Critical Storytelling

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 Critical Storytelling

Series Editors
Nicholas D. Hartlep (Berea College, Kentucky, USA)
Brandon O. Hensley (Wayne State University, Michigan,
USA)

Editorial Board
René Antrop-González (State University of New York at New
PALTZ, New York, USA)
Noelle W. Arnold (Ohio State University, Ohio, USA)
Daisy Ball (Roanoke College, Virginia, USA)
T. Jameson Brewer (University of North Georgia, Georgia, USA)
Cleveland Hayes (Indiana University–Purdue University,
Indianapolis, USA)
Mohamed Nur-Awaleh (Illinois State University, Illinois, USA)
Valerie Pang (San Diego State University, California, USA)
Ligia Pelosi (Victoria University, Australia)
David Pérez II (Syracuse University, New York, USA)
Peggy Shannon-Baker (Georgia Southern University, Georgia,
USA)
Christine Sleeter (California State University, California, USA)
Suzanne SooHoo (Chapman University, California, USA)
Mark Vicars (Victoria University, Australia)

VOLUME 7

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The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/csto

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 Critical Storytelling

Experiences of Power Abuse in Academia

Edited by

Julie Hansen and Ingela Nilsson

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 LEIDEN | BOSTON

This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which permits any non-
commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and
source are credited.
Further information and the complete license text can be found at
https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use
of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as
diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further
permission from the respective copyright holder.

The open access publication of this book, as well as the production of the
Epilogue by Ingela Nilsson, have been supported by the research program
Retracing Connections (https://retracingconnections. org/), funded by
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (M19-0430:1), with kind support from the
Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul.

All chapters in this book have undergone peer review.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

online at https://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and
download: brill.com/brill-typeface.

ISSN 2590-0099
ISBN 978-90-04-52095-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-90-04-52094-3 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-52102-5 (e-book)

Copyright 2022 by Julie Hansen and Ingela Nilsson. Published by

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill
Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck &
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Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against
unauthorized use. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in
a sustainable manner.

Contents

1 The Same Old Story? An Introduction 1

Julie Hansen and Ingela Nilsson

2 The Polyphony of Academia 6

Ingela Nilsson

3 What My CV Doesn’t Tell You 10

Julie Hansen

4 Notes from the Margins of Academic Life 15

Anonymous 1

5 A Decisive Meeting in Department X 18

Dinah Wouters, Tim Noens,Thomas Velle and Anonymous
2

6 Phantom Libraries: Unspoken Words, Untold Stories and

Unwritten Texts 31
Moa Ekbom

7 On the Occasion of My Retirement 35

Cecilia Mörner

8 How to Be a Professor in the Twenty-First Century 41

Wim Verbaal

9 Bad Days 49
Anonymous 3

10 On Diversity Workshops: Challenges and Opportunities 51

Hanna McGinnis, Ana C. NÚÑEZ and Anonymous 4

11 Still a World to Win 66

Anonymous 5

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12 Fragments of Missed Opportunities: Or Unrealized Dialectical
Exchanges with a Mentor 68
Anonymous 6

VI CONTENTS
13 Flexing Muscles 74
Ingela Nilsson

14 Lessons I Learned at University 78

Ricarda Schier

15 Benevolence or Bitterness 81
Antony T. Smith

16 Observations from a Non-Academic on Academic Life 87

Ken Robertson

17 Harassment and Abuse of Power from a Global Perspective:

Or the Importance of a Conversation 92
Anonymous 7

18 What My Younger Self Would Have Said, Had She Spoken up,
and How My Present Self Would Have Replied 103
Ingela Nilsson

19 The Ghosts of Academia 105

Veronika Muchitsch

20 The Unbearable Shame of Crying at Work 107

Anonymous 8

21 Panic Button 111

Ingela Nilsson

22 Quit 117
Thomas Oles

23 Diving Deeper: The Redemptive Power of Metaphor 125

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 Helen Sword

Epilogue: The Privilege of Writing One’s Story and Reading

Those of Others 130
Ingela Nilsson

Epilogue: Gathering Voices for a Better Academic Workplace 137

Julie Hansen
CHAPTER 1

The Same Old Story?

An Introduction

Julie Hansen and Ingela Nilsson

Storytelling is seen by many as a universal human impulse, a way

for individuals and groups to communicate experiences and make
sense of life. It is also a social and cultural activity in which not
everyone has an equal voice. As the Czech dissident and later
president Václav Havel argued, “an examination of the potential of
the ‘powerless’ […] can only begin with an examination of the
nature of power in the circumstances in which these powerless
people operate” (Havel, 1985, p. 23). For those with a chance to
make themselves heard, storytelling can be an empowering act that
exposes injustice. Storytelling can forge a path toward better
endings. By daring to tell our stories, we enter into a process that is
larger than ourselves.

This volume of essays arose out of the courage of scholars and

students to share stories of the academic workplace that are often
only spoken of in hushed tones, if at all. The essays explore
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individual experiences as well as underlying institutional structures,
providing original perspectives on bullying, sexual harassment,
discrimination and other forms of power abuse in academic
workplaces. Topics include the risks of unequal power relations for
graduate students and junior faculty, the roles of gender and
ethnicity, the negative effects of the tenure system and limited
mobility, and

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2 HANSEN AND NILSSON

the implications of new public management for academia.

This is not a reckoning with any particular institution, department

or individual, but an examination of collective problems. Narratives
like these comprise necessary first step toward change. The culture
of silence surrounding harassment and power abuse in the academic
world needs to be broken, so that it will not always be the same old
story, but a better narrative that we can call our own.

The academic world presents many obstacles to sharing such

experiences. As some of the contributors observe, it can be difficult
to overcome the mis- placed sense of shame that victims of power
abuse and harassment often feel, despite the fact that they have
done nothing wrong.1 The nefarious phenomenon of victim-
blaming can be effectively mobilized to protect perpetrators by
discrediting their victims. Shame and victim-blaming in connection
with harassment are not specific to academia, yet some of the
peculiarities of aca- demic workplaces arguably present further
obstacles to speaking out. As Sarah Viren (2021) notes, “academia
is a hierarchical industry, one in which a small minority of those
with secure jobs or tenure have huge sway over decisions about job
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security for the remaining majority” (para. 56). A tight and
competitive job market can lead to a higher frequency of
harassment (Blomberg, 2016, p. 51). Studies indicate that bullying
in a workplace often does not stop until the harassed individual has
left it for good (Blomberg, 2016, p. 35), but this option is not
always available, or even desirable, for academic

THE SAME OLD STORY? 3

workers. Another risk factor appears to be emotional investment in

one’s work (Blomberg, 2016, p. 51). The fact that successful
scholars tend to be devoted to their work may ren- der them more
vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

Often there is a lack of institutional support, knowledge and

transparent practices for dealing with work environment issues,
even among some Human Resources departments. For those in
academic leadership positions, incentives to acknowledge problems
may be low (Twale & De Luca, 2008, p. 22). Researchers note that
“heads of departments today hesitate to admit that harassment takes
place at their workplace, as they see it as a disqualification of their
own leadership abilities” (Björkqvist et al., 1994, p. 174). Some
employees who file complaints face retaliation or unethical
behavior on the part of the administrators and consultants entrusted
with conducting investigations (Friedenberg, 2004).2

Yet there are compelling reasons for everyone with a stake in the
academic world to speak out against power abuse. Research has
documented the various consequences of workplace harassment for
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victims, and they include depression, anxiety, insomnia, post-
traumatic stress disorder and suicide (Björkqvist et al., 1994;
Blomberg, 2016). These unacceptable costs are not limited to
individuals, however. Although more difficult to measure, the
institutional losses for universities are undeniable, and these can
spill over onto students and the quality of the education they
receive, as well as overall research quality and output. Despite solid
data and the existence (in some places) of legislation and policies
intended to

4 HANSEN AND NILSSON

prevent problems, many academics are sorely unequipped to

recognize and deal with power abuse in their chosen profession.3
Many believe it will never happen to them, yet research shows that
“anybody may become a victim, provided that the individual has
less power than the tormentor” (Björkqvist et al., 1994, p.175). The
Swedish organizational psychologist Stefan Blomberg (2016)
debunks a common myth about workplace bullying:

There is a widely held idea that it is primarily people who behave in

an eccentric or strange way who become targets of bullying. Our
clinical experience on this is clear, however. The majority of those
targeted are strong, highly functional and successful individuals,
whom others— colleagues, coworkers or supervisors—perceive as
a threat. Many of those we encounter in clinical contexts describe
feeling shocked when the bullying process begins, because they
could have never imagined that they would fall victim to it. The
idea that targets of bullying are eccentric or divergent makes an
exception appear as the rule. This idea can also be fueled by our
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own fear. If only eccentric or divergent individuals can become
targets, it may be easier to situate the risk beyond ourselves. (p. 50,
authors’ translation)

Of course, perpetrators and victims are only part of the story. More
numerous are the bystanders who witness wrongful actions in their
work environment and face a choice between turning a blind eye
(complicity), joining in the destructive behavior (collaboration) or
taking action to challenge it. All too often, bystanders choose
complicity orcollaboration.4 Standing up for col- leagues in such a

THE SAME OLD STORY? 5

situation entails risks and requires courage, but a collective effort to

do so could be a catalyst for change.5

Collective is the key word here: the problems explored in this

volume are collective in nature and call for collective solutions,
requiring us to put aside competition in favor of collegial solidarity.
Parker J. Palmer (2017) posits the following:

The external structures of education would not have the power to

divide us as deeply as they do if they were not rooted in one of the
most compel- ling features of our inner landscape—fear.

If we withdrew our assent from these structures, they would

collapse, an academic version of the Velvet Revolution. But we
collaborate with them, fretting from time to time about their
“reform,” because they so successfully exploit our fear. Fear is
what distances us from our col- leagues, our students, our subjects,
ourselves. (p. 36)

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At their worst, academic hierarchies can feel unsurmountable and
paralyzing, particularly if one is fighting these problems alone. Yet
as the voices in this volume attest, we are not alone. There is
strength in numbers, and together we in the academic profession
can do better than the status quo.

We are grateful to the authors who took on the challenge of putting

their experiences into words. They come from a variety of
geographical places and backgrounds. Some have already left
academia, while others are just embarking on promising careers.
Circumstances allow some to publish under their own names, while

6 HANSEN AND NILSSON

others have chosen anonymity to protect themselves or others. For

every story that appears on the pages of this book, there are many
more waiting to be told. We are especially grateful to those of you
who con- tributed by sharing with us your unwritten stories, reading
drafts, and offering invaluable advice and encouragement along the
way. Your voices resound in this volume, too.

And now we invite you, our readers, to turn the page and begin to
heed these stories. Their narrators speak to you through different
forms, styles and genres. The plots and themes may already be
familiar, or perhaps they will surprise you. Regardless, we hope you
will contemplate alternative endings, because we believe it doesn’t
have to be the same old story.

Notes

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1 Stefan Blomberg (2016) observes that it can be difficult to measure
the frequency of work- place bullying precisely because most
people do not want to categorize themselves as victims of it out of
shame (p. 52).
2 For discussions of the phenomena of bullying and mobbing
specifically in academic work- places, see Keashly and Neuman
(2010), Lewis (2004), Twale and De Luca (2008), Westhues (2004),
Zabrodska (2013) and Zabrodska et al. (2011).
3 In recent decades, numerous academic career guides have been
published, some of which have the word “survival” in their titles.
They dispense advice on how to write productively, how to get
published, how to get tenure, how to balance teaching and research,
but most remain silent on how to cope with abuses of power.
THE SAME OLD STORY? 7

4 For a taxonomy of the different kinds of reactions observed in

connection with destructive work environments, see Thoroughgood
et al. (2012).
5 A recent study found that witnesses of bullying at work who did not
intervene ran a heightened risk of becoming a victim themselves
(Rosander & Nielsen, 2021). For more on the role of bystanders,
see Niven, Ng and Hoel (2020).

References

Björkqvist, K., Österman, K., & Hjelt-Bäck, M. (1994). Aggression

among university employees. Aggressive Behavior, 20, 173–184.
Blomberg, S. (2016). Mobbning på jobbet: Uttryck och åtgärder.
Studentlitteratur.
Friedenberg, J. E. (2004.) Political psychology at Southern Illinois
University: The use of an outside consultant for mobbing a
professor. In K. Westhues (Ed.), Workplace mobbing in academe:
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Reports from twenty universities (pp. 259–289). Edwin Mellen
Press.
Havel, V. (1985). P. Wilson (Trans.). In V. Havel et al. (Eds.), The
power of the power- less: Citizens against the state in central-
eastern Europe (pp. 23–96, J. Kean, Ed.).

Routledge. (Original work published 1978)

Keashly, L., & Neuman, J. H. (2010). Faculty experiences with

bullying in higher education: Causes, consequences, and
management. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 32(1), 48–70.

8 HANSEN AND NILSSON

Lewis, D. (2004). Bullying at work: The impact of shame among

university and college lecturers. British Journal of Guidance &
Counseling, 32(3), 281–299.

Niven, K., Ng, K., & Hoel, H. (2020). The bystanders of workplace
bullying. In S.

V. Einarsen, H. Hoel, D. Zapf, & C. L. Cooper (Eds.), Bullying and

harassment in the workplace: Theory, research and practice (3rd
ed., pp. 385–408). CRC Press.

Palmer, P. J. (2017). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner

landscape of a teacher’s life

(20th anniversary ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Rosander, M., & M. B. Nielsen. (2021). Witnessing bullying at

work: Inactivity and the risk of becoming the next target.
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Psychology of Violence. Advance online publication.
https://doi.org/10.1037/vio0000406

Thoroughgood, C. N., Padilla, A., Hunter, S. T., & Tate, B. W.

(2012). The susceptible circle: A taxonomy of followers associated
with destructive leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 23, 897–
917.

Twale, D. J., & De Luca, B. M. (2008). Faculty incivility: The rise

of academic bully culture and what to do about it. Jossey-Bass.

Viren, S. (2021, May 25). The native scholar who wasn’t. The New
York Times Magazine.

THE SAME OLD STORY? 9

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/MAGazine/cherokee-native-
american- andrea-smith.html

Westhues, K. (Ed.). (2004). Work place mobbing in academe:

Reports from twenty universities. Edwin Mellen Press.

Zabrodska, K. (2013). Prevalence and forms of workplace bullying

among university employees. Employee Responsibilities and Rights
Journal, 25, 89–108.

Zabrodska, K., Linnell, S., Laws, C., & Davies, B. (2011). Bullying
as intra-active process in neoliberal universities. Qualitative
Inquiry, 17(8), 709–719.

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 CHAPTER 2

The Polyphony of Academia

Ingela Nilsson

An important part of my job as a university professor is listening to

people’s stories. Since academia is such a multicultural, inclusive
and diverse environment, I hear an amazing range of voices and
stories. It’s an ever-growing collection for which I’m running out of
space. Where to put them? Will they go bad if I don’t store them
correctly? Should I sort them under specific categories? I need a
solution, they are taking over my office, my spare time, my life. All
these voices, spinning round and round in my head, urging me to
listen to them:

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I read the article over and over, hoping I was mistaken, that I wasn’t
reading my own words under someone else’s name. But to my great
horror I could only conclude that I had been right from the start:
this was a chapter from my dissertation, published under the name
of one of my super- visors. I didn’t know what to do, so I contacted
my other supervisor to ask for advice. She said it was not the first
time and asked me to produce evidence that the material was really
mine. I spent a week digging up dated files, putting together a time
line, but in the end, it didn’t lead to anything—the article is still out
there and I had to refer to it in my thesis instead of the other way
around. And

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THE POLYPHON Y OF ACADEMIA 11

now you’re telling me how import- ant it is to be open and share

our work with others, how the hell am I supposed to feel about
that?

I mean, it’s really sad to see how she keeps treating her PhD
students, and not the least the women, but what am I supposed to
do? I’m just one of them, with no power, and anyhow I have to
think about my own situation, because if I defend them, I will get
into trouble myself. It’s not so easy, you know, if I don’t put myself
first, no one else does.

We sat in the office of the head of department, and she told her
version and then I was supposed to tell my version, but even as I
spoke, I felt the doubt growing in the room, even in myself—is this
really how it happened, or had I misunderstood everything? Was
this in fact just a “version,” as the chair put it, or was it the real
thing? In the end, I didn’t file a complaint because the whole
situation made me feel so insecure and I had no wit- ness to either
the “incident” or the meeting. There are so many guidelines, rules
and even laws, but somehow, they rarely seem to work in practice.

It’s not as if he did anything, I mean nothing sexual, he didn’t touch

me or anything, never. It was just the way in which he talked about
women, always bringing up sexual situations from novels or films
or the real world. The framed poster he had in his office, depicting
half-naked women in some sort of ancient setting. The way in
which he would always stand too close to you, forcing you to raise
you head in order to look him in the eyes. The handwritten notes he
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would leave in your pigeon hole, instead of sending an email. Or
even emails that were somehow too private, but never crossing the
line.

12 NILSSON

But he never did anything, of course, it’s not as if it was

harassment, it was just super uncomfortable. But that’s life, you
know, all these men acting more or less correctly in the open but
secretly waving their dicks. What can you do?

So, I said, “This is not OK, you were so mean to him, this is no way
to behave, you should apologize.” But even though they had all
heard what had been said and had seen the student fighting back his
tears at the comments of the senior professor and then leave the
room crying, no one wanted to support my complaint. The student
was inexperienced and spoke broken English, the professor was a
large man with a red face and a loud voice, knowing how to exert
his power. They all knew that if they objected to his behavior, they
might be next. My written complaint was countered by a letter from
the dean, explaining that this is “simply the way he is,” nothing to
be upset about.

Everyone knew about his right-wing ideas, of course, they were no

secret and when he invited people over for drinks, he was rather
outspoken. But, I mean, it was his house and it’s a free country,
right? Of course, that last event was unpleasant and people
obviously got very upset, the Nazi thing might have been too much.
But still, telling the whole story to the dean and then forcing him to
apologize in public like that, it was pretty harsh, considering what a

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beloved teacher he had been for so long. What was the point, really,
what did she gain by turning him in? Anyhow, it was all forgotten
after that and things went back to normal, he kept teaching for at
least more

THE POLYPHON Y OF ACADEMIA 13

years and was awarded a pedagogical prize. We all make mistakes

you know, we’re just people.

I agree he’s a bit creepy, that’s no secret, but it’s your responsibility
to handle him. Make sure you dress decently, button up your shirt
properly— not like today—and don’t wear short skirts. Don’t
provoke him and he probably won’t do anything to you. This is the
way it is, so you might as well get used to it, that’s what I did, it’s
what we all do.

Then she went on and on about all the important places she’d been
to and the important people she’d met and knew, and how much
they appreciated her, and I really tried to look interested because
after all she is my senior and my supervisor, but in the end I felt
that I had to say something, so I waited for her to take a breath and
then I cut in, telling her that my article had been accepted by that
journal. I expected her to be pleased, since she had read it and
actually been quite helpful, but she looked at me as if I had
offended her, then forced a smile and said “congratulations. “She
then turned to her desk, shuffled around some papers and told me
that our meeting was over, she had important things to do.

I was at the point of crying and then someone at the back of the
room stood up and said, “Enough now, let’s move on. But first a
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five-minute break. “It was a professor I had never met before, from
a different university, and as I was smoking a cigarette during the
break, still fighting back my tears, he came up to me. At first, he
said nothing, just lit his cigarette and stood there, smoking. Then he
said,

14 NILSSON

“Sometimes people still do that to me, try to make me feel small,

intimidating me in front of others. But then I imagine them as tiny
people with tiny voices, of little or no importance. Let them
whimper.” He put out his cigarette, nodded to me and left.

