I was to begin teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. I had just turned forty. It was my first university teaching position. I approached it with longing, excitement, and fear.
In the last fifteen years, since receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I’d driven a cab, worked as a janitor and day-care assistant, and been a printer and designer for small publishers. After some of my writing was published, I began to work in writers-in-schools programs. This work took me to Alaska, Washington, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming. I worked in villages, small towns, cities.
The writers-in-schools work was demanding and gratifying, but as the years went by it became more difficult for me. The travel was wearing, and between 1982 and 1988 I found that there were increasing restrictions on the range of speech allowed in the public schools. In 1988, after twelve years of writers-in-schools work, I was told to leave a small town in Wyoming as a result of reading two poems about ranch life to junior-high and high-school students. In one, a horse’s penis was mentioned; in the second, a man mutilated a horse, after which the horse’s owner had to confront his own desire for revenge. Having spent so much time working with students — and believing that I am sensitive to the needs of young people — I felt bitter about being told to leave.
I wanted to find another way to make a living. After speaking with several writer friends, I decided to apply for university teaching jobs. I had always assumed I would not be considered qualified for such positions. I was neither a famous nor critically acclaimed poet. But I began to apply. It was disheartening. I wasn’t even asked to interview.
So when staff members from the University of Southwestern Louisiana called in the early spring and said they wanted to interview me, I was shocked. I hung up the phone and told my wife, “They received between three and four hundred applications. They’re going to interview fifteen people, and I’m one of them.”
She was as shocked as I was and without malice said, “Why would they want to interview you?” Both of us had long ago decided I would never be a sought-after writer.
I went to Louisiana, had an interview, and was offered the position. The USL English department chair and the director of the creative writing program were both generous and welcoming toward me. Both expressed strong feelings about the quality and importance of my work. Both emphasized the university’s desire to bring in a writer who was not a career academic. They hoped to offer their students another perspective, they told me.
It was the first time in my life that I felt my work was being treated with respect by a university. I was grateful and, much as I hate to admit it, my sense of self-worth rose. After long talks with my wife about whether or not we wanted to change our lives, I accepted the position.
Lafayette, Louisiana, in late August is hot. And humid. I began to get settled — apartment, phone, electricity, gas, garbage service, water. I rode to the office on my bicycle, arriving a steaming, sweaty jumble, my clothes stuck to me, my hair matted and dripping under my helmet. Most people drove air-conditioned cars. When they stepped into a building, they were fresh and crisp. I would need to carry a change of clothes.
At the first orientation meeting for new faculty members, I was presented with many documents to sign before beginning work — health insurance forms, disability coverage, retirement packages. Among all the documents was one that surprised me:
State of Louisiana
University of Southwestern Louisiana
Appointment AffidavitI, ___________________, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution and laws of the United States and the Constitution and laws of this state; and I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as a State employee according to the best of my ability and understanding, so help me God.
IMPORTANT: Before swearing this appointment affidavit, it should be read and understood by the appointee.
The woman from the personnel office who was conducting the meeting said, “Now sign your appointment affidavit and turn to the next page.”
At the end of the meeting we were all asked to line up to have our documents checked, to make sure we had correctly and completely filled everything out. I loitered at the end of the line, wanting to talk about the appointment affidavit, but not wanting to hold up the others. When there were only a few people left in the room, I heard the representative say, “Well, I’m surprised nobody’s said anything about the appointment affidavit. Usually there’s one or two who make a fuss.”
I raised my hand.
“Oh, you.” She smiled.
When I expressed my reluctance to sign, she was kind but firm. I would have to sign. It was a state law required of all public employees. If I did not sign, personnel could not pay me.
“You can have until Friday to decide,” she told me.
Five days. During that time I spoke with my department chair, the director of the creative writing program, other faculty members, the New Orleans office of the American Civil Liberties Union, my wife, the Association of American University Professors in Washington, D.C., the Louisiana attorney general’s office, and the personnel office at Louisiana State University — the other big public university nearby.
The ACLU thought it would like to prosecute on my behalf, but I would have to sign in order to be an employee who could then file suit. My wife said, “I can’t tell you what to do.” The AAUP considered the oath “innocuous,” not worth making a fuss about. Sixteen states have something like it. The attorney general’s office said, “State law, no exceptions.” LSU stated that not only must every faculty member sign, but that the university also requires the signed affidavit from graduate students — including foreign ones — who teach or receive financial assistance.
“You can’t make foreign nationals sign an oath to support the U.S. and Louisiana constitutions,” I said.
“Everybody signs.”
