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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 |
Section VI: System
"Breakdowns"; Actions of Various Players and Entities
Part 1: System "Breakdowns"
This
section focuses on the players and academic entities that were active in this
Eight-Year Review process, the role they played, and on the effect that their
actions had in how the process eventually played itself out. The first part concentrates on the
individual faculty, reviewers, administrators, investigating bodies, etc.
involved in the process and to an extent on the process itself. The second part looks to evaluate the
process as an organic whole to see just how it broke down and why it failed to
bring about substantive change and substantive remedy, and what the
consequences of that failure are.
1. The Previous Eight-Year Review
The
Eight-Year Review prior to the 1999-2000 Eight-Year Review, as was described
above, was a farce. The entire
review seemed controlled from the beginning. Students were made to understand the importance of the
Department doing well in this review and some were actually coached by faculty
members as to what they should say in response to questions. These extra measures did indeed pay
off, since during the 1992 review, the outside review team did ask probing
questions. The fact that the
previous Eight-Year Review was so ineffective did not bode well for the
1999-2000 review.
2. The
Initial Questionnaire Sent to Slavic Department Graduate Students
Students
were already suspicious when the time came for the 1999-2000 review. The review began with a questionnaire sent
out to all graduate students in the UCLA Slavic Department. This questionnaire consisted of two
parts, the first being a series of questions that could be answered by choosing
from one of a number of possible answers, the second being a space for students
to add additional comments. It did
not help the situation when those who were administering this section of the
review gave the graduate students in the Slavic Department different answers as
to who exactly would see the their written comments. Given the absolute need for anonymity, this was a not
unimportant question.
Unfortunately, one official said that nothing that was actually written
would be seen by the Slavic Department faculty, while another official said
that it might be the case that Slavic Department faculty would read the
comments. This marked an
inauspicious beginning for the entire process, as paranoia among graduate
students was already quite high.
3. Attempt by the Department to Put
Off the Review
Again,
given that paranoia among Slavic Department graduate students was already so
high, it was not particularly comforting to know that the faculty of the UCLA
Slavic Department was trying to put off the review. This just made it that much harder for graduate students in
the Slavic Department to take the stand that they eventually did by agreeing to
the request by the UCLA Administration that they fully cooperate with the
investigating committees.
4. Not Enough
Administrative and Investigative Support Staff for the Review Committees
This
was a problem that continually came up throughout the review. No doubt the internal review committee
had no idea what it was getting into when it started this process. While there were strong indications
that something was very, very wrong, it became immediately clear that the
internal review committee was not prepared to handle the amount of data and
documentation that had been supplied to it. Because of these manpower restrictions, there were areas of
abuse that were not covered. It
was because of this lack of manpower that the internal review committee
originally had no plans to interview former graduate students of the UCLA
Slavic Department, i.e. graduate students who had been driven out or crushed
out prior to the attainment of their degrees. It was only at the insistence of current graduate students
that the internal committee agreed to talk to former graduate students, and
even then, only a small number were interviewed. The importance of interviewing former graduate students was
immediately evident, as this is where some of the most damning information in
the internal review committee's report comes from, but it was only the tip of
the iceberg in terms of the sort of information and insight that could have
been made available by former graduate students.
The
lack of administrative and investigative support meant that the picture that
arose from the internal report, as bad as it was, was not complete and perhaps
not even representative of the worst abuses that went on in the UCLA Slavic Department.
5. Alan Timberlake's Presence on the
External Committee
For
anyone interested in comprising an investigating committee free of conflict or
interest or (to give Timberlake the benefit of the doubt) potential conflict of
interest, the placing of Alan Timberlake on the External Committee was a
colossal blunder. Timberlake is a
former tenured member of the UCLA Slavic Department, and even worse, he is a
former linguist in the UCLA Slavic Department, with close ties to linguistic
component of that department's faculty.
Even if he had turned out to be evenhanded and trustworthy (which, in
retrospect, quite clearly was not the case), he would have been the wrong
person for that position, simply because of his past history with the UCLA
Slavic Department.
6. Michael
Heim's Pattern of Deception: Denying What was Painfully Obvious until the
Evidence Became Overwhelming
To
the extent that the faculty of the department being examined cooperates and is
truthful with the investigating committee, it is to that extent that much
easier for the investigation to proceed.
Obviously, that did not happen here. Denial and deception started at the top, with the Chair of the
UCLA Slavic Department, and spread outward from there. Had Michael Heim not lied to the
reviewers, had he not lied to the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate in
his Errors of Fact statement, had he not tried during the Eight-Year Review to
cover up the systematic abuse of graduate students by faculty of the UCLA
Slavic Department, then this would have saved the reviewers much time and
effort, time and effort that could have been devoted to other areas of abuse
not even touched upon by the Eight-Year Review report. In addition, Michael Heim's willingness
to dissemble and prevaricate, even in matters when the truth was obvious, sent
yet another chill down the spine of graduate students in the Department, many
of whom had hoped that Heim would be more sympathetic to the cause of letting
the truth come to light, especially given his history of being a fairly
sympathetic shoulder on which graduate students could cry whenever they were
battered about by the more abusive faculty in the Department. By his actions, Michael Heim was making
very clear that whatever the role it was that he had played in the past with
regard to the Department's graduate students, when it came to defending the
party line, he was a democratic centralist of the first order.
7.
Bethea/Timberlake: The Failure of the External Committee to Challenge the
Information Being Provided to Them by the UCLA Slavic Department, and the
Consequences of that Failure for the External Review Report
As
was shown in detail in the annotated version of the External Review Report, the
external reviewers main flaw was that they appeared to accept at face value the
information provided to them by the department which they were supposedly
investigating, e.g. the preposterous claim that seven out of the last seven
UCLA Ph.D.s received tenure track positions. This failure to delve into the facts may have blinded them
to some of the realities of the Department. And yet, there are instances in which the external reviewers
do get it right, and those instances are noted time and again in the annotated
version of their report. This then
begs the question, if they were right on that, why couldn't they have done the
necessary work to verify the statements being fed to them by the Chair of the
UCLA Slavic Department and by the rest of that department's faculty?
One
is tempted to surmise that this failure to investigate to the level necessary
in a department such as the UCLA Slavic Department might be the cause for their
subsequent failure to comprehend the role being played by Michael Heim, and
hence also the reason behind their statement "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." Indeed, they even went so far as to
characterize Michael Heim's leadership as "enlightened". What argues against the fact that this
drastically flawed view of Michael Heim's leadership came about as a result of
insufficient information is the fact that both of these two reviewers, Alan
Timberlake and David Bethea, continued to heap praise upon Michael Heim, even
after they had seen the full report in which Michael Heim's systematic pattern
of deceptions, including point-by-point rebuttals of his claims, were made
clear for all to see. This
strongly suggests that they had, from the very beginning, abandoned any
pretense of being objective reviewers and were instead quite willing to do
whatever was necessary in order to mitigate the findings of the internal
review. Their willingness to turn
a blind eye to the facts in an attempt to sanitize Michael Heim's actions and
the reputation of the Department mark one of the major breakdowns in the
overall review process.
8. Refusal Of
Michael Heim To Honor Repeated Requests By Student Representatives Not To Talk
To Graduate Students About The Eight-Year Review
This
point has been addressed numerous times, so it will not be repeated here other
than to say that this stand by Michael Heim was the beginning of the end in
terms the University being able to have confidence in its ability to solicit
candid and frank commentary from its graduate students regarding the state of
this department or any department.
While some students might nonetheless agree to cooperate, others would
not, and even the commentary of those who would agree would be tainted, since
they would be agreeing to provide this commentary with the full knowledge that
they might be latter quizzed or interrogated over the results of their
comments, thereby leaving open the real possibility that they would tone down
what they had to say, or even pass over some items all together.
