My Brilliant (Academic) Career (1)

In the academic sense, I have never been a “good student,” and in fact my career in school has been checkered with what the outside eye would perceive as failure.   I hated high school and contrived to escape it early by going to summer school each year in order to accrue credits enough to leave in 3 years rather than 4.  Along the way I was antagonized by the mostly bad teaching, and in turn I antagonized the system.   At the end of those 3 years I declined to go to my graduation ceremony and later found out I was punished for this transgression by formally not receiving the papers that said I had completed my studies.  I found this out much later on, when I went to prison for refusing to participate in the American war machine, when they suggested I do remedial classes there because there was no record of my having graduated.    I noted for the prison people that I’d done two years of college and they let it go.  I was busy reading Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Silone, John Barths, Duras, Brecht, and things like that while in prison.

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Jon singing at Sadie Hawkins dance 1958

Going on to college in 1960 I anticipated a big change in the academic reality, but at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where I landed to study architecture, it didn’t really seem that much different, except I wasn’t living at home.  Within 6 weeks I concluded I would never get a degree, and figured out how to manipulate the system to my advantage by dropping all courses I didn’t enjoy within 6 weeks, in which case these – like my high school diploma – vanished from the record as if I’d never signed up.  I hence was on the dean’s honors list my first two semesters, and got a scholarship.   After that year I also concluded that architecture was a business and I didn’t feel at all comfortable with that.  So secretly, with regard to my parents, I applied to go to an art school in Britain, the Bath Academy of Arts, and was accepted.

Crown Hall, IIT, home of architectural school and Institute of Design

That summer I went to the UK on a ship, checked the school and found it was a playground for rich kids, with snazzy MG’s and Morgan’s and such, and decided I would not fit in or like it there either.   So after a summer of hitchhiking in Europe I returned to the US, where the Pratt Institute accepted me, but wanted me to wait a semester as I’d applied late.  I didn’t like that so I went back to Chicago and got into the Institute of Design, at the time considered one of the top schools in the States for such things.  I excelled, got straight A’s and the second semester did all the work equally well but rebelled and told them they were just like the academies of old which they criticized, and that they just taught a different set of rigid cliches, those of modernism.  And I left, looking to find a job over the summer,  but the Postal Service, whose test I’d passed, required a Pledge of Allegiance, which I could not do.  I returned to ID, talked with the dean of the school, Jay Doblin, and told him I didn’t want to get a degree, and would like to attend solely to use the equipment and take classes that were of interest to me, but not other things.  He told me that in his view I was already beyond what they had to teach, and let me stay under the terms I described.   But that didn’t last long as the Marines sent a recruiting team on campus and I and a few friends did a political protest.  We were called up to the IIT dean and told to cease and desist, which the others agreed to do.  I, instead, knowing I had no interest in a degree anyway, announced I would protest against the Armour Research Institute, which was part of IIT, and did research for the military.   Meantime the Cuban missile crisis arrived, and I hunkered down with my friends to smoke dope and drink lousy red wine waiting to be incinerated in a nuclear war.   I sold everything I had (some books) and checked the process of moving to New Zealand.  However, by the time I had it all together to make that move the crisis had blown over.  So, almost arbitrarily, I decided to become a filmmaker, spent a month going to movies at the Clark Street Cinema, which showed 2 different films each day – old Hollywood and European classics, and new European and Japanese art house films – and got my film education.  I bought a Bolex in NYC, and decamped for Europe.   And that was the end of my academic life.   While I had “dropped out” in 60’s fashion I later found out I’d also been expelled – not that it mattered to me.  I spent a year and a half in Europe and Mexico, hitch-hiking and making my first three films.  And then returned to the USA knowing I would go to prison for refusing to serve in the military.  I was locked up from March 1965-June 1967.   It was another education, as meaningful and useful to me as the two years I’d spent in college.

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And that was my academic career, until in 2007, I was invited to teach at Yonsei University in Korea – considered one of the country’s top three schools – and was magically elevated to a full Professorship at the age of 64.  It was my first ever actual job.  A year later they informed me that in Korea mandatory retirement comes at 65, but they solved that problem by making me a “Distinguished Professor,” and I spent 3 more years teaching (in the easiest job one can imagine) and quit of my own choice last July, 2011, though the school wanted me to stay.  And thus ended my brilliant academic career.

In the many years from leaving prison to becoming a professor I did have the experience of showing my films at many universities, colleges and art schools, which for the most part was an eye-opening process.  Back in the early 70’s, along with many other things, these schools began to do “Film Studies” and related courses – history, theory, and making.   It was indeed quite fashionable, and in turn it bred a peculiar kind of academic filmmaking, often weighted with theoretical or other ideological baggage – feminism, “minority” tilts,  and all kinds of things.   In my glancing passages through these institutions I was often asked to look at work and give my opinions, sometimes to PhD candidates who would then enter teaching film.   The work I saw was most often mind-bogglingly bad, though presented by the professors or teachers as good work.   Usually it was clotted with whatever fashionable intellectual winds were sweeping through, and usually they evinced not even the most basic artistic sensibility.  Most of these films seemed to strain to demonstrate some intellectual “thesis,”  and they were terrible.  And over the decades this kind of “filmmaking” was taught, reproducing itself.   It also reproduced the notion in our groves of academe that after such studies, with one’s fresh diploma, a job in the industry – either the actual filmmaking industry or the film studies industry – would materialize.   Anyone remotely connected with the industry is well aware that a degree is worth a little less than toilet paper in the business, as the statistics available to those very schools, busy charging students 40K a year and up, show, and of which they are quite aware.  Similarly the chances for snagging the next generation’s academic slot are rather dim as the line is endless and the places few and becoming fewer.   So, like many other things in our culture, what is offered up is more or less a fraud.     I bring this up, perhaps prompted by a letter I received last autumn, from a friend, Ray Carney, who teaches at Boston University.  Over the years he’s told me of his situation, which has steadily worsened, even as I have in the same years crossed paths with former students of his, whose testimony is of a teacher who genuinely changed them for the better, opened their eyes, and, well, did what a teacher should do:  helped them learn to comprehend the world honestly.   I think his blog, now blocked by BU, offers testimony in its very high hits-per-day, and the positive commentary on it, that Ray has been an inspiration to a generation of students.  Which seems to make him a threat to BU.  (See www.Cassavetes.com.)

