Meet the Nobel laureate who got away: Anne Carson.
Not long after Carson, the Canadian poet and essayist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, Princeton University praised her in a social media post that noted that she had once taught there as a classics professor. The university’s classics department also congratulated Carson on its website on Thursday.
And the university has also welcomed her back: Carson returned to campus a year ago to deliver a prestigious lecture to a standing-room audience of more than 400 people.
But the university’s praise of Carson also attracted criticism, as social media users highlighted that Princeton had denied her tenure — a highly coveted continuous teaching position — in the 1980s.
“Good job granting her tenure!” one person responded sarcastically on Facebook.
Ezra E. Fitz, an author who earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Princeton in 2000, lamented that his alma mater had not retained Carson.
“I wish she’d been granted a richly-deserved tenure so I could have taken a class of hers in the 90s,” he wrote on Facebook.
“She could teach ‘Translating the Phone Book’ and I’d have taken it,” Fitz added in an email.
University officials on Thursday declined to comment on the criticism online or Carson’s departure from the faculty. Princeton, as a policy, does not discuss its tenure process.
Carson’s agent, Nicole Aragi, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
In 2014, the writer Roy Scranton wrote in Contemporary Literature, a scholarly journal, that Princeton had denied tenure to Carson in the mid-1980s. She had previously taught at the University of Calgary. After leaving Princeton, she spent a year at Emory University before moving to McGill University, he wrote.
There did not seem to be any signs of hard feelings last fall when Princeton invited Carson to deliver the Robert Fagles Lecture for Classics in the Contemporary Arts and held a reception in her honor.
Carson additionally taught a special session of an undergraduate humanities course, according to a Princeton University Humanities Council summary of the event.
An illustration of Carson at the lecture also appeared on the cover of a classics department newsletter that was published over the summer.
The novelist Joyce Carol Oates, a retired professor of the humanities at Princeton who has been nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, praised Carson’s writing as “risky & original” in a social media post on Thursday.
“We’d met just once decades ago at Princeton where Anne Carson was an instructor in the Classics Dept. & I was — hypothetically — just a ‘visitor’ for one year in Creative Writing,” she wrote on X. “Not predictable that Anne would move on, & on, & on to numerous universities & I would remain at Princeton.”
Oates suggested that for some writers, the requirements of academic tenure were a “damper on their freedom,” including “teaching conventional courses semester after semester.”
“I do not know the circumstances of Anne Carson’s career — at all,” she wrote, “but would guess that she has been warmly welcomed at many colleges & universities.”
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