Section 1 | Section
2 | Section 3 | Section 4a |
Section 4b | Section 4c | Section 4d
| Section 4e | Section 4f | Section 4g | Section 4h | Section 4i | Section 4j | Section 5 | Section 6 | Section 7 | Section 8 |
IV-B. Annotated
Copy of Eight-Year Review Report Provided to the Academic Senate by Linguistics
Graduate Students of the UCLA Slavic Department
October 30, 2000
What follows is our reaction, as some of the linguistics graduate students in the Slavic Department, to the 8-year review report of the UCLA Slavic Department, and to some of the documents associated with this report. Our comments are interspersed in blue type with the original text in black type.
We would ask that this document be read only by members of the Graduate and Undergraduate Councils, with the proviso that no member of the Slavic Department be given access to this document. Moreover, we would ask those who do take the time to read this to be mindful of the need to preserve confidentiality. To this end, we would further request that the contents of this document not be discussed by those who read it with members of the Slavic Department, nor with those whom the readers of this document might have reason to suspect are sympathetic to the Slavic Department faculty. We realize this sounds quite paranoid, but experience has taught us that in instances such as this, there can be no such thing as too much caution.
We would also ask that this document be read only in Luisa Crespo's office and in Luisa Crespo's presence.
We apologize for any typographical errors we might not have caught. We were pressed for time to make the submission deadline, and did not want to sacrifice content for style. We realize that this is a rather longish document, but felt a document of this length was necessary to address adequately the points brought up in the 8-year review report and in the documents associated with this report…
1999-2000 ACADEMIC SENATE REVIEW OF THE
DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES
Internal Reviewers:
Harold Martinson, Chemistry & Biochemistry,
Graduate Council, Chair of Team
Elinor Ochs, Anthropology, Graduate Council
Fred Burwick, English, Undergraduate Council
Chris Stevens, Germanic Languages, Undergraduate
Council
External Reviewers:
Alan Timberlake, Slavic Languages & Literatures,
UC Berkeley
David Bethea, Slavic Languages & Literatures, U.
of Wisconsin
Date of Site Visit: February 24-25, 2000
Date of Report: June 6, 2000
Approved by the Graduate Council: Approved by the
Undergraduate Council:
Draft Report of Internal Review Team
Appendix I: External Reviewer Reports
Appendix II: Site Visit Schedule
Appendix III:
Factual Errors Statement from Department Chair, M. Heim.
Response to Statement from H. Martinson
Appendix IV: Self Review Report
Internal Report on the Department of Slavic
Languages and Literatures
Preface
The following Academic Senate review of the
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures was conducted during AY1999-2000
on the normal 8-yr cycle. The core of the review was the site visit on February
24 & 25, 2000 during which the four internal reviewers (Fred Burwick, UGC, Chris
Stevens UGC, Elinor Ochs, GC, Harold Martinson, GC, Chair of Team) and the
graduate student representative (Mark Quigley) were joined by the two external
reviewers (David Bethea, Wisconsin, and Alan Timberlake, Berkeley). The site
visit consisted of two full days of interviews with faculty, staff, students
and administration. After the site visit, the external reviewers prepared and
submitted a joint report (attached), based on the site visit plus additional
data and information supplied by the Graduate Division and the Department.
Meanwhile, the internal review team conducted additional interviews, as
necessary, to clarify issues raised during the site visit. The following
account is based on all of the above sources of information, and relies heavily
on the report of the external reviewers (henceforth, ER).
Introduction
The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at
UCLA has, for decades, been recognized as one of the finest and most
distinguished in the country. Not only are all the faculty individually of
national or international stature, but also the department as a whole is unique
in the breadth of its scholarship. This breadth is two-fold. First, while
departments elsewhere tend to be strong in literature at the expense of
linguistics, UCLA's strong literature component is paired with a linguistic
component that is unmatched in the country.
This
last part ("a linguistic component
that is unmatched in the country") is debatable. There
are many in the field who feel that the synchronic linguistic component of the UCLA Slavic
Department has failed to remain current with linguistic theory. The diachronic linguistic component remains strong.)
Second, following a period during which good departments
nationwide have trimmed non-Russian components from their programs, the
department at UCLA has remained dedicated to maintaining its comprehensive
Slavic character. In the future, UCLA's continued pre-eminence in Slavic
Languages and Literatures will depend both on maintaining the quality of this
faculty and on ensuring that adequate FTE are available to sustain its breadth.
Slavic studies, at UCLA as elsewhere, has been
uniquely buffeted by international events in recent decades. Shortly after the
last review, the initial euphoria following the collapse of the Soviet Union
gave way to apathy-and a nationwide decline in Slavic studies enrollments. Now
interest is picking up again and Slavic studies at UCLA has emerged from this
dark period stronger in comparison to departments elsewhere and is in a
privileged position to capitalize on the trend. Indeed, the department worked
tirelessly during the dark period to expand and advertise its undergraduate
offerings...
(It should be
noted here that this effort was confined primarily to Olga Yokoyama and Olga
Kagan, and was indeed opposed by a significant segment of the faculty...),
...and
its undergraduate program is now probably among the best in the country.
Undergraduates interviewed during the site visit were effusive in their praise
of the program. In the future, to maintain its stature in the field, the
department must turn its attention single-mindedly to the graduate program,
which is in a state of complete disrepair and endures only because of the
resilience and quality of its surviving graduate students.
Faculty
The uniformly high quality of the faculty has been
noted above, as has the remarkable breadth of scholarship in the department.
However, recent departures have left gaps in current coverage of the literature
component that must be filled before the department will be recognized as truly
balanced, having equally prestigious linguistic and literature components (ER,
pp. 4-5).
This
is problematic at two levels:
1.
Not everyone in the department sees the need to achieve a "balance"
between literature and linguistics.
As was correctly noted, most Slavic departments barely have a linguistic
presence, and many have none.
Given this state of affairs, it is unclear why the UCLA Slavic department
cannot remain the one department in the country with an emphasis on
linguistics. This is not to say
that the literature side of the department cannot also be of the highest
quality, but not everyone sees the need for this aforementioned
"balance". Indeed, even
when one overlooks the wildly exaggerated claims made by the department as to
placement of its graduates, it must be stated that it has been more successful
than some (but not all) major Slavic departments in placing its literature graduates in tenure-track
positions. Thus, it seems that in
spite of the fact that this department has a profile tilting towards
linguistics, it has nonetheless been relatively successful in placing its
graduate students, thus begging the question, why change? If anything, it is the department's
linguistic graduates who have had difficult times as of late competing for and
obtaining tenure-track jobs.
2.
The question of "prestige" is also problematic, especially with
regard to this department. For
years, the department's reputation has been measured by the prestige of its
faculty and its publications. What
was not measured to any significant degree, and thus not taken into the
calculations which determine a department's "prestige", is the
effectiveness with which the faculty trains new scholars and allows them to
contribute to the growth of the field in general. We feel that the failure to measure accurately this part of
the department's obligation has contributed greatly to the current state of
affairs now obtaining within the department. Many of the faculty feel that as long as their academic
reputation remains strong and intact, they have carte blanche to run the program and interact with
graduate students and staff alike in any manner they choose. The result may (or may not) be a
continuing stream of high quality publications, but what cannot come out of
this is a healthy graduate program, one in which the next generation of leading
Slavic scholars will be trained.
In the prevailing atmosphere, innovation and exploration of other
aspects of our field and of other disciplines in an attempt to gain new
perspective on our own discipline are not only not encouraged, they are
actively discouraged and openly scorned.
What is encouraged is very safe, very detailed work which will not
embarrass the faculty, but which also takes no chances whatsoever and which
contributes very little to the overall body of knowledge in our field.
We
understand that, as a part of the faculty's responsibility in producing valued
scholars, they must from time to time rein in overly enthusiastic graduate
students who might want to run before they have learned to crawl. This is, in our view, both necessary
and appropriate. However, when the
attitude becomes so restrictive and so self-enclosed that outside influences
aren't even allowed to filter in, then we feel that the faculty not only
deprives the graduate student of the wide ranging liberal arts foundation
necessary for innovative approaches to the type of scholarship which characterize
leaders in any field of academic endeavor, but even worse, the faculty is then
forced to take the less then ground-shaking papers and dissertations which
result from this atmosphere and declare them significant.
This
attitude that students learn here as graduate students cannot help but carry
over into their professional lives, the result being that, with the exception
of Gil Rappaport at the University of Texas, Austin, none of UCLA's Slavic
linguistic graduates is even close to taking over the reins as a leader in the
field. One former graduate student
who left our department to continue his education at another university was
quietly pulled aside by some members of that faculty and asked what the
situation is with the linguistics faculty at UCLA: why, given the size and
quality of that faculty, are the next generation of leaders in the field of
Slavic linguistics not emerging?
To those of us who are going through the UCLA program in Slavic linguistics,
the answer to this question is clear.
Thus,
we feel that we as students, and the field as a whole, would be better served
by a department concerned less with difficult to quantify concepts such as
"prestige" and more with the time it devotes to mentoring its
graduate students in an intellectually open manner. We are confident that this would be a much better and more
honest approach to the goal of obtaining prestige, since said prestige would
emanate not only from the reputation of the faculty, but the quality of its
graduates as measured by their ability to lead, and contribute to, the field.
Both external reviewers considered replacement of the
19th century specialist to be "absolutely crucial to the long-term health
and viability of the department" (ER, p.4). This opinion was expressed repeatedly
during the course of the site visit.
While
a Golden Age specialist would of course bolster the literature profile of the
department, we would emphasize that in the search for a highly regarded
specialist in this field, UCLA should not lose sight of the problems that have
led to the current state of affairs in the Slavic Department. From our point of view, better a young
and fair-minded junior scholar than a highly regarded senior scholar who shares
the opinions of the current faculty with regard to the treatment of graduate
students.
Moreover, to raise the department to a position of
unchallenged preeminence both reviewers argued that the appointment must be
made at the tenured level (ER, p. 5, and repeated assertions during the site
visit). The Dean has authorized a search at the assistant professor level. This
search should continue, but it would be wise for the department simultaneously
to try to identify a specific mid-career individual, highly respected in the
field-and also here, who would be willing to move. The Dean may reconsider the
rank if presented with a specific and compelling alternative.
The dilemma in this is that the ladder faculty are
already 100% tenured, and only one of these is at the associate professor
level. However, there were two
faculty losses last year and the above appointment would replace only one of
them. The external reviewers urge that the second FTE also be replaced, this
time at the junior level (ER, p. 5) and with a twentieth century specialist
which the department sorely needs ER, pp. 4 & 5). While the 19th century
appointment is crifical to the stature of the department, the 20th century
appointment also is very important programmatically and (given a senior 19th
century appointment) is essential as an opportunity to bring in young blood.
As mentioned earlier, a hallmark of the Slavic
Department at UCLA has been the breadth of its scholarship. Essential to
maintaining this breadth is representation on the faculty of a permanent South
Slavist, an area of expertise represented in most major programs in the country
(ER, p.5). Currently this position is filled by an Adjunct appointment which
has been satisfactory as a stop-gap measure but which does not give the
position permanence.
For
the record, the South Slavist position has been filled much, much more than
"adequately" by the current adjunct professor. Not only are his publications
outstanding, but so is his willingness to help so many students in our
department and serve on committees as an outside member. As the leading department in the
country in Slavic linguistics, the South Slavic position is fundamental, since
the earliest attested Slavic writings are South Slavic in nature, and it is
these writings which have influenced the development of a great many of the
Slavic standard literary languages.
Since the retirements of Birnbaum and Albijanic, this adjunct professor
has pulled the entire weight of the department in this regard, in addition to
being an excellent instructor in Serbo-Croatian, in which he has a truly
native-speaker capacity.
The
problem the he has encountered, and which those of us who are familiar with the
linguistic program in the Slavic Department know all too well, is that, for
whatever reason, he has fallen out of favor with those linguists who are
identified in this report as "the
two difficult faculty members...both of whom are in the linguistics program". Why he would be out of favor with them, no one of us could
possibly know or understand, but given the respective histories with the people
involved, it is not in the least difficult to infer with whom the problem lies.
Moreover,
it makes it difficult for students because Adjuncts do not "count" on
examination committees, and students hesitate to choose this area for their dissertations
because they cannot be sure that the expertise will still be there when it
comes time to read their theses.
The Slavic Department lost three FTE during the
period under review. Ideally they should be replaced as outlined above,
including a permanent South Slavist. However, recognizing that this may not be
possible at the present time, but in view of the importance of making these
appointments, we urge the department and the administration to explore
aggressively the possibility of filling the 20th century and the South Slavist
positions with joint appointments. This solution is being pursued increasingly
across campus, and for a small department like Slavic would be adequate to
maintain the breadth that has been a pillar of its reputation.
Strongly
disagree. We need a full-time
South Slavist. This department
made its reputation on historical linguistics, and the key to historical
linguistics in Slavic is South Slavic linguistics.
Undergraduate program (including language
instruction)
The reader is referred to the department's excellent
self-review (pp. 4-6) for a complete account of the department's many
accomplishments in this area. The external reviewers, like the undergraduates
mentioned earlier, were effusive in their praise of the Slavic undergraduate
program (ER, pp. 1-2). Note that the 19th and 20th century literature
appointments will be very important for the undergraduate program as well as
for the reasons discussed above, as these areas (particularly 19th century)
attract substantial enrollment.
However, while it is usual for literature to attract
more students than linguistics, we wish to emphasize, along with the external
reviewers (p. 2), that this should not be used as an excuse for the linguists
not to participate in the undergraduate program. As the externals point out,
"the linguists need not teach only highly specialized courses in
linguistics per se." They, like the literature faculty can extend
themselves to develop courses of more general interest, and thereby better
serve their department and the university community at large. "The
asymmetry in the utilization of faculty energy needs to be addressed" (ER
p. 2).
Strongly
agree. It is our feeling that the
failure of linguistics faculty to participate in the undergraduate program is
closely connected to their overall problems in dealing with students. Graduate students are, by their nature,
easier to teach, and they are much, much less likely to challenge their
professors, whereas undergraduates, whose success at the university is not
dependent on just one or two faculty members, readily and freely question and
challenge their instructors. It
comes as absolutely no surprise that these difficult linguistic faculty members
shy away from undergraduate courses.
It
is also worth noting that the UCLA Slavic Department, which has always prided
itself on its strength in linguistics, barely addresses this subject at the
undergraduate level anymore, with only one linguistic course listed for
undergrads, down from three a decade ago.
The UCLA Slavic Department is hardly in a position to complain about the
lack of preparation on the part of its incoming graduate students in the field
of Slavic linguistics when its own undergraduate program is so deficient in
this field.
Graduate Program
Student welfare. During the site visit the
review team heard several amazing accounts of emotional abuse perpetrated on
students by certain members of the faculty. So fearful were the students that
several asked to meet in private "somewhere far from our dept" after
the site visit was finished. These students told of still others who were too
fearful to meet with us at all. These meetings led to additional interviews
designed to assess the credibility of what was heard. In all, dozens of interviews
were conducted with current students, former students, faculty and staff. The
picture that emerged was one in which many students live in personal fear of
specific faculty members, and in anxiety about their futures within a program
perceived as capricious and self-serving. We note that the external reviewers
devoted more space to this issue than to any other single aspect of the Slavic
program despite the fact that they heard but a fraction of all the complaints.
The
last part of this sentence--"...despite
the fact that they heard but a fraction of all the complaints"--should be noted when reading the
most recent comments of the two external reviewers in which they lend their
strong support to the UCLA Slavic Department.
It
is important to maintain the proper focus on what follows. The mandate to the
review team was not to conduct a fact-finding mission or to determine the guilt
or innocence of particular individuals, but rather to assess the welfare of the
graduate students and to recommend corrective action, if necessary, to assure
their well-being.
This
then begs the question as to what exactly the mandate of the review team was. While we do not question the sincerity
of the review team's efforts and while we acknowledge that, in comparison with
other 8-year reviews, this review was indeed severe, it is nonetheless the case
that this review focuses on but a fraction of the abuses that have occurred in
this department over time. The
review committee itself, as it was constituted, was simply incapable of doing
the type of in-depth study of the department which would have been needed to
present a true picture of the abuses that have become institutionalized
there. There was, to our
knowledge, no detailed (i.e. involving extensive review of all financial aid
awards) investigation done into the system for distributing financial aid, nor
was there any financial auditing of the department's funding accounts to
ascertain the allegations made by students as to irregularities and
inconsistencies in the distribution of financial aid. While the report states that former graduate students were
contacted, in fact only a very small percentage of these former students were
actually contacted.
If
the mandate of the 8-year review committee did not include an in-depth
investigation and analysis of the department's fiscal practices and did not
include a comprehensive examination of all former graduate students, then who
in the Administration is charged with looking into these matters? If the 8-year review committee was indeed not instructed to
"conduct a fact-finding mission or
to determine the guilt or innocence of particular individuals", then who is charged with this task? Graduate students in the Slavic
Department took and continue to take considerable risk to their future careers
by cooperating so closely and extensively with the 8-year review committee to
uncover the abuses which have existed for years in this department. Now that some of these abuses have been
discovered and now that the Administration has been alerted to the fact that
such abuse is extensive and of long standing, what does the Administration plan
to do about this? Is it the
Administration's plan to be satisfied with what was uncovered in the 8-year
review process, hoping that once reforms are made the situation will be
forgotten, or, having been alerted by Slavic graduate students as to the real
nature of the department, is the Administration going to authorize the real and
in-depth type of investigation of this department that needs to be done? A failure to do this begs the question
as to who, if anyone, controls the behavior of academic departments at
UCLA. In addition, any such
failure of the Administration to continue the investigation into the Slavic
Department could create the impression that the Administration simply wants
this problem to go away, to fade with time.
The
Slavic Department, and by extension UCLA, is guilty not only of repeated and
institutionalized abuse of its graduate students, but also of lying to its
graduate students concerning funding and academics, resulting in students who
have been forced out of the field, or in students who have been trying to hold
on and suffering financially because of this. The Administration must realize that the UCLA Slavic Department
is not a thing apart, not an academic entity "associated" with UCLA,
but rather it is a part of UCLA.
Moreover, it was UCLA's representative to the students, UCLA's conduit
to students and the conduit by which UCLA monies were distributed to students. To the extent that the UCLA Slavic
Department abused its powers and abused its students, it is to this same extent
that UCLA as an academic institution abused power and abused its graduate
students in the Slavic Department.
UCLA has transgressed. UCLA
has for decades harmed and wronged students in the Slavic Department. It is now incumbent upon UCLA to right
that wrong, to make right what it has allowed to happen, and to do whatever is
necessary, financially, academically, and professionally, to remedy the
situation vis-a-vis those of its past and present graduate students adversely
affected.
Thus,
the issue is not whether any or all of what we heard is correct in its detail
or interpretation. The issue is the emotional trauma perceived by the review
team in the students entrusted to the care of this department. This is not to
cast doubt on any part of what we were told. Great care was taken to ensure the
legitimacy of the information upon which we have based the conclusions at the
end of this report. Several case histories from different sources were compared
and no example of any significant discrepancy was found. In other instances
different case histories involving similar situations were compared across
time. The consistency was remarkable, even between former students who had
never met. But to emphasize again: regardless of the details, the fear and the
anxiety among the affected students is real, it is deep, it has interfered with
the education of many, and it has crushed the careers of some. This level of
graduate program dysfunction is unprecedented in the collective experience of
this review team.
Without exception all who spoke with us feared
retribution if they were planning to make their career in Slavic studies, and
we heard reports of both threatened and perceived retaliation. Some students,
initially willing to tell their stories, later requested (even in tears) that
we not use any details. Therefore, to preserve anonymity, we will present most
information only in general terms, and the students, about half of whom were
directly affected, will be referred to collectively. However, we begin our
account below with one specific case history whose several facets reflect
themes we were to hear repeated over and over. This student, whom we will call
simply XX, did not fear recognition because she has left the field. The
following is her story.
XX entered the program with excellent credentials.
For various reasons-and on the advice of another faculty member-XX decided it
was best to drop a particular graduate course during her second quarter. When
XX spoke to the professor involved, the professor reportedly went on the
offensive, not only insulting XX repeatedly, but also disparaging, with
gestures and sarcasm, the other members of the faculty from whom XX had
obtained advice. When exchanges like this continued unabated-and after being
reduced to tears, XX concluded that she was merely a pawn in a jealous rivalry
between this professor and other members of the faculty. Therefore, XX resolved
to go to the Chair. According to XX the Chair responded with soothing words,
and a statement to the effect that "there are problems among some of the
faculty in this department. It is too bad that you have been caught in the
middle of it. You just have to work around them." Accordingly, rather than
addressing the problem, and with a comment to the effect that enrollment was
low, the chair suggested that she re-enroll. Having heard numerous stories
about the professor in question, and concluding that the Chair was merely
circling the wagons, XX, in "the saddest decision I've ever made",
left the program and the field. The "sad decision" quote above was
not provided to us by XX simply for effect. Others have quoted her as saying at
the time, "I have a broken heart .... This was the love of my life."
If the above case history were an isolated report it
could justifiably be overlooked.
(We wonder
at this statement. Even if it were
just one person and one incident, why would the review committee think it would
be "justifiable" to overlook it?)
However, every detail in this account has counterparts in the accounts
of others dealing with this professor. We were told of other highly qualified
students who were driven away, of another chair who sat idly by (indeed, reportedly
suggesting that a student apologize to the professor for requesting to drop the
class!?). Thus, the perception of students that this professor takes even the
most routine matters personally led XX to leave rather than spend "5 years
worrying that the most innocent move or comment can turn into a major
battle." And so a highly qualified student with a passion for the field,
was lost.
The above is the only case history we have been given
permission to present explicitly. However, during the course of our interviews
we were told of
• physical displays of faculty anger including
frequent yelling and even slamming a chair on the floor
• students being intimidated into taking
particular classes because of enrollment concerns
• students who fear writing anything but
laudatory comments in the "anonymous" course evaluation forms
• a fractious faculty so immobilized by
disagreement that no common reading list can be agreed upon (at least for
linguistics) to assist the students in preparation for their exams
• students who feel compelled to tailor their
intellectual approach in exams to the committee membership, and who are advised
to "get one on your side" before going into exams
• students who don't dare complain for fear of
retaliation in the MA or PhD exams, or in obtaining a dissertation signature
• students who feel that the only value of
their comments is for use as ammunition in the internal squabbles of the
faculty
• repeated episodes of students being ridiculed
for having various deficiencies in their background; e.g. "What the hell
are you doing here?" or "Well, you might as well just be an
undergraduate!"
•
students feeling abandoned and with no place to turn
• faculty who appear to change their minds
about the quality of work in response to unrelated circumstances
• ladder faculty conspiring against non-ladder
faculty in the presence of students
• faculty playing out their rivalries by
deprecating students' choices of dissertation advisor
• students being threatened with loss of
funding in arguments with faculty, e.g. " ... and don't think you are
going to get funding next year..."
• students being threatened with disciplinary
action for voicing disagreement with faculty
We
would take pains to emphasize that the above list is accurate, but very general and not comprehensive.
Funding. A persistent complaint among students
for years has been the chronic shortage of funding and the apparently
capricious manner in which it is distributed. Students complain about lack of
transparency in the criteria and processes governing the awarding of graduate
student support. Certain jealousies and rivalries among the faculty are said to
be so conspicuously displayed as to be common knowledge among the students. So
vengeful are the faculty, we were told, that many students sincerely believe
they are merely pawns among these colliding ambitions and that the awarding of
support often is little more than manipulation resulting from jealousy or
retribution.
The
issue is not the nature of the details giving rise to this perception, but
rather the perception itself of a systemic disrespect of graduate students, and
their apparent treatment as chattel in the department. The chronic shortage of
funds, almost universally identified by the faculty as the principal source of
student dissatisfaction, is secondary to the spiritual blight in the department
in the eyes of the students. Nevertheless, the inability to find adequate
student support is also unacceptable and must be remedied (at least in the
short term) by reducing the number of acceptances into the program.
Attrition. Based on the above one would expect
the level of attrition in the Slavic department to be quite high. While
attrition cannot reliably be determined from statistics alone, a rough estimate
based on the total number of degrees awarded (MA+PhD) compared to the number of
admittances between Fall of '88 and Spring of '98 suggests that Slavic has the
highest record of attrition of any comparable department in the Humanities
(comparison among 10 departments). But the reported mistreatment of students
appears not to be the only reason for attrition in the Slavic department. A
cursory survey of case histories for students who have left the program in
recent years suggests that several were underqualified from the start. In
addition, many of the others have had backgrounds considered grossly inadequate
by some of the faculty ("What the hell are you doing here?"). In
particular, students frequently reported being castigated for insufficiency in
Russian. The impression is that the department over-admits
and then relies on attrition to select for the students that will eventually
get their degrees. Under normal circumstances this would be a healthy
selection-capable, well prepared students would be admitted and the motivated
ones would persevere and succeed.
