Re: 3/30/00 - An open letter from Thomas and Donna Jovin
An open letter from Thomas and Donna Jovin
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Published 3/30/00
To the Editor:
The letter of Tom Conroy, Yale's Deputy Director of Public Affairs, published on March 29, is misleading and an affront to the Jovin family. It cannot go unchallenged.
On January 26, 2000, we informed the office of Vice-President Linda Lorimer that Mr. Conroy was making declarations to the ABC 20/20 team along the lines that "Yale is trying to put it [Suzanne Jovin's murder] behind it." The first acknowledgment that this information had been received was in an e-mail sent to us by VP Lorimer on March 7, that is, after the 20/20 program was aired on March 1. Yale had over a month to revise the official position represented by Mr. Conroy to ABC. It did nothing. Thus, the statements by the Yale College administration (but where is the voice of President Levin?) in reaction to the outcry on and off campus to the callous position of the University reported in the 20/20 program are disingenuous, hypocritical, self-serving. We would add that in January, Yale denied the ABC team access to the Davenport College court, the site of the memorial plaque for Suzanne, until we intervened.
We also take issue with the tenor of VP Lorimer's press release of March 22. The Jovin family does not welcome the focus of the Yale administration on memorials of Suzanne's accomplishments, to the exclusion of dealing with the terrible crime which ended her life. Our daughter was indeed exceptional. Yet many, if not most, of the students at Yale are in the same category, and engage in some sort of service activity during their undergraduate careers. Tragically, our daughter will be remembered at Yale primarily because she was killed there.
It would behoove Yale to be more concerned with the identity of the perpetrator, most likely someone associated with the University, and with the hows and whys of the crime. Yet, while the University has assisted the police with some forensic aspects of the case, it has been far from forthcoming in other instances. In fact, it would seem that Yale disallows the rights of the deceased victim. For example, our request for copies of the graduate school recommendations obtained by our daughter from her teachers and on file in her residential college, Davenport, was rejected until the state attorney's office insisted that Yale had no legal basis for its position. Attempts by the police to secure information important in developing leads regarding potential witnesses were also blocked. Yale excluded mention of Suzanne's murder in its 1998 report on Campus Security, despite a moral obligation to so and although the scene of the crime was very close to the School of Divinity and in a neighborhood composed largely of people associated with Yale.
In the aftermath of the murder, it became obvious to us (and others) that our daughter had been exposed to bizarre, unethical and unprofessional teaching practices in the Political Science course PLSC 182a, during the fall term of 1998. The lecturer teaching this course pledged the students to secrecy in a clandestine project devoted to collecting information about the design and deployment of weapons of mass destruction (e.g. capable of wiping out the crowd at the Superbowl), and brandished a gun (presumably a simulation indistinguishable from the real thing) in a demonstration of intimidation in another course (PLSC 197a). Most importantly, he failed to provide Suzanne with guidance as she worked on her senior essay, a central requirement for graduation. These practices were apparently unknown to the senior faculty of the Political Science Department, or to the various Yale College Deans who wrote recommendations when the lecturer applied for academic advancement in the fall of 1998. In a perfunctory investigation of these matters, the Yale administration came to the conclusion that our claims of academic malpractice were unfounded. We challenge the Fellows of the Yale Corporation to conduct a thorough review of PLSC 182a and 197a (fall 1998) by impartial members of the faculty .
Why such a situation could have arisen has become obvious. Yale College has no mechanism (or policy) for reviewing or monitoring the classroom practices of its faculty -- be it senior professors or graduate student and adjunct teachers -- other than reading student assessments at the end of the courses. The lecturer in question was dismissed from an administrative position at Stanford University prior to being hired by Yale in 1998 with virtually no background checks (not required at Yale for temporary faculty). In our estimation, it was a grave mistake to have placed him in front of an undergraduate class. Yale has refuted (with no basis) our statements about the very high percentage of courses taught by non--ladder faculty. Yet such undue reliance on temporary instructors in certain Yale College departments has been denounced publicly by others (YDN, April 28, 1999). Our recommendations to the University for corrective action (a requirement for references in hiring lecturers, a code of ethics binding on teachers and students, lifelines for students in distress, course monitoring by peer faculty, syllabi available to parents) have likewise been dismissed. President Levin wrote us in Dec. 22, 1999: "We believe that, however well intended, some of your suggestions -- such as a code of conduct for teachers -- would do more harm than good in an institution such as ours." How? Why?
According to the police, the lecturer of PLSC 182a is a suspect in the investigation of our daughter's murder. We have repeatedly refrained from taking a position on this matter, which is the rightful and legal responsibility of the authorities. Nonetheless, it is a fact that our daughter experienced great distress during the last week of her life because of the irresponsible actions of her teacher detailed above. Two days before she died, she made this abundantly and tearfully clear to Dean Susan Hauser, with whom she worked. Upon Suzanne's request, Dean Hauser took no action, a judgment we would question in retrospect.
In her press release, VP Lorimer concluded with the statements: "The important issue now is that all of us continue to do what we can to honor Suzanne's memory and to keep pressing for justice. The University's position today is exactly what it has always been: Suzanne Jovin's death is a terrible tragedy and a great loss for her family, for all others who knew her, and for our community in general. We at Yale continue to work to memorialize the gifts of her life even as we fervently hope for justice to be served."
Noble words, but they don't jibe with many of Yale's actions. Nor with the dire assessment made by Rabbi Shmully Hecht of the current moral fabric of Yale University (YDN, Feb. 22, 2000). The record is indeed dismal: a tenured professor and Residential College Master being arrested and pleading guilty to pornographic practices; an undergraduate savagely stabbed to death with her teacher (a former undergraduate and residential college dean) a suspect; a distraught student committing suicide after being released from the Yale--New Haven Hospital without custody of friends, advisors, or family; failure to implement the recommendations of the 1995 Task Force for Preventing Workplace Violence...
The Yale College administration has failed to take a moral stand on any of these issues, for example asking that the individuals in the first two cases cooperate fully with the investigators. Yale did not act even when Suzanne's teacher -- while still a member of the faculty and representative of the University -- stopped cooperating in any way with the New Haven police as of early December, 1998, i.e. only days after Suzanne was murdered.
It was a tragic mistake to send our daughter to Yale College for an education.
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