I have tried putting the voices in the freezer, but they come back
and haunt me, sitting on the kitchen shelves, whispering from
behind the bathroom mirror, sometimes sitting at the breakfast table
while my partner and I have our eggs. I make up a Linnaean system
in my head: Helplessness, Power abuse, Boundaries … Why so few
stories in the categories of Respect, Integrity, Solidarity? There
must be more such stories, I’m sure there are more, but right now I
just need to find space to store them. Not in my head, but perhaps
in a book. Yes, a book might be a good idea. Taking us from despair
to hope. Yes, a book, they all have to go into a book.

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 CHAPTER 3

What My CV Doesn’t Tell You

Julie Hansen

A good CV showcases your skills and your academic and

professional achievements concisely and effectively. It’s well-
organized and easy to read while accurately representing your
highest accomplishments.

“WRITING AN EFFECTIVE ACADEMIC CV” (2019)

The academic curriculum vitae is a special genre, designed to be

both terse and exhaustive, plodding a straight and narrow path of
education, employment, publications … At the same time, it is
selective, trumpeting high points only, never lows. Unexplained
gaps would hint vaguely of failure.

A recent application for something or other prompted me to

undertake the tedious task of updating my CV. As I added new
entries, I began to reflect on the kinds of professional experience,
often unsought and painfully gained, that a CV will never
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acknowledge. To fill in those blanks requires a less self- assured
genre, one that allows for the winding implied by the literal
meaning of curriculum vitae— “course of life.” What follows is my
attempt at an alternative CV. In her memoir Educated (2018), Tara
Westover relates what it was like to study at Cambridge University
in the new

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WHAT MY CV DOESN’T TELL YOU 16

millennium. In the popular imagination, an arrival at Cambridge

signals success, and so it is in the narrative arc of Westover’s story:

After the porter left, I stood, bookended by my suitcases, and stared

out my little window at the mythic stone gate and its otherworldly
battlements. Cambridge was just as I remembered: ancient,
beautiful. I was different. I was not a visitor, not a guest. I was a
member of the university. (p. 255)

She tells of an unusual upbringing in rural Idaho, with survivalist

parents who were prepping for Armageddon and kept their children
out of school. Against these odds, the self-taught Westover manages
to get a higher education, earning a PhD in history. To Westover,
education represents freedom and self-invention, yet when she
arrives at Cambridge, she feels out of place.

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The circumstances of my own entry into academia fall somewhere
between Westover’s and those of the other students she describes as
blending in seamlessly at Cambridge. After graduating from high
school, I enrolled at the state university on the other side of the
lake. The oldest things on campus were trees, but I entered its halls
(Collegiate Gothic style, anno 1950) with a sense of awe not unlike
Westover’s at Cambridge. True to its etymology, the place served
up the universe from an infinitude of perspectives. I was drawn to
study

17 HANSEN

literature for its capacity to explore the full range of human

experience through words alone.

As an undergrad, I had only the vaguest awareness that there could

be a backside to this world that so entranced me. Not until later did
I realize there is no direct correlation between intellectual
refinement and treating others well. There were occasional rumors
of misconduct, but I didn’t want to hear these stories, much less
believe them. I told myself they were anomalies in an other- wise
benign world. Decades later, my former undergraduate advisor and
long- time mentor would relate over dinner some scandals from the
era of my 0student days. I didn’t want to hear them then either, and
my conflicted reaction sparked our first disagreement in years (but
I’m getting ahead of myself here …).

Looking back, I imagine that my aunt, the black sheep of the family
and the only other one to earn a PhD, must have faced obstacles as
a professor in the 1970s. When I was a teenager, she made me

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promise never to learn to speed type, on the logic that people can’t
treat you like a secretary if you don’t have secretarial skills. I broke
this promise, naively secure in the belief that, after the battles
fought by her generation, I would never encounter sexism in my
chosen career.

My undergraduate degree was made possible by a combination of

scholarship, student loans and the modest help my parents could
provide. High tuition made graduate school a long shot, but thanks
to a fellowship from a prestigious university, I could afford to spend
a few more years studying literature. It was in grad school that the

WHAT MY CV DOESN’T TELL YOU 18

contours of the downside of academic life began to sharpen. The

graduate students tiptoed around a temperamental departmental
secretary, lest she wield her informal power to our disadvantage.
Every Tuesday and Thursday at 3 pm, my small cohort would
breathe a collective sigh of relief at having made it through another
seminar on medieval literature without freezing up or starting to
cry. Misery loves company, but even this kind of camaraderie can
crack and fissure. In the beginning we were four, then three—too
few to withstand the atmospheric pressure. In an unforgiving
environment, it becomes harder to forgive one another.

Some professors exchanged harsh words in the corridors, others

didn’t speak at all. The majority were nice to students, but one
seemed to take out aggression obliquely, on the graduate students
supervised by a colleague he disliked. It was this that reduced me to
tears at my oral exams. Afterwards I was mortified not so much by

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the belittling words, as by my own show of weakness in response.
Many times, since in my academic career, I’ve told myself I need to
toughen up.

Another graduate student consoled me with the fact that no one in

recent departmental history had passed their orals without breaking
down. To the credit of the compassionate department chair, I
received her apology the next day. She was not present at my
exams, but had heard. Somehow, every- one had. She called the
incident unforgivable and attributed it to a feud that had nothing to
do with me. It helped to hear this, and I had, after all, passed with
distinction. You’ve been vindicated, said my consoler. Yet that
moment of

19 HANSEN

undeserved humiliation influences how I approach exam situations

to this day. Some colleagues might think I’m too quick to intervene
on behalf of students, but I can’t tell students to toughen up, seeing
as that’s never worked for me.

At the same time, the intense experience of graduate school was

addictive. Never have I learned so much in so little time (even from
the one professor who was not so kind). I basked in the aura of
brilliant minds. The faculty were generous with their time and
knowledge, my dissertation advisor ever-patient and encouraging. A
slow reader, I lived by necessity with my nose in a book, spending
entire contented days in an overstuffed armchair in the graduate
reading room (Art Deco, anno 1938). I made my way through long
reading lists, transformed by what I consumed. I traveled to my first

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conferences and took summer research sojourns in Europe. Two
Nobel laureates gave poetry readings at my department. I was
acquiring a taste for the intellectual pleasures of this profession, and
there was no question that the good outweighed the bad.

Not long after defending my dissertation, I got lucky on the job

market and accepted a position in a department distinguished by a
collaborative spirit. As a product of the American educational
system transplanted to Europe, I had a steep learning curve to
climb, but my colleagues gave me a leg up. It was from them that I
really began to learn how to teach.

I was fortunate to come to such a welcoming department straight

out of grad school, but I’ve since witnessed disasters in the
academic

WHAT MY CV DOESN’T TELL YOU 20

workplace. I’ve seen a thriving department, overflowing with

students, decimated by internal strife that no one could get a handle
on. The solution in the end was to downsize, rendering half the
faculty redundant. Before we reached that sorry state, however,
there was a five-day group therapy retreat, led by a consultant in
Birkenstocks with a mandate to diagnose and treat our deficiencies.
We sat in a circle eight hours each day, urged to reveal our
innermost thoughts and feelings. “There will be yin and yang,
crying and screaming,” the therapist had (rather alarmingly)
explained to me over the phone when I tried (unsuccess- fully) to
get myself excused on the grounds that I was eight months
pregnant. He assigned us divisive little tasks, like listing the five

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best and worst traits of each colleague. Reluctance to participate
was viewed as an act of insubordination, of which there were plenty
over the course of the retreat. If any good came of that experience,
it was that it united us in collective distaste and resistance. On the
fourth day, the therapist lost patience and accused us of
undermining his work. “Never in twenty years,” he complained,
“have I met such a hopeless group of people.”

Once an organizational psychologist, who had been hired by a

university to investigate a harassment complaint, explained what he
thought I needed to know: that being undermined by colleagues is a
normal part of any work- place—the implication being that I should
just toughen up. Needless to say, I haven’t followed this advice, and
it turns out that part of my education has entailed learning what I
am no longer willing to accept.

21 HANSEN

Yet my work life has been far from bad—consult my CV and you
will see the high points. I have been the beneficiary of generous
resources, monetary as well as less quantifiable kinds, such as
encouragement, kindness and constructive feedback. I have
experienced the deep satisfaction that comes from collaboration
with colleagues on equal terms, unmarred by envy and competition.
And the classroom always provides a welcome refuge from
collegial strife. The truth of the matter is that the course of my
academic life has wound through both good and bad, and as time
goes on, it’s getting harder to reconcile the two. Once, when
intradepartmental intrigues got so bad as to make me ill, the
physician who examined me asked where I worked. On hearing the
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answer, she shook her head knowingly, making it clear I was not
the first from my profession to turn up in her clinic. Yet I continue
along the well-trodden path, still

hoping the good can be made to outweigh the bad.

The above-mentioned dinner with my mentor took place at a

critical juncture in my professional life. By outward measures,
things could hardly have been going better, but I had been suffering
at an unhappy department for months and inwardly knew the
situation was untenable. Between the main course and dessert, my
mentor inquired if things had improved. They had not, I explained.
My mentor raised an eyebrow, expressed sympathy and offered
some well-intentioned but disappointing advice. Don’t fight back, it
will only make things worse. And it was then that the revelations
poured forth about professors I had admired as a student. In a
childlike reflex, I wanted to cover my ears to keep from hearing
things I would rather not know.

WHAT MY CV DOESN’T TELL YOU 22

At the same time, an angry question formed on my lips. Why are

you telling me this only now? My appetite for dessert was gone,
replaced by a sense of betrayal. He said he hadn’t wanted to
discourage me from pursuing an academic career, that he had hoped
things would get better over time.

A few days later, my mentor sent an apologetic note and I forgave,

knowing that the problem is a joint inheritance. He had just retired
after a long and significant career, and now I was the one in a
position to dispense advice. His choice back then was now mine to
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make—of what to be silent, and of what to speak. This book is part
of my choice.

References

Westover, T. (2018). Educated: A memoir. Random House. Writing

an effective academic CV. (2019). Elsevier.

https://www.elsevier.com/connect/ writing-an-effective-academic-
cv

CHAPTER 4

Notes from the Margins of Academic Life

Anonymous 1

1 Academic Harassment

They say, we’ve never seen him behave like that, so you must be
lying. (Chanel Miller, Know My Name)

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Dear Madam Chair,

Thank you for agreeing to see me and for agreeing with yourself
throughout our protracted and unpleasant interview. It was indeed
consoling to learn that I have imagined the whole unhappy affair;
now I can make an appointment with my doctor and ask for a
referral to the psychiatric services. Your confirmation that Dr. X.
has never bullied you was particularly reassuring; had he raped me,
the fact that he has not once raped you would certainly serve as a
very useful witness statement in his defense.

Permit me to congratulate you on your tactics. Pretending total

ignorance of the circumstances was a masterstroke (although, for
future reference, it might have been more effective to have
maintained the pretense consistently throughout). I shall always be
indebted to you for your invaluable advice, applicable to so many
difficult professional situations. Above all, I will remember the
golden maxim that when two people have a conversation behind
closed doors, either one of them is free to deny anything that was
said afterwards. In this context, I am assuming that you’re belittling
and patronizing comments would, if repeated by me, be added to
the list of things I have imagined.

Finally, I would like to thank you for pointing out to me how

grateful I should be for the privilege of being associated, albeit in
the remotest possible sense, with the faculty, and for clarifying my
position in the University as an official non person. I shall take care

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to refer to myself in future as “non persona non grata,” a title that
does honor not just to me but to the wider academic community.

Yours etc., etc.

© JULIE HANSEN AND INGELA NILS SON, 2022 |

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16 ANONYMOUS 1

2 Academic Collaboration

One of my greatest research pleasures has always been

collaborative projects. My first was with two other women. We
investigated the presentation of men and women, from literary and
social perspectives, in a medieval poem. After- wards, I heard
myself referred to at a conference as “one of those three weird
lesbians.” (Why else would women want to work together?) I have
to admit that in persisting, and going on to publish with one of my
fellow “lesbians” a paper on Renaissance love poetry, I was asking
for trouble. (Isn’t that what women do?) My next two collaborative
research ventures happened to be with a man.
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This did not improve matters. First of all, the editor assumed we
were a couple and sent a single set of proofs to my home address. I
had to photocopy them and mail them, as my supposed “partner,”
far from living in my marital home (which might have come as
some surprise to my husband, especially after the “lesbian”
revelation) was in another country. After our second joint
publication, my head of department at the university (a woman)
called me in for some career advice. I was to cease and desist from
research collaboration with a man, because everybody would
assume that the results were all his own work; none of mine.
(Really?)

Over the years, I have gone from bad to worse, collaborating with
people who self-identify in various ways. One thing they have in
common, though, is that they do not use gender or sexual identity
as insults or even grounds for suspicion.

Note to the Reader: Please don’t imagine that you have to sleep
with your research collaborators. You can, if you like, of course. As
it happens, I didn’t.

3 Academic Milestones

When I was just eighteen,

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You interviewed me for a place at university. You said, “The boys
will all run after you; How will you cope?”

When I was twenty-eight,

You offered me advice before an academic interview.

You said, “Just smile your charming smile.”

When I was thirty-eight and just- divorced, you crept up on me and

kissed

my neck. Your wife was in the next room.

NOTES FROM THE MARGINS of ACADEMIC LIFE 17

When I was forty-eight,

You started telling colleagues I was “difficult.”

When I was fifty- eight, you went too far.

I called you out,

and now, Sir, out you are.

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So, when I tell my students about teachers who inspired me, oddly
enough, I never mention you.

Publisher’s Note

The author’s identity is anonymized for this chapter. Brill is aware

of the real identity of the author. The inclusion of anonymized
chapters has been permitted by Brill in view of risks to the general
security of the author.

CHAPTER 5

A Decisive Meeting in Department X

Dinah Wouters, Tim Noens, Thomas Velle and Anonymous 2

1 Email Invitation

From: Frank Jacobs

<frank.jacobs@university.edu> Date: Friday, April 20, 2020 at

11:51 AM

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Subject: Convening an extra meeting of the departmental
committee

To: Department list

To all members of the Department of X To all members of the

Department Council

Dear Colleagues,

Today, the Faculty Board has forwarded the request by the

Chancellor and the co-directors, addressed to all departments, to
draw up a report in view of the general well-being of their
members, teaching staff, research fellows, administrators and
students. Our particular attention is asked for the situation of the
doctoral students and the postdoctoral fellows, due to some recent
commotion in the press. You all know the background and it would
be useless to come back to the case itself, but, nonetheless, we will
have to take a position on what was transmitted to the press and
mainly on how to avoid similar things from happening in our
department. This report will constitute one of the preparatory
documents to be handed over to those responsible for the risk
analysis that our department will be subjected to as a result of the
recent events. As this risk analysis ought to start before the end of
this month, we are obliged to convene a department meeting at the
beginning of next week. Our meeting is planned for Monday, and
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we start early, at 10 am, because we need a true discussion in order
to have a first draft of the report.

Both by email and during a quick and improvised discussion, a

number of colleagues have tried to single out some of the more
urgent points and problems in view of the risk analysis. They
particularly paid attention to the difficulties PhD students encounter
in their relationship with their supervisors. They could take as a
basis the recent PhD survey as it was conducted among

© DINAH WOUTE RS ET AL., 2022 |

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BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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A DECISIVE MEETING IN DEPARTMENT X 19

PhD students of the entire university and of our faculty. I am very

grateful for this work done by Prof. Susan Haas, Prof. Paul Renard
and Prof. Olivia Monti.

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In the end, they came up with following points that we must take
into consideration:

– How do we welcome junior members in the department?

– How do we inform junior members about what is expected

from them?

– How do we stimulate junior members to talk about

problems if they ever encounter them?

– How can we help junior members find the resources that

are designed to help them?

Although we think it superfluous to stress, we still want to

emphasize that the meeting is not meant to address the concrete
event in which our near colleague is involved nor the commotion it
caused in the press. We can assure all members of the department
that the university authorities are taking care of this. Our only task
is to ask how our department fulfills its responsibilities in the future
as to the guidance of PhD students and postdoctoral research
fellows. We hope to draft the most essential elements of the report
as we must transmit it to the committee that was entrusted with
screening our department.

With kind regards, Frank Jacobs

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2 Meeting

F. Jacobs: Thank you all for coming today, I know you are all very
busy. Unfortunately, it came to my attention only after the invitation
was sent that there is an overlap between this department meeting
and the Career Day for early-career researchers organized by the
university. I regret that, but I thought it would be better not to
bother you all with additional emails and new dates. And we are in
a hurry, as we mentioned. I can see there aren’t that many PhD
students and post- docs present today, but I’m sure the other
participants will be able to empathize with their position and voice
their concerns. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

20 WOUTERS ET AL.

O. Monti: It’s not illogical that we as academic staff have a

somewhat stronger representation in meetings. Anyway, there is a
nice balance between men and women today, that’s good at least.

F. Jacobs: Given the subject of the meeting, I would have preferred

to see more PhD students. But I can assure everyone that we will
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take this matter with us to the preparation of the next meeting.
Before we start, we just have to deal with a small problem. Our
secretary has been ill since yesterday, so I’m looking for a volunteer
to take notes. Any candidates? Perhaps one of the PhD students?

S. Nielsen: Ehm, yes, I could do that.

F. Jacobs: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much, Sander. You can

start off by noting the names of the people present. Full professors,
let’s see … Susan Haas, Olivia Monti, Paul Renard … and Ian
Lang. Do I forget anyone? Emma Davies, then, is assistant
professor, as well as Lucia Flores. And the doctoral students present
are …

S. Eder: Sara. Sara Eder.

F. Jacobs: Sara, right. So, Sara Eder and yourself, Sander. I don’t
see Nicolas here. And Emily is also absent, you might have to note
that as well.

S. Nielsen: So, there are no postdoctoral researchers present?

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F. Jacobs: I’m afraid not, Sander. I’ll first give the word to Emma,
our ombudsperson, who will talk you through the results of the PhD
survey. She won’t say anything about the unfortunate case that has
recently occurred between the colleague from our department and
one of his PhD students. As I wrote in my email, we all regret what
happened but we have to get past this specific case. The aim of this
meeting is to look towards the future. Emma, the floor is yours.

E. Davies: Thank you, Frank! I’ll keep it short. In the survey, PhD
students were asked for their opinion about various aspects of the
department’s doctoral guidance policy. Two results are relevant
within the context of this meeting. The first concerns the guidance
PhD students receive from their supervisor. The second is about the
conflicts PhD students have already experienced with their
supervisor. We’re talking here about serious and long- running
conflicts about matters like intellectual property, abuse of power,
sexual or other kinds of intimidation, racism and discrimination,
and so on. You can see both results projected on the screen.

S. Haas: Thank you, Emma. I must say that I am very happy with
these results. Seventy percent of the PhD students are satisfied with
the guidance by their supervisor: a clear majority!

A DECISIVE MEETING IN DEPARTMENT X 21

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P. Renard: And only fifteen percent claim to have already had a
more serious conflict with their supervisor. It is such a relief to read
that. The newspapers from the past few days, reporting on the
unfortunate recent case, gave the impression that this department is
full of predators who routinely mistreat their PhD students. This
result clearly shows that these kinds of conflicts are just exceptions.

