An Ironic Petition

Have any of you noticed that there’s a new Butler petition housed on the ipetition web site? If so, do you share my amusement in the irony of that petition?

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, let me bring you up to speed. Last fall, a group of my friends (creatively entitled “Friends of Jess Zimmerman”) began a petition demanding that the Butler administration apologize to me and to the Butler community for their crazy actions associated with the True BU blog. (That petition has grown very nicely and all the people who have signed it have been completely ignored by the Butler administration. Take a look and add your signature if you haven’t yet done so. It won’t help, but it can’t hurt!)

Now, the president of the faculty senate has created her own petition to the Butler administration! It seems that the administration, with virtually no input from faculty or students, has decided to do away with the science library. Faculty and students are not happy about the decision and, because meaningful communication on the Butler campus is virtually nonexistent, the president of the faculty senate has had to resort to creating a public petition to give people a voice. The petition is growing rapidly and must be a huge embarrassment to the administration. In a little over 24 hours, the petition garnered over 500 signatures.

But beyond the obvious embarrassment, what can anyone think about Butler when the only way for the faculty senate to be heard is for its president to have to go public with a petition. And I bet most faculty will be too frightened to add their names to the petition.

All I can say is that this is yet another example of the Butler Way!

Butler is at it Again

Many of you have noticed that I haven’t been writing much for this blog lately. Some of you have commented on that and have asked for more posts. I definitely do appreciate your interest.

My lack of posts, however, were a conscious choice I made, a choice to try and put this sordid affair behind me, to move on, to see if I could forget the incredibly defamatory statements so many in the Butler administration made about me. Although I still had a great deal to say, you’ll notice that since the middle of December I’ve only posted seven times.

Unfortunately, Butler won’t let the issue die. Just this week, a “Forum on Civic Discourse” was announced for later this month. So far so good. But Butler decided to frame the event within the context of public safety. I don’t see that as an accident. From the beginning, the president has justified his actions (when he’s bothered to say that he was aware of them rather than claiming that others acted without his knowledge) as necessary to protect the safety of various administrators and the campus in general. He raised the specter of the shootings at Virginia Tech to provide cover for his actions. In an act of unbridled paternalism and amazing hubris he claimed that the provost “was afraid, for her own safety, for her husband, for her house and property.”

In essence, he attempted to do what the Bush administration did to great effect: scare people into accepting actions that they would otherwise find completely abhorrent. There were no threats against any person or property made by anyone except by Butler’s high-priced attorney. I made a promise that I would not forget the actions of the provost. Butler’s administration opted to pretend that that was a threat and now they’re holding a forum so we can hear why campus safety is important.

The forum announcement also notes that discussion might include situations where “messages of hate” are prevalent. I doubt that this is an accident either. After all, in his first tirade to the faculty about The True BU situation, the president proclaimed “Butler does not tolerate racial and sexual epithets in the name of free exchange of ideas.” On this blog, on October 15^th 2009, the day the president made that comment, I wrote the following: “Of course I agree with this statement, as I hope all of you do. The thing is, there is no hint of any such despicable language in anything I have ever written. I think that this is yet another attempt to unfairly and falsely attribute to me things that I did not say.” Since that day, I have repeatedly asked the president to point to one example in my writings of a racial or sexual epithet. He hasn’t done so because he can’t: there are NO such examples. But those facts haven’t kept him from repeating this mantra and, by doing so, continuing to defame me.

I wanted to move on but Butler apparently wants to live in the past – a past they are apparently proud of. So many of you have expressed outrage about Butler’s actions and have called for an apology, to me and to the Butler community. Butler and its president, however, don’t apologize. Instead they attack, they defame, they sue, they intimidate and they besmirch the good name of a once-proud institution.

I wanted to move on but to do so now would mean that my reputation isn’t worth anything. That’s why I’ve written this post.

$100,000: The Price of Justice?

