Controlling Faculty Expression
Defeating Tenure
Being Shunned, Sidelined, Shunted to the Side,
Ignored, Made a Non-Person
Boston University has
a long and inglorious history, beginning in the 1970s and extending into the
present, of finding ways to control its faculty members’ expressions and of
defeating and legally getting around the supposed protections of the tenure
system in particular. I have received a surprising number of inquiries from
faculty members and administrators at other universities who read the blog
regularly and want to know more about the treatment I have received in response
to the reports of ethical misconduct and professional misbehavior I have filed
and the attempts of Boston University administrators to ostracize, marginalize,
and remove me from the decision-making process in the university. This is the
fourth part of a seven-part posting touching on some of the ways I have, as I
note in a previous posting, been “bullied, beat-up, and bludgeoned
administratively,” “turned into a persona non grata,”
and “effectively expunged, banned, and prevented from doing anything but
teaching my courses” in my College. Due to lack of space and the number of years
these events have taken place, the individual postings will be of a summary
nature. Details are provided on earlier blog pages. —Ray Carney
Part 4—Being Ostracized,
Banned, Expelled, Ignored
The three previous entries in
this series describe the insults, abuse, and humiliations that have been
inflicted on me for speaking out about unethical and unprofessional activity I
have witnessed. This page will describe how, as a matter of deliberate
institutional policy, I have been de facto expunged from my own
institution and department, transformed into a pariah and outcast. All I am
allowed to do, all that I am able to do without being subjected to being
berated, bullied, or savaged in one way or another, is teach my courses.
(Though the secret meetings and slanderous remarks of the Director of Film
Studies to my students, as described on the previous blog page, have obviously
affected this area of my professional life as well, but fortunately I have a
large and loyal following of students who take more than one course with me, notwithstanding the smear campaign.)
Notwithstanding the Film Study
Director’s machinations and dirty tricks, I still get an extraordinary amount
of joy out of being in the classroom and satisfaction from working with
students, discussing artistic issues with them, and attempting to stimulate
their thinking about life and art during office hours. Teaching is one of the two
greatest joys of my life. (Writing is the other. I absolutely love doing
it—though one of its pleasures is no doubt that it takes me to a different
place than one where I am being publicly abused and yelled at or sneakily
slandered behind my back. Unlike my department and College, it is a safe and
nurturing place.
I am no longer allowed to have any role at all in
my department, and no one at any administrative level will allow me to have
one—though I’m sure they must explain my expulsion to administrators above them
with some kind of cover-story. All of my undergraduate and graduate student
advisees were taken away from me more than a decade ago. I formally protested
this fact, as I protested so many others, but the Chairman refused to change
the policy or restore any advisees. The Film Studies Director has similarly
warned me about interacting with grad students, at one point, even issuing a
warning in writing that I was not to contact entering grad students over the
summer before they arrived on campus (at which point he can presumably start
telling them things to undermine me). And my current Dean read me the riot act
a few years ago for communicating with my undergraduate students via emails in
which I directed them to articles on film I thought were worth thinking about.
He sternly upbraided me for writing to them. He made clear that my opinions
about film (a subject he clearly knows nothing about, since he does not even
have an academic background) were apparently too independent, too dangerous for
students to be exposed to. (For a description of that particular event, see
"How Marketing and Branding Considerations Limit What Teachers Can Tell Their Students or Suggest that They Read.")
For many years my classes were, over my objections,
deliberately scheduled so that they it would make it impossible for me to
attend faculty meetings, undoubtedly to prevent me from having input into
specific hiring or promotion discussions—and of course the meetings I did
attend involved my being shouted down or told to “shut up” (in department
meetings), being mocked and called a liar (in Film Studies meetings), or asked
why I didn’t quit or if I was only working at BU “for the money” (in a meeting
chaired by my Dean).
Beyond
that, I have been administratively excluded from serving on hiring, promotion,
and other committees, and either kept off the invitation lists of or outright
forbidden to participate in a wide-range of department activities and
events—from the important to the symbolic (viz.,
removed from the invitation list for Open Houses and Visiting Day events and
not allowed to speak at those I did show up for without being invited; told
that any suggestions I submitted for visiting speakers would never be honored
simply because I was the one who nominated them; and that I was not welcome to
attend special events).
