In which John recounts some chastening encounters with academia ...
When the professor who axed the Masters of Creative Writing I established at an Auckland University was sacked for regaling his colleagues with his Japanese sexual bondage methods, I caught a glimpse of the inscrutable workings of fate.
An Englishman and Professor of Hotel Studies, he had a disarmingly upbeat manner as he told me that my job and the centre I had established were to be extinguished.
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| Hotel studies at AUT University |
I had known I was in trouble when another professor, who had been my staunchest ally and sponsor at the university, an Anglican vicar with a penchant for astronomy, abandoned his wife to elope with my Dean to the mountain tops of Chile to gaze amorously at stars for a year. It didn't seem to matter that he liked astronomy. This seemed to me to be a grave dereliction of duty.
The heavens, I had begun to realise, were not aligned for my embryonic writing programme. It seemed fitting, somehow, that the only rooms they could find for my centre were next to the Serious Fraud Office in a faceless downtown office block.
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| Unpropitious neighbour |
The Head of Department ushered me into his office. He wore a tweed jacket, with leather elbow patches, and had thick spectacles. He directed me to a chair, and then put both his feet up on his aircraft carrier of a desk, with the soles facing me.
'Good of you to come in,' he said. He sighed heavily. He seemed perplexed by the sheer obdurate nature of the Universe. 'Did you know that there is already a Masters of Creative Writing in New Zealand?' he asked.
I did know that.
I had been Chair of the Auckland Branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors for four years, and helped restructure this body after a spectacular public altercation between one of his colleagues, Professor C.K. Stead, and other writers had brought ridicule and near-collapse to the Society. The London Flat Affair, as it came to be known, was something of a notorious watershed in the history of New Zealand writing politics. (See my previous blog item, 'Autumn of the Patriarchs'.)
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| Stead - baffling perversity |
If nothing else, the incident demonstrated the baffling perversity of professors in the Auckland University English Department.
Also, I had talked to Bill Manhire, the architect of Wellington's renowned Masters of Creative Writing Programme. In fact the success of his programme was a prime stimulant for trying to establish something similar in Auckland.
'You know there's really no room for another Masters of Creative Writing in New Zealand,' he went on sorrowfully. 'I can't see the authorities permitting it'.
I pointed out that Masters of Creative Writing were proliferating all over the world, that Manhire - reputedly - had a waiting list of over a hundred applicants for the twelve places on his programme each year, and that many of those applicants would be from Auckland, a much larger city than Wellington.
He sighed again and looked at his fingernails. I gazed at the soles of his shoes. I noticed that one had a large hole in it. This seemed incongruous in a man on a six-figure salary.
'Look,' I said. 'There is a tremendous renaissance going on in New Zealand writing. Our authors are key to forming our emerging identity. We're a young nation finding its feet.' He languorously crossed his legs. 'A fascinating cross-fertilisation is occurring between Maori, Pasifika and pakeha writers right now,' I went on, trying not to focus on the hole, which had moved to the other side. 'I can't think of a more exciting time in New Zealand literature. And Auckland, with its big Pacific and Maori population is key to that. Manhire's programme at Victoria University has created a whole new generation of writers in Wellington. Surely we can do the same in Auckland.'
Some years earlier, I had spent several years living in the headquarters of Nga Tama Toa, the Maori brown panther movement, and had had my eyes opened to the oncoming Maori renaissance by the writers and film-makers I had met there - Merata Mita, Rowley Habib, Brian Potiki ... (See my blog item 'Two Years Living With Maori Activists').
'I'm sorry. That's just the way it is,' he said, taking his feet off his aircraft carrier desk. He ushered me from his office with a sweep of his leather-bound arms.
I never heard from him again.
The next year, the Head of Department established a Masters of Creative Writing, and recruited an obscure poet from the USA to run it. A likeable, warm woman, she subsequently told me that her speciality area was 'the digital analysis of the silences between words in poetry'.
After leaving my job as editor of the country's largest circulation magazine, where I had employed many writers to do precisely what I had explained to the Head of Department - to write on issues of New Zealand culture and identity, I took up a job in the journalism programme at the Auckland University of Technology.
There I got a much more sympathetic hearing. Ironically, it probably didn't hurt that Auckland University had just established a Masters of Creative Writing ... it spurred the AUT high command to a competitive response. The Dean of my Faculty and the Pro-Vice Chancellor were supportive, and I spent a year designing the programme, approaching a variety of writers to help out as guest tutors and mentors.
A sympathetic journalist at the national paper the Sunday Star Times profiled the embryonic programme ('Get a decent haircut and move to Auckland'), and the fact that it was being run by a group of prominent local authors, with a specific goal of celebrating our local literature, rather than the more modest goal of the digital analysis of the gaps between words in American poetry.
We got off to a great start. We had many applicants, and I was able to employ most of the writers who had been behind me when I approached Aircraft Carrier Desk Man. A number of graduates from that first year went on to publishing success, some internationally, including Fiona Sussman, who regularly wins national awards for her writing. Other graduates, perhaps infected by the spirit of entrepreneurial energy that characterised the establishment of the centre, eventually formed their own publishing collective, Eunoia Books, where they not only published several of their own novels, but went on to publish many other authors' books as well.
The Pro-Vice Chancellor and Dean were behind me, and the masters degree was almost immediately, and to my astonishment, voted by students the best-taught post-graduate programme at the University.
This seemed to me a vindication of the collective group-based approach I had taken, employing a variety of NZ authors to come in to teach, rather than a specifically personal accolade. It was also a vindication, I felt, of bringing in successful working authors, rather than career academics, to teach on the programme.
The other thing I was keen to do was to establish an atmosphere of equality and empowerment amongst my students, all of whom were adults, with an average age in their 40s. Many had lead rich, varied and tumultuous lives in a variety of occupations: somewhat different from the circumscribed lives of many of my academic colleagues, most of whom had been cloistered in the academy for decades. I was often bemused by the devotion of these folk to the tortured wisdom of Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and the other doyens of French post-structuralism.
It seemed like a fashionable gambit to confer mandarin status on a marginal elite, and had little to do with the raw and vigorous stories of an emerging Aotearoa. I was put in mind of the person who loses his keys on a long darkened street, and spends his time searching under the tiny area illuminated by the one working street-lamp on the road, because that's the only place where there's light.
So all was not entirely well in the state of Denmark. I had noticed at both Auckland University, and AUT University a number of academics had family members employed alongside them, something that in the corporate world would be considered dubious. After all, universities are publically funded organisations that consume hundreds of millions of dollars of tax payers money.
When the career academic who had helped me establish the programme proposed to personally employ his father on the Masters of Creative Writing I said I thought that would be poorly received by the literary community. 'Look,' I said. 'Writers are badly underpaid in this country. They're really sensitive to any hint of nepotism or unfairness in the dispensing of opportunities. They won't like this, it'll damage the reputation of the programme, and I don't think you should do it.'
What I didn't realise was that I had made a bitter enemy, which would come back to haunt me. And then my two principle supporters, the Pro-Vice Chancellor and the Dean, eloped together to their Chilean mountain top, and I was all alone, with the 2010 global financial crisis bearing down on us all like a runaway juggernaut.
For some reason I had never been able to divine, but probably had to do with the fact that I was keen to establish an independent centre, outside the AUT English department, I was required by the Faculty, and by my budget, to raise $80,000 a year in corporate sponsorship for the programme to continue. Bill Manhire, who had recently returned from a tour of North American writing programmes, told me the message there was clear - stay out of English Departments.
When Victoria University had proposed his centre be absorbed into the English Department, he resigned in protest. Rather than lose one of the stars in their crown, they had relented and reversed their plans. It probably didn't hurt his case that Bill had an eccentric Las Vegas billionaire by the name of Glen Schaeffer bankrolling his programme.
Now, with the Global Financial Crisis, the corporate sponsorship doors slammed shut to me. Loudly. I was all alone.
The Acting Dean called me into her office. To my surprise, she looked at me with undisguised rage. Perhaps SHE had wanted to elope to a Chilean mountain top. I knew I quite liked the idea myself.
'You're getting the chop,' she said. 'Chop, chop, chop, chop,' she chortled. 'You'll just have to take your bunch of grubby so-called real-world writers somewhere else and annoy some other reputable, protocol-observing academics who have a keener sense than you do of the intricacies of post-modern thought.' Actually, she didn't say any of that, but it did seem to me that that was what she was thinking.
'Look,' I said. 'This programme has been many years in the gestation. It's only been running two years, and just been voted the best post-graduate programme in the university by students. Surely that counts for something?' Her look turned to one of glee. She had a PhD. I didn't even have a Masters degree, and here I was, running a Masters programme. This was a perturbation of the academic universe that was almost certainly contrary to the divine order of things.
'Sorry,' she said, with the smile of a wildebeest.
'I'd like to talk to your superior, please.' And this is where the Professor of Hotel Studies, and exponent of shibari, or Japanese sexual rope bondage stepped in.
'You've been a naughty boy, John,' he said. 'You don't fit into our robust, rope-loving, pristine culture here. And I'm afraid you need to be punished.' Actually, he didn't say that at all, but I felt that that was what he was thinking.
So the programme was closed down, and the Masters of Creative Writing absorbed into the English department, where it has been presided over for the last ten years by the career academic who employed his father. To my knowledge, this person has not published any contemporary New Zealand fiction.
I had gone to both Auckland universities with passion and an excitement at the possibilities of helping them spawn a new generation of kiwi writers. I was particularly keen to harvest the wisdom and generativity of the previous generation of authors, to help the tyro upstarts on their way.
I came away with a sense of disillusionment with the structure and practices of these places. Perhaps things have changed. Perhaps the English departments of these two universities are now hot-beds of joyous experimentation. But I came to the reluctant conclusion that in the literary realm at least, there was something about universities that was fundamentally hostile to creativity.
