Former UTS dean of science Dianne Jolley has been found guilty after facing trial in the NSW District Court for having sent a series of threatening letters to herself between the months of July and November in 2019.
The letters included suggestions she had been poisoned, photographs of her face with a red line through it, and even a pair of her underwear, resulting in $127,586.93 worth of security measures.
She began sending herself these threats following months of staff and student opposition to the closure of the long-running Bachelor of Health Science (Traditional Chinese Medicine) degree and its Chinese Medicine Clinic at UTS.
The closure was financially motivated, with the Faculty of Science viewing the course as neither fiscally viable nor in the faculty’s strategic direction.
Jolley was captured on CCTV writing one of her own threatening letters on her work computer, and forensic analysis revealed that Ms Jolley had left her fingerprints on the sticky side of a stamp used to send one of these threats to her office.
“We condemn the actions of University Deans who make attacks on our education and on staff, and then attempt to victimise themselves.” UTS Education Officer Ellie Woodward said in a statement to Honi. “We condemn making out students and staff who campaign against the cuts at UTS as being violent and threatening.”
Dianne Jolley’s act of self-harassment when faced with backlash over education cuts bears similarities to FASS Dean Annamarie Jagose’s letter in which she claimed protestors’ chants “made an insinuatingly gendered recourse to [her] first name only.”
