An Open Letter to the Academic Community, Activists, and Artists from friends and colleagues of Sherry Lynn Holland

This letter is a last­ditch effort to redress serious lapses of professionalism and academic integrity taking place within the Anthropology Department of Wayne State University. The author regrets that these matters should be placed before the court of public opinion, but systemic corruption and conflicts of interest within the department of Anthropology have repeatedly frustrated efforts to address these issues through “official” channels. While the failures of this department have cost Ms. Holland dearly the stakes involved are much higher than one scholar’s personal ambitions. Rather, they encompass the academy’s continued commitment to diversity in all forms, and the pursuit of knowledge un­warped by political and pecuniary interests.

Growing up in Detroit during the late 60’s and 1970’s, Sherry Holland was steered away from her interests in art and science by teachers and guidance counselors who took for granted their students’ futures as employees of the Big Three auto manufacturers. By the time she graduated high school, however, rapid deindustrialization had foreclosed on those opportunities for Sherry and an entire generation of working class Detroiters. Left without a clear path forward, she­ like an increasing number of Americans­ decided to pursue further education. In college, however, she grew increasingly aware that the history and people of Detroit had been inaccurately reflected in mainstream and academic discourse. Seeking to ameliorate these distortions, she embarked on graduate study in the Department of Anthropology at Wayne State University. Sherry began preparing a third dissertation under the supervision of her committee: Dr. Thomas Abowd (advisor), Dr. Pamela Crespin, Dr. Jaclyn Harden, and Dr. Joseph Gaughan (outside committee member). With this committee, Ms. Holland completed her qualifying exams, proceeded to candidacy, and prepared a first draft prospectus for the committee’s approval. Just as Sherry completed a preliminary draft of her IRB protocol in anticipation of beginning her fieldwork, a sudden ideological shift fractured the department into two warring camps. On one side of this ideological divide stood faculty members committed to the Department’s longstanding emphasis on activist scholarship and a pluralistic intellectual environment. Methodologically, this faction emphasized people centered ethnography, the importance of marginalized voices and local knowledge. Opposing them were a cohort of business and medical anthropologists with close links to Detroit’s corporate developers who championed a vision of urban revitalization grafting the language of activism and community onto the managerial­bureaucratic impulse of the firm. Dismissing the department's long­time commitment to the core ethical values of the disciplines focus on the social periphery as naive and out of sync with the funding demands of the modern university, this faction’s research tended toward the quantitative and catered to the managerial­bureaucratic needs of corporate funders.

Sherry’s original committee self­destructed as this toxic environment drove members from the department. Facing hostility from the department that ventured into racial and religious discrimination, Dr. Thomas Abowd left Wayne State. He subsequently filed and won a lawsuit against the school for violations of his civil rights. Dr. Pamela Crespin departed shortly after a well­attended speech in which she accused the faculty of putting corporate interests and careers ahead of students’ needs. Dr. Jacalyn Harden left the department shortly after being denied tenure­­a decision which she strongly suspected reflected retribution for her complaints about the department’s non­inclusive atmosphere and her own difficulties having her voice heard within the department. Following these defections the department became increasingly factionalized and any semblance of civility between professors evaporated. Graduate students, wishing for the most part to avoid this morasse and complete their work, found themselves drawn into the fray and used as pawns in these departmental turf wars.

Sherry­­because of her affiliation with the ousted faction as well as her research agenda­­ became a target. She did not learn until later that she and other graduate students thus marked as ideologically suspect were referred to as “dead wood” by the now­ascendant neoliberal faction. Not appreciating the extent of this hostility, Sherry put together a new dissertation committee including Andrew Newman and Todd Meyers, both of whom maintain personal and professional investments in the Detroit revitalization efforts which her dissertation critically engages.

In the months leading up to her defense, Sherry did receive positive feedback and useful critiques of her work from Andrew Newman but received no feedback from Prof. Meyers on the drafts she submitted to him­ leading her to believe that he harbored no substantial criticisms of the work. To her shock and horror, however, Professor Meyers seized on Sherry’s dissertation defense as an opportunity, not only to belatedly broach criticisms but to also vindictively ridicule her work and mock her learning disability in a public venue. Professor Newman, up until then cautiously encouraging and helpful, seemed to have been influenced by Professor Meyers to assume an equally antagonistic stance. They expressed hostility to the alternative narratives of Sherry’s African American, female and working class informants, as well as to Sherry’s analytic and theoretical sympathy toward these narratives. One asked “Aren’t the working class notoriously right­wing and reactionary?” While the other wondered “Why are there so many middle­aged black women in your work?” Similarly, the two directed comments at Sherry in which she was characterized as “ridiculous” and “arrogant,” and as having “nothing to offer to the scholarship on Detroit.” They went so far as to dismiss Sherry’s own reflections as a working­class Detroiter and perhaps most tellingly, Todd Meyers accused Sherry (and Detroiters in general) of being obsessed with the past. This accusation echoes exactly those discourses mobilized by cultural interlocutors­­ the developers and revitalizers and non­profits­­ all of those parties who want Detroit to be seen as a blank slate, prime for recolonization. In this one comment Meyers laid bare the ideological underbelly of the whole affair: Sherry’s dissertation challenged his self­perception as a benevolent engineer of broken communities and called into question his role as an “investor” in Detroit’s revitalization.

Professor Meyers bullied the other members of the committee to support him in this blatant suppression of Sherry’s point of view, her theoretical framework, and her personal identity as a working­class Detroiter. Following Meyers the committee insisted that she add literature from the pro “creative class” authors who write in support of entrepreneurs as adding value. This was done under the rubric of adding balance to her work, when in fact it was an attempt to water down and confuse Sherry’s critical analysis. All told the committee demanded several hundred substantial revisions of the dissertation, some of which included more field work. These criticisms had never been aired before, despite months of draft submissions. Sherry had only three weeks until her time­to­degree deadline but she attempted the edits anyways. She eventually de­prioritized Meyers’ requested revisions under the advice of her committee chair who deemed Meyers’ behavior and written comments abusive. Meyers rejected the dissertation claiming the revisions were not adequate. Sherry was failed and was denied her PhD on the grounds that her literature was deemed inadequate.

Todd Meyers’ issues with Sherry’s work has very little to do with scholarly rigor and everything to do with ideological and personal biases. Sherry’s informants and her analysis of aesthetics, artists, power, and revitalization sheds critical light on what he and his colleagues are doing in the academy and the city of Detroit. This style of scholarship increasingly clashes with the ambitions of a department bent on purging critical voices in the interest of courting corporate funders. Nor is Sherry the first scholar to suffer under the new dispensation at Wayne State’s Anthropology Department.

This departmental direction is a betrayal of the principles of intellectual and scientific freedom. It can only lead to a static academic discourse that has no real meaning for the people who have lived experiences in the city of Detroit. The recolonization of Detroit is taking place under a hegemony of cultural and aesthetic boosterism; a boosterism that is self­aware to the extent that it seeks to suppress critical perspectives.

What happened in Detroit is very complicated; the lives of those who made this history should be heard. The voices at the center of this project are not those that of dispassionate observers; they are people who lived through the struggles of everyday life in Detroit, as did Sherry and her family. Many of Sherry’s colleagues and fellow activists are concerned that Wayne State University has taken this action due specifically to a deeply troubling and unchallenged prejudice toward students with disabilities, towards minority students (race, religion class and gender), and for political reasons! Please send emails, letters, and phone calls immediately to the following persons to express your support of Sherry L. Holland and for freedom of academic expression for all scholars irrespective of race, class, gender, sexuality.