VIII. What Needs to Be Done

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VIII. Anticipated Reactions and Recommendations

The release of this report has been timed to coincide with the new review of the UCLA Slavic Department that was scheduled to start in 2004 and which is currently either finished or in its last stages. From the point of view of the UCLA Slavic Department and the UCLA Administration, this current review of Slavic Department was meant to be the final act in the faculty's triumphant reestablishment of complete control of the Slavic Department and in the suppressing of challenges to this faculty's authority. As can be seen in the preceding sections of this report, this effort began before the first Eight-Year Review in 1999-2000 had even been completed, continued through the intermediate review in 2002, and was supposed to culminate in this final departmental review, one in which the situation in the UCLA Slavic Department would be deemed acceptable and in which the faculty would be seen as, if not redeemed, then at least reformed. No doubt there has been some actual improvement within the Slavic Department, if for no other reason that three of the four main abusive linguistic faculty are now either retired or dead. Of course, for those students who suffered through the worst of the graduate student abuse visited upon them by the UCLA Slavic Department faculty, there has been no recompense, and for those who abused students, and for those who covered up, and conspired to cover up, this abuse, there has been no punishment. Indeed, there hasn't even been an official investigation, and with this final "review" of the UCLA Slavic Department, the Department's faculty and the University's faculty as a whole no doubt hope that the threat of such an official investigation will have been extinguished at last.

In anticipation and preparation for this result, the UCLA Slavic Department and the UCLA Administration have taken a number of steps to ensure that graduate students in the Department are not dissatisfied. Among the steps taken to "sweeten the pot" for these graduate students about to undergo the upcoming Eight-Year Review has been the passing out of Dissertation Year Fellowships (DYF) left and right in the Slavic Department. Dissertation Year Fellowships are prized one–year fellowships that provide the student enough to live on comfortably for one academic year with no obligation other than to finish writing his dissertation, and as such are much sought after. It is not uncommon for a department to have not a single one of its graduate students receive a DYF, and often even large departments only receive one or two DYFs for their entire graduate student body. In the UCLA Slavic Department, one of the University's smallest departments, four graduate students were offered Dissertation Year Fellowships for the 2004-2005 academic year. (For a list of recipients, see page 26 of the Fall 2004 UCLA Graduate Student Quarterly at www.gdnet.ucla.edu/asis/library/gqfall04b.pdf) This on-going review is the opportunity for the UCLA Slavic Department to put this "unfortunate episode" behind it, and now more than ever both the Department and the UCLA Administration want to see Slavic Department students happy. When it comes to doing whatever it takes to maintain their privileges and station within the system, the Academic Administration, in its role as the representative of the University's tenured professoriate, is willing to do whatever it takes to put an end to this "unpleasantness". As they say, UCLA pays cash. Literally.

Anticipated Reactions to the Release of This Report: General Comments

Given the fact that the UCLA Slavic Department and the UCLA Administration were no doubt of the opinion that they had succeeded in "dodging a bullet" with regard to the events that took place in the UCLA Slavic Department, the release of this report will be an unexpected and unwelcome event. One of the more interesting aspects of the release of the report will be how the University and others associated with it—students, the taxpayers and legislators who support it, faculty and administrators—react to it.

What should one expect in terms of reaction to this report? No doubt, everyone in the UCLA Administration, from the Chancellor on down to the individual faculty members of the Slavic Department, will express their "shock" and "disappointment", and perhaps even "sadness" that graduate students feel that they are somehow not being treated well. This is typical. Note the response from the Chair of the UCLA History Department after the situation there boiled over in 2002:

"I'm saddened by the sense of neglect and ill-treatment that our graduate students have expressed. I want to have a departmental environment in which everyone, particularly our graduate students, feels welcomed, respected, appreciated and able to do the important scholarly work that is the driving passion of our lives.

"It was never my intention, nor the intention of other members of the department's administration, to design policies or act in any manner that would jeopardize the well-being of our students or make them feel that we don't care for them. Indeed, one of the central missions of the department is to nurture and train our graduate students; it is a mission we are dedicated to carrying out."

This "Claude Rains"-like reaction of being "shocked, shocked" at such behavior is typical of academe, and indeed, how could it be any other way? If those in authority were to acknowledge that they already knew of the abuse, then the obvious next question is, if they knew of the abuse, then why didn't they do anything about it? Thus, they are practically forced to adopt the "Claude Rains" approach, regardless of ludicrous such protestations of ignorance might seem in the case of the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

What might be unexpected, at least to those unfamiliar with this department and its "cult of denial" is that some members, even in the face of such overwhelming evidence, might still try to insist that they did nothing wrong. From a tactical point of view this might not seem to make sense, since every time the Department or one of its representatives tries to deny the obvious, they only wind up digging themselves in deeper (witness the section of the Eight-Year Review Report titled "Response to Slavic Chair's 'Errors of Fact' Statement" in which the chair of the internal committee issues a point by point rebuttal of the Slavic Department Chair's arguments, pointing out further the lies that characterized the Slavic Department's approach toward the review committees: "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.")

And yet, one should not at all be surprised if some members of the Slavic Department faculty choose to continue this pattern. From a legal point of view, the most logical path might be for them to say nothing, but no one ever claimed that logic ruled the day when it came to the decisions made by many of the faculty in the UCLA Slavic Department. No doubt many will continue to struggle in the quicksand of their own lies. One should also not forget that some of these faculty, the same ones who threatened to take legal action against the UCLA Administration when told that they shouldn't speak to Slavic Department graduate students about the Eight-Year Review, might also attempt to take legal action. Against whom would be the question, but again, logic does not necessarily play a role in such decisions.

As for the UCLA Administration itself, one should expect, after the inevitable "Claude Rain" responses of "shock", "surprise", and "sadness" a well orchestrated public relations campaign designed first to staunch the bleeding, secondly to begin the process of outward contrition, thirdly a strenuous effort to convince the public that the UCLA is going to be taking some "real" and "concrete" steps to bring about change and to prevent such abuse from ever happening again. What this will really be, however, is nothing more than an attempt to divert the public's attention, to the extent that this can be done, from the real causes of systemic abuse by the tenured professoriate to superficial "causes". In a sense, the UCLA Administration will attempt to do on a large scale what the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures did on a smaller scale via its attempts to minimize the problems and to place them in a greater overall positive context. This attempt at minimalization by the Department also included attempts divert attention from these problems through various "smoke and mirror" techniques: the artificial division of the Department into "caucuses" in an attempt to isolate the offending linguistic faculty members, the production of a "quantitatively impressive but qualitatively vacuous" student handbook, and so on.

The intent of the UCLA Slavic Department with all these faux reforms was twofold: 1. to provide those on high bent on defending the Slavic Department with some help, some ammunition with which to make such a defense, some evidence to which to point that would support the false claims that real reform was being made. 2. To confuse and divert those outside of academe (e.g. the taxpayers who pay for the University of California system) with large quantities of alleged "reform", all the while knowing that most of these "outsiders", due to their lack of familiarity with the system, are unable to determine which of these reforms would bring about real change and which are nothing more than window dressing.