9. Michael Heim's Email to Graduate
Students
This
point has also been covered in detail in the annotated copy of the Eight-Year
Review report. Heim's
determination to continue to the smear campaign against XX, his assertion that
he already knows who the offended students are, his assertion that retaliation
has never occurred against students in the UCLA Slavic Department, and his
assertion that the abuse of graduate students had somehow been blown out of
proportion—these points, along with others in this email, combined to act
as a further impediment to investigating the abuse of graduate students in that
department.
10. Refusal
Of The Graduate Council To Send Copies Of The Review By Email To Students Who
Had Received Michael Heim's Email But Who Were Not In Residence At That Time
A
review process of this type should, ideally, be conducted by neutral
investigators dedicated to the principles of equity and determined not to show
favoritism toward either faculty or students. At this point in the investigation, when so much of what had
been alleged with regard to abuse of graduate students had been shown to be
true, the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate should have been bending over
backwards to show fairness and even-handedness. Instead, knowing that Michael
Heim was sending out propaganda concerning the Eight-Year Review report via
email, the Graduate Council refused to send the Eight-Year Review report itself
out via email, no doubt fearful of the consequences of a digitized version of
such devastating review floating about cyberspace. Still, these fears notwithstanding, the obligation that rested
upon the shoulders of the Graduate Council was to be fair and evenhanded. The Graduate Council's failure to meet
that obligation in this regard led to a further lack of confidence among
graduate students in the system that they had been encouraged to trust and
cooperate with.
11.
Bethea/Timberlake's Post-Review Revisionist Letter in Which They Attempt to
Soften the Impact of Their Report and Show Support for Michael Heim, This
Despite the Fact that Michael Heim Had Been Shown to Have Been Consistently Untruthful
Just
as Michael Heim's email to students was threatening and ominous because of his
insinuations of insider knowledge as to which students had complaints and which
students did not, so too was the revisionist letter from Bethea/Timberlake ominous. That they were so willing to completely
ignore what they themselves had written in their original External Review
report, and that they were so willing to join in this smear campaign against
XX, the one student who courageously allowed her story to be told, did not
inspire confidence in graduate students as to the effectiveness of the entire
review process. In-depth
commentary on their revisionist letter is included in the annotated copy of the
Eight-Year Review report. (Section IV-B)
12. The UCLA
Administration Backing Down on It's Directive Instructing the Faculty Not to
Talk to Students about the Eight-Year Review in the Face of Threatened Legal
Action by the Slavic Department Faculty
Obviously,
this was a devastating blow to the entire process. If the UCLA Administration, which had promised Slavic
Department graduate students protection against retaliation and interrogation,
cannot back up its own promises, then the legitimacy of the entire process is completely
undermined.
13. The
Internal Committee's Failure to Insist that the UCLA Administration Not Back
Down with Regard to its Directive to Michael Heim and the Rest of the Slavic
Department Faculty
Whenever
offering up criticism of the Internal Review Committee, it can not be
emphasized enough that this was the one part of the review process apparatus
that seemed to be genuinely concerned about graduate student welfare and about
bringing the truth to light.
Still, this was a major mistake on the part of the Internal Review
Committee and cannot be characterized as anything but a mistake, regardless of
the intent behind this decision not to insist that the UCLA Administration
stand by its word regarding protection of graduate students.
14. The
Graduate Council's Lifting of the Ban on Graduate Student Admissions in the
Fall of 2000 Against the Recommendation of the Head of the Internal Committee
This
was an equally devastating blow, perhaps even more so given that the Graduate
Council knew of Michael Heim's continuing pattern of denial and falsehoods, and
had been informed of the fact that Michael Heim had committed illegal acts in
his attempts to cover-up and deny the abuses that occurred within the UCLA
Slavic Department. It shocks the
conscience that, knowing what they knew, the members of the Graduate Council
would allow a department such as this to continue to admit and enroll students.
15. The
Failure Of The Dean Of The Humanities To Remove Michael Heim As The Chair Of The
Slavic Department Once It Had Been Established That He Had Continually Lied
At
this point, it had become abundantly clear that the Chair of the UCLA Slavic
Department, Michael Heim, had lied time and time again when confronted with
investigators delving into the issue of abuse of that department's graduate
students. It should have been
equally clear that Michael Heim was an impediment to the investigative process,
not an asset. He should have been
removed immediately from his position as Chair pending investigation into his
activities and to the charges that he had violated state and federal law. He was not removed, thereby weakening
the investigative process that much further.
16. The
Failure Of The UCLA Administration To Contact Law Enforcement Once They Had
Been Informed That Michael Heim Had Broken State And Federal Law By Illegally
Releasing Grades From The Undergraduate Transcript Of XX Without XX's
Permission
Once
it had become absolutely clear that Michael Heim had broken state and federal
law by illegally releasing grades from an undergraduate transcript without the
consent of the student (in this case, XX, the student who had allowed her story
to be told), officials in the UCLA Administration had the moral obligation to
inform law enforcement that laws had been broken. They failed to do so, which cemented further in the minds of
graduate students the idea that the entire process was nothing more than a
farce and that no matter what the faculty did, be it moral, be it immoral, be
it legal, be it illegal, there was no way that the UCLA Administration was
going to confront or do anything to endanger tenured faculty at UCLA.
17. The
Failure of the Dean of the Humanities to Implement the Recommendation of the
Internal Review Committee that the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and
Literatures Be Put into Receivership.
The
same reasoning applies here: the true nature of the UCLA Slavic Department was
abundantly clear to anyone who wanted to see it. The failure of the Dean of the Humanities to immediately
place this department into receivership dealt yet another blow to the process
itself, although it must be said that by the time it became clear that this
entire "Co-Chair" ruse was exactly that, a ruse, the whole process
had been so discredited in the eyes of graduate students that this came as no
great surprise. It was seen as
just one more example of a system put in place by the tenured professoriate
bending over backwards to protect tenured colleagues.
18. The
Failure Of The UCLA Administration To Have In Place Any Sort Of System For
Disciplining Faculty Wherein It Is Publicly Acknowledged That The Faculty
Member Has Been Disciplined
The
system in place for disciplining faculty, and the weaknesses therein, have been
discussed in detail in the annotated version of the Eight-Year Review
report. Since this system is so
weak and so opaque (even if a faculty member has abused a student, and even if
there is some sort of punishment involved, neither the abused student nor
anyone else will know the disposition of the case because it is all done in
secret), it really has very little effect in terms of sending a message to
other faculty that abuse will not be tolerated. Moreover, as has been touched upon above, rarely is the
punishment ever so great as to extend to dismissal, at least not for tenured
faculty. This weak-to-non-existent
system of faculty discipline no doubt emboldened the faculty of the UCLA Slavic
Department to take the stands that they did, even in the face of overwhelming
evidence of wrong doing and abuse of graduate students.
19. The
Failure Of The Internal Review Committee, Which Conducted The Follow Up Review,
To Insist That Its Original Recommendations, i.e. Suspension Of Graduate
Student Admissions And Receivership, Be Implemented.
No
doubt the Internal Review Committee, which had seen its main recommendations
(1. Suspension of Graduate Student Admissions; 2. Placement of the UCLA Slavic
Department into receivership) rejected by the Graduate Council of Academic
Senate and by the Dean of the Humanities, respectively, entered into the
follow-up review of the Slavic Department with a high degree of
frustration. They had provided
what was perhaps one of the most damning reports in the history of UCLA only to
see their recommendations minimized or rejected outright. Perhaps this is why they did not
recommend that these same sanctions be imposed after the follow-up review. But regardless of what their thinking
was in this regard, they should not have backed down in the follow-up review
from their original suggestions, as this leaves the impression that the
conditions that brought about the situation in the UCLA Slavic Department in
the first place no longer existed, when in fact, an official investigation of
the UCLA Slavic Department was never instigated and none of the abusive members
of that department had been disciplined or even charged with abusing graduate
students.
