Oliver Obfuscater had it made. He wasn’t making so much money as he would have if he had stayed in big law, but his life was a lot easier and a lot more satisfying. It hadn’t actually been his choice to leave big law. He was let go. It wasn’t that he didn’t bill enough. It was that he didn’t work enough. He was, to put it kindly, not a workaholic, so he didn’t really fit into the world of big law. Plus, if truth be told, he wasn’t actually all that smart. He was one of the increasing army of humanities grads who decided to go to law school because they didn’t know what else to do after they got out of college. He was young enough that he was a product of “the student is always right” attitude among university administrators. His instructors had mostly been overworked adjuncts who had little time to grade assignments and so basically didn’t give any, and who were so afraid of negative student evaluations that they routinely gave everyone high grades. So basically, Oliver had never really had to work in college. He’d been able to wrangle a decent GPA by making veiled threats to any instructor who had appeared poised to give him less than an A, so he actually had a pretty decent GPA. So did everyone else, though, so he’d had to take one of those LSAT prep courses just to get into a third-tier law school. 

He hadn’t gotten an offer from a top firm, but he had gone into big law none-the-less, and he was still in recovery from that when he heard from a friend that Cliff Edge was looking for someone to head its Title IX office, or Office of Equity and Diversity (OED for short). The job was perfect for him. There was hardly any work. The work was done by the “investigators,” a bevy of attractive young recent law-school grads that he liked to think of his harem. He rationalized hiring only young women on the grounds that most of the complaints his office received came from female students, so they would likely feel more comfortable talking to a woman than to a man, and the closer that women was to their own age, he figured, the more comfortable they would be. And everything, in higher education at this point, was about making the students happy. None of the investigators was very bright, but that didn’t matter. Oliver knew that his job was not actually to root out discrimination, but to protect the university from lawsuits. He’d devised a system for doing that that was absolutely foolproof. Even the most inexperienced and intellectually challenged young attorney couldn’t go wrong. 

It worked like this. A student, faculty member, or administrator would make a complaint to the office. The “investigator” would take the complaint, interview the people against whom the complaint had been made, as well as anyone else who might be helpful, write up the interview testimony in the form of an “investigative report” and then present that report to the complainant. He did have to coach the investigators a little on how to ask the relevant questions. For example, if the complaint, as often happened, came from a female faculty member who felt excluded from discussions of her male peers and discriminated against in the assignment of courses, released time, committee work, etc., etc., to say nothing of being outright defamed, bullied, and harassed, then it was important that the investigator not simply ask for facts relative to the complaints, but work in references to intentions. If, for example, an investigator asked a male head of a department how often he met with senior faculty to discuss department matters and with whom he had met on each occasion. It might actually emerge that he met with only senior male faculty.

On the other hand, if the investigator asked instead, “Did you deliberately exclude Professor X (who was a woman) from meetings with senior faculty?” then you would get the answer you needed. No department head who wasn’t brain dead would admit to deliberately excluding any faculty member, male or female, from meetings with faculty. So the trick to the “investigations” was making sure you phrased all the questions in such a way that you got the answer you needed. Basically, the investigators were instructed never to ask neutral questions. Rather than collecting facts that might support charges of discrimination they simply confronted people with the charges that had been made against them so that they could flat-out deny that there was any truth to them. The investigative reports were thus pretty much he-said/she said affairs. 

To make the investigative reports even more difficult to interpret, Oliver instructed his investigators to make sure they were long, that absolutely nothing was left out, and that they included lots of repetition so that it would actually be difficult to figure out where the testimony that might help the complainant could be found in the report. Not only did the reports list the names and positions of all the parties against whom complaints were made. They listed the history of each individual’s position at the institution, all the positions the person had held, all the responsibilities that went along with that position, etc., etc. That was listed first, immediately after the charges, long before any testimony was presented. Next the charges were presented in excruciating detail (though not always detail that corresponded to the charges as they had been articulated by the complainant because the process of correcting errors in the investigative report was very helpful in the process of drawing out the investigation so that it would exceed the 300-day statute of limitations for a lawsuit). Finally, after all that, each charge was listed yet again, with the bullet-pointed testimony of the person against whom the charge had been made. 

So the reports were incredibly difficult to interpret and never included any actual “findings” of the investigation, but only lots of testimony from as many people as possible. Even so, it occasionally happened that information emerged as the result of an investigation that could be damaging to the university, as had happened a few years ago when a professor against whom a charge of discrimination against female colleagues had been made, went on and on about all the “incompetent women” in the department. This is where Oliver’s real genius came into play. Complainants were required to come physically to the OED to review the investigative report. They were not allowed to keep their own copy of the report, so the OED could basically always deliver a finding of “no discrimination” independently of what the report said. What could the poor complainant do? Oliver made sure that every single investigation into a complaint made to the OED took so long that it exceeded the 300-day statute of limitations for a lawsuit. That is, complainants had only 300 days from the time a discriminatory event occurred to actually sue for discrimination. After that, they lost their right to sue. So Oliver made sure that each and every investigation the OED undertook, took more or less a full year. 

That was probably an unnecessary precaution, however, at least with respect to faculty complaints because even if someone were still able to sue the university and got a copy of the investigative report as part of the process of “discovery,” most would be too afraid to pursue a lawsuit against the university when its own Title IX office had investigated their complaint and found no discrimination. Plus, most faculty, even tenured full professors, couldn’t afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars a lawsuit would likely cost them.

The situation was different, of course, with respect to students who made complaints against faculty. The investigative procedure was more or less the same, so students usually found themselves without standing to sue by the time the investigation was concluded. But while student complaints were never actually vindicated, students were placated by various means such as moving them to different sections of the same course, or allowing a different instructor to recalculate their grade to something they found more satisfactory. Oliver suspected that most student complaints were really about grades rather than discrimination of any sort, and, in fact, most students seemed pretty satisfied with the old “raise the final grade approach” to dealing with their complaints. The fact that the OED pretty much never found anyone guilty of actual discrimination didn’t keep the them from recommending disciplinary action against faculty. Students had to be placated and faculty had to be kept in their place. The findings were usually something like “inconsistent grading” or “hostile” or “unprofessional” behavior and the case then turned over to HR. 

Oliver wasn’t all bad, though. He reviewed the investigative reports, and when it seemed clear that there probably was a problem with a given individual, he would read that person the riot act. He’d authorized repeated findings of “unprofessionalism,” and even non-gender, non-race-based “hostile workplace environments.” He’d successfully inserted such negative findings into people’s personnel files, and even successfully ushered a few particularly vicious and bigoted faculty into early retirements. 

Oliver felt pretty good about what he was doing as head of Cliff Edge’s OED. He was helping protect the university from lawsuits, while also doing what he felt he could to improve the climate at the place. Everything had been going along pretty smoothly until COVID hit. Unfortunately, when everyone was working remotely, and the offices were thus closed, it had become necessary to send complainants links that would enable them to view the investigative reports online. They couldn’t print them out, of course, he’d made sure of that. What he hadn’t anticipated was that one particularly outraged female faculty member who clearly had been a victim of unrelenting gender discrimination ever since she had first arrived at Cliff Edge, and whose investigative report tended to support that, despite the best efforts of the investigator to skew it otherwise, had managed to preserve for herself a copy of the report. She’d written to the office repeatedly requesting that they explain how she could print it out. Oliver felt he’d dodged that bullet by simply failing to reply to her emails. 

Unfortunately, when she didn’t hear from the OED, she finally decided to take a screen shot of every single one of the nearly 100 pages of the report. So she had a copy. 

That was when things began to unravel.