One should not be in the least surprised if the UCLA Administration attempts to recreate this on a larger scale. For example, one might see the appointing of a "commission" to investigate these abuses and charges of lying and law breaking on the part of the Slavic Department faculty. But of whom would this commission be comprised? Tenured faculty, no doubt. And no doubt this commission will cluck its tongue and announce how much it disapproves of the type of faculty behavior documented here, and no doubt this commission will make many, many recommendations. But the real question is this: will this commission make any recommendation that will break the near stranglehold on power that the tenured professoriate wields throughout the University of California system? Will it make any recommendations that will allow the University to hold tenured professors to account for their actions? Will it make any recommendations that provide real oversight of the academic process to ensure that abuse does not occur? Will it make recommendations that allow for the meting out of real punishment to abusive faculty? For if not, then this will turn out to have the same effect as the Slavic Department's so-called reform: superficial changes that allow the underlying system to remain fully in place and intact.

Pressure will also be put on graduate students in the UCLA Slavic Department. What forms this pressure will take cannot be known, but it would not be surprising to see both subtle and overt pressure employed on the behalf of the UCLA Administration to get existing graduate students to be pliable in response to these revelations. No doubt the Administration and the Slavic Department itself will point out the slew of dissertation year fellowships that have been given out recently to Slavic Department graduate students. It will also be made clear to these graduate students that negative characterizations of their department will also reflect negatively on them when they try to get jobs. Unfortunately, whenever the pigeons come home to roost with regard to the faculty's behavior toward graduate students, it can often be the case that the graduate students themselves suffer more than the faculty, simply because the faculty already have tenure and security. The students will be in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. Some students will fear not speaking up in defense of the Department, simply because to refuse to do so will be seen by the Department as a betrayal. Others will fear that speaking up in defense of the Department—regardless of how sincere this defense is—might hurt future job prospects as they would be seen as selling out to a faculty that is obviously and undeniably guilty of repeated and extended gross misconduct. And it must be said that there are current graduate students who are genuinely fond of Michael Heim and will want to defend him. The situation of these students will be addressed below.

Recommendations: What Needs To Be Done And By Whom

This section focuses on what needs to be done in order to change the system as it currently stands, and where specific change needs to take place. As can be seen in Section VI, the weak points (or, depending on your point of view, the strong points) of the system with regard to exposing (or hiding) abuses are found throughout the system, at every level, and it is for this reason that reform must be instituted at every level. There are limits to what change can be accomplished at a given level, and these limits are recognized in the recommendations as they apply to each level or group of individuals. Many of these recommendations are identical to the "Summary of Main Recommendations" made at the end of the Annotated Eight-Year Review, Section IV-B.

UCLA Administration

1. UCLA has an obligation to right the wrongs done to UCLA graduate students in the Slavic Department and to make amends for the financial, professional, and academic damage done to graduate students in this program, both past and present. Any former graduate students who either left the program of their own accord or who were forced out because of the testing procedure in place in the Slavic Department should be given the option to re-enter the program and finish the degree.

2. Faculty members in the UCLA Slavic Department who abused graduate students, and those who lied about such abuse and conspired to cover it up, must be terminated. When UCLA speaks of concepts such as integrity and ethical breaches, these are concepts that cannot be selectively applied only to basketball coaches and other non-tenured employees of UCLA. The violations here could not possibly be any clearer: if UCLA refuses to terminate tenured faculty members in this instance, then it is simply that much clearer that for UCLA, terms such as integrity and ethical behavior are not immutable values but simply relative concepts to be employed whenever it is in the interest of those running the University to do so. Obviously the University of California has no authority over David Bethea, the outside reviewer from the University of Wisconsin who joined in Michael Heim's attempt to smear XX, the one graduate student from the UCLA Slavic Department who allowed her story to be aired publicly, but it does have authority over Alan Timberlake of UC Berkeley. Timberlake should be subjected to the same degree of discipline as that which should be exercised against his former UCLA colleagues with whom he worked to cover up the abuses that took place in the Department. Given Timberlake's willingness to work hand in hand with his former UCLA colleagues in this regard, the UC Regents might also do well to authorize an investigation of graduate student conditions in the UC Berkeley Slavic Department.

3. As was made clear in the sections above, in spite of the overwhelming amount of credible evidence of abusive behavior by UCLA Slavic Department faculty members towards their graduate students, no official fact-finding mission was ever conducted. (From the Internal Report: "The mandate to the review team was not to conduct a fact-finding mission or to determine the guilt or innocence of particular individuals...") Unfortunately, since it is clear that at this point that the UCLA Administration is incapable of conducting such an investigation, it will have to be initiated and directed at higher levels, probably by the UC Regents or possibly even by the State Legislature. Until such time, however, that a true investigation of the UCLA Slavic Department can be carried out, the UCLA Administration should heed the requests and suggestions of the internal review committee in its first report, namely that the Department be put into receivership and that a ban on new graduate students be put into place. Any "improvements" that have occurred in the UCLA Slavic Department since 2000 have occurred not because of any change of heart with regard to the UCLA Slavic Department faculty's attitudes toward graduate students, but rather because of their fear that substantive action might be taken against the Department as a result of the graduate student abuse that occurred.

4. The UCLA Administration needs to provide an official explanation as to why the University was either unable or unwilling to rein in members of the UCLA Slavic Department faculty who insisted on speaking with graduate students concerning the results of the Eight-Year Review. The words in the Eight-Year Review concerning possible retaliation by faculty against students who participated in the Eight-Year Review were stirring and resolute: "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." The reality was very different, as the UCLA Administration could not back down fast enough in the face of legal threats from the UCLA Slavic Department faculty. The UCLA Administration needs to explain its ignominious actions (and inaction) in this shameful episode, one in which the trust of the students was betrayed and the promises made to them quickly swept under the rug.

5. Because there never was an official investigation into the conduct of individual faculty members of the UCLA Slavic Department to answer the charges made against them of abusing graduate students, none of the individual faculty members ever had charges brought up against them. This was, of course, by design, and was in fact the point of the long, drawn out process that was documented in Section VI of this report, a process which purported to be in place to weed out wrongdoing but in fact was intended to dilute the force of the anger coming from students by elongating the process and thus make this student backlash manageable and, above all, to keep details from leaking out to the public at large.

The result was that one of the worst offenders and abusers among the Slavic Department faculty, a person who the entire faculty (with the exception of this person's spouse) realize is severely in need of psychological counseling, was actually allowed to serve for one year on the promotion and tenure committee, one of the most important committees in the University in that the approval of this committee is one of the last steps in the granting of tenure. This is yet another example of how failing to have a system in place under which faculty could be effectively subjected to discipline may have hurt people who have nothing to do with Slavic. The idea that this individual would be a deciding voice in whether or not a person receives tenure or promotion is frightening. As a result of her having been allowed to serve on this committee, the UCLA Administration should revisit every case that she had a part in deciding to ensure that the right decision was made. In fact, everyone who lost a position or failed to get promotion under this version of the CAP committee should receive a second chance for tenure or promotion.

