USC Takes Out A Confidential Informant - Termination Planning as Whistleblower Retaliation [View all]

[ellisonz]

Last edited Thu Apr 27, 2023, 08:53 PM - Edit history (1)

Published April 26, 2023

By Zachary Ellison

When the University of Southern California (USC) gets ready to take out on their own, it likes to make a show of it, and to do that it uses what is known in the Human Resources world as termination planning to manage the process and ostensibly reduce the risk of litigation through good-faith, best practices in management science. USC’s termination planning is the inversion this in reality, if there’s two things it excels at its gaslighting and blackmail, and I knew to expect it coming. I was USC’s worst HR problem, the employee who kept blowing the whistle on misconduct and non-compliance, who had even managed to obtain an independent investigation report from USC’s own attorney working under the direction of Senior Vice President of Human Resources that was critical of HR business practices in the Office of the Provost, and implicitly in relation to Human Resources at large, for which our unit was a key component. From the moment I was hired, I had been an easy target for my former Human Resources Director, who delighted in treating me as the Administrative Assistant for the Vice Provost for Academic Operations in a purposefully diminutive way. The curt text messages to bring her water, to confronting me face-to-face for not signing the Holiday party as signed for her unit alone, to threatening me in my office with retaliation. You know when they are after you, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about bullies, it’s that the thing they hate most is when their misconduct is recorded. You really don’t chose to just go to the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (ED OCR) to cooperate, you have to be so shocked by what you’re seeing, and treated with such contempt for objecting to its occurrence that they simply leave you no choice but to want to nominally turn against them.

https://zacharyellison.substack.com/p/part-20-usc-takes-out-a-confidential

This is my story. I know to some people this seems like a world away, but I can assure you this has been and continues to be the front page issues of the news of Los Angeles. So I hope that people will find it to be an interesting read, versus a battery of complaints.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Cheers,

Zach