Weber State professor resigns after tweeting threats at those involved in police protests

One post was a response to a video of a police car driving into a crowd of protesters in New York City while they were demonstrating against deadly force by officers. That action has been criticized both by the New York police commissioner and mayor, along with those at the rally who say they feared being run over.

Senjo wrote: “That’s not how I would have driven the car into the crowd.”

Cringe. Yeah, behold the very moment of the blind spot thunderstrike.

(I’m over here practically crossing myself, hoping I never wander into that kind of territory again, and recalling past events in my own life. In Twitter-style reactive & extroverted discourse, I think it would be easy to get caught up in the waves of cultural stake-raising, and end up saying something starkly uncalled for, no matter where you’re at on the sociopolitical spectrum.)

What’s also interesting are some of the INTJ fingerprints in the professor’s decision-making style. For example, he wasn’t asked to resign:

In a statement Wednesday, Allison Barlow Hess, the school’s spokeswoman, confirmed his resignation, but she said the school never requested that Senjo leave. He had been placed on paid leave while WSU began reviewing the situation.

…and yet the professor’s subjective intuition of future events seems to have driven him to make the decision:

I studied the situation and the public fury is too great. I have to resign immediately. There’s no other option.

No other option! Now there’s a phrase I’ve had to learn to watch out for. There are many, many paths to reconciliation—none of which are guaranteed to be easy, but quite often it’s the smarter decision than effectively taking one’s toys and leaving. And it would be just like a troubled INTJ to get over-defensive, pouty, and leave before their personal value proposition, their very worth! is challenged.

Which is really kind of sad in its way—I don’t think the main intent of the pushback is to challenge this professor’s right to be a professor, so much as it is to challenge his most recent decisionmaking. According to him, even though he made poor decisions, he was also acting in a manner common to Twitter’s particular pattern of discourse:

“I agree that my tweets were far beyond the realm of acceptable university policy as well as acceptable social norms,” wrote Scott Senjo in a message to The Salt Lake Tribune. “I made those tweets in the oftentimes vulgar, extreme back-and-forth that can occur on Twitter and they were simply wrong.”

“Those are my tweets,” he added, “but I don’t stand by them and will have to suffer the consequences of my recklessness.”

From this perspective, he sounds like he’s heaping punishment upon himself needlessly. If it’s true that he deserves punishment, it should at least also be true that a little bit of time and discussion would yield a more nuanced outcome for an experienced employee of a university.

Unless, that is, his covert intent is to punish those who are criticizing him, creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. “You said in the past that I’m a really talented professor? OK, here’s what happens when you act like you can even think on my level, and take me down a notch. I’ll take you down a notch by leaving.” The diva effect. This kind of thing could also be expected of a troubled INTJ.

So: Huh. I do wonder about the details.

Finally, bias blind spot is a formulation of the blind spot term which is new to me. Of additional interest: Naïve cynicism and Selective Exposure Theory.

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