About Ray Carney

 

Photo of Ray Carney taken at the premiere screening of the first version of Shadows at the Rotterdam Film Festival by Anke Teunissen. Copyrighted. May not be used without permission.

RAY CARNEY received his A.B. from Harvard magna cum laude and his Ph.D. from Rutgers (where his dissertation was supervised by William Keach and read by Richard Poirier and Thomas Edwards) passing his oral examination (conducted by Richard Poirier, Paul Fussell, and David Kalstone) "With Distinction." He also did separate periods of study with Philip Kapleau in Rochester, New York and Walter Nowick in Surrey, Maine. He has been an Assistant Professor of English in the English Department of Middlebury College (teaching English and American literature), William Rice Kimball Fellow at the Stanford University Humanities Center (working on a project on performance art and the intellectual background of the stand-up comedy routines of Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, and Richard Pryor among other figures), and Associate Professor in the Humanities Program of the University of Texas (teaching interdisciplinary American studies, focusing on the relationship of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art and philosophy).

At Boston University he is Professor of Film and American Studies. For approximately ten years, he served as Director of the graduate and undergraduate Film Studies Programs and Chair of graduate admissions in Film Studies. He resigned in the summer of 2005 as a matter of principle when he disagreed with admission and curricular changes that were imposed on the program. He teaches courses on American film, literature, and art (including painting, dance, drama, and philosophy); European art film; acting; and on the relation of film and the other arts.

He is generally acknowledged to be the world's leading scholarly authority on American independent film and American art film. He has written extensively about the "off-Hollywood" movement, lectured at American and European film festivals and special events, and been interviewed about American independent filmmaking throughout the world. Professor Carney has appeared on radio and television in Europe, Asia, America, and Australia, and his books and essays have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, German, Italian, Danish, Hungarian, Korean, and Japanese. He has lectured on or moderated panel discussions about independent film at more than one hundred special events or screenings, speaking directly to more than forty thousand people in Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United States.

1998 and 2002: Ray Carney is twice nominated by his graduate and undergraduate students for the Metcalf Cup and Award, Boston University’s highest award for a lifetime of teaching excellence. 

Every year prior to 2005 without exception: Prof. Carney's annual performance evaluations, assessing his teaching, research, collegiality, and professional contributions to the university, awarded by his department Chairman and College Dean, are consistently and without exception among the highest of any faculty member at Boston University.

January – March 2005: After Professor Carney speaks up on numerous occasions, in public and private, strenuously opposing the Dean of the College of Communication’s newly instituted policies to lower graduate admissions standards, change grading standards to artificially raise grades, and dictate to faculty how their courses must be structured, taught, and graded, the Dean tells him in private that he will “destroy” him by “digging up dirt” against him. In the event, he doesn't dig it up, he manufactures it. The Dean holds a series of secret and surreptitious meetings with Prof. Carney’s students during which he attacks Prof. Carney's competence as a teacher, smears his character, tells lies about his morals, and uses the authority of his office and title to pressure students to submit corroborating criticisms of Prof. Carney to senior administrators (who are of course not told that the Dean is the instigator and ghost-writer for all of the “student complaints”). The overwhelming majority of students refuse to participate in the unethical scheme, but the Dean knows that it only takes one or two disgruntled students who have received a low grade from Prof. Carney to go along with his instructions to build a made-to-order "case." At various points during the 2005-2006 academic year, the Dean holds additional meetings with Prof. Carney’s students, without Professor Carney’s knowledge, telling them they should not be studying with Prof. Carney, in an attempt to further undermine his standing and authority as a teacher and a mentor and kill the enrollments in his courses. (See “Sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind,” below, for one of the results.) 

Starting in the 2005-2006 academic year, the Dean and department Chairman "zero-out" Carney's annual performance evaluations and pay increments, and tell him they will not improve until he stops speaking up (and subsequently stops reporting ethical violations). His evaluations stay bottomed-out for the next ten years, and continue that way at present.

May 2005: Ray Carney resigns his position as Director of Film Studies, to protest the unilateral and unethical imposition of admissions, grading, and curricular changes on the program by the Dean of the College of Communication without free and uncoerced discussion, debate, and approval by the full-time faculty. (The Dean imposed the changes by making financial threats against specific faculty members and threatening to abolish the program if approval of his proposals was not forthcoming.) The Dean is delighted with Carney’s resignation and hand-picks his replacement, a professor who in future months and years will work will hand-in-glove with the Dean to spread unfounded rumors and slanderous gossip about Carney to undermine his academic status and stature.

2005-2009: Ray Carney formally submits written appeals of the lowered evaluations and pay cuts he is receiving year after year for speaking up at meetings and in memos, and will continue to receive for making his later ethics reports. (He is still unaware of the Dean's, and later on the Film Studies Director's, secret meetings with his students for a significant period of time, and only discovers them subsequently.) His formal appeals are filed with senior administrators at the two levels above him, including the Chairman of the Department of Film and Television and the Dean of the College of Communication, to be forwarded to the Boston University Provost. No reply is ever received, other than for the department Chairman to call Prof. Carney names and jeer at his appeals as “rants.” His pay continues to be cut and his evaluations to be lowered for speaking his mind and filing continuing reports of significant professional misbehavior by BU administrators in subsequent years.

