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Friday, June 25, 2004

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA UPDATE


“Chaotic,” “pernicious,” “vituperative,” “toxic,” “dangerous,” “devastating.”

University Diaries is now prepared to say that, with language like this invoked by virtually all observers, the scandal at the University of South Florida English department [for background, see UD, 5/17 and 6/21] is getting way out of hand.

A third faculty member has disgraced herself, reports the St. Petersburg Times: “Debra Jacobs [Director of English Composition] selected [for her courses] a textbook she wrote, and received $26,129 in compensation without proper approval.” Several other professors are accused of sexual or financial impropriety.

But the scandal is not merely about this particular professor or that one. (Although a lot of these guys do deserve singling out for ingenuity in the service of greed: Professor Moxley [more about him in an earlier UD post], reports one paper, made a deal “to have a fiction book [he authored] published. The contract required him to buy 150 copies of the book. He submitted $1,200 he paid for the books as a printing cost.“) There’s an “ideological schism” (the classic one, between text-based and theory-based types) in the department, reports the paper, which has created “trench warfare, with factions of professors battling for control.”



USF - a tax-payer supported university - has now hired an outside firm to investigate what one department member calls a “pathological” situation, a situation which has generated “at least thirteen complaints of discrimination and harassment … during the past year and a half.”

One USF English professor believes that the mess can be cleared up only by “an outside leader for the department,” which is to say receivership. Should this occur, it will be interesting to see whether USF gets the kind of attention Columbia University got when its English department went into receivership.