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"[A]cademics can be activists as long as they do nothing to challenge the structure of the university, or anyone's power within it. If you want to make an issue of labor conditions in Soweto, great, you're a wonderful humanitarian; if you want to make an issue of labor conditions for the janitors who clean your office, that's an entirely different story."
"One thing I've learned in academia is no one much cares what your politics are as long as you don't do anything about them. You can espouse the most radical positions imaginable, as long as you're willing to be a hypocrite about them. The moment you give any signs that you might not be a hypocrite, that you might be capable of standing on principle even when it's not politically convenient, then everything's different."
David Graeber
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Introduction
In his 1977
Huizinga lecture, “Intellectuals and the State,” Noam Chomsky begins with a caveat that
will not surprise anyone familiar with experimental procedures and their
purpose; namely, he will
omit
many important nuances and draw lines more sharply than the full range of
complexity warrants, trying to isolate some ‘ideal cases’ that can serve to
organize and facilitate our understanding of more complex phenomena, much as
one does in the natural sciences, for example. Though such an effort carries risks, it is indispensable if
we hope to proceed beyond a kind of ‘natural history’ to some understanding of
what lies behind a confusing range of events, acts, and pronouncements.
In his Introduction to Chomsky's Language & Politics (1988), UCLA's Carlos P. Otero repeats Chomsky's caveat to say that this effort can allow us to overcome "the difficulty of developing an insightful understanding of the facts and of discovering important truths about the real workings of power."
This [effort] requires the application of the principles of rational inquiry, much as researchers do in the natural sciences. To make sense out of what lies behind a confusing range of events, decisions, and pronouncements one has to begin by trying to isolate some highly representative cases that can serve to organize and facilitate our understanding of less clear-cut phenomena... . Only in this way is it possible to succeed...in isolating some principles that have explanatory force over a significant range.
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Unethical Student Termination at UCLA
An Ideal Case
I
will try to proceed here in the way described in the preceding quotes
from Chomsky and Otero, so that my expulsion can be used to show that "there's a real selection for obedience and
conformity" in the university, and also used to help us overcome "the difficulty of
developing an insightful understanding of the facts and of discovering
important truths about the real workings of power" in the university.
To consider my expulsion as an ideal case, we must look first at how UCLA says it operates as a public university: UCLA Standards of Ethical Conduct and Faculty Code of Conduct.
From Standards of Ethical Conduct:
“Members of the University
community are expected to conduct themselves ethically, honestly and with
integrity in all dealings. This
means that principles of fairness, good faith, and respect consistent with
laws, regulations and University policies govern our conduct with others both
inside and outside the community.”
From Faculty Code of Conduct, under Teaching and Students:
“Professors make every reasonable
effort to foster honest academic conduct and to assure that their evaluations
of students reflect each student’s true merit.”
Now
we can turn to documents that shed light on how the
university actually operates.
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