June 12, 2001

Professor Patricia Moran

Department of English

Voorhies Hall

University of California, Davis

Dear Professor Moran,

We have been empowered by the Representative Assembly to express the collective sense of that group and a deep-felt apology for the role that the Senate played in allowing the inexcusably painful public presentation of your Distinguished Teaching Award to occur. The Academic Senate purportedly promote the best interests and the will of the faculty yet it failed to recognize the damaging implications of the demeaning announcement of your Award to the Assembly in June 2000. Your comments to the Assembly on June 5, 2001 effectively persuaded us that we have colluded in an institutional process of significant personal and professional injury to one of our colleagues. Our failure to identify the problem and our failure to act represent an indefensible institutional blindness that typifies the very discriminatory process which you highlighted.

Following your presentation (and a momentary stunned silence) many Assembly members expressed sincere remorse for the situation as well as deep respect for you as a colleague, as a teacher, and as an individual with great integrity and fortitude. Trite as it may seem, you truly educated us on a problem of considerable importance on which the University of California at Davis has much progress to make. Furthermore, the Senate takes seriously your criticism of the University’s failure to implement uniformly such policies as maternity leave and is committed to addressing these inequities. Please accept our sincere apologies.

On behalf of the Representative Assembly,

Professor Vicki Smith, Sociology

Professor Anna Kuhn, Women and Gender Studies

Professor Winfried Schleiner, English

Professor John Vohs, Communications

cc: Jeffrey Gibeling, Chair, Davis Division of the Academic Senate