December 15, 1998 Michele Cheung Editor Dark Night field notes P.O. Box 3629 Chicago, IL 60690-3629 Tana Hasart President Clark College 1800 McLoughlin Blvd. Vancouver, WA 98663 Dear President Hasart: It has come to my attention that my name and e-mail address have appeared on a December 9, 1998 directive from your Vice President of Instruction Chuck Ramsey to Professor Jim Craven in your Economics Dept. This directive orders Prof. Craven not to use your campus computer to contact me without obtaining Mr. Ramsey’s "written approval." I do not know what your differences or difficulties with Prof. Craven are, but I take great exception to one of your administrators including my name on this invidious list which strongly suggests an assumption on the part of Clark College that my communications with it are somehow suspect or unprofessional. Above my name along with many others are these words: "You are further directed, effective immediately, that you are to STOP [sic] using college resources, including any College computer, or the College e-mail system, either directly or indirectly, to send any communication or information to any of the following persons and/or addresses." Mr. Ramsey’s stated reason for this is that he "cannot see" how the e-mails sent to me and the others "have any relationship whatsoever" to Prof. Craven’s responsibilities as a professor at Clark College. He further states "the matters discussed are not College business." I am familiar with most of the documents listed in this directive and although I cannot speak for other’s relation to your college’s business, I can certainly speak for my own. I am an editor for a quarterly magazine that looks to the economic as well as other explanations for what is happening in worldwide struggles for indigenous rights. We publish some of the most informed and respected writers today (such as Noam Chomsky). I am and have been a college instructor of English for the last fifteen years. As a consequence, I follow certain listservers to keep apprised of what the mainstream media does not cover. I notice several of those list-servers on Mr. Ramsey’s proscribed list. I would like to point out that it is part of my professional duty as an educator and a journalist to do so. I am morally certain it is part of Prof. Craven’s. It is in fact on those very listservers that I became aware of Prof. Craven’s excellent work in this field as well as his association with your college, which I gave credit for having the sense to employ him. I initiated contact with Prof. Craven, not the other way around, to ask him if he would write an article for our magazine (non-profit – Prof. Craven does not earn anything by this). Publication in one’s discipline is such an important aspect of faculty performance that it is almost a professional responsibility. The story I asked him to work up for us is current with day by day developments, which necessitated quite a bit of correspondence between us. I would also like to point out that we communicated not only through the college’s system, but on our personal systems. In the introductory blurb to Prof. Craven’s piece we prominently state that he is a professor at Clark College. In other words, my running Prof. Craven’s article redounds both to his credit and the college’s. So at first I could not imagine why your administration would wish to discourage journals from seeking to publish your faculty’s work. But a closer look at the directive shows that the correspondence Mr. Ramsey examined were all documents that had been copied to me, not directly addressed to me. It does not surprise me that Mr. Ramsey "cannot see" their relation to Prof. Craven’s business with me. I find it very disturbing that I was not asked before being put on a "forbidden address" list. I will now explain it to you, hoping you can see the alarming potential for unintended offense this method of policing e-mail entails. In the middle of our project, Prof. Craven had his professional character attacked in a public forum frequented by many of our readers. His credibility and integrity in the world we move in is very much my business as an editor about to print his work associated with your college’s name. Attacked publicly, he answered publicly in the same forum. Prof. Craven is informed, responsive, dedicated and not a pushover on matters of principle. I can make a good guess that his very distinctive writing style alarmed Mr. Ramsey. However, I can assure you that if Prof. Craven had not been as free as he was with the information he sent to me and his audience on the list-servers in which his honesty was impugned, I would, in my professional capacity, have been checking it out before I put the name of my magazine behind his work and by extension, your college’s. It is not my decision to make, but from where I stand, Prof. Craven’s defense of his credibility relates directly to college business, because his ability to participate in the academic community, to publish, to reflect credit on your school are all so bound up with his credibility as to be inseparable. But even if you separate Prof. Craven’s credibility from the college’s, this issue is a very small fraction of his substantive, colorful and highly respected contributions on the list-servers in question here. I doubt that anyone who reads his works, or who has had swift germane answers from him does not know that he teaches at Clark College – it’s on his message format. He also scrupulously points out that his opinions are not necessarily those of the college. It will not be lost on his readers and correspondents if you disavow him or persist in cramping his freedom of professional expression in this way. Even if we do not see eye to eye as to academic freedom, I have great difficulty with Mr. Ramsey’s method of dealing with the problem he perceived. Instead of blocking correspondence on the subject of Mr. Annett, he blocks outgoing e-mail to a long list of people and list-servers representing countless more people. He knows nothing of any of our business with Prof. Craven and by extension Clark College except for one small thing – that for a short period, Prof. Craven spoke to us of Mr. Annett. This would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that many of us have quite real, serious, ongoing professional, relations with Prof. Craven as a professor at Clark College, work that has been interrupted without notice to us. We can hardly be expected to know Clark College’s Computing Service rules. What can Mr. Ramsey have been thinking of when he directed his displeasure at us, implying that we are all somehow categorically "not business"? If it is a technical matter of being able to control our addresses from where he maintains his post, I for one am not content to let him enforce his rules at the expense of my good name. It is not good policy or leadership to make rules that cannot be enforced justly. My business now is to insist that you immediately remove my name from this list suggesting my relations with your college are unprofessional, a list I assume anyone in your Computing Services can see. As a professional academic, I also strongly object to my name being used to constrain Prof. Craven’s ability to send me information I need to make professional judgments about work coming out of your college. I do not understand what I have done to Clark College beside propose giving you good publicity. If I do not receive a satisfactory answer from you before the New Year, I will be forced to assume that Clark College does not care about this careless insult to a wide swathe of people who have hitherto been happy to work with you. I am sure Clark College alumnae who are also in our field will be distressed to hear that a college policy is operating that blindly renders academics and publishers of scholarly work nonpersons without their knowledge and without their having given any offense. Sincerely, Michele Cheung Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
