Organized Crime

Content Warning:  sexual assault and gaslighting to protect perpetrators, structures which protect reputation and brand at the expense of victims.

[Overall structure: Kittens/consent, handsy

Higher ed story of alienation

Story of whiteness

Coming in from an orphaning

Creating the beloved community]

From concept analysis of cult to organized crime.  Thinking about organizations within which I have worked which may have members who committed crimes.  And what structures are in place to protect perpetrators and to silence people questioning what happened and how.  Thinking about complaint.  (Sara Ahmed) Squelching complaint.

How is higher education like organized crime?  How is K-12 ed organized in such a way as to protect criminals?  How is orphaning related to how decisions were made....Do you think that orphaning can be used as a metaphor for how people were treated, funds were used, for the benefit of those making the decisions rather than for the students?  Looking at how these students were treated in the context of my search for adoption story.  Sense of alienation, loneliness have given me a lens to understand those experiences of higher education, specifically starting with Lawrence.  Personal history of education.

Karen's parallel stories of pursuing higher ed career and also researching adoption merged in 2018 as I was finishing dissertation and getting a match with the DNA test results which led to finding grandfather.

Cult of higher ed, cult of traditional family

Gangsters, mobsters

the higher up you get, the more power people have but more distant from those who are supposed to benefit from those services. 

State administrators make decisions made on wrong assumptions,

focus on outcome rather than process to get there

(metrics, neoliberalism)

the ease with which you can make decisions and NOT BE accountable to them

Setting aside $$$ putting into pocket without kids/families seeing

Principal in trouble, academic/finac probation, clean up their books so they won't be put in jail.

Some were ignorant, some were shifty/knew, some put their trust in the wrong people, shifty characters.

"I don't know what to do--put him in jail?"

"Have him pay back, fire him" because you don't want people to think you're an incompetent administrator.

Trust--because of all the alienating/orphaning structures, we have to "trust" people who are untrustworthy based on a story (based on a brand--relationship-based decisions/accountability versus reliance on a brand story to establish meaning)

(Or what I think are traits of org crime)

1. Funneling tax dollars into pet projects. With baked-in paternalistic mindsets, some IHEs have a small number of decision-makers --often people from privileged positions such as BOT and executive board-level administrators (how does one become a member of the president's board of advisors?  Are VPs included or merely updated on status of projects?  Are faculty in any way meaningfully connected to the decision-making?--these are questions which evolved from my research questions in my dissertation in 2019) Sometimes decision-makers are literally related to people receiving contracts for construction, etc.  Remembering how an institution re-hired an awful contractor who underbid the competitors yet had a history of expensive construction cost overruns.  Very difficult to understand how he was the best candidate for the contract without an explanation including personal loyalties.

2. Having very little oversight: a person could issue checks to themselves or relatives via supplemental contracts, with few eyes which might notice, especially if the contract is legitimated through existing processes/programs.  Potential for corruption.  Giving a spouse or other relative supplemental contracts for work

3. Self-policing:  Having a built-in motive to protect the institution's brand, any bad news is considered a PR problem to be managed rather than corrected.  Assumptions about academic administrators/processes being best to police academic problems leads to complete inaction to correct people who display openly racist, sexist, homophobic, and other bigoted behaviors.  As Sara Ahmed (https://www.dukeupress.edu/living-a-feminist-life) writes, the complaint becomes the problem.  People who commit sexual assault or harassment protected even by the victims due to not wanting to embarrass.  Amendment to reporting sexual assaults--put the victim on public forum, where he/she has to explain what the suspect did, makes the situation embarrassing to victim, doesn't want to go the adjudication process.  Law conveys the opposite of what the law intended.  Law was meant to enable the suspect to wiggle out of situation by public discourse/dialogue, put weight on the victim instead.  My mother's sexual assault story, trial, cross examination.  My own sexual assault story and participation in cover up. Compartmentalizing bad experiences until we feel safe enough to unpack and process, reinterpret, reassess what actually happened to make sense of what happened.

