James McCorkle, “Field Notes towards…” continued

“Everything begins with the apparition of a specter. More precisely the waiting for this specter,” writes Jacques Derrida contemplating Hamlet, in Specters of Marx; he continues, “more precisely, everything begins in the imminence of the re-apparition, but a re-apparition of the specter as apparition for the first time in the play.”[2] We are haunted by what we dispossessed as much as by the futures that did not happen. This haunting is always a form of repetition, formations that re-appear, a supposition of some point of origin, but one that exists only because it has been repeated. Derrida’s meditation is one on trauma, which for the sake of this brief paper is the re-memorying of—. That “of” opens, much like the asterisk in Sharpe’s text, into repetitions and hauntings.

Haunting is what is withheld but what is present. “Water,” in all its fractured iteration, comprises the opening section of NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!: “www w a wa.”[3] The sedimented names running as a chyron at the bottom of each page of the opening section, names re-animated from the manifests of ships such as the Zong bearing captive Africans to the so-called “new world,” haunting many Black spaces, many Black students. Reassembling the word “water” back into its form does not bring forth water for those held in the belly of the Middle Passage, those nearly 150 thrown overboard from the Zong for want of “water.” Such a trans*port to another future was also a body of replicated tests as to the effects of the calculations of diminished care and the making of humans into invisible bodies, imaginaries to be exploited. What Philip describes was the reiterated beginning of the crisis.

The occurrence of the global outbreak of Covid-19, and also the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 by a Minneapolis police officer, revealed what most colleges and universities have deferred admitting for so long—in other words, what they are, and how they increasingly operate. In some sense, the asterisk in “trans*formation” is this doubled event of a pandemic and the awareness that Floyd’s death was an accumulating death not only of centuries of outright violence, but also the violence of neglect, whether in the university or throughout neoliberal societies. There is no crisis in the universities. What we see is how they always operate. Colleges and universities do not trans*form. Perhaps isolated individuals trans*form, but universities do not en*act emancipatory processes.

And how could it be otherwise? Was there a period in which white supremacy or anti-science (or its obverse, militarized science) did not exist? Is there any reason to believe that universities and colleges—the sites which have trained virtually every person of power—could be somehow exempt from the very forces that surround and support them? I would like to think and hope that this would be true—or the apparitional truth, that higher education is actually emancipatory or that it is a nascent community in which experiments of emancipation could be enacted. Perhaps the real crisis is our crisis of awareness, or my crisis, of not letting go of such an illusion that this place is both refuge and possibility. Or, perhaps, we academics should go further and argue the future has been deferred, or cancelled. There are no “After Times” once the pandemic has subsided to a low viral buzz at some seasonal horizon. We will repeat, return, go back to the normal way of being, the “Before Times” in our collective institutional settings. The pandemic and the moment of George Floyd is both an interregnum and a repeated point.

Education in the United States has increasingly become a form of managed experiences. Epistemological approaches have narrowed, and the experiences have, as so often commented upon, become commodified. Responses to the Covid-19 pandemic simply have accelerated and deepened forms of systemic management. Ranging from wellness assessments to curricular assessments to re-structuring of departments and programs to the policing of student behavior have taken on new or more pronounced forms. It is not that wellness assessments, for example, are in themselves wrong—they may be essential for a modicum of contact tracing. Furthermore, they may encourage mindful habits during a pandemic; or even serve as the more prosaic economic consideration of how many vaccine doses to actually order when and if the possibility that the college vaccination site arrives. But such assessments raise the question of what is on the other side of the pandemic in terms of human relations. Who will be allowed to return? I admit a conflict in myself: the necessity of vaccinations is indisputable, but in what ways might health-monitoring open up or expand other forms of monitoring and for what purposes?

On the one hand, my institution has performed remarkably—for example, widespread testing (but not universal, and generally not available to staff or faculty), and rushing samples to Boston for overnight results. In comparison, local clinics took, initially, days for results. We could argue this was an expression of care. On the other hand, particular inequities were glaring: students are served as the priority, but seldom staff or faculty, and not the “essential” workers—housekeeping staff, food-service, grounds, and maintenance staff. Blame the lack of testing and vaccination availability during 2020 and early into 2021 on the Trump regime. But the implication here is that there are disposable populations, under any administration, and that higher-risk populations, in this example, are considered disposable. (Since giving this essay as a presentation in March for the colloquy “Poetry & the University in Crisis,” two on-campus vaccination clinics were offered for students, faculty, and staff, so that by the end of the 2020-2021 academic year nearly eighty-seven percent of the faculty and staff at my institution had had at least one shot; and students were approaching seventy-five percent. Does this negate my critique? I would respond with the question, is time ever neutral? What is the system that is in place that demands that a choice be made? What is the system that markets precarity over, not survival, but sustainability?) The threat of closing the campus was not lost on any of the concerned populations. For some staff, any closing represented a direct threat of loss of income, hardship, the potential for eviction, or the upswing of domestic abuse. For some students a closing of the campus was a threat of homelessness.

