William Courtney Dowling (; born April 5, 1944, in
Warner, New Hampshire
Warner is a town in Merrimack County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 2,937 at the 2020 census. The town is home to Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, Rollins State Park and Mount Kearsarge State Forest.
The town's centr ...
) is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature emeritus at
Rutgers University
Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...
Warner, New Hampshire
Warner is a town in Merrimack County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 2,937 at the 2020 census. The town is home to Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, Rollins State Park and Mount Kearsarge State Forest.
The town's centr ...
Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern
''The Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern'' (also known as ''the Jacko'') is a college humor magazine, founded at Dartmouth College in 1908.
History
One of the magazine's oldest traditions is "Stockman's Dogs". In the October 1934 issue, F.C. Stockman (c ...
, 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, where he administered the Dudley House fellowship program during the Mastership of
Jean Mayer
Jean Mayer (19 April 1920 – 1 January 1993) was a French-American scientist best known for his research on the physiological bases of hunger and the metabolism of essential nutrients, and for his role in shaping policy on world hunger at bo ...
. Dowling is a past fellow of the
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH, University of Edinburgh) was founded in 1969 at the University of Edinburgh, for visiting fellows to engage in study and research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The current ...
Fulbright Lecturer
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...
in American Literature at the
Universidad Autonoma de Madrid
The Autonomous University of Madrid ( es, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid; UAM), commonly known as simply la Autónoma, is a Spanish public university located in Madrid, Spain. The university was founded in 1968 alongside the Autonomous Universi ...
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''; In 2012 he was the recipient of the
Drake Group
The Drake Group is a network of American academics who believe that college athletics has become too dominant a force on university campuses. It was established after a 1999 meeting at Drake University in Iowa by Drake University Provost, Dr. Jon E ...
's Robert Maynard Hutchins Award for his part in the struggle against Div IA athletics corruption in American higher education.
Dowling retired from Rutgers in 2016 after 28 years with the university.
Battle with Big East Sports
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.
In September 2007, a controversy arose when Rutgers Athletic Director
Robert Mulcahy
Robert Edward Mulcahy III (1932 – February 7, 2022) was an American college athletics administrator. He served as the athletic director at Rutgers University from 1998 to 2009.
Early life and education
Mulcahy attended Millburn High School in ...
accused Dowling of racism 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."
The Wall Street Journal labeled Mulcahy's attack a "campaign of character assassination" against a professor who had spoken out against athletics corruption at his university. In New Jersey, Dowling was most memorably defended by Donald and Roscoe Brown, in a column in the
Trenton Times
''The Times'' is a daily newspaper owned by Advance Publications that serves Trenton and the Mercer County, New Jersey area, with a strong focus on the government of New Jersey. The paper had a daily circulation of 77,405, with Sunday circulati ...
(2 October 2007): "I -- and many other blacks -- agree with Professor Dowling, that if Rutgers were serious about enhancing the development of a black intelligentsia, it would start recruiting 'black kids found in the library after school' as aggressively as it does black kids whose primary attributes are an ability to run fast and/or to jump high. Right on, Brother Dowling."
The Rutgers administration responded by releasing announcements stating that Rutgers ranks highly among state universities in the Academic Progress Report rankings compiled by the NCAA for the use of member schools.
''Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University'', Dowling's memoir of the Rutgers 1000 campaign, was the occasion of a long personal interview in ''Inside Higher Education, WCD: the Inside Higher Ed Interview and received substantial coverage in ''The New York Times,'' ''The Weekly Standard'', ''The Manchester Guardian'', and other publications. An interview with Ralph Nader's anti-sports-corruption group appeared o ''League of Fans'' in 2012. According to his Rutgers University web page, Dowling has recently published ''Professor's Song: A Life in Teaching'', a memoir of his career in literary studies.
Joseph Dennie
Joseph Dennie (August 30, 1768January 7, 1812) was an American author and journalist who was one of the foremost men of letters of the Federalist Era. A Federalist, Dennie is best remembered for his series of essays entitled ''The Lay Preacher ...
and the Port Folio, 1801-1812'' (University of South Carolina Press, 1999)
* ''The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle'' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991)
* ''Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut'' (University of Georgia Press, 1990)
* ''Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious'' (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984)
* ''Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson'' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981)
* ''The Boswellian Hero'' (University of Georgia Press, 1979)
* ''The Critic's Hornbook: Reading for interpretation'' (Crowell, 1977)