UMass Lowell: Age Discrimination is Wrong

I wanted to share with you an important and difficult announcement. My mother, Prof. Mitra Das, started teaching at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 1972 and became a tenured member of the faculty in 1979. She has nurtured the University's mission to educate its students and promoted its best interests during her more than forty-two years of service. Over the past several weeks, she made the difficult decision to sue the University for age discrimination. I cannot be more proud of her.

I did not initially believe that the institution that mom has spent the bulk of her adult life and professional career -- and a place I used to wander with amazement as a child -- had grown hostile to older faculty. Alas, after observing the legal process, which has included interviews with nearly a dozen faculty members at Lowell and analyzing the huge evidentiary trail, it now appears clear that there is a war being waged against older faculty members by the administration, and particularly by Dean Luis Falcon and Provost Ahmed Abdelal.

At an age when many of her peers have given in to the hostile work environment being created at Lowell and have retired under duress, I am so darn proud that my mother -- my intellectual and spiritual role model, has not. Universities are made stronger when they embrace both the innovation of youth and the wisdom of experience, and I feel more alive today because mom is standing up for those principles. Good luck, mother, on your fight. I know you will prevail, and we will all be better as a society for your efforts. You have always taught me to stand by my core principles. I love you for doing just that.

Prof. Mitra Das at the beginning of her teaching career at Lowell State College
(now the University of Massachusetts Lowell) in 1972

 

 

Prof. Mitra Das in her last few months as Chairperson of the Department of Sociology
at University of Massachusetts Lowell. She has served as Chairperson of the Department
of Sociology over three different periods, the first from 1987 – 1993, the second in 2004,
and most recently from 2011 - 2014, under the leadership of five different deans

NYT: Law Schools’ Applications Fall as Costs Rise and Jobs Are Cut

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

This year's law school applicant pool is 30% smaller than last year's and nearly 40% smaller than in 2010, according to an article in today's The New York Times.  While I can understand the elasticity of demand based on macro-economic considerations, I firmly believe that applicants to all graduate programs, including law schools, must separate their beliefs about employment prospects from their  intellectual and professional passions.

My career has seen much evolution since I graduated from law school, but despite the changing focus and job environment, the intellectual process of law school and the training and refinement it provided remain invaluable to me. While I experienced a very comfortable job environment upon graduation, the economy cratered only a few years after, only to rebound and fall several times thereafter. Applicants to law schools must know that the job market may contain volatility, but also, and perhaps more importantly, that there will always be a need and role for qualified, passionate and intelligent lawyers. That is just as true today as it has always been.  A focus on just the availability of a big corporate law firm job after graduation robs the decision of whether to go to law school of much of its other essential considerations.

That said, we must address the broader issues of the financing and cost of modern American education so that bright students of all economic backgrounds are able to pursue and obtain the highest level and quality of education available anywhere in the world. That availability will define and reinforce America's greatness in the next century. 

A tribute to Professor E. Graham Ward

It is with great sadness that I pass along news of the passing of a dear friend, professor and mentor at Brooks School. Prof. E. Graham Ward is one of the people most responsible for my ability to write and appreciate the power of the written word. It was he who awarded me the Brooks School Journalism Award, a prize I still cherish today. Professor Ward's decades of service at Brooks School brought him in contact with approximately one-third of the entire alumni population of the school.

The following tribute, written by Professor Mark Shovan, one of Professor Ward's contemporaries at Brooks, himself a legend at the school, is fitting and worthy of a few minutes of your time. Farewell my dear and beloved Professor Ward, you are and will forever be missed.

E. GRAHAM WARD 



An hour after reminiscing with Doug Burbank about Graham Ward's masterful approach to teaching, I received the call: Graham had died that morning of cardiac arrest.



E. Graham Ward (Graham, never Edgar) was so patient with those less intelligent than he; simply said, everyone. I am still dumbfounded how a man who said so little could convey so much. A man of few words both in the classroom and on the wrestling bench, Graham believed in stepping away from center stage and letting the learning process unfold through discovery aided by his moderate guidance. Forty some odd years ago, Jim Moffett and Graham Ward, both of whom once taught at Exeter began collaborating on a curriculum entitled Interaction, a student centered approach to learning. The Interaction series employed a sound theory of discourse and the use of varying levels of narrative voice. It became a widely circulated program of several varying texts published by Houghton Mifflin in 1973. Graham also wrote a biography of Frank Ashburn; Graham was a newspaper reporter; he wrote for Offshore Magazine; he most recently published a series of World War II letters from his uncle a combatant in Europe to the (McCallum) family back in Falmouth.

Graham was the Chairman of the English Department well before he hired me in 1968 until his retirement in 1997. Under Graham's leadership, the department moved from a program my grandmother might well have recognized in her secondary school education to a more forward-looking, cutting edge, much imitated but never duplicated department: The Brothers Dunnell, Todd Spader and others were all giants of this boarding school/ English Department life; it was indeed a life in this place called Brooks.

Let it be said that Graham was a gentleman too- a gentleman to all but fish: blues, stripers, bonefish and king mackerel all of which he pursued relentlessly in the waters off the Cape and off the Florida Keys. Graham died shortly after having put in his boat in Quissett Harbor. Maria, his wife said, "he was so pleased." He probably would have been out this evening to wet a line.



Graham was my mentor, my hero, my old friend without whose gentle guidance and succor, I would never have begun to have learned the little I know about teaching. Everything I ever, ever learned about teaching English, King Lear, negotiating the waters of secondary school, about honing intellect, about crafting independence and wearing an ascot, I learned from a fellow who looked more like Ernest Hemingway than Ernest Hemingway. I simply and greatly miss him so.



- Mark J. Shovan