A Virtual End to the Academic Year

On Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020 nearly a hundred UC Davis English faculty and students gathered virtually for our annual end-of-the-year awards celebration. 

 

Below, you’ll find the chair’s opening remarks and statements from our faculty to mark the occasion. We also recorded a set of videos to announce our award winners, and we invite you to watch those here. 

 

At the time of our awards gathering, we did not yet know that graduating English major Jumana Esau would win the University Medal, the most prestigious award offered to an undergraduate at UC Davis. Jumana is also the recipient of a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to support her further work on climate change fiction. We invite you to read her interview on the English web site about that award.

 

We hope you join us in congratulating Jumana along with all of our graduating students. As the comments below suggest, we engaged in celebration this June fully cognizant of the challenges confronting our graduates and all of us in the weeks and months ahead. We believe that our graduates will rise to these challenges, and look forward to seeing them, and you, back on our campus and in Voorhies Hall. 

 

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Some remarks from the Spring 2020 UC Davis English Department Virtual Awards 

Professor John Marx, Chair

Thanks for being here. In a minute, I will be handing things off to several English professors who have thoughts to share about the class of 2020, and we want to take a few minutes today to really put the focus on you, but we can’t move forward without acknowledging the scary moment that we’re living through.

 

You are graduating into the maelstrom, and I hope all of our students both undergraduate and graduate know that your instructors are mindful of the stress and strain you’re experiencing, which has seemed only to increase over the course of spring. 

 

When I say we want to put the focus on you for a few minutes, that means we want to recognize what you’ve accomplished during incredibly trying times. It also means that we need to acknowledge that what comes next is going to be hard. 

 

UC Davis can continue to support you in specific and more general ways—from the Internship and Career Center to the huge Aggie alumni network. We’re certainly not going anywhere in English. Your instructors are primed and ready to write recommendation letters as always, and we hope you’ll stay in touch as you move on to the next stage in your lives. We are always glad to hear from you. 

 

We hope that if plans come together for a fall graduation ceremony that you will be able to come back and visit us, but we know that won’t be possible for all. 

 

And that’s why we’re holding this event today, releasing our annual newsletter shortly, and making available a webpage with videos to announce and confirm the winners of our annual awards and to further celebrate the achievements within our Department. There will be a large and visible link to this page on our department homepage, and it will go live as we’re ending here today. 

 

Bottom line: no one is going to ever forget the class of 2020. Both because of the circumstances surrounding your graduation, and, I am confident, because of what you’ve accomplished at Davis and what you will accomplish next in your lives. 

 

We don’t know when we will have the chance to gather together again, but we know we will. And when you come back to campus in a future that we hope comes sooner rather than later, with more justice and thought rather than less, we will congratulate you in person just as warmly and sincerely as we are celebrating you now. 

 

Professor Francis Dolan

Nothing I could say would be adequate to the present moment or to my pride in you and how honored I am to have been able to work with you. But I want to try to articulate two things that I took for granted but that I now miss and recollect with gratitude. 

 

The first I might call social proximity, the opposite of social distancing. It’s those of you who sit in the first few rows; who strategize to take a class with your roommate, your friend, your whole posse; who gather before a class to create community and kickstart the conversation; who study in the corridors of Voorhies, sit on the floor waiting for office hours to begin, and counsel and commiserate one another as you wait; who hang around after class and accompany your teachers back to Voorhies. Who gather together around a rare book in Special Collections, bring books, and photos, and other treasures to show us, and bring, even make, and share food. By the way, Alex, it doesn’t look as if you’re going to get your tupperware back. Sorry.

 

You were really present and that makes me feel and hear and lament your absence now.

 

The second is all of the ways your reactions in a classroom exceeded up, down, applause. In class, you convey so much information—perhaps more than you realize––and it shapes what happens there. The questions and comments, of course. But also the laughs—so often not where I would have anticipated!; muttering; grimaces; furrowed brows; head shakes; raised eyebrows; exchanged looks; closed eyes. 

 

Thank you for your reactions—however communicated—that pushed me to rethink a comment, rephrase a question, shift a deadline, revise my syllabus, change my mind. I miss learning with and from you. You made an impact. Thank you.

 

Professor Matthew Stratton

Professor Stratton spoke semi-extemporaneously, and without a recording, an exact reconstruction of his remarks here is impossible. To recap, he talked about the balance of being proud of what everyone had done while acknowledging the realities and difficulties of the past weeks. What brought tears to many eyes was how he missed being in the space with students from whom he learns so much, making everyone long to be together in the sticky heat of the Voorhies courtyard.

