Tuesday, April 25, 2017

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.
              

No comments: