The following letter was written in response to a nasty email I
received from my Dean, Thomas Fiedler, scorching me for having sent emails to my
students and former students in the summer of 2011 that included links to
articles in the New York Times and Indiewire.com asking questions
about the meaning of a film education and the value of majoring in film
production. The articles made a series of obvious, important, and indisputable
points: First, that many of the most important filmmakers of the past fifty
years had not majored in film production (or even studied film in a university
setting at all). Second, that the number of actual jobs available for film
production or scriptwriting majors was vanishingly small. Fewer than one in
twenty film production and screenwriting majors would actually end up working
in the area of their major. And third, that the intellectual value of a film
major was questionable in itself—with or without the prospect of a job upon
graduation. As a field of study, film was intellectually insubstantial,
jargon-filled, flakey, trendy, and fashion-obsessed in the worst ways,
hopelessly compromised by commercial considerations, and corrupted by the
adolescent artistic values and stunted intellectual development of most of the
individuals who taught, administered, and worked in the field. In one of the
emails to the students, I also pointed out that many of the generalizations in
both articles did not apply to a smaller or less ambitious “second-tier” film
program like the one that existed at Boston University, but only to “top-tier,”
“major league” programs like those at UCLA, USC, and NYU.
Dean Fiedler blew his stack at my having sent these links to my
students, and at my categorization of the BU film program as “second tier.” He
swore at me, told me I was “pissing in [my] soup” by ventilating unflattering
realities about a field many of my students were majoring in, and told me that
mentioning the occupational challenges film majors faced once they graduated
was “discouraging”—and therefore something I should not have exposed my
students to. In a word, I was formally, sternly, and angrily reprimanded by my
boss for having communicated with my students as I had, and was put on notice
(if I valued my job, my perks, and my pay raises, since he determined them)
never, under any circumstances, to communicate such facts to students again. Dean
Fiedler's message was not hard to take in: I was to "boost" the
program, to "sell" it, to "sing the praises" of a film
major, and its "value" as an occupational preparation--with the goal
of increasing enrollments and tuition dollars. That was, clearly, what it was
all about. My emails had not done that. And I was being formally reprimanded in
writing for not doing it.
I took Dean Fiedler’s objections seriously enough to write him a thoughtful and detailed reply. It is reprinted below. (Since it goes into many painful and
embarrassing facts about the inadequacy of the Boston University film program
and its failure to serve student needs, I wrote it as a confidential memo, for
his eyes only.) His attempt to de facto censor what a teacher said to
his students was extremely worrisome to me. It violated central aspects of a university professor's academic freedom to teach, advise, and otherwise interact professionally with his students as he or she saw fit and judged to be in their best academic interests. The Dean was taking those rights away from faculty members. (When the man who determines your
pay sternly criticizes your actions, make no mistake about it: He is telling
you what you can and cannot do, and you do what he says, unless you are a
self-destructive fool or masochist. He is your supervisor and boss, and when he
viciously criticizes your words and actions, he is exercising control over you;
he is not asking but telling you what to do; he is attempting to censor and
control what you say and do--what, in this case, you are allowed to say to your students--in the future.)
I also took advantage of the Dean's claim that BU was a “top tier” program (and not a “second tier” one as, in his view, I had mistakenly asserted) to raise a series of issues about the overall quality of the film program. I honestly still can't decide if he really believes that the BU film program is equivalent to something like the UCLA one; it would be incredibly silly to think that, but administrators get funny ideas about the programs they administer, and of course the faculty have every reason to mislead the Dean about the quality of their own teaching and creative work. To call BU second-rate on both fronts is to compliment it. The faculty of the Boston University film production program (with a single exception) and the courses they teach are third- or fourth-rate at best. At best.
I also took advantage of the Dean's claim that BU was a “top tier” program (and not a “second tier” one as, in his view, I had mistakenly asserted) to raise a series of issues about the overall quality of the film program. I honestly still can't decide if he really believes that the BU film program is equivalent to something like the UCLA one; it would be incredibly silly to think that, but administrators get funny ideas about the programs they administer, and of course the faculty have every reason to mislead the Dean about the quality of their own teaching and creative work. To call BU second-rate on both fronts is to compliment it. The faculty of the Boston University film production program (with a single exception) and the courses they teach are third- or fourth-rate at best. At best.
The only reply the Dean in turn offered to the response I reprint below
was to mock the length of what I had written. He did not reply to any of the
points I made in my memo, and clearly did not take it to heart or give it any
deeper thought. In his mind, it obviously did not deserve a real reply. (Mockery and sarcasm have been the responses of Boston University administrators to virtually every important memo I have submitted for the past ten years. I have reported ethics violations, violations of academic freedom, and dozens of instances of serious professional misconduct. All I have received in response, time after time, has been mockery or sarcasm--followed by lowered evaluations and hits on my pay.) But I
did eventually receive a more substantive and more tangible reply from the
Dean in this case--the same final response my other memos have been accorded. He informed me that my salary for the following
year would be frozen--to punish me for the views I had expressed in this memo
and elsewhere. Dean Fiedler clearly aimed to control not only the content of my
communications with my students, but my communications with him. I had not
replied in the correct way (e.g., by apologizing or claiming I was misquoted).
I had not promised never to communicate with my students again about the
forbidden subjects. I had not promised to function in the future as a salesman
shilling a product. Shame on me.
His subsequent punishment of me showed I had been right all
along about the fact that he viewed faculty members as glorified salesmen. My
job was to “promote” my program, not to expose students to challenging
intellectual experiences. My job was to bring in tuition dollars, not to
educate and inform. His punishment of me showed that he was not really
interested in allowing students to hear the truth, or in protecting a faculty
member’s academic freedom of expression. He honestly believed that he had the
right to control what I said to my students; he honestly believed that
censoring what they were told was acceptable. He honestly believed that when I
refused to accept being censored, refused to allow my communications with
students be controlled by him (and, in fact, clearly threatened to
"misbehave" in similar ways in the future), I deserved to be
financially and bureaucratically punished. —Ray Carney
P.S. I would emphasize that the incident described above (and replied to in the memo below) is far from the only time that my present Dean (and his predecessor) and my department Chairman have spied-on and attempted to control my presumably private email communications with others. There have been numerous similar instances, and the situation continues right up into the present. Only a few weeks ago (in Spring 2013), in fact, I wrote a memo to my Chairman and Dean protesting their admitted monitoring of emails I had sent to an individual not connected with the university, emails which both of them had read without my knowledge or permission, and had subsequently called me on the carpet for having written. (An excerpt from this memo is reprinted on the following site page: "Violations of Privacy and Confidentiality--A Continuing BU Saga.") Is this the way all Boston University administrators treat private communications by faculty members with third parties, inside and outside the university? Do faculty have any privacy in what they write others? Is any confidentiality left? Do administrators have the right to monitor (and control) all faculty communications? And even if they do claim this right, is this the right thing to do--the way professionals should be treated? In short, is Boston University a university or a banana republic? It's not only that there is no respect for the privacy and confidentiality of faculty communications with others by university administrators, but, based on my own personal experience, university administrators feel that they have the right to grill and criticize (and punish) faculty for anything they say when they write others, if the administrator does not agree with what has been said.
For a more general consideration of this issue, including other forms of monitoring and control--including the monitoring of faculty members' use of their computers, their telephones, and other forms of communication with students and individuals outside the university, see another page on the site: "The Monitoring and Control of Faculty Emails, Phone Calls, and Personal Expression in the Boston University College of Communication."
P.S. I would emphasize that the incident described above (and replied to in the memo below) is far from the only time that my present Dean (and his predecessor) and my department Chairman have spied-on and attempted to control my presumably private email communications with others. There have been numerous similar instances, and the situation continues right up into the present. Only a few weeks ago (in Spring 2013), in fact, I wrote a memo to my Chairman and Dean protesting their admitted monitoring of emails I had sent to an individual not connected with the university, emails which both of them had read without my knowledge or permission, and had subsequently called me on the carpet for having written. (An excerpt from this memo is reprinted on the following site page: "Violations of Privacy and Confidentiality--A Continuing BU Saga.") Is this the way all Boston University administrators treat private communications by faculty members with third parties, inside and outside the university? Do faculty have any privacy in what they write others? Is any confidentiality left? Do administrators have the right to monitor (and control) all faculty communications? And even if they do claim this right, is this the right thing to do--the way professionals should be treated? In short, is Boston University a university or a banana republic? It's not only that there is no respect for the privacy and confidentiality of faculty communications with others by university administrators, but, based on my own personal experience, university administrators feel that they have the right to grill and criticize (and punish) faculty for anything they say when they write others, if the administrator does not agree with what has been said.
For a more general consideration of this issue, including other forms of monitoring and control--including the monitoring of faculty members' use of their computers, their telephones, and other forms of communication with students and individuals outside the university, see another page on the site: "The Monitoring and Control of Faculty Emails, Phone Calls, and Personal Expression in the Boston University College of Communication."
September 20, 2011
Dean
Thomas E. Fiedler
College
of Communication
Boston
University
640
Commonwealth Ave.
Boston,
MA 02215
Dear
Tom,
Sorry
to have taken a few days to get back to you. I was out of town when your email
arrived, and am crazy busy right now preparing for a couple TV interviews, but
thought that, because your email raises so many important issues, and is the
culmination of so many other things you have said to or written about me over a
period of three years, it deserved a comprehensive reply, and I didn’t want to just
dash something off. I only now found time to write a response to your imperative.
I of course felt the force of your rebuke (heightened by the off-color metaphor
you use to describe my behavior in your third paragraph and the emotionally fraught
and sarcastic language you employ throughout your memo), but I shall endeavor
to respond to your words with respect, and, as far as I am able in the highly
charged situation you have created with your relentlessly accusatory language
(the second sentence from the end, needless to say, does not alter the effect
of everything that precedes it), to make my reply substantive and not emotional
in nature.
Since
the three paragraphs of your email each raise separate issues, I shall take
them up in sequence:
The
only possible meaning I can find in your first paragraph is that I should not be
sending links to articles in major publications that will certainly be of
interest to students because they have too much truth or reality or useful information
in them. The implications of this view are deeply disturbing—and, I might add,
antithetical to the educational process as I understand it, and to my
professional obligations as a teacher. How in the world is my sending links to
articles in The New York Times (which
I assume you regard as a reputable publication) and IndieWire (which, since it may be less familiar to you, I assure
you is one of the most highly respected internet film publications) construed
by you as "throwing [something] in [students'] faces?” By what stretch of
the imagination is it, as your first paragraph makes painfully clear, a reprehensible
and unprofessional thing for me to have done? Are we to shelter students from reality
and to cultivate fictions, delusions, and fantasies? Yes, I realize that many
faculty members in our College do this in the interests of boosting enrollment
and fighting for administration dollars. They turn themselves into salesmen
and, like any salesman, knowingly deceive students and parents in the interests
of closing the deal. I squirm as I listen to artful shadings and minuets around
the truth, not to mention outright deceits, at every student recruitment event
my department holds—about how many jobs are available to film or television production
graduates and how successful graduates have been. Is this the policy you propose
I should adopt on a day to day basis in my classroom, my office conversations,
and my telephone and email interactions with my present, past, and future
students? I thought I had a higher calling than that, and that I owed my
students my best, truest, most compassionate, and most useful input (and, in
the case of these particular links, the thoughts and observations of other respected
observers).
The
larger issue goes beyond deceits at recruitment events or lies in my
conversations or emails to students; it comes down to a fundamental difference
in your and my visions of the purposes of education—and, most worryingly, in
your apparent intolerance (and, as I will detail below, the intolerance of
faculty members in my department) of the view of education that I am
representing. The reason you (and my colleagues) don’t want me to send out
emails like the one you object to is not only that they tell the truth about
the occupational situation for film majors, but that you and they understand
film education as essentially being a form of vocational training, a view which
I am seen to be undermining. What you and they can’t tolerate is that I not
only will not buy into, and propagate, the careerist view of film education,
but that I am actively subverting it—in my classes, my conversations with
students, my publications, and my emails to students. I am not educating
students to give them jobs but lives. I am not trying to enrich their wallets
but their minds and souls. And I make no secret of doing it.
Of course, the lesson of the New York Times and IndieWire articles—like
the lesson of many of my own essays and interviews—is that if film school is viewed as being vocational training
for a future high-paying career (as if it were no different from medical
school, law school, or business school), it is a fraud. The administrators and
professors who embrace the vocational view are not only lying to students, but
cheating them financially. The students are paying far too much in tuition for
what they are getting. They could learn how to use a camera and edit a movie in
six-weeks in a weekend or evening course at a community college; they could
learn how to shoot a movie by apprenticing themselves to a low-budget
independent filmmaker. They wouldn’t have to pay the exorbitant tuition of a
university. This is the kind of thing that you and my colleagues want to
prevent me from saying. (I am not speaking hypothetically: My colleagues have
formally censored me for posting statements on this topic on my web site and
have attempted to have the postings removed from the university server.)