It
is not clear to us what the internal reviewers mean by this. Our complaint has always been that the
department issues a blanket statement to the effect that if students "do
well", then they will be funded.
Never is the term "do well" defined, for the to us all too
obvious reason that the department can never fund all of its graduate students. What if all the graduate students did
equally well? Would they all get funded?
Of course not. The
department has always known this yet it often keeps this information from
potential graduate students. The
department has no ethical or moral obligation to fund every graduate
student. The department does have,
however, a moral and ethical obligation to be truthful to all its current and
potential graduate students about the state of funding in this department.
What
is potentially troubling about the statement of the internal reviewers above,
i.e. "Under normal circumstances
this would be a healthy selection-capable, well prepared students would be
admitted and the motivated ones would persevere and succeed," is how one interprets the term
"motivated". What if all
students were equally motivated?
Would all then be provided funding? Or is could this criteria be used in exactly the same way
the department has used the terms "good" and "satisfactory"
in the past, with funding only available for those who fall under the
"good" rubric according to criteria known only to the faculty? In other words, if all the students of a given class proved to
be outstanding, would they all then be provided funding?
Or is this just another construct (with "motivated vs.
non-motivated" replacing "good vs. merely satisfactory") through
which the department could continue its policy of Social Darwinism?
However, in this department the reports we heard
paint a picture of a process that results not in cultivation of the best and
the brightest, but in the survival of the toughest and the most resilient-with
the rest simply being discarded as damaged goods.
Attrition
is a terrible waste. Resources, desperately needed by other students, are
squandered on students who do not return. Precious time in the young lives of
these students is needlessly lost; they either should not be admitted or, once
admitted, they should not be driven away. Talent, important to the field and to
UCLA, is shunted aside or destroyed. It is imperative that the department
reform its attitude towards graduate students. These are young human beings
entrusting themselves to the department for intellectual nurture and
professional training. The department should consider more carefully exactly
what background and capabilities it expects its students to bring to the
program and then should screen the applicants rigorously. But once the students
are admitted to the program the department is obligated to work as
conscientiously as possible to mentor each student to success.
Apparently
some faculty have very strong opinions about the level of preparation required
of students who enter the program. The admissions committee should enlist these
faculty in the screening of the applicants. Where possible, interviews in
person should be conducted. When this is impractical, telephone interviews
should be substituted. But some kind of direct interaction appears to be
necessary to avoid admitting students who are considered inadequate. However,
once the students are admitted, no faculty member has the right to ridicule
their level of preparation-the faculty are responsible for whom they admit.
Here we, quite obviously, strongly agree
with the internal reviewers and we appreciate the forceful way in which these
points are made.
Graduate
requirements. A number of specific issues were discussed with the review
team, leading to the following recommendations by the external reviewers (ER,
p. 6). "Reasonable and coherent reading lists [must] be established".
The "exam format [must] be regularized ... and the expectations for
student performance be made explicit". "The graduate program [must]
be simplified and the time to-PhD be reduced". The internal reviewers
strongly support these recommendations and refer the reader to the report of
the external reviewers for a complete discussion of the issues. However,
because none of these issues-nor others the internal reviewers would ordinarily
have raised-can be meaningfully addressed unless the problems above are
resolved, we forgo further elaboration here.
Moreover,
there is an additional problem that must be solved before these graduate
program issues can be dealt with. The faculty must find some way to make
collective decisions. Repeatedly we were told that particular issues had not
been resolved because no consensus could be reached. In some cases this involved
dissertation committees whose members, we were told, changed their minds or
could not agree-leaving the student stranded! In other cases departmental
issues were involved, such as the infamous (and functionally non-existent)
reading lists. When we asked the chair what the vote of the department had
been, we were told that there had been no vote! Further questioning left the
review team, with the impression that the faculty avoids voting on issues that
might go against the strongest personalities in the department. This tendency
would be' consistent with reports of attempted intimidation following such
votes in the past.
Even
now, as this is being typed, months after the release of the report, it is still the case that the radical changes that
need to be made are being thwarted by the same two linguistic faculty members
mentioned in the report proper. We
have heard of faculty shying away from changes which need to be made because
"you-know-who would raise a fuss." This, then, is precisely what the 8-year review pointed out, the Slavic
Department faculty avoiding issues and proposed changes which "might go against the strongest personalities in the
department".
Some
way must be found for the department to make collective decisions so that the
students can have the security of knowing what is and what is not expected of
them. In the current climate many students feel obliged to tailor their
preparation to the perceived idiosyncratic preferences of specific members of
the faculty.
Action
Although the problems reported to us centered
primarily on just two members of the faculty, the greatest anger of the
affected students was often reserved for the majority of the faculty who they
say take no interest in, and no responsibility for, their plight. Again and
again the review team heard of mistreated students who received only soothing
words from the Chair and from other members of the faculty. In one instance the
Chair actually did approach the faculty member involved to suggest outside
mediation. When (predictably) the faculty member objected, the matter was
dropped. Thus, a situation with its origins in a small minority has become the
responsibility of the entire department because of the inaction and complacency
of the faculty (with one exception). Therefore, with but this one exception,
the entire faculty, collectively and individually, is culpable.
With
one small exception, we agree fully with this assessment. We do feel that some
of the native Russian faculty should not be held to the same degree of
responsibility as the Americans on the faculty since their understanding of the
academic system as a whole is not as comprehensive as one would expect from an
American scholar whose academic training and teaching has, in the main, been
done in the American system. In
fact, certain of these native Russians have made significant attempts to rein
in the two problem faculty members in linguistics and to circumvent
difficulties associated with these two faculty members.
Accordingly:
1) To reduce the
burden of students in the department and to preclude additional students from
entering an unhealthy environment, the Graduate Council has voted to suspend
admissions to the graduate program of the department of Slavic Languages and
Literatures until such time as conditions for graduate students in the
department improve.
2) To
protect students already in the program from further abuse, and to prevent any
possibility of retribution against those who may have cooperated with the
review team during this review process, it is hereby recommended that the
Administration place the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in
receivership until such time as external oversight is no longer deemed
necessary to protect the legitimate rights of the students to:
• be treated with respect
• take courses that benefit their education
rather than the need for enrollments
• be provided with reasonable and coherent
reading lists
• be informed explicitly of the format and
expectations for exams
• have their dissertations read in a timely
fashion and to receive constructive and useful criticism
•and in other ways, not specified above, to be
enabled, not impeded, in their education.
It
goes without saying that the willingness of numerous students to speak with the
review team (but not to be quoted) was critical in arriving at the decision to
take the above actions. Let it, therefore, be clearly understood that the
slightest indication of retaliation by faculty against students will be
aggressively investigated by the Graduate Council to determine whether charges
should be filed with the appropriate Senate Committee for violations of the
Faculty Code of Conduct, not only for recent but also for any past offences.
These
are certainly strong words.
Unfortunately, it seems as though the Administration is incapable of
providing the protection it promised to students who would volunteer to come
forth and speak with the committee.
Immediately after the release of the report the Chair of the Slavic
Department, Michael Heim, announced that he wanted to speak individually with
each and every one of the graduate students in the department. This was immediately brought to the
attention of the Administration.
Subsequent to this, one of the emeritus professors also began asking
students what they knew about the 8-year review, and this same professor then
openly confronted one student, accusing her of trying to bring down the
department.
The
Slavic Department graduate student representative several times made clear to
the Chair of the Slavic Department that she thought this sort of interaction,
one-on-one, between any professor in the Slavic Department, including the Chair, with
graduate students concerning the 8-year review would be inappropriate, simply
because it would put the student in a position of having either to openly state
his/her opinions of the review to the Department Chair, or it would force
him/her to lie in instances where he/she did agree with the report. Additionally, for every student that does speak with the Chair, this draws further
suspicion to those who choose not to speak with him, especially in a small
department such as Slavic. The
Slavic Department graduate student representitive offered to act as a conduit
to the Chair if he wanted to solicit feedback from the students, but the Chair
continued to disregard her request (made several times) that he not seek to
meet with students individually to discuss the report, even after other
students voiced complaints.
Eventually,
the Administration took action, instructing the Slavic Department faculty that
only the Chair of the Department should be talking with students. While this was a good first step as far
as it went, it was bad in that, far from instructing the Chair not to discuss
the 8-year review with the students individually, it in fact appeared to give
him a mandate to do so.
What
follows is perhaps some of the clearest evidence that the UCLA Slavic
Department faculty, far from being inclined to accept the report and to work
with the Administration to fix what is clearly a broken program, is intent on
holding on to its power and on attempting to defend its treatment of graduate
students. Certain members of this
faculty actually threatened legal action against the Administration and the
University for abridging their First Amendment rights. This strikes us as outrageous. We are not lawyers, so we cannot
comment on the validity of their claim.
It seems that in other areas of employer-employee relations, an employer
would be more than justified in asking his/her employees not to speak with
customers about certain issues.
Apparently, however, because of the "special status" of
professors vis-a-vis the university for which they work, i.e. issues related to
academic freedom and tenure, these restrictions cannot be placed on tenured
professors.
We
do not know for sure that this is true, i.e. that professors in this instance
are privileged over and above non-academic workers in this regard. As we have said, we are not lawyers. What we do know is that the
Administration, when challenged by these dissatisfied Slavic Department faculty
members, quickly acquiesced and recognized the faculty's "right" to
approach students and speak with them at will concerning the 8-year review. This implies one of two possible
scenarios:
1.
That the Administration conferred with its lawyers who told them that those
Slavic Department faculty and their legal representation were in fact correct,
and that the Administration has no power and no right to preclude conversations
between faculty and students on certain issues. If this is the case, then the UCLA Administration should
have known this beforehand, and should have made it clear to students that, if
they were to honor the Administration's request to participate fully in the
eight-year review process, then they would be doing so knowing that there is no
way they could be protected from direct inquiries from the UCLA Slavic
Department faculty. The fact that
the effort was made by the Administration to preclude such conversations
(excepting the Chair) shows good faith on the part of the Administration, but
clearly this was an area in which the Administration was ill-prepared and as a
result, led the Administration to offer what it could not provide, namely protection
from the Slavic Department faculty.
2.
The second possible scenario is that the Administration, when confronted with
the threat of legal action from the Slavic Department faculty, chose simply to
give in, not wanting to risk an intra-university legal battle which could open
up a legal can of worms vis-a-vis the always sensitive issues of academic
freedom and tenure. In other
words, rather than taking the difficult road of engaging its own faculty in the
legal arena, the Administration defaulted to the faculty's position and thus
left Slavic Department graduate students open to this type of intrusive
questioning. If this is the case,
there is no other word for it than shameful.
Regardless
of which of these two scenarios is true, it is clear that either the
Administration or the Graduate Council or both is still either unable or
unwilling to protect Slavic Department graduate students from unwanted
conversation with Slavic Department faculty members regarding the 8-year
review. When the Graduate Council
was asked by graduate students to make the 8-year review available via e-mail
(this in response to Michael Heim's sending out to graduate students via e-mail
documentation which supported the position of the Slavic Department faculty),
the Graduate Council was extremely reluctant to do so. This reluctance itself seems to
indicate a bias toward faculty sensibilities. Whatever arguments might have been made against releasing
the report via e-mail surely would lose their justification in light of the
fact that the Slavic Department faculty itself was using e-mail to communicate
its own side of the story (and only its side of the story) to graduate students. In spite of the fact that the Slavic
Department itself was sending out reports which reached graduate students
immediately, regardless of where these graduate students were (i.e., student
out of the area or abroad would instantly get the department's side of the
story via e-mail, but not the original report to which the department was
responding), it appears as though the Graduate Council did finally buckle in to
the Slavic Department itself and refused to send out the report via
e-mail. A sort of
"compromise" solution was reached whereby the Graduate Council agreed
to send out paper copies of the report to individual graduate students.
Even
more disturbing than the double standard seen here (e-mail for statements and
arguments favorable to the faculty, snail-mail for the report itself), was the
letter which accompanied the report, in which Slavic Department graduate
students, many of whom had already expressed clearly their desire not to
discuss the 8-year review with Slavic Department faculty (including the Chair,
Michael Heim), were actually encouraged to participate in what the letter
termed the department's "self-review process". In spite of student objections to
communicating directly with Michael Heim and other Slavic Department faculty
members about the 8-year review, the University has not only failed to prohibit
Michael Heim from communicating with graduate students concerning the 8-year
review, it has in fact given him a mandate to do so.
UCLA's
handing of this matter in promising what it could not (or would not) provide in
terms of protection from retaliation will cast a long shadow not only over
future 8-year reviews but on the reputation of the University as a whole.
Recommendations
It is the goal of the councils to use the review
process to strengthen departments. Therefore, we urge the Administration to
refrain from imposing punitive measures (such as withdrawing the 19 century
FTE). This would diminish the department's stature and would harm even the
graduate students we seek to protect.
We
sincerely appreciate the internal review committee's desire to protect graduate
students. We do not, however,
necessarily see a contradiction between such protection and punitive measures
being taken, not against the department per se, but against those faculty
members who have abused graduate students and those who stood by and allowed it
to happen.
Problematic
in this regard, however, is that, as things stand now, the censure procedure as
it exists requires students to come forth, give up their shield of anonymity,
and testify on record as to the wrong-doing of the professor in question. In a field such as ours, going public
with complaints about one's own institution is tantamount to making oneself
persona non grata in the Slavic world.
That is not especially fair, but it is true nonetheless. UCLA should have in place an investigative
and censure procedure which would not rely on the direct testimony of graduate
students.
Another
problem with academic censure, as we understand it, is that, astoundingly, this
is supposed to be a "confidential" process, the result of which is to
be known only to the Administration and the faculty member involved. While we doubt that any graduate
student would want to even avail him- or herself of the opportunity to try the
censure option, simply because of the need to lift the shield of confidentiality,
the absurdity of this "confidentiality" requirement begs the question
as to what value the entire procedure could possibly be? If a student were willing to give up confidentiality to
participate in a censure procedure, the hope would be that, by censuring a
faculty member, that faculty member's standing and prestige in the field would
be negatively affected, as would, consequently, his or her power to harm
graduate students, either by outright negative commentary or by instances of
"damning with faint praise" directed towards colleagues in the field
who might be considering hiring the graduate student in question. But if the entire process itself is
"secret", then there would be no sense of disapprobation visited upon
the faculty member by others in the field, again leaving open the question, why
would a graduate student even bother?
As long as graduate students are giving up their confidentiality anyway,
they might as well file suit in court, where at least they stand a reasonable
chance of collecting damages, and in addition, they can at the same time focus
the spotlight on the misdeeds of the offending faculty member.
Instead, we offer the recommendations below in the
hope that they will be supported by the administration so that the department
may emerge stronger and more respected than before. The department, for its
part, can minimize the inevitable stain on its reputation resulting from the
measures outlined above, by working quickly to address and redress the problems
described in this review.
The
one thing this department has not done since the release of the report is to
work "quickly to address and
redress the problems described in this review." On the
contrary, this department has fought against these results tooth and nail from
the very beginning, and continues to do so today. The Chair of the Slavic Department has not only refused
requests from the graduate student representative that he refrain from engaging
students in one-on-one conversations concerning the 8-year review, he has
continued his campaign against a former graduate student in this department who
had the courage not only to speak out, but to allow her story to be used
publicly.
In
the internal review team's response to Michael Heim's "Error of Fact"
statement, it is made abundantly clear that Michael Heim will twist and shade
the truth, and even completely deny the truth, in his efforts to undo the
results of the 8-year review. To
quote from this response from the internal reviewers: "The pattern that emerged was consistent denial or
minimization of the problem-until confronted with overwhelming evidence.". This pattern of which the
internal reviewers speak continues to the present day. One would think, after having been
confronted so openly and undeniably with such a characterization of his
actions, the Chair of the Slavic Department would mend his ways, but not
so. In the above-mentioned e-mail
he sent out to all graduate students, in spite of the fact that the Slavic Department's practice of
always striking out at the weakest and most vulnerable of its members, namely
graduate students, had been exposed in the 8-year review report, and in
spite of the fact that
the internal reviewers had effectively rebuffed his attempt to demonize the one
student brave enough to allow her story to be told (the very first point
addressed in the internal reviewers' response to the Chair's "Error of
Fact" statement), the Chair of the Slavic Department unbelievably continues to attack this same student. In doing so, not only does he falsely
characterize her abilities, but he actually releases details of her private
transcript from UC Riverside, without her consent, to other students, thus
putting him in violation of UC regulations, to say nothing of the Family
Privacy Act of 1974.
Far
from complying with the suggestions in the 8-year review, the Chair of the
Slavic Department has done everything in his power to refute the facts stated
in the review. He has stated his
intention of not only arguing against receivership (which is the very least that the Slavic Department should
receive), but also his intention to ask that the ban on incoming graduate
students be lifted.
As
for the rest of the faculty, clearly there are elements who will stop at
nothing to thwart the University's attempts to reform the Slavic
Department. They have already
challenged the University's authority legally (and won?). Tenure grants them next to absolute
security in their positions, and they are well aware of this. If they succeed in avoiding
receivership, which is what the rumor mill is saying will happen, this will
only strengthen their resolve, for they will know that not only have they
consistently and grotesquely abused graduate students, but that even though
this has been exposed publicly, they have still managed to hang on to power,
which will make them even more arrogant (if that is possible) than before.
The
University should be under no illusion that this department will ever
voluntarily comply with the suggestions contained in the 8-year review. It will never voluntarily acknowledge
that it was abusive to students.
It will never consent to give up power or to reform itself, because to
take steps to do so would in effect acknowledge the correctness of the report,
namely that reform was needed and that abuses did occur.
To the department and the administration
1 . To maintain the stature of the
department and to bolster undergraduate teaching, raise the current search for
a 19th century specialist to open rank, preferably someone already highly respected
in the field, and ideally someone who might take a leadership role as the
department emerges from the present crisis. It is understood that recruiting
such a person may be temporarily delayed by the measures outlined above,
however the delay can be shortened by aggressive cooperation on the part of the
department to correct the problems that have been noted above.
2. Seek a joint appointment to fill the 20th century
position.
3. Seek a joint appointment to provide a permanent
South Slavist.
As
mentioned above, not all of us agree that a 19th century position is as
important as a South Slavist. Some
of us believe that a full-time South Slavist should be the next appointment approved, assuming
the Slavic Department continues to be a viable academic department at UCLA.
To the department
4. Engage the linguistics faculty in the
development of a more balanced undergraduate curriculum in which the linguists
share in the undergraduate teaching.
Increase the selectivity of admissions to reduce
graduate student attrition. The goal should be to generate a smaller (by half),
better prepared student body, with more funding per student. Simultaneously,
efforts to find additional sources of funding should continue. Any subsequent
increase in admissions should be accompanied by commensurate increases in
funding opportunities for the students.
6.
The procedures for and the criteria upon which funding decisions are made must
be clearly explained to the students in writing.
7. Lift the veil of secrecy characteristic of the
department. For example, admit the MSO to faculty meetings as is done for all
other departments in the Kinsey Humanities Group, and allow graduate students
meaningful participation.
Time line
A follow-up review of the department will be conducted
in the Spring of 2001 by a process to be decided before June 30, 2000.
It is now October of 2000, four months
have passed since this process was to be determined, and no one among the
students has heard anything of it.
Approved by the Graduate Council: June 9, 2000
Approved by the Undergraduate Council: June 9, 2000
Appendix I: External Reviewer Reports
Appendix I
External Reviewer
Reports
Alan Timberlake, Slavic Languages & Literatures,
UC Berkeley
David Bethea,
Slavic Languages & Literatures, University of Wisconsin
TO: Duncan Lindsey, Chair, Graduate Council, Academic
Senate Office, UCLA
FROM: David Bethea, Department of Slavic Languages
& Literatures, University of WisconsinMadison;
Alan Timberlake, Department of Slavic Languages &
Literatures, University of California at Berkeley
ABOUT: External Review of the Department of Slavic
Languages & Literatures, UCLA, February 23-25, 2000
1.
General. For several decades UCLA
has been a leader in Slavic studies in North America, the hallmarks of its
program being an enviable breadth and rigor. It has been especially strong in
the area of linguistics and poetics. Perhaps more than any other department in
the country, UCLA's has embodied, and to a significant degree still embodies in
some of its faculty, what the great structural linguist Roman Jakobson called
the study of the "Slavic word"-- the investigation of how the
disciplines of linguistics, poetics, folklore, and literary study interrelate
and interpenetrate on Slavic soil. UCLA's Slavic faculty are virtually without
exception highly productive and distinguished, with national and in several
cases international reputations.
This is true for some faculty in the
Slavic Department. Others are
looked upon as productive, but not particularly relevant or distinguished, as
they have failed to keep up with developments in the field.
On
the undergraduate level, the department has generally worked hard to make
itself accessible and relevant to today's students, and it has done so without
abandoning its traditions and high standards. The language program at UCLA,
about which we will have more to say below, is one of its singular strengths.
With regard to the graduate program, the students appear to be exceptionally
well trained,.....
Yes and no. Linguistically, the program here is seriously deficient in
current theory. No one is saying
that the linguistic component of the UCLA Slavic Department should turn its
focus completely on current linguistic theory. There is much to be said for its emphasis on historical and
Jakobsonian linguistics. But it
does its students no favors when it fails to offer even a cursory introduction
into Government/Binding and Minimalist linguistic theory. One need not be able to claim expertise
in this area in order to be taken seriously in the field, but one should at
least be conversant in this school of linguistic thought, since it is the
dominant scholarly construct for linguistics in this country. One need not necessarily agree with it,
but in order to even debate it, one must know what it is.
In this respect, then, not only has the
UCLA Slavic Department not trained its charges well, it hasn't trained them at
all. It's a problem. Of the seven UCLA Slavic Ph.D.'s in
linguistics who received tenure track positions in the 1990's, three received
tenure, three were denied tenure, and one has yet to come up for tenure. It is telling to see UCLA graduates at
national conferences delivering papers on issues brought up by Jakobson 50
years ago while their colleagues are addressing cutting edge topics in the
world of linguistics.
Thus, while some of the linguistic training received by
UCLA students is good, much of it is not, and much of it is non-existent. This raises the question of how the
external reviewers came to this evaluation of the teaching in the UCLA Slavic
Department. Was Timberlake (the
linguistic member of the external review team) relying on his own memories of
UCLA when he was a tenured faculty member in the 1980's, or did he do a full
investigation into the current UCLA Slavic linguistic training which he ranks
so highly?
.....a
fact further corroborated by the department's record of placing seven out of
seven new Ph.D.s over the past five years. This record of placing students in
recent years is unparalleled among Slavic programs in America.
Indeed, UCLA's record of "placing seven out of seven new Ph.D.s over the past
five years" is in fact
unparalleled, more so than Profs. Timberlake and Bethea can know, since not
even UCLA has managed to do this.
When statements like this occur, one is forced to ask if the external
review committee did any reviewing/investigation at all, or did it simply allow
the UCLA Slavic Department to feed it information? It is not as if this would be a difficult claim to check:
the UCLA Slavic Department web site lists all the department's recent Ph.D.
recipients. It would have been a
simple matter of asking where exactly each of these graduates has received the
"tenure track positions" they are supposed to have.
In point of fact, of the ten students who
have received Ph.D.'s during this time period (Rob Romanchuk-99, Andrea
Lanoux-98, Kelly Herald-97, Eun-Ji Song-97, Lingyao Lai Walsh-97, Christopher
Gigliotti-97, Iida Katerina Hirvasaho-97, Amanda Nowakowski-96, David
Macfadyen-95, Karen McCauley-95) only four received tenure-track
positions. Interestingly, for a
department which claims such expertise in linguistics, none of these four
positions were in linguistics. Of
the three linguistics Ph.D.'s, one is working as a lecturer in Korea, one is
working in a library, and one is out of the field altogether. When combined with the fact that full
half (3 of 6)of the UCLA Slavic linguistic graduates who came up for tenure in
the 1990s failed to receive tenure, a very different picture of the
department's academic successes emerges.
How would the external reviewers explain
the discrepancy between 7 out of 7, on the one hand, and 4 out of 10, on the
other? Perhaps the external
reviewers should be asked why they were so eager to accept blindly whatever
information was provided to them.
At best, this suggests they were careless, lax and naive. At worst, it suggests collusion on
their part with the faculty of the Slavic Department in an attempt to somehow
neutralize the record of long-term abuse of students with an impressive
placement record.
It has been suggested by some that this
is not the fault of the external reviewers, that they took the information
provided to them simply because this was the customary way of conducting 8-year
reviews at UCLA, i.e. they would have never dreamed that they would have been
provided false information. This
may or may not be the case. If it
is, however, then this begs another question, namely why even have external
members (or internal members, for that matter) on an 8 year review if the
reviewers are going to accept unquestioningly statistics provided by the very
entity they have been asked to investigate? . This practice in essence turns
the review into a self-review. Why
even bother with external members if they are simply going to parrot the
statistics provided them by the department itself and echo the department's own
view of itself? Why not just have
the Slavic Department review itself?