Here’s a question for you to think about: What will $100,000 buy you in our legal system?

I don’t mean who can you bribe for that sum of money, and I don’t mean how much legal representation can you purchase. No, I’m interested in looking at the crimes you would have to be accused of to be saddled with a bond of $100,000.

A random look around the web at bail schedules shows the following:

In LA, you’d be required to post a bond of $100,000 for a felony that could land you in prison for 16 years.

In San Francisco, they’re much more specific. $100,000 would be required if you were accused of assaulting a government worker or car jacking.

In San Diego, you’ve got to be charged with kidnapping.

Note that most jurisdictions that have easily accessible bail schedules don’t list any infractions that have bonds approaching $100,000.

If you search for actual crimes where people had to post a $100,000, you also get some interesting results:

Earlier this month actor Rip Torn posted $100,000 in Connecticut for criminal charges including burglary, possession of a revolver without a permit and carrying a firearm while intoxicated.

Last month a Chicago area man had bail set at $100,000 after being charged with reckless homicide and aggravated driving under the influence.

In December a Seattle man charged with child molestation and exposing himself to a 14-year-old girl had bail set at $100,000.

Also in December a union president in New York City had bail set at $100,000 after being charged with embezzling more than $200,000 of union funds.

And just a little more than a week ago, Dr. Conrad Murray was released on a $100,000 bond after being accused of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson. Oh wait, my mistake. That was $100,000 in Singapore dollars! He was released after paying only $75,000 in US cash in Los Angeles.

So, it’s clear that $100,000 will buy you quite a bit in most places. You have to have done some pretty terrible things to warrant being required to post such a huge sum.

But, here at Butler University, the situation is very different. Here at Butler University, if you ask for a fair disciplinary procedure, one in which you’re not publicly convicted prior to the proceedings and one in which you are permitted to see the evidence against you, you’re told you have to pony up $100,000. You can read their outrageous request here.

Even more ridiculous, Butler’s president claims he knew nothing about this charge made in his name.

Which sounds right: $100,000 for kidnapping, involuntary manslaughter, embezzlement, child molestation, reckless homicide, burglary with a firearm, or car jacking in most portions of the country or $100,000 to delay your appearance before a kangaroo court at Butler University?

Rhetorical Gymnastics: A presidential Sport

Two pieces appeared in the latest edition of Butler’s student newspaper that I want to bring to your attention. The first was a news report about the settlement I reached with Butler. The second was an opinion piece written by Professor Bill Watts.

I very much hope that you read both pieces because, in very different ways, they are both amazing.

The news story addressed the fact that Butler demanded that I post a $100,000 bond to delay the disciplinary proceedings against me. Remember, I filed suit asking for a temporary restraining order against Butler because they had demonstrated that they were not prepared to undertake a fair disciplinary process. The judge agreed with me.

The newspaper story broke some absolutely astounding news: “When asked about the bond amount, Fong said he had no knowledge that the action had been taken.” The president of Butler University claimed he didn’t know that his institution had demanded that one of its students post a bond of $100,000? Can anyone actually believe this stuff?

The president has a pattern of denying any knowledge of the most important actions taken by the university in this case. As I’ve pointed out before, he also claimed he knew nothing about the decision to replace “John Doe’s” name with my name in the original lawsuit. Really? I don’t think anyone believed him last time and I doubt that anyone believes him now.

Frankly, though, I don’t know which is worse: that he is so out of touch that he doesn’t know what’s going on in the university in his own name, or that he authorized such an outrageous action and then opted to lie about it. Both options are shameful and embarrassing.

That wasn’t the only amazing piece of news in the newspaper story though. The sentence immediately following the one I just quoted in which the president denied knowing about the bond is also bizarre: “After speaking with university attorneys, Fong said in an e-mail that the bond was merely a legal formality that had to be added to the document for the restraining order to stand.”