[A note to the reader of this blog: I have more detailed descriptions of the acts of censorship and suppression of my ideas and publications and attempts to control my communications with my students by Boston University administrators, which extended over the course of many years, on three other site pages. For a quick overview, see the introductory headings to the following site pages: "Censorship, Punishment, Abuse, Threats--Being Banned in Boston," "Making a Living or Making a Life--The Purpose of an Education," and "Losing Consciousness--Losing Invaluable Ways of Understanding," all available in the side menu.]
The
deeper scam, however, is not financial but intellectual. In censuring (and
attempting to suppress) the expression of views like the ones I represent, the
students are being denied the full value of their educations. My responsibility
as a teacher and mentor is to show them—through my classes, through my
conversations, through my publications, and, yes, through my emails—that there
are other reasons for them to be studying in a university than to learn how to
use a piece of equipment. It may take students a while to understand the lesson
(all the more given that what I am saying is drowned out by a chorus of
careerist propaganda from my colleagues), and some students may, of course,
never understand education as being about anything other than learning how to
make money; but that is the lesson I am teaching. And it is not only personally
insulting but intellectually wrong that, as the Dean of the College, you feel
you have the right to tell me that I should not be teaching it.
And
what if a student (or faculty member) doesn’t agree with the points of view
embodied in the articles and emails I sent out? What if a careerist student (or
vocational training faculty member) complains that my email is “discouraging?”
Does that justify mocking and censuring me—or censoring my message? Is
everything I do supposed to flatter, please, and conform to what students (or
other faculty members) believe? Does everything I send out have to adhere to
the Admissions or Alumni Office party-line? Where did that idea come from? Boston
University has had too much of that in the past—too much of senior
administrators telling faculty members what they should or shouldn’t teach,
publish, and say. Does the old BU live on—only with a kinder, gentler face? I
thought President Robert Brown’s goal was to usher BU into a new era—where
there would be no more retaliations against the Howard Zinns for thinking
differently; where faculty members would be free to teach what and how they
judged best, and to speak their minds freely and without criticism. I was
apparently mistaken. The old BU is alive and well in the attitudes of the new administration.
Let’s
not forget that students are perfectly free to disagree with anything I say
and, in this particular case, to disagree with these articles. They are free to
make up their own minds. I give them that much credit. They are not my hand
puppets. If they don’t like these articles, so what? They can write replies to
them. (Both of the links make ample provision for reader response.) If they
don’t like my emails to them, they can drop me a note telling me they don’t
agree with what I wrote. They can trash my emails unread and tell me that they
don’t want to receive future ones from me. (I send out dozens of informational
emails of this sort every year, and not one student in all of the years I have
been sending them has ever asked to be removed from the mailing list.)
Tom,
I hope it’s clear that the reason that your response is so discouraging is that
we are not discussing—and you are not reprimanding me for engaging in and
attempting to suppress in the future—some sort of sideshow triviality. These
emails are part of my teaching. (Why else would I be sending them to my
students?) An important part. As I say, we have different ideas about the
meaning of education. For me it has nothing to do with salesmanship. The
exposure to different and potentially conflicting or controversial views and
ideas is what education is about. It is what academia is about—the free
exchange of ideas and opinions. It is not something that a faculty member
should be reprimanded for contributing to. It is the heart and soul of the life
of the mind. The kind of “good news” filtering you expect me to indulge in is
the total negation of academic values. You want to de facto censor the amount of reality I can expose my students
to—or you want to put enough institutional pressure on me so that I will censor
myself. Your memo disturbingly takes its place alongside many other attempts by
you, the two Deans who preceded you, a previous Provost, my department
Chairman, and several of my colleagues to prevent the expression of opinions
you, or they, haven’t deemed “appropriate.” You and they clearly feel free to
censure and criticize my conduct if I tell my students something you don’t approve
of, or haven’t cleared with you or members of my department in advance. Forgive
me for saying it but your and their attitude is anathema to the life of the
mind—and to all academic values. (And let’s do a quick reality check: What are
we talking about? What is it I am being vehemently criticized and angrily
berated for sending my students? Links to articles in the New York Times and another prestigious publication. I can hardly believe it.)
Three
anecdotal side-notes about the preceding:
First,
I might mention that in the case of the particular email you cite, the material
was actually called to my attention by a student. This frequently happens. Students
send me links almost every day to something that interests them and that they and
other students are reading and talking about, suggesting that I might want to
share the material with other students. So what you are telling me, in effect, is
that material some of my students are already
aware of, are already sending to
each other in emails, and are already discussing
among themselves should be off limits for me to make available to or discuss
with other students. How weird is that?
Second,
about the actual response of the students to my mailing: For the record, without
exception, every student who acknowledged my mailing thanked me for sending it.
There was not a single exception. This has been the case with every similar mailing
I have ever sent. Students told me that it was good to learn that the
difficulty of obtaining a job in the area of their major (and it is very difficult) was not due to their own
personal failings; it was good to know that others were having problems. Many
of them, in fact, told me it was refreshing to be able to read a “real-world”
view of things; and several of them wrote back asking for career advice or commenting
on occupational issues they faced.
Third,
with respect to my statement that I give my students credit for having minds of
their own, and that they are free to disagree with anything I send them—it’s
worth mentioning that that statement was not rhetorical. One of the students to
whom I sent this particular email did, in fact, several days later post a response
to the links I sent, disagreeing with a number of things in both of the articles—though
I’d note that he also said he agreed with other things, found the articles of
value, and wrote me more than one email thanking me for sending the links along
and saying how they had stimulated his thinking on this issue. In one of his
emails to me he sent me a link to his reply, which was posted as a blog. And
guess what I did? I sent his link on to the same group of students that I
had sent the original links to, praising what he wrote and recommending that
the students check out his essay to read another side of the story.
That’s what academia is about.
That's what the free exchange of ideas is about. Not suppressing different
views; not censuring professors for exposing students to them; but discussing
and debating them. Those are the values I have devoted my life to. They are
emphatically not the values embodied by your memo to me—or the values embodied
by the efforts of my Chairman, two previous Deans, and many of my colleagues to
censure me and censor my publications, for what is now nearly a decade. (I’ll
have more to say about others’ efforts to censor and limit my expressions
below.)
Moving
on to your second paragraph, where you criticize me for mentioning the BU film
program’s “second or third tier” status. I was, as seems obvious to me, using
these terms to explain why both articles refer to the particular schools they
do—and don’t even allude to the existence of Boston University's film program—and
was further invoking the concept to suggest why some of the issues in the
articles don't apply to Boston University's smaller and less ambitious program.
