Maelstrom, Part VII: Revelation

Well, well, well. Here we are again.

Ten years since "Maelstrom" was coined as the name of my fully realized life's purpose of punishing and ultimately destroying the College of Musical Arts at Bowling Green State University. With Maelstrom, Part I: Immolation I lost all illusions of BGSU's chance at redemption. Now, ten years later, I recently laid out for you my present clarity of intent with the previous post, The War of Perception.

You might be tempted to play devil's advocate here, but be careful of antagonizing someone who is more motivated than you are. Challenge me on this and watch how quickly things escalate.

With any milestone in this feud, with any significant transpiration, you get another installment in the Maelstrom series of blog posts. Today, I bring you my moment of glory.

For the longest time, I knew I would eventually have to write to someone in charge to air some of my grievances, if for no other reason than they deserve to know. But I never did, only because I never knew what I could request from the dean in order to achieve any level of catharsis. I discussed this in Maelstrom, Part VI: Domination, even suggesting that it should be the subject of Part VII, but nothing really came of it since then.

But a few months ago, before the holiday craziness, I received something in the mail that caused my core temperature to rise several degrees. Fully in control, despite what you may think about my disposition, I filed it away for later, sometime after January, when I could give it the proper attention. You see, I am actually in complete control of my hatred. The War of Perception and the next phase of the Maelstrom were timed--both strategically and poetically. Premeditated, as part of my New Year's resolutions, I suppose you could say.

We are approaching the tench anniversary, and I have been working on composing Unfinished Fever Dreams, which I detailed in Maelstrom, Part VI: Domination. Really, my progress in composition is 50% of the impetus for this post, but it is frustratingly behind-the-scenes, so it doesn't get any attention. Yet.

Anyway, what I received in the mail was a pamphlet for The Crescendo Club, which I'd never heard of before. I regularly receive BGSU alumni magazines and donation requests, but
I'd never gotten this one before.

The Crescendo Club

Supporting Music at BGSU

Your gift of the Crescendo Club helps keep the music growing!

Your generosity will help recruit and enroll new BGSU College of Musical Arts students, fund student travel to competitions and performances and enlarge the scholarship budget for gifted and deserving students.

Dear Alumni and Friends of the College of Musical Arts,

This past year, BGSU celebrated 100 years of Music.

From our earlier days as one of the inaugural departments on the campus to today’s thriving College, music has been a crucial part of the landscape at Bowling Green State University. The College recently welcomed one of our largest freshman classes in recent years. The performance season promises to be an exciting one, with exceptional concerts by our student groups including the Falcon Marching Band, the Philharmonia, Wind Symphony, the Choruses and our Jazz bands, just to name a few. The various ensembles can be heard at events across our campus and community. Please check out our website (bgsu.edu/musical-arts) for information about events.

The CMA plans to keep attracting these kinds of freshman classes. To do so, we need to maintain a healthy base of undergraduate music scholarship money. That is where you can be of terrific assistance to Bowling Green State University. Are you willing to become this kind of difference-maker? Please join me in supporting the College of Musical Arts through the Crescendo Club. The attached form lists a number of areas where your donation will have a direct impact on our students—and allow you the opportunity to support an area of the CMA about which you feel the most passionate. You can also visit www.bgsu.edu/givemusic to make a gift, call the BGSU Foundation at 1-888-839-2586 or email us at ATWagen@bgsu.edu.

On behalf of the students, faculty and staff of the College of Musical Arts, THANK YOU for your support, attendance and dedication. Let’s build on a strong history as we enter the next 100 years of music at BGSU.

With sincere best wishes,

Jeff Showell

Dean

By the way, I don't believe for a second that my hypothetical donation would go entirely toward some starry-eyed music major's scholarship. I know that tricky wording, and I know how resources are spread around.

I also don't believe for a second that my response will really land on the dean's desk, even though it's his name on the letter in the pamphlet. I dearly hope he does read it, but probably some secretary will skim and toss it.

Nevertheless, I wrote a letter in response, and it was a long time coming:

March 28, 2016

Jeffrey Showell,

I am writing with regards to the brochure I received for the Crescendo Club.

I attended BGSU from Fall ’04 to Spring ’06, earning my Master of Music in Composition. I periodically receive a request such as this for donations. I am writing to explain as concisely as possible why I will never support the program in any way, ever. As dean, it might behoove you to look into some of the grievances I have with the program. Besides, it seems to me that if you are going to ask someone for money, the least you can do is listen to what they have to say, no matter what it is.

The first and foremost reason for me not to donate—or for anyone else, quite honestly—is faculty corruption. Those funds will likely be put to use to benefit the faculty, not the students. I shall give you an example.

