Andrew's email commenting on first set of received ICSD emails

From TattlerWiki

Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:17:44 -0600

To: Abe Halpert, Andrew Alexander, Ted Stinson Bryan Ellerbrock, Prabhas Pokharel, Trevor Sorrells, Laura Fattaruso, Robert Ochshorn

From: Andrew Alexander

Subject: Tattler Legal - ICSD internal emails!

Cc: Scott Zuccarino, Jarrah O'Neill, Evan D. Williams, Adrienne Clermont

Hi all,

We've just received over 200 pages of internal emails and other correspondence from the ICSD related to the Tattler lawsuit! It's very exciting, and, partly at Rob's request and partly my request, I'm written a summary/analysis of the important/interesting points of the documents. It got fairly personal, so keep in mind that this is just me speaking (what else is new?), but I hope that I've distilled them reasonably well. Actually, this email is over 5000 words long, so I don't know if "distilled" is the right word, but you get the point.

(I tried to separate trains of thought with pound signs ###, and I've cited using "Bates numbers" stamped at the bottoms of the original documents).

Please feel free to forward these to whomever you like, and most of all, check out the documents themselves (public!). They're online, split into several PDFs, at Defendants'_Response_to_First_Request_for_Documents

The emails are very interesting, and show that a lot of things that the ICSD had been telling us were, at best, manipulations of the truth. Stephenie Vinch, contrary to her meek demeanor, in fact disliked the 2004-2005 Editoriat very much and was a strong supporter of Joe Wilson; indeed, in her resignation as advisor and later from teaching altogether, she cited us as the primary reason. Development of the Guidelines began as an attempt to control content in the Tattler, and the ICSD administrators' union decided to take up the "inappropriate" content in the Tattler as a cause. The BoE president at the time, Chuck Bartosch, as well as both of his predecessors, Roy Dexheimer (the Albus Dumbledore of the ICSD) and David Lee, all thought that the administration was overreacting to the Tattler and would/will lose the lawsuit. And, stunningly enough, the Board of Education nearly fired Bill Russell in the summer of 2005 due to an apparent pattern of lying to the BoE that he had.

---

The only emails from BoE members in the documents are from Roy Dexehimer and David Lee, as well as one or two from Judy Maxwell and Chuck Bartosch. Dexheimer, Bartosch, and Lee both seem to have very different takes on the situation than the rest of the ICSD does, perhaps because of their outside perspective and greater intelligence. Dexheimer, while he stops short of saying that freedom of the speech means freedom of despicable speech, or explicitly referring to the First Amendment, is by a long shot our biggest defender. Here's what he wrote Judy Pastel on November 10th, 2004:

I do have to say that the 'Tattler' is generally a well-written, well-constructed student paper. The articles are literate and many are actually interesting. And maybe I missed some things, but I read a lot of supportive stuff about Joe and the policies, as well as the occasional downer (e.g., the report on the assembly with the 10th graders). I'm not going to go out of my way to publicly praise the paper, but I must confess to you privately that it's a pretty good student paper. D00502

It's nice to hear most of that. As to his last sentence, it's interesting that he wants to avoid public praise of the paper--obviously he doesn't want the BoE or Administration (which Dexheimer, a former administrator himself, tends to confuse) to seem fractious, but as an elected BoE member, shouldn't he be worried less about politics and more about standing up for his opinions? I mean, I see where he's coming from and would probably do the same were I in his position (and I'm loathe to second-guess him), but just a thought. Here's Dexheimer again, this time in early July, 2005:

The stuff they wrote about Joe Wilson this past year was annoying, but not libel. THe [sic] cartoon was annoying and in bad taste, but I'm not sure it would meet the standards of being obscene (and from what I'm reading about Middle School habits, I'm not sure it would appeal much to their prurient interests). The review of the restaurant was a sloppy attempt at humor, and ended up sounding racist. But not the level of being censored. D00513

To be fair, he's far from perfect (no First Amendment ideologue here :(), and says a lot of stuff about how it's important for the Tattler advisor to have the final say, for example. Still, compared to the rest of the ICSD, he's quite the voice of moderation. Behind Dexheimer, our strongest almost-supporter seems to have been Chuck Bartosch (no surprise). Here's what he wrote to the BoE, Bill Russell, and Judy Pastel on January 27:

