letter to a bureaucrat

Professor,

It is ironic that I receive your end-of-year comments on my “performance” at the same time that I received a 25-year service thank-you note from Loyola, with a Seiko watch as present. I thank you and the administration for the 100-dollar Seiko watch (Amazon's price).

You really think that you’ll “improve” my “performance” by letting me teach five days a week at 8:00 and by having “colleagues” attend my courses? You’ve already unfairly increased my load, rejected my promotion, and froze my salary to an associate professor level. Why not treat people with dignity, and tell them we don’t want you with us anymore? Why this stupid game of forcing someone to quit by pushing him to unbearable working conditions? You call that a “plan”? Let’s think of it as a deathtrap.

You must be thinking that people have no dignity, that they could be pushed around and humiliated no matter what their core beliefs are.

My core beliefs have been clearly stated since I joined Loyola 25 years ago in every page that I’ve written for my students and to the outside world, and in every photograph that I did. I received my tenure in 1998 based on those principles.

I wonder whether Loyola has core beliefs that it is defending. If a university respects itself it will not appoint a professor on tenure when he is unable to teach, write, and publish. Moreover, the university only insults itself when it tells that same professor, a couple of years before retirement, that you cannot teach, write, and publish, and your colleagues will teach you. A university must be clueless when it tells a professor right before retirement that we’ll teach you how to teach, and that your students will tell you how to teach, and whether you teach well. Have you thought of grade inflation before you get me into one of your sinister “plans”? Maybe this professor has become the objet petit a of the university, or its dark consciousness. You’ll have to convince a judge in a court of law that, mutatis mutandis, you’ve kept a professor for 25 years in service “in spite” of poor performance. Or maybe because of it? Maybe the judge will tell you that it must be the university’s performance that has been going downhill! The Wall Street Journal had us ranked at 194 in 2017. We’ve always been low, but not that low!

The department must have a copy of every syllabus I taught since 1992. Read them and let me know if my teaching has degraded. Samples of those syllabi are posted on my private website and are available for the world at large. I do not usually receive from readers comments on “incompetence,” but more of the kind, I’m surprised you can do all this in a university like that!

If I cannot “do all this” anymore it’s because the working conditions at Loyola have degraded, at least since 2013. It has become difficult to even get the minimum required enrollment of 12 for most of those syllabi. Out of the five yearly courses, four are core, and the core is not a core anymore—more like a Persian bazaar with a hodgepodge of incompatible courses. Even a bazaar has more coherence, personality, and decency than anything we call core at Loyola. We’ve never had the luxury conditions of our friends in Hyde Park, but at least the room was open for experimentation. We’re now into a sinister machinery called the Core—with a capital C! I’m sure Loyola is making more pennies, and the WSJ will have us lower in 2018!

I find it wicked that you’re trying to “improve” my performance by assigning me five times a week at 8:00—when I expressly told you and David that I cannot teach that early, because never in 25 years did I teach that early, and because I work late at night and suffer from certain health conditions, which is not unusual at my age.

With the Syrian wars, I am under lots of pressure. I want to produce a book that matches the gravity of the conflict. Thank you for worrying about my Regenstein hours, but I need something more than your prayers: a good night sleep, the ability to work and concentrate, and days where I stay at home to write.

Rather than give me lessons of “ethics,” I want you to question your ethical line, assuming you have one: Are the 8:00am assignments really there to “improve” my teaching, or are they an overt attempt to make my working conditions unbearable? Is there any consciousness left in you?

So let’s come to business, which is what Loyola likes doing most, albeit clumsily.

I cannot accept any 8:00am assignments. You can do whatever you want with the two h104 sections, but I won’t be able to teach them myself. Let’s not waste time on this. Unless I’m brought back to the fall MWF 2017 schedule, I will only attend the course on the modern middle east in fall 2018.

I only accept my students to attend my courses, and will not approve anyone else attending, certainly not Stasi "agents" planted by the department to write dubious spying "reports." Let them work on improving their own courses. My syllabi are public on my personal website, and anyone can comment. Syllabi are too important to be disparaged by the macabre reclusiveness of academics.

My conditions are final and nonnegotiable. You can do whatever you want with me—that’s the sinister aspect of clueless bureaucracies—but you won’t be able to harm my dignity.

the bogus of enrollments

Institutions are in their very essence hypocritical about their aims, methods, and practices, a fortiori when an institution of “higher learning” claims that its “high” aim is nothing but “knowledge,” the common good, or “Jesuit education” and the goodness of the world.

So it was no surprise to detect that level hypocrisy in a letter from the Chair of our department addressed to me in late January apropos my “low” enrollments. (Full text below, letter #1) (A letter always reaches its destination, says Jacques Lacan.)

Even though the letter seems to be written in a “consensual” “friendly” tone, albeit with cowardly undertones, that “friendliness” is precisely the problem. Thus, while placing “loyalty” in the institution of higher learning that employs us both as tenured professors for over 20 years, what the letter lacks is that institutional objectivity: the simple fact that if my enrollments have been lower than they should in the past couple of years, it is for no other reason due to objective institutional changes which have nothing to do with me (nor with the Chair for that matter) as an individual.

Yet the whole tone of the letter is individualistic, addressing enrollement as if it is “my” problem, while maintaining that bogus institutional loyalty as the bearer of “higher principles” of learning (Jesuit and Catholic education and all that crap). Universities are known to thrive on the non-said, which is a general non-dit policy down to the most mundane memos.

From the beginning, the letter comes directly to the point, addressing the problem of “my” low enrollments in fours seminars in Fall 2013 and Spring 2014. Considering that the Chair and myself both work in the History department (with a big H), two semesters do not seem much of a time framework either historically or statistically for that matter. So why did the Chair, who seems to appreciate historical time in his research (on the British monarchy), not check my enrollments in the last five years (at least since my return from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 2009), comparing them with broader institutional patters.

As the letter de facto criminalizes me for my low enrollments, making me responsible for what happened (again, without explicitly naming the criminal act(s), for being, say, “hard” on students, “irresponsible,” élitist, and so on), it fails to mention the essential, namely, that enrollments have shifted due to strategic changes in the core requirements, which, in turn, have prompted changes in the departmental requirements.

To solve the mystery problem of low enrollments, the letter engages in a vicious circle: to reach a “decent” enrollment, which is set at 100 for a 2:2 load like mine (“research intensive,” another one of those bogus terms), I must teach 3 courses in the Fall 2014 on a 3:2 load, but now the minimum enrollment should be in the order of 125. The Russian roulette continues until we reach the maximum 4:4 load for a 200 minimum. To reach such “demanding” numbers, the only solution is to load one’s schedule with tons of useless core courses. Adieu à la liberté, bonjour tristesse, vive la fraternité! Adieu au langage, as Jean-Luc Godard would say.

Loyola has been toying with the cash-machine of the “core” since eternity, but it was only in 2003–05 that this Jesuit (and Catholic) institution of higher learning (and knowledge) finally found its Eureka moment: to transform the “core” into a capitalist enterprise one must include every possible subject on the planet, from western and non-western civilizations to terrorism and Boko Haram. In other words, the “core” became truly “Boko.” We should name it the Boko-core. Moreover, departments, in light of the new core, started changing their own requirements accordingly. For example, a “world history” course, history 299, which was a requirement for “international studies” students, was no more required since 2012–13. Instead of the 35 students I would normally get, I had only two in Spring 2014.

At the time, when Loyola made its great discovery on über-capitalism (a.k.a. Jesuit education), I was a visiting professor at Aleppo University, the major industrial city in the Syrian north. The then Chair sent me a “good news” letter informing me that “Islam” (whatever thay may mean) is now part of the core, and that I could, if I wanted to, offer “Islam” within the core. I’ve responded that the “good news” must coincide with the end of the core-as-core, as it had lost, through extensive inclusion of non-western societies and civilizations, and various topoi, its heart and soul, becoming more of a shopping mall and a supermarket of ideas. Equally important, I predicted, the “special topics” seminars would lose both their status and momentum; indeed, I thought that all 300-level courses would be affected. That’s particularly true of someone like yours truly living from a “minor” field, whose courses are not “required,” and with no openings to graduate studies and upper-level dissertations. Needless to say, it looks pretty much clear in hindsight that the killing of the 300-level seminars was pretty much a deliberate institutional policy, as those courses look less “profitable” than the fully capped core courses. (See letter #2 below)