About 6 years ago I was invited to do a workshop at BU, a 7 day matter for BU students, but also open to others.  So I had around 12 students, including a few BU graduate film school ones, down to some young girls utterly inexperienced.   I’m used to this, and my teaching philosophy is to cut the bullshit talk, and get  down to a very carefully bracketed bit of work – work which should also be play.   So after some days of this – essentially little guided exercises that open up one’s creative spirits to what digital video can be – I had them each make a little film, and at the end of the week we had a screening of films running around 90 minutes total.  And most of it was from very good, to quite creditable.  Of course one can’t make those without innate talent suddenly acquire it, though you can nicely tell them they should find some other outlet suitable to whatever talents they might have, though film schools seem loathe to do so.  In any event the person who’d invited me was rather surprised and told me he hadn’t really expected the students to actually “do something” over the week, where in reality they’d each made three or four simple “learning” films, and then the final one.   The students were, naturally, excited and pleased with themselves and the process, and I suppose with this kind of teaching which so quickly and successfully prompted them to learn so much so fast, and make something worth showing.  As it happened, the teacher who’d invited me had also required the participants to write a little diary of the process.   He passed those along to me, and in those done by the BU grad students there were comments to the effect, “why didn’t we do this the last two years?”    Indeed.  And, being reasonably well acquainted with many film schools, I know most would be deliriously pleased if their students made work so good as this workshop’s at the end of an entire year.  But, for the most part, those teaching don’t really know how to make such work themselves, and less how to convey to students the sensibilities to try themselves.   There are exceptions, of course – I’d point to Cal Arts as one school that seems to work, but then it has some real filmmakers on the faculty – Jim Benning, Thom Andersen, Nina Menkes among them, and from the viewpoint of students from there that I’ve met, they’re good teachers as well.

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While doing that workshop, there was a little gathering for me, which the faculty seems to have pointedly avoided, except as it happened, for Ray Carney.   I’ve been to many schools and this seems endemic.  If not of the glamor/fame bracket (I am sure they’d show up for Spielberg or someone of contemporary Hollywood fame) – my experience is that the filmmaker/teacher faculty seldom shows up for such things.  I feel they perceive someone like me as a threat – someone who actually makes films.  When they have materialized I have literally heard some teachers tell me they have, once upon a time, made one film, doubtless one I’d fear to see.  And they are the teachers!  During that BU visit Ray told me a little bit about what the administration was doing to him, and in turn I wrote a letter to the President of  BU.  In the turgid language of a bureaucrat he replied that the Film Department was undergoing an administrative change of some sort, and that he’d take my note into account.    And indeed the Department did change a bit – it became more Hollywood oriented, more technical, and more averse to creative thinking.  In effect it became a trade-school with the little caveat that the industry for which it cranks out techies has no room for them.  I was told a year at BU runs around 60K.  An expensive con.   Though, I guess one must, in light of the rest of American culture these days, from Wall Street to K Street, and doubtless down your nearby Main Street,  rack it up to a generalized corruption – economic, moral, ethical – which is now the nation’s “norm.”   One would like to fantasize that universities are pristine exceptions to this rule, but even the most casual look shows they are in reality – with perhaps their sports programs demonstrating it most clearly – paragons of corruption, basically in the service of our corporate overlords.  Money talks and bullshit walks.  Even in our most respected educational institutions.

Here’s the letter Ray sent me:

From: Prof. Ray Carney
Subject: Faculty treatment at Boston University
To: Jon Jost
Date: 26 November 2011

Dear Jon,

Hope you are thriving. Sorry to take so long to respond to your questions about the BU situation and whether it has changed in the past few years. I’m racing a deadline on a French project, but have a little time tonight to give you a summary account. The basic thing you have to keep in mind, and that I’d assume you wouldn’t already know, is that the treatment I have experienced for the past eight or nine years (I’ve lost count) is part of a much longer history of faculty-administration problems within Boston University that extends back four or five decades. The university has a long history of abusing, mistreating, and retaliating against faculty who say things administrators don’t agree with. Google “John Silber” and “Howard Zinn” to read the highest profile, but by no means only, instance—in that case involving the administrative abuse of one of BU’s most distinguished history professors for more than three decades because his politics did not coincide with those of the administration. I was, in fact, warned about the faculty-hostile situation before I arrived at BU (many academic friends told me to avoid the school at all costs), and during my time here have witnessed a number of the most creative faculty members being driven away by administrative high-handedness and stupidity. The university continues to have faculty recruitment problems on this count. Although there have been a few administrative changes at the top in the past six or seven years, not much has actually changed in terms of the attitudes of some of the middle- and upper-level administrators who cut their teeth, and formed their anti-faculty attitudes, under the old system. Many of them are still in place and continue to perform their duties no differently than they did ten or twenty years ago. As any MBA “Introduction to Organizational Behavior” course teaches, a large bureaucracy fights change tooth and nail. It takes more than a few changes at the top, or a Kumbaya speech from a new President, to change an entrenched institutional culture. File under “Democracy in Iraq.”

The current President, a guy named Robert Brown, talks big about leaving the bad old BU behind, but, if my situation and the treatment I have received (some preceding, but much, even most, of it taking place during Brown’s administration) counts as evidence, he has not done anything to alter the unethical behavior, anti-faculty attitudes, and anti-intellectual understandings of the function of a university at the middle- and upper-management levels. Most of the faculty think Brown is simply too naïve to understand the depth of the problems he inherited—or too imperceptive about human nature. (His background is in science.) Others say he is afraid to make real changes. If you want a good sardonic laugh, look up what happened to the man who preceded Brown, a guy named Daniel Goldin, who announced that he was actually going to “clean house at BU” and that he intended to remove the worst-behaving individuals in middle- and upper-management and put the university on a completely new path. He made the announcement one day, and a few weeks later was canned—by the very individuals he sought to remove! They went to the Board of Trustees and had him fired! Many BU faculty members consider it a “lesson learned” for Brown. He learned it was OK to talk a good line, as long as he did not actually rock the boat by doing anything to threaten the entrenched powers. (You’ll only find a skeleton account of this on the internet, but enough to read between the lines, since as much as possible was hushed up by the university with a multi-million dollar buy-out and a non-disclosure agreement. That’s BU’s customary way to deal with “problems.” They buy silence and keep them out of the paper with payoffs. There are lots of unmarked graves.)

Well, that’s the university I’ve devoted the best part of my career to for something like 22 or 23 years. Everything went terrific for me for the first thirteen or fourteen of them: As you know, I am a highly published scholar with many books in many languages and am invited to speak or participate in events all over the world; as a university teacher and colleague, I received superlative annual evaluations; I was entrusted with high-level committee assignments; I was asked to speak at major university functions; my classroom teaching and professional mentoring of students was judged to be superb; and I was even asked to play an administrative role, serving as the Director of the program I teach in for close to a decade, and, more briefly, serving as department Chair during the regular Chairman’s leave of absence. But everything—and I do mean everything—changed in 2003, following the appointment of a new Dean (the highest administrative position in my college). He was an absolute terror—and a horror—as an administrator. He demanded a series of changes in graduate admissions, course requirements, and student evaluation and grading methods that would significantly lower academic standards in order to attempt to bring in more tuition dollars. (He was nothing if not candid about his reasons.)

