Bare

One of the more amazing things about being a professor is getting an occasional glimpse of the world to come, the world that will be made by my students. Granted, sometimes I get a little apocalyptic (and apoplectic) when I think that this could be a world without the Oxford comma, proper use of the objective case, and actual books, but that's usually a sign that I need to stop grading papers and walk the dog. Sometimes, however, I experience that other sense of the term apocalypse, an unveiling. In those moments, the stars begin to fall, the planets seem to realign, and what was formerly impossible pulls up a chair, smiles, and says "guess what? That just happened." Last night, that happened. A young man named Ethan, whom I am fortunate to call my student, directed and starred in Bare: A Pop Opera, a production that is also his honors project. Written in 1999, Bare unfolds in a Catholic boarding school, where two boys have fallen in love and carry on a clandestine romance until one, Peter, decides he is no longer willing to live in the closet. The other, Jason, the school's golden boy, scared and confused, refuses to embrace their love in public and the consequences are tragic. Jason has a fling with the sexy but insecure Ivy that results in a pregnancy. Then, he ODs during a school production of Romeo and Juliet, another play about forbidden love and hidden lives that animates this one. This summary doesn't do justice to Ethan's production, but it's a sketch of what unfolded in song, American sign language, and the 15 heart-out, passionate, Katy-bar-the-door performances that simultaneously gave the play its sense of urgency and, paradoxically, marked it as a play set in the past. Faulkner once observed that the past is never dead; it's never even the past. I've always thought that insight needs the ballast of Tony Kushner's prophetic assertion that the world only spins forward. Both halves of this equation are true; without Faulkner's insight, we would be blind to the histories shape us, and without Kushner's, how would we keep going? Faulkner reminds us to honor the parts of the past that are honorable; Kushner reminds us that it's OK to ask for more.

Last night, the stars began to fall, at least in my neck of the woods. The past met the present and shook hands with the future. Let me explain. Just before the play, I was celebrating the news that a dear friend had been accepted to seminary and was in line for a substantial scholarship. Toasts would be in order under any circumstances, but this friend is gay, out, and seeking ordination in a mainline Protestant (OK, since you asked, Lutheran) tradition. Earlier that day, the Supreme Court agreed to hear cases from 4 states in the 6th Circuit, including cases from Tennessee, which will likely lead to the legal clarification of the right to marriage equality on a national scale. That means that by April of 2015, the court should hear the cases, and the issue should be resolved in June. Of this year. So as I sprang up from dinner's joyous conversation to make it to Ethan's play, the sense of moment, of history lurching forward, electrified me. During the passionate talkback after Bare, I sat next to Carol Mayo-Jenkins, whom I am honored and continually flabbergasted to call my colleague. Carol played Sherwood, the sharp, caring, dulcet-toned English teacher on Fame, and she's in my personal pantheon of real and imaginary teachers who made me want to do what I do. I pinch myself whenever I stop to think about the fact that we inhabit the same office building and dote on the same students. Together, we listened to these young actors talk about why this show mattered so much to them, how close their own stories were to their characters', how they struggled to believe that they could be loved by God when their churches rejected them, how many of their parents refused to come to the show, how intertwined we are in the past, and how we can taste the future.

My own high school years in the early 80s were days in which, even in a relatively artsy high school, people weren't "out." It was a far cry from the 50s, which kept the likes of Rock Hudson in the closet, but it was still a world before Gay-Straight Alliances, PFLAG, and trans awareness. What we had in that post-Stonewall, pre-ACT UP moment were the arts, and shows on TV like Fame, which let us dream about moving to New York, attending a school for the arts, living, dancing, singing, and writing with fiery passion. It gave us (all of us--kids who were gay, straight, who knows yet?) a glimpse into a world that looked more tolerant, more creative, and more open-minded than the one we inhabited, one in which we might be loved and appreciated for our freaky gifts and quirks. Fame did, in reality, lead to the creation of hundreds of schools for the arts across the country. Oscar Wilde got his revenge: more often than we realize, life imitates art. My mundane south Florida public high school, an architectural wasteland further scarred by portable classrooms, overcrowding, and double sessions, had none of the charm of the 46th St. High School for the Performing Arts, but at least we had a chorus room and a tiny drama program to bring together the odd ducks, smart kids, and performative types. That last group included several boys who knew or came to realize later that they were gay. And I loved them--great prom dates, fantastic singers, hilarious, affectionate, classy, but, alas for me, not straight. Some made it through, and some we lost in the 90s to the scourge of AIDS. In the middle of those in-between times, though, in 1983 (and thereabouts), we had chorus, The Music Man, and our shared passion for making the most beautiful and meaningful disposable art we could, being as honest and brave as we could, and knowing something more about ourselves and each other as a result.