Prof. Carney is an expert on the life and work of John Cassavetes. He knew the filmmaker personally and wrote the first book ever devoted to his life and work. His books about Cassavetes include: American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience (University of California Press, 1985), The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies (Cambridge University Press, 1994), John Cassavetes: The Adventure of Insecurity (Company C, 2000), Cassavetes on Cassavetes (Faber and Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), the BFI Film Classics volume on Shadows (British Film Institute Publishing, 2001), and A Detective Story – Going Inside the Heart and Mind of the Artist: A Study of Cassavetes' Revisionary Process in the Two Versions of Shadows, which greatly revises and expands the material printed in the BFI volume. He also edited a coffee table picture book devoted to Cassavetes in French: John Cassavetes—Autoportraits (Paris: Editions de l'Etoile/Cahiers du cinema, 1992), and a study of the films in Japanese: John Cassavetes: Men and Women in Love (Tokyo: Keiso-Shobo, 1997). Neither of these last two books has been published in English. He guest-edited and contributed extensively to the "John Cassavetes Special Issue" published by Post-Script magazine in 1992, and contributed to Film Comment's posthumous tribute to Cassavetes in 1989. His memorial essay on the filmmaker, "The Adventure of Insecurity: The Life and Work of John Cassavetes" was named co-recipient of the prize for "best essay of the year by a younger scholar" by The Kenyon Review in 1990.

To mention two more Cassavetes books that have not yet been published: Prof. Carney is currently completing two biographical studies that will revolutionize the understanding of Cassavetes' films and working methods: John Cassavetes on Art and Life and John Cassavetes: What is Art?, a critical/intellectual biography exploring the relation of Cassavetes' art and life.

In 1989, Prof. Carney curated festivals and moderated panel discussions about Cassavetes' work for the French-American Film Workshop in Avignon and the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. In 1989 and 1990, in collaboration with the Walker Art Center and the Pacific Film Archive and University Art Museum at Berkeley, he presented the fifteen-city American tour of Cassavetes' films (the first time the complete films were ever shown in a single program, not counting Prof. Carney's own classroom screenings of the works), wrote the souvenir program and individual screening notes for each film in the tour, and introduced the films, lectured, and organized and led panel discussions at the various screening sites featuring Cassavetes' friends and collaborators (Elaine May, Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel, Al Ruban, Ben Gazzara, Jonas Mekas, Ted Allan, Sam Shaw, and others). In 1994, he hosted a reunion of the cast and crew of Shadows (including Lelia Goldoni, Hugh Hurd, Maurice McEndree, George O'Halloran, and others) for a special screening and panel discussion of the Beat Film Festival at New York University. In 1997, he organized and presented "Love on the Edge," the six film touring retrospective sponsored by Miramax, wrote the souvenir program to accompany the screenings, and participated in the celebrity panel discussion at the Paris Theater in New York (featuring Peter Bogdanovich, Sam Shaw, Al Ruban, and others).

In 1999, Prof. Carney presented "An Evening with John Cassavetes" for the Danish Film House in Copenhagen, Denmark and toured Australia as a representative of the U.S. Department of State and a guest of the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, speaking to more than ten thousand people in Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne about Cassavetes' work and American independent film. In 2000-2001 he toured a number of film archives presenting a video show titled "The Unknown John Cassavetes," screening unreleased, unknown, and otherwise unavailable films and videotapes from his private collection showing Cassavetes acting, rehearsing actors, and talking about his work. In November 2001, he conducted a one hour on-stage interview with Gena Rowlands in front of 1000 people as the opening night event for the Virginia Film Festival and participated in a six-day retrospective of her work which she attended and introduced. In January 2003, he conducted the first East Coast screening of the restored UCLA print of Shadows at the Coolidge Corner theater in Boston, and conducted an on-stage interview with Tony Ray about the making of the film to a standing-room-only, turn-away audience.

February 2006—January 2013: Ceremonies of Public Humiliation, Shaming, and Threats as Administrative Techniques: For a period of more than seven years, Prof. Carney is subjected to a variety of ceremonies of public abuse and humiliation, and a series of threats to destroy him financially, professionally, and bureaucratically by the Dean of the College of Communication, Associate Dean of the College of Communication, Chairman of the Department of Film and Television, and Director of Film Studies. In these events he is screamed at, called names, told he is mentally ill, has his character and morals attacked, and is threatened with public internet postings being made against him on the university web site or other actions by the university explicitly designed to bankrupt him financially. These ceremonies of abuse are occasionally conducted in private, behind closed doors, but often in public spaces—in front of students, staff members, junior colleagues, and other university administrators. (As well as in front of a representative of the Boston University legal office who clearly sees nothing wrong with these bullying, shaming, threatening, name-calling, character-assassination tactics, since these techniques were frequently used to force tenured faculty to quit during the administration of John Silber and the lawyers apparently see no reason to alter their methods during the administration of Silber’s successor Robert Brown.) Doing these things publicly, in front of students, staff, junior faculty members, and others, is clearly part of a larger strategy to turn Carney's students against him, and to publicly humiliate and harass him with the goal of forcing him to renounce his tenure and quit. (See “Sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind,” below, for one of the results.) 

