Time to get to the bottom of sordid workplace story

By Brian Greenspun (contact)

Sunday, July 12, 2015 | 2 a.m.

It is summer. It is hot. It is time for a story.

I don’t normally tell stories in this space, especially ones that sound like fiction rather than fact.

Let’s create the setting for this in the headquarters of the Nevada System for Higher Education. I may have picked that one because it is where Chancellor Dan Klaich holds sway over Nevada’s public universities and community colleges. He has been under a little fire lately, so a bit more heat shouldn’t hurt. Unless, of course, this particular story were true.

This tale may not be as sexy as changing reports about educational shortcomings at NSHE and what the leadership does or doesn’t do about it to protect its own reputations, jobs and futures. Hiring consultants, then having those consultants write the reports the way you want them to read rather than what the writers actually think, is not as uncommon a practice as one might think. That doesn’t make it right, it just makes it a management issue for which the Board of Regents — the folks to whom the chancellor and NSHE are responsible — need to do a better job.

No, this is a simple story of one young woman and one man, in the workplace.

The opening scene shows the man sitting in his office at lunchtime with the door wide open. He is in his chair behind his computer. Like good bureaucrats, most of the employees are at lunch, taking a break, getting refueled and visiting with friends and co-workers. Our antagonist is sitting at his desk.

In the next office is the young woman. She is trying to work during lunch while strange and muted sounds emanate through the walls or the open door next to her office. Let’s say the sounds have a cadence all of their own.

This happens on multiple days. And each time the young woman leaves her office to walk down the hall, she passes the open office where the man still sits, behind his computer from which the strange sounds continue. Over and over again.

No matter how young or unworldly this woman may be, it becomes apparent to her — using her senses of sight and sound — that there is a lot going on behind that desk. It isn’t just emanating from the computer. Because this is a family newspaper and fiction like this is the stuff from which more sordid tales are told, suffice to say men can find pleasure behind their work desks as easily as they can on top of them. Especially when there is only one person involved!

I don’t intend to get any more graphic, but you should understand by now what was going on at lunch in the NSHE offices. And just who was the victim in this story.

Eventually, the young woman gets the nerve to tell a co-worker what is going on and a reconnaissance mission is undertaken to confirm what is being reported. Lo and behold, when the two women walk by the open office, the man’s solo activity is still going on!

It is what happens next, believe it or not, that is the basis for this tale.

The incident is reported through the proper channels, action is taken immediately to remove the self-gratifying offender as well as his computer with the funny noises and, I suspect, the intriguing videos, and the man and his computer are never to be seen again at NSHE.

The young woman, traumatized from the goings-on at her workplace at the NSHE offices in Las Vegas, removes herself from the situation and a couple of months later gets a job on the UNLV campus. She is free from the hostile environment and happy with her new life. The man is out of her sight and, hopefully, out of her mind’s eye.

And then imagine this: As she walks out of her office one day, she looks into the office across the hall and who do you think is sitting there? You guessed it. He isn’t, thank goodness, on his computer, but there he is just like he was at the NSHE office a few months earlier — sans the boring music and hand movements.

That is when I heard the story. Since, and here is the difficult part to accept, no one — not at NSHE, not at UNLV, not at any personnel office — either knows about this fellow who just dropped like a stone back into the life of this young woman or, at least, feels compelled or empowered to talk about it.

If this were true, it would raise any number of troubling questions that should be answered.

First, how does the system of higher education remove the offender from his job, only to put him back in a similar one, again in close proximity to the victim of his earlier exploits? More important, why does this happen?

Second, is everyone so afraid at NSHE and UNLV to talk about what could be such an obvious wrongdoing that their common sense and basic instincts take leave? And why are they afraid?

Third, is the law so blind to hostile workplaces that it protects the guilty at the expense of the innocent? A protection that may be misplaced because the man now at UNLV is no longer an employee but, rather, an independent contractor and, therefore, not legally protected. And who decided to protect him anyway? And why?

And what of this young woman? Who is here to protect her and her career and her aspirations and her desire for a sex-act-free workplace? At least one that isn’t flaunted behind an open office door!

There are, if this weren’t the fiction we wish it were, a lot of questions to not only be asked but to be answered.

If this actually happened, there should be outrage at NSHE, UNLV, the Board of Regents, the Chancellor’s Office and the Governor’s Office. And there would have to be an immediate and full inquiry into the events recounted here.

That’s because, unlike a made-to-order consultant’s report, which are a dime a dozen — or in this case a few million dimes — there is a stickiness to charges like this that stays with the public far longer and far more granularly. We don’t like stories like this in our public workplaces. Or, at least we shouldn’t.

So, is it fact or is it fiction? Is this just the stuff of a hot summer’s column or is there something more insidious and more revealing into the way things really work in the higher education system in Nevada?

If I were Gov. Brian Sandoval I would start an immediate inquiry before heading to Europe to look for business to bring back to our state. Although in Europe, a story like this may be an added incentive to some!

And, if I were on the Board of Regents — the people who have direct responsibility for what has or hasn’t happened — I would be all over this. Today.

Before this story gets a lot messier.

Brian Greenspun is owner, publisher and editor of the Las Vegas Sun.