How incredibly moronic
An ethics complaint accuses the dean of the University of Washington Law School of doing business for a huge insurance company when he should have been working for the university.I've always thought applying these state "no use of public resources for non-public business" policies to routine email communications was absurd. This is a fine example. Doesn't the UW Law School likely benefit in various ways from its dean serving as a director of a major corporation? Of course. It's a feather in their cap. Has there been any suggestion that his duties as dean were in any way compromised by the e-mail "abuse"? Of course not.
Law school dean W.H. "Joe" Knight Jr. sent or received hundreds of e-mails at his university e-mail account regarding State Farm Insurance, of which he is a board member, the complaint says. The e-mails were sent from 2002 to 2005 . . . .
. . . . UW spokesman Norm Arkans said the university was alerted to Knight's e-mail usage about a year ago by a public records request. The university thought it violated the state's policy of prohibiting the use of public resources for business purposes, and the university told Knight he had to stop using his e-mail for such purposes, he said. - Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 8, 2006
So what's the point? Why not just get rid of these stupid policies and let highly skilled professionals do their jobs and balance them with other valuable responsibilities or, heaven forbid, the occasional perusal of this blog? If I were the dean of the UW Law School, I would be offended to learn that someone was reviewing my email usage. And people wonder why the best people avoid public service.
If the state really needs policies like this, and really needs to enforce them, then enforcement should be the responsibility of some body besides the Executive Ethics Board. It's hardly a matter of ethics. Perhaps an Executive Bean-Counting Board or Pedantry Board.
posted at 12:02 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home