F. Jacobs: The press communication has been very difficult. It has

been impossible for me as the department’s chair to gain control
over the story. Before you have a chance to speak up, journalists
have twisted your words and written all sorts of things about our
department that are simply not true.

I. Lang: You did a good job, Frank. And as Paul and Susan said: the
results of the survey prove that our efforts are widely appreciated
by our PhD students. Let’s focus on these numbers and not on what
the press has been saying about us.

S. Eder: With all respect, but I find it difficult to follow your

interpretations of the survey’s results. These numbers also mean
that more than 1 in 4 indicate that they receive insufficient
guidance. And I don’t think that fifteen percent reporting on serious
conflicts is insignificant. On the contrary!

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I. Lang: You are right, Sara. But we should also look at the response
rate, of course, which is 37 percent. I suspect an overrepresentation
of people who are unsatisfied or have some personal grievance with
their supervisor. In that case, 30 and 15 percent is really not that
much. You cannot make everyone happy. Some people just fill out
these surveys to get back at someone.

S. Eder: Can I say something to that? I don’t want to deny that

resentment might play a minor role, but if we assume that the
survey is not representative, why do we take it as the basis for this
discussion?

S. Nielsen: I do think it gives a good picture of the fact that the

majority of people have no complaints and have developed a good
relationship with their supervisor. Of course, I agree with you, Sara,
that we should reach out to these few exceptions that are
experiencing problems.

S. Haas: But how can we reach out to them? The survey is

anonymous. If they do not come to the ombudspersons of their own
accord, what can we do?

O. Monti: It’s such a shame that people use these surveys to

complain but do not come to us with their problems. We cannot do
anything if they don’t take the first step.
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22 WOUTERS ET AL.

L. Flores: That’s easy to say, but from what I hear from my own
PhD students, people find it hard to take that step and report
problems they are facing with their supervisor. The low response
might also be an indication of this, even though the survey was
anonymous. PhD students are dependent on their supervisor for
guidance, a network, and recommendations in the future. We should
not underestimate this.

P. Renard: I would be very sad to hear that PhD students do not

trust the good- will of their supervisors. All people make mistakes,
of course, and academics are very busy people, but I cannot think
of anyone in this department who does not take the well-being of
his students to heart.

O. Monti: or her—

P. Renard: Beg your pardon?

O. Monti: Or her. You said “his students”—

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P. Renard: Right, of course.

L. Flores: Perhaps you should say that to the PhD student who was
sexually assaulted by one of our colleagues last week, Paul.

P. Renard: That’s a very unfortunate case!

L. Flores: That we as a department allowed to happen!

F. Jacobs: Let’s not get emotional! I see your point, Lucia. Actually,
Emma and I anticipated it. Right, Emma?

E. Davies: Yes! Frank asked me to develop a concrete plan to

prevent similar cases in the future and to optimize the department’s
doctoral policy. First of all, I wrote a protocol listing a couple of
good practices regarding doctoral guidance. We can hand this
document to new PhD students. In this way, it will be immediately
clear to them what the department expects of them and what they
may expect of their supervisor.

P. Renard: You said “protocol.” Does this mean this will be a

binding instrument?

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A DECISIVE MEETING IN DEPARTMENT X 23

E. Davies: Well, yes. From my experience as the ombudsperson, I

can say that it’s better to have clear rules. But I can assure you that
all the guidelines I pro- pose are very reasonable. I state, for
instance, that supervisors must talk with their PhD students about
their research on a regular basis, at least once per trimester. I also
include a paragraph on how to give feedback in a decent way, and
another one on respecting each other’s professional and personal
boundaries.

O. Monti: Aren’t we overreacting? Just because there are a handful

of troubled relationships between a PhD student and a supervisor in
the department, we do not suddenly need moral protocols. I don’t
see why we should hold every- body to the same little rules because
of a few cases where things go wrong.

P. Renard: I mean, where are we, kindergarten? We are all highly

intelligent people who should be trusted with knowing what works
best for us.

L. Flores: What strikes me is that the discussion has so far been

dominated by professors. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think I am
attending a meeting on the well-being of PhD students. So perhaps
we should listen to what they have to say. Sander, I see you are
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busy writing, but what is your opinion on the measures that have
been proposed?

F. Jacobs: Good point, Lucia! Please, Sander, speak up! —

S. Nielsen: Well, ehm, it is clear that it is a complex debate. I have a

good relationship with my supervisor—

O. Monti: Thank you, my dear. I also think that we have an

excellent connection—

S. Nielsen: Regardless, I think it will be good to have a protocol on

PhD guidance. As PhD representatives, we have been asking for
such a document for a long time. Also, I agree with Emma that the
protocol should be more than a list of good practices. It should be
an instrument for PhD students to hold their supervisors
accountable. I mean, in case of lacking guidance or abuse of power,
where it is really necessary. In my case, for instance, there is no
need.

I. Lang: “Accountable?” This horrifies me. What has become of

mutual trust and respect? Only people who cannot take
responsibility for their own problems would call in the help of

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protocols, accountability, rules. It horrifies me that the university is
turning more and more into a place where everyone mis-

trusts each other and we must account for everything that we do.

24 WOUTERS ET AL.

S. Nielsen: That is not what I mean. I am as wary as you are of the

corporatization of universities, but I am not calling for more
optimization or administrative burdens. On the contrary, I want
more responsibility in dealing with each other.

I. Lang: Exactly, responsibility. That includes the responsibility of

supervisors to provide guidance and the responsibility of PhD
students to stand up for themselves. If I think about how it used to
be … in our time, we were not waiting for others to come and ask
us how we were doing. We had to stand up for ourselves!

F. Jacobs: Please let us stay calm. We can decide whether or not we

make these guidelines a binding instrument in a later meeting.
Incidentally, the issue of taking responsibility to come forward with
complaints brings us seamlessly to the next point, right, Emma?

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E. Davies: Indeed. Apart from the protocol, we need to think about
ways to encourage PhD students to talk about their problems. As
the ombudsperson, I was shocked that I wasn’t aware of the
misbehavior from one of our colleagues, until I read about it in last
week’s newspapers. How can we find out about these issues more
quickly? How can we help these PhD students?

O. Monti: You shouldn’t blame yourself, Emma. You are a

wonderful ombudsperson. Really.

I. Lang: Absolutely! You can’t help it if PhD students don’t come to

you.

E. Davies: I know. But how can I make them come to me?

F. Jacobs: Any ideas?

P. Renard: Well, our department’s website really is a mess.

Everything is so unclear there. It wouldn’t surprise me if PhD
students who want to ask for help simply get lost.

E. Davies: So, you suggest improving the website?

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P. Renard: Yes! But this will probably take a while. For now, we
can place this information on the home page.

F. Jacobs: Excellent idea, Paul. That should help! I’ll pass this to
the website’s administrator. Sander, have you written down this
suggestion? It should go into

A DECISIVE MEETING IN DEPARTMENT X 25

the meeting’s minutes. I shall also mention it in the press release

that I have to send out this evening, together with the protocol
Emma proposed. Any other suggestions?

S. Eder: I don’t have the feeling that we are taking this serious
enough. The case that elicited this meeting is very serious and the
media do have a point when they talk of widespread abuse of
power. [Indignant exclamations, Sara speaks louder.] I heard you
talking about responsibility and trust. I am talking about people in
power not taking their responsibilities and people in precarious
positions not being able to trust those in charge. This case is not an
exception, and it rests on many smaller abuses that pass
unreprimanded each day.

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F. Jacobs: Alright, Sara, general accusations are not very helpful.
Can you give us a few examples of what you are referring to?

S. Eder: I am referring to supervisors who will not grant their PhD

students the right to a holiday, who expect them to be at their beck
and call at all times, who invade their personal space, who
appropriate their publications through unrightful co-authorship, or
who do not provide any guidance at all.

I. Lang: If these problems are as omnipresent as you say, why do

we hear nothing about this? Examples are all very well, but can you
give us names? Why are these people not speaking to us?

S. Eder: I hear from many of my colleagues that taking this first

step is difficult because they haven’t met any examples in their
surroundings of problems that have been properly solved by taking
such a step. It’s the reigning impunity and a certain powerlessness
of the administrative course they have to take that makes it not
worthwhile to even start with it.

F. Jacobs: I’m not sure what you are insinuating.

E. Davies: Indeed, as the ombudsperson, I sometimes feel quite

powerless myself when I cannot help a situation move forward. I’m
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not allowed, for example, to get back in touch with someone who
had been complaining about a malpractice before. The initiative
should always come from this person.

F. Jacobs: Yes, but that is for privacy reasons, of course. It is not

our responsibility or even within our powers to look back, I’m
afraid.

26 WOUTERS ET AL.

L. Flores: But it is there you find the malpractices! You should not
interview current PhD students, but PhD students who have left,
who have not finished their PhDs, etc.

S. Haas: That, I find, is very dangerous. They are full of grievances

towards their old job. Did you know, by the way, that the word
“ombudsman” goes back to the Old Norse umboðsmaðr, which
means representative? You can only represent someone who wants
to be represented.

[Hesitant silence.]

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S. Eder: The problem is that our jobs are temporary and that our
future in academia depends on the recommendations of our
supervisors. And we should not forget another characteristic of our
academic culture: most of the PhD students are very young, often
doing a PhD as their first experience with a working environment.
How would they know what is normal and abnormal, also in a
working environment that is loosely structured in comparison with
other sectors?

F. Jacobs: That’s why agreeing on good and bad practices is

important. We should communicate them more clearly to the PhD
students when they start, so they know their rights.

S. Eder: I just wanted to explain why most people don’t even take
the first step. Once they know something is not right, they are
probably closer to the finish than to the start of their PhD, so why
risk the entire endeavor at that point? Why would they even come
to a department meeting discussing matters that will be
implemented long after they are gone, in the best-case scenario?

S. Haas: It seems as if you are implying that all professors are bad
guys who intimidate and bully their PhD students. 70 percent are
satisfied with the guidance they receive from their supervisor. 70
percent!

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F. Jacobs: Let’s all stay calm. Perhaps that’s also good advice in
case of conflicts. Stay calm, talk to each other and eat cake
together. In my experience, a freshly baked cake can do wonders.

O. Monti: Absolutely! Almond cake is my personal favorite, I

admit.

F. Jacobs: Good choice, Olivia! All kidding aside, I take note of

your concerns, Sara, thank you for your intervention. For now, we
stick to the plan to communicate the protocol. If necessary, we can
take extra measures.

A DECISIVE MEETING IN DEPARTMENT X 27

E. Davies: In my experience, it is often the little things that help

create a good and inviting environment. The other day, we went
with a group of colleagues to a bar, which was very nice.

F. Jacobs: Of course, not all supervisors should have to go to a bar

with their students. Personally, I think one should also keep a
certain distance.

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E. Davies: Perhaps it is a good idea to work with large pieces of
paper to make mood boards in smaller groups, to brainstorm
together and work out some suggestions to improve the work
environment.

S. Haas: Maybe that suggestion should be tabled until the next

meeting. That deserves a separate get-together.

F. Jacobs: Indeed, Susan, that might be a good idea, but let me

remind you all that we have been making quite some progress
already. Olivia already took the initiative earlier this year to have a
group sport activity. The turnout was quite poor, but we might have
to make this into an annual activity, every year another sport or an
excursion.

[Person in the back coughs.]

F. Jacobs: We are also currently having discussions with the

university about the possibility of moving some things around in
the building in order to create space for new breakrooms.

[Happy chatting.]

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F. Jacobs: An update on this will be given later this month. We will
also recon- sider coffee machines. We had those in the past, but the
machines tended to break down and the repair costs turned out to be
too high. But as I hear you all speak today; I will move this up on
the priority list. I will also contact some people to create a team to
organize these annual team building activities …

L. Flores: [muttering indistinctly] Ridiculous … [Lucia Flores

leaves the room; door slamming.]

F. Jacobs: I see some colleagues are leaving; we are indeed running

overtime. I want to thank everyone for their engagement. I think
this meeting has been very fruitful, given the short time. I will end
by briefly summarizing the

28 WOUTERS ET AL.

measures we have agreed upon: first, to put together a list of good

practices concerning the guidance of PhD students, second, to put
the necessary information for PhD students, like the ombuds and
health services, more visibly on the faculty website, and third, to
organize yearly team-building activities. Sander, will you
communicate these measures to the doctoral and postdoctoral
researchers and put them in the minutes? Thank you so much. I
have to run now. Take care!
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Minutes of the meeting

Meeting of the departmental committee in response to the request

by the Vice-Chancellor to carry out a risk analysis and propose
some measures towards improving the well-being of doctoral
students and postdoctoral employees

Date and time: Monday, April 23, 2020, 10:00-12:00

Present:

Professor Frank Jacobs, head of department Professor Susan Haas

Professor Olivia Monti Professor Paul Renard Professor Ian Lang

Professor Emma Davies

Assistant Professor Lucia Flores Sander Nielsen, doctoral student

Sara Eder, doctoral student

Absent:

Dr. Emily Smith, postdoctoral researcher Nicolas Leroy, doctoral

student

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Chair: Professor Frank Jacobs

Minutes secretary: Sander Nielsen

Purpose of the meeting: to discuss the results of the survey and

decide on measures that are needed to further the well-being of PhD
students in our department

A DECISIVE MEETING IN DEPARTMENT X 29

Items on the agenda:

1. Discussion of the recent survey of doctoral students

The overall impression is positive: a majority of respondents are

satisfied with the guidance they receive.

There is concern for a minority of people who indicate that they

receive insufficient guidance. The committee members hope these
people will find their way to the ombudspersons.

2. How can the quality of PhD supervision be optimized?

Action item: The ombudsperson has put together a list of good and
bad practices. These will be communicated to doctoral students.

3. How can we encourage PhD students to seek help when

they experience problems with their supervisor or others?

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Action item: We will bring together information on the
ombudspersons and other facilities on the department’s homepage.

Next step: Create a dedicated page when the new website is

launched.

4. What can we do to alleviate stress among PhD students?

Action item: We will reconsider the costs of repair for the coffee
machines, as places where people meet and connect with each
other.

Action item: We will make the excursion a yearly team-building

event and advertise the event more widely.

Next step: We will organize a meeting on the idea of mood boards

that will help people to connect with each other.

3 Afterword

This contribution is fictional, although based on personal

experiences and actual meetings from a group of researchers in
different faculties and universi- ties. The names and characters have
been largely fictionalized.1

In writing this depiction, it was not our intention to address the

issues concerning harassment in the workplace in a direct manner,
nor to reflect on or promote certain solutions. Instead, we wanted to
show the Kafkaesque situation PhD students and policymakers
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alike end up in, often despite good intentions. The very process that
leads towards needed change in academic culture is a path scattered
with surveys, meetings and reports, with half-hearted objectives,
selective interim conclusions and short-term solutions. This arduous
work is set in an environment that esteems intellectual freedom
very highly and considers HR policies to be part of the business
world, or at least to be a bit childish. Not surprisingly, individual
needs and concerns hardly trickle

30 WOUTERS ET AL.

down to the policies that are actually implemented. Accordingly,

the effects on academic culture remain insignificant.

In the meantime, persons who become victims of harassment are

labeled as the exception. They are either “vengeful” or “avoiding
help,” and are hereby silenced. Their anonymous testimonies are
not taken seriously, or at best are considered shaky foundations for
bold and general policies that potentially affect all supervisors. And
thus, in this administrative process, victims of harassment become
victims once more, now of seemingly harmful platitudes—the bad
apple and the bunch, the half-empty or half-full glass of wine—that
have real-life consequences and deprive them and their future
colleagues of any perspective.

Above all, we wanted to show that the systemic nature of this

process, most clearly visible during endless meetings, has the

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dangerous consequence that it nullifies all sense of urgency. Before
actual change is enforced or even considered as a need, PhD
students have either already left academia, accepted their situation
in the hopes of pursuing an academic career, or become part of the
same academic milieu that condoned previous harassment. By then,
the urgency appears to have gone down, as a new generation of
PhD students is still in the process of discovering how academia
works, separating good from bad practices, and starting to learn
how to stand up for themselves and via which channels.

Although universities and faculties can vary in degrees of

transparency and goodwill, it is our hope the fictional documents
above will be recognizable in their core. Once this modest goal is
achieved, we can all go quietly back to work. We do have meetings
to attend.

Publisher’s Note

The identity of one of the authors of this chapter has been

anonymized. Brill is aware of the real identity of the author. The
inclusion of anonymized chapters has been permitted by Brill in
view of risks to the general security of the author.

Note

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1 We are very grateful to the colleagues and friends with whom we
discussed this contribution and whose extensive suggestions and
feedback tremendously improved its argument. They
wholeheartedly support this book’s aim and intentions yet have
chosen not to be mentioned by name.

CHAPTER 6

Phantom Libraries

Unspoken Words, Untold Stories and Unwritten Texts

Moa Ekbom

There are really only three things that can ruin your life in
academia: outright malice, sheer incompetence (which is worse
than malice) and silence. The first two are the most startling,
leaving you gasping in surprise, since it is beyond you that
someone would do something like that. Silence is easy and logical
— you just need to avert your eyes. Malice is strangely easier to
deal with, despite being infinitely more painful. It leaves little room
for ambiguity, as it is usually quite clear that the intention is to hurt
and batter. This makes it easier to comprehend—it is of course
awful to be hated, but you can categorize it as nastiness, and
occasionally it is so egregious that you can actually report it.

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Abuse through incompetence, however, is harder to pinpoint, and
the perpetrator is protected by their incompetence. This kind of
abuse is usually com- mitted by those in leadership roles, by
mishandling a situation—for example, a malevolent campaign
against a junior colleague by a senior one. Nothing can be done
about this; hence incompetence is the perfect shield. This can be
painfully shocking, since it can really beggar disbelief how
someone employed and paid handsomely to take responsibility can
bungle it so badly. Ambiguity regarding whether there is
incompetence or malicious intent brings extra pain, and an added
layer of paranoia. It also undermines trust in authority and in the
possibility of holding a harasser accountable.

Incompetence can also manifest itself silently, through rage-

inducing sins of omission. Passive failure, by pretending something
never happened, follows the law of least resistance. Inertia is
something we all understand, and it can even elicit envy—imagine
being able to just sit and close your eyes, and not have to fight for
survival. The averting of eyes is particularly beloved by academic
management, since it also has an engrained aspect of gaslighting—
making someone question their perception and reasoning, since the
silence indicates that nothing bad has happened, and thereby the
problem is dealt with as if it never existed.

By choosing not to interfere and denying any problems, the

collegially elected chairs and administration aid in portraying
someone who has been inappropriately touched and stalked as a
delusional brazen minx who actually

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© MoA EKBOM, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_006

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

- 978-90-04-52102-5

32 EKBOM

wanted it badly, or the passed-over junior female colleague as a

ruthless hysteric, untethered from reality, who needs to wait her
turn, or the harassed grad student as a confused incompetent hussy
who should never have been admitted to the program. With this
framing and the decision to take no action, there is nothing the
abused can do, and the non-action stasis leaves everything hanging
in perpetuity. You are left in a vacuum, without breathable air, the
non-action having suspended everything, and the environment has
become uninhabitable—you must leave. Management has thus
solved the problem by forcing out the slag, the floozy and the
madwoman.