If the Dean’s ideas were bad, his character and morals were worse. He was emotionally off the chart—with, as a psychologically-minded colleague put it, “major anger-management issues”—uncontrolled rants, rages, tirades, and explosions of anger, garnished with obscene language (“asshole” was the special term of endearment I personally earned for my service to the university over the years) and actual physical threats—believe it or not. (“If I meet you in a dark alley and have a baseball bat, watch out…,” was one uttered at a gathering of faculty and staff members, and the friend who told it to me was pretty sure the Dean wasn’t talking about playing a night game of fungo with her; she was scared.) Morally speaking, the Dean was completely beyond the pale (guilty of an uncounted number of ethical and procedural violations). He administratively punished faculty “enemies” (his designation for anyone who wasn’t in favor of his changes or who asked embarrassing questions about his violations of procedure) and rewarded faculty “friends.” The first group had their leaves denied, their perquisites withdrawn, and was berated, yelled at, badgered, or as I say called obscene names or threatened with bodily harm. The second group was given high evaluations, pay raises, money for research and travel, promotions, and, yes, last but not least, teaching and service awards at Commencement. (Could someone make this stuff up? Would anyone believe it if it was in a novel or a movie?)

Absolutely everything was “personal” for this guy—and nothing too low or too unethical for him to stoop to doing it, including gaming the faculty evaluation and review system to achieve the results he wanted. To illustrate the depth of the Dean’s paranoia and retaliatory machinations, though it sounds comical to mention it, this guy even enlisted specific faculty members to serve as “spies” to report back to him if someone said something negative about him in a closed-door meeting, the better to speedily punish the offender. Needless to say, there were individuals willing to do this; there are always individuals willing to do such things. (Both the Dean’s bullying personality and his thuggish behavior were established facts long before he was appointed, since he had behaved similarly as a college faculty member and department Chair—and had, in fact, been forced to resign his Chairmanship a few years earlier after being charged with plagiarism. Only at BU could a faculty member guilty of that degree of academic misconduct be promoted to the Deanship a few years later! And only at BU could he continue in the Deanship with this sort of behavior, because virtually everyone on the faculty was either too afraid—or bought-off with bureaucratic bribes—to protest. Good old Boston University.)

It’s a basic principle of bureaucratic behavior that when the person at the top not only endorses shady practices, but pressures the people under him to achieve certain kinds of results, the sleaze can spread like an oil slick throughout the organizational flow chart. The Dean taught the people under and around him what was and was not acceptable behavior to deal with faculty “troublemakers” (another of his tender terms, directed at me personally on more than one occasion), and other college administrators (not all of them, but more than a few) were not slow to learn the lesson, particularly when they were being given raises, promotions, and awards for being good soldiers. Much of the same unethical behavior (tweaking faculty evaluations and reviews to achieve “desirable” results, punishing individuals who expressed reservations about the Dean’s plans to increase tuition income, etc.) started being practiced by administrators in my own department shortly after the Dean came to power, and these administrators or their successors continue many of the same shady practices right up into the present.

Leopards don’t change their spots and a situation like this does not magically heal itself if the person at the top leaves. In point of fact, the Dean had to resign his position in late 2006, after he was charged with a series of additional, unrelated ethical violations, including lying on his résumé. (Thanks to the predictable generosity of the university senior administration when it comes to supporting one of its own, even after these events, he was not drummed out of the university in disgrace, but remained on the faculty and continued to collect a fat salary—those tuition dollars he was so obsessed with pulling out of students’ pockets now being used to support him.) But, as I say, the Dean’s resignation didn’t change very much, given that most of the other administrators who had worked hand-in-glove with him to carry out his orders remained in place after his departure, and the additional fact that, by the time he stepped down, the practices he had pioneered had become generally accepted, especially by my department Chairman and most of the program Directors. In summary: even after the Dean stepped down, very little changed, particularly in my department.

Well, you can probably see where this is headed. My mortal sin—like Howard Zinn’s two or three decades earlier, and like that of other fired or discredited Boston University faculty members before and after Zinn—was that, starting in 2003 and continuing right up through the present, I dared to argue against the lowering of academic standards and had the audacity to object to the ethical and procedural violations I witnessed or was told about. Just call me stupid. I made the mistake of speaking out on the basis of my intellect, my conscience, and my principles—not based on calculations of what would curry favor with the Dean and his successors, or with other college and university administrators.

A few others in my college also spoke up over the years, but it was never more than a handful. The overwhelming majority of college faculty and staff serve on renewable, limited-term contracts; they couldn’t possibly speak up about these things without being fired; but I was different. I had tenure. This kind of situation was, as far as I was concerned, the reason tenure existed: to allow a faculty member to speak for those who are unable to speak for themselves (particularly students who are unknowingly being defrauded of receiving a first-class education, even as they take out enormous loans to pay astronomical tuitions in the expectation of obtaining one), and to defend the highest possible pedagogical, procedural, and ethical standards (even as the administration headed pell-mell in the opposite direction). I spoke up at meetings; I wrote memos; I sent emails; I held face-to-face meetings with the Dean and his successors and with administrators inside and outside the college to express my concerns.

But, as should be clear by now, taking principled stands and reporting ethical issues has always been hazardous to one’s health at Boston University, and as the past decade of my experience proves, it continues to be extremely dangerous. The response of the entire administrative system at Boston University, right up to the present moment, has been to attempt to force me to shut up, and if I won’t be silenced, to savage me. I have been attacked and punished in every way possible—personally, professionally, pedagogically, financially, and emotionally. My annual evaluations (which, as I said, had been the highest in my department before I began speaking up) have been reversed and are now at the bottom; my pay has been docked; support for my research has been withdrawn; my student advisees have been taken away from me; my courses have been assigned to undesirable times (how about one class that meets 8AM and another that meets at 9PM, and on the same day—worse hours and a longer workday than the building custodian would be given) and impossible locations (all-too-easy to do to a film teacher—all you have to do is force him to show the films on a tiny TV so that students can’t read the subtitles—while other teachers’ classes, on the very same days and times, are assigned to a movie theater classroom); and, to add insult to injury, I have been abused and reviled—had my morals, character, and performance of my duties viciously attacked—in a series of truly unbelievable ceremonies of public and private humiliation (staged both behind closed doors and in public places to humiliate me in front of students, staff members, and junior colleagues).

