When Mission and Identity Will Not Answer the Question - August 2022

23–30 August 2022

By August 2022, I was no longer asking an abstract question about ACU’s mission and identity.

I was asking how that mission applied to me.

I’ve worked at ACU for approximately twenty years, living the values the university publicly professes: dignity of the human person, service, compassion, community, respect for others and the common good.

My family’s relationship with the university reaches back even further, to the late 1990s.

That history matters to me.

And yet, after everything that had happened since I first spoke up locally on 2 July 2019, I was still trying to find somebody — anybody — within the university who would answer a very basic question:

How does what has happened to me reconcile with ACU’s Catholic identity and mission?

That question became particularly confronting in August 2022.

——

I went directly to Mission

I found the university’s Communications Officer (Mission).

The ACU webpage preserved in my records described the Communications Officer (Mission) as the person to contact for comment about the university’s “Catholic identity and mission”, or for comment from areas including ACU Campus Ministry, EthicsFinder and ACU Community Engagement.

That seemed to be precisely where my questions belonged.

So I contacted her.

On 23 August 2022, I left a voice message on her phone. It was a voice message I recorded and sent, due to the creepy nature of all this conduct, and for self-preservation from further harm, like this incident: http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/02/when-safety-is-denied-at-threshold-may.html

I have that recorded message and I have retained the transcript of exactly what I said.

I also sent written communications. The records include the lengthy text message I sent to the Mission communications number. The screenshot preserved in my records shows that message marked “Read.”

I also know that my emails were being received and read.

I wasn’t throwing questions into the ether. I was trying to communicate directly with my university through a position specifically identified by ACU as a contact point for comment about its Catholic identity and mission.

And I was asking for answers.

——

Listen to what I was actually saying

The voice recording is difficult for me to revisit because even through the written transcript, the level of distress is unmistakable.

I spoke about my twenty years at ACU. I spoke about trying to live its mission and values through my work and through the way I supported other people.

I spoke about what had happened after I asked for discrimination, harassment, bullying and privacy violations to stop.

I spoke about my father’s suicide and the impact upon my family.

I spoke about the loss of my financial security.

I spoke about isolation and ostracism.

I spoke about my attempts to get back to my work.

I spoke about workers compensation and the Injury Management Plan.

I spoke about being frightened.

And I kept coming back to the same question:

“So you tell me how all this relates to the mission and to the identity, and ethics and everything that is being promoted, because I lived that.”

That wasn’t a rhetorical flourish.

I wanted an answer, because this had begun with something so much smaller than everything it eventually became.

I had asked for a few agreed boundaries so that I could have a psychosocially safe working environment.

That was it.

I hadn’t asked for my life to become consumed by an institutional battle.

I hadn’t asked to become isolated from my workplace, my colleagues and the support network that should have been part of my recovery.

I hadn’t asked for my family to become caught up in my workplace matter.

I hadn’t asked for their privacy to be implicated, or for members of my family to receive communications that I experienced as attempts to intimidate them into silence.

I hadn’t asked to spend years documenting what was happening because documentation had become one of the few protections I felt I had left.

I had asked for safety.

And this is where the question of dignity becomes impossible for me to separate from everything that followed.

——

The dignity of the human person

My own relationship with ACU extends across approximately twenty years of service, and my family’s relationship with the university reaches back even further, to the late 1990s.

That history matters to me.

It makes what followed - including the involvement of my family in a workplace matter that was mine - all the more difficult to comprehend through the lens of the dignity of the human person.

This isn’t an abstract phrase to me.

It’s not something that belongs only in a mission statement.

It has to mean something in the treatment of an actual human being.

It has to mean something when that human being becomes vulnerable.

It has to mean something when an employee says: I am frightened.

It has to mean something when she says: I need this conduct to stop.

It has to mean something when she asks for a safe work environment.

It has to mean something when her family is drawn into something that began as her workplace matter.

And it has to mean something when the person asking the question has given approximately twenty years of her working life to the institution.

