Thanks, Rick. There's another experience I have with the campus that seems
cult-like to me. When I returned from China, I lived on campus for a time,
renting a room in Utopia Park. My friend (and landlady) and I learned that a
woman in her late fifties who had worked for decades as a secretary to a high
movement official had lost her job (no fault of her own) and was homeless,
literally sleeping in the woods. My friend and I looked at each other and we
both said, "That is really wrong." And although we were already crowded (three
in that 2-bedroom trailer), we invited this woman to stay with us.
When the administration somehow learned of this, they told us that we could not
do this, and if we continued, my friend would be evicted from her home. There
were many empty trailers at the time, and it seems that, rather than allow them
to remain empty, one of them could have been used temporarily to house this
former secretary who had worked long hours for almost no pay for many years. a
Rick Archer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of Angela Mailander
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 9:28 AM
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: David Lynch Lecture in Berlin Turns Into Chaos
I agree completely with your assessment of Fairfield life. It is a
vibrant, creative, and spiritual community. My comments were about the TMO, not
life in Fairfield. I have worked on campus twice in two different capacities.
I taught tenth grade boys for two years. The boys were great. Most of them
are still good friends ten years later. But the administration and some
(though by no means all) colleagues were---well, cult members. Later, as I
said in another post, I was called as a consultant when the ESL department
couldn't get Chinese grad students in computer science competent in English.
Again, my experience was that the atmosphere was repressive---not on the part
of the people who'd called me in, but the administrators involved acted like
cult members. I want to emphasize again that this is not true of many faculty
members I have met. But I have also met many good teachers who left the
university b ecause of the kind of cult-like repression I've
observed.
Having been on MIU faculty for a few years (teaching Desktop Publishing) I
agree with you, and would add that Bevan, who ultimately runs the university,
is a major contributor to the cult-like atmosphere. He intimidates and fires
faculty who get too independent in their thinking, and either appoints
repressive people to administrative positions or makes otherwise nice people
play by his rules. Theres also the universal principle that control freaks
tend to gravitate to administrative positions and experience ego-bloating once
they get there.
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