My statement about BU being in a different “tier” was less a pejorative than a
discrimination (when did “tier” take on a derogatory meaning?)—one that you
yourself acknowledge in your memo when you list the names of eight schools that
you readily concede have larger and better-known programs, more accomplished
alumni, or more distinguished academic reputations than BU’s. I am assuming you
limited your list to eight merely for the sake of concision, since the names of
fifty, sixty, or more other American film production programs superior to the
one at BU could easily be added by anyone familiar with the topic. And you
don’t even have to go very far to find them, since the production program down
the street at Emerson and the film program a few miles down the road at
R.I.S.D. are both regarded as being superior to the one at BU by unbiased
observers. (For a few more names—though any such list is partial and there are a
couple dozen other schools whose names could easily be added—see the following
article: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/25-best-film-schools-rankings-215714 .
For the record, this link was sent to me by one of BU’s most talented recent film
production graduates, who pointedly noted the absence of the BU production program
from the list—and agreed with the omission.)
I
have to admit that I can’t quite follow the logic of your concession that the
film programs at schools like the ones you name are both somehow superior to and
somehow not superior to BU’s, so let me pass over what “peer plus” means if it
doesn’t mean that a school’s “educational offerings” are superior, or how a
school can be “in a category above our own” and yet not really be better—and
cut to the point of your criticism of me—even though, as I have noted, it
misconstrues what I wrote my students. You seem to believe (can it be true that
you really believe this?) that the BU film and television production program is
one of the best programs in the country, and your consequent criticism of me is
based on the fact that I do not acknowledge the first-class nature of our
program. Tom, it just isn’t true. If someone, or some group, has told you that
BU has an important, leading, or educationally distinguished film and television
production program, you have been misinformed. (To say the obvious, it is in department
faculty members’ interests to misinform you on this subject—since hiring,
promotions, institutional funding, and their own raises all depend on inflating
the importance of their own activities. Alumni are also not the right people to
consult on this subject, since their “be-true-to-your-high-school” nostalgia inevitably
biases their views.) But however you heard it, wishes aren’t horses; saying something
doesn’t make it so. I understand your natural reluctance to face this fact, and
inclination to shoot the messenger who brings you the bad news, but it must be
faced.
To
be clear, let me repeat: my email to the students does not raise this issue, but since you, angrily and sarcastically,
construe my email as having raised it (undoubtedly because I have indeed raised
it with you and many others in the College in private memos and conversations),
I feel I must recap things I’ve said to you and to others in the past: The BU
film and television production program is not
first-rate. Neither its faculty nor its students justify that distinction.
It is a quite marginal, second- or third-rate program, with a large number of
quite marginal second- or third-rate faculty and students. (There are, of
course, a few talented students who do choose to come to BU each year, who are
exceptions to this generalization, but it is only a few, unfortunately.)
Those
facts may be regrettable (and I think they are), but no amount of press release
hullabaloorey, PR "branding," or alumni rah-rah boosterism will
change the reality one iota. The only way to change the quality of BU’s film production
program is by improving hiring and promotion, and by raising admissions
standards at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Though I don’t have space
here and now to go into the history of this situation and how and why it arose,
I’d be glad to sit down with you and give you more information any time you
ask, just as I already have in the past with you and others. But let me reprise
the facts in extreme summary form: In terms of the quality of student admits,
admissions standards, particularly for grad students, have been deliberately
and consciously lowered to maintain the size of the entering classes over the
past decade in order to keep the flow of tuition dollars coming in. This
lowering of standards has been a conscious administrative decision, one which
the Dean who preceded you discussed openly. In terms of film production faculty
hiring and retention: for a memory jog, I’d suggest you revisit the memo I
wrote endorsing [name removed]'s appointment to the faculty last year. (I'll
paste it below my letter text, in case you’re not in your office when you are
reading this.)
What
you can’t seem to appreciate is that not to
have communicated these unpleasant realities to you, not to have told you the truth when I was asked for my opinion,
would have been the irresponsible thing to do. My obligation is to the
generations of students who are being cheated of their money’s worth, who are
being misled, who are being ill-served by unqualified teachers (and whose
classroom experiences are being degraded by unqualified classmates). Should I
speak otherwise just to keep you and my colleagues happy? Should I sell out the
students’ interests by pretending everything is hunky-dory? My observations in
that particular memo cried out for a conversation on this subject (just as the
observations in many previous and subsequent reports I have written have)—but
how did you respond? You did more or less the same thing you did with the links
I sent to the students: You berated me for having written what I had, told me
that I shouldn’t have written it, and ended with a series of veiled threats
about the negative consequences of my expression of my views on my annual
evaluations, my pay, and my career at BU.
Moving
on to your third paragraph: Skipping over the [obscene] language and your inapt comparison
of my profession with being the employee of a newspaper, I have to demur from your
assertion that I am “derid[ing my] profession.” That is the opposite of what I am
doing. I believe in the importance of my profession, and it is precisely because
I do believe in its importance that I have high standards, and hold it to those
standards. It is those who participate in the go-along-get-along system of hiring
and promoting their friends and the lowering of admissions standards to bring
in tuition dollars who are cynically “deriding their professions.”
With
respect to there being a contradiction between being a member of a program and seeing
its limitations—a contradiction you suggest at the start of your second and
third paragraphs that I am guilty of—I would argue that as the senior and
longest-serving member of the department, I am in the best possible position to
see problems and limitations, and to be able to trace the downward spiral it
has followed in the past decade.
If
you are asking why I myself haven’t corrected these problems in the time I have
been here, the answer is easy: I did work to correct them when I was Director
of Film Studies, and more briefly when I served as department Chairman, but I
have been prevented from doing anything since then. In both positions, I
significantly raised graduate admissions standards, tightened course
requirements, and raised grading standards—in the face of considerable
opposition. I also spoke out against the vote-to-promote-your-friends-this-year-so-they-will-vote-to-promote-you-next-year
department and College review process, and did not endorse the promotion of
several of my more marginal colleagues. (Though, when the dust had settled, I
have to admit that my dissent didn’t really count for much. I was unanimously
outvoted by my junior colleagues, who upheld the department’s close to 100
percent positive recommendation rate on promotions.) In hindsight I can now see
that my reluctance to play the go-along-and-get-along game to promote my colleagues
was one of the turning points in my situation within the department. (My campaign
to remove the emotionally unstable, bullying, sexist Dean who preceded you was another.
My colleagues had benefitted financially during his tenure and, in the
interests of maintaining their perks, did not look at all kindly on someone who,
in their minds, was killing the golden goose.)
