My Lunch with Grantham
By A.S. Erickson | Sunday, November 18, 2007
This paper has famously dubbed Shelby Grantham the worst professor at Dartmouth (TDR 9/24/07). Anxious to see what all the hubbub was about, I was intrigued to learn that Grantham would be speaking to students at the Tucker Foundation. It was a part of the “What Matters To Me And Why” series of lunches, a series where professors are encouraged to speak to students about their “passions.”
Hoping to find out beforehand what exactly her passions were, I went to her page on the faculty website. Her blurb is short and to the point:
I teach writing. It’s the second-best way I know to figure things out--such as what to do about racism, how to make non-violence a national priority, why so few students think they can make a difference, what poetry is good for, when and how to resist injustice, ways to share the planet with other species, and what gender has to do with anything. Seeking words to make such questions ring and their answers sing is what my English 5 sections are about.
She mysteriously never alludes to what the best way of figuring things out might be. Unable to discern anything other than the typical academic tropes from her blurb, I looked to the list of her publications, hoping to find something more concrete. I had no luck with the titles, but one thing did catch my eye, namely, the lack of any scholarly journal to her name. In fact, half of all her published articles were in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.
I entered the Tucker Foundation not quite sure what to expect—though I was provided an early clue of what was to come when Grantham entered wearing a Dennis Kucinich 2008 pin. One person in attendance asked her about it, and she replied that, “he is the only politician I’ve heard, who has ever made any sense.” It only got better from there.
The event began as everyone took their seats, focusing on Grantham in the corner of the room, seated in a rocking chair. The event coordinator read a short biography, and then Grantham opened it up to questions. A student started the questioning by remarking that she thought pulling out of Iraq unilaterally and without warning would be a mistake. She asked Grantham for her opinion.
Grantham said that we should pull out immediately. She claimed that in our names “mayhem and murder, and in a certain sense genocide, have been committed…. The idea that we should not fully stop doing those heinous things because what the people of Iraq will do we may not think is sane—that makes no sense to me.”
“The people of Iraq will handle their country with as much sanity, probably even more, as we handle our country, and it is not up to me, unless asked and invited, to decide how Iraq and Iraqis should behave.” After giving questionable credence to the sanity of most Iraqis, she moved to what would occupy the bulk of this lunchtime chat, racism.
When adopting a child, she “went in looking” for an Indian child. Four years later she wanted to adopt another Indian, told that Indians were no longer available for adoption she looked to “different ethnicities, including African-American. And I was still not sure that I was ready to adopt an African-American child, that I had my head on straight enough to do that. It’s a terrific responsibility to take a child from one culture in a racist society, and raise that child successfully.” How did she know that she had finally come to grips with her innate racism (because, as she made clear, every white person is a racist, even herself), to the point that she would be able to adopt a black infant?
“I was driving around Dartmouth one day, when I was trying to decide what to do….I didn’t have enough energy to worry about sex anymore, and I used to be a fairly lusty woman…and I’m suddenly visited when I see a student walking in front of me; I’m visited by a wave of adolescent lust. This is the cutest rear end I have seen in a long, long, long time. This guy just turned me on…. It was about three blocks down that I realized that that young man had been black. At that point I said to myself, ‘okay, I think I’m there.’” That’s right, by having not seen race she determined she was ready to adopt a black child; yet throughout the whole lunch she chided those who thought it was possible to see beyond race. That was not the only time during the event when she contradicted herself.
She would say, “Race is a fiction…being white is a cultural construct,” though she was apparently born outside of her culture in Mississippi: “From the time when I was old enough to think, I said, ‘Why is there a colored water fountain and a white water fountain?’” In another moment she moved with intensity to silence the notion that there is only one race, the human race.
One intrepid freshman questioned her view on racial compatibility, noting that speakers like Al Sharpton only increased the “tribalism” in today’s racial politics. Grantham surprised everyone in the room by claiming that tribalism is a good thing, and that ideals like assimilation or integration are despicable.
The lunch closed on a truly perplexing note, as Grantham claimed that only whites are racist. None of the other races are categorically capable of being racist. Therefore it’s not a racist act if an African-American denies employment to a Hispanic based solely on his race. Ah-ha, the true rationalization of affirmative action becomes known.
For all of her strange pronouncements, Grantham was hesitant to make a stand for anything in particular, adopting a sort of ‘what’s right for you is right for you, and what’s right for me is right for me’ mantra. She concluded her statements by saying, “that’s a privileged white lady’s perception. I don’t know whether it’s right or not, but it is the way I feel.”
This all leads to the question: Do we want a professor at Dartmouth who simply peddles feelings? n
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