March—April 2006: “Saying What is Not Allowed to Be Said in the Classroom” Citation. In several closed-door meetings, Prof. Carney is told by the Dean of the College of Communication that he is not allowed to espouse “controversial” intellectual positions in his teaching (specifically positions indicating the limitations of certain gender and cultural studies views and methods), or to say anything that might “upset” or “disturb” his students intellectually—and told that since he has been guilty of doing this in the past, he is being formally reprimanded, and will be financially punished for having done it. This blatant violation of academic freedom is stunningly endorsed by the Silber-trained Boston University legal office.

In a separate series of actions, the Dean of the College of Communication secretly deputes a number of Carney’s students, without Carney’s knowledge or permission, to sit in on Carney’s classes and report back to the Dean about any “violations” of the above policy. (Prof. Carney remains unaware of the "spying" policy for a significant period of time.) Carney’s evaluations are lowered, his pay is docked, and research funding for his projects is subsequently withdrawn for his failure to adhere to the “no-controversy” policy. The Boston University Office of General Counsel (i.e. the university lawyers) formally endorses the Dean’s actions in a meeting held with Prof. Carney by Erika Geetter, a lawyer from that office.

Prof. Carney has advised or curated screenings at a number of major arts institutions, museums, and film archives in America and Europe. He recently advised and provided otherwise unavailable, unpublished Cassavetes script material to Ivo van Hove and Toneelgroep Amsterdam (the Dutch National Theater Company) for planned future dramatic adaptations of John Cassavetes' films to the stage. He also recently hosted a screening of Mark Rappaport's work in Salzburg, Austria and participated in a conference there devoted to the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Mozart's birth, presenting a paper there on Rappaport's Mozart in Love. Prof. Carney also holds the largest private archive in the world of Rappaport's "raw material" (drafts, notes, scripts, film elements, prints, videos, and other material). The material was given to Prof. Carney by the filmmaker.

Prof. Carney has also advised, curated, and introduced major screenings at, and extended film programs for, the Harvard University Film Archive. The two most recent events were eleven days of screenings in the summer of 2007 devoted to showcasing the work of "emerging or undiscovered new talents" in American independent film. More than fifteen writers, directors, producers, and others associated with these new or unreleased works were present at the events and conducted extended discussions with the audience. The second event occurred in November 2007, when Prof. Carney helped to organize and host the world premiere screening of Rob Nilsson's entire nine-film 9@Night series of interconnected works (almost 15 hours of film in all) at the Harvard Film Archive. Prof. Carney curated and introduced various screenings, at which Nilsson and others associated with the films were present and conducted question-and-answer sessions and lengthy discussions with the audience.

November 2007 – March 2008: The Director of Film Studies, the Chairman of the Department of Film and Television, and various faculty members in the Department of Film and Television hold a series of secret meetings with students during and after class, in which students are instructed to “complain” about Prof. Carney’s character and morals, with the administrators and faculty members stipulating specific points the students are to make, and with the administrator actually dictating or writing part or all of the “student complaint," but instructing students to conceal the involvement of the administrator in the creation and composition of the letter. Many students, needless to say, refused to participate in such a put-up job, but a small number understood that their grades and letters of recommendation were contingent on their cooperation and, under pressure, agreed to sign the ghost-written complaint. A number of other students who refused to go along with the suborned and perjured letter-writing campaign did in fact experience negative repercussions. The campaign was instigated and led by Associate Professor and Film Studies Director Roy Grundmann.

2007 and the following years: Prof. Carney’s teaching schedule and classroom assignments become part of the Dean’s and Chairman’s punishment regimen. Prof. Carney’s film classes are assigned to media-unfriendly classrooms (where films have to be viewed on a small television in the front of a large room, making subtitles on foreign films unreadable), the least popular times (8 in the morning and 9 at night), unpopular parts of the day (late Friday afternoons and early Friday evenings), and grueling durations (a teaching schedule deliberately strung out to create a 13-hour teaching day) to punish him, limit his enrollments, and try to force him to quit. His requests for normal rooms, days, and times are ignored or ridiculed. He is also assigned massive course overloads, being forced to teach up to twice as many courses as he is supposed to be responsible for. 

2008 Dubious Distinction Award: Prof. Carney holds the honor of being arguably the only faculty member in America banned from hosting a faculty web site on his university's server, because of the unanimous decision of Boston University administrators in 2008 to censor the expression of his ideas--especially those connected with the teaching of film and the limitations of many contemporary critical practices and beliefs. When Prof. Carney objected to the censorship of his publications, Boston University administrators threatened to destroy his reputation by making internet postings against him on the university web site and to bankrupt him with legal actions by the Boston University Office of General Counsel (i.e. the university lawyers) if he did not agree to “voluntarily” remove all of his publications and references to them from the university server.

