Imagine you’re a professor somewhere. You hear rumors of the creation of a new Office of Student Property Security. “Whatever,” you think.
Yet before long, you’re summoned to a brand-new mandatory training session run by certified officers of Student Property Security. At this session (in-person back in the old days; now Zoom of course), they give you a tortoise-paced 90-minute Powerpoint presentation on the student property crisis and the appropriate faculty response. And the whole spiel can be readily summarized in a single commandment: “Don’t pickpocket your students.”
To me, such a training session would be insulting, pointless, and unhinged.
Why insulting? Because I would never consider pickpocketing my students in a million years. I don’t need a self-styled anti-pickpocketing “expert” to remind me of this elementary obligation. To quote Uncle Junior in The Sopranos, “Where does he get the effrontery?”
Why pointless? Because any professor who did pickpocket his students would probably not be dissuaded by a training seminar. Wrong-doers already know the rules; they just don’t care.
Why unhinged? Because there is no ongoing pickpocketing “crisis.” Sure, the media can pinpoint a few egregious scandals in a country with over 300 million inhabitants. But no matter how much outrage such scandals spark, they show next to nothing about statistical reality. And outrage directed at those who demand hard numbers – not horrifying anecdotes – shows less than nothing about real life.
What would motivate an institution to impose this insulting, pointless, and unhinged training? It could be an effort to diminish the school’s legal liability; if a pickpocketed student ever sues the school, the school can protest, “Don’t blame us, we run a first-rate anti-pickpocketing training program!” But it’s hard to imagine that a jury would find such protests convincing. The real motive, I suspect, is not that the administration is protecting their school from lawsuits, but that administrators are protecting themselves from hassling. Once the student pickpocketing availability cascade gets off the ground, the administrator who refuses to “do something” to “address the crisis” troubleth his own house and inherits the wind.
Now to be fair, no American university currently requires faculty to attend mandatory anti-pickpocketing training.
As far as I know.
And that’s great, because it would be truly Kafkaesque if any university did.
READER COMMENTS
Jason Brennan
Oct 20 2020 at 12:13pm
But, they will say, what if we had evidence that people engaged in “implicit pickpocketing”?
Mark Z
Oct 21 2020 at 8:04pm
Or does accepting full tuition from students, the school knowing full well it’s going to shut down everything when the completely foreseeable covid outbreak happens constitute ‘systemic pickpocketing?’
Tyler Wells
Oct 20 2020 at 12:52pm
I am not sure that it has anything to do with the universities, but “Safe Sports” is a great example of the above. “Safe Sports” came about as a result of the incredibly disgusting sexual abuse of young gymnasts by a US Olympics doctor (as I understand it). Naturally, cries of “lets protect the children” rang out and we now have to sit through an hour and a half long video every two years to get certified for Safe Sports. When I say “we”, I mean every person who has contact with children of every national sports organization. If your sports entity is even roughly connected with a national sports organization, Safe Sports is required. The end result is that all my volunteer coaches have to go through this training despite the fact that they are never alone with a child, ever. Plus, they don’t have it in Spanish, although it is available with subtitles.
Nick Ronalds
Oct 20 2020 at 7:40pm
Clever, and true.
Brad Hobbs
Oct 20 2020 at 8:39pm
My best friend from Boy Scouts eventually became a scout leader to continue his and his father’s commitment to the organization he loved. He had to take such a course and said it was a horrible experience and that it did basically instruct people how to engage in the action it was intended to thwart.
It wasn’t his job or his nature to pickpocket anyone. Shortly thereafter he was asked by a “victim” to do a bit of pickpocketing. He was horrified and scared. Shortly thereafter, he quit serving the Boy Scouts.
Rob
Oct 21 2020 at 11:05am
The point of the training is not effectiveness. It’s minimizing legal liability. If someone sexually harasses a student or employee, and the university or employer hasn’t explicitly 1) forbid the practice and 2) taken action to avoid a “hostile environment” then the university or employer could be held liable or contributory in a lawsuit or criminal case. Such training sessions are not 100% guarantees, but the lawyers have scared administrators enough to make it worth the money to reduce the risks.
Same would go with EEO law and racial bias. Most employers and employees and managers are neither inherently stupid nor inherently racist. But the lawyers are greedy.
Thomas Hutcheson
Oct 21 2020 at 11:32am
I might help if Federal regulations [ 🙂 ] required universities to disclose the cost of the anti-pickpocket program in there admission documents.
Adam Michalik
Oct 21 2020 at 3:57pm
Bryan, the real reason for such a training would be to humiliate you and demoralize you. Of course everyone knows that this training is stupid and pointless. However, you (well, maybe not you, you have tenure, but, say, your grad students) will still go, because not going implies that you are one of those evil pickpockets, or that you sympathize with them. You will be demoralized, because there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent such humiliation, and, moreover, any attempts to do so, any complaints will be used as a *proof* that putting you through this idiocy is required. This whole affair will send a strong signal to you that you must either submit, or leave, because there’s no future in the institution for dissenters. Thus, you’ll either lose your career, or start living by lies.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Oct 22 2020 at 5:23am
“But if it saves even just one student from having her pocket picked….”
Niko Davor
Oct 23 2020 at 4:56pm
“pickpocketing” offices and trainings have two purposes:
1. Build nice, well paid, dream job positions for friends and allies. Many people would love to get paid a nice salary and have a high status position at a “pickpocketing” office, where they get to do largely whatever they want.
2. Build political capital, authority, and leverage for specific political positions.
These offices aren’t pointless as Caplan says, They are dishonest and self-interested. I believe these offices serve their intented purposes of creating nice jobs and building political leverage. I don’t believe that’s in the interest of the public.
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