A Letter From Dr. Daniel Povey’s Students

key points:

• Dr. Povey is an incredibly supportive advisor who works diligently and closely with his students. None of us considers Dr. Povey to be a violent person.
• Dr. Povey’s entering of Garland Hall was not politically motivated.
• We are disappointed by the way the University handled this incident.
• We are not implicitly endorsing all of Dr. Povey’s comments or views nor are we excusing Dr. Povey’s actions.

To Whom It May Concern:

We are some of Dr. Daniel Povey’s students. Throughout the course of the events leading to Dr. Povey’s dismissal, our voices were never heard. We feel the need to provide our perspective. Though among us there exist differing opinions on Dr. Povey’s actions, we collectively believe the following to be true:

Dr. Povey is an incredibly supportive advisor who works diligently and closely with his students and colleagues. He has always been available to help any students, colleagues, and collaborators with both technical and non-technical issues. We appreciate his experience, insight, and genuinely kind heart. With over 20000 citations, Dr. Povey is an undisputed leader in our field and is internationally applauded for his research contributions. He has always been committed to making his work open-source, specifically due to his profound belief that all people should be able to use, develop and benefit from state-of-the-art speech recognition technology for free. There are almost 20 students and research fellows in his group, of varying background, religion, nationality, gender and race. None of us has ever felt discriminated or remotely unsafe working with him. We work extremely closely with our advisor everyday and the thought of him being violent never crossed anybody’s mind.

Dr. Povey’s entering of Garland Hall was not politically motivated. Dr. Povey has always played an important role in maintaining our computing infrastructure. The CLSP (Center for Language and Speech Processing) has for the past few years entrusted Dr. Povey with this task, but it is a large responsibility. The CLSP computing infrastructure has at least 111 different users with very few restrictions on how users can access these resources. In fact, during orientation for new students, the rules for how to use our grid were described by one professor as, “there are no rules until you do something you shouldn’t at which point you will receive an email from Dan.” His diligence in this responsibility was so great that he once came to campus at night in the middle of a snowstorm during winter break to prevent machines from overheating which could have possibly resulted in significant loss of data and work.

For these reasons it is clear to us that his sole motivations for his actions were to protect the public property of the school, to protect students’ work, and to ensure that his students and colleagues could fulfill their own job responsibilities. Dr. Povey entered Garland Hall, where the CLSP servers locate, with the sole purpose of saving the 50 machines that hold thousands of CPUs and GPUs, and hundreds of terabytes of data. The components of the servers go down from time-to-time, and require manual reboot regularly. Failing to promptly maintain the mal-functioning components might cascade into more serious problems and data loss in a large-scale. The protest happened right before an important NLP conference’s submission deadline, making maintenance an urgent issue. Importantly, we were at risk of losing years of work if servers went down, and we did end up losing hundreds of gigabytes of data! From the center-wide emails, we saw Dr. Povey become more and more anxious when machines started to fail and he needed to physically reboot the machines in Garland Hall. After JHU administrators repeatedly denied his requests for permission to access the computer servers in the building, Dr. Povey seemed increasingly frustrated. He was very upset when he found out that the protesters had chained themselves to the doors in Garland Hall, and the University expected it could be weeks before he would be granted access to the server room. We do not all agree with the actions he took, but strongly believe they were out of sincere concern for the CLSP and University property.

We are very disappointed by the way the University has handled this incident, including its failure to come up with workarounds for providing server access and student services timely, lack of transparency in the investigation, and the harsh treatment to Dr. Povey, specifically the subsequent restrictions on communication with his students.

First, as far as we know, the University was aware of the infrastructure problem of the server room and the potentially adverse impacts of the student occupation on the CLSP, especially its students, if the servers went down. We saw nearly no effort on the University’s behalf to effectively address these concerns; even a temporary solution would have been better than none. Had the University acted appropriately in the first place, all of this could have been avoided.

Second, we are troubled by the lack of transparency in the investigation. During the investigation, no one from the investigation team solicited opinions about Dr. Povey or his actions from any of his students: those who presumably interact most with him, would know him best, and would be most adversely impacted by his dismissal. We also do not have a full account of the events of the night of May 8th. We respect the opinions of our fellow students at JHU including the protesters, but their portrayal of his supposedly violent actions that night are incongruous with our own experiences with and impressions of Dr. Povey and we are left wondering if this incident may have been precipitated by a simple misunderstanding of Dr. Povey’s motivation for being in the building. We are not implicitly endorsing all of Dr. Povey’s comments or views, nor are we excusing Dr. Povey’s actions. We simply do not know exactly what happened and cannot help but feel that the University’s handling of the incident may have helped contribute to some of the subsequent rancor.

Third, we feel that the University’s decision is both premature and harsh. For three months, Dr. Povey was banned from any correspondence with us without the presence of other faculty, even after we informed the University that we were badly in need of his advice regarding purely academic matters. In addition to being dismissed from the University, he has been banned from entering the campus, the university property, and from communicating with students without a faculty member present, making collaborating with him on purely academic matters exceedingly difficult. Should his own former CLSP students be deprived of easy communication with a trusted advisor who no longer even lives in Baltimore? These additional impositions seem unnecessarily extreme.

Right now with our advisor gone, the whole group is deeply frustrated. Dr. Povey is irreplaceable not only because of his research skills, but for his feedback on our ongoing research projects. As our advisor of several years, he is arguably the only person who sufficiently understands the intricacies of our work. Now we are facing a lot of uncertainty during this difficult time. Within the CLSP, many students appreciate Dr. Povey’s diligence as the system administrator, devotion to his duty, and appreciate his efforts in maintaining an excellent computing infrastructure, even if they disagreed with his actions. In a broader sense, we believe the improper handling of the whole incident has led to a lose-lose situation, with CLSP and JHU losing one of their most important assets in our research field.

Sincerely,
Some Students of Dr. Daniel Povey’s