There are many things that can be done at an institutional level to

improve academia, such as better labor practices with better
contracts and safety nets. Academic career advancement could be
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made less feudal, so that you are not dependent on the goodwill of
your liege lord, with transparency in hiring, especially in short-term
contracts. It should be in the interest of a vice chancellor to ensure
there are clear avenues for reporting harassment and holding people
accountable. Yet at many universities, harassment is investigated
and arbitrated within a department, and everyone who has ever
worked in a department knows that no one is neutral in such
situations. Enamored with the idea of collegial leadership, I hesitate
to call for a more professionalized managerial stratum at
universities, but I have gradually come to the conclusion that
collegial leadership does not work in the most fraught departments,
since it places power in the hands of people who have already
established friends and foes. There are very few incentives to
improve the situation; the calm of the status quo where no one is
questioned or has to alter behavior is infinitely more alluring than
the mess of change and examination. Despite improved labor law
governance in academia, inertia is beguiling and all too easy.

I have no sweeping suggestions for solutions, since academia looks

different from the perspectives of different departments,
universities and countries, even if they share the same kinds of
abuse and harassment. When problems arise, good leadership is
essential, but rare. That colleagues have a sense of responsibility
and call each other out and act, instead of averting their eyes, is also
essential. This is not even a culture of fear and retribution, but a
natural inclination to take the easy way out. Inertia is also
connected with shrinking funding in academia, as everyone must
fend for themselves as money and time disappear in cut-backs and

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reorganizations. Permanent positions are essential for a fair,
democratic and vibrant academia, since stability is necessary in
order to be a responsible and conscientious colleague.

In the magical #MeToo autumn of 2017, where change seemed

possible and I finally learned that it is not okay if someone
masturbates in front of you with- out consent (thank you, Louis
CK!), the online journal Eidolon published an

PHANTOM LIBRARIES 33

article by Donna Zuckerberg on the books that were never written

and never will be, because their potential writers have been
harassed, shamed or just so worn out that scholarship was not
possible: “But in its shadow is a second library—at once infinite
and infinitesimal—of essays, articles and books that will never be
written because the people who would have written them were
pushed out of the field by harassment and abuse” (2017, para. 1).

This story of lost libraries mainly concerns sexual harassment, but

it can easily be expanded to include all forms of abuse in academia.
Abuse that is not expressed in a sexualized manner and not
specifically sexist is in many respects just as tiring and shaming as
that of a sexual nature. This abuse is also practiced more visibly
and openly, perhaps under the guise of supervision or
scrupulousness. Specific excuses can include expressing worry
about some- one’s aptitude for academic work, with fake concern

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for a specific individual’s personal suitability, and exclusionary
approaches such as certain information not being disseminated,
with some particular person always falling off the email list.

As a classical philologist, I am of course obsessed with lost texts—

all that has been lost through the ages and ravages of time, as well
as the haphazardness of preservation—and I think about this
ghostly library every day. It includes a text or two by me, when I
was too tired, beaten and angry to produce them. The lost library
should be as longed for as the (probably exaggerated) Library of
Alexandria, as the dispersed books that traveled with the Byzantine
princess Sophia Palaiologina to Russia, or the volumes that Ansgar
and his men abandoned to the Norsemen when attacked in their
missionary travels.

Texts are created from language, and this is a reminder of how hard
it is to speak of abuse in academia. We all prefer exacting and
precise terminology, but where stories of abuse are concerned, there
are only tentative phrases, with glosses and subordinate clauses
galore. Once again, the #MeToo autumn, while having
devastatingly little impact, at least started to lay the foundation of a
language for speaking out about and narrating abuse and
harassment. The non-sexual arena is in many ways equally fraught.
We are still far from having the vocabulary and narrative
framework to be able to talk about this, to be capable of discussing
the imbalances of power in a mutually intelligible language that
encompasses the past, present and future. Translation,
contextualization and interpretation is hard, especially when the one
trying to tell the story is developing the language. Language cannot
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grow in a vacuum, when there is a refusal to listen and see. Yet the
evolving language helps the abused find words for what happened.
This is a delicate and precarious means of communication among
the bewildered, which may remain secret for some time to come.

34 EKBOM

In all probability, I will continue to work within the same field as

my harassers and their passive enablers for a very long time. I will
see how others support and laud them, and how they will be given
opportunities to hurt others. I can leave, of course, and I probably
should, especially if I want to leave the anger and sadness behind. I
might one day, but for now, I control my anger and grief, and I
think of the library of lost books, and how one day it will no longer
be a secret library, but a public one, where we can learn, invent and
discover words, and ensure they are correctly transmitted and
interpreted.

Reference

Zuckerberg, D. (2017, December 1). The lost library: E(i)ditorial—

Philomela’s tapestry.

Eidolon. https://eidolon.pub/the-lost-library-dcac1adeb281

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 CHAPTER 7

On the Occasion of My Retirement

Cecilia Mörner

Last winter I decided to take early retirement. For some time, I had
considered going down to halftime until I turned 65, which is the
average retirement age in Sweden. This would have meant
continuing with at least some of my duties as a lecturer for three
more years. But one morning I woke up and said to myself: No! I
can’t! It’s simply impossible. Not fulltime, not halftime, not at all. I
sent off an email informing my superior and started to plan for a
life with less income than I have had ever since I was a PhD
student, yet with greater peace of mind than I have had for years.

What led me to make this decision, which seemed unexpected and

totally illogical to most of my friends and acquaintances? I mean,
as a PhD student I had struggled for years to achieve my goal of an
academic job. Ever since my first position, I have shared
workplaces with intelligent and exciting colleagues, and I have
traveled around the world to meet other intelligent and exciting
people at international conferences. My salary is good. I enjoy a
high degree of independence when it comes to how I plan and carry
out my lectures and seminars, and I have nice and ambitious
students. I have even been offered more opportunities to do
research than I have asked for. Nevertheless, I gladly leave all this

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behind because it will mean the end of a suffocating feeling that I
believe can be traced to the occurrence of a specific phenomenon:
New Public Management.

New Public Management was introduced to Swedish universities in

the early 1990s in order to implement principles of the business
world in the public sphere. Most notable among these were
documentation, measurement, outcomes and efficiency. These
keywords were, of course, established in the academic world long
before New Public Management was even heard of. Academics of
all times have been practicing them whenever they build research
networks or decide which grade a student assignment deserves.
What New Public Management brought to the table was not so
much the practice of documentation, measurement, etc., but rather
the visible existence of documentation, measurement, outcomes and
efficiency. Clear instructions and templates of all kinds became
mandatory. Days and hours were spent—and still are— on writing
various documents intended to ensure the quality of institutions and
academic work. Independent, collegial groups function as
gatekeepers who guarantee that not a single wrongly spelled word
or misplaced comma

© CECILIA MÖRNER, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_007

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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36 MÖRNER

blemishes the syllabi. The intranet offers templates for course

guides, reading lists and grading criteria in the name of efficiency
and measurement. So far so good. The question is: who makes sure
that all these documents are produced? Before the introduction of
New Public Management, professional administrators typed
timetables and made copies of students’ term papers and theses to
be handed out at seminars. They did other things, too, but these
were per- haps the most obvious tasks besides enrollment and
registration. I worked in administration at a department for some
years back then, so I know. Today, the number of administrative
tasks has grown enormously. One might expect that the vast
production of documents is done by real experts with plenty of time
to carry out the work. However, New Public Management focuses
on the outcome of processes—not on the processes as such. It is
interested in what can be documented, measured and completed in
an efficient way. It requires documents which can be used to
measure the outcome of a process, but what and who makes this
possible are not of interest. This has resulted in a workplace culture
where teachers and researchers are expected to be secretaries,
though without

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training or even time for administrative duties.

Personally, I have no difficulty with instructions and templates. I

find them timesaving. I enjoy writing course guides and I gladly
publish them weeks in advance. But there is a considerable group
of academics who are highly intelligent, hardworking and
experienced but who do not fit into an organization which expects
everybody to be their own secretary. They are the kind of
academics who would have had no problem in the pre-New Public
Management era, when lecturers were assumed to be eccentric and
odd. In those days nobody asked for details. Timetables were
posted on the wall outside the lecture hall the same day the course
started, and the course books were available in the university
library and the local bookstore. Nobody cared about things such as
course guides. Students were concerned about the meaning of
different theories, but they rarely bothered about deadlines,
objectives and grades.

Today is different. In the name of New Public Management,

lecturers and professors are expected to handle documents which
assure students that everyone involved in a certain course can say
exactly what will happen day by day and exactly what we expect
from them. The actual meaning of different theories is less
important than to what extent students manage to demonstrate
knowledge about them. Lecturers and professors are supposed to
spend as much time explaining what the students must achieve to
pass with a certain grade as they do explain the actual content of a
course. Above all, lecturers and professors are supposed to know
exactly where to find the kind of information students ask for.
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Some fail completely in this mission, a fact that results in a reality
where, on the one hand, there is an incalculable amount of neatly
written documents somewhere in the jungle of the intranet and, on
the other hand, total chaos each time a course or a module is to be
offered. The students are coming! What to do with them? They send
me emails! What should I answer them? They ask which version of
Bryant’s book on methods they should buy! Whom am I to know?
Grading criteria—what the hell is that? And what is wrong with the
course guide I just posted? It is the same as last year and worked
perfectly well then!

Some of my colleagues refuse to adapt to students’ requirements by

pointing out that it is absurd to focus on things that really do not
matter in the long run. Who needs to know on which pages a certain
theory was accounted for once you have graduated? Students need
to understand and use theories, not remember where they read
about them. I totally agree with this. Nevertheless, lectures and
professors are obliged to provide visible evidence of measurement
and efficiency, some of which are just for show and some of which
students find intelligible. I have noticed two main strategies among
my less adaptive colleagues in handling the problems, both of
which often involve me. The first one is mainly used by colleagues
who

ON THE OCCASION OF MY RETIREM ENT 37

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rarely show up at campus and work from home (even without a
pandemic). They claim that they cannot log in to the intranet where
the information students request can be found. They have tried
several times and they have contacted university support. In vain.
Could I please email them this and that document? Well, I can, and
I do. It doesn’t take more than five or ten minutes to find what the
colleague needs. Why should I not help? However, it directs my
attention away from what I should be doing: planning a lecture,
looking for an article, writing a course guide for one of my own
courses, etc. I would not mind if I were interrupted just now and
then, but it happens more or less every week. Sometimes several
times a day. Such days are wasted. I must either do whatever I had
planned to do on a Saturday or Sunday, or give it up. The second
strategy is more evasive. The colleagues who practice this strategy
do not ask anything of me. Nor do they respond to students’
requests. They just wait for things to happen. And things do happen.
Students have their own networks and they are well- informed
about the teachers. Sooner or later, they will realize that the teacher
in charge of their course will not answer them. Instead, they turn to
me or another (usually female) teacher who has already proven
willing to help. And we will patiently answer their questions and
send them information about lecture halls, course literature,
examinations, etc., even though it is not our responsibility. We will
even revise our colleagues’ outdated documents. Meanwhile, our
colleagues focus on their own research projects and future lectures.

Maybe I shouldn’t blame them. Who knows, perhaps they are

secretly

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ashamed of their administrative disabilities? I know that that they
have other

38 MÖRNER

skills that, to be honest, are as useful as the ability to write a good

course guide and upload it on time. Most of them have profound
knowledge about theories, methods and history, and they know
everything worth knowing about various iconic researchers. But
they force me into the role of a clerk because it is I and other well-
organized New Public Management-adapted colleagues who
compensate for their lack of administrative skills. Instead of
reading a new article on a research field that interests me or
drafting a research application, I found myself carrying out not only
my own secretarial duties but also those of others. You may ask
why I am doing this. Why can’t I just say no? I can at least tell the
students that it is not my job to prepare for courses of which I am
not in charge. But I do not, because I know it would cost me more
energy than it does to just fix what is lacking. Students will haunt
me if I do not respond to their requests. They will not be content
with reading course syllabi (which are available at the external
website and not too hard to find), because they are too abstract and
complicated. Today’s students want to know exactly which pages in
a specific course book they are supposed to read and exactly how
many pages they must write in the take-home exams to pass. They
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quickly learn the logic of New Public Management, which means
that they know that some information, such as a syllabus, exists
solely because it is compulsory and not because students are
expected to read and understand them. Who understands the
meaning of learning outcomes anyway? Syllabi are visible evidence
of documentation and measurement, but they do not correspond to
students’ day-to-day experience of studying at a university.
Students demand transparent, informative, easily digested and
extremely concrete information. If this is denied them, they will
make sure to denounce the course, its teachers, the program and the
entire university, not only in course assessments but also on social
media. Students are not just measured, they also measure. Bad
student reviews will—in the name of New Public Management—be
used in the overall measurement of courses and departments. And
bad reviews will increase the already existing tensions within the
department, where those who sacrifice their research for
administrative tasks are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I
know several examples of departments that were brought down by
this. Not because of a lack of academic and pedagogical skills, but
because of problems with cooperation within the group due to an
unfair division of labor.

I would not complain if the administrative work I do for others

were compensated for in some way. Let us pretend that a colleague
is

ON THE OCCASION OF MY RETIREM ENT 39

working on an application for a research program while I am

struggling with his or her frustrated students’ questions. My
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colleague is aware of the favor and invites me to take part in the
program. This is done with mutual respect. I know that he or she
writes better applications than I do, and my colleague is aware that
I am better administrator. It is also in line with New Public
Management’s requirement of efficiency: those who are good at
anticipating what kind of information students will request make
sure that course guides, reading lists and grading criteria are
available before the course starts, and those who are good at fore-
seeing which project will appeal to research funders write
applications. Every- one would benefit from this. Unfortunately,
however, this rarely happens. As a matter of fact, most of those who
do not manage to write a decent course guide are not good at
writing research applications either. They are good at reading hard-
core theories and, to various extents, communicating their
knowledge. In addition, those who are successful at writing
applications usually prefer to keep their projects to themselves.
They pretend not to know that administrative work is an important
part of lecturers’ and professors’ duties, whether we like it or not.
And there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Why not talk to your department head, you may ask. Believe me,
I’ve tried. I have also experienced what it is like to be a department
head trying to explain to lecturers and professors the importance of
knowing where to find grading criteria, as well as the importance of
upgrading course guides and not just copying old ones. For some
employees this was not a problem. For others the request was a
violation of their professionalism. I understand that. Lecturers and
professors are hired for their academic knowledge and pedagogical

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skills, not because they are good at administration. When hiring a
new faculty member, applicants’ research publications are
scrutinized and their ability to teach is tested. But they do not have
to prove that they can foresee what students would like to know in
advance. Doctoral students are trained to handle data, theories and
methods, not to write course guides and answer email from
students. New PhDs who get their first job as a lecturer at a
university are not pre- pared to handle students’ demands. None of
us who have worked for ages were ever told how to be a good
administrator. Yet, producing, finding and following instructions
and manuals are indispensable skills in the New Public
Management apparatus, and the job has to be done in order to make
the institutional machine grind on.

The biggest injustice in this system is the fact that administrative

skills do not leave any traces in one’s CV. Or rather: it leaves gaps
in the CV. Taking care of departmental administration and the needs
of confused students does not further one’s academic career. On the
contrary, the more you help others by finding documents or writing
new ones, the more you try to be informative, transparent and
efficient when communicating with students, the less likely that you
will get an article accepted in a highly rated journal or invited as a
keynote speaker at an international conference. There is simply not
time enough for succeeding at everything. Someone in the
department will always volunteer to help his or her colleagues
handle students and this person will probably do the job far more
efficiently

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40 MÖRNER

than those who have not adapted to the almost 30-year-old

unspoken requirement. But in the long run, the loyal and
cooperative ones are the losers. Attentive department heads may
make sure to raise the hardworking lecturer-cum-administrator’s
salary a bit, but it does not compensate for the measly CV. The true
winners are those who constantly improve their own CV by
focusing on their own research and ignoring the needs of others.

However, contrary to what might appear to be my standpoint in this

text, I wish that all lecturers and professors were able to concentrate
on their own research and teaching. I sincerely wish that we could
go back to a pre-New Public Management time when lecturers and
professors focused on the meaning of knowledge and well-trained
administrators took care of the administration. But finding myself
squeezed between administrative demands, on the one hand, and
intelligent but hopelessly dated and often selfish colleagues, on the
other, was too much for me. I gave up research some years ago, and
I do not mind spending all my time and energy on teaching. But I
am certainly not willing to be an unacknowledged administrative
slave in the academic machinery. I’ve had enough and I blame it on
New Public Management.

CHAPTER 8

How to Bea Professor in the Twenty-First Century

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 Wim Verbaal

“We’re heading for a time where you have intellectuals, on the one
hand, and academics, on the other, and where, at the university, you
will find only academics.” The colleague who, about twenty years
ago, addressed these words to me recently retired. At that time, we
stood up together for the rights of doc- toral and postdoctoral
researchers. We didn’t belong to the permanent aca- demic staff.
Upon his retirement, I remembered his words and repeated them to
him. We had seen them come true in a frightening way.

It is no revelation that the university landscape has changed

dramatically in recent decades. Nor do we lack analyses that lay
bare the causes. These are usually referred to as the results of the
so-called “neo-liberal policy model,” based on an unrelenting belief
in the forces of the market and thus in boosting “out- put” and
generating external funds (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2000; Fleming,
2021).1 That such a policy would prove disastrous for non-profit
institutions and, within the academic landscape, for all non-
industrial disciplines, seems obvious.

The former vice chancellor of a leading university in Northwestern

Europe and a pivotal figure in the “neo-liberal reform” of the
universities in his country once remarked that there were “too few
students going in the right directions,”

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i.e., in the technical and industrial sciences, and therefore too many
going in the wrong directions, i.e., “in the humanities.”2 A look at
the actual situation might reassure him: since he made his
statement, enrollment in the “wrong” faculties has dropped
dramatically. The neo-liberal policy model of the past decades has
borne fruit. Of their own accord, people align their professional and
educational choices with its objectives and, therefore, the social
implications of this model can now be felt everywhere.

Of course, this has far-reaching consequences. Faculties such as

those in the humanities and the arts are faced with harrowing
financial cutbacks. They have to look desperately for ways to
ensure their survival and, strangely enough, they mostly do so by
responding precisely to the demands imposed upon them by the
neoliberal policy model. The outcome is easily guessed. Whoever
brings in money is rewarded. Thus, everyone starts looking for
opportunities to strengthen their own position within the university
institution that wants to profile itself as an academic business
enterprise. Education is compromised in

© WIM VERBAAL, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_008

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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42 VERBAAL

the first place, in spite of any protest that this is a university’s most
important social task. Nevertheless, university policy in general
shows that whoever puts too much effort into education is
punished.3 This does not pay off, at least not immediately, and the
university, like all “neo-liberal” institutions, mainly wants to
generate income in the short term.

Europe offers another opportunity for those who want to make a

fast career. Anyone who succeeds in obtaining European funding is
welcomed with open arms by many universities and can
immediately count on a permanent position, without any questions
asked as to whether the scholar’s specialization was necessary or an
asset to the existing research or educational programs. Nor is it
asked which criteria Europe applies and whether they correspond to
a university’s requirements of its staff. The millions in monetary
resources coming in outweigh any internal policy concern
(Schinkel, 2018). Researchers with little or no experience in
academic education or administration will be in charge of the
university for decades to come. In the meantime, absenteeism is
increasing in internal councils and boards whenever they are purely
policy- related and do not yield any immediate financial benefit.