January 2008: Professor Carney meets personally with the Boston University Provost to protest the history of censorship actions, and the removal of his faculty web site from the university server. The Provost upholds the policy, says it has the backing of the university lawyers, and reiterates the willingness of the university to destroy Professor Carney with internet postings against him and bankrupt him with legal actions if he resists and does not “voluntarily” agree to the censorship policy. The Boston University President, Robert Brown, and presumably the Boston University Board of Trustees, subsequently ratify the decision of lower level administrators to censor and suppress Professor Carney's work, and condone a variety of additional actions to punish him, financially and bureaucratically, for having said and written what he has.

April 2008: The Boston University Provost issues a list of subjects Professor Carney is not allowed to make internet postings about. The Chairman of the Department of Film and Television gives the list to Professor Carney.

Spring and Fall 2008: “But Wait, There’s More (Punishment in Store)” Category: All of Prof. Carney's previously granted and promised research support is withdrawn by the Chairman of the Department of Film and Television in the spring and, after Prof. Carney appeals the decision as a violation of a set of earlier written agreements, the withdrawal of support is endorsed by Assistant Dean Maureen Mahoney and Dean of the College of Communication, Thomas Fiedler, in the fall. The withholding of all university support for Prof. Carney's research continues into the present day.

Ray Carney has also made a name for himself as the discoverer, presenter, and popularizer of dozens of new, unknown, or lost works of art. There are too many instances to cite more than a few representative examples. As a graduate student, he discovered a previously unknown source for the first five books of William Wordsworth's poetic masterpiece, The Prelude in Reverend Joseph Simpson's Science Revived, or The Vision of Alfred, a forgotten Augustan epic. When he curated the Beat show for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Prof. Carney discovered and screened a major new work that had not been seen in more than forty years: Frank Paine's Motion Picture, a film which had never been written about before. He has discovered, introduced early screenings of, or brought to public attention previously unknown or neglected works by many American independent filmmakers, works which are now recognized and appreciated because of his championing of them – including films by Morris Engel, Lionel Rogosin, John Korty, Barbara Loden, Robert Kramer, Shirley Clarke, Elaine May, Paul Morrissey, Su Friedrich, Gordon Erikson, Charles Burnett, Mark Rappaport, and Caveh Zahedi. 

January 2009: In a meeting with Prof. Carney, the Dean of the College of Communication, Thomas Fiedler, tells Prof. Carney that his reports of ethical violations, procedural irregularities, and other professional misconduct (including serious failures to perform their assigned duties by specific classroom teachers) are of "no interest" to him and will not be acted on. The Dean makes it very clear that the only "problem" he sees is the reports themselves, not the ethical violations or misconduct they describe, and tells Prof. Carney that he regards him as "a troublemaker" for filing them, and that he does not want him to file similar reports in the future. A series of veiled (and not-so-veiled) threats are issued by the Dean at this meeting and in several subsequent meetings and memos about the negative financial and bureaucratic consequences on Prof. Carney's career if he continues to "make trouble" (the Dean's term for filing an ethics report) by filing similar reports in the future. Carney continues reporting the major ethical violations and egregious acts of professional misconduct he witnesses.

In the months and years that follow, Dean Fiedler (with the assistance of Film and Television Department Chairman Paul Schneider) follows through on the threats. Prof. Carney is administratively retaliated against and financially punished for filing his reports—making it official: It is the avowed and acknowledged policy of the administration of Boston University President Robert Brown to retaliate against faculty who report ethical violations and acts of professional misconduct.

Spring semester 2009: Sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. The effect of the “hear no evil, see no evil, know no evil” Robert Brown administration as the successor to the “reign of terror” John Silber administration: There are a series of death threats as a direct consequence of the more than four years of shameless and irresponsible lies and vicious personal attacks against Prof. Carney by BU administrators. To learn more, consult the Old Testament.

Prof. Carney's writing on John Cassavetes, particularly in his Cassavetes on Cassavetes and Shadows books, has brought to light hundreds of previously unknown facts and events about the life of the filmmaker and completely changed the understanding of the production history of his work. Prof. Carney is the first writer to have told the complete behind-the-scenes stories of the making of all of Cassavetes' films. His greatest intellectual coup was to recount the previously unknown story of the production history of the two versions of Shadows. To the surprise of the world, he revealed that—in direct contradiction of the statement that ends the film about its being "improvised"—Cassavetes employed screenwriter Robert Alan Aurthur to "story doctor" the second version and write a series of scenes to be inserted into the movie. Many of these facts were revealed to Carney by Cassavetes himself in a "Rosebud" conversation shortly before his death as well as through interviews with the actors and crew members of the various works in the final years of their lives.

