The Shameful Art of Acting Shamelessly: Verity Turpin and the University of Calgary's Institutional Gaslighting.

By Dick Gariepy | Big Thinky Ouchey

"The less you say, the less they can hold you to. But also: the more you don't say, the more it says about you."

A businesswoman dismisses concerns with a smile as a worried man stands trapped in a tube, facing laser-equipped sharks below a poster emphasizing "Teamwork."

Background: How I Got Expelled Without a Hearing

Let me set the scene. I was in my final year at the University of Calgary — one year away from finishing a degree I had fought tooth and nail to complete, while managing disability, poverty, and trauma. But events occurred that exceeded my capacity to cope and had to askl for help. What i got instead was expelled. I asked for help with very specific problems, they did not respond, and i turned their failure into advocacy for myself. They still ignored me, I filed complaints about grading inconsistencies, unfair treatment, and systemic barriers to mental health support.\

In return?

• I was trespassed from campus with no formal hearing.

• I lost access to student wellness services.

• A mental health screening was made a condition of my return.

• I was told I needed to "prove I was safe" in order to be allowed back.

  
  

Not because I posed a threat. Not because I broke rules. But because my persistence, clarity, and refusal to accept mistreatment made the institution uncomfortable.

This is what I mean by constructive expulsion: I was pushed out through backchannels, policy fog, and psychiatric gaslighting and then left to pick up the pieces of a life they dismantled.

At the center of this slow-burn expulsion? A woman who turned being spineless into a career, Verity Turpin, Vice Provost Student Experience at the University of Calgary.

Verity, Lets Have Some Girl Talk, Between You and I

Let me get ahead of a few responses I fully expect to see in my inbox after you read this.

You’ll tell me that speaking publicly about the sanctions you placed on me violates confidentiality — and that doing so constitutes yet another instance of non-academic misconduct.

You’ll probably also claim that this blog post violates the University’s harassment policy because you believe my intent is to humiliate you.

Let’s take those one at a time.

On Confidentiality

I know you love hiding behind the word confidential, but let’s be clear: confidentiality exists to protect personal privacy, not institutional shame. You placed those conditions on me. I am the subject of the sanction. I am not disclosing someone else’s private information — I am narrating my own lived experience. You don’t get to slap a gag order on the people you’ve harmed just because your paperwork is embarrassing.

On Harassment

And as for harassment? If describing what you actually did feels humiliating, maybe the problem isn’t the description.

I’m not stalking you. I’m not threatening you. I’m not demanding your time, energy, or attention. I’m holding you to account — publicly, factually, and with more patience than you deserve.

And besides, I’m not currently — nor do I ever plan to be again — a student at the University of Calgary. Your policy isn’t enforceable against me. And even if it were, it still wouldn’t make me wrong.

You act as if you have the power to compel others to act as you think they should, all while behaving as though no rule on this earth could possibly constrain you. You move through institutions like gravity doesn’t apply to you. You enforce standards you yourself never meet. You believe deeply, that rules are for other people.

On Morality (since you’ll pretend it’s about that)

This brings us to the real crux of it.

You will likely position your choices as institutionally moral, as if your refusal to acknowledge harm is justified by some higher procedural order. But here’s the problem: moral rules only function when those bound by them recognize that morality gives everyone a reason to act, not just their subordinates.

A man may say, “This was immoral, so what?”And we may condemn him, certainly, but not because he is inconsistent or irrational. Immorality, unlike irrationality, does not necessarily defeat its own purposes. It is perfectly possible to be morally bankrupt and completely coherent. You are proof of that.

You do not fail because you’re confused.

You fail because you have chosen,

repeatedly,

to prioritize institutional reputation over human responsibility.

Because you saw the power to disappear someone and took it.

Because you traded integrity for deniability.

Because when faced with harm, your response was to not respond at all.

That’s not caution. That’s cowardice.

That’s not professionalism. That’s abdication.

And it doesn’t make you safe from criticism — it makes you the subject of it.

So before you try to send your reprimands, remember: I’m not in your system anymore. I don’t owe you deference. And you don’t get to define harm when you’re the one who caused it.

