Yesterday, the student newspaper on my campus, The Post, told an amazing story that reveals once again how upper-level administrators are shielded from the consequences of wrongdoing, while whistleblowers are punished. It’s an old story, but the details are freshly repellent with each retelling.
Howard Lipman was VP for University Advancement (aka fundraising) before he left earlier this school year, returning to his old employer, Florida International University. (This and subsequent facts come from the The Post’s account.) But evidently he thought one of the job’s perks was the chance to act abusively toward at least one of his subordinates, Molly Taylor-Elkins, who is now filing suit with the EEOC. The Post reports:
Molly Taylor-Elkins spent almost two years as Lipman’s executive assistant. She says she felt harassed and bullied by Lipman and that on multiple occasions he made inappropriate sexual comments to her and other female employees.
A university investigation conducted last year agreed Lipman created a hostile work environment but couldn’t find enough evidence to substantiate the sexual harassment claims.
The investigators didn’t find that Taylor-Elkins had fabricated the sexual harassment claims, only that there was not evidence of them being “pervasive” enough to rise to the standard of creating a hostile environment. The investigators determined that Lipman’s bullying behavior violated university policy on workplace violence. He is accused of shouting at employees and belittling them. The Post provides detail on an encounter after Lipman’s yelling reduced Taylor-Elkins to tears:
Elkins says Lipman approached her desk and said: “Some people make up by having sex and since we can’t do that let me buy you lunch.”
She says she denied the offer.
In his interview with the OIE investigator, Lipman acknowledged that he was frustrated after having worked an 18-hour day. He said he was disappointed Elkins defied his orders not to schedule or cancel meetings without his approval.
But Lipman insisted he never made the comment about make-up sex.
At FIU, Lipman makes more money than he’d earned here at OU. His old salary here was a measly $232,000. He was never suspended or put on leave while the investigation was underway. He never faced any substantive consequences before he left for FIU.
Taylor-Elkins was first put on administrative leave, but then moved onto sick leave, which – if I understand The Post’s article correctly – has been unpaid. This switch was made directly after Taylor-Elkins took her case to the EEOC last July.
Her son, who had been admitted to a grad program at OU, had his admission revoked after his mother filed her original, internal complaint. Taylor-Elkins has letters to substantiate this, according to The Post.
This is absolutely stunning. I have never heard of admission being revoked unless there were a proven charge of fraud or cheating in the application. You really have to wonder who brought pressure to bear on the faculty who’d admitted Taylor-Elkins’ son, and what form the pressure took. No faculty would be willing pawns in a game of revenge.
The whole thing stinks. I do not know if Lipman is guilty of everything as charged. I do not know him or any of the other principals in this personally; the chief investigator is an acquaintance, and I know enough about her that I would not impugn her integrity.
At the very least, Lipman was a first-class bully at a top-flight salary. He came in for a soft landing. Meanwhile, a vulnerable female employee who blew the whistle on his bad behavior has suffered. There aren’t many other employers in this town, apart from Wal-Mart and a couple of wonderful tech start-ups that mostly require tech skills.
I know rotten things like this happen all the time. It’s how Wall Street works. Our universities are supposed to stand for loftier ideals. Instead, they are aping the corporate structure, giving sweet deals and institutional protection to a small and not necessarily deserving elite, while janitors, secretaries, and adjunct faculty are losing their jobs. Blatant mistreatment like Taylor-Elkins alleges is just the whipped cream on top of this sundae of inequality.
(Actually, if we’re going to wander into food metaphors, “pigs at the trough” might be more fitting, but the next thing you know, we’ll be talking about making sausage, and I feel grody enough already after writing this post.)
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
Our elites have become all-out grifters, out to remove as much money from the “marks” (a.k.a. the rest of us) as they can bluff, bully, coerce, or bludgeon out of us. Of course, there have always been grifters — con artists who produce nothing, create nothing, do nothing except extract the hard-earned monies of those who actually do build, create, or provide useful services. What’s new is that grifters are in high office and defending other grifters. Used to be, grifters were too independent to cooperate like this in extracting money from their marks, but now it’s like those coyotes that are now running in packs capable of pulling down full-grown cattle or even full-grown human beings like that folksinger girl in Canada — what were once some mangy scavengers are suddenly a threat to everything living now that they’ve learned how to cooperate with each other in taking down their marks.
Welcome to Griftopia, citizen… now empty your wallet into the nearest grifter’s pockets, or be put out onto the streets to wander as a homeless bum. It’s your choice, after all. You could have chosen to be a grifter too, but instead you chose to be a productive useful human being. Silly you — and me.
- Badtux the Grifter-scryin’ Penguin
Yes, the number of outright con artists at the highest level of the economy and politics is really quite astounding. And they protect each other! The coyote pack analogy is a pretty good one.
Today I heard more gossip about Lipman. His yelling and bullying was allegedly legendary. I say “allegedly” just because I’m not privy to the investigators’ report and I don’t want to get sued. But I will say that I believe the rumors.
There is a whole caste of high-ranking college administrators that rotates through jobs, each position better-paid than the last. They are not typically reputed to be personally abusive, but they do coax high salaries and generous benefits out of the system, while the professoriate is now composed primarily of low-paid instructors ineligible for tenure. (By “low-paid,” I mean earning anywhere from under 20K to mid 40K – and that with a Ph.D.) Institutions like my own get only a small portion of our funding from the state these days (approx. 20%) but we are still nominally a public university, and there ought to be some sense of public accountability. With Kasich rewarding his cronies, I’m betting the upper administrators are also pretty safe; it’s the little people who have it “too good,” according to Kasich and his ilk.
At least the victim here still received paid leave. Most victims are fired. And he leader in question is gone, and it sounds like she should be able to return to work with the situation resolved, still keeping her job.
This is probably why the university won’t settle–where are the damages to her (perhaps a few months of salary and some medical bills)? Just being legalistic and realistic here.
The overall issue, however, is that bullying that is not gender- or race-based, in violation of current laws, cannot be remedied in the U.S. in most places. Even gender-based harassment has to be severe, which means worse than every day, and worse than using the c-word, so cases just cannot go forward.
The legality retaliating against a family member is another legal question entirely and one that will probably go forward successfully, thank goodness.
I honestly can’t speak to the chances for her to return to her job with “the situation resolved.” I don’t know the victim or her co-workers (though scuttlebutt says that she wasn’t the only person targeted for bullying).
You’re quite right that whistleblowers are routinely fired or otherwise punished. This is part of what lets the highly-placed bullies continue.
I appreciate the legalistic point of view. When any victim brings charges, it’s important to know whether she or he has a realistic chance of success. If not, they’re usually better off personally just moving on, even if bringing a lawsuit might call attention to a broader-based problem. Some individuals may want to fight the just fight anyway, but no one should do so unless they feel they’re up to it.
As for whether the university will settle, one more factor comes into play – the university’s reputation. In my observation, a settlement is much more likely when the university is trying to avoid embarrassment. A few years back, a professor of photography at my university was charged with sexually harrassing a student. The case against him was quite strong, too, but I suspect the university might have fought it, except that doing so would keep it in the headlines.