It is this, frankly, which is most
disturbing. This incident serves
not only as an indictment of this particular external review team, but of the
entire review process. It leaves
the impression (and indeed, can anyone argue that in this case this impression
is not that far removed from reality) that this is nothing more than an
"Old Boys Network", with each department nominating as potential
external review members only those scholars whom it knows to be sympathetic to
the department under review. Thus,
the purpose is not to actually review the department from without, but rather
to provide cover for the department, to make perhaps some superficial criticism
of the department, but basically to confirm the department's view of itself and
allow the department to claim that it is indeed subject to oversight of sort
(granted, only once every eight years, but that is beside the point).
If the external review committee's blind
acceptance of the department's statistics is not convincing enough evidence
that this was indeed the case in this review, then one need look no farther
than the external reviewers' shameful letter in support of the Slavic
Department (appended and commented on below) which was solicited by the Slavic
Department after the review came out and which was distributed to all Slavic
Department graduate students via e-mail, a letter in which the external
reviewers frantically attempt to distance themselves from their initial report
and to undermine the internal report.
(Because of Alan Timberlake's close association with two of the problem
linguistic members in the Slavic Department, the two mentioned explicitly by
the Slavic Department chair in his Statement of Facts response, and because he himself was a former member
of the UCLA Slavic Department, many of the senior graduate students would have
nothing to do with the report, fearing bias on Timberlake's part. Given the results of the internal
report, and given the aforementioned revisionist letter on the part of the
external reviewers, can anyone say that it was a mistake on the part of these
graduate students not
to talk to them? More on this
below in the section dealing with this revisionist letter.)
UCLA
has thus managed to keep intact a basic infrastructure for Slavic study which
should allow it to be well positioned for the future. This depth and breadth
will be necessary as a kind of gold reserve, which can be drawn upon over time,
as the needs of the world at large and of the student body at UCLA change. It
goes without saying that no Slavic program, in the country has been immune to
the vast cultural and demographic shifts brought on by the fall of the former
Soviet Union and the onset of the new global economy and changing interests on
the part of American undergraduates, who ever more treat undergraduate
education as training for future employment.
God forbid that anyone should ever accuse
the UCLA Slavic Department of being concerned with its students' future employment
opportunities.
The
key is to find a way to adapt to external changes while still maintaining the
basic integrity of one's programs-to provide needed training to undergraduate
and graduate populations without becoming in the process a service department.
What exactly does this mean? A "service" department? Is it not the duty and role of a state
university to provide service to its students and to the public at large which
supports it?
This type of statement is distressingly
familiar to the graduate students in this department, usually because it is a
code of sort, wherein "service"-type activity is defined as anything
that the faculty does not happened to be interested in at a given moment. The refusal of the department
historically to involve itself in (not advocate, mind you, but simply teach/make
aware of) the various
incarnations of Chomskian linguistics, i.e. in that school of linguistic
thought which dominates the field, has often been justified using that same
phrase: "Oh, we are not a service department, dancing to the tune of whoever has the loudest
whistle. We are true scholars."
Perhaps the Slavic Department at UCLA,
should it survive this review, would do well to think of it self more in terms of
service, however much that might offend the pure and scholarly aesthetics of
those currently in power there.
The
external reviewers sense that Slavic at UCLA can successfully adapt to the
demands of a smaller (yet still strategic) language, literature, and culture
program in today's academy, but some of the decisions it will have to make will
not be easy and will necessarily go against the grain of the department's own
traditions. In what follows we try to offer some points of orientation as well
as concrete recommendations that the department and administration may want to
take into account as they consider the future.
2. Undergraduate
Program. The interviews with the
department's undergraduate students were one of the most pleasant aspects of
our two-day review experience. Slavic appears to be blessed with a number of
gifted undergraduate instructors. We cannot recall an instance where one of the
students being interviewed said something negative about the department or the
individual course or courses. So-called "heritage"
(émigré or second-generation) students were especially numerous
and enthusiastic: they stated repeatedly that the new courses designed to
educate them further in a language and culture they left prematurely are both
much needed and well taught. Several individuals praised the accessibility of
the instructors and TAs. They felt themselves to be part of a small
"collective" on a large campus, with the staff making time to
accommodate their needs in a cheerful and always professional way. The
"Russian room," a specific location where students can drop to chat
with TAs or a native Russian speaker (Ninel Dubrovich) is a demonstrable
success.
Ms. Dubrovich is one of the few bright
points in the Slavic Department and she should be compensated accordingly.
The
system of offering three parallel tracks for majors (Russian language and
literature, Slavic languages and literatures, and Russian studies) appears to
work well and to, build on the strengths-especially the breadth---of the
department. We would also like to applaud the new major in European studies,
which further integrates Slavic into the campus mainstream. The department is
to be commended for the efforts it has made in the last decade to broaden its
appeal. We are confident that the department is genuinely committed to these
efforts, and under the department's present enlightened leadership, ...
It should be obvious at this point in the
reply that not all share this view of the present leadership as "enlightened". Quite the
contrary: the present leadership of the department, while not himself one of
the main abusers, has for years turned a blind eye to such abuses, his
objections notwithstanding. The
response to his Statement of Fact by the internal reviewers makes this clear.
...even
more new courses will emerge and the efforts will continue, organically and
effectively, to broaden Slavic's undergraduate presence on campus.
Again, it is important to note that this effort
is supported much more by some faculty members than by others, who have no
interest whatsoever in the undergraduate program. See our reaction to the internal reviewers brief commentary
on the undergraduate program above.
We
would like to note, however, that, based on enrollment data for the 1997-98 and
1998-99 academic years provided by Academic Planning and Budget, there appears
to be a significant asymmetry between the literature and linguistics faculty in
terms of their respective undergraduate teaching assignments. Literature
faculty regularly teach undergraduate courses, linguistics faculty do not. It
looks to us that virtually every course that contributes substantially to the
undergraduate student credit hour numbers for Slavic-Russian 25 (The Russian
Novel in Translation), Russian 99A (Introduction to Russian Civilization),
Russian 99B (Russian Civilization of the 20th Century), Russian 124D
(Dostoevsky), Russian 130B (Russian Poetry of the Late 18th to the Early 20th
Century), Russian 140B (Russian Prose from Karamzin to Turgenev), etc.-is
taught by a member of the literature faculty, and those student credit hours
have allowed their departments to offer low-enrolled graduate courses and
thereby to keep these programs going. This creates the impression that, at
present, the senior linguists are doing the majority of their teaching at the
graduate level, a distribution of faculty energy which naturally results in
problems with enrollments and student credit hours. Linguists need not teach
only highly specialized courses in linguistics per se, which in any event would
have trouble drawing from an undergraduate population; instead, they might
consider offering courses in such related fields as folklore, mythology,
culture, history of culture, etc. After all, literature faculty around the
country have been called upon to "reinvent themselves" by offering
more general education and writing-intensive courses that serve the larger
college population; literature faculty regularly extend themselves to develop
courses in film, art, or periods of literature in which they are not research
specialists. Another possibility is that the department's linguists offer
already existing courses for other departments and programs-for example, a
course on dialectology for the Linguistics Department or a course on discourse
theory for Applied Linguistics.
We very strongly agree with this sentiment. Again, we would refer to the
aforementioned undergraduate section of the internal reviewers report above as
to exactly why certain linguistics faculty members shy away from contact with
undergraduates. As to working with
students in other departments, this would expose some of these faculty members
to 1. students who are not under their direct control and thus not amenable to
pressure, and 2. students who are versed in areas of linguistics about which
this faculty knows very little or students who are current in schools of
linguistic thought in which this faculty has not remained current.
We would also point out that not all of
the linguistic faculty in the Slavic Department fall into this category. Two of the "non-problematic"
linguistics faculty (both of whom have strong reputations in the field) have in
fact taught large undergraduate classes here at UCLA, drawing in students from
outside of Slavic.
We
might note parenthetically that small departments like Slavic would be
encouraged in attempts to reach larger audiences if the University were to
adopt a policy of crediting the home department of the instructor rather than
the department offering the course;...
Strongly agree.
...this
would be an incentive for faculty in small departments to teach established,
high-enrollment courses for other departments. And even if it is not UCLA's
policy (for now) to give official credit for enrollments logged by home faculty
in visiting departments, Slavic in this instance would still get the reputation
for being good citizens. The asymmetry in the utilization of faculty energy
needs to be addressed and something approaching equality of
undergraduate-graduate teaching assignments for all ladder faculty ought to be
instituted.
3. Language Program. UCLA is fortunate to have an exceptionally strong and
well-integrated language program with a bright and responsive staff. Professor
Olga Kagan is generally recognized as one of the three leading experts on
Russian language pedagogy in the country, along with Patricia Chaput at Harvard
and Benjamin Rifkin at Wisconsin. She has remained active as a writer of a
widely-used textbook and course materials, and her writing and boundless
professional activity also serve to raise the visibility of the department. Her
leadership and highly professional manner are in evidence throughout the
program. The departments TAs seem very satisfied with Professor Kagan's
supervision of their teaching duties and with the
preparation they receive in Slavic 375 (Teaching
Apprentice Practicum). When we interviewed all the language instructors
together, including those in Russian, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Romanian,
and Serbian/Croatian, there appeared to be excellent camaraderie among them. We
were particularly impressed with the numbers of students in Dr. Galateanu's
Romanian classes. The enrollments in most upper-level Russian classes are
relatively robust, comparing favorably with enrollments in other institutions,
and that is a good sign. It is also impressive that there is remarkably little
attrition from one quarter to the next in the basic sequence of language
courses. There is also much more emphasis on non-linguistic content in the
language courses than was the case just a few years ago. Again, students seem
to reflect the well organized nature of the program and the dedicated attitude
of Professor Kagan and her colleagues with their comments, which virtually to a
person show a high degree of satisfaction. It was a wise move to fix Olga Kagan in place as permanent
faculty, at a time when it was difficult to make lecturer appointments with
SOE. It is our judgment that the language program, while forced like many
sister programs around the country to pay heed to enrollments and to continue
to reach out to a changing student population, is in good hands for the
indefinite future.
The work done by all the teachers of
non-Russian languages in the Slavic Department has been outstanding, again one
of the few bright points in a department such as this. Dr. Galateanu has gone out of her way
to recruit undergraduate students to her class, and Dr. Kresin is very much liked
and respected by both undergraduate and graduate students, having done a
wonderful job in undergraduate teaching in both Czech and Russian and in
sponsoring UCLA's Russian Club.
Dr. Corin's contribution to the undergraduate program in Serbocroatian has
been nothing short of outstanding, especially so in light of the fact that he
has been the department's de facto South Slavist for the last six years or
so. (See responses above to the
internal reviewers section on the need for a South Slavist for more on Dr.
Corin's role in this department.)
(We omit comment on Dr. Simon not as an
implied slight--indeed, from what we have heard her students appreciate her
course--but simply because we don't have any experience with her since
Hungarian was just last year added to Slavic Department offerings.)
Given the relative difficulty of languages in the
Slavic group, we would urge the administration to give the department some
flexibility in setting smaller class sizes in lower level courses: aiming for
the mid-20s (with maximum at 26) seems high to us; a limit of 15 would be
better, given the context.
4.
Graduate Program. As we suggested in
our opening remarks, at present Slavic is undergoing as much change as any
field in the humanities. Without doubt much of this change has to do with
demographics and the "new" economy, but some does not. At many
universities deans are not replacing slots automatically, but are waiting to
see if student demand warrants the same outlay as in the past. Financial aid
for graduate study in the humanities, usually one of the more difficult sells
to campus administrations even in prosperous times, has not been helped by news
of shrinking applicant pools and the ever fragile job market for new Ph.D.s.
Thus, we would like to stress that there are various factors over which no Slavic
program, including that of UCLA, has had control since the time of the last
review in 1992. Disciplines can grow up when there is a need (say, the
"Cold War" or "sputnik"), but they can also languish when
that need disappears. We are all historically situated in this way, as any look
in a course catalogue just a few short generations ago will show. It is a
cliché, but it is perhaps worth repeating: in order to remain viable,
today's Slavic departments and programs will have to attract and train today's,
not yesterday's, students; they will have to find ways to maintain intellectual
integrity while still being responsive to different audiences.
Having
said this, we believe that Slavic at UCLA is at an historical crossroads for
other reasons as well. If the "infrastructure," in terms of faculty
resources and national reputation, is there to insure that the program is well
situated to face the future, there are also real challenges that need to be
addressed soon, and in a thorough, collegial manner. As capable as UCLA's
graduate students in Slavic are, and as appreciative as they are of the
intellectual training they receive, they suffer from an alarming level of
anxiety, bordering on demoralization.
In light of this comment by the external
reviewers, and other similar comments that they will make throughout their
review, one can only wonder how they were able to justify writing the
aforementioned revisionist support letter, a copy of which is appended and
commented upon below.
(The
issue of faculty collegiality will be addressed farther on.) We realize that to
be a graduate student is to be, by definition, in a vulnerable, transitional
status, with the result that a certain amount of legitimate (and sometimes less
than legitimate) "ventilating" is to be expected. Bearing this in
mind, we must nevertheless report that what we found during our visit was much
more than what can be attributed to run-of-the-mill graduate student anxiety.
We would urge the department to do everything in its power to address these problems
in an open, fair, and non-defensive manner...
If nothing else has come out of this
review, it should be abundantly clear that this department is utterly incapable
of receiving criticism in an "open,
fair, and non-defensive manner". Indeed, they are
incapable of taking criticism at all, as is evidenced by the Chair's repeated
attempts to deny the substance of the internal report.
...We
do not wish to be alarmist, but neither do we wish to treat euphemistically an
atmosphere that can poison and further undermine the continuing life of the
department.
To begin with, too many applicants have been accepted
in the past relative to the level of support that the department is capable of
providing. This in turn has translated into a system. where: 1) some (many?)
continuing students do not have a reliable sense of their possibilities for aid
in the future; 2) not everyone is given the opportunity to teach (a real
liability for those going on the job market);
This is a sore point among graduate
students. Those graduate students
who do manage to survive this program and graduate are many times woefully
under prepared in terms of teaching experience. It should also be pointed out that the allotment of teaching
slots is far from uniform, with some graduate students teaching for years while
others have been denied any chance to teach at all.
and 3) the program has more people in the on-leave
status than it ought. (The practice of dividing TA positions into two in order
to spread the opportunity to teach perhaps has a certain logic, but it is
unheard of at other institutions, and should be eliminated.)
We disagree. Until the faculty takes steps to increase enrollments, these
divided TA-ships are absolutely essential to providing teaching experience to
graduate students.
We anticipate that the shrinking applicant pool will
probably take care of this problem by itself, but even so, the department
should as a policy decide to admit fewer students and to provide more initial
funding and continue to fund those it does admit on a more regular, longer
basis.
What the department needs to do more than
anything is be up-front and honest when discussing the possibilities for
funding with potential graduate students.
There is no disgrace in not having enough money for your graduate
students. Stigma should be
attached, however, to those who promise funding to students knowing in
advance that this
funding cannot be provided to all students. This is a shameful practice of long-standing in the Slavic
Department.
In addition to being the responsible thing to do
given the current job market in Slavic, this would both improve student morale.
Some change in initial funding-a commitment to four- or five-year support
packagesis absolutely necessary to compete successfully against the other
strong programs that offer multi-year financial aid packages.
One thing that became clear from the review team's
discussions was the need to make a more concerted effort to find teaching and
research support positions for Slavic graduate students on campus. It appears
that there are very real opportunities for Slavic graduate students to, teach
in other programs, to serve as: TAs in ESL courses (after the minimal
training), TAs in other languages of competence (many grad students in Slavic
are foreign), TAs in writing-intensive or composition sections and in
literature discussion sections of large General Education lecture courses (if
this is a possibility); possibly TAs in content courses in Linguistics, etc. It
would take a little effort to learn what the realistic possibilities are, but
once the paths of employment in other programs, once discovered, quickly become
worn.
Strongly agree. This is the single best suggestion for the improvement of
the Slavic Department offered by the external reviewers.
The
department also has in place some specific projects, specifically the journals
edited by Professors Ivanov and Klenin, that are of value to the profession as
a whole. It would be a valuable source of modest support for one or two
graduate students if such projects could be funded on a reliable and recurrent
basis.
The
graduate students interviewed complained repeatedly that the procedures for
selecting those to be funded in a given year are not explained to them in a
consistent fashion. (For the record, the external reviewers are of the opinion,
based on their experiences at home institutions, that the procedures for determining who receives financial aid should be
made explicit, but that publicizing the actual ranking of all the students can
be divisive and ought to be avoided.)
For the record, based on our experiences
at this institution,
we are of the opinion that publicizing rankings should certainly be done. For years this department has chosen to operate in the fog,
where requirements, criteria for success, and true evaluations of students all
remained in the dark. This
attitude very much suits the faculty of this department, for they know that the
murkier the requirements, the greater their freedom to act in whatever manner
they please, since they are, in the end, the final arbiter of grades, funding,
and success or failure.
If this department is only going to fund
only some of its
graduate students, then all of the students have a right to know how they were evaluated
against their peers.
Equally
troubling were the numerous stories of confusion and frustration with regard to
exams and readings lists: there does not seem to be an understanding of what
the core material is that all students should know for their M.A. exams
(linguistics), as apparently the faculty cannot agree on a single format;
likewise, there does not appear to be a clear policy on the composition of
examinations: what should come from relevant course work and ,what from outside
reading (NB: no reading list exists). Finally, the Ph.D. exam (linguistics) too
often repeats "broad knowledge" aspects of the M.A. exam without
allowing the student to do the sort of in-depth analysis he or she will have to
show at the dissertation level.
Strongly agree. The exam process here, especially in linguistics, is both
one of the major abuses perpetrated upon students as well as a major source of
power for the problem faculty discussed above. Especially abusive are the oral exams, in which the faculty
is unrestrained and free to go wherever they choose. In a department with fair-minded faculty, this would not be
much of a problem. Clearly, that
is not the case here.
We would take pains to point out that not
all students object to the concept of an MA exam per se; the objection is to having to take an
exam without having any idea as to what body of acknowledge we are responsible
for knowing. When this objection
has been put to the faculty in the past, we have been accused of wanting to be
"spoon-fed" the exam. No
one expects to be spoon-fed anything, certainly not in this department. What we do expect is to have the corpus
of knowledge which we are expected to assimilate be clearly, comprehensively,
and precisely defined, such that the faculty cannot (as they have done so often
in the past) pull something out of the air, accuse the student, with an air of
disbelief, of "not knowing something so basic to the field" (a direct
quote, by the way), and then use this "shocking" lapse on the part of
the student either to assign a lower grade (thereby putting future funding in
jeopardy) or to fail the student in a comprehensive exam.
Defining this corpus of knowledge
clearly, precisely, and in detail is not, in our view, anything close to the
"spoon-feeding" of which the Slavic Department faculty speaks so
derisively and with such disdain.
Quite the contrary, this is part of what the University itself and the
taxpayers who support it demand that they do. A vigorous and demanding exam based on such clear criteria
is certainly possible. Defining
and crafting this body of knowledge would, however, require effort on the part
of the faculty, and even worse, from their point of view, it would limit their
ability to be arbitrary in their assessment of students and in the type of
questions they could pose to students on exams, which is of course exactly the reason why this type of detailed
definition for the corpus of knowledge covered by the exam should be required.
On
the literature side, the students asked that the reading list be updated, a
course on recent Russian literature be instituted (in the bargain, probably
displacing moving the requirement of Medieval Literature to the Ph.D. level),
and the Movements and Genres course be replaced by Introduction to Graduate
Study (or in Other terminology, a pro-seminar on literary theory and research
methodology). These are all reasonable requests in our view.
We agree. This proposed "pro-seminar
on literary theory and research methodology" should not, however, be merged with a similar class
for linguists. This has happened
before in the past with the result being a course no one wanted to take and no
faculty member wanted to teach.
As
stated, one of the special strengths of the UCLA graduate program in Slavic has
been its breadth in linguistics offerings and its expertise along the
"seam" of linguistics and poetics, and some faculty (especially from
the linguists side) continue to teach and do active research in this tradition.
But this strength has also created its own weakness. This broad interest could
be one of the sources of a problem that we sense both the faculty and the grad
students are loathe to acknowledge: the average time to Ph.D. for 21 students
from 1988 to 1998 was, by our calculations, 9.347 years (based on the
"Profile for Slavic Languages and Literatures," p. 2). Despite some
improvement in recent years, we believe this time frame is much too long, given
the department's financial aid constraints and the job market in Slavic.
Programs should make every effort to advance their (hopefully now better
funded) students through all the requirements, including writing the
dissertation, in a 5-6 year period.
We agree. We would point out that, while spending nine or more years
in a Ph.D. program is indeed a grotesquely wasteful use of time, at least those
students whose time-to-degree was analyzed by the external reviewers actually received their Ph.D., for what it is worth. There are other students in this
program who spent that much time and left with nothing, good students who had
been highly regarded and recruited by the Slavic Department.
Understanding
this outer limit as a reality will force the department to make some changes in
its program. Some of these changes might (and probably should) be: 1)
instituting an 4-6 course outside minor (French, Philosophy, History,
Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Film, etc. the list is quite open-ended) that
would give the students an added area of expertise (very attractive in today's
market) but would have to come at the expense of existing requirements; 2) doing away with a formal
M.A. exam (with obvious exceptions: when a student comes with a M.A. from
elsewhere and needs to be tested or when the M.A. is terminal) and focusing
attention entirely on the Ph.D. qualifying exam;
Again, not all students object to the
concept of an M.A. exam in and of itself, we simply want to know what the
corpus of material is on which we are being tested. Some among us
would also object to automatically granting an M.A. to students who are continuing on into the
Ph.D. program while requiring at the same time terminal M.A. students to take
an exam in order to receive their M.A.
If the M.A. is granted, it should mean the same thing for everyone who
receives it, otherwise you call into question the academic integrity of the
degree-granting entity. From what
we have seen and heard at other universities, when the type of
"automatic" M.A. granting system is in place, one will often see
students who claim from the outset that their goal is to get the Ph.D., but who
in fact want only the M.A. and who, upon receipt of the automatic M.A., simply
drop out of the Ph.D. program, with their M.A. in their back pocket.
3)
using the Ph.D. written examinations to test the student's comprehensive
knowledge of the field, but using the Ph.D. oral examination as an opportunity
to discuss and refine the dissertation proposal (i.e., replacing what is now
called the "qualifying paper" by a new category); 4) considering
requiring reading knowledge of French or German rather than French and German;
5) establishing thorough, up-to-date (both in terms of the primary and
secondary literature), yet manageable/"realistic" reading lists in
linguistics and literature; 6) announcing as policy to students that they be
expected to take the qualifying exams by the end of their fourth year of
graduate study; 7) making the study of the "second Slavic" language
and literature an option for a minor rather than a requirement.
By
calling for these or analogous changes, we recognize that in some cases we are
asking the department to move in a direction opposite the one they would
prefer. For example, we gather from the linguistics graduate students and
faculty that many would like for all M.A. students to have demonstrated
proficiency in several "core" courses-Introduction to Phonetics,
Introduction to Historical Linguistics, Phonology, Syntax-before being admitted
to the Ph.D. program. Here the implication is that until all the Ph.D.
candidates are on the same level playing field, it is disruptive and
inefficient to have them study together. Only by having capable but
insufficiently trained new students take the requisite courses outside of the department,
presumably in Linguistics, can the situation be dealt with, goes this logic.
Again, the impulse to fix the problem has been to add rather than subtract. But
we fear that this solution, while understandable and perhaps desirable in a
world of unlimited resources, could end up extending further the time to degree
of these students.
We disagree. Most graduate students who come here and opt for the Slavic
linguistics track come here with next to no formal training in linguistics, and
this is not taken into account by the linguistics faculty. The result is not only frustration on
the part of the students, but also gross inefficiency, a horrible waste of time
spent looking up and trying to understand even the simplest of linguistic
concepts (phone vs. phoneme, etc.).
If one were to have even the most elementary of linguistic background,
and by that we mean the type of undergraduate introductory courses for
phonetics, phonology, syntax, historical linguistics, and semantics taught in
our Linguistics Department here, it would make a world of difference for
students.
Similarly,
students were enthusiastic about the possibility of courses that would extend
in the twentieth century past the thirties, but at the same time seemed
unwilling to understand that any such addition will lengthen the program.
