan Boland, those one-year stints turned into teaching careers for many of the current Jones lecturers. Boland was a prominent Irish poet who directed Stanford’s creative-writing program for 21 years until her death in 2020. “It was just understood that if you were a good teacher, you could stay,” Smith said.
So they stayed. They crafted new courses and mentored students. They settled down and raised their kids in the Bay Area. They created a community of writers. That community, the instructors say, became a haven for creativity and expression at a competitive, anxiety-ridden university like Stanford where students are more apt to become computer programmers than poets.
Colleagues who knew her well said that Boland wanted Stanford students from any discipline to be able to take creative writing if they desired. She believed that students shouldn’t have to forfeit the humanities to study the sciences. Neuroscientists could be poets too.
“It was very much her vision that we were going to build a home and a haven for undergraduates and that we were going to have creative-writing classes offered to every single person in Stanford who wanted to take them,” said Nina Schloesser Tárano, a Jones lecturer since 2012.
The program surged in popularity under Boland, growing from about 25 classes in the early 2000s to more than 100 this year. In the 2022-23 academic year, lecturers say 1,729 students took a creative-writing course. Creative writing is the most popular minor at Stanford, with waitlists that lecturers say include more than 300 students each quarter. A Stanford spokesperson said that the university does not share course enrollment information.
Boland described the Jones lecturers to the student newspaper in 2014 as the “engine of innovation and interest with the undergraduates.” The gradual exodus of the current cohort feels like an abandonment of Boland’s vision to the 23 lecturers and their advocates.
A protest petition created by a recent alumnus has garnered close to 1,700 signatures. Three weeks ago, students gathered at a cafe and drafted letters by pen and typewriter to send to the dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. Even prospective students are weighing in. One applicant for next fall wrote in a letter to administrators that the decision was “deeply troubling to her.” The drama has also captured the attention of high-profile writers like Joyce Carol Oates, Rebecca Solnit, Ottessa Moshfegh, and George Saunders.
To advocates, having lecturers who stick around is a defining feature of the program. But the program’s leadership contends that aspect in particular stands in the way of its mission.
“Slowly, the system that had been created to ensure Stanford students could work with a consistent flow of emerging writers began to falter as many term-limited contracts were renewed annually,” wrote Nicholas Jenkins, the creative-writing program director, in a Stanford Daily letter to the editor.
Jenkins and Debra Satz, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, did not make themselves available for an interview. A Stanford spokesperson directed The Chronicle to public statements made by the program’s leadership.
Cycling out all the lecturers will enable “a fresh flow of perspectives within the program,” a university news article stated. (The article also notes that starting in 2019, newly hired lecturers were subject to a four-year term limit. The new policy applies to all lecturers, including those who arrived before 2019.)
Along with adding term limits, the university said it will increase the number of courses in the program by 10 percent next year, and add 13 new, term-limited lectureships — 10 new in the English department and three in the creative-writing program. Jones lecturers can apply for those positions.
There were just a lot of secrets this last year. People were fearful. As it turned out, they had a right to be fearful.
Jenkins wrote in the Stanford Daily letter to the editor that the decision was not based on budget considerations and that they’re investing more in the program, not less. Lecturers who spoke to The Chronicle said they wondered about the necessity of rotating all the adjuncts out, given the seeming abundance of resources and ample demand. “There’s room for us all,” said Sarah Frisch, who’s been a Jones lecturer since 2009.
Students and lecturers worry that shorter terms may harm the student experience. “If you have people who are there temporarily who are busy trying to get their books out so they can compete for jobs elsewhere, you don’t have the same kind of support available to students,” Frisch said.
Current Jones lecturers are also fearful that specialized courses they’ve developed — like the Novel Writing Intensive, where students write a 50,000-word novel during National Novel Writing Month — will not survive the change. “People develop these [courses] not anywhere near their first three years,” Kealey said. “It takes a while for people to become confident enough as a teacher and also to know the students well enough.”
Stacey Swann, a former Stegner fellow who has been a creative-writing instructor for more than 10 years, said courses like these make for a stellar catalog. “[The Jones lecturers] have turned it into one of the best creative-writing undergrad programs in the nation,” she said.
Jenkins said in a university news article that it is “common for popular classes to change hands.”
“Nothing that draws enthusiastic undergraduates is likely to go away,” he said in the article. “The influx of new Jones lecturers into the program will also produce innovative course offerings that will become must-haves.”
Feeling blindsided, a few lecturers were quick to speculate and assume bad-faith motivations on behalf of their senior colleagues.
The decision to reinstate firm term limits was made by a working group of creative-writing faculty and affirmed by Satz, the dean. The group was tasked with a yearlong review of the program’s structure including appointment length, opportunities for full-time work, evaluation, and rotation.
In an email shared with The Chronicle, an academic-operations specialist wrote that Stegner fellows’ ability to apply for the Jones lectureship is an aspect of the program “deserving the most serious reflection” for the working group. Last year, there were no openings for Stegner fellows to become Jones lecturers.
The Chronicle reached out to several current Stegner fellows to request an interview. All either did not respond or declined to comment.
The lecturers asked for representation on the working group, but they were told that it would consist of only tenure-line faculty on Stanford’s Academic Council, according to emails shared with The Chronicle.