6. The idea of anonymous course evaluations is a good one in that they provide students with an opportunity to evaluate the level and quality of instruction presented to them in a given course. Naturally, course evaluations must be taken with a certain degree of skepticism, since there will always be students who would choose either to spew vitriol unjustifiably on an instructor whom they did not like or else heap praise on an instructor with whom they were enamored, regardless of the performance of that instructor. Yet, taken as a whole, and with a wide enough sampling base, course evaluations do play an important role and can offer insight. In graduate school, however, the role of these evaluations is more complicated, simply because the courses have many times fewer students enrolled (at the graduate level, these courses are usually seminars), and thus the anonymity of the students filling out the response is much less secure. In other words, in a class of five people, if one student voiced a complaint on a supposedly "anonymous" evaluation form about a specific incident, it would be fairly easy to discern which student wrote that evaluation. A new system is needed for graduate student feedback, but until that comes about, the UCLA Administration must make sure that the option of the old system, however flawed it may be, is still available to graduate students. In the UCLA Slavic Department it was not unheard of for a faculty member to pass out course evaluations and then sit there while the students filled them out. It should be made clear to all faculty that once these forms have been passed out, the faculty member should leave the room. Students should also be given the option of taking the evaluation form out of the room and dropping it off anonymously later, thus giving them more time to think through their responses.

7. The system in place for comprehensive exams at the masters level needs to change. As it stands now, in most departments that have comprehensive exams for the masters level, there are three possible outcomes: 1. Outright failure of the exams, in which case no degree is given and no admission into the Ph.D. program is allowed; 2. The so-called "low pass" (officially, just a "pass") in which a masters degree is granted but no admission into the Ph.D. program is allowed; 3. The "high pass" in which a masters degree is awarded and admission to the Ph.D. program is granted. While the existence of the "low pass" option might at first glance seem favorable to students, since after all, at least they will have a degree of some sort to show for their time and trouble, it in fact serves a very different purpose. The "low pass" masters degree is merely an additional tool the faculty use to weed out students while at the same time pacifying these students in the hope that they won't cause a fuss. ("Oh well, at last I got a masters degree out of it.") Students who spent two or three years working towards admission to the Ph.D. program via passing the Masters comprehensive exams are much less likely to take lying down an arbitrary failure on the comprehensive exams if they are going to get nothing out of it at all. Beyond this, the existence of two levels of masters degrees calls into question the academic integrity of the institution that grants such a degree. An M.A. should represent the same level of knowledge for every student who earns one. It is absurd for an academic institution to award a student a masters degree, thereby presumably certifying a certain level of expertise, and then rejecting that same student for its Ph.D. program.

There is no such thing as a "low pass" bachelors degree or a "low pass" doctorate degree; nor should there be a "low pass" masters degree.

8. The current system of evaluating departments, the review of a department once every eight years, is inadequate to achieve true oversight of an academic department, but the changes that need to be made in this process will need to be addressed at a higher level. It is obvious from the events surrounding the Eight-Year Review of the UCLA Slavic Department and the cover-up that ensued that the UCLA Administration has neither the will nor (apparently) the ability to take the necessary steps in this regard. One thing that can be done, however, is to make more accessible the results of whatever review process (be it the current Eight-Year Review or whatever replaces it) not only to the students, but also to the public at large. The results of every review of every department should no longer be hidden in the Academic Senate office, nor should they be restricted to a single review copy in the department that was reviewed. UCLA is a public institution, funded by taxpayers, and everyone should have immediate and complete access to these reviews via the Internet. Just as the answer to the Enron/World-Com scandals and the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandals has been a demand for transparency, so too should transparency be the watchword for the abusive conditions that currently blight UCLA.

The words of J. Robert Oppenheimer here are instructive: "We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert." Proof of Oppenheimer's claim can all too easily be found in the events surrounding the Eight-Year Review of the UCLA Slavic Department. The results of every review of every department at every UC campus (and ideally at every institution of higher learning) should be made readily available via the Internet to all who would like to view them.

9. Exit interviews should be done for all graduate students. In instances where graduate students have simply stopped attending, UCLA should take the initiative in contacting these graduate students to ascertain why it is they have chosen to leave their program.

University of California/UC Regents

1. There is a need to establish an independent and permanent review apparatus. Clearly the present system, in which tenured UC professors and outside tenured faculty are used to review their tenured brethren, is unsatisfactory. A permanent review apparatus should be completely independent of the University Administration itself, reporting directly to either the Regents or to the State Legislature and the Governor. Reviews of academic departments should occur at least once every three years and in addition, there should be random, unannounced reviews from time to time. Among the rules governing this new process of review would be the following:

-Faculty would be prohibited from discussing such reviews with students

-Faculty would be prohibited from prompting students beforehand as to what they should or should not say to the reviewers.

- The department being reviewed should not be allowed to suggest a list of possible external reviewers. Before the external reviewers are finally selected, their names should be run past the graduate students of that department to prevent situations such as was seen in the most recent Eight-Year Review when it was discovered that Alan Timberlake, himself a former member of the UCLA Slavic Department, was going to be on the external review committee.

- A UC graduate student should be a part of each review, and should be compensated appropriately for his or her efforts. (Under the current system, the only reviewer who is not compensated is the graduate student reviewer.)

- All incoming graduate students should be provided contact numbers/emails/addresses to this permanent review organization and be instructed in ways to get in touch with that organization should any of these graduate students feel uncomfortable with the way the review is being conducted.

- Again, all review reports should be available in full via the Internet to the public at large.

2. There need to be fundamental changes in the nature and meaning of tenure at the University of California. Tenure as originally conceived was not meant to be a system by which faculty were guaranteed a job for life. Tenure was meant to do two things: A. Protect faculty from being terminated for teaching controversial doctrines; B. Protect faculty from being terminated for publishing articles and books which are perceived by some as controversial. These are worthy aims, and tenure in so far as it means retaining these protections should without question be retained. What tenure was not supposed to do, however, was to extend into every nook and cranny of the University teaching experience. When faculty can not be told that their teaching methodology needs to be changed (not the substance of what they are teaching, but how they are teaching it), when faculty cannot be told to keep from discussing sensitive issues regarding the faculty themselves with their graduate students, as happened during the Eight-Year Review of the UCLA Slavic Department, then the Moosa-ization of the academe will have been completed, in effect giving complete and unchecked power to the faculty. This is what tenure is well on its way to becoming, if it isn't there already. When one segment of the University, or of any organization for that matter, has absolute freedom, then that means every other segment has its rights and freedoms severely curtailed. No faculty member, tenured or otherwise, should have absolute free rein to do whatever he or she pleases. Tenure must be redefined in such a way that faculty, even those with tenure, can be held accountable for the type of behavior seen in the UCLA Slavic Department and elsewhere.