I think the students have exercised exceedingly poor judgement (reprehensible, as Deborah put it), but there is a dramatic over-reaction to what the students want to print, and frankly defensiveness/censorship by-whatever-name-you-want-to-call-it. // Basically, I see an over-reaction that is causing a greater problem than that is justified, in particular, to criticism of Joe Wilson. If they want to say 'he stinks,' well, he's a public figure (in the context of the students) and just has to suck it up a little. I'm not trying to be callous, but trying to impose restrictions on the students (even when they are off-base) just isn't healthy. It'd be better to use their 'open forum' to get the truth out if we're concerned about the situation than to get them into a fight. Win their hearts, not crush them, as it were. D00495

Both Dexheimer and Lee say that they think the ICSD would lose a lawsuit against the Tattler. (And, as Lee points out, "we are certainly losing and will continue to lose the PR war" D00566.) It's very interesting that these two people--both very smart, and both past and current BoE Presidents--agree with our legal stance. Lee and Dexheimer have no doubt read all of our analysis and been persuaded by it; are the administrators really that blind?

---

One of the things David Lee wrote really struck me. "This is a classic cause celebre which these guys are prepared to ride all the way to their Harvard Law applications four years from now" D00566. Now, the year of the Tattler Affair was also the year that the Redbud Woods protesting was coming to a head, and at the same time that we were suing the school, those tree-huggers were chaining themselves to the bushes on University Avenue. I think I subjected more than a few of you to my rant about why I disliked the Redbud Woods protestors, but I'll summarize it again:

It's unfortunate that Cornell had to build a parking lot over what had been a wooded lot, but it was a necessary choice--the construction of the new West Campus dorms eliminated a lot of parking, parking lots anywhere else (especially underground) were unfeasible, and even with the Redbud Woods lot there was still a net loss of parking spaces on West Campus. The parking lot went through a long approval process and a number of lawsuits. "Redbud Woods" was not a habitat for California condors or home to a rare species of star-nosed mole--it was a pretty but completely undistinguished patch of scrub. The student protesters took the controversy out of proportion--it simply was not an important enough thing to fight over. Pick your battles. The students were, I think, motivated by a desire to do what has been so nobly glorified: to stand up for their rights. Whether subconsciously or not, they wanted to be like Rosa Parks or the Tiannamen Square protestors (or the ACLU defending the Nazis in Skokie) and be able to fight for a noble cause, in this case, the environment. Fair enough. The problem is, they were so obsessed with doing something good--and with the notion that doing something that noble can only be done by standing up to someone, rather than standing up the tallest, or being the only one standing up in a crowd of sleepers--that they lost sight of the scope of the controversy. Redbud Woods may have deserved the City Planning Board's support and the subsequent lawsuit, it may have deserved a reasonable level of protest via op-eds and petitions, but it was not important enough to generate the tree-sitters, arrests, demands for amnesty, and New York Times articles that followed. The energies directed towards saving Redbud Woods could have been directed elsewhere with much more productive results. In the end, the protestors, consciously or subconsciously, were motivated more by their own desire to feel like they were doing something good than to actually do something good.

And that's what I always feared that we were doing with the Tattler Affair. That's what I always feared that people thought we were doing. There was no smoking gun we could point to, no "I hate the First Amendment--and students!" memo sent by Joe Wilson we could point to. I remember spooling for a fight in the fall of 2004, hoping that Joe Wilson would clamp down more so we could have an excuse to shout out more, and I remember being, on some level, thrilled for that reason when they finally did present the Guidelines. This is something I've thought long and hard about, although admittedly not recently. I do think that we are doing the right thing. Of course we are motivated by the desire to feel like we're doing something good--but in the end, I believe that we are doing something good by continuing with this lawsuit. (Although I daresay I need some new hobbies.)

--- I always found it ironic that math teachers seemed to be the strongest supporters of the First Amendment and English teachers the least. Certainly Stephenie Vinch and Eileen Bach were not very big on it, and I suspected that the Yearbook Advisors always kind of thought that we should just print "We Love Joe!" articles. Anyway, reading through these emails confirmed what had been a half-facetious hypothesis of mine. In one email, AP Lit teacher Moira Lang complains to Joe Wilson that she saw Rob in the copy room photocopying a censorship packet D00580. Most damning, however, is what Humanities teacher Ross Creagan told Joe Wilson on November 3. Read the whole thing:

