This incident prompted me to do a little research into Dr. Alvergue, and what I learned prompted me to send him an email with what I think is polite admonishment; this email is below. But first, a few samples of things he has expressed (he primarily is considered a poet); he is clearly not a he/him that wears a MAGA tee-shirt:

“I am a graduate of both the Cal Arts Writing (MFA) and Buffalo Poetics (PhD) programs. My interdisciplinary work engages decoloniality and embodiment through the lenses of aesthetics and aesthetic theory, performance study, poetry and poetics, political histories of the Americas, and political theory...he lists several of his publications, then...I am a member of the Salvadoran diaspora, and my inquiries into national identity in the 21st-century––as one of human geography, migration, care, and survival––shapes the way I often approach teaching. I believe that we can’t unlock the empathy hidden behind words if we don’t understand what is at stake in the risk writers and artists take when they decide to transform the matter which makes up the world around them into the story words communicate.”

“My project is of knowing, and in knowing––or returning sentience to the decolonialized––engaging with the ongoing care work of the self in the era of its sublimation into the expansive, polluted power of supremacist monopoly capitalism.”

Greetings Prof. Alvergue:

My name is Reid Fitzsimons, age 66, and I live in Northeast Pennsylvania. I am writing to offer comments on your newsworthy behavior: in a way the Warholian 15 minutes of fame has evolved into a news-cycle; perhaps 15 minutes equals one day in the cycle, and for the most part yours has come and quickly dissipated. There was a time, within my lifetime, that society conflated academicians with maturity and reason, in a way a check and balance defending civility, expression, and tolerance against ignorance and bigotry, and calmness against juvenile capriciousness. To the detriment of all of us, that time has faded away: now a professor with a PhD at a respectable college, a department head no less, cannot control feelings of rage and overturns a table containing speech and ideas inconsistent with his. It’s possible you did not actually do this- I guess it’s being investigated- but if true you really did diminish the status of higher education, academic credentials, your specific university, and especially yourself (su mismo).

I looked at your university website and found the expected neologisms weaved into cliches and absurdities (“My interdisciplinary work engages decoloniality and embodiment through the lenses of aesthetics and aesthetic theory, performance study, poetry and poetics…”). At this point I need to offer a brief explanation of a portion of my life experience. In 2001 I left the world of money-making work and headed for Guatemala for five months or so to assuage a long-term desire to be a volunteer do-gooder. In 2002 I became the volunteer medical director (PA) at a rural clinic in Kenya, this being at the peak of the African AIDS epidemic; I was there for 11 months. In 2004, along with my wife, we began laying the foundation for a charity children’s project in Honduras, which opened in May of 2007. In all I’ve spent maybe six years living in impoverished areas in “3rd-world” countries, and 4-5 in Honduras.

One goal of our Honduran project was to make volunteering with us accessible and inexpensive (you might know there are companies, using altruistic sounding marketing, that place volunteers with organizations...for a price). We were very successful and attracted scores of volunteers from Europe, the UK, the US, and Canada. On two occasions we had a group of Duke Univ. pre-med students, obviously from wealth and privilege, who proved to be excellent volunteers. Part of their deal was to be accompanied by a chaperon, a less young person to keep them from doing stupid things in a land strange to them, the chaperon being from a group called “Peacework.” We had a friend living as an ex-pat, a blunt-spoken blue-collar guy married to a physician. He asked the chaperon, “Exactly what do you do.” She was a very pleasant person who responded (I’m freely paraphrasing) with something like, “I help facilitate a meaningful growth and learning experience within the milieu of a cross-cultural immersion experience.” To which our friend again asked, “So what exactly do you do?”

Reading the way you put words together (“...being a part of the Central American diaspora have informed the nature of my work, which borrows from postlyric, docupoetic, and hybrid compositional practices.”) reminded me of this nice young lady chaperon from 15 years ago, who needlessly resorted to circumlocution to answer a simple question: she tried too hard to sound impressive or, to use a somewhat crude phrase, she tried to “baffle them with BS.” Perhaps owing to the era of my upbringing, I always associated becoming easily enraged and childish acts with uneducated and emotionally immature bigots; it wouldn’t be a bad thing to return to that mindset.

I run an opinion website (conservativeproletariat.com) with a viewership probably in the single digits, but I do a lot of research for my articles and it keeps my mind busy. In the next few days I’ll likely write an introductory paragraph or two and post this email as an article. I hope that’s okay, no chance it will “go viral.” There is a long and overly wordy article I posted in Dec. 2024 called Immigration: The Pretend Real World Versus the Real Real World (https://conservativeproletariat.com/?p=1997); perhaps you might find it interesting.

I hope you do read this email and would welcome a response.

Kind Regards,

Reid Fitzsimons, April 3, 2025