For many of the kids I knew, the arts were what saved them. And that's likely to remain true, even if the Supreme Court affirms the right to marry that 36 states now recognize. Bare was about the urgent need for the arts and especially for theatre as a space of imagining what we can't yet fully realize, for encountering ideas and issues with an audience that otherwise might not be willing or able to have that conversation, and for glorying in the painful, beautiful, complicated process of being and loving in this imperfect world. These kids were leaning in to their own futures, and sitting next to one of my childhood idols who mapped out territory that helped give my friends hope, territory I would later claim as my own when I decided to teach, I knew that their work mattered. Bless them for it. As sister Chantelle sings in the show, God don't make no trash. Sing loud, lead on, and don't ever apologize for who you are. Non-judgment day is coming.

Eat the Omelet

This Christmas morning, I woke with what looked like a lovely bit of time before creatures were stirring.  I live in the House of Teen, and I thought 10:00 AM would be early for them. While I was wrong about that one, I did get about an hour for the coffee infusion, the comfy chair, and time with the dog, Emma, who was gratifyingly calm and soft this Christmas morn. I was thinking about a post my wise friend Nerissa Nields wrote on Christmas Eve.  She said

There's a reason that the medieval English celebrated these 12 days as some kind of grand reversal, with the Lord of Misrule at the helm (borrowed from the old Roman festival of Saturnalia), and all sorts of indecent liberties taken. It's too much to take in, all this darkness, but at the center of it all is the great gift of the coming of the light in the form of a new baby, hope, a way out, a way home. So we spend too much, drink too much, eat too much, sometimes say too much. We can't contain all the feelings. But if we can stop for a moment, sit still and take it in...that's where the real present is...

So, at her kind reminder, I stopped and dropped in, warming my feet with a real live dog in my snug house and letting my heart melt. The presents glittered their infinite potential in shiny unbroken paper shells; the lights blurred gently as I fumbled for my glasses, and the sun snuck up over the fence of the world. I could just reach the Mary Oliver collection of poems, Dog Stories, on the adjacent table, and I read Emma "Little Dog's Rhapsody in the Night" in the silent language of dog lovers who know they know our minds:

"Tell me you love me," he says

 "Tell me again."

Could there be a sweeter arrangement?

Over and over

he gets to ask.

I get to to tell.

My pause turned into my new favorite yoga pose, "fluffy house booties reclining with dog and coffee" pose, in which you stretch out and rhythmically scratch the dog's head with each breath, contemplating the happy circuit of love from dog to human. The endless petitions for love that make more love work so well with dogs, yet somehow, in the arrangements of family and extended family, not so much.

This sacred morning quiet could not be a shield against the mixed set of experiences of the day, the ways that Christmas light in the darkness includes, well, the darkness, but it did provide a little emergency footrest if I could remember to use it. Because Christmas, let's face it, is a mixture of experiences, of great joy and hope, the memory of love, loss, pain, and death. Spend a little time with someone who has lost a truly loved one in the last year and this will become clear, no matter how much tinsel, egg nog, and fa la la la la you throw at them. And by the way, don't throw things. Then there are less extreme, less obviously devouring kinds of loss, disappointment, and annoyance that haunt and deflate us. These are everybody's problems. I have come to the opinion that anyone who says their joy isn't mingled with tears and sorrows is either lying or is 3. The human condition is such that by the time you are invited to the adult's table (heck, by the time you are in big girl pants) some grief creep has started.

