The Chronicle of Higher Education on our move to Virginia
Media-Studies Star Leaves NYU for U.Va.:
MORE SPACE: Siva Vaidhyanathan is moving from New York University to the University of Virginia, where he will be an associate professor of media studies and law.
Mr. Vaidhyanathan, 41, has been a star in academe ever since he wrote Copyrights and Copywrongs (New York University Press, 2001), which gave readers a guide to the complicated history of American copyright and its future in a file-sharing age. He has also established a reputation as a left-wing pundit through his blog, Sivacracy. He has been profiled in The Chronicle and appeared as a guest expert on a segment about social networks on The Daily Show.
Mr. Vaidhyanathan has been courted by Virginia for more than a year. "They made it clear that they were going to create a top-notch media-studies department out of what was already an impressive program," he says. Last year, when the university hired Andrea Press, a well-known sociologist in media studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to direct the program, he "knew it was time to take it seriously."
To sweeten the deal, the University of Virginia offered a position to Mr. Vaidhyanathan's wife, Melissa Henriksen, 39, who is now an assistant professor of biology at Fordham University. Mr. Vaidhyanathan says that Illinois was also trying to recruit him but could not offer a position to Ms. Henriksen.
Mr. Vaidhyanathan says that various frustrations with New York University made Virginia even more attractive. Mr. Vaidhyanathan and Ms. Henriksen live in a one-bedroom apartment subsidized by the university, which has felt a little cramped since their daughter was born a year and a half ago. The university would not give him a larger apartment to accommodate his growing family, so he is looking forward to the wide-open spaces of Charlottesville.
New York University also put down a graduate-student unionization drive "with all the dignity and delicacy of a bunch of Wal-Mart managers," he says. He has also been turned off by what he sees as the university's obsession with its brand — a counteroffer letter from the university included a "branding clause."
"I am not a billboard," he says. "I am a scholar. 'Branding' is not my job."
The source of all of this madness is that my department at NYU has been stuck in the School of Education for about 40 years for reasons that only John Dewey could explain. John Sexton made some feeble efforts to consider moving it to Arts and Sciences when he first became president. But he made the classic mistake of appointing deans to the committee appointed to consider the role of media studies at NYU. So the deans fought for the status quo.
Since then, Sexton has been doing his best to hire hundreds of star Arts and Sciences faculty from other universities. To do this, he changed the housing policy so that it no longer considers family size to be a determining factor in housing assignments. Instead, Sexton wants to offer two- and three-bedroom apartments to imaginary faculty he hopes to recruit from the Ivys, Stanford, Chicago, etc. It's a terrible policy guaranteed to drive away those of us who came up through the ranks of NYU, regardless of our levels of accomplishment and distinction.
Along the way, the new dean of Education, Mary Brabeck, decided that because she would not do what it takes to make her school a real education school, she had to engage in "branding" to accommodate the departments that do not fit: Culture and Communication, Nutrition, Physical Therapy, Audiology, Music, Art, Applied Psychology, etc.
BTW, the reason that the School of Education historically has all of these disparate departments is that it used to be the women's college at NYU, the Barnard of Downtown without the quality. All of these departments feed into the few professions that women were allowed to enter in the mid-20th century. Just recently, Brabeck let Nursing and Public Health move over to the Dental School (don't ask).
So she came up with this ridiculous new name: The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
The "branding" clause was a result of three events. First, the producers of The Daily Show did not mention that I was at NYU.
Second, I sat for an interview with the Metropolitan Opera for its Playbill. When the interview came out, the editors called me "author of The Anarchist in the Library" but said nothing about NYU. Dean Brabeck, who attends the Opera regularly, was not amused.
Of course, if she knew anything about how media work, she would know that Jon Stewart tends not to run his show by his subjects for review. Duh.
The third event was the creation of this absurd new name for the school and the consultant-driven effort to aggressively "brand" the Steinhardt School. I tried to tell the deans that you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. They don't seem to get it.
So here is the "branding" clause:
· Steinhardt Affiliation and Identity: As we try to promote and reinforce the Steinhardt brand, we request that in all future media and public appearances and presentations that you make every effort to indicate that your institutional affiliation is with the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development in the Department of Culture and Communication.
Once I got this letter, I concluded that I could not work for these people any more. They are not serious. Their priorities are tuition money, headlines, buzz, and rankings. They don't care about classrooms, quality curricula, graduate student life, or the prospects for growing families.
Comments
What was the "branding clause"? Did they want Sivacracy.net to use a purple template?
Posted by: michaelzimmer | July 2, 2007 8:39 AM
That's a mouthful. Would they ever consider it's *way* too long to be a memorable brand? (seems like it violated a fundamental rule of branding ...). What would have happened if you had said "Well, in theory I could tell them that, but it's far too much for any writer to devote the space, much less fit on a TV crawl, so they won't use it, not my fault"?
Posted by: Seth Finkelstein | July 2, 2007 4:08 PM
Congratulations on your move! Charlottesville's a great town, and from what I know of UVA, it seems like it'd be an awesome place to exercise your talents. Too bad NYU's still pulling all that b.s. though...their loss.
Posted by: Not Liz | July 2, 2007 11:15 PM
Were they requiring you to get a purple NYU tattoo?
Posted by: Nani | July 3, 2007 10:44 AM
Maybe if you had gotten a colorful "NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development in the Department of Culture and Communication" tattoo someplace provocative and flashed it on television you'd have gotten a larger NYU apartment, but who would have paid the FCC fine?
Posted by: Ann Bartow | July 3, 2007 10:47 AM