The examples given in this report deal mostly with the personal consequences of what happens when tenure is used as a broad shield for actions which have grave implications for graduate students, e.g. dismissal from the program, failure to receive recommendations for jobs and tenure, etc. This abuse of tenure also has consequences beyond these, however. It in effect creates two different classes of faculty, those who truly have the freedom to speak their mind, i.e. those with tenure, and those who don't have such freedom, i.e. those coming up for tenure or academics without tenure track positions (lecturers, professors-in-residence, etc.) With time, as the "reach" of tenure has expanded, that is to say as the number of areas covered by tenure has grown, there has been an inversely proportional shrinking in the ratio of tenured faculty to non-tenured faculty. One need only look at this ratio fifty years ago and compare it to what it is today. What this means is that an ever larger percentage of faculty members do not enjoy the protections of tenure. As the reach of tenure has expanded to the point where its abuse as seen in the UCLA Slavic Department and the Moosa case at California State University, Chico has become more and more common, educational institutions are understandably that much more reluctant to open up tenure-track positions. It is much easier for all concerned to have students taught by adjunct faculty or lecturers, academics without tenure who will not rock the boat on University issues out of fear of losing their jobs. Of course, this also means that they will be more cautious in expressing themselves on academic and scholarly issues, exactly the sort of check on intellectual freedom that tenure was supposed to prevent. This is yet another reason that tenure should be redefined to what it was originally meant to be, protection for the scholar to teach and publish what he wants without fear of retribution, and not from what it has become, a broad shield behind which any sort of behavior can be engaged in, irrespective of how odious or hurtful this behavior is to other members of the academic community.

3. The punishment and misdeeds of professors can no longer be considered purely personal matters. In the past, the University would hide behind the excuse of protecting an employee's privacy when questioned about an individual professor's proclivity to abuse graduate students or to abuse other staff and faculty. The protection of an employee's privacy is and should remain a paramount concern of the University. (It's a pity the University did not feel the same way when informed that the Slavic Department Chairman had illegally released grades from the transcripts of the one graduate student who stood up publicly to the Slavic Department, but never mind.) Unlike any other members of the University community, decisions made by faculty members affect students to a disproportionately large extent, and this fact must be taken into account when determining what degree of privacy be granted to them. In purely personal matters, or in matters that have only to do with issues between faculty members and the administration, then of course normal privacy rules should apply. But in instances where abuse of students is at issue, then the record of the faculty member in question as it applies to issues of student abuse should be accessible not only to all members of the University community, but also to the taxpayers and public at large who are paying to support this university system.

No doubt the current academic administration will decry this as a violation of privacy and submit that such matters as best handled discretely by the university administration itself, thereby raising the question, "best" for whom? For the tenured faculty that the university administration represents and seeks to protect at every turn? It goes without saying that, for them, it would be better that there be no public record of instances of abuse towards graduate students. But for the greater good of the academic community and the public that supports the university system, it is best that all such confirmed instances of graduate student abuse be made readily available to the public. Just as the results of future departmental reviews should be posted on the Web, so too should prior confirmed instances of graduate student abuse by individual faculty members be readily accessible via the Web. Again, transparency is the watchword.

4. There should be no more confidential settlements by UC. It is the people's money; they have a right to know what is being done with it. Any legal suits brought against UC that are eventually settled out of court should not be done so with secret settlements, and by this term "secret settlements" is meant not only those settlements in which a legally binding non-disclosure clause is agreed upon, but also those settlements in which such "non-disclosure" is simply understood. In one form or another it is taxpayers' money that is being used to settle these suits. Beyond that, the public has a right to know of the conduct of the University employees whose salaries it pays. In other words, those who offend should not be allowed to buy their way out with the public's money, but rather should be held publicly accountable for their actions. Whenever the University pays off in a legal settlement, regardless of the legal nature of non-disclosure involved, everything about that case, including the amount of money paid out and to whom, should be posted on the Web and be easily accessible to those who pay for the running and upkeep of the University, i.e. the public at large, as well as to those who choose to donate to the University. Transparency.

5. As part of this movement toward transparency, the University needs to make most of its internal documents accessible via the web. As it stands right now, almost all University documentation that is not directly associated with a specific employee's personnel file, is accessible to the public, but often only after cumbersome requests via the Freedom of Information Act, requests which sometimes take weeks and months to process and for which the requester is usually charged a fee, usually somewhere along the lines of ten cents to twenty-five cents a page. Thus, while this information is nominally available to the public, the time and expense involved in prying it free from the various UC administrative units in which the information resides in effect discourages citizens from examining the workings of the university system that their tax dollars support.

The solution to this is to make all information that is legally accessible via the Freedom of Information Act immediately accessible to the public at large without having to go through the Freedom of Information Act, by either placing it permanently on the Web or making it accessible via the Web when it is requested. It may have been the case in the days of typewritten documentation that it was justifiable to charge someone by the page to copy such documents, but in the present day, almost every document is produced on computer and thus is already in digitized form. It would cost next to nothing to place such documents on the Web (either permanently or when requested), and that is precisely what should be done. The UC system, just like the California State University system and the state community college system, belongs to the people of California, the people who authorized it and the people who pay for it, and thus these same people have a right to the maximum insight possible into this system, with a maximum of speed and a minimal amount of cost (if any).

Moreover, statistics involving the graduate program of each department on each of the ten UC campuses should be included on the website of that department. These statistics should include, but not necessarily be limited to, the following:

• Percentage of students that enter the program vs. percentage of students who finish with a Ph.D.

• Percentage of students who are funded in the department by year.

• Percentage of the students who are fully funded in the department, that is to say, percentage who receive a livable wage that does not require them to seek outside work while trying to attend graduate school. (Each campus usually has a suggested income level for what is needed to live and study in the locale in which the college or university is located.)

• Of those students who are funded, but not fully funded, the average amount provided to each of these students (not including funding used to offset fees and tuition) should be listed.

• To the extent that former graduate students will allow it, their contact information should be provided so that prospective graduate students can contact them and get firsthand information on what it is like to be a graduate student in that department. This list of former graduate students should not include only those who finished the program and are gainfully employed in the field, but should include everyone who was ever in the program. For obvious reasons, it is more beneficial for a prospective student to speak with former students who did not finish the program in order to ask why they didn't finish.

6. The practice of UC paying the legal fees of professors who abuse students, who break the law, or who, by their arbitrary actions, bring about damages of any sort in the lives of their students, should end. If the conduct of tenured faculty member is egregious enough that it motivates a student to go to court, then the professor should pay his own legal fees and not expect the University, funded by taxpayers and public monies, to reach in its pocket to pay fees that result from that professor's own misconduct. In rare cases where it is deemed appropriate for the University to pay the fees of the faculty member, then it should also be willing to pay the legal fees of the student or students who are bringing the charges. The legal playing field between student and faculty must be made level.

In addition, in those rare instances in which the University ends up paying some or all of the legal bills for the misdeeds of a professor, if there is judgment against the Regents, that professor himself should be expected to pay some, if not all, of the judgment from his own pocket. It is only when held accountable for their actions that the faculty will come to appreciate the need to behave appropriately.

7. It must be made clear to the all the faculty of UC that there is no inherent "right to privacy" for messages sent and received on UC emails or stored on UC computers. Computers purchased either with UC money or with grant money associated with the professor's work at UC are not the personal property of the professor, but rather belong to the University of California. During the 1999-2000 Eight-Year Review of the UCLA Slavic Department, several of the faculty from this department were under the false impression that they had no obligation to reveal what they had done and what they had written on their computers regarding their attempts to minimize and cover up the abuse of graduate students in the UCLA Slavic Department. They have every right to take their case to court (not that the UCLA Academic Administration would let it go that far anyway), but they will lose. While they may maintain the right to whatever intellectual property that is on their computers, they maintain no right to exclusivity of access to those computers. The University of California system needs to make this very clear to its faculty.

