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."
• Every student who spoke feared retribution
• Physical displays of anger by the
faculty
• Students being intimidated into
taking courses they neither wanted nor needed
• Course evaluation forms which are
anonymous in name only
• Fear of retaliation in
comprehensive exams or in getting dissertation signatures
• Shouted and barbed insults aimed
at students
• Students threatened with a loss
of funding
• Students threatened with
disciplinary action for disagreeing with faculty
• Systematic disrespect for
graduate students
• Spiritual blight in the
Department in the eyes of the students
• Overadmitting students and then
allowing attrition to select those students who finally get degrees
• Talent being shunted or destroyed
altogether
• Incomplete or non-existent
reading lists
• The faculty avoids voting on
issues that might go against the strongest personalities in the Department
• Excerpt from the review:
"Again and again the review team heard of mistreated students who received
only soothing words from the Chair and from other members of the faculty. In
one instance the Chair actually did approach the faculty member involved to
suggest outside mediation. When (predictably) the faculty member objected, the
matter was dropped. Thus, a situation with its origins in a small minority has
become the responsibility of the entire department because of the inaction and
complacency of the faculty (with one exception)."
• The very Chair of the Slavic
Department himself claiming not to understand the picture of the UCLA Slavic
Department drawn by the internal committee
• The Chair of the Slavic Department
was untruthful in his statement that XX was the only student lost as a result
of a conflict with a faculty member
• The Chair of the Slavic
Department was untruthful in his statement that the UCLA Slavic Department does
not discard students as damaged goods
• The Chair of the Slavic
Department was untruthful in his statement that the internal committee taking
everything that was told to them by the students at face value
• The Chair of the Slavic
Department was untruthful in his statement that the UCLA Slavic Department
faculty was looking forward to the Eight-Year Review
• The Chair of the Slavic
Department was untruthful in his statement that the UCLA Slavic Department
could handle its own affairs and thus did not need to be put into receivership
• The Chair of the Slavic
Department was untruthful in his statement that he had "no idea" of
the Review Team's probable conclusions
• The Chair of the Slavic
Department was untruthful in his statement that retaliation had never occurred
in the UCLA Slavic Department
• The Chair of the Slavic
Department was untruthful in his statement that student suffering had been
blown out of proportion
• The Chair of Slavic Department,
in seeking to smear the one student who did speak openly with the internal committee
(designated "XX" in the report), openly mischaracterized this
student's ability in Russian, and misrepresented the nature of the coursework
taken by her here at UCLA
• As a part of this smear campaign,
the Chair of the Slavic Department violated UC regulations and state and
federal law by releasing, via email, grades from XX's undergraduate transcripts
to grad students and others
Instances of
Abuse Not Covered Specifically in the Report (Not a Comprehensive List)
• Minimal, and at times non-existent,
concern with student welfare
• Violations of ethical and
professional codes of conduct by faculty, some of whom are almost certainly
psychologically disturbed
• Campaign to keep regulations, requirements,
and official obligations as vague and as ill defined as possible in order to
allow the faculty the greatest possible interpretation of said rules,
regulations and obligations.
• A faculty that rules by canard
and by decree as opposed to adhering to the rules and regulations set down by
the University, ignoring rules that were not to their liking and establishing
new rules on the spot
• A department with no
organization, with no firm policies, no coordination of policy, and no will to
organize itself
• Irrational and contradictory
behavior towards graduate students (and often towards other faculty as well)
• Failure by the rational and
semi-rational faculty to check the behavior of the irrational faculty
• Institutionalization of graduate
student abuse
• The previous Eight-Year Review
process had been a farce:
1. Graduate students had been coached on
what to say and what not to say to the investigating teams
2. Thus, the investigating teams failed
to highlight the abuse going on in the Department
3. Even worse, by failing to highlight the abuse, the eventual report that came out of the review provided a cover of sort for the Department, an inaccurate report of a good department
• Failure to prepare students in
the fundamentals of the field, especially in linguistics
• Giving out misleading information
to potential students in an attempt to recruit them into the UCLA Slavic
Department. Included in this
on-going campaign of deception were misrepresentations, half-truths, and out
and out falsehoods, especially with regard to the funding that was said to be
available to graduate students.
• Students were routinely told that
if they made satisfactory progress (the criteria for which were never defined)
then sufficient funding would be available for the duration of their on-campus
training. This was not true.
• Students had no right to expect
funding, but they had every right to expect the truth about the funding
situation, a truth that was consistently downplayed or denied outright during
the recruitment process.
• A grading process by the faculty
that was at best wildly subjective, at worse deliberately manipulated according
to the personal whims of individual professors and not according to objective criteria
designed to test the student's mastery of the material presented.
• The at time almost nonexistent
relationship between grades earned and success on comprehensive exams.
• Students being forced to take
classes they neither wanted nor needed simply to provide students for a class
that a particular professor wanted to teach.
• Students being punished for
dropping out of classes that they didn't need
• Students who had no idea what to
expect on comprehensive exams, no idea of what to focus on, no idea of what the
faculty considered important, especially in linguistics
• Uneven and often inconsistent
standards for what was expected of students in terms of their ability in
Russian
• Different standards and different
levels of difficulties for different students on what are supposedly the same
level of exams, e.g. one student having a markedly more difficult and
challenging M.A. exam than another.
While Ph.D. exams are expected to be more individualized, this was not
true of M.A. exams, and yet there were wildly different standards of success
for different students.
• Exams being used to punish
students who failed to toe the line
• Using individual homework
assignments to punish students who had fallen out of favor
• The problems of nepotism within
the UCLA Slavic Department
• Faculty acting as a carburetor of
sorts, regulating the field by discarding graduate students at their whim, as
opposed to by the abilities, or lack thereof, of the individual graduate
students
• Students not being mentored
through the dissertation process, but rather being left to flounder by a
faculty so uninformed on recent scholarship in the field that said faculty is
incapable of helping students in this situation move on with their work
• Faculty actually threatening unspecified
retaliation against other faculty, even in the presence of graduate students (note the above-mentioned
"serf" phenomenon), for perceived offenses such as breaking the
"unity" of the Department, and for watching out for graduate
students' best interests, even when those interests are at odds with those of
the abusive faculty members
• The faculty's inevitable
characterization of any attempt to regulate its behavior from the outside as a
"violation of academic freedom" and as an "insult to the dignity
of the University" (actual quotes from various faculty members)
• The faculty actually discouraging graduate students from publishing and
from delivering papers at conferences, other than at the tightly controlled
California Colloquium ("You're at conferences in order to listen to talks, not to give them.")
