From the issue dated April 4, 2003
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Fall From GraceOne lie, retold over 26 years, undoes a professor's teaching careerBy ROBIN WILSON Last spring, Quincy Troupe was at the pinnacle of his academic career.
His $141,000 salary made him one of the best-paid humanities professors at the University of California at San Diego. An urbane and at times profane man who favors French Cabernets and elegant black suits by a Senegalese tailor, Mr. Troupe stands out in a crowd with his 6-foot-2-inch frame and shoulder-length dreadlocks. During his 12 years at the university, he had become not only one of the best-known black poets in the United States, but a charismatic figure in the San Diego arts world, where his intimate dinner parties attracted renowned intellectuals, artists, and writers. One night about a year ago, Mr. Troupe, who is 63, received some news that should have been the crowning achievement of his career. He was sitting down to dinner at his home in the La Jolla hills when the telephone rang. He had, the caller informed him, been chosen as one of three finalists to be the first official poet laureate of California. But Mr. Troupe didn't revel in the honor. "At that moment, when I hung the phone up, I thought ... 'Oh, man. This is not cool.'" Despite all his achievements, one thing Mr. Troupe lacked was a college diploma. That may not have posed a problem if, for 26 years, Mr. Troupe had not been listing a bachelor's degree from Grambling College on his CV. While he claimed to have graduated in 1963, he never even finished a semester. The moment of reckoning came last fall, four months after California's governor announced that Mr. Troupe would be the state's poet laureate, when a routine background check turned up the lie. Once confronted, Mr. Troupe immediately resigned the post. After the university told him it was considering suspending him for up to a year without pay, he decided he would retire in June. The news shook the literature department, where Mr. Troupe has been a beloved teacher. "It was horrifying for everybody," says Fanny Howe, an emeritus professor of literature. Many in the department say the university overreacted and pushed Mr. Troupe out. As a poet, they believed, it was Mr. Troupe's writing, not his academic credentials, that had earned him his job. "His misstatements about his undergraduate career were sort of like a baseball player who had won the MVP and World Series and then was discovered to have lied about his achievements in Little League," says Todd C. Kontje, chairman of the literature department. As the news has trickled out across the country, some former colleagues have been disappointed. Rainer Schulte, a professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas who has known Mr. Troupe for 30 years, recalls thinking, "Quincy, I thought you were more intelligent." Message About Truth-Telling The Troupe affair and other recent scandals involving faculty members who falsify credentials have prompted questions about whether universities are doing enough to check the backgrounds of people they hire. No one at UC-San Diego, for example, ever verified Mr. Troupe's educational credentials when he was hired as a full professor in 1990. Mr. Troupe's case also raises questions about whether academic credentials really matter in certain fields, like poetry and art. Should one lie ruin someone's credibility and career? Some say there's no question that it should. Plagiarism, faking academic credentials, stealing research -- all deal a serious blow to academic integrity, and a high price must be exacted. Mr. Troupe is hardly the first professor or college administrator to be caught fabricating his résumé. Pat J. Palmer worked for the University of Iowa for 11 years as a research scientist before it was discovered last summer that she had never earned any of the four degrees she claimed on her CV -- not the doctorate from Iowa itself, nor two master's degrees, nor a B.A. from the University of Northern Iowa. Following that finding, she was charged with falsifying public documents, a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail and a $1,500 fine. (Ms. Palmer could not be reached for comment.) In the wake of the Palmer case, the university has begun checking the academic credentials of all faculty and staff members before they are hired. Lana Nguyen, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Regina, in Saskatchewan, was found guilty of fraud and forgery in 2001 after the university charged her with listing her ex-husband's academic degrees and publications as her own in order to get hired and obtain research grants. And the Rev. Eugene R. Kole announced his resignation as president of Quincy University, in Illinois, last fall after the Board of Trustees discovered he had claimed two master's degrees he'd never earned. (Father Kole could not be reached for comment.) Martha C. Nussbaum, a professor of philosophy, law, and divinity at the University of Chicago, says people caught fabricating their CV's must be fired. "You don't want somebody there teaching students who gives that kind of moral example," she says. "It's a wrong that goes to the heart of the integrity of the academic enterprise." But Richard Attiyeh, vice chancellor for research and dean of graduate studies at UC-San Diego, says circumstances matter. "When we hired [Mr. Troupe] he was somebody who had many years of productive activity as a scholar, and he never failed to meet our expectations in any way," he says. "The question of his bachelor's degree was not particularly critical." After all, no one needs a B.A. to be a good poet -- Ms. Howe, the emeritus professor at UCSD, doesn't have an undergraduate degree either. And many well-known writers who teach at colleges and universities lack advanced