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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 |
II. Contextualization of the Problem
In
order to understand the problems that were associated with the UCLA Slavic
Department and the issues connected to the Eight-Year Review of this department
that was conducted in 2000, one must understand the various contexts within
which these problems and these issues have arisen. This section will concentrate on the role of tenured faculty
and how these faculty relate to the academic administration that is supposedly
located just above them on the academic hierarchy. This role and this relationship will be examined first from
the point of view of academia as a whole, and then as they were seen within
both UCLA as an institution and the Slavic Department as an entity within that
institution.
A.
Within the History of Academia
Like the unions that exist for the technical, custodial,
administrative, and maintenance staffs, the professors have a de facto union in what is usually termed an
Academic Senate. (At UCLA, the
Academic Senate is comprised of all the tenured members of the faculty.) Unlike these other unions, however, the
Academic Senate has a disproportionately large amount of power. In many of the major colleges and
universities throughout the country, the tenured professoriate, through
organizations like the Academic Senate, often play a dual role: on the one
hand, the Academic Senate at UCLA sets University policy (including policy on
matters of professional conduct, and, in effect, many of the rules for running
the University), while on the other hand, it serves to represent the interests
of the tenured faculty. While it
is true that individual campuses, at least at UC, are subordinated to the Board
of Regents, these regents in reality rarely concern themselves with day-to-day
proceedings, and even more rarely, except in the most egregious cases, with
matters of discipline involving tenured faculty.
Thus,
the end effect is a "union-like" entity that also sets (or has a
disproportionately large influence on) university policy. Imagine if the custodial union for the
university also ran the university.
The conflict of interest would be obvious. And yet, this is the situation as it exists now for tenured
professors at most institutions of higher learning, and certainly for those at
UCLA and the other UC campuses.
The
result of this situation is an academic administration which, at its highest
levels, is comprised solely of tenured professors. Does this have an effect on the enforcement of rules and
regulations that govern and define standards of conduct and professional
behavior for University employees?
There is nothing to suggest that this is so with regard to non-tenured
employees, most of whom are subject to the same behavioral and disciplinary
sanctions, including termination, as is seen in government or other large
workforces.
The
same cannot be said, however, of those members of the university who have
tenure. The institution of tenure,
cherished and fiercely defended by the faculty, also plays a major role in the university's
stance toward disciplining and dismissing faculty members. As originally conceived, tenure was
meant to protect professors from political pressure with regard to the content
of their teaching and their publications, within obvious limits. (For example a professor of Russian
cannot walk into a class and start teaching chemistry). What tenure was never intended to
do, however, was to provide carte blanche to faculty so that they might engage in abuse or
unprofessional behavior with impunity. And yet, even the staunchest defenders of tenure will admit
that this does indeed happen. In
fact, it happens with varying degrees of frequency, in some departments much
more so than in others.
Even
if one were to leave aside the issue of tenure, however, one is still
confronted with the fact that, of all the employee groups at the university,
only the tenured professoriate is in a position to, in effect, police itself
when it comes to issues of abuse and unprofessional behavior. It is true that there exists a level in
the university hierarchy which is nominally above that of the tenured faculty
(for example, in the University of California system there is a president for
the entire UC system as well as a Board of Regents, which is above both the
University President and the individual Academic Senates on the individual
campuses) but this level is rarely, if ever, called upon to deal with issues of
faculty abuse and unprofessional behavior. It is the individual campus administrations and the Academic
Senates of the individual campuses that serve as the de facto final arbiter in matters such as this.
The
results of this situation, one in which the faculty finds itself serving as its
own supervisor and as the director of its own oversight and review procedures,
are predictable. It has long been
known throughout academia that tenured academics have always tended to tread
lightly when it comes to meting out discipline to their tenured colleagues. There are a number of reasons for this:
1. There exists within academia, as is the case within many of
the professional vocations, a strong sense of professional courtesy. Just as it is often difficult to find a
physician who would be willing to testify against a fellow physician, so too
are tenured academics loath to speak out openly against their fellow
academics.
2.
The hesitancy that many academics feel when assigned to what they feel to be
the distasteful task of disciplining one of their own is augmented by the
knowledge that, whatever their findings, there are very real limits to the
disciplinary action that can be meted out to tenured faculty, regardless of how
harsh the recommendations made against them. A common attitude can be summed up as follows: what's the
point of doing an extensive investigation into the alleged misdeeds of a
colleague when there is very little chance that he/she will be subjected to any
real punishment, much less be subject to dismissal? All this does is stir up bad feelings that will have to be
circumvented in any future action with that particular colleague or colleagues.
3.
What might be the strongest deterrent to strict enforcement of disciplinary and
professional ethics codes by academics with regard to their fellow academics is
the fact that, in the eyes of many tenured professors, to discipline one member
of their collective for abuse or unprofessional behavior could lead to others
of their class also being challenged and reprimanded/dismissed for such
behavior. Even those members of
the tenured professoriate who are not abusive towards their students and who do
maintain a high standard of professionalism with regard to their conduct and
demeanor--and let there be no doubt, there are many in academia who do fit this
description--but even they can be at times hesitant in insisting that their
colleagues who have crossed the line be disciplined or dismissed. Many of these academics who honor their
pledge to maintain this high standard of professionalism nevertheless often have
to work with colleagues who fail to honor this pledge. Sometimes this contact is at a moderate
level, for example simply being in the same department, sometimes it is at a
higher level, such as working on the same committee, and at times it is
extremely intimate, including working together on the same projects, the same
research, and the same publications.
Given the nature of these contacts, and given the fact that, because of
tenure, there is next to no chance that an offending colleague will ever be dismissed,
regardless of how heinous the behavior, it is understandable--lamentable, but
understandable--that many of the academics who do maintain high standards of
professionalism feel that there is little point in pressuring their colleagues
to do the same.
Reinforcing
this feeling are faculty codes of conduct and codified "standards of
professionalism" which, while on the surface dedicated to upholding these
principles, actually end up discouraging investigations in instances where such
codes and standards are violated.
For example, these codes will often specify that if there is misconduct,
then the "professional" way to address such conduct, especially
conduct on the part of one's tenured colleagues, is to be found exclusively in whatever system the academic
administration has set up to handle instances such as this. In other words, at no time are a
department's problems ever to be aired publicly. To do so would be considered an egregious violation of collegial
trust and, by extension, of "professionalism", selectively defined.
In
this respect, what happens at the higher levels of academia is little different
than what happens at the higher levels of business or government. Those who occupy the higher levels in
these and many other bureaucratic structures tend to make rules--and, more
importantly, to interpret rules--in such a way as to allow greater flexibility
for themselves than is allowed for those at lower levels. A significant part of this process of
"rule interpretation" can be seen in what are commonly known as
"rules of professional conduct", rules which, ostensibly, are there
for the protection of all, but which in fact often serve to bring academics in
line and to make sure that, whatever they do, they are not to put fellow
academics in difficult situations, nor are they to point out or highlight the
flaws and/or misdeeds of individual members of the tenured professoriate. If there are problems, then these
problems are to be addressed internally and are to be brought to resolution in
as unobtrusive and private a manner as is possible. The emphasis is always to be on gentle correction, and only
in the most severe of cases is the question of punishment or dismissal even
considered, much less imposed. In
other words, the sort of disciplinary options available and regularly
imposed at other levels
of the academic employee hierarchy, that is to say among the technical,
custodial, administrative, and maintenance staffs, are only nominally
available, and only in the rarest of instances imposed, for the tenured
faculty.