• Graduate students being coached
on how to respond to inquiries from the Eight-Year Review committee
• Faculty members staying in the
classroom while supposedly confidential course evaluation forms are being
filled out
These then are some of the abuses, which characterized the
UCLA Slavic Department's treatment of its graduate students. Once again it must be emphasized that
this list is not even remotely comprehensive, and it may not even be
representative of some of the worst abuses that occurred. Others will inevitably come to light as
investigation of this department proceeds, but what the above lists do provide
is the sort of background necessary to understand the nature of the claims made
by the UCLA Slavic Department in late summer and early fall of 2000 to have
turned itself around and become capable of directing its own future and that of
its present and future graduate students.
Response of
the UCLA Slavic Department Faculty to the Graduate Council of the Academic
Senate
The
response to Graduate Council by the faculty of the UCLA Slavic Department was
consistent with what one would have expected from a department which had for
years denied there were any problems at all. When confronted with the truth time and again by the
internal review committee, however, the strategy of the Slavic Department then
switched. The decision was made to
try to minimize the impact of the report and to make it seem that the abuses
reported by the review committee had been blown out of proportion. Central and essential to this effort,
however, was the goal of once again gaining control over its own graduate
students, the same students who (in part) had been empowered by the promises of
the UCLA Administration, promises of anonymity and of protection from
retribution and from being interviewed and questioned by the faculty concerning
the Eight-Year Review. Once it
became clear that these promises were empty, that the faculty (any of the
faculty, not just the Chair, which would have been bad enough) could corner any
of these students and ask them about the review, this control over the graduate
students began to flow back toward the faculty. Students knew then, if they hadn't known earlier, that
indeed, no matter what happened, the UCLA Administration was going to stand
squarely in the corner of the faculty of the UCLA Slavic Department.
Once
this criterion was met, once control had once again begun to be reestablished,
the Slavic Department could begin this process of minimalization. Since the review process is itself so
compartmentalized, this attempt might not be as far-fetched as it sounds: the
UCLA Administration goes to great lengths to see to it that the reports from
the Eight-Year Review are not circulated, this despite the fact that what is
reported there is all technically on the public record and thus retrievable
through the Freedom of Information Act.
Even at this late date, even with all that had been revealed about the
abuses that had occurred in the UCLA Slavic Department and the attempts by the
faculty in the UCLA Slavic Department to deny and cover-up these abuses, there
was still hope among the Slavic Department faculty that the Graduate Council of
the Academic Senate could be led to believe that not only was substantive
reform possible, but that it had already occurred.
The
response by the UCLA Slavic Department to the Eight-Year Review is appended
below, so what will be seen here will be a brief overview. The attempt at minimalization, at
balancing out all of the bad with some of the good, begins with the very first
sentence: "We are gratified by the praise for the Department's stature and
the accomplishments of both the graduate and undergraduate programs, but we have
also taken the harsh criticisms to heart." Apparently the first thing that struck the UCLA Slavic
Department about the Eight-Year Review was not the long list of repeated and
documented abuse and charges of cover-up associated with that abuse, but rather
an enormous sense of gratification at the praise heaped upon the UCLA Slavic
Department in the Eight-Year Review for its "stature and
accomplishments". The
Eight-Year Review is appended here in its entirety (except for once page of the
faculty self-review that was not released), so readers can judge for themselves
whether this sense of gratification on the part of the UCLA Slavic Department
faculty is merited. The more jaded
interpretation of this opening line to the Academic Senate's Graduate Council
would be something along the following lines: "We as the UCLA Slavic
Department have for years done what has been asked of us by the
University. We have assembled a
world-class faculty, we have published, we have hosted and attended
conferences, we have established what was a well-regarded graduate
program. We have done all this,
and this is not something that should be overlooked by our colleagues on the
Graduate Council. Sure, there has
been some unfortunate abuse of students, but that goes along with the system. Who among us hasn't seen this or
something like it in our own departments?
Keep this in mind, and keep in mind the old saying, 'There but for the
grace of G-d go I.'"
The
response goes on to detail the division of the Department into so-called
"caucuses", one for literature and one for linguistics. In this can be seen the beginnings of
the idea that was germinating at the time among literature faculty, the idea to
do away with the linguistic side of the program, an idea actually broached by
some of the literature faculty to senior linguistic faculty. Also able to be seen is the
continuation of the policy of simply refusing to confront those troublesome
linguistic faculty identified in the report as "the strongest
personalities in the department".
Rather than actually confront them, the new idea was simply to isolate
them in a linguistic "caucus", and thus insulate the literature
faculty from the madness which regularly emanated forth from some of their
linguistic colleagues.
In
order to continue with this strategy of minimalization, the UCLA Slavic
Department was going to have to show something, some evidence that not only had
substantial reform been undertaken, but that it had actually been implemented,
and had become so well entrenched that this department, a department which for
years had abused its graduate students and then routinely lied about such
abuse, was now, in the course of just a few months, completely turned around. One would think that being able to
project a positive image of such a department would be a near impossible task,
and in most cases it would be, assuming that those elements of the UCLA
Administration which were tasked with overseeing the Slavic Department, namely
the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate and the Dean of the Humanities,
were not already predisposed in favor the UCLA Slavic Department.
