Friendship gone bad. Really bad. Someone I liked a lot, trusted, confided in and wanted to hire has, upon finding out that he didn’t get the job, filed a complaint with my employer against me. Charges include abuse of power, sabotaging a national search, harassment, demeaning and harassing students and attempting to destroy his professional career. X found my blog, and has scoured it, finding what he calls evidence that I lied and set him up to fail, sabotaged the hiring process, harassed him and intentionally undermined him. He has also accused me of giving another university a bad recommendation for him. All false, of course, but X has a hard time accepting responsibility for his actions. The Investigation is in its third week, and if feels like it’s been going for months.
On a personal level, it’s such a personal attack that I cannot but feel that. And I’m really pissed that he outed me and my blog to the university authorities, and is trying to use my own words to support an action against me. I hate that I had to kill a 7 year writing project.
On a professional level, I’m just disgusted. Just because somebody thinks they ‘deserve’ a job doesn’t mean that they can afford to ignore a supervisor’s request for documentation. It certainly doesn’t mean that repeated requests for such documents amounts to harassment. ‘Deserving’ a job doesn’t come into it, not in this market! Not in any market. The university and the department were out to find a candidate that would 1) meet the needs of the department; 2) work well with the rest of the department and 3) contribute to the university as a whole. X met those qualifications and expectations until he 1) blew off repeated requests for departmental documentation; 2) went into a four month pout during which he locked himself in his office and refused to interact with 1/3 of the department; 3) withdrew from all university functions except the barest minimum and 4) conspired with students to bypass the normal hiring processes and force his hire through direct and open student action.
The university handled the notification badly as well. X says he found out he hadn’t gotten the job through my blog. Well… there are so many bad things embedded in that I won’t go through the list, but I’m sorry, that is NOT my fault. The dean should have told him long before X went out digging around and finding a blog that I rarely mention on campus. And that blog? Nobody knew where it was, or what my pseudonym was - and there’s nothing on that blog that would enable a direct connection between it and me unless they already knew me. And then? They’d have to know my pets, because those are the pictures and identifiers I used.
So I’m writing this on my laptop, and not even posting it until I can ensure that I’ve created another, denser online identity that X can’t find. And that? That pisses me off.
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