With the assistance of the Museum of Television and Radio and, in many cases, in collaboration with Jane Klain, Manager of Research Services, Prof. Carney has also discovered and revived many unknown or forgotten early television works in which Cassavetes appeared, including his virtuosic one-man performance piece on Quest's Flip Side (which was never broadcast in U.S.), his acting and directing work in Johnny Staccato (including the remarkable Double Feature episode where Cassavetes plays two roles at once) and The Lloyd Bridges Show, his zany, over-the-top performance in S. Lee Pogostin's "Free of Charge," and his acting in many other otherwise lost or forgotten television series like Burke's Law, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater, and Columbo. Prof. Carney has organized and presented the first public screenings of many of these works in recent years as well as screenings of other works by Cassavetes that have never been broadcast on television or released in theaters. For film festivals and archives, he has put together a screening event of his favorite pieces, which he calls "The Unknown John Cassavetes," and which has drawn rave reviews and standing-room-only crowds.

Ray Carney made two of the most important film discoveries of the past one hundred years. He located one of the long prints of Cassavetes' Faces and two years later, after seventeen years of searching, in November 2003 found the legendary lost first version of Cassavetes' Shadows, a completely different film from the known version – in effect adding a new first film to Cassavetes' body of work and an important new work to the canon of American independent film. In January 2004, he unveiled the discovery at two standing-room only screenings at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands. The screenings attracted critics, reviewers, and scholars from around the world, and the discovery has been written up in more than 100 newspapers and magazines from Japan to Italy to the U.K. (although very little has been written about it in the U.S. where Hollywood values and interests prevail even in so-called serious cinematic writing). Prof. Carney has been besieged with requests to show the print in England, Europe, Asia, and the Far East. As part of the announcement of the discovery, he published a long piece in the London Guardian describing the quest and was interviewed by more than 20 European publications.

Prof. Carney recently made two other major Cassavetes cinematic discoveries that are still under wraps. They will be announced to the world after legal issues are resolved.

March—April 2009: The Dean of the College of Communication, Thomas Fiedler, asserts his “ownership” of, and absolute right to read, all faculty and student emails. The Assistant Dean of the College of Communication, Maureen Mahoney, asserts the right to call telephone numbers faculty have called from their offices to check up on who they spoke to and what they said. In previous months both Deans have surprised the faculty by retrospectively revealing that they have been secretly electronically monitoring what faculty members print on their printers (and that they have reprimanded specific faculty members for printing material with content the Dean disapproves of). They have also been monitoring (and controlling) the content of what faculty members have Xeroxed on the College copying machine—which, as one of his first acts upon assuming the Deanship, the Dean of the College of Communication removed from a room freely accessible to the faculty and relocated in a locked office strictly controlled by a member of the Dean’s staff, who has been deputed to read and monitor the content of all material being copied by the faculty.

March 2009: Ray Carney speaks out at a faculty meeting protesting the violation of confidentiality and lack of professional respect these policies represent, and the chilling effect such actions have on faculty communication. The Dean and Assistant Dean defend their positions and refuse to make any adjustments to them. Ray Carney files a formal complaint with the Boston University Faculty Council, who refuse to express an opinion or take any action on the issue, out of fear of alienating university administrators. (The John Silber years live on.) They remain silent and pass the buck: passing the complaint on to the University Ombuds, Francine Montemurro, who herself files the complaint away, never contacts Carney about it, and takes no action on it. The Dean’s and Assistant Dean’s policy of monitoring and controlling faculty expression—in faculty emails, faculty telephone conversations, and in what faculty print on their printers and Xerox on the copier—continues at BU unchanged into the present, and continues to have the chilling effect that Prof. Carney predicted. Faculty warn each other about the danger of writing, emailing, or copying anything, or telephoning anyone, the Dean does not approve of.

2009 and following years: Guilt by association as an official intellectual policy. Ray Carney is told by the faculty organizer of the Department of Film and Television Visiting Speakers Series (the BU Cinémathèque) that he is not welcome to attend events and that anyone he personally recommends being invited to speak will not be invited. Over the course of the following years, Prof. Carney is told by filmmakers and critics in his circle of acquaintance that when they innocently name Prof. Carney as a friend to the faculty member who runs the event and/or express admiration for Carney’s writing, they are told that there are “problems” with their visits, which are then cancelled.

2008-2010: Ray Carney is excluded from attending Visiting Day, Open House, and Orientation events by the Chairman of the Department of Film and Television.

October 2010: Actions that cannot bear the light of day are always done in secret or with a demand of secrecy. How to get rid of "troublesome" ethical reports by buying off the reporter and getting rid of him: In a formal memo he sends to Prof. Carney, the Dean of the College of Communication, Thomas Fiedler, asks that Prof. Carney consider renouncing his tenure and resigning his position, and attempts to secure his agreement by offering him a semester free of teaching if he immediately agrees to quit–but adds that the offer, which the Boston University Provost has already approved, must scrupulously be kept secret. Prof. Carney is not to reveal the deal to shut him up and buy him off and not to tell anyone that the Dean has written what he has to him. Just as he has refused to be silenced by years of bullying threats and retaliatory punishments, Prof. Carney turns down the bribe and continues filing his reports.