The
arguments advanced by the Slavic Department in favor of lifting sanctions can
only be seen as unreal and bizarre, as least in so far as they could be seen as
a justification for lifting the sanctions. To quote from the second paragraph: "Let us begin by
treating the issue the internal report revolves around, that is, what it terms
the unhealthy environment among the graduate students and its relation to
faculty conduct. Although we understand that an unhealthy environment cannot be
legislated out of existence, we feel we have taken the necessary decisive
actions to restore that environment to health." How might they have accomplished this Herculean feat in a
mere matter of months? To a large
extent, through (so goes the claim) the production of a "handbook"
for graduate students, one which "will go a long way to lifting what they
have perceived as the veil of secrecy surrounding a number of departmental
procedures" and "will contain detailed explanations of all current
policies, including the ones recently passed in connection with the
review." In reality, this
"handbook" (seen in Section
IV-H of this report) was nothing more than an attempt to appease the
demand for change with a quantitatively impressive but qualitatively vacuous
document that, far from "lifting…the veil of secrecy surrounding a
number of departmental procedures", only served to further obscure the
real causes for student alienation.
The vast majority of this "handbook" merely told students what
they already knew: where to sign up for email addresses, calendar of deadlines,
important phone numbers, building maintenance, information on the Reading Room
and the Russian Room, a list of faculty and staff, housing information, and
that type of program information that is typically available in a college
catalog, faculty committees, and so forth. Of the 34 pages of the initial "student handbook",
only one addresses faculty misconduct, and all it does is to quote official
University policy in this regard.
In
short, this student handbook does nothing--nothing--to alleviate the
deep-rooted problems that have characterized the UCLA Slavic Department for
years. The only purpose for a work
such as this is to provide a cover of sorts, to provide something to which the
UCLA Slavic Department faculty can point in order to claim that they have taken
steps to address the many problems that are found in the Department. The handbook is appended below, and can
be seen there in its entirety. A
quick glance through it makes glaringly clear the intent behind such a
handbook, one which simply repackages information easily available elsewhere
and which contributes nothing to the resolution of the Department's
problems. Given the fact that the
intent of this "student handbook" is so transparent, the question
then becomes, why would the UCLA Slavic Department offer up such a weak and
flimsy document to the university body (Graduate Council of the Academic
Senate) and the university official (Dean of the Humanities) who will
eventually decide the fate of the Department with regard to the questions of
receivership and the lifting of the ban on graduate student admission? The only plausible answer goes back to
what was discussed at the beginning of this work, the nature of the
relationship between tenured professors, and especially between those tenured
professors who are tasked with the unpleasant duty of overseeing their fellow
tenured colleagues. The faculty of
the UCLA Slavic Department understood very well that they had to offer up
something, anything that would, at least superficially, appear to be a step in
the direction of clearing up the confusion and darkness that has enveloped the
Department for so long. They also
understood that the tenured faculty who would be judging their efforts (the
Graduate Council and the Dean of the Humanities) would not be pressing them on
the flimsy nature of this "student handbook". The important thing was that there be
something that could be presented, and something to which could be referred
should a worst-case scenario occur and inquiries be made from outside of the university system regarding the
UCLA Slavic Department.
The
claims of the Slavic Department to have turned itself around reach their most
surreal, however, when addressing the issue of abuse. Given the fact that abuse of graduate students was the
central (although not only) issue of the Eight-Year Review, this section will
be excerpted here:
"Of
the new policies the one most directly relevant to the issue of faculty conduct
is the establishment of a formal grievance procedure in cases involving a
potential violation of the Faculty Code of Conduct. Given its central
importance let us cite it in toto: Students believing they have a grievance
involving a faculty member are advised to attempt to resolve the matter with
the faculty member in question. If the grievance remains unresolved or if
students feel hesitant about approaching the faculty member, they may bring the
matter to the attention of the chair and request the chair's mediation. At any
point students may avail themselves of the campus Ombuds Office. Other courts
of resort include the Graduate Division and the Office of the Dean of the
Humanities. In cases of grievances involving a potential violation of the
Faculty Code of Conduct (see UCLA Faculty Handbook
[www.apo.ucla.edulapoweblfacultyhandbookl9 htm49]) students may consult with a
member of the Academic Senate Grievance and Discipline Procedures Committee
(3125 Murphy Hall, 310‑825.3891) for help in deciding on an appropriate
course of action. For further details see UCLA General Catalogue, Appendix A,
Charges of Violation"
Again,
on the surface, this looks fine: the establishment of a formal grievance
procedure. But what does this
"formal grievance procedure" say and do? When we break it down it lists the following options (in the
order in which each option is to be exercised) whenever a student feels he/she
has been the victim of abuse:
1.
Resolve the matter with the faculty in question.
For the type of abuse that has gone on in this particular department,
the very idea of resolving the problem with the faculty member in question
flies in the face of reality. The
response to such challenges is always instantaneous and scathing. Even assuming--and this would be a
great assumption--that the graduate student could continue in the graduate
program after challenging the faculty member, what he/she would certainly have
to look forward to is increased difficulty in getting funding, and, more
importantly, the loss of whatever mentoring and recommendations one could
possibly hope to attain from the faculty member whose conduct was challenged. There have been several instances where
students simply changed their concentration from linguistics to literature
after having made the mistake of challenging a linguistics faculty member. In addition, one would also have to
deal with the influence of these faculty after graduation, influence that
extends throughout the United States and into foreign countries as well. It is difficult enough to get a job in
the field of Slavic, it is that much more so when your home campus faculty not
only would not support you, but would let it be known, subtly but clearly, that
you should not be hired.
2.
Bring the matter to the chair and request the chair's mediation.
This is sheer lunacy. This
department, the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, actually
expects graduate students to go freely to the Chair with problems concerning
faculty abuse? This after the
chair at the time of the review, Michael Heim, continually lied and covered up
and denied the abuses that were taking place? The same chair who himself admits that he cannot recognize
the picture of the UCLA Slavic Department drawn by the review committee? The same chair who tried to smear the
one student brave enough to allow her story to be told publicly, and who
encouraged Bethea/Timberlake to join in that smear campaign? The same chair who broke the state and
federal law by releasing grades from the undergraduate transcript of this same
student? The same chair who said
that the report overstated the degree of student suffering, and who said that
there were no real problems to speak of, and who said that the UCLA Slavic
Department could handle its own affairs, and who claimed that retaliation never
occurred in this department, who claimed that the internal review committee
took everything that the graduate students said at face value? The same chair who refused urgent and
repeated requests from students and administrators alike to cease his
questioning of graduate students about the Eight-Year Review?
