History of the English Department: A Work in Progress

Notes on a bygone era in the English Department...

by Stephen Arkin

At the Modern Language Association meeting in New York in December of 1966, Caroline Shrodes wound up offering eleven jobs to a group of people she had invited to a party at her hotel room. Everything about the person hosting the party, the committee she had brought along with her from San Francisco, and the interview was unconventional. Seen now from the vantage point of a growing budget crisis and with only a handful of people left in the department who remember Caroline Shrodes, that distant time seems almost surreal.

When Caroline Shrodes was hired in 1946 by J. Paul Leonard (there was a person before there was a library), she was asked to make something of the Language Arts Division that would distinguish its approach to teaching writing from more traditional composition programs, and she was encouraged to think about new ways of teaching Engish as a second language. (There was also an English in the Humanities Division, but this would not become more fully incorporated in the English Department for several years as our English literature wing.) Because literature was the territory staked out by the Humanities faculty, Caroline decided to look for interesting ways to attract faculty to her Language Arts Division, and so she went to work to build a Creative Writing Program and to develop a more comprehensive set of courses in linguistics and language studies. One of her more stunning coups was the hiring of Walter Van Tilberg Clark as a full professor at a time when President Leonard said there would be no hiring of full professors. (She planted a copy of "The Oxbow Incident" among Leonard's papers when he went off on a trip, and when he came back he was eager to hire Clark.)

By the early 1960s Caroline had assembled a very unusual faculty which was remarkably open to a variety of critical approaches to literature, to teaching language studies, and to both composition and creative writing. (The writers were an extraordinary group, and when I came in 1967, Kay Boyle, Wright Morris, Bill Dickey, Jim Schevill, Mark Linenthal, Bill Wiegand, Herb Wilner, and Leo Litwak were all teaching creative writing courses.) Her strength as a chair was her remarkable ability to encourage people to broaden what they were doing in the classroom. She encouraged Robin Gajdusek to create courses on literature and film, boldly supported literature and psychology classes, was openly receptive to discussions of gender long before there were programs in gender studies of any kind, and eager to help faculty reinvent themselves as teachers of material they had not been hired to teach. The result was a department with a remarkable number of interesting courses, a creative writing program that was openly compared to the one at the University of Iowa, and a vibrancy and enthusiasm in our teaching that attracted a great many students.

Life did not remain euphoric, however. By 1969 the creative writers decided to form their own department. (The idea seemed to be that by doing this they could scuttle meetings, committees, and the rest of academic bureaucracy, only to discover that they had to create it all from scratch. Luckily for them Bill Dickey was a lover of electronic gadgetry and took on most of the work.) And the most serious difficulty was the strike that brought S. I. Hayakawa (our mostly absent colleague in language studies) in as president and a prolonged and bitter struggle to define what the college was and would become. Caroline Shrodes worked very hard at bringing her department back together, but by 1973 when she retired the period of limitless seeming expansion was over and a much more constricted sense of possibility became our reality. When Graham Wilson took over as chair he spoke quite often about "the management of decline," and the once boisterous faculty grew more and more quiet and hiring slowed down.

Caroline Shrodes went on from San Francisco State to work at Union Graduate School supervising doctoral candidates in psychology (which was her own professional background). She was quite proud of the work she had done at San Francisco State, and at a meeting of The Holloway Historians in 1988, she spoke at some length about how she had gone about building the department that I joined in the fall of 1967. Thurston Womack (who became chair after Graham Wilson retired) and I have found ourselves on long walks over the years talking about Caroline's extraordinary gift for finding academic misfits and moulding them into a group of teachers and writers who made life interesting in the classroom and outside of classroom. Her parties were famous and her pleasure in the energy, quirkiness, and occasional brilliance of her faculty created an atmosphere--unusual for an academic department--in which a fair amount of boldness was encouraged. I see her still, orange cigarette holder in hand, eyes bright, and a smile forming as she asked a question that pointed to new possibilities. Whatever the spirit of this department was, it was her creation.

I am not alone in being grateful for what she did.

Stephen Arkin
Professor Emeritus, taught from 1967-2009, and chaired the department from 1985-2004