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Anyone who cannot knock on Europe’s door or does not have the
right keys to obtain European funding must secure a position in
another way.4 One such option is to become a member of those
committees where money and doc- toral scholarships are
distributed. The past decades have seen an increase of the well-
established phenomenon whereby academics manage to accumulate
funds in certain councils, boards and committees while serving as a
member of them. Objections are almost always countered by the
statement that only the top of the research landscape is represented
in such committees. However, it remains mostly unclear which
criteria are used to select this elite.

Administrative positions are also limited. What can be done by

those who, for whatever reason, do not qualify for similar
functions? Academic funding based on output focuses on the
production of articles and defended PhD dissertations. They
constitute quantifiable academic production. Academics thus have
to publish a great deal. They must produce an avalanche of articles.
Anyone who succeeds in this is a good academic and can count on
recognition with all the associated benefits. Nobody bothers about
the content of such overproduction. At a meeting of my own faculty
board, I heard, to my astonishment, a member of the university
administration says bluntly: “It’s not quality that counts. It’s
quantity.” It should come as no surprise, then, that no questions are
raised as to how an academic can find the time to produce the
required quantities. And that is where the shoe really starts to hurt.

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For one, plagiarism has become a significant phenomenon in
academic publications. Journals, review sites and editors all have to
find ways to cope

HOW TO BE A PROFESSOR IN THE TWENTY-FIRST

CENTURY 43

with this increase of intellectual theft. And more often than before,
scholars see themselves confronted with colleagues who “make
use” of their results without referring to their sources. One of the
main problems, however, is that plagiarists can avoid consequences
once they are established names or belong to established
universities, or as soon as this could mean a financial loss for their
universities. The victims are mostly younger scholars who have yet
to establish a scholarly reputation, or scholars employed by
universities that do not belong to the select “highly rated” happy
few. Rarely is the damage to their career recovered.5 But younger
scholars can fall victim to other abuses, as well. If one browses
through academic bibliographies at some universities, one might
notice that a majority of publications are the work of multiple
authors. The academic world seems to be an ideal world where
everyone works together to achieve a beautiful joint result.

Unfortunately, in many cases, the underlying reality turns out to be

less rosy. Of course, fortunately many researchers work, in good
conscience, together with their collaborators to achieve shared and
common results and publications. But in too many cases, the truth
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behind such “co”-publications looks quite different. Often, the
highest-ranked in the local university hierarchy simply puts their
name above an article without even looking at it. The actual author
suddenly sees his or her own work partly or even completely pass
into the hands of someone else.

In the humanities, reference is invariably made to established

practices in the applied sciences. As if there were no protest in the
applied sciences against similar forms of appropriation!
Internationally, criticism is growing, especially in the medical field,
precisely because here these practices also extend to the work of
students and interns.6 But even apart from this, it is clear that
research in the humanities is strongly based on individual
commitment.

Projects over long periods of time in which many researchers each

carry out a small step that contributes to some far-off results are
rather the exception. For this reason, any individual input must be
recognized with credit given to the person who pro- vided it. This is
not only a moral obligation. It moreover avoids the violation of the
right of authorship. Authorship is considered inalienable, unlike
copyright (Nwabachili & Nwabachili, 2015).7 For academics, the
difference is virtually unknown, which means that, more than once,
they commit intellectual theft. Supervisors often derive their right
as “co-authors” from the fact that they acquired the funds for the
research. For this reason, they consider everything that is paid for
by these funds to be their property. They probably envisage a
parallel with what happens in industry. They do not realize,
however, that, as opposed to industrial funding, they do not invest
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anything themselves and that the only one who can assert
ownership rights is the funding association. The supervisor is no
more than

an intermediary who ensures that the investment

44 VERBAAL

(in the arts and humanities, it is usually public money) ends up with
a capable researcher. For this reason, he or she cannot assert any
right of ownership.

In all these cases, however, the researchers who are in one way or
another involved in the publication usually act as supervisor of the
actual author. But there are others who impose themselves without
any official link to the author. Or who first impose a link—by
making themselves co-supervisors—in order to assert themselves as
“co”-authors and increase their quota of publications. Such
researchers display a remarkable broadness in the specter of their
expertise. They seem at home in almost all the disciplines that can
be found at their home faculty. The way they manage this is by
imposing themselves both on younger colleagues who are not yet
adapted to modern academia and its customs and, of course, on the
PhD students who feel their academic career to be under threat if
they do not comply.

It is possible to go still further, for example, by appropriating the

entire research of a PhD student who is subordinate to you. At

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international congresses, your present research as your own and
under your own name, although everything you present has been
collected and written by someone else to whom you refer as to
“your” PhD student. Preferably, he or she should be in the room in
order to answer any questions that might come up after your
lecture. This way, you even display your own “generosity,” because
you give your students the opportunity to participate in the
international debate.

Maybe you think that too risky? It is indeed easier to force the PhD
student who does not want to continue, or who will in any case not
secure a postdoc- toral position, to leave behind all material. Now,
you have ready-made texts to publish under your own name. Or
you can open a page on social media for academics in the name of
the student in question and upload one of the confiscated texts with
your own name first. Preferably, of course, without the student
knowing about it.

Does all this sound difficult to believe? Unfortunately, all these

examples are drawn from real life. The victims are, of course,
precisely those (post)doctoral researchers who form the unprotected
middle management in many universities. They see their work
published under another’s name. Internationally, they lose
credibility. Some obtain their doctoral degree with a dissertation
based on articles that have all or largely been published with their
supervisor or co-supervisor as their “co-author.” To what extent can
they still claim to be the author of what they have written and
published?

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I saw several of them succumb to the never-ending pressure to
publish, as imposed on them by their (co-)supervisor wanting to
meet the required quota. The pressure can become unsustainable, as
can the means of imposing it. In my immediate surroundings, I
have known doctoral researchers who were so

HOW TO BE A PROFESSOR IN THE TWENTY-FIRST

CENTURY 45

severely bullied and harassed by their supervisors that they

eventually needed psychiatric help. One of them is still partially
incapacitated after years. Another was for three years refused even
a single day off and ended up bed-ridden for a year, suffering from
total burnout. Of course, such individuals are considered “unfit” for
an academic career and shown the door. And the supervisors? They
continue to have new victims assigned to them. For, painfully
enough, many of those responsible at universities even appreciate
that, in this way, doctoral researchers become accustomed to
“normal” academic practice.

When addressing the question of how universities counter such

practices, the answer can be as short as it is simple: nothing.
University boards proudly refer to the many hotlines and
committees, where complaints do indeed flow in and accumulate
like litter in dead-end alleys. Nobody cleans up. If a complaint
seeps through, it is “an individual case,” or university boards try to
erase all unpleasant traces as quickly as possible and to exonerate
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the scholar involved, despite the severity of the charges. Whoever
dares to stand up for the victims is quickly advised to be careful in
order not to be accused themselves, ending up as a prosecutor
against whom charges are brought in order to annihilate the
charges, he himself has brought.

One could even speak of a new kind of slavery that is developing in

academia. Extra money is brought in by inviting scholars from
outside Western academia. The prospects of an academic career in
the West are indeed still appealing for many in less prosperous
countries with fewer opportunities. Those invited do not know that
their invitation is often also inspired by fundraising motives.
Sometimes this is a painful discovery. For, as soon as the money is
received, the presence of the invited scholar is less necessary. As
soon as some tension arises, he or she can simply be dismissed
without further explanation. That they gave up a life in their home
country, that they brought over their partner and children, that they
suddenly become illegal, without work and thus with- out a
residence permit, seems of no importance to the inviting supervisor
or university. Their case now falls under the jurisdiction of the
police and social services. The check has been cashed.

It is painful to realize that most of the above excesses are not

limited to younger academics who are obliged to think about their
careers. Established professors are guilty, yet avoid consequences.
Nor is this only a gender-related problem, in which the female side
always is the victim. True, women seem to suffer more, and men
seem to account for the majority of bullying behavior. But one
might wonder if this distribution of roles is not due more to the still
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predominant male part in the higher university positions.
Unfortunately, women in similar positions do not always behave
differently as some of the aforementioned cases show, and as
became clear from some of the #MeToo

46 VERBAAL

discussions. As far as invited scholars from non-Western countries

are concerned, the victims mostly are male.

The true problem must be looked for on a deeper level. It has to do

with an incapacity to handle power over others, even in the slightest
way. It has to do with loss of responsibility and respect toward the
personal integrity of those who entrust themselves to your guidance
and leadership.8 But how do you check it? How can a university—
supposing there is a sincere desire to prevent harassment, bullying
and power abuse among staff—be sure that the individual it hires
has this sense of respect and responsibility, as well as the capability
to handle power?

Somehow, this is an educational problem and, of course, it is not

that different from the problem hovering in the background. A
society that invests all its resources in those who know how to build
up their career, irrespective of the human or material consequences,
will in the end create people who do not care about the safety or
health of others. Perhaps universities ought to resist these
developments. Perhaps universities ought to create islands of

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human respect and responsibility towards the other, towards the
world, towards the future. Perhaps they should. But in reality, they
are adapting to a system that, in the end, is destroying the true
missions of the university: high-level teaching, intellectual
innovation and fundamental research.

One wonders why universities do not feel the need to keep the
intellectual blazon pure. That is the impression they give, anyway,
but it shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Unfortunately, in recent
history, universities have not often been shown to excel in
intellectual resistance. They rather breed academics who are
obedient employees.

When my colleague, twenty years ago, made the distinction

between intellectuals and academics, he didn’t have all these
developments in mind. But he has been proven right, perhaps more
so than expected. Does this mean that there are no intellectuals left
at universities? Certainly, there are some. But the number is
growing of those working at universities in whom the academic has
gotten the better of the intellectual, in whom the craving for a
career has sur- passed the urge to know. And what was once called
“conscience” has become extremely rare at universities. But of
course, conscience has nothing to do with either career or intellect.
It would merely make the university more human.

Acknowledgement

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This contribution is an enlarged version of my earlier Dutch
opinion piece,

“Hoe word je tegenwoordig hoogleraar?”

HOW TO BE A PROFESSOR IN THE TWENTY - FIRST

CENTURY 47

Notes

1 On the dangerous consequences for emerging countries and

economies, see Kigotho (2018). See also Runia (2018).

2 André Oosterlinck in De Standaard, August 25, 2011.

3 For the Netherlands, see van Oostendorp (2019); for the UK,
see Graham 2015, (p. 17). For an interesting (Canadian)
gendered approach to the problem of academic teaching,
considered as “care work,” see Fullick (2016).

4 For criticism of European Research Council policy, see

Migliorato (2016) and Schneider (2017). See also Sylos-Labini
(2014, 2016).

5 For just one example, see Anonymous (2017).

6 See the guidelines of ICMJE (n.d.) and COPE (n.d.).

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7 See also the guidelines of US Legal (n.d.) and the EU (n.d.).

8 See Chapman (2013) and Zhao (2016). For an example, see

also Hall and Betty (2020).

References

Anonymous. (2017). Plagiarism is rife in academia, so why is it

rarely acknowledged?

The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-

network/2017/ oct/27/plagiarism-is-rife-in-academia-so-why-is-it-
rarely-acknowledged

Chapman, D. (2013). Abusing power for private gain—Corruption

in academe.

University World News.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=
2013100110401544 COPE (Committee on Publishing Ethics).
(2014). What constitutes authorship?

COPE discussion document.

http://publicationethics.org/files/u7141/Authorship_
DiscussionDocument_0_0.pdf

EU. (n.d.). Copyright.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/running- business/
intellectual-property/copyright/index_en.htm

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Fleming, P. (2021). Dark academia: How universities die. Pluto
Press. Fullick, M. (2016). Changing the value of teaching in
universities.

https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/speculative-diction/
changing-value-of- teaching-in-universities/

Graham, R. (2015). Does teaching advance your academic career?

Perspectives of pro- motion procedures in UK higher education.
https://www.teachingframework.com/ resources/Does-teaching-
advance-your- academic-career-RAEng-online-report- (APRIL-
2015).PDF.

Hall, R., & Batty, D. (2020). ‘Abuse of power’: should universities

ban staff-student relationships?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/26/abuse- of-
power-should-universities-ban-staff-student-relationships

ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors).

(n.d.). Defining the role of authors and contributors.
http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/ roles-and-
responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html

48 VERBAAL

Kigotho, W. (2018). The dangerous rise of neo-liberal universities.

University World News.
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?
story=20181108130628468
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Migliorato, L. (2016). Europe’s flawed race for scientific research
funding. https://undark.org/2016/09/23/european-research-council-
flawed/

Nwabachili, C. C., & Nwabachili, C. O. (2015). Authorship and

ownership of copyright: A critical review. Journal of Law, Policy
and globalization, 34.

Runia, E. (2018, January 19). Waarom ik ontslag neem bij de

universiteit [Why I quit university]. NRC.
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/01/19/waarom-ik-ontslag- neem-
bij-de-universiteit-A1589052

Schinkel, W.(2018, September 22). Waarom ik niet actievoer voor

de universiteit [Why I refuse to campaign for the university].
Groene Amsterdammer. https://www.groene.nl/artikel/waarom-ik-
niet-actievoer-voor-de-universiteit

Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2000). The neo-liberal university.

New Labor Forum, 6, 73–79.

Sylos-Labini, F. (2014). European science policy and research risk.

Euroscientist. https://www.euroscientist.com/european-science-
policy- research-risk/

Sylos-Labini, F. (2016). Europea: Robin Hood al contrario.

https://francescosyloslabini.info/2016/04/06/la-politica-scientifica-
europea- robin-hood-al-contrario/

van Oostendorp, M. (2019). Neerlandistiek moet opkomen voor

onderwijs [Dutch Studies have to defend education]. De
Nederlandse Boekengids/The Dutch Review of Books, 2, 22–23.
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US Legal. (n.d.). Authorship in copyright.
https://copyright.uslegal.com/authorship- in-copyright/

Vasishth, S. (2017). Lack of transparency in ERC funding

decisions. https://forbetterscience.com/2017/04/26/lack-of-
transparency-in-erc- funding- decisions-by-shravan-vasishth/

Verbaal, W. (2019). Hoe word je tegenwoordig hoogleraar?

Streven, 86, 543–547. Zhao, Y. (2016). Vigilance of power abuse in
colleges and universities. Advances in

Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, 63, 239–243,

https://download.atlantis-press.COM/ARTICLE/25865809.PDF

CHAPTER 9

Bad Days

Anonymous 3

It was Professor Old boy’s turn to organize the Spring School that
year but we all have bad days sometimes

Like Pedro, who, on day one, chose not to use slides and spoke
with a heavy accent old boy didn’t have to lecture him on the
academic courtesy of talking like a Western European

We all have bad days sometimes

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Like Natalie who, on day two, took old boy’s questions in stride

—she’d answered them when he’d nodded off yet somehow, she
was made to feel stupid

We all have bad days sometimes

Professor Old boy should have known that the museums close early
off-season, or might, on day three, have believed Sasha, who told
him so, or he might at least have remembered her name

We all have bad days sometimes

Professor Old boy might even, on day four, have listened to

comments I offered in the evaluation session

We all have bad days sometimes

Like the people who didn’t dare to speak up when he started

shouting his “feedback on my feedback”

© JULIE HANSEN AND INGELA NILS SON, 2022 |

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DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_001 This is an open access article
distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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50 ANONYMOUS 3

And my supervisor, he might have acknowledged the issue

when I later recounted these events but after all, as he put it

We all have bad days sometimes

Like—all those other days—

Professor Nice guy, who calls me a nymph

after I introduce his talk Or Eric, who persists in a third

question though I tell him we’re moving on

Or Jack, who tells me he wonders how I look in a dress Or Andrew,

who gives me the floor because ladies go first

We all have bad days sometimes, or is it just me?

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Publisher’s Note

The author’s identity is anonymized for this chapter. Brill is aware

of the real identity of the author. The inclusion of anonymized
chapters has been permitted by Brill in view of risks to the general
security of the author.

CHAPTER 10

On Diversity Workshops

Challenges and Opportunities

Hanna McGinnis, Ana C. NÚÑEZ and Anonymous 4

1 Introduction

A not uncommon occurrence within academic walls: the (usually)

older white male scholar who makes an “off color” comment, or
interjects a racist, sexist, classist, etc. remark into an otherwise
innocuous academic presentation. Of course, for the minority
targets of such opinions, these comments are not sim- ply “off

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color,” but rather a real aggression directed at them. Perhaps even
more indicative of the lack of inclusivity and diversity in academic
spaces is the fact that such toxic comments are intended as “jokes”
directed at a presumed like- minded audience, the perpetrator
unaware that within the room are individuals whose identities are
indeed abused by such “jokes.”

This was the experience of the three authors of the present article at
a conference at our beloved undergraduate alma mater. In this
essay, we leave the details of the not uncommon “occurrence”
purposefully vague, with a shared conviction that to retell the
“incident” in question would only serve to center the perpetrator yet
again. To dissect the blatant personal and systemic sexism that such
incidents reveal is work that has already been masterfully done by
other individuals.

Instead, we three current and former graduate students focus on

what we accomplished in a workshop that we organized and
delivered in response to such abuse of power: the labor we
invested, the lessons we learned, and our hopes for greater
inclusivity in those disciplines that study the pre-modern world.

In response to the inciting conference, we were approached by our

trusted former undergraduate advisor to build and lead a subsequent
workshop that would address, dissect and teach undergraduates
about the challenges facing minority groups within graduate
studies.2 Though feeling out of our depth, we accepted the offer
because we felt that by holding our own workshop to address
sexism—as well as discrimination against other marginalized
intersecting identities—we would transform the “incident” into a
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meaningful learning opportunity in which workshop participants
productively worked

© HANNA MCGINNIS ET AL., 2022 |

DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_010

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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52 MCGINNIS ET AL.

toward greater inclusivity. Ambitions notwithstanding, we also took

on this responsibility to engage with inequality in academia because
we felt an obligation to not let this “incident” go unaddressed.

The workshop into which we invested four months of planning was

titled: “Equity in Academia: Gender and Intersecting Identities in
Graduate School, Research, and Beyond.” We aimed to accomplish
three things: discuss different power dynamics in academia;
collectively develop a toolkit for recognizing bias; and end with a
roundtable discussion with trusted faculty about their own graduate

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school experiences, and how, as professors, they incorporate
diversity and inclusion into both their research and teaching. The
workshop aimed not only to share information about biases in the
academic world, but also to collectively develop and explore tools
so that we can all be active bystanders with the capacity to
recognize and respond to witnessed bias, as well as be aware of
potentially enacting bias ourselves. Rather than dictate information
in a top- down approach, we wanted to practice more active
pedagogy by incorporating a combination of content delivery,
small-group discussion, collective information sharing and large-
group discussion.

That said, none of us had prior experience leading workshops of

this scope, and a major concern was how to put this event together
responsibly. Our back- grounds are in medieval history, a
notoriously white and cis-male field. As we began to plan the
workshop, we soon had to confront the fact that all of our mentors
in the field, and therefore the people we felt comfortable asking to
participate in our faculty panel discussion without monetary
compensation, were white. We felt that it was irresponsible to host a
workshop on equity, diversity and bias in academia with an entirely
white faculty panel. However, asking scholars of color to contribute
uncompensated labor for the benefit of our workshop would also be
irresponsible and tokenizing. In this, we were encountering
firsthand the results of gatekeeping academic hiring practices that
have historically excluded scholars of color from medieval and
other pre-modern fields.

