An allegedly harassing email I sent in 2023

In 2023 I was working at Fed Uni in a project on student retention. I was unable to complete the contract due to an intensely hostile work environment and protracted bullying antics from managerial thugs.

The adults in the room at Fed dealt with my complaint about workplace bullying by letting my contract expire. When I said anything, they sent out a slanderous email to all staff and students.

When the workplace thugs took me to court for 3 IVOs for having to be asked about workplace bulling allegations, the judge not only thought being asked about workplace bullying allegations was more harmful than workplace bullying, he refused to explain how slander was appropriate, or what evidence there was of actual harassment. This was particularly confusing when I had plenty of evidence to the contrary that the kangaroo court refused to even accept or look at.

Here is the text of one email I sent around. It was part of my submission of evidence to the Ballarat Magistrates’ Court that they refused to accept or look at. Not corrupt as fuck and happy to dish it out but fragile as shit when they have to catch any back though.

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From a managerial perspective, Fed sure seems like a great example of organisations becoming too top-heavy and toxic when we preference bootlickers and enablers over innovators, and even basic competency, doesn’t it?

As a paradigm example, let’s consider the welfare regime based on reasonable adjustments:

• Neurodivergent (ND) students and staffhave to have a diagnosis, costing thousands of dollars in the middle of perpetual housing and cost of living crises, to even be able to register for welfare supports with the DLAU. In addition to being extremely expensive and non-negotiable, it also takes a very long time.
• To have a diagnosis, ND students and staffhave to be aware of neurodivergence, otherwise we internalise the ableism that prevents them from succeeding as something innate about ourselves. This appears to happen often. We have to be willing to disclose, which a lot of people aren’t thanks to the culture of ableism, which is as normalised and taken for granted as racism in the Jim Crow South, or Australia in general.
• Meanwhile the administration can’t be told anything about the built environment, about things likeeven the effects of flourescent lighting on students and staff on the spectrum, or approaches to learning and assessment that force students into forms of such that suit the institution, rather than the needs of the individual student. It then wonders why it bleeds enrolments like a stuck pig.

Even if students or staffget a diagnosis, ‘reasonable adjustments’ are still based on a medical model of disability, which still treats the neurodivergent individual as the problem that needs fixing. It neglects root causes in the ableist social culture that sees neurodivergence as an abnormality, rather than considering ableism as a typically maladaptive trait of settler colonial hierarchies built on conquest and supremacism.

In researching these issues, it became pretty obvious to me that a correlation existed between the very small percentage of reasonable adjustment registrations (less than 20% of estimated ND students), and the high turnover of students.

ND students enrol at an institution like Fed where neurotypical supremacism is naturalised and taken for granted, fail to acculturate and settle into a milieu that invisibilises large parts of our daily struggle, drift, fall behind, fall into difficulties, and drop out.

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If the DLAU statistics are correct, it would seem that, at any given moment, Fed Uni (let alone anyother) has at least 6-700 students who are completely unsupported where they need it most at anygiven time. Again it wonders why it bleeds enrollments like a stuck pig.

What is of more interest and concern is that the DLAU also knows this, but not only stands byreasonable adjustments, but perpetrates aggression against researchers such as myself, who advocate moving beyond them. Hardly surprising really that there should be pushback frombureaucrats and neoliberal technocrats whose own power and status is invested in the dysfunctional,maladaptive and antisocial status quo.

The fact that bureaucratic pushback is enabled and supported by university management, while itcontinues to bleed enrolments like a stuck pig, arguably begs the question as to its own usefulness . .. not least where the head technocrat is on 900k a year, even in the midst of large operating deficits and job losses. We find it easier to envision the university closing than evolving ideas about how it runs itself.

The 900k-a-year technocrat would rather bleed students than evolve ideas, close the university down apparently rather than be paid only as much as the Prime Minister or, indeed, evolve ideas beyond the aristocratic Platonic instrumentalism that sees corporate hierarchies in terms of elite heads and plebian arms and legs. That sees the university as a business with the students as both product and consumer.

La Trobe has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by recognising that ableist supremacism createspractical inefficiencies. Instead of throwing large sums of money into treating neurodivergent students as broken and in need of fixing, it has fixed its own culture instead by making inclusion strategies standard practice—as opposed to discrete services requiring separate practices. The DLAU lives in fear of its own demise for good reason, being redundant.

It is ironic however that Fed Uni management retains obsolete and even counterproductive and harmful ‘reasonable adjustment’ processes, apparently because they serve the ambition of the powerful bureaucrats in charge, even as the institution itself chokes on its own maladaptivity. 900k-a-year technocrats revert to technology-driven Future Fed PR while leaving gaping holes in studentretention through reasonable adjusments.

It’s almost as though the 900k-a-year technocrats have outlived their own usefulness a class. Fed Unitries to dress up selling itself out to industry as a ‘cooperative’ business model, yet is not internallycooperative itself. Why is that? Democracy is good enough for the ballot box, it’s good enough formajor referendums for things like the VtP, so why not good enough for where we work?

One of the last things I did at Fed before being bullied out of my ability to do my job by the extremely aggressive bureaucratic thug running the welfare division (one of my own project team) was to read and summarise all 800+ responses from our neurodiversity inclusion survey. The levels of pain and suffering amongst neurodivergent student and staffare deep and acute, and I would wager few even realise how widespread that pain is. Fed clearly want to keep the true horror well under wraps, and are more than happy to cancel careers and lives to do it.

I think ND students and staff alone could self-manage universities like Fed a lot better in cooperative ways than the neoliberal technocracy who see students as consumer and product, value-added human capital to be moved through the system as on a conveyor belt. The moneyed aristocracy likes to label and devalue those it dominates; we are crazy, emotional and difficult for not taking disrespect lying down. When no longer servicable, we are redundant.

Academic staff, like all other workers, make the education system run. Academia can’t do without workers. It can, on the other hand, do without managers. Atlas Shrugged is one of the most lol books alive on that planet; if only corporate techocrats would go on strike. Even the current management agree that cooperativism is a noble and worthy ideal, even if they try to co-opt it to dress up corporate capture as something else.

Gaslighting subjects to devalue us and make us think we need those who abuse and exploit us tosave us from ourselves definitely seems to be a key feature of positively sacred social and class hierarchies, but personal boundaries not so much.

Gaslighting is clearly a characteristic feature of ability supremacism and ‘reasonable adjustments’ legistation; we like being able to cast opponents and critics as crazy / unhinged / unstable / possibly dangerous for saying bad things about our maladaptivity if it shuts us up. We are happy to stand by and watch others label and paint targets if we think we’ll be okay for now.

Either way, we still find ourselves having to deal with the unintended consequences of maladaptive mismanagement and hierarchical systems less broken than working exactly as intended for the white men of property and neurotypicality who built them in the first place.

If so then maybe the problem is less redundant workers than a redundant social order, which has forever promised a civilising mission and delivered punishment for deviance and nonconfomity, hate and brutality. Forget ableism even; Ballarat just about needs a sign saying ‘X days without a woman being murdered.’

Maybe it’s time to evolve ideas instead of continuing to try to roll neoliberal corporate turds in egalitarianism and inclusion glitter.