The
tenured professoriate will, of course, deny that the above description is an
accurate representation of the disciplinary constraints under which they
operate. They will take pains to
point out the various and sundry disciplinary options available to the
university administration and their own abhorrence of unprofessional and
abusive behavior. They will
further point out that, for tenured professors, and especially for the sort of
respected academics who represent high powered research institutions such as
UCLA and the other UC campuses, the fact of being singled out, the very fact of
being upbraided, however secretly, by their fellow faculty members is, in a
way, the worst punishment to which they could be subjected, far more severe
than simply being demoted or losing their job altogether.
While
there may in fact be some truth to this latter assertion, it is more likely the
case that the tenured professoriate trots out this sort of explanation
("Look, why even bother demoting this person, or firing him? Clearly he has suffered enough.")
with the hope of deflecting the public's demand (assuming, of course, that news
of the academic's misdeeds would even reach the public) that the academic or
academics in question be held accountable for his/their actions. The fact is, statistics do not in the
least bare out the claim that tenured professors are disciplined at the same
rate or with the same level of severity as is seen with other groups of
university employees. In the entire
history of the University of California system (not just UCLA, but the entire
ten-member campus) only a handful tenured professors have ever been fired. How many have had to suffer the
"shame" of being privately upbraided by their colleagues, one cannot
say (more about this later), but however excruciating this shame, the fact that
those who have been forced to undergo it did so while being paid their full
salaries, and without worry that their jobs would be at risk, no doubt helped
to soften the blow.
B. Within the
Slavic Department at UCLA
While
every university and university system is different, for those which have
academic tenure--which would include almost all public institutions and a great
majority of the private ones--the above-mentioned scenarios are fairly typical. They may differ in specifics, but in
general, the sacrosanct status of professors, and the abhorrence with which
tenured academics look upon the task of disciplining their tenured brethren is
common to most such institutions. 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).
At
UCLA this system is essentially two pronged: at the individual level, all
tenured faculty undergo peer-review for promotion from associate professor to
full professor, and for so called "step increases" within the
associate professor and full professor levels. At the program level, the normal review process runs in
eight-year cycles. The eight-year
review process begins with a departmental self-evaluation, with graduate
students encouraged to fill out what are supposed to be confidential and
anonymous questionnaires that cover various aspects of the department being
reviewed.
The
departmental self-evaluation and the graduate student questionnaires are then
forwarded higher up along the chain to an internal review committee consisting
of two to three (sometimes more) UCLA professors and one UCLA graduate student
(none of whom are from the department being reviewed) and usually at least two
external reviewers from comparable academic institutions throughout the
country. An important point to
note, especially when seen in the light of the 1999-2000 Eight-Year Review of
the UCLA Slavic Department, is that it is the department being reviewed which provides the university the
initial list of academics from which the final two external reviewers will be
chosen. Thus, the department under
review has enormous influence on the selection of the outside (non-UCLA)
reviewers who will be investigating the department itself.
The
on-site investigation itself usually involves meetings with the faculty, with associated
staff, with various deans and other members of the UCLA academic
hierarchy. In addition, there is
an opportunity for graduate students to sign up for individual 15-minute
sessions with the investigating committee as a whole. One should note that while these sessions are indeed
private, there is no anonymity guaranteed to the students participating in
these sessions. They are attended
by the investigating committee, whose members, in theory anyway, are dedicated
to maintaining the confidentiality of the discussion, but the fact that this or
that student actually took the initiative to go in and speak with the
investigating committee is on the record for all to see.
In
the case of review of the UCLA Slavic Department, this set-up was extremely problematic,
for at least five reasons:
1. It was
unclear from the outset whether or not the questionnaires that graduate
students filled out, which also included a section for them to address
individual problems not covered by the questionnaire, would be accessible by
the Slavic Department faculty. In
a department as small as the Slavic Department, it would not be difficult to
determine who had written what, especially if specific issues were involved.
2. None of the
students who had substantial complaints dared to go in and make these
complaints directly to the committee for fear of being identified as having
gone in and "aired the Department's dirty laundry", so to speak. Those who did go in spoke in
generalities and stuck to issues that were, for the most part, far from the
main issues of abuse that were rocking the Department at that time. Given the fact that no one was sure if
the questionnaires afforded confidentiality, the ability to communicate directly
with the committee took on that much more importance.
3. The bulk of
the problems concerning abuse of graduate students was concentrated on the
linguistics side of the Department, although it often affected students in the
literature side as well. Of the
two outside members brought in to be a part of the investigating committee, one
was a former member of the UCLA Slavic Department, a linguist who had close
ties to members of the Department.
When students in the Slavic Department found this out, they immediately
raised concerns with the UCLA Administration. Although this individual had, at this stage of the
investigation anyway, done nothing to cause students to question his
impartiality, the gravity of the situation and the knowledge of the backlash
that would be unleashed against those who were suspected of having spoken
against the Department made many of the students feel that speaking
confidentially to this particular investigator would be a less than judicious
choice.
4. The 15-minute
blocks that were allotted to each graduate student would not have been nearly
enough time to address the problems that were facing graduate students in this
department.
5. These
15-minute interviews were held in a room located squarely in the main Slavic
Department office. While one is
not always able to hear through the door what is being said, sometimes when
discussions become heated conversation does escape this room, even when the
door is securely closed.
In
response to these concerns raised by the graduate students, they were given the
option of meeting with individual members of the investigating committee (as
opposed to having to meet with every member) at a secure location outside of
the Slavic Department.
This,
then, was the system that UCLA had in place to investigate its Slavic
Department. The longer one looks
at the system, the clearer the picture that emerges, and that is a picture of a
university that wants to have some sort of system in place that can be pointed
to as an example of oversight, and which may in fact deal with superficial abuses
of power, but which is also designed to keep such oversight as superficial as
possible. Keep in mind that these
reviews of any given department only occur once every eight years. Thus, the investigative committee is
asked to gauge a department's performance for this period based on the results
of a graduate student survey and a week's worth of investigation. Perhaps this would be sufficient were
the department in question a perfect department, but it is woefully, woefully
inadequate for a department that has even a moderate degree of problems, much
less problems of the scope seen in the UCLA Slavic Department. The only way a system such as this one
could even come close to shedding light on such departmental abuse would be if
the students themselves not only cooperated, but actually pushed the system,
demanding that it live up to what it claimed to be, a true review process. Given the potential repercussions to
any students imprudent enough to do so, only rarely do they make this demand of
a lax oversight system such as this one.
In
light of UCLA's lackadaisical attitude toward the review process, it should
come as no surprise that individual departments at UCLA would adopt a similarly
indifferent view towards it, for clearly this sort of attitude is in their
interest in that it provides the departments a maximum amount of autonomy. While such autonomy is a good and
welcomed thing with regard to their scholarship (again, within reasons:
mathematics professors should not be devoting all their publishing time to
Victorian Literature), it is very questionable whether or not it is a good
thing with regard to how UCLA oversees and, when needed, disciplines its own
faculty. One would think that the
fact that these departmental reviews occur only once every eight years, and
that they are, in large part, so very superficial, and that these reviews are, to a large
degree, guided by the department itself, would provide enough assurance for the
department under review, specifically for that department's tenured faculty,
that they would not have to be overly worried about any single review.
