A commenter at the end of the last post thought this might be worthy of a new post. We have covered and discussed much of it on the previous post, but just to keep the fires burning here it is. It seems that UK cannot keep off of the front page of the Herald Leader. Once again we have this article:
http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/education/article100919697.html
entitled: “Three UK trustees clash with Capilouto over suing student newspaper.” Of course this was on the heels of this article:
http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/education/article100359972.html
entitled: “Andy Beshear seeks to intervene in UK’s lawsuit against its student newspaper”.
In the former article three BoT members at a recent BoT meeting attempted to generate a discussion and vote on the President’s decision to sue the school newspaper for requesting redacted public records regarding the investigation into James Harwood sexual harassment of students. Unfortunately, these board members were somewhat coerced into not doing this. To quote the article:
“I’ve been told by other trustees in leadership that if I prompted a vote on this today that the president would resign and I would plunge the university into chaos, so I’m going to simply express my own views today and not call for a vote,” said trustee David Hawpe. “I think the university’s position is unwise and unfair. I think it’s the wrong balancing of interests, which I freely admit exist on both sides of this controversy.”
What this appears to translate into is that the UK President fully agrees with the decision that any university professor who uses his position of power to sexually harass students, should be rewarded with 6 months paid vacation, health benefits till he/she finds a new job and a nondisclosure agreement that says we will not disclose this information to anyone. President Capilouto attempts to justify this decision by stating that it is all being done for the good of the students. Two questions, what if it was your daughter that was sexually harassed Dr. Capilouto, and what do you tell the parents of the future students that you put in harms way by this decision? Thank you Kentucky Kernel for doing Dr. Capilouto’s job, and shame on you Dr. Capilouto. Personally I can’t see where Dr. Capilouto’s resignation would throw the university into total chaos.
The bottom line being that this all appears to be a fight for secrecy by the upper administration at the university, versus a fight for transparency by many of the university students, university faculty, university staff and the taxpayers subsidizing this public university.