The case of Michael Paull
Pollitt describes the case of Michael Paull, a Ph.D. student in the English department at UNC, who was fired after a media maelstrom misrepresented his assignment to undergraduate students about Anthony Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." Pollitt was the president of the UNC chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and offered counsel to Paull during the process. Though Paull was initially removed from his position as a teaching statement, he was reinstated after an investigation found he should never have been removed in the first place. In addition, Pollitt describes the role of Jesse Helms (then, a commentator for WRAL-TV), UNC Chancellor Carlysle Sitterson, and the response of the national media.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Daniel H. Pollitt, February 22, 1991. Interview L-0064-5. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
Every other year there was some episode. A
fun one, sort of, was Michael Paull.
- ANN MCCOLL:
-
When was this? What year was this?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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This was 1967. Michael Paull was a graduate student in English and he was
a teaching assistant. There they have large freshmen courses and then
one day a week they break into smaller groups and meet with teaching
assistants who are graduate students working on something. Michael Paull
was a very nice young man, married, and he'd come here from I
believe Cornell and was in his second or third year being toward his
Ph.D. degree. At that time we were starting the Upward Bound program
where in the summer time we would recruit juniors and seniors in high
schools, blacks, minorities, and bring them to the campus for five or
six weeks. They'd live in the dorm and they'd see
college life and they would have various courses which would sharpen
their skills in English and math and whatever. Hopefully they would be
interested in health matters. The med school was big on this to try to
encourage people to take pre-med types of courses.
Michael Paull, the graduate student, was very interested in that and he
worked with the Upward Bound. It was started by the Y. It
wasn't started by the University. It was started by the YMCA
and got private support and then eventually the University adopted it.
But Michael Paull had also one summer gone to Texas to work in their
Upward Bound when they decided they should have one modeled on ours. He
had been in ours, so he went down to Texas to show them how we had done
it and to get it started. You didn't make a lot of money when
you work for the YMCA on a volunteer project. So he was a very
altruistic person and well-regarded by everyone. Now what happened was
that they had…. He was from Detroit, Michigan and he had
assigned a poem, "To His Coy Mistress" was the name of
the poem. It was written by Andrew Marvell.
- ANN MCCOLL:
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That was a very old poem.
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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Very old poem. I was just trying to find it. I have my file here. I have
a big file. Here's the story in the Sunday New York Times of
October 23, 1966.
- ANN MCCOLL:
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So this is being reported?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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Oh, boy was it reported. What happened was that Michael Paull who was
this young graduate student, assigned his class to write a theme on
Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress" which
is, you know, like twenty-five lines long or something. Well, I
can't remember what it said, but there was a
misinterpretation and one of the freshman coeds told her mother that she
had to write a poem on "my first seduction" which was
not true. At least that's what the mother reported at a
dinner party to Jesse Helms who was then a radio
commentator in Raleigh, now our Senator. And the mother told Jesse Helms
that her daughter had told her that she had to write on "my
first seduction" and the assignment was given by a young male
graduate student.
- ANN MCCOLL:
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Nothing was said about it being about this poem?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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No. So Jesse Helms called the University and asked what was going on.
"Are your young male graduate students trying to seduce the
freshmen coeds this way?" And they didn't know
anything about it, you know, and they said they'd call back.
But in any event, Jesse went on the air.
- ANN MCCOLL:
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During his editorials?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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During his editorial and complained that the University was
assigning…. That the freshmen coeds had to write about their
love affairs to the young graduate students who naturally were trying to
seek out what was doing around. So that was the thing. And as soon as
Jesse…. And he said, "What are they doing about
it?" Well, immediately Carlysle Sitterson, the Chancellor,
removed Paull from his teaching assignment to a research assignment, so
he was no longer a TA, a teaching assistant, he was an RA, a research
assistant.
- ANN MCCOLL:
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Did they investigate what was going on?