When I returned to Chicago in Fall 2005, after a two-year absence, we developed with colleagues working on Islam, the Near and Middle East, North Africa, and east and central Asia, a “minor” that we decided to call “Islamic World Studies” (IWS). Our main aim was precisely to counter the “crisis” of the lack of variety in the 300-level special-topics offerings for “minor” areas like ours. We naïvely reasoned that if we could sign in 50 to 80 students into the IWS minor, we would not be cursed forever with low-enrollments at the 300-level. By 2006–07 we had 60 students joining in, which enabled me to offer topoi like “the middle east on film,” “Iran,” Egypt,” “Turkey” and “the Arab uprisings,” with 20 students on average. We got $3,000–$5,000 grants on newly designed seminars from the Department of Education in D.C. to promote novel ideas and expose students to new topics.

In 2009–10, upon my return from Princeton, my enrollments were at their highest, so were they in 2010–11. The decline in numbers started in earnest in 2011–12, albeit modestly, as an outcome of the “reforms” that were worked out in 2003–05, and they accelerated further in the following year, until we reached a low point in 2013–14. The IWS has now only 20 students, and a seminar on the “Ottoman Empire,” scheduled for Spring 2014, had to be cancelled because it had “only” 8 students by Christmas. The lucky 8 students received their providential cancellation Christmas time. No one has offered such a seminar in 20 years, and possibly throughout the university’s long history.

Nor is this cowardly cancellation of courses limited to history. A friend of mine got his "philosophy of religion" seminar canceled in November 2013 for no other reason than it had missed the 10-student mark a couple of months before the beginning of the new semester in mid-January. Instead, he had to teach four identical "ethics" core courses, capped at 35 each: some will die teaching the core, the same way some die from eating too much chocolate. Needless to say, it has become impossible to plan for a more coherent thematic approach in teaching and writing in such an environment.

It does not require a rocket scientist to realize that the problem of enrollment is institutional. The university has spent in the last decade close to $500 million (and counting) on projects to “renovate” its various campuses, making them more agreeable to the body and soul, hence, it goes without saying that it needs the cashing-machine of the core to service its debt. In other words, it operates like a banana republic economy which is grossly indebted to hungry investors and banks, while surviving annually only by servicing its mounting debt. Debt aside, Loyola faces another crucial problem, namely, the fact that no more than half of the students are able to make it in four years for graduation, compared to 86 percent for our neighbor Northwestern, which fairs poorly for the university in its “national ratings.” So all this shuffle between core and requirements has no other purpose but to give students a college degree without much work.

Which is precisely the problem in American higher education in the last decades. Colleges and Universities of sorts attempt to become lucrative not by improving content and knowledge, but by opening up to entertainment, at least for the arts and humanities and social sciences. It’s a live or die situation where the high expenses of learning could only be met if the institution transforms itself into a machinery for promoting investment capital.

letter #1

Dear Zouhair,

I am sorry that we have not had a chance to speak since I became chair.  I write to you now on a matter of some seriousness.

As you may know, I am required to monitor the enrollments of all faculty in the Department. According to the latest figures, your two courses for this term, Hist 300E-001 and Hist 299E-001 have enrolled five and two students, respectively. This comes after a Fall semester that saw 13 students take your Hist 322-001 and 5 take your Hist 299E-00. In addition, you supervised a Provost Fellow in HIST 399, for a total across the academic year of 26 students.   

Unfortunately, those numbers are not appropriate or financially sustainable for a faculty member with a 2-2 teaching load in the College. According to the Department of History Standards for Research-Intensive and Research-Active Faculty (adopted by the department and approved by the Dean in the Fall of 2010):

As a general rule, faculty should average approximately 25 students per class. Research-intensive faculty with a 2-2 load should teach at least 100 students per year; research-active faculty with a 3-2 load should teach at least 125 students per year. Faculty with 3-3 teaching loads should teach at least 150 students per year; those with 4-4 loads, 200 students per year. Exceptions are granted with the approval of the chair and/or dean. 