My
colleagues, correctly enough, felt deeply threatened by my attempts to raise
standards, and my willingness to speak out and, where necessary and appropriate,
take action to improve the College, and saw the writing on the wall in terms of
my potential reservations about their own future promotions. From that point
on, in a word, I found myself being savaged—either to silence me or to minimize
the threat I posed to them by administratively marginalizing my position. I
cannot summarize the month-by-month events of eight or nine years in a memo,
but suffice it to say that after that point, the Dean and interim Dean who
preceded you, my former Chairman, and several of my colleagues took a series of
actions designed to made sure that I would have virtually no input into future department
decisions. It was just too risky to leave me in a position of power; who knew
what I might be able to do? I was summarily removed from the Film Studies
Directorship when the Dean and Chairman concluded that I would not endorse the
promotion of a junior colleague. I was summarily removed from the graduate
admissions committee (which, up to that point, I had served as Chair of) when I
spoke out against lowering admissions standards. My annual evaluations were
lowered; my pay was docked; my research funding and other support was taken
away. My classes were assigned to unsuitable classrooms and were scheduled at
times that conflicted with required courses, to prevent students from taking
them.
Though
there was more, that’s a summary of the public, professional side of the
retaliation. When it became clear that no matter what was done to punish me
financially and bureaucratically, I would continue to argue against lowering
standards, a new series of actions were taken in an apparent effort to make my
life so uncomfortable and my career so untenable that I would resign. Entire department
meetings were organized by my Chairman, in which faculty members verbally
abused me, criticized my work, and impugned my character. I was shouted at, called
names, and had my morals attacked. During discussions at department and program
meetings, I was cut off and told to shut up since “no one is interested in what
you have to say,” and, on other occasions, called a liar. A formal resolution
was passed by the department demanding the removal of all of my publications
and other writing from the university web site and censuring me for what I had
written. I was berated in public places in front of students and others by a previous
Dean and two different department Chairmen, in attempts to undermine my
authority and standing as a mentor and teacher. Mass meetings of students were organized
by selected faculty members in their classrooms, and other meetings were held
by the department Chairman Charles Merzbacher and the new Director of Film Studies Roy Grundmann in their offices,
to pressure students to submit letters criticizing me. (More about this later.)
[For more information about the stunningly
unethical and unprofessional actions of Boston University administrators and
several professors in my department, see the following site pages (available in
the right-hand menu): "Lynch Mobs--Secret and Surreptitious Meetings to
Foment Students Against a Teacher," "Playing with Souls/Death Threats--Cynical
Administrative Power-games," and "Letter to the University Ombuds--Events
That Almost Defy Belief...." Those pages describe how the College of
Communication Dean, the Chairman of the Film and Television Department, the
Film Studies Program Director, and a few other BU administrators and faculty
members, over a period of years, held a series of secret and surreptitious
meetings with students, as part of an orchestrated administrative campaign of savagery and
character-assassination directed against me, to attack my teaching and writing,
in an apparent attempt to force me to resign. Two other site pages, Parts 1 and
2 of "Ten Years of Administrative Retaliation....," summarize almost
a decade of administrative retaliation against me for having taken principled
stands in meetings, memos, and publications.]
To
be clear: I am not claiming to have been the only victim of this sort of bureaucratic
vindictiveness and professional misconduct. Over a period of years, College administrators have attempted to
intimidate and silence many different faculty members who expressed ideas the
administrators disagreed with; and when threats and intimidation have failed to
silence them, punishments were meted out (often in attempts to force the
faculty member to quit by making his or her career or relationship with students
unsustainable). Other
faculty members in the College of Communication who expressed genuinely
independent and principled views, views different from the press release/Bay
State Road version of reality, were similarly confronted with warnings and
threats, and were similarly punished. (Several of them still teach in the
College, though others—some of them among the best and brightest—were, indeed, successfully
forced out.) Faculty members were threatened with being summarily fired (on charges
of misconduct fabricated by the Dean or their Chairman). They had scheduled leaves
or sabbaticals denied. They were verbally abused (in shouting matches staged, like
the ones I have experienced, in public places to deliberately humiliate and
undermine them in front of students and colleagues). They were bureaucratically
marginalized and removed from positions of authority. They had their annual
evaluations lowered and their pay negatively affected. They had their research
funding and travel or assistantship budgets withdrawn. And, most diabolically
(the Dean who preceded you was nothing if not inventive), they have been subjected to whispering campaigns about
sexual and other indiscretions or were made victims of acts of character
assassination—where students, colleagues, College administrators, and the
Provost were told lies about them or their performance, and about how difficult
they were to work with.
The major difference I can
see between my colleagues and me is only that while many of the punitive
actions that were taken against them seem to have been discontinued in the
recent past, most of the retaliatory actions that have been taken against me
have continued into the present. I continue to have research and travel funding
denied, research assistants withheld, my annual evaluations lowered, my pay
docked, my publications censored, a departmental motion of censure still in
effect against me, to be verbally abused and harassed in public places in front
of students, etc., etc..
Frankly,
Tom, I had hoped that your appointment would wipe the slate clean and put an
end to this rancor. Nothing in this letter is news to you—or should be. I have documented all of these events and made a
number of formal appeals for redress and correction of my annual evaluations
and pay during the time you have been in the Dean’s office. But, for reasons
known only to yourself, you have chosen to do nothing about any of these
issues—beyond criticizing the memos I have written about them, when you haven’t
simply ignored them or told me they were not worthy of a response. (I leave
aside the serious violation of university policies and procedures represented
by something like six or seven consecutive years of the Provost’s Office failing
to respond to my formal, written appeals of my annual evaluations and pay.)
The completely dismissive and
automatically critical response I would be accorded (and, as the current email
demonstrates, continue right up to the present moment to be accorded) should
have been clear from the first one-on-one meeting I had with you after you arrived
at the College. It was a meeting which I requested expressly in order to
discuss a memo I had written you detailing serious ethical violations by a specific
department member. You responded, not by discussing the memo, but by telling me
that you had “been warned” “to watch out for” me since I was “trouble,” and
that you not only would not be speaking to the faculty member about his actions,
but that you didn’t take the memo I wrote as being of any real importance. Your
breathtaking characterization of me as a “troublemaker” on the basis of absolutely
no first-hand knowledge or previous acquaintance (remember that this was the
first time we had ever spoken in private) caught me completely by surprise and more
or less ended our meeting.
