a letter by Jonny Gray and Craig Gingrich-Philbrook criticizing Villanova University and President Fr. Peter Donoghue circulated today via the NYU performance studies listserve. it being described as "open," i haven't sought permission to reprint it here, but i'll place the full text after the jump; the nutshell content is that the writers are breaking a silence surrounding the retraction of Tim Miller's invitation to work with Villanova students on campus. i'm working under the assumption that if it an open letter is released into the wild, it qualifies for posting even though i wasn't one of the original addressees. the Villanova pages about the upcoming conference--on, sad-facedly, "the economies and ethics of performance"--are here, and a write-up of the circumstances from the campus "Cardinal Newman Society" is here, characterizing Tim Miller as a "militant gay rights performance activist" (not a compliment in this context, although LGBTQ rights and queer studies deserve vigilant champions).
interesting tidbits include Fr. Donoghue's self-identification as a theatre director, and the connection, by him, of his work in that context to Miller's dis-invitation:
forewarned, the letter is long and has footnotes (and has not been rigorously re-formatted by me for this presentation).
interesting tidbits include Fr. Donoghue's self-identification as a theatre director, and the connection, by him, of his work in that context to Miller's dis-invitation:
As a theatre director, I have faced the issue of how to evoke such a response in a way that I deem appropriate for myself, my actors and audiences. . . . . As an artist and a priest, I find the choices that Mr. Miller makes to be disturbing. While some may disagree, as president of Villanova University I can assure you it is the explicit, graphic and sexual content of his performances that led to this decision—a decision that in no way was affected by issues of sexual orientationaccording to the open letter that follows the jump, Miller was not scheduled to perform any of his own work. also interesting: the letter writers' trenchant observation that since Miller's books are available in the university's library, it is his actual, embodied queer personage (and, presumably its potential for threatening pedagogy) that becomes visible as objectionable in the administration's eyes.
forewarned, the letter is long and has footnotes (and has not been rigorously re-formatted by me for this presentation).
Why Jonny Gray and I are not attending the Villanova Conference
by Craig Gingrich-Philbrook<http://www.facebook.com/craig. gingrichphilbrook> on
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 3:43pm ·**
Friends and Colleagues,
As the conference at Villanova approaches and people ask if we are going,
we’ve felt increasingly disturbed by how little people know about the
University’s decision to ban Tim Miller and as yet unmet assurances made by
the Chair of the Villanova Department and the planning committee of the
conference. It was in the context of those assurances that we elected to
remain relatively silent about what we (particularly Craig) knew about the
decision by Villanova’s President to ban Tim. It is in the context of those
unmet assurances that we elect to break our silence at this time and ask
you to reconsider your decision to attend the conference at Villanova.
From Craig: Context
On February 16, 2012, I received an email from performance artist Tim
Miller, whose outspoken queer performance is familiar and important to many
of us. Tim indicated that there was trouble brewing related to his
scheduled visit to Villanova University. Villanova had *invited* him to
come to present an autobiographical performance workshop for students, out
of respect for the institution, he and his primary sponsor, Heidi Rose,
felt it wise to limit his visit to helping students develop their work,
forgoing any performance of his own.
University announcements for the workshop drew the attention of the
Cardinal Newman Society, a conservative, arguably reactionary, student
organization, the national office of which specializes in protesting any
invitation by any Catholic university to any speaker at variance with the
most conservative interpretation of church doctrine. Past targets include
Bishop Desmond Tutu, for his positions about the importance of family
planning in developing nations, and Sister Helen Prejean (author of *Dead
Man Walking*), who took issue with Pope John-Paul II’s promulgation of an
exception to his otherwise notable opposition to the death penalty. (For
more perspective on the Newman Society and its chilling effect on Catholic
campuses, see Sirois.) (Note 1)
While other Catholic universities have resisted the Newman Society’s
censorship (e.g., Gonzaga’s recent refusal to cancel Bishop Tutu),
Villanova President, Fr. Peter Donoghue, succumbed, banning Tim’s
workshop. Donoghue defended that choice in a statement that thoroughly
mischaracterized Tim’s work as explicit, graphic, and sexual, appearing to
support the Newman Society’s charge that Tim’s work contains simulations of
sex acts. Donohue offered his assurances that Tim’s work was objectionable
in these ways, placing it at odds with the university’s Augustinian
mission--*despite the fact that Tim was not scheduled to perform his own
work. *(Note 2) Fr. Donoghue offered these assurances without ever seeing
Miller’s work live, resorting to a small number of YouTube snippets.
Miller’s books are in the university library, so the implication that
students required protection from his work, besides infantilizing them,
shielded them only from contact with him *as an embodied human being*.
