While chairman of the board at Ivy Tech Community College, V. Bruce Walkup bombarded college officials and powerful friends with emails filled with political diatribes and sexist jokes, some that included nude pictures of women.
The emails — which featured jokes about erectile dysfunction and breast size, and pictures that compared naked women to various animals — appear to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of Ivy Tech’s sexual harassment policy. Yet they were allowed to continue for at least six months before administrators asked Walkup to cease sometime this year.
[. . .]College officials said they “blocked and deleted” Walkup’s emails, a move that puts administrators in the awkward position of correcting a member of their own governing board.
Walkup, a former IndyCar driver and bank executive, is no longer chairman, but he remains on the Ivy Tech board. And, while college officials have no power to sanction or remove a trustee, they appear to have made no overtures to the one man who does have such power: the governor.
We fool ourselves sometimes into thinking such people no longer exist, but once in a while one pops up to remind us that bad taste never disappears. This guy really thought that stuff was funny?
I feel for the Ivy Tech people who didn't speak up because Walkup was so powerful. But isn't that the very essence of harassment, directing such crap at people you have power over?