Apparently the president is claiming that first he heard of the bond demand was from the reporter, about two months after it was filed with the court, and, upon hearing about it, he immediately contacted the university attorneys (again, note the use of the plural – the university is certainly willing to spare no expense to attack their undergraduates) to ask about it. His response, as reported, is also beyond belief: “the bond was merely a legal formality that had to be added to the document for the restraining order to stand.”

As I’ve done with so many of the president’s earlier statements (see my posts on Oct. 15, Oct. 19, and Oct 27, for example), let me explain the absurdity in what he has said. First, as I noted on Feb. 12, the request for a temporary restraining order that my attorney filed had a place for the judge to fill in the amount of money to be posted as a bond. The judge, as is his legal right, opted not to require any bond at all, for the simple reason that postponing a kangaroo court was not going to cost Butler University any money.

Second, if you read the document submitted to the court in response to my request for a temporary restraining order (a document, by the way, submitted in the president’s name, even though he claims not to have been aware of the most important point in it), you’ll see that the last thing the university wanted to do was to have the restraining order stand; indeed the title of that document begins by calling itself an “Emergency Motion to Dissolve Restraining Order.” Nonetheless, what the president is claiming, is that their demand for me to post a bond of $100,000 was actually their way of doing me a favor. After all, according to his statement, had they not asked for the bond in that amount, my request for a temporary restraining order would have been thrown out and I would have been forced to participate in their kangaroo court.

If you’re as confused by the president’s rhetorical gymnastics as I am, I can’t say I’m surprised. As has been his pattern in every aspect of this case, he refuses to take any responsibility for any action, he refuses to acknowledge any possible errors or misjudgments, and he weaves stories that make absolutely no sense in the belief that people will simply accept them because he is, after all, the president.

This is all simply ridiculous.

As I said above, there were two pieces in the student newspaper about my case. The second was an opinion piece written by Professor Watts. As he has done throughout, Professor Watts asks probing questions in his attempt to hold the university responsible for its actions. I can’t tell you how appreciative I am of his efforts on a campus where faculty are so afraid of what the president will do to them if they disagree with him, that they have to take confession with a priest to get their opinions to the public.

While I recommend his entire article to you, I want to focus on one part because he perfectly captured one of the things that has been bothering me. He noted that “a high university official” explained the “aggressive campaign” against me because that administrator believed that my father was ultimately the force behind The TruBU. Professor Watts went on to say that this is “just another way in which the university has denied Jess his autonomy and personhood.”

Exactly!

The Butler administration seems to have such a low regard for Butler students that no administrator could believe that a student could possibly be responsible for bringing to light all that The True BU brought to light. They simply dismissed my competence and, by extension, the competence of all of my fellow students. Not surprisingly, I have felt incredibly demeaned by their position. Beyond that, why would these people want to be in charge of a university that, in their minds, enrolls such pliable students who are incapable of acting on their own? And why would the University want administrators who clearly hold their students in such low regard?

Let me, again, say as clearly as I can: the information in The True BU came from faculty and staff members who were willing to provide information to me anonymously because they were too scared of administrative retaliation to speak openly. And let me make it clear that my father did not know that I was Soodo Nym.

Let me conclude today by asking why was “a high university official” discussing such incredible things with a faculty member? Isn’t this simply yet another way of defaming another member of my family, something that “high university officials” have felt comfortable doing regularly?

To be completely honest, I think it's about time the University got new "high university officials."

Secrecy and Discipline: The Butler Way – Part 3

In the first two parts of this post, I pointed all of you to public documents available to any and all, that summarized the struggle I was having with the Butler administration. In the first two parts of this post, because of Butler’s incessant and unfair demand for secrecy, I told you nothing more than what was present in those public documents.

Now, in part three, I will bring this part of the story to a conclusion, but, unfortunately, I will do so in a way that is particularly unsatisfying, at least to me. The overall outcome is certainly not unsatisfying, at least to me, in that Butler and I reached an agreement. But what makes it less than fully satisfying is that I can’t tell you any of the details. As before, I am limited to being able to point you to publicly available documents.