For some of us, it's the little irritation that has become, over time, an actual wound. The source of it was the little speck of sand we failed to turn into a pearl. Now it's an icky rash, sensitive to all touch. Sianne Ngai calls them the "ugly feelings," the petty emotions that have to do with our sense of powerlessness and frustration.  Sometimes it's our plans gone awry (or even the secret hopes we didn't quite consolidate into a plan) that become a huge, sprawling, sticky mess oozing into other people's lives. But there are corresponding moments of grace that meet these ugly feelings, like when a partner, who knows all the fights by heart and can go as many rounds as you can, finds you on the third verse of your favorite tune "I Feel Like Shit and It's Your Fault." Imagine the evil musical twin  Cole Porter's "You're the Top" and you've got it. But instead of joining in (it's a duet, after all), the beloved pauses. Smiles. Listens. Does not react. Said partner even waits just the right number of seconds to let you shift emotional gears before the hug, and stands there in the middle of the mess as its inky tide begins to recede.

If none of that sounds very Christmas-y, let's come back to those presents, the ones glittering in their paper shells. They are visual reminders of what we asked for, what we wished we'd asked for, the unknown hopes others have for us, the things we wish for the ones we love, the way others see us. Sometimes, the presents are not what we (or they) wanted. Sometimes, they are. But they are about to be, in just a few minutes, a beautiful mess. Hopefully, we will revel in the chaos, suspending the urge to grab the garbage bag and clean up long enough to watch faces and experience our own joys and griefs, pretty and ugly feelings, all being swirled together at a higher velocity than usual because our hearts are with the people who matter the most to us.

The eggs of our life don't unscramble. Yet the mind inclines to mastery (or perhaps that's just panic in a fancy dress) so much that we waste time imagining how we could unscramble them, how to unstir our stirred selves, undo the irritations and the bad choices, all the while regarding with contempt the familiarity of our own glorious and mysterious lives. If I had a dollar for every time I've let myself be sucked into the "if only" vortex, I'd have enough money to pay for the 24/7 massage therapists, the house cleaning staff, and the psychiatrist I convince myself I need because I've made such a mad, sticky, messy omelet of things. FaceBook can make it worse by presenting the illusion that other people have it all together or that other people's families are perfect and yours is weird.  But it's a great big Lacanian mirror stage ruse in which the baby in the mirror is always cooler, more together, and more capable than we are. Other people's omelets look shiny and perfect from a distance.

Let's face it, my fellow omelet-makers, we all have egg on our faces, even if some remember to wipe it off in public.  And all these omelets are a good thing, because people get hungry. My omelet of a life, made of leftovers, time, and love, it's pretty damn tasty. Christmas didn't end yesterday; it just got started. If my feet are cold, I can warm them with a dog. My emergency footrest will be there if I just remember to meditate, even if I'm doing it, in the words of Anne Lamott, like a meth-head squirrel. I'm going to screw some things up, I'll say too much, and I'll break a few eggs. But there is still a little coffee in the pot, and I'm taking the day off.  Merry first day of Christmas, to all.

Good morning, Chaos. Sit down

Today I welcomed chaos into my life, and it was, well, better than I thought it would be. You may have heard the Chaos Muppet/Order Muppet theory of all personality. This is the theory in which we are all Bert or Ernie (or Kermit or Animal, choose your weapon) and that the sooner we understand this about ourselves and others, the better. Corollary 1 of this theory is that the Chaos Muppet should always drive (because the Order Muppet will give directions and, God forbid, should the Order Muppet be driving and need directions, the Chaos Muppet will DO IT WRONG and then bad things will happen. Very bad things. Name calling and fuming are the tip of the iceberg.  You seem like a pretty smart reader, so you've probably surmised by now that I am among the Order Muppets, the people who make trains run on time, find other people's lost keys, and figure out how to get seven impossible things done before breakfast. Being an Order Muppet is not the same as being a neat freak, mind you (cf, my desk) but it does mean that we live in a world of to do lists, created by brains that don't just keep calendars but have become one with them. These calendar brains are the matrix and the shield, the Very Efficient Person's Prophylactic against any unruly little feelings that might lead to disruption, change, or something else that won't fit in the boxes. They should probably add VEPP to the Myers-Briggs chart that tracks the coping mechanisms of all those acronyms, especially the weirdos with the Is and Fs and Ps.

