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Q & A with Dr. Lucia Martinez Valdivia, Reed College Professor
Your title at Reed College is assistant professor of English and Humanities. Describe in non-academic terms what you teach and why you became a professor in early modern English poetry?
Put simply, I teach poetry written in England from roughly 1530 to 1660, usually focusing on the intersection between poetry, music, and religion. One of the main goals in what I do in the classroom and in my research is to resist the separation of what we might traditionally label highbrow or "literary" poetry from works written for a more popular or general audience. Just as classical and pop music are both recognized as "music," "poetry" is a category that contains a wide variety of texts that are all worthy of study.
I've always been fascinated by travel, and for me that's meant traveling through time as much as traveling through space. Reading early modern poetry lets me travel into the past and hear the voices of people whose lives were utterly different from mine and to imagine and feel things I could otherwise never experience.
On February 12, you will speak at a symposium, "Speech on Campus: When Protests Turn Extreme," at Arizona State University College of Law with Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger. Stangerwas seriously injured last March as she participated in an event featuring controversial political/social/demographic thinker Charles Murray. Do you have trepidation about the event? Do you fear for your safety there or on your own campus? Do you believe you have an obligation to defend free speech, as a citizen, as a professor, or as an intellectual role model for your students?
No, of course I don't have any trepidation about this event or my participation in it. I'm looking forward to an evening of intelligent conversation and hopefully debate about the questions surrounding speech and university life and missions, and I have no reason to fear for my safety. More than safety, the issue that has concerned me most in the past has been about walking into a hostile work environment, which is substantially different than choosing to walk into debates, which can be difficult or confrontational.
The decisions made by every educator about their obligations and duties are deeply personal, and, just as I wouldn't want them prescribed to me, I'm not going to prescribe them to anyone else. The ethical expectations I have of myself are of speaking up when I see something I feel is wrong and of doing so publicly in a way that has sometimes been described as showing a reckless disregard for my own well-being. In my case, I've found that it does me more harm than good to bite my tongue about things that matter deeply to me. That's who I am, and inevitably I think that transfers into the classroom, especially an intimate discussion-based class like those typical of Reed. While I'm sure it can be intimidating, I hope that ultimately, my students are empowered by my example.
What's your political background? Did the Reedies Against Racism (RAR) have a point in their more-than-yearlong militant protest against your class Humanities 110 (Hum 110)? Were you surprised that this story would capture the attention of national and international publications such as the Economist, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Huffington Post, or that you would acquire a national reputation as a defender of free speech on campus?
I was raised by socialists and identify that way myself, though perhaps in a way that would be recognized as more politically mainstream in Europe than it is here. I'm absolutely a leftist, but again, I think that means differently in the U.S. in 2018 than it did and has for me as I grew up and came into my own political mindset. My childhood in the '80s and '90s was divided between Missouri and Peru, and my mother, who's been my strongest political influence, is a Marxist professor of economics and leftist. That was always completely separate from the violent Maoism of Shining Path, the terrorist group active in Peru responsible for the assassination of thousands of innocent people whose only crime was not agreeing with their ideology, which I suspect some people in the U.S. today would also misguidedly identify as "leftist."
I think -- I know -- that racism is a real problem today both in the United States and worldwide. It is so deeply ingrained in our culture that most of us can't see the ways in which we exhibit it, and we must reflect consciously on how we move through the world and how we treat both the people we know and, almost more importantly, those whom we don't. I would hope that's an idea on which we can all agree, but sometimes the style of messaging can get in the way of the message itself, which is ultimately the thing that matters most. In my experience, more flies are caught with honey than with vinegar and callouts, especially if the goal is ideally to change people's minds rather than merely silence their voices. The latter's a temporary fix, and what we really need is a cure.
In October 2017, more than a year into the students' protests, you published an op-ed in The Washington Post, stating,"Professors like me can't stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses." The article received thousands of comments, almost all positive, on your views. You wrote, "Three times a week, students sat in the lecture space holding signs -- many too obscene to be printed here -- condemning the course and its faculty as white supremacists, anti-black, as not open to dialogue and criticism on the grounds that we continue to teach, among other things, Aristotle and Plato."
How did The Washington Post know about this issue? And why did you take over a year to say "yes" to their repeated requests for commentary?
An Opinion editor at the Post had reached out to me a year earlier for my thoughts on classroom dynamics surrounding free speech, and at the time, I was advised that, as a junior and untenured faculty member, the wisest course for my career would be to keep my head down and focus on my official duties. Though I didn't agree with it, the thinking was that if we ignored the conversation, it would go away. That clearly wasn't true, and I came to the decision that I had to speak up precisely because of one of the responsibilities of my job as I understand it: to teach by modeling careful, consistent, and nuanced reasoning. I also felt an obligation to say what I thought for ethical reasons, as well as for my own well-being. It's not healthy for anyone, much less an academic, to censor her thinking.
An article in the Economist this fall listed your past crimes in the eyes of student protestors. They were as follows: "She was a race traitor, who upheld white supremacist principles by failing to oppose the Humanities syllabus. She was anti-black because she appropriated black slang by wearing a T-shirt that said, 'Poetry is Lit.' She was an ableist because she believes trigger warnings sometimes diminish sexual trauma. She was also called a 'gaslighter' for making disadvantaged students doubt their own feelings of oppression."