It is unfortunate that the students with
whom the external reviewers spoke "seemed
unwilling to understand"
the point of the view of the external reviewers. We would hold open the possibility, however, that they did
indeed understand with this position, they simply, however, disagreed with
it. In fact, it may even be the
case that these same students can appreciate the need to reduce the time to
degree more than the external reviewers could ever hope to realize, but that
they want this done in such a way as to preserve the academic integrity of the
program. To imply, which the
external reviewers seem to do here, that there is an unresolvable contradiction
between the presence of well-prepared graduate students and a reasonable
time-to-degree strikes us as illogical.
The real
causes for the absurdly long time-to-degree (or "time-to-no-degree, as the case may be) have nothing
to do with efforts to make sure students have an elementary foundation of
knowledge before entering into graduate courses concentrating on highly
abstract and complex concepts, but rather have everything to do with failure of
this faculty to carry out their responsibilities and the litany of abuses
listed (and the many abuses not listed) in the internal review. When you take care of that problem, you will have gone a
long way towards solving the time-to-degree problem. Ignoring the common sense suggestion that students have the
prerequisite knowledge needed to understand, much less assimilate, the material
presented in advanced graduate courses does not only does little to affect the
time-to-degree problem, it also damages the integrity of the program and the
level of scholarly discourse which can take place in it.
These points were made clearly to the
external reviewers. It is
unfortunate, however, that they seemed unwilling to understand them.
Evidently
some changes need to be made to adjust the real preparation of incoming students.
Perhaps it would be better for the colleagues teaching the graduate curriculum
in Slavic linguistics to think of ways to provide some of this rudimentary
knowledge in phonology or syntax in already existing (or, if necessary, newly
designed) courses. Or if they truly believe that students entering the program
need to do work outside the department before they are qualified to study with
their peers, then the burden will be on these same colleagues to come up with a
way to reduce the students' requirements at a later stage.
And
lastly, in the spirit of morale building, we would urge the faculty to have an
open discussion among themselves and come up with simple guidelines for how to
provide feedback to students when correcting papers. Although students
applauded the faculty for being generally accessible and responsive in
one-on-one situations, they want more explicit feedback on their written work
(especially when the professor possesses competence in their native language).
As this is a culturally nuance issue, the best solution may be to establish
some general "do's" and "don't's" (including silence). With
regard to faculty advising, the students ask that their own professional needs
be placed above enrollment issues when recommending courses.
We strongly agree.
They
would also like the option of taking exams either by hand or on the computer (a
fairly widespread practice these days), and they would like to have greater
access to the reading room, but in a way that doesn't jeopardize security.
5.
Faculty. The Slavic faculty at UCLA gets high marks for its splendid
publication record and its national and international visibility. It is true,
moreover, that the department has made strides in the 1990s to balance its
profile between linguistics/language, on the one hand, and literature, on the
other. Professors Ivanov and Yokoyama are major appointments by any standards,
and Professor Koropeckyj has been an excellent addition as Polonist with other
areas of expertise. Be this as it may, there are gaps in current coverage that
will need to be filled before the department can be considered to be at full
speed and competitive with the top programs in the country: 1) a specialist in
"Golden Age" prose (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc.) with theoretical
sophistication and a well-established record in the field; 2) a specialist in
twentieth century Russian literature, particularly the contemporary period; 3)
a South Slavicist. It is our belief that the first position, the Golden Age
specialist, is absolutely crucial to the long-term. health and viability of the
department: this is where the biggest enrollments reside in any Slavic program,
and to have a well-known person representing this area would certainly add to
the luster of the department. It is the core area of any graduate program, and
it would not be unnatural to expect the person filling the position to exercise
a leadership role in the definition of the literature program. For this latter
reason, we recommend that the search be open as to rank; the department might
be extremely well served if it could identify and attract a prominent colleague
at an intermediate rank (approximately, the senior associate rank-that is,
ready to be promoted to full professor) and with one or more outstanding books
to his or her credit. To repeat, however, nothing in our estimation would do
more to raise the profile of the department and to solidify its orientation as
an equal parts literature and linguistics faculty than this appointment.
As was discussed above, our priorities
are different. We see the most
critical need being for a full-time South Slavicist, and we do not see the need for the department to
"solidify its orientation as an
equal parts literature and linguistics faculty". Every
other Slavic Department in the country has an orientation strongly toward
literature. We do not see why this
department could not continue to be the one department in the country with an
orientation towards linguistics.
Just because the problem faculty members have overwhelmingly come from
the linguistics side of the house does not mean that this need remain the
case. Two of the problem faculty
have already retired, and at least one other soon will (we hope).
There is a misconception among some in
the field that being in such a department is a disadvantage for students of
Slavic literatures. In fact,
coming from such a department, i.e. a department with a strong linguistics
profile and a solid (yet not the most prominent) literature faculty does not at
all seem to be an impediment to receiving jobs. As was stated above, despite the Slavic Department's
ludicrous claims as to the amount of students they place, the fact is that the
last three students they have placed in tenure-track jobs during the last four
years have all been literature students.
If anything, it is the linguistic students in this department who have had a difficult time
competing for tenure-track jobs, for reasons already discussed.
The
second literature appointment is also important programmatically and politically:
the graduate students would like more training in contemporary literature and
they are right to assume that this would make them more marketable-but perhaps
a little less so strategically. It could and probably should be at the junior
level. The South Slavic position, which both the linguistics faculty and
students lobbied for eloquently and for years, is an area that most major
programs in the country still have coverage in. Since breadth has always been
UCLA's hallmark, it would be a significant blow to its tradition and reputation
to do away with this position. The question seems to be whether to fix it in
place as a permanent ladder position or to continue to fill it on a
visiting/adjunct basis. The adjunct position has evidently been a satisfactory
temporary and ad hoc measure (with the reservation that no adjunct person can
serve on examinations). If one of the senior linguist positions (two are
relatively close to retirement) could be "mortgaged" for this one,
and if the position description were crafted not for a narrow linguist but for
a person genuinely able to teach the language(s), literature(s), and culture(s)
of the former Yugoslavia, then it would make sense to make the appointment
sooner rather than later.
We agree. Both the last South Slavicist and the current adjunct
replacement have fit this profile of a broad linguistic, literary, and cultural
background. We urge that, should
the Slavic Department remain intact after this review, this be the first
appointment made.
For,
to reiterate, we do believe that UCLA should have a South Slavicist.
6.
Leadership and Collegiality. We
understand from the faculty, graduate students, and staff that the period since
the last review has not always been easy for the department. The Slavic field
has changed and business as usual, probably never a viable option, is even less
a possibility today than it was eight years ago. Moreover, there have on
occasion been personnel issues in the department, which we will touch on
briefly below, that have sometimes strained relations and caused problems with
morale, especially the morale of the graduate students.
The external review team, as was
mentioned above, was not privy to all the information which the internal review
team received because of the presence of Timberlake. Thus, it would be unfair, since they were lacking this
information, to upbraid them for some of the conclusions they have
reached. It is fair, however, to
correct some of the misimpressions they may have received.
It is inaccurate to characterize the
"personnel issues" as something which happens "on occasion". These "personnel issues" are much more the norm than the exception. True, there may not be an outburst at
every meeting with a problem faculty member, or perhaps not even every second
or third meeting, but they happen often enough such that the atmosphere of
potential/probable retaliation is always in the air. This cannot help but effect the nature of the relationship
between student and faculty member, causing anxiety and fear, and stifling the
exchange of scholarly opinion.
(Who wants to put forth an idea only to have it ridiculed publicly, and
potentially be penalized for it in terms of grades/funding?) The result is a system wherein opinions
of students (or even questions they might have) are put forth very cautiously,
if at all. Even worse, one often
finds oneself in the humiliating position of having to confirm in the presence
of the faculty conclusions drawn by the faculty, even if the student is not in
agreement with that position.
As students, we do not expect that our
opinions will always be right: indeed, we are here to learn from those who
supposedly are the best in the field.
And yet, if we live in fear of even uttering dissenting opinions (or
even opinions which in some way question the opinion of the instructor) then
how can the learning process flourish?
It is a vexing and humiliating position in which to find oneself.
But
we do not believe the fabric of trust and collegiality has been irreparably
torn, only frayed.
We find it very possible that trust and
collegiality has been irreparably torn.
In
this respect, it seemed obvious to us that the current chair, Michael Heim,
with his patience, good will, sensitivity, and the respect he universally
enjoys, has done an admirable job of bringing the department out of a situation
of potential crisis; he is the right chair for the department at this time.
Clearly, we could not be more at odds
with this statement. Michael Heim
is not and cannot be a part of the solution to this department's woes. On the contrary, he has been and is a
part of the problem. Although he
is not one of the faculty members who regularly abuses students, he is clearly
one of those guilty of appeasement, of letting this abuse continue unabated for
years. Why he does this, we do not
and cannot know. He is tenured, he
has a solid reputation in the field, and he is certainly not lacking in perception. And yet, for years, he has denied that
there were any real problems in the department. Nothing makes this more clear than his Factual Errors
Statement and the response to it by the internal reviewers. Even now, he continues, in front of
students, his attempt to defend the indefensible, namely the conduct of this
faculty.
Not only has Michael Heim not done "an admirable job of bringing the department out of a
situation of potential
[potential?] crisis", but in fact he is an impediment to positive change. Michael Heim is not a part of the
solution, he is a part of the problem.
This fact needs to be clearly understood.
It
was especially encouraging to us to see the solid relationship that Professor
Heim had forged with Dean Yu and the administration-this at a time when a
positive relationship needs to be and can be developed.
This is very troubling. It is our understanding that the
recommendation of the Academic Senate that the Slavic Department be placed in
receivership has been rejected by Dean Yu in favor of allowing for a one-year
period of supervised adjustment and reformation.
We very much disagree with this course
and cannot help but wonder if the "solid
relationship that Professor Heim had forged with Dean Yu" has played a role in her choice
not to follow through with the Academic Senate's recommendations. This department has next to no ability
to govern itself. With the
exception of a brief chairmanship cut short several years ago, this department
has never shown the leadership and the willingness to deal with the problems
which lie at the core of the current crisis.
Indeed,
in our view (and here we rely on observing analogous situations at our own and
other institutions), it can be catastrophic when trust between department and
administration breaks down, and there is no justification in this instance for
the department not to work cooperatively with the current administration.
We find it startling that the external
reviewers can, on the one hand state that "there is no justification in this instance for the department not to
work cooperatively with the current administration", and then, on the other hand,
after having seen Michael Heim's continued pattern of evasion and excuse, write
the aforementioned revisionist letter (appended below).
Yet
all of the patience and intelligent stewardship of one individual will not by
themselves succeed in mending the frayed fabric and getting this academically
superb department again on sound footing. Nor will additional resources in and
of themselves. For this mending process to take place, other colleagues will
have to participate. They will have to be willing to compromise on some issues
(the shape of the curriculum, the set of requirements, the length of the
program of study, etc.) but not on others (what constitutes
"Professional" behavior).
Which
brings us at last to the thorny issue of (for lack of any other general word)
collegiality. We, the external reviewers, heard numerous descriptions from the
students and staff of how some Slavic faculty behaved in a manner that can only
be called unprofessional. We mention these incidents now neither to denounce
specific individuals nor to establish the allegations as true-we were not given
the time or the mandate to determine the veracity of these reports or to
adjudicate in these matters- but simply to let the department know that there
is a significant problem of aggrieved perception (and quite possibly fact) with regard to
student-faculty and staff-faculty relations...
The fact that the external reviewers,
like the internal reviewers, were "not
given the time or the mandate to determine the veracity" of much of what they are
reporting, thus making it necessary, as was also the case with the internal
reviewers, to state the problem in terms of "perception", again underscores the need for the University itself
to undertake an official investigation of this department to determine the
extent to which wrongdoing was done, and the extent to which individual
students suffered abuse. The
University can take no steps to reprimand or terminate offending faculty
without first having conducted such an investigation.
We
live in a litigious society...
We agree.
...and,
issues of normal civility aside, the power differential between a tenured
faculty member and a graduate student is too great not to take seriously the
potential for abuse. To repeat, the issue is not whether any of this, or even a
small part of it, happened (although this much smoke suggests there must be
some fire). Rather, the issue is that the "air needs to be cleared,"
the students and staff need to feel that they have been heard, and a statement
needs to be made that nothing like this will occur again and that the
department is making a fresh start.
While this suggested remedy falls far,
far short of what needs to be done, it is understandable that the external
reviewers might come to such a conclusion, since few graduate students were
willing to meet with them because of the presence of Alan Timberlake on the
external review team. (Again, in
hindsight, especially in light of the aforementioned revisionist letter, this
correctness of this decision on the part of those graduate students has been
fully confirmed.)
We
make no official recommendations here other than to say that the department
must find a way to reunite around Michael Heim's and others' leadership. How
they accomplish that, either with the help of professionals or on their own, is
best left up to the department and to the administration. But at the end of the
(hopefully short and efficacious) day, something must be done.
7. Conclusion. The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UCLA has been, one
of the premier programs in the country for three decades, especially in
linguistics, where it arguably has the strongest research faculty in
America....
"Arguably" is the operative
word here. Some of the faculty
have done and continue to do quality work in diachronic, especially
Slavic/Indo-European, linguistics, and one is doing innovative work in
synchronic linguistics. Others
long ago burnt out and confined themselves to areas of linguistics which are
not only not current, but frankly, not even that interesting. There is a serious lack of scholarship
and dearth of knowledge among the faculty as a whole in the field of
theoretical linguistics.
...Its
students are being placed....
The external reviewers' misperceptions as
to the placement record of the UCLA Slavic Department has already been
discussed above.
...The
research and editorial activity of its faculty are visible and respected by
colleagues in the field. But like any program it has evolved to the point where
it faces a series of challenges, some external, some of its own making. To
respond to those challenges we recommend the following:
UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM:
1)
that undergraduate teaching assignments be shared equally by linguistics and
literature faculty through the development of a more balanced curriculum;
2)
that the department continue to seek ways to include General Education,
writing-intensive, and other courses appealing to a campus-wide audience in
their curriculum;
3)
that the beginning sections of Russian not be filled to 26, but be allowed to
be smaller (app. 15);
GRADUATE
PROGRAM:
4)
that the number of new students being admitted to the graduate program be
reduced and that the goal be to give financial support to all grad students in
the program;
5)
that other forms of financial aid for graduate students on campus be
investigated (TA-ing in ESL courses, language courses outside of Slavic, etc.);
6)
that reasonable and coherent reading lists be established for the Ph.D. (and if
still necessary, M.A.) programs in linguistics and literature;
7)
that an exam, format be regularized for both linguistics and literature exams,
M.A. and Ph.D. levels, and that the expectations for student performance be
made explicit;
8)
that the graduate program, be simplified and the time-to-Ph.D. be reduced by a
variety of changes, possibly including: eliminating the M.A. exam. (except for
specific circumstances), offering the choice of French or German, establishing
a non-departmental minor while reducing other requirements, replacing the
"qualifying paper"' with a "dissertation proposal" (to be
discussed at the qualifying exam. oral), etc;
FACULTY:
9) that a Golden Age prose specialist, at open rank,
be appointed as soon as possible;
10)
that a junior specialist on contemporary literature be appointed as soon as the
Golden Age specialist has been fixed in place;
11)
that a well-rounded South Slavicist, with possible background in linguistics
but with the ability to teach various courses in the language(s),
literature(s), and culture(s) of the former Yugoslavia, be appointed as a
"mortgage" for one of the senior linguist positions;
Our disagreements with the external
reviewers have been detailed above.
We feel that the South Slavicist position should be filled and
maintained, and not
at the expense of another linguist position.
12)
that the department work together to address issues of collegiality that have
damaged relations with graduate students, staff, and the administration.
(signed)
David M. Bethea
Vilas Professor
University of Wisconsin-Madison
(signed)
Alan Timberlake
Professor
University of California at Berkeley
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Appendix II:
Site Visit Schedule
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Site Visit Schedule
February 24-25, 2000
*All meetings will take place in 374 Kinsey unless
noted otherwise
Wednesday, February 23, 2000
7:00 p.m.: Dinner meeting for review team members
only. Tanino's Restaurant, 1043 Westwood Blvd. (between Kinross and Weyburn,
(310) 208-0444.
Thursday, February 24, 2000
8:00: Breakfast discussion with Chair Michael Heim
9:00: Meeting with Dean Pauline Yu
10:00- 10:40: Linguistics Faculty (Henning Andersen,
Andrew Corin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Emily Klenin, Olga Yokoyama)
10:40 - 11:20: Literature Faculty (Michael Heim,
Vyacheslav Ivanov, Joachim Klein, Emily Klenin, Roman Koropeckyj, Alexander
Ospovat, Rob Romanchuk)
11:20 - 12:00: Language Faculty (Nelya Dubrovich,
Georgiana Galateneau, Michael Heim, Olga Kagan, Roman Koropeckyj, Susan Kresin,
Judith Simon, Mel Strom)
12:00: Lunch
1:15: Meeting with Undergraduate Students
2:00: Meeting with Graduate Students
2:45: Review of TA Training Program - Olga Kagan ,
Susan Kresin and Julia Morozova
3:15: Review of Advising - Henning Andersen, Inna
Gergel, Roman Koropeckyj, Alexander Ospovat
4:00: Closed Session for Review Team only
5:00: Dinner at Michael Heim's home
Friday, February 25, 2000
8:30: Breakfast for Review Team
9:00: Conference call with Ron Vroon
9:15: Conference call with Gail Lenhoff
9:30: Marilyn Gray, graduate student
9:45:
10:00: Minhee Kim, undergraduate student
10:15: Olga Yokoyama, Professor
10:30: Cori Weiner, graduate student
10:45: Susie Bauckus, graduate student
11:00: Julia Verkholantsev, graduate student
11:15 :
11:30: John Narins, graduate student
11:45
12:00: Lunch
1:00: Meeting with Slavic Staff (Mila August, Inna
Gergel, Carol Grese, Jami Jesek, Sasha Mosley and Carolyn Walthour)
2:00: Final review team with Michael Heim
3:00: Closed Session
4:00: Exit Meeting (2121 Murphy): Review Team; Chair
Heim; EVC Hume; Assoc. Dean Hune; Dean Yu; Provost Copenhaver; GC Chair
Lindsey; UgC Vice Chair Bjork; FEC rep K. Baker.
Contact Person for the Site Visit:
Inna Gergel
Phone #: X53856
Fax #: 65263
115F Kinsey
Appendix III: •Factual Errors Statement from Department Chair, M.
Heim
•Response to Statement from H. Martinson
Crespo, Luisa
From: MICHAEL HEIM [heim@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2000 1:54 PM
To: crespo@senate.ucla.edu
Subject: response to academic senate review
8 June 2000
Professor Duncan Lindsey
Professor Orville Chapman
Academic Senate Executive Office
3125 Murphy Hall
140801
Dear Professors Lindsey and Chapman:
Please distribute the following to the members of the
Graduate and Undergraduate Councils. It is my response to the drafts of the
internal and external reviewers' report of the Department of Slavic Languages
and Literatures. I will address both errors of fact and errors of omission.
Let me begin by saying that I have no bones whatever
to pick with the external report: it is not only factually accurate but conveys
the spirit of the Department. I cannot say the same about the internal report
or, rather, about the section of the internal report entitled "Graduate
Program" (pp. 2-5). It contains a number of inaccurate statements, fails
to make certain important points, and - most important - draws a picture of the
Department I do not recognize.
This statement leaves us struggling to
understand. For years Michael Heim
has heard of the abuses visited upon students by certain faculty members. Indeed, he has somewhat of a reputation
as the professor to whom students go when they are at the end of their rope and
need a shoulder to cry on. He has
been part of the problem here in that he has allowed to continue, and tried to
excuse, the behavior of some of his colleagues, but he himself was never one
who psychotically lashed out at his students. Why, then, he would feel the need to try to defend what has
happened in this department for so many years is a mystery to us. If Michael Heim does not understand the
picture of this department presented by the 8 year review report--a picture
which, by the way, is not comprehensive and which homogenizes individual acts
of abuse in order to preserve the anonymity of the students, and which passes
over other abuses altogether--if this picture is unrecognizable to Michael
Heim, it can only be because he does not wish to recognize it.
Before I try to set right the general impression,
however, I will set right some details. The specific case history on p. 3 opens
by stating that the student in question entered the program with
"excellent credentials." In fact, her Russian was so poor that she
had to take not the usual remedial course we recommend in such circumstances -
that is, the fourth-year undergraduate course - but the third-year course.
This is a deliberate misrepresentation of
facts on Michael Heim's part. What
happened is this: several students of that year's incoming class had weak
Russian. (And again, this is not
their fault: they were accepted into the program as is. If this student with the 3.9 GPA out of
Riverside was indeed too "weak" for this department, then it is the
department's fault for having admitted her.) These students were given the choice, with emphasis on the word
"choice", as to which of the two classes they wanted to take, 3rd- or
4th-year Russian. There are very
good reasons why the student in question opted for 3rd year Russian over 4th
year Russian. These two courses
have widely different content, with the 3rd year course being much more a
review of the grammar and grammar rules, while 4th year is much more
free-flowing and much less concerned with the grammar and formal structure of
the language, and much more concerned with widening the student's exposure to
Russian in a variety of contexts.
The student in question (XX) was a
linguist and as such, felt that the 3rd year course would be much better suited
for her than the 4th year course, and she was absolutely correct in this
belief. Another of her colleagues
who came in with her that year, a literature student whose Russian was at a
similar level, was also given the option of taking 3rd or 4th year Russian, and
she opted for the 4th year course.
What must be understood, then, is that
these are two very different kinds of courses. This department has a history of admitting students,
especially in linguistics, and then berating them mercilessly because their
Russian is not up to par. The
knee-jerk recommendation of this department is for such students to take 4th
year Russian, but the problem is that 4th year Russian doesn't provide the type
of linguistic knowledge about Russian that the linguistic faculty demands of
its students. And, to be truthful, neither does 3rd year, but it is much closer
in this regard than 4th year.
To someone not in the department (e.g.
all of you reading this) it would be easy to come away with the idea that 4th
year is more advanced than 3rd year, and in some respects it is, but in many
respects it is simply a very different course. XX could just as easily have taken 4th-year Russian. The reason she chose not to is because
of the content of the course, not because of its degree of difficulty. Michael Heim knows very well that this
is true. This is yet one more
attempt by him to twist facts and smear the one student who had enough courage
to come out and tell her story openly.
When she came to me, I did express sympathy, I did
say there were problems with some of the faculty, and I did say we would have
to work around them. I also promised to talk to the instructor: I needed to
hear both sides of the story to find a way to handle the situation. I talked to
the instructor for several hours and was ready to talk to the student, but
although I phoned and e-mailed her repeatedly she never responded.
XX herself is at adds with this account
by Michael Heim of his attempts to communicate with her concerning this
incident. We would suggest that,
if and when an official investigation of the Slavic Department is begun, that
she be contacted and asked to give her account of what went on between her and
Michael Heim.
I was of course sorry that we lost her and I do not
condone the conduct of my colleague, but I am certain we could have solved the
problem had she come back to see me.
Exactly how would Michael Heim have
solved this problem? This
professor in question, one of "problem faculty" so often mentioned,
is a full professor with tenure.
Just how was Michael Heim going to force her to allow this student to
audit the class? Any attempt to do
this would have been met instantly and ferociously with cries from her and her
husband, an emeritus professor in the same department, that her "academic
freedom" was being violated.
The only way
to possibly bring about change is to expose them publicly, something Michael
Heim refused to do.
Even worse, the very act of having
challenged her would have been enough to make XX's remaining time in this
department a living hell. This
exact same scenario happened years before with other students, students who
eventually wound up packing it in and either transferring or quitting the field
altogether. Michael Heim knows
this as well.
The
section entitled "Attrition" on p. 4 includes a statement to the
effect that "mistreatment of students is not the only reason for
attrition!' In fact, the student in question was the only student we have lost
as a direct result of a conflict with a faculty member.
Unbelievable. For Michael Heim to make a statement such as this leaves us
stunned. Not only is it false, not
only does he know it
is false, but what is so stunning is that surely, surely he must know how easy
this statement would be to disprove.
Is he so sure of himself and so sure that, as a tenured faculty member,
his statements would never be challenged, that he feels he can say whatever he
needs to say at any given moment, regardless of whether or not his statements
correspond to reality? If Michael
Heim were under oath, would he continue to make statements like the one above?
The
following statement - that several students who have left the program were
"under-qualified from the start" is correct;
If these students were "under-qualified from the start", then why were they admitted to this
department in the first place?
Surely if this department is as highly regarded in the field as it
claims to be, then it would have well-qualified students knocking down the
doors in an attempt to get in, and there would be no need to accept such "under-qualified" students.
This is simply another example of the
department doing what it does best: when confronted with problems existing in
the department, their first, second, and last instinct is to deflect blame by
turning on that segment of the department which is most vulnerable and least
able to defend itself, that being the graduate students.