September 2011: “Limiting What Faculty Can Tell Their Students or Suggest That They Read” Citation: Acting on his own announced policy of monitoring and controlling faculty emails, the Dean of the College of Communication, Thomas Fiedler, tells Ray Carney that the Dean has read emails Professor Carney has sent to his students and former students and strenuously objects to them. Professor Carney is specifically told by the Dean that he was not to have sent emails to current and former students containing links to articles in The New York Times and IndieWire, raising philosophical questions about the value of majoring in film production as a prerequisite for becoming a filmmaker, and describing the real difficulties of obtaining post-graduation employment for a film production major. The Dean formally reprimands Prof. Carney in writing, describing what he had done with an obscenity, and subsequently lowering his evaluations and docking his pay for having communicated “discouraging” information. He is being punished and all future communications with his students are to avoid alluding to such realities. Only happy facts are to be communicated to them. Anything else will be reprimanded and punished.

October 2011: “Censoring What Boston University Faculty Are Allowed to Say in Interviews” Department: The Chairman of the Department of Film and Television, Paul Schneider, informed Professor Carney in writing that he wanted formally “to go on the record” to caution him that he is not allowed to speak about his treatment by university administrators and his overall situation at Boston University when doing interviews with the media. His discussion of the history of the censorship he had experienced (and continues to experience) at Boston University is officially being censored. Chairman Schneider offered the dubious legal justification that since Boston University is paying Professor Carney, the university had the right to control what he says in interviews. 

September – December 2012: Continuing the Dean’s announced policy of monitoring faculty emails, and penalizing faculty for writing things he doesn't agree with, the Dean of the College of Communication reads and distributes to other university administrators, without Prof. Carney's knowledge or permission, copies of personal and confidential emails he wrote to an individual unconnected with Boston University, and severely criticizes what he has written and penalizes his evaluations, pay, and perquisites for the content of the emails, in which, among other things, Carney criticizes the Dean’s ethics. This action, like so many of the other actions the Dean and Chairman have taken against Prof. Carney, is approved by the University Office of General Counsel (the BU lawyers), in the person of a university lawyer named Erika Geetter.

November 2007 – Present:  For more than seven years and continuing into the present, the Director of Film Studies (Associate Professor Roy Grundmann) plays a variety of calculated “dirty tricks” on Ray Carney, intended to destroy his reputation and drive his course enrollments to zero—including telling Film Studies and American Studies students not to take courses with Prof. Carney, telling them he will refuse to work with students who ask to have Carney as their thesis reader or director, and attacking and making damaging insinuations about Prof. Carney’s character, morals, competence, and the value of his teaching and research. (This last accusation is all the more ironic, almost to the point of comedy, coming from someone who himself has done little or no original and important research, and who administers a Film Studies program where virtually none of the professors other than myself have published any important or original critical work, a program where many of the Film Studies professors who teach graduate students do not even hold the Ph.D. degree.) He does this in a series of private meetings he holds with students in his office, in the performance of his formal administrative duties as Director of Film Studies, as someone who advises and approves students’ course selections. Everything he tells the students is a lie, calculated to discourage or prevent them from taking Prof. Carney’s courses. Knowing no better, and needing the approval of their designated adviser (and letters of recommendations from him), many students innocently and unquestioningly believe and accept the lies and misrepresentations. Even those who are shocked by the demonstrable falsehood of what they are being told, or who are independent-minded enough to question why it is being said, don’t dare express disagreement for fear of jeopardizing their job or graduate school recommendations, since Grundmann has an established record of retaliation against students who express independent views. When the tactic succeeds, after a short period of time, Grundmann enlarges the game and tells a series of similar bare-faced lies to faculty members in the American Studies program and the Department of Film and Television. The Chairman of the Department of Film and Television (Paul Schneider), Dean of the College of Communication (Tom Fiedler), and Boston University Provost (Jean Morrison) refuse to do anything to address, correct, or reprimand Grundmann's egregious professional misbehavior.

Professor Carney has published a large number of other books on art, film, criticism, and culture. They include The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World (Cambridge University Press, 2000), American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (Wesleyan University Press, 1996), and Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

He has also written: Why Art Matters: A collection of essays, interviews, and lectures on life and art; Necessary Experiences – What art can show us about ourselves and our culture; and What's Wrong with Film Courses, Film Criticism, and Film Reviewing – And How to Do It Right.

He has also published general-interest critical and cultural pieces in a variety of national magazines and journals, including The New Republic, Partisan Review, The Georgia Review, The Chicago Review, Raritan Review, The Boston Phoenix, The London Times, and Film Comment. Interviews with him have appeared in many national and international magazines, including: Switch (Tokyo), Visions (Boston), The Christian Science Monitor, and The Baffler (Chicago). He has written about independent film and the "boutiquing" of the independent movement for MovieMaker magazine for more than ten years, contributing the two-part "Fake Independents and Reel Truth," the three-part "The Path of the Artist," and the two-part "Art, Life, Hollywood, Independent Film, Critics, Professors, and How to Make a Fortune in Real Estate."