So when I say that I welcomed chaos into my life today, I am using "today" in the specific sense of morning, and to be more precise, 1:30 AM, when it literally came into the house.  I woke to two voices, and thought perhaps my older son, who had just arrived home from college earlier that night, was up talking to my husband. It even could have been his "little" brother, who is now taller than I am and becoming a basso faster than you can say "holy hormone blast, Bat Man." The voices weren't necessarily cause for alarm. We do tag-team insomnia in this house, so who knows who might be on the couch reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, playing Skyrim, stringing a bow and arrow, or looking for cookies at 1:30 in the morning.  With four on deck, all permutations can be simultaneously true some night-mornings. But this time, the voices belonged to my husband and Mr. Chaos, who had knocked on the door roughly half an hour earlier when my husband, bless him, answered.  I'll call him Mr. Chaos because I just adore this kid and have known him a long time, enough to know that his true name is Mr. Chaos. It's been a rocky road for him, and tonight's rock came in the form of a car wreck. (This is a case where the Chaos Muppet shouldn't drive, at least not without an Order Muppet on deck.) And this is also why a hysterical young man off his meds with a fresh traffic violation showed up at our door at 1:30, phone and keys Goddess knows where, car towed to East Egypt. TN, where believe me, you do not want to hear banjo music.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  None of that was really worth processing yet, because it was all the raw emotional chaos, the kind of thing I do not do or witness electively. This kid was spewing the panic, fear, hatred, self-loathing, and deep weariness that, not to be a Debbie Downer, we know is inside all of us. Mr. Chaos was doing all he could do to stay in his skin while it was all coming up, like vomit (and while we're on the subject, thank you, Mr. Chaos, for not actually vomiting on my stuff). My husband was great, listening, responding a little, calming where he could, and mostly, being there. (In case you haven't guessed this part yet, my husband is the Chaos Muppet in our relationship, though most days, his muppetude plays out on a manageable scale). Mr. Chaos had gotten loud enough to wake me where the knock did not, and that's when I came down. More listening, more chances to practice what Brene Brown describes as real empathy, which means taking his perspective, not judging, recognizing the other's emotions, and connecting with them. I'm not saying either one of us did it right, and I can't properly explain how I stumbled my way to something like empathy with Mr. Chaos, but it meant I had to feel with him, take his crazy, disorienting perspective, and just sit with it all. NOT my strong suit, as my superpower is that I can fix everything. And I will, so you better just go ahead and get the freak out of my way while I order your life for you.  But this was going to be about something else, because even with my superpower, I was both pretty sure I couldn't fix this one, and, more to the point, that fixing it wasn't the point of what was happening in this surreal space, which also happened to be my couch.  So, I tried to sit, to listen, without judgment. And you know what? I mostly did. It was totally wild, scary, and it also felt like I was doing something that I was very, very much supposed to be doing. And you know what else? I got back to sleep after it (a huge victory for a farm-league insomniac), as did Mr. Chaos. We covered him up with blankets, found him a pillow, kissed him on the forehead, and lo, sleep found him. Then, in the morning, we went about the thinking work of figuring out what happens next, what baby steps should and can only come after coffee, some eggs, and a shower. This surprisingly calm morning after, as it turned out, was GREAT time for me to use my superpower, but in a different way than I usually do.  Believe it or not, some people find my superpower off-putting. Even when it is operating at the peak of its wonderful efficiency, others have responded to me as though I am invading their space, judging, running their lives for them, giving unsolicited advice, or even being a bit of a bitch.  These people obviously have problems, which is precisely what I was trying to tell them in the first place, and if they had just held still and let me do everything....but I digress. Instead, this morning, the elemental functions of the superpower were sitting there, looking pretty useful as individual elements of support. Turns out, everyone in my house also possessed superpowers and found a way to use in a nicely concerted effort (insert small back pat here) while still letting someone else pull their own pants on themselves. Finding phone numbers, loaning a phone, encouraging a call to the shrink, giving a ride to the impounded car. And lo and behold, Mr. Chaos made it to his shift on time, which means that the rock of job loss is not going through what's left of his windshield today.

