Courtesy of Pam Martens.
John Sexton Coaching a Debate Class At St. Brendan's High School in 1964
The battle intensified today between faculty at NYU and its Board of Trustees. The President of the University, John Sexton, has already received a no-confidence vote by five schools at the University. Now, a group of faculty have penned an 8,800 word treatise (which reads like a civil complaint for a lawsuit) calling for Martin Lipton, a legal icon on Wall Street, to step down as the Chair of the NYU Board of Trustees for failing to take the growing scandals seriously.
The letter comes amidst recent revelations of outlandish pay, perks and even forgivable mortgage loans to buy vacation homes being doled out to a small, select group of faculty and administrators while NYU tuition skyrockets to the most expensive in the nation.
There is the distinct feeling of a circling of the wagons by Lipton, Sexton and a core group of administrators. In response to a professionally worded email from this writer seeking to verify facts for this article, a furious response came back today from NYU spokesman John Beckman: “These highly personal questions have all the hallmarks of a campaign of character assassination. I think this is deeply inappropriate.” My questions were ignored.
The “highly personal” questions Beckman refers to were highly relevant to the matter at hand: does John Sexton deserve five no-confidence votes from his own faculty at five separate schools at NYU; is this so-called Renaissance man, as he is described on the Bill Moyers’ Journal web site, more myth than substance?
One area of inquiry that apparently set nerves on edge concerned a 1997 New York Times Magazine article by James Traub. In it, Traub discusses Sexton’s early years as a debate coach at an all-girls Catholic high school in Brooklyn, St. Brendan, which closed in the late 1970s:
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