All I can say is wow. In my wildest
fantasies I never anticipated the response the previous blog posting
("Youth, Beauty, Idealism, Hopes, Dreams") would receive. Within 48
hours of going up, it received something like a thousand views—thanks, in part,
to being linked to by a number of high-profile sites devoted to the college
application and admissions process—and I received hundreds of emailed
expressions of support, with still more continuing to come in as I write this a
few days later.
Even more gratifying to me is the fact
that almost everyone who wrote me is a young person. Many of the other blog
pages have generated hundreds of comments and responses from high-level
university professors and administrators, but the emails I received in response
to this particular page were almost entirely from students, former students,
and prospective students who have applied to, been accepted by, or received
degrees in film (including a significant number who have been accepted at,
contemplated applying to, currently attend, or have graduated from the Boston
University Department of Film and Television).
To a person, without a single
exception, my correspondents thanked me for the posting and expressed gratitude
for the blog. A few students (God bless ‘em) told me that their graduate or
undergraduate experiences at other film schools were different from the one I
described at BU but the majority, sadly enough, told me that what I described at BU tallied
with depressing educational experiences they themselves had or were still having.
A number of film production students referenced the blog page titled “Pretend Filmmakers” and another group of film studies/film
theory/film analysis students referenced the page titled “Real and Pretend Thinking,” and confirmed that they indeed had teachers and
courses similar to the ones I describe on those pages.
Many of the film theory, criticism, and
analysis students or former students focused on the appalling unreality of
academic jargon. Many of the emails included stories—a few comical, but most of
them sad—about how the film study courses they had taken involved little more
than mastering a series of arcane terms and references. They described how the
pleasures, excitements, and discoveries of the actual viewing experience not
only were lost in the translation, but more or less off-bounds and forbidden as
subjects for discussion. The more arcane jargon you knew and used, the more
“scholarly” the teacher judged you to be. They told me that even before they
read the blog page on “Real and Pretend Thinking” they knew there was something
profoundly wrong with that notion of education, but that what I had posted confirmed
their worst suspicions. They were being cheated and misled.
Several former Boston University Film
Studies/Film Theory students referred to another page linked to from the
previous posting—“Pedagogical Betrayals of Trust: Assessing Film Course Offerings”—and thanked me for pointing out the intellectual fraudulence of Boston
University’s advertising that they had a graduate-level program in Film Studies
and admitting graduate students to study in it, while concealing the fact that
students wouldn’t have any actual graduate-level classroom experiences,
but only be thrown into pre-existing undergraduate courses (many taught by faculty who don't even have a Ph.D.), where Ph.D. and
Master’s degree Film Studies/Film Theory students sat next to Freshmen and
Sophomore non-film majors, listening to the same lectures and discussions,
writing the same papers, taking the same courses in the same room at the same
time as the lowest-level undergraduate non-major. A smaller number of the undergraduate film students at Boston University understandably and justifiably complained of having their undergraduate course experiences side-tracked and derailed by grad-student-level discussions and interests.
Other current or former students (many also
from Boston University but a few from other schools) commented on the fact that
much of film course class-time consisted of doing nothing but sitting in the
dark watching a movie, with the instructor sometimes not even present in the
classroom. They agreed with the point I made that they were paying far too much
money to have the majority of their class time involve watching a film they
could have seen on their own outside class.
Many of the people who wrote said it
didn’t occur to them how they were being cheated of their tuition dollars and
denied a real education until I pointed it out. I can understand that. It’s
human nature to accept situations as we encounter them and assume that there
are good reasons for the ways things are done. Beyond that, students are young,
trusting, and inherently generous in their opinions of their teachers. They assume
that what they are being taught is being done in the best possible way and that
this is the way film courses and film instruction have to be.
I blushed to hear a few students call
me “the only faculty member in America with the courage to tell the truth” (or
words to that effect) about the institution he worked for. I don’t deserve the
honorific or the praise, but I will plead guilty to believing that creating a
first-class educational experience is more important than shilling for a
multimillion dollar corporation to rake in tuition dollars for programs that
gravely need to be re-examined and re-thought.
