Dear Editor,
Thank you for your coverage of the outcry raised by many members of the UCSD literature department last week. However, I was dismayed at the rather flippant and dismissive editorial published along with it. In attempting to emphasize ‘the need to make transparent all information relative to the situation,’ the editorial board neglected the history of the issue, leading it to advance a misguided opinion regarding our frustration and subsequent activism.
The editorial strongly suggests our protest was unwarranted, given that ‘the university is actually doing more at this point than at any point up until now.’ Considering that members of the literature department first expressed concerns regarding the health of the faculty, staff and students, and requested an investigation into the possible link between this and the plant facility five years ago (in 2002 and again in 2005), to say that the report commissioned by the administration last year demonstrates evidence that it is indeed ‘doing more,’ is hyperbolic and misleading. Moreover, beyond a superficial consideration of how much attention the administration is now paying to the problem, it strikes me as amazing that the editorial board did not pause to consider what precisely the administration has done since the publication of the 2008 report ‘mdash; at least up to the time of our demonstration last Tuesday.
How did administrators respond to the results of the 2008 report? Did they agree to follow the report’s recommendations? They did not. Rather, they announced to us in a special meeting that, while the health and safety of the university’s faculty, staff and students, were their ‘top priorities,’ the administration saw no reason to accept the results of the 2008 report as conclusive or authoritative, and immediately requested another study. Bear in mind that the first report was also commissioned by the administration, and placed in the hands of an epidemiologist who the administration praised as a top specialist in his field.
The details of the report are available online at http://blink.ucsd.edu/go/EHS-LIT. The questions that fuel the exasperation and demoralization of many students and faculty who work in the building are rather simple: if the administration is concerned with our immediate health and safety, why are we waiting around for more reports? Why has there been no attempt to either follow the recommendations, or relocate us? Consider the following analogy: if you are the manager of a movie house and your patrons complain that they smell smoke, and that, moreover, some patrons are actually suffering from different forms of asphyxiation, what do you do? You respond to an emergency with the appropriate concern, responsibility and leadership. It is this that we are asking of the UCSD administration. The literature department and its academic community cannot be made responsible for the burden of proof of detecting and eliminating the health-risk factors in the building.
For more information, consider reading our petition at PetitionOnline.com/litdept/petition.html.