Let me recap briefly. As you can see from my request for a restraining order against Butler, I was forced to go to court to ask that any internal disciplinary procedure be put on hold until the university could guarantee that it the procedure would be handled fairly. Butler’s attorneys responded by ignoring the substance of what my request was all about, instead opting to demand that I put up a bond of $100,000. They claimed that this was the amount of money Butler would lose if they could not discipline me in a secret hearing on campus. Ridiculous! My lawyer replied by further explaining the inappropriate actions Butler administrators had undertaken.

The resolution, except for the secrecy, was a wonderful one for me – and perhaps Butler administrators feel similarly. Upon reaching an agreement with Butler I immediately sent in applications to law schools. And, as I said, within days of filing my applications, I was admitted to one of my top choices.

There are three points that I want to make about all of this. First, my experience has convinced me that it is possible to fight abuses of power – and to win. In my mind, I clearly won, but as I’ll note in my second point, I didn’t win everything. I won not only because I was right; I won because I was able to generate a huge amount of support from people around campus and around the world who saw an injustice and were willing to support me. That support came in many forms, some public and lots private, and all of it was incredibly important to me.

Second, although I believe I was able to win, I feel I lost a great deal in the process. Butler administrators from the president on down, on a regular basis, on campus and off, in public and in private, defamed me. They regularly said that I was guilty of actions they couldn’t prove and actions they knew they had no evidence to link to me. They used innuendo to accuse me of making racially and sexually intolerant statements. They used those same tactics to accuse me of threatening violent acts. And they abused their positions of power by telling anyone who would listen that they knew things about me they couldn’t share – things that were really terrible. The reality is, however, that none of those things ever existed, but it didn’t keep unscrupulous people from implying that they did in their misguided attempt to further their own ambitions.

Third, even though my victory is very real for me, it has to be an incredibly hollow one for the Butler community and for the broader community composed of people who care about civil rights. I believe that it's clear that Butler administrators abused their power and the university’s financial resources in their attempt to stifle criticism. Members of those communities have demanded an apology from Butler’s administrators for their unconscionable actions, but none has been forthcoming. The same administrators who did all of this are hoping that their veil of secrecy will protect them. If we, you and I, let them refuse to take responsibility for their actions, they will never apologize, and they will likely abuse others in the future. I hope you do at least two things to help prevent this from happening. I hope those of you who have not yet signed the petition asking for an apology sign it now. And I hope that some of you begin asking the Butler administration just how much money they spent in legal fees in their persecution of me. At a time when Butler is cutting budgets related to teaching, if not related to the provost’s remodeling schemes, don’t you think that this money could have been more profitably spent?

Again, I want to thank you for your support.

Thoughts on Censorship

I’ve gotten a little worried that over the last two months readers of I am “John Doe” may have gotten caught up in the details of some of the ridiculous and untrue things Butler has said about me and lost sight of the bigger issue. The real issue is that in the original True BU blog I was expressing my opinions (and those of faculty in the School of Music who were too fearful of administrative retaliation to express them themselves) and the Butler administration didn’t like what I had to say. The threatened me for writing what I wrote. They intimidated me for what I wrote. And, ultimately, for about nine months at least, they silenced me. In simple terms, their threats and intimidation were acts of censorship.

So, I did an internet search to see what others had to say about censorship. Rather than comment on each quotation, I want to leave them with you as a package. Read them and think about what the Butler administration has done. Read them and think about the world the Butler administration has attempted to create. And, perhaps most importantly, read them and think about the world you will live in if you sit by and do nothing to stop actions of this sort, in the Butler case or in other cases where people in power attempt to silence those who disagree with them.