"I am so sorry and disturbed that the long, bad habit of granting privileged status to 'intelligent' students has so quickly challenged your authority and insulted your hard-earned honor. The Tattler staff are misusing their 1st Amendment rights to rant and rave like so many spoiled children when you treat them like any other student. I'm enraged that parents of Tattler students continue the tradition of threatening litigation against administrators as the most effective way of protecting their children's long tradition of special entitlements at I.H.S. It's appalling that the students on The Tattler, and their parents and lawyers who stand ready to attack you presume to have enough information about you to judge and challenge your policies. This is the only time since I began working here in 1988 that I felt there should be more provisions in the First Amendment, allowing censor [sic] of immature press in educational settings, particularly when selfish interests take precedence over the best interests of the community. I'm equally troubled by my peers, some of whom express surprise that you would make an issue of how hurtful the bad press and graffiti have been for you, when they presumed your authoritative style would continue, in the face of student resistance, with unflappable resolve." (D00606)

Judy Pastel echoes Creagan's sentiments: "As one teacher shared," she wrote, "'there are a number of AP students whining because they are being held accountable for the first time'" D00502. Again, this is interesting to me, because, like with the cause celebre, this was always uncomfortably in the back of my mind. In the fall of 2004, a relative, a sociologist, visited Ithaca, and on a walk around the Plantations with him and my dad, I tried to explain what was going on with Joe Wilson. He was basically just enforcing the rules, I said, but what was upsetting students like me was that we had been used to implicitly not having to toe the line--for example, not needing hall passes. In one sense, this seems unjust and unfair--one class of students having different privileges than another. And "accountability" is one of the current buzzwords in that awful, awful world of education policy (the world of people who think that our country's educational problems can be solved en masse by legislation and research)--everyone talks about "holding students accountable" or "holding teachers accountable."

But, quite frankly, isn't it incorrect to say that the ICSD was "not holding AP students accountable" by, for example, looking the other way when we skipped gym or went to the bathroom without a pass? I mean, by any measure, the "AP students" that teachers like Ross Creagan decry are model students. We're the students who studied hard, got good grades, and went to Cornell/Stanford/Harvard/Chicago/BU/Albany/Brown/MIT--the ICSD should be proud of us and should want other students to follow our example. (I know this all sounds arrogant, but just bear with me.) It sure seems like we were "held accountable" when it came to schoolwork and learning--and isn't that the point of school? If I skipped every AP Bio class after the AP exam (very close to the truth), or if I routinely walked through the halls without a pass, does it matter, as long as I'm on top of my schoolwork? To hear Creagan and Pastel tell it, they're more obsessed with maintaining a totalitarian order ("hold them accountable for hall passes!") than promoting education ("hold them accountable for their homework!").

Secondly, is it really such a bad thing for students to be granted privileges based on their performance? I mean, obviously this informal system of implicitly granting privileges to top students at IHS (if it existed at all--even that I am not sure sure about) was pretty sketchy, but in general, shouldn't privileges in school be merit-based (like they are in the real world)? I'm just throwing this out there. At Boynton, students who won the Homework Award got to have free ice cream sundaes courtesy of the PTA; students who won the homework award three out of four quarters got to go on a swimming/bowling/etc. trip to Helen Newman during the school day at the end of the year.

You know, I hate the thesis about "bad language causes bad thought" (the Whorf Hypothesis, in linguistics) with a passion, but reading that sentence about "holding AP students accountable" almost makes me want to agree in it. The common phrase "to hold accountable" is suddenly applied to an inappropriate situation, and inappropriate conclusions result. Maybe Orwell was right.

--- Vinch, too, was a strong supporter of Joe Wilson, sending him a page-long email in early November 2004 praising his work and explaining how much she disagreed with the criticism of him in the Tattler and how she hoped that "you will be seeing less criticism in the future" D00601. And it's astonishing how little she told us about her dissatisfaction with our Editoriat--to read her emails, it seems that she hated us and thought we were out of control; I never heard her say anything remotely close to that. During the fall of 2004, I remember having good-natured arguments with her over content--the type of arguments that any newspaper has--but Vinch seems to have interpreted that as malicious teenagers trying to intimidate an authority figure to get their way, rather than colleagues having a collegial, intellectual debate.