In the fall of ’04, my first semester at BGSU, Burton Beerman was planning to take his oratorio, Tikvah, on national tour, and his wife Celesta Haraszti gave a presentation for Praecepta, the student chapter of the Society for Composers, Inc. that promotes New Music on campus, requesting funding for the project. The request was for $1,000. The previous year, Josh Plocher and Steven Rice had put together a competent budget proposal to the student organization board with the express purpose of purchasing sound equipment to support off-campus performances, which resulted in this surplus of funds. Since I was new, I abstained from voting, but the rest of the group voted to give Dr. Beerman $500—half of the amount requested. It seemed like a generous compromise, especially considering that touring performances of Dr. Beerman’s personal project had no practical relation to the university, and the group’s charter was to promote “on campus.”

But Elainie Lillios, supervisor of sorts to the organization, sent a mass email lambasting and shaming us all, saying that Dr. Beerman had done so much for the music program, that we should give him every penny he asked for. She demanded a second meeting to vote again. And so we reconvened in a farce; the vote was unanimously, begrudgingly, in favor of donating the full amount. Then, Dr. Lillios emailed us hollow words of disingenuous praise for making the right decision.

As someone once wrote to me, “The composition area has a bad habit of using Praecepta as a backdoor funding source.” Opportunism is one thing. Using intimidation to coerce funding is something else. It’s a flagrant abuse of power. So, when Crescendo Club asks me for a donation, although it is not Praecepta, I might as well just write a check directly to one of the professors. No, thank you.

The second reason I would never donate through the Crescendo Club is because of Praecepta itself. Purportedly devoted to the singular purpose of “promoting New Music,” Praecepta only ever promoted experimental music. Even though I was a member, as a composer I was always snubbed for programming performances because my music did not fit their narrow view, their dogmatic agenda. I was always given the excuse that it was “the wrong time” for my music to be featured, or it was “not right for the theme of the concert,” because it did not conform to the homogeneous aesthetic. Not once did I get a piece of my New Music promoted by the organization that promotes New Music.

This encapsulates most of my disdain for the composition program at BGSU: Praecepta, along with the faculty, cultivate an atmosphere that is nurturing and beneficial solely to sycophantic students whose aesthetic fit the faculty’s aesthetic and ideology; the environment is fiercely dogmatic and entirely narcissistic. Anyone who does not feed the egos of the professors is treated like a second-class citizen. I have so many examples of favoritism and discrimination, but in the interest of brevity I must at least attempt to limit my grievances to what is pertinent to the issue of donating funds.

I have yet another reason not to donate. Only a handful of the professors’ anointed few students are even allowed full access to the CMA’s boasted music technology. Not even I was allowed so much as to set foot in the studio (the one time I came close, despite being a grad student in composition, I was shooed away like a homeless person). That is, quite simply, false advertising on BGSU’s part; the caliber of resources is irrelevant to the vast majority of even the composition students. So, even if I were to donate, I would have to wonder just how many people would actually benefit from me even if the money went to upgrading equipment.

I entered the music program at BGSU in good faith. I expected to be part of a community, to learn and thrive, and to achieve my passion, as per the university’s mission statement. Instead, I did none of those things. Instead, the supposed mentors of the music program failed me at every turn. I can’t begin to count all the instances in which I was treated like a second-class citizen in the composition department.

A former faculty member from BGSU (who shall remain anonymous) described the situation as “petty and insecure” in their defense of “turf and power.” He recently synopsized the institution, “BGSU (provincialism) syndrome is that those petty matters tend to rule more than they even normally do. The history of BGSU’s music school can be written in terms of Shrude’s enmity with Beerman, which seems to have been replaced with her enmity with Lillios. And in both cases, one sees a transparent does of envy.” I have personally been on the wrong end of such pettiness and enmity.

The faculty indeed created a toxic environment, but not just between each other. Students like myself were caught in the crossfire, which might partially explain the account I am about to give.

This former faculty member also explained for me the attitude of the music department, “starting by underestimating their students and thinking that they will never amount to much so they shouldn’t be exposed to things beyond them.” I can’t imagine a more corrosive attitude for an institution of higher education.

Perhaps the most egregious account of injustice is from April 2006. Every year, second-year grad students had an analysis paper and presentation. It was essentially a rite-of-passage; it was not for a grade, and therefore couldn’t be failed. I was the first student to give my presentation that year. And I was failed. That year, the faculty decided to make it a pass-fail project, and they failed me arbitrarily.

