The Politics of Respect (1981)

This is an interesting article in which Murray assumes a different role than usual. He writes from the perspective of an administrator, a program chair, an English Dept chair, and a spokesperson for the discipline. He is speaking as one who has built or is still building a program, one with authority on his own campus and within the field. The final paragraph or so is terrific (see below).

We have built our program at the University of New Hampshire over the past ten years in what seemed to us a logical, professional manner. It has been the work of many people--Professors Thomas Carnicelli, Lester A. Fisher, Thomas Newkirk, hundreds of teaching assistants and part-time lecturers, as well as myself. Invited to look back at what we have done from the perspective of a department chairperson as well as a former director of Freshman English I think we instinctively built the program in four steps, each designed to achieve a new level of respect. (1)

We all have our English Department meeting anecdotes. One of my first was when I heard a colleague say, "We are the defenders of the humanistic faith. We must withhold our knowledge until there is a generation worthy of it." [...] Of course they are uneducated. That's why they are here. It is their job to learn and our job to teach. And to teach them we must respect their potential. (1)

In the section, The Second Respect, Murray sets out a list of ways that the Freshman English staff can be given respect--this ties into what he found when he arrived in the 1960s.