In addition, the Principles and Normative Guidelines on Faculty Instructional Responsibilities, approved by President on October 20, 2009 (available on the Academic Affairs web-site as the Loyola University Chicago Faculty Instructional Responsibilities:  http://www.luc.edu/academicaffairs/pdfs/Faculty_Instructional_Responsibilities_2009__rev_3-11.pdf) indicate that "Undergraduate courses that enroll under 10 students do not generally qualify as fulfilling this course load, except with permission of the Dean as may be necessary to delivery of a particular program."  

As a result, after consultation with the Dean, it has been determined that your total enrollment of seven students this semester cannot count for two courses.  Though it does not reach the threshold of one course, we have decided to count it as one.  In order to fulfill your commitment to the College as a research intensive faculty member (2-2 load), you will be required to teach three courses next semester (Fall 2014).  In order to approximate the required number of students, we will ask you to teach at least one section of Core (History 104 or, if you prefer, History 101) and possibly two, in addition to one or two upper division courses (your choice of Hist 312, 313 or 322) for a combined total of three.

I cannot imagine that this E Mail will be welcome to you.  Please understand that it is not intended to be punitive and I take no pleasure in having to write it.  As you may recall, I have read your work, Zouhair.  It addresses many subjects, but one of the most important is that of institutions.  As we would both agree, institutions have shared cultures and specific requirements of their members.  This initiative is intended to help you to justify the salary paid you by the institution that granted you tenure, as well as to assist you to participate more fully and rewardingly in its life.

If you wish to discuss this in person, I am in the chair's office most afternoons. In any case, I look forward to your response. 

Yours sincerely,

Bob

Robert Bucholz, D.Phil.; F.R.Hist.S.

Professor and Chair

Department of History

Loyola University, Chicago

1032 N. Sheridan Road

Chicago, IL 60660

773-508-2594

rbuchol@luc.edu

letter #2

Marcia Hermansen on 11/19/13:

HI and thanks for supporting the program.

I will be happy to help you promote classes to get more enrollments.  300 enrollments are also down in Theology.

Due to changes in core beyond my control--the IWS program now has only 20 Minors rather than 60--this may also be a factor so plan for less interest from that quarter in 300 courses in future semesters.

Best wishes,

Marcia

Marcia Hermansen

Director, Islamic World Studies Program

Theology Department

Loyola University Chicago

1032 W. Sheridan Road,

Chicago, Il 60660

773-508-2345 (office)

mherman@luc.edu

faire une pipe

A while ago I received a message from the Chair of our department with the title “your webpage.” (See infra for the full text.)

What’s wrong with my webpage <zouhairghazzal.com>?

Loyola had at the time accepted that my webpage be directly linked to the departmental webpage, that is, my name links me directly to my personal page which carries my own domain-name, hence contrary to what the Chair’s email falsely claims, this is not “your LUC webpage”: I’ve designed it myself over 10 years ago, and it does not sit on the Loyola servers in Chicago. In fact, it is hosted by the Yahoo Small Business unit.

When I did the initial design once I moved to Rome for a year in 2001–02, the year the Manhattan Twin Towers went down, Loyola did at the time host my webpage, and I used to update it regularly, that is, until 2006–07 when updating became a real annoyance: every once and a while the page was “locked” under an administrator’s name, and it had to be “unlocked” simply to add a photo or a text. When I thought that enough is enough (I disliked also that the “address” was too long, ugly, and could not be easily memorized), I created the above domain-name and moved everything to the new website.

The point here is that Loyola has nothing whatsoever to do with this personal webpage of mine. So why was the Chair frustrated? Because “someone” from the “Loyola community” got “offended” that on my Flickr portfolio <http://www.flickr.com/photos/zghazzal/> there is (female) nudity. Actually, to be specific, the message below did not specify what the “problem” really was with the “four images” “in the vicinity” of the link below—nudity (male or female) or otherwise. One has to go to the link to see what the “problem” might be: nudity, indecency, sexual intercourse, penetration (or lack thereof), blow-jobs, and so on. The fact that the “problem” is unnamed but only alluded to is a fundamental aspect of the accusation by this or those anonymous person or persons from the so-called “Loyola community.” Forget about freedom of speech, the first amendment, and academic freedom, you only feel within a “community” once you’re accused of a felony or crime. We’ve known for some time that institutions of higher learning in the United States are Foucauldian in their essence, with a high degree of scrutinization, and with a lot of empty homogeneous time and resources at their disposal. Thus the dumb hypocritical bureaucracy must be running mad in its paper work, servers, viruses and malware, and paranoia, fearing that it would lose its grip on its “audience,” “community,” and “Jesuit education.”