Summation
This
series of "breakdowns", assuming that is what they actually were, are
appended below in tabular form.
These breakdowns, as they were manifested in the review of the UCLA
Slavic Department, will be addressed again from a new perspective later on in
this exposé. For now, they
exemplify well the problems inherent in the system that serve to hinder any
true investigation of faculty misconduct and which serve to deflect any real
punishment from being imposed.
***************
|
2. The initial questionnaire
sent to Slavic department graduate students |
|
3. Attempt by
the Department to put off the review |
|
4. Not enough
administrative and investigative support staff for the review committees |
|
5. Alan Timberlake's
presence on the external committee |
|
6. Michael Heim's
pattern of deception: denying what was painfully obvious until the evidence
became overwhelming |
|
7.
Bethea/Timberlake: The failure of the External Committee to challenge the
information being provided to them by the UCLA Slavic Department, and the
consequences of that failure for the External Review report |
|
8. Refusal of
Michael Heim to honor repeated requests by student representatives not to
talk to graduate students about the Eight-Year Review |
|
9. Michael
Heim's email to graduate students |
|
10. Refusal of the
Graduate Council of the Academic Senate to send copies of the review by email
to students who had received Michael Heim's email but who were not in
residence at that time |
|
11.
Bethea/Timberlake's post-review revisionist letter in which they attempt to
soften the impact of their own report and show support for Michael Heim, this
despite the fact that Michael Heim had been shown to have been consistently
untruthful |
|
12. The UCLA
Administration backing down on its directive instructing the faculty not to
talk to students about the Eight-Year Review in the face of threatened legal
action by the Slavic Department faculty |
|
13. The Internal
Committee's failure to insist that the UCLA Administration not back down with
regard to its directive to Michael Heim and the rest of the Slavic Department
faculty |
|
14. The Graduate
Council's lifting of the ban on graduate student admissions in the Fall of
2000 against the recommendation of the head of the Internal Committee |
|
15. The failure of
the Dean of the Humanities to remove Michael Heim as the chair of the Slavic
department once it had been established that he had continually lied |
|
16. The failure of
the UCLA Administration to contact law enforcement once they had been
informed that Michael Heim had broken state and federal law by illegally
releasing grades from the undergraduate transcript of XX without XX's
permission |
|
17. The failure of
the Dean of the Humanities to implement the recommendation of the Internal
Review committee that the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
be put into receivership. |
|
18. The failure of
the UCLA administration to have in place any sort of system for disciplining faculty
wherein it is publicly acknowledged that the faculty member has been
disciplined |
|
19. The failure of
the internal review committee, which conducted the follow up review, to
insist that its original recommendations, i.e. suspension of graduate student
admissions and receivership, be implemented. |
Part 2: Individual Actions of Various Players and Entities in This Review Process
This
section focuses on the individual actions of those who played important roles in
this investigation, both single individuals and groups as entities or as a
whole.
1. Slavic
Department Faculty
As
has been described above, at least some of the faculty of the UCLA Slavic
Department did not even want the review to take place. This did not mean, however, that all
faculty were opposed to it. Some
of the non-tenure track faculty welcomed it because it was one of the few means
available of possibly putting some sort of a check on the faculty. Even some of the tenured faculty welcomed
it for the same reason. But as a
whole, the faculty was not at all favorably disposed towards the review.
The
actions of some of the faculty in response to the review itself can only be
termed shameful. From storming in
and actually shouting at students to threatening to bring suit against the
University itself when told that they should not ask graduate students
questions about the Eight-Year Review report, the behavior of some of these
faculty shocks the conscience. The
Eight-Year Review Report (Section IV-A) and the annotated Eight-Year Review (Section
IV-B) report go into detail with
regard to faculty prevarication and failure to interact in an open and honest
fashion with the reviewers, so that point will not be belabored here.
This
was a faculty that could not believe that it was being challenged. Even more astounding was the fact that
so much of the ammunition that was being used against it was provided by its
own graduate students, a group which, as a body, had been cowed and fearful for
years and years. The anger that
welled up in some of these faculty was barely containable, and in at least one
instance, wasn't contained at all.
It is all too easy a simile to liken people and institutions to wounded
animals, but in this case, it fits.
The fury among the faculty that someone, anyone, would challenge them
was not universal, but it was widespread, especially among the linguists, with
two exceptions. Those graduate
students that had to teach that summer had no choice but to be present in the
actual Slavic Department office at that time, but many others laid low, waiting
for cooler heads to prevail.
The
performance of the faculty was as one might have expected. Obviously, the non-tenured faculty and
the tenure-track faculty that had yet to receive tenure were limited to what
they could say or do. Some of the
tenured faculty recognized that abuse was going on, including the
above-mentioned two exceptions among the linguists. The abusive faculty themselves, however, and those other
tenured members of the faculty who had tried to cover up for them, reacted in
various ways, from outright denial, to passive resistance, to out-and-out
denial of the truth, misrepresentation of facts, smearing of former graduate
students and outright illegal activity.
2.
Administrators of the Eight-Year Review
By
"administrators", what is meant here is those who were responsible
for setting up the logistics of the review process, e.g. passing out of
pre-review student surveys, setting up of the process, etc. Given the level of abuse and fear
within the UCLA Slavic Department, this was no easy task, and the
administrators, by and large, did an admirable job. The only slip up was that which was mentioned above, the
providing of contradictory statements as to who would and would not be able to
see the students' written responses to the survey questions.
3. The
Internal Review Team
Of
all the investigative bodies involved in the Eight-Year Review process, none
performed more admirably or with greater concern for students' welfare than the
internal review team. Early on it
had become clear to the UCLA Administration that there were problems of a
magnitude rarely seen even at a high-powered research institution such as
UCLA. The word among graduate
students was that when the UCLA Administration finally came to understand how
serious the problems were, they actually rearranged the composition of the
internal review committee, placing at its head a professor who had been in
similar positions in the past. The
head of the internal committee, when asked about this by graduate students in
the Slavic Department, refused to either confirm or deny it. If true, however, it was in fact a good
choice, at least from the point of view of the Slavic Department graduate
students, as he set the tone for the way in which the internal review team
would interact with these graduate students.
As
was pointed out above, there were some problems with the approach taken by the
internal review team. At the
outset, the internal review team knew that there were major problems, but it is
doubtful that they knew the extent or severity of those problems. Some of the graduate students who had
been around for a while had heard from others about the last Eight-Year Review,
and were aware of the shortcomings in the process, even for a regular
department, much less a department like the UCLA Slavic Department. It was clear from the outset that, in
order to get a comprehensive picture of what had been going on in the UCLA
Slavic Department for all these years, not only present graduate students but
also former graduate students needed to be interviewed. This was something that the internal
review team hesitated in doing.
Nonetheless, graduate students pointed out that a failure to do so would
result in an incomplete picture of the abuses that had occurred within the
Department, since some of the most glaring examples of abuse would come from
students who had, in one way or the other, been driven from the
Department. To the credit of the
internal review team, they showed the ability to receive input from graduate
students and adjust their strategies accordingly, finally agreeing to contact
former graduate students (although it must be said, not that many, certainly
not nearly enough to paint a completely accurate picture of all the abuse that
had taken place within the UCLA Slavic Department).
In
a similar vein, the position that the head of the internal review committee
took towards the UCLA Administration when it came to the question of protecting
Slavic Department graduate students from retaliation and interrogation from the
Slavic Department faculty, while no doubt well intentioned, turned out to be,
in the end, incorrect. Still, this
was, at least so far as graduate students could tell, an error in tactics and
not in intent. These errors
notwithstanding, the internal review team was the one faculty-associated body
in the review process that consistently did its job and which made the protection
of graduate students and their welfare its prime concern. Had it not been for the efforts of the
internal review committee, the path to resolution of problems dealing with the
abuse of graduate students by faculty might have by-passed the UCLA Administration
entirely and gone directly to fora designed to redress these issues
judicially.
