William C. Dowling

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William C. Dowling (born April 5,1944 in Warner, New Hampshire) is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, specializing in Eighteenth-century English literature, colonial American literature and literature of the early American Republic, Philosophy of Language, and Literary Theory.

[edit] Biography

Born in Warner, New Hampshire, 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 the National Humanities Center, and has held Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Howard Foundation fellowships. 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 Oliver 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 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. In 2007, in the wake of a decision to finance a $102 million football stadium expansion when Rutgers was attempting to deal with a $65 million budgetary deficit, the campaign was revived by a group of Rutgers students, alumni, and faculty.

In September 2007, a controversy arose when Dowling was accused of racism by 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." [1]

The controversy died when a number of distinguished African-American commentators rallied to Dowling's side while criticizing Div IA football as itself involving racial exploitation. "As a black dad who has coached and counseled black athletes," wrote Donald Roscoe Brown in a widely-discussed Trenton Times editorial, "I strongly support Professor Dowling and find Mulcahy's response to be consistent with the low academic expectations that many leaders of big-time athletic programs have of their black athletes." ([2])

Subsequently, the Rutgers administration released announcements stating that Rutgers ranks very highly among state universities in the Academic Progress Report rankings compiled by the NCAA for the use of member schools.

[edit] Books

  • 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 Dennie 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

[edit] External links