The Story of the Blocked
Blog Continues
By
Leonard Zwelling
This is the exchange of emails that took place last evening (Monday,
September 14) when the leadership of MD Anderson learned of my concern about
the putative blockade of my blog site.
They have attributed the messages faculty received of
blocked access to a technical glitch.
This is certainly possible. But as my response denotes, that was not
what most people believed when they had trouble accessing the blog
yesterday. As of 3 PM on Tuesday,
September 15, I have heard nothing further.
As
we said in synagogue yesterday, Happy New Year!
Here’s
the emails verbatim:
Received at 8:56 PM Monday, September 14, 2015
Dr. Zwelling,
I was planning to
write you tomorrow but a coworker just directed me to your blog post. It was a
short outage.
Your blog was
accessible at MD Anderson as early as 1 PM today. Perhaps even earlier than
that. I’m surprised someone didn’t tell you.
From what I am
hearing, it was likely related to an outside IT vendor’s actions. I was
planning to send you a note tomorrow but hoped to receive some confirmed
information before doing so and again, assumed you knew that it was only a
short outage.
Jim Newman
Sent from my iPad
Response at 9:39 PM, September 14, 2015
Jim:
Thanks for the note of explanation.
Could be, but the damage will need to be repaired with my
readers who believe that you have purposefully interfered with my blog’s access
within the firewall.
As you know as a communications expert, this is what paranoia
does. It is sad beyond measure that MD Anderson’s leadership is so poorly
trusted that the first thing that happens when a glitch like this occurs is a
shower of emails to me about how the leaders are blocking access to the blog.
I had no idea what was going on, but I had at least 3 people
send me the same story and in light of the email I received and printed about
the rest of the behavior of the leaders (previous blog), you cannot be
surprised.
I don’t take it personally for my major saying about leaders is
that I never attribute to malevolence that which can be explained by
incompetence. That appears to be the case here.
It is not I who have damage control to do. I am afraid it is
your boss. If the faculty thinks the worst when the offense is innocent,
he has a real gap between himself and his constituency–if he actually believes
the faculty are his constituency and not just the Board of Regents.
Sorry, Jim. Apologies, missing from your note, are way too
late. Besides, I don’t want an apology. The faculty needs one from Dr.
DePinho and has needed one for years. Best,
LZ