Now, it's just a few moments before my dear friends arrive for Thanksgiving. Somehow, the house is ready enough, the pies will still get made, takeout tonight seems like a stroke of hot-damn genius, and my heart is full and humming.  Thank you, Mr. Chaos. I think you're awesome and I am so glad you came to visit. Let the holidays begin.

Masquerade and Civilization

Over the course of a very busy weekend conference meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, that scholarly society had a ball.  Literally.  The Masquerade ball was the first of its kind, hosted by a small group of women from the Women's Caucus as a fundraiser for our scholarships and prizes for independent scholars and lecturers, graduate students, and those working on translations or editions. All these groups tend to be long on talent and short on cash. The event was an overwhelming financial success, thanks to the generosity of many donors, big and small, and the scrappy efforts of the organizing committee and volunteers who sold lottery tickets, masks, eye-patches, wigs, costumes, photo booth privileges, and admission tickets that evening. We should be able to fund our scholarship prizes for the next seven years. These are small amounts of money, but they make the difference between being able to go to a research library to look at documents, or to afford illustrations for your book, or not. It is an accomplishment that will have lasting, material effects in the lives of gifted scholars among us.

Financial success is, as ever, nice. But having my heart warmed, indeed, deeply moved by the energy and joy of so many brilliant minds gathered to celebrate each other and our shared interests took that evening outside the circuits of exchange, irreducible to values and equivalencies. Priceless. It was, for me, one of those rare moments of pure flow, presence, and communion with others. The collective I.Q. and knowledge in that room threatened to blow off the roof at any moment. That may sound like a mystical description of a dance party, but it's true. Ask anyone who was there. I saw (and all parties shall remain nameless) Mary Wollstonecraft, a Methodist minister from the cover of my last book, Belinda from Pope's The Rape of the Lock, and a full head-to-toe domino out on the dance floor.  I saw King Charles II with his spaniel shaking it to Rihanna and the Jackson 5 (this alone qualifies as a Christmas miracle). I saw handsome men in crushed velvet suits, in bright silk topcoats with lace, masked and unmasked.  I saw gorgeous women with powdered wigs rising 2 feet into the air, graceful in their watered silks, tiny-waisted, big-skirted, bolsters brushing on the dance floor as these visions, brilliant inside and out, laughed together. I saw graduate students, senior scholars, junior scholars, with their eyes all aglow because we took this leap together, bringing fantastic period clothes and other costumes along with our usual staid professional duds, packing lace and furbelows beneath the copies of our lectures and flattened by our laptops, and setting aside one night to enjoy the fact that we love the things we study and the privilege of studying them together.

Usually, Beyoncé isn't a part of that conversation, but that night, she was. The music, provided by a team of fantastic volunteer DJs (hey, this was a fundraiser on a shoestring budget--we even strong-armed the hotel into giving us the dance floor for free), moved from Telemann, Mozart, and Handel at the very beginning to Annie Lennox, Devo, Cyndi Lauper, then Pitbull, Scissor Sisters, and beyond. When those of us who organized the event were first making our plans, we wondered if anyone would come, and then, if they would dance, dress up, or participate at all. Let's just say that after a point, if you wanted space on that dance floor, you had to be pretty determined.  Hands went up in the air both because DJ Lauren was spinning Macklemore and Lewis and because, well, we could squeeze in more people that way. When we tried to make Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" a last song, it turned into a gigantic, throat-ripping sing-along performed by the best minds of my generation. But unlike Ginsburg's, they were refusing to be destroyed by the madness of our times: the attacks on higher education that describe the humanities as elitist or partisan and undercut our ability to educate the rising generations; the shrinking budgets that outsource the professoriate, tenure's quiet vanishing act; the difficulty of teaching our students to read the great novels, poems, plays, and essays of the past that will make them better critical thinkers, especially when they write about them with clarity and grace.

