Ben-no Schmidt! Ben-no Schmidt!

Excerpt from the faculty letter to Sexton regarding Blackboardgate and electronic surveillance, signed by 204 members of the NYU faculty.

We consider this seizing of access to the communication
between professors and their registered students to be an intensely unethical
act, one that is in the deepest violation of academic freedom. At our meeting
with you on Tuesday, you tried to assure us that your primary identity at the
university was as a proud member of the faculty, but it is hard for us to
believe that anyone committed to faculty rights and governance, and academic
freedom (especially in the arena of classroom pedagogy) would countenance
practices of this sort. These are acts of invasive intimidation. You suggested
at our the same meeting that your opposition to the unionization of graduate
students at NYU was a measure of your principled devotion to the sanctity of the
academic process, and yet the university's effort to resist that unionization
have now evidently compromised the most basic principles defending that process.
You also suggested that the various parties in this struggle no doubt were not
acting from mendacity, but for outsiders to secretly listen in on the
communications of a class is mendacious in the extreme.

The principle of safe space – in terms of a classroom
ethic of mutual respect, in terms of specific anti-harassment rules, and in
terms of instructors’ duty to seek consent before sharing any privileged
communications or materials – is a principle that we all work painstakingly to
establish in our classrooms. Indeed, it is fundamental to establishing the basis
for a functioning class.

Opening of Blackboard lists to administrative surveillance compromises
principles of free conversation and exchange perennially enjoyed not only by
faculty, but undergraduate students as well.

Nothing so confirms that academic workers at this university need
protection and representation of their own choosing (such as the protection
afforded to graduate students by a union) as this single egregious act, which
goes against the foundational principles of higher education as well as those of
a democratic and open society.

We spoke to you in our Tuesday meeting of the deep wounds that the
administration's refusal to negotiate is causing the university. Now we must add
the outrage we feel at this terrible and shameful act of misconduct. Faculty
trust in the administration’s good faith has been irreparably damaged, and 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.