Is
this the chair to
whom graduate students are supposed to go? It is stunning that this department, or any department that
had been so thoroughly exposed as abusive, would have the chutzpah even to
think such a thing, much less suggest it formally as a way of countering abuse
perpetrated by faculty.
3. Four other potential mediators are
mentioned. The problem is, these
are not so much mediators as they are facilitators, institutions that simply
route people through the complaint process:
a. the campus Ombuds Office
The Ombuds Office will contact the various
people concerned, but its powers are extremely limited;
b. the Graduate Division
The Graduate Division is the institution
that conducts the Eight-Year Review.
That process has already been tried and shown to be severely deficient;
c. the Office of the Dean of the Humanities
A number of students went directly to the
Dean of the Humanities prior to the 1999-2000 review of the UCLA Slavic
Department. They were told that
the best way to handle this problem is through the above-mentioned severely
deficient Eight-Year Review process;
d. Academic Senate Grievance and
Discipline Procedures Committee:
This point is addressed in detail in the
response to the Eight-Year Review appended here, but just to touch briefly on
this and why it is not much of an option: according to the Dean of the
Humanities at the time of the review, whatever action is taken against the
professor in question is done so in secret; not even the students who bring up
the complaint are allowed to know what that action is. Not only can one not know the severity
(or lack thereof) with which the offending faculty member has been punished,
it's not even possible to know if he/she was punished at all. This is particularly problematic in
that it removes the embarrassment and shame of public censure as a tool for
keeping faculty in line and discouraging them from practicing the sort of abuse
that was characteristic of the UCLA Slavic Department.
Thus,
past experience would tell us that none of these four options are much of an
option at all, at least not if one hopes to bring about effective action in
restraining the offending faculty members.
The
sort of "made for display" nature of "the new policies the one
most directly relevant to the issue of faculty conduct is the establishment of a
formal grievance procedure" is best seen in the fact that these policies
are not in the least bit "new".
These options, weak as they are, have always been available to graduate students,
even when the storm was blowing its worst in the UCLA Slavic Department. It is precisely because they were so
weak that they were rarely if ever used.
It was only when things got so bad that there seemed to be no
alternatives for large numbers of students other than to quit the program
altogether that graduate students availed themselves of options such as going
to the Dean of the Humanities and the Academic Senate, the results of which
action will soon be discussed here.
The main point, however, is that the UCLA Slavic Department faculty, in
proclaiming this "new policy" and the "establishment of a formal
grievance procedure", has in fact done nothing of the sort. They merely repackaged the old,
insufficient system and presented it as new. Granted, this works well for those looking in from without,
but for those who are familiar with the Department, this was nothing more than
yet another Potemkin village built to impress onlookers with the new sense of
concern this faculty suddenly developed for its students.
This
is the sort of "reform" that has been on-going in the UCLA Slavic
Department. One last final example
of such "reform" will be examined here, one supposedly dedicated to
making clear the opacity of the funding process. In an internal report of the UCLA Slavic Department dated
November of 2001 (entire text is appended below) the Slavic Department faculty
address the funding procedure, declaring that henceforth there would be a
student-self assessment involved, and that the criteria would include level of
academic performance, timely progress to the degree, and support history (i.e.
how much support an individual student has had in the past compared to that
provided his peers). This is much
the same approach that the faculty used when adopting the "new" procedures
for dealing with faculty abuse of students and the "establishment" of
a "formal grievance procedure".
There is nothing new in all of this. It is simply a repackaging of the old criteria. It is not as if the criteria themselves
are bad. They are not now bad, nor
were they bad then. It is simply
that the criteria themselves were so loosely adhered to that they couldn't even
be said to have been guidelines.
Let's take them one at a time:
1. Student-self assessment: Nothing new here. This simply harks back to the time when
graduate students had to include a statement of purpose when requesting
departmental support. The
particulars might be slightly different, but the principles are the same.
2. Level of academic performance: On the face of it, this seems
reasonable. The problem is how one
judges the levels of academic performance. The Eight-Year Review report speaks of students being
threatened with lower grades simply for disagreeing with instructors. It speaks of criteria so poorly defined
that students don't know what they should be studying. How does this putatively "new"
system do anything to address those issues? The answer is that it does nothing to address them.
3. Timely progress to the degree: Again, prima facie, this seems reasonable. But it can only be seen as reasonable
if the responsibility for moving through the program, and, more importantly,
the ability to move through the program, rests with the student. There is a reason that UCLA graduate
students in Slavic, especially in linguistics, have such abnormally long time
to degree averages. When students
do not know what to expect, they naturally tend to slow down, to try to
concentrate their efforts on finding out what is expected in classes, on
homeworks, on papers, in comprehensive exams, and in dissertations. The less sure the individual student
regarding what is expected of him/her, the more cautious he/she will become.
What is also true is that the amount of
support offered to students figures in directly to the time to degree. Since this support is often based on
the above-mentioned "Level of Academic Performance", the failure of
this system to work often has ripple effects on students who are trying to make
progress on their degree.
Inaccurate systems of student evaluation and ranking lead to lower or
nonexistent funding, and this in turn leads to longer than normal times to
degree.
4. Support history: The idea behind using support history,
i.e. the amount of support a single student has had over time, as a criterion
for further funding is yet again, prima facie, a normal one, with the idea being that
students who have had great amounts of funding shouldn't be ranked higher than
students who haven't had that much funding. It this were actually the practice of the UCLA Slavic Department,
then this would be fine, but in fact this is not the practice. Students used to be given vague
promises of funding ("If you do well, we will fund you", without any
further definition of "doing well") but that soon gave way as funding
dried up. The next line used by
the Department was that it would endeavor to provide four years worth of
funding for its graduate students.
