My Story - My Voice: ACU Celebrated the Human Library. Who Was Listening to the Human Being Behind Its Own Closed Doors?

On 25 November 2022, I received a LinkedIn notification containing a warm reply from my counterpart at another campus. I had congratulated her on receiving a Vice Chancellor’s Award for her contribution to the Human Library Project.

She wrote:

“Many thanks Vicki. It was such an amazing, rewarding project to be a part of. I hope you are doing well xx”

Her recognition was deserved and earned. I have no reason to believe she knew what I was going through.

Her kindness belongs in this story because it reminds me of the humanity that existed between colleagues, and of the profound contradiction between that humanity and my experience of the institution’s leadership.

We were both of value to this university.

Yet while one colleague was being publicly celebrated, I was fighting to have my safety, dignity, statutory entitlements and humanity recognised behind the scenes.

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What the Human Library asks us to do

The Human Library brings people together through conversations with volunteers who share lived experiences of prejudice, stigma and discrimination. Its purpose is to challenge assumptions by allowing people to encounter the human being behind a label. Its invitation is simple: “Unjudge someone.” (http://humanlibrary.org/about/).

That’s a powerful idea for a university to support.

But what happens when the person who needs to be heard is already a member of its own community?

What happens when she’s a longstanding colleague who has supported students, researchers and staff for years, and who says the institution is harming her?

Does the commitment to listening extend to her?

Or does it stop where listening might require scrutiny of the university itself?

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Two colleagues, equal human worth

My colleague’s award doesn’t diminish my contribution. My experience doesn’t diminish hers.

We brought our knowledge, care and commitment to the same university. We supported the people who make a university what it is.

My work in academic and research library services has never been merely transactional. Behind every enquiry, research problem and academic milestone is a person trying to get somewhere.

A doctoral student trying to move forward. An academic developing their research. A colleague building confidence or progressing in their career.

Supporting them requires expertise. It also requires patience, kindness, integrity, empathy and a work ethic grounded in responsibility to others.

Those qualities don’t disappear because the person who possesses them reports an unsafe working environment.

My humanity didn’t change when I asked for protection.

My value didn’t disappear when I became injured.

The difference, as I experienced it, lay in who managed us, the environments in which we worked, and how leadership responded when I reported harm.

What began within a local management environment became a much wider question about organisational culture and accountability.

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The public celebration and the private reality

The same Vice Chancellor whose office celebrated this work was part of the leadership to whom I looked for protection and accountability.

My complaint is about the gulf between that public celebration and the treatment I experienced while seeking a safe working environment and a supported path to return and recover in my role.

I have raised allegations of workers’ compensation fraud and corporate misconduct involving ACU and its insurer, Catholic Church Insurance. I have challenged the narrative used about me, the withholding of entitlements, privacy violations and the continuing failure to provide the safeguards and injury management support I have sought.

These are allegations I want independently investigated. An award notification cannot establish them. But it can illuminate the contradiction that makes this moment so painful.

A university was celebrating a project about seeing beyond assumptions while I was struggling to have my own account heard, my records examined and my humanity respected.

From where I stood, the public language of inclusion existed alongside an experience of institutional abuse.

That’s why this award stayed with me.

Just like my questions regarding Identity and Mission, it brought into focus a significant question:

How could the university recognise the humanity in this project while allowing the harm I had reported to continue?

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Ask the people who know me

Let’s ask the ACU community.

Former colleagues. Current colleagues who are still there. Doctoral students. Researchers. Academic and professional staff. People I have worked alongside and people I have supported.

What was your experience of working with me?

What did you know of my integrity, my work ethic, my kindness and my commitment to helping others?

Did the narrative you later encountered resemble the person you knew?

And if you felt unable to question it, support me or speak openly, what made that feel unsafe?

I cannot know what every person was told. I cannot know what pressures they faced, what they understood or what they feared.

Silence alone doesn’t prove intimidation. But the distance between the relationships I know and the isolation I’m experiencing deserves an honest examination.

Was anyone afraid that supporting me would affect their own standing, employment or career?

Did anyone believe that questioning leadership would carry consequences?

Was it easier—or safer—to accept the institutional account than to ask what was happening to the person behind it?

These are questions about the conditions in which people could speak and act. They are not a demand that every colleague should have known everything.

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What was happening behind the public thanks?

I have also struggled with the contrast between the conduct I experienced from people in leadership and the public expressions of gratitude to the Vice Chancellor as people moved on to other roles.

A public thank-you tells us what someone chose to say publicly. It doesn’t tell us everything that happened behind the scenes.

But I can ask whether those who knew about my complaints challenged the harm I reported. I can ask what they did with the information entrusted to them. I can ask whether protecting a colleague mattered as much as preserving relationships with those in power.

Leaving an organisation doesn’t erase the consequences of decisions made while holding authority within it.

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Perhaps I should be a Human Library book

Perhaps members of the university community should book time with me.

They could ask what it feels like to seek a safe workplace and then find yourself fighting two powerful institutions, while suffering forced isolation and exclusion.

They could ask what happens when you contest a false narrative while the institutions advancing it hold the resources, authority and access.

They could ask about the humiliation of private information being accessed and used. About the experience of discrimination. About the financial devastation of entitlements being withheld while you continue trying to comply with every requirement placed upon you.

They could ask what it means to keep documenting, reporting and seeking help while the harm compounds.

They could ask why I continue seeking a safe path to return and recover in my role.

And they could listen to the answers.

I offer that suggestion in the spirit of the Human Library’s central idea: encounter the person, hear the experience, and question the assumptions. I’m not claiming an affiliation with the initiative.

I’m asking whether ACU is willing to apply the principle it celebrates to someone within its own community.