If students are "under-qualified" by the department's estimation, then the department has no
one to blame but itself. Instead
of checking on each potential student's level of Russian, however, this
department has always relied on a Social Darwinistic approach of welcoming
people with open arms, thus taking care of the need to keep their enrollments
up, only to crush them out of the program a year or two later (sometimes with a
low-pass M.A., sometimes with nothing more than another ten thousand dollars in
student loan debt) once these students have fulfilled their role as warm bodies
for the enrollment count.
...what
is incorrect is the conclusion that the department's treatment of students
"does not result in cultivation of "the best and the brightest, but
in the survival of the toughest and most resilient."
This is utter nonsense. For years, very highly qualified
students have entered this program, only to leave a few years later, broken and
discouraged. It is exactly the truth that this program is designed
for the "survival of the toughest
and most resilient". Slavic department faculty have even
said as much. For Heim to say
otherwise is galling.
In
fact, three out of the seven students who have received degrees in the past
five years were only marginally acceptable at the time they applied; all of
them are now teaching at institutions of higher learning.
We know all the students (ten, not seven)
who have received degrees in the past five years (see list above) and we have
no idea as to which of these students were deemed by Heim to be only "marginally acceptable". The
backgrounds of these students were superb: almost any Slavic Department would
have been happy to have such students.
One wonders what sort of background an applicant must have in order to
be classified above the level of "marginally
acceptable" for this
department. (We have already seen
how Michael Heim characterizes the background of XX.) Must an applicant already have a Ph.D. in order to be
considered "acceptable"?
This question could easily be characterized as a semi-rhetorical,
sarcastic barb aimed at Michael Heim and the Slavic Department were it not
for the fact that there
actually was an instance of this department accepting into the program an
applicant with a Ph.D. in Slavic linguistics from another Slavic country. Then again, even this, apparently, was
not enough to raise this applicant above the level of "marginally acceptable", since this particular student lasted less than two
years in this program.
It
was a pleasure to teach them and watch them develop.
Please...
What
the report's discussion of attrition omits are points like the following:
because the country has fewer Slavic Departments than most other language
departments the pool of applicants is smaller and we have to gamble a bit more;
the loss of interest in our field during the nineties restricted the pool even
further; the only group of applicants that grew was that of international
students, but their qualifications were harder to judge, especially until we
had gained some experience.
The reason fewer applicants apply to UCLA
has little to do with the a restricted pool of applicants and much to do with
the reputation of the UCLA Slavic Department throughout our field as a place to
pursue graduate study. Many of us
had heard the whispers before we applied to UCLA, and more than a few of us had
been told by our undergraduate professors that UCLA was not the place to be if
you had any hope of getting through with a Ph.D. in a reasonable period of
time.
It is the common belief among graduate
students that one of the reasons we have so many foreign students in our department
(Koreans, Taiwanese, Russians, Eastern Europeans) is that they are perceived as
being more compliant than American students, partially, perhaps, because of
cultural factors or from the uncertainty that always comes from studying in a
foreign country, but almost certainly because they are more reliant than even
their American colleagues on funding from the Department, for if they fail to
receive funding, not only do they have to pay fees, which are at $1500 per
quarter, but also they have to pay out-of-state tuition, which for almost all
of them would effectively mean the end of their graduate studies at UCLA.
We would also emphasize that almost all
of these students, in spite of the claim that "their qualifications were harder to judge", are in fact very qualified.
In
the early nineties, when fellowships were easier to come by, we could admit
more students and let them prove themselves, and as I have indicated a healthy
selection did take place.
This is the second time in this report
that the phrase "healthy selection" has been employed. We stand by our aversion to this phrase
and all that it connotes.
Now
that funds are tight, the situation has changed. Consequently, last year and
this year we admitted only two students instead of the cohorts of six to eight
students we used to aim for. But all the students we admitted we gave a fine
education; never did we discard students "as damaged goods."
This is absolutely not true. Regularly were students allowed to drop
off the department's map as damaged goods. Of course, the department never saw it that way: to the
faculty, this was a "healthy
selection". Again, it is stunning to us that
Michael Heim would make this claim given the relative ease with which one could
refute it. Look at the number of
students admitted vs. the number who graduate. Do the math.
In the "Graduate Requirements" section the
issues of exam format and reading lists come up several times. Neither is in
fact an issue for literature students: the exam format is standard, and the
reading list, though currently under revision, is perfectly functional -
reasonable and coherent - as it stands.
Again, untrue. The problems on the literature side of the house are not
nearly as severe as with the linguists, but it is untrue to say that neither
the exam format nor the reading lists are an issue for literature
students. The last two students to
take the MA exam in literature can attest to this, as can the faculty members
(including Michael Heim) who administered that exam.
The linguists have not yet agreed on a reading list,
but are working on one and have put together a data base as a first step.
They linguists have been working on a
reading list since 1991 (so we are told).
Never have
they been able to agree on a reading list. One would think that after the 8-year review report, they
would finally be able to put together such a list.
The section also mentions dissertation committee
problems. These have occurred - again only among the linguists - but I mediated
one such problem this year, and the student has recently defended the
dissertation successfully. The section calls upon the faculty to "find
some way to make collective decisions." We have recently agreed to
institute a new experimental MA in
Russian Language and Culture and an optional outside concentration at the PhD
level, two major decisions. It took many meetings to arrive at a consensus -
two linguists opposed the programs - but we have done so.
By
now a pattern should be emerging.
Yes, we have indeed noticed a pattern.
The
students' complaints plaints refer primarily if not exclusively to two members
of the faculty, both of whom are in the linguistics program. Until the section
entitled "Action" on p. 5 the text reads as if all faculty members
were equally guilty.
We have commented on this above.
Under
"Funding" on p. 4, for example, it states, "So vengeful are the
faculty, we were told, that many students believe that they are merely pawns
among these colliding ambitions." Some (though not all) of the linguistics
students may believe this, but I am certain that none of the literature
students (who comprise approximately half the graduate population) do.
This is partially true. Not all the linguistics students
believe this. The vast majority,
however, do. Most of the
literature students do not feel that this description applies to them, although
a few do.
Even
after the "Action" section on p. 5 does allow that only two members
of the faculty are involved, it continues to refer to "students," as
if all students had experienced the problems equally.
The department I read about in this report is a
dysfunctional one (the report in fact speaks of "graduate program
dysfunction" on p. 3), a department where no learning can take place
because graduate students and faculty are constantly at loggerheads. The
department I experience is one where office doors are open and graduate
students and faculty are constantly discussing scholarly issues, that is, one
in which first-rate training is the order of the day.
Some literature students may feel this way. Very few if any of the linguists share
this point of view. What good is
an open door if what awaits you inside is an unbalanced, vicious, and
unpredictable faculty member? It
is precisely because of this that, with the exception of a couple of tenured
linguists, there can be no true intellectual give-and-take, no sharing of ideas
or attempts to innovate or to approach problems from new and different
perspectives. We have already
discussed at the beginning of our commentary on this report (above) the
attitude taken by faculty toward such attempts at innovation and the
consequences this attitude has for the reputation of those who do a Ph.D. in
Slavic linguistics here at UCLA.
I do not deny that the regretful aberrations
described by the students occurred, but they are aberrations.
Again, we are stunned at Michael Heim's
assertion. This is not unlike the
claims made by dictators who, once the enormity of the crimes they have
committed is made clear to the world, then "'fess up" with a sort of
general purpose statement such as "Well, it's true, mistakes were made. But..." Not only are the incidents described not "aberrations", they are regularly occurring events. This report, because of the time and
manpower limitations placed on the 8-year review committee, was limited in its
ability to investigate this department, thus it was forced to concentrate only
on this incidents which were the most egregious. (Or, to state it better, on those egregious incidents which
graduate students were willing to talk about. There are some incidents which people refused to bring up
again, not wanting to go through that type of turmoil.) This report scratched the surface of
the abuse that goes on in the Slavic Department. It is for this reason that an official, intensive, and
thorough investigation of the department, using outside auditors, is what is
needed.
They make it more difficult for the students involved
(who, I repeat, are mostly, if not entirely, students in linguistics, but who
do not include all linguistics students), but the record shows that they do not
in the end stymie the educational process. This year, for instance, two
literature students and one linguistics student passed their MA exams, one
linguistics student passed her PhD exams, and one student (the one I referred
to above) defended a dissertation in linguistics, another in literature.
Again, it stuns us that Michael Heim can
make a statement such as "the
record shows that they do not in the end stymie the educational process." Surely he must understand how easy it would be to prove him
wrong, a simple matter of going through the records and looking at the ratio of
students admitted to students who finally finished.
The latter begins a tenure-track position at the
University of Florida in the fall.
What we see running constantly through
this department's attempt to defend itself and its actions is this leitmotif,
this mantra of "our students get tenure-track jobs", as though that
will somehow resonate with the Academic Senate and somehow place their abuse of
students in a better light. So
desperate is the department to defend itself that it even resorts to providing
false figures as to who gets tenure-track positions and who does not (see
above).
The point is, though, that even if this
false profile provided by the department were true, even if most or all of its
students did indeed graduate, even if most or all of its students did receive
not only tenure-track positions, but also tenure—even if all this were true, it still would
not and could not justify the way they have mistreated
students for all these years. Aside
from being angered by this, we also find it more than a small bit pathetic (although not at all surprising) that
they would even attempt to make this argument.
What
I miss first and foremost in the report, in other words, what I consider the
greatest sin of omission, is any indication that the faculty members in
question have been given the opportunity to give their side of the story.
If the faculty wanted to give their side
of the story, we would have no objection to this. In fact, we would welcome it. We know very well what the story
is, and we know the usual rhetorical ruses employed by the faculty to cover up
their actions. Nothing would
please us more to have them go on record and in detail as to their version of events. We would hope that any official
investigation into the Slavic Department will cause this to happen.
Asking the faculty at the time of the
investigation, however, would have been disastrous for students, many of whom
had grades, recommendation letters, and comprehensive masters or doctoral exams
scheduled before the end of the school year. This was also the same time that funding decisions were
being made for the next academic year.
We already caught a small example of what this faculty is capable of
when they immediately began questioning students (and, in one instance,
shouting accusations at a student) at the beginning of the summer after the
report had come out. One can only
imagine what things would have been like had the content of the report been
made available to them while classes were still in session. This is a student body which lives in
fear of this faculty and the actions which come out of their mood swings. It is very possible that more than a
few students would have broken under that sort of pressure. (Yet another reason why the
University's refusal/inability to keep Michael Heim from questioning students
about the report is so disturbing.)
The other problem with this is if the
8-year review committee spoke in detail about any of this with the faculty, it
would immediately identify the student in question, bringing about a swift and
fierce response from the faculty.
As was stated above when discussing the University's "censure"
policy, ours is a very small field (and growing smaller!). Word does travel fast, and it wouldn't
take much at all for a job candidate to receive the label of
"troublemaker" or "rabble-rouser". In a field where you have hundreds of
people applying for a single job, it doesn't take much to have an application
nudged from the "possible" pile to the "reject" pile. This faculty not only has connections
throughout this country, but throughout the world. It is no exaggeration to say that they could and would do
their utmost to blackball a candidate from getting a job. Clearly, many of them are abusive and
vindictive, but what they are not is stupid. They understand academe, they understand the value system of
academe, and they understand the need to be sophisticated and low-key in doing
something such as blackballing a candidate. They are truly masters of damning with faint praise. We have seen this done personally.
And again, Michael Heim knows all
this. Why he insists of
maintaining this course of denial is beyond our understanding.
The
Preface to the report states that "the internal review team conducted additional
interviews, as necessary, to clarify issues raised during the site visit,"
but it never asked to see me again. True, the chair of the internal committee
got in touch with me twice after the site visit - once by e-mail to request a
list of the institutions at which our recent PhD's were teaching and once by
phone for details about one student's account (the report as it stands mentions
neither) - but why was I not interviewed about the student who left the program
after the run-in with her professor? She was interviewed for her side of the
story, but I had no chance to tell mine. I have filled in a few details here,
but I could say a good deal more about the case. Why was I not asked about
admissions and reading lists and dissertation committees? As chair I have been
actively involved in all of them. And most important, why was I not asked about
what I regard as the most damning accusation, which occurs in the first
sentence of the "Action" section: " ... the greatest anger of
the students was often reserved for the majority of the faculty who take no
interest in, and no responsibility for, their plight." Who are "the
students" here? What does "often" mean? Who is included and who
is excluded from "the majority of the faculty"?
What would Michael Heim have the 8-year
review committee do? Identify the
students? As to who is excluded
from "the majority of the faculty", it is quite clear to most of us
who that person is. (Although, as
we said above, we would also exclude to a large degree those faculty members
from Russia and of course all non-tenured faculty, whose precarious job
position precludes them from forcefully advocating for the students.) The question of "how often"
is easy enough to answer: often enough to become the norm.
How
do the students know that I or any of my colleagues take no interest in, and no
responsibility for their plight"?
You know people by their actions. We know that Michael Heim has made
efforts to deal with problem faculty.
We have always known that.
The problem is that he is only willing to go so far, and that he is not
willing to do what is necessary to bring about change. What was necessary to bring about
change was to expose publicly the abuses which occur in that department. Of course he was right to attempt
initially to deal with these problems quietly, but that more often than not
that does not work in our department, and if he tells you otherwise then he is
not telling you the truth. We have seen what happens, all too often, when
problem faculty get their minds made up.
They have tenure, they can't be threatened with losing their jobs, and
when they get stubborn, no power on earth is going to move them, especially not
Michael Heim's delicate efforts.
What we truly find offensive, however, is
how Heim, time and again, attempts to justify what the faculty has done, or
tries to put it in a different light in an attempt to make it seem as though
there is no real conflict, just a matter of mutual misunderstanding on the part
of professor and graduate student alike.
This is not only insulting, it's infuriating. Michael Heim needs to be disabused of the notion that he can
never say anything critical about another professor to a student. This type of "collegiality"
does nothing but serve to cover up problems. There is nothing wrong with Michael Heim saying to a student
"Yes, my colleague's action in this respect is offensive and inexcusable,
but he/she is tenured and there is really little that I can do about it just by
talking to him/her." We
understand that. What we don't
understand are these repeated attempts to maintain "civility" in
dialog when that civility is completely one-sided.
For years and years we have watched
Michael Heim refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem. To do so would have been unpleasant. We understand that. And yet, he, and the others who said
nothing, must be held accountable.
He and they are protected: they have tenure. We have nothing.
We as linguists are totally at the mercy of the faculty. If he and his colleagues aren't going
to stand up and expose the abuse which characterizes the Slavic Department,
then who will?
I can
understand that the internal reviewers were outraged by the student complaints
listed on pp. 3-4, but I cannot understand why they assumed there was no other
side to hear. The students do not know, for example, about the hours I spend
every week mediating between them and the two difficult faculty members; they
do not know because it would be unprofessional of me to tell them.
Clearly, from what we have just said in
the paragraph above, we do not agree with this. Quite the contrary: we felt it was unprofessional of Michael
Heim to continue, year after year, to provide cover for abusive faculty and to
try to justify their actions.
This section of Michael Heim's response
is also interesting in that it seems to conflict with what he had said
earlier. According to Michael
Heim, the internal reviews drew a picture of a department in chaos, which is,
according to Michael Heim, "a
picture of the Department I do not recognize". And yet
here Michael Heim speaks openly of "the
hours I spend every week mediating between them [the students] and
the two difficult faculty members". It is
disturbing, and telling, that Michael Heim can hold these two contradictory
facts in his mind and not experience any cognitive dissonance. This illustrates perhaps better than
any other thing the essence of his approach to the Slavic Department and what
goes on there.
But
neither do the internal reviewers know, because they have taken everything the
students say at face value.
The second part of this statement is, as
far as we know, very wrong. We
cannot speak for every Slavic Department student, but our experience with the
internal reviewers leads us to a different conclusion. Not only did they not take everything
we told them at face value, they were constantly challenging the information,
asking for clarifications and repetitions of what they were being told.
I am
by no means implying that the students are not telling the truth; they are
telling the truth as they see it, but there are many things they do not see.
Does Michael Heim really believe that his
perspective as a fellow professor gives him a better perspective on
professor-student abuse than does our perspective as students? Yes, indeed, we were telling the
truth as we saw it. Regardless of
what Michael Heim has done or hasn't done, that doesn't change the reality of
the abuses we have experienced and seen here year after year. The reality of these abuses exists
independently of his ability (or lack thereof) to perceive them.
I am
not surprised that the reviewers found "no example of any significant
discrepancy"(p. 2) among student accounts: their accounts come from the
same point of view;
What Michael Heim appears to be
suggesting here is that because there is one point in common among all the
students, namely just exactly that, the fact that they are students, this then
implies that their points of view would all be the same. As students, we have a very wide array
of backgrounds. If one follows the
"logic" proffered by Michael Heim, all of us then must share the same
point of view. Presumably, then,
not only do we all share the same point of view, but we also all made the same
mistake in thinking that abuse was being perpetrated by the faculty.
I am
surprised that the reviewers did not see fit to solicit other points of view,
that of the chair, for instance.
The result of which would have been
what? That there is no abuse going
on in the Slavic Department? To be
sure, this is exactly what Michael Heim told the internal reviewers at the
beginning of the review process. (See "Response to Slavic Chair's "Errors of Fact" statement", point 5, below)
There is another point of view missing: as for as I
can tell from the report, the reviewers have not interviewed either of the
difficult faculty members. Interviewing them would have served several
purposes. First, it would have furthered the cause of justice. Is it not normal
for both sides of a story to be heard?
Again, as stated above, we have
absolutely no objection to this.
We very much do want to here the detailed responses by these faculty
members to charges brought against them.
Unfortunately, there is no way to make specific charges without losing
anonymity. Michael Heim's desire
to "[further] the cause of justice" is to be admired. Michael Heim also knows full well that
faculty and students are not operating on an even playing field in this
situation. The faculty members
have tenure. In the last 50 years,
only a handful of tenured faculty members have ever lost their jobs at UC. Contrasting markedly with this almost
iron-clad job security is the situation of the students, who not only have no
job security or jobs, but who don't even have their degree yet, and who are
dependent upon this same faculty not only for grades and guidance, but also for
recommendations, and who also have to fear the influence of this faculty
throughout the field. (For
example, the one faculty member who actually shouted accusations at one of the
students right after the release of the report is actually a member of the
Russian Academy of Sciences. This
same faculty member has also, by the way, been allowed to participate in the
meetings of the Slavic Department linguistics faculty which have taken place
since the results of the 8-year review were made public, even though he has
been retired for 8 years. Given
the fact that he himself has always been one of the most abusive faculty
members in the department, this gives us further cause to doubt the
department's sincerity in wanting to reform itself.)
Given this discrepancy in status between
student and professor, and in light of the fact that confronting these faculty
members with the specifics of their behavior (as if they don't know already!)
would immediately identify the students involved and leave them vulnerable to
the retributive acts which would surely follow, we are curious why Michael Heim
has failed to integrate these facts into the calculus supporting his admirable
desire to further the cause of justice.
Second,
it would have given the reviewers first-hand knowledge of what the rest of us
(students, colleagues, and staff) are up against.
Again, no cognitive dissonance on Michael
Heim's part: he claims that the internal reviewers present "a picture of the Department I do not recognize" while at the same time he speaks
of providing the reviewers with "first-hand
knowledge of what the rest of us (students, colleagues, and staff) are up
against". It seems to us that the reviewers know
full well what those associated with the Slavic Department are up against.
Third, it would have made the two faculty members
aware of the accusations that have been leveled against them and of the
enormous issue their behavior has become.
Yet again: how can Michael Heim on the
one hand speak of "the enormous
issue their behavior has become" while at the same time claiming non-recognition of the
Slavic Department as described by the internal reviewers?
And fourth, it would have helped the internal
reviewers to come up with advice about how to deal with them.
What would Michael Heim have had them
say? These abusive faculty members
are tenured, they can't be fired, and beyond that, they have been provided
cover for the behavior for years by Michael Heim and other faculty members like
him. What possible advice could
the internal reviewers have provided to the abusive faculty in question and to
those who continually enabled and helped to obscure that abuse? How does one give advice to a faculty
which refuses even to admit that there is a problem?
Both the faculty and the students looked forward to
the review because we hoped it would bring us useful insights.
Absolutely untrue. In no way, shape or form was the Slavic
Department faculty looking forward to this review. In fact, the Slavic Department faculty actually polled
Slavic Department graduate students asking them what they thought of the
possibility of putting off the review for two more years, which resulted in a
near unanimous vote by the students (there may have been one or two dissenting
votes or abstentions) against putting off the review.
We have in fact received a number of such insights
from the external reviewers, but the two recommendations made by the internal
reviewers I find not only less than useful; I find them harmful.
The
first, "to suspend admissions to the graduate program of the department of
Slavic Languages and Literatures until such time as conditions for graduate
students in the department improve" (p. 5), will harm both the department
and the students.
Let us be very clear of what Michael Heim
is saying here: his drawing of a distinction between the department and the
students, but not between the department and its faculty, is telling. Yes, if one draws no distinction
between a department and its faculty, then the department will indeed be hurt,
and that is as it should be.
Whatever small amount of punishment the university is able to mete out
to tenured faculty members should be meted out, to the fullest extent possible.
We as students are all too aware that
these recommendations may hurt some of us in the short run, especially those of
us close to finishing and being out on the job market. Yet, we are willing to take that
risk. This should be obvious from
the numbers of students who were willing to talk to the internal committee
despite the risk of incurring the wrath of the faculty. Anytime a tumor is excised some healthy
tissue is inevitably taken with it.
This is by far preferred to allowing the tumor to remain and grow.
Our
field is small and tightly knit. Word travels fast.
We agree. It should be noted, however, that word had already gotten
out about the UCLA Slavic Department, and about its failure, given the
brilliance of its faculty, to produce the next generation of leaders in the
field of Slavic linguistics. (See
above.)
Once
it becomes known that a punitive action like this has been token against us, we
will lose the reputation that has allowed us, for example, to place all our
students in tenure-track positions in the last five years.
In the first place, whatever positive
reputation the UCLA Slavic Department might have had deserves to be lost.
Secondly, once again we see Michael Heim
throwing out inaccurate statistics in an attempt to somehow ameliorate the
depiction of the department's behavior in the eyes of the Academic Senate. This appears to us to be an almost
desperate attempt by Michael Heim to hoist whatever meager arguments he can
find to the fore to neutralize the impact of the 8-year review. Apparently, he believes (and it may
well be true) that for high-powered research institutions such as UCLA, success
in placing graduate students in tenure-track positions is the "coin of the
realm", so to speak.
As we have already stated above, even if
Michael Heim's claims were true, that would not justify the type of abuse
visited regularly upon graduate students by this faculty. Also as stated above, however, this statement
on Michael Heim's part (his claim that the Slavic Department has placed "all our students in tenure-track positions in the
last five years") is
nowhere close to the truth. As was
explained above in our commentary on the external reviewers' report, only four
of the ten students who finished during the time period referred to by Michael
Heim (four of 12 if we include two who finished before the start of this
academic year) have received tenure-track positions.
Moreover,
for years after the ban is lifted, we will have trouble attracting students.
Indeed. This is as it should be. This faculty has forfeited its rights to train graduate
students. It would be a gross injustice
to allow graduate students into this program without major and sweeping changes
which would, in our opinion, take years to bring about.
As I
pointed out above, we have recently voted in a new MA track and an optional
outside concentration on the PhD-level. Just as we are making the first move in
the nearly thirty years I have taught in the Department to develop the graduate
program in new directions and broaden the applicant pool, we are told to
suspend graduate admissions. Furthermore, we are about to make our first new
appointment in Russian literature in ten years. We began the search last year
and, although for technical reasons we had to suspend it, formed a short list
of three candidates. We were the first choice for all three. What will happen
this year if we have to tell our candidates that we have been forbidden to
accept graduate students? What decent candidate will come to such a department?
What will happen is that UCLA will still
be the first choice for all three.
The job market in Slavic is always very tight. It is highly unlikely that any candidate for a job here
would turn it down because of the suspension of graduate student
admissions. Even if a candidate
were to turn down a job here, however, does that mean that it was wrong to
suspend admissions? This
exemplifies much of what is wrong about the Slavic Department: rather than
worry about graduate students, this department worries about not filling a
faculty slot. Of course, since
Michael Heim apparently believes that there was no problem and no abuse of
graduate students, outside of the occasional regrettable
"aberration", perhaps this can explain his concern about not filling
this open faculty slot.
What
will be the effect on the Department and the University of missing the
opportunity to hire the best candidate?
The University is strong and
resilient. We suspect that it will
be able to muddle through somehow.
The
internal reviewers do not tell us how the move will help us to solve our
problems, only that it will remain in force until the problems are solved. But
I can easily imagine that the havoc the move will play with the Department will
exacerbate our problems rather than solve them.
The second recommendation is to place the department
in receivership, in other words, to deprive it of the right to govern itself.
