Massey ignored complaints about predator professor

The Herald reports:

Massey University received multiple complaints about former journalism professor Grant Hannis in the months after his arrest for sexually assaulting an elderly woman but did not act on them.
Hannis was sentenced to eight months home detention on Friday for an indecent act against an 82-year-old dementia sufferer in her rest home.
After news of his offending broke, Massey initially said there had been no issues with his behaviour aside from an incident of ‘rudeness in the classroom’ in October.
But the Herald can reveal that several complaints were made by female students alleging intimidation, aggression and inappropriate jokes about sexual assault by Hannis.

Maybe if Massey University hadn’t been so focused on trying to protect students from hearing from Don Brash, they might have been more responsive to complaints about Mr Hannis.

It really is quite sickening when you think about it. The rationale in the e-mails between the senior leaders of Massey about Don Brash were all about how allowing students to hear from him could be a safety issue – that some staff and students would feel unsafe, if he was allowed to speak.

So Massey claimed to be so focused ion safety of staff and students that they did everything they could to stop Brash speaking, while ignoring actual complaints from female students about one their senior staff members.

It seems the complaints were just ignored. There was no system to record them, pass them on, detect a pattern etc. Just ignored them – and then claimed there had been no complaints.