You could look at this night and say "sounds like a bunch of geeky academics having the prom they missed in high school." Go ahead; we made the same joke ourselves. But hear this as well: we were (and are) gorgeous, graceful, and fierce in the cause of a joy that comes from the life of the mind lived for the love of teaching and learning. And our feet hurt. But we'd do it all again in a heartbeat.

Magic Words

The exchanges I've had with Senator Campfield this past weekend and the very strong response they generated have me thinking about words and how powerful they can be. Stunning as it may sound, I have come to believe that Senator Campfield and I may agree on something: that words are "magical." We disagree starkly, however, about how that magic works.

The Senator has been on the receiving end of the late-night comedy shows for a while now, a drubbing that began with the "Don't Say Gay" bill, otherwise known as S.B. 49. The bill would have restricted speech about homosexuality in schools, evidently on the premise that, as Stephen Colbert said, "if you don't talk about something, it disappears." Colbert's bit dialed into something about Campfield's talismanic approach to language, which grants words a terrifying degree of power over us. Our speaking (or not speaking) makes things happen in some primitive, mystical sense.  Like the origin of the curse, which retains its trace in our references to "curse words," an utterance is enough to strike down, raise up, or unleash horrors.

Here's the funny thing:  I agree that words have awesome power. Words have changed my life.  Reading George Etherege, Alexander Pope (shout out to my 18thC peeps), Judith Butler, the Bible, and Gloria Naylor were experiences that transformed me and that continue to transform me, as I bring new experiences and insights to the endlessly hermeneutic process of reading. Likewise, I've had conversations with students, with my teachers, and my colleagues that have made me see things differently. But those texts and conversations didn't change me because of some voodoo in the words before which I was helpless. They changed me because they allowed me to interact with other people's imaginations, perspectives, and ways of being. Through that process of interaction, I was able to discover new things about myself: what I thought, what I valued, what I love.

Campfield's desire to restrict speech, which is at the center of his most public bills, presupposes a scary verbal landscape in which one must take a defensive posture, or an excessively aggressive one, in order to be protected from words. It is a world of "avadacadabra," of verbal talismans and taboos. What that fearful stance shuts down is the beautifully arresting possibility that we might engage in conversations that change us, or clarify things, or make us think. We are desperate for civil discourse in this country so that we can renew civic discourse, in which we engage with actual ideas and wrestle with them, not each other. Our national discourse needs both respect and clarity in a condition of freedom. Yes, words shape ideas. But to fear this process is to fear thought itself and to alienate ourselves from each other.

Campfield seems to think there's not quite enough human agency to withstand words, or perhaps that freedom is too scary and overwhelming for mere mortals. So he responds to free speech as fundamentally threatening; ironically, he talks about it as "tyranny" and is willing to shut it down out of fear. I'm a good bit more optimistic about words, and I try to teach people how to use them well, with style, grace, thought, and yes, kindness. My teachers, Austen, Addison, Shakespeare, and Sterne, among others, along with those teachers I had the privilege to know in person, helped me to understand how to put my thoughts into words. They weren't magic words, but the experience of discovering them was magical. Jane Austen's matchless eye for human frailty, the chiasmus of the psalm that weaves together praise and lament, the elegant balance of the Johnsonian line, Sterne's fabulous brand of zaniness: they all matter to me deeply, both because of what these voices had to say and because of how they said it.  They brought me into the drenching rain of language that nourishes my heart and reminds me every day why I do what I do. Free speech is the guarantor of that project.

Wrecking Balls: Campfield's SB 1608 and 2493

Hello world.  I'm new to blogging, but I was inspired to give it a shot after a recent exchange with Senator Stacey Campfield (R-TN), who represents the University of Tennessee, where I have been a professor for 18 years. Out of both frustration and a desire to educate others, I posted that exchange on my facebook page, and it proved to be very popular. With the bills going forward this week and Sen. Campfield up for re-election this fall, I felt that I should share it with a wider audience.

