Spurious & Scurrilous

                   
Who are critics to conjure conflicts of interest or appearances of conflicts of interest in practices of campus security?
             

Of late, a few campus trash-talkers and too many faculty gadflies have disparaged the director of security at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] over multiple, overlapping conflicts of interest that only those with X-ray vision can espy.  By contrast, respectable, responsible, and reliable colleagues whose main trained incapacity is myopia peer through such disparagements to see illogical, ill-informed micro-management by faculty, staff, and students who are not sufficiently sympathetic to administrators or to authority in general.  As "Cool Hand" Lucas Jackson cautioned his fellow inmates, bosses at any road prison need all the help they can get. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVpNfjj2Atw about 18 minutes in]  Cooperative, collaborationist,  conformist and/or craven colleagues -- which is to say, the majority of the faculty -- will disparage the disparagers and disparagements.  It's our duty.
                              
Those who disparage the Director allege as a first-order conflict of interest that someone defamed on the "Bigots of Puget Sound" flier should minimize his involvement in any conduct processes following from the UPS3 flier incident of November 2016.  Cooperative, collaborative, conformist faculty and staff will note, however, that the UPS3 or confederates may have anticipated such an appearance of a conflict.  Indeed, those miscreants may have planned it!  What better way to get security out of your way than to hamstring the Director by naming and defaming him?  Lovers of good order and propriety intone that longstanding allegations of repeated discriminatory practices rehearsed on the UPS3 flier are stale and dated calumnies that respectable, respectful, reliable, and responsible members of the Puget Clowns community would not sink to consider.  Problems and allegations thus dismissed, the Director has neither a conflict of interest nor even the appearance of a conflict of interest in the first flier.  Along the lines of "The Emperor's New Clothes," the defenders of good order demand that respectable, respectful, responsible, and reliable colleagues view such matters innocently.  Besides, if the Director were barred by a conflict or the appearance of a conflict, would there be anyone else in security to substitute?  It's not as if the university has seven or more "Campus Safety Officers" whose names did not appear in the November flier.
                                          
Not content with their first-order canard, the disparagers of good order and prompt compliance conjure a supposed second-order conflict more specious than the first.  The fliers distributed at the installation of the new president named the selfsame Director anew. Are faculty of good will and excellent conformity to suppose this a coincidence?  Mustn't those disseminating the new flier have known that the Director, upon even the most preliminary inspection of the flier, would be hopelessly compromised because he could not then appear to be content-neutral in declaring the silent distribution of fliers to be disrupting the inauguration?  Note that disparagers and distributors do not claim to know who stymied the silent disruption of the latest affront to good order on campus.  For all that the disparagers know, the Director had nothing to do with censoring or evicting the two students.  How could craven, conformist faculty know whether the Director asked anything of those distributing the fliers?  They couldn't.  They shouldn't.
                            
Disparagements, alas, do not stop with the first- and second-order affronts above.  The nonconformists who believe in liberty take decent staff and faculty aback with aspersions of a third-order conflict.  The Director named in each flier then "criminally trespassed" an erstwhile student, a refugee from the University of Puget Clowns, who was sitting at the inauguration as if he were a member of the public and thus entitled to attend an event open to the public.  Have disparagers and nonconformists and libertarians no shame?  What did the transferred student have to do with the second flier?  What appearances of that conflict could security-blasphemers adduce?  If the Director could not escort the former student and poster of the first flier off campus, who would be available to do so?  What detractors claim to know whether the ever-vigilant Director revenged himself on one of the UPS3?  Such information has appeared in no approved account of the incidents.  Nor do carping critics know that the Director called Tacoma Police and for what reasons.  
                                
Every proponent of civility and order and docility and servility and obsequiousness on campus must denounce criticisms of the Director as spurious and scurrilous.
              

Questions Faculty Do Not Ask & Authorities Do Not Answer

The Committee on Diversity induced the plenary meeting of the faculty on 18 April 2017 to discuss recent acts by campus security against students at the installation of President Crawford on 24 March 2017.  To assist colleagues who did not participate in the discussion, I construct below the questions that they might have asked of authorities.  I quote black-fonted copy below nearly verbatim from emails.  Questions colleagues might ask appear in a brick-red font.
              


Questions colleagues might have asked concerning the email from the Office of the Dean of Students that faculty received on 30 March 2017: 
                 

In the wake of several high-profile protests and demonstrations on college campuses across the country this spring (including Middlebury, Notre Dame, NYU, and UC-Berkeley), we write to affirm the right of all members of the campus community to engage in free expression, peaceful assembly, and orderly demonstrations in accordance with university policies.  Two deans wrote to faculty in response to recent news from college campuses rather than as a response to eviction of one or more students from Pamplin Fieldhouse at the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996]? Was the juxtaposition of protests and demonstrations with the "affirmation" of rights of free expression in the campus community more contextualization or more misdirection? Would a member of the faculty lack civility to suspect that the email was pre-emptive?
                                   