This,
however, was not the case with the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and
Literatures. The Slavic
Department, more so than a great many other departments at UCLA, has always
fiercely guarded its independence and has never been shy in raising the battle
cry of academic freedom should any of its perceived freedoms and rights come
under threat. The very idea that
the Department should be reviewed at all, given its past standing in the field
of Slavic, strikes many of its faculty as slightly insulting. The notion of "academic
freedom" is flexibly interpreted by these same faculty, such that it
encompasses not just what they publish and what they teach, but almost every conceivable
aspect of how the Department itself is run, certainly to include the manner and
tone with which the faculty interacts with its graduate students. The idea that outsiders (and by that is
meant anyone outside the UCLA Slavic Department, including UCLA faculty from
other departments and other UCLA administrators) should have any say whatsoever
in how the Department acts in matters such as these is not a popular one among
many of the faculty in the UCLA Slavic Department. And yet, the Eight-Year Review is mandated, it is a part of
the above-mentioned system of oversight that public universities must have in
place, if for no other reason than to be able to claim that they do indeed
exercise some degree of control over what goes on within individual departments,
and to be able to refute the claim that faculty are "free agents"
unfettered by any rules of conduct or professionalism.
The
UCLA Slavic Department, however, was not in the least anxious to undergo the
Eight-Year Review scheduled for 1999-2000. The reasons for this were not restricted solely to the
feeling of indignation, mentioned above, that they should be subject to any
sort of oversight at all. The situation
in the Slavic Department had been, for a number of reasons, growing
increasingly tense throughout the decade of the 90's. The eventual report
itself details a small yet illuminating fraction of some of these reasons, so
they will not be highlighted here.
Suffice it to say that when the time had rolled around for the 1999-2000
Eight-Year Review, there was reason enough for the faculty to worry what the
response would be from a graduate student body that was, in many respects,
highly disaffected and disillusioned, a graduate student body that saw students
suffering both from fear and from extreme anger at the causes of that
fear. So concerned
were some of the faculty with the potential ramifications of any such review
that they attempted to put it off, calling on a little known and rarely used
codicil in the review procedure which allows, under only the most exceptional
of circumstances, the review to be put off for a couple of years. At some point in the discussion someone
must have suggested polling the graduate students to see what they thought of
this idea.
This
is not quite as innocuous or as simple as it may sound. While those in attendance at a graduate
student meeting called to discuss this issue almost to a person felt that there
was a need to alert the University to the abuse that was happening within the
Slavic Department, there was also fear of the consequences of voting not to
postpone the Eight-Year Review, and fear of what would happen as a result of
the Eight-Year Review. A graduate
student, when he/she finally finishes, depends greatly on the reputation of the
department from which he/she has graduated for initial job offers. While in other departments it might
have been possible to address the issues of abuse in a constructive way, most
of the graduate students in the UCLA Slavic Department knew very well that
there was every chance that this would not be the case here, with the result
being a possible loss in prestige for the Slavic Department and a subsequent
lessening of their chances to obtain a position. In spite of this fact, the vote among graduate students was
overwhelming, with approximately 90% voting not to postpone the Eight-Year
Review, the faculty's clear desire that it be postponed notwithstanding. (The exact record of the vote, if there
was one, was not available for the preparation of this work, but it might even
have been the case that the vote was 100%, or perhaps 90+ % in favor, with no
dissenting votes, just one or two abstentions.)
In
retrospect, this vote might have had no practical effect, since postponing
eight-year reviews is done only in very exceptional circumstances, but from the
point of view of seeing where graduate students were at this particular time
and how they were thinking, this vote was instructive. It was particularly impressive to see
the literature students acting in support of the linguistic students. While the abuses that went on within
the UCLA Slavic Department emanated primarily from the linguistic faculty, the
effects also spilled over onto the literature section, and there was in fact a
history of literature students leaving the programs because of abuses by
linguistic faculty, so it is not as if the literature students were not
incurring considerable risk by taking a stand in solidarity with their fellow
graduate students in linguistics.
As it turned out, the attempt by the faculty to put off the review was
probably doomed from the outset anyway, but the vote and the solidarity shown
by literature students toward their fellow students in linguistics was and is
instructive as to the depth of feeling that permeated that department's body of
graduate students.
If
this fear seems somehow exaggerated to people on the outside, it is important
to remember the context in which this whole review was taking place. Not only was the faculty for the most part
against this review (or, if not a majority against it, certainly quite
apprehensive as to what would result from it), but the instructions that
graduate students received regarding the filling out of the initial forms and
questionnaires that signify the beginning of this process were also unclear and
at some points contradictory. In
order to ensure that students would speak up and be candid in their description
of their experiences within the UCLA Slavic Department, there needed to be a
promise of both absolute confidentiality and absolute opaqueness regarding the
instances of individual participation, i.e. no one should be able to look at
the final report or at descriptions of the Eight-Year Review process and be
able to deduce who had said what to whom.
From the outset, however, there were flaws in the system.
As
was described above, the section on the questionnaire that allowed students to
add additional comments in long hand was a source of concern for a number of
reasons. Handwriting, obviously,
gives people away, but so do descriptions that reveal specific instances of
abuse, especially in a department as small as the UCLA Slavic Department. Thus, going beyond answering a simple
multiple-choice questionnaire to writing out specific examples could have very
real consequences were these examples ever to be seen by the UCLA Slavic
Department faculty. Given the
attitude of fear and mistrust that already permeated the UCLA Slavic
Department, the fact that there was at the very outset of the Eight-Year Review
process already ambiguity with regard to the crucial question of whether
faculty would be able to read graduate student written responses that were part
of the original questionnaire only served to make students that much more wary
about committing to a system which in the past had not only failed to uncover
abuse, but had in fact served to cover it up.
IV. How the
Slavic Dept. Review Was Actually Conducted
It
was immediately brought to the attention of the investigating committee that students
had fears about talking with the committee, both because they didn't want to be
seen in the middle of the Slavic Department office going in to talk to the
committee, and because of the presence of a former UCLA Slavic Department
faculty member (a linguist, no less) on the committee. From this point on, there were in
essence two reviews going on: the sort of formal review that happens regularly
every eight years, with regularly scheduled meetings with faculty, deans, etc.,
and a second review, with students meeting with the investigating committee at
a site far removed from the physical environs of the Slavic Department.
The
review process thus took on a schizophrenic character, with the formal review
process looking outwardly much like the previous Eight-Year Review process and
much like the usual review processes that are conducted at UCLA, while in point
of fact, much of the real investigation was taking place away from the Slavic
Department, with students, at their request, meeting members of the internal
committee at an unannounced location.
As was discussed above, many of the students, especially the linguists,
refused to meet with the external committee because of the presence on it of
the former UCLA Slavic Department faculty member, who was himself a
linguist. It became clear as the
process proceeded that the faculty itself soon became aware of the severity of
the situation. Some of the more
candid faculty members made mention, in guarded terms, that they were aware
that the UCLA Slavic Department was under a harsh microscope.
This
was a justifiable fear on the part of the faculty. The fact that the students were so afraid of retaliation
that they had asked for a neutral meeting site was not the only indication that
something in the UCLA Slavic Department was very much amiss. In order to gain a broader picture of
what had been happening in this department, the internal committee, at the
urging of the active graduate students, began to contact former graduate
students in the UCLA Slavic Department.
The nature of the charges being leveled against the faculty in this
department was such that independent corroboration was deemed essential.