4. The
External Review Team
The
report of the external review team, in combination with their after-the-fact
revisionist letter trying to save the UCLA Slavic Department, is one of the low
points in this entire process, as it exemplified well the
"you-wash-my-back-and-I'll-wash-yours" attitude that exists among
tenured colleagues, even extending to tenured colleagues at other universities. Why they thought they would be able to
simply turn on a dime and take a situation that they had previously described
negatively and then sing its praises, no one but they can know for sure.
To
be clear, not everything that the external review team suggested was
wrong. As can be seen from the
annotated version of the Eight-Year Review report above, some graduate students
agreed with quite a number of the points that they made. When the external review committee got
things wrong, it was usually for one of two reasons:
1. The external
review team did not have access to all the graduate students that the internal
review team had due to the presence of Alan Timberlake on the external review
team and students' fears (since confirmed) that he could not be trusted to be
an objective reviewer of the Department.
Mistakes made by the external reviewers because of a lack of candid
input from graduate students cannot be laid at the doorstep of the external
reviewers.
2. There were times
when the external reviewers simply made statements without having done the work
to back up these statements (e.g. when they said that the training in the UCLA
Slavic Department is "excellent") and there were times when they drew
false conclusions based on incorrect data fed to them by the UCLA Slavic
Department itself (e.g. the ridiculous claims made regarding the number of UCLA
grads who received tenure track positions), data that they failed to
investigate and corroborate on their own.
The
great failure, of course, had nothing to do with any lack of or
misinterpretation of data. By the
time the two external reviewers had sat down to write their external report,
they undoubtedly knew that there were major problems in the UCLA Slavic
Department, and they come out and openly acknowledge much of this, noting
especially the climate of fear and paranoia among the graduate students. By the time Bethea/Timberlake got
around to writing their revisionist letter, they had of course seen the
devastating internal report issued by the internal review team. Even if they somehow managed to
convince themselves that they had received essentially the same input from
graduate students as the internal review team (they hadn't) and even if they
had somehow managed to convince themselves that the internal review team had
simply put an overly negative spin on the picture that emerged (it hadn't),
this still does not change the fact that it was crystal clear that the Chair of
the Slavic Department, Michael Heim, had lied again and again throughout the
review.
And
yet, how do Bethea/Timberlake react to that reality? They ignore it.
Even worse, not only do they ignore it, but also they argue fiercely
that Michael Heim is somehow, for some reason, the only person who can save the
Department! They praise his
leadership and his sensibilities, even after having read of how he tried, time
and time again, to deceive the investigating committees. Without question the most shocking and
most abhorrent act on their part was when they tried to characterize the UCLA
Slavic Department faculty as somehow a victim of some sort of Stalinist
oppression that emanated from either the UCLA Administration or the internal
review team. This was a faculty
that for years had operated with undertones of fear and intimidation, never
missing an opportunity to make clear to graduate students the nature of the
power relationship that existed in the Department between faculty and students,
and the consequences that would ensue to anyone so unwise as to challenge that
relationship.
To
understand fully how loathsome this comparison was, one must keep in mind that
the department in question is a Slavic department. Few issues are more deeply felt in such a department than
the issue of Soviet-era repression and the vice-grip that such repression had
on both the Russian and other Slavic peoples as well as on their
literatures. The irony here, of
course, is that no one had perfected the Stalinist art of intimidation more
than the faculty of the UCLA Slavic Department, and no one was more willing to
use institutionalized power to their advantage than this faculty, be it against
students, administrators, or other faculty. The abuses of power within the Soviet system depended upon
the willingness of the bureaucracy to cooperate, the willingness of those in
positions of privilege to go along, the willingness of those in charge to make
whatever claim was needed, in whatever form was needed, in order to keep the
existing system in place, regardless of how close those claims were to
reality. By the time they had
written their revisionist letter to the Academic Senate, Bethea/Timberlake had
seen exactly this system in place at UCLA, and indeed, it was the same system
that was in place during Timberlake's tenure here as a professor. And yet, instead of exposing this
system, they proved that they were a part of it, as they were more than willing
to do whatever it took to help their tenured brethren in the UCLA Slavic Department,
including overlooking evidence, including failure to check on information being
fed to them, including showing a willingness to join in Michael Heim's campaign
to smear the one student who was willing to stand up and let her story be told,
the student with a 3.9 GPA out of UC Riverside who, according to Michael Heim,
received her high grades in Russian only because of "grade inflation"
at UC Riverside.
The
performance of Bethea/Timberlake was, in short, disgraceful. When confronted with the choice of
fulfilling their responsibilities as objective outside reviewers or protecting
their tenured colleagues, they chose the latter.
5. The Slavic
Department Chair, Michael Heim
In
order to understand Michael Heim's performance in this Eight-Year Review, it is
necessary to know his history in the UCLA Slavic Department. Although he came very much from the
Harvard tradition of many of his colleagues, he seemed to arrive at UCLA
without the ego that characterized so many of his colleagues in the Slavic Department. In this sense, he was not all that different
from many of the literary scholars who were in the UCLA Slavic Department at
that time, few of whom had the same tortured sense of injured pride that seemed
to define so many of their colleagues on the linguistic side of the house. Michael Heim, perhaps more so than any
of his colleagues, seemed to aspire to the ideal—at least in theory. He became known for his translations of
major Central European authors, and to the surprise of many, announced at some
point after he had received tenure that he wasn't going to publish any more,
since there were others who were better at this than he, and that to pretend
otherwise would be dishonest.
This
might not be seen as all that earthshaking a declaration, but in the
environment that existed in the UCLA Slavic Department, an environment which
was very much that associated with a high-powered research-oriented department,
this was practically a counterculture-like manifesto of defiance. And yet, as much as it vexed senior
faculty that Heim would take this position, it was to that same extent that it
was appreciated by many of the graduate students, most of whom had had their
fill of the "high powered, research-oriented" attitudes of the senior
faculty. When combined with the
fact that Heim did not appear to be ego-driven, and that one could talk to Heim
without worrying about him exploding into anger, and without worrying about him
plotting to take some sort of vengeance against a student who would question
his positions, he quickly became the sort of faculty member to whom students
could go when things got rough, if for no other reason than to have a
sympathetic audience. Many were
the UCLA Slavic students who used Michael Heim's shoulder to cry on when the
going did get rough,
which was not an uncommon state for students in that department.
For
Michael Heim, there was never a problem that couldn't somehow be solved. Of course, this optimism was rarely
born out, as can be seen in the painfully low rate of graduation among UCLA
graduate students over the years.
Still, to find an optimist anywhere, much less in the UCLA Slavic
Department, was generally seen as a good thing, and if this was the worst thing
one could say about Michael Heim, then that was certainly something that
graduate students could live with.
The
other piece of background information essential to understanding (or trying to
understand) Michael Heim's performance in this most recent this Eight-Year
Review is the situation that he stepped into prior to the commencement of the
review itself. As was alluded to
in the Response to the Eight-Year Review above, Michael Heim was a sort of
"emergency chairperson".
His predecessor, a relatively new addition to the Slavic Department at
UCLA, had just stepped into the job, and had served less than a year when she
tendered her resignation as the chair.
This is itself a long story, but briefly what had happened was that this
professor, in her short tenure here, had quickly come to realize how deep the problems
were in the UCLA Slavic Department and, upon taking the helm of the Department,
had set out to bring about much needed changes. The response to this from most of the faculty, including
even a good number of literature faculty, was decidedly lukewarm, and in many
cases, outright hostile. After
less than a year of trying to bring about some change in the Department and
being met at almost every turn by the Department's inertia, this chairperson
came to the conclusion that she was fighting a battle of diminishing returns
and as a consequence resigned as chair.