Perhaps most unethically of all (though it’s hard to rank the circles of hell to which these individuals have descended), when my department program Director, my Chairman, the Dean whose conduct I have described, and others designated by them saw that I was not going to stop speaking up or writing memos no matter how much they docked my pay and lowered my evaluations, they held meetings with students to publicly criticize my teaching and the performance of my duties and instructed them to complain about me, with the student being pressured to submit a criticism of something I had published or said in class, with the administrator coaching the student what to say or actually editing or writing the text, all the while concealing the meetings and the coaching and editing sessions, with the goal of making the complaint look like it was spontaneously initiated and written by the individual student. It shouldn’t be hard to imagine how this affected my teaching and relationship with students. Can you picture what a teacher’s classes are like after the students’ minds have been poisoned in this way—after this kind of toxicity has been created by a trusted administrator telling students vicious (and false) things about their teacher—or after a student has seen his or her teacher being yelled at and upbraided in a public place by an administrator?

Another strand of the retaliation involves censorship, or punishment directed against me if censorship fails, for what I have written or said. To give credit where credit is due, I want to acknowledge that the Dean whose behavior I have been describing apparently initiated the censorship plan. He deserves full credit as the first one to scream at me at the top of his voice, in private and public, that things I published be changed or suppressed, and was the first to threaten me with bureaucratic punishment if I did not comply. (Him to me, in his most bellowing, threatening voice: “There will be consequences … there will be serious consequences….[if you don’t retract what you wrote].” And, of course, there were.) But, as I noted, the Dean was a master at getting others to do his bidding, and around 2004 or 2005, he enlisted my Chairman and the new program Director (I was forced out of my position as Director at the Dean’s insistence, of course) as his allies and surrogates, which ensured that the censorship efforts continued, and, in fact, even increased, after he was forced out of the Deanship.

As you know, a good part of my publication record involves reflections on issues affecting film and arts education in American universities. For close to a decade now, BU administrators have asserted their right to censor, suppress, edit, or otherwise meddle with what I publish or say on this subject—or, if censorship fails, to punish me (in my evaluations, pay, and perquisites) for what I have said or written. I have been forbidden to talk about certain things when I give interviews. I have been told what I can and cannot say in my classes. I have been told not to tell my students about the challenges of the job market. I have been told I should not have written confidential memos pointing out problems in my department. I have been told to remove my web site from the BU server because it had views about education that the administration disagrees with.

The catch-all criticism (and justification for the subsequent negative evaluations and hits on my pay) is that I am “not being a team player”—though why in the world I would want to be a member of this sort of intolerant, dictatorial, censorious, anti-intellectual, and unethical “team” has never been explained to me. I had thought I was hired to follow the dictates of my conscience in ethical issues and to think with my own brain in intellectual ones. I had thought that that’s what my job was: to think as originally and creatively as possible; but I was mistaken. BU clearly hired me to think with its administrators’ brains.

In terms of the censorship issue, if the facts weren’t so appalling, they might make for an absurdist black comedy. Since it may be good for a laugh, or at least to demonstrate that the BU administrators have no sense of humor, I’ll mention that the two pieces that subjected me to the most vicious administrative attacks and the most serious punishment (lowering my evaluations and pay based on my “uncollegiality”) were two interviews I gave: one was with a reporter from the UCLA Daily Bruin, titled “A Modest Proposal: Let’s Replace Film Production Programs with Majors in Auto Mechanics (at least majors would be able to get jobs…),” and the second was with a former BU student, titled: “About Art, Life, Hollywood, Independent Film, Critics, Professors, Universities, and How to Make a Fortune in Real Estate.” As the titles indicate, both were semi-comic in nature, but about serious issues—from the false values fostered by academics who fawn on celebrity speakers and host movie-star events; to the consequences of staffing the professoriate with Hollywood-trained (and entertainment-addled) writers and directors; to the pernicious effects of journalistic film reviewing on American film appreciation and commentary (and the bad effects of including newspaper reviewers on the faculty); to the shocking lack of intellectual content in most film production courses; to the dishonesty of film programs representing themselves as preparing students for meaningful careers. I was told in no uncertain terms—and with the financial and institutional penalties I have described—that these subjects were no-nos. They were things I was not supposed to say. They were bad for student recruitment; they would hurt enrollment; they could affect student morale; and heresy of heresies: what I said might actually encourage students to major in something other than film—an absolutely unthinkable outcome to administrators more interested in defending departmental turf—by maintaining course enrollments—than in helping students pursue their true callings. I was not allowed to say such things. Since this material appeared on several pages of my web site, I was given a formal, written order by my Chairman to take the entire site down and given a deadline by which to do it. The over-the-top extremity of my Chairman’s demand—the fact that it also meant censoring hundreds of other pages of writing and interviews (probably close to a thousand pages in all) that did not contain material that had been objected to—or that could not possibly be objected to even by individuals as intolerant and narrow-minded as my college’s administrators—was central to the punishment. It would not punish me and my work sufficiently if I was forced to remove only five or ten or twenty pages of writing and interviews and was able to leave hundreds of other pages in place. I was told to remove everything I had published on the internet.

It may amuse you if I add that when the censorship threats against me were initially made, my first response was to tell my Dean, Chairman, and everyone else that if they didn’t like what I said, and felt that their views needed more visibility and publicity, I would gladly engage in a public debate with them on these issues, and if they didn’t want to do that, I would be delighted to post their responses to anything I had said that they disagreed with on my web site, complete and unedited, at any length they submitted them, prominently displayed next to my own statements so that no one could miss them. The offer was rejected out of hand (and jeered at as “a trick”). So much for the commitment to the free and open exchange of ideas at Boston University. No, no, no—dialogue, conversation, the expression of a range of views and opinions was emphatically not what BU administrators wanted. They demanded that their ideas and only their ideas, their views and only their views be represented. They repeated—frankly, I have to admit I’ve lost track how many times a BU administrator, month after month, year after year, angrily yelled it at me, both in public and in private, screaming at me in front of students in a hallway, in front of junior colleagues at a faculty meeting, or pounding the table in an office—that I was not to have published these opinions, and having published them, I was to be punished for having done it. The administration position was non-negotiable and unyielding. As my Chairman told me several times in front of the entire department faculty, if I wouldn’t take down the web site “voluntarily” (a new and different sense of the word than the one I was familiar with), university administrators would “bring in the lawyers” and do it themselves. He was not asking; he was telling. The web site would not be tolerated. (I’ll pass over the sheer institutional stupidity and counter-productiveness of his fiat. My web site was arguably the largest, most important, and most highly visible site by a BU faculty member. It was known all over the world, read by as many as 50,000 viewers a month, and was one of the major recruitment tools for BU’s own graduate programs. Now that it has been suspended and discontinued, all of the benefit it provided the university has, of course, been lost.)

