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One of the richest things about a college English department is the wide variety of professors, all experts in a variety of fields that you may have never heard of, such as social media, digital humanities, animal studies and food studies. While Connecticut College’s English typically has a vast array of professors in a wide variety of sects, English majors have taken note of a smaller department for the coming spring semester, with more changes on the horizon. In the spring of 2020, the College offered 23 English classes, which was lowered to 19 classes in the fall of 2021, and then further shrunken down to 15 for the upcoming semester. English majors and minors were emailed on Oct. 28 to be made aware of a further reduction of offerings for the spring.
A reason for this pruning relates to the need for academic sabbaticals. Professors Jeff Strabone, Blanche Boyd and Hubert Cook are all on sabbatical this fall. In the spring, Professors Cook and Michelle Neely will be on sabbatical while Professors Rachel Gaubinger and Marie Ostby will be away on parental leave. Professor Steven Shoemaker will also not be teaching at Connecticut College this spring. In the fall the College employed Professor Sarah Strong and Professor Kate Rushin. Rushin will be here all year to assist with departmental gaps. The department will also bring in Professor Ben Card for the spring.
“Professor Card is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale who also holds a Master’s degree from Oxford. At Yale, Professor Card is completing a dissertation on heresy in seventeenth-century British literature. He’s an experienced teacher, having taught several courses at Yale, including a co-taught course on Religion and Shakespeare, and a course at Gateway Community College. He’ll be teaching Milton–an amazing opportunity for us, since he is a bona fide Milton scholar!–and Religion and Otherness in Renaissance Drama,” stated Department Chair Lina Wilder. Card will be the third pre-1800s scholar teaching in the department this spring. Card was hired to teach 300-level classes in order to free up space for Wilde to “cover the 150s,” which are the required first-year courses for English majors.
To major in English, the department requires five or more classes to be taken at the 300 level or above that satisfy three geographical areas (British, U.S., and World Literature and three time periods comprised of medieval, eighteenth-century, and literature consisting of 1800 to the present. “I tried to find someone to teach 20th century or World Lit and there just wasn’t anyone interested that I could find for adjunct wages. It’s not ideal that there will be three Renaissance lit scholars next semester but people just weren’t available,” Wilder admitted, “I do think with one class available in each category we will make it doable for people to fulfill requirements.”
Another major requirement being changed for the semester is the required 400-level seminar all English majors must take if they’re not writing a departmental thesis. Professor Steve Shoemaker was scheduled to teach this year’s senior seminar titled “Fitzgerald and Hemingway,” but had to bow out due to teaching commitments at Yale. Professor Shoemaker also recently resigned from his position at the Writing Center.
“Obviously he is a very valued teacher and scholar and the fact that we’re not able to keep him around is not something that makes me happy. Professor Shoemaker had been teaching this year as an adjunct, which doesn’t get a very high pay at Conn. We were not able to come up with a more permanent offer for him; it’s a matter of budgeting,” Wilder said.
Seniors will now have to take a 300-level course to fill the seminar requirement along with a planned meeting to build camaraderie. “It is far from ideal; we hope to never be in this position again. We thought 300-level classes would be more important. It was the perfect storm this semester.” Many English majors are confused with the new expectations and are disappointed by the smaller offerings.
“As an English major my choices are already limited in terms of class selection, so restricting my choices even further is going to not only hurt me when I’m looking for classes to take next semester, but also any potential new majors, who are going to have even less options than I did throughout my time at Conn,” stated Kayla O’Malley ‘22.
The department will also be shrinking due to the phased retirement of Professors Blanche Boyd and Charles Hartman, who are the College’s current Writers-in-Residence. This will be their final semester teaching at Conn. Professor Hartman will be teaching one last course in the spring semester, and Professor Boyd will be teaching two courses. The department is hoping to bring Rushin on as the College’s new Writer-in-Residence and as a tenured professor. They are also searching for a fiction or nonfiction writer to bring on in the same capacity. “It’s very complicated; we have to get authorization from the Dean of Faculty to do a search,” Wilder continued. “Committees weigh in on what is needed. Policy right now is not allowing depts to hire more than one tenure track professors per year.”
The three year average number of enrollments at Conn in the English department was 579. This number does include individual study, honors research, and Foreign Language across the Curriculum.
“The sad reality is that higher ed is going through some crises. Wages haven’t really risen since the ‘70s and the cost of college keeps going up. There are things we don’t offer that I would love to offer… Asian American or Latin American lit specialists [should be hired]. We obviously discuss race but it would be amazing to have a specialist in that area. We’d love to offer journalism and something specific there but we haven’t been able to dedicate a position to that, or linguistics. It tends to be a zero-sum game. There are a lot of moving pieces there.”
If students want to change the way the English department at Conn works, Wilder suggests weighing in. The department will likely be reviewing the major over the next year after the arrival of a visiting committee next fall. For continued excellence, student voices are needed.