The problem is, some students got nowhere near four years of funding
while others were funded for five, six, seven years and beyond. There are examples of favored students
being allowed to teach classes as TAs that had only one or two students in
them, simply to keep that funding available to the students in question. There are other examples of students
who had nowhere close to four years of funding yet were listed as having had
this funding anyway.
So while it would in theory make sense to
include support history in any decision concerning funding, it makes no sense
to collect information on the support history of each student and then ignore
it and fund whomever you want to fund.
That is what the UCLA Slavic Department has done in the past, and there
is nothing in this "reformed" funding procedure that would prohibit
them from doing it again. The
point to such a "reforms", then, is simply to be able to claim that
reform has occurred, be that true or not.
Of course, such reforms would never survive a true investigation into
the Department, nor would they fool any supervisory entity determined not to be
fooled. If the UCLA Slavic
Department knew one thing, however, it was the environment in which it was
operating. It knew that the
University Administration wanted, at all costs, to keep a real investigation
from happening, the to prevent the conducting of a "fact-finding mission
or to determine the guilt or innocence of particular individuals". (The quote is taken from the internal
reviewers when they themselves were describing what their investigation was not.)
Before moving on to the actions of the
Graduate Council of the Academic Senate and of the Dean of the Humanities in
this matter, it is instructive to look at one final excerpt from the
"Response by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures to the
Eight Year Review". At the
end of this document, the faculty make the following point: "We therefore
request that the Graduate Council reinstate the Department's right to admit
graduate students into its program, effective immediately. It may seem
questionable whether changes made over the eight months that have passed since
the site visit can resolve problems that developed over a period of eight
years. Should the Graduate Council have any doubts about the current ability of
the Department to create an atmosphere productive of intellectual stimulation
and growth, we invite you to ask the opinions of our students, including those
interviewed during and after the site visit." Above, it was noted that the single most crucial point in
the review was when the
University Administration failed (or simply gave up) in its attempts to keep
the Chair of the Slavic Department and the faculty of the Slavic Department
from talking to students about the Eight-Year Review. The consequences of that failure can be seen here in the
quote above, in which the UCLA Slavic Department practically dares the UCLA
Administration to continue questioning students. And why should it not have adopted such a confident
air? The Chair of the UCLA Slavic
Department and some of its faculty not only successfully asserted their
"right" to talk with students about the Eight-Year Review wherever and
whenever they choose, they also made clear to graduate students the limits of
the "protection" that was supposedly made available to them by the
UCLA Administration in return for their cooperation in the Eight-Year Review.
This is
not to say that there was not some level of reform in the UCLA Slavic
Department. After so devastating
an Eight-Year Review report, it would have been impossible for there not to
have been some reform. The
question is whether such reform is sufficient to keep such abuse from recurring
and whether such reform will redress the damages done to current and former
students. On both counts, what the
Department tried to pass off as reform fails. It is also possible that there were some students who were
not intimidated by talking to the faculty, at least not to Michael Heim, who
had a reputation as a faculty member on whose shoulder students could cry after
having gone through abuse at the hands of the faculty. It was never a question of Michael Heim
himself being an abusive faculty member.
Michael Heim will be discussed at length later on in this report, but
while he had weaknesses as a teacher and a mentor, he also had strengths. There are students in the Department
who like and respect Michael Heim.
But the point is not whether or not Michael Heim himself was
abusive. The point is what Michael
Heim did when he was put in a position where he had to choose between the good
of his colleagues and the good of the graduate students. To repeat what was already stated
above, when asked again and again to refrain from questioning graduate students
about the Eight-Year Review, he refused, again and again, to do so. At that point not only was the trust of
the graduate students betrayed, but it also compromised the veracity of
whatever they say thereafter. No
doubt there were some students who would have said that some things had gotten
better. There were also students
who would have said that what was going on here was nothing more than a cover
up. This latter group of students,
however, had been around too long not to see the handwriting on the wall. They had already cooperated fully with
the investigation instituted by the UCLA Administration, in return for which
they were promised protection from retaliation and protection from interrogation. That promise had already been broken,
in spite of repeated pleas bordering on begging for the UCLA Administration to
protect them. There was no way those
students were going to have anything more to do with this system, one which had
already so egregiously betrayed their trust. It is because of this that the UCLA Slavic Department could
so confidently invite the University Administration to come in and interview
the graduate students. Those who
had no complaints would add credence to the faculty's claim of real
reform. And those who did have
real complaints would say nothing.
Those students who had not understood the true nature of the
relationship between the tenured faculty of the UCLA Slavic Department and the
UCLA Administration now understood this relationship quite well. Order had been restored.
The Decision
of the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate
This
was the backdrop against which the Chair of the UCLA Slavic Department followed
up on his promise to go to the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate and ask
that the ban on incoming graduate students be lifted. Graduate students were somewhat taken aback that he would
even attempt to do this given the severe nature of the review and given the
fact that he had been proven, time and again, to be untruthful in response to
repeated inquiries from the internal committee of the Eight-Year Review
team. When combined with the
feedback requested by the Graduate Council from graduate students on the
Eight-Year Review report (including the annotated copy of the report, appended
here, which responds in detail to almost every section of the report and which
not only exposes more untruths and the scope of the cover up activity, but also
reveals that the Chair of the UCLA Slavic Department went so far as to break
federal and state law in his attempt to smear one ex-graduate student) the hope
was that this request would be seen for what it was, an exercise in temerity.
In
the end, this was to be an empty hope.
The faculty head of the internal committee argued at length and
persuasively that this ban should not be lifted, and that the culture of denial
and intimidation that was for so long a part of the UCLA Slavic Department
could not be changed in such a short period of time, even if one had had a
cooperative faculty that that had been willing to assess honestly and
forthrightly the sins of the past.
The Chair of the UCLA Slavic Department, as expected, presented the
Graduate Council of the Academic Senate with his quantitatively impressive list
of "reforms", and argued that keeping the ban on the admission of new
graduate students would hurt both the Department and its students. It is the latter part of this assertion
that seems to have carried the day.
