The Cow shrugged. Apologies notwithstanding, her level of alienation from the institution still precluded her participating in the climate survey, however well-intentioned its aspirations, and so her level of interest in, and engagement with, it had blocked such musings.
Gramsci persisted. "They say they're monitoring IP but are not linking it to response. So then... if they get 253 responses from the same IP, how do they know which are the 252 multiplicate responses to disregard?"
The Cow sighed. "Who says they warrant disregarding?" she asked. "There are many people in the University without a computer on their desks, or even a desk. If you're a shelver in the Library, say, you're likely to use a shared PC to access your mail, and so several responses from a single PC could be quite legitimate!"
"Perhaps," conceded Gramsci, "but how could they tell if those responses are from bona fide staff, and not arb others? Students, for example, or even - shock horror - contract workers belonging to the outsource companies?"
The Cow snorted. "I suppose if they get more than one response claiming to be from an African woman full professor, they'll realise something is amiss, but perhaps not otherwise," she guessed.
"And what about off-Campus IPs?" Gramsci demanded. "On the one hand, those could quite legitimately be from staff members trying to do the survey from home, where there's bandwidth, rather than from their offices, where there's none... but they could just as easily be from disgruntled former staff now working at Stellenbosch, or anyone else wanting to register an opinion!"
"Perhaps," shrugged the Cow, "but I'm really not sure what all the fuss is about. Those opinions are all out there, anyway - it hardly needs a survey to validate them. If people stopped to listen to what their colleagues said, once in a while, or read what was freely posted on discussion lists or blogs, or even raised in meetings, they'd get a sense of the issues."
"But not a sense of how many people felt like that!" insisted Gramsci.
"Oh?" the Cow raised an eyebrow. "And a survey with contestable means of ensuring representativity and validity will do that how?"
Gramsci rolled all eight of his eyes dramatically. Circular arguments were very bad for his blood pressure.
"Still," he added, "We do have the first recorded admission of strategic error, and written apology from a member of the SLG. That in itself constitutes an historic event."
The Cow chuckled. "Perhaps they've just never made mistakes before?"
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