“Several decades ago, UCSD professor and (now, former) California Poet Laureate Quincy Troupe falsified his academic record, claiming to have graduated from Louisiana’s Grambling College when in fact he attended that institution for only a short time. The falsification was discovered a few weeks ago. Since then, he has resigned his position as poet laureate, withdrawn from an appearance at next April’s Border Voices Poetry Fair at San Diego State, been excised from a videotape poetry series for children on cable TV and been pilloried by letters and a blistering editorial in this newspaper…

“But since his arrival in San Diego in 1991, Troupe has proved so popular a professor, so prolific an author and so generous a contributor to the city’s quality of life, that no one — including the UCSD administration that hires in the arts based on performance, not paperwork — could possibly care whether he ever received an undergraduate degree. His deception was unnecessary; the cachet of a B.A. played little if any role in his success. Had he never made that amendment to his curriculum vitae, he might well have gone just as far — and he’d still be poet laureate…”

— From a commentary in the San Diego Union Tribune.

Read poems by Troupe here, here and here.