The pandemic has presented the always and already conundrum: who counts? To address the long history of white supremacy or to focus on controlling Covid presented my campus, and no doubt many, with an existential choice. Campus marches and any form of institutional (here meaning, faculty, student, or traditional administration) reparative response to the compounded narratives of the murders of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Daniel Prude disappeared on my campus by the end of the second week of Fall 2020 classes. What replaced it was an enforced experiment in the management of behavior under Covid-19. It was, institutionally, a matter of risk to reward. To her credit, the provost kept a discussion of racial inequities, particularly within the curriculum, alive; but here it was at her own insistence and the pressure from some faculty and students, and it resulted in her exhaustion and, ultimately, resignation. The cost of attempting an intervention of racialized structures is often personal. To some degree, the emphasis on re-opening for face-to-face teaching after closing down in March of 2020 for the remainder of the spring was a matter of institutional survival—who would pay for attending college at $65,000 for Zoom classes? Students attend elite residential liberal arts colleges and universities for the service, managed “care,” the “high touch.”

But what is such care? On campus, and this one is not unlike many others, the counselling center is overwhelmed with students in need of care. Black students find few formal resources—counsellors, therapists, psychologists—and so, they rely on faculty of color or particular spaces, physical or intellectual, like the Intercultural Center or Africana Studies, or faculty, particularly those of color. And this is a mirror of the world outside the campus grounds: Blacks are perceived not to feel pain to the degree whites do, Blacks are frequently not provided medical advice or robust treatment in comparison to whites; and palliative care is largely absent. [4] The discrepancy of care based on race was most acutely registered by Dr. Susan Moore as her white doctor dismissed her pain while she was being treated for Covid-19. Dr. Moore, who was only fifty-two, died in a suburban Indianapolis hospital after her complaints were broadcast on social media.[5] Indeed, at the time of Dr. Moore’s death, the Brookings Institute had analyzed that the rate of death of Black and brown people from Covid-19, was 2.5 times greater than whites; Black people died at far greater multiples than whites regardless of age group.[6] It is this understanding—regardless of its presence as discourse for individual students—that haunts Black students, and the wider population of students of color. How do institutions care? How might, in fact, faculty care? We are, in fact, in a crisis of care.

As I look out my office window, onto the traditional quadrangle, to the older Dutch Revival buildings with their stepped gables and steep gambrel-styled slate roofs, I am reminded of the Dutch-influenced architecture of apartheid South Africa. The processional landscape—the long approach to the steps of the central administrative building, and ancillary buildings flanking the approach—spatialize the project of enforcing a hierarchical relation to the world.

Architecture matters. It constructs, monumentalizes, and memorializes epistemological and ethical systems. The Dutch Revival buildings are a re-membering of colonial histories. My institution is situated in the heart of the traditional land of the Onondowaga, one of the six nations of Haudenosaunee. Across from my office on the east side of Seneca Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, is Rose Hill plantation—its Greek Revival architecture insisting on the permanence of its power—and its companion White Springs Farm on the west side, where scores of enslaved Africans, who were forced to walk north from Virginia and Maryland by Robert Seldon Rose and his brother-in-law John Nicholas in 1809, were quartered. This tract of land was previously one of the six-hundred-acre tracts from lands that New York State appropriated after the Revolutionary War from the Cayuga, Seneca, and Onondaga nations; they were surveyed, divided, and rewarded to those who served in the military. As slavery drew to a close in New York State by 1829, Rose Hill’s owners had replaced the Africans with Irish tenant farmers. As NourbeSe Philip might say, this is a hauntological landscape. The specters of particular economies are here—ones based on dispossession and debt, of logistics and extensions of capital across oceans and continents, and thus ultimately of memory and mourning.[7] And then, inserted into this landscape of dispossession are those markers of Dutch colonialism, spectral buildings, marking another epoch of American colonial expansion. In the first decade of the twentieth century, as W.E.B. DuBois was discussing the “color line” and the failure of reparation under reconstruction, the stepped gabled buildings were being built. We might also want to recall that DuBois, in the chapter “Of the Black Belt” in Souls of Black Folk, wrote that the depletion of the land mirrored the exploitation of the enslaved who labored on it: “the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell….The harder the slaves were driven the more careless and fatal their farming.”[8] It will be near thirty years—1932—that a Black man will graduate, Alger Adams, from Hobart College, which traces its beginnings to 1822. And another forty years before a Black woman, Gloria Robinson Lowry, will graduate from William Smith, the women’s coordinate institution, founded when the Dutch Revival buildings were constructed on the Hobart campus.