If the ban hurt the Department itself (and by "Department", we
mean here the faculty in it, along with their reputation), then this as it
should have been. As for hurting
students, one could argue for this or against this, and probably one could come
up with compelling arguments either way.
Certainly when a department is in trouble and word leaks out, then that
cannot be seen as helpful to students who are coming from that department and
whose chances at employment depend, to a certain extent, on the reputation of
that department. On the other
hand, allowing students to go on in a department that has essentially denied
that any wrong doing took place at all cannot be good for the remaining
graduate students, and it is nothing less than disastrous for any future
graduate students. If the faculty
of the UCLA Slavic Department can be exposed so devastatingly in a review and still be allowed to accept and train graduate
students, then it would only confirm and embolden them the next time questions
of faculty conduct and abuse of students were to arise.
The
reaction to this news by graduate students was diverse. Some felt that, given the nature of
academe and especially the nature of academic tenure, nothing short of the
faculty committing murder was going to be enough to get faculty members
terminated, so why prolong the agony?
Others felt that perhaps some good might come of this decision and that
the faculty would have learned a lesson.
Still others were shocked and stunned that the graduate Council of the
Academic Senate would again put power into the hands of those who had abused,
lied, and broken the law, and then denied it time and time again, even after they were caught. The only saving grace that could be
imagined was that the Graduate Council had taken this decision with the tacit
understanding that the Dean of the Humanities would eventually get around to
implementing the recommendation of the Eight-Year Review committee that the
UCLA Slavic Department be put into receivership.
The
Decision of the Dean of the Humanities
The
feeling among some graduate students was that once the line had been crossed
into illegal activity, someone at some level of the UCLA Administration, be it
the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate or the Dean of the Humanities or at
the level of the College of Letters and Science or at even a higher level would
step in and take over. Not only
was there nothing to suggest that the UCLA Slavic Department would be capable
of running itself, there was everything to suggest that it would not be capable
of this: the continued lying, the continued deception, the continued cover ups,
the continued minimalization of problems and exaggeration of successes. And when, on top of this, one sees
actual violations of the law by the person in charge of the UCLA Slavic Department,
it was just assumed by some that, even though the Graduate Council of the
Academic Senate had acquiesced to the wishes of the Chair of the UCLA Slavic
Department, that this would simply be a pro forma measure, since the Department
would have to be put into receivership given the egregious nature of the
violations, violations which were reported to the UCLA Administration. Thus, there was no excuse for the UCLA
Administration not to act. They
had evidence of wrongdoing, evidence that was provided by graduate students at
great risk to themselves. The
thinking was, how could the UCLA Administration fail to act given this
overwhelming amount of evidence?
And
yet, the move to put the UCLA Slavic Department into receivership kept getting
delayed. The Dean of the
Humanities, the person immediately tasked with making the decision to implement
receivership, kept putting it off.
Finally someone asked her what the problem was, to which she responded
that, instead of immediately making the decision whether or not to follow the
recommendation of the Eight-Year Review committee and put the Department into
receivership, she was instead going to wait. Incredibly, during this interim period, the same chair who
had deceived and covered up during the investigation was going to be allowed to
remain in place. When this fact
was pointed out to the Dean of the Humanities, she explained that she was going
to be acting as the "Co-Chair" of the Department, and thus would have
a moderating influence on the Chair that was from the Slavic Department proper.
At
this point, any persons even remotely interested in seeing justice done could
only throw up their arms in frustration.
What more did the Dean of the Humanities need to know? How could any clearer a picture have been
painted, not just of the UCLA Slavic Department but also of the Chair of the
UCLA Slavic Department? His
untruths, his deception, his cover-ups — these were all on paper, for all
the world to see. What possible
point could have been served by keeping on Michael Heim as the Chair, or the
"Co-Chair", or in any other capacity? He had proven himself untrustworthy, time and time
again. This is someone who broke
the law in his attempts to smear students, a fact that was pointed out, on
paper, to the UCLA Administration.
And yet, the Dean of the Humanities wants to keep him on as the
"Co-Chair"? To what
possible end? The only response
that was forthcoming from the Dean of the Humanities was, tellingly, the same
response that came from the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate: this
action was being taken "for the good of the students". But one has to ask, how could this
possibly be good for the graduate students? What would have been good for the graduate students would
have been to have had the recommendations made by the Eight-Year Review
committee implemented, and to have had the UCLA Slavic Department put into the
hands of a strong-willed receiver, one who would make the needed changes and
reforms and implement them from above.
That is what
would have been good for graduate students.
As
it turns out, the Dean of the Humanities was "Co-Chair" in name
only. "Co-" would seem
to indicate a joint sharing of duties, but that was never, ever the case, and
indeed, how could it be? The Dean
of the Humanities was just that, a dean, with all the responsibilities and
duties attendant to that position.
She might have been a "Co-Chair" in that she oversaw major
decisions, but when it came to the day-to-day, nuts and bolts decisions and
activities that define the duties of a departmental chair, she was nowhere
close to being a "Co-Chair".
What she did do was to attend various faculty meetings in which the
so-called reforms were discussed.
There were, of course, times in which she would assert herself. At one meeting of the faculty, in
response to a particularly nasty comment by one faculty member as to why the
Dean of the Humanities would not commit to a particular course of action, the
Dean replied "because I have not yet decided whether or not I will put this
department into receivership."
Thus, from time to time, the possibility of receivership would raise its
head, but it soon became clear that receivership, despite the fact that it had
been recommended for the UCLA Slavic Department and that the faculty head of
the internal committee had argued forcefully for it, was never a real
possibility. Its role was simply
to serve as the Sword of Damocles, a subtle reminder to the UCLA Slavic
Department faculty that, in theory anyway, there did exist in the University
hierarchy a power greater than themselves. Of course, this superincumbent power in the University
hierarchy, as can be seen in retrospect, desperately, desperately wanted to
keep from having to use that power.