Many faculty members at USL told me they had never signed such a document, but when I asked personnel about this, the faculty members’ files were pulled, and there were the signed forms.
My department was apologetic, chagrined that it had forgotten to inform me of the oath during the interviews.
What should I do? I thought about how it had felt to get that job, to believe that there were people who had honestly admired my work and wanted to have me teach at their university. I thought about having uprooted my family from Wyoming. Would we just go back as if there never had been this Louisiana episode? And, of course, looming in my mind was, “How will I make a living?”
When faculty members learned I might not sign the affidavit, many gave me advice. They sincerely hoped to help me find a way I could sign and thus get on with what they perceived to be the more important matter — teaching at the university.
“Sign, it’s just bureaucratic garbage.”
“Sign, it doesn’t have anything to do with what you teach.”
“Sign, it says right there you support the Constitution, and the Constitution guarantees you the right to break laws if those laws are unjust.”
“Sign, it’s some petty legislator’s way of flexing his muscle.”
“Sign, it’s just a piece of paper.”
“Sign, you don’t have to believe it.”
“Sign, it’s only saying that you’ll be a good citizen, and you’re a good citizen, aren’t you?”
“Sign. . . .”
The week was very long, each day very large. On Wednesday night I stayed up, pacing in my empty apartment, sitting, trying to meditate, writing down the pros and cons of signing. Confused by a welter of conflicting feelings, I also cried. On Thursday I felt no clearer. Thursday night I stayed up again. At four in the morning, exhausted, with no decision in sight, I fell asleep on the floor. I awoke at six-thirty with a feeling of calm. I knew I could not sign the affidavit. It was wrong for me to sign.
When the English department office opened that morning, I was there, waiting. When I told them I could not sign, I saw that no one thought this might really happen. I would grouse and grumble, but in the end I would sign. People were shocked. They also supported me. The university had no desire to impose the oath but saw no way around it.
So I left Lafayette, Louisiana, and my first university teaching job.
Why didn’t I sign? There were many reasons, but all were secondary to the fact that I felt I could not sign and be an honest teacher. One of my jobs would be to help students learn to think for themselves, to listen to their consciences, to act from principle, and to find their own values. These sorts of charges are not compatible with signing an oath that limits one’s scope of thought. If I signed this oath, which I opposed, then stood before a class and spoke about integrity, I would be a charlatan, and my students and I would know it.
This world is made of water and earth and a million material things — wood, glass, asphalt, plastic, steel, diamond. And this world is made of words. The way we talk, the way we think, the way we communicate with one another has a great deal to do with the physical nature of our world.
It is a world imperiled by material problems — nuclear weapons, the degradation of the environment, hunger, and disease. Even our material successes often become problems; our ability to produce and consume more and more things inflicts suffering on the other animals and plants of the earth.
Many of the problems that cause us to despair and that we wish we could ameliorate result from the ways we use language. Our words become our world. We have made the physical world out of ideas, ideas that are framed and held by the words we use to express them.
Again and again I was told the affidavit did not matter, that it was empty words. But the words were not empty. To sign would have been to promise to support whatever law might exist or come into being. I could not make such a promise.
Had I signed I would have alienated myself from my words and from myself. Often in my life I’ve felt alienated — from my neighbors, my family, my country, from my own humanity. I sometimes feel odd and strange, unable to connect deeply with other people. I assume many of us have had this feeling and that we struggle to transcend it, to transcend our aloneness and reach out to others.
If I am to reach out to others I must have a true self that can reach out. I cannot present two faces to the world. If I try to, I lose track of which face is my own. Is one the true me and the other a false me? How can I know which is the false me? Both make claims on my self, both inhabit this world and act in it. So first, I must try with all my might to find that true self that is deep inside me, living beyond the frame of my ego. As best I can, I must make sure that the things I say I will do turn out to be the things I actually do.
In his Nobel acceptance speech, Albert Camus said, “It’s part of the writer’s duty to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.”
I hope that some of why I didn’t sign was because I was offered the opportunity to act on others’ behalf. Many faculty members at the University of Southwestern Louisiana expressed dismay about the appointment affidavit. They were angry that they had been forced to sign in order to gain their positions. But they felt they couldn’t afford to refuse. These people had made choices to be professional scholars and teachers. They were committed to a life in the university. Most were as surprised as I had been when confronted with the appointment affidavit. Often new faculty members had sold former houses and purchased new ones in Lafayette. They had payments to make, mouths to feed. Refusing to sign would inflict not an abstract and temporary hardship on them personally, but a very real hardship on other people — their families.