It bears repeating that the financial, bureaucratic, and personal punishments administered to me have been doled out not for anything I have done or failed to do as a teacher, advisor, or mentor, but for the expression of my ideas, for my reports of ethical issues—in meetings, memos, and emails—and for the statements about film education I made in my writing and in interviews like the two I mentioned. Now I don’t know your personal feelings about it, Jon, but to someone who has devoted his entire professional career to academia, this is the most shameful, most destructive action a university can take: to punish a faculty member for the principled expression of his or her views. In my definition of it, this is the reason that a university exists, and the thing that most distinguishes a university from a profit-making corporation—namely, that its faculty are not only allowed, but as the very heart and soul of the performance of their duties are required to speak the truth and to defend the honesty and integrity of their dealings with others. That’s what it is to be a professional with professional standards of conduct, and not a wage-slave doing the bidding of a corporate boss to shill a product to turn a profit. But that distinction is clearly something administrators at Boston University are unable to grasp. My Dean, my program Director, my Chairman, and others treat my job as if it were about generating flattering press releases, not about telling the truth—and they are willing to punish me for my non-compliance with their gag-orders.

My point is that the issues these administrative actions raise have nothing to do with the merit of any particular idea I may express. My Chairman always told me, as justification for his censorship, that my ideas were “wrong” or “put things in a false light”—as if that made it all right to suppress them. Of course I disagreed with him; my ideas were not wrong. But the rightness or wrongness of my views is not what ultimately matters. What matters, supremely, to the lifeblood of the university is that I and other faculty members be accorded the right to express our ideas, to say what we honestly think and believe, without fear of censorship or punishment.

That’s what academic freedom is about—not about pleasing people, and certainly not about putting the acceptability of a faculty member’s ideas up for a vote—as my Chairman did before telling me that I was not allowed to publish what I had—and that I was being formally censored for having done it. Now that was an experience I’ll not soon forget. Can you imagine sitting through three months of department meetings where excerpts from my publications were projected on a screen, distributed in Xeroxed packets, and read out loud by my Chairman and others while, in an orgy of abuse personally orchestrated and presided over by my Chairman, I was called names, yelled at, and had my morals and character viciously attacked for what I had published? That’s how BU treats faculty who “think differently.” All I could think while the rigged, one-sided “show trial” went on (at an early point in the proceedings I was told that “no one is interested” in anything I might say in my own defense so that for most of the time I was forced to sit there and take the hurled abuse in silence) was that it was good practice if I—or any other BU faculty member who similarly said something BU administrators disagreed with—ever ended up teaching in China, Iran, or North Korea.

These actions raise important questions about the university attitude toward (and treatment of) public intellectuals. Public intellectuals are lauded if they talk about (and locate) problems elsewhere in society, but are criticized and punished if they turn their attention to what goes on in universities. The modern corporate American university, like the rest of modern corporate America, puts a premium on unanimity of opinion and homogeneity of expression, and penalizes genuine diversity of points of view. There is of course much lip service given to something called “diversity”—i.e., racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity; however, intellectual diversity, the expression of genuinely new, different, or—God help us—unpopular or controversial ideas and opinions, the only kind of diversity that means anything intellectually—is frowned on. Like other corporations, the educational corporation aspires to speak with one voice—a sanitized, safe, uncontroversial, politically-correct voice—since the goal is never to offend or upset anyone—particularly anyone with money, anyone who wields the power of the purse, like students, grant officers, politicians, or alumni contributors. The goal is to “build a brand” (there has been much appallingly straight-faced discussion in this vein in my college) that will upset no one, change nothing, and threaten nothing that really matters—particularly cherished beliefs. But this is the opposite of the true function of a university and the death of true education—which is to allow everything, absolutely everything, to be looked at, questioned, examined, and re-thought where necessary. These “branding” discussions, pointedly, focus not on how to better educate students, how to get them to see the limitations of their current understandings and preferences, but about how to please them and teach to their desires—once more in the service of getting tuition dollars out of their pockets and burdening them with ever larger student loans.

If you can stand to read even more on this subject some day, ask me sometime and I’ll send you a memo I wrote my current Dean a few weeks ago, after he vehemently objected to my raising a few fundamental questions with my students (e.g., about the real purpose of their education, and the relation of an education to a career, and of a career to a life—controversial, and hence forbidden, topics, as my Dean angrily told me). If you can believe it, one of the things he went ballistic over was that I sent my students a link to an article about film education in The New York Times—that’s an article in The Times, not a link to something by Noam Chomsky or Karl Marx! My Dean made clear—in a nasty, sarcastic critique of my actions—that articles like the one in The Times are not things I am supposed to be exposing my students to. They are apparently too controversial, too subversive, too dangerous for Boston University film students to grapple with. What does that tell you about his views on education—not to mention his opinion of the intellectual ability of the students in his college? They should be picketing his office to protest his contempt for their intellect.

In what I wrote him in reply I tried to explain why these issues (i.e. about the value and purpose of an education) were important ones for a teacher to raise with his students—and specifically why sending my students links to articles in the New York Times and elsewhere was an important part of my duties as a teacher; but my Dean’s mocking, sarcastic, and completely dismissive response demonstrated one more time (if it weren’t already abundantly clear) that everything I said represented a vision of education that not only had never occurred to him before, but that was something he still couldn’t wrap his mind around even after I had spent several thousand words trying to explain it to him. Not really a surprise. Like many other BU administrators, my Dean spent his entire previous career in corporate America, and has clearly internalized its values, where you don’t ask fundamental questions or raise difficult issues. You “sell a product” to a “customer”—in this instance, a college degree to students. You don’t ask people to think deeply about purposes and values and the meaning of their lives; you just yammer a sales pitch, convincing the customer that the commodity he or she has purchased is worth the tens of thousands of dollars and multiple years of his or her life required to obtain it. If the past is prologue, I am bracing myself for one more hit on my annual evaluations and pay as a result of that exchange. The beat—and the beating—goes on.

