Harper Valley PTA vs Mrs. Johnson

As you are aware, this office has a policy of Googling potential hirees for photographic evidence of undisclosed moral turpitude in their past. Using this approach, we have already sent three questionable job applicants packing, thus protecting the university's future students from the no-doubt corrupting influence of a drunken pirate, a proselytizing "naturist," and an outwardly demur young lady who in reality attended a Halloween party in 2007 disguised (all too convincingly, alas) as a so-called "pole dancer," complete with leather lasso, Dallas Cowboy short shorts, and a pair of L.E.D.-lit ornamental spurs sparkling about her (admittedly somewhat dainty-looking) ankles. Despite the media firestorm that followed our "outing" of this trio of applicants, the University stands by its policy of evaluating online photographic evidence as part of their pre-employment background checks of teacher wannabes. From a legal standpoint, our Department lawyers are defending our new policy by pointing to the 1968 Supreme Court decision in the case of Harper Valley PTA vs. Mrs. Johnson, a case that proved that officially established local boards can be as closed-minded as they please.

Mrs. Johnson, as you may recall, was a Harper Valley widowed wife who had a teenage daughter who attended Harper Valley Junior High. The PTA had accused the mother of "wearing her dresses way too high" and of "runnin' around with men and goin' wild." They went on to declare that the woman in question should not be "bringin' up your little girl that way." Mrs. Johnson was defiant, however (she had actually worn her miniskirt into the room that night) and denounced the entire board as hypocrites, pointing out that its president (one Bobby Taylor) had repeatedly asked her for a date, that if anyone cared to check her breath, they'd find that PTA Secretary Shirley Thompson had "had a little nip of gin," and that Mr. Harper, the grandson of the school's namesake benefactor, was AWOL that night because he had "stayed too long at Kelly's Bar again." Ignoring what they called her "irrelevant and mean-spirited" counter-charges, the board then voted 8-0 to censure the said Mrs. Johnson, a position that the Supreme Court eventually upheld (though Mrs. Johnson's lawyers later insisted that at least half of the justices "weren't wearing any pants" under their robes when they did so).

Despite this vindication from the highest court in the land, our online morality checks are likely to become more difficult to administer in the future, thanks to a new counter-strategy that is increasingly being adopted by our job applicants. Teacher candidates who are aware of some past indiscretion on their part that is (or might be) photographically documented online have now started coming to our interviews armed with a list of still other online photographs that they believe will cast them in a correspondingly positive moral light. Then, if the interviewer confronts them with an embarrassing online photograph from the job candidate's apparently mis-spent youth, the applicant will request that the interviewer also view these additional photographs, claiming that an accurate appraisal of the candidate's moral suitability for the teaching profession can only be made if the negative evidential value of the former is balanced against the positive evidential value of the latter.

As a rule, the pejorative pixels are so damning in any given case that it would take a very angelic slide show indeed to succeed in lowering the red flag that the originally incriminating photograph(s) had raised in the minds of our professionally censorious hiring panels. (If a half-clad job candidate is caught on film cantering about a probably private beach by firelight, good luck finding a photograph inherently moral enough to reverse the tawdry impression that such a spectacle will vouchsafe our panel of straitlaced reviewers -- especially if said applicant has a coy and mincing gait in the photograph in question, tussled but not entirely unruly locks, and is dancing with obviously pre-waxed thighs around a positively rip-roaring bonfire, perhaps even chanting some kind of eldritch liturgy to a seemingly pagan moon!) Still, in order to be fair, we must consider all evidence, so to ensure consistency of treatment and to speed the hiring process under this new paradigm, the Department will soon be issuing guidelines to help our hiring committees determine whether the exculpatory value of an applicant-supplied photograph can be said to adequately counterbalance the moral flaws that the committee found implicit in the original "gotcha" photographs that they had turned up in advance of the job interview.

The complete guidelines will be released by the end of the Month, but the following sample rule should give you an insight into the new "photographic moral calculus" that the university will henceforth be employing when evaluating applicants for teaching positions:




Sincerely,

Wilbur B. Fusterby