Vinch also said, in her November 2004 email, that the June Issue included "a scathing editorial about me and my decision to 'censor' the newspaper." I went back to the original 1200-word editorial, and here's everything that was said about Vinch:

Although the staff knew the ad was in the paper prior to sending our final draft to the press, our faculty advisor, Ms. Stephanie Vinch, did not. While moving the ad from page to page, the final proofs were printed, erroneously resulting in the ad's omission. Its printing was in no way surreptitious, and the ad was one of many things omitted from Ms. Vinch's proofs. Unfortunately, Ms. Vinch felt the ad had been intentionally snuck into the paper without her knowledge. She deemed the ad to be personally offensive to a specific member of the student body, and declared its printing a libelous act with "malicious intent." Ms. Vinch, in her first year of overseeing the school newspaper, sought council with the previous Tattler advisor, and emerged with the decision to cancel the final issue of the Tattler for the 2003-04 school year. ... // ... Ms. Vinch had served as a relaxed, gregarious, and judicious advisor for the past seven issues, but on this issue she would not budge. She upheld her decision to cancel the final issue of The Tattler. ... // ... Finally, and most importantly, by discontinuing the printing of the Tattler, Ms. Vinch single-handedly censored the high school's only student publication, setting a dangerous precedent for the freedom of the press at Ithaca High School.

I don't see anything in there that was gratuitous.

--- According to both Vinch and Bach, the premise behind their suggestion to survey faculty and parents about their opinion of Joe Wilson was because, in Bach's word, "those will show ample support for Joe" (D00483). As if the point of a survey and of a newspaper was to promote a certain viewpoint. Later, after the ICSD administration rejected even the faculty survey, Asst. to the Supt. Melina Carnicelli cited one of the reasons as being that the faculty survey "has no educational and/or academic benefit, and I'd argue little or no journalistic benefit either. For a student organization, an endeavor of this nature should satisfy the test for educational efficacy. And, since The Tattler's previous survey allowed students to apply/test their abilities in a statistical analysis, another exercise of the same nature is unnecessary" (D00440). As if a) education is complete after a single test or application of it (by that logic, wouldn't the Tattler have fufilled its goal after every staff member had written one article?), and b), (and much more importantly) as if the Tattler was an educational endeavor.

This conviction that civil rights, the First Amendment, and more generally, the law, is/are subjective is repeated again, by Joe Wilson, in early 2005. Wilson wanted the Tattler to be, from 2005-2006 onward, part of a "credit-bearing course in which the editorial board is enrolled." In the class, students would be taught "rights from the high school's perspective as opposed to real or fictional 'Cornell professors.'" (Incidentally, the paper in that form would also have a "review board" in addition to an advisor.) D00557. This is kind of like how we learned in Government class that Hazelwood gave schools the right to censor student newspapers, period, and that Tinker had no precedence beyond the right to wear black armbands.

--- These emails were very difficult to read. It took me about two hours to go through them, and after that, I had to go for a long, long walk, because of how emotionally exhausting it was. I don't think I've been that drained in a year. The level of condescension of students is remarkable. Every time the Tattler printed something the administration didn't like, it was a breach of journalistic ethics; every time we criticized the administration, it was "inappropriate posturing." They never try to engage us in debate about our content; they just criticized it, with most of that criticism happening behind our backs, where we couldn't respond to it. Here's what Melina Carnicelli said after meeting with Rob and Prabhas about the teacher survey:

I was very distressed and disappointed at Rob's remarks to me, 'She will have to do better than that,' when he heard my response to why the Superintendent was not approving the survey for distribution for teachers, and 'I think it's up to her to get in tough with us,' when I suggested he and Prabhas put their response in writing to the Superintendent. I should hope you share my distress and disappointment in that type of inappropriate posturing by one of our student leaders toward the Superintendent and me. D00440

---

Another very interesting revelation in the emails is that the BoE seriously considered firing Bill Russell (Asst. Supt. for Curriculum and Instruction, now Supt. of Owegeo schools), or at least was extremely upset that he "lied" over them. Exactly what he lied about is unclear, and it may even have been multiple topics. Here's Roy Dexheimer, on June 24, 2005:

Now to a most difficult dilemma. It seems clear that a majority of the current Board members have disquieting thoughts about Bill Russell. (Indeed, if the accusation of outright lying is accurate, those Board members should be demanding a 3020a Hearing and be willing to buy out Bill's contract for two years. But I don't hear that being proposed........which might mean that we are willing to offer the benefit of doubt and concede that Bill may have been speaking hastily or with insufficient information)

So let's presume that Bill is in place at least for the two remaining years of his contract with the District. I would argue that we (the Board) should not make those years a guaranteed failure. And would argue further that a loud public vote refusing to extend his contract will make him a lame duck with very little authority to be effective.

