Dynamic Subspace

Late last night, Steve Pec, publisher of AEQ, sent me, Professor Masood Raja, English Department Chair Ron Corthell, and Graduate Studies Coordinator Raymond Craig an email in response to a post that I made in February about Professor Raja’s experience trying to publish an article with AEQ.  You may read my original post, along with Mr. Pec’s response, which he supposedly couldn’t post to the comments on his own, here.

I do feel that blogs that permit commenting, as mine does, should facilitate conversation.  If Mr. Pec had a problem with Raja’s experience, which is also available on his own website here, he had every opportunity to post his response to the comments of my original post or to Raja’s blog.  However, he did not choose this route.  Instead, he sent an email detailing his theory of a student trying to please his professor by posting a story to the student’s blog, and he felt it necessary to bring this to the attention of the chair of the English department and the graduate studies coordinator.  

First, Professor Raja and I are colleagues.  I do not think of our academic and professional relationship as hierarchical, but as a meeting of minds with different experiences and knowledges to share.  This isn’t grade school where I might leave an apple on the teacher’s desk hoping for a boost to my spelling test grade.  Graduate school is an entirely different environment and experience.  It is a different dynamic, which is certainly as various as their are schools and professors, but it is apparent to anyone with experience working with Raja that we are colleagues first and foremost.

Second, spamming this email to Professors Corthell and Craig was obviously meant to gain some kind of leverage on the part of Mr. Pec.  His devised narrative of favors exchanged was meant to incite the departmental authorities against Professor Raja and me.  This infantile end-run around is something I naively didn’t expect to encounter professionally. 

So, let me make one thing clear to Mr. Pec and anyone else who may feel it necessary to make implicit threats against me regarding what I choose to post on dynamicsubspace.net.  Any challenges will be met, and all provocations defended against.  This is my blog, and I will run it as I see fit.  Furthermore, I believe in the fundamental right of free speech for myself and others.  One element of that idea of free speech is the freedom to conversation, and blogs are one arena that facilitates dialog.  It is for that reason alone that I posted Mr. Pec’s reprehensible email to the original post about Professor Raja’s experience with Academic Exchange Quarterly–not for any implied threat by emailing Professor Corthell and Professor Craig.  

It bears noting that dynamicsubspace.net isn’t the end all-be all of the Internet.  Ideas posted here may be challenged here as well as any where else online where one can find a space to speak her or his mind.  Battles need not be confined here to this, my little corner of the Net.

Comments are open to all sentient beings.  Enjoy.