Dear President Sexton,

As an alumna of New York University (Ph.D. English, 1998), I receive the usual set of appeals for donations, both from the university’s annual giving fund and from other fundraising bodies within NYU. In the past, I have given, not much, but happily—both to the Friends of Bobst Library and to the annual fund—but I feel it is important to let you know why, until things change, my response to any and all such appeals will be not just “no” but “hell, no.”

I was admitted to NYU in 1993, as a post-master’s Ph.D. student. I was given absolutely nothing in the way of funding during my first year—no fellowship, no assistantship, no tuition remission. Poor advising and a real desire to be in New York led me to make a decision I now counsel all of my undergraduates against—I enrolled anyway, supporting myself through that first year on loans and freelance work. Because of this decision, I graduated from NYU $21,000 in debt, a debt that was accumulated at your institution alone.

That I managed to hold my debt to $21,000 was due in part to the teaching position I applied, interviewed, and was hired for in the Expository Writing Program (EWP) in 1994. At EWP, instructors—all of us post-master’s Ph.D. students, from across the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—taught two courses a semester. This is, of course, the same teaching load as that of full-time faculty at NYU. These were, furthermore, student-contact intensive positions, as we were teaching required first-year writing courses, and we instructors thus spent countless hours not simply in the classroom, in class preparation, or in grading, but in student conferences, in faculty development programs, and in the evaluation of required writing proficiency exams. For this work, we instructors were given tuition remission (those of us still doing coursework, in any case) and a stipend of less than $10,000 per year.

In New York City. For more than forty hours of work per week. Less than $10,000.

Needless to say, nearly all of us held down a second job as well, simply in order to eat. Many of my colleagues picked up teaching at other institutions around the city; some worked in publishing; others did tutoring or worked corporate jobs. All of this, of course, in addition to both being full-time graduate students and to teaching a full 2-2 load. I was lucky enough to find freelance work in electronic publishing, work that has not only helped me in my career since graduation, but that was sufficiently highly-paid that I was able to make ends meet.

In fact, during my fifth and final year at NYU, as I was on the academic job market, my freelance work had become lucrative and enjoyable enough that I decided to leave EWP. I made nearly $60,000 that year. (Of course, I took a significant pay cut when I landed an assistant professorship. But that’s another story.) More importantly, I spent no more than 40 hours per week working for pay, freeing up many hours for my own work. Given that ability to maintain better control of my time, I was able to finish my dissertation that year, spending a total of a year and a half on it.

The point of all of this history is to make clear exactly how the treatment of graduate instructors and teaching assistants affects their lives. All of us struggled to make ends meet. Most of us graduated in serious debt, debt that our future salaries—if we were lucky enough to land full-time professorial positions—would not easily cover. And many of us were put in the position of having to sacrifice our own studies, our coursework, our exams, and our writing, to our teaching. If we did so, it was because it was our job to do so, as employees engaged in the core mission of the institution—the education of undergraduates.

Things changed somewhat after I graduated: the English department moved toward a policy of accepting only those Ph.D. students to whom it could grant funding, for one thing. And the graduate students organized, and won recognition for their union (the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, or GSOC), successfully bargaining for a contract that dramatically improved their working conditions. I was enormously proud to have graduated from the first private U.S. university to recognize and bargain in good faith with its graduate employees union, and I was thrilled to think that students who followed behind me might not have to make the same difficult choices that I did, compromising the quality of their studies or taking on insupportable debt in the pursuit of a degree.

This pride made it all the more heartbreaking when it became clear that you were going to take advantage of the National Labor Relations Board’s politically motivated 2005 ruling in order to refuse contract-renewal negotiations with GSOC, and that, worse, you were going to use ugly strike-breaking and retaliatory tactics in an attempt to bust the union. That you still, months later, refuse to negotiate with the graduate employees, even when urged to do so by both U.S. Senators from your state, is an appalling display of pigheadedness on your part, and begins to suggest to me that NYU has become less educational in function—that “private university in the public service” that I put myself in debt to attend—than, as detailed by NYU Exposed, a giant corporation, one working to undermine job security through an increasing turn to underpaid adjunct labor, while simultaneously (and underhandedly) overcompensating its senior executives.

