[Vision2020] Grduate Council, Faculty Council, and Christ haters

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

There was so much wrong in Donavon’s outrageous e-mail (appended below) that I just have to set the record straight.

1.	I was on the UI Graduate Council for two years, and I attended nearly every meeting, and I didn’t see Donovan there a single time.  

2.	Perhaps Donovan meant the Graduate Student Association (GSA).  Yes, I was the GSA faculty advisor for two or three years, and I was on very good terms its president.  I attended every meeting to which I was invited, including a very nice awards banquet in the spring of 2003.  I didn’t see Donovan at any of these meetings.

3.	I have a long and productive history with the UI Faculty Council (FC).  My proudest moments were (1) the passage of an open files policy that I wrote; (2) a discussion of biweekly pay in which FC had no information but the faculty union had lots; (3) the passage of motion in 1982 that denied appropriated funds for athletics (I collected 120 signatures); (4) the time I was given 30 minutes to talk about the abuse of part-time faculty (the administration did nothing).  Yes, Donovan, when I discovered that $700,000 in appropriated funds for athletics had been reinstated, I lost 0-17 to have them removed again.  I had numerous calls from faculty saying that FC certainly did not represent them on this issue.

4.	I’ve had a good record in general faculty meetings as well.  When FC voted down due process for non-tenured faculty 11-9, the general faculty passed it 99-51.  When FC refused to consider supporting a 1976 collective bargaining bill, I went to general faculty again and it was passed by a 2-1 vote.  

5.	In 2002 I was elected president of the Pacific Northwest American Academy of Religion and Society for Biblical Literature.  Dozens of Christian colleges and universities attend this conference, and when I hosted it in 2003, 40 percent of the papers were from conservative evangelical schools.  For thirty years I must have really fooled everyone with my alleged hatred of Christians and Christian values.

6.	If Donovan had bothered to read my abortion essay, he would have noted that I quote from Christian authorities a lot.  The belief that the fetus is a person from conception on is a recent development among Protestants and Catholic.  Canon law on abortion (for centuries it was allowed in the first trimester) was not changed until 1917.

7.	Except for my weekly commentaries, many of my articles on the web have passed a rigorous process of blind review.  The nonsense and turds that Donovan allege does not get by scholarly reviewers but appears on V2020 all the time.

Donovan Arnold:

I am continually amazed that a guy can be so egotistical and self absorbed as to write pages and pages on his nonsensical drivel, publish it in on the Internet and expect us to all go flocking to it like it was anything the more exciting than a turd floating in the toilet at the far stall.
 
He never once attended a Graduate Student Council Meeting, in which he was suppose to be our adviser, sat back while the undergrads looted our funding,  and was soundly shot down on his idiotic nonsensical proposals to the Faculty Council.
 
So why anyone would listen to this Christian Hater on the merits of an unborn soul is well beyond me.
 
Best Regards,
 
Donovan