“This is a collective effort to gather stories of official and unofficial complaints against and accounts of interactions with Barrett Watten”: Barrett Watten Records. Barrett
Watten, poet and academic at Wayne State University, is having a moment.
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November 26: Barrett Watten has been removed from teaching and advising at Wayne State.
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December 11: The Chronicle of Higher Education has more. My favorite bit:
Colleagues previously told The Chronicle that [Watten] was known to launch into profanity-laced tirades that were made all the more ominous by his imposing physical stature. Watten sees such critiques as rooted in a misunderstanding of his approach to his discipline. “I teach the avant-garde, and am challenging in class. All supposedly good things,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle.A related post
From “Stalin as Linguist — II” (Watten’s response to a critic of language poetry, 1985)
comments: 2
This is a frightening and troubling record.
A powerful illustration of how a toxic personality can find a home in academia. It’s so awful that my wife told me I should stop reading, but I ended up reading it all.
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