Professor Caitlin Zaloom assigned a class to do an ethnographic study of Occupy Wall Street. One student, Sara Ackerman—who objected to being “forced,” in her words, to interview “criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill people, and of course, the few competent, mentally stable people”—did not like this. She seems to have complained several times, eventually attempting to confront NYU President John Sexton at Bobst Library; and when he (according to Ackerman) sent her to the “Mental Health exchange,” she let fly with the early-morning “open letter.”

After sending several emails through the listserv for NYU’s department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Ackerman began making slanderous threats to reveal misconduct and ethics violations among the various professors and administrators involved in the growing “scandal.”

Though the focus of the initial email is ostensibly the Occupy Wall Street assignment, there’s a lot more going on: at one point, Ackerman complains that a guest lecturer refused to call on her despite her hand being raised for a minute and 15 seconds (“a long time to keep one’s arm raised”); at another, she claims to have placed an op-ed at one of four “reputable papers” (the Washington Post, The New York Times, the New York Observer and the Wall Street Journal) where she has “close family friends” in employment, ready to be published on Thursday. (I asked Observer editor Elizabeth Spiers if she was aware of this; “we don’t do op-eds,” she told me.)

It is truly saddening to see these types of libelous attacks on the professional careers of members of the NYU academic community. I also find it appalling that Ackerman conflates her refusal to engage with the course material with an issue of academic freedom. This type of encounter is disturbingly indicative of a mentality where undergraduate students see their university education as a service that comes with various entitlements. I can only hope that this controversy brings to light the way that the term “academic freedom” is often co-opted in the name of the degradation of higher education.