200 NYU Professors Say They Lack Confidence in Sexton

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The New York Sun

Faculty members at New York University have warned their president, John Sexton, that they are losing confidence in his leadership.


With tensions high on a campus divided by a strike of its graduate students, more than 200 faculty members signed a letter to Mr. Sexton telling him that “faculty trust in the administration’s good faith has been irreparably damaged.” The letter, fiery in its denunciation of university actions, suggested the possibility of a faculty revolt against Mr. Sexton’s administration.


The flare-up in the faculty was sparked by charges that the administration was spying on communication between teachers and students. The letter charged that, in gaining access to the primary online program that teachers use to manage their classes, his administration committed the “deepest violation of academic freedom.” About two-thirds of the signatories are professors in the Faculty of Arts and Science, the largest academic unit of NYU, with about 650 tenure and tenure-track faculty members.


The warning to Mr. Sexton seemed to widen the split between his administration and a faction of the faculty that has urged the president to bargain with the graduate student union, whose contract with NYU expired at the end of August. Mr. Sexton has vowed that NYU will no longer recognize the union, which he said interfered with NYU’s academic mission.


“We have little confidence in the university administration’s ability to lead us out of this crisis. We urge a rapid effort to resolve this dispute with the graduate students before matters pass the point of no return in the university as a whole,” stated the letter, which was signed by many of the same people who have expressed support for the union.


One of the scholars who signed the letter was E.L. Doctorow, the acclaimed novelist and NYU professor in American letters. “The university has become quite polarized,” he told The New York Sun. “Sensitivities are extremely exacerbated and issues of academic freedom have jumped to the fore.”


Another signatory, professor of physics Alan Sokal, said, “It sure sounds like the administration has done one of the worst possible things it could do, which is to intrude in the communications between faculty and students.”


“Clearly,” he said, “a large faction of the faculty are extremely dissatisfied with the administration’s handling of the graduate student unionization issue.”


NYU officials strongly deny that they were snooping on professors and students but acknowledged that the administration made mistakes in its efforts to deal with the graduate student strike. As of Wednesday, several hundred graduate students have refused to teach, grade papers and exams, or lead discussion sections, putting the university under pressure to make sure undergraduate courses are not disrupted.


The spying dispute revolves around an online software program called Blackboard that many tech-savvy teachers use to make announcements to their classes, to post homework assignments and readings, and to allow students to communicate with each other on message boards.


On Wednesday, NYU gave two associate deans and departmental directors of undergraduate studies access to the Blackboard sites of classes taught by graduate students. NYU officials said 165 class sections – many of which are foreign language courses – are taught by graduate students.


NYU says it was giving departments and administrators the ability to communicate with students whose teachers are on strike to pass on instructions or other information should the need arise. They said the access given to the directors and associate deans was not done in secret and that many departments had been counseled about the decision beforehand.


What most alarmed professors was that NYU also gained access to Blackboard pages in classes taught by faculty members. NYU officials said it was a mistake to include those courses and blamed the error on the fact that in some cases graduate students were listed as instructors when they were merely assistants.


After receiving complaints from faculty members, NYU immediately scrapped the plan and said the administration would use a different method to communicate with students. A spokesman for NYU, John Beckman, denied that there was anything malicious about the university’s actions. “Nobody was doing anything that was surreptitious and nobody was engaging in surveillance,” he said.


He said NYU had good intentions but acknowledged that the administration ought to have alerted every department affected and to have made a university-wide announcement about its plan.


The New York Sun

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