4. Predatory delay:  remembering stories of students and fac/staff who were waiting on checks from payroll, or reimbursements, which were MONTHS late.  I knew of one student who left for the summer without their check because they couldn't get it resolved.  Awful.

5. Enforcing policies that don't exist/not enforcing existing policies:  Athletic students not even applying to the university, no test scores, so I couldn't place them.  And also ACT score minimum--used only if you want to exclude some people from the opportunity of accessing higher ed.

6. Structural Opportunities for exploitation and coercion which align with unspoken assumptions about race, gender, class.  The structures behind the structures, like White Christian Supremacy, which foster their own allegiances/loyalties, in-group/outgroup dynamics, and which undercut democratic processes because people default to these unexamined structures behind the acknowledged "official" structures, decision thresholds.

7. Teachers and power trips: we teachers sure like the power of being at the front of the room, the expert, recognition, prestige, accolades for our contribution to society.  They make us put up with inordinate amounts of bullshit, exploitation of ourselves and also create the conditions for us to be co-conspirators in these crimes via looking the other way on bad behavior, protecting the perpetrators of said behavior.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/02/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-republican-accountability-capitol-attack

While her disclosure of sexual assault with doubtless garner much of the media attention, the real purpose of AOC’s broadcast was to call for accountability for the Republican members of Congress who incited and may have aided the Capitol attack. “Accountability is about creating safety,” she said. It was their actions that caused the trauma inflicted on her and others; their actions that had incited the violence and ultimately, indirectly, led to several deaths. “The violence needed someone to tell the lie,” AOC said, referring to the false claims, made by Trump and stoked by Republicans. “They knew that these violent people needed the lie. Because it would be advantageous to them, they chose to tell the lie.”

What does higher ed produce? compliance, dependence

how others minimize your trauma

trivialize

Marilyn Manson as accused of violence and abuse

there are some forms of entertainment based on the suffering  of others

football, transgressive art 

music film genre pantheon of male artists who celebrate/depict rape

so many apologists

coup cult republican party

book is leading to a pathway of activism...this week pulled back into thinking about reconciling thoughts about work in higher education, my career , my developing of expertise

two committee members who ushered me through the dissertation--called out to me

tentacle trigger...fuck you all the way across the street. I don't have anything in common with people who are in higher education

i cannot work in this industry

i think it's a sham  pyramid scheme

awful to work at a university with a football team--so self righteous about it-working it out

music teachers as perpetrators to sexual harrassment

I had an affair with a music professor which was kicked off by a sexual assault from drinking too much and me trying to figure out why i was there. he

s asking me what i was going to do about it...

sense that something went wrong

instead of going in the direction of you assaulted me i continued to have a relationship with this guy for 3 years

i really beat myself up a lot bc of the affair part of it

ashamed

every time they had sex, why?

how do I get out of it?

there is something tied up in education that causes us to keep secrets

what causes us not to question

Why didn't people call me out on things

students have stayed over, same bed

i think i was above the board

drop out music school student-food/farming conference

I was sleeping in my truck bc i wasn't going to pay for a hotel room.

we both slept in the back of my truck together  she identifies as lesbian

you're sleeping with a former student in the back of your vehicle?--other person asked

it was the first time anyone had ever question

i had the status--impunity

no one questions...

all of the times i saw something discrimatory happen, i didn't have the position or courage to stand up

now i'm not in the system anymore, do i have a responsibility to write about it?

I'm describing structures where bad things can happen

boys will be boys

good ol boys attitude

lawsuit david and goliath well meaning white women thinking about how local food should be done, bucking convention

he played football with the judge who ruled on the case he bribed them 20,000

HOW DARE YOU???

when you complain, you are met with indignance

Getting a send-off--retirement parties versus having to basically sue to get back payment after being laid off

Obligation