Factual
Errors Statement
When
the investigation of the UCLA Slavic Department was for all intents and
purposes completed, two separate reports were issued: one by the internal
committee, the committee consisting entirely of UCLA faculty and one UCLA
graduate student, and one by the external committee, consisting of just two
people, the two outside reviewers, one of whom was the linguist who was a
former faculty member in the UCLA Slavic Department. A rough draft of both of these reports was then sent to the
Chair of the Department for what is termed a "Factual Errors
Statement". The purpose of a
"Factual Errors Statement" was just exactly what it sounds like, to
go over the report for accuracy of basic facts (number of faculty, fields of
expertise of the faculty, things of that sort). In other words, it is purely there to allow simple mistakes
to be corrected. It is not
intended to be a forum through which the conclusions drawn by the internal and
external committees can be discussed and disputed.
It
appears as though Michael Heim, the then-Chair of the UCLA Slavic Department,
misunderstood the nature of the "Factual Errors Statement" section on
two points: first, he apparently believed it to be a low-level communication
between himself and the Academic Senate, when it fact it was destined to become
a part of the official report.
Secondly, he either did not realize that the sole purpose of the
"Factual Errors Statement" is merely to ensure that the basic facts
listed in the report are correct (and not to dispute the conclusions of the
report itself), or else he realized this, but thought that he could use it as a
forum to rebut some of the very harsh conclusions reached in the reports
themselves. Because the Chair was,
apparently, unaware that his comments would become part of the public record,
he was unusually candid in his assessment of the problems facing the UCLA
Slavic Department and in his assessment of some of the problem faculty
involved.
When
the Chair first learned that his response would in fact become part of the
report, a report that is itself a part of the public record, he was quite distressed. He was heard to have said time and time
again that he simply could not believe that they would actually put his candid
comments on public record, thus enabling the colleagues about whom he spoke to
see what exactly it was that he had said about them. It was one of those rarest of moments in which the
façade of the UCLA Slavic Department fell, if but briefly, exposing not
only the reality of what was going on in the Department, but also the thoughts
of the faculty themselves, both as regards their colleagues in the Department
and the Department's graduate students.
Essentially
what the Chair attempted to do in this "Factual Errors Statement" was
not correct small statements of fact, but to rebut the very harsh report of the
internal committee (the review committee made up of faculty only from UCLA,
along with one UCLA graduate student).
In this attempted rebuttal, the Chair continued with the same patterns
of denial and evasion that had characterized his participation (or lack
thereof) in the initial investigations.
So egregious was this continued pattern of prevarication and sophistry
that the internal committee felt compelled to answer in a point-by-point
response, detailing some of the instances in which the Chair's response
deviated from the truth, a response which confirmed officially and on the record the fact that the Chair had been less
than honest in his interaction with the internal committee, and had in fact
attempted to cover up and deny the systematic abuse that permeated the UCLA
Slavic Department. The Chair's
initial "Factual Errors Statement", the internal committee's response
to this statement, and student commentary on this statement, are available in
this report. The content of these documents speaks for itself, so it will not
be belabored here.
Initial
Reaction of UCLA Slavic Department Faculty
When
the report finally came out, the reaction of the UCLA Slavic Department faculty
was mixed. The Chair and those who
had perpetrated this fraud--or at least who had attempted to do so--were understandably
upset. The Chair had at least had
some forewarning of what lay ahead, while many of the other faculty members
were still in a state of denial.
For so long this faculty had done what it wanted when it wanted, and had
been unchallenged in its treatment of its graduate students, that it was at
first almost impossible for the reality of the situation to sink in. The next step in the response cycle
varied by individual faculty member.
Some of the younger faculty, especially the non-tenure track faculty,
felt that the Department had been warned, had but failed to take advantage of
the opportunity to come clean, admit the abuse, and right the ship, however
painful and embarrassing that admission of wrongdoing would have been. Another set of faculty simply were not
in town at that point. A third
group, representing the traditional core of the faculty, soon got over its
shock and moved quickly to fury and anger. One emeritus came storming in and accused one student of
trying to destroy the Department that this emeritus had worked so hard to
build. Others of this group began
questioning students about the Eight-Year Review.
The problem with this is self-evident. These students were promised protection by the UCLA Administration for their frank and candid participation in the process. Examples of that encouragement are as follows:
[From an administrator in
Graduate Information Services] "I am very concerned about your reluctance
to comment on your program. I strongly
suggest that you make ever effort to convey your perceptions to the review
teams during the programmatic review next year. If you do (sic-should
read: "do not") make any effort
to do this, people cannot fairly evaluate your program."
Before
the process even began, some students had gone to the Dean of the Humanities to
complain about what was happening in the UCLA Slavic Department and were
encouraged to be as open as possible, and were again promised protection from
reaction to the report by the UCLA Slavic Department faculty. The following is culled from a message
sent to a Slavic Department graduate student concerning fears about
participating in the review:
"I have been assured [by the Chair of the Slavic Department and the Associate Dean of Graduate Division] that input from graduate students will be solicited and reviewed in a manner that protects the confidentiality of those who provide it…I can't emphasize enough the importance of offering your frank assessment of the program, and of encouraging your fellow students to do so. Former students should be urged to contribute as well. As I mentioned when we met, this input has been taken very seriously in reviews of other departments. Those students, too, were no doubt concerned about repercussions, but to my knowledge that has not occurred."
The
report itself emphasized the need for such protection, and (as it turns out,
ineffectually) threatened faculty with dire consequences for trying to
retaliate or threaten students for their participation in the review
process. Thus, there were multiple
instances of the UCLA Administration, in its various incarnations, encouraging
student participation and promising protection from harassment and retaliation.
To
have the Chair and other faculty asking graduate students about this review was
problematic for any number of reasons.
In a department as small as the UCLA Slavic Department anonymity can be
quickly lost simply by the process of elimination. For example, out of a graduate student body of twenty five
to thirty, if five or ten students, when cornered by faculty, deny involvement
in the review process (and given the level of fear and intimidation that
existed in the UCLA Slavic Department, this is not in the least beyond the
realm of the possible, or even the probable), this then further narrows the
field of possible "culprits", i.e. of students who might have talked
to the investigating committee.
In
addition, those students who choose not to participate in discussions with
faculty also then run the risk of coming under a cloud of suspicion as students
who refused to abide by the understood code of silence regarding discussions of
the UCLA Slavic Department's dirty laundry with those perceived as
"outsiders". Students
could, in effect, be damned if they did and damned if they didn't. And those who did acquiesce to faculty
requests to discuss the review would also experience what is termed a
"Captive Audience" situation, one in which a subordinate finds
himself or herself face to face with a faculty member who determines grades,
who writes recommendations, who sits on committees, and who approves--or
disapproves--dissertations. The
potential for intimidation in such a situation is enormous, and again,
especially so in the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that defined the UCLA
Slavic Department.
Attempts
to Keep Faculty from Interrogating Graduate Students
When
the original report came out, it contained strong wording concerning the
possibility that faculty in the UCLA Slavic Department might attempt to
retaliate against the graduate students in the report who agreed to speak with
the internal committee. The
wording is as follows:
"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."
Given
the fact that the internal committee felt so strongly about this issue, and
that the internal committee had made it clear to graduate students that this
was their feeling, graduate students were of the opinion that they could appeal
to the internal committee if they felt threatened. And this is precisely what some of the students did,
appealing to both the faculty head of the internal committee, and also to the
graduate student representative on the internal committee.
The
faculty head of the internal committee was initially reluctant to ask the Dean
of the Humanities to intervene in this matter, i.e. to prohibit the faculty
from discussing the results of the Eight-Year Review with the graduate
students, at least until he had the opportunity to investigate further. Upon such further investigation,
however, the faculty head of the internal review committee did in fact agree
with students that faculty should not be communicating with students directly
about the Eight-Year Review, for all the reasons listed above. The graduate student representative for
the Slavic Department students offered in lieu of such direct communication to
serve as a medium for those students who wanted to communicate with the
faculty, but who did not want to be identified, and also for faculty who wanted
to convey their thoughts to the Slavic Department graduate students.
