William C. Dowling
Encyclopedia
William C. Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature at Rutgers University
in New Brunswick, New Jersey
, specializing in 18th-century English literature
, literature of the early American Republic, and Literary Theory
.
, Dowling earned a Bachelor of Arts
(A.B.) at Dartmouth College
in Hanover, New Hampshire
, where he was editor of the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern
, the college humor magazine, a Senior Fellow in English, and recipient of the Perkins Prize in English and Classics. He received his Master of Arts
(M.A.) and Doctor of Philosophy
(Ph.D.) from Harvard University
. Dowling is a past fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh and National Humanities Center
, and has held Guggenheim
, National Endowment for the Humanities
, and Howard Foundation fellowships. In 1995, he was Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He is past winner of the Richard Beale Davis Prize for work in early American literature and a
New Jersey Council of the Humanities award for his book Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
Dowling came to national attention in the 1990s through his work with the Rutgers 1000 campaign http://www.ru1000.org/RU1000.html which fought for the removal of Division I sports from Rutgers. The original campaign voted to dissolve itself in 2002 when Francis L. Lawrence
resigned from the presidency. It was resurrected in 2007 to combat the new administration's proposal of a $102 million-dollar expansion of the Rutgers football stadium at a time when the university was struggling with a $65 million budget shortfall. A group of the movement's original members today continues to maintain a Rutgers 1000 website, and a group of faculty and students on campus to exert pressure for Rutgers' return to participatory athletics.
In September 2007, a controversy arose when Dowling was accused of racism by former athletics director Robert Mulcahy for having dismissed, in a New York Times interview, the claim that athletic scholarships provide educational opportunities for minority students: "If you were giving the scholarship to an intellectually brilliant kid who happens to play a sport, that's fine. But they give it to a functional illiterate who can't read a cereal box, and then make him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That's not opportunity. If you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who are at the library after school." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/education/26education.html
The Wall Street Journal labeled Mulcahy's attack a "campaign of character assassination" against a professor who had spoken out against athletics corruption at his university. In New Jersey, Dowling was most memorably defended by a distinguished African-American commentator, Donald Roscoe Brown, in a column in the Trenton Times (2 October 2007): "I -- and many other blacks -- agree with Professor Dowling, that if Rutgers were serious about enhancing the development of a black intelligentsia, it would start recruiting 'black kids found in the library after school' as aggressively as it does black kids whose primary attributes are an ability to run fast and/or to jump high. Right on, Brother Dowling." http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/mulmack3.html
The Rutgers administration responded by releasing announcements stating that Rutgers ranks highly among state universities in the Academic Progress Report rankings compiled by the NCAA for the use of member schools.
Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University, Dowling's memoir of the Rutgers 1000 campaign, was the occasion of a long personal interview in Inside Higher Education,http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/27/dowling and received substantial coverage in The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, The Manchester Guardian, and other publications. Dowling is presently at work on Blossomberry Farm, a memoir of the folk-blues scene at Dartmouth in the 1960s, http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/blossom.htm and Professor's Song: A Life in Teaching, a memoir of his career in literary studies.
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
in New Brunswick, New Jersey
New Brunswick, New Jersey
New Brunswick is a city in Middlesex County, New Jersey, USA. It is the county seat and the home of Rutgers University. The city is located on the Northeast Corridor rail line, southwest of Manhattan, on the southern bank of the Raritan River. At the 2010 United States Census, the population of...
, specializing in 18th-century English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
, literature of the early American Republic, and Literary Theory
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
.
Biography
Born in Warner, New HampshireWarner, New Hampshire
Warner is a town in Merrimack County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 2,833 at the 2010 census. The town is home to The College of Saint Mary Magdalen, Rollins State Park and Mount Kearsarge State Forest....
, Dowling earned a Bachelor of Arts
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
(A.B.) at Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...
in Hanover, New Hampshire
Hanover, New Hampshire
Hanover is a town along the Connecticut River in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 11,260 at the 2010 census. CNN and Money magazine rated Hanover the sixth best place to live in America in 2011, and the second best in 2007....
, where he was editor of the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern
Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern
The Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern is a college humor magazine, founded at Dartmouth College in 1908.The Jacko publishes print issues approximately four times a year, as well as regularly updated online content and occasional video productions...
