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Chicago State University Lawyers Attack Faculty Bloggers
An anonymous reader writes "A blog run by faculty members at Chicago State University (CSU) has been threatened by university lawyers with a cease and desist notice. Since 2009 the blog has posted information critical of CSU's policies and hiring practices. The notice threatened legal action if the site is not disabled by Friday due to violations of 'trade names and marks' without permission and violations of University policies. The blog admin changed the name of the blog in the meanwhile to Crony State University and replaced an image on the page pending legal counsel. Also the blog is currently still active."
I might also recommend: Crony Streisand University
I can't think of a more ringing endorsement of what the CSU faculty are doing with this blog.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Do Chicago State University lawyers also send cease ad desist letters to faculty bloggers that are supportive of its policies and hiring practices? Or do they apply the government standard of never prosecuting leaks that makes the government looks good even if they damage national security?
No, they used "sarcasm". The deadliest attack of them all.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Did they ruin academic careers?
Did they chill discourse on campus?
Did they impoverish bloggers with legal costs?
Your narrow minded notion of the use of the work 'attack' couldn't be more naive.
Well, shutting it down is a form of "resolution"...
"The floggings will continue until morale improves!"
Only in academia would faculty feel entitled to freely criticize their employer while expecting their employer to turn a blind eye. In any other field you would be canned on the spot for doing something like this. Possibly government employees in some departments would have similar attitudes?
Now you can argue that academia has it right and the rest of society has it wrong or you could call the faculty self entitled tenured representations of antiquity. Having worked in the private industry as well as some years in a very large University one could argue this either way.
I looked at the blog and all I saw was a bunch of petty complaints. Things that may technically be true, but are not anywhere near the horrendous scandal that the blog's author tries to claim.
For example, a couple of university press releases and documents from university board of trustees meetings refer to a person as "Dr. Henderson" 6 weeks before she officially received her PhD. Oh the horror!! And her resume fails to list the 4 months that she was demoted from Dean of Instruction to ordinary teaching faculty -- 11 years ago.
Seriously, these people need to get a hobby or something.
I poked around the blog a bit. It's more than a little creepy. They have people's resumes and pay scales available for all to see. That's just weird. What did the janitors at Olive-Harvey do to deserve having their names and wages published? That's wholly inappropriate, and not necessary to make the author's point.
When you work for the government, your pay is a matter of public record, whether you're a senator or a janitor.
Doesn't this fall under some anti-slapp law?
I would think so. "Chicago State University Faculty Blog" is a statement of fact, not a trademark infringement.
Having said that, they may have some logos, etc. they will have to take down.
I looked at the blog and all I saw was a bunch of petty complaints. Things that may technically be true, but are not anywhere near the horrendous scandal that the blog's author tries to claim.
I'm also an external observer to all of this, but I think if you had read further, you might see the point of all of these seeming "petty" details.
Basically, it sounds like a blog aimed at a huge increase in non-academic administration personnel. Apparently, in the past 4 years or so, the number of non-academic administrators and staff has risen by almost 50%, from 76 people to 112 people, while the rest of the university (including academics, etc.) has remained relatively stable. Salaries and numbers of upper-level administrators apparently also have risen significantly.
I have no idea about the internal stuff that might be going on here, but a 50% increase in non-academic staff at a university in just a few years, while the rest of the university doesn't grow, does seem like an issue that people might care about.
But, if you haven't heard, there's a significant concern these days with the large amount of administrators and administrative staff being hired at colleges, which has apparently significantly contributed to the huge increases in college tuition at many schools.
The random stories you refer to apparently are related to the way that some administrators are refusing to hire professors or consider them qualified on the basis of some minor details in their academic credentials:
[The administrator] has also taken it upon himself to uphold the highest standards of the academy by weighing in on degrees and the quality of schools attended by CSU faculty applicants (across disciplines, it seems like he has a Ph.D. in everything). He has apparently decided that no one without a Ph.D. in hand should be hired at Chicago State and has often expressed the notion that CSU faculty should be able to "transfer" to Harvard.
Etc. The blogger seems to be responding in kind, by picking apart some minor details in the credentials of the new administrative staff.
Is some of this "petty"? Probably.
But that doesn't mean there aren't larger issues buried if you read more than the top two blog posts.
For example, a couple of university press releases and documents from university board of trustees meetings refer to a person as "Dr. Henderson" 6 weeks before she officially received her PhD. Oh the horror!!
Actually, it was two years before she got her PhD.
If you're a PhD in academia, it is a big deal. Falsifying credentials is academic fraud, like plagiarism.
It's like a military officer wearing a battle ribbon for a battle he was never in. There was a Navy officer who killed himself after Newsweek reported that he did such a thing.
These are called "sinecure" positions, "without care", a name from old school religion where paid appointments were made for multiplying positions outside the responsibility of saving souls. i.e. graft
In this case, it means without care to the principle mission of teaching, i.e these are not actual teachers, TAs, principles, etc. However large the self-importance, people dedicated to feelings, environmental impact, speech code enforcement, and a hundred other things not directly tied to education raises costs.
This is a known problem and is under scrutiny. Note it is, ironically, easy borrowing that lets colleges fund this. Nobody will pay an additional $1000 each year for long...but add $25. to their monthly loan bill...4 years from now? Sure!
Loaners don't care because they know if it collapses, Congress will cover it anyway. Helping the kids and the future, you know.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
lawyers don't stick their necks out, either.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I was unaware that Chicago State owned Blogspot (where the blog is hosted).