The understanding of the space we move in, the corridors of thought and movement, are acutely and thoroughly a component of apartheid thinking, which is a kind of thinking that resists Sharpe’s intervening concept of “trans*formation.” Of course it is not to be thought of per se, but to understand this is the terrain, the echoing green, the lay of the land. The pandemic exposes this managerial project that has had its explicit formation in New World plantation economies, or more acutely, acknowledging the climate crisis, the plantationocene. Likening the university as a “plantation” is not new; Kehinde Andrews in 2016 likened the university as “the master’s house,” evoking Audre Lorde’s essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Those tools or disciplines, Lorde writes, “may temporarily allow us to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.”[9] Andrews, Britain’s first university professor of Black Studies, argued that “The history of universities is the history of oppression. Universities are not just complicit, they produce racism. They are no less institutionally racist than the police force.”[10] The headline of The Sunday Times (London), “Universities like Slave Plantations,” as Andrews points out in a corrective article, misconstrued his point and intention: “the metaphor of the plantation was not used to explore the experiences in the university but the regressive role it plays in society.”[11] Universities and colleges in the United States have largely conceded that their role is to continue the neoliberal project, and faculties, if silent, consent. It would be worthwhile to bear in mind Andrews’s concluding paragraph:

The bleak metaphor of the plantation was not meant to discourage but to disturb, in the hope of rethinking our roles in universities. Our aim cannot just be to get a better representation of students and staff on campus; we need to change the nature of what we do….we occupy an incredibly privileged position. We can organically engage with social movements off campus, and gear our work towards improving the social conditions that we so eloquently describe. This is the main reason we started the black studies movement in Britain—because we are committed to using university for social change. But doing so means recognizing our privilege; the regressive role that universities continue to play in society, and the institutional barriers we must overcome.[12]

The metaphor of the university as a plantation has been used to describe the recruitment and retention of faculty and students, the curriculum, campus social relations, pedagogical practices, and campus labor. In their introduction to Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions, Bianca C. Williams and Frank A. Tuitt argue that higher education institutions were not made for Blacks, that implicit—as well as explicit—policies and rhetoric grounded in racism fuel institutions, that Black people and their labor are exploited so as to provide the monetized appearance of diversity at the same time devaluing Black voices, and that marginalized people—especially Blacks—bear extraordinary emotional and pedagogical labor, especially when the institutional brand is threatened by campus rebellions.[13] The labor of resisting invisibility is, however, central to the “plantation politics.” When “property” becomes paramount—as reflected in discursive ordering such as “they have been peaceful, no property damage, they have been a corporative effect with the local police involved and the local city councilors.” (See Note 15 for the context of this particular example), we can begin to ascertain how invasive anti-Black narratives are as well as how plantation politics or the policing of visibility intends to make less visible the signs of crisis. In a sense, this becomes the management of diversity and inclusion.

At this time, my college is about to establish a master’s program in Management Science as a “value-added” element to the institution. Nowhere in the program’s curriculum is there a critical history of management, with its roots in plantation economies. Caitlin Rosenthal, in her Accounting for Slavery, notes that “Scientific managers . . . have seen their practices not as something utterly disconnected from the history of slavery but as a strategic movement forward from it.”[14] At my college, the program depends upon shifting faculty from their undergraduate teaching responsibilities to the master’s program, as well as the hiring of adjunct instructors. In the now perpetual struggle to hire full-time faculty, tenure lines (when available) will be diverted to compensate for the classes faculty have left unfilled as their duties shift to “populate” the management science program. What then is to be made of such a purely revenue-generating stream? The very language of the proposal is to convince people—trustees, alumnae, faculty—that the program adds to the “revenue stream” and will increase the admissions’ “yield.” But will it further the students’ “lives of consequence,” as the institution’s mission statement proclaims?

