In addition to POCatIC’s critiques of President Tom Rochon, I want to draw attention to the complaints several faculty have voiced via three letters published in The Ithacan in the past six or so years. These complaints, however, have fallen on deaf ears.

Primary among our criticisms is that the president, with collaboration from some faculty, has occupied the curriculum in the name of accreditation and assessment. The result has been the ghastly ICC labyrinth that leaves faculty and students little curricular freedom. On top of it, his compulsive need to break the spokes of a functioning wheel every two years so that he can reinvent it drags faculty into endless/busy/meaningless/bureaucratic work that keeps us from doing what we are hired to do, and like to do: teach, learn, read, write and publish. Then, too, the president has bureaucratized regular procedures and centralized authority and resources in his own and the provost’s hands to such an extent that faculty feel we can’t breathe. Finally, he has instituted a regime of surveillance and psychological warfare by using punitive measures and manipulating information so that the space to voice dissent has been steadily decimated.

These are some reasons why I believe faculty must also vote “no confidence in Tom Rochon.”

Asma Barlas
Professor, Department of Politics