Sexton and Lipton Must Resign: A Redux
Rebuttal to Professor Magder’s retort, by Edward Radzivilovskiy, Deputy Opinion Editor, Washington Square News
*Note: This is my rebuttal to NYU Steinhardt Professor Ted Magder’s retort of my opinion piece for Washington Square News that called for the resignation of NYU President Sexton and Board of Trustees Chair Martin Lipton. Professor Magder’s letter can be found here.
In the September 24 edition of WSN, NYU Professor Ted Magder responded to my recent editorial with Raquel Woodruff, in which we called for the resignation of President Sexton and the Board of Trustees Chair, Mr. Martin Lipton. First, I would like to say that as the article was an opinion piece intended to take a firm position that we were not required to present all sides of the issue. However, we endeavored to solicit the views of Professor Magder on the issue of shared governance alone.
I remind Professor Magder that he chaired the Faculty Senate Council when it had this to say about shared faculty governance in a memo addressed to the University Leadership Team and dated October 29, 2012: “The practice of … shared governance has been neglected at NYU. This is a concern not only to faculty, but also to students, the public trust, and the NYU institutional vision alike.”
This is what I asked Professor Magder to address. His response was that after this date, the FSC and the Leadership committee held two meetings and came to an agreement on faculty governance, and the Board endorsed the wording of the agreement by December 2012.
However, after this date, five NYU schools passed votes of no confidence in President Sexton, a slight detail that Professor Magder failed to acknowledge in his response to our query. These votes of no confidence were based in no small part on the frustration among many faculty regarding President Sexton’s top-down management style.
As to the other points mentioned in the original opinion piece, some of which were addressed by Professor Magder, he actually said nothing in his email reply to us. Thus, it is difficult to know what he means when he complains that “nothing I said appears in the article.” In fact, everything he said, which was not much, appeared in the article.
Magder suggests that we contacted him in his capacity as the Chair of the FSC and the Chair of the Space Priorities Working Group. However, we contacted him strictly in connection to his former chairmanship of the FSC. Magder said nothing about the Space Committee or its recommendations. The fact that this Space Committee was convened after 2031 was already approved suggested to us that faculty oversight was an afterthought and not a priority for the Sexton administration.
Professor Madger complains that our editorial was “shockingly one-sided.” Yet, in our second paragraph, we list Sexton’s considerable achievements and recognize his “compelling legacy.” We also noted that the faculty has soundly rejected his vision, as the no-confidence votes attest. I reiterate here that a president who has lost the confidence of his faculty cannot effectively lead a university.
As to Professor Madger’s final point, which contends that we expect no change or that none has occurred, we can only say that our editorial was written to effect such change. The change we called for, and which I reiterate here, is that John Sexton and Martin Lipton should resign. I believe we have made a case for this opinion, and have supported it with evidence that we judge to be substantial.