8. When the time finally comes that the UC Regents are actually forced to address the issue of what happened with the Eight-Year Review of the UCLA Slavic Department and the cover-up that ensued, it must be understood that there can be no "compromise" on the part of the UC Regents with regard to the interpretation of these events or the reality of the graduate student abuse in the UCLA Slavic Department that was behind these events. Academe can be remarkably Byzantine in these matters, always ready (when pure application of force is no longer effective) to seek out face-saving compromise. Indeed, face-saving solutions are more or less knee-jerk reactions in matters such as this in the world of academe.

But no response from the UC Regents that would allow the UCLA Slavic Department to "save face" would be acceptable, for in order for this department to "save face", one would have to posit a scenario in which there was a "misunderstanding" (or, better yet, an "unfortunate misunderstanding") between faculty and students such that the students somehow mistakenly believed they were being abused. Even worse, it would imply that there might be no pressing need to bring about reform, when in point of fact only the most drastic of reforms are capable of changing this system. Any evaluation of this episode by the UC Regents that fails to openly acknowledge the abuse of graduate students by the UCLA Slavic Department faculty, that fails to acknowledge the wrong-doing on the part of those faculty members who abused, and those who lied about such abuse, and those who conspired to cover up such abuse—in short, any evaluation by the UC Regents that does not condemn in the strongest possible terms the events that transpired relating to the UCLA Slavic Department and the Eight-Year Review, can only be seen as an attempt by the University system to continue the cover up of these events. There can be no gray area here: The UC Regents must openly embrace the reformers and openly condemn the abusers, and then husband the political will to make the painful changes needed to bring about reform of the system.

9. Former graduate students from the UCLA Slavic Department must be given the option to finish their degree if they didn't do so before. Students who "failed" comprehensive exams should be given the opportunity to retake a new set of exams, written and supervised by outside observers. How many students would want to take advantage of such an option cannot be known, but one suspects that these numbers would be small since most of these former graduate students have moved on in their lives. The option, however, should be theirs.

Given the inevitable stain that will blemish the UCLA Slavic Department with the release of this and future reports, current graduate students in the UCLA Slavic Department should also be given the option of transferring out of the UCLA Slavic Department and transferring to the UC campus and department of their choice. It is difficult enough to get a job once one leaves graduate school, and although it may not be fair to the graduate students, they will be the ones who suffer as the reputation of the UCLA Slavic Department suffers. They have invested an enormous amount of time and energy in their studies in the UCLA Slavic Department. If they want to take their chances and finish their degree in this department, then that should be their choice, but they should also be offered the alternative of finishing their degree in another department at UCLA, or at another UC campus altogether, if they feel that this will give them the best opportunity to move forward in the field. The department and choice of UC campus should be theirs and theirs alone.

10. If there is one thing that is beyond question with regard to the UCLA Slavic Department and its review, it is that UCLA as an institution is incapable of investigating its own departments in any meaningful or substantive way. Even after abusive behavior was revealed, even after the Chair of the UCLA Slavic Department was exposed as a liar and as one who violated the law, even after the risks taken by UCLA graduate students to cooperate with the various review teams, not a single faculty member was fired. Not a single faculty member was reprimanded. Indeed, the Chair of the UCLA Slavic Department, the professor who lied and broke the law in an effort to cover up the abuses of the faculty towards its graduate students, was actually promoted, not one step, but two steps.

What this means is that if there is to be a true investigation of the UCLA Slavic Department, then it cannot be directed at the University level (i.e. it can not be undertaken and directed by UCLA itself), but must be instituted and directed at the University of California system level, at the very least, and must include full investigative powers and it must have the necessary investigative, academic, and administrative manpower to explore in depth the past actions of this department.

California State Legislature

As was discussed above, even though the University of California is a state-financed University that was created by the California State Legislature and developed by the state, it maintains a large degree of independence from the State Legislature. The Regents of the University were created to act in large part as a buffer between the University system and the state, thus insulating the University from political trends and pressures that emanate from the political body that has ultimate authority over it. The goal of freeing the intellectual and scholarly element of the university system from such pressures is in itself a good one as it allows scholars and researchers to delve freely into every sort of topic and it protects the university system and the individual researcher from any potential political backlash that might come about as a result of what the researcher chooses to teach or publish. In a sense, this distance between the Legislature and the university system is to the university system what tenure was supposed to be for individual faculty members: protection against unjust and unwarranted political interference into the work of the University. But just as tenure can be abused, so too can the independence of the university system from the Legislature that authorizes and financially supports it be abused.

The State Legislature must realize that it is the last representative of the people with regard to how their tax dollars are used by the University of California. While it is good that the State Legislature respects the need for an academic system free from political influence in how it conducts its research, in what it teaches in its courses, and in what it publishes, the Legislature cannot ignore its responsibility to ensure that taxpayers' dollars are not spent on a system that allows the sort of abuse and cover-up that can be seen in this report. One would hope that the UC Regents will recognize the scope and severity of this problem and take real, effective measures to bring about change, but there is no guarantee that this will be the case.

Usually the State Legislature is extremely reluctant to interfere into the specifics of the University of California or California State University systems, preferring instead to allow the Regents of these particular university systems to provide oversight. By allowing the current system to develop the way it has (at least with regard to the University of California system, although as the Moosa case makes clear, the same problem can be found in the California State University system) these state-appointed Regents have shown that they are in need of more direct oversight, at least with regard to this issue. Individual members of the State Legislature prefer not to deal directly with problems in the University of California system, as can be seen clearly in the case of the California state senator who suggested that his/her involvement in this case might somehow constitute a "separation of powers" infringement. The "Separation of Powers" doctrine was designed to protect the government from fusing into a single governmental entity by preserving the system of checks and balances put in place to prevent any one branch of government from acquiring too much power. What it was not intended to do, however, was to relieve any one branch of government from addressing issues of wrongdoing. In fact, just the opposite is true—the system of checks and balances supposedly protected by the separation of powers should do just that: it should check unjust behavior and balance out negative actions by other branches of the government.

This is not to say that the State Legislature has to be the governmental entity that forces reform upon the University of California. It may in fact turn out that the Regents of UC will find the political resolve to rein in a faculty that has run amuck and reform a system of academic administrations that lacks the will and/or power to carry out effective oversight of individual academic departments and faculty members. But should it turn out to be the case that the UC Regents are not capable of doing this, then the State Legislature must overcome its squeamishness and step in to bring about change. One member of the California State Senate who was contacted concerning the events surrounding the Eight-Year Review of the UCLA Slavic Department explained her reluctance to get involved as follows: since some graduate students might take the University of California to state court as a result of the abuse visited upon them by UC faculty and UC administrators who covered up this abuse, the State Legislature should therefore stay out of the fray lest it interfere in the State Judiciary and thereby "somehow" blur the lines of demarcation that define the "Separation of Powers" doctrine. Such a scenario, however, is simply not credible. In order for the system of checks and balances to work at all—in other words, in order for there even to be a possibility of "checking" the inappropriate actions of one branch of government—there must be at least some interface between the various branches of government. Just because two different branches of government find themselves involved in a single incident involving one of the state's university systems is not tantamount to weakening the separation of powers doctrine. Ultimately the University of California and the state's other two systems of higher education derive their power and authority from the people through the people's representatives in the Legislature, thus making it appropriate—in exceptional cases and circumstances—for that same legislature to take action to ensure that the educational system work the way it was originally intended to work. If students are at the same time seeking financial and criminal redress through the use of the judiciary system, then these are not conflicting phenomena, but complementary actions, with each branch of government doing what it is supposed to be doing.