These include the Student Integrity Code, Violence Prevention Policy, Campus Policy Prohibiting Harassment, and other policies designed to uphold our core values of self-expression and diversity of thought, collegiality, courage, passion, and equity and inclusion; allow for robust dialogue; and also protect the rights and safety of all members of the campus community.  How familiar are most would-be demonstrators with the named policies?  How might would-be demonstrators familiarize themselves with unnamed policies?  Beyond directing readers to core values to which the deans attribute policies named and unnamed, does this sentence serve to insinuate concerns for the rights and the safety of all?  Might an unwary reader fail to note that no threat(s) to rights or safety were even alleged?
               

In keeping with its mission, the Puget Sound campus is a space for open and civil dialogue and the free exchange of ideas.  Did the deans deliberately equivocate between assumed ideals and asserted actualities in this sentence?  
                 

It is understood that participants in protests or demonstrations speak only for themselves and do not represent the college as a whole.  If these matters are understood, who so understands them and why do the deans state them?  Why the passive construction "It is understood" rather than identifying the authorities who so understand?
               

So that protests and demonstrations achieve their intended purposes without disrupting college operations and activities or the ability to provide services; intimidating or infringing upon the rights of others; or threatening the safety of persons or property, college officials acting in performance of their duties have the right and responsibility to limit the time, place, and manner of protests or demonstrations.  Do the deans in this sentence mean to imply some solicitude for the purposes of protests and demonstrations?  Do the deans invoke disruptions, operations, and activities or services or intimidations [of whom?] or infringements on rights or threats to persons or property to contextualize and thereby to concoct some expansive rights and responsibilities of and for officials of the University of Puget Clowns?
   

In such an instance, for example, a representative of the college may ask a person or group to refrain from entering a meeting or event that is in progress, or to move to an alternate space, such as an area outside of where a meeting or event is taking place.  Why is this instance phrased hypothetically?  Do the deans intend their litany of limits on the "time, place, and manner" of free expression to characterize by indirection removal of student(s) from inauguration?  Did the representative of the college who evicted the member of the UPS3 have any conflicts of interest that might have compromised his "performance of . . . duties" or raised questions of reprisal?

             

We hope that this information provides useful guidance to those who plan to exercise their rights to organize or participate in demonstrations on campus.  If useful guidance in service of free expression were the primary purpose -- rather than, say, a defense of actions undertaken without the knowledge of the two deans -- why is the email so guarded and equivocal?

Please contact either of our offices for questions about university policies and support of university activities.  Are you two kidding?

Questions colleagues might have asked concerning the email from the Office of the Dean of Students that faculty received on 31 March 2017:


By way of summary, I understand that some number of faculty members received the video referenced below that depicts a portion of an incident that occurred during the installation ceremony for President Crawford. Two issues occurred during the ceremony.  How did the "issues" come to the attention of which officials?
            

1) In the midst of the event, two students came into the event area to distribute fliers.   They were asked to not disrupt the event by distributing fliers during the ceremony but were free to distribute outside the Fieldhouse. They complied with that request. What event(s) began when?  Which event area(s) did the two students enter and when?  Did they disrupt any parts of the inauguration, or did one or more officials fear that they might?  Did the fliers implicate any official(s) who were making requests, raising the specter of conflict(s) of interest again?  God forbid, was any official or decision-maker implicated both in the flier last November and the flier in March?  
            

2) A third person, a former student on suspension who did not have permission to be on campus, entered the Fieldhouse and was asked to leave. When the individual failed to comply with multiple requests to leave campus, Tacoma Police were called to assist.  Does a former student ordinarily require permission to be on campus?  When a student on suspension leaves the university, does the suspension persist? When did the erstwhile Logger enter the fieldhouse?  When was the erstwhile Logger spotted?  What was he doing or had he done before he was spotted? How and how often did the individual fail to comply and with what sorts of requests?  Who called TPD?  What made their assistance necessary or advisable?  Did the person who called TPD have any conflict(s) of interest?
               

The foregoing are among the questions faculty might have asked or might yet ask in the unlikely event they cared enough to ask.  
              

By contrast, faculty who prefer to go along with being clowned need ask nothing. Indeed, responsible and respectable faculty know that asking questions of officials is ba-a-a-ad.
                      
              

Re-Accommodating Authority

   
The following report on the rousting of a passenger from a United Flight from Chicago to Louisville adduces norms of ethics, courtesy, and legality that might inform us all regarding the "criminal trespassing" of one former student from the inauguration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXB87rSCU0Q  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXB87rSCU0Q

           
Inauguration:  https://www.facebook.com/lsbbgh/videos/1646576072038202/
             

Let's Shorten Inaugurations!

      
Since, by Haltom's Second Law, it doesn't mean nothing, inauguration is mostly blather.  Couldn't it be enhanced?
          
Introduce representatives of the Puyallup Tribe.  Those representatives announce that the University of Puget Clowns [© Susan Resneck Pierce 1996] is a failed experiment.  The tribe then asks for its land back.
           
Then, we all hit the buffet.
           
Just a suggestion.