In short, the modern American corporate university, like its close cousin the modern American corporation, puts financial considerations ahead of educational ones, and analyzes educational projects (including faculty publications and a teacher’s exchanges with his students, in my case) not in terms of their educational benefit, but their potential effect on the bottom line. The educational experience takes a backseat to budgetary considerations, and the educational process is never allowed to pose questions that might jeopardize fund-raising, grant support, or alumni boosterism. As a professor friend of mine put it, the “cost” of education, in this state of affairs, is education itself—which gets dumbed-down or forgotten in the relentless competition universities (and professors!) wage with each other for students, grants, and alumni support. The budgetary—or enrollment—tail wags the educational dog. Meanwhile, as it didn’t take the Occupy Wall Street protestors to point out, the ballooning cost of college tuitions (required to pay the ridiculous salaries of the very administrators who are setting these mistaken priorities) staggers generations of students under the weight of loans they may never be able to work their way out from under—no matter how many false promises about the value of their degrees and the glorious careers that await them are self-promotingly proffered by the schools they are persuaded to attend.

Now none of the preceding observations is particularly new or original. Everything I am saying is really just common sense and conventional wisdom. And there is nothing terribly controversial about any of it, beyond the fact that it is being said by a university faculty member rather than an outsider, and the fact that it is being said out loud rather than merely whispered or muttered under the faculty member’s breath during or after a meeting. When someone who is actually a member of a university raises these kinds of issues in public, or, for that matter, raises them behind closed doors in a committee or staff meeting, he or she is ostracized or retaliated against as betraying the institution—or “pissing in your own soup” as my current Dean vulgarly put it in a recent memo excoriating me for having informed my students about the challenges of the job market in an email I sent to them that apparently veered too close to the truth. A faculty member who says such things must be penalized—or marginalized and made irrelevant. It’s worth noting that, on top of the other punishments that have been administered to me, I have also been removed from (or excluded from service on) university committees where these sorts of issues might come up and be discussed—e.g., committees in charge of admissions, curricular matters, and faculty reviews, promotions, and hiring. It is apparently too dangerous to give me a platform to express my views, even to other faculty members within Boston University. Who knows what might happen if I actually persuaded a few others to go along with my ideas? My Chairman actually cited this as his reason for removing me from a graduate admissions committee I had previously chaired, after I expressed my opposition to the Dean’s dictates about lowering admissions standards to bring in more tuition dollars. He told me that if he left me on the committee he was afraid I would persuade other faculty members to agree with me about the importance of maintaining academic standards and consequently might jeopardize the execution of the Dean’s goals. So much for the virtues of discussion and debate at Boston University. The only kind of faculty input that is wanted—or tolerated—on the admissions committee is unequivocal, unthinking, obedient academic hucksterism.

The censorship I’ve personally experienced is part of a larger system of surveillance and control of expression at Boston University. The college I teach in, the College of Communication (ironically named in the light of what I am going to tell you) can stand as an example. The current Dean of the college is the same guy I have already mentioned a couple times (the guy who eviscerated me for raising philosophical issues about the meaning of education with my students), a fellow named Tom Fiedler. Unlike the Dean who preceded him, Fiedler is not a total disaster as a human being, but being a normal human being is not sufficient to qualify one to be a university Dean. It takes a lot of knowledge and insight into how a large, complex academic organization devoted to scholarship and pedagogy functions, and Fiedler is clearly not qualified in those areas, about which he knows more or less nothing, since he has no academic background. As I noted, his previous career involved working for a corporation, specifically as a journalist whose apparent claim to fame (it’s the lead item on his bio sheet and something he is obviously extremely proud of) is that he was one of a team of Miami Herald reporters who forced Democratic hopeful Gary Hart to drop out of the presidential race in 1987 by stalking his girlfriend and secretly staking-out Hart’s residence, to catch the two of them in a compromising relationship. Fiedler and his reporter buddies trailed, spied, stalked, and staked-out Hart in a private residential neighborhood night and day for days at time (with, at one point, Fiedler actually putting on a costume to continue the surreptitious snooping!). Then, like the pack of yelping jackals they were, they swooped in for the kill as a group, unexpectedly surrounding a stunned and off-guard Hart on the street when he hadn’t even known they were there, swarming, confronting, and barraging him with a series of privacy-invading questions about his sex life, then broadcasting the results of his stammering, stunned replies on the front page of the newspaper.

In other words, Fiedler and his pals were practitioners of the trashiest form of headline-grabbing tabloid journalism, based on covert surveillance, deceit, trickery, concealing your identity, and a final Perry-Mason-like “gotcha” confrontation with the individual you have snared in your trap and deliberately caught off-guard. It’s the sensationalism and trivialization of journalism that the Watergate scandal and television shows like 60 Minutes inspired, as practiced by reporters who would rather “investigate” who a politician slept with than what the effect of his policies will be—and a quintessential example of the transgression of every normal and customary standard of human decency and respectful treatment that American and British journalists (and executives like Rupert Murdoch) so proudly and self-justifyingly feel their profession entitles them to. Cheaters has become the standard of excellence for the new journalism. It’s not about ethics; it’s about getting a big headline you can cite on your bio sheet.

Well, given that kind of “investigative” predilection, and that sense of what constitutes acceptable (and ethical) professional behavior, I guess no one should have been surprised that when Fiedler arrived at Boston University he chose to pursue a covert spying and surveillance policy against his own faculty members. He revealed to surprised college faculty last year that his office had had a long-standing policy of remotely electronically monitoring what faculty members printed on their computers (it’s amazing what can be done nowadays in that way), and subsequently revealed that he had authorized staff members to call telephone numbers faculty had dialed from their offices to check up on them (allegedly to verify whether college equipment was being used “properly”). The spying policy was divulged to the faculty in the form of a memo that attacked specific individuals for printing material that Fiedler did not approve of. When questioned about the extent of his surveillance activities at a subsequent faculty meeting—I was the questioner of course—Fiedler asserted his additional right to read the emails faculty send and receive (though he noted that he didn’t “have the time to do it,” as if that made a difference). Shades of News Corps’ Rupert Murdoch and Hewlett-Packard’s Patricia Dunn, with the major difference being that at least Murdoch and Dunn initially denied that they had authorized what they had, since they knew it was wrong, while Fiedler defended his right to do everything he did—and he and the BU administration continue to defend his right to continue to do it. At BU, it’s not only OK to spy on your faculty, but you don’t apologize for it or abandon the practice when you are forced to divulge it.

