What's in a Number?

For the past two weeks, the Chronicle has been covering former SWT professor Michael Blumenthal's grievances against the university, specifically Blumenthal's sense that SWT hired poet Cyrus Cassells for a permanent teaching position (for which Blumenthal also applied) because Cassells is black. Blumenthal is white. Long before Hopwood attorney Steven W. Smith, whom Blumenthal chose to represent him, wrote a letter to SWT outlining Blumenthal's grievances, the Chronicle had planned a story about SWT's rising stature among the nation's creative writing programs. Blumenthal stated in a letter to the editor in last week's Chronicle that his choice of Smith as an attorney is not a sign that he is "implicitly allied" with the Hopwood decision. In a May 11 letter to Dr. Robert Gratz, vice-president for academic affairs, Blumenthal announced his intention to drop "any and all contemplated complaints" against SWT, alluding twice in the letter to SWT's status as a top ten program but not exactly in a laudatory manner. At one point Blumenthal writes, "I came to literature, quite frankly, as an escape from a world, and people, for whom some superficial lunacy about a `top ten' writing program is more meaningful than a profound understanding of the Ten Commandments."

It is evident that Blumenthal feels gravely wronged in what he categorizes as a dispute about basic standards like "integrity, and honesty, and honor," a dispute he asserts is not about race or who is and who is not hired by a top ten creative writing program. - Claiborne Smith