You
have now made it clear that everything I have done in the three years you have
been Dean—and presumably everything I shall do in the future—has been and will continue
to be understood (and dismissed or criticized) on the basis of that insulting and
false categorization. There is no other way I can interpret the statement in
your present note that, in your opinion, if I continue on the path I am on (i.e.,
in this case, the path of sending links to New
York Times articles to my students!), I “will further
alienate [my] colleagues – and disappoint [my] dean.” Your use of “further”
tells the story of how I have been categorized by you, and how everything I do
and have done continues to be categorized in the same vein. Nor is it the first
time you have written words to this effect. The vaguely threatening paragraph
at the bottom of the first page of your response to the [name removed] memo
makes the exact same point. I am a “troublemaker;” my words need not be taken
seriously; the issues I raise need not be dealt with. QED. I would refer you to
what you wrote on that occasion.
And by the way, while I am on the subject: Your response to the [name removed] memo
demonstrates that this is not really a PR issue or a question of whether
students should be protected from reading articles in the New York Times. The
[name removed]
memo was sent to you privately and
marked “confidential,” yet it received the same response that my mailing to the
students did: I was reprimanded for having written it.
Needless to say, in all of
the preceding, what is at stake is more than a matter of verbal responses: You personally supervise the annual review process
and the pay award system; you personally set the tone for faculty relations.
Your attitudes about me, your memos to me, and your conversations about me with
my Chairman and with other faculty members and College administrators have established
what is and is not acceptable in their views and treatment of me, in my
Chairman’s evaluations of my performance, and in terms of my pay and
perquisites.
It is impossible for me
not to see your responses as a continuation of the treatment I received from
the previous Dean, the Dean ad interim who
succeeded him, and two department Chairmen: The basic administrative response—for
what is now approaching ten years—to the honest, thoughtful, principled
expression of my views has been to berate and attempt to silence me or, if I
won’t be silenced, to punish me—administratively, financially, and personally—for
having said or written what I have. Even putting aside my own situation, aren’t you
afraid that there is a serious loss to the larger community when this “no news
but good news” stance is adopted? Is deploring, ignoring, or using vulgarities
to describe the memos and reports I have written (including many other reports
and memos beyond the [name removed] one of course) the best way to foster
candid and honest input on challenging issues? Aren’t you afraid of the
demoralizing effect on the rest of the faculty of having individuals called on
the carpet for the honest expression of their opinion? Aren’t you concerned
that criticizing the content of faculty emails and communications with students
will have a chilling effect? Even beyond
the personal suffering to individual faculty members and the losses to the
College through resignations, these events seriously threaten free expression
and the free exchange of ideas in the College. The entire culture is the loser.
I
have written so much more than I intended to, and alluded to so many issues in
the College that I hope you don’t mind it if I broaden the discussion in one final
direction. I believe that you are making a serious mistake in letting complaints
from one or two disgruntled students (I am assuming that that was your source for
the text of the email I wrote) dictate your treatment of faculty members. The inclination
of College of Communication administrators to appease complainers and, more or
less automatically, to take the complainer’s side against a faculty member (who,
as in the present case, is treated as being guilty until he or she proves
himself innocent) has had many destructive effects on the teaching and
evaluation process: ranging from rampant grade-inflation—since faculty members
are afraid of student complaints about the grades they award, and afraid of receiving
low student evaluations and jeopardizing their pay or promotions if they
maintain rigorous grading standards (the over-reliance by College
administrators on course evaluations made by self-interested 20-year-olds has led
to many errors in the pay and promotion process); to a general erosion of
curricular standards—since students can almost always get a sympathetic hearing
for their claims that a given faculty member is making unreasonable demands on
them in a course; to ineffectual administrative responses to proven instances
of student cheating and plagiarism—since College administrators seem all too ready
to conclude that student misconduct can be attributed, at least in part, to a professor’s
failure to explain something.
The
use of “unidentified” complaints has also led to frequent abuses. (I would note
that you pointedly do not identify the source of the complaint lodged against
me in the present instance.) It becomes almost impossible for a faculty member
to defend himself when he is not allowed to know the name of the complainer (or
allowed to read the text of the actual complaint). The faculty member cannot
possibly reply to what may not only be false, but vague, unspecified, and
anonymous accusations.
In
the preceding, as I say, I am assuming that you received the copy of the New York Times email from a complaining student.
In a normal academic setting that would be the normal expectation and the only
normal course of events that would lead to an administrative rebuke and demand
for an explanation like the one you have made of me. However, the College of
Communication is not a normal academic institution, and events do not always
follow a normal course. As you are well aware, as part of their efforts to
punish and marginalize me, a number of members of my department, including the
Chairman and, with the Chairman’s direct knowledge and support, several faculty
members, have made it their mission to “dig up dirt” about me from students to
use against me in any way they can. This has gone on for years and continues
unabated in the present. The Chairman and these faculty members have actually
gone to students who have studied with me (generally a student who received a
grade he or she was not delighted with; I am a very hard grader), told them
derogatory (and false) things about me or my teaching, and instructed the
student or students (who had no intention to do this prior to the meeting) to
file a “formal complaint” against me to administrators. This process has taken
many forms—from a faculty member telling a student never again to take courses
with me and to write in to object to something I am alleged to have said in a
long-past course meeting (the complaint has often been cooked up six or seven
months after the course was over); to a faculty member making it clear to a
student who was dependent on him for a letter of recommendation or a job
placement that the faculty member’s assistance to the student was contingent on
the submission of a letter of complaint about me to an administrator; to a
faculty member actually writing, dictating, or editing the letter, and having the
student sign and submit it as if it were the student’s own independent
submission. (In the most absurd—it would be comical if it weren’t so
immoral—version of the process, more than one faculty member in my department
has mistakenly, but successfully, solicited complaints from students who have
never taken a course with me, never had a conversation with me, or even known
who I was prior to the faculty member’s meeting with the student. These faculty
members seemingly know no shame, and stop at nothing, when they are determined
to attack me: In other instances, individuals who are no longer students, who
have graduated and left the area, have been platooned in to complain about me
from a distance in both space and time. Since they are generally the worst
students I have had, as far as I have been able to identify them, what they are
really disgruntled about is the low grade I gave them in a course a year or
more prior to the point the faculty member rounded them up.) The manufactured,
made-to-order document of complaint has then been sent to various members of
the administration (the Provost, the Dean, the Dean ad interim, the Associate Dean, or someone else), while
deliberately concealing the faculty
member’s central role in its creation, so
that when the administrator receives the complaint (or hears an account of it
from the Chairman or the faculty member) it is treated as if the student had independently
initiated and authored it.