First, let me offer a little background on the exchange that follows. Campfield has been the sponsor of several questionable pieces of legislation, including the "Don't Say Gay" bill, a bill that would require school officials to inform parents if their children are gay, and reducing welfare payments to families whose children are not doing well in school. In light of these past efforts, Campfield's current bills, SB 1608 (which would allocate funds for university speakers by "proportional" membership in various groups, also known as the "size matters" bill) and SB 2493, a more comprehensive bill that would eliminate and ban all university money for speakers, might seem like garden-variety, anti-intellectual hostility to universities.  But as with so many other pieces of his legislation, these bills were motivated by objections to "Sex Week," a sex education week at UT that happened this past week. Sex Week seems to represent what Campfield fears most: the free exchange of ideas and perspectives, protected by the First Amendment. That fear is so great that he is sponsoring a bill to shut down money for all speakers; were it in effect, UT would not have had visits from Tom Brokow, Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O'Connor, Bill Nye, Dr. Paul Farmer, and a host of other luminaries from architecture to zoology. No one would agree with every single speaker; indeed, I know no one who has the time to go to every speaker who comes to campus. The point is that UT is a university and hosts a vast array of conversations, with specialists from many fields. Hosting a range of conversations is part of what a university should be doing.

I contacted Campfield along with other TN Senators to express  my concern about these two very shortsighted bills, and I received these replies from Senator Campfield.  In the interest of full disclosure, I am a professor of 18th-century literature and culture, so Campfield was somewhat ill-advised to include a decontextualized quotation from Thomas Jefferson, which he appears to have found on BrainyQuotes or some such site.

And now, the email exchange:

Dear Senators,

I write to you as a parent of a college student as well as of a middle schooler, as a Tennessean, and as a teacher to ask you to oppose SB1608 and SB2493. These bills are far too sweeping and undermine the project of inquiry, First Amendment rights, and the kind of professional development we try to offer our students at UT.  Just this academic year, for instance, we were able to host Tom Brokaw.  Two of my students had the opportunity to interview him about his career as a journalist, and he was generous with both his advice and time.  This was a crucial professional development opportunity that would have been completely unavailable to them under the terms of these bills.  

Students at UT have chances to weigh in on what kinds of speakers and activities take place, they have chances to participate in a wide array of learning opportunities, and to debate with significant voices in a range of cultural conversations: novelists, political scientists, religious leaders, philosophers, business innovators, and more.  That is as it should be.  It's part of the strength of our American education system, and it encourages students to debate, develop their perspectives, and become better citizens. Please don't take that away from them.

I realize, Senator Campfield, that you are the sponsor of both of these bills, but I'm including you in my appeal nonetheless. I urge you especially to reconsider your position and to consider the free and secure future of UT.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.  I will be watching with great interest to see how you all vote, and I implore you to vote down both bills.

Sincerely,

Misty Anderson

On Mar 8, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Stacey Campfield wrote:

While I support diversity of thought at the university. What is currently in place is not diversity. Sadly, when you look at a list of the paid speakers for the university the vast majority are from one point of view and balancing points of view are minimized.

Truly, more balance is needed.  The current committee that decides who gets funding is @35-4  from one point of view. And they fund accordingly. The current system also does not allow for changes to the committee because new members to the committee are picked by the current members on the committee. It is impossible for diverse points of view to get a fair hearing. Instead, It is "two lions and a lamb deciding on what to have for dinner." That is not a system that creates a diverse menu. In fact it eats the minority points of view.

To make sure all points of view get a fair opportunity to be funded I have proposed two bills.

The first would say all fees for optional political type speakers should be optional to join or not. No one should be forced to pay for speech they find objectionable. Current student tuition and fees are high enough. People are graduating in incredible debt. There is no need to heap insult on top of injury. If they wish to hear speakers let them decide by joining and paying the speakers fee. If not, they should not be forced to do what they find objectionable. Forced speech is not free speech. It is the oposite.

As Thomas Jefferson so eloquently said I couldn't agree more.