This
proved to be a Pyrrhic victory of sorts for the faculty of the UCLA Slavic
Department. On the one hand, the
immediate problem of having their infrastructure challenged had been solved for
the time being. The linguistic
faculty, with two exceptions, were for obvious reasons not in the least bit
receptive to changing a system that had been shaped over decades to ensure
their place in the Department's hierarchy. And the literature faculty (again, with a few exceptions)
were also not all that saddened by the departure of the chairperson and her
innovative ideas. As bad as it was
for the literature faculty being under the harsh thumb of the senior linguists,
the one thing that can be said is that, because there was such a high drop-out rate
among graduate students in linguistics, that much more funding was left over
for graduate students in literature.
This was not always the case in every year, but in general this held to
be true, and it seemed, at least from the point of view of graduate students
outside looking in, that this was the compromise that had been effected between
linguistic and literary faculty: linguists rule the roost in whatever way they
see fit, and the literature faculty, in return for their cooperation, get to
have a larger percentage of support go to their graduate students. This worked for a number of reasons:
the linguistic faculty could always explain away the high washout rate among
linguistic students as something not surprising when one is dealing with the
best department for Slavic linguistics in the country (indeed, in perverse sort
of way, this high washout rate was used to backup their claim as to the quality
of the linguistics program.) In
addition, the fate of Slavic linguistics as a discipline inadvertently fit into
this system. Although an appalling
small number of students who set out to get a Ph.D. in Slavic linguistics from
UCLA ever actually wound up with such a degree, this small number served the
Department well when it came to placing students, since those who did manage to
survive could be held up as the cream of the crop. It is much easier to place a small number of students in
tenure track jobs than it is to place a large number, so if UCLA was only
graduating one PhD in Slavic linguistics every year and a half to two years or
so, this small number was offset by the fact those who did graduate could
sometimes be placed in tenure track positions, which seemed to satisfy the UCLA
Administration that the Slavic Department was indeed doing a good job, since
the Department could point to their graduates in Slavic linguistics and
truthfully say that they had placed a large percentage of them (i.e. of those
who had graduated,
not of those who had started out in the Department) in tenure track jobs. That this large percentage was
generated from a very small number of graduate students who had managed to
survive the UCLA Slavic Department was then conveniently overlooked.
Thus,
the system in place, while probably not deemed optimal by the literature faculty,
nonetheless seemed acceptable, and the attitude taken toward this new
chairperson seemed more or less to be, "better the devil you know than the
devil you don't know." Her
departure then required that the Department find a new chairperson, and it is
here where Michael Heim's optimism and generally pleasant demeanor seemed to
fit the bill as to what was needed.
Linguistic faculty felt that he was compliant, literature faculty felt
that he was definitely sensitive to their needs, and graduate students, for the
reasons discussed above, at least did not feel especially threatened by Michael
Heim. This is not to say, however,
that this change of chairs went down well with all graduate students. Many of the graduate students in the
UCLA Slavic Department had for years seen the sort of abuse that had gone on
there, and were thrilled when Michael Heim's predecessor took over as chair,
thinking that this might indeed be the dawn of a new day, and that substantive
change really might be possible within the academic system itself. While few graduate students had
specific bones to pick with Michael Heim, a great many felt that this coup d'état was the last straw, and began to explore other
options to redress their grievances, explorations which eventually led to the
results of the most recent Eight-Year Review.
Still,
even though no one had any faith that Michael Heim would bring about change in
the Slavic Department—after all, he was one of the faculty who
continually tried to explain away or outright ignore the abuses visited upon
graduate students by the Slavic Department linguistics faculty—some still
held out hope that, once these abuses had been highlighted by students willing
to push the Eight-Year Review to do what it claimed it was going to do, at that
point Michael Heim would see the writing on the wall and would feel relieved of
the need to defend the Department against charges that were so widespread and
so outrageous and thus would perhaps—perhaps—become part of an
eventual solution to the problem.
Sadly, this was not the case.
As can be seen from everything that has come before in this
exposé, not only did Michael Heim do nothing to further the process, he
in fact did everything he could to hinder it, up to and including lying to the
Internal Committee, lying to the Academic Senate, and going so far as to break
the law in his attempt to smear the one student who dared to speak out on
record as to her treatment at the hands of the UCLA Slavic Department.
There
is no question that Michael Heim did these things. The internal committee made clear that he would opt for the
"lie and deny" strategy when confronted with the realities of the
UCLA Slavic Department and would abandon it only when confronted with
overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
His lies to the Academic Senate as to the placement record of the
Department are easily documented.
And his illegal release of grades from the undergraduate transcripts of
the student he was attempting to smear is as clear as the email in which he
released those grades. There is no
question about any of these things.
The question is, why would Michael Heim do this? This leads to the realm of speculation,
but the answer that makes the most sense would be that Michael Heim had a
misguided sense of duty to the UCLA Slavic Department, a sense of loyalty so
warped that he must have felt that protecting the UCLA Slavic Department, no
matter how well documented the charge against it, was somehow the lesser evil
than allowing the Department to be closed. If that meant lying time and again, and if that meant
releasing grades illegally from students' transcripts in order to smear them,
and if that meant ignoring the law, then somehow, in his mind, that must have
been seen as being justified when juxtaposed against the possibility of closing
the Department.
And
yet, even with all the unshakeable documentation of his lies and his behavior,
it is still difficult to believe that Michael Heim would go to this extent and
would do such heinous things. In
many ways, his actions stand in stark juxtaposition to the principles he
espoused in his classes. To be in
a class on Central European literature taught by Michael Heim was to see a
professor who fiercely defended the rights of the individual. To hear Michael Heim discuss Havel or
Milosz or Kundera or any other dissident writer was to hear an impassioned
defense of the right to dissent.
Heim's knowledge of dissident writing and the conditions under which
Eastern Bloc writers would labor is deep and sophisticated. He understood that, while expulsions
and jailings and beatings were the actions by totalitarian authorities that
made the news, the greater burden was often not these individual acts of
thuggery, but rather the day-to-day conditions under which the these writers
worked. He understood that much of
the battle against dissent was not comprised of swift individual acts of
repression against this or that writer, but rather the maintenance of a system
that would, more often than not, rely not on brute force, but on low-intensity
oppression backed up with the threat of brute force to discourage dissent. This institutionalized, systemic
oppression, backed up with the threat of brute force, was the greater retardant
to the free expression of ideas.
Michael Heim understood this very, very well.
And
yet, when the time came to choose, when the time came for Michael Heim to make the
choice in his own life between siding with students who were desperately trying
to defend themselves, on the one hand, or with, on the other hand, the faculty
which for years and years had visited abuse upon its own students, Michael Heim
faltered. For whatever reason,
Michael Heim threw in his lot not with the victims of institutionalized
oppression, but rather with its perpetrators. Time and time and time and time again. There was no lie too outrageous to be
told, no truth so clear that it couldn't be obfuscated, no deed too atrocious
to be overlooked, no moral too sacred to be circumvented, no student too
talented to be smeared, and no law too threatening that it could not be
broken. It may well have been the
case that Heim had deluded himself into thinking that by throwing in his lot
with the abusive faculty, he was somehow doing the right thing; that in some
way the preservation of the Slavic Department, however flawed it may be,
outweighed the protection of that department's students. It may have been the case that Heim was
ashamed of all the years that he and his fellow faculty members had looked the
other way when graduate students were being crushed left and right by his
linguistic colleagues.
One
can speculate endlessly as to why Michael Heim acted in the manner in which he
did. What is beyond question is
that his performance in the Eight-Year Review was disgraceful and
shameful. From his lies to his
shading of the truth to his smearing of students to his refusal not to question
students to his breaking of the law, Michael Heim fell short in every way.