The Consequent Results of the
Decisions by the Dean of the Humanities and the Graduate Council of the
Academic Senate Not to Follow Through with the Eight-Year Review Team's
Recommendations
As
the Fall 2000 Academic Quarter progressed with no sign of the UCLA Slavic
Department being put into receivership, it soon became depressingly clear that
none of these main recommendations--the suspension of graduate student
admissions and the placing of the UCLA Slavic Department into receivership--was
going to occur. In fact, just the
opposite seemed to be happening.
While the Department was still under closer supervision than it had been
previously, Michael Heim began to reassert his control over the
Department. He was
"Co-Chair" in name only.
In point of fact, he regained most of his former status and the
Department began its plan to pull itself out of its current state. This would, one would think, be all to
the good, assuming that the plan to accomplish this turn around included a
frank assessment of where the Department had been and what needed to be done to
turn it around. Unfortunately,
such a frank assessment was all but impossible given the fact that many of
those in authority now, and many of those who were gaining in influence behind
the scenes, had long been among the main collaborators and apologists for the
old regime. They were the same
faculty who had turned a blind eye to student abuse, or who had minimized it,
or who had lied about it and sought to cover it up.
As
was mentioned above, the first instinct of the faculty was to isolate the
abusive linguistic faculty. Two
had already retired, and one was on the way out, propelled no doubt by the
Eight-Year Review. This left just
one such linguist still on faculty, too young to be "golden
handshaked" into retirement.
This faculty member had also published in Russian literature and had
actually inquired as to the possibility of crossing over to the literature side
of the house. This caused no small
amount of titillation among the graduate students, especially the linguists,
who had been burdened by this professor for years. Apparently the literature faculty had no problem telling
linguistic graduate students that they would "just have to work
around" this particular faculty member, one who had a predilection for
throwing a conniption fet when confronted with contrary points of view, but
when faced with the possibility of this same faculty member joining up with the
literature side of the house, the literature professors were at once aghast and
unified in their determination to keep this from happening. Apparently what was said to be good for
the linguistic goose ("you linguistic students will just have to learn to
work around this person)" was anathema to the literary gander.
Given
the fact that the report was so devastating, especially with regard to the
linguistics faculty in the UCLA Slavic Department, for the first time in the
Department's existence, the literature faculty were actually in a position to
garner control over the Department.
Whether or not they no longer feared the linguists, or whether it was
simply a case of fearing the potential damage that could come about if things
were not brought under control, no one can say. In any case, the literature faculty did indeed begin to assert
itself, beginning with the floating of the idea to abolish entirely the
linguistic side of the house. For
those readers of this document who are not Slavists, this is not as radical as
it sounds, since this would be consistent with a long trend in Slavic
Departments throughout the country, most of which are now simply literature
departments with (sometimes) a small linguistic component. Another approach that was being
considered was to bring in new faculty sympathetic to the literature side of
the house. In the review
documents, mention was repeatedly made of the need to fill three FTEs in the
Department, the most pressing of which was a 19th century
specialist, after which a 20th century specialist and then a South
Slavist. That the primary and most
pressing need was for a 19th century specialist was emphasized again
and again. From the internal
report, commenting on the external reporters observations:
"Both
external reviewers considered replacement of the 19th century specialist to be
"absolutely crucial to the long-term health and viability of the
department" (ER, p.4). This opinion was expressed repeatedly during the
course of the site visit."
From
the Faculty Self-Report: "in literature we are currently conducting a
search for a junior position in nineteenth-century prose with proven competence
in contemporary Anglo-American and/or continental theory (gender studies,
cultural studies, postcolonial theory, neo-Marxism, and the like)"
From the Internal Report's Final Recommendations: "1. To maintain the stature of the department
and to bolster undergraduate teaching, raise the current search for a 19th
century specialist to open rank, preferably someone already highly respected in
the field, and ideally someone who might take a leadership role as the
department emerges from the present crisis."
And
yet, this search never produced such a 19th century specialist. What did happen, in a subsequent
search, however, was that a 20th century specialist was hired. While this position had been mentioned
during the review, it clearly was not listed as the number one priority. So why then would the UCLA Slavic
Department hire a 20th century specialist and not a 19th
century specialist? The answer,
many suspect, was to do exactly what was mentioned above, to "bring in new
faculty sympathetic to the literature side of the house." The choice they finally made was
himself a graduate of the UCLA Slavic Department, one who had worked closely
with the literature faculty and whose dissertation chairman had been the
chairperson of the UCLA Slavic Department during much of the time period in
question that was covered by the Eight-Year Review.
At
this point it should be made clear that, by bringing this fact to light, an
attempt is not being made here to disparage the qualifications or character of
that particular new hire. Some of
the older graduate students remembered him from his time here as a graduate
student, and the consensus was that he was extremely bright and, even better
from the point of view of academia, extremely productive. He received a tenure-track position in
Canada after finishing his graduate program in record time here at UCLA,
quickly published a number of books and just as quickly received tenure from
his Canadian institution.
Thus,
nothing presented here about this particular individual is meant to reflect
negatively upon him. He saw his
opportunity and he took it. What
his hire does suggest, however, is that the literature component of the UCLA
Slavic Department was looking to shore up its side of the house, and since this
new hire was a product of that faculty (in so far as they mentored him and
served on his committees while he was a student here), it would certainly seem
to be a safe bet that his addition to the faculty would serve that particular
end.
What
was happening was very clear to most of the graduate students on the
ground. Of course, the UCLA Slavic
Department had to go through a formal hiring procedure, inviting other
candidates to come and give lectures, feedback was solicited, procedures were
adhered to. In the end, it came as
a surprise to nobody when the Chair of the Slavic Department, in March of 2001,
announced that the faculty had voted to offer the position to the applicant who
had been a graduate student here, and who had worked under the former chair of
the Department. So rather than the
specialist in 19th century literature that was deemed by all sides
to be so critical to the UCLA Slavic Department's future, rather than
"ideally someone who might take a leadership role as the department
emerges from the present crisis", the Department instead hired a junior
scholar expert in 20th century who had just achieved tenure at his
home institution. The reasons
behind this choice were clear to all, but at that point, no one was going to be
too vocal about their opinions regarding this hire. As has been pointed out above, order had been restored.
