Quaker teacher fired for changing loyalty oath

Quaker teacher fired for changing loyalty oath
California State University East Bay has fired a math teacher after six weeks on the job because she inserted the word “nonviolently” in her state-required Oath of Allegiance form.

This reminds me of something that happened to me.  After getting my masters degree in Aerospace Engineering in 1992, I was continuing to work at a local Boulder-based software company where I had been an intern for about 4 years.  But I wanted to put my high falutin’ degree to work, and so I applied for a job out in Virginia.  This particular job would have been doing software development of aeronautical simulation software for a massive government contractor called Computer Sciences Corporation.  CSC did some contract software work for NASA at the Langley Research Center, which is where I had done a summer internship a few months earlier.

I was delighted when the company invited me to come interview in person.  They paid for my airfare, car rental, and hotel for one night.  So I flew out there on a Saturday.  Nobody at NASA works on a Saturday, so the place was pretty empty except for these 2 or 3 guys who were there to interview me.  The interview went OK, I thought.  I wasn’t a top notch expert in the particular skill they were looking for, but I was very confident that I could apply what I knew to pick it up quickly.  The interview then ended with a bunch of paperwork.

One piece of paperwork was a long statement that I had to read and sign.  This page-long statement included a lot of the usual stuff you’d expect, like promising not to steal company secrets, promising not to embezzle money, promising not to work for a competitor on the side, etc.  But then there was one sentence that was really long and was such legalese that I had to read it twice to understand what it was saying.  Essentially this statement was saying that I promised – on threat of losing my job – to never break any laws that are in effect anywhere CSC did business.

I thought about it for a while.  I had no problem promising to not break any laws in the jurisdiction where I worked, while I was on the job.  But promising to not break any laws while off the job was a bit extreme.  I couldn’t in good faith promise to never drive faster than the speed limit, for instance.  But that wasn’t what set me off.  I knew this company did business overseas, including in some countries with really draconian legal systems, like Saudi Arabia.  So, by signing this agreement, I was promising to not break any laws of Saudi Arabia even though I live and work in the USA.  They have so many freakish laws there, that I can’t even pretend to know them all.  I’m sure it would be against the law in Saudi Arabia for me to have sex with my girlfriend, or to drink alcohol, or to wear a hat on a Tuesday.

So I crossed out the offending clause of the sentence, and signed the rest.

After the interview, I stayed the night and then flew back home.  A couple days later they called me up to ask me why I crossed out that one clause of the agreement.  I explained that I couldn’t honestly promise them to not break any laws in foreign countries that I don’t even know about.  I thought I was doing the morally right thing – not making a promise I have no intent of keeping.  They didn’t see it that way, and I wasn’t offered the job.

I was disappointed to not get a job offer.  But after thinking about it, I realized I really didn’t want to work for a company that would rank legal ass covering as a higher business priority than honesty.