Worse, Donoghue’s statement makes no effort to distance itself from the
Newman Society’s blog postings about Miller. Reading through them, the
conservative contempt for GLBTQ persons and performance “art” (in permanent
scare quotes) is difficult to miss. (Note 3)
Additionally, much of the rhetoric about Miller was simply untrue. The
Newman Society characterized ACT UP, to which Miller belongs, as an
“anti-Catholic organization” and claimed that Miller participated in the
Stop the Church action (which took place in New York City while Miller was
in Los Angeles). That ACT UP protest was against the New York Archdiocese’s
“public stand against AIDS education and condom distribution, and its
opposition to . . . abortion.”(Note 4) ACT UP never protested against
Catholicism in its own right, never advocated laws against Catholics, never
rallied people to oppose the marriage of Catholics, never sought the legal
right not to hire them, never lobbied for the legal right of their children
to bully them, and so on, as Catholic organizations have against GLBTQ
people. To characterize ACT UP this way was misleading and incendiary, a
defamation of an organization that works to protect an excruciatingly
vulnerable population from prejudices that continue to fuel the HIV-AIDS
epidemic, stigmatizing those who contract it and hope merely to live.
In the end, the president cowered before such falsehood; perpetuated much
of it; misrepresented the work of an important artist who is friend to many
of us and many of our students. His work at our institutions over the years
has made him a colleague, one we rely upon to help students compose
compelling images and narratives that move toward social justice on all
fronts. Villanova’s President characterized Tim’s mere presence and
pedagogy—which is to say, his embodied becoming—as so dangerous that he
couldn’t even interact with students on campus in a teaching role *because
of his history and identity as a queer performer who dared to speak back to
power and might teach others to do so.* To fail to defend Tim is to fail a
colleague, to fail the very work that so many of us strive to do in
classrooms and on stages. *It is to fail to defend performance and
performance pedagogy.*
As Miller’s friend and a confidant in this situation, I spent a good deal
of time on the phone and emailing with him, writing the president before
the public announcement of the decision to describe Tim’s considerable
commitment to correcting parallel misrepresentations of Catholics (Tim lost
friends working as missionaries in Latin America). I also prepared a
Change.org petition once the cancellation was announced. Many of you signed
it, and I thank you for that. During this same time I also served on the
planning committee for the Economies and Ethics of Performance conference.
As the situation with Tim unfolded, it became clear that I could no longer
participate in good conscience. When I told the planning committee of my
intentions to resign, Heidi emailed me that her Chair, Maurice Hall, wanted
to speak with me by phone. We spoke on February 29th. In that
conversation, Hall indicated that he had asked members of the department to
refrain from public statements in support of Tim specifically or the power
of performance as free speech more generally until the department could
speak with one voice. He assured me that they were at work on crafting such
a statement. Months have passed and that statement has yet to surface. Its
appearance at this time would be tragically belated, the department having
now forfeited two moments of kairos: the time of the cancellation and the
time of the substitute workshop, hosted by Bryn Mawr.
Additionally, Hall told me that the department had decided to bring in
Chuck Morris, a rhetorician specializing in Queer history, to help
compensate for the situation. Yet, as Chuck’s friend, I was aware that he
had been invited well prior to the Tim situation, not as a form of redress.
I knew that Chuck had become aware of Tim’s cancellation, had written the
department when the news broke to determine if he was still welcome, and as
of that time had yet to hear. Eventually, weeks after his initial inquiry,
the Dean did contact Chuck, indicating that he was welcome to come as
invited. Maintaining that invitation was an important step, and Chuck
courageously addressed Tim’s situation in his remarks. Nonetheless, the
differential treatment does leave open the unfortunate perception that
queer rhetorical study is safe for students, but queer performance remains
uniquely dangerous, worthy of disparagement, and subject to censure. I want
to make two caveats about this perception. First, queer rhetorical study
hardly enjoys any blanket immunity to censure; second, I want to be clear
that Chuck does not share this differential view of the value of
performance and rhetoric (and I urge you to keep an eye out for his
forthcoming work on the resistance offered by queer archivist-historians).
An increasing number of us work to restore joint access to areas of mutual
concern to rhetoric and performance by acknowledging shared histories and
stakes in critical scholarship and objects of study. This joint project to
resist characterizing either rhetoric or performance negatively is all the
more reason to resist local manifestations of the differential view
embodied in the juxtaposition of Tim’s disinvitation with Chuck’s
reaffirmed invitation—a reaffirmation that in itself took far too much time
to secure.
From Craig and Jonny: Why We are Not Coming
When we withdrew from the conference and Craig from the planning committee
in the wake of our dissatisfaction with Tim’s treatment, the discourse
about it, and the lack of will to cancel the conference if logistics didn’t
allow its relocation, we opted to do so in a statement prepared jointly
with the planning committee and to leave it at that. We did so at least in
part because of the promise that the conference would deal with the Tim
situation openly and honestly and that the Department would be forthcoming
with the statement Hall had promissed. We believed that the Performance
Studies Division would be forfeiting the opportunity to send a message to
all Catholic University presidents about the wider reputational
consequences of succumbing to the Newman Society’s campaigns of
misinformation and bigotry (a message they need in order to continue to
support speakers like Tutu, Prejean, and Miller). But we also recognized
the felt necessity many experienced to meet as a group and consider our
collective future.