(I do want to add a small disclaimer. Although all of the following quotations were found on the internet, I can’t vouch for their authenticity. Regardless of whether every one was actually spoken or written by the person to which it was attributed, each provides important and interesting insight.)

Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. - Potter Stewart

Censorship is the height of vanity. - Martha Graham

I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print. - John Mortimer

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen. - Tommy Smothers

The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship. – John Paul Stevens

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. - John Stuart Mill

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. - John Stuart Mill

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. - John Stuart Mill

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. - Alfred Whitney Griswold

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. - Sigmund Freud

Every burned book enlightens the world. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The paper burns, but the words fly away. - Akiba ben Joseph

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. - John F. Kennedy

You can cage the singer but not the song. - Harry Belafonte

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. - Voltaire

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken - unspeakable! - fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse - a little tiny mouse! -of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. – Winston Churchill

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. – Noam Chomsky

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. – Benjamin Franklin

And let me end with one that should be near and dear to the heart of Butler’s president, since he is an expert on Oscar Wilde: “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."

Administrative Moments

Butler University recently released a fund-raising video titled “Butler’s Proudest Moments of 2009.” Not surprisingly, given the quality of students and faculty at Butler, there were a large number of things to celebrate. I join with my friends and mentors in congratulating those at Butler who accomplished so much this last year.

In the spirit of this video, I offer my “Butler’s Less-Than Proudest Administrative Moments of 2009.” As with everything associated with The True BU situation, Butler has far deeper pockets than I do so I won’t be able to produce a flashy video like they did. Instead, I’m going to have to provide you with a written list of those moments that the Butler administration would likely hope you all forgot. So, please imagine some music as well as administrators and their attorneys ranting and raving, as you read the following.

January 2, 2009: The vice president for student affairs demands a meeting with me on a day the university is officially closed. He brings along a witness and when I say I want one as well, he refuses to allow me that courtesy. He says he is not asking me who was responsible for The True BU but I am later accused of lying to him about this issue.

January 4, 2009: The university attorney Emails the Soodo Nym account to threaten both a civil and a criminal case over The True BU. This threat frightened me into removing The True BU from the internet.

January 8, 2009: The university, over the signature of three attorney’s, files the country’s first ever lawsuit by a university against on-line speech. This occurred four days AFTER I was successfully intimidated into removing The True BU from the web.

January 9 – June 15, 2009: All quiet on the Butler front.

June 16, 2009: In response to a letter from my father asking for a retraction, a clarification or an apology from the provost about outrageously untrue statements she made about him, Butler informs me about the “John Doe” lawsuit and threatens to substitute “John Doe’s” name with my name unless both my father and I sign confidentiality agreements and unless I agree to submit to any punishment Butler deems appropriate for speaking my mind.

June 17 – September 26, 2009: Butler repeatedly threatens to substitute my name for “John Doe’s” name in the lawsuit and continues to demand that my father and I sign confidentiality agreements and that I submit to any punishment they deem appropriate for speaking my mind.

September 27, 2009: Butler stops threatening to replace my name for “John Doe’s” name in the lawsuit, instead promises to do so by the end of the week. They also say they will instigate internal disciplinary procedures immediately.

October 12, 2009: A local Indianapolis television station ran a news story reporting on Butler’s lawsuit against “John Doe.” Because the only people quoted were associated with the Butler administration, it appears obvious that the Butler administration leaked the story to the press.

October 13, 2009: The president tells the faculty senate about the lawsuit indicating that he was compelled to file suit because of the possibility of a Virginia Tech style event taking place. The president sends out a memo to the entire faculty about the lawsuit that was riddled with inaccuracies and that made absurd claims about The True BU.

October 19, 2009: The president sends out a second memo to the entire faculty about me and The True BU that was also riddled with inaccuracies and that made absurd claims about The True BU. Additionally, the president accuses me of bullying the administration and the campus by writing The True BU. The president says he never intended to sue a student and he would not sue a student.