The Non Performativity Machine

Every meeting I’ve had with Verity Turpin has been a masterclass in what Sara Ahmed calls “institutional non performativity” . When an institution makes declarations or gestures that sound like action but are specifically designed not to bring anything into effect.

Verity doesn’t lie to your face. She performs a different magic trick: she listens politely, nods empathetically, and then... says nothing. Does nothing. Explains nothing.

It's not passivity. It’s strategic inefficiency — weaponized stupidity.

To be clear: the harm I experienced was not just emotional, it was institutional.

The trespass order.

The loss of medical care.

The psychiatric conditions placed on my return to campus.

And yet when I referenced policy, precedent, testimony, and damage, Verity’s entire response has always boiled down to: "I understand how you feel. I truly am sorry that you had a negative experience, your distress is heartbreaking, but I disagree that we are the cause of any of it."

That’s not a disagreement. That’s a dismissal veiled in the tone of concern.

Ahmed writes that to lodge a complaint is to “become an institutional mechanic,” someone who knows where things get stuck. Verity’s job is to act like nothing is stuck. To keep the walls looking smooth, even while people are buried behind them.

In every meeting, she inhabits what Ahmed describes as the “gap between appearance and experience”—a place where support means surveillance, where concern means containment, and where silence becomes a violence of its own.

This is the genius of soft power. She doesn’t need to threaten you. She doesn’t even need to speak. Her refusal to engage with the facts is itself the message:

"You are not supposed to be here. You are not supposed to ask this. You are not supposed to fight back"

And when you do — you become the problem to be managed.

The Shameful Art of Acting Shamelessly : Gaslighting, Epistemic Self-Trust, and the End of Her Spell

Verity’s behavior used to affect me deeply. Her refusal to acknowledge my reality, her constant redirection into therapeutic jargon, her smooth ability to pretend nothing was wrong.

It all worked.

For a while. I doubted myself. I kept rechecking timelines, rereading policies, asking other people if what I saw was really what happened.

This is what gaslighting does: it makes you confuse clarity for instability. And it works best on people who care about being accurate, fair, and coherent — people like me. I didn’t just doubt my perception of her actions. I doubted whether I was allowed to call what happened harm. Whether I was allowed to call what she did wrong.

But that spell broke. Not all at once. It broke slowly, as I rebuilt my epistemic self-trust — the capacity to trust in your own ability to know and understand your experiences, even in the face of dismissive or manipulative disagreement.

What once made me spiral now just makes me laugh. I see her strategic vagueness, her scripted denials, her blank-face nodding for what it is: not professionalism, not compassion, but a performance of incompetence designed to avoid accountability.

She’s not composed. She’s not careful. She’s just shameless. And what once hurt now just makes her look small.

You Look Dumb Verity.

You’re not a bystander to the harm, Verity — you’re the author. Don’t act like your name just wandered onto the paperwork by accident.

Verity Turpin personally signed off on my trespass order. She personally authorized the mental health screening. These actions had cascading consequences: housing, safety, education, identity.

And when asked to explain why? She just doesn’t.

No evidence. No timeline. No rationale. Just blank silence and soft deflection.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t some bureaucratic misfire where blame is hard to trace. She signed the forms. She enforced the conditions. And now she acts like it all just happened, like it came down from the sky fully formed with her name magically attached.

There’s something profoundly embarrassing about this kind of denial, not just morally, but intellectually. It’s the kind of shame-dodging that makes you cringe on her behalf. Imagine wielding institutional power like a hammer, only to show up later pretending you’ve never seen a nail in your life.

What makes this even worse is that her silence isn’t strategic — it’s desperate. It’s the last refuge of someone who knows she can’t justify what she did. She’s not just avoiding accountability — she’s betting that no one will notice.

That blank stare isn’t mystery, Verity. It’s a loading screen stuck at 3%

Here’s the game: Verity believes that saying nothing protects her. That if she just nods solemnly and speaks in scripted generalities, she becomes untouchable — as though vagueness were a shield, and silence a form of virtue.

But silence under direct scrutiny doesn’t make you look measured. It makes you look guilty — and afraid.

In one meeting, I spoke for 30 straight minutes. I built a case: citations, policy language, dated emails, cross-referenced timelines. I laid out a clear validity claim — that what she had done was not only harmful but unlawful. I wasn’t venting. I wasn’t speculating. I was presenting an argument with legal and ethical weight.