At
other times, the student is simply left out of the loop altogether. Why go to
all the bother of ghost-writing, editing, coaching, and pressuring students to
write letters, if you can get the same result—a sympathetic response and a reprimand
for Carney—from an administrator without them? The department Chairman or
faculty member has gone directly to the administrator and complained about me
themselves (generally representing, of course, that they are speaking for a
group of student complainers—though, in fact, there are no such individuals),
and asking that an administrative rebuke be administered to me. So, as outrageous
as it would sound to an outsider, it is certainly possible you received the copy
of my email as an act of back-stabbing against me orchestrated by one of my
colleagues representing that he was speaking on behalf of a group of (fictitious)
students.
And
let me add, as a reminder of what we are talking about (and what I am
protesting in the case of your ongoing attitudes toward and comments about me):
In every case, what the students were told to complain about (and what my
colleagues and you criticized me for, and what I have had my annual evaluations
and my pay negatively affected for) was and is not inappropriate behavior (my behavior inside and outside the
classroom was and continues to be impeccable), but unacceptable opinions and expressions—unacceptable to whom?—to certain
Boston University administrators like my Chairman, a previous Dean, and now you.
What happened to academic freedom of expression? What kind of university is
Boston University? We know what kind of university it was in the Howard Zinn
days. We know what kind of university it was under certain previous
administrators. But how in the world can Provost Morrison or President Brown
countenance the continuation of this treatment of faculty opinions here and
now—or pretend to turn a blind eye to it? (They are not really blind, of
course, since both the Provost and the President are aware of what has been
done to me—since I have informed them or their deputies—and have done nothing
to remedy it, or even asked to speak to me about it.)
This
scenario—where the department Chairman or faculty member ran to a gullible
administrator to report (fictitious) student complaints about a faculty member
they wanted to “build a case” to get rid of—took place so often (and was so
successful) in past years that a colleague who was forced out after receiving
similar treatment, but who managed to keep his sense of humor about it, invented
a term to describe the process. He called it: “turning your friends in for the
bounty.” If anything like this took place in this instance (for the millionth
time in the College), so much the worse for the morals of the Film Department faculty,
and I must, in all candor, add: so much the worse for your own morals if you
went along with it (or failed to detect how you were being played and used to
fulfill faculty members’ own nefarious agendas).
I
would like to see a little of the righteous anger, and maybe a little of the
cursing you direct at me, directed against colleagues who have violated every customary
standard of professional behavior to undermine my reputation and standing. It
is they who are genuinely acting in an uncollegial way, and whose annual evaluations
and pay should be lowered. It is they who are (to use your term) deliberately
“alienating” a colleague. It is they who are eroding the intellectual grounding
of the College with their intolerance of others’ views and opinions, and unraveling
the moral fabric with their back-stabbing statements and lies. It is they who
are undermining student and faculty morale and poisoning the atmosphere with
their fictitious invention—or secret fomenting—of otherwise non-existent student
resentments and complaints in order to manipulate university administrators. They
are the ones who are having a destructive effect on the entire community—not me
when I send out an email link to an article in the New York Times.
However
the “complaint” reached you, I can imagine several possible responses you might
have given. One would have been for you to say that you re-affirmed the right
of faculty members to speak their minds freely and openly, and that one of the great
strengths of the College of Communication is the diversity of opinions and the
free exchange of ideas both between faculty members and between faculty members
and students. That would of course not be true—as your email to me, your
previous statements criticizing my expression of my ideas, my negative annual evaluations
(citing me as being “uncollegial” for having expressed them), the hits to my pay,
and the actions of College administrators and colleagues to retaliate against
and censure me for articles I have written and interviews I have given demonstrate—but
at least it could have, to use the term you are fond of employing, "aspirational"
value.
Another
response you might have given is that you had more important things to do than to
listen to tattling and snitchery and snide remarks about a faculty member, and
that (in line with your statement at the faculty meeting last March in response
to a direct question from me about respecting the privacy of faculty telephone
calls, emails, printouts, and other personal communications) you “did not have
time to read the emails faculty members send to others.” You gave the faculty reason
to believe that you respected the privacy of personal communications that were not
directed to you. Though the present instance shows that that was a mistaken
impression, and that you do read faculty emails to others, the principle behind
your statement might have been worth re-affirming.
Or
you might have proposed that the student (or faculty member) complainer write a
rebuttal and refutation of anything they disagreed with in the New York Times link or in my covering
note, and that they send their thoughts to me to initiate a dialogue about it,
or that they post their criticisms of these articles on the comments sections
of the linked pages.
There
are many other responses you might have made. But, if you don't mind me saying
so, I think you chose the worst possible one, because in doing so you made yourself
captive (unfortunately, not for the first time) to the most narrow-minded,
intolerant, and destructive elements in the College. You chose to side with a
tiny disgruntled minority—perhaps only one individual who has a secret agenda—someone
who went to you without expressing his or her concerns to me (since I received
nothing but thanks from my students for sending them this material), and
someone whom I am sure would be glad to be disgruntled with many other things I
and other faculty members do, and to have action taken against others he wants
to get back at for some reason. You have allowed yourself to be used by him;
you have collaborated with him.
It
is a terrible precedent to be setting, a morale-destroyer for your faculty, and
(assuming a student was even involved in the complaint process) absolutely the
wrong lesson to be giving students about how to deal with ideas they disagree
with. They are being taught that they should try to shoot the messenger (or slander
him or otherwise personally undermine his position) by running to his boss to file
a complaint to have him silenced—rather than that academia is about grappling
with ideas we find threatening and engaging in discussion and debate with those
we disagree with.
If
the complaint came from a faculty member, you are teaching them a similar wrong
lesson: that if a colleague takes unpopular stands, votes against them or their
friends for promotion, or expresses concerns about problems in the department
(and the memo I am writing here and now itself obviously itemizes a series of significant
departmental problems), they can retaliate against the individual, have him
punished or reprimanded by someone else, and neutralize his input into future
decisions.
There
is of course much more to say about all of these issues, particularly when it
comes to the professional misconduct of specific members of the Film and
Television Department. But this is already much too long. If you or someone
else in the administration wants to know more, I’d recommend consulting the narrative
account and attachments I provided to Francine Montemurro.
Sincere
best wishes for a successful academic year.
Cordially,
Ray
Carney
Prof.
of Film and American Studies
Boston
University
Author
of: The Films of John Cassavetes:
Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies (Cambridge University Press); The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the
World (Cambridge University Press); Speaking
the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer (Cambridge University
Press); American Vision: The Films of
Frank Capra (Cambridge University Press); American Dreaming (University of California Press at
Berkeley); Shadows (British Film Institute/Macmillan);
Cassavetes on Cassavetes (Faber and
Faber/Farrar, Straus); The Adventure
of Insecurity; Necessary Experiences;
Why Art Matters; and other books,
essays, and editions.