October 20, 2009: At an open forum discussing free speech issues, the provost said that although she was frightened for her safety, Butler was compelled to file a lawsuit against “John Doe” rather than contacting the police for protection, claiming that the police could only be contacted if they could be told who was threatening her.

October 26, 2009: Butler withdraws its lawsuit against “John Doe,” a full seven days after the president said it would be dropped. The president’s wife writes to faculty about The True BU situation enclosing e-mail and documents personally addressed to the president’s office at Butler Univeristy.

October 27, 2009: The president sends out a third memo to the entire faculty about me and The True BU that was riddled with inaccuracies and that made absurd claims about The True BU. He again states that I am guilty of various transgressions and says that I will be punished through Butler’s internal disciplinary process. The president tells a student reporter that he had nothing to do with the promise made by Butler’s attorney on September 27th to replace “John Doe’s” name with my name.

October 29, 2009: The president refuses to act on a letter privately delivered to him by Father Charles Allen from more than 10 faculty members in the School of Music. These faculty members, fearful of administrative retaliation, opted to speak out only if they were guaranteed anonymity and confirmed that what was written in The True BU was the truth and that it accurately reflected the information they provided to Soodo Nym aka John Doe.

October 30, 2009: The chair of Butler’s Board of Trustees sends a statement to the media about The True BU case. In that statement, he opts to “reaffirm Butler’s pledge to provide for the safety and welfare of its students, administration, faculty and staff,” implying that campus safety was somehow at risk.

October – November: The president and his public relations staff regularly reply to concerns raised about my situation with a defamatory letter claiming that I threatened the campus community.

November 12, 2009: The chair of Butler’s Board of Trustees writes to acknowledge receiving a letter from my attorney discussing the internal disciplinary process. The chair ignores the issues of bias raised saying, instead, that he trusts the process and that the president was made aware of my concerns.

November 12, 2009 – the present: I’m sorry to say that I cannot, at this time, discuss this part of the ordeal. I hope to fill you in on it, as much as I can, soon.

There you have it: my list of “Butler’s Less-Than Proudest Administrative Moments of 2009.” The crazy thing is, all of these items involve only my case. I know, and I suspect that many of you know, many other administrative actions taken this past year that are just as reprehensible as these. It is a shame that no one is able or willing to hold Butler administrators accountable for their actions. I hope that my blog sheds some light where none has been and that it encourages others to speak out when they see injustices being committed.

When in Doubt, Sue

Inside Higher Ed recently ran an interview with Professor Amy Gajda, the author of The Trials of Academe: The New Era of Campus Litigation published in October by Harvard University Press. The book and the interview have much to teach us about Butler’s reaction to The True BU.

Take a look at how the interview opens and see if it sounds familiar: “When in doubt, sue. That philosophy has become an expected part of American society and (to the frustration of many in higher education) academe as well.”

Professor Gajda was asked to comment on the notion that “Many college administrators these days complain that lawyers for their institutions have too much power.” In response, she said, “University counsel have never been busier or more important, but there is a danger in letting lawyers call all the shots. The ‘safest’ course from a litigation standpoint may not be the best for innovation, research, or teaching….College administrators and faculty generally need to be alert to the legal risks, while remaining true to their academic judgment.”

Remember that Butler’s president is on record saying that the university lawyers were operating without his knowledge and not under his control. Actually, though, I don’t think that is what Professor Gajda meant when she said that “lawyers for their institution have too much power.” Frankly, I doubt that she would have ever imagined a situation of the kind Butler’s president wants you to believe. But I have no doubt that the lawyers were complicit in creating Butler’s strategy with respect to intimidating me into shutting down The True BU. And I have no doubt that they play too large a role in the Butler administrative ethos.

Professor Gajda was asked about ways to reduce litigation: “Can you summarize the steps you recommend to colleges to discourage litigation as a means of solving disputes?” Her advice makes good sense. “The most important thing is for colleges to find a way of defusing academic disputes before they harden into a legal complaint. If colleges and universities took greater care to promote communication and a sense of community on campus, there would be fewer lawsuits.”