Regardless of what changes are instituted (or not instituted) by the Regents, the Legislature should also conduct open hearings on the inability of the state university systems to practice effective oversight and discipline of their faculties, and on the issue of the abuse of students at the hand of faculty in these particular systems. The public at large has a right to know how their tax-dollars are being spent on these public institutions of higher learning, and anything less than an intensive, extensive, and public investigation of these institutions, along with legislation to correct the situation and ensure transparency in future operations of these institutions, would be is a disservice to those who support these institutions financially.

Law Enforcement

In his attempt to deny and cover up the abuse of graduate students at the hands of UCLA Slavic Department faculty, Michael Heim broke both state and federal law by releasing grades from the undergraduate transcript of student XX to third parties without the consent of student XX. (XX, to refresh memories, was the one student who allowed her story to be told in such a way that she was easily identifiable to those within the UCLA Slavic Department.) Possibly because she was the only student to allow her complaints to be publicly identified with her it was felt by the Department that her story of abuse above all the other stories of abuse must be singled out and attacked, and the smear campaign by Heim, later picked up by the outside reviewers Bethea/Timberlake, was presumably part of that attack, hence the decision to actually release her grades to others without her consent.

The law enforcement agencies responsible for enforcing these laws, both at the state and federal levels, must not be hesitant in bringing charges against Michael Heim for breaking this law. Arguments typically given in situations such as this against bringing charges would be that Michael Heim would be a first time-offender, or that the crime in question—releasing a student's grades without her permission—is a relatively minor crime in the larger scope of things. This is all true as far as it goes: it is doubtful that Michael Heim has ever been charged with a crime, and Michael Heim's failure to adhere to the law in this instance can hardly be equated to other crimes that involve bodily violence and theft.

And yet, the fact cannot be denied that he did break the law, and he did so for the most ignominious of reasons, in order to smear a student who had the courage to stand up to the Slavic Department and to report openly on the abuse she suffered at the hands of that department and of that faculty. Just because the nature of the offense was not equal to assault and battery or theft, the law he broke was still a law, and it is a law for a reason, in order to protect the privacy of students at institutions of higher education. If society only enforced laws against more egregious offenses, then there would be no need to have laws against smaller offenses, since by this reasoning, they would never be enforced anyway.

Moreover, if Michael Heim gets away with not being prosecuted for his violation of the law, this sends yet another message to all tenured faculty, namely this: everyone gets one "freebee", one opportunity to break these laws concerning the protection of student privacy without consequence. Ignoring infractions of these laws would have serious consequences for students in review situations such as the one seen in the Eight-Year Review of the UCLA Slavic Department. It is difficult enough to persuade students to participate voluntarily in a review of their own faculty, especially when they get burned as happened in this particular review. It would be that much more difficult to persuade them to participate if they knew that their personal academic information (and any other personal information in the possession of their academic department) can be released to the public with impunity should their home department choose to do so.

The facts here are simple. By releasing XX's grades from her undergraduate transcript to third parties without her consent, Michael Heim broke several laws. He must be held accountable for his actions. A full accounting of Michael Heim's actions will be provided to the appropriate state and federal law enforcement authorities. Failure by law enforcement officials to do so would simply be an extension of the same type of favoritism we have seen granted to the Slavic Department faculty by the UCLA academic administration and by the UCLA Academic Senate.

Faculty Members: At UCLA and At Other Institutions

The predicted response of faculty members and suggestions for what they should do in reaction to the release of this report is divided into a section on UCLA faculty, including specifically Slavic Department faculty members, and non-UCLA faculty.

UCLA Faculty

The reaction of UCLA faculty who are members of the UCLA Slavic Department will, not surprisingly, depend on the individual faculty member. As was mentioned above, for those who abused students or those who participated in the cover up of this abuse, silence would probably be the prudent option, but as can be seen from the Eight-Year Review report itself, reason does not always guide their actions. They may try to point to the follow up review in 2002 of the UCLA Slavic Department (this was a "mini-review" of the Department, not equal to the original review in depth or in scope and one without a UCLA graduate student as a part of the Internal Review team) in which some improvements were noted. What they will not tell you, of course, is that by the time this review came around, it had been made crystal clear to graduate students in the UCLA Slavic Department that there could be no trust in the earlier promises to protect them were they to honestly and openly participate in this follow-up review two years after the original, thereby severely compromising students' ability to criticize openly. Fool us once, shame on you, fool us twice, shame on us. Thus, any attempt by the UCLA Slavic Department faculty to appeal to student opinion elicited since the original review must be seen in that light.

No doubt the knee-jerk reaction of some faculty in the UCLA Slavic Department will be to deny the charges. Others may attempt to attenuate the nature of the charges by adopting the "Mistakes Were Made" defense. Given the overwhelming evidence seen in the Eight-Year Review report itself, both options appear rather pointless, but when one of the reviewers in the 2000 review characterized faculty members of the UCLA Slavic Department of being "in denial", this was not an exaggeration. Still others, especially those who threatened to bring suit against UCLA for prohibiting them from talking with graduate students in the UCLA Slavic Department about the Eight-Year Review report, and who even have threatened students at times with legal action, might attempt to strike out legally again. These are people who, regardless of the evidence gathered in support of the charges of abuse, will fight to the end to "defend the honor" of the Department and the University, by which they really mean they will fight to the end to defend themselves, since they have effectively, in their minds, conflated the two concepts. To them, they are the Department, and any failure of the University back them 100% (much less an attempt by the University to reprimand and discipline them) is taken as a personal attack. What these abusive faculty members, and those who tried to cover up the abuse, should do, of course, is to admit what they did and to cease this never ending round of denials. The evidence of the wrongdoing and the subsequent cover up attempts is overwhelming, and there is more to come. Whether such an admission will actually be made, however, is doubtful. Some have advocated the creation of a sort of "Truth and Reconciliation" panel, not unlike that which was employed in South Africa after the fall of apartheid, in which faculty would be excused from further punishment if they would agree to be open and honest in their account of what was done to graduate students in the UCLA Slavic Department throughout the years. It is doubtful, however, whether this would work, mainly because it is very unlikely that any of the offending faculty would be willing to tell the truth (indeed, after so many years of lying and cover up, it is doubtful that any of these faculty members would even recognize the truth), and beyond that, very few former students who bore the brunt of this treatment have any desire to "reconcile" with this faculty, with this department, or with this university. There are alternative avenues by which to seek redress.