I know, I know, that takes all the fun out of it.
In this at least, academia had it right and the rest of society has it wrong.
The traditions of the academy stem from outdated (medieval) notions of freedom. Colleges are supposed to be collegiate, as groups of free scholars able to speak their minds freely. The university administration should serve the colleges and if the administration is corrupt then the scholars owe it to the institution and to their students to object. Otherwise, there is no check on the administration.
Professors should not be mere employees. (Of course, as you'll see, I don't think anyone is or should be a mere employee.) They ought to be members of a guild, granted the right to teach freely because they're recognized and accepted by their peers. Anything less and they become mere proletariat, providing their labor to a large institution which claims the right to fire them at whim.
Now, I say all this recognizing that de facto faculty are mere employees. For this reason, I've even argued that faculty ought to unionize. If we can't have the guild, at least we can have the union to offset the power of our employer.
Lest one should say this thinking makes me "entitled" because I'm an academic, as though that were something special, I would say this again: the rest of society has it wrong. Your employer does not own you. You are a free man or a free woman. If you perform your duties diligently, the duties you've promised to perform by agreement, you ought to be remunerated. Beyond this, they have no claim on you. It is a crime against the freedom and dignity of people that we've allowed employers to command our lives outside that time we've given them in exchange for payment. It is a great loss that we've reduced our notion of freedom to a mere matter of politics, while allowing employment organizational charts to dictate our lives in ways we would never tolerate from government.
Sitting here in an academic library, a janitor just walked by and wiped off the table next to me. So long as he continues to wipe off tables when he is obligated to do so, he ought in spare time to be able to call me, the university president, or the president of the United States a useless layabout.
I would propose that our notion of freedom extend beyond mere politics. I would submit that employers do not own their employees and that work is not the most important aspect of life. And while I am at it, I would close down everything but essential services on Thanksgiving day. The medieval peasant had more holidays than the modern proletariat. I've grown tired of the implication that longer hours away from loved ones, serving some robber baron who will leave one jobless and destitute for speaking ill of him, can be called progress
So, yes, I am an academic. I claim certain anachronistic rights and I wish only the same for you. /anachronisticrant
In any case, that group doesn't need to use university trademarks to make them.
Of course they did. It's called "nominative fair use". They have to identify who they're criticizing; otherwise, it's just empty-headed bellyaching (the kind we could probably expect from you).
Fair Use is applicable to trademarks, too.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Of course they did. It's called "nominative fair use". They have to identify who they're criticizing;
That's not creating a need to use trademarks. They can identify them by simple language. I've put up web pages with complaints about various companies. Not once did I have a need to use any of the companys' trademarks to identify them. I just called them by name. And I can attest to the fact that using simple language to call them by name didn't stop them from finding the pages and complaining. They just had no legal grounds to demand a takedown because none of their IP was infringed.
it's just empty-headed bellyaching (the kind we could probably expect from you).
Thanks for demonstrating a civil way to have a disagreement.
Fair Use is applicable to trademarks, too.
Which still does not create a need to use them. It may, in some really stretched interpretation, mean they can use them. But if they use them to try to identify their website as an official function of the University (which is what is alleged to have been done) fair use does NOT protect them.
So, what in "fair use" creates a need to use a trademark, and not just a desire to use it to make the site look more official?
Non-Academic Administrators include people like me. I'm a librarian.
Yes, I know what the phrase means, and I didn't mean to imply anything bad about all administrative (or "non-academic") positions -- AT ALL. I'm all for libraries and librarians. Apparently, if this blog is to be believed, the issue at this particular school is that there's also a significant amount of jobs going to friends of existing administrators going on in administrative hiring. I have no idea whether these claims are true, but the implication of the blog is that unnecessary jobs are being "created" and sometimes unqualified people are getting them.
This is NOT an indictment of all administrative staff at all institutions, let alone those who provide important services to students.
On the other hand, the reality of budgets at many schools is that administrative costs are rising at alarming rates (along with costs for new buildings and facilities, etc.), while academic budgets are static or going down, with more and more adjunct faculty hired at levels below minimum wage just to cover basic teaching needs.
These are general trends, and this blog seems to claim that one university has some particularly problematic stuff going on. Again, I have no idea how true it is, but that's the subject of this thread.
That "Non-Academic" phrase gets thrown around a lot and frequently includes people like guidance counselors who DO have an impact on student success.
Yep. That's great. SOME "non-academic" growth is certainly necessary at many universities to provide various kinds of student services, whether that's a career counselor or just an extra person at the registrar's office to facilitate student access to records.
The issue is the rate of growth relative to academic areas, making these administrative costs a significant driver of increasing tuition rates, as discussed in many news stories in the past few years. In many cases, these "administrative" staff have increased anywhere from 5 to 10 TIMES the rate at which faculty and academic staff have increased.
I'm all for providing student services, but if all of these guidance counselors and librarians, etc. are necessary for student success, what had colleges been doing before these giant increases in administrative hiring in the past decade? How could they possibly have functioned before with so few administrators?
I'm not at all saying that administration is somehow "bad" -- it's just that the growth seems disproportionate to other areas, and I'm certainly not the only person to have commented on that trend in the past few years.
Get boycotted by the "Homosexual Students of Chicago University" possibly.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
In the United States, truth is always an absolute defense against defamation. http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/substantial-truth