William C. Dowling

Dowling retired from Rutgers in 2016 after 28 years with the university.

In September 2007, a controversy arose when Rutgers Athletic Director Robert Mulcahy accused Dowling of racism 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."

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 Donald and 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."

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, where he administered the Dudley House fellowship program during the Mastership of Jean Mayer. Dowling is a past fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and the National Humanities Center, and has held Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Howard Foundation fellowships. In 1994–95, 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 Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table; In 2012 he was the recipient of the Drake Group's Robert Maynard Hutchins Award for his part in the struggle against Div IA athletics corruption in American higher education.

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.

William Courtney Dowling (/ˈdaʊlɪŋ/; born April 5, 1944, in Warner, New Hampshire) is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, specializing in 18th-century English literature, literature of the early American Republic, and Literary Theory.