SPECIAL: Unsilencing the University of Southern California – Current Failures and Past Scandals
Published September 27, 2024

By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

The University of Southern California (USC) doesn’t want me to talk with you, much less write about it openly and honestly. Just over two years ago, USC’s Vice President for Professionalism and Ethics, Michael Blanton, snarled at me in a Zoom meeting, wondering if I was “going to send any emails.” Mike, as they call him, had come to know me as the staff member from the Office of the Provost unceremoniously questioning him, and for sound reason. One of his own internal investigators had named him in open court, alleging systematic misconduct, deliberate mismanagement of documents, manipulation of investigations, and intentional destruction of what’s known as a “preservation file” related to gynecologist George Tyndall. That still secret whistleblower even went to the press, to KCET, and then she fought a four-year legal battle all the way to arbitration. Now here I was staring him down, and what was he to do other than pull another hattrick out of the legal arsenal? Sure enough, he did, and soon I was on my way into the real world!

First, he made me promise that if he did it, I wouldn’t kill myself. You see, things don’t always end so well for whistleblowers, and the more I stared down, Mike, and the more he growled at me, the more obscene the situation became. Here was a grown-ass man, acting like a child, misguided in his belief that he was protecting an institution by breaking the law, and he knew it. Like the song from J. Cole, “Crooked Smile,” his look wasn’t so good, and I was far from an angel. The fact of the matter was simple: I was standing up to Blanton’s way of doing business. USC denied the allegations, of course, by the anonymous July 2020 whistleblower, and as near as I can tell, the case has now been settled. The truth of it, though, alarmed the faculty; was it true? Was USC really as corrupt as they say? Is the case simply that we shouldn’t trust institutions, Men and Women of Troy, betrayed by powerful attorneys like Blanton acting simply above and beyond the law? New General Counsel Beong Soo-Kim, a former federal prosecutor, couldn’t have been more obsequious in telling the faculty that there was no need for further investigation.

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