6. The Slavic
Department Graduate Student Representative
If
Michael Heim's performance can be said to be completely devoid of moral
courage, then that of the Slavic Department's graduate student representative
can only be said to have been the polar opposite. This student, who had agreed to take on the unenviable job
of acting as the official go-between in the UCLA Slavic Department between its
faculty and its students, could not have been more squarely placed in the eye
of the storm. She knew very well
what the reputation of the UCLA Slavic Department was, and she knew what
happened to those who dared to voice even timid objections, much less stand up
outright to the sort of behavior practiced by the UCLA Slavic Department
faculty. Her own position was at
that time extremely vulnerable as she had yet to take her PhD comprehensives,
and yet time and again she challenged the chairman of the Department, the
senior literary scholar Michael Heim, on issues relating to the Eight-Year
Review and the protection of students who had heeded the request of the UCLA
Administration to voluntarily participate. Unlike Michael Heim, she had no academic tenure to protect
her, yet when faced with the question of doing the right thing versus
protecting her own future in the Department (and by extension in academia) she
always opted for the first choice.
When it became clear that the faculty would go to any lengths to
preserve their "right" to interrogate students about the details of
the Eight-Year Review, she was not only unyielding in insisting that this not
happen, but actually volunteered to act as an intermediary between faculty and
students so that there could be communication between the two groups that did
not threaten individual students. Of course, this solution was rejected as the
promises of the UCLA Administration to protect students began to crumble, but
the offer was made. She worked
untold hours of unpaid labor to defend the graduate students of the UCLA Slavic
Department, and she never backed down in the face of threat or
intimidation. Whatever eventually
happens to the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, her role in
trying to protect graduate students who had been betrayed by the UCLA
Administration and who were under threat of interrogation by the faculty of the
UCLA Slavic Department should not soon be forgotten.
7. The
Graduate Student Representative on the Internal Committee
As
has been explained above, the Internal Review Team of every Eight-Year Review
is supposed to contain a graduate student from UCLA, with the thought being
that students reluctant to talk to faculty members might be more comfortable
and more willing to speak with one of their fellow graduate students. This allows them to speak on the record
if they wish but through the graduate student representative. Off the record,
of course, it does give the internal review team a view of the department that
might not otherwise be available, which is why the idea of having a graduate
student on the internal review team is a good one. As was the case with the graduate student representative
from the Slavic Department, the graduate student representative on the Internal
Committee served without compensation, unlike all the faculty members involved.
While this position is often pro forma, especially in cases where the academic
department being examined is relatively healthy with a faculty that fosters
good relationships with its graduate students, in this case, the role played by
the internal committee's grad student representative was crucial. Students who wouldn't talk to the
faculty members on either the internal or the external committee were willing
to speak with him, and some who were willing to speak to a limited extent with
the internal and/or external committee were willing to talk in an even more
open manner with a fellow graduate student. Moreover, his relationship with the
head of the internal committee was a good one and he provided much information to
the committee and corroborated other such reports that had been received,
perhaps to a lesser degree, by the internal committee.
The
graduate student representative on the internal committee took his
responsibilities seriously and, in the face of a UCLA Administration reluctant
to protect graduate students whom it had persuaded to participate in the
review, the grad student representative was tireless and dogged in his
continued insistence that the UCLA Administration live up to the promises that
it made to them. When it became
clear that the UCLA Administration had decided to back down in the face of
legal threats from the UCLA Slavic Department faculty, he was relentless in
communicating to the internal committee, to the Dean of the Humanities, and to
the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate as to what needed to be done. It would have been easy to send one
email and then back off. As can be
seen from the emails included in Section
IV-E of this report, the graduate student representative of the
internal committee instead sent at least four communications to the officials
named above, each communication more insistent and more detailed than the one
before it, trying to highlight the looming danger of allowing the UCLA Slavic
Department faculty to interrogate its graduate students on the Eight-Year
Review. The graduate student
representative to the internal committee came to the position with considerable
experience in graduate student government (the Graduate Students Association-GSA)
at UCLA, and was an invaluable source of information to graduate students in
the UCLA Slavic Department, informing them of their options and rights as
students. He also made them aware
of the potential for the GSA to assist and advise them as to possible courses
of action in the face of the decision of the UCLA Administration not to follow
through on its promise to protect the graduate students of this
department. In addition, he had
ties with members of the Graduate Council itself and thus was able to make
appeals directly to certain individuals associated with the Graduate Council.
Had
it not been for the graduate student representative on the internal committee,
many of the abuses that occurred in the UCLA Slavic Department might not have been
exposed. His service was selfless
and extensive, and should be so recognized. What should also be recognized is that this person's status
as a graduate student. Even though
he was a student in a department that, by all accounts, was relatively reasonable
in its treatment of its graduate students, there was still risk involved. Other
than the graduate students in the UCLA Slavic Department themselves, no one had
greater insight to the abuses that were going on there, and, more
frighteningly, the unfolding story of the UCLA Administration's
unwillingness/inability to control this department and the actions of its
faculty than the graduate student representative of the internal review
team. If the Eight-Year Review of
the UCLA Slavic Department in 2000 has shown one thing above all things to be
true, it is that tenured academics will go to very great lengths to protect one
another and how little protection the system itself affords to those students
who might be characterized as troublemakers. If the graduate student representative didn't know this
before, he certainly knew it by the time he was deeply entwined in the
Eight-Year Review process, and yet he pressed ahead, advocating forcefully and
eloquently for the graduate students in the UCLA Slavic Department.
Both
he and the graduate student representative in the Slavic Department have shown,
at risk to themselves, the conviction and the character to stand firm in
defense of their fellow graduated students regardless of this risk. The juxtaposition of their actions,
taken in spite of the precarious nature of their position as graduate students,
to those of Michael Heim and Bethea/Timberlake, tenured academics whose jobs
were not at any risk whatsoever, reveals a contrast that could not be starker.
8. Dean of
the Humanities
The
Dean of the Humanities initially appeared to be sympathetic to the situation of
the Slavic Department graduate students.
As was noted above in Section II of this report, the Dean of the
Humanities had actively solicited responses from graduate students in the UCLA
Slavic Department and indicated an awareness of the possibility of
repercussions. When the Dean of
the Humanities proposed, after being approached by several graduate students in
the UCLA Slavic Department, that this problem would be best resolved through
the process of the Eight-Year Review, graduate students were willing to give
her the benefit of the doubt, this in spite of the fact that the previous
Eight-Year Review in 1992 had been little more than a sham designed to conceal
the real nature of what was happening in the Slavic Department at that
time.
The
role played by the Dean of the Humanities was covered extensively in Section
II, so it won't be detailed here.
Briefly stated, the Dean of the Humanities actively encouraged
participation and downplayed the risk of retaliation. (See snippet
of the message sent by the Dean of the Humanities to a Slavic
Department graduate student in Section II.) The Dean of the Humanities had been informed in person
by a number of graduate students as to what was happening in that
Department. She also had access to
the final report, in which the scope and extent of Michael Heim's mendacity had
been made clear to all. In spite
of all the evidence of wrongdoing in the UCLA Slavic Department, in spite of
the fact that even after
the review came out the UCLA Slavic Department faculty continued to deny
wrongdoing, in spite of the fact that the UCLA Slavic Department faculty
directly challenged her order not to talk to Slavic Department graduate
students about the Eight-Year Review—in spite of all of this, the Dean of
the Humanities still
refused to put the Department into receivership as per the recommendations of
the internal committee. To add
insult to injury, she then asks the Slavic Department graduate students, who
had been lied to about being protected from the faculty, to actively cooperate
with the same chair who had not only lied repeatedly, but had actually broken
the law in his attempts to smear the one graduate student who had enough
courage to allow her story to be told openly.
When
the Dean of the Humanities announced that she was going to become the
"Co-Chair" of the Slavic Department, along with the chair who had
told one falsehood after the other, it became very clear that her purpose was
not to bring about positive change to the UCLA Slavic Department, but rather to
do everything she could to keep this scandal contained, to keep the current
power structure in place until tempers cooled and the whole "unfortunate
incident" could blow over.
