Elizabeth’s Machination: A Convoluted Tragi-Comedy

One often hears about university professors falsifying their curriculum vitae but not often about administrators forging student transcripts to suit their own political agendas. Much file and transcript forgery relates to controlling or retaliating against students who have grieved injustice.

This fraudulent pattern or practice frequently goes unnoticed because the provisions of federal law prevent anyone but faculty, administrators, and students accessing student records. [01] In essence, administrators and faculty members frequently betray the trust granted under this law for their own political purposes and use restricted private information for blackballing.

Elizabeth L. Feetham, Associate Dean, Graduate School, University of Washington, worked under the auspice of the late Marsha L. Landolt, Graduate Dean. They conspired with others to deny academic freedom and due process of law. They forged and destroyed documents in a cover-up then removed selected documents from files to create an appearance of student fraud. Moreover, they withheld transcripts and student records by making false declarations about outstanding debt. This prevents their victims from gaining employment. When outside attorneys become involved the university completely destroys the evidence. [In Memoriam]

University of Washington self-governs under a mandate from the Washington State legislature. However, university officials ignore applicable laws and replace them with ambiguous rules that change depending upon the machination of the day. To protect them from prosecution, the university employs an attorney as its hatchet man: Steven G. Olswang, Vice Provost, at $138,000.00/03-0101 in taxpayer-funded, annual salary plus benefits.

Olswang conspires with state attorneys general to harass complainants and to deny access to public records that would expose wrongdoing by university administrators. These state employees ignore the grievance procedures mandated by the legislature and replace them with kangaroo courts stacked with sycophants. These courts characterize dishonesty and act in violation of established legal procedure.

In the real world, if one becomes involved in an automobile accident then one does not trust the other driver's lawyer to investigate objectively. Similarly, one does not trust university lawyers or attorneys general to investigate illegal practices by university employees. They do not investigate complaints with a view to due process of law. Instead, they use risk management techniques designed to protect the university from lawsuits and to deny due process. Those risk management techniques require the cooperation of the ombudsman.

Many administrators also hold academic positions which creates a dangerous conflict of interest. This serves no useful purpose other than to increase their pension income and provide them with a convenient bolt-hole.

The university employs Lois Price-Spratlen, University Ombudsman, to investigate complaints, report findings, and mediate fair settlements. She works directly for Olswang for $86,400.00/03-0101 in taxpayer-funded, annual salary plus benefits. Instead of maintaining an unbiased, confidential relationship with people who seek mediation she passes the documents she receives to Olswang for risk management without the griever’s permission. When questioned about this lack of confidentiality, Olswang replied: “She works for me”.

University of Washington granted Price-Spratlen a PhD degree in Urban Planning (1976) for which she wrote a dissertation on hypertension-screening of inner-city adolescents. Although a full professor, she teaches only one course and allegedly has no current research studies. She remains unpublished except for an article in Journal of School Health (1982) based on her PhD dissertation. She claims to have published a book; however, commercial, academic, and library databases do not reference it.

Price-Spratlen spends much of her time lecturing white male professors about “sensitivity” in race and gender discrimination issues. She uses the same unlawful, politically correct, techniques that she criticizes in her lectures to treat her captive audience as honkeys - oxymoronic for an ombudsman committed to mediation and fairness. Her audiences do not respond to her perceived racism for fear of administrative reprisals. They sit quietly then discuss it among themselves afterwards. This reignites latent racism that they have probably addressed and overcome many years ago. [Institutionalized Racism]

Risk management policies create serious obstacles for victims of abuse. Lawyers paid to reduce financial risk do not perform the same function as lawyers paid to resolve problems through due process of law. The two procedures remain incompatible because they serve opposing purposes and, with freedom of expression issues, construe as unconstitutional. Risk management also supports blatant conflict of interest. It allows university officials to circle their wagons and cover up their wrongdoing. They can then deny access to promulgated university grievance procedures.

Elizabeth Louise Feetham provides another example of “neo-feminist mystique”. Claiming ignorance of Washington Administrative Code (WAC) procedures and Revised Code of Washington (RCW) mandates, she blindly wields absolute power. She falsely claimed that a doctoral candidate did not have a masters degree from another university. When asked to correct the record, Feetham wrote: “ . . . there is no written procedure or form for correcting error on a transcript”. Landolt then forged the transcript to support Feetham’s false contentions. This and other alleged criminal activity has deprived a professor of his livelihood for more than ten years. University officials allegedly lied to the media to cover up this activity in a 2002 press interview.