Can you imagine the climate of fear and intimidation this policy has created among faculty members—or the chilling effect it has had on faculty expression? Some faculty members have stopped using their office computers to print sensitive documents, stopped using their university email accounts to write anything important or confidential, stopped using their office telephones, and stopped using the Xerox machine—oh, I forgot to mention that, as one of his other administrative innovations, Fiedler had the faculty copier pulled out and requires that everything faculty members want to Xerox be left for 48 hours with one of his staffers to read and check its contents before the job is performed by the staffer on a locked machine controlled by the Dean. So much for the confidentiality of communications between faculty members or between faculty and the senior administration. If you copy a letter before you send the original off to the President or a member of the Board of Trustees (or copy anything else you want to send to anyone else), the Dean’s office gets to know about it before you’ve even put it in the envelope. (And remember you can’t just print out a duplicate on your computer, since printing is already covered by the Dean’s other surveillance practices.) That, by the way, is why I am writing this at home and e-mailing it to you from a non-BU account. If I didn’t, or if I printed this out on a university printer, my Dean could conceivably know that I was writing you—or what I was writing about—before you did. That’s the BU I and other faculty members know—the so-called “new BU” under the leadership of President Robert Brown.

I had initially assumed that many of the things I am describing (and particularly the attempts to control and censor what I write and say) were taking place “under the radar” of the most senior university administrators, but I was disabused of that notion in 2007 when my Chairman told me that many of the punitive actions he was taking against me to censor my publications (or to punish me for having published them) had been personally authorized by the Provost, the second most senior administrator in the university—a fact which the Provost (David Campbell) subsequently confirmed when I met with him in person to object to what was being done. (For the record, Campbell didn’t yield a nanometer. He told me he saw nothing wrong with censoring my publications, and that I should obey my Chairman’s dictates.) In the three or four years since then, I have made sure that the previous university Provost (David Campbell), the current Provost (Jean Morrison), and the President (Robert Brown) have been made fully aware of the events I am describing, by sending them reports and memos (or by sending them carbons of memos and reports I have sent to others) describing everything I have described here—and more. So nothing I have mentioned in this email is news to the Provost or President. Since none of the misconduct I have told them about has been stopped, or even questioned, the only possible conclusion is that it is endorsed and approved by the Provost and President. Only at BU would that not be surprising.

For five or six years now, I have done everything but get down on my knees in front of these administrators, both those in my college and those above them, either in person or via memo, to plead with them, to beg them for fair treatment and redress, but the obvious problem is that, at the level of my college, I am appealing to the very people who have been guilty of the mistreatment and unprofessional behavior I am asking to be remedied. I have written memo after memo and held meeting after meeting with my program Director, Chairman, and Dean, but the only reply (if I can dignify it with that word) I have received from any of them has been more name-calling, more sarcasm, more verbal abuse (shouts and attacks on my morals, character, and performance of my duties), more threats that I am not to talk or write about certain things, more anger, and more negative evaluations, hits on my pay, and withdrawals of research and other support, etc..

In a vicious circle, my appeals have actually been used against me on the grounds that, by appealing for fair treatment, I am being “difficult” and “uncollegial.” BU administrators have told me this over and over again when I have met with them in person. If I just stop making these reports and stop pointing out that administrators have failed to act on them (or, to all appearances, even to read them), I might stand a chance in the future of getting a better evaluation or a raise in my pay to make up, even slightly, for the past. (Do you get it? Is it clear why they would say this? Do you understand the bribe I am being offered to withdraw my reports of their misbehavior?)

Dean Fiedler’s first conversation with me on the subject can sum up the Catch-22, upside-down, inside-outness of the situation. When, a few months after he took over the Deanship, I sent him a memo detailing some of the unethical behavior I had witnessed in the College of Communication, and (after receiving no response for a number of months) asked to meet with him in person to discuss what I had sent him, he told me that my memo only confirmed what he had been told when he took over the Deanship, namely that I was a “troublemaker”—someone, he said, he had been “warned” to “watch out for.” In the light of that, he told me that what I had written about professional misconduct was of “no importance.” He didn’t take anything I wrote or told him seriously then—or since. He concluded the meeting by saying he hoped I would agree not to “make trouble” (i.e., not submit such reports) in the future. He laid it down as a condition he expected me to live up to if I wanted to restore myself to his good graces—and the good graces of other administrators. He called it “wiping the slate clean.” And that was the end of his response, the end of our meeting, and the end of the ethics inquiry. The ethical problem was me!—for writing what I had. And the only action to be taken was to be taken by me!—I was to stop making reports.

But I guess you can call me a hardened criminal, since I compounded my initial felony since that first meeting by continuing to write or visit Fiedler’s office (but only a few times, of course, since he’s made it more than clear on numerous occasions that he simply doesn’t want to hear about such things) to continue to express concerns about ethical issues, administrative misbehavior, transparency of decision-making, violations of procedure, treatment of faculty members who think differently from others, faculty review procedures, and related issues. Predictably enough, Fiedler’s subsequent responses have been even more rude, sarcastic, or nasty than they were at that first meeting—increasingly rude, sarcastic, and nasty—and of course my evaluations and pay (which he determines) have continued being negatively affected. My problem, my failure, the reason for the scornful, mocking words and the punishments? I continued to express ethical and procedural concerns.

The humor of it is that the Dean’s logic is actually unassailable since, once he’s defined submitting reports of ethical violations and professional misconduct as “making trouble,” I have to plead guilty to indeed having been a bona fide “trouble-maker”—in that definition of it. And, in that definition of it, I continue to “make trouble” right up into the present, every time I submit another report about a problem. With each statement I make, the Dean is clearly more exasperated with me than he was the last time. By this point, three or four years into the process, his responses have ceased being either thoughtful or logical (not that they were so eminently thoughtful or logical even in our first meeting): they have descended to sheer mockery, sarcasm, name-calling, and the “pissing in your soup” vulgar insult I already quoted. Fiedler clearly doesn’t want reports of ethical and behavioral “trouble” to cross his desk—just like the administrators at Penn State didn’t want them to cross theirs. He wants positive stories and good news. He wants “team spirit” (and, if you can believe it, actually showed a sports video to the faculty to make the point!). He wants “salesmanship” and “brand identification.” He wants flattering press releases. In his (corporate/sports-nut) view, that’s what a professor is paid for. My reports and meetings with him about ethical issues obviously don’t fit into those categories or perform those services. They “make trouble” for him, which is reason enough, once he has committed himself to this view of the function of a Dean/Coach and the function of a professor/team member, to punish and retaliate against me. Quod erat demonstrandum. What part of “stop telling me about ethical issues” don’t I understand?