When,
despite these warnings and discouragements, I nonetheless did write and submit
hiring or promotion evaluations, or other reports to my Dean, he explained to
me in no uncertain terms that I was wasting my time—and my breath or typing
fingers. He was not interested. I may have been (and was) the senior member of
the Department of Film and Television, but my views didn’t matter—not even a
little. When I submitted a carefully thought-out 5000-word evaluation of a
promotion case where I dared to differ from the Dean’s view, and pointed out
serious ethical violations on the part of the candidate, the Dean told me that
what I had written, like all of my other reports before and after that point,
was of absolutely “no interest” to him, that it would not “have any influence”
on his decision, and that it would not be forwarded to administrators above him.
(Not to forward, let alone investigate, a report of an ethical violation is in
itself a serious ethical violation.) My pay and evaluations were subsequently
negatively impacted.
When I
submitted a similarly detailed and thoughtful evaluation of a candidate to be
hired, where I again expressed opinions that differed from the Dean’s, he wrote
me a memo upbraiding me for what I had written and telling me that it was
confirmation that I was a “troublemaker.”
My
official appeals of my annual evaluations and pay were, in violation of
procedure, similarly ignored and, as far as I can tell from the stony-silence and unresponsiveness that has greeted my inquiries, also not forwarded to higher administrative levels.
My Chairman has similarly completely ignored and not replied to the reports of ethical violations and procedural irregularities I have appended to every one of Faculty Annual Reports since 2007, as well as the separate memos I have given him covering the same ethical and procedural areas.
Ignoring my reports, not acting on them, and not even responding to them is not limited to my Chairman and Dean. The university Provost has treated my memos, emails, and reports similarly. No action, no response, no request for more information, no investigation, no correction of the problems. See "Negotiating with Boston University, Part 1," for a summary of the complete and utter silence and total non-responsiveness that my reports have been accorded by the university Provost.
In
short, my Dean, my Chairman, and the university Provost could not have made it more clear that there was absolutely no
point in my writing or submitting memos or reports—reports of ethical violations,
evaluations of candidates for promotion, evaluations of candidates to be
hired—or appeals of my treatment for that matter. Nothing I wrote would be
taken seriously, let alone acted on. The only question in my mind is whether
the reports I submitted were even read or retained by the administrators I sent them to, or, as is certainly possible,
were tossed in the trash upon receipt to preserve institutional “deniability” that they
were ever submitted. (Fortunately, I always gave copies of the most important
documents I submitted to the university Ombuds, who retains them, though that
doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference. Based on the treatment I have received, Boston University is not big on
letting the university Ombuds have input into anything important.)
Ignoring reports of ethical issues and procedural violations is, of course, an ethical violation in itself, a fact that is expressly stated in the Boston University code of ethical behavior, as promulgated by the President of the university. Not to inquire about, investigate, or act on a report (and none of the reports I have submitted has even been acknowledged--other than to be dismissed, jeered at, and characterized as being "of no interest"--let alone been acted on) is to make oneself part of the problem.
In short, in the interests of a) ignoring my reports and not acting on them, and b) punishing me for submitting them, I have been turned into what in a banana
republic would be called a "non-person." This stonewalling, persona non grata, silent-treatment is not as unusual as it might seem to
someone unfamiliar with this ethical territory. In fact, it is the more or less
the standard institutional treatment for whistleblowers of all stripes. Read a
history of the FBI, of NASA, or the U.S. Army, and you will find dozens of
almost identical responses on the part of administrators to underlings they
want to force to quit or to express their extreme displeasure with for having
reported ethical violations or acts of professional misconduct. It’s a standard
bureaucratic response to take away all of their power, ignore all of their
input, insult them in every way possible, then move them off to the side and
make them non-entities, to punish them in the hope that they will resign their
positions. Boston University has illustrious company.
[Continued on the next page]