In a comment on a fellow academic's blog post discussing the incident, you wrote, "I am intimidated by these students. I am scared to teach courses on race, gender or sexuality or even texts that bring these issues up in any way."
What methods did the students use to intimidate you? How effective were they? And what toll does this continue to take on your teaching and on you personally?
I think the holding of signage that attacks both what people do and people themselves in their workplace can be a very effective form of intimidation depending on the targeted individuals. The toll it took physically was substantial, but I've felt my usual and stronger self again since the publication of that op-ed piece. As an educator, the effect of this whole process -- of working in a protested environment, of examining how and what I teach -- has led me to start exploring the possibilities for programming higher education coursework outside the confines of campus and instead turning to an environment I hadn't previously considered teaching: prisons. When it comes to the liberal arts, Oregon's carceral education options are sorely limited, in particular compared to programs in the Midwest and on the East Coast. Some efforts, like the Bard Prison Initiative, are allowing incarcerated students to earn degrees for the first time, and I hope that eventually something similar can be developed in Oregon. We're national leaders in many ways when it comes to liberal causes, and there's no reason why we can't do so in ways that effect disenfranchised members of our population.
In your Washington Post op-ed you responded in greater length and depth about the deeper more intellectual disconnect:
"Nuance has largely been dismissed from the debate about speech raging on college campuses. Absolutist posture and the binary reign supreme. You are pro- or anti-radical or fascist, angel or demon. Even small differences of opinion are seized on and characterized as moral and intellectual failures, unacceptable thought crimes that cancel out anything else you might say.
"No one should have to pass someone else's ideological purity test to be allowed to speak. University life -- along with civic life -- dies without the free exchange of ideas."
What ails our culture when nuance and critical thinking have been, as you say, largely dismissed from our college campus debates? Where does this intolerance come from?
I'm not sure whether this dismissal is a symptom of a problem, as you're describing it, or the source of it. I suspect that it's incubated in virtual echo chambers, and have often wondered whether Tumblr in particular, more than other preceding and subsequent social media platforms, was responsible for starting the trend for these. Tumblr allows users to blacklist tags so that they never come across certain content they find difficult, uncomfortable, or "harmful" -- anything from pictures of people making eye contact with a camera to subject matter like rape and suicide -- and can essentially enter a world in which those things don't exist. A user can curate content so that any ideas with which they don't agree are eventually filtered out by keyword, and that can, I think, make it easy to block out other people entirely. This effaces the fact that while we might not agree with someone on everything, that doesn't mean we don't still have a lot to discuss, and possibly even a lot in common, assuming that matters. In some ways, we've learned to see people not as individuals with lots of different and differing thoughts and opinions, but people as those thoughts and ideas. No one thinks identically to anyone else, and that is what attention to nuance can help us remember.
An article by Chris Bodenner of The Atlantic, "The Surprising Revolt at the Most Liberal College in the Country," chronicles a moment last fall when freshmen students at Reed College took back their humanities class. "When a few professors got into a heated exchange with RAR leaders, an African-American freshman in the front row stands up and raises his arms: 'This is a classroom! This is not the place! Right now we are trying to learn! We're the freshmen students!' The room erupts with applause."
What were you feeling when this freshman took back his classroom, your classroom? Should this be the college's job, or was the organic way that it happened a better learning experience for all involved?
I suspect that while this was perhaps the least difficult way to resolve the protest in the classroom, it ended up shifting a responsibility that was properly the purview of the college to ensure an undisrupted learning environment for all of its students. Ultimately, however, I think this more organic resolution was one that empowered our newest students in a constructive way, and I hope everyone involved can agree that was a positive outcome.
You begin the introductory lecture of your humanities class this way: "I'm Lucia Martinez Valdivia, and in addition to Hum 110, I teach in the English department, focusing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry and how it intersects with music, history, and religion. I'm female, mixed race, American and Peruvian, gay, atheist, and relatively young. I study poetry that is basically the opposite of me: male, British, straight, God-fearing, 500 years old. And I love it."
How do the students usually react to this statement? You ask them as a prerequisite for your course to "embrace the texts." Are they willing to do this? Are you just an old soul fighting an uphill battle? Are the "classic" texts of our civilization in decline or on a comeback?
The statement I make about my identity is meant to illustrate both that it has little to do with what interests me intellectually and, perhaps contradictorily, that I am most curious about things that are unlike me. This is perhaps a trite idea, but for me the point of reading literature is for the windows they offer onto the lives and cultures of others, not for a mirror in which to see myself. In asking students to embrace texts, to say "yes" to them before saying "no," that means that we should take them seriously, considering their ideas and reasoning rigorously. If we end up agreeing with them, that's all well and good, but if we disagree with them, we should know why and how those points of disagreement arise if we want to refute them, or even if we just want to understand how other people think.
I think our "classic" texts are fine, and are being enriched and sustained by the conversations resulting from putting them into conversation with new classics. While syllabi are necessarily finite collections of text, the canon, or canons more generally, are not: there's room for everyone without the need for exclusion of what's come previously. The new and the old can and should exist together, throwing both innovation and tradition into relief in productive ways.
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