Monday, September 03, 2007

Asbury Park Press: The truth about spin at OCC

Asbury Park Press columnist Bill Handleman has written some very entertaining pieces on the state of affairs over at Ocean County College in the past year or so, and he continues to do so with this latest column.

The following excerpt is more than I usually like to extract from a newspaper column, but I feel the need to preserve a good portion of the piece for this blog once the link becomes inactive...
Karen Bosley, a professor who has been teaching journalism at OCC for the better part of 36 years, had settled her lawsuit against the college. She had been restored to her proper position, teaching in her area of expertise rather than in some other field, and she had been awarded $90,000 by the court.

Another suit settled over the summer, brought by three past editors of the Viking News, resulted in Bosley being reinstated as the student paper's faculty adviser. The judge in the case spoke of the "chilling effect" the removal of an adviser could have on students and their First Amendment sensibilities.

In addition, two professors who were fired by OCC in 2005 took the college to court and won the right to know why their contracts had not been "renewed." The ruling was handed down in the spring. Each of the former professors was awarded $50,000 and granted assurances that the college would not speak ill of them to prospective employers. The case set a precedent.

The good guys had won, it seemed. There was cause for celebration. Together, teachers and students had struck a blow for freedom and fairness, two antiquated concepts that sometimes appear to elude the administration at OCC.

"I am relieved the lawsuit is over," said Bosley. "The three former editors and I have been vindicated ..."

She paused for a moment to allow the other shoe to drop.

"But the cost in human pain has been high," she went on. "Several student journalists, valuable members of the OCC faculty and others were disparaged because of administrative hubris ... some of the college's best faculty and administrators left earlier than planned, and two others were fired because ... they dared to exercise their First Amendment right to speak.

"The lawsuits have led to the adoption of a strong policy statement against censorship and reprisals. It remains to be seen whether more employees will exercise that right. I certainly hope they will."

Wait until the president of the college hears about this. His people have been going around telling everyone they got what they wanted out of the Bosley deal.

You know, pretty much.

"We got a lot of things we wanted," Tara Kelly was quoted as saying.

"It was not a one-sided settlement," she insisted.

Kelly is the vice president of college advancement, a title that sounds like a euphemism dipped in a vat of irony.

President Jon Larson, meanwhile, has been notable by his silence on anything pertaining to lawsuits or settlements.

Then again, when you have the power to create your own reality, what's the difference? When you can spin anything you want, any way you want, so what if your insurance company has to pay out all those piddling settlements and you have to concede control over certain trifling matters?

Man, how that must hurt. Not the money, the concessions.

"It's the insurance company that's paying the money," said Randy Monroe, an English professor and president of the faculty association. "But I did notice in the board report the other day that our insurance premiums were going up."

Years ago, when he was president at Luzerne Community College, Larson demoted a woman named Susan Merkel for some fuzzy reasons. She was an associate dean of human resources. She claimed he demoted her because she wouldn't lie for him.

Merkel sued the college. The first day of the trial, the insurance company heard her testimony and promptly offered her a hefty settlement.

For years after that, Larson's friends at OCC continued to spread the fantasy that Merkel's complaint was judged to have no legal merit.

Just churn out your own reality, no matter how far you might stray from the truth, no one will ever notice. They call this a management style.

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