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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No they didn't investigate. The problem was that the head of
the English department was visiting. He was visiting at Texas. Maynard
Adams was the acting head and he's a great fellow, but he
teaches Thoreau and he lives in a world of his own. A good fellow, but
in a world of his own, and he thought he was doing
them a favor by giving him more time to be a research assistant than to
be teaching. In any event, it happened. So here's the New
York Times: "A poem arouses university storm," is the
headline. Subline is, "Teacher transferred over theme on
seduction." It starts off, "To his coy mistress. A
poem about seduction written more than three hundred years ago by Andrew
Marvell, one of the great poets of the Puritan period in England, has
risen to stir a tempest on the campus of the University of North
Carolina." That's the lead paragraph and it goes on
to say that "An instructor has been transferred from teaching
to research duties. Students are mounting protests." And
that's true. They then went to investigate his students.
There were twenty-two in his class and they all signed a petition asking
that he be returned and many of them said that he was the best teacher
that they had at Carolina and they liked him and they wanted him back.
What had happened again, was that Michael Paull had read and asked the
students to read their essays and one or two had exaggerated and so on,
and Paull told them that that's not what he had had in mind
when he had asked them to…. Their assignment was to discuss
the poem in terms of what they had been learning in poetry writing;
onomatopoeia, alliteration and rhyming and whatever. And
that's what they were supposed to do. They weren't
supposed to give their personal experiences at all, but one or two had,
you know. After they did the other, they went on and added things. Then
when he was transferred, the students were upset and the twenty-two
students signed the petition. "We want him back." All
of them. One hundred percent. And then the graduate
students in the English department said they were going on a strike and
they were no longer going to teach until he was reinstated. The Tarheel
got involved and had editorials saying, "Put him back. What
kind of a University is this?" And the President of the student
body, Bob Powell, a great fellow, said that the student council was
going to have an investigation. We have a lot of graduates in the press
media. Brinkley and Tom Wicker and a whole bunch of them.
- ANN MCCOLL:
-
The big names.
- DANIEL POLLITT:
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The big names. So they were writing editorials. The Wall Street Journal
had a lead editorial on academic freedom and they all made fun of it and
Life magazine had a full page reprint of the poem and sort of made fun
of Southern institutions that can't stand up to having
students comment on a three hundred year old poem. Again, from the New
York Times, "An instructor has been transferred from teaching
to research duties and students are mounting protests. Faculty members
are disturbed. Chancellor Carlysle Sitterson, who recommended the
transfer, has had to issue an clarifying statement and justification.
And then the clouds began to gather when Michael Paull, an instructor in
freshman English, assigned his class to write a theme on the subject of
‘To His Coy Mistress’, a poem that appears in many
college textbooks and anthologies used in classwork. The resulting
themes were read aloud and some of the students found them embarrassing.
At least one regarded some of them as vulgar. The instructor also was
embarrassed and asked that the themes be
rewritten. One of the students apparently wrote her parents about the
incident and the parents brought it to the attention of WRAL T.V., a
television station in Raleigh with right wing views that has been a
frequent critic of liberalism at the University. All twenty-two of Mr.
Paull's students signed petitions requesting his return to
teaching duties. Between two hundred and three hundred students and
faculty members organized into the Committee for Free Inquiry and asked
that Mr. Paull be reinstated and that a review board be set up in the
English department. Some newspapers expressed concern. The Greensboro
Daily News declared, ‘The spectacle of a great University
reassigning its instructors at the behest of a bullying television
station is hardly believable.’ The Daily Tarheel campus
newspaper headed its editorial, ‘Who's afraid of
Jesse Helms? The University, that's
who."’ So it went. They did appoint a committee in
the English department to review the whole situation. There are five
members; five tenured senior members of the faculty were appointed to
look into it and this was a fig leaf. You can't just put him
back and acknowledge you were wrong. So you have a committee and the
committee…. Another report here is nineteen pages long and
there were distinguished people on the committee and they recommended
that he be reinstated, that it had all been an misunderstanding. And he
was reinstated.