Months after that compromise, we have yet to receive that promised
statement from the department. The Conference schedule available on the web
has yet to be changed to reflect our absences or the addition of any
session dedicated to discussing or protesting Tim’s exclusion from campus.
*It is as if nothing has happened.*
* *
From an ecological standpoint, we feel that the discipline we have
dedicated much of our adult lives to faces a tipping point. Indeed, the
conference itself acknowledges this exigency. We face some levels of
encroachment on what we believe to be our territory, more competition for
resources, and a political/economic environment increasingly spoiled by
toxic perceptions of performance and its value. It is *precisely* these
circumstances that lead us to withdraw from the conference. Under these
ecological conditions:
- We believe that the purpose of this conference was to discern how a
communication-centered performance studies can survive and distinguish
itself in this environment.
- We believe that what makes such a performance studies unique is its
commitment to free and open communication, the opening up of diverse
perspectives—including those of historically minoritized subjects.
- We believe that a communication-centered performance studies takes a
broad view of context and system, recognizing how what appears to be an
isolated incident of oppression—in this case, the disinvitation of Tim
Miller—actually contributes to broader discourses of disparagement. We
believe these broader discourses encourage the perceptions of bullies—in
legislatures and on school playgrounds—that GLBTQ persons are fair game for
misrepresentation, regressive legislation, and violence.
- We believe that predicating Tim’s disinvitation on rumor and the
briefest exposure to his artistic labor licenses the view that university
administrators can judge and dismiss performance with a passing glance and
cursory opinion, especially when such an opinion favors that of the loudest
and least-informed of its economically privileged benefactors. We believe
that licensing this view undoes the good work undertaken to create tenure
and promotion documents for the division and the National Review Board
created to demonstrate and fulfill the need for rigorous,*informed* review
of performance work.
- We believe that a communication-centered performance studies
contributes as much as rhetoric does to the vitality of its home
department’s ability to offer a well-rounded curriculum, one that nourishes
a holistic view of speaking by including aesthetic communication in its
purview; we believe that, in turn, such home departments fail performance
studies when they refuse to speak out—immediately, vigorously—to protect
that speech from erasure or mischaracterization.
- We believe that a communication-centered performance studies that
holds a conference at Villanova has significantly compromised the very
principles and commitments that make it unique in a field of rivals. To
sacrifice our distinction in this way, through our own inaction, forfeits
our speciation, as it were, allowing us to fall back into an
undifferentiated population more concerned with the show going on than the
politics, economy, and ethics of that production in its communicative
context.
We recognize that many good people will not share our views. If you must
go, we ask that you call upon the planning committee to finally, quickly
post a revised schedule to replace the false one that persists on the
conference site. Such a schedule should indicate clearly when and how
conference attendees can expect the direct and honest discussion of the
issue the planners have promised, including the consequences of continuing
to defer departmental support of our Performance Studies colleagues at
Villanova. If the planners and attendees believe that such a session would
provide sufficient reflexivity about the affair, that session should be
publicly announced. The injuries done to Tim and to performance were done
publicly; a remedy conducted in secret is no remedy at all.
Until such time as the department and president publicly apologize to Tim
Miller and vigorously distance themselves from the Newman Society’s
falsehoods and the abuse of minority groups the President’s decision
represent, we refuse to continue in our relative silence about our
knowledge of this affair. To be frank, we could say much more than we have
here. We refuse to collude with the further promises and postponements of
an institution determined to burnish its alibi that Tim was simply too
extreme, *as a person, a performer, and an educator*, to allow anywhere
near its students. In short, we refuse to collude with its efforts to
stifle communication, particularly when the conference is hosted by the
Waterhouse Institute, which will use that sponsorship as evidence of
Villanova’s commitment to social justice. On a day like today, when the
voters in the state of North Carolina consider a constitutional amendment,
motivated by the very prejudices that animate the Newman Society and Fr.
Donoghue’s gross mischaracterization of Tim and his work, that is simply
too much to ask.
Craig Gingrich-Philbrook
Associate Professor
William and Galia Minor Professor of Creative Communication
Southern Illinois University
Jonny Gray
Associate Professor
Southern Illinois University
Notes
1. Sirois, Emily. “The Right to Choose: Orthodoxy May be the Big Winner
in the Furor over the Selection of Commencement Speakers at Catholic
Universities in the United States.”*Conscience* Summer (2005).
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb064/is_2_26/ai_ n29184244/. 2/24/12.
Web.
2.
http://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/president/speeches/ officeofthepresident
_february2012.html
3. If you visit the site to read their response to Tim’s cancellation, I
urge you read some of their other recent posts and press releases to gain a
sense of the organization Donohue’s decision encouraged.
http://blog.cardinalnewmansociety.org/ 2012/02/24/villanova-accused- of-homophobia-by-cancelled- performance-artist/
)
4. http://www.actupny.org/YELL/stopchurch99.html.
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