It is a sad fact, at least in my own
department and program, that raising the kinds of questions I have raised about
the meaning and value of the educational experience is not only not allowed,
but is administratively retaliated against and punished. Deep, searching
questions are simply not allowed to be asked. They threaten too many
administrative interests and fiefdoms. I don’t know if it is only at Boston
University or equally the case everywhere, but there is something almost tribal
in the impulse to circle the wagons, retaliate against, or ostracize anyone who
suggests things are not being done in the best possible way. (See “How (Not) to Conduct a Meeting” and “Censorship, Punishment, Abuse, Threats—Being Banned In Boston” for accounts of the verbal abuse, ceremonies of public shaming, pay
cuts, and lowered evaluations I have endured from administrators simply for
pointing out problems.)
As I note elsewhere on the blog (see
the end of “A Summary—Ten Years at Boston University”), I kept my questions
strictly “confidential” and “inside the system” for more than eight years, and
only went public with the first blog posting on this site two years ago, after I
couldn’t get a single Boston University administrator even to discuss the
issues I was raising, let alone investigate or address them—issues not only involving
problems with teaching, course offerings, and the education of students, but significant
ethical violations and acts of professional misconduct on the part of several mid-
and low-level administrators in the College of Communication, most egregiously the
Director of Film Studies. The only response to my memos, reports, and personal
meetings, for ten years at this point, was hundreds of acts of retaliation and
punishment—against me, for mentioning the problem! For almost that entire
period of time, I have been treated as persona
non grata by Boston University administrators—effectively expunged, banned,
and prevented from doing anything but teaching my courses—bullied, beat-up, and bludgeoned administratively, abused, sworn at,
called a liar, told I was mentally ill, subjected to pay cuts, threatened with having
a public posting made against me on the official Boston University web site to destroy
my professional reputation, told the university would take legal actions against
me deliberately intended to bankrupt me, and subjected to all of the other
abuses, insults, and outrages documented on page after page of this blog—if I
didn’t (as both the Boston University Provost and two different Deans explicitly
demanded of me) stop reporting the
problems, ethical abuses, violations of procedure, and acts of professional misconduct
I had witnessed.
I’ll admit I sometimes feel like a
character in a Beckett novel. I’m Malone or Molloy. I go on, I go on. The Boston
University administration has if anything increased the punishments since I
began these blog postings, but I vow never to stop speaking out until the
university administration faces and deals with these problems. I am making
these postings so that the next faculty member who has a mind of his own and
dares to speak out will not be treated this way and for my students and all Boston
University students. They deserve moral, principled, honorable faculty members.
They deserve faculty who can speak out on behalf of the students’ educational
interests, and not just on behalf of the almighty tuition dollar. —Ray Carney
*
* *
But let me end on two lighter notes:
More than half of the students or
prospective students who wrote me in response to the "Youth, Beauty, Idealism, Hopes, Dreams" page, hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of them, to my embarrassment and surprise, asked me to send them
copies of one or more of my course syllabi. Yikes and double yikes! I had no
idea what I was letting myself in for when I mentioned that I occasionally send
course syllabi to applicants to the BU program when they ask me to. Though I
am flattered by the requests, I have to plead that I simply don’t have the time
to fulfill the hundreds of requests I have unintentionally brought down on my own
head. Not only is my time in short supply as I struggle to finish my gargantuan
Bresson book, and is my computer ancient (it might as well be steam-powered); but—don’t
laugh—I still use an old-fashioned dial-up modem for my internet connection. I
have no wireless, no cable connection, no cell phone, no portable devices (or
i-anything), no streaming or download-access capability, and no speedy internet
access of any sort! To the hundreds of students, former students, and
prospective students who wrote and asked for copies of my course syllabi, the
best I can do is suggest that you work through the long list of films on the
previous blog page, one by one. They are all worth a long look. Sorry to be
such a Charlie Chaplin baggy-pants man!
Finally, I wanted to thank the film theory
student who wrote and described a screamingly funny “Film Theory Card Game” he
invented where every card has a name adapted from his film theory classes—with
lowly “metaphor” being a Deuce, “symbol” being a Three, “gender” being a Four, “ideology”
a Five, right on up to "suture," “parametric,” “diegetic,” “sjuzhet,” "fabula," “Freud,” “Lacan,” “Derrida,”
and “deconstruction” as Face Card Royalty, and that tired, old chestnut “Killing
the filmmaker” as one of the Aces. Bravo, bravissimo! The terminological idiocies and
jargon of the sixties, seventies, and eighties live on in the yellowed, wrinkled
grad school notes of your teachers! I laughed out loud when I read your
description of the imaginary game you and your friends play. Thanks for the
chuckle, and keep holding onto your sense of humor as the intellectual garbage piles
up in front of your eyes, trying to block your view of the screen.