While the faculty who have designed the program insist it will not be a version of an M.B.A. program, the perception is that it will be a business program, that the graduate certificate will be the next best thing to an M.B.A. The entrepreneurial studies program, while resolutely defended as not business-centered as we know it, attracts students for the idea that it is a preparation for business-as-usual. The pressure for students, particularly as the circles of disparity widen, to engage in programs that appear (and perversely become) programs that replicate most egregiously the larger narratives of oppression, is intense: from families, friends, and advisors, the advice is to join the ranks of brokers in real-estate, management, or finance. The shadow of student debt may hang over many. This is simply a more subtle version of the scene Malcolm X reports in his Autobiography; when he announces to his guidance counselor Mr. Ostrowski, that he’d like to be a lawyer, his counselor responds, “Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic… A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a n—. You need to think about something you can be.”[15]

Last summer a group of Black students articulated a clear set of demands—ranging from the hiring of diverse, particularly Black, faculty and staff, particularly in counseling, the revising of the First Year Seminars into a more unified approach to the study of race and power; and the movement from the specters of Black dispossession to Black achievement. As much as this was in response to Floyd’s murder, and all the bodies transposed within his own, it also became an urgent response to the colleges’ presidential statement dismissing the presence of systemic racism: “in general, in upstate New York, I don’t think we have had that many direct issues with systemic racism here; uh, we don’t think that it is an issue for Geneva.”[16] Almost to the day of this statement, just nine years earlier on May 20, 2011, Corey Jackson, a Black man, died after he was shot by a group of police officers as he sat in the back seat of a car on Buffalo Street in the very same Geneva, NY. A cell phone was claimed to be a handgun. There were six police officers. Not one was reprimanded. The statement was challenged by Black women students, which resulted in an apology by the president’s office. But what should we make of this—both the original assertion, and that the labor of witnessing and speaking to power fell on Black women students, perhaps the most marginalized of campus constituencies? The presidenti had been attempting to placate a worried parent of a Black student, concerned that their child—as Covid-19 cases were escalating—could be turned away from the local hospital due to histories of the disposability of Black children. Hence, the president’s ill-conceived reply. An attempt to care?

The masters in Managerial Science was recently voted on by the faculty; it was approved by a roughly two-to-one margin as I was drafting this essay. Meanwhile, the demands of Black students for specific curricular and staffing revisions have been left largely unacted upon. An exploratory alternate First Year Seminar offering is being worked out, but no initiation of an expansive curricular change—other than a proposal to offer an essentially non-credit bearing anti-racist course required for incoming students, coupled with a demand that there be five new hires in various departments who explicitly address issues of race in their discipline.

There is a compounding, haunting despair, and the question of what comes of the desire to reform. Nothing? As provocative and thoughtful as the students’ demands were, they were not revolutionary. They were within the strictures of the institution. And they were unheard. Robin D. G. Kelley’s essay, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” published in the Boston Review, was written after another haunting, the events in Ferguson. Kelley comments:

I want to draw attention to the contradictory impulses within the movement: the tension between reform and revolution, between desiring to belong and rejecting the university as a cog in the neoliberal order. I want to think about what it means for black students to seek love from an institution incapable of loving them—of loving anyone, perhaps—and to manifest this yearning by framing their lives largely through a lens of trauma. And I want to think about what it means for black students to choose to follow Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call to become subversives in the academy, exposing and resisting its labor exploitation, its gentrifying practices, its endowments built on misery, its class privilege often camouflaged in multicultural garb, and its commitments to war and security.[17]

The desire to reform the institution comes, ultimately one might argue, from the desire to belong. And the institution fails them. Trauma is a haunting neglect.

The murder of Floyd in Minneapolis accelerated protests in Geneva last spring: Black students not affiliated with my institution began daily marches, vigils, and rallies, all of which quickly developed into a petition for the city to establish a police accountability board. This process of engagement continued, resulting in the establishment of a substantially empowered police review board. As the lack of engagement by the institution—outside of the letters that periodically go out to placate and insist on concern—caused a group of faculty, mainly allied with my institution’s Africana Studies Program, including myself, to provide teaching and speaking spaces outside the institution for residents and with residents. This non-institutional group, organized under the title “Community Education for Transformation,” has been subjected to physical threats outside of the college. The creation of this ongoing effort, rather than a single response, was initially ad hoc with no pre-determined model. But it is perhaps akin to the Mississippi Freedom Schools, which examined power along the axes of race and class; it intends to support and supplement rather than direct community action.