The chief difference from the Penn State situation that I can see is that the Penn State events apparently consisted of an administrator simply not responding to a “troubling” report, while Fiedler has taken a much more active stance and decided to “shoot the messenger”—to punish me financially, bureaucratically, and personally (with verbal abuse)—for bringing him the message. So, you see, that’s my crime: I have told and, like a complete fool, continue to tell my Dean things he doesn’t want to hear and refuses to listen to. That’s the man President Brown chose as the successor to the previous Dean, to restore ethical conduct and respectful faculty treatment to the College of Communication. Welcome to BU. Welcome to my world. Ah, the joys of the academy and the life of the mind, and the deep satisfaction of devoting your life to an institution committed, as President Brown frequently boasts, to the highest standards of ethical conduct.

As I say, I have sent long, detailed memos (or copies of reports submitted to others) to the current Provost (Morrison) and President (Brown) describing the behavior of the individuals in my college and the unprofessional treatment and unethical behavior I have witnessed and been subject to, appealing for fair treatment and redress. And what has been the result? I have yet to receive a single sentence in the way of a reply, an invitation to meet with them to discuss the issues I have raised, or seen any change whatsoever in the treatment I am receiving. (I have waited months for a response from either one, and have even written follow-up memos reminding them about the original memos, which they also never responded to.) If a university administrator can’t even be bothered to respond to a memo about serious ethical violations from a long-serving, senior, tenured professor—let alone take action based on it—he or she is clearly not interested in addressing serious ethical issues.

Call it one more manifestation of the Penn State see-and-hear-no-evil syndrome. Middle-level administrators (my program Director, my Chairman, and my Dean) ignore my appeals for fair treatment since they would be admitting their own present and past misbehavior and culpability. And senior-level administrators (the university Provost and President) are unable to sympathetically enter into the situation of someone who is so far below them (Jerry Sandusky’s victims, or me in this instance—not that I am equating myself with them). BU is very top-heavy administratively (and very top-down in its management style) and faculty do their jobs many layers down, near the bottom of the totem pole. I can only conclude either that the bad behavior is taking place so many levels below the President and Provost that it is effectively “invisible” (notwithstanding my detailed reports) from the skyscraper heights they inhabit, or that it is too dangerous for them to deal with, since dealing with it would involve rattling the cages of the administrators below them who perpetrated the situation—or who, at least, repeatedly turned a blind eye toward my reports of it. Since the individuals guilty of the misbehavior undoubtedly deny that anything untoward has taken place, it becomes easy for the President and Provost to pretend that nothing happened. As at Penn State, when in doubt, put your head in the sand. To quote the lyric to the old song: Out of sight; out of mind. It’s easier to look the other way and deny ethical problems exist than to go to all the trouble of dealing with them. “Denial”—in every sense of the concept—is a major BU administrative coping strategy, at all levels.

I am tenured; I cannot easily be fired (baring a trumped-up morals charge against me, which might sound like a sick joke, but given the Nixonian dirty tricks I have already been subject to—like the secret meetings administrators held with my students to say nasty things about me—nothing is beyond the realm of possibility). Tenure is supposed to grant me the right to speak my mind and teach my courses without fear or retaliation; but the treatment I have received obviously raises questions about what is tenure worth at Boston University? Not very much apparently. If you say something university administrators don’t like, they can make your relation to your colleagues so unbearable, the performance of your duties so difficult, and your mentoring of students so untenable—in short, make your life so hellish—that they will succeed in making you quit in disgust and discouragement, tenure or no tenure. That’s clearly what they have been trying to do to me. At BU, tenure is, in effect, worthless.

Well, that’s a very long answer to a very short question. Forgive any typos in the preceding. I am writing quickly. It was early in the evening when I started, but it’s now well past midnight. Yikes! And sorry for the length. I’ve undoubtedly told you more than you wanted to know; but, if you can believe it, there is more to say about all of these issues—and many other instances of administrative misconduct and ethical violation at BU. (It’s a basic principle that if someone is capable of the kinds of unprofessional and unethical behavior I have described, they are capable of others.) I’ve left out a lot. I have hundreds of pages of memos and reports documenting additional events. But this will do for now. Basta. Thanks for reading this far—if you did!

I wish you well in your work, Jon. You are truly one of the most important living artists, and I only hope I can do justice to your work in the book I am writing. The sooner I finish, the better to celebrate the importance of your films and your personal example. Keep going. It matters—all the more in the world we find ourselves living in. As a greater man than I said: “Truth and love will triumph over lies and hate.” Given my experience at BU, I sometimes have my doubts, but we have to keep believing that is true. It’s the only way to live our lives.

All best wishes.

Cordially,

Ray

Ray Carney
Professor of 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/University Press of New England); 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; What’s Wrong with Film Criticism; and other books, essays, and editions.

Web site: http://www.Cassavetes.com (suspended at the demand of my Chairman and Dean)

Mailing address:
Prof. Ray Carney
College of Communication
640 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston University
Boston, MA 02215

Office telephone: 617-353-5976
Office e-mail address: rcarney@bu.edu

What this little tale tells is in keeping with a broader phenomenon in America: the steady seep of corruption into all levels of our society, a hand-maiden to the take-over of corporations, with their financial power warping all aspects of life in America.   I will do another post on this in the near future.

Meantime support the Spring Occupation where ever you live.

ADDENDUM:

The following is a response to this posting from the President of Boston University, Robert Brown:

April 1, 2012
Dear Mr. Jost:
It is inappropriate for me to comment externally on faculty performance and university personnel matters.  Boston University has well established and fair processes for faculty members to bring forward grievances.  Sometimes they do not like the answers that result.
Sincerely,
Bob Brown
President
Boston University

This is, naturally, the kind of response one can expect from corporatized souls, reciting like a mantra cliche phrases defending their institution.  Boston University in truth has a good track record of harassing faculty who don’t toe the proper political line of the administration.  Howard Zinn is the most visible case.   The response to the letter I sent to Mr Brown some 6 or so years ago, was pretty much the same boiler-plate corporatese CYA.    Our universities have long been the subject of scathing novels on the petty politics of internal department politics, bloated egos, etc., and recently, as in the case of Penn State, of pure unmitigated corruption.  Universities are now very big business, with spin-off research institutions, close ties to corporate interests, sports incomes, and of course their original mission of “education” has been duly corrupted in process.  They largely function as farm systems for corporate interests.  Along the way they charge exorbitantly for their “services” and leave their students, clearly as part of a larger social project, with a massive debt in loans, which puts those clients on a treadmill of corporate servitude.  Student loans are particularly odious as most are structured precisely to put the borrower in an untenable position, under the lash.  It is clearly a purposeful system as the universities are transparently part of the larger social con in which it is insisted that without a vaunted degree one will get nowhere in life.  It has all degenerated into a cruel farce in which corruption is the moral, ethical, economic, social and political norm.   These universities play a significant role on constructing this fraud.