William C. Dowling (born April 5, 1944 in Warner, New Hampshire) is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, specializing in eighteenth-century English literature, literature of the early American Republic, and Literary Theory.
Born in Warner, New Hampshire, Dowling earned a Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he was editor of the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, 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. Dowling is a past fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh and the National Humanities Center, and has held Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Howard Foundation fellowships. In 1995, he was Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. 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 Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.
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. The original campaign voted to dissolve itself in 2002 when Francis L. Lawrence resigned from the presidency. It was resurrected in 2007 to combat the administration's proposal of a $102 million-dollar expansion of the Rutgers football stadium at a time when the university was struggling with a $65 million budget shortfall. A group of the movement's original members today continues to maintain a Rutgers 1000 website, and a small group of students on campus to exert pressure for Rutgers' return to participatory athletics.
In September 2007, a controversy arose when Dowling was accused of racism by former athletics director Robert Mulcahy 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." [1]
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 a distinguished African-American commentator, Donald Roscoe Brown, in a column in the Trenton Times (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." [2]
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,[3] and received substantial coverage in The New York Times,The Weekly Standard, The Manchester Guardian, and other publications. Dowling is writing Blossomberry Farm, a memoir of the folk-blues scene at Dartmouth in the 1960s, [4] and Professor's Song: A Life in Teaching, a memoir of his career in literary studies.
Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University (Penn State Press, 2007) ISBN 978-0-271-03293-1
Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, And the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (University Press of New England, 2006) ISBN 1-58465-579-8
A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest, with Robert H. Bell (Xlibris, 2005) ISBN 1-4134-8446-8 ([5])
The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory (University of Nebraska Press, 1999) ISBN 0-8032-6617-0
Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801-1812 (University of South Carolina Press, 1999) ISBN 1-57003-243-2
The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) ISBN 0-691-06891-7
Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (University of Georgia Press, 1990) ISBN 0-8203-1286-X
Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984) ISBN 0-8014-9284-X
Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981) ISBN 0-691-06455-5
The Boswellian Hero (University of Georgia Press, 1979) ISBN 0-8203-0461-1
The Critic's Hornbook: Reading for interpretation (Crowell, 1977) ISBN 0-690-00884-8