degrees. Still, the university knew that "as a matter of principle" it had to take the issue seriously, says Mr. Attiyeh. "The main concern here is the message that we send to our students about truth-telling." Higher education is behind the curve in recognizing résumé fraud as a "major trend," says D. Frank Vinik, a lawyer for United Educators, an insurance company for colleges and schools. "We should not assume that just because people are in the academic world they are any different ... that there are fewer bad apples," he says. "A lot of institutions do not verify academic credentials and employment history as much as they should, particularly for faculty." University lawyers are beginning to realize, says Mr. Vinik, that "résumé fraud is much more common than people want to believe" and that "it knows no restrictions in terms of professional field or level of position." Race Case? Mr. Troupe has repeatedly apologized for the lie. But he has also attempted to make his fate a race issue. He believes the reaction would have been different had he been white. He says people wondered: "This guy is a black guy, he doesn't have a degree, he's got dreadlocks, he's at the university, and he's making $141,000 a year. How can that be? ... "There was some kind of suggestion that I was not first doing my job. But I was publishing books, I was bringing honor to the school, and the students loved me. I didn't cheat anybody." Adrian Arancibia, who is working on his doctorate in literature at UCSD, says it is clear to him that race was a factor. "There are white professors at our school who have been accused of and found guilty of other things, and none of them have been let go," he says. "If you are going to make a mistake in this town and you're a person of color, they will make an example of you." But Michael Kalichman, director of the research-ethics program at the university, says Mr. Troupe got the benefit of the doubt. "If anything, the administration erred on the side of additional consideration rather than less," he says. "They bent over backward to say, 'He's valuable.'" Mr. Troupe says no one is hired to be a professor at UC-San Diego because he earned a degree from Grambling. "There are lousy teachers who have Ph.D.'s." What he doesn't seem to understand is that it was telling a lie, over and over for 26 years, that led to his downfall. "I think this touches on the heart of being a poet," says Lawrence M. Hinman, a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego, a Roman Catholic institution. He has turned Mr. Troupe's story into an ethical case study on a Web site he runs, and he will moderate a session for an ethics seminar, "The Quincy Troupe Affair," at UC-San Diego in May. Mr. Troupe says he won't attend. "What poets do is tell difficult truths," says Mr. Hinman. "They tell them in a way that's unflinching. And he flinched about himself. He didn't look his own situation in the face and assess it." Mr. Troupe says he began listing a fake bachelor's degree on his résumé around 1976 while teaching at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. The college was new, born of a merger between Richmond College, where Mr. Troupe had been a lecturer since 1971, and Staten Island Community College. With all of the shuffling that accompanied the merger, says Mr. Troupe, no one noticed he'd suddenly gained a degree. He says he made the change after a colleague, whom he won't name, told him he could earn more money and job security if he were on the tenure track. But he'd probably need at least a B.A. to make the transition. Not being a "career academic," Mr. Troupe says he didn't quite realize the vast difference between a lecturer and a professor. Tenure was attractive. He had to support three children. And his colleague told him he deserved the promotion. Mr. Troupe had been publishing poetry for a decade, and had co-edited Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writings, which was considered groundbreaking. In all, Mr. Troupe spent nearly 20 years at Staten Island, earning tenure and advancing to full professor by the time San Diego recruited him in 1990. Staten Island tried to lure him back with the title of "distinguished professor," says Mr. Troupe, but he turned it down. He considers himself a self-made man. Growing up in a rough, all-black neighborhood in central St. Louis at first, and later in a mostly white area in the northern part of the city, he played baseball and basketball, listened to jazz, attended a black Baptist church, and secretly tucked novels by William Faulkner and Jack London into his back pants pocket, covering the evidence with his shirt. "I didn't want to advertise that I wanted to read," he says. Reading and writing, he recalls, were for "sissies." In 1959, after Mr. Troupe graduated from high school, he enrolled at what was then Grambling College on a baseball scholarship -- a move encouraged by his father, Quincy T. Trouppe (who changed the spelling of the family name), an all-star catcher in the Negro baseball leagues. But Mr. Troupe did not last even a semester at Grambling. First, he clashed with some Southern athletes -- "I'm talking about Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and they were talking about some country-and-western singers," he explains. He also loathed required chapel, and in defending his reasons for leaving, he again makes race an issue: "Most of these black colleges, they're preparing you to become a worker in the white world for white folks. So therefore, you have to go to church every Sunday, even if you don't want to go. I didn't feel like going." He was kicked out for fighting before the semester ended, re-enrolled the following semester, but left prematurely again. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1961 and went to France, where he played on the Army basketball team. But he injured his knee and, with free time on his hands, discovered that he loved writing. He tried his hand at poetry and, "by the time I came back, I was determined that that's what I was going to do." He doesn't remember his first poems, "they were so bad, probably." But he kept practicing, studying classic forms -- haiku, tanka, villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets -- and trying to mimic each style. "It was writing by rote," he says. "It was like trial and error." He never wondered, he says, whether he was making a mistake by skirting more formal education. This was the mid-1960s, after all. "The best artists have arrived at that point through self-discovery," he says. "Picasso taught himself to be a great painter by doing it. Miles Davis taught himself to be a great musician by doing it. Chuck Berry is the father of rock 'n' roll -- I grew up down the street from him -- and he did it by doing it." Mr. Troupe's real education came when he moved to Los Angeles after leaving the Army and discovered the Watts Writers Workshop. There he heard black writers reading poems "that were coming out of the African-American church and out of jazz." That astonished him. "Here I was writing these European poems, and when I heard these guys I threw all my poems away," recalls Mr. Troupe. "I don't know where they are." Poems in Jazz Mr. Troupe published one of his first poems in 1968, "Ode to John Coltrane," and it publicly unveiled his hard-driving, rhythmic style, making him a celebrity of sorts in Los Angeles. With other members of the Watts workshop, Mr. Troupe traveled around the country, reading his poems on college campuses. One of the group's stops was Ohio University at Athens, where professors liked Mr. Troupe's poetry so much that they offered him the position of writer in residence in 1969. It was his first academic job. What he discovered at Ohio University was that he loved teaching. "I didn't say I loved posturing," he clarifies. "I didn't have any image of myself walking across the campus with a pipe and a patch on my elbow and effecting a certain kind of speech." But he liked connecting with students. By the time the University of California at San Diego hired Mr. Troupe in 1990, he'd become an acclaimed poet and nonfiction writer. He had just appeared in an Emmy-winning PBS series on poetry -- Bill Moyers's The Power of the Word. And Miles: The Autobiography had won the American Book Award. "He was all over the news," says Pasquale Verdicchio, a professor of comparative literature and writing at UC-San Diego who was on the search committee that selected Mr. Troupe. The literature department received a "target-of-opportunity grant," says Mr. Verdicchio, specifically to hire an African-American writer. In San Diego, Mr. Troupe has helped start two poetry and literature festivals, received a Peabody Award for co-producing and writing a 1991 radio series on Miles Davis, and published Miles and Me. His popular "Poem for Magic" was turned into a children's book, Take It to the Hoop, Magic Johnson. Last year, just before the problems with his CV were discovered, Coffee House Press published Transcircularities, a collection of Mr. Troupe's poetry from the last 35 years. On the back of the book, the last sentence about Mr. Troupe reads: "On June 11, 2002, he was sworn in as California's first official Poet Laureate." In October of last year, a lawyer for UCSD called Mr. Troupe at home and asked if he had earned the degree from Grambling. "I said, 'No,'" recalls Mr. Troupe, who offered to resign the laureate position right away. The lawyer told him not to be hasty, but Mr. Troupe gave up the post the next day. "I am not stupid," he says now. "I saw the political handwriting on the wall and that somebody's going to use me as a paintbrush." Two months after that, on December 3, 2002, he resigned his university position, effective in June. He plans to move to New York City this summer with his wife, Margaret, while writing his memoir, finishing a novel, and working on a children's book about Stevie Wonder. Gordian Knot Mr. Troupe says that over the years he never worried that the lie on his résumé would surface. "I'm not the kind of person to get on an airplane and worry it's going to crash," he comments. "What can I do about it? I'm on the airplane." He says that, at times, he thought about removing the false degree, but "it's a Gordian knot, how do you undo it?" Last year, Mr. Troupe confesses, "was the worst year of my life." He has been disinvited from Border Voices, a poetry fair in San Diego he helped start, and he has received hate e-mail messages and telephone calls. During a trip to the supermarket one afternoon last fall, "a big white guy with a ponytail" came up to Mr. Troupe, pointing his finger, and saying, "You're the disgraced poet. You're the disgraced poet." The professor couldn't take it. "I said, 'Listen, listen, you better shut up. You're not going to be able to handle all this rage that's going to pour on you like lava.'" Then he caught himself and apologized. "I said, 'God, Quincy, you've lost it.' And I turned around and got my cart." His colleagues in UC-San Diego's literature department wrote a letter to the university's chancellor, expressing their disappointment that administrators did not try to keep Mr. Troupe. "There needs to be a sense of proportion between an admittedly ill-advised misstatement on a résumé and a decade of outstanding service to his students and the community," reads the letter. Although Mr. Troupe's students have also supported him throughout the ordeal, some people have suggested he abrogated his job as role model. But he refuses to carry that load. "Like Charles Barkley says, I'm not a perfect person. If you pick me as a role model, you have to pick me with the flaws." Eileen Myles, a professor of fiction