For more than a decade, Professor Carney served as the General Editor for The Cambridge Film Classics series, published by Cambridge University Press. Prof. Carney commissioned, edited, and published individual volumes on a wide range of American and international filmmakers, including Joseph Losey, Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, John Cassavetes, Paul Morrissey, Vincente Minnelli, Orson Welles, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, D.W. Griffith, Peter Greenaway, Wim Wenders, Mike Leigh, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and other figures and movements (including a volume devoted to avant-garde film), in "new auteurist" studies authored by many of the most important contemporary film scholars and cultural critics, including Peter Bondanella, Sam Girgus, Amy Lawrence, Robert Kolker, Scott Simmon, David Sterritt, James Naremore, Leonard Quart, Robert Garis, Maurice Yacowar, Peter Brunette, Scott MacDonald, and others.

Prof. Carney was a scholarly advisor for and appeared on camera in The American Cinema, the ten-part television series broadcast on PBS in the spring of 1995 and rebroadcast several subsequent times. He co-curated and contributed three essays to the catalogue of the Whitney Museum's Beat Culture and the New America 1950-1965, show that opened in New York in 1995 and traveled to Minneapolis and San Francisco in 1996.

Prof. Carney has served as a consultant on film and American art for the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, National Public Radio, and numerous television programs and newspapers. He was a charter member of the advisory board of the Boston Film Festival and, for many years, was the founding presenter of the festival's annual "Independent Filmmaker" award and moderator of a panel discussion that featured on-stage conversations with major artists and others connected with the arts -- from Eric Begosian to Ismail Merchant to "Bobcat" Goldthwait. He currently serves on the board of advisors for the Boston Independent Film Festival, one of the most important screening venues for independent filmmaking east of Austin. He has programmed films for, advised, or lectured at numerous national and international film festivals, including the Sydney Film Festival (Australia), Festival de San Sebastian (Spain), the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival (Park City), The San Francisco Film Festival, and the USA Film Festival (Dallas), the Virginia Film Festival, the Denver International Film Festival, the Olympia Film Festival (Washington), and too many others to list.

November 2009 – February 2013: Ray Carney prepares a 50,000 word written report detailing the personal abuse and financial and bureaucratic retaliation he has received for speaking his mind and filing reports of ethical violations, and meets with the Associate Provost for Faculty Development Julie H. Sandell to explain that his formal appeals of his treatment have not been replied to. Prof. Sandell says that she is sympathetic and has no reason to doubt that the situation has occurred exactly as Prof. Carney has described it, but as an official BU administrator, she can do nothing to help him. She suggests that Prof. Carney file a report of his mistreatment with Francine Montemurro, University Ombuds. Prof. Carney continues to inform Associate Provost Sandell of subsequent ethical violations, professional misconduct, and outrages to academic freedom on a regular basis for the next four years, sending her many additional reports and memos. No action is taken at any point in the entire period of time. (As far as Prof. Carney can tell, all administrators ever do is ask the perpetrators if it "really" happened. Not surprisingly, those asked decline to "bust" themselves.)

October 2011 – January 2013: Ray Carney sends a series of memos and emails to Boston University Provost Jean Morrison documenting numerous serious ethical and procedural violations he has observed, appealing to her for action and redress for the retaliatory treatment he has received for filing these and other previous reports with more junior administrators. He also carbons her on memos he sends other administrators. No action is ever taken, and not a single memo, carbon, or other communication is responded to or replied to. Provost Morrison makes no request for more information from Prof. Carney, no request to meet and talk with him, and never even acknowledges with a token reply that she has received, or read, anything he has sent her.

In the areas of literature and culture, Professor Carney has edited literary editions of Henry James' What Maisie Knew and The Spoils of Poynton (New American Library); Henry Adams' Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (Viking Penguin); and Rudyard Kipling's Kim (New American Library). He contributed a major essay on pragmatic aesthetics, "Two Forms of Modernism: Pragmatic and Visionary," to Townsend Ludington's An American Mosaic: Modernism in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2000). His contribution to Morris Dickstein's The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture (Duke University Press): "When Mind is a Verb: Thomas Eakins and the Work of Doing," was singled out for special praise in the April 1999 New York Times Sunday Book Review discussion of the volume by Alan Wolfe.

In 2010 Prof. Carney completed a major study of the relation of John Cassavetes' life and art, with new and previously unknown information about the filmmaker and his personal relationship with Gena Rowlands and its influence on his work. The book was four weeks away from publication by The University of California at Berkeley Press when Gena Rowlands made legal threats that forced it to be withdrawn and suppressed.

In late 2011, Prof. Carney completed a book about the work of Mark Rappaport, the intellectual and cinematic influences on his work, and Rappaport’s artistic place in the American independent film movement. Carney was forced to withdraw the book from publication shortly after Rappaport began posting slanderous statements about him on the internet.