Feetham’s absolutist statements ignore a plethora of regulations that govern student and faculty records. Interpreted intelligently, they allow for error correction in most circumstances. However, Feetham’s underlying motive for lying relates more to covering up blackballing by Marsha L. Landolt, Graduate Dean; Richard S Neel, Formerly Associate Dean, College of Education; and, Judith A Ramey, Professor and Chair, Technical Communication, College of Engineering.

Ironically, Feetham’s assistants belie her claim to nonexistent procedures by misquoting the Washington Administrative Code when they try to support her contentions. Her stonewalling techniques excel when PhD candidates request access to their academic records in attempts to challenge file falsification and to correct inaccurate information. Her ploys effectively preclude filing grievances against her and her confederates for alleged criminal activity. This practice also fits comfortably within Olswang’s “risk management” polices that deny due process and subvert academic appellate procedures.

Feetham, provides an excellent example of a non-educating, absolutist university official. She has apparently developed neither academic skills nor experience since she obtained her PhD from University of Washington (1977). Nor has she published anything or visibly developed aptitude as an efficient bureaucrat, unless one includes machination as a primary attribute.

Feetham presumes to sit in arbitrary judgment over professors with higher rank, more merit, and longer experience. She uses her administrative power vindictively to help destroy their careers for no apparent reason. Morally, she ranks among other university officials who have achieved virtually nothing academically yet consistently attack those who have achieved many things.

At University of Washington, doctoral students routinely prostitute themselves to obtain lucrative, administrative positions. Probably, for lack of any other evidence to the contrary, the merit-less Feetham obtained her graduate school position through the manipulated tenets of affirmative action and other connections.

Feetham teaches one course as “Affiliate Assistant Professor, English” presumably only to preserve her pension aspirations. She certainly could not have obtained even that lowly position on her academic merits or publishing record. Academe has spawned a generation of morons incapable of communicating with anyone outside their own special interest group - one can recognize these pointy-heads by the way that they attack true genius. [02]

For showing up at the campus Feetham receives the princely (princessly) sum of $94,932.00/03-0101 in taxpayer-funded, annual salary plus benefits - no wonder that the cost of a university education has spiraled out of all proportion to the economy. Now, at state universities, double-dipping administrative whores not only fraudulently control academic progress to meet their own political agendas but also receive a whore’s pay for their criminal activity.

Statistically, abrogation of affirmative action law has benefitted too many undeserving white females during the past three decades. For two decades more women than men in all racial groups have attended college through affirmative action. Through quota systems women have gone beyond parity and have caused a gender imbalance with commensurate mediocrity.

Feetham's Philosophy for Flatulent Functionaries

Perhaps a few lines paraphrased from Lizzie’s inspired doctoral dissertation entitled Series Novels: A Technique for Middling [03] will give meaning to her convoluted philosophy, her recalcitrant behavior, and her arrogant attitudes. Unpublished since her never cited dissertation (loaned once 1977-97 from UW library) she indisputably adds value to satire:

Graduate school decisions rest upon temporary achievement until more information reveals new possibilities. Consequently, associate deans require starting and stopping points to satisfy a need for limits. This paradigm suggests explorative possibilities in all directions without the necessity to explore them. Moreover, this release from boundaries creates extensive middles by imitating illusionary realities that do not need boundaries.

Bureaucratic psychology forms a basis for a graduate school philosophy. The world view uses a perspective that creates a received consciousness that simultaneously assimilates several, often contradictory, criteria. However, linear forms demand that one suspend the process until one apprehends a unified pattern of internal reference. This gives a sense that simultaneous activity occurs in different places and mindfully contrasts activities in different time frames.

Consequently, a fragmentation process shows an extremely diffuse reality that one may only partially grasp at any given time. This reality includes all that occurs simultaneously, whether one understands it or not, and depends on any number of past known or unknown events. Moreover, fragmentation, caused by a chaotic world view exposes a variety of bureaucratic and psychological aberrations. By creating the illusion of a perceived reality it gives non-bureaucrats many piecemeal elements of thought that helps them interpret reality. Consequently, the fragmentation process provides an elaborate reality.