I did not go $21,000 in debt and work two full-time jobs in order to receive my doctorate from Wal-Mart.

With this letter, I want to add my voice to the many others, including not only many of your own faculty but also thousands of professors and graduate students around the world, as well as untold numbers of sympathetic citizens, urging you to resume good-faith negotiations with GSOC.

But I also want to note, very clearly, that until such time as you do, what modest donations I would have made to the university will instead be sent to the GSOC Strike Hardship Fund. Moreover, I’m going to urge my fellow alumni to do the same. And I will advise my undergraduates, 75% of whom go on to grad school in some form, not to apply to or attend NYU. They will certainly receive a better educational experience at an institution that values their labor appropriately.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Associate Professor of English and Media Studies
Pomona College

P.S. A video detailing the history of the GSOC’s strike can be found here.

Again, via email:

To the Pomona College Community:

This afternoon, I received a phone call from the Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles Field Office of the FBI, who apologized for any disruption caused on our campus by the visit of two members of the Joint Task Force on Terrorism to Professor Miguel Tinker Salas’s office on Wednesday. He assured me that no intimidation was intended and that he regretted that the timing and location of the interview request suggested otherwise.

A short time later, the FBI’s Los Angeles Office released the attached public statement. There has been a great deal of media interest in these events, and I believe that these latest developments may be covered by several news channels this evening or this weekend.

We are grateful to all of you who have helped bring about this apology by virtue of your communications with professional colleagues and professional associations across the country. I am very sorry that our colleague was subjected to this treatment, and I’m sure you join me in hoping that we will not have a repetition of this kind of incident in the future.

David Oxtoby

The attached public statement:

For Immediate Release

DATE:  March 10, 2006

FBI STATEMENT REGARDING INFORMATIONAL INTERVIEW OF POMONA COLLEGE PROFESSOR

Agents of the FBI and its state, local and federal task force partners routinely conduct interviews in the course of daily activity.  Being interviewed by FBI Agents or Task Force Officers should not suggest wrongdoing on the part of the interviewee.  The FBI takes great pains to avoid publicity when interviews are conducted.

The FBI and its task force partners in state, local and federal agencies are mindful of the need to respect the circumstances that might surround the timing and location of an informational interview.  When requested to participate in interviews, individuals are free to indicate a preference regarding these issues. 

With regard to the interview of the professor, the purpose of the interview was to seek information.  There was no intent on the part of the FBI, regarding the timing or location, to place the professor, his students or Pomona College in an uncomfortable situation.

I’m not quite sure that rises to the level of an apology, given the (mighty blatant, to my surprise) note of desire to avoid publicity, but I guess we take what we can get.  Thanks to any of you whose outrage helped provoke a response, and remember, when requested to participate in interviews, you are free to indicate a preference regarding these issues.

Miguel’s story has now been picked up by the Pacific News Service.

Come on, LA Times; we’re waiting…

[Further UPDATE, 12.57 pm CST:  My pal John Seery has a post about this outrage today at the Huffington Post.]

[UPDATE, 3.11.06, 11.45 am CST:  The LA Times catches the story today...]

Gee, spend one little day traveling and the blogosphere goes a wee bit bonkers over some article in the New York Times about how some professors seem to think that student use of email is hastening the end times.  And my pal meg winds up with an inbox full of vitriol, not to mention having to spend a day convincing our fellow academic bloggers that she’s not a power-mad despot in technophile’s clothing.

People, please!  Repeat after me:

First, the small point:  the much maligned “mainstream media” got maligned for a reason.  Have any of you, EVER, been quoted accurately in the newspaper? Really accurately?

Second, the bigger one:  no one heavily invested in an older media institution can analyze the workings of a newer media form objectively.  The anxiety of obsolescence that all media change breeds makes it impossible for such analysis to be carried out innocently, without an agenda driven by the desire to promote the virtues of the older form at the expense of the newer.  Any argument in print about the ways that electronic communication is leading us all down the primrose path really needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Letters of recommendation.