Notice here that my Flickr account is unrelated to Loyola, and that on my webpage there is a link to Flickr only under “photography”; to repeat, both webpages are not hosted by Loyola, but by Yahoo.

“The ones who have generated complaints,” as the text below says, did not generate their complaints to me personally—say, be email—but to the Chair. Not only such decent people prefer to remain unnamed and anonymous, but their complaints only point to an image, which we’ll have to assume “contains” something “indecent” into it, to the point that it must be permanently “deleted,” as the text urges me to do, so that the unnamed “problem” would not reach the ears of the higher officials at Loyola.

The image to which the link below refers to is composed of frames within frames, which are framed with a single “final” frame—that of my camera’s viewfinder. There is the frame of a cheap reproduction of a painting by the Belgian René Magritte. The painting is quite well known and world famous, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” This is not a pipe, to which Michel Foucault had devoted a small penetrating book on the ambiguities of language. The painting is indeed a meditation on language: “this is not a pipe” is technically correct because what we see is a painting that represents a pipe, hence as a representation of a pipe “is” not a pipe—per se. The being-of-a-pipe should be taken strongly as one of existence-of-a-thing, its being what it is. But then we know damn well that this is a pipe in the sense that the representation of the pipe still makes it a pipe, that we can all acknowledge it as such without problem. Notice, however, how in the title, “this is not a pipe,” the “not” negates the “is,” as if in an act of defiance to the very existence of the object—and to being and time in general. Moreover, it is the very juxtaposition of the representation-as-image with language which, in the final instance, negates the existence of the represented object, leaving it to an object-of-representation that marks the sublime beauty of this unique work of art of the twentieth century.

Magritte seems to have been under the influence of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) whose view of language operated under the separation of the signifier from the signified. If the signifier is the “sign”—the linguistic word—which designates a “content,” the signified object, then the relation between signifier and signified remains problematic. For example, if I say “tree”—acting as signifier—the signified in this instance is nothing else but the “image” of a “tree” that I have in mind at the moment—not the “real tree.” I can, of course, designate a “real tree” out there to show to my hearer what a “tree” “is.” But the way we generally (unconsciously) use language is through abstract associations and representations. Every word “makes sense” not by designating a concrete object, but by “defining” it through other words and designated objects. Which renders any “tight association” between signifier and signified a bit problematic, to say the least.

This is precisely what, for example, American abstractionism of the first few decades of the twentieth century has perfectly seized. Artists like Marc Rothco and Jackson Pollock have seized the moment of the “separation” of signified and signifier to declare the non-necessity of figurative art, an art that paints something that is out there, and hence transforms it into a mere object of representation. Abstractionist paintings do not “represent” anything in particular anymore. The representation, if any, must be thought of abstractly or conceptually.

That’s—briefly—regarding the first “frame” in my photograph. The second “frame” consists of a still from a film running on a TV-monitor, presumably from a DVD machine, and what we see—at face value—is a woman giving a blow-job to a man. We only see the face of the woman but not that of the man, whose only erect penis is within the frame. What’s interesting here is that the wo(man) is gazing at the man’s invisible gaze, which, being excluded from the frame we can only imagine—the spectator filling the gap.

The film clip is from a short by Argentinian director Gaspar Noé who became well known with Irréversible. It is its “juxtaposition” with Magritte’s painting that gives it resonance. The frames within frames. Magritte’s painting is only a cheap reproduction of the original, covered in glass with a black frame. Nöé’s film clip by contrast is framed within a monitor, and the two frames have been framed through a camera’s viewfinder and presented as such to the spectator.

Does the title-caption give any clues? The French “faire un pipe,” to do a pipe, simply means in common jargon “blow-job” (léchouille). I leave it to your imagination to decide.

Zouhair:

It has been brought to my attention that some of the images connected to your LUC webpage are objectionable to some in the university community.  Would it be possible for you to remove them?

The relevant images are on page 5-6 of the Flickr page.  There may be others, but those are the ones that have generated complaints to me.  The four images in the vicinity of the link below are most relevant.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zghazzal/5659574189/in/photostream

If the photos are not removed and complaints are made to higher officials in the university, your page may be removed from the university site.

