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thanking all my teachers in my mfa thesis EXCEPT dean young, who refused to meet with me on campus yet hung out and drank with my male classmates, & whose response to my request for a rec letter was "your work is not part of my workload"—it really is the little things :')
also the prof of "claudia rankine has never written a poem in her life" (said to me) & "you can't write a poem about a tree these days unless it falls on a person of color" (to my friend) & gratuitously saying the n word in a classroom (mine!) w/ zero black students in it
(he was explaining, helpfully, what language is off-limits to white writers 
)
)
when last year's first-year students finally formally registered a complaint, he stopped teaching in his workshop & started just bringing a stopwatch & telling each student to talk for 25 minutes. TWO (2) students showed up to the final class in the fall.
i spent (wasted!) countless hours of grad school complaining & listening to my peers complain about him, both on and off campus—feeling confused and hurt and still wanting to learn from him, blaming myself for his behavior
fuck a whisper network
fuck a whisper network
i just graduated and it's STILL incredibly scary to say any of this publicly; i'm worried about retaliation, about being seen as indiscreet and unappreciative and untrustworthy, about being quietly excluded from other academic & literary institutions
one student DROPPED OUT of our sister mfa in their 1st semester because of this. they told me: "I just didn't work my whole life to be in that situation. And I know I wouldn't have to work with him again, but the whole space felt tainted, & I genuinely felt unsafe"
they told me: "I have actual nightmares about Dean. And as soon as I got back to New York, any time I'd talk to anyone vaguely connected to the writing world & told them I left UT, they'd say 'because of Dean Young?'"
a current mfa student, also afraid of retaliation, says: "he’s a bully in workshop. three students had to technically switch to an 'independent workshop' out of fear he’d fail us for speaking out against him. he decided to not even make eye contact with students he didn’t like."
he was my favorite poet, someone i looked up to; he generously blurbed my first book years before grad school, when i was a 21-year-old stranger emailing him out of nowhere. i'm still bewildered, disappointed, hurt, angry on behalf of each student he's affected like this
i do want to say that my program—our other faculty and ESPECIALLY our admin and staff—otherwise treated me exceptionally well, making it possible for me to write 2 new books & teaching me SO much about both craft & community. this is not their fault & i don't regret my mfa at all
another current student: "The general feeling I got was that he would not mentor you from a professional distance – he only had interest in being your teacher if he could also hang out with you, drink with you, trash talk other students with you, etc."
"As someone who has been abused by boundary-crossing authority figures before, I desperately wanted to maintain a professional distance but I felt like this middle-ground was just not there."
"He would become disproportionately angry at seemingly random things. I found myself worrying about his reaction a lot. I felt like there were long, bitter arguments in his head and if you said something that brushed too closely to those subjects, he would rant at you or yell..."
"...There were long, awkward silences in workshop after these outbursts because nobody wanted to speak next and risk being humiliated like that."
"Dean’s comment 'you can’t write a poem about a tree these days unless it falls on a person of color' was made on the 1st day of class, the very 1st class I took at this program. He kicked off the semester with that, then complained about the English dept the rest of the time."
another student says: "I studied with Dean in 2018 during my first semester of grad school. I’m North African and have an easy to pronounce (not English) first name. Dean repeated mispronounced my name in class even after I corrected him in private and in public..."
"Several weeks in, I firmly corrected him in class and he responded with: 'I’m from Pennsylvania, you can’t expect much from me.' I promptly responded with: 'I am too.' He was flustered, embarrassed and stormed out of the classroom the minute our class ended."
"I took it up with the director of the program and sent an email directly requesting he work on his pronunciation. Not only did he continue to call me by a different name, but he changed the pronunciation altogether and used his new version often."
"This is my personal experience with him and his lack of care and respect for his students. I got a strong feeling of dislike/discomfort from him when it came to the focus on diversifying the program/poetry world."
the student says: "On multiple occasions he made bigoted and pointed comments about gender and race as well, handling certain subject matters with a brashness and seemingly deliberate lack of sensitivity."
thank you all for your supportive responses! sharing all this has been extremely scary, but i am glad (and sad) i'm not alone. i may continue to add to this thread with experiences other current/former students who fear retaliation want to share; not every story is mine to tell.
