Ask a Manager: My new job requires me to take an oath of allegiance

[ermingarden]

(#5 at the link.)

I am a PhD student graduating this summer, and I have just signed on to a fantastic job that I am really excited about. I’m moving from the east coast to California, where I will work for the University of California with my salary paid by a federal grant.

I received my onboarding paperwork today, and along with all the normal stuff, it included an “Oath of Allegiance.” I am required to sign it in front of a witness who is “legally authorized to administer oaths.” Here’s the full text:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.”

Am I right in thinking this is insane? On the one hand, it doesn’t bother me that much because I can’t see it ever coming into play. I definitely don’t have the type of job where I’m likely to encounter enemies, foreign and domestic, seeking harm to the constitutions of my state or country (and if they do I’m peacing out, thanks). But I feel weird about signing something this intense, and I don’t really want to. Can they legally require this as a condition of employment?

Yep, they can require it. In fact, it looks like all California state employees are required to take that oath, and all federal employees have one too.

Comments

[ashbet]

I am creeped-out by routine fingerprinting — I did it voluntarily when I was applying for a position that was explicitly working with abused children, but I don’t want to be printed (and thus in the criminal-justice system) for, say, a secretarial job.

I spent years working in government contract law (and, later, worked for a govt contractor), but never had to take an oath — I did have a minimal interview for my boss’ security clearance at one point, though.

[melannen]

Exactly.

It feels particularly wrong for a church - yeah, if you're going to be in a specific position of trust with other people's children, fine. But if you can't go to a Christian church to get a second chance after having messed up, what even is a Christian church for?

[ermingarden]

It wasn't required in order to attend the church! Just as a volunteer. And a past conviction for drug possession, for example, wouldn't have raised a red flag in this situation.

Respectfully, taking measures to protect vulnerable members of a community isn't in conflict with spiritual values of forgiveness and unconditional love. And being too quick to brush something under the rug as soon as someone says they've changed is part of what made child sexual abuse so widespread in the Church.

[melannen]

That's true, it's a tough call! But does protecting vulnerable members of the community really require that other members of the church know about a choir member's past drug conviction? Or really, even about a choir member's name on a list of sex offenders, if they aren't going to be supervising young people?

There are definitely fingerprint-included background checks where the organization asks about only very specific things and doesn't hear back if anything else comes up. My church does those for Sunday school teachers, pastors, and adult nursery volunteers. But even those have a really steep chilling effect on the kind of people who are disproportionately likely to have unjust criminal records, whether they would pull up those records or not. You might want to scare them out of being Sunday School teachers, but do you need to scare them out of working on the garden? They also need to have a way exist as people in the world.

My church also works heavily with prison and homeless ministries on the ground level and almost always has at least one or two volunteers or part-time employees or partner workers who would not pass a standard check. You could say that with those people you will do the checks but leave the option to make a judgement call - but if you're overriding them at will, what are you getting from them that's worth the chilling effect?

Certainly run relevant checks on the people who are going to be trusted alone with other people's children, and the people who are going to be the authority figures that other people would bring reports of problems to. But there are absolutely middle grounds between "quickly brush it entirely under the rug" and "mark someone as unfixably bad and untrustworthy because they are on a government list". In fact, the acceptance of the second is generally what leads to the first, because if middle grounds aren't provided, people will generally choose "nothing really happened" over "this is a Bad Person we can't interact with anymore". And questions of how to balance protecting the community with providing support to everyone who needs it is always a struggle, but it's really deep down inherently what Christian doctrine is about struggling with! Christian communities *should* struggle with this, it's when they stop struggling and think they know that they go wrong.

(Also, seriously, sex offender listings like show up in those checks are really, really bad at filtering out the people who are a danger to your kids. If *all* you're doing is a fingerprint check, you're not protecting your community, you're protecting your own ass. The people who are a real danger to your kids are the ones who haven't made it onto the lists, and most of the things that get you on the lists aren't directly correlated with committing in-person crimes against actual children.)

[ermingarden]

It absolutely doesn't "require that other members of the church know about a choir member's past drug conviction" or presence on the sex offender registry! None of this was, or should be, made public. I wasn't at all involved in the administration side of this – which was done at the diocesan level, not the parish level – but to my knowledge nothing was widely disseminated.

I also want to note that we've been discussing this in the context of background checks, but I don't think that was the sole purpose behind getting fingerprints. Fingerprints certainly aren't necessary for sex offender registries: I don't know off the top of my head how the CA registry works, but here in NY, the list of level 2 and 3 sex offenders (the higher levels) is publicly available online, and for level 1 offenders you call a hotline and provide a name and other piece of identifying information (e.g., driver's license number, SSN, birthdate) to check if someone is on the list; I expect the system in CA is similar. True, a fingerprint check might turn up an arrest that didn't lead to a conviction, or someone might be using a fake name, but I think a major rationale for the general fingerprinting requirement was proactive rather than retrospective and aimed at having evidence in case a volunteer committed a crime in the future.

I agree that sex offender registries not being differentiated based on whether a person's victim was a child or an adult results in some people being subject to restrictions (e.g., not being able to live near schools) that really don't need to apply to them. But that's not a problem I expect anyone will be dedicating administrative resources to in the foreseeable future – sex offenders, even if their victims were all adults, aren't exactly the most sympathetic constituency.

mark someone as unfixably bad and untrustworthy – I do think those are two very different things.

[cut for non-graphic discussion of child sexual abuse]

As an example, I worked on a case a couple of years ago against a woman who had sexually abused her children for over a decade. Now, I don't believe anyone is truly irredeemable. I hope she someday repents of what she's done and becomes a better person; I regularly pray for her. But no matter how she changes, I would never – not if a hundred years had passed without evidence of reoffending since she were released from prison – trust her to be left alone with a child. Even if I truly believed she was no longer dangerous! I would't trust my own assessment enough to take that risk.

[liv]

This is a really good point: if you are going to do background checks you have to be willing to enforce them when they come up positive. If someone has a past conviction involving harm to children, they certainly can't do a role that involves contact with children. But if someone has a basically irrelevant criminal record (which might be about a crime they actually committed, or an unjust one), then you're absolutely right that orgs shouldn't just exclude them from all possible interactions. Exist as people in the world is a great phrasing!

When I worked in a medical school we asked for background checks, which was reasonable because our students had loads of patient contact and that would obviously include kids and vulnerable adults, it's not incidental, it's very much the core point of training to be a doctor. However, what actually happened was that a new student showed up who had a past stupid firearms rap. (I'm in the UK, it's illegal to use an unlicensed airgun to shoot squirrels, it's a very different legal context from having a constitutional right to mess around with all kinds of guns.)

Outcome: total meltdown. The fact that someone as a teenager had done something stupid and illegal didn't in any way make him unsuitable to be a doctor in his 30s. But the school were unconsciously assuming that the sort of people who apply to medical school are nice middle-class teenagers who don't get mixed up in that sort of thing, and when someone was admitted who didn't fit that profile, it turned out we had no procedure in place to handle it. Which was of no help in protecting anyone from potentially abusive doctors, and had a big chilling effect in blocking people from even applying to med school.