Thanks.

Tim

Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Professor and Chair of History, Loyola University Chicago

Associate Editor, Journal of Urban History

tgilfoy@luc.edu

dept. of education

Chicago, 5 April 2013

Dear Dean Reinhard Andress,

Thank you for receiving me in your office in mid-March, and I apologize for the delay in responding to your email.

During our conversation, I made it clear that a major reason for my reluctance to submit my annual assessment form to the Chair of the History Department since January 2010 was the unwillingness of our department to make public the relevant data that would correlate teaching evaluations with grading and other matters.

In the last few years, beginning with the departmental committee report that evaluated my request for promotion to the rank of professor, and further assessments by the Chair, the students’ evaluations have become the most contentious issue. In our meeting last month, you read to me what you perceived as “negative comments” by the students, and in your letter you mention that “your teaching is problematical because of a significant number of negative comments by students.” And you add that “I see you as not fully complying with your teaching responsibilities.” First of all, I don’t know what “significant” means here, since the department has failed to provide us with any relevant figures that would correlate evaluations, grading, and the quality of teaching. In effect, since the students’ evaluations have become computerized around 2005–06 through a new system, I’ve requested from the Chairs of our department to provide us with relevant data that would situate the evaluations for each professor in relation to his or her colleagues. Such data would include at the very minimum the class average for grading and assessment; the standard deviation for each course/seminar and the overall average; the correlation between each professor’s performance and that of the department; and the distribution of grades for individual courses and seminars and the department as a whole.

To wit, there is a national problem of grade inflation, well documented in the academic and journalistic literatures, and to which the department and university are willingly not paying much attention. Consequently, those of us who have our courses and seminars structured on rigorous readings and grading of papers and assignments are punished for not fitting with the mysterious and unpublicized “general curve” of grading and behaving. It is no secret, however, notwithstanding absent data about grading and the performance of students and their professors, that 50 percent of Loyola’s students fail to receive their bachelor degrees within the four-year period normally assigned to them, and that this may in turn point to a major structural weakness in the performance of students, in spite of Loyola’s lenient requirements.

Should professors like myself, who have been at the service of the university for 20 years, be punished just few years before their retirement, simply for assigning first-class readings, and for providing rigorous comments and grading to their students’ papers? During our conversation in your office, you have quoted what you perceive as so-called “negative comments” by some of my students, which were randomly accumulated by the departmental Chair. Besides the fact that such statements would only produce circumstantial and anecdotal evidence at best, they should not be used for purposes of tenure/promotion and the renewal of contracts, unless, of course, they are substantiated by statistical evidence for the totality of courses and seminars offered by the department in a semester. Moreover, the so-called “negative comments” are taken for granted for what is perceived as negative. When, for example, a student claims that “the professor’s lectures are too long and incomprehensible,” shouldn’t we inquire further and check whether this student has read the assignment, cares about the content of the assignment (the assigned book), and if so, whether his/her dissatisfaction stems from any differences of interpretation, or is indicative of something else? Or when a student claims that “the essay’s prompt is vague, if not incomprehensible,” shouldn’t we pursue the question further and ask her whether she has read the texts upon which the prompt was based? And if so, does she care about the texts she has read? Do they mean anything to her?

Why are you confronting me only with the negatives? Why not look at what “positive” comments have to say, and, again, confront such comments with a rigorous test of quality in order to see what they have in turn to say about what Loyola has to offer—or what it fails to offer?

There is the desire of a consumer society to avoid learning curves. This tends to result in dumbed-down products that are easily started but compromised in value and application. Shouldn’t we contrast this with teaching experiences that do have learning curves, but pay off well and allow students and teachers to become well versed in reading and writing? For over 20 years I’ve committed myself to demanding learning curves in my writing and teaching, and I want to pursue along that path.

Sincerely,

Zouhair Ghazzal

Professor of historical and social sciences

Department of History

zghazza@luc.edu

Post-Scriptum:

Regarding my writing and research, I prefer to be read rather than simply graded. For that purpose I made public all my contributions since 2009–10:

http://luc.academia.edu/ZouhairGhazzal

Additional material is available here:

http://zouhairghazzal.com/