It seems to me that Butler has a great deal of work to do on this front. What sort of a “sense of community” exists on Butler’s campus when faculty member after faculty member expresses great fear of the administration? How can the administration ignore the problem when music faculty feel they can only come forward anonymously under the protection of a priest to document that what I wrote in The True BU was what they shared with me and that it was accurate? There is one thing that is helping faculty come together and build a shared community: their sense of fear of the Butler administration. Similarly, the Butler administration is all about secrecy. They “classify” more documents than you can imagine. Their two-pronged strategy when dealing with conflict, as has been so well demonstrated throughout my experience, is to demand that the content of all meetings remain secret and to have meetings with as few people at a time as they can get away with so they can tell each group a different “secret.” Amid a climate of fear, this strategy ensures that no one knows what anyone else knows – and thus that administrators are never asked tough questions.

One of the main points of Professor Gajda’s book is that recourse to the court system, while being overused now, came about to correct abuses present on college campuses that occurred when colleges acted as if they were outside of the law. She paints an unsettling picture of how things were: “At one time, colleges were basically unaccountable in the courts. They ignored contracts, trampled speech rights, and dismissed students and faculty on whim or prejudice with basic impunity.” She concludes that thought with the only statements she’s made with which I disagree and which is demonstrably false, at least on one campus in central Indiana: “No one should want to go back to those days.” It is all too obvious that Butler administrators yearn for the good old days when they could act with impunity, when freedom of speech stopped when someone in power didn’t like what was being said.

Professor Gajda does a great service by documenting a very real threat to higher education and the actions of Butler University serve to prove her case definitively.

Run the Numbers

I want to do something a bit different than my usual posts tonight.


Let’s look at the numbers:


33,470 – The number of distinct page loads I am “John Doe” has had in the 29 days it’s been in existence

31,200 – The difference between the number of distinct page loads of "I am John Doe" over a 3 week time period and The True BU had over its entire existence

859 – The number of signatures on the petition to the Butler administration asking for apologies for their actions

140 – The number of days it took for Butler to dismiss the lawsuit against “John Doe” after they used the court system to determine that “John Doe” was me, despite the president’s repeated claim that the university never had any intention of suing a student

58 – The number of comments on the original story about this case in Inside Higher Ed, making it the third most commented upon story for the last month, the ninth most commented upon story for the past six months and the thirteenth most comment upon story for the past year

11 – The number (at the very least) of School of Music faculty members who have endorsed a statement indicating that they provided me with the documents published in The True BU, that they shared their opinions and impressions of what was happening in the fall concerning the removal of the chair, and that they believe that what I wrote was accurate and consistent with their impressions.

10 – The number of university newspapers around the country that have written stories and editorials expressing their concerns about Butler's handling of this situation and the implications for freedom of speech issues across the country

8 – The number of times people signing the petition to the Butler Administration used the word “abuse”

6 – The number of months from when my father was first threatened with the specter of a lawsuit over The True BU to the time the administration informed me that a suit was actually filed, and that was in response to a concern raised by my father about defamatory statements made about him by the provost

4 – The number of months in which the Butler administration threatened to replace “John Doe’s” name with my name in the lawsuit accusing me of libel, defamation, harassment and threats; and the number of days after The True BU was removed from the web but before the Butler administration filed that lawsuit

3 – The number of memos Butler’s president wrote to the entire university faculty in a 15 day period about me

2 – The number of my family members removed from their administrative posts at Butler after The True BU began publishing

1 – The number of times a university has filed a lawsuit over online speech, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)

0 - The number occurrences of threatening, harassing, libelous, racist or sexist comments appearing in any of my writing, despite what the Butler administration has repeatedly claimed in communications intended for audiences both on and off campus