Dartmouth's Worst Prof: Shelby Grantham

By Karen Parkman | Monday, September 20, 2004

We should have bolted when she entered the door on the first day of class. Or perhaps gotten out when we perused the term's readings. We had heard the rumors, whispered down from upperclassmen, that Prof. Shelby Grantham was "the worst prof for English 5." Other tales quickly followed: She was among the most subjective graders at Dartmouth, and she didn't accept any deviation from her liberal hard line. Still, with the naivete of freshmen ("It can't be that bad, can it?") we forged ahead, confident that it was only a term. It was just a term—from hell, that is.

Grantham made it clear from day one that anything white, male, or straight was evil. Occasionally subtle, more often not, she blamed straight white males for their racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-environmentalism, and any other negative epithets that tipped her fancy.

A self-described "recovering racist," Grantham not only saw herself as racist but every white person—period. As she often noted, "racism is a one way street." All whites (even those who marched with Martin Luther King or were arrested for the cause) were as guilty as the slave drivers of the 1800s. The Black Panthers, on the other hand, were haloed angels; they were just trying to get back at "whitey" for years of bondage. She read the riot act to anyone who disagreed with her assessment. Once, while lecturing on the racism of white band-aids, a student suggested that it was not racism that drove corporations to make white band-aids, but profit. Grantham proceeded to silence him by calling him "a white supremacist." After class, she sent an e-mail to all her students to clarify her comments—and called his views those of a white supremacist again.

Instead of reading the classics, we read articles like "The Case for [Slave] Restitution" and "White Privilege/Male Privilege," alongside a book list containing works about radical environmentalism, racism, and the like. The only "great book" we read during the term was Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Instead of any reasonable interpretation, however, Grantham read it (and taught it) as "one of the most dangerous books ever written." Then, opening her eyes wide, she questioned in a sing-song voice, "Can anything justify genocide and racism?" And she stared at everyone until we shook our heads in collective disbelief. Of course, she took this entire interpretation from only a few scattered sentences.

She once told us "I can't read male authors anymore." Her justification was that male authors only write about conflict, and that she had read enough works by male authors while earning degrees. She did, however, note that there were exceptions to this. She loved Ishmael, by counter-culture superstar Daniel Quinn so much that she put it on our syllabus. For those who don't know, Ishmael savages modern "Taker" culture as ignorant while exalting hunter-gatherer, or "Leaver" cultures as the way to go. Grantham really liked this point; she told the class that hunter-gatherers "have other kinds of knowledge. Can we say that it's less valuable?" Other than Heart of Darkness, which she attempted to "unteach," this was the only book penned by a male.

At the beginning of the term we were told to buy Ama Ata Aidoo's No Sweetness Here, out of which we read one eight-page short story. Grantham's justification for having us buy the whole book even though we had a course reader? "I think she's a great author, and I think she deserves the royalties." This is but a small example of Grantham's consistent manipulation of her power throughout the term.

Naturally, Grantham's intolerance of other opinions and alacrity to harshly grade those who disagreed with her stifled any dissent in the class. She urged us to tell her, "Grantham, you don't know what you're talking about." Whenever anyone dared to do just that, she would pull out the racist trump card and the argument would be immediately squelched. Instead of a first collegiate classroom experience of rational argument, point and counterpoint, the class was forced into cadence with Grantham's outlandish beliefs. For instance, regarding flush toilets, she noted that "Building codes are designed to support the unsustainable American lifestyle." She added that if she could become a hunter-gatherer by pressing a button, she would willingly do it. At least then, she wouldn't have to concern herself with (gasp!) unsustainable things like toilets, stoves, and sinks. Reading The Color Purple, Grantham noted, "I think from this we have to respect the legitimacy of same-sex relationships." After statements like these, Grantham would look wildly around the room for support; eventually some people would half-heartedly nod. This grin-and-bear-it torture was repeated every day for every conservative or moderate in the class.

Then there were her other "activism moments." She felt the desire to tell the class when she was going to Washington to protest the "occupation" of Iraq. She also noted that she had boycotted her electricity company for two weeks the summer before. Why, you may wonder? According to Grantham, HydroQuebec had purposely leaked mercury from its dams to poison native Inuit and Cree children so the nefarious corporation could steal land from the Indians—he felt the duty to boycott. But after the two weeks were up, she went back to her power, apparently proud of her limited stand. It would have taken more than her faux courage to do the same in the dead of winter.

We suppose most of these criticisms would be moot if she had actually taught us to write, but the writing she taught was sadly impotent outside of her classroom. A majority of our papers cited our feelings or opinions as the only "textual proof." Many didn't cite a single printed source until final papers; some never cited all term. Her lecture on "the proper care and feeding of footnotes" was optional—and very few of our classmates attended. In fact, as she put it, footnotes and references were mere courtesies for one's reader—there was not a mention of giving credit to someone else for his work. Her writing pet peeve was cutting unnecessarily: She was quick to note that if the writer didn't want to cut the words, then the offending verbs, adjectives, and nouns should remain. Hardly an introduction to college writing, Grantham's English 5 was instead eerily reminiscent of high school—or, better yet, grade school.

Indeed, our "instruction" on how to become better writers was limited to two short handouts about collegiate writing, and one short book. Discussion of these readings was limited to a single one-hour class period, mainly consisting of Grantham asking us how we "felt" about the works. They were also used to contrast their nature with Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write. Grantham heralded this book as a pivotal piece of literature that brought writing "back to the writer." The book's main point was that one shouldn't write unless one really loves the subject he or she writes. In other words, it hardly addressed the basics. When a student asked Grantham the most simple of questions—"Well, how do I write a paper for a class I don't like?"—our professor's response was that maybe the student should consider whether or not they wanted to be in that class. Oh, the irony.

The only other writing instruction that we received were the limited (and politically slanted) comments that she wrote on our papers and a two-page handout called "Grantham's Grammar," which was a list of about fifty of the most common grammatical mistakes that young writers make. But the corrections she wrote on our papers very rarely regarded how we wrote. Rather, she more often commented our "cultural insensitivity." Yet she tried to mask this leftist plunge: She prefaced our final exam by saying "Write what you want, and that doesn't have to be what you think I want to hear."

Nearly a term later, sitting back and remembering Shelby Grantham, we wonder how we survived the name-calling, the constant liberal tirades, and the suspect papers. But more, we find ourselves wondering not just how she was offered a position at a school like Dartmouth in the first place, but how she has managed to keep it for so long.

Dartmouth's Worst Prof: Shelby Grantham

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