An adjunct professor in the English Department who teaches in Fred’s University Community Annex, housed in the crumbling concrete 1960’s academic bunkers on the outskirts of campus, was fired yesterday after he handed in an angry resignation letter and sent a copy to the entire Fred’s U email list. Longtime teacher Dudley Dont argued in his letter to the Dean of the English Department that he could not continue teaching Standard English when it is really just the dialect of the privileged white rich and in no way standard. He further suggested that Fred’s University should be closed and students should be allowed to learn languages from each other, naturally allowing slang to slowly replace the outdated language schools have tried to force on children. When the school newspaper questioned how the Dean could fire someone who had quit, he said that was a “matter of semantics” and challenged the student reporter, who is a person of color, to “look it up.” When pressed, the Dean added that this was not an example of The Great Resignation, as the reporter suggested, but a Terrible Resignation.
Although the Dean had the emails retroactively deleted and removed the letter from the English Department website homepage where Dudley Dont had placed it, the newspaper printed it in full.
Letter of Resignation
To the Dean of the English Department,
I quit because I no longer think the way I talk and write is better than the poor students I teach in the Community Annex of Fred’s University. In my early years of teaching English in this special program of Fred’s University, I was filled with a sense of righteous self-satisfaction that I was bringing culture and knowledge to “disadvantaged” students, giving them a chance at the opportunities I had growing up as a privileged white person. My reward was not my sub-minimum wage earnings as an adjunct professor, but the golden halo of superiority. Every lesson I taught at the Community Annex reinforced the underlying idea that my white academic ways were better than the ways of my poor and mostly black and brown students.
As I grew more and more doubtful of the entire enterprise of the Community Annex, I tried to tell myself that without the tools to succeed in the rich white world, my students would only become poorer. The stakes are high in the United States where poverty means hunger, preventable diseases, grueling work, and short life expectancy. Certainly plenty of English teachers argue on Tiktok that we have an obligation to help people outside the privileged classes get the tools they need to access the protections of the rich while world. The promise of Standard English was that all students could be assimilated to one culture, and that, theoretically, everyone could therefore have an equal chance. In that story, schools and universities are the agents of upward mobility and promote equality. National language unification, such has happened in most colonial enterprises and also throughout Europe, would enable all Americans to communicate and participate equally in a shared culture. Ha! That never happened. Schools in the United States have served the opposite purpose of entrenching the privilege of a few and locking everyone else out.
Primarily White Institutions (PWIs) like Fred’s only bring in a small number of outsiders to their ranks. And they do it at a terrible cost to the students who not only pay outrageous tuition, but have to give up their own culture and often their relationship with their loved ones as well. We think we are giving our students the tools to succeed, but really we are tools of a system that devalues them. The grammar and vocabulary I teach are just the grammar and vocabulary I grew up with and learned naturally in my family as a child. The grammar and vocabulary that my “disadvantaged” students grew up with are their own. It is not worse than mine. The rules that define my speech are just the ones recorded in the textbooks. They are not better. The way I speak naturally is not the correct way. In fact, given how eager all the rich white kids are to learn and imitate the street language of the black music they live by, the language I grew up with is static and unbeautiful by comparison. Humans naturally speak in a systematic way to be understood by those around them. Schools are unnatural: you don’t need grammar books to learn to communicate. It is a species thing.
Over the past year, I have come to feel a sense of sick dread as I enter the asbestos-ridden room in this PWI where I attempt to discipline young people out of the way of speaking that came naturally to them in childhood. I know by doing this I will create a terrible rift with the families they leave behind. The grammar books that attempt to enforce my way of speaking on them are enacting a kind of linguistic and cultural torture. Fred’s University’s well-intentioned initiative to introduce “Asset Based Pedagogy,” which is supposed to allow students to build from the strengths of their diverse backgrounds, only made things worse. If we see everything as an asset, it is all the more clear that African American Vernacular English (AAVE), for example, is a devalued currency in our country.
Despite the ideological presumption of deficit imposed on our minority language groups, across the globe, people consume the artistic products of AAVE that are our most powerful export.
Close the schools. Let the kids learn English through the music that they prefer to our textbooks. Let them share the slang that drives linguistic innovation instead of being chained to archaic forms. Eventually, the dream of a unified language will be realized as our PWI become PB.
Sincerely,
Dudley Dont
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