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My contribution came from a human being

At times, the treatment I’ve experienced has made me feel as though the university valued my labour while treating the person providing it as expendable.

The years of service, the care, the professional knowledge and the contribution to other people’s futures were real.

So is the person who gave them.

My colleague deserved to be celebrated. I deserved safety, dignity and a fair response to the harm I reported.

Both should have been possible within the same university.

The Human Library offers an invitation to look beyond a label and listen.

My question to ACU’s leadership is whether that invitation reaches behind its own closed doors.

Will you listen to the human being whose story challenges the image you present, and allow that story to be independently examined?

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 571.

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Further reading: our trauma is not permission to harm us

“My Personal Story” — Finding Hope After Suicide

Content note: suicide bereavement and childhood sexual abuse.

I include this husband’s account because it speaks to the importance of hearing another person’s experience without reducing them to assumptions, stigma or a convenient explanation.

He writes about losing his wife, Rebecca, to suicide, and about discovering, shortly before her death, childhood sexual abuse she hadn’t previously disclosed to him despite their decades together. He describes the grief, unanswered questions and long process of trying to understand. His account can’t explain everything about her death, and I don’t present it as doing so.

This is his story. The circumstances are different from mine. What connects us isn’t an identical experience, but the humanity of people living with trauma and suicide bereavement—and our right to speak about what that means.

One part of his account particularly struck me: the practical compassion of the people at the workplace where he was teaching when he received the news. They took over his responsibilities, arranged travel, contacted family and helped him get home. They recognised a human being in distress and responded with care.

That response deserves reflection alongside a university’s celebration of the Human Library.

In my own experience, ACU exploited my trauma and my family’s tragedies in taking adverse action, rather than respecting our dignity and protecting our privacy. While isolating me from colleagues who knew my work, character and contribution, the institution constructed a damaging narrative about me and presented it to regulators and other institutions. I have challenged that narrative and the way it has been used to deny me protection, support and a safe path back to my role.

I asked for a psychosocially safe workplace, free from bullying, discrimination, harassment and overwork. My history of trauma didn’t make that request less legitimate. It made a careful, respectful response all the more important.

A university cannot meaningfully celebrate listening to people’s lived experiences while refusing to confront allegations that an employee’s own experiences were used against her behind the scenes.

The Human Library invites people to question the label and encounter the person. I ask ACU’s community to bring that same willingness to my account: listen to me, examine my records, and question the narrative rather than accepting it simply because an institution presents it.

My colleague’s deserved recognition is not the issue. The issue is whether the humanity celebrated through her work extends to an employee asking the same university to stop harming her.

Sharing our grief is not consent to its exploitation. Asking for safety is not a justification for isolation. And our tragedies must never become tools for discrediting us when we report harm.

See some of my own story:

The night I lost my dad to suicide

From the day after the tragedy

Part 1 - Suicide and the Greek Orthodox Church

Part 2 - Suicide and the Greek Orthodox Church

Part 3 - Suicide and the Greek Orthodox Church

Ostracism as adverse action - 2019

Associate director unfit to do the inherent requirements of the job - Part 2 - 2020

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Further reading: the difference was not our worth

“High Achievers Are the Target of a Bully’s Insecurities” — Bully Free at Work

This article describes how capable, committed employees can become targets of workplace bullying through tactics including misrepresentation, undermining their achievements, unreasonable workloads and persistent criticism. (bullyfreeatwork.com).

I recognise my experience in that description. To me, it reads like a textbook account of the pattern I’ve been reporting. I include it not as proof of anyone’s private motives, but because it gives language to conduct that can otherwise leave a person struggling to explain what’s happening to them.

My counterpart and I were both high-achieving professionals. Both committed. Both contributing knowledge, care and years of service to the same university. Her recognition was deserved, and nothing in my account diminishes it.

The difference was not our worth. It was the management and workplace culture surrounding us, and the response when I asked for safety.

One colleague could be supported and publicly celebrated while another experienced exclusion, harassment and the undermining of her professional standing. That contrast demands scrutiny of the environment, not an assumption that the person being harmed must somehow deserve it.

In my case, that the harm extended beyond individual managers. When senior leadership was notified, the response didn’t provide the protection I sought. Instead, I experienced continuing isolation and a damaging institutional narrative that I have challenged before regulators and other bodies.

That’s why I describe my experience as institutional abuse, not simply a difficult relationship at work.

A university’s public support for inclusion doesn’t answer allegations of exclusion within its own workplace. Celebrating the Human Library doesn’t excuse failing to listen to an employee whose account challenges the institution’s preferred story.

Where were ACU’s mission and Catholic social justice principles in the treatment I received? Where was the commitment to human dignity? What did the existence of an entire Directorate of Identity and Mission mean for an employee asking to be treated with humanity?

These questions concern what the university did when its values needed to become actions.

I’m calling this out because my life has the same value as every other person’s. That value doesn’t depend on an award, a title, my capacity to keep working through harm, or whether acknowledging my experience is comfortable for those in power.

My colleague deserved recognition. I deserved protection. A university committed to human dignity should never have made those seem like different possibilities for different people.

See some of my own story:

Bullying, discrimination and harassment - the initial complaint

Part 2 - Bullying, discrimination and harassment - the initial complaint

Part 3 - Bullying, discrimination and harassment - the initial complaint

Part 4 - Bullying, discrimination and harassment - the initial complaint

Part 5 - Bullying, discrimination and harassment - the initial complaint

Quality staff and university leaders that destroy the common good

Introducing the corporate psychopath responsible for SAFETY - 2020

WHS harm achieved by intentional psychopathic letter from a WHS national manager - 2020

Blocking, mobbing and truth - 2020

The “decision maker” - a now Vice-Chancellor - June 2020

Harassment continued - a violation of psychological guarding on medical record - October 2020