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In an attempt to counterbalance the racial homogeneity of the
faculty panel, we sought to include resources throughout the
workshop that centered different identities and perspectives in
terms of race, academic position and research focus. We also
addressed directly the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in the
workshop at the beginning of the day’s programming. In keeping
with the collaborative environment of the day, we asked
participants to reflect on what we could have done differently, and
how they might approach this situation if they ever find themselves
in a similar one. For those of us in academia with racial privilege, it
is imperative to seek out solutions that invite and include diverse
perspectives into the conversation.

On DIVERSITY WORKSHO PS 53

2 The Workshop

Our workshop ran for one full day, and the audience included
primarily pre-modern studies undergraduate students and faculty
members. Because the workshop was open to all undergraduates,
however, we worked to design sessions that would be widely
applicable outside the study of the pre-modern world, be it in other
graduate fields or other workplaces. In taking this conceptual
approach, we designed the workshop in such a way that the key
takeaways could be learned and then abstracted into lessons

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relevant to nearly any circumstance of implicit or explicit bias.
Below is a discussion of the two main sessions that we hosted,
followed by a description of the faculty panel that followed these
sessions. In the appendices, we supply a full program schedule as
well as activities and discussion questions referred to below and
used through- out the workshop. Our hope is that such appendices
will further illuminate the nuts and bolts of the day’s programming,
and may serve as a tool or reference for any other graduate students
planning a similar workshop.

We opened our workshop with a session called “Navigating Bias in

the Academy.” This first session specifically focused on
recognizing bias and abuse of power structures within academia.
Since we all grow up with biases ingrained in us by our
communities, families and cultures, it may seem like a simple task
to identify such biases. Nonetheless, it is often difficult to recognize
bias when it manifests as “small” incidents that we are accustomed
to dismissing or normalizing. These incidents, however, play a large
role in systemic discrimination, elevating traditional white male
voices and mentalities while keeping people with marginalized
backgrounds and perspectives from rising to positions of power and
equality, particularly as graduate students, postdoctoral researchers
and professors.

For example, as a graduate student, an individual has different roles

and responsibilities daily. They might be a student, a teacher and a
researcher; or an intern and a student; or a student who is also a
full-time working professional. As they move throughout their day,
a graduate student likely transitions among these different roles,
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beginning their day as a teacher, for instance, and ending it as a
student attending class. One of the challenges of balancing these
various roles is the unique position of power and authority that each
entail. As they move between these spaces, a graduate student will
take on different positions of power in their relationships with
others, thereby changing how they experience potential issues of
sexual harassment, racial bias, gender bias, etc. Our goal in this
session was to discuss these shifting power dynamics with the
undergraduates, and to share and brainstorm responses to bias. On a
personal level, we each felt underprepared in this respect when we
arrived at

54 MCGINNIS ET AL.

graduate school, so we focused on this important skill from the very

start of the workshop.

In this first session on recognizing and responding to bias, we broke

into small groups to brainstorm possible power dynamics and how
graduate students with diverse identities fit into such dynamics.
After a brainstorming session in groups, we wrote a list on the
board of different kinds of power relationships. Here is a sampling
of what we collected:

– Professor/student

– TA/student

– Upper-level student/lower-level student

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– Older student/younger student

– Younger student/older student

– Tenured faculty/untenured faculty

– Supervisor/student

– Extrovert/introvert

– Hierarchy based on perceived prestige of undergraduate

school

– Male/female/non-binary

– White/Black, Indigenous, Person of Color (BIPOC)

– Well-known research focus/niche research focus

– Local student/international student

– Neurodivergent/neurotypical

– Disabled/non-disabled

We talked openly about how to react when we find ourselves in

abusive or subtly unhealthy dynamics within these power
structures, particularly when the other person(s) involved do not
perceive the bias at hand. Then, we shared three case studies
focused on unhealthy dynamics within academia to dive deeper into
recognizing bias within certain power structures and identifying
possible responses, such as removal from the situation and self-
recognition that the situation was not one’s own “fault” (see
Appendix 1).
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In summary, the exercise was designed to help both students and
faculty members in attendance to recognize shifting vulnerabilities
and privilege within these power structures, and to thereby develop
an awareness not only to recognize when they are a recipient of
bias, but also when they may be unwittingly perpetuating or
enacting bias themselves. For those teaching, such an awareness
can be particularly beneficial in moderating classroom participation
in order to create a more equitable environment where diverse
voices and perspectives feel welcome and encouraged.

Moving forward in the day, the second session of the workshop

focused on resource-sharing and discussion for building more
equitable academic spaces.

On DIVERSITY WORKSHO PS 55

We structured the information of this second half according to the

three roles that the graduate might inhabit as discussed in the first
half of the day: the student, the teacher and the scholar.

First, our discussion of the “graduate student” focused on formal

and informal sources of support in the face of gender-based bias or
assault. A campus officer from the Title IX Office—responsible for
ensuring university compliance with US federal law that protects
individuals from sex-based discrimination—presented information
on the emotional and legal support available through the Title IX
Office. During this section, we also acknowledged the potential
barriers that students may face in accessing these resources. For
example, graduate students may feel dissuaded from reporting acts
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of bias that involve their advisors or fellow graduate students out of
fear of potential retaliation. With this in mind, we talked about
some of the student-based campus resources that graduate students
may be able to rely on while preserving anonymity, such as campus
advocates for survivors of sexual assault, or a campus ombuds
office. The undergraduates and early career scholars in the room
expressed familiarity with these potential barriers and appreciated
the open discussion of alternative avenues for support. While it was
invigorating to brainstorm alternatives together, it also served as a
stark reminder of how many students experience gender-based bias
or assault before even completing their undergraduate degree, let
alone embarking on further graduate study. During the section on
the “graduate teacher,” we emphasized ways of leading academic
spaces that actively try not to marginalize students or fellow
participants in the space. Since teaching is typically a requirement
for graduate students in American PhD programs, we thought it
important to give time for workshop participants to think about and
work through the dynamics of leading a classroom. We turned to
critical pedagogical resources available through Vanderbilt
University’s Center for Teaching. We spent some time exploring
Van- derbilt’s many pedagogical guides, such as “Teaching Race,”
“Teaching beyond the Gender Binary in the University Classroom”
and “Increasing Inclusivity in the Classroom” (Thurber, Harbin &
Bandy, 2019; Harbin, 2016; Greer, 2014). Along with the
undergraduates, we then collectively sought out resources for
specifically forming more critical syllabi, paying attention to what
and whom to include in the course content. Here, we turned to the
websites of the Medi- evalists of Color and the Teaching
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Association for Medieval Studies (TEAMS) for their knowledge
and inspiration (Hsy & Orlemanski, 2018; Robinson, 2018). In this
part of the workshop, it was great to see how both undergraduates
and more senior faculty members re-approached the classroom with
new critical pedagogical ideas. As early and former graduate
students with varying teaching experiences, it was powerful for us
to witness how creating spaces for collective

56 MCGINNIS ET AL.

learning and discussion could benefit both students and advanced

professors. While it is difficult to gauge any ripple effect from this
specific workshop, for us it highlighted the importance of creating
these spaces and opportunities as part of the work toward more
equitable classrooms—a key component of a more equitable
academic workplace.

In our final session on the “graduate scholar,” we shared and

discussed resources for carrying out research in supposedly “niche”
areas within pre-modern academia. These “niche” areas, such as
disability, gender and race, can often be treated as peripheral to
“real” pre-modern scholarship, making it harder for a scholar’s
work to be taken seriously; in other words, academia can
marginalize scholarship as well as scholars. For students
contemplating further graduate study, we wanted to illustrate that
finding the sources to pursue traditionally undervalued areas of
scholarship is possible, and that communities within academia
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have, in many cases, already put in the labor of assembling online
bibliographies or indices as starting points. We presented two such
resources as examples: the Feminae Index, and the History of
Disease, Disability and Medicine in Medieval Europe source
database. We also shared tools from online community spaces and
blogs (such as Sarah Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoys blog), as well as
funding opportunities that specifically serve financially
disadvantaged graduate scholars (such as those offered through
Sportula).3 Based on participant engagement, it appeared that these
resources were welcome news to many in the room, and we hope
that they have been able to assist those undergraduates who have
gone on to further graduate study.

Finally, we drew together our discussion of the graduate student,

teacher and scholar with a close-reading of a medium article written
by Eugenia Zuroski (2018), associate professor of English at
McMaster University: “Holding Patterns: On Academic Knowledge
and Labor.” While not specifically aimed at pre-modern disciplines,
Zuroski’s work dissects oppressive dynamics within academia and
highlights the conditions necessary for building a more equitable
academic space for students and scholars. We asked workshop
participants to read this article individually and discuss it in small
groups before moving into larger group discussions and engaging
with reading questions designed to help unpack Zuroski’s work in
light of the themes of the workshop (see Appendix 3). Here, we
asked participants to engage with the written work of a scholar who
has already devoted energy and time to the subject of equity and
abuse in academia. Looking back, it would have been beneficial to

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have had more time to discuss Zuroski’s article, as it clearly
resonated with many of the participants in the room, some of whom
expressed excitement at reading

On DIVERSITY WORKSHO PS 57

a compelling summation of the very dynamics that they hitherto

had trouble finding the words to describe.

To close the day-long workshop, we convened a faculty panel

session of five of our mentors and colleagues and asked them to
reflect on their positionality and experiences within academia (see
Appendix 4). We asked them questions such as: When doing
research or teaching, how do you think about your identity in
relation to the subjects you research and the students you teach and
mentor? How does an awareness of your positionality affect your
work? How do you think about minority representation in your
work, be it in articles, presentations or in the classroom? Through
this conversation, we found that many of our mentors were familiar
early on with the position we found ourselves in while planning and
putting on this workshop: a sense of being unprepared and possibly
unqualified, yet hopeful that our work would lead to change within
academia.

One key take-away from the panel session was the pressure to
maintain continuous passion for the discipline—in other words, the
supposed dis- tinction, lauded in academia, that jobs are not so

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much jobs, as they are labors of love. While enthusiasm for one’s
job is not inherently problematic, it becomes burdensome when this
expectation of unwavering passion excuses hardships and inequities
that graduate students may be facing. This expectation of
unfaltering passion is also troubling when it causes feelings of
inadequacy or inability—imposter syndrome—in graduate students
who aren’t as passionate as they “should” be. To combat this
expectation, the five panelists recommended drawing clear
boundaries between one’s work and one’s passions.

Another highlight from the discussion was a shared concern and

frustration among the panelists that far too often the extra, “para-
academic” work falls to persons (especially women) of color. While
such work is necessary for the health of the academic workplace,
this extra labor consequently keeps those individuals from their
search and writing that moves their careers forward. For
prospective graduate students, the panelists recommended that the
students enter academia with a clear awareness of their personal
willingness and capacity to perform extra labor.

This panel discussion was a great conclusion to the workshop

because it further broke down barriers between faculty and
students, both undergraduate and graduate, and gave the
undergraduate students a window onto the upsides and downsides
of an academic career. All too often, this kind of institutional
knowledge goes unspoken, and the ropes must be relearned again
and again as new faces enter the field. For students from minority
backgrounds, the starting line at the beginning of the search for
institutional knowledge may be even further back. The panelists
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were exceedingly open in sharing their own experiences, and we
hope that the tips and tricks they shared to survive and thrive in
academia can be passed on to incoming students, especially those
of diverse identities.

58 MCGINNIS ET AL.

3 Concluding Reflections

Reflecting on our experience of planning and leading this

workshop, we are proud of the result that we achieved. We did our
best to organize an event that reflected diversity without tokenizing;
that provided resources without embracing solely a content-delivery
format; and served as a meaningful experience that somehow
moved beyond the ephemeral one-day workshop. The students and
faculty who attended were committed to centering diverse thought
and minimizing bias in the pre-modern academic field. The students
who participated left with the skills to recognize and respond to
different forms of bias, preparing them to enter graduate school
better able to advocate for themselves and support their peers. Our
panelist mentors (one of whom returned from research leave
specifically for our workshop) generously engaged with our
questions and were willing to share their personal experiences with
the group. Above all, we were honored to go back to our alma
mater to engage with both undergraduates and faculty and carve out

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a space for discussing diversity and inclusion in pre-modern
disciplines.

This isn’t to say, however, that we don’t still wonder what

constitutes the lasting impact of the workshop, or indeed perhaps of
all one-day diversity training workshops. The audience was a self-
selected group of students who wanted to spend a day (on a
Saturday, no less) learning how to confront bias in academia.
Nobody in the room was unaware of the issues of diversity and
inclusion in academic spaces. After four months of work, countless
hours of team planning, individual preparation, and plane rides
across the state, it was hard not to wonder whether we invested too
much labor for something relatively “small,” because meaningful,
actualized diversity and inclusion work should not be assigned to
just one day. Instead, this work should be modeled and discussed by
the visible, secure figures of the department or university who
commit to this work on a regular basis. This needs to be done in
class- rooms, during office hours and in administrative meetings,
where identifying bias and creating more equitable contexts have
the greatest possibility for effecting change.

On DIVERSITY WORKSHO PS 59

In conclusion, we realize that possible participant responses, or key

take- aways from the different program modules, might be missing.
Thinking back on the workshop, we remember with certainty that
many participants— undergraduates and faculty alike—offered
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critical, illuminating and self- reflective comments on these
difficult topics of bias and abuse in academia. But what we, as the
three current and former graduate students who organized, planned
and led this event, remember, is the immense labor we invested, the
stress and worry during the actual workshop, and the overwhelming
relief when the day had successfully concluded. We realize now
that we could not meaningfully join in the communal discussions
because we were so focused on simply carrying out the logistics of
the event. This is part of the reason why we include the four
appendices that follow, to fill in the gaps where our collective
memory is lacking.

Finally, if we’re truly honest in our reflections, our hopes for the
realization of a more diverse and equitable academic world are
slight and waning. It is possible, however, that such a negative
outlook is in part a response to our current times in the US (early
2020), which are characterized by the coronavirus pandemic,
institutional anti-Black racism and a tyrannical president. The
current exceptional circumstances notwithstanding, it is
disheartening to constantly witness the lack of diversity that
predominates in academic spaces, and to observe that incidents of
abuse continue to unfold (Cassens Weiss, 2020; Loupeda, 2020).
Yet, ever hopeful, we hold on to the aspiration of an academic
world free of bias and abuse. To arrive here will require that
diversity training be seen not as peripheral, but rather as integral to
the classroom, the university and the discipline(s). This means
assigning credit (or other inducements) for diversity learning, and
incorporating diversity and inclusivity work into every- day

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practices. This also requires that all levels of the academic world
nurture greater humility: the humility to listen to the unique
perspectives of diverse students and scholars; to self-interrogate;
and to welcome changes in behavior that was never really okay, but
rather more widely ignored and accepted in the academic spaces of
previous times. Perhaps then we will make concrete steps toward
ensuring a more just academia.

Publisher’s Note

The identity of one of the authors of this chapter has been

anonymized. Brill is aware of the real identity of the author. The
inclusion of anonymized chapters has been permitted by Brill in
view of risks to the general security of the author.

60 MCGINNIS ET AL.

Notes

1 See, for instance, Perlata (2019), and the remarks in solidarity

with Perlata by Chaganti (2019), providing links to many other
relevant pieces.

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2 We would like to thank two other women who invested their aid,
labor and resources in helping us organize this workshop.

3 Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index. Society for

Medieval Feminist Scholarship.
https://inpress.lib.uiowa.edu/feminae/WhatIsFeminae.aspx;
History of Disease, Disability, and Medicine in Medieval Europe,
https://dishist.hypotheses.org/; The Sportula: Microgrants for
Classics Students, https://thesportula.wordpress.com/. See also
Ahmed (2017).

References

Ahmed, S. (2017, December 19). Diversity work as complaint.

Feminist kill joys.

https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/12/19/diversity-work-as-
complaint/ Cassens Weiss, D. (2020, June 2). Stanford law prof
who used quote with racial

slur in class says he won’t do it again. Aba Journal.

https://www.abajournal.com/news/ article/Stanford-law-prof-who-
used-quote- with-racial-slur-in-class-says-he-wont- do-it-again

Chaganti, S. (2019, January 18). On context: AIA-SCS 2019.

Medievalists of Color.
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https://medievalistsofcolor.com/public-discourse/

Greer, A. (2014). Increasing inclusivity in the classroom. Vanderbilt

University Center for Teaching. https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-
sub-pages/increasing-inclusivity- in-the-classroom/

Harbin, B. (2016). Teaching beyond the gender binary in the

university classroom.

Updated by L. M. Roberts et al. (2020). Vanderbilt Center for

Teaching. https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/teaching-
beyond-the-gender- binary-in-the-university-classroom/#cred

Hsy, J., & Orlemanski, J. (2018). Race and medieval studies: A

partial bibliography.

Medievalists of Color.

https://medievalistsofcolor.com/resources/pedagogy-
bibliographies/ Loupeda, M. (2020, May 11). Students call for
accountability, faculty diversity after professor twice uses racial
slur. Stanford Daily.
https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/05/11/STUDENTS-call-for-
accountability- faculty-diversity-after-professor-twice-uses-racial-
slur/

Perlata, D. P. (2019, January 7). Some thoughts on AIA-SCS 2019.

Medium. https:// medium.com/@danelpadillaperalta/some-
thoughts-on-aia-scs-2019- d6a480a1812a

Robinson, C. L. (2018). Featured lesson resource page: Race,

racism, and the Middle Ages. Teaching Association for Medieval
Studies (TEAMS). https://teams-medieval.org/?page_id=76
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On DIVERSITY WORKSHO PS 61

Thurber, A., Harbin, M. B., & Bandy, J. (2019). Teaching race:

Pedagogy and practice.

Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.

https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/teaching-race/ Zuroski, E. (2018, April 5).
Holding patterns: On academic knowledge and labor.

Medium. https://medium.com/@zugenia/holding-patterns-on-
academic- knowledge-and-labor-3E5A6000ECBF

Appendix 1: Schedule (Created by Hanna McGinnis,

Ana C. Núñez and Anonymous 4)

Breakfast (9:30–10:00)

Session I (10:00 Am–12:00 pm): Navigating Bias in the

Academy

The intention of this half of the program is to begin talking in more

general terms about gender and other bias and power dynamics in
academia; to outline potential for- mal and informal resources that
students and scholars can draw from when deciding how to respond
to bias; to discuss strategies for how to support colleagues

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experiencing bias; and to discuss strategies for ensuring against
(unintentionally) marginalizing one’s colleagues. This more general
half of the program will be complemented by the second half (see
Session II below), in which we will seek specific answers from an
academic panel.

1. (10 minutes) Introduction: Intentions and Goals

2. (40 minutes) Power Dynamics in the Academy and Recognizing

Bias:

i. Activity I: Small groups to brainstorm dynamics

encountered in an aca- demic setting. Here we will
encourage the students to think critically about more
nuanced situations.

ii. Activity II: Coming together as a room to share thoughts.

The master list compiled will serve as a reminder
throughout the event that will be crucial in the second half
of the program. The session leaders will then discuss how
bias plays into the broader hierarchical dynamics of
academia.

iii. The session leaders will speak to personal experiences of

bias and the sup- port or resistance they encountered when
deciding whether to confront it.

3. (10 minutes) Morning Break

4. (60 minutes) Toolkit for Responding to Bias:

i. Speaker I: A speaker from the university’s center for

prevention, advocacy and support for survivors of sexual
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 violence and harassment will discuss relevant campus
resources.

ii. Speakers II: The session leaders will discuss additional

resources, high- lighting communities (both in person and
online), gathering support systems and allies, and the
power of collective action.