Finally, there is that group of Slavic Department faculty who were not abusive and who did not scheme to minimize and cover up the abuses that were occurring within the UCLA Slavic Department. Part of this group consists of non-tenured lecturers, who of course are limited in what they can and cannot say. Among the group of tenured professors, there were some who saw what was going on and worked to change the system, including the above-mentioned "Prague Spring" chairperson and others who tried to work within the system to bring about change, only to be stymied by the collective will of the old guard and the inertia this old guard represents.

In an early section of this report it was noted that there exists within academia, as is the case within many of the professional vocations, a strong sense of professional courtesy (Section II). This sense of professional courtesy has been more or less codified into a set of rules, one of which dictates that one academic should never criticize another academic publicly. If there is criticism to be handed out, then it should be done so within the system put in place by the University itself. Unfortunately, more often than not this tends simply to mute criticism of faculty misconduct. While the stated reason for such circumspection might be in order for the individual in question to be afforded fair treatment, to keep from disrupting the work of the University, etc. etc., the more probable reason is that, by keeping academics from criticizing other academics, the system itself, a system by which faculty have almost unlimited power, is protected.

While one should acknowledge that this one group of faculty within the UCLA Slavic Department did in fact try to play by the accepted "rules" in their attempts to reform the Department, it is now abundantly clear that such rules no longer serve any purpose, since the word on the abusive nature of the UCLA Slavic Department is already out of the bag. Beyond that, adherence to such a code of professional silence at this point would be tantamount to joining those members of the UCLA Slavic Department who were attempting to minimize and cover up the abuse in the first place. Good faith efforts were made, time and again, to use the system already in place to deal with these instances of abuse, but all this resulted in was more cover up and more denial. The thing for these faculty members to do now is to be open, comprehensive and honest with the public concerning the events that took place within the UCLA Slavic Department. These faculty know who they are. They did nothing wrong, they made no attempt to minimize or deny the abuses that were occurring within the Department, they made no attempt to strategize on how best to keep the Department from avoiding responsibility for its actions, and thus these faculty should have nothing to fear by speaking up openly and truthfully concerning the conditions within the UCLA Slavic Department.

Non-UCLA Faculty

Relationships between faculty members at different institutions but in related fields are usually defined solely in terms of scholarly work, although inevitably it is the case that among these professional relationships personal friendships can and do develop. Just as those members of the UCLA Slavic Department who were abusive and/or covered up such abuse will be tempted to turn to their students for support against the charges that have been made in this report, so also will they be tempted to turn to their fellow academics in the field, soliciting support in terms of attestations as to their character, their devotion to the field and to their students, the high quality of their scholarship, etc.

In a sense, this puts these outside faculty in a situation somewhat akin (although not nearly as perilous) as that of graduate students who are asked to come to the defense of their faculty. Obviously these outside faculty are in no position to say that this abuse has never occurred, since they are not at UCLA, and especially since, given the weight of the evidence already available, it would be pure folly to make this claim. The dangers of trying to minimize abuse committed by faculty members at institutions not your own is that someone else at that institution who is familiar with the abusive behavior can trump you at every point, as was seen in this report's point-by-point rebuttal of Bethea/Timberlake's attempts to overlook the abuses of the UCLA Slavic Department in general and the lies of the UCLA Slavic Department Chair in particular. The probable response of these outside faculty will be to speak truthfully, but in general terms about the faculty in question. One may hear statements from them such as "I have never met an academic so committed to his field and so concerned about graduate students." Statements such as these sound good, and they would appear to offer support to any UCLA Slavic Department faculty member who was coming under fire, but one should note as well what is not being said in a statement such as this. While the elements that comprise the statement may be true, i.e. while the academic heaping the praise may in fact have never met someone so committed to the field, and may in fact have never known someone so concerned about graduate students, that does not mean that the academic in question always acts in a manner consistent with those principles. As has already been pointed out above, Michael Heim often acted as a shoulder to cry on for graduate students who had just been skewered by one of the abusive faculty members, and often tried, within the very limited system of academe, to address some issues.

That fact does not, however, excuse his attempts to cover up the abuse that took place in the UCLA Slavic Department, and there is nothing in this theoretical statement of support that implies that he did not attempt to cover up this abuse. It does not excuse him for lying to the Eight-Year Review committee, and there is nothing in this theoretical statement of support that implies that he did not lie to the Eight-Year Review committee. It does not excuse him for lying to the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate, it does not excuse him for breaking the law, and there is nothing in this theoretical statement of support that implies that he did not lie to the Graduate Council and that he did not break the law. It is usually possible to find something good to say concerning just about anyone, and such statements will be made by non-UCLA faculty concerning those members of the UCLA Slavic Department faculty who abused students or who attempted to cover up that abuse, but the questions that should be asked about these statements are 1. Do they deny that the abuse took place? and 2., If so, how do those who make such statements denying such abuse (or actions to cover up or minimize such abuse) know this? In other words, what evidence do they have to disprove the accusations of abuse made in this report and elsewhere? Have they spoken with every graduate student who ever went through the program? Anyone who, in an attempt to support the faculty of the UCLA Slavic Department, tries to claim that there was no such abuse should be ready to back up his or her statements with the appropriate evidence in support of that claim.

It is important to read such statements of support not only for what they are, but also for what they are not, not only for what they say, but for what they do not say.

Unions at UC

Workers at UCLA are represented by a number of different unions — University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE), Coalition of University Employees, (CUE), University Council — American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT), Association of Graduate Student Employees (AGSE), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and others, each of which must negotiate with the UC Administration not only for pay and benefit packages, but also for the rules and regulations that govern their conduct within the University setting, and for what the various thresholds and criteria are when it comes to the application of disciplinary action against any of its members, actions up to and including job termination. These unions should demand that the standards for dismissal for unethical behavior be set no higher for their employees than those same standards are set for tenured faculty. Indeed, the standards for ethical behavior—and thus the potential for dismissal for violating those standards—should be set higher for tenured faculty, since they represent the main function of the University (as opposed, say, to the men's basketball coach, whose role with regard to the main function of the University is peripheral at best).

These unions should not allow themselves to fall prey to the "outstretched hand" coming to them from the tenured faculty. For too long the workers unions in the UC system have mistakenly drawn an artificial distinction between the tenured faculty on the one hand, whom they see to be relatively sympathetic to their cause, and the UC Academic Administration on the other hand, which they see as their natural "management" antagonist. In fact, as this report has attempted to show, these two entities are actually one in the same. Even in instances where there is a legally recognized union for the tenured faculty, e.g. the California Faculty Association for the California State University tenured professoriate, this union is less a union in the traditional sense of labor vs. management, but rather more of a guarantee that the tenured faculty's privileged position as the leading force of the University will be preserved. It is only in the most egregious of circumstances (e.g. the situation at California State University, Chico when Professor Moosa refused to comply with any of the demands by those who were putatively above him in the University hierarchy) that brings the faculty into legal confrontation with the academic administration, and as the outcome of the Moosa case showed quite conclusively, the academic administration that is said to "supervise" these tenured faculty often comes to regret its decision to challenge these tenured professors. While these so-called "unions" do at times play a legitimate role in protecting legitimate faculty interests, all too often their efforts are directed at doing whatever is needed to protect their tenured members, regardless of how outlandish the claims of abuse by the tenured professor. (Again, the Moosa case serves as a poster-child for such outlandishness.)