The academy is a refuge for a few, but it serves as a credentializing service for most, including many who in previous generations were excluded—those not only before Alger Adams or Gloria Lowry, but those afterwards, in their haunting absences. There is a serendipity or perhaps another haunting: recently I was teaching James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, with a focus on his unfolding of love: “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”[18] Kelley ends his essay with a meditation on Baldwin, and also on the topic of Baldwin’s insistence on the trans*formational power of love, writing: “if we are committed to genuine freedom, we have no choice but to love all. To love all is to fight relentlessly to end exploitation and oppression everywhere, even on behalf of those who think they hate us. This was Baldwin’s point—perhaps his most misunderstood and reviled point.” Institutions of education do not “teach” love. Instead, they are haunted powers.

And poetics? What would poetics be but “trans*formation”? Or could not be, but love?

[1] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 30.

[2] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 2.

[3] NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 3.

[4] See Jason Silverstein, “I Don’t Feel Your Pain,” Slate, June 27, 2013, at 

https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/racial-empathy-gap-people-dont-perceive-pain-in-other-races.html

See also Rob Stein, “At the End of Life, A Racial Divide,” The Washington Post, March 12, 2007, at

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/11/AR2007031101565.html

See Cardinale Smith and Otis Brawley, “Disparities in Access to Palliative Care,” Health Affairs Blog, July 30, 2014, at 

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20140730.040327/full/

[5] John Eligon, “Black Doctor Dies of Covid-19, After Complaining of Racist Treatment,” New York Times, December 23, 2020, at 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/us/susan-moore-black-doctor-indiana.html

[6] Tiffany N. Ford, Sarah Reber, and Richard V. Reeves, “Race Gaps in Covid-19 Deaths are Even Bigger than They Appear,” Brookings, Up-Front, June 16, 2020, at

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/06/16/race-gaps-in-covid-19-deaths-are-even-bigger-than-they-appear/

[7] Philip, 201-202.

[8] W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 86.

[9] Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (Penguin, 2018), 19.

[10] Julie Henry, “Universities Like Slave Plantations,” The Sunday Times, October 23, 2016, at

 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/universities-like-slave-plantations-n8nk6fwsm

[11] Kehinde Andrews, “I Compared Yniversities to Slave Plantations to Disturb, not Discourage,” The Guardian, October 24, 2016, at 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/24/universities-slave-plantations-racist

[12] Ibid.

[13] Bianca C. Williams, Dian D. Squire, and Frank A. Tuitt, editors, Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (Albany: SUNY University Press, 2021), 6.

[14] Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 202.

[15] Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 1992), 43.

[16] This statement was reported on by Gabriel Pietrorazio, FingerLakes1.com, July 14, 2020:

But in general, in upstate New York, I don’t think we have had that many direct issues with systemic racism here; uh we don’t think that it is an issue for Geneva. Believe it or not, again it is actually a rather diverse community here, we have been pretty comfortable with the black lives matter demonstration here like everybody else, but they have been peaceful, no property damage, they have been a corporative effect with the local police involved and the local city councilors, so we are actually comfortable about local race relations here,’ Jacobsen said during the session. See full text at

https://fingerlakes1.com/2020/07/14/students-parents-and-community-leaders-outraged-after-hws-president-says-geneva-doesnt-have-direct-issues-with-systemic-racism/  

President Jacobsen offered the following reiteration of her apology on July 16, 2020: 

I write to draw your attention to remarks I made earlier this week on the Evan Dawson Show [a local show on the NPR-affiliate station WXXI]. I had been invited to join the program to discuss the ICE directive that has since been rescinded. I was also asked about my recent comments regarding systemic racism and the hospital during one of last week’s Zoom calls with parents and families. On the radio show, I said: “I want to acknowledge systemic racism exists as a whole, especially at HWS as a campus. When I spoke on a Zoom call with parents, I did not say that and I’m sorry. It may not have been my intention, but words have power beyond our intention. It took the collective effort of our campus community to draw my attention to this and looking ahead, I want to expand my work with our students and welcome feedback.

I stand behind that statement, look forward to the work ahead and thank you in advance for your partnership.

See full text at

https://www2.hws.edu/president/statements/a-message-to-the-hws-community/

[17] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review, March 7, 2016, at 

http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle

[18] James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993), 95.

[19] Kelley.