 

Professor Mark Jerng

I’ve been struggling to think through how to offer up to the graduates a sense of your accomplishments during this time, while not diminishing the significance of this historical moment and the parts that we play in these social conditions. But in thinking about the classes that many of you have shared with me, I was reminded that education connects lived experience with the work of analysis that we do in the classroom. I have learned so much from your insights and your thinking. I just thought I would share three examples where you made those connections in the classroom, ones that seem important in this particular political moment.

 

1) In my fantasy fiction class, ENL 44, I remember an amazing discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Gifts. You all characterized the book as the “anti-Harry Potter.” That is because you thought through how the main characters essentially refuse to practice magic, refuse to use the gifts passed down to them, because their society turns that magic into weapons used solely for maintaining property rights and territory.

 

2) In my English 10C class, I remember discussing W.E.B. Du Bois’s two distinct representations of the 1917 massacre in East St. Louis, one that he co-wrote with Martha Gruening and published in the periodical The Crisis, another that he published in his book, Darkwater. The class produced a powerful analysis of the rhetorical and poetic strategies that Du Bois used to critique both mainstream media accounts and statements from city leaders, judges, and juries, accounts and statements that reinforced a police power that served and protected white supremacy and white propertied interests. You noticed all the representational work that Du Bois had to do in order to get his audience not to reduce or to pathologize, but rather to see and listen to the black citizens and residents of St. Louis struggling against circumstances that made it impossible to live.

 

3) Finally, just last Winter quarter in my class on Asian diasporic literature, the class analyzed Carlos Bulosan’s short story “The Romance of Magno Rubio” and you placed much more attention on the character Nick than I had initially planned. You made connections between the continued extraction of debt from the characters in Bulosan’s story, the graduate student struggle for a fair wage in the face of untenable housing conditions, and your own experiences with those housing conditions. You identified how some characters in the story, like Nick, reinforced the inequalities and punishment that Magno Rubio faced while pretending to help him.

 

In all three of these examples, and there are many others, you connected these readings and analyses to your lived experiences. Thank you for analyzing with your minds and your hearts. Thank you for connecting thought to practice, and practice to thought. Thank you for these shared experiences which I will lean on in the days ahead.

 

Professor Parama Roy

Hello, everyone. It is good to see so many of you here.

 

I have been asked to say a few words to you on this occasion. Normally this would be a pleasant task but right now I am having some trouble finding the words that are appropriate to the occasion, given that we began the quarter with a pandemic (which still continues) and are ending it having to confront yet again this country’s long history of brutalizing black lives.

 

So I thought I’d share with you something of what has been happening in my classes, and its relation to events in the world today. I am teaching English 157, a class on detective fiction. I started the class thinking it would be a pleasant diversion, one that students might appreciate in a time of crisis. In fact I wrote to my students before classes began, saying that I found detective fiction a solace in a time of stress. How quaint that sentiment seems now.

 

Of course I was only partly serious when I wrote this to my students because, read carefully, detective fiction is a window into the world, with all its inequities and brutalities, rather than a refuge from it. This was never more clear than in the past week when, with uncannily horrific timing, our reading of Chester Himes’s Cotton Comes to Harlem coincided with the murder of George Floyd, the latest in an unbearably long list of black people killed by the police. For those of you who don’t know Himes’s novel or indeed his brilliant series of detective fictions set in Harlem, this is a book that showcases the war of a racist NYPD against the inhabitants of Harlem in an era of organized black resistance.

 

The book was written in 1965 but, as my students noted, it could have been written today. Indeed, the book itself notes that the genocidal violence of which it speaks is not an artifact of its moment alone, but tied to a history that is 400 years old. The book ends with some of the victims receiving financial restitution but without any real possibility of justice. In the final scene, the two black detectives explain what happened to a pleasant but clueless white superior who entirely misunderstands the historical stakes and racially charged character of the crime. In the book nothing has been learned by those in a position to effect a transformation, and nothing will change.

 

I knew when I assigned the book that it would resonate with our moment; I just couldn’t predict how much it would do so. I suppose that the coincidence of our reading Cotton Comes to Harlem on the occasion of the latest police murder and the subsequent popular uprising to affirm the humanity of black lives makes for what is called a teachable moment in the classroom. But I am really, really sick of such teachable moments. I want these teachable moments to end.

 

I wish I could put a bow on this. But I can’t. What I will say, though, is this: In reading Cotton Comes to Harlem and other texts though the quarter, my students have been my comrades and fellow-travelers. I want to thank them for having responded to the words on the page and to the events unfolding outside the classroom with intelligence, resilience, good humor, and sometimes unbelievable moral and physical courage. Thanks to them, and thanks to each and every one of you, for teaching us how to persist with grace in hard times. And congratulations to all!