Students are protesting again. They are subdued compared to the brick-throwing, establishment-busting rampages I saw as a student in UC Berkeley, but their complaints against the University of California, which calls into question the prestigious institution's basic humanity, are serious and deserve public attention. The recent conflicts arose over the University's failure to protect students from sexual predators.
A lawsuit has been filed claiming that administrators did not adequately address accusations of sexual abuse, and also discouraged students from filing complaints. A UCLA professor who allegedly fondled young women and stuck his tongue in their mouths, was disciplined, but then allowed to continue teaching on campus.
The University's casual attitude toward the safety of female students is disturbing and dangerous, but not unexpected. The University has been, and continues to be, guilty of much worse.
Victims who have been violated by their teacher, like women to whom Bill Cosby was a mentor before he betrayed them, undoubtedly suffered deep psychological wounds. But, their lives went on. They did not suffer permanent physical injuries inflicted by an unknown assailant. They did not have to wonder why that assailant was never pursued, and why the University of California lied to them and about them; why the University wrote demonstrable falsehoods on hospital records and accounts distributed by the campus police department and administration which covered up the crime. They did not lose their livelihoods because of their injuries. They did not have to fight a Goliath like the University of California without benefit of a salary, Workers' Compensation, good health or health insurance. And, they did not have to live with the burdening fear that someone wanted them dead, and that person, the perpetrator of the attack--not the victim!--was being protected by the authorities.
In a previous post, my niece and I told the story of a UCLA employee who was brutally beaten and raped. As immigrants, she and her husband were panic-stricken when the University tried to blame him for the attack. He was still humiliated and terrified weeks later when he heard about the parking lot attack on another UCLA employee, a psychiatric nurse. He warned the nurse about UCLA's cruel treatment of crime victims, but begged her not to tell anyone what happened to him and his wife. Their lives had been forever devastated.
Dizziness, headaches, nausea and either insomnia or horrific nightmares began to deplete the nurse's physical and emotional resources, but inhuman abuse, inflicted by the University of California, nearly destroyed her spirit.
The nurse's doctor was pressured to send her back to work. He refused, telling UCLA that she had been mugged and was lucky to be alive.
She asked the California Nurses' Association for help. They ignored her.
When it was revealed that campus police had dismissed the attack as "just an injury," the nurse's family hand-delivered a complaint to the Chancellor's office. Eventually, UCLA conducted a putative internal investigation and a detective interviewed the nurse. He apologized for the failure to go after the assailant.
A month later, he said, it was unlikely the assailant would ever be caught. But, the detective promised to post the crime, as the law required.
It wasn't done. And nothing came of the 'internal investigation," except that the case was submitted to Workers' Comp.
The nurse asked again for assistance from the California Nurses' Association. Again she was ignored. Weak, debilitated, and still unable to process her thoughts properly, the psychiatric nurse reluctantly accepted her inability to return to work. Because of continued harassment, she left the job she had once loved.
The Workers' Comp. investigation dragged on for months, delayed, apparently, by UCLA's refusal to grant access to campus police records.
Then, the University changed providers without informing the nurse. By the time her family tracked down the new person in charge of the case, they were told it was too late for an investigation because of the looming statute of limitations.
Anxiety, pain, fear, frustration and severe weight loss had now caused a dangerous decline in the nurse's condition. Still, she was told her only recourse was to file a lawsuit within the next few days.
Again, the California Nurses' Association ignored her pleas for help.
The family filed a lawsuit for her, but asked legislator Sheila Kuehl to intervene with UCLA in order to avoid the legal action for which they were unprepared. A female staffer curtly told them that UCLA had explained everything already.
How?
In a letter written by a campus police representative and disseminated by the administration.
She sent the nurse a copy. It was full of obvious lies, including what was to become the University's repeated response to every question: The University was sorry, but it was unable to determine the cause of the nurse's injuries.
Period. Case closed. Then a judge dismissed the nurse's lawsuit when the lawyer for UCLA stated that the delay the nurse asked for would be an unfair financial hardship to the University.
The family wrote letters to Sheila Kuehl's office, to the University, to the CNA, to the Justice Department, to Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and many others complaining about UCLA's treatment and refuting the many lies in the letter it used to deny the nurse justice.
A typical response came from a female staffer in Dianne Feinstein's office: "You keep writing as if you expect us to do something."
A ridiculous concept, really, politicians who actually do something for the people.
Years later, when the nurse was in ICU after more than fourteen hours of surgery, she learned of another lie perpetrated against her by UCLA.
A doctor--not the one who treated her--lied on the nurse's medical records, turning an attack which caused a severe concussion with multiple head wounds into "a laceration" from a fall.
Complaints to authorities, including UC President Janet Napolitano, the California Nurses' Association, Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, the Justice Department, even California Attorney General Kamala Harris, were ignored. At least the outgoing president of UC wrote the usual regrets that the University was unable to determine the cause of the nurse's injuries.
So whatever happened to "women supporting women?" Where was the California Nurses' Association when it was needed? Why is there outrage, sympathy, sisterhood, for sexually violated women, but nothing for a woman whose entire life has been destroyed by violence?
Not suggestive enough? Or what?
In the future, we will print some of the actual correspondence between the nurse and authorities who, instead of being advocates for victims of abuse, became adversaries instead.
Some of us do feel the outrage.