Given the fact that this department has
shown that it is clearly unable to govern itself, the loss of this "right" does not impress us as all that great a loss. What receivership would do, however, is
to prevent, at least to some extent, is the ability of this faculty to
threaten, abuse, and arbitrarily lash out at its graduate students.
As I have said, both the students and the faculty had
hoped that the review would help us to solve our own problems.
As we have said, this is not in the least
true. The only hopes the faculty
had for the 8-year review was that it wouldn't take place.
The fact that we have put into practice some of the
suggestions of the external reviewers before their official report even reached
us (the institution of the outside PhD concentration, for example) indicates we
are perfectly capable of dealing with things on our own.
Our reaction to Michael Heim's claim that
the he and the other faculty members "are perfectly capable of dealing with things on our own" would not differ substantially
from that found below in the "Response to Slavic Chair's "Errors of
Fact" statement".
I might also add that within a week of the site
visit, following a suggestion that was made then but does not figure in either
the external or the internal report, I consulted a member of the Ombuds Office
about the difficult faculty members ...
Again, no cognitive dissonance here. Either one of two things can be true:
either this is a department which had faculty members so difficult that one is
required to consult the Ombuds Office in dealing with them, or this is a
department in which "there was no
student dissatisfaction to speak of". It cannot be
that both of these statements are true.
...and have adopted a new approach to them, which has
begun to yield results. Whether or not the "help of professionals"
referred to on p. 8 of the external report is necessary remains to be seen.
Graduate students in our Department have suffered,
and there is no excuse for that suffering.
But that is all that Michael Heim is
doing and all that he has done: offer excuse after excuse after excuse. It is neither unfair nor an
exaggeration to say that he never saw a case of professor-induced suffering in
the Slavic Department for which he couldn't find some sort of excuse.
But the report blows their suffering out of
proportion.
This is offensive and arrogant beyond
measure. It may be the case that
Michael Heim does not know the true extent of the abuse visited upon students
in this department. In fact, we
would say that is probable. What
cannot be, however, is that he is unaware of the fact that graduate students
have, at the hands of the faculty, for years undergone extensive abuse, mistreatment,
insult, and harm, a representative part of which was detailed in this 8-year
review report. For years, Michael
Heim himself has spoken with and offered some measure of comfort to students
who have been scorched by the ferocity of the linguistic faculty. How is it then possible for him to turn
around and dismissively claim that this report "blows their suffering out of proportion". This is either outright prevarication or a case of denial so
severe that it would have to be said to border on mental instability. We see no alternative to these two
possibilities.
It projects the injustices done to a number of
linguistics students onto the student body as a whole;
We disagree. While it is possible for different readers to reach
different conclusions as to what is projected and what is not projected by this
report, it is our belief that this report does not project "the injustices done to a number of linguistics
students onto the student body as a whole". Obviously, a
lion's share of the problems originate with the linguistic faculty, so it is
only natural that the fate of linguistic students is more thoroughly documented
in this report than that of literature students.
Two further points:
1.
Many of the literature faculty, particularly Michael Heim, have long pointed to
the fact that the difference between linguistics and literature in our
department is such that it is not only not possible, but indeed inappropriate,
for literature faculty to intervene on issues between linguistic faculty and
linguistic students. While this
reluctance to intervene is presented by many of the literature faculty as a
determination on their part to honor traditional academic decorum (e.g.
"It would be inappropriate and a violation of academic freedom to intervene
in the way a fellow faculty member interacts with his students..."), we
see this explanation as nothing more than a rather thin facade hiding the fact
that, for them, not confronting their linguistics colleagues is a winning
proposition on a number of levels: their students don't receive the same level
of abuse as do linguistic students (although they do at times experience such
abuse, contrary to what Michael Heim says--see point 2 below), and they avoid
the always unpleasant task of having to confront the unstable personalities who
for many years now have predominated in the linguistics side of the house. We see this desire to look at the
Slavic Department as almost two mini-departments as the result of their not
wanting to take responsibility for what is happening in the linguistic side of
the department. We have seen and
heard this before: "Well, that's unfortunate, but that's something for the
linguists to work out among themselves."
2.
In making statements such as "[The
report] projects the injustices done to a number of linguistics" Michael Heim seems to be implying
that it is only linguists who have been subjected to such injustices. This is not at all true. Literature students, although not
bearing the brunt of such abuse, have continually been subject to it
intermittently for years now.
Contrary to what they might have others believe, we are not two
mini-departments, but one single department. Literature students do have to take a certain number of
linguistic classes, and some of the problem faculty have also in the past
offered literature classes.
Linguistic faculty sit on funding committees and have influence in other
ways, both within the department and within the field. At times, linguists have sat on
literature M.A. and Ph.D. committees.
To imply that only linguists have been
subject to this abuse is wrong.
Even some of the very general scenarios listed in the internal
reviewers' report represent events involving literature students, some of whom
have been driven out of this program because of this abuse. Michael Heim himself has spoken to such
literature students and knows what went on between them and the problem
linguistic faculty. For him to act
as though he doesn't know of any such examples (which is the clear implication
of the statement above) is disingenuous.
it makes it seem as if only suffering and no learning
were going on. At the same time it projects the excesses of a minority onto the
faculty as a whole. I reject its conclusion on p. 5 that "the entire
faculty, collectively and individually, is culpable";
We have touched upon this point above
when commenting on the "action" section of the internal reviewers'
report.
I reject the claims of "inaction" and
" complacency."
Clearly, we could not disagree more with
Michael Heim on this point.
They run counter to the external report and, more
important, to my daily interaction with the students and with my colleagues.
As has been discussed above, the external
reviewers had nowhere near the access to graduate students that the internal
reviewers did because of the presence of Alan Timberlake on the external review
committee. We have also indicated
above the extent of our disagreement with the external reviewers vis-a-vis
their opinion of Michael Heim.
If I
did not request to talk to the internal reviewers after the site visit, it is
because I had no idea they would come to conclusions I can only call one-sided.
I have voiced only a fraction of the objections I have to the report because I
think we can come to an agreement about how best to remedy the situation only
if we talk the issues through in person.
It is unfortunate that Michael Heim chose
to list but a fraction of his objections as we would have preferred to have
heard all of his objections to this report. We would repeat our assertion that, because of the time and
manpower constraints placed on the 8-year review committee (and because of the
need to protect sources and anonymity), what is represented in the 8-year
review itself is but a fraction of the abuses which have occurred in the Slavic
Department.
I
therefore request a meeting with the internal reviewers. I also request that
before our meeting takes place they have separate interviews with each of the
two difficult faculty members.
Respectfully submitted,
Michael Heim
Professor and Chair
Response
to Slavic Chair's "Errors of Fact" statement
The review team has the highest personal respect for the
Chair of the Slavic department. Nevertheless, there appear to be irreconcilable
differences in our respective points of view.
1 . The Chair objects to characterizing student
"XX" as having "excellent credentials".
•The review team stands by this characterization-XX
came in with an undergraduate GPA of 3.97 from UC Riverside, and had a 4.0 at
UCLA until her run-in with the faculty member in question.
2. The Chair states that XX is the only student that
has been lost as a direct result of conflict with a faculty member.
•This is not true.
3. The Chair repeatedly objects to the failure to
identify clearly the specific faculty members and students who are referred to
in the report.
•As explained in the report "to preserve
anonymity [we presented] most information only in general terms." Also, as
stated, it was not our purpose to establish the "guilt or innocence of
particular individuals." Some wording in the report will be modified to
counter the impression that all students experienced problems equally.
4. The Chair strenuously objects to the failure of
the review team to confront specific faculty members with specific complaints
so that they could present their point of view.
•As explained in the report, no student would
talk without an absolute guarantee of confidentiality. Obviously this precludes going back to
the faculty with any specifics. We had already learned that addressing these
problems in general terms is fruitless (see below).
5. The Chair feels that he was not adequately
consulted in the preparation of the internal report.
•We have explained why checking details with
the faculty was not possible, but it was certainly the desire of the review
team to work with the Chair of the department. For this reason the chair of the
review team brought up, very directly but in general terms, the issue of
student dissatisfaction at a presite visit meeting with the Chair of the
department. When the Chair of the department said that, aside from funding
problems, there was no student dissatisfaction to speak of, the chair of the
review team asked the question again to be sure he had heard correctly. Similar
questions were asked of the Chair and of other faculty during the site visit.
Especially in the beginning, the response was a disavowal of any such problems.
At one point an external reviewer was moved to exclaim to a faculty member,
"...you are in denial!" The pattern that emerged was consistent
denial or minimization of the problem-until confronted with overwhelming
evidence. Thus, there was no recourse but to unearth sufficient detail from the
students themselves in order to determine whether the initial impressions
reflected a situation serious enough to warrant decisive action. Once this
bridge was crossed (and precluded from discussing details) there was little to
be gained by rehashing generalities with the Chair of the department.
6. The Chair claims to have "had no idea"
the review team would come to the conclusions it did.
•During the site visit, the chair of the review
team (believing that the Chair of the department did not appreciate the
seriousness of the situation) made it very explicit that suspension of graduate
admissions was being considered. When, later, the Chair of the department still
did not appear to grasp the gravity of the discussion, one of the external
reviewers pointedly reminded him of the review team chair's comment. Later,
after the exit meeting, both Graduate Council members of the review team
reminded the Chair that his department's graduate program was considered
"dysfunctional".
7. Many additional issues regarding procedure and
interpretation are raised by the Chair.
•These are matters on which we will simply have
to agree to disagree. For example:
--
Issues of long standing (more than a decade) that the review team considers to
be of fundamental importance, the Chair characterizes as
"aberrations".
-- For a festering problem involving abuse of power
that the review team believes requires immediate and decisive action, the Chair
believes "hours [of mediation] every week" and "a new
approach.....which has begun to yield results" is a sufficient response.
--While
the review team has been told of years of student abuse which the department
has had no will to correct, the Chair offers a recent revision in the graduate
program as evidence of the ability of the department to manage its own affairs.
These
differences in perception do not give the review team confidence that the
problems of student welfare will be dealt with swiftly and effectively (and
with no retaliation towards students) without drastic measures. This issue is
now a matter for discussion between the Chair and the Administration.
Appendix IV:
Self Review Report
First Page Missing
(The first page of the
Department's self-evaluation was not released to students. This section begins with page two of
this self-evaluation.)
(Henning
Andersen, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Emily Klenin, and Olga Yokoyama) and four in
literature (Michael Heim, Gail Lenhoff, Aleksandr Ospovat, and Ronald Vroon)
one associate professor in literature (Roman Koropeckyj), and two lecturers for
Russian-language instruction (Olga Kagan and Susan Kresin, the former with
security of employment); part-time faculty includes one adjunct associate
professor in linguistics (Andrew Corin) and lecturers in Romanian (Georgiana
Galateanu) and Hungarian (Judith Simon). When ladder faculty members go on
sabbatical leave, they are typically replaced by visiting professors who are
leading lights in their fields (Leonid Kasatkin, Roza Kasatkina, Roman
Timenchik, Elena Zemskaia). We also receive an average of two and a half FTEs
yearly for teaching assistants. We have approximately thirty-five undergraduate
students majors and minors and thirty graduate students on the current rolls.
Until
approximately a decade ago the Department had the reputation of being stronger
in linguistics than literature - the traditional components of Slavic
departments since they started appearing on the American academic landscape
after the Second World War. Research in our Department has concentrated on
comparative cultural, literary, and linguistic studies in a number of fields:
early Russian literature (hagiography), major authors of the eighteenth century
(Sumarokov, for example), the classical poets of the nineteenth century
(Pushkin, Tiutchev, Fet), Russian and Polish Romanticism (especially
Mickiewicz) and the post-Symbolist avant-garde of the twentieth century
(especially Khlebnikov) - all of which incorporate recently discovered archival
materials and pay special attention to the historical context; Slavic
historical linguistics in a broad Balto-Slavic and Indo- European context with
emphasis on the ethnolinguistic issues connected with defining the Slavic
homeland and tracing migration patterns, the analysis of newly surfaced
materials (Novgorodian birch-bark letters, Old Believer literature of the
seventeenth century, dialectal data including Los Angeles Molokane speech),
colloquial Russian and its manifestations in recent written texts, the
pragmatic aspects of contemporary Russian, and literary translation and
translation studies. Currently we are perceived as being equally strong in
literature and linguistics, but we will continue to be perceived as such only
if we can compensate for certain recent losses.
Let us
take literature first. At the end of the previous review period we acquired a
specialist in nineteenth-century Russian poetry, Aleksandr Ospovat, at the
beginning of the current period - a specialist in Polish and Ukrainian
literature, Roman Koropeckyj. They have been instrumental in improving both the
breadth and depth of our offerings.. Although we can still boast scholars
publishing in nearly every period of Russian literature, prose and poetry,
including the typically less well represented medieval period and the
eighteenth century, last year we lost our two specialists in nineteenth century
and twentieth-century prose, the core of the undergraduate curriculum and
central to graduate studies as well. Dean Yu has authorized a search at the
assistant-professor level for one of these positions. We have maintained
strength in other Slavic literatures - Czech, Polish, South Slavic, and
Ukrainian - in terms of both teaching and research. Only a handful of
universities - Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina,
Wisconsin - can begin to match us here, though none has more than two or three
"second" Slavic literatures to our four, and the ability to teach
these literatures is emerging as a particularly desirable qualification for new
literature PhDs entering the job market.
In
linguistics, which has suffered more than literature at most other
institutions, the UCLA-Slavic Department has been able to maintain a full
panoply of courses - in East, West, and South Slavic (the latter filled at
present on a regular basis by an adjunct associate professor), Old Church
Slavic, and the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Contemporary Standard
Russian. A new appointment at the beginning of the period under review, that of
the internationally known Slavic and Indo-European linguist and semiotician
Vyacheslav Ivanov, has helped cushion the loss of three linguists to early
retirement (Aleksandar Albijanic 1992 and Henrik Birnbaum and Dean Worth in
1994), though Professor Ivanov teaches literature as well as linguistics and
contractually devotes one third of his time to Indo- European Studies. The
linguistics program has likewise been bolstered by the appointment of Olga
Yokoyama, who came to us from Harvard several years later and works in the
fields of discourse analysis and gender linguistics using data from the Slavic
spectrum. Many of the departments once strong in linguistics - Harvard, Yale,
Stanford - have reduced the number of linguists, their primary function being
to provide service courses to literature students. As a result, they are less
likely to produce new doctorates in Slavic linguistics. (Of the eight doctoral
dissertations in Slavic linguistics for 1997 [Slavic Review, Winter 1998,
959-60], two come from UCLA; of the other six, several come from universities
with recently reduced linguistics faculty. UCLA is the only university
represented by more than one dissertation.)
The Department considers the crossover between
literature and linguistics central to the mission of its graduate program. This
is reflected in the MA requirements (students must take a number of courses in
both), in approaches applied in PhD courses (structural analysis of literary
texts, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, semiotics, translation studies,
the interface between literature and history and literature and anthropology)
and, naturally, in the faculty's research. A recent development - and one that
is becoming increasingly common - is the joint publication of articles by
faculty members and graduate students. Graduate students also regularly give
papers at national conferences: eight will participate at the annual meeting of
the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages this
December in Chicago. They note with satisfaction that the Department is helping
to prepare them for the job market by rehearsing them before their talks and
staging mock interviews, but would like to see general advising and mentoring
strengthened as well.
The
Department provides more regular, required Russian-language instruction on the
graduate level than comparable programs and has a native speaker available for
conversation and consultation on a drop-in basis for twenty hours a week, a
feature no other department in the country offers. It also requires a working
knowledge of one or two other Slavic languages. Practical language preparation
has proven an important factor in the competitiveness of our graduate students
on the job market, and some graduate students would like to see more emphasis
on perfecting their command of Russian and the other Slavic languages. The
Department prides itself on training its TA's in the latest in
language-teaching methodology. Not surprisingly, then, the Department plays a
leading role' in formulating language-teaching policy on the UCLA campus. And
not surprisingly, Professor Kagan was recently named the first chair of a newly
instituted campus-wide Foreign Language Resource Committee. The Department also
houses Romanian for the Romanian studies Program and has recently elected to
take over Hungarian from the Department of Germanic Languages.
The Department is committed to undergraduate
education. We offer two or three general education courses a quarter: The
Russian Novel, Russian civilization, Russian Civilization in the Twentieth
Century, Slavic Civilization. We offer three majors (Russian Language and
Literature, Russian Studies, and Slavic Languages and Literatures, the latter
unique in the country in requiring the study of Russian and an additional
Slavic language) and three minors (Russian Language, Russian Literature, and
Russian Studies, all of which require Russian language study). In the past few
years we have made a highly successful effort to attract heritage speakers of
Russian by creating language and literature courses with their interests in
mind. The Russian club provides undergraduates with a wide range of
extra-curricular activities. The number of courses required to sustain this
breadth tended to tax our faculty even before we lost two of our faculty
members most involved in the undergraduate program, but we feel confident of
being able to carry on once they are replaced. If we can make such a claim, it
is largely because, while maintaining their reputation for scholarly
excellence, members of the ladder faculty regularly teach five courses a year
(and many have in fact taught six or seven on an overload basis) and earn
consistently high evaluation ratings from both undergraduates and graduates.
During the mid-nineties, when the decision was made
to consolidate the staff of several departments into a single administrative
unit, the Kinsey Humanities Group, we went through a bad patch. Our main office
was left unmanned, and many of us spent an inordinate amount of time directing
lost students, answering other people's phone calls, and the like. Mercifully,
the situation improved dramatically when Marcia Kurtz, our student affairs
officer, was returned to us, and now under Mila August's capable leadership -
and Marcia's highly capable Russian-speaking replacement, Inna Gergel - things
administrative are again on an even keel. We are currently gearing up for the
seismic retrofitting and general renovation of Kinsey Hall. In a year's time we
will move to Hershey Hall for the two years it will take to gut and completely
reconfigure our current quarters. The chair has had numerous and fruitful
consultations with the architects and assures the Department that while
individual faculty offices will decrease-slightly in size there will be a
notable increase in public space: a second lounge/seminar room, a student
commons room, and a set of dedicated computer work stations.
The Undergraduate Program
The
euphoria that followed the fall of the east-bloc regimes in the late eighties
and early nineties, the period covered by the previous eight-year review,
quickly evaporated when the transition to democracy proved more arduous than
expected. Undergraduate enrollments in our field, especially in
Russian-language courses, dropped dramatically country-wide. The Department
nonetheless continued to give regular instruction in five Slavic languages
(Russian, Czech, Polish, Serbian/Croatian, Ukrainian) and Romanian; it continued
to offer instruction at all levels of Russian - including self-paced Russian
and First- and Second-Year Russian during Summer Session - every year. (Five of
the textbooks used in courses have been or are being developed by members of
the Department: V puti [1996, second-year Russian, Olga Kagan], Cestina
hrou: Czech for Fun [1998, first-year Czech, Susan Kresin], Readings in
Czech (1985, second-year Czech, Michael Heim, Dean Worth], Communicative
Romanian [first-year Romanian, Georgiana Galateanu, Michael Heim],
Balakajmo!-A Basic Course for English-Speaking students [first-year
Ukrainian, Roman Koropeckyj, Robert Romanchuk.) Our attempts at boosting
dwindling enrollments included publicity campaigns (posters, sandwich boards,
advertisements in the Daily Bruin), mass e-mailings (lists of our
offerings to all eleven thousand undergraduates), regular alphabet-learning
sessions, reinvigoration of the Russian Club (with many off-campus activities
and integration into the local Russian community), increased frequency of
general education courses (the Russian Novel, Russian Civilization, Slavic
Civilization) and popular literature-in-translation courses (Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky), experimentation with flexible scheduling patterns for language
courses, introduction (in addition to the successful self-paced, that is,
one-on-one first-year courses) of an intensive Russian course covering the
first year in two quarters, and a series of senior seminars taught by advanced
graduate students (because of the quality of our students' proposals the Slavic
Department, though one of the smallest in the College of Letters and Science,
was the only one allotted two such courses by the Office of Instructional
Development last year). Professor Heim piloted a new type of General Education
course for the College, a writing-intensive course based on Russian 99B
(Russian Civilization in the Twentieth Century); Professor Vroon introduced
Russian 30 (Russian Literature and World Cinema), which TAs have now taught for
University Extension and the Summer School.
Another tack we took was to increase efforts to
attract the pool of heritage speakers from the Russian community, which, again
contrary to general expectations, has kept replenishing itself. As a result, we
were able to make up for our decrease in elementary language enrollments with
enrollments of up to sixty students in advanced classes like Professor
Ospovat's Russian poetry and prose series (Russian 130 and 140.), classes
which, because readings and lectures are entirely in Russian, were
traditionally limited to majors and therefore five or, at most, ten students.
The Department is also offering a number of new advanced language courses aimed
specifically at Russian heritage speakers: Russian 100 (Literacy in Russian),
Russian 103 (Russian for Native and Near-Native Speakers: 103A/Russian National
Identity, 103B/Literature and Film, 103C/Special Topics). In this connection
Professor Kagan is working on the first textbook for heritage speakers, Russian
for Russians. The emphasis on heritage speakers is especially important in
view of a major outreach project created by Professor Ivanov to study the
diverse language communities of greater Los Angeles, a project that began as an
undergraduate seminar in the Department.
The Department was the first in the College to create
a minor; in fact, it was Professor Heim who during his stint-on the Executive
Committee in the early nineties proposed that the College as a whole institute
minors. The Department now gives students a choice of three, all of which have
a language component.
Finally,
we have incorporated video components and web-based material into virtually all
courses, language and literature, at the undergraduate level. We have offered
Fourth-Year Russian to UC Riverside and Russian civilization to UC Irvine via a
distance-teaching hook-up. Support for such activities comes from a variety of
campus-wide facilities like Humanities Computing, the Office of Instructional
Development, the Faculty New Media Center, and the Instructional Media
Laboratory. Graduate research and
teaching fellows have designed programs of internet-based instructional
materials at various levels. (You may visit our site at
www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/slavic and click, for example, on the tutorials for Golosa,
the textbook for first-year Russian.) Finally, in conjunction with her
second-year textbook of Russian and as a result of a $30,000 grant from Provost
Copenhaver, Professor Kagan is working on a pilot project to supplement
classroom instruction with interactive web-based exercises that can serve as a
template for other foreign languages.
In other words, we have been careful to pull our
weight on the university level even when circumstances have kept enrollments
and the number of majors lower than we would have liked. One major problem
remains. The loss of Professors Irina Gutkin and Peter Hodgson has cut deeply
into the Department's undergraduate program in literature: eight of the ten
courses they collectively taught per year belonged to the undergraduate curriculum,
that is, together they taught approximately 45% of the undergraduate Russian
literature courses in translation. We are currently conducting a search for one
of their positions and have requested authorization for the second. Our goal is
to maintain at the highest level what we feel to be an intellectually
stimulating and viable liberal arts program. One student who took several
courses in our department but graduated from another recently told us she
regretted not having majored in Slavic, which she called "one of UCLA's
undiscovered treasures."
The Graduate Program
Several years after the nation-wide decline in
undergraduate enrollments the Department began to experience a concomitant
decline in graduate applications.
With Slavic departments failing to replace retiring faculty, reducing FTEs, and
facing mergers with other language and literature departments or even
abolishment, with ever decreasing funds available for recruiting and retaining graduate students, morale
plummeted throughout the field. The funding situation became especially
precarious when our Center for European and Russian Studies lost its Department
of Education grant three years ago: the grant had included several annual FLAS
fellowships that supported our
graduate students.
What you are not told here is the role
the UCLA Slavic Department played in losing that grant. The grant application is very specific,
and it is very much language-instruction oriented, meaning that those in DoEd.
who issue the grant care less about those things which usually are considered
prestigious at a research institution such as UCLA, e.g. previous grants
awarded, articles published, positions held within professional societies,
etc.) and very much more with the nuts and bolts of teaching language and most
importantly, a set series of language classes in the target languages for that
FLAS area, and respectable, steady enrollments in those classes. There were times when some Slavic
Department faculty out and out ignored the requested information and instead
simply reported on what they felt was important (publications, receipt of a
Guggenheim Fellowship, etc.). We
know there were other irregularities as well involving the Slavic Department in
the loss of these FLAS fellowships, but we do not have the specifics.
(Fortunately, the Graduate Division, the College of
Letters and Science, and the International Studies and Overseas Programs have
made up the difference each year, and we are confident the Center will regain
the grant for the coming three-year period.)
Hard times have prompted us to re-examine our
mission, that is, to ask how we can best ensure the vitality of our traditions,
enhance our present strengths, and accommodate the future needs of the
university and the profession. While faculty and students alike agree that it
should build on those strengths - namely, the commitment to the entire Slavic
field rather than Russian alone and to the interplay between linguistics and
literature - we also agree that they can be complemented by certain changes. A
once required proseminar is no longer taught and has not been replaced with
basic training in research techniques, bibliography, style sheets, etc.; it is
sorely lacking. Reading lists for
the MA and PhD examinations in both literature and linguistics need to be
updated.