That’s why I keep returning to Mission and Identity.

How is any of this reconciled with the dignity of the human person?

Not as an abstract Catholic principle.

Not as words on a university website.

As something that must mean something in the treatment of an actual human being.

——

The contradiction 

This wasn’t just any employer.

ACU is a nationally registered, publicly funded Australian university. It operates across Australia and has a presence in Rome.

It publicly identifies itself through an explicitly Catholic mission and identity.

That makes the question of institutional conduct more important.

• What does dignity of the human person require when an employee says she’s being harmed?

• What does the common good mean when a staff member repeatedly asks for a psychosocially safe workplace?

• What does community engagement mean when an employee and members of her family experience the institution very differently, under current leadership, from the values being publicly communicated?

• What does compassion mean when somebody is telling you that she’s frightened?

• What does ethics mean if policies and values exist beautifully on websites and in public communications, but the person asking how those principles apply to her, cannot obtain an answer?

• And what does Catholic Identity mean if the difficult questions about institutional conduct are the questions nobody wants to answer?

They require answers.

——

“Polished words on paper mean nothing to people”

A week later, on 30 August 2022, I wrote again.

My email again asked how what I was experiencing, could be reconciled with the university’s:

“mission, values, ethos, community engagement, code of conduct and compliance of Australian laws”

By then, I was explicitly connecting what had happened to me with the broader public conversation about mental health and mentally healthy workplaces.

I wrote:

“Polished words on paper mean nothing to people.”

This captures the problem for me.

An institution can have excellent policies.

It can publish beautiful statements about dignity.

It can speak about compassion, wellbeing, inclusion, ethics, social justice and the common good.

It can employ people specifically to communicate its mission.

But eventually those principles have to encounter an actual human being.

They have to mean something when that human being is distressed, injured, frightened, persistent or asking questions the institution would rather not answer.

Otherwise, what do they mean?

——

I can only speak for myself

There were broader concerns in my communications. I was beginning to ask questions about regulators, governments, workplace mental health and what appeared to me to be much larger systemic problems.

Those questions remain important.

But here I want to be careful.

I can speak for myself.

I can speak about what happened to me.

I can speak about the records I kept.

I can speak about the communications I sent.

I can speak about the voice message I left and recorded.

I can speak about the text messages.

I can speak about the emails.

I can speak about asking for help.

I can speak about asking for safety.

And I can speak about repeatedly asking how the conduct I was experiencing could possibly be reconciled with the values my employer professed.

The text message preserved in my records ends with words that are painful for me to read now:

“I’ve begged and begged and begged. No more indignity and exploitation of the human person.”

That was August 2022.

More than three years after I first asked for a safe work environment. 

——

So what’s the answer?

That is the question I am left with.

• What was the answer from Mission and Identity?

• How was what was happening to me consistent with the dignity of the human person?

• How was ignoring repeated requests for a safe work environment consistent with the common good?

• How was involving my family in something that began as my workplace matter consistent with respect for human dignity?

• How was my prolonged isolation from my workplace consistent with an institution professing community?

• How was the level of fear and distress I was communicating consistent with a commitment to wellbeing?

How could I be telling the university, repeatedly and in increasingly vulnerable language:

I am frightened.

I need support.

I want to get back to my work.

Please listen to me.

- while the public language of mission, compassion, dignity and mental health continued around me?

I wasn’t asking the Communications Officer (Mission) personally to resolve everything that had happened.

I was asking a question that the very purpose of that position made particularly important:

What does ACU’s mission require the institution to do when its own employee is telling it that the institution’s conduct towards her is causing profound harm?

And if what I documented was consistent with ACU’s mission and identity, then explain to me how.

If it was not consistent with that mission and identity, another question follows.

Why did nobody intervene?

I had asked for a few agreed boundaries for a psychosocially safe work environment.

Look at where it went from there.

That’s the question I was asking in August 2022.

And it is the question these records still leave unanswered.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 460-462.