Among other things, the Superintendent does not need that burden. She has three administrators in building positions who will need her full attention, and one administrator close her whom we have raised questions about (and who is doing quite well at this point, thank you.....). Putting Bill so publicly on the endangered species list is not in anyone's best interests.

So, I hope the Board will consider some or all of the following as a course of action: 1) take no public action on Tuesday, either will Bill's contract of Paul's (Mike has a different kind of contractual agreement with the District, and is not in this mix). Do Paul quietly in the summer; Judy can explain to him now. 2) give the Superintendent, in Executive Session, clear admonition that the behaviors we've described must get her attention as she mentors Bill in the next school year. 3) set a reasonable time limit to see and measure progress. My own preference would be to ask the Superintendent to give the Board a mid-year assessment of Bill's contributions, as if it were the end of year assessment. If we are not satisfied, then vote publicly to not extend the contract. If we are generally, but not completely satisfied, let it ride and make the decision(s) on extensions in the spring. And if we are satisfied, then extend by a year.

Mid-year will give the new members time to get up to speed on the issues and the progress (or lack thereof) on performance, and their votes at mid-year would be informed votes. D00567-8

David Lee chimed in, too:

I basically agree with your plan. I do however think that it's important that the message be clear and unambiguous. The difficulty here is that I suspect we're dealing with some pretty endemic behaviors which may be hard to change.

For what it's worth, in my limited contact w/Bill, the term 'lying' is way too strong. I would call it 'deliberate obfuscation' or 'deliberate misrepresentation'. I realize those of you with longer histories have your own 'incidents' that may be stronger. But for me, the term 'lying' has a very severe, very extreme connotation, akin to fraud, and something we would never countenance in an employee, certainly not a highly-placed one. So I would urge caution in using that term, unless you are prepared to cite exact and documentable instances of when it occurred. As far as my personal experience has been, this is way too strong. But that's just me. D00566

--- On a fairly personal note that none of you care about, the emails also show how deep Eileen Bach's hatred of me was. See, throughout the last half of twelfth grade--when all this stuff was going on--she had a habit of, whenever the Tattler was brought up, always mentioning how obstinate, unreasonable, and malicious I was. I always figured that

Bach told David Lee that if Teukoslky were appointed as the Tattler's advisor, the lawsuit would likely be dropped, as there would only be one student left who would "want to go to the mat"--presumably me. Obviously, she was completely incorrect in her analysis, but I wonder what made her think that RT's appointment would make the suit go away. Perhaps I should take it as a compliment, if she's suggesting (however inaccurately) that I was the only plaintiff to not be easily appeased out of my First Amendment rights. There are numerous other little references, whether explicit or by pronoun, to me in her emails, that are quite appalling. I thought she disliked me because of the flyer I distributed right after the Guidelines were imposed; the emails show that she disliked me as far back as October 2004, when I was doing the Joe Wilson survey. I just don't know why she hated me so much.

Bach's most malicious action was her torpedoing of our effort to move the Tattler archives to a secure and accessible location. As some of you kight recall, we discussed for some time the prospect of moving the 110 years of Tattler archives to the History Center, where they would be safe, organized, and publicly accessible, as they should be. In the Tattler office, they were shoved into overflowing file cabinets that had melted candy and piles of salt on the bottoms of the file drawers (I think the latter was left over from a popcorn fundraiser at a Craft Fair). Anyway, the History Center, where I was working the summer of 2005, was interested, and so we boxed up the archives, took them over, and Eric Morris '05 and I started sorting through them.

Meanwhile, in an interview with the Ithaca Times in June 2005, I offhandedly mentioned that I had been working hard to bring the Tattler archives to a safe and accessible location. The article read:

[Alexander]'s also working to preserve the entire history of the paper. 'I am currently in the process of transferring our archives to the History Center in Tompkins County, where they can be safe, secure, and accessible to researchers.'