In the case of linguistics, these reading
lists need to be more than updated--they need to exist.
On a
more global level the first area that needs addressing is that of theory. The
Slavs have contributed richly to the theoretical background of
twentieth-century linguistic and literary studies with Russian Formalism, Czech
Structuralism, Lotman's cultural semiotics, and the Bakhtinian approach, and
here we are on firm ground. What we need is to cross-fertilize their
contributions with current Anglo-American and continental theory. We have
expanded the theoretical purview in linguistics by attracting Professor
Yokoyama; in literature we are currently conducting a search for a junior
position in nineteenth-century prose with proven competence in contemporary
Anglo-American and/or continental theory (gender studies, cultural studies,
postcolonial theory, neo-Marxism, and the like). We need to help our students
better integrate theoretical perspectives into their work starting at the
basic, MA level.
Closely related is the issue of the direction the
field as a whole is taking. Students have expressed an interest in making the
program flexible enough to include a new, third track within the Department,
one combining linguistics and literature. Professors Ivanov, Klenin, and
Yokoyama have been publishing scholarship on the cusp of literature and
linguistics for years. We intend to explore the possibility of setting up joint
degree programs with the Department of Linguistics (where a graduate student in
Slavic is currently a TA in an undergraduate course) and the Department of
Applied Linguistics (where, for instance, the theory of language pedagogy is
taught).
We strongly support setting up such joint
degree programs with the Linguistics and Applied Linguistics departments. This would not only expand the options
for us as students of linguistics, it would also serve to provide for us
options not involving the two problem linguistic faculty members in our own
department. We would encourage the
Slavic Department to also look into similar possibilities for joint programs in
conjunction with the interdepartmental Comparative Literature graduate program.
Such programs would considerably broaden our students'
options on the job market. We were highly gratified by the fact that last year,
for example, the three students who applied for positions (two in literature
and one in linguistics/language pedagogy) each received two offers, and all
three are currently teaching (at Brandeis, Connecticut College, and Grinnell).
This is a record matched by no other department in the country. Other
institutions at which our students found positions during the period under
review include the University of Iowa, Ohio State, Dalhousie, Rice, and the
Russian State Pedagogical University, and two received tenure (at Brown and the
University of North Carolina).
The Department has lobbied the College of Letters and
Science for two FTEs to replace those it lost from retirement during the period
under review. One is for a South
Slavic specialist, the position currently being filled by Adjunct Associate
Professor Corin and one that is essential to the Department's programmatic
commitment to Slavic languages and literatures. In the framework of our
interest in current theory the South Slavist would ideally represent a
prominent school in theoretical linguistics not currently represented in the
Department (formal, cognitive, etc.) and be versatile enough to develop and
teach, for example, undergraduate courses on the cultures of the Balkan Slavs.
The other is for a literary specialist whose principal expertise lies in the
Soviet and Russian postmodern periods. Current students - both graduate and
undergraduate - and many recent applicants have expressed a strong interest in
post-Soviet developments in literature, the arts, and popular culture. By
filling the second position with a specialist in this area, which is not yet
widely taught anywhere in the country, we would be able to compete more
effectively for the best students. Such a specialist would also have much to
contribute to the Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for
Modern and Contemporary Studies.
A
department is as good as its faculty - and its students.
Yes, well...
We are currently making our web site
more applicant-friendly and doing everything we can to attract qualified
candidates for graduate study. However, despite our best efforts at recruitment
and retention we are unable to complete with the financial incentives offered
by a number of other institutions. The problem is compounded by the fact that,
given the Department's international reputation, we have had a number of
excellent international graduate students, mostly from Asia and (now that they
are free to travel) Eastern Europe, but these students strain our resources
inordinately because they must pay non-resident tuition in addition to
university fees. To support both them and other qualified applicants - and to
fill the Department's sorely depleted coffers - we have begun a fundraising
campaign among our alumni and the public at large. We have made contact with
all our alumni by means of a departmental Newsletter and collected several thousand
dollars.
It should be noted that these last two
activities, the fund-raising and the alumni newsletter, were instituted by the
one Departmental Chair whose tenure in this position lasted only half a
year. Not once but several times
and from several different faculty did we as students hear the derisive remarks
directed against the efforts.
Apparently, for some of our faculty, such activities are "beneath
the dignity" of a department with as high an academic and scholarly
profile as our own.
This
new source of funds together with increased support from the Graduate Division
will help us to compete with the multi-year financial-aid packages with which
other institutions have wooed promising students away from us in the recent
past.
Comparison to the Previous
Review
Let us begin by addressing the recommendations made
by the previous review agencies, the Committee on Undergraduate Courses and
Curricula (CUCC) and the Graduate Council (GC). Both advised the Department to
establish clear and consistent written guidelines for distributing TA
assignments and to select Tas in a timely manner. The guidelines have been
established and are distributed to graduate students annually together with the
guidelines for receiving all types of financial aid. We understand that
students wish to learn about TA assignments in the spring preceding the
academic year during which they will teach, but since the funding of TAships is
inextricably bound with other varieties of funding some of them may simply have
to be assigned later. We are careful to keep everyone apprised of the situation
as it develops. Nonetheless, a number of students have expressed a desire for a
more collegial and transparent atmosphere.
Yes, that would be nice.
We immediately followed the GC recommendation that we
create a course to provide students with training in methods of language
teaching. All students now take Professor Kagan's Teaching Slavic Languages at
the College Level (Slavic 495) in preparation for teaching and her Teaching
Apprentice Practicum (Slavic 375) while teaching. We also immediately followed
the CUCC recommendation that we evaluate and revamp Russian 1. Methods
developed in Slavic 495 laid the foundations for the new elementary language
course, but other changes - a new textbook, Golosa, more emphasis on
video and computer-assisted instruction - occurred as well. We have also begun
to take advantage of the TA consultant position funded by the office of
Instructional Development to enable experienced Tas to help train their peers.
The CUCC recommendation that we lobby for funds to
use TAs to teach sections in the larger literature and civilization courses
took longer to address, but within the past few years funds have been
forthcoming and we now regularly offer discussion sections in two General
Education courses, The Russian Novel (Russian 25) and Russian Civilization in
the Twentieth Century (Russian 99B), which, as mentioned above, served as a
pilot course for the writing-intensive component of the new General Education
program.
There was a concern among the graduate students about
the availability of TAships given the ratio of graduate students to available
TA FTE's. To address this issue, not raised at the time of the previous report,
we have begun to allot TAships at 25% rather than the full 50% level. The
argument in favor of breaking up a TAship is that it gives both experience and
fee remission to two students rather than one; the argument against it is that
it may result in fragmentation in the classroom. Another problem is how to
insure that TAs hired at 25% do not work proportionally more than those hired
at 50%.
Instead
of adopting the recommendation that the graduate adviser be a given course relief,
which would have proved difficult in light of our already tight resources, we
decided to divide the responsibilities of the office among four faculty
members: a linguistics adviser, a literature adviser, and two members of the
admissions and support committee. The way in which admissions and support
decisions are reached has also changed: the faculty used to submit comments to
the committee, which then made the decisions; now every faculty member rates
every applicant for admission and every continuing student, and we meet as a
body to discuss and vote on the candidates.
Special Circumstances
We feel we have emerged from a difficult period of
transition in our own field (the
transformation of East-Central Europe and its very real repercussions in the
academy) and in the university (the reduction of public funding and the call
for the financial accountability of academic programs) with a sense of where
our strengths lie, how best to capitalize on them, and how to adapt to the new
situations confronting us. We do not yet have all the answers, of course: we
spent a good deal of energy, for example, formulating a new preprofessional
MA program in Russian, but the chair postponed discussion until the outcome of
our FTE requests is clear. Still, we have come through with our reputation and
achievements intact - every faculty member contributes not only to the teaching program but also
to the departmental profile of a center of research in a variety of fields -
and we look forward to contributing even more to UCLA and to the scholarly
community as a whole.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000
18:17:48 -0800 (PST)
From: MICHAEL HEIM
<heim@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU>
Subject: missing external
attachment (apologies)
To: slavic.department.graduate.students@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU
MIME-version: 1.0
Priority: normal
Professor Duncan Lindsey
Academic Senate Executive
Office
3125 Murphy Hall
UCLA
Los Angeles CA 90024
Professor Pauline Yu
Dean of Humanities
3125 Murphy Hall
UCLA
Los Angeles CA 90024
Professor Michael Heim
Chair, Department of Slavic
Languages
115 Kinsey Hall
UCLA
Los Angeles CA 90024
Dear members of the UCLA
community:
Towards the end of last week,
we, the two members of the external review committee, received copies of
the 1999-2000 Academic Senate Review of the Department of Slavic Languages
and Literatures, a document which includes the Draft Report of the
Internal Review Team as well as our own report. We recognize that no response to the Draft Report was
solicited from us, the external reviewers. Nevertheless, we would ask you to consider our remarks
below, regardless of procedures, because of the importance of the matter:
the very existence of this academic unit is at stake. We have sent this letter first by
e-mail (through the address of Ms. L. Crespo:crespo@senate.ucla.edu) with
the hard copy with signatures to follow. We have addressed it to a minimal number of individuals,
but we trust it can be made known to the full bodies of the
relevant committees.
When we two left Los Angeles,
having heard the same evidence as the internal committee,...
This is completely untrue.
For reasons touched upon several times above, a great many students
would not speak with the internal review committee because of Alan Timberlake's
presence on it. The internal
review committee made this very clear: "We note that the external reviewers devoted more space to this issue
than to any other single aspect of the Slavic program despite the fact that
they heard but a fraction [our emphasis] of all the complaints." This
fact cannot be overemphasized in assessing this revisionist letter by Bethea
and Timberlake: they heard but a fraction of the abuses heard by the internal
reviewers, and the internal reviewers themselves heard but a fraction of the
abuses that have gone on over the years in the UCLA Slavic Department. Any conclusions drawn by Bethea and
Timberlake were based on this fraction of a fraction.
...and having given a quite
detailed and rigorous exit interview, we believed that we shared
approximately the same perception as the members of the internal committee
of the state of the department, of both its strengths and its
difficulties. Accordingly, we were astonished when we read the Draft
Report and found that it includes a thoroughly negative evaluation of
the department's treatment of its graduate students and, further, that
it includes the dual recommendations that the department be obliged
to suspend graduate admissions indefinitely and that the department
be placed into receivership. The evaluation does not correspond to
what we heard during our two-day visit.
It is fair and reasonable that the external reviewers would state
that "The evaluation does not
correspond to what we heard during our two-day visit". Given the fact that they heard so little directly from
graduate students, the evaluation logically could not correspond to what they
heard.
These recommendations
are counter-productive. > >In greater detail: > >1. The Draft Report (p. 2)
states that students perceive the program as "capricious
and self-serving," and then follows this assertion by the statement
that the external reviewers "devoted more space to this issue than to
any other single aspect...," as if to suggest that we, the
external reviewers, were in agreement with the immediately preceding
statement and, by extension, with the whole of the internal report. Not so. In our exit interview and our written report, we
identified a problem, and we wrote about it at some length in order to
make it clear exactly what our perception of the severity of the problem
was--serious but circumscribed--and in order to offer a recommendation on
how to deal with it.
Again, fine as far as it goes. If the external reviewers feel that their position was
misrepresented by the internal reviewers, then they have every right to speak
up. It is important, however, to
note the external reviewers' own words here: "we identified a problem, and we wrote about it at
some length in order to make it clear exactly what our perception [our
emphasis] of the severity of the problem
was--serious but circumscribed--". What was in
fact circumscribed, albeit through no fault of their own, was the amount of information
available to the external reviewers by which to come to the conclusions they
eventually did reach, conclusions based on their perception, a perception which could be no more
accurate than the input they had received and on which they based this
perception.
We do not find the program
capricious and self-serving.
We do not agree with the language of the Draft Report that
characterizes the department as treating students as "chattel"
and "damaged goods." This simply does not correspond to our judgment
of life in the department, and as external reviewers, we want to distance
ourselves as far as possible from this characterization of the department.
Once again, fine as far as it goes. We quite obviously disagree with them. For us, the characterization of the
department treating students as "chattel" and "damaged
goods" is quite mild. But
again, we have directly experienced the Slavic Department as students. The external reviewers have not, and,
furthermore, were denied direct input from us as to the nature of the
faculty-student relationship in this department.
2. The dual recommendations to suspend graduate
admissions and place the department in receivership punish the whole
department for the sins of a few, invoking the logic that all are "culpable." The logic is peculiar, and the
recommendations are unfair to the department as a whole. Punishing the collective for the acts
of individuals (a scenario with which we are familiar from our study of
the Soviet Union) is a strategy of desperation.
We have discussed above our view of this section of the internal
report, and our feeling that some of the faculty coming from Russia proper
should not be held accountable, at least not to the same degree as their
American counterparts. Having said
this, we would make two points here:
1.
We by and large do
agree that a great majority of the Slavic Department faculty should be held
accountable for failing to take steps to stop the institutionalized abuse which
has for years (decades?) characterized the Slavic Department.
2. We are aghast and well nigh dumbfounded
that the external reviewers would have the chutzpah to draw a comparison with
the Slavic Department faculty and victims of Soviet oppression. For year after year it has been the Slavic
Department faculty
acting the role of the capricious thug, stifling any hint of dissent and
demanding unquestioning loyalty.
For years it has been the Slavic Department faculty who have acted with near impunity in any
way they saw fit, riding roughshod over anyone who dared get in their way. It has been the Slavic Department
faculty which has used
its protected position to institute a reign of fear and intimidation, primarily
over the graduate students, but at times over staff and other faculty as well.
Perhaps
the only appropriate analogy to the Soviet Union would be those rare instances
in its history when Soviet citizens rose up and rebelled, eliminating the thugs
and goons who did the dirty work of the Soviet regime, which would respond by
first crushing the revolt and then elevating those same thugs and goons to the
position of martyrs. This would be
the only appropriate Soviet-era comparison one could make with the Slavic
Department faculty.
The
external reviewers here perversely attempt to turn the situation on its
head. Although there might be some
regrettable "aberrations" concerning the mistreatment of students, it
is in point of fact the faculty which is truly suffering! In fact, so horribly ill-treated are
the faculty by this report that it evokes images in their minds of the victims
of Soviet oppression, we are told.
In making such an odious and artificial comparison, the external
reviewers find themselves adopting the same tactic traditionally used by the
Slavic Department: when problems arise, instead of going to and identifying the
source of those problems, they attempt to place blame elsewhere. Since graduate students, the normal
recipient of this blame, are in this once instance unavailable to fulfill this
task because of the nature of the charges made in the report about the abuse of
graduate students, the external reviewers instead lay the blame at the feet of
those vicious Stalinists who comprise the internal review committee, and who
(apparently) are bent on punishing the collective for the sins of the few.
It represents a refusal to
take any responsibility for the practical implementation of change.
What would the external reviewers have the internal reviewers do
other than report the facts and make the recommendations which are with its
purview to make? It is our
understanding that the 8-year review committee was charged with reviewing the
department in order to offer up suggestions for change. Was it also the charge of the 8-year
review committee to take "responsibility
for the practical implementation of change"?
In fact, if one takes at face value what the internal review
committee said at the beginning of its report on the Slavic Department graduate
program ("The mandate to the review
team was not to conduct a fact-finding mission or to determine the guilt or
innocence of particular individuals, but rather to assess the welfare of the
graduate students and to recommend corrective action, if necessary, to assure
their well-being.")
then we would think that the internal review team has shown great
responsibility to the graduate students and has in fact fulfilled its
mandate. This is, of course, not
to say that this is enough. As we
have mentioned above, an official fact-finding mission and an investigation to
determine the guilt or innocence of certain faculty members is certainly called
for. But that wasn't the mandate
of the internal review committee, just as the "practical implementation of change" was not the mandate of the
internal review committee
3. The judgments about the transgressions of individuals
place complete trust in the versions of the students.
How do the external reviewers know this? At the beginning of this report, the internal reviewers
write the following:
"Great care was taken to ensure the legitimacy of the
information upon which we have based the conclusions at the end of this report.
Several case histories from different sources were compared and no example of
any significant discrepancy was found. In other instances different case
histories involving similar situations were compared across time. The
consistency was remarkable, even between former students who had never met."
Do the external reviewers mean to question the veracity of the
internal reviewers? Is it their
opinion that the internal reviewers were deliberately untruthful when they said
they verified the information they had received from graduate students? If so, then the external reviewers
should come out and say this. Then
they should come out and give us, in detail, the information they have which
supports the statement that complete trust was put in the students' versions of
these transgressions.
(Is it not possible that
student XX, whose Russian turned out to be extraordinarily weak, was in
fact not capable of graduate studies?)
Of course it is possible.
There are instances of the problem faculty members chairing Ph.D.
committees and approving Ph.D. theses which have no business being approved,
which are an embarrassment to the field, from students who were not capable of
graduate studies.
So it is indeed possible.
It is, however, completely untrue in this instance. This student was a brilliant student
who simply happened to have, just as most of us had upon entering this program,
weak Russian.
The external reviewers here characterize XX's Russian as "extraordinarily weak". Again,
we ask, how do they know this? Do
they know XX? Have they heard her
speak Russian? Do they know there
were two other students who came in the same year as XX and who had similar if not weaker
Russian than XX, and yet somehow managed to high-pass their M.A. exams last
Spring? Or do they base this bold statement about her not only "weak"
but "extraordinarily weak" Russian on what they have heard from their UCLA Slavic
Department colleagues, presumably the same colleagues who told them about
"the department's record of placing
seven out of seven new Ph.D.s over the past five years."? Do they know and can they support any of what they say about
XX, or are they merely joining in the time-honored defense stratagem of the
Slavic Department: attack the weak, especially if they are no longer in the
program, and thus presumably no longer around to defend themselves.
It is disturbing, yet at this point not in the least surprising,
that the external viewers are so ready and quick to parrot the lines fed them
by the UCLA Slavic Department faculty, both with regard to the state of XX's
Russian and the placement record of the UCLA Slavic Department.
In all the
extensive interviews that went on after we left, there was apparently no
attempt to interview any of the faculty members who are tacitly
held responsible.
The reasons for this were made abundantly clear in the internal
review. As we have said, we would
love nothing more to see the "tacitly" responsible faculty put forth
a detailed response to charges made against them.
4. Above all, the recommendations are simply
ineffectual. They contain no
suggestion of a practical mechanism that would improve the behavior of
individuals or the ethos of the department. (There is also no exit strategy: how can the department
ever prove that they no longer mistreat their graduate students?) The recommendations punish, but
they offer no mechanisms for improvement.
They offer nothing that can be implemented.
The implication here seems to be that because the recommendations
contain no practical mechanisms, they are therefore "simply ineffectual". Again, we
would ask: is the implementation of the recommendations the charge of the
8-year review committee or of the University Administration?
These harsh sanctions have
come out of the blue.
This is untrue. For
several years now Slavic Department faculty have known that there were
questions being raised about them.
This reached a head several years ago when one faculty member was made
chairman and attempted to institute real reform, only to be stymied at every
turn. This faculty member,
frustrated at having her hands tied and being rebuffed whenever she tried to
introduce even the mildest of reforms, resigned after only six months, ending
our brief Prague Spring.
To say that these sanctions (hardly "harsh",
by the way, especially when compared with the actions of the faculty which made
them necessary) come out of the blue is ludicrous, but even if it were true, so
what? The nature of the
transgressions by this faculty are such that, in our opinion, the University
was thoroughly justified in taking this action.
If the perception within
the university was that the department was dysfunctional, the problem
should have been addressed in some more productive,
positive, problem-solving fashion by the administration prior to this
review.
Nonsense. Attempts
were made repeatedly, both from below and above, to make it clear to the Slavic
Department that their behavior was unacceptable. The result was the same pattern of denial and equivocation.
There is a fundamental issue
of fairness and justice to the academic unit that is at issue here.
Again, this is utter nonsense. This department has been warned and approached and pleaded
with for years. This is a
department that is utterly incapable of seeing itself for what it is. Michael Heim's response to the report is the very best
evidence for that. The Slavic
Department has been warned time and again, but chose to ignore/could not help
but ignore these warnings. Not
only has the University Administration bent over backwards to be fair to the
Slavic Department, it has gone way too far, allowing the Slavic Department to
get away with grotesque abuse of its students for years on end. To say that there is "a fundamental issue of fairness and justice to the
academic unit that is at issue here" is absurd. What
might well be at stake, however, is the reputation and the integrity of the
external reviewers who here act as nothing more than advocates for the
department which they are supposedly critiquing.
In fact, we, the external
reviewers, while we know full well the nature of the historical tensions
within the department, do not find it dysfunctional.
Given the fact that they did not have the benefit of speaking with
most of the graduate students affected by this faculty, this would be a fair
statement. We would suggest,
however, that the external reviewers, in spite of Alan Timberlake's tenure has
as a professor 12 years ago, might very well not be aware of the present day
manifestations of the aforementioned "historical
tensions within the department". Beyond that,
there are issues concerning this department which were not issues during
Timberlake's time here, to say nothing of the presence of certain faculty
members who were not here when Timberlake was here.
Needless to say, we very much disagree with the opinion of the
external reviewers, namely that "do
not find it dysfunctional. " Indeed, examination of the external
reviewers' first report on the Slavic Department suggests that perhaps even
they could be persuaded to disagree with themselves: "real challenges that need to be addressed soon"; "[students who] suffer from an alarming level of
anxiety, bordering on demoralization"; "UCLA's
graduate students in Slavic...suffer from an alarming level of anxiety,
bordering on demoralization...much
[emphasis in the original] more than what can be attributed to run-of-the-mill
graduate student anxiety";
"this much smoke suggests there
must be some fire".
Are these the characteristics which the external reviewers
associate with a non-dysfunctional department? If so, we find ourselves wondering what this says about the
state of the graduate programs at Wisconsin and UC Berkeley. (Of course, if the Slavic departments
at these two universities can expect UCLA Slavic Department faculty to
"return the favor", so to speak, and serve as external members in their review process, then the faculties of
both those Slavic departments should come out fine.)
The training
is excellent.
How do the external reviewers know this? Some of the training is excellent. Much of it is not.
Much of it is out of date and poorly presented. And a great deal of it is not
coordinated among the faculty members themselves, with the result being that
students have paid the price on comprehensive exams as they were forced to choose
between competing views on certain issues, with the faculty administering the
exams holding different views on these issues.
The department has recently
placed its graduates with extraordinary success (though we do not have the
figures, we expect its placement record in recent years is better than
that of any other national language-and-literature program at UCLA).
It may be that the external reviewers felt here that they "do not have the figures", but that certainly wasn't their feeling in their
section of the 8-year review report, in which they wrote with great confidence
"With regard to the graduate
program, the students appear to be exceptionally well trained, a fact further
corroborated by the department's record of placing seven out of seven new
Ph.D.s over the past five years [Our emphasis]. This record of placing students in recent years is
unparalleled among Slavic programs in America.".
We have already commented on this above.
And--especially under its
current chair--the department has come to a mature understanding of the
nature of its problems as a collective and it has begun to find ways of
resolving conflict and functioning effectively as a collective.
We have already made clear opinion of Michael Heim's
leadership. The idea that this
department "has come to a mature understanding
of the nature of its problems as a collective" is a flight of fancy. As we have repeatedly said, this faculty is incapable of
governing itself or coming to an understanding of itself which is even close to
reality.
The historical problems are
real, but the resolve to get beyond these problems is no less
manifest. The department
should be congratulated for its recent efforts to move forward, not
punished for the residue of its historical tensions.
This would be laughable were it not so infuriating. This department "should be congratulated for its recent efforts to
move forward"? What efforts? Trying to put off the 8-year review? This department does nothing unless it is pushed. That is crystal clear to anyone who has
had anything to do with this department.
As a more efficacious
alternative to these precipitous and harsh sanctions...
We find these "sanctions" to be neither precipitous nor
harsh, certainly not in the light of the actions and abuses of the Slavic
Department faculty. If anything,
the Slavic Department faculty will be getting off lightly if nothing else is
done, if no other investigations are conducted. Not one of them has lost his/her job, not one of them has
been personally been singled out and censured by name, not one of them has been
forced to answer before a board for their actions.
..., one might consider a
concrete two-step strategy that would consist, first, of a meeting between
representatives of the university community--possibly Dean Yu and the
chair of the internal committee--and the whole of the faculty of the
department. Such a meeting
could be used to make clear how the Administration and the larger
university community perceive the problems of the department and could
serve to remind the faculty of the standards for comportment. After such a meeting, once the
ground-rules are set, the department can then, as a long-term strategy,
articulate and utilize an internal mechanism for conflict resolution,
where necessary involving the services of a professional mediator.
