SHOUT and Twist

Henry Gee came to Academic Senate today and tried to pin bullying on me, linking me to comments made about the student trustee that included insults such as "bitch" and statements like "I would slap her".

While I applaud the administration's attempt to use a public forum to smear me (after all, that is what I have done to them sometimes on the RHCFA website), they didn't quite succeed. The problem was that the facts do not support their accusations.

A week or so ago, student leaders became involved in a group on Facebook called SHOUT (accessible here). Angered by the Hannah Pastrano affair, some students posted some inappropriate things about the student trustee. Apparently, Dean Foster told the students that this was inappropriate. They took down the posts and some noted that Dean Foster said something about slander and libel.

This is where I came in. By the time I was included in the forum, the insults had been taken down. I never saw them. I then posted something to the effect that Dean Foster should stop harassing students and do his job. His threats were attempts to limit speech on an issue that is important to students. I followed up my post by saying that we should appear to be civil.

At Senate, Henry first described the offending comments and then went directly to my statement about Dean Foster doing his job. This led to the implication that I somehow condoned the insults. By the way, Henry conveniently omitted the bit about being civil.

The funny thing is that the administration is very angry about abuse of a student trustee, but is a bit less concerned about other forms of bullying. I certainly think that insulting the student trustee is not acceptable. However, it appears that threatening Hannah into resigning and scaring students into thinking that they will be in legal trouble if they continue to voice their opinions would not fall into the category of bullying.