In
response to this request by the internal review committee that the faculty be
kept from discussing the results of the Eight-Year Review with the graduate
students, the Dean of the Humanities came up with a partial solution, one which
stated that only the Chair of the UCLA Slavic Department should be in contact
with students about the results of the Eight-Year Review, and that other
faculty should refrain from engaging students on this topic. Although the Dean of the Humanities might
have thought she was proposing a reasoned compromise, in fact that was not the
opinion of the graduate students in question. Even if the Chair of the UCLA Slavic Department had been
honest and aboveboard throughout the review process, the fact is that he is a
colleague of faculty members who for years had abused graduate students and who
had instituted and for years nurtured an atmosphere of fear and intimidation
among graduate students. Even if
this chair had acted honorably during the Eight-Year Review process, it would
still have been inappropriate for him to interact directly with graduate
students concerning the Eight-Year Review, for these reasons and all the
reasons listed above. There is no
information that he wanted to have or disperse that could not have been done
through the graduate student representative for the Slavic Department.
As
the facts clearly show, however, the Chair of the Slavic Department was not
honest and aboveboard during the review, and he did not act honorably during
this process. Far from it. The internal review committee
found numerous instances of the Chair failing to be honest and aboveboard. The following excerpt from the report
makes clear the lack of forthrightness with which Michael Heim approached his
duty to work with, and be honest with, the review committee:
"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."
The
Dean of the Humanities knew at this point the extent to which the Chair had failed
to be honest and aboveboard with the investigating committee. If the internal committee, which had
the power to recommend sanctions against the Slavic Department, found that it
could not trust the Chair of the Slavic Department, then why would the Dean of
the Humanities think that this individual would warrant the trust of graduate
students who had, under promises of protection from the UCLA Administration,
spoken openly and at length about abuse within the UCLA Slavic Department? The "compromise" offered by
the Dean of the Humanities was unacceptable and ominous: if the Chair's
behavior was going to be overlooked even as the investigation is reaching a
crucial point, the question had to be asked, what was the Dean of the
Humanities' commitment to seeing that the process was conducted fairly and in a
way designed to protect those graduate students who had responded to the UCLA
Administration's request that they participate fully in this inquiry?
Graduate
students immediately pointed this out to the faculty head of the internal
committee. The graduate student
representative in the UCLA Slavic Department again repeated her willingness to
act as a medium between faculty and staff. The graduate student representative on the internal
committee also voiced his concern.
The response from the faculty head of the internal committee was
one of concern, but also a feeling that the Dean of the Humanities should not be
pressured on this point, at least not at this time. This was one of the few moments where some graduate students
failed to see eye to eye with the faculty head of the internal committee, who
did make the assurance, however, that if circumstances were to change, i.e. if
it appeared as there might be problems with the Chair regarding this issue, he
would immediately appeal this decision by the Dean of the Humanities to the
"highest levels" of the University, understood by graduate students
to mean the Chancellor's Office.
Two
things immediately made clear the need for the internal committee to do just exactly
that. The first was the reaction
of the other faculty in the UCLA Slavic Department to the prohibition on
speaking with graduate students about the specifics of the Eight-Year Review. Graduate students were informed that
not only were some of the faculty not amenable to such a prohibition, they were
furious that it had been imposed upon them from above. There was an immediate threat by these
faculty to challenge this prohibition legally as an infringement upon their
First Amendment rights of free speech and as a violation of their academic
freedom.
Heim's
"Response to the Response" to the Factual Error's Statement
The
second thing was a mass email sent out by the Chair of the UCLA Slavic
Department to all the graduate students.
Apparently frustrated that his attempt to defend the Department via the
"Factual Errors Statement" was trumped, point-by-point, by the
internal committee, the Chair appears to have wanted to continue this argument
privately with the graduate students themselves. At this point, given what was already on paper (and also
given what graduate students in this department already knew) one has to wonder
whom the Chair thought he was going to convince with this attempt. In any case, the Chair proceeded to
again argue his case. The details
of what he said and graduate student response to these details are appended in
a latter section, so they will not be belabored here. Briefly, however, the Chair continued to defend his conduct
and that of the faculty.
Shockingly, he continued his attack on the one student (identified only
as XX in the report) who had the courage to tell her story in such a way as to
make her identifiable to the Department as a whole. In his attempt to smear her and to question her abilities,
Michael Heim went so far as to release, without her permission, some of this
student's undergraduate grades, thus violating a host of federal and state
laws, to say nothing of UC regulations.
Throughout this "rebuttal to the rebuttal" of the
"Factual Errors Statement", the Chair continued his pattern of false
and misleading claims. (Again, the
specifics are seen in the annotated version of the report.)
The
single most egregious, and disquieting, aspect of this mass email to students
was when the Chair attempted to explain the question he posed in response to
the internal report, namely "Who are 'the students' here?" In his attempt to characterize this
question as one of a number of rhetorical questions, he makes the following
statement: "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." The effects of such a
statement, sent directly to each and every one of the graduate students in a
department which is being reviewed, can be nothing less than chilling,
especially so for graduate students in the UCLA Slavic Department. Michael Heim is saying that, in effect,
he knows very well who was affected, and thus there is no longer any need to
maintain a distance between him and the students.
Student
Response to the Threat of Lawsuit Made by Slavic Department Faculty and to
Michael Heim's Refusal to Recuse Himself from Questioning Slavic Department
Graduate Students
Graduate students immediately reacted to
this mass email. They pointed out
to Internal Committee that, because the Chair had emailed his view of the
situation to graduate students, including those not in the area (i.e. those on
vacation or on summer abroad study programs), those graduate students not
actually in Los Angeles at that time were in effect getting only one side of
the story, while at the same time being asked to comment on the entire
situation. In other words, these
students were not able to physically go into the UCLA Slavic Department office
and look at the report, an option available (in theory, anyway) to graduate
students still on campus at that time.
The demand was made that all
graduate students receive a copy of the entire report. If that meant emailing a copy of the
report to grad students not currently in the local Los Angeles area, then so be
it. This situation put the
Academic Senate (which controls the dissemination of the report) in an awkward
situation. Normally the Academic Senate
prefers to keep a tight rein on the report itself, which is why there is
usually only one or two copies available for student perusal, and even at that
it is only available by going into the department in question and asking for
it. And yet Michael Heim had
already sent out his response to this report by email. Fairness demanded that the report
itself also be sent out via email to all students, just as Michael Heim's
rebuttal of the report was sent out by email, lest those students not on site
receive only one side of the issue.
And yet this request was ultimately rejected by the Academic Senate,
presumably because the university was loath to have an Eight-Year Review report
as damning as this one floating about in cyber-space. Instead, paper copies were mailed out to all students who
were local with the promise that copies would be Federal Expressed overseas or
elsewhere in the country to any UCLA Slavic Department graduate students who
wanted a copy. (This, of course,
would require the student to identify himself/herself as having this interest,
something that did not have to happen in order to receive Michael Heim's
response to the report by email.)
This
failure by the Academic Senate to be evenhanded in its distribution of the
report was disturbing enough, but nowhere near as disturbing as was the content
of Michael Heim's mass email and the reaction of some of the UCLA Slavic
Department faculty, i.e. their threat to bring suit against the UCLA
Administration for violating their First Amendment rights. Earlier, in response to concerns from
UCLA Slavic Department graduate students that Michael Heim had not been
prohibited by the Dean of the Humanities from discussing the results of the
Eight-Year Review, the faculty head of the internal committee was concerned,
but also said that if circumstances were to change, i.e. if it appeared as
there might be problems with the Chair regarding this issue, he would
immediately appeal this decision to the "highest levels" of the
university.
When Heim's email arrived, a copy of it was immediately delivered to the faculty head of the internal committee along with a frantic request that he honor his promise to go to the highest levels of the university to keep Heim (and now the other faculty as well) from talking to UCLA Slavic Department graduate students about the Eight-Year Review. In spite of the numerous protests by graduate students involved in the Slavic Department's Eight-Year Review, no conclusion was ever reached in the matter involving Heim and the other faculty. That is to say, the status quo, that being Heim's refusal not to agree to refrain from talking directly to graduate students about the Eight-Year Review, never changed. Graduate students were told by the Internal Review Team that appeals had been sent to officials from the College of Letters and Science and on up to officials at "the highest levels" of the university, again a euphemism they understood to mean the Chancellor's office. In spite of this, graduate students never heard of an official change in Heim's position, and there was no further directive coming from the university at any level prohibiting Heim from interrogating students about the Eight-Year Review. Likewise, there was never any indication from the University that it would challenge those faculty members who threatened legal action when they were asked not to interact with graduate students in the Slavic Department with regard to the Eight-Year Review. This sent a message that could not have been any clearer: in spite of what the Academic Senate or the College of Letters and Sciences had promised about protecting graduate students who participate in the Eight-Year Review, the university administration was not going to confront these faculty any further, regardless of what effect this had on the graduate students who had been promised protection in return for their cooperation with the investigation.
Single Most Crucial Point in the
Review:
Once the University had promised, explicitly, to protect
cooperating graduate students, only to prove itself unable and/or unwilling to
prevent faculty members from asking students about the review, the true nature
of the power structure at the UCLA became clear to all concerned, and
especially to the graduate students who had believed the University's many
promises of protection. While the
process of investigation into the Slavic Department continued after this point,
the credibility of any promise made to graduate students concerning protection
evaporated with these incidents (faculty members threatening the university
with legal action/Heim's refusal to leave off questioning graduate students
about the review.) What also
evaporates, as an extension of this, is the ability to question graduate
students in an open and candid manner: not only can graduate students never
again trust the promises of the university administration with regard to issues
such as protection and lack of retaliation at the hands of faculty, but from
this point onward, student responses themselves have to be seen as potentially
compromised. Why would any
student, in response to an inquiry concerning the department and faculty on
which he/she is so dependent, give a frank and detailed response in light of
what has happened? To do so would
be tantamount to professional suicide.
Next
Steps: Evaluating Options
At
this point, the only alternative students were given was to respond to the
Eight-Year Review report. The
Graduate Council of the Academic Senate had requested a response to the report
from Slavic Department graduate students, and since it seemed that the UCLA
Administration had either given up or refused to order Heim and other faculty
members from talking to graduate students, the only alternative would be to
raise this issue with the Academic Senate itself, via its Graduate
Council. This was done both
individually and in groups. The
response attached here to the Eight-Year Review is of the latter and represents
the view of more than one Slavic Department student, but others wrote
individual responses.
The
recommendation made by the internal committee was two-fold:
1.
That the graduate admissions to the Slavic Department be suspended
2.
That the Department be put into receivership
The
first of these steps could only be authorized by the Graduate Council of the
Academic Senate (the body which authorized and oversees all eight-year
reviews), while the second, ordering the UCLA Slavic Department into
receivership, could only be done by the Dean of the Humanities. The Chair of the Slavic Department,
even after he had been exposed as one who misled, covered up, and fed false
information to the internal committee, made clear from the beginning his
intention to fight against the implementation of these two suggestions. As a part of this campaign he enlisted
the assistance of the two members of the external committee, David Bethea of
the University of Wisconsin, and Alan Timberlake of UC Berkeley, himself a
former member of the UCLA Slavic Department. The Chair persuaded these two members to write an addendum
to their original report, one that in effect softened both their own initial
external committee report and also countered the findings of the internal
committee.
During
this time the Chair continued to ask students about the report, and continued
to assert his right to do so. It
was at this time that the Chair and some of the faculty in the UCLA Slavic
Department began a long-term strategy to isolate the offending linguistic
faculty and to make a show of change in the Department. Senior faculty members were approached
and the idea was floated of closing down the linguistic component of the
program altogether. A strategy was
begun to differentiate literature from linguistics, presumably on the grounds
that, since the offending linguistic faculty members could not be terminated
because of their tenured status, the next best thing would be to make clear to
the university administration that the real problem lay with the linguistic
faculty, and not with the literature faculty. Above all, the "denial-of-the-obvious" strategy,
which had blown up so devastatingly in the Department's face during the review
itself, was continued.
The
Bethea/Timberlake Addendum
The
addendum to the original report by the two members of the external committee,
David Bethea of Wisconsin and Alan Timberlake of Berkeley, was a part of this
"lie and deny" strategy.
It too is appended to this report, along with an annotated copy which
comments in detail on the accuracy of this addendum. Only a brief overview of this addendum will be given here.
When
the scope, detail, and severity of the internal committee's report finally
became clear to the Chair of the UCLA Slavic Department, the "lie and
deny" strategy kicked into full gear. It may seem counterintuitive to non-academic readers of this
tract (i.e. to those not involved in academe at the university level) that the
Chair would do this, especially given the fact that his credibility had just
been decimated by an investigating committee comprised of his own academic
colleagues at UCLA, but one needs to keep in mind the environment at UCLA. The only people really capable of
disputing Michael Heim or any of the faculty were graduate students
themselves. The relationship that
exists between faculty and graduate students in a department such as the UCLA
Slavic Department is one in which intimidation and the
always-present-if-not-always-subtle threat of retaliation at all time lies
ominously just beneath the surface.
The resulting fear on the part of the graduate students allows the
faculty much leeway in what it reports as the truth: in many instances, only
graduate students can refute what is being said, and no graduate student who
has any hope at all of graduating (much less of getting the all important
mentorship and recommendations after graduation) would dare to contradict
faculty. Russian literature tells
us of a similar relationship between Russian plantation owners and their serfs,
where the most intimate and damning of topics were often discussed in the
presence of these serfs, mainly because these serfs had no legal standing in
law or society, and that the word of a serf against his master carried no
weight in this particular power paradigm.
Graduate students are not serfs, but the same principle applies: since
it would be dangerous and self-harming to call attention to any faculty
member's "flexible" interpretation of the truth, the faculty often
become used to the fact that they can take liberties with the truth, so much so
that it becomes second nature.