We strongly disagree with this. The Slavic Department should either be put into receivership
while official investigations into its actions take place, or it should be
disbanded altogether.
We, the members of the
external review committee, would take the liberty of reminding you that
our external review was an extremely rigorous review.
This is all very relative.
Compared with a normal review, this might indeed have been a rigorous
review. What it was not, and in
our opinion, could not be, is "an
extremely rigorous review", simply because the external reviewers did not have anywhere
near the requisite amount of time to conduct such a review, a fact which they
themselves seem to acknowledge in their section of the 8-year review: "we were not given the time or the mandate to
determine the veracity of these reports or to adjudicate in these matters".
We listened carefully while we
there, and discussed with each other quite intensely our ongoing
perceptions and incipient recommendations. This was no sweetheart review.
It may not have been a "sweetheart
review", but for
whatever reason, it certainly did not come close to identifying the severity
and breadth of the problems which plague the Slavic Department. Because of time and manpower
restraints, not even the internal reviewers' report, which had the benefit of
input from graduate students, was able to come close to identifying all of
these problems, so certainly the external reviewers' report could not do so.
It was a review that identified
problems and made clear judgments and strong recommendations, some of
which, we knew in advance, would not be popular with all of the individual
faculty members at UCLA.
Two points here:
1.
Yes, it did identify problems and it did make clear judgments. But we would ask, is that not what an
8-year review committee is supposed to do? Is that not their job, what they are paid to do? Why does the identification of problems
and the issuance of clear judgments qualify this review as "no sweetheart review"? There
were very clear problems and these reviewers commented on the small part of
these problems which was brought to their attention. In other words, they did what they were supposed to do.
2.
The external reviewers take pains to point out that they made "strong recommendations, some of which, we knew in
advance, would not be popular with all of the individual faculty members
at UCLA." Again, what is the implication of this
statement? That this review
qualifies as "no sweetheart review" because they made statements which
might offend their colleagues and, in the case of Timberlake, former
co-workers? Again, is that not
their job, to report on their findings regardless of whom these results offend? Such statements support the inference
that the practice of external reviewers being brought in at the suggestion of
the department being reviewed is just another way to keep the "Old Boys
Network" in place: "You don't be too critical of us, and we won't be
too critical of you." (We
have addressed this issue in more detail in our comments on the external
reviewers' original report.)
For this reason, we feel
particularly distressed that the language and recommendations of the Draft
Report run so thoroughly counter to our perceptions of the program, our
perceptions of the sense of the committee during our visit, and our
judgment of what is practical and necessary to move this department
forward.
As the members of the external
review committee--as individuals who were likewise charged with evaluating
how well the department fulfills its academic mission, as individuals who
observed the same department and heard the same testimony as the internal
committee--we would urge you to reconsider the decision to impose harsh
sanctions on the department and, instead, to formulate a more measured and
more constructive response.
These sanctions are unwarranted.
Given the fact that the external reviewers, during their two-day
visit, had neither the time to conduct an in-depth review of the department nor
the graduate student input needed to conduct such an in-depth review, they are
in no position to make the statement that "[t]hese sanctions are unwarranted." Since they do
not know the true extent of abuse which has gone on in this department, they
also have no way of knowing whether these sanctions are warranted or not. The fact that they are nonetheless
willing to go on record saying that the sanctions are unwarranted does two things:
1.
It undermines their personal credibility;
2.
It undermines the credibility of the process. For them to present such an easily challenged conclusion to
you their colleagues and fellow academics suggests they believe that none of
you would ever be discourteous enough to call them on this inconsistency. Again, the picture this presents is one
of tenured academics taking care of each other, so confident of the fact that
they will protect one another and keep anonymous one another's comments that
they are willing to put forth the most frivolous and facetious of arguments.
These sanctions will
destroy overnight a department...
If, as a result of this 8-year review and the relatively mild (in
our view) sanctions resulting from it, the UCLA Slavic Department ceases to
exist as an academic entity, then that would at least be better than the
alternative, namely to allow it go on as it had been. It not only did not help its own students, but it actually
hurt the field as a whole by taking in students willing to give of their time and
effort and then crushing them, so that they were lost not only to UCLA, but to
the field itself.
We do not agree, however, that these mild sanctions "will destroy overnight a department". They will and should be reflected
in the reputation of the UCLA Slavic Department, but options are available for
change. It is our opinion that it
is doubtful that the UCLA Slavic Department, given the myopia which has
characterized it for years, will
avail itself of these options, but failure to do so could be then laid only at
the feet of the department itself.
...that has been
making extraordinary and earnest efforts to improve its
undergraduate curriculum,...
Efforts which, as we have pointed out above, have often been
ridiculed loudly by some members of the faculty, especially the problem faculty
members, as unworthy of a Slavic department of their academic stature. Some of these same faculty members have
even speculated aloud as to how much better a place the UCLA Slavic Department
would be were it not forced to have an undergraduate program.
its already effective graduate program,..
How the external reviewers could dare characterize the Slavic
Department graduate program as "effective", especially after having read the
report of the internal reviewers (and knowing that you, the members of the Academic Senate,
have also read the report), in our eyes further undermines their credibility
and strengthens the feeling that this entire review process is for them nothing
more than a means of providing cover for colleagues who find themselves in
trouble.
.... and its historically
imperfect but improving departmental ethos. What is needed instead is a response that will lead to
productive change, in the relevant individuals and in the ethos of the department
as a whole, rather than to further factionalism and rancor.
Sincerely,
David M. Bethea, Vilas
Research Professor, University of Wisconsin
External Member, 1999-2000
Academic Senate Review of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at
UCLA
Alan Timberlake, Professor,
University of California at Berkeley
External Member, 1999-2000
Academic Senate Review of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at
UCLA
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000
16:01:02 -0800 (PST)
From: MICHAEL HEIM <heim@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU>
Subject: eight-year review
follow-up
To:
slavic.department.graduate.students@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU
MIME-version: 1.0
Priority: normal
By now you will have had
time to read the Internal and External Departmental Reviews, my
"Errors of Fact" statement, and the Internal Review Committee's
response to that statement. I am pasting below my point-by-point reaction
to the response and sending under separate cover the External Committee's
response to the Internal Review. Once you have perused these documents and
reviewed the earlier ones, I would like to talk to each of you and hear
your suggestions for addressing the Department's problems. I will be out
of town from 14 July to 21 July, but will be in town for the rest of the
summer. Please drop in or call for an appointment. If you would rather
respond with an anonymous letter, please feel free to do so.
Not once, but several times, Michael Heim was asked by the graduate
student representative for the Slavic Department not to speak directly with graduate
students concerning the content of the eight-year review. The reasons for this we have already
discussed above when commenting on the section of the internal reviewers'
report dealing with possible retaliation against students who participated in the
review. The graduate student
representative informed Michael Heim that if he wanted input from graduate
students, then she would be happen to take that input from the graduate
students and pass it on to him.
Twice he rejected this.
Michael Heim has had twenty years here at UCLA to listen to student
complaints. Moreover, he often has
listened to student complaints, more often than not trying to downplay them or
explain them away as "aberrations". The implications of his refusal to agree to the request of
the graduate student representative have already been discussed above.
Chair's
Response to the Internal Review Team's Response
1. The Chair objects to characterizing student "XX" as
having "excellent credentials."
The student in question had excellent credentials on paper, which
is why we accepted her; they turned out to be less than excellent
in reality. Given that she had to take our third-year
undergraduate Russian course (we normally require four years of
undergraduate Russian of incoming students) after receiving A's and A+'s
in the Riverside third-year Russian course (the Russian placement
examination she took upon arriving at UCLA is in her file), I conclude
that grade inflation was at work at UCR. I would also point out that her
4.0 GPA at UCLA consists of an A in the undergraduate third-year course
she was retaking and two A's in graduate courses from the faculty
member with whom she had the conflict.
Truly shocking that Michael Heim, after
having been exposed so thoroughly and completely in "Response to Slavic
Chair's "Errors of Fact" statement",
would, in the UCLA Slavic Department tradition of never blaming itself but
instead always seeking to place the blame on the weakest members of the
department, continue his attempt to discredit this student. The particulars of the arguments he
makes here have already been discussed above, including his violation of the
Family Privacy Act of 1974 by sending out the particular's of a former
student's transcripts to other students without her consent. Still, we cannot help but respond to
his statement that "grade inflation was at work at UCR".
XX had a 3.9 GPA at an institution (UC
Riverside) which has plus/minus grading (thus making such a GPA even harder to
attain as even an A-minus would lower such a GPA). Achieving a 3.9 GPA says two things:
One,
that this individual must have formidable scholarly abilities. She may not be a genius, whatever that
term may mean, but clearly she is no idiot.
Two,
that this is a person who understands how to interact with faculty, how to
avoid getting on their bad side, how to present herself in their presence. This is not to say that such knowledge
should come into play when assigning grades, but we all know that in some
instances, it does come into play.
Thus, when Michael Heim tries to make the
claim that "grade inflation was at work at UCR",
the question that immediately comes to our mind is this: was grade inflation at
work with all of her courses at UCR? Or was it just
with regard to her Russian that grade inflation was at work? If the latter was the case, we would
like to Michael Heim to share with us how he knows where grade inflation had
"stained" XX's transcript and where it had not.
2. The Chair states that XX is the only student that has been lost as
a direct result of conflict with a faculty member.
The response "This is not true" is not a rebuttal. Do the
internal reviewers mean I have not told the truth or do they merely think
I am wrong?
Michael Heim here writes as though these
two options were mutually incompatible.
Clearly they are not.
Michael Heim is wrong. Michael Heim did not tell
the truth. Whether or not the act
of delivering such untruthful information can be characterized as a lie would,
we suppose, depend on the semantics of the word "lie". By our reckoning, one lies when one
provides untruthful information with intent and knowledge of its
untruthfulness. Thus, the question
of whether Michael Heim lied to the internal reviewers is a question of intent,
a question presumably answerable only by Michael Heim himself.
What is absolutely certain, however, is
that Michael Heim provided untruthful information. Of that there is no doubt.
In either case, I must know which student or students they
have in mind before I can defend my name or viewpoint. Retaliation here
is beside the point because by definition the student/s involved
have left the program.
This is nonsense and Michael Heim knows
it is nonsense. The power and
influence of this department, as has already been discussed above, extends not
only throughout this country, but across international borders, even into
Russia itself. Faculty members
themselves have commented on this influence. Regardless of whether or not a student has left this
particular program, if he/she has any hopes of landing a tenure-track job in
this field and making a career in Slavic, he/she would be foolish to allow
him-/herself to be identified as having taken part in this review process.
3. The Chair repeatedly objects to the failure to identify clearly the
specific faculty members and students who are referred to in the report.
Not only do I not "repeatedly object to the failure to
identify clearly the specific faculty members and students who are referred
to in the report"; I never once do so. I can see how one sentence,
taken out of context, might be misconstrued to read as a call for
identity. But that sentence - "Who are 'the students' here?" -
is the first in a series of four clearly rhetorical questions.
How can we possibly respond to a
statement such as this? To try to
deny the intent behind a statement such as ""Who are 'the
students' here?"" borders on absurdity.
I am not asking which students came forth: I do not need to ask who
the offended students are because I know who they are.
This is chilling and, in our view, very
much meant to intimidate. What
Michael Heim is telling us, the graduate students, is that we might as well go
talk to him. "The jig's up: I
know who talked and what they talked about. You might as well come clean." It is an indictment of this process
that even after Michael Heim has made a statement such
as this the University Administration still refused to direct him to cease
talking to students directly about the 8-year review.
Most if not all of the students in question have come to talk to
me, or I have proactively gone and talked to them.
This is incorrect.
Most of the students refuse to talk to Michael Heim
about this.
I also - again proactively - encouraged all students who I knew
had had problems to talk to the review committee openly. The report could
at least have stated 1) what percentage of the graduate student body as a
whole reported problems and 2) what percentage of those who reported
problems were in linguistics as opposed to literature. That would have
given a clearer and more balanced picture of the issue.
4. The Chair strenuously objects to the failure of the review team to
confront specific faculty members with specific complaints so that they could
present their point of view.
I still strenuously object to the failure of the review team
to confront specific faculty members with specific complaints, but
not only "so that they could present their point of view" but
also, as I stated in my letter, so that 1) the team could judge the
complexity (and abnormality) of the problem and offer advice on how to
deal with it and 2) the faculty members themselves would understand
how seriously the team took the problem. Then there is the issue
of confidentiality. How can anyone - review team, chair, colleague -
deal with the issues without citing specific instances? The reason
students called for confidentiality was to prevent retaliation, but
retaliation has never occurred...
Retaliation has never occurred? It is just disgraceful for Michael Heim
to make a statement such as this.
Retaliation and threat thereof are the defining characteristics of this
department. It is the primary
method of keeping others in line and preventing outsiders from questioning what
goes on "in house".
.., and I will be glad to outline the measures the Department has
taken to ensure that it not occur.
5. The Chair feels that he was not adequately consulted in the
preparation of the internal report.
When I expressed my dissatisfaction at not being adequately
consulted, I referred specifically to the period following the site visit.
From my single post-site conversation with the chair of the team, I
knew that he had talked to one student. He told me that he was checking
my version of an incident against hers and that her case was linked
to several others, but he did not tell me how. I cannot imagine that
any student would fear retaliation from me
We, on the other hand, can imagine
this. Very easily.
(in fact, on the first day of the site visit the Departmental
graduate-student representative asked me to deliver a statement of their
grievances to the committee, a statement that was not sealed or even in an
envelope), and as chair of the Department I was in a position to give
objective information on any number of cases. The students knew I was
aware of the problems: in some cases they had come to me; in others, as I
have pointed out, I took the initiative and went to them. I expected to
hear about specific cases and was not interested in "rehashing
generalities." We held an open meeting with the graduate students
before preparing our self-review; we also invited - and received -
anonymous statements from them after the meeting. I therefore went into
the site visit with my eyes open. I am here quoted as having given the
impression that "aside from funding problems there was no student
dissatisfaction to speak of." I certainly never felt that that was
the case, and I am not aware of having given or wishing to give such an
impression.
So to be clear: Is Michael Heim then
denying the truthfulness of that part of the internal reviewers' report which
says the following:
When the Chair of the department said that, aside
from funding problems, there was no student dissatisfaction to speak of, the
chair of the review team asked the question again to be sure he had heard
correctly.
If it is
Michael Heim's intention to claim that the internal reviewers are lying about
his comments, then he should come out and say so, officially and for the
record.
The disaffected students gave their picture of the Department,
which I never questioned, but it was not the whole picture. My job as
chair was to give a well-rounded picture, which I might add, coincides
in both its positive and negative assessments with the external report.
It surprises us not at all that Michael
Heim's "well-rounded picture"
coincides with the external report.
6. The Chair claims to have "had no idea" the review team
would come to the conclusions it did.
The statement here is unequivocal: I was told three times during
the site visit that "suspension of graduate admissions was
being considered." I can only say that I was stunned when I read in
the report that the Graduate Council had voted to suspend
graduate admissions. Had I known of the possibility during the visit, I
would have reacted on the spot with the arguments against it I raise in
my letter and perhaps a few more:...
What is Michael Heim saying here? If he, as he writes here, "was told three
times during the site visit that 'suspension of graduate admissions was
being considered.'", then how could he have been
"stunned" when he read that graduate
admissions had indeed been suspended?
...the waste of resources, the curtailment of the literature
program because of problems in the linguistics program,..
We have already commented above on the
tendency of those enabling members of the literature faculty to highlight the
division of the department into literature and linguistics sections rather than
to take the hard steps needed to confront those members of the linguistics
faculty who regularly abuse students, including literature students.
...the punitive rather than curative nature of the
"solution,"...
Frankly, we don't see these steps in the
least as punitive. In our opinion,
those who abused students and wrecked lives and careers are getting off very
easily, much to the discredit of the University, which, even in the face of
overwhelming evidence of wrong-doing, has yet to launch an official
fact-finding investigation into the abuse which has occurred in the Slavic
Department.
...its unforeseeable aftermath, etc. As a result, I phoned
Professor Timberlake and asked him whether he remembered the suspension
issue coming up during the site-visit interviews with me. His response
was that he remembered the issue being mentioned only in closed
session, that is, when I was not present.
7. Many additional issues regarding procedure and interpretation are
raised by the Chair. (Three are listed.)
Let me address each of the three issues separately.
First, the review team objects to my use of the word
"aberrations" to refer to "issues of long standing"
and "of fundamental importance." By using the word
"aberrations," I do not mean or even imply that the issues are
not of long standing or of fundamental importance; they are clearly that.
What I mean is that they are a "departure from the norm" (the
standard definition),...
We can only hope that the events which
have taken place within the UCLA Slavic Department are indeed a "departure
from the norm" for Slavic departments in general,
although the revisionist letter penned by Professors Timberlake and Bethea does
give us pause.
...that is, they affect a minority of the students and that learning
goes on even among that minority. I do not condone the aberrations; I
qualify them in my letter as "regretful," but - as I try to show
by citing the rate of success in MA and PhD examinations this year and the
number of PhD's granted and teaching positions secured in the past five
years - aberrations they are.
We are pleased to know that Michael Heim
finds these "aberrations" to be regretful. As to the placement record of the department, that has been
discussed in detail above.
Second, the review team demands "immediate and decisive
action." Besides the suggestion to consult the Ombuds Office, it has
given no advice as to what form that action should take. I have however
taken action on my own and in conjunction with various colleagues.
Immediate results are easy to demand, but - and here we have no argument
with the report - the problem is a recalcitrant one and far from easy
to repair, especially in a department as small as ours.
Once again, we ask why there is no
evidence of cognitive dissonance on the part of Michael Heim. If indeed this "problem is a
recalcitrant one and far from easy to repair",
then how can this square with his earlier assessment of the department as one
"where office doors are open and graduate students and faculty are constantly
discussing scholarly issues, that is, one in which first-rate training is the
order of the day."
In larger departments students have many faculty members to
choose from and can move from one to another should problems arise. The
linguistics students in our Department work with only three and a half
faculty members. I do not intend this as an excuse (the literature
students work with only two more and do not experience the
linguistics students' problems); I intend it as a partial explanation of
why the problem has proved so difficult to solve. Which brings me to the
final point.
I resent the review team's insistence that the Department "has
had no will to correct" the situation.
We resent Michael Heim for appeasing and
enabling, for years and years, those who perpetrated the very worst sort of
abuse upon graduate students in the Slavic Department. Perhaps the righteous indignation he
shows here originates from the school of thought which states that the best
defense is a good offense. We
would assert, however, that in the case of Michael Heim, there is no possible
defense of his failure to act, and no possible defense for his constant
attempts to downplay the abuse within the department.
I say "insistence" because its report made a similar
accusation in similar terms. I cannot claim we have been as successful as
we might have liked, but we have not ignored the problems by any means.
Professor Vroon, who was chair for most of the period under review, tried
any number of strategies. I know this from the innumerable conversations
we have had on the subject over the years and from the progress,
intermittent as it was, that was in fact made.
For the umpteenth time, we ask: Why no
cognitive dissonance on Michael Heim's part? If the department is indeed wonderfully nurturing place he
claims it to be, then how can it be that the previous chair was involved in
"any number of strategies" engendering "innumerable
conversations...on the subject over the years [our
emphasis]".
Let me conclude by reiterating my strong belief that
suspending admissions will harm rather than help the graduate program,
that it is a punitive rather curative measure. I plan to go before the
Graduate Council at its first fall meeting and demonstrate why the efforts towards
a permanent resolution of the problems during the months since the site
visit warrant a vote to lift the suspension.
*******
Summary of Main Recommendations:
1. At the very least this
department should be placed into receivership. If it seems as though receivership will not suffice to bring
about change, some of us would recommend that the University consider the
possibility of closing the department.
(This is a minority opinion among us.) Under no circumstances should
this department be given back the power to govern itself. Michael Heim will soon be coming before
you with all sorts of superficial changes (different course requirements, new
reading lists, a decision to grant graduate students open access to the reading
room, and no doubt a slew of others).
He will present these as evidence that the department has indeed
fundamentally changed. We hope we
have presented to you here more than enough evidence to know that this is not,
and cannot, be so. Until at a very
minimum the two problem faculty are removed from the department, fundamental
change cannot take place. These
faculty members still have the power to threaten students, and can still do
harm outside of the UCLA environment.
2. Maintain the ban on incoming
graduate students. It would be
unconscionable for the University to knowingly allow potential graduate
students into a program such as this one.
3. Conduct an official inquiry and
fact-finding investigation designed to bring to light wrongdoing by the faculty
and irregularities in the administration of the program. This investigation should include a
complete financial audit of all funding directed towards the department and a
comprehensive examination of the manner in which financial aid was dispersed to
students. This investigation
should also include interviews with all graduate students, especially past
graduate students, in an effort to get a complete picture of the actions of the
Slavic Department both during and when possible before the review period.
4. Provide an official
explanation as to why the University was unable/unwilling to rein in Slavic
Department faculty members who insisted on speaking with graduate students
about the results of the 8-year review.
5. Take steps to right the
wrongs done to UCLA graduate students in the Slavic Department, to make amends
for the financial, professional, and academic damage done to graduate students
in this program, both past and present.
In addition, graduate students who either left the program of their own
accord or who were forced out because of the testing procedure in place in the
Slavic Department should be given the option (should they still want it) to
re-enter the program and finish the degree. We do not imagine that many would want to avail themselves
of this option, but as a matter of principle it should nonetheless be offered.
6. The system in place for
departmental reviews needs to be completely revised:
a. A review once every eight
years is not nearly often enough.
Reviews should take place at least every three years, if not more
often. When reviews are done with
so much time in between them, what happens is that many of the students who
were hurt/abused (assuming there are any abuse) have already left the program
and have no opportunity to tell their story. Those students still remaining are of course reluctant to
come forth as openly as they should, since they are completely dependent on the
faculty being reviewed. Failure to
do this results in what you see today in the Slavic Department. The previous 8-year review in the
Slavic Department was worse than having no review whatsoever, because it barely
scratched the surface of all the abuse going on at that time. What this does, then, is provide the
department with cover, in that it can claim that, while it might have a few
problems now and again (and after all, what program doesn't?) things are by and
large all right, and in support of this assertion, they can simply point to the
8-year review.
b. The department being reviewed
should not be allowed to suggest a list of possible external reviewers. Before the external reviewers are
finally selected, their names should be run past the graduate students of that
department to prevent situations which happened with this most recent review
when we discovered that Alan Timberlake was going to be on the external review
committee.
c. Provisions should be made not
only for external faculty reviewers, but for external graduate student reviewers as well.
d. Both internal and external
reviewers should be given the time and administrative support they need to do a
through review, including, if necessary, personnel qualified to do financial
accounting. As it stands with this
most recent review of the Slavic Department, as bad as the results appear to
be, there is much more that was never ever touched upon.
7. A system for disciplining and
censuring faculty members which does not require graduate students to identify
themselves must be implemented by the University, otherwise it will never be
possible to punish faculty for wrongdoing. Since graduate students, for obvious reasons, cannot come
right out and accuse their own faculty, this will involve markedly increased
oversight of the faculty from those above them administratively. If the University comes to the
conclusion that it cannot provide such increased oversight authority with an
eye towards enabling it to discipline, when needed, faculty members, then the
University should be prepared to explain why it is unable to ensure a proper
standard of behavior from its faculty and why it is unable to punish its own
faculty.
8. Exit interviews should be
done for all graduate students. In
instances where graduate students have simply stopped attending, UCLA should
take the initiative in contacting these graduate students to ascertain why it
is they have chosen to leave their program.
9. The University, in future
review sessions, should be absolutely clear what it can and cannot do in terms
of protecting graduate students and in keeping them from being questioned by
their own faculty members as to the content of the departmental review in which
the students participated.
10. The University needs to take a long, hard
look at what should fall under the rubric of academic freedom and what should
not. Anytime anyone ever tries to
bring the problem faculty members in the Slavic Department in line (or at least
to get them to stay within the norms of expected behavior), they immediately cry out that their freedom as
scholars is being violated and that this is an unspeakable affront not only to
them, but to the University as a whole.
Academic freedom and academic tenure are hallmarks of the American
system of higher education. While
we realize that there are plusses and minuses to these two institutions, as is
the case with any institution, we in general have no problem with them per se,
realizing they are important to the educational and intellectual process. This does not mean, however, that we
think they can or should be interpreted as a license to act arbitrarily. When the situation is such that these
two concepts are equated with complete freedom from University oversight and
authority, at this point we feel that these institutions are being abused, to
the detriment both of students and the public at large who support institutions
of higher learning.
Section 1 | Section
2 | Section 3 | Section 4a |
Section 4b | Section 4c | Section 4d
| Section 4e | Section 4f | Section 4g | Section 4h | Section 4i | Section 4j | Section 5 | Section 6 | Section 7 | Section 8 |