Based on reading these two sentences, Eileen Bach sent out a page-long email to Donna Eschenbrenner, the History Center's Archivist (and my boss), the Director of the History Center, Judy Pastel, Joe Wilson, Emily Hess, Teukolsky, myself, and Rob, calling the move "a huge mistake and highly insulting to those Tattler editors and advisers who follow you." According to Bach, the archives should have been retained at IHS becase a) the Tattler staff kept good care of them (melted candy next to 100-year old newsprint?); b) the archives are useful for reporters to gain a historical perspective (yes, but, because she didn't bother to ask anyone before she sent her invective, she didn't know that THC was only taking one copy of each issue, leaving the bulk of the archives (and certainly multiple copies of every issue past 1970) at IHS; c) THC isn't to be trusted, anyway, because they routinely throw out parts of their archive (!!! absolutely not!!!); d) at one point a student wanted to apply for a grant to digitize the archives, wouldn't that be a better solution? (well, maybe, but impossible and impractical for a number of reasons); and e) "who made this decision, and who was consulted about it? The morgue belongs to Ithaca High School and is NOT anyone's to give away" (they are the Tattler's property, no?, and would be the right of the Tattler to give away. Indeed Teukolsky had not been brought up to speed on this, because she was new, but the move had been discussed for over a year within the Editoriat.)

Bach's concerns were reasonable, but were ameliorable, and had she just bothered to ask--rather than rely on two sentences in the newspaper--all of her questions would have been answered without the need to email the entire staff of the History Center and the ICSD administration over such a trivial issue. (In this way, it was similar to her reaction to the Personales Incident, in which she fired off a page-long letter to Vinch explaining what her practice was in responding to students "who have slipped libelous material into the paper," without ever once talking to Adri, Evan, or another student to get their story.) In the series of archives-related emails that followed her initial epistle, her tone was always derogatory towards me, constantly implying that I was some sort of outsider who had nothing to do with the Tattler. In an email to my boss, she elaborated on one of her concerns:

I thought I should let you know a major reason I was concerned about this issue that I'd prefer remain quiet. ... Andrew made a number of unilateral decisions that were detrimental to The Tattler and caused significant difficulty. He means well but he is not and never was in charge. I am FINE with whatever decision Mrs. Teukolsky makes, but the decision should be hers, in conjunction with the editorial staff. No one reined [sic] Andrew in when he needed it most, and Mrs. Teukolsky should have the opportunity to do so upon her return (she is out of the country at present). She is very capable of putting Andrew in his place when needed.

I was very nearly fired from the History Center, saved only by the fact that they already knew me well and trusted me (and were rather startled by the nature and tone of Bach's email). Thanks to Bach's temper tantrum, the archives were returned to IHS, where they remain, unaccessible to the public and decaying. It is unfortunate that Eileen Bach has enjoyed so much influence over the Tattler and the school (largely, I suspect, because of her constant eagerness to voice her opinion loudly and often), when the logical workings of her brain appear to follow axioms accepted only by her. I never liked her as a teacher--what with spelling tests and directives like "don't split infinitives," she was kind of the exemplum of a bad English teacher--but until she started attacking me in twelfth grade, I always liked her quite a bit as a person. It's one thing to be attacked semi-professionally, such as in sparring matches with Joe Wilson or the ICSD administration, but to have someone--someone you had previously trusted, much the less--start openly and baselessly attacking your character is... I just don't know where all of her vitriol came from. I mean, the more I read her emails, the more she reminds me of a less-intelligent Joe Wilson, never missing an opportunity to make unsubtle insinuations or to support her arguments with clever rhetoric instead of sound logic.

Here's one more thing I should mention about Eileen Bach: not only is she malicious, she doesn't actually know what she's talking about. On numerous occasions, she demonstrated her failure to grasp the basics of student press law. In an early email to administrators, she confuses Hazelwood and Tinker, thinking that Hazelwood allows administrators to censor content if it "'substantially disrupts the school'" (D00449). This is nothing compared to what she said when the Editoriat visited her minutes after the Guidelines were imposed--when Bach said, "But the Tattler's always been Hazelwood!", when it turned out that she in fact meant Tinker. You'd think that someone who advised the paper for a decade and was involved in numerous controversies would at least get the basics down, but I guess not.

--- Overall, these emails depressed me a lot, and not just because I had to go through the same emotionally-draining crap again while going through them. I've been thinking about being a teacher recently--not seriously, but just as something to do for a few years after college--but reading these emails makes me want to less. The attitude of the teachers is bitter and shortsighted; I wouldn't want to be their colleagues. The administrators have completely missed the point that their job is to educate students. Goodness.

As always,

Andrew