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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, September 26, 2005

MILQUETOASTS REVISITED

A correspondent who used to work at AU writes to UD with a question:


[In newspaper accounts of the AU situation,] faculty [are] portrayed as proceeding with great caution, often under the cloak of anonymity, for fear they might be fired… Is it that bad? Whatever happened to academic freedom? Surely tenured faculty have the cojones to speak out.



The answer to this is that professors are rather wimpy.

But there are significant and impressive exceptions.

UD has in mind The Committee to Save Adelphi, which had its first press conference almost exactly ten years ago today. This group included not only faculty at Adelphi University, but also alumni, students, and former trustees.

Showing great courage and clarity, the Committee successfully organized to sue the bejaysus out of their grotesque president, Peter Diamandopoulos, and his fellow opulence-obsessives on the board, all of whom had to cough up millions.

I hope it’s okay with Committee members (and others at the university who brought the suit) if I reproduce here, a decade later, from the language of the suit, the roll of honor:

THE COMMITTEE TO SAVE ADELPHI, by its Co-Chairs, GAYLE INSLER, DEVIN THORNBURG, RAKESH GUPTA, and CATHY CLEAVER; THE FACULTY SENATE OF ADELPHI UNIVERSITY, by its Chairman, DEVIN THORNBURG; SYLVIA ARON; CRAIG F. ASH; JAMES L. BEDELL; WILLIAM H. BORTEN, CARL B. BUXBAUM; DOMINICK CAVALLO, CATHERINE CLEAVER; BARBARA S. COHEN; DEBORAH COOPERSTEIN; ROBERT J. DEVLIN; PETER P. FARLEY; VALERIE FEINMAN; PATRICIA PREISS-GALLAGHER; RAKESH GUPTA; THOMAS F. HEFFERNAN; MONICA M. HOMER; GAYLE INSLER; ELLEN R. KELLY; PATRICK J. KELLY; STEPHEN I. KLASS; DAVID LUBELL; GAIL B. MALLOY; RACHEL MATHER; LEONARD NADEL; FRANK RICO, JR.; STANLEY SNEGROFF, BROOKE E. SPIRO, DEVIN THORNBURG, MARIE-LOUISE VAZQUEZ; and STANLEY WINDWER.