*sigh*

A bibliography-in-progress, bringing together resources and discussions on electronic scholarly publishing, as well as other links useful to particular issues in the ElectraPress project.

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(Or, Remaking the Academy, One Electronic Text at a Time)

cross-posted from The Valve:

Inside Higher Ed reported a few days back on the work thus far done by an MLA task force on the evaluation of scholarship for tenure and promotion, and on the multiple recommendations thus far made by the panel, whose members include current MLA president Domna C. Stanton, Donald E. Hall, Sean Latham, Leonard Cassuto, and our blogging friend Michael Bérubé.

What follows is a lengthy consideration and extension of one of the recommendations made by this panel, as well as a sketch of one possible future, presented in the hopes of opening up a larger conversation about where academic publishing ought to go, and how we might best take it there.

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There is something quite lovely about reading everybody’s early MLA posts and knowing that, not only am I totally not going there this year (for only the second time since 1996), I’m not even on the same continent.  Why is it that avoiding what ought by all rights to be an intellectually stimulating gathering of colleagues produces such… relief?

Word in this morning’s Chronicle is that Tulane University is entering a period of major restructuring as it attempts to reopen.  This “renewal,” as the university calls it, includes the elimination of 233 professors (53 from academic departments and 180 from the medical school) and 14 doctoral programs (including economics, English, French, historical preservation, law, political science, sociology, water resources planning management, social work, and five programs in engineering).  26 of the 53 academic faculty being laid off have tenure, as do 39 of 180 medical faculty.  This follows the layoff in October of 242 full-time staff members.

The decisions were made by the university’s president, Scott Cowen, in consultation with a group of seven external advisors (”Malcolm Gillis, a former president of Rice University and an economics professor there; William G. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a former president of Princeton University; James J. Duderstadt, a former president of the University of Michigan; William R. Brody, president of the Johns Hopkins University; Eamon M. Kelly, a former president of Tulane; Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies; and Farris W. Womack, former chief financial officer at the University of Michigan”) and was “reviewed” by “an elected faculty advisory committee.” Cowen also apparently consulted with the American Association of University Professors in order to ensure that the processes he’d laid out were in compliance with the AAUP’s guidelines on terminating faculty members.

Of course, the Chronicle quotes chairs and faculty of departments that have not been cut as saying that the plan, while unfortunate, makes good sense.  And perhaps it does.  But there’s something in all of this that bodes ill for me, something beyond my complete lack of surprise that English and French are included among the doctoral programs to be eliminated, something beyond my continuing heartbreak at watching the city that I love more than any other implode.  Tulane seems to me to be sketching out a roadmap of the future, not just for itself but for institutions nationwide, a Darwinian approach to institutional survival that allows its leadership to take the opportunity of devastation to do what it has longed to for some time:

“We basically cut the programs that were not the strongest,” he said. In a way, the hurricane prompted the university to make decisions it could not make before the storm hit. “Under the current way universities operate, you can’t make these decisions under normal circumstances,” he said. “It takes an event like this.”

None of my friends at Tulane are in the affected departments, but my heart goes out to them nonetheless—this promises to be a difficult, painful period for everyone there.

My doctoral institution, that private university in the public service, was at one point not too many years ago ahead of the pack in its recognition of its grad-student union.  That recognition has of course now been withdrawn, and the university’s failure to negotiate with the union at all resulted in a decision by the union to go on strike back in early November.

The university’s administration, and particularly NYU President John Sexton, however, have retaliated against the grad students in a series of heavy-handed ways, including infiltrating the campus’s Blackboard installation in order to find out which faculty members were supporting the strike.  Now Sexton has sent the students an ultimatum:  any students who remain on strike as of Monday will be denied next semester’s assistantship, and any who return to strike next semester will be deprived of a full year’s funding.

A coalition of NYU faculty in support of the union has written a letter asking for the help of the academic community nationwide.  The full text of the letter is below the fold, but let me just note this, here:  Something big is definitely brewing when Andrew Ross and Alan Sokal are standing shoulder-to-shoulder.

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