and poetry at UCSD, tries to explain why Mr. Troupe may have done what he did. To many poets and writers, she says, "a degree is an afterthought," just a piece of paper. Saying you've got one when you don't, therefore, just is not that big a deal. "We're not credentialized by the academy," she says. "The better a poet is, the less education they have. It's almost more wonderful because they're uniquely creating." Mr. Troupe is on the road for poetry readings now at least three to four times a month. During a visit in February to Scott E. Garlock's jazz-history class at Knox College, in rural Illinois, Mr. Troupe first takes off his long black-leather coat and his black cotton hat with the word "Miles" stitched in white script. He knows everyone is interested in what it was like to know Miles Davis, so he gets right to it. "I can sit up here and talk about Miles Davis all day," says Mr. Troupe, who doesn't pull the plug on the conversation until every student's question is answered. By the time he's finished, he is sweating. That evening, his dreadlocks swinging, Mr. Troupe, as much performer as poet, gives a spirited reading. Choosing poems he's written for his mother and his father, one about Duke Ellington, and another about a St. Louis slaughterhouse, he reads in a voice low and lyrical before building to a loud, rhythmic cadence. As usual, the reading earns a standing ovation. Afterward, Mr. Troupe lingers on the auditorium stage, signing books and offering encouragement to students who want to be writers and artists. No one ever asks about his academic credentials. QUINCY TROUPE Born: July 22, 1939. Academic Career: writer in residence, Ohio University at Athens, 1969-71; Richmond College and College of Staten Island of the City University of New York, professor, 1971-90; the University of California at San Diego, professor, 1990-present; has also been an adjunct at Columbia University and at California State University at Sacramento. Books: writer and editor of 14 books of poetry and nonfiction, including Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2002); Miles and Me (University of California Press, 2000); Miles: The Autobiography, with Miles Davis (Simon and Schuster, 1989); Snake-Back Solos: Selected Poems 1969-1977 (I. Reed Books, 1978); and Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writings, with Rainer Schulte (Random House, 1975). Awards and Honors: American Book Awards for Snake-Back Solos and Miles: The Autobiography. The Peabody Award in 1991, for co-producing and writing a radio series for National Public Radio, The Miles Davis Radio Project. Two-time winner of the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout. Personal: lives in San Diego and New York City with wife, Margaret, and enjoys art, fine wine, and fashion.
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting
POEM FOR MY FATHER for Quincy T. Trouppe Sr. father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout with you, the glory of great black men swinging their lives as bats, at tiny white balls burning in at unbelievable speeds, riding up & in & out a curve breaking down wicked, like a ball falling off a table moving away, snaking down, screwing its stitched magic into chitlin circuit air, its comma seams spinning toward breakdown, dipping, like a hipster bebopping a knee-dip stride, in the charlie parker forties wrist curling, like a swan's neck behind a slick black back cupping an invisible ball of dreams & you there, father, regal, as an african, obeah man sculpted out of wood, from a sacred tree, of no name, no place, origin thick branches branching down, into cherokee & someplace else lost way back in africa, the sap running dry crossing from north carolina into georgia, inside grandmother mary's womb, where your mother had you in the violence of that red soil ink blotter news, gone now, into blood graves of american blues, sponging rococo truth long gone as dinosaurs the agent-oranged landscape of former names absent of african polysyllables, dry husk, consonants there now, in their place, names, flat, as polluted rivers & that guitar string smile always snaking across some virulent, american, redneck's face scorching, like atomic heat, mushrooming over nagasaki & hiroshima, the fever blistered shadows of it all inked, as etchings, into sizzled concrete but you, there, father, through it all, a yardbird solo riffing on bat & ball glory, breaking down the fabricated myths of white major league legends, of who was better than who beating them at their own crap game, with killer bats, as bud powell swung his silence into beauty of a josh gibson home run, skittering across piano keys of bleachers shattering all manufactured legends up there in lights struck out white knights, on the risky edge of amazement awe, the miraculous truth sluicing through steeped & disguised in the blues confluencing, like the point at the cross when a fastball hides itself up in a slider, curve breaking down & away in a wicked, sly grin curved & posed as an ass-scratching uncle tom, who like an old satchel paige delivering his famed hesitation pitch before coming back with a hard, high, fast one, is slicker sliding, & quicker than a professional hitman -- the deadliness of it all, the sudden strike like that of the "brown bomber's" crossing right of sugar ray robinson's, lightning, cobra bite & you there, father, through it all, catching rhythms of chono pozo balls, drumming, like conga beats into your catcher's mitt hard & fast as "cool papa" bell jumping into bed before the lights went out of the old, negro baseball league, a promise, you were father, a harbinger, of shock waves, soon come Reprinted with permission of the author. http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 49, Issue 30, Page A10
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education