62 MCGINNIS ET AL.

iii. Activity III: Bias Bibliography. Session leaders will present

a few blogs, book chapters and (online) groups as
potentially helpful resources for students and scholars.

iv. Activity IV: Small groups (2–3 people), brainstorming

strategies for sup- porting colleagues experiencing bias,
highlighting how to proactively offer support and how to
respond when someone reaches out for support.

v. Activity V: Coming together as a room to share thoughts

culminating in the composition of a second master list.

vi. Activity VI: Small groups (2–3 people), brainstorming how

students and scholars can attempt to proactively and
meaningfully prevent the further marginalization of
students and scholars in these fields.

vii. Activity VII: Coming together as a room to share thoughts

and build another master list.

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LUNCH (12:00 pm–1:00 pm) Over lunch everyone will be asked
to write down one or two questions for the culminating discussion.

Session II (1:00 pm–4:00 pm): Research and Teaching

The intention of this half of the program is to look at identity and

bias in academia through the lens of research and teaching. The
academic panel will give scholars and researchers the opportunity
to share their experiences in academia, their approach to pursuing
research and teaching, and their assessments of how their fields can
be expanded. This session will culminate in an interactive
discussion in which everyone in the room will have a chance to ask
questions or propose answers.

1. (100 minutes) Panel on Research and Teaching

a. Panel speakers will each be provided with a list of

questions beforehand from which they can choose several
or all to address.

2. (15 minutes) Afternoon Break

3. (45 minutes) This concluding session will give the students and
the panelists the opportunity to engage in a fully interactive
manner with the material covered throughout the day. The
questions that the students brainstorm over lunch will be used

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 to fuel this discussion in the case that lulls arise between
questions/comments.

4. (20 minutes) Conclusion/Final share-out.

Appendix 2: Case Studies (Created by Hanna McGinnis,

Ana C. Núñez and Anonymous 4)

1. Your advisor asks you how you’re habituating to the new

environment of grad school. You share your fears of being less
prepared than your classmates, at which point your advisor tells
you to be more confident and to “man-up” and act the part of a
graduate student, since this is no longer an undergraduate
environment that will baby you as you go.

On DIVERSITY WORKSHO PS 63

a. How does this comment make you feel? Would you leave
the meeting feeling better/more prepared than you entered?

b. Is this an example of a productive advisor/student

meeting? Why or why not?

c. How might you continue this meeting?

d. Would knowing the gender identity of the people involved

in this scenario change how you view the situation?
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2. One day before class starts, you overhear Student A brag to
Student B about how much Student A has already written for an
upcoming paper assignment. Student A then asks Student B
how much they have written. Student B responds, nervously,
saying that they have finished their research and have an
outline, but still need to write the paper. Student A laughs
dismissively, saying Student B must be struggling to keep up
with the workload, which wasn’t designed to accommodate
everyone’s abilities.

a. Would you engage in this conversation, and if so, how and

with what intention?

b. If not, what might you say to Student B after the

conversation with Student A has ended?

c. Do you consider this conversation to be unhealthy? Why or

why not?

2. At the 2017 International Medieval Congress at Leeds, when

introducing the keynote lecture on the theme of “otherness,”
which was part of a panel of white, European men speaking on
the topic, the moderator joked that “If audience members
thought he was just another old, white man, they should just
wait until after his holiday at the beach.”
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 From/240666

a. How does this comment make you feel?

b. Imagine that after the conference, people are discussing the

event, and a colleague says that they don’t see anything
wrong with the comment and think people were
overreacting since it was “just a joke.” Do you feel able to
further discuss this situation with your colleague? If so,
what might you say?

c. What might be an appropriate way to introduce an all-

white and male

panel on otherness?

64 MCGINNIS ET AL.

Appendix 3: Reading Questions (Created by Hanna

McGinnis, Ana C. Núñez and Anonymous 4)

Eugenia Zuroski, “Holding Patterns: On Academic Knowledge and

Labor,” Medium.com, Apr 5 2018,
https://medium.com/@zugenia/holding-patterns-on-academic-
knowledge- and-labor-3E5A6000ECBF

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 Reading Questions

1. “If we want to build solidarity within hostile institutional

conditions, we must do better at respecting all knowledge
formed at particular distances from power, especially when it
addresses us directly.”

a. What might respecting this knowledge look like?

2. “Some of us are compelled structurally to perform kinds of

labor that others of us have never come to know, or not until
now.”

a. What might this (often unacknowledged) labor look like?

b. In what ways do you think students/scholars with more

privilege could ease the burden placed on students/scholars
with less privilege to perform this kind of labor?

3. “Sometimes I have been part of this ‘we,’ and sometimes I have

been the ‘you.’ I have tried to learn by listening.”

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 a. Imagining yourself to be part of this “we,” what might be
ways of resisting “hostile institutional conditions” (quoted
from first excerpt)?

b. Imagining yourself to be part of this “you,” can you think

of gaps in your knowledge/experience, and ways you could
educate yourself or be more open to listening? What do
you think is at stake in listening to folks whose experience
differs from your own?

4. “Academic allyship has to be focused on transforming

institutions, overhauling their missions and methods, to make
them worthy of the people they mobilize and claim to serve. We
don’t need your admiration, your acclaim, your invitation. We
don’t need you to feel bad. We need you to hire more of us; we
need you to practice humility; we need you to take some
instruction. There’s a collective endeavor underway, and we’re
showing you this: step away from the center and you’ll learn
how to do the work.”

On DIVERSITY WORKSHO PS 65

a. What might “step[ping] away from the center” look like?

b. Where do you think undergraduate and graduate students

fit into aca- demic allyship and transforming institutions?

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 c. Where do you think graduate students who don’t intend to
go further in academia fit into academic allyship and
transforming institutions?

Appendix 4: Faculty Panel Questions (Created by

Hanna McGinnis, Ana C. Núñez and Anonymous 4)

1. Personal Introduction: Please introduce yourself to the group.

When and why did you realize you wanted to pursue graduate
studies and a career in academia? What was that experience
like? How did you first encounter your research interests?

2. Positionality: When doing research or teaching, how do you

think about your identity in relation to the subjects you
research and the students you teach and mentor? How does an
awareness of your positionality affect your work? How do you
think about minority representation in your work, be it in
articles, presentations or in the classroom?

3. “Standard” versus “peripheral” history: Within pre-modern

studies, are there certain types of history that might be seen as
“standard” (e.g., military, economic, political), and others that
might be seen as “peripheral” (e.g., gender, sexuality,
environmental)? What are the trends regarding these “two
camps,” if such a divide exists? Do ideas of “standard” versus
“peripheral” history also emerge based on the kind of platform
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 used (e.g., Speculum versus Eidolon)? Or based on the
identity of the historian (e.g., white male versus brown
woman)?

4. Advice to potential graduate students: Thinking back on your

experience as a graduate student and now a professor, and
bearing in mind the theme of today’s workshop—navigating
gender and other identities in the Academy—what advice
would you give to students thinking about pursuing graduate
studies in the humanities? What lessons or words of
encouragement would you like to leave them with today?

CHAPTER 11

Still a World to Win

Anonymous 5

When I entered the Dutch academic world as a young (male)

scholar in 1983, I expected to become part of a broad-minded, open
community in which thoughts and ideas would be exchanged.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. I became part of a
world in which scholarly ideas were hardly ever exchanged and
open discussions barely possible. Moreover, there were many
conflicts between my colleagues, on a professional as well as
personal level. Many of these were over power and status, and they
often arose from jealousy and frustration over the success of other
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scholars and/or those in positions of authority within the university.
Within this strange world, I have always done my best to go my
own way, to stay true to myself and to treat my colleagues and
students with the respect they deserve, regardless of gender,
background and skin color. Hopefully I have succeeded in this.

At the time of my entry into academia, it was much more

hierarchical than it is now. Full professors (most of them male)
were at the top of the hierarchy and wielded considerable power
over everyone lower in the pecking order. Fortunately, that has
changed somewhat over the years, and now the voices of those
lower in the hierarchy are also being heard. Yet full professors still
exercise substantial authority and sometimes abuse their power. I
am sorry to say that, in my experience at least, the increased
number of female full professors over the past decades does not
appear to have improved this situation. Like men, women in
positions of authority sometimes behave in intimidating ways
towards those below them in the hierarchy.

Fortunately, I have seldom been a victim of abuse of power and

intimidation in my academic career. I remember only one such
occasion, which had a great impact on me personally. The incident
occurred in the early 1990s, as I was gradually becoming successful
as a scholar and administrator within my department and the faculty
of arts. My boss at the time had, as a young scholar, seemed to have
a promising career ahead but did not live up to expectations. In the
beginning, he supported me unreservedly, but our relationship
gradually deteriorated with my growing success. We had
disagreements and he tried to thwart my career. Our differences of
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opinion increased and I was regularly the target of his fits of anger.
I thus avoided him as much as possible. The shit really hit the fan
one day when he stormed into my office because I had apparently

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STILL A WORLD TO WIN 67

said or done something that was not to his liking. He started

bullying me and said, “I am the professor here. I make the
decisions, and you do as I tell you.” I was shocked and asked him
to leave my office. I filed a formal complaint about his
inappropriate behavior, shown towards others as well as towards
me. I think he received a formal reprimand. After that, we avoided
one another and were no longer on speaking terms. These strained
relations gave me cause to seriously consider leaving academia, but
I’m glad I didn’t. Fortunately, over the last decades academia has
become more open, broad-minded, diverse and less hierarchical,
even though there is still a world to win.

Publisher’s Note

The author’s identity is anonymized for this chapter. Brill is aware

of the real identity of the author. The inclusion of anonymized
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chapters has been permitted by Brill in view of risks to the general
security of the author.

CHAPTER 12

Fragments of Missed Opportunities or Unrealized

Dialectical Exchanges with a Mentor

Anonymous 6

1 What Was Said

18/06/20xx, 23:50: Dear Denis,1 I will be in my office tomorrow

morning. Come see me, I need to talk to you. Professor

19/06/20xx, 00:02: Dear Professor, of course. I hope it is nothing

serious. See you tomorrow. Denis

P: … remember, last summer, in the restaurant by the sea, when

most of the others had left, you were washing your hands in the
bathroom and I approached you from behind. You leaned towards
me, but suddenly pulled back when you heard a noise … [leans
forward expectantly]

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D: I’m really sorry, professor. I remember that dinner, but I really
cannot recall the moment you refer to. I’m sorry if I … [the rest of
the record has been censored by survival mechanisms]

19/06/20xx, 20:45: Dear Professor, I am a bit troubled by what you

mentioned this morning. But only because I’m afraid you might be
troubled, too. I was trying really hard to remember what I did, and
it is true that I recall a moment of proximity that might have caused
the confusion. And it is my fault. On the one hand, you must have
noticed that I am rather flirtatious in general and, on the other, I am
used to combining intellectual closeness with certain physical
gestures. Anyhow, I am glad you mentioned it, since honesty and
sincerity are qualities, I really appreciate in you. Please know that,
from the very start, you have been a great father figure to me, and
you remain someone I respect, admire and—moreover—am
inspired by. As a student, friend and confidant, I remain at your
disposal.

Cordially, D.

19/06/20xx, 20:45: Dear Denis, no troubles, no problems, no

worries. A long road lies ahead of us. We talk, we explain, we live.
A very important thing: I found a copy of my book, come pick it up
on Monday. Complicitly yours, and please, no father figures—I
despise them. P.

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FRAGMENTS of MISSED OPPORTUNITIES 69

2 What Could Have Been Said

2.1 Fragment I

P: What did you want to discuss?

D: Sexuality, rapaciousness and academia. P: Why now?

D: Because the long road is over and you have no power over my
life anymore.

P: You were always a strong and stubborn person. What kind of

power have I ever had over you?

D: You arranged for me to relocate to a foreign country whose

language I barely spoke, to a city where I had no social support, to
enter a system where I always felt slightly illegal, did not know my
rights or the administrative mechanisms. You convinced me to
pursue a long unfunded endeavor without any structure, but with
you as the sole reference point in a foreign land.

P: When I was your age, I traveled Europe alone! Did I tell you
about that time in a monastery?

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D: Many times. You also told me not to worry about money
because you would help me figure something out. I don’t know
whether I prefer to believe that you were just lying, or that you had
some kind of sleazy arrangement in mind.

P: You were always so sensitive and creative. I don’t know where

you get your ideas. You were always neurotic about money, too.
You seemed to be doing just fine.

D: I was lucky to meet genuinely generous people. I was also

motivated enough to juggle three jobs at a time. You call me
neurotic, but while you got a bonus for having an extra student, I
had to get by at times with half the minimum wage.

P: You’re exaggerating, reducing a fruitful scholarly relation to a

moment of physical weakness. My students are everything to me.

D: Scaffoldings for your robust ego?

P: Would not life have been harder for you in your country, where
you could not express yourself freely?

D: You made sure to establish that early on, didn’t you? P:

Whatever do you mean?

D: You asked my colleague if I was homosexual less than a week

after you met me.

70 ANONYMOUS 6

2.2 Fragment II
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P: I felt you needed support, encouragement and acceptance. I felt I
could empathize with your position.

D: I was in my early twenties and living my sexuality more or less

openly. You were nearly retired, married, with children, inquiring
about other people’s sexuality by proxy.

P: You are twisting words and events. I was genuinely caring.

D: I believed you were caring, now I know you were tentacular.

P: I accepted you and appreciated you as you were.

D: You imagined me as you wanted me to be. You were being

duplicitous. You said you had two sons and that, if you had a third
one, you would like him to be just like me. And I told that to all my
friends as a wonderful example of kindness and acceptance in
academia. That is, before you made your move and tried to
convince me that I misconstrued you as a father figure, or whatever.

2.3 Fragment III

P: I do not see anything wrong in a physical relationship between

two free and equal adults.

D: Then why did you wait for your wife to leave the city before
approaching me?

P: There’s no need to bring her into this, this is between a teacher

and a student.

D: I’m sorry to ruin your Spartan fantasy, but you have just tapped
the nerve of inequality in our positions as adults.
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P: You are being so Anglo-Saxon and puritan! This bureaucratic
temperament will be the death of free academia. Makes me wonder
what happened to the spirit of ’68!

D: Mind your adjectives! What was this spirit of ’68, pray you?

P: Freeing bodies, unbinding spirits, unshackling minds! Society

and academia have forgotten our great heritage.

D: And where were you while they were forgetting? Having a

perfectly heteronormative life, dipping your spoon into the sexual
liberties in the cupboard, cashing in on social democracy, while
letting it expire and disintegrate.

P: But the spirit of freedom …

D: Freedom begins where necessity ends. How was I to live my

freedom with homophobes on one side and predators on the other,
both latently threatening my physical integrity?

FRAGMENTS of MISSED OPPORTUNITIES 71

2.4 Fragment IV

P: You’re accusing me of hetero whatever, while you defend a

puritan traditionalism that only allows for relations sanctioned by
bourgeois society.

D: It’s the dishonest predatory types that keep us trapped in our

“chosen” binary categories, because we feel it is safer there.

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Sexuality is the most liberating thing there is. But you cannot blame
me for not wanting to explore the depths of a shark tank.

2.5 Fragment V

D: You know the joke you always tell about northern cavemen and
southern faggots in antiquity?

P: Brilliant, isn’t it?

D: It’s about as funny as the one about a woman’s head serving as a

beer- pint stand.

2.6 Fragment VI

P: You’re turning this into a trial. D: I could have, had I wanted to.

P: So, I should just stop doing young people favors to avoid hurting
their feelings?

D: You know, I hooked up with a guy soon after I met you, just
before starting my studies. An “uneducated” fellow, professional
waiter. Dazzled by the opportunity you offered, I bragged so much
about being lucky, about the things you said and your warm
endorsement. “Just you wait,” he said, “soon he will name his
price.” No way, I objected, not in academia!

P: What is the meaning of this?

D: The meaning is that you are not extraordinary in any way, and
that the ivory tower is porous and rotten.

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P: Do you think you are special?

D: No, now I know that I was not the first one to refuse you.

2.7 Fragment VII

P: You just want to hurt me.

D: I just wish I could unhurt myself.

2.8 Fragment VIII

P: Why are you so obsessed with this? It happened years ago and I

didn’t even touch you!

D: You touched me and others inappropriately so many times. And

you always stood too close.

P: You did not object.

72 ANONYMOUS 6

D: Was I in a position to object?

P: Now you are being duplicitous. On top of perverting an honest

affection, if this vision of frigid and sterile academia is what you
believe in, why didn’t you fight for it?

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D: Even if we disregard the fact that I felt my career and livelihood
were at stake, there are still a couple of reasons.

P: I would never cause you harm.

D: You were doing it constantly without realizing it. P: What are the
other reasons?

D: Insecurity and empathy.

2.9 Fragment IX

P: Do you think it was easy for me? Do you know where and when
I grew up?

It’s easy for you to talk about freedom.

D: Do not turn this into a generational thing. Do you remember that

famous scholar from our field who admitted his attraction to a male
colleague? His boss “found him a wife” to quiet down the rumors,
because the object of his attraction bullied and blackmailed him,
threatening to ruin a joint project. Do you know that less renowned
scholar from our field who fled the dictatorship and jubilantly lived
his homosexuality for decades, with or without his partner, without
harassing or harming anyone around him? They are both of your
generation, living in the same city. Alternatives become more
obvious when you move the axis of the world away from yourself.

2.10 Fragment X

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P: Now you are being duplicitous. You admitted to being flirtatious.
D: And you did nothing to correct me.

2.11 Fragment XI

P: You always had a nasty character. And this dialogue is artless,

you turned me into a scarecrow, a one-dimensional caricature that
no one can empathize with. I don’t understand what kind of
empathy you are talking about.

D: That afternoon, after you stood too close to me once again, while
I was thinking of ways to mend my vulnerability, when I did not
know whom to ask for advice, when I dug painfully deep into my
memories and forced myself to fill the void with your version of
events, a part of me that was not torn between panic and anger and
guilt, a part of me was actually feeling compassion for you.

P: You were pitying me?

D: I was trying to put myself in your thick skin. I imagined myself

30 years on, an emotionally hungry male professor in frigid
academia, tortured by the fact that he happened to be attracted to
male beauty and youth in front of him, nostalgic for the beauty and
youth that he wasted laboring behind dusty volumes.

FRAGMENTS of MISSED OPPORTUNITIES 73

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P: Your brain is too complicated. Didn’t you get anything from me?

D: Oh, so much! A life-long warning and empathy for those who

deserve it. When I opened up to my friends, I heard so many stories
of unsolicited exposures, implicit blackmail, wandering hands,
rapes. Years later, I told my mother about what you did. She shared
stories of sexual harassment by her professors. I was the first
person she ever dared talk to about this.

2.12 Fragment XII

P: You admitted to being flirtatious. You’re a bright young man,

you knew what you were doing.

D: Throughout my education I overheard and imagined whispers.

They said I was gay because I wore a different outfit every day.
They said I was sucking up to professors because I always asked
questions. They said my grades were higher than what I actually
deserved. They said I got where I was through charm and rhetoric,
they said I had no substance. And here I was, starting out in a new
environment, being told that the man who brought me there was
interested in my body. Were you ever aware that I disagreed with
most of your scholarly work? Did you even hear anything of what I
said?

P: You are twisting and projecting. You make it sound like I

violated you. D: Should I be grateful that you didn’t?