This
is not to say, however, that there were no opinions regarding this hire. Few of the opinions centered upon the
candidate himself, or his abilities, since these were not the issue. It has already been noted that he
himself was an outstanding scholar, and that his abilities in this regard were
never in question. What was in
question, however, was the commitment of the UCLA Slavic Department to rebuild
the linguistics program. Graduate
students had been told, during the attempts to induce them to cooperate with
the investigating committees, that the only way that the Department was going
to improve, and that the only way for the linguistics program to improve was
for them to cooperate with the investigating committee. Some chose not too, and in retrospect,
who could blame them? And yet
others did choose to cooperate, at risk to both their advancement through the
program as well as at significant risk to their future careers. Their reward for this cooperation
turned out to be nothing. Not only
were they not protected against inquiries that might come from the faculty
itself regarding the Eight-Year Review, now it appeared that the linguistic
side of the program was being allowed to die off. The literature faculty denied this, of course, even while
they were actively discussing the possibility of allowing this to happen. As it turned out, those linguistic
graduate students who did finally agree to cooperate with the investigating
committee not only did not help to improve the linguistics side of the house in
the UCLA Slavic Department, they in fact ended up contributing to its demise
and thus hurting their own chances for entrance into the field.
The Follow Up Review
After
such a disastrous review, and given the state of the UCLA Slavic Department
with its theoretical "Two Chair" system, it was deemed necessary that
the next review should take place not eight years later, but rather the
following year. In fact, this was
put off even further, probably due to the fact that even small changes took a
while to implement. When this
review finally did happen, it consisted of the internal committee of the
original Eight-Year Review team.
The above facts concerning the slow death of the linguistics side of the
house and the frustration among some graduate students that not all that much
had changed was received sympathetically by the internal committee, but by
then, this committee had learned what the rest of the graduate students had
suspected for many years, that the UCLA Administration would do everything in
its power--ignore abuse, ignore illegalities, ignore student frustration and
anger--in order to keep from having to "discipline" tenured faculty,
regardless of how tepid such disciplinary measures might be. The internal committee noted the fact
that some improvements had occurred, but then again, how could they not have
occurred, given the devastating report of two years before that? The internal committee then backed off
its original recommendation that the UCLA Slavic Department be put into
receivership, and instead recommended the appointment of a very strong chair
from the outside.
The
obvious question that arises is why would the internal committee back off its
original recommendation of receivership, a recommendation that it argued
strenuously in favor of in front of the Graduate Council of the Academic
Senate? After all, a number of
graduate students remained in contact with the internal committee during this
whole time, and there was nothing to suggest that the internal committee was in
the least bit impressed with what the literature faculty of the UCLA Slavic
Department was doing. Without question
the internal committee very quickly saw through the attempt to allow the
linguistic program to die on the vine, and foremost among their recommendations
was that the linguistic program be resuscitated. Of course, it is one thing to suggest this, quite another to
get the UCLA Administration to provide the FTEs necessary to make this
happen. That fact notwithstanding,
the UCLA Slavic Department was forced to turn course and at least put on a
respectable show of "reviving" the linguistic program. But if the internal committee had been
so quick to spot the attempt by the literature faculty to allow the linguistics
program to die, why then did they withdraw their recommendation for
receivership and substitute in its stead a recommendation for a strong chair,
someone brought in from the outside?
It
is the belief of a number of graduate students that the internal committee had
finally come to the conclusion that the UCLA Administration, be it in the
person of the Dean of the Humanities or in the form of the Graduate Council of
the Academic Senate, simply did not have the will to implement such
measures. If the UCLA
Administration itself was going to refuse to implement such strong measures,
even in the face of such a devastating Eight-Year Review report, then (so went
the thinking) why would or why should the internal committee continue to bang
its head against the wall advocating things that were simply going to be
ignored anyway? It was known as a
fact by some of the graduate students that there was great disenchantment
coming from the internal committee, which had taken on the unenviable task of
investigating its own colleagues, and which had stuck to its guns in demanding
that substantive (as opposed to cosmetic) changes be made, only to, in effect,
be ignored.
The End Result
The
end result to all this was precisely what the Slavic Department faculty had
hoped for. Anger was allowed to
simmer and fade, graduate students exhausted by the fight to bring about change
either quit the field or quit trying, knowing that their efforts within the
context of the system in place at UCLA were doomed to failure, and what had at
one point seemed like a tsunami of scandal now appears to be no more in
evidence than pond ripples generated from a pebble. It is now early 2005, and
no official investigation has taken place, no faculty members have been
charged, much less punished, no attempt has been made by the UCLA
Administration to pass on to law enforcement officials their knowledge that the
Chair of the Slavic Department violated state and federal law, and no efforts
have been made to right past wrongs suffered by all who were subjected to the
tribulation and suffering meted out by the UCLA Slavic Department.
On the contrary. The Department, having successfully isolated the one remaining abusive linguist, has also had successes in other realms as well. It has, in effect, killed off the linguistics program and in so doing, for all practical purposes driven from the Department the one individual faculty member listed in the Eight-Year Review report as the one who actively and openly attempted to effect positive change. The final act in this redemption drama, a new review of the Department, is about to be completed, if it hasn't been completed already. This review is meant to be the final nail in the coffin of the attempt to expose what went on in the UCLA Slavic Department and to pave the way for a shiny new day for the Department as it rises phoenix-like from the ashes of the 2000 Eight-Year Review, at least in so far as the term "Department" is understood to represent the faculty and their concerns. Many of the students who were subjected to such vicious abuse have left the Department and gone on with their lives, while both UCLA and its Slavic Department remain, as do all institutions, to carry on as before. As far as the faculty of the UCLA Slavic Department is concerned, and as far as the UCLA Administration is concerned, the worst is over, the bullet has been dodged, and the system has survived unchanged.
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 |