April 20, 2010
Professor Paul Drake, Senior Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs
University of California San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 0065
Open Letter to UCSD Senior Vice-Chancellor Drake from the MIT Program in Art, Cuture and Technology, in support of Professor Dominguez and the bang.lab/EDT members, and calling for an immediate end to the ongoing criminal investigation of their art practice
Dear Senior Vice-Chancellor Drake,
As professors, students, fellows, and staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology, we would like to express our deepest alarm and dissatisfaction with the current persecution
of Professor Ricardo Dominguez (Associate Professor, Visual Arts Department, University of California San Diego). With this letter, we signal to you our full support of Professor Dominguez and the bang.lab/EDT
members in their resistance to unwarranted attacks on their research. We find criminal investigation and threatened revocation of tenure to be entirely unacceptable responses to a faculty member’s lauded research.
As artists and researchers, we strongly believe in the necessity of presenting political, ethical, and conceptual challenges to the boundaries of accepted practice. We recognize the research of Professor Dominguez
and the bang.lab as making invaluable contributions to the theory and practice of new media and performance art, always strongly in the interests of social justice. We believe that academic departments have a responsibility to promote and protect this research, and not to persecute it.
Along with the UCSD Faculty coalition, we condemn the persecution of Professor Dominguez, and find its pursuit a serious threat to the integrity of academic and artistic freedoms and to the right to protest. The implications of this threat are far-ranging, outside of this particular case, and both on and off university campuses.
Further, in a nation-wide context of rising right-wing extremism, racial tension, and threatened violence against immigrants and visible minorities, we are disturbed by the harassment of a tenured faculty member
for activities that pursue social justice and freedom of speech across lines of race, citizenship, gender, and economic status.
We urge you, as Senior Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs, and the UCSD administration to discontinue the persecution of professor Dominguez, in accordance with the principles of academic integrity espoused by research institutions such as UCSD.
Sincerely,
Students, faculty, staff, and affiliates of the MIT Program in Art,
Culture, and Technology
! #!
Haseeb Ahmed (Graduate Student, ACT)
Gina Badger (Graduate Student, ACT)
Ute Meta Bauer (Associate Professor/Director, ACT)
John Bell (Fellow, ACT)
Andrea Frank (Lecturer, ACT)
Amber Frid-Jimenez (Visiting lecturer, ACT)
Lisa Hickler (Administrative Assistant)
Sohin Hwang (Graduate Student, ACT)
Joan Jonas (Professor, ACT)
Jaekyung Jung (Graduate Student, ACT)
Sam Kronick (Undergraduate Student, Architecture)
Jae Rhim Lee (Fellow, ACT)
Micheal Mittelman (Associate Director, ACT)
Amanda Moore (Graduate Student, ACT)
Mabel Negrete (Graduate Student, ACT)
Gediminas Urbonas (Associate Professor, ACT)
Jess Wheelock (Graduate Student, ACT)
Sarah Witt (Graduate Student, ACT)
Krzysztof Wodiczko (Professor, ACT)
Ian Wojtowicz (Graduate Student, ACT)
Cc: Grant Kester
Seth Lerer
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