Z Stands for Zanzibar

As Juli McGruder retires, "Rump Parliament" salutes a fighter and her fight.

The Faculty Senate resolved in December 2007 that Juli McGruder had been a boon to the university. I could not agree more. I add my own resolution below to complement the necessarily bland pronouncement of the senate.

First and most important, Dr. Juli McGruder for almost thirty years strove to deny students, faculty, and staff at the University of Puget Clowns what she demurely called “the luxury of ignorance.” By this she meant that discriminations against women, racial and ethinic minorities, and those who have less income and wealth proliferate in part because people claim not to realize what they want very much not to realize. Juli shook colleagues and pupils. She made them admit that they should have known what they claimed not to know. More, she made them admit that they now knew what they claimed not to have known. Like Neil Young in “Ohio,” Juli Mack asked, “How can you run when you know?”

Second and almost as important, Professor McGruder was credentialed in Occupational Therapy, Anthropology, and cognate disciplines or specialties, making her that rarest of UPS faculty: she possessed rather than merely professed interdisciplinary learning and expertise. Juli did not fake interdisciplinary. She earned interdisciplinary. On a campus where many faculty extol interdisciplinary research and teaching but exemplify dilettantism, Professor McGruder tantalized colleagues with what might not merely seem but be.

Third and not as important, Juli McGruder tried to make faculty governance more accountable and less corrupt. Her Sisyphean labors included service on the Faculty Senate and on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC]. Many senators quietly contradicted decanal subtrefuges and presidential mendacity; Senator McGruder called bullshit in senate meetings and in plenary meetings of the faculty. Many toadies and tools were ensconced on the FAC despite garnering fewer votes from peers; Professor McGruder took being passed over as the compliment that it was and won election until finally a dean let her serve. Members of the senate and FAC alike often serve as if campaigning for promotion or other favors or as if they lusted after respectability. [And those are the relatively heroic. Lesser senators and FACers cannot recall authenticity or independence!] McGruder did not want to be a “reliable, responsible” member of the faculty or anything else that required major surgery on spine or gonads. Instead, McGruder committed candor, a habit disgusting to administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists alike.

As Dr. McGruder exits the University of Puget Clowns, she acknowledges honestly that students and faculty still walk and talk without acknowledging the privileges and patronage that they receive, without admitting that “interdiscplinary” is more shibboleth than modifier, and without concerning themselves about which “contract of depravity” [The Hustler, 1961] shapes them. Juli sees that the luxury of ignorance, the dilettantism, and the docility remain as she leaves. Nonetheless, Juli McGruder tried. She tried the patience of presidents and deans. She tried to induce faculty to stand and speak their truths. She tried to live up to intellectual ideals.

So here is my toast to Professor Juli McGruder: Like Randall P. McMurphy [Are the initials “R.P.M.” coincidental? I think not.], you tried to set other inmates free. Unlike Randall P. McMurphy, you leave the asylum with your frontal lobes connected. If you see Nurse Ratched on your way off campus, slap her for us, would you?