· Weeding 101 at UCLA ·

January 17th, 2010

Dear Vice Chancellor & Dean Claudia Mitchell-Kernan,

          I am enclosing the letter I wrote to you ten years ago today concerning my termination from UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies (I have changed only the date).  I am also enclosing my submission to the UCLA Academic Senate which accompanied that letter.  I'm sending you the letter and submission again because these documents contain facts and academic and ethical principles that will always remain crucial not only to the proper functioning of UCLA, but also to the educational foundations of the university itself.  In fact, if UCLA ever attaches an expiration date to the facts and principles of my termination, it will then show the public that it has altogether ceased to be a reputable public university.  Likewise, it is when UCLA continues to ignore the facts and principles of my termination that this university continues to betray its Statement of Ethical Values & Standards of Ethical Conduct as well as its Faculty Code of Conduct—and thereby continues to betray not only this university's own students, but also the public supporting this university.

          As a student of UCLA's Graduate School 0f Education & Information Studies, I was to make my own contribution to the field of education, and in making this contribution, I was to rigorously apply academic principles to the discovery and pursuit of facts, and follow these facts wherever they may lead.  And since it happens in our search for knowledge and understanding that we sometimes discover the most important facts in the most unlikely places, so it was that I discovered these facts in what was for me at the time a most unexpected place: my termination from UCLA.

          Since I last wrote to you, in my reading about education and in my discussions with others on the facts of my termination, I have not found a principled argument for ending my pursuit of these facts and allowing my termination to stand.  Indeed, as I understand education and the mission of the entire university, I would be doing great harm to my chosen field of education, to UCLA's student body and to the university itself if I were to disregard these facts, and along with them the university's foundational principles.  And as a citizen, my responsibilities to this public university did not end when UCLA ended my academic studies.

          As you have most likely known for the past ten years, after my termination my graduate advisor, Dr. Nicholas Blurton-Jones, wrote to me that he was willing to argue that my termination from UCLA

indicates that you have been made to pay with your academic career for department error (no copies of probation letters to me), professor and university disorganisation (incompletes not being processed), [and] carelessness by whoever (Harold [Levine] claimed it was the Grad Division office?) issues the dismissal notice (for their failure to verify the situation).

          You also most likely know that this past summer UCLA demanded that I remove from the Internet my website offering the pubic important facts on how this university operates when terminating a student.  UCLA said that its demands were necessary "to protect its trademarks and reputation."  However, the public may seriously question what sort of brand name and reputation UCLA is protecting (or marketing) when its demands run afoul of U.S. Constitutional law protecting free speech.

          If UCLA is to stand by its termination of a student, or to put this otherwise, if UCLA truly understands what is necessary "to protect its trademarks and reputation" (to say nothing of education itself), this university will openly demand that its own faculty members make my advisor's argument, and UCLA will then openly refute this argument in order to uphold this student termination—in what is quite simply the everyday work at a university promoting itself under the banners of integrity and accountability.

          Or if UCLA continues to ignore this necessary work involved in its termination of a student, this public university is thereby saying to the public what the facts and circumstances of my termination make readily apparent: a few UCLA administrators, at their sole discretion and fully unchecked by UCLA faculty, decide when facts and the university's academic and ethical principles matter, and when they don't.  Furthermore, it seems to me that the longer the university waits to engage in this necessary work, the more clearly it appears that UCLA is functioning first and foremost to weed out students—for reasons that are entirely antithetical to higher education (thus exposing this university's trademarks and reputation as mere marketing).

          I trust, Dr. Mitchell-Kernan, that as the Vice Chancellor and Dean of UCLA Graduate Studies you are aware of the extremely problematic facts and circumstances of my termination from UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.  I also trust that you are fully committed to academic freedom and the university's academic and ethical principles.  Finally, I trust that you don't need me to put forth here the actions that I think UCLA faculty members must take in this case in order to defend academic freedom and secure fundamental principles at UCLA.  Indeed, I think you well understand the actions that are necessary in this case, so it seems to me that it is merely a question of whether you will act on these principles, in the security of academic freedom.

          Surely your truly privileged position within this public university still allows you to ask yourself—and others: "What better place than here, what better time than now?"

Sincerely,
Tom Wilde

January 17, 2000

Dear Dean Mitchell-Kernan,

          It likely struck you as quite absurd that you should be named in my legal action against my termination from a graduate program at UCLA, considering you had no part in the actual dismissal decision and I was to you only a faceless student.  Likewise, it struck me as equally absurd that I should be dismissed from my graduate program by two faceless administrators who made no attempt to verify the information used in their dismissal decision and who made no inquires to concerned faculty about my academic standing.  So perhaps we have some common ground.
          As you know, following my termination I wrote to you about the problematic facts and circumstances surrounding the decision to dismiss me.  It struck me as still more questionable that my letter to you on these concerns was referred back to the person I had brought to your attention as responsible for these same problematic facts and circumstances.  And I trust you now know the reasoning I put into bringing you into the matter.  I think it is quite reasonable for a student to expect the dean of any graduate school to safeguard fundamental academic and ethical principles by seeing that her "delegated representative" actually practices these same principles.
          I am enclosing a copy of my recent (but much belated) submission to the Academic Senate Grievance Committee.  Of course, had I known of this Committee at the time of my termination I would have immediately taken those problematic facts and circumstances to them as well, and from what I now know, I believe there would have then been a satisfactory resolution of the situation.  Following Academic Senate procedures, I have met with an Academic Senate counselor who, after contacting various people in the University, told me that their position was that my failed legal action was my last option.  I have made this much-belated submission notwithstanding this counseling, for reasons I will conclude with.

          I have made this submission to the Academic Senate because the facts remain to show that those named abandoned fundamental academic and ethical principles in their decision to dismiss me, principles on which the entire University is founded.  And I have no doubts that the University's own cadre of attorneys would candidly concede this, if they could; of course they cannot, since that is not their job.  So instead, it now appears from the statements of the Academic Senate counselor that the two people who decided my dismissal are going to be allowed to hide behind my own ineptitude with complexities of legal practice so as to hold themselves unbound by the ethical conduct to which the University itself had obligated them.
          Certainly you can appreciate the efforts made by those who have refused to let a court decision be their last option, lest we would continue to "enjoy" our places in society by having allowed 'separate but equal' to remain a last option.  And certainly a University decision that has not secured for its students and faculty the fundamental academic and ethical principles upon which education is founded cannot be allowed to stand as a last option.

Sincerely,
Tom Wilde