He is currently working on four other books in various stages of completion: a critical history of American independent filmmaking, The Real Independent Movement – Beyond the Hype; a study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American painting and its relation to pragmatic aesthetics; a volume on Henry James' late fiction; and a major new study of the life and work of Robert Bresson, intended (as he half-jokingly says) "to change everything about how Bresson's work is understood in the future."

Between 1999 and 2002, Ray Carney served as the official scholarly advisor for Charles Kiselyak's recently released documentary about the life and work of John Cassavetes, A Constant Forge. Prof. Carney did the scholarly research for the film, located unknown documentary material used in it, and wrote the script for the voice-over commentary (impersonating the voice of John Cassavetes). In 2004, he devoted eight months and more than 300 hours of his time to serving as the scholarly advisor to the Criterion Collection for the John Cassavetes, box set of DVDs. He helped in the planning of the entire box set and advised Criterion with the choice of prints (succeeding in getting both versions of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie included, and unsuccessfully attempting to include the first version of Shadows, the entire long version of Faces, and outtakes he located from Opening Night). He also located rare photographs and documentary film material to be included on the disks, did a voice-over disk commentary, and planned and wrote several essays for the booklet that was to accompany the set.

Prof. Carney has written essays to accompany other DVD and Blu-Ray releases, including the films of Jay Rosenblatt, Aaron Katz, and foreign releases of the work of John Cassavetes and other American independent filmmakers.

The cover-up within the cover-up: Over the course of many years, dozens of Prof. Carney’s students are appalled by the treatment he is accorded and, spontaneously and without his prompting, seize the initiative and write letters to the Chairman of the Department of Film and Television, the Dean of the College of Communication, or other administrators and staff members describing and protesting the disgraceful behavior of College of Communication administrators and faculty, including the meetings held by administrators to slander and defame their teacher. Most of their letters, which indict and incriminate some of the very individuals who receive them, are destroyed or thrown away by the recipients. They are not forwarded, as they should have been, to higher levels of the university administration. They are not shown to the Boston University Provost and President. The cover-up must be maintained.

December 2009 – April 2014: Ray Carney submits more than 250 pages of documentation to Boston University Ombuds, Francine Montemurro. The material documents in great detail a ten-year-history of financial and bureaucratic retaliation taken against Prof. Carney by BU administrators for reporting a host of ethical violations, procedural irregularities (to rig the faculty evaluation and promotion system and feloniously secure pay raises for selected faculty members), monitoring and censorship of his communications with his students inside and outside the classroom, the censorship and abolition of his faculty web site, and a range of other attempts to threaten him, punish him, silence him, and force him to quit by Boston University administrators. While Ms. Montemurro tells Prof. Carney in a series of private conversations that she has no doubt the events took place as described, and, in fact, has abundant additional information corroborating his reports, no action is taken to remedy the problems described, to restore his lost pay, or to reprimand or replace the offending administrators. 

 March 13, 2013: After more than eight years of keeping his reports of ethical misconduct, violations of academic freedom, and egregious professional misbehavior at Boston University strictly confidential and private, filing them strictly within the official university reporting system, and not receiving a single meaningful or substantive response from a single Boston University administrator—let alone being informed of a single serious attempt to investigate the issues raised or rectify the situation, following a face-to-face meeting with Paul Schneider, the Chairman of the Department of Film and Television, in which Chairman Schneider, in direct answer to Prof. Carney’s inquiry, tells Prof. Carney that no response will be forthcoming, that nothing will be done to remedy the situations he has reported, and that there are no plans to lift the university censorship order and allow Prof. Carney to resume hosting a faculty web site on the BU server, Prof. Carney creates a blog at Blogspot.com and makes his first posting.

Present: Prof. Carney’s student teaching evaluations continue to be among the highest and most complimentary, and his publication record the largest and most distinguished, of anyone on the entire Boston University faculty—while his annual performance evaluations and pay continue to be among the very lowest of all tenured Professors with his rank and seniority. The ethical violations, rigging of the pay, promotion, and tenure review system and teaching evaluation system, and the wide-range of pedagogical and administrative misconduct and egregiously unprofessional behavior he has reported for almost a decade continue in full force, uninvestigated and unabated. Easier to shoot the messenger than face—or admit—the problems.

Prof. Carney freelances for a fee as a confidential script consultant and advisor to a number of actors and directors in New York and Los Angeles, and also offers private, personally-tailored seminars, tutorials, and lectures in artistic appreciation to selected individuals and groups.

He is an avid, insane, fanatical blader (Coyotes, Outbacks, and Crosskates), biker (off-trail), kayaker (expedition touring), runner and hiker, and skier (cross-country). His "strictly for fun" activities on rainy nights involve reading James, Balzac, or Proust, teaching himself molecular biology (all hail, Bruce Alberts!), or listening to Bach (slowly, haltingly working his way, note by note, page by page through the wonders and mysteries of the Johann Sebastian Bach's Werke Bach-Gesellschaft zu Leipzig edition.

But Carney says that the greatest joy of his entire life is teaching. He just loves working with students.

Photo of Ray Carney copyrighted and used with permission. All rights reserved.