On July 7, as my family was driving home to Massachusetts from a trip to see relatives in New Jersey, I received an email from Connecticut College English Department Chair Jeff Strabone. The five-hour drive from Massachusetts to New Jersey and back that my family has made many times before is often boring. This time, however, it was punctuated by unexpected news: “I hope you’re enjoying your summer so far. I know you’ve heard from [Professor] Courtney Sender that she has been hired away by a tenure-track offer elsewhere,” the email began. I had not – it was the first I had heard of it.
The next day, Strabone sent an email to all English majors and minors addressing the reasons for Sender’s departure, how the English Department was now hurrying to search for a replacement before the summer ended, and what students should do about it. But Suleman Saleem ‘25 and I got an email a day before because we were especially affected by Sender’s departure: she had agreed to be our thesis advisor for our creative honors theses in English only a few months prior, a commitment to working with us throughout the entirety of our senior year as we developed creative projects that were to be the capstones of our college experience.
Sender was the College’s writer in residence, the position specifically dedicated to teaching prose fiction classes. An English honors thesis requires your advisor to be an English faculty member, and the few other faculty members with the relevant experience to mentor a prose creative project had already taken on other students’ honors theses. This put Saleem and I in a very awkward position, now having to find new advisors for the projects we already proposed with another professor and without many options. I was told that, unless I could find someone else with relevant expertise willing to take me on, my only option was to wait to see who the English department would hire over the summer in Sender’s place, and work on my senior thesis with them.
I was deeply surprised and frustrated by the loss of Sender’s mentorship. I had taken three prose writing courses with her over two years; I felt that I had developed a rapport with her and that working on a creative honors thesis with her would be the natural culmination of my undergraduate experience as an English major whose focus is creative writing. I knew that Sender was hired on a temporary contract basis as a visiting associate professor after the previous long-term writer-in-residence, Blanche Boyd, retired and left the college, and thus that she might not be here for my senior year at Conn. At the end of my junior year, I asked Sender about this specifically, wondering if she knew whether or not she would stay at Conn before I went through the process of proposing an honors thesis with her. Though unsure, she told me that she likely would.
Saleem was also very saddened to discover Sender left Conn after proposing a thesis with her. He first found out about her departure not long after arriving in Pakistan this summer, still very jet-lagged, and it came as a shock. He also had a strong rapport with Sender and was solemn to hear about her leaving, describing himself as “lamenting her loss every day.” In Saleem’s case, another staff member with whom he previously worked, Chris Colbath, volunteered to take over as his thesis advisor. Because Colbath was not a member of the English faculty, he had to be hired as a temporary English adjunct by the department just to be technically allowed to fill the vacuum left by Sender’s sudden absence. Saleem is grateful that Colbath volunteered to take over, and he has enjoyed the process of working on his thesis so far. Still, he says that he would have very much preferred to keep working with Sender, calling her the best professor he had at Conn and that the fact that she felt she had to leave was “deeply screwed up.”
Of course, Saleem and I were not the only students affected by Sender’s departure. I know many other students interested in creative writing who wanted to take classes with her in the future were disheartened to see her leave the college. Andrew Cross ‘26, who took a course with Sender before, said about her leaving that “[he] was definitely disappointed to hear it,” as “having a constant person to be that kind of long-term advisor and mentor is what’s needed.” Owyn Ledina ‘25 also took classes with Sender, and remarked, “Professor Sender deserved a permanent position in our English Department, and creative writing students deserve a permanent professor.”
Sender left Conn because she was offered a tenure-track position elsewhere, providing her with more job security. I can’t blame her for leaving. In Strabone’s email to English students, he discussed how the English department “has been begging the college for a tenure-track hire in fiction for four straight years, […] and they have denied us all four years.” Effectively, “the College left her no choice but to leave.” Strabone stressed that the English department would have loved for Sender to stay at Conn and acknowledged that a lack of continuity of mentorship in creative writing was particularly problematic for students. “Those of you who’ve taken creative writing, whether in fiction or poetry, know that constant faculty turnover is no way to run a program and no way for student writers to build the necessary trust with a faculty mentor,” Strabone wrote. “Many of you share very personal experiences in your stories and poems. […] How could we possibly run a program on a revolving-door basis? Well, that is what the administration is forcing us to do by making us hire annual VAPs rather than a tenure-track faculty member who’ll stick around for the long term.”
Renee Branum is the professor who was hired as the new writer-in-residence over the summer. She has taken over teaching the creative writing courses that Sender was originally scheduled to teach this semester and has also become my creative honors thesis advisor. I have had a wonderful time working with her so far, and it is a shame that she is being put into the same position that forced Sender to leave. I asked Branum about her thoughts on the circumstances of creative writing mentoring. “I think that, in a perfect world, the ideal creative writing program has the resources to provide both long-term faculty members that are deeply embedded in the program and a rotating roster of visiting writers that provide new perspectives for their students,” Branum responded. But she acknowledged that not all institutions can afford to do that: “We work with the resources we have at hand.”
Branum also noted that academia offers little job security outside tenure-track positions, making them increasingly scarce and leaving the competition for those positions “brutally fierce,” while more and more classes are taught by adjunct faculty instead. This is not a problem unique to fiction teaching or English in general but a deep and systemic issue across academia as a whole. “There does seem to be a rising awareness that there’s not enough room at the academic table to feed all the hungry writers emerging from graduate programs and hoping to support their life and art with a career in teaching,” she wrote.
Strabone ended his email to English students and faculty with a call to action, encouraging students to speak their minds about their dissatisfaction with the administration’s choice not to provide more security for fiction professors and stability for creative writing students. He called attention to new Conn President Andrea Chapdelaine’s recently sent out feedback survey, giving students the opportunity to voice their opinions about the changes they would like to see in her administration. Hopefully, the College administration will not do a disservice to Branum and all the students who want to take creative writing courses by denying her the opportunity of a tenure-track position as they did for Sender. “If there’s anything you want, now would be a good time to speak up,” Strabone wrote. “You get nothing if you ask for nothing.”