This
results in a sort of laxness when it comes to reporting the truth, an
understood "built in" margin of error/exaggeration. This may explain the implementation by
the UCLA Slavic Department of the "lie and deny" strategy, even in
the face of such a massive and embarrassing trumping of this strategy
previously. It appears that this
same strategy also played prominently in the addendum penned by
Bethea/Timberlake. They begin by
acknowledging that what prompted their letter was their fear that the continued
existence UCLA Slavic Department as an academic department was itself at
stake. They then claim the
following:
—
that they heard the same evidence as the internal committee (not in the least
true, since many graduate students, because of the presence of Alan Timberlake,
a former UCLA Slavic Department professor--and a linguist no less--, refused to
talk to the internal committee);
—
they wrote against the internal committee's finding that the UCLA Slavic
Department treated graduate students like "chattel" and "damaged
goods" (there is no way that the external committee could know one way or
the other whether or not this was true, since they didn't have the same
broad-based student input that the internal committee had);
—
They shamefully try to twist the situation in the UCLA Slavic Department around
such that it is not the UCLA Slavic Department faculty that is guilty of abuse,
but rather, just the opposite is said to be true: it is the poor faculty which
is being treated unfairly, not unlike those who suffered injustices in the
Soviet Union;
—
Bethea/Timberlake go on to question the trustworthiness of the internal
committee, implying that it accepted the students' version of events sight
unseen (this is completely untrue; everything told to by graduate students to
the internal committee was repeatedly questioned, and the committee itself did
independent verifications of what was said);
—
Quite to the contrary, it is Bethea/Timberlake who unquestioningly accept
information, but they do it from the faculty: they accept without question the
Slavic Department Chair's characterization of XX (the one student who was
courageous enough to go public with her story), and then go on to repeat it as
if it were fact as they join the Chair in his campaign to smear her further;
they also accept as fact the ludicrous figures fed to them by the Chair of the
UCLA Slavic Department with regard to the number of the Department's graduate
students who obtain tenure track positions;
—
Bethea/Timberlake mischaracterize the training received as
"excellent" (some
of it is excellent; some is good, some is mediocre, some is terrible, and much of it, especially in linguistics, is
simply outdated)
—
Bethea/Timberlake mischaracterize their own review as "extremely
rigorous". (It may have been
that from their point of view, but they did not even come close to the truth of
that department, albeit for reasons that are not entirely their fault, since
many students refused to talk with them because of Timberlake's presence on the
committee.)
—
Bethea/Timberlake at times out-and-out repudiate their previous report, taking
a department that they once characterized as having "an alarming level of
anxiety, bordering on demoralization" and then turning around in this
addendum and claiming that they "do not find it dysfunctional". Have they adopted here the "lie
and deny" strategy of the UCLA Slavic Department itself? Did they automatically default to that
manifestation of "Truth" that is built upon the aforementioned
"understood" and "built in" margin of error/exaggeration, a
margin which none of the graduate student "serfs" has heretofore
pointed out? Or do they simply
lack cognitive dissonance?
—
Most amazingly, even after having seen the internal report, after having read
how Michael Heim went out of his way to deny the truth, went out of his way to cover
up abuse, went out of
his way to defend at all costs the reputation of the UCLA Slavic Department,
even up to and including smearing the reputation of former students--even after
all this, Bethea/Timberlake still
continue to characterize Michael Heim in the most positive of lights, claiming
that "especially under the current chair--the department has come to a mature understand of the
nature of its problems as a collective…" etc. etc. If someone who had acted in he way
Michael Heim had acted was considered by Bethea/Timberlake to be an optimal
person to chair the Department, then one could only ask whom they would
consider to be an inappropriate person to chair the Department?
In
summary, the Bethea/Timberlake addendum was nothing more than an attempt to
downplay the severity of the problems that exist within the UCLA Slavic
Department, an attempt in which they were quite willing to ignore
inconsistencies, accept unquestioningly what was told to them, accuse the
investigators of Stalinist tactics of repression against the faculty of the
UCLA Slavic Department, join this faculty in its attempts to smear students who
did speak up, and on and on and on.
It is a disgraceful and embarrassing example of the solidarity that
exists among tenured faculty, and of the extent to which they will go to
protect their own regardless of how repugnant or abuse the behavior of these
colleagues.
Responding
to the Report
This,
then, was the atmosphere that confronted graduate students who had complied with
the request of the UCLA Administration to cooperate fully with the
investigators of the UCLA Department, and who had been promised anonymity and
protection from retaliation on the part of the faculty. They had seen this promise dismissed
completely by the UCLA Administration, this after numerous requests from
graduate students themselves, from the graduate student representative from the
Slavic Department, repeated requests from the graduate student representative
on the internal committee, and from the faculty head of the internal committee
itself (who would later reverse himself).
These same students were now being asked to comment directly to the
Academic Senate (more precisely, to the Graduate Council of the Academic
Senate) on the report itself. As
was noted above when it became clear that the UCLA Administration was going to
refuse to take steps to keep Michael Heim and the rest of the UCLA Slavic
Department faculty from questioning students about the content of the report,
the handwriting was very clearly on the wall: as graduate students in that
department at that university, there could be no expectation--none--of
protection from avenging faculty or from further interrogation or even of
anonymity, since such interrogation could, in a small department such as the
UCLA Slavic Department, very quickly narrow the field of who talked and who did
not.
And
yet, even in spite of this fact, even in spite of the betrayal of these
students by the UCLA Administration, many still responded to the report, still
offered feedback to the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate. Whether or not they were as open and
aboveboard in their commentary as they might have once been, one cannot say. Clearly some were, as can be seen by
the documents appended here in this report. Some felt that this was the absolute last chance to convince
the UCLA Administration to do something about the UCLA Slavic Department. At the end of the 1999-2000 academic
year the Graduate Council had acted immediately upon the suggestion of the
internal committee and suspended admissions to this department, but the Dean of
the Humanities had yet to act on the suggestion that the Department be put into
receivership. This was new ground
for everyone concerned, but very few of the students doubted that the
receivership would happen, especially given the extent to which the corruption
and abuse and lying in the UCLA Slavic Department had been exposed by the
report. The feeling among many
UCLA graduate students was that, regardless of broken promises, once all the
information got to the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate, once this body
of UCLA faculty members were confronted not only with the numerous lies told on
behalf of the UCLA Slavic Department both by its chair and by the supposedly
objective "outside" reviewers brought in to evaluate it, and once the
Graduate Council was informed that this disinformation campaign had even grown
to include cover up activity, threats to students' well-being brought about by
the abrogation of promises made by the UCLA Administration, the public smearing
of an ex-student, and actual illegal activity in the form of releasing to
non-authorized persons grades from the undergraduate transcript of that same
individual--that at this point, the Graduate Council could not help but step
in, continue the ban on the admission of new graduate students, and urge the
UCLA Administration to fully implement the suggestions of the internal
committee, i.e. receivership.
In
order for this to happen, however, the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate
had to know the specifics of the incidents that occurred within the UCLA Slavic
Department and the incidents that characterized this most unusual of eight-year
reviews. It was the belief of some
graduate students that without the presentation of overwhelming evidence of
wrongdoing on the part of the UCLA Slavic Department, and without overwhelming
evidence of how the entire review system is skewed in favor of the faculty, the
Graduate Council of the Academic Senate might find a way to wiggle out of its
obligations, might find a way to soften the steps suggested by the internal
review committee. Past experience
both within the UCLA Slavic Department and in this particular Eight-Year Review
(e.g. the Bethea/Timberlake addendum) has shown that if given the chance,
faculty members investigating fellow faculty members will, to varying degrees,
tend to give the benefit of the doubt to their colleagues, usually for the
reasons discussed at the beginning of this tract (e.g. professional courtesy,
inability/unwillingness of the institution to bring about real punishment,
etc.). Because of this, it was
decided that in the student response appended here, there could be no wiggle
room, no possible way for the UCLA Administration to misinterpret or
conveniently overlook the actions of the UCLA Slavic Department faculty. It was for this reason that the
response to the Eight-Year Review, and to Michael Heim's emails and to the
Bethea/Timberlake addendum, had to be as detailed as possible, almost a
point-by-point commentary on what was being claimed. The thinking was that no matter how outlandish and fantastic
the protestations of innocence that would be made by the UCLA Slavic
Department, the evidence countering those claims would be so overwhelming, and
so damning, that the UCLA Administration, in the persons of the Dean of the
Humanities and the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate, would have no
alternative but to follow through with the suggestions of the internal review
committee by putting the UCLA Slavic Department into receivership and by
continuing the ban on graduate admissions.