The strategy of the Dean of the Humanities appears to have been to stay,
as much as was possible, "above the fray", and only exercise real
power when it appeared that the existing power structure inside the Slavic
Department might be in real danger of falling. It is as good an example as could be desired for the
phenomenon of the tenured elite protecting their own, this time through the
formal structure of the University itself.
9. The
Graduate Council of the Academic Senate
At
the beginning of this report, the Academic Senate of the University was
represented as a sort of de
facto union for the faculty.
It was further pointed out that because the Academic Senate of the
University in many respects runs the University, this would suggest that the
idea of the Academic Senate policing the conduct of its own members (that is to
say, the idea of the Academic Senate policing itself) is fraught with the
potential for very real conflict of interest to arise. That this might have been the case was
hinted at by the reluctance of the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate to
send out digitized (emailed) copies of the Eight-Year Review report to graduate
students in response to Michael Heim's emails to these same students in which
he attempted to deny the substance of the report itself. What confirmed this view in the eyes of
many of the graduate students was the Graduate Council's quick acceding to of
Michael Heim's request in the Fall Quarter of 2000 that the Graduate Council
lift the ban on the graduate student admissions after only a few months. The arguments against lifting the ban,
a ban that was recommended by the internal review committee and which the
internal review committee recommended stay in place, have been detailed
elsewhere in this report, especially in sections II and IV
(B), the annotated copy of the Eight-Year Review report, but they
merit a quick review here.
The
Academic Senate, through the Graduate Council, had been informed, in exquisite
detail, of the severity and scope of the charges leveled against the UCLA
Slavic Department by its own graduate students. The Graduate Council read first hand of the numerous denials
and attempts to deceive on the part of the Chair of the UCLA Slavic Department,
to include lies told to, and reported by, the internal review committee, and
lies in the report itself, e.g. the falsely reported rate at which UCLA Slavic
Department graduates received tenure track positions. It knew of the promises that had been made to graduate
students in this department who had agreed to participate in the review to
protect them from their own faculty, and it knew of the abrogation of that
promise. The Graduate Council was
informed of the attempt by the outside reviewers to soften their initial report
and their attempt to back up the Chair of the Slavic Department, going so far as
to joining in his smear campaign against the one student who allowed her story
to be told and who had grades from her undergraduate transcripts illegally
disseminated by the Slavic Department Chair as part of this smear campaign.
Finally,
it is worthwhile revisiting the phrase in the internal review report that dealt
with graduate students' fear of reprisal:
"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."
It should be
made clear that the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate endorsed these
strong words, and indeed, they were very strong: at the slightest indication of retaliation, we are told, there will
be aggressive investigations
by the Graduate Council. And yet,
when Slavic Department graduate students were begging the UCLA Administration
not to allow the UCLA Slavic Department faculty to interrogate them about the
Eight-Year Review, when the Slavic Department graduate student representative
made multiple requests of the Chair of the Slavic Department that he not talk
directly with graduate students concerning the review, when the graduate
student representative on the internal committee sent message after message,
each one more urgent than the one before, requesting that the faculty be
prohibited from contacting graduate students about the Eight-Year Review, when
the Chair of the Slavic Department Michael Heim went so far as to claim he knew who the offended students were, and when
the Slavic Department faculty threatened legal action against the University
and thus forced it to back down from its order to them that they not discuss
the Eight-Year Review with graduate students—even when all this had
happened and all this had been reported to the Graduate Council—what did
the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate do? Did it "investigate aggressively" as it pledged to
do by ratifying the report?
Or
did the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate do nothing?
The
performance of the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate was clearly in
keeping with the description of the Academic Senate in Section II, namely a representative of the tenured
faculty that holds the interests of this tenured faculty at its center, first
and foremost among its concerns, with the obvious conflict of interest that
this implies with regard to the Academic Senate's responsibilities and duties
in the area of investigating and disciplining fellow faculty members. Just as was the case with the Chair of
the Slavic Department Michael Heim, and the members of the external committee
Bethea/Timberlake, and the Dean of the Humanities Pauline Yu, the Graduate
Council of the Academic Senate wanted nothing more than to find a way out for
the Slavic Department faculty, to find some method by which the situation could
be salvaged without actually officially investigating the faculty for
wrongdoing or even going on record as having made an accusation of
wrongdoing. The chasm between the
Academic Senate's noble words concerning the protection of graduate students
and its actions in allowing young students to once again enter this department's
graduate program, a department with the very same chair who had lied and been caught lying and
had actually broken the law in an attempt to smear a former student, is
telling.
10. The UCLA
Administration
From
Day One, the UCLA Administration said all the right things and made all the
right moves to leave the impression that it was truly interested in effecting
change for the better in the UCLA Slavic Department. Those graduate students who had found the courage to
actually go outside the traditional (and ineffectual) avenues of redress
available in the Slavic Department and to go straight up the academic hierarchy
(for example, those who secretly went to the Dean of the Humanities for help)
were pointed to the upcoming Eight-Year Review and told that this would be the
best avenue for change. And why
would graduate students doubt the word of University officials? It was a relief to find out that there were
officials in academia who seemed to be not only rational, but also sympathetic
to the concerns of these graduate students.
What
in retrospect seemed to be an attempt to draw out this process and in effect
wear down graduate students at the time seemed to be simply an academic
administration concerned with taking all the proper steps and proceeding
cautiously but steadily forward.
Bit by bit the UCLA Administration would back off its commitment to
bring about real change, but never in one fell swoop, never all at once in a
way that would be evident to all that this is what was being done. The internal review committee
recommends a ban on graduate student admissions for the Slavic Department: the
Academic Senate agrees, but only for a few months. The internal committee recommends that the Slavic Department
be put into receivership: the Dean of the Humanities delays and delays
implementing this suggestion, and then finally announces that she would be the
"Co-Chair" of the Department, strangely allowing the Slavic
Department Chair to stay on as a "Co-Chair", this in spite of
overwhelming and undeniable evidence of prevarication and other wrongdoing on
his part. Students frantically beg
the Administration to honor its pledge to protect them from interrogation by
Slavic Department faculty. In response, the UCLA Administration backs down in
the face of legal threats from the Slavic Department faculty and tries to
recharacterize this contact between Slavic Department faculty and Slavic
Department graduate students as "participation in departmental discussions
of the report" or as "solicitation of student response".
At
one point in this process, when confronted with the (arguably) harsh
recommendations of the internal committee as to what should be done with the
UCLA Slavic Department, the Provost of the College of Letters and Sciences was
said to have been taken aback and to have remarked something to the effect
of (paraphrasing) "Are you
sure about this? After all, the
Slavic Department is a small but shining jewel in UCLA's crown and something
like this will devastate the department." That this would be a concern of the Provost (assuming that
this is in fact what he said) would certainly be consistent with what
happened at every other level in this investigation (with the exception of the
internal committee): minimize the bad and try to salvage as much as can be
saved while causing as little a stir as is possible. It is noteworthy that this comment focused not on a concern
for the students who had been left and hung out to dry, but rather on the
reputation of the University.
The
ultimate goal of the UCLA Administration was not to bring about substantive
change in the UCLA Slavic Department or to protect the graduate students who
had risked everything to comply with the request by the UCLA Administration
that they comply fully with the Eight-Year Review teams. If change were to occur and if students
did wind up coming out of the process relatively unscathed, then that was all
to the good, but that was not the main concern of the UCLA Administration. The main concern was that the reputation
of the University not be unduly harmed and to that end, the goal was to
minimize the damage done to the Slavic Department. If graduate students had to be betrayed and crushed in order
to make this happen, well, it wouldn't be the first time.
Thus,
every action taken by the UCLA Administration seems to be, with regard to
achieving these specific goals, in harmony with the actions and suggestions of
the UCLA Academic Senate, the Dean of the Humanities, the Bethea/Timberlake
external review team, and the Chair of the Slavic Department, Michael Heim.