And when I finished? She just nodded. And said, “Thank you for sharing that.” End of meeting.

As if I had read her a poem. As if this wasn’t about housing, survival, due process. As if my words didn’t produce any obligation — not to respond, not to engage, not even to acknowledge the weight of what had just been said.

That’s the absurdity and the insult. I entered that room engaged in what Habermas would call communicative action, goal-oriented speech aimed at establishing truth, understanding, and mutual recognition. I made a claim with evidentiary weight. I wasn’t just speaking to be heard; I was seeking consensus on what actually happened, on what it meant, and on who was responsible.

Verity responded with a gesture of sincerity, not truth. Not clarification. Just vibes in a suit.

She said “Thank you for sharing that,” as though I had handed her a watercolor, not a documented case of institutional harm. It sounded cooperative, but it functioned as the opposite. It gave the impression of engagement while delivering none. A performance of listening designed to avoid responsibility.

This is not neutrality — it’s strategic action masquerading as care. It’s the textbook definition of bad faith. And it is, by any serious metric, disrespectful: because it deliberately obstructs my ability to achieve the goal of truth-seeking while pretending to support it. It treats the communicative process itself as a weapon to be blunted — not as a space for resolution.

And the fact that she thought I wouldn’t notice? That I wouldn’t recognize the maneuver for exactly what it is, a classic institutional tactic of containment through performance?

That’s what’s truly embarrassing.

What Verity is doing isn’t diplomacy. It’s discursive gaslighting, the use of insincere speech to obscure harm while maintaining plausible deniability.

She’s not confused. She’s not being careful. She’s using the appearance of sincerity to block the process of truth — and hoping I mistake that for professionalism.

Verity heard ‘silence is golden’ and thought it was a conflict resolution strategy.

I presented detailed rebuttals. Procedural violations. Disability law. Policy breaches. Verity’s response? "I disagree."

No counterpoint. No correction. Just bureaucratic shoulder-shrugging.

There is nothing more humiliating for an institution than to be publicly confronted with facts and respond like a malfunctioning chatbot. Verity’s inability to respond with substance isn’t a quirk — it’s the entire strategy. Deny without defending. Dismiss without engaging. And hope the person across from you is too exhausted to call it out.

This is the institutional equivalent of a child standing next to a shattered vase insisting, "It wasn’t me." Only the child grows up and gets a six-figure salary for it.

She doesn’t engage because she can’t. And she can’t because any engagement would immediately expose the institution’s actions as unjustifiable.

And so she plays dead — intellectually, morally, ethically. Because she has nothing to offer but the well-rehearsed absence of responsibility.

But we see through it. This is not deliberation. This is not professionalism. This is bureaucratic pantomime — and Verity is playing the role of “reasonable adult” while hoping no one notices the childlike evasion behind the mask.

That’s not disagreement — it’s intellectual cowardice in a name tag.

You keep pointing to the manual like it’s going to answer the question you refuse to.

Verity’s main move is procedural deflection. She reroutes. She refers. She cites processes she herself does not follow.

It’s the oldest trick in the book: hide behind the rules you actively circumvent. The moment you ask for clarification, she gestures to another office. Another flowchart. Another contact form.

She weaponizes policy not as protection, but as obfuscation. Paper shields. Flowcharts of fog.

Policy becomes a substitute for responsibility — not a guide for ethical conduct but a decoy. Ask her a direct question about decision-making and she’ll point you to an administrative PDF. Request an explanation and she’ll offer you a hyperlink to a process you were never allowed to initiate.

This isn’t accountability. It’s a magic trick.

Now you see the institution.

Now you don’t.

What’s most damning is how confidently she performs this: like reciting the script makes her blameless. Like handing you the policy manual is the same thing as applying it. It’s procedural ventriloquism and she’s not just the mouthpiece, she’s the puppet too.

She’s not resolving complaints she’s composting them, hoping they rot into silence.

If my clarity looked like a mental health crisis to you, Verity, then maybe we should be more concerned about your grasp on reality than mine

Every concern I raised was rerouted into the language of "concern" and "support."

• My resistance? A "risk indicator."