However, with most bureaucratic functions one assumes that a conclusion will derive from duration and meaning. Not so in the [University of Washington Graduate School] where the extensive middles de-emphasize, or outrightly resist, the creation of either a beginning or an end. This successfully de-emphasizes any need for real debate on important issues and forms a novel illusion. Cleverly, these novel illusions lead to conclusions that, in a world of multiple realities caused by perceptions interlapping [sic], causes no final resolution to any problem.

Feetham’s technique for diddling and fiddling in the middling then protects her job for at least another year.

Womynx Apologists

Feetham exemplifies the sycophantic group privilege that rampantly permeates policies at University of Washington. However, womynx could achieve nothing without male apologists who benefit from their sycophancy. For example, Neel used illegal gender quotas instead of achievement and experience as a basis for doctoral admission into the College of Education. Evidence shows that he falsified files and exhorted the faculty to follow his preferences in support of his illegal contentions. Quids pro quo insured a cover-up to protect him. [Revelation: Womyn and Womynx]

Former UW president, Richard L. McCormick, publicly declared that students who enter college without basic requisites for college work waste precious time and space in remedial courses. [04] Presumably, he meant that quotas and preferences remain inextricably linked to radical multiculturalism, political correctness, and declining academic standards. Also, that ending gender preferences would strike a blow against the ideological orthodoxies used to justify them. [05]

Yet, hypocritically, McCormick supported Neel’s admission practices that prefer women to men despite merit, that contravene equal opportunity laws, and, subsequently, that contribute to grade inflation. Then McCormick cavalierly adopted laissez faire, the most tyrannical and disastrous of orthodoxies, to cover-up criminal activities by Landolt, Feetham, also Ramey - another sweet cheat like McCormick’s wife, Suzanne D. Lebsock. [Sweet Cheat]

McCormick’s laissez faire covers up his real intentions. Under its guise he stresses the importance of economic growth and entrepreneurship at the expense of traditional education. This doctrine of non-interference, prevalent among university presidents throughout the United States, greatly enriches their institutions, and themselves, at the expense of learning and research.

Historic paternalism does not justify retaliatory discrimination by preferring less-qualified, less-experienced women over more-qualified, more-experienced men. Any discrimination should result in criminal instead of civil penalties. If one can go to jail for kicking one's dog then people who deliberately discriminate should receive much more jail time for destroying careers. If this means more law suits then let them occur. Ludicrous arguments that relate to numerical goals, critical mass, and gender parity no longer carry any weight. They mock the law.

When one puts pressure on criminals the evil eventually disappears. Then Feetham, Ramey, and others like them, will not only learn about discrimination but also what construes as fairness and equal opportunity. By condoning Landolt’s actions, McCormick apparently believed that fairness, a notion thoroughly confused by affirmative action, results from retaliatory discrimination: a disruptive and social evil that exists in academe generally. [06]

Conclusion

Holding joint faculty and administration positions allows university officials to use their academic freedom to pervert the judicial process. However, academic freedom does not grant absolute power for administrators to say and do anything they damn well please. Moreover, if regents favorably recognize panderers and sycophants then they proliferate.

Absolute power in the hands of non-educating administrators and a lack of power among faculty and students presents an elemental problem that faces contemporary higher education. The politically motivated, power structure interferes with the pedagogic process. Any improvement must accompany significant changes in the structure and employment terms of those wielding power. [07]

Compromised principles for personal gain and academic privilege without merit.

Unfortunately, the University of Washington judicial process has become one of risk management that protects the university interests, covers up employee wrongdoing, and prevents the complainant from receiving a hearing. UW officials consistently ignore the law and abrogate university regulations to deny due process. Landolt consistently supported associate deans when they used kangaroo courts to cover up their ineptitude and unlawful practices. [In Memoriam]

In the process, Landolt denied access to documents and falsified records. This gives the complainant no option but to sue the university. Fortunately, in recent cases the court has started to award legal fees and damages personally against deans and faculty members who misuse their power to prejudice faculty members and students. Perhaps this will deter them in the future.

Commonly, administrators have little contact with students and some even have little or no educational background. They act upon the principle that if one can manage well, then one can manage anything. The academe needs fewer of these parasites. Instead, it needs more academically oriented, knowledgeable administrators, of either gender - people with students and higher education as their primary concerns. University trustees need to preclude administrators from lining their own pockets at taxpayers' expense.

Nmesis.

© Copyright 1997 by Paul Trummel
All Rights Reserved: 11 Feb 97/14:48 PST
Edition: #603-01-00/08-0126-23:35
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