To Kealey, exclusion from the group shrouded the past year in mystery. “There were just a lot of secrets this last year,” he said. “People were fearful. As it turned out, they had a right to be fearful.”
The lecturers are seen as disposable and easily replaceable in a way that other employees of the university are not.
Jones lecturers were invited to one listening session to voice their concerns, but Frisch said that it was not clear that reinstating term limits and cycling out the entire cohort were on the table. “I would never have guessed that the working group was considering this kind of drastic change,” she said.
Barred from the working group, the lecturers have struggled to piece together the logic of the decision. Some have their guesses. Others, like Frisch, are hesitant to do so. “I don’t feel comfortable theorizing because I’m probably going to be wrong because I had no access to the internal workings of this process,” she said.
Some chalk it up to mere spite, while others think it’s retaliation for advocating for pay raises last year. “I don’t have any clear evidence that it’s linked to the salaries, but it does seem strange that we don’t get a salary increase for a long time, then we all ask for raises, and then a year later we’re all terminated,” Kealey said.
Last fall, lecturers secured a significant pay raise, according to an email shared with The Chronicle. The leadership of the School of Humanities and Sciences and the creative-writing program told The Chronicle through a spokesperson that lecturer salaries are confidential and cannot be disclosed. Many lecturers had been earning about $52,000 prior to the raise, according to Kealey. The cost of living in the Bay Area is 71-percent higher than the national average, and the San Francisco Chronicle reported last year that a $104,000 annual salary was considered “low-income” for single people in three Bay Area counties. A spokesperson for the School of Humanities and Sciences, on behalf of the school and creative-writing program’s leaders, said that salary increases are in “no way related to the changes to the creative-writing program.”
Months after the vote, Smith is calling out his colleagues. Two weeks ago, he named four faculty members on Instagram who he believes voted for the change. Gabriella Safran, senior associate dean of humanities and arts, declined to provide details of the vote, including how many faculty members took part, saying she could not speak about private and confidential matters. The Chronicle contacted several creative-writing faculty members who all either did not respond or declined to comment.
But to the lecturers, the story is about something bigger than who voted for what: academe’s hierarchy that places those with tenure above those without. “The lecturers are seen as disposable and easily replaceable in a way that other employees of the university are not,” Tárano said.
A 2018 report commissioned by Stanford’s provost found that lecturers pull significant weight to meet the university’s teaching needs. More than a quarter of units at the university were taught by lecturers in the 2016-17 academic year. Lecturers quoted in the 2018 report said that faculty treat them like “second-class citizens,” a common feeling among adjuncts across academe.
There’s also the commonly held notion that, while tenured faculty are free to focus on research, adjuncts take up a large share of higher ed’s teaching load. Jones lecturers are quick to point this out. Smith argues that the tenured faculty who voted to establish term limits are out of touch with undergraduates. “They don’t know how much we mean to our students because they never teach,” he said.
But creative-writing faculty do teach. All are scheduled to instruct either an undergraduate course, an independent study, a graduate course, or a Stegner Fellowship workshop this year, according to Stanford’s course bulletin. Yet Jones lecturers teach a majority of undergraduate creative-writing courses, and some students have considered them more accessible.
“It was just hard to even get [the faculty’s] time,” said Katherine Ho, a recent Stanford graduate who minored in creative writing and worked as a peer adviser in the program. “It didn’t feel like they were trying to build a relationship with you to get to know you beyond just being in the classroom.”
Tárano said that the job descriptions of lecturers and faculty differ. While she views herself primarily as a teacher, she said perhaps faculty see their primary role as pursuing their artistic work. “Our faculty are renowned artists,” she said. “That’s why they’re there.”
Over the past three decades, the academic work force has shifted from mostly tenured or tenure-track faculty to mostly contingent faculty. More than two-thirds of faculty members are on contingent appointments, according to the American Association of University Professors. Low wages and the precarity of short-term contracts have galvanized contingent faculty at some colleges to unionize.
To Tárano, her working conditions are her students’ learning conditions. “If I’m not allowed to pursue my lines of inquiry as a teacher over years, then my students are not allowed to benefit from those,” she said. Frisch also worries that the new term limits will hurt the program’s focus on undergraduate students’ needs.
“The centering of the students is what is lost when you turn their teachers into temporary workers and when you decenter them in the decision making,” she said.
Lecturers continue to protest the decision, and hope that it’s reversed. Smith is stoking the flames on Instagram, calling out faculty by name and posting memes with the hashtag #adjunks. He didn’t frequent social media before this: “Catch me reading Keats before you’ll catch me reading tweets,” he wrote in one post. In response to the change, he also started an in-person and online book club to read Stoner, a 1965 novel by John Williams about a teacher at odds with the department chair.
Smith carries the book with him everywhere. He said it’s his spiritual text, and this fight to get his job back is a “spiritual one” too. Smith identifies with the book’s main character, a professor who ditched a science major to pursue a literary life, and who doesn’t see eye to eye with administrators. The book keeps Smith going, and reminds him of the power of literature — the thing he and his supporters say this whole thing is about.
On the first day of class this fall, when Smith arrived a few minutes late to his 9:30 a.m. poetry course, all eyes were on his poster. He walked to the front of the class and laid the sign down. He invited students to ask him about it later if they were curious. But right now, they had poems to read.