• My pushback? "Cause for assessment."

• My advocacy? "Destabilizing."

  
  

She doesn’t argue — she medicalizes. And that’s not care. That’s coercion wrapped in therapeutic language. She turns your complaint into a symptom. Your argument into instability.

This is the cornerstone of institutional gaslighting: the refusal to provide justification forces the person harmed into an impossible epistemic position. If I am wrong, show me where. If I am not wrong, then the silence becomes its own violence — a tacit diagnosis without name, a decision without explanation. And if I protest that silence, it is used as further evidence of my instability.

The dilemma is exhaustive: either you are mistaken, or you are mentally unwell. There is no space for the possibility that you are simply — and inconveniently — correct. This is how institutional power disciplines its critics: not with argument, but with implication. Not by disproving your account, but by making you the problem for speaking.

Verity does this not through malice but through machinery. Her refusal to justify decisions is not neutral — it is an institutional act that casts all dissent as delusion. It is a form of epistemic violence: one that delegitimizes critique by framing it as pathology.

This is not supported. This is suppression with a soft tone.

It’s not just gaslighting. It’s institutional psychiatry cosplay with a PowerPoint deck.

You didn’t prove your case — you just avoided making one.

I showed up with policy references, dated emails, timelines, and cross-referenced documentation. I didn’t just come prepared — I came armored in evidence. Because when you’re queer, disabled, and critical of authority, people assume your tone discredits your content. So I brought receipts. Dozens of them.

Verity Turpin showed up with vibes.

She disagreed — but couldn’t say why. She frowned empathetically — but didn’t deny anything. She simply chose to look blank and wait it out. It wasn’t a rebuttal. It was a disappearance.

This is not incompetence. It’s a refined technique. In the language of Täuber and Moughalian (2022), it’s collective system-supporting inaction: a mode of passive resistance where those in power actively do nothing in order to protect privilege. Strategic inaction doesn’t look like violence. It looks like indifference. It feels like a shrug. But it’s one of the most effective ways institutions maintain inequity without ever appearing to oppose equity.

Because if you never take a position, you can never be held accountable.

This is how bureaucratic regimes protect themselves. They install figures like Verity — people who are socially polished, emotionally bland, and ideologically empty — to stand at the gate of institutional harm and absorb all attempts at accountability. Not by responding. Not by arguing. Just by refusing to register the complaint in any meaningful way.

Täuber and Moughalian describe this as a kind of pre-emptive containment, where dominant groups resist transformative change not by open conflict, but by making sure nothing ever happens. Verity doesn’t deny evidence. She doesn’t engage with claims. She simply behaves as though objective reality never entered the room.

That’s not neutrality. That’s structured disappearance. It’s the bureaucratic version of ghosting.

And it’s deadly effective. Because it doesn’t just fail to acknowledge harm — it makes the harmed person seem obsessive about continuing to speak.

So when Verity sits in silence while facts are prersented? That’s not professionalism. That’s a defensive mechanism of privilege. She’s not the emperor. She’s the curtain that hides the emperor’s naked ass while pretending to be a mirror.

And if the only move this leadership role teaches, is how to look blank in the face of injustice?

You’re not a VP.

You are a clown who has perfected The Shameful Art of Acting Shamelessly

On Shamelessness and Selling Out

Let’s talk about what this really is. Verity Turpin’s only real skill in her role is her complete lack of shame. That’s it. That’s the whole competency.

She gets paid VP money to pretend she doesn’t know what she did.

She sells herself out every day by performing stupidity on behalf of the university — bending her face into whatever shape the institution needs to avoid accountability.

And I say that with authority. I know what it means to sell yourself. I am a sex worker. The difference is: I do it with honesty.

Verity performs ignorance like it’s a job — because it is her job. She is a paid professional blank space. An institutional weather balloon. The soft edge of structural violence.

And for what? A pension? A nameplate? The right to say, "We followed process" while people’s lives get ground up behind her smile?

I have bee very polite with Verity, despite the violence she has done to me. I have refused ever urge and desire to call her what she really is. 

Im not holding back anymore.

Verity Turpin, i mean it from the bottom of my heart when i say ...

You are not a nice lady.

....Feels good to get that out.