Web
site: www.Cassavetes.com (suspended at the demand of my Dean and Chairman—a sad commentary
on the state of academic freedom of expression in the College of Communication)
*****************************************************************************************
Dean Tom Fiedler
College of Communication
640 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston University
Boston, MA 02215
Confidential letter of recommendation for [name removed]’s appointment to a
Professorship of the Practice in the Department of Film and Television
Dear Tom:
[Material omitted]
I am glad to support [name removed]’s appointment to a Professorship of the Practice in film
production. I hardly know [name removed] personally
(we’ve had no more than ten minutes of casual chit-chat in the hall or mailroom
during his entire previous time at Boston University), but I am familiar with
his work.
[Material omitted]
I have also, by chance, had a large number of
conversations with students who have taken classes with him during his five or
six years of adjunct or part-time work at Boston University and am glad to
report that, without exception, the students who have talked about him to me
(generally in the course of complaining about the poor-quality of the other
production courses and teachers in the department) have singled him out as
being, hands down, the most stimulating and interesting film production teacher
they have had the good fortune to have had. More than one of these students has
employed the formulation—or something similar to: “If it weren’t for Mr. [name removed]’s class, I would have transferred out of the program….,” and
proceeded to give me examples of how much more interesting his courses and
teaching were than that of one of the department’s regular faculty members.
If I had to sum up the reasons for my support
of [name
removed]’s candidacy in one phrase, it would boil down to
the bare fact that he is an active and
accomplished practitioner of his art.
This may sound like I am damning him with faint praise (and it truly is the
barest minimum that one would expect of a teacher in any film production
program that aspires to be above the level of that of a community college or
extension school); but there is, in fact, a crying need in our department for
writers, directors, and producers who actually
make movies—high-quality movies—as [name removed] does: Not unwatchable, unscreened,
disorganized, or unfinished documentaries; not
shorts that are the equivalent of bad student films or trite public service
announcements; and not sentimental,
third-rate, cable-television, “movie-of-the-week” kitsch.
Though the truth is hidden from administrators
as much as possible by a paperwork blizzard of made-to-order or strictly
local-interest press-releases and lists of alleged “awards” from tiny,
unimportant film festivals, it’s a simple fact that the Department of Film and
Television simply has no filmmakers of
even the smallest degree of importance, stature, or achievement on its
regular, full-time faculty. Not one.
It is not only a public relations embarrassment
that this should be true of the entire faculty of a Department of Film and
Television at a supposedly major American university; it is intellectually illegitimate
and pedagogically fraudulent. The department is not giving its students the
education they think they are so handsomely paying for; it is tricking and
defrauding them with a second-rate educational experience. (Imagine a music
program where the students were taught by third-rate performers who had never
done anything important—or a creative writing program where students were
taught by writers who have only written schlock and junk.)
It should not be surprising that this state of
affairs poses an almost insurmountable obstacle to the recruitment and
retention of graduate students—or at least to the recruitment and retention of
intelligent, knowledgeable grad students. Potential applicants to the film and
television production programs browse our online listings or attend one of our
orientation events and see the name of—or meet—no one who has done any even slightly important, creative, or
interesting work in their field.
It would carry me far beyond the bounds of this
letter to explain how this deplorable situation has arisen and been
perpetuated, and how, in fact, the few genuinely talented and accomplished
working filmmakers (several among the most important living practitioners of
the art) who have expressed interest in teaching in the department over the
years have been rejected out of hand by department members clearly threatened
by their accomplishments; or how, on the rare occasions when a talented
filmmaker has actually joined the faculty, on a part-time or full-time basis,
they have either been fired, driven away, or left of their own volition when
they realized who their colleagues were, and who—and what sort of work (and
complete absence of creative work)—was being rewarded with pay-raises and
promotions. (Tom, I have spoken out about this state of affairs on numerous
occasions, most often during department review periods—and have been penalized
financially and administratively for doing so—but if you would like a “crash
course” on the subject of friends-promoting-friends in attempts to ensure their
own future promotions, I would recommend that you look again at a memo I sent
you on XXXXX about the YYYYYY review, where I touched on a few of the ways that
administrative time-serving, press-release self-promotion, celebrity and
special-interest “endorsements,” and the currying of favor with administrators
have replaced actual productivity and intellectual accomplishment as the basis
for department promotions and pay-raises.)
Given this state of affairs, I have every hope
that [name
removed]’s appointment to a regular, full-time faculty
position will be a first step (though only a first step) toward beginning to put the department on an
intellectually, pedagogically, and artistically defensible footing.
All best wishes for a productive and restorative
summer.
Sincerely,
Ray Carney
Professor, Film and American studies
Author of: The
Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies (Cambridge
University Press); The Films of Mike
Leigh: Embracing the World (Cambridge University Press); Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films
of Carl Dreyer (Cambridge University Press); American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (Cambridge University
Press); American Dreaming (University
of California Press at Berkeley); Shadows
(British Film Institute); Cassavetes
on Cassavetes (Faber and Faber/Farrar, Straus); The Adventure of Insecurity; Necessary
Experiences; Why Art Matters; and
other books.
web site: www.Cassavetes.com (indefinitely suspended at the demand of my Dean and Chairman—so much for
Boston University’s commitment to “long distance learning”—not to mention,
academic freedom!)
cc: Chairman Paul Schneider
Department of Film and Television
As I noted in the text of the first letter on this page, my Dean's sole response to the preceding memo was to criticize me for having written it, saying that he regretted that I had sent it to him, and telling me that my pay would be frozen for the upcoming year because of the trouble I repeatedly made and the problems my reports, words, and actions caused, including this particular report on the state of the department. He did not take up my offer to meet with him or to provide more information, just as he has not taken up similar offers I have made many other times. Better to shoot the messenger than listen to the message, or try to find out more about it. --R.C.
As I noted in the text of the first letter on this page, my Dean's sole response to the preceding memo was to criticize me for having written it, saying that he regretted that I had sent it to him, and telling me that my pay would be frozen for the upcoming year because of the trouble I repeatedly made and the problems my reports, words, and actions caused, including this particular report on the state of the department. He did not take up my offer to meet with him or to provide more information, just as he has not taken up similar offers I have made many other times. Better to shoot the messenger than listen to the message, or try to find out more about it. --R.C.
