San Diego Union Tribune - April 6, 2010 -
'Activist' UCSD professor facing unusual scrutiny
By Eleanor Yang Su, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
UCSD professor Ricardo Dominguez is facing unusual scrutiny from campus police and auditors for his involvement in two divisive projects — one that helps migrants find water stored along the border and another that disrupted the UC president’s Web site through a virtual sit-in.
Dominguez, 50, is a self-described activist and new media artist who is accustomed to stirring up controversy. But he said he’s troubled that his tenured status may be revoked for work that promotes his academic specialty of electronic civil disobedience.
His supporters said Dominguez’s academic freedom is being trampled because he targeted administrators last month over its financial management. The sympathizers include coalitions of more than 50 faculty members at the University of California San Diego.
Others, including three Republican congressmen who have written to UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox, said Dominguez should not be using taxpayer money to develop programs that aid illegal immigrants.
Last week, UCSD police questioned Dominguez about whether he committed a crime with the virtual sit-in.
Dominguez had publicized the March 4 event online. About 400 students, faculty and staff participated, each triggering a reloading of the UC system president’s Web site by registering for the sit-in. The computer program that Dominguez helped create also prompted a series of messages to appear, including, “There is no transparency found at the UC Office of the President.”
Dominguez said the sit-in was a political statement.
“I wanted to alert the UC Office of the President to the growing concern and critique of its policies,” he said yesterday. “The policies are restructuring our university so it’s no longer a public good, but solely a business, and a business that so far is failing.”
He said campus officials have accused him of launching a “denial of service attack,” in which a hacker takes over a Web site and shuts it down. That could be considered a crime.
UCSD administrators said Dominguez’s case is a private personnel matter.
“The university does not take positions on the political implications of its researchers’ work, relying instead on the marketplace of ideas to resolve conflicts or disputes over the merits of that work,” they said in a statement.
While the university “protects academic freedom,” the statement said, it does review alleged violations of the law.
Grant Kester, chairman of UCSD’s visual arts department and Dominguez’s supervisor, defends his work.
“What seems to be a multipronged attack on Ricardo sends the message that there are certain questions that one should and should not ask,” Kester said. “In his case, the message is you can engage in electronic civil disobedience if it’s organized around issues not directly tied to the UC system.”
Dominguez acknowledges that his research blends academic scholarship and activism. But he and Kester note that Dominguez was hired in 2005 and granted tenure in 2009 because of this work.
Dominguez’s salary was about $65,000 before furloughs started this academic year.
Campus professors have organized a letter-writing campaign that has resulted in at least 110 correspondences sent in Dominguez’s favor from faculty, students, museum curators and activists around the world. Some faculty met last night to discuss their strategy for the coming weeks. That includes a campus rally planned for tomorrow, while Dominguez meets with campus auditors.
Dominguez said he’s been told the audit will examine his Transborder Immigrant Tool, a project that provides migrants with GPS-enabled cell phones informing them about water jug locations and U.S. Border Patrol lookouts. It also attempts to blend technology with art, delivering inspirational poetry through the phone speakers.
The project is still in development, and is only available to university researchers. But it already has prompted death threats and hate mail.
Last month, Reps. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine; Brian Bilbray, R-Carlsbad; and Darrell Issa, R-Vista, sent a letter to Fox questioning whether the university should be helping illegal immigrants.
“We would say there’s more important things to be spending money on, like good science and math studies, as opposed to a GPS tool that could help illegal immigrants, terrorists, criminals and drug runners cross the border illegally,” Hunter said in an interview yesterday. He said he has not received a response from the chancellor, but hopes the project will be halted.
It’ll likely take days or weeks for the GPS-tool audit and sit-in investigation to be completed.
Some experts said it’s uncommon, but sometimes warranted, for professors to be dismissed or have their tenure revoked.
“Typically grounds for dismissal are tied to incompetence, not performing up to appropriate level of teaching or scholarship, or professional misconduct involving unethical behavior,” said Gregory Scholtz of the American Association of University Professors, a professional organization based in Washington, D.C.
Without those conditions, he said, academic freedom should prevail.
“An essential element of academic freedom,” Scholtz said, “is insulation from outside political influence at the university.”
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