, the college humor magazine, a Senior Fellow in English, and recipient of the Perkins Prize in English and Classics. He received his Master of Arts
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
(M.A.) and Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
(Ph.D.) from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. Dowling is a past fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh and National Humanities Center
National Humanities Center
The National Humanities Center is an independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. It is the only major independent institute for advanced study in all fields of the humanities in the United States. The NHC operates as a privately incorporated nonprofit and is not part of any...
, and has held Guggenheim
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
, National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
, and Howard Foundation fellowships. In 1995, he was Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He is past winner of the Richard Beale Davis Prize for work in early American literature and a
New Jersey Council of the Humanities award for his book Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
Dowling came to national attention in the 1990s through his work with the Rutgers 1000 campaign http://www.ru1000.org/RU1000.html which fought for the removal of Division I sports from Rutgers. The original campaign voted to dissolve itself in 2002 when Francis L. Lawrence
Francis L. Lawrence
Francis Leo Lawrence was the eighteenth president of Rutgers University, serving from 1990 to 2002.-Early years:Francis Leo Lawrence was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where he graduated from Mount St. Charles Academy in 1955. Lawrence earned his bachelor's degree from St. Louis University in...
resigned from the presidency. It was resurrected in 2007 to combat the new administration's proposal of a $102 million-dollar expansion of the Rutgers football stadium at a time when the university was struggling with a $65 million budget shortfall. A group of the movement's original members today continues to maintain a Rutgers 1000 website, and a group of faculty and students on campus to exert pressure for Rutgers' return to participatory athletics.
In September 2007, a controversy arose when Dowling was accused of racism by former athletics director Robert Mulcahy for having dismissed, in a New York Times interview, the claim that athletic scholarships provide educational opportunities for minority students: "If you were giving the scholarship to an intellectually brilliant kid who happens to play a sport, that's fine. But they give it to a functional illiterate who can't read a cereal box, and then make him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That's not opportunity. If you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who are at the library after school." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/education/26education.html
The Wall Street Journal labeled Mulcahy's attack a "campaign of character assassination" against a professor who had spoken out against athletics corruption at his university. In New Jersey, Dowling was most memorably defended by a distinguished African-American commentator, Donald Roscoe Brown, in a column in the Trenton Times (2 October 2007): "I -- and many other blacks -- agree with Professor Dowling, that if Rutgers were serious about enhancing the development of a black intelligentsia, it would start recruiting 'black kids found in the library after school' as aggressively as it does black kids whose primary attributes are an ability to run fast and/or to jump high. Right on, Brother Dowling." http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/mulmack3.html
The Rutgers administration responded by releasing announcements stating that Rutgers ranks highly among state universities in the Academic Progress Report rankings compiled by the NCAA for the use of member schools.
Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University, Dowling's memoir of the Rutgers 1000 campaign, was the occasion of a long personal interview in Inside Higher Education,http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/27/dowling and received substantial coverage in The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, The Manchester Guardian, and other publications. Dowling is presently at work on Blossomberry Farm, a memoir of the folk-blues scene at Dartmouth in the 1960s, http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/blossom.htm and Professor's Song: A Life in Teaching, a memoir of his career in literary studies.
Books
- Ricoeur on Time and Narrative: an Introduction to Temps et recit. (Notre Dame University Press, 2011)ISBN 13: 978-0-268-02608-0
- Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University (Penn State Press, 2007) ISBN 978-0-271-03293-1
- Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, And the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (University Press of New England, 2006) ISBN 1-58465-579-8
- The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory (University of Nebraska Press, 1999) ISBN 0-8032-6617-0
- Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph DennieJoseph DennieJoseph Dennie was an American author and journalist who was one of the foremost men of letters of the Federalist Era. A Federalist, Dennie is best remembered for his series of essays entitled The Lay Preacher and as the founding editor of Port Folio, a journal espousing classical republican values...
and the Port Folio, 1801-1812 (University of South Carolina Press, 1999) ISBN 1-57003-243-2
- The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) ISBN 0-691-06891-7
- Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (University of Georgia Press, 1990) ISBN 0-8203-1286-X
- Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984) ISBN 0-8014-9284-X
- Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981) ISBN 0-691-06455-5
- The Boswellian Hero (University of Georgia Press, 1979) ISBN 0-8203-0461-1
- The Critic's Hornbook: Reading for interpretation (Crowell, 1977) ISBN 0-690-00884-8