I was not in that position. I was a newcomer to the university with another life already in place to which I could return. I’m sorry that my decision meant I would not be able to work with university students. But it was not such a great sacrifice. I lost a job I had not yet had. No one threatened my life or property. By not signing, I was able to make a small gesture that might help change a law that places an inappropriate demand upon those who have been hired by the public universities of the state of Louisiana.
After deciding not to sign the appointment affidavit, I began to read about loyalty oaths. I learned that as early as 1776, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “I have never regarded oaths otherwise than as the last recourse of liars.” Still, loyalty oaths of one kind or another have been a part of American life from the beginning.
When George Calvert, the Roman Catholic first Lord Baltimore, attempted to settle in colonial Virginia, he was asked to sign an oath he felt he could not take. Rather than sign, he got back on the boat and returned to England. His successors later received their own grant in Maryland, guaranteeing them the right to practice their Roman Catholic faith as they saw fit. They immediately imposed a new loyalty oath on those who would immigrate to Maryland.
During the American Civil War, the Confederate government required loyalty oaths before individuals could be granted travel passes. After the Civil War, the Missouri State Constitution required that all voters, jurors, state officers, clergymen, lawyers, teachers, and corporation officers sign an oath swearing that they had never served the Confederacy nor been Southern sympathizers.
This kind of oath — a “disclaimer of specific beliefs, associations, and behaviors deemed criminal or disloyal” — is called a test oath. Test oaths are retroactive and have been used to inflict penalties and punishments on those who were considered obnoxious minorities.
Though test oaths have been widely used, they are rare in the United States today. More commonly, one is required to sign an oath of allegiance. Oaths of allegiance (such as the Louisiana Appointment Affidavit) are “. . . promissory oaths by which one swears to support the government. . . .” One of the first national oaths of allegiance was required after World War I, when public schoolteachers were legally compelled to sign oaths stating their support of the U.S. Constitution. Many teachers objected and refused to sign.
Oaths of allegiance for public employment are often defended on the grounds that such oaths do not deprive anyone of civil liberties. In this view, the oaths make it clear that public employment is a privilege, not a right. Oliver Wendell Holmes believed that, although we have a constitutional right to talk politics, we do not have any such right to hold a public job. While many legal scholars and jurists have agreed with Holmes, many have not, and throughout the years the Supreme Court has heard numerous cases concerning the constitutionality of oaths.
The real heyday of both test oaths and oaths of allegiance in this country came after World War II during the McCarthy period. People were required to sign oaths swearing that they’d never been members of, or sympathized with, or attended meetings of any of a number of organizations, including the Communist party.
In this period, test oaths and oaths of allegiance were combined with state and federal loyalty-security programs designed to purge certain influences from public life. Generally, the courts supported this purging. Legal scholar Robert McCloskey has written that the Supreme Court in the fifties was “so tolerant of governmental restriction on freedom of expression as to suggest it had abdicated the field.”
It occurred to me that, however innocuous the language of a particular oath, it cannot help but hinder freedom of thought and inquiry. In 1972, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “The time may come when the value of oaths in routine public employment will be thought not ‘worth the candle’ for all the division of opinion they engender.”
After not signing the appointment affidavit, there was nothing left but to leave Louisiana. I spent a few days organizing myself — disconnecting the water, gas, electricity, talking to my landlord, packing the car.
I also spent some time bicycling, seeing the place where I was now not going to live. One afternoon I stopped at a bike shop. I looked around at gadgets I wasn’t going to buy. There was a young couple buying a mountain bike. They noticed my well-used bike and asked what I thought they should buy. Then they asked what I was doing in Lafayette. I told them I had come to teach at USL but now would not be doing so.
“What were you going to teach?” the young woman asked.
“Literature and creative writing,” I told her.
“Wait a minute, you’re not that new guy . . . ?” She tried to pronounce my name. “I’m signed up for your class.”
We talked about the why of my leaving the job. They bought their bike and left. I think about those students. They were concerned about my experience, and sensitive to the ways in which political repression may develop. Their talk was lively and they were interested in the content and meaning of their educations. Because of my “integrity,” I was not going to have anything to do with those educations. I like to think I could have been a teacher who would have helped them to think carefully about the course of their lives, about the decisions they would make.
And that makes me wonder again. What good did it do not signing? I never entered a classroom. My only conversation with students was an accidental one at a bicycle shop. The issue of the appointment affidavit was a nonissue. Everyone who taught signed. There are things one does. By not signing, I fear I may have signed away an opportunity to participate in the life of my culture.
This essay first appeared in Poets & Writers and is reprinted with permission.