Departmental Strategy vis-à-vis
the Graduate Council and the Dean of the Humanities
At
the beginning of the Fall Quarter of the 2000-2001 academic year, the Chair of
the Slavic Department, Michael Heim, did what he said he was going to do all
along, and that was go to the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate and ask
that the ban on graduate student admissions be immediately lifted. Graduate students were understandably
of two minds on this issue. On the
one hand, the handwriting seemed to be very much on the wall. Everything pointed to the fact that the
UCLA Administration was going to do everything it could to hush up this
horribly embarrassing review and, if possible, effect whatever change was
deemed necessary through gradual reform and not confront the UCLA Slavic
Department directly. It may well
be that the legal challenge that some of the UCLA Slavic Department faculty had
threatened might have put the Administration in its place and let it know where
ultimate authority resided in the University. Both Heim and the rest of the UCLA Slavic Department faculty
had openly and with impunity defied the attempts to keep them from talking to
graduate students about the Eight-Year Review. Given this fact, some graduate students asked the question,
what's the point of fighting this thing any further? Clearly the UCLA Administration has shown its intention to
preserve the UCLA Slavic Department and its faculty at all costs, so why
continue this fight? The impulse
to give up was also fueled by the knowledge that continuing the fight, while
perhaps morally noble, could easily harm the very students who were waging this
battle, since any dent to the UCLA Slavic Department's reputation would also
have negative residual effects on the graduate students themselves, who depend
in part on that reputation to get jobs.
And
yet, there was also the feeling that given the egregious and repeated nature of
both the abuses within the UCLA Slavic Department and of the attempts to cover
up and minimize this abuse, this would be one time where the UCLA
Administration simply could not ignore the recommendations of the internal
committee. While there was never a
poll conducted among graduate students regarding the lifting of the ban on
graduate student admissions to the Department as a whole, their were
discussions about whether or not the ban should be lifted for just specific
sections of the Department, i.e. whether or not the ban should be lifted to
allow the admission of just literature graduate students or (much less likely,
since the problems in this department stemmed primarily from the linguistic
section) or of just linguistic students.
Most of the graduate students in literature felt that it might be all
right to allow the admission of literature graduate students. This would help to soften the blow to
the Department's reputation and it would keep any more young and enthusiastic
first year graduate students in Slavic linguistics from being exposed to the
linguistic faculty in the UCLA Slavic Department with all that would connote
for their graduate student experience.
The linguistic graduate students were, understandably, much more
divided. On the one hand, they
were to a much greater degree the direct recipients of the abuse that had
characterized the UCLA Slavic Department's treatment of its graduate students
and were thus very much aware of the need to put an end to this treatment. In addition, there were some among this
group that were so incensed at the way the system seemed to conspire in favor
of the faculty, so outraged by the fact that outside faculty such as
Bethea/Timberlake were willing to jump so readily onto the bandwagon and try
to, in effect, disavow some of what they had written in their original external
review report, that these students were willing to do whatever it took,
including risking their own careers and risking potential legal action against
them that they were more than willing to do whatever it took to make sure that
the truth was revealed and that this sort of cover up (regardless of at whatever
level it was taking place) would succeed.
(The fear of having legal action being threatened against students by
the UCLA Slavic Department is not, by the way, one that is without foundation
or precedent. Such threats have
been seen even for smaller incidents, far less important to the reputation of
the UCLA Slavic Department than the results of the Eight-Year Review.)
On
the other hand, there were linguistic students who felt that, since the UCLA
Administration had, at this point, indicated by its failure to bring Michael
Heim and the rest of the faculty in line, at least with regard to the issue of
not contacting graduate students concerning the results of the Eight-Year
Review, that we might as well accept this defeat as a partial victory (at least
some of the abuses were brought to light) and go on from here. And some of the graduate students,
frankly, were in fact intimidated by what the faculty might do in response to
continued pressure from the graduate students to bring to light the abuses
within the UCLA Slavic Department.
The fact that students now knew that they had no real protection from
the faculty, and that the promises of protection from interrogation at the hands of the
faculty were in reality empty promises, no doubt contributed to this atmosphere
of intimidation and hesitation on the part of some of these graduate
students. In the end, when polled
by the graduate student representative for the Slavic Department whether or not
the Department should be allowed to open admissions to graduate students again
in their respective disciplines (on the condition that reforms be undertaken in
the Department and that outside supervision be present), about half of the
Slavic linguistic graduate students agreed. The others said no, with a small number abstaining. (There was also a small number who were
technically graduate students but who were out of residence, i.e. advanced to
candidacy and working elsewhere.) It
should be noted that literature students voted in favor of allowing the
Department to admit new students, but only literature students.
(In effect, for the purposes of this vote, the students were divided
into literature and linguistic sections, with each group voting on whether or
not graduate students should be admitted specifically in that subfield, i.e.
literature students voting on whether the Department should be allowed to
accept graduate students only
in literature, while linguistics students voted on whether or not linguistics
students should be admitted.)
When
the time came for Michael Heim to address the Graduate Council of the Academic
Senate, he did exactly what he said he was going to do, he asked the Graduate
Council to remove the ban on graduate student admissions, claiming there had
been "significant reform" of the Slavic Department during the
summer. Anyone who knows the UCLA
Slavic Department, even if only superficially, knows that this is
nonsense. The very idea of
reforming a department like the UCLA Slavic Department, one which for decades
existed using threats of abuse and abuse itself, in just a single summer is
outright laughable. The fact is
that this department, if it was reformable at all, would be so only after years
of oversight and probably only after the termination of some of its faculty, an
option made almost impossible because of the institution and rules of tenure,
at least as this institution and as these rules exist now. This is not to say that the UCLA Slavic
Department didn’t make pretenses of reform, and in some cases, there
really were some small reforms.
Apparently Michael Heim's strategy, and that of the UCLA Slavic
Department, was to "make show".
In other words, to introduce a number of quantitatively impressive
"reforms" to which the Slavic Department Chair could point to when
making his case for lifting the ban on graduate student admissions and for
keeping the UCLA Slavic Department out of receivership.
In
order to understand the nature of the reforms and the pseudo-reforms that came
about as a result of the Eight-Year Review report, one must first understand
both exactly what the Eight-Year Review found during its investigation into the
UCLA Slavic Department and the nature and scope of the abuses that characterized
this department. The Eight-Year
Review is attached to this document, both in its original form and in annotated
copy, but a summary of those aspects of the report necessary to evaluate the
above mentioned reforms and pseudo-reforms will be presented here. In addition, some of the abuses in the
UCLA Slavic Department which were not presented in the report itself (for
reasons of preserving anonymity, or simply for reasons of keeping the report to
manageable dimensions) will also be presented here. It is against the backdrop of these factors that the
analysis of these reforms and pseudo-reforms will be made.
Excerpts from the Review and
Individual Instances of Abuse and Subsequent Cover Up Documented Therein or
Connected with the Review Report
•
Setting the tone for the report: "This level of graduate program
dysfunction is unprecedented in the collective experience of this review
team."
• Ever