The reason I was failed, Dr. Lillios explained, was because it was mainly Dr. Shrude who felt that I had plagiarized, even though she could not or would not provide evidence. Simply put, the original language I used in my writing was far more eloquent than what she thought I was capable of, so she assumed I had plagiarized when in fact it was entirely my own. I was another casualty of Dr. Shrude’s habit of deciding who was worthy enough for her program and abusing anyone who didn’t stack up in her mind.

I was going to appeal to the dean at the time, but my project adviser, Dr. Lillios, managed to talk the others into letting me jump through all the hoops a second time to redeem myself. She was unable to defend me properly and ensure the passing grade I deserved because, at the time of my presentation, she was actually in St. Louis for a premiere of one of her works, not that that should have made a difference to my case.

The worst part was what Burton Beerman told me himself. In Burton Beerman’s own words, and I quote verbatim, as I had immediately written it down at the time, “Your presentation was a lot better than those that shouldn’t have passed but did. But you have to start cracking down somewhere, and where do you start?” Well, I would think you’d start cracking down on the ones that, by your own admission, shouldn’t have passed anyway.

Many of my classmates saw this travesty for what it was: the culmination of the faculty constantly mistreating me over two years, in this case with humiliation and outright persecution. Many grad students were outraged by how much trouble the faculty had given me throughout that semester especially, but no one ever did anything about it, for fear of reprisal.

About Dr. Shrude, one of her former colleagues revealed to me, “Sadly, you are not the first nor have you been the last of her students who have been screwed over for spiteful reasons. And it is entirely likely that you were humiliated to get back at Elainie for god knows what reason. This is the main driver of Lillios's hatred for Shrude. Shrude has a history of doing this to the students of other faculty, and coming down hard on the intellectual curiosity of students who were especially bright and especially good writers.”

The myriad ways in which the faculty had let me down as a student are so numerous that brevity in making my case is exceedingly difficult.

When I had a choral piece premiered off-campus, not one faculty member was in attendance, despite the universal rule of mandatory performance for all students and faculty at all premieres, whether off-campus or not. That’s a black-and-white case of the faculty unanimously breaking their own rules to snub me.

I began work on my thesis early in fall ’05, months before most of my classmates, but I still ended up finishing months after them because of Dr. Lillios, my thesis adviser, mishandling my time. She would have me spend one week doing one thing only to tell me at our next week’s meeting to toss out that work and do the opposite, wasting time. She knew she could drag out the process until the very last second before the March deadline to apply for May ‘06 graduation. Both she and Dr. Shrude, the other member of my thesis committee, procrastinated and postponed meetings together, giving other students preference over me, causing me to work tirelessly on a single composition for nearly my entire second year of study at BGSU.

Then, in March, when it was clear that my thesis defense schedule would push me back to an August graduation rather than May—through their mishandling of my time, not my own—I was immediately moved to the bottom of their priorities so they could instead fast-track other grad students’ theses in order to let them graduate on time instead of me, even though none of them even began the process until at least two months after I did. I was further ignored, despite everything, and Dr. Lillios still almost made me miss the June deadline in order to graduate in August; it was mere minutes before the online submission deadline before Dr. Lillios finally let me finish.

The final letdown was graduation itself. My lease ran out and I had made arrangements to move to Missouri at the end of July, so I wasn’t able to walk at graduation in August. I filed to receive my diploma in the mail. It never came, and I eventually forgot about it. I didn’t miss it hanging on my wall, since by this point I absolutely loathed BGSU and didn’t want to be associated with them anyway. It wasn’t until two years later that I finally decided to inquire about the absence of my diploma. I found out that Dr. Lillios never signed off on me, or misfiled the application or something, so I never technically graduated. All I could do was re-apply and receive my Master’s Degree dated August 2008 instead of 2006.

The composition faculty failed me at every turn. Two abysmal years of hostility, antagonism, repression, and disaffection. Above all, I learned nothing from them. That alone is a damning review.

My list of grievances with BGSU goes on for volumes, but I fear you already stopped reading after the second paragraph. I will have to end it here.

In almost ten years since I left, literally not a day goes by that I don’t ruminate about the travesty of it all. If only there were some sort of reparations I could demand, I would have written the dean years ago. But I never could quite think of what would make attending BGSU retroactively worthwhile for me. Instead of coming to some sort of conciliatory terms, therefore, I have engaged in a campaign of remonstrance for the past decade. I assure you, most of these grievances have been published in one form or another.

However, if you would like to extend an olive branch and attempt to make amends, I am receptive.

The next time I receive a request for donations in the mail, I am just going to shred it and send the scraps back to you, along with a summary of my student loan payments, because I already gave you my money once. I am still paying for a worthless degree. I will not be donating anything on top of that.

Warmly,

Timothy James Scott

The letter has already been sent.

Bombs away.