UC unions should bear this in mind when evaluating the contents of this report. Allowing the tenured faculty to run amok and propping up a system that allows faculty malfeasance to occur unchecked and unpunished is not in the interest of the University workers whose welfare these unions are pledged to protect. Rare is the University employee who does not have his or her tale of what happens when conflict breaks out between a tenured faculty member and a non-tenured university employee. Moreover, the double standard between tenured and non-tenured employees with regard to work performance and the consequences for failure to maintain high performance standards, is striking. There is no reason that non-tenured employees should be held to a higher standard of ethnical and professional conduct than the tenured faculty while at the same time enjoying a lower level of job security than these same tenured faculty.

Student Loan Organizations

One of the dirty little secrets of graduate programs, especially those in the humanities and those that are run by a public university, is that it is often not possible to fully fund all graduate students. The topic of funding has been touched upon elsewhere in this report, especially in Section II, but to revisit the issue briefly here, what often happens is that departments which don't have sufficient funding are faced with an unsettling choice: either preside over a smaller program that funds all of its students, or divide up what funding there is between a larger number of students. This is especially problematic for smaller programs, such as Slavic departments. The fact is that it is extremely difficult for humanities programs such as Slavic in public universities to compete with some of the established programs at private institutions. (For a summary of this phenomenon, see the Los Angeles Times story "Grad Students Turning Away From UC System" by Jeff Gottlieb, October 21, 2001.) In the most recent announcement (http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0310D&L=seelangs&P=R1197) made by Princeton for their program in Slavic Linguistics, incoming students were being offered a five-year fellowship which covered tuition and what was described as a "generous living stipend", as well as summer support and other benefits. Rarely is a state institution able to offer such a package to all of its graduate students.

Unfortunately, some of the financially less fortunate graduate programs at state institutions will attempt to compete with these better funded programs by overadmitting to their graduate programs. At UCLA, a certain amount of money for each graduate student is awarded to the Department, but that money need not go to the student himself. It is thus in the program's interest to have a full-size contingent of graduate students, even if it cannot support that contingent financially. The strategy of the UCLA Slavic Department was to admit students with vague promises of funding, and then when such funding did not appear in sufficient amounts (assuming it appeared at all), encouraging students to take out guaranteed student loans to make up the difference. The Department would then begin its "healthy selection", i.e. its process of culling out students at the masters level, giving them their "low pass" M.A., and sending them on their way with a masters degree in Russian (not exactly a "money producing" masters degree) and a couple year's worth of student loan debt.

In recent years there has been a move to hold colleges and universities accountable for the quality of the education that they provide to their students. (See Excite News, Canada article "Colleges Required to Prove Learning" Sunday, May 6, 2001; by A.P. national writer Arlene Levinson; See also "White House Seeks to Monitor College Graduation Rates" by Dorothy Augustyniak in the March 11^th, 2002 issue of the UCLA Daily Bruin — http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/articles.asp?ID=18870) Establishing whether or not a given institution is doing what it claims to be doing should be a crucial component in deciding whether this same institution is worthy of being a part of the federally guaranteed student loan programs. These student loan programs, in which the government guarantees the loans, are made available to higher education and technical/trade programs that are generally held to be reputable. There are many instances of institutions which appear at first glance to be reputable, but then after several years of operation, are seen to be little more than diploma mills, issuing "degrees" and "certificates" that do not allow their graduates to secure the sort of future that is normally implied by the advertisements for these institutions. What happens is that the students take out massive loans to pay for their "education" at these institutions only to find out afterwards that they have no way of paying back those loans, which then results in default, and eventually in the removal of these institutions from the federally supported student loan programs, but not before these institutions have collected tens of thousands of taxpayers' money in profit. (For a transcript of a recent 60 Minutes story on how these diploma mills use the federally guaranteed student loan programs to leave their students saddled with worthless degrees and tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt [For-Profit College: Costly Lesson--Jan. 30, 2005], point your browser to http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/31/60minutes/main670479.shtml.)

The situation with UCLA in general and with the UCLA Slavic Department in particular is comparable but not identical. One certainly does not normally associate an institution such as UCLA with the sort of diploma mills that, in order to turn a profit, depend on gullible students willing to go into student loan debt. The default rate on such loans is far greater at the diploma mills than at UCLA. Nevertheless, there are some valid points of comparison. Departments such as the UCLA Slavic Department lure potential graduate students into their programs with a subtle mix of half-truths and vague promises. They know they cannot fund every graduate student, but they never make this fact clear to the aspiring graduate student. Indeed, they do everything they can to underplay this fact. As a result, students expecting funding to come their way are instead faced with the prospect of trying to live in a high cost of living area such as Los Angeles with minimal (if any) funding support and attempting to keep their heads above water financially while competing academically with their fully funded graduate student colleagues. In the scenario which has played out in the UCLA Slavic Department for years now, these weaker students, further hampered by the lack of financial support, are judged deficient and dropped from the program via the very subjective testing system. Although they are disappointed in not reaching their goal of obtaining the Ph.D., from the point of view of the UCLA Slavic Department faculty, these weaker students have played their role and served as warm bodies for the program so that the program can compare itself favorably with other, better-funded programs. As one former graduate student from the UCLA Slavic Department recently put it "The Department needs enrollments and the faculty view graduate students as a renewable resource."

It is in this one respect that UCLA can be justifiably compared to the diploma mills that misuse the federally guaranteed student loan programs. The attrition rate in the UCLA Slavic Department is astounding. Up until the 1999-2000 Eight-Year Review of the UCLA Slavic Department the ratio of the number of students admitted to the number who actually received their Ph.D. was probably somewhere around 7:1 to 8:1, if not higher. One of the common responses to this ratio was that many of the students who did not get a Ph.D. did end up with a masters degree in Russian from the Department. Of course, what the Department does not say is that very few of these students who wound up getting only a masters degree came into the program with that as their goal. Almost all students who come into a graduate program at an institution such as UCLA do so with the intention of getting a Ph.D. Because of the existence of the aforementioned "low pass" masters degree, however, most of those who are forced out of the program go away with at least a masters degree as a consolation prize. As was discussed above, this "consolation prize" of a masters degree serves to take some of the sting out of 1. being rejected from a program and 2. having gone thousands of dollars into student loan debt just to stay in the program. It actually can serve as a bribe of sorts on the part of the faculty, e.g. "We're going to cut you from the program, but if you don't take it too hard and make too much of a fuss, we'll throw in a 'low pass' masters degree in the bargain. Sure, it's a 'low pass' masters, but no one on the outside will know. You can honestly tell people you have a UCLA graduate degree." While this may be true as far as it goes, having a masters degree in Russian or any of the humanities is not the same as having a masters degree in engineering or chemistry where such a masters degree can actually make a difference in one's jobs prospects. In the humanities it is often the case that even possession of a Ph.D. is not enough to secure employment. And, in addition to having little practical value, these "low pass" masters degrees also serve to mask the high attrition rate in departments such as the UCLA Slavic Department by allowing the faculty to point to these recipients of "low pass" masters degrees as "graduates", i.e. as "success stories", at least in so far as those who are outside the sys