Part 3: The System
"Breakdown" Seen from a Different Perspective.
To
the uninitiated reader, the question that inevitably comes to mind when reading
the preceding two parts of Section VI, along with the relevant portions of the
previous sections, is the following: how could a system designed to investigate
the University's departments and to ensure both the quality of its programs and
the welfare of its graduate students have broken down so completely and at so
many levels, all at the same time no less? After all, the review process consisted of numerous layers
of authority, any one of which could have sounded the alarm and demanded that
students be protected and substantive change be effected. (Whether or not such change would have
actually come about, of course, is a different matter, but what is without
question was the ability of these various layers of authority to call for such
change.)
And
yet, nothing. All we see is
breakdown after breakdown after breakdown, from the tenured faculty themselves
who visited abuse upon the graduate students, to their tenured colleagues who
looked the other way or actively attempted to cover up these abuses, to the
Chair of the Slavic Department who consistently lied and went so far as to step
outside the law in his attempt to smear a graduate student, to the
Bethea/Timberlake external review team's attempts to downplay the abuses found
in the Department, to the UCLA Administration's giving in to the legal threats
from the Slavic Department faculty and thus reneging on the pledge to protect
graduate students, to the Dean of
the Humanities first failing to remove Michael Heim as the Slavic Department
Chair and then failing to put the Slavic Department into receivership, to the
internal committee's atypical and ill-advised decision to capitulate on the
question of allowing graduate students to be questioned, to the Graduate
Council of the Academic Senate assenting to Michael Heim's request that the ban
on graduate student admissions be lifted after having been in place for just a
few months, etc. etc. etc. What is
crystal clear is that, as a series of procedures "designed to investigate
the University's departments and to ensure both the quality of its programs and
the welfare of its graduate students", this system could not have been
worse, could not have been less efficient, and could not have been less firm in
its purpose and less coordinated in its actions.
Back,
then, to the original question: how could this system fail so badly? The answer has in reality nothing to do
with the actions described and everything to do with the supposition that
underlies the system, namely that it in point of fact is designed to investigate
university departments, ensure the quality of University programs, and ensure
the welfare of graduate students.
These are, no doubt, the stated purposes of this system. Part B of Section II of this report speaks of the abhorrence
with which tenured academics look upon the task of disciplining their fellow
academics, and then remarks as follows: "This abhorrence
notwithstanding, UCLA, as a public institution financially supported by and
nominally beholden to the public at large, is obliged to have in place some
sort of system by which it evaluates the performance of its tenured faculty and
through which, in theory anyway, it can bring about the dismissal of tenured
professors who abuse their authority or who fail to conduct themselves in
accordance with university regulations (or, in extreme cases, in accordance
with state and federal law)." Thus, the Eight-Year Review and all the
processes that are associated with it are, ostensibly, there for the reasons
stated above, and if one takes at face value the stated purpose of the system
currently in place, then one can only conclude that it failed and failed
miserably.
If,
however, one challenges the stated supposition that is said to underlie this
system, the supposition that identifies the investigation of academic programs
and ensuring their quality and the welfare of graduate students as the goal of
the system, then the picture begins to change very quickly. If, instead of this, one looks at the
system as one designed to be a multiply redundant fail-safe system designed to
allow some small degree of dissent to air, not unlike a safety valve designed
to let out steam, while stifling the larger swells of discontent and
downplaying the nature and severity of any abuse or wrongdoing that might have
resulted from the actions of the faculty, then the pictures starts coming into
clearer focus. When seen from this
new perspective, what was previously characterized as a grotesque failure can
now be seen as a notable success.
Like every bureaucratic entity, the University very much wants to
control the intensity and direction of any self-investigation, and the system
in place during the investigation of the UCLA Slavic Department did just
that. Thus, what at first glance
seems like a series of failures in fact turns out to be a series of successful
damping stages. The table in Part
1 of this section that lists 19 separate "breakdowns" was in reality
19 different examples of the University delaying and deflecting and twisting
and doing everything in its power to absorb and diffuse the devastating impact
of the Eight-Year Review report.
Such
an interpretation of the process would, of course, be vehemently denied by the
UCLA Administration. Whether or
not such a system was put in place deliberately, or whether or not it developed
as a result of the material conditions that predominate in academe, is
difficult to say. What is not
difficult to see, however, is that regardless of intent, this is how the system
works in effect. Whatever happens
in the course of an investigation of an academic department at UCLA, certain
core principles cannot be violated: no investigation of any department shall be
allowed to reach a point where official investigations of individual faculty
members are initiated. No
department shall be deprived of the "right" to run itself. Investigations of abuses against
students should be done with care and should always be conducted in such a
manner to make clear that the purpose of the investigation is the correction of
the problem, NOT a truly exhaustive exploration of the damage suffered by any
individual graduate student or groups of graduate students, since such an
investigation would veer dangerously close to the logical corollary of actions
needed to remedy such damage and thus to all the financial and legal overtones
associated with such remedy.
When
seen from this radically different perspective, the "breakdowns" in
the system are seen for what they are, circuit breakers that keep the currency
of dissent from shorting out the entire system, a system that is heavily skewed
toward the interests and power of the tenured professoriate. In this framework, the decision of the
Dean of the Humanities to keep Michael Heim on as the Chair of the Slavic
Department and the decision of the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate to
allow this department to again admit graduate students makes perfect
sense. To the uninitiated, these
actions (or, in some cases, "non-actions") were at the least
outrageous acts of negligence, at the worst collusion and complicity. But within this new framework, these
actions make perfect sense. For
those tasked with keeping the system in place, Michael Heim's acts of lying and
deception and misleading and denial were not the acts of an immoral and
uncaring academic. They were the
acts of a "team player", of someone who was willing to "take a
hit for the team", and this he did indeed do. In their eyes, his behavior
was not only not disgraceful, it was gutsy, it was a selfless act, as he
managed to persevere, even while taking hit after hit after hit to what
remained of his credibility.
For
the UCLA Administration, Michael Heim wasn't a liar and an accomplice and a
justifier of thuggery and a criminal.
Far from it. For them,
Michael Heim was a hero, and if there is any doubt about this, one need only
look at how the UCLA Administration treated Michael Heim after the Eight-Year
Review. Was he chided for his
deceptions and his prevarication and his failure to stand up and protect
graduate students and his breaking of the law by releasing grades from the
undergraduate transcript of a former graduate student he was trying to
smear? Far from it. Michael Heim, after all of this, after
every one of his actions had been made crystal clear to the Graduate Council of
the Academic Senate, was not terminated.
He was not suspended. He
was not publicly held to account for his actions. No, no. Quite
to the contrary.
Quite,
quite to the contrary. For Michael
Heim was promoted. And not only
was he promoted, but he was promoted two steps, not just one. Say what you will about the UCLA
Administration, when their interests are threatened, UCLA pays cash, and that
is exactly what they did in this instance, both literally and figuratively. And again, why not? From their perspective Michael Heim,
the scholar and translator of Czech literature, did in fact become the Good
Soldier Schweik. Michael Heim did
yeoman's work and, in their eyes, deserved to be compensated accordingly. And he was. And so, not only did the system not "break down",
it worked surprisingly well, even under tremendous duress, at least as far as
the UCLA Administration was concerned.
No faculty member was rebuked, no reports of illegal activity were made
to law enforcement, no official investigation into the conduct of the UCLA
Slavic Department faculty was ever launched, no graduate students were ever
compensated for what they had undergone, no readily accessible paper trail had
been left to embarrass the University.
With time, as tempers cooled and graduate students moved away or were
failed out of the program or somehow became disassociated with the program (so
went the thinking) so too would the danger posed by this particular
"unfortunate incident" and soon the status quo would once again reign
supreme in Westwood.
|
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 |