Next,

If a student wishes to pay the optional student activity fee for speakers then those fees should be dolled out on a fair basis so all points of view get a fair hearing. To do this, I think the best way is to allow the students themselves to decide by joining clubs that interest them and allowing funding to be dolled out on membership basis. That way, if say college Democrats have 50 members and college Republicans have 50 members both would receive a fair share of the funding. If it were to tilt to 60/40 democrat leaning, the democrats would receive a larger proportion but not a 100% per portion. Diverse points of view would be heard and have a fair shot at receiving funding.

As I have said from the beginning, I still stand ready to negotiate the system details but leaving things as they currently are is a non starter. We need diversity of thought and not tyranny in action.

Yours in service,

Sen. Stacey Campfield

On Mar 8, 2014, at 12:12:09 PM EST, "" wrote:

Dear Senator Campfield,

With all due respect, I had a hard time following your reply because it was full of sentence fragments that did not make clear how one idea flowed from and logically gave rise to another.

Your claim that the current committee is "35-4 from one point of view" is a mystery to me.  What is that one point of view? And how is it that you can claim that the vast majority of speakers on campus are "from one point of view" when they have addressed so many different issues and topics? How can one say that points of view are to be calculated? Most thinking people hold a range of points of view on many subjects.  Are you alluding to two-party politics? If so, I would submit that such a designation hardly summarizes all possible points of view, and to imagine a world where it does is deeply disturbing to me as a citizen and an educator.

You then say that all fees "for optional political type speakers should be optional." How are we to determine what speakers are political and which speakers are not?  Was Tom Brokaw political? Is a visiting novelist like Elizabeth Gilbert political?  How would we calculate the "interest" represented by such speakers? I would hate to restrict that representation to the number of journalists or novelists in the student body. The bill pertains to all speakers, who can hardly be screened only on their party affiliation.  But on that subject, let me offer an analogous question: I often find your speech objectionable, yet my tax dollars fund your salary.  May I opt out of paying the portion of your salary that I pay, particularly since your speech is not only objectionable to me but has binding consequences on my life as a citizen, unlike open debates in which I can choose to participate or not?

What was it that Thomas Jefferson said?  Because that sentence is actually a fragment and not a complete sentence, it is not at all clear. I am  not being a mere grammarian about this fact; it is significant because it is fundamental to clear meaning. Thomas Jefferson said many things I cherish as examples of wise and thoughtful statesmanship, in spite of his actions as a slaveholder.  Here are a few of my favorites:

•    "I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend."

•    "Educate and inform the whole mass of the people.  They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."

•    "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

•    "Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty."

I would hope that we could find a zone of agreement on this important Enlightenment thinker, who was a staunch supporter of both education and free speech.

To conclude, I am writing back to you because I am distressed both by your approach to micromanaging the process of speakers at UT and other universities and your failure to comprehend the consequences of your own bills, which seem to have more in common with a totalitarian nation's approach, rather than a free country's approach, to public discourse.  Curiously, you claim the opposite is true, calling the current system "forced speech" and even "tyranny in action."  But you, sir, are the one in the governing position.  I would suggest you reconsider the language of tyranny and how it reflects on your own position in the legislature.

Sincerely,

Misty G. Anderson

On Mar 8, 2014, at 12:49 PM, Stacey Campfield wrote:

To compel a man to furnish money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical

March 8, 2014 2:00:02 PM EST

Dear Senator Campfield,

Context, so often, is everything.  The short quotation you have pulled is from Jefferson's 1779 Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (not passed until 1786), which was an argument for more free speech, as well as freedom of religion, by prohibiting the state support of the clergy and state tests for office based on religion or lack thereof. Accordingly, it proposed that "the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical" not "assume dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible."  Jefferson's own position as a Deist inclined him strongly to realize that both the state and the church can conspire to compel and restrict speech and behavior in ways that are anathema to free people.  I quote the 3 sections of the act for your convenience, with some of the more relevant selections bolded:

 SECTION I. Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness; and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

SECT. II. WE the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

SECT. III. AND though we well know that this Assembly, elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.

Best,

Misty G. Anderson

Professor of English