2.13 Fragment XIII

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P: Your brain is too complicated. My students are all over the
world, I gave all I had to them. Didn’t you get anything from me?

D: You turned me into a monster from my father’s nightmares. I

spent my whole adult life secretly trying to prove to him that queer
relations are not necessarily “tainted” with perversion, illicit
seduction and exploitation of youth, falling into the decency trap. I
thought I carved a stable ground for myself, a safe social niche.
And at the beginning of my independent life, there I was, losing at
my own game.

P: I couldn’t have known any of these things.

D: Would you have done anything differently if you had?

Note

1 The name is fictitious.

CHAPTER 13

Flexing Muscles

Ingela Nilsson

A smile is formed primarily by flexing the muscles at the sides of

the mouth. […] Among humans, a smile expresses pleasure,
sociability, happiness, joy or amusement. It is distinct from a
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similar but usually involuntary expression of anxiety known as a
grimace.

“SMI LE” (Wikipedia, n.d.)

Looking back over some thirty years in academia, I sometimes

wonder if there has been more focus on my facial expressions than
on my research. It all started, I think, with a piece of friendly
advice. I was on the shortlist for a position and was to be
interviewed by a panel. The day before the interview one of my
close colleagues and friends offered me some advice. She told me
to relax and be confident, then added, “And don’t look so sour, it
will be off-putting to the panel, you have to start looking more
friendly, smile a bit!” I remember my instantaneous annoyance:
who was she to imply I always look sour? And any- way, even if it
were true, I had good reason to look sour, after years of pointless
criticism from colleagues who found faults with whatever I did.
And even if I looked sour for no good reason, it was my face, I had
the right to look however I wanted! But she insisted, to the point
that I understood that this was a common conception of me: I was
an angry and sour-looking person, who risked my career unless I
took control of my facial muscles and started to smile.

Since I was an angry and sour-looking person who insisted that I

had the right to be that way, I did not smile at the interview. I was

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offered the position nevertheless, but my well-intentioned
colleague’s comment echoed at the back of my mind and I began
taking mental note of similar advice from other col- leagues. I also
started recalling such occasions in the past. The co-student who told
me to stop looking so angry, since it would scare away people—
especially men. The professor who called me aggressive when I
questioned his critique, claiming he was afraid to spend time alone
with me. The supervisor who told me to cheer up and smile more,
assuring me it would make people be nicer in return. The colleague
who told me that I acted like a grumpy teenager, because I didn’t
sufficiently admire the environment of the posh research institute
and never smiled at the director. The mentor of the pedagogical
course who suggested that a smile would make my teaching more
enjoyable. Had I always been an angry and sour-looking person
who put people off with my facial expression? If so, why did my
friends and quite a few colleagues accept me the way I was without
questioning my personality? I was perfectly happy, so why did
people keep telling me to cheer up?

© INGELA NILS SON, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_013

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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FLEXING MUSCLES 75

I began spending time in front of the mirror, flexing and unflexing

my facial muscles. It was quite true, I realized, that when my face
was completely relaxed, I looked rather sour, sort of like when I
was fourteen. I practiced ways of flexing the muscles at the sides of
my mouth so that I looked friendlier, without quite smiling. I
wanted to look friendly, though I refused to humor my critics by
smiling. After months (or was its years?) of practicing, I noticed a
certain difference in my surroundings: I was clearly seen as less
intimidating, even if I did not actually smile much. It was an
astonishing discovery. What basic insight of the human mind had
escaped me, and only me, for so many years?

76 NILSSON

The careful study of my own face made me much more aware of

other people’s expressions and it slowly dawned on me that most
people never relaxed their facial muscles. They must have learned
something earlier in life that I had missed. Women in particular had
splendid control over their faces. Their eyes were constantly wide

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open and the corners of their mouths turned lightly upwards,
lending a friendly curiosity to their appearance. To me it seemed
rather exhausting, especially the eye thing. And several women also
seemed to smile while talking, an exercise that appeared not only
exhausting but also to affect their voices. Some of them looked as if
they were caught in an eternal grimace, which was more frightening
than friendly to me. Men clearly had other ways to flex their
muscles, physically and intellectually, so they didn’t care as much
about their faces. On the other hand, it seemed as if their facial
expressions were of less concern to others, and they were certainly
interpreted differently. A wrinkled forehead was not a sign of an
aggrieved personality, but gave character to a male face. A raised
eyebrow signaled ironic distance, not sarcastic critique. And even if
quite a few men I observed seemed much more intimidating than I
thought I was, I never heard a man being offered the same advice
that I was: Smile and look friendly, otherwise it will harm your
career? Nah, not really.

I did not become the kind of smiling person that my colleague had
perhaps hoped for; if anything, my observations made me more
determined not to give in, to argue my right to be an unsmiling
woman in academia. However, my new awareness made me so
much aware of my “problems” that I learned to put on a well-
practiced friendly face in professional situations simply in order to
avoid accusations of being unfriendly. After a decade or so I no
longer thought much about it, except for when I accidentally caught
a glimpse of my relaxed face in the reflection of a window and
remembered to properly flex the muscles at the sides of my mouth.

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I was careful never to let my half-smile turn into a smirk or a
grimace and I really tried to avoid the involuntary tick of raising
my right eyebrow, which apparently (so I was told) made it seem as
if I was mocking the speaker. I wanted to be seen as a friendly
person, not an angry woman. There did not seem to be many other
alternatives to choose from. There still aren’t.

Although I was very angry at the time, I am now grateful for my

colleague’s advice. It was a useful reminder of the way in which
women are perceived, making me very much aware of both
gendered power structures and my own facial muscles. Am I hiding
my angry self behind a controlled mask of friendliness? I guess I
am, allowing her to appear in certain situations that demand her
presence. She is fearful and rather awesome, correct but sarcastic,
and she knows better than anyone that a smile expresses much more
than happiness and joy. In fact, she smiles much more than my
friendly face does.

FLEXING MUSCLES 77

Reference

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Wikipedia. (n.d.). Smile. Retrieved March 29, 2022, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Smile

CHAPTER 14

Lessons I Learned at University

Ricarda Schier

A while ago I found myself attending an illuminating lecture. A

teacher of mine delivered a long monologue about how I, as a
young woman, am simply not taken seriously in this world and how
I just have to deal with that. He illustrated this with anecdotes of
what other men had thought and said about me. This wasn’t exactly
news to me. As a woman in academia, I am generally aware,
although many won’t admit it, that there are still a lot of people
who perceive me as less capable because of my gender. Not
necessarily because they actually think that women are less
intelligent than men, but because a lot of characteristics
traditionally framed as female are not associated with rational
thinking, while many traits traditionally framed as male are. In
other, more personal words: several of the insecurities I had during
my time at university stemmed from the fact that when you think of
an intellectual, you typically don’t think of a young, blonde girl
with a high-pitched voice, who laughs a lot and likes to wear short
skirts.

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For a long time though, I would tell myself it was just that: my own
insecurities. Surely, I was imagining that patronizing treatment I
seemed to receive a lot from mostly older men. Surely, I
misinterpreted those condescending smiles they gave me when I
spoke. However, that all ended the day that teacher mans- plained
sexism to me. Since receiving that lecture, I am now convinced that
I and other women (in academia or elsewhere) are not collectively
imagining things, and that if you feel you are not being taken
seriously for reasons that have nothing to do with your actual
intellectual capacities, you are probably not overreacting—it may
simply be the truth. I am perceived as weaker, less smart and less
competent because of my gender, at least by some people.

This lecture was, in a painful way, more educational than a lot of

the seminars and talks I attended regularly at university. It is a great
example of how as a student I learned a lot of uncomfortable
lessons about the academic world (and humanity in general). I want
to share some of them in case they might be helpful:

Lesson 1. Abuse and harassment come in many different forms and

are often not as easy to recognize as one would think, especially not
by the victim. Our bodies and minds normally tell us when our
boundaries have been violated: we feel uncomfortable, stressed,
threatened, physically nauseous. But our immediate reaction to
these feelings is often to question them. Wearetaughtto evaluate
things from a rational perspective. Strong emotions, especially
negative ones, are often frowned upon. We don’t want to be
regarded as hysterical or weak. When we feel something is very
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wrong, though, something probably is wrong. Although it is
awkward to talk about an awkward situation, it is really helpful to
talk to other people and get their perspective, because it is often
easier to evaluate a situation that you are not part of yourself.
Others can be quicker to see when we are being treated
inappropriately.

© RICARDA SCHIER, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_014

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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LESSONS I LEARNED AT UNIVERSITY 79

Lesson 2. If you want to work in academia, be prepared for

exploitation. You might be exploited by supervisors who steal your
work, by fellow students who steal your work, by other people who
steal your work. You might also be exploited by publishers who
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profit from the fact that you have to publish in order to advance in
your career but never have to pay you. I’m not saying you will be
exploited, but that you should be prepared.

Lesson 3. Being a brilliant scholar or a good teacher doesn’t mean

someone is a great person. It doesn’t mean they are kind, or
altruistic, or honest. Academia would be a better place if we paid as
much attention to how we treat each other as how many papers we
published; if we valued people for their decency as much as how
big their name is in their field. It is better to stick with the people
who are nice and caring, instead of trying at all costs to get close to
famous scholars who you think might advance your career.

Lesson 4. Although you are taught much about objective thinking,

constructive criticism and how to make a professional argument at
university, people are still emotional beings and will take things
personally, which is probably why grown-up scholars sometimes
behave like school children. It is a damaging pre- tense that one
must always be rational and free of emotion instead of
acknowledging when one feels unnecessarily attacked or provoked.
Being more open and honest with ourselves and others would make
working together easier.

Lesson 5. There is no need to be loyal to people or institutions that

treat you badly. We tend to make excuses for people who behave

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inappropriately. We don’t want to make unfair accusations, we
don’t want to be regarded as judgmental, or we are simply afraid to
make a fuss and are scared that we would ultimately be the ones
who come off looking bad. We may forget, however, that those
people who act abusively or simply unprofessionally are not being
forced to do so. They act in this way because their actions don’t
have consequences,

80 SCHIER

and they will continue to act this way until their actions have
consequences. This can only happen if someone speaks up.

I learned some of these lessons through things that happened to me

person- ally; some I learned through stories I heard from others.
Some people told me they are not representative of academia. But
then why do I know so many stories from around the world of
stolen dissertations, sexual harassment, bullying, sexism, racism,
burnout, depression and the ever-present fear of unemployment?
There is a lot of gossip and talking behind other people’s backs
about these kinds of problems; an open conversation about why
they occur so frequently at universities is sorely missing. This has
much to do with prioritizing work output above everything else—
including creating a decent work environment—and valuing only
intellectual achievements while ignoring traits like kindness,

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decency, integrity and professionalism. Moreover, many
universities seem to need stronger mechanisms to prevent and deal
with abuse. Victims of harassment and bullying are often unsure of
where or to whom they can turn for help. Sometimes those they talk
to don’t believe their situation requires action, or don’t believe them
at all. Even though it might be hard, having an open conversation
about these problems and learning from all of these uncomfortable
lessons is the first step toward realizing that the way we treat each
other in academia not only can, but must, be better.

CHAPTER 15

Benevolence or Bitterness

Antony T. Smith

I found the pathway to tenure stressful and fraught with tensions,

and I know I am not alone in feeling this way. In the American
university system, the tenure track races toward a fifth-year tenure
file submission and a sixth-year vote by colleagues and
administrators on whether to award tenure (i.e., promotion to
associate professor) or not to award it (meaning termination of
one’s assistant professor position). From day one of Fall semester I
knew, every moment, that the hourglass was trickling sand slowly
and irreversibly until my tenure file submission was due. I am not
afraid of hard work, but I soon learned that this high-stakes tenure
pathway is not just about effort. Academic expectations, university

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structures and senior colleagues create tensions deeply rooted in
systemic power imbalances. In trying to cope with these tensions
while moving toward tenure, the destination became a question
about my own emotional and mental state: Would I arrive in a state
of benevolence or bitterness?

1 Availability

My PhD advisor tried to give me some advice on my upcoming

academic journey as an assistant professor in a tenure-track
position. Looking up from a student essay, she peered at me over
her reading glasses and stated, “Don’t make yourself too available.
If you’re around campus too much you’ll end up doing more
service work.” I wondered, what would that look like? How would
I, as a new hire and assistant professor, make myself scarce while
also somehow being regarded as a hardworking and contributing
colleague? Should I skip faculty meetings, avoid the program
office, or work from home? How many days per week should I
work from home? There were no answers to these questions. I tried
to strike a balance between being present and not always being
avail- able, but I don’t think I was very successful.

Course and meeting scheduling interfered with my efforts. As a

junior member of the faculty, I did not have say in what courses I
taught or when I taught them, and as a result my weekly schedule
was sometimes a disaster. One semester I had one course that began
at 8:30 am and another that started at 4:30 pm, both on the same
day, so rather than commuting back and forth from home I stayed

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on campus—making myself unintentionally available for service
work between classes. Faculty meetings were scheduled on Fridays,
causing me to lose a prime day for my scholarship and instead be
on campus for hours.

© ANTONY T. SMITH, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_015

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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82 SMITH

Summers were even worse when it came to availability. On nine-

month faculty contracts, we do not receive any salary from June
through September unless we teach summer term. Described as
“optional,” teaching summer term was a necessity for me since no
matter how much I managed to save I could not go without a
paycheck for almost four months. Summer had the university
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expectation of research, to which it was hard to dedicate much time
during the academic year due to teaching and service work—but in
summer, this time for research was without compensation.
Established senior colleagues used grant funding to support their
summer research work, but I had no such grants in my early years. I
tried three times to secure an internal grant for this purpose but was
denied three years in a row—each proposal taking weeks to write
with bud- get plans I had to develop myself; with each rejection I
was left with a denied proposal that added nothing to my
curriculum vitae. So, I ended up being avail- able to teach courses
each summer, needing to pay rent and buy groceries.

In faculty meetings and other interactions, I was inevitably asked to

join work groups, committees, search committees and task forces.
For all my attempts to be less available and to protect time for
scholarship, I found I couldn’t say no to these requests. Senior
colleagues, some of them having been full professors for more than
20 years, were watching, judging my actions to determine my
worthiness in academia: Does he work hard? Is he a team player? Is
he a valuable colleague? Daring to say no, and making myself less
available, had consequences. Saying yes, and taking on service
work that would erode my time for scholarship, also had
consequences, but only for me, and so this was the path I took,
thinking to myself, “I’ll find time for my scholarship somewhere.
Maybe I can get up earlier, stay up later, or work on weekends.” So,
I said yes to multiple search committees. I said yes to being on a
campus-wide writing and communication task force, a group
notably populated by junior faculty without institutional knowledge

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and with the absence of any senior faculty. Clearly these senior
colleagues had the agency to say no at times when junior faculty
did not, to a series of meetings across an academic year that
resulted in a written report promptly ignored by the administration.

The consequences of my inability to say no and to make myself less

avail- able extended beyond the workday into what could only be
considered per- sonal time. One time a colleague hosted a dinner
for a candidate she wanted to impress (and hire). It was scheduled
at the last minute and my colleagues and I were expected to come.
As it turns out, I had a family commitment I could not cancel, so
for once I did say no, and I was the only one who did.

BENEVOLENCE OR BITTERNESS 83

Everyone else attended the dinner, making me look bad. So bad that
I ended up taking the candidate to dinner the next night to make up
for it, paying for the dinner myself, since the university did not
consider the dinner a reimbursable expense. The dinner turned out
well, so it seemed that I had managed to salvage this particular
situation.

This incident showed me I had to make myself available despite my

advisor’s words of wisdom, to be at the beck and call of any senior
colleague who wanted or needed something, or who wanted me to
represent the school at the campus level so that they wouldn’t have
to and could work on their scholarship instead. One bitter senior

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colleague, who I ended up referring to as the Viper, invited me to a
holiday party at her home. The Viper’s unpredictable behavior
made me nervous, but I wanted to be on her good side, so I went to
the party with my cheerful husband Ken, who I thought might help
gloss over any awkwardness at the party. Very few other people
were there. While Ken and I stood with our glasses of wine, she
came up to us and said, “So good you came! But of course, you did,
because you want tenure after all, right?” This was followed by a
forced and maniacal laugh. I cringed, knowing she was kidding but
also that she wasn’t. Vipers don’t make jokes. She and four other
senior colleagues would eventually get to decide my academic
future.

2 Imbalance

My inability to make myself less available created an imbalance in

my work life. A benevolent senior colleague, whom I nicknamed
Grace due to her calm demeanor and ability to speak in complete
paragraphs, once acknowledged this work/life imbalance and her
own struggles with it. She explained to me, “Tony, this work is, at
its very core, mathematically impossible. We are expected to
accomplish work in three areas: teaching, scholarship and service.
The expectation, really, is 50% teaching, 50% scholarship and 50%
service. There’s always more work than can possibly be finished.” I
understood her point, and so for the next five years I did my best to
give 150% to my institution, always searching for ways to create

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more time for scholarship, to work faster, to somehow teach more
efficiently despite having to create seven new courses in three
years. Being a former school teacher, I couldn’t justify cutting
corners in teaching—I continued with complex practicum-based
assignments for classes of nearly 40 students, without a grader or
teaching assistant. I couldn’t say no to service work, so I continued
to serve on multiple committees and, later, review and editorial
boards. I also ended up chairing the curriculum committee, a
position of authority ill-suited for junior faculty.

84 SMITH

This increasingly severe work/life imbalance took its toll on my

scholarship and my personal life. Stacks of unread research journals
accumulated in my office and living room; articles and book
chapters had to be written at four in the morning, eleven at night, or
on weekends when I wasn’t grading or planning for class. I missed
one grandmother’s 90th birthday party, and I seldom visited my
other grandmother living in a nursing home. Persistent friends
stayed in touch, but the rest faded away, as did all of my hobbies
and recreational activities. I didn’t have time for them. Ken, a
patient man, stayed with me, but years later confessed he got
awfully tired of hearing “no” and of going to movies and concerts
alone.

At my third-year review, the halfway point to tenure, I was told I

wasn’t doing enough, feeding a rapidly expanding and
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overwhelming sense of inadequacy. I needed more publications
and, importantly, I needed to get at least one grant— and it had
better be a big one. So, I stayed up later, got up earlier, worked
longer hours on weekends and got a major state-level service grant.
This victory made my work imbalance markedly worse, requiring
me to travel multiple times over the course of a year to a remote
logging town, working with math and science teachers on content-
area reading and vocabulary instruction—topics they did not want
to teach. I did my best, spending time collecting tree core samples
and touring timber mills; I wrote an un-publishable final report
(service grants seldom lead to publications, I later learned) and
realized afterward I had missed nine weekends of life with friends
and family. The grant award is a single line on my CV, at high cost.

3 Inadequacy

Over my years along the pathway to tenure, pressures and the

persistent work imbalance led me to feel an ever-expanding sense
of inadequacy. No matter what I did, I was convinced it would not
be enough. I asked myself, how might I get more manuscripts
published? If I apply myself and work harder, might I get another
grant? A larger one? A multi-year research grant? How do my peers
from other institutions manage to publish more than I do, while
maintaining a cheerful attitude and networking with researchers all
across the country?

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The Viper likely sensed my growing thoughts of inadequacy and
feelings of failure. She offered to help secure an internal technology
grant, and I, desperate to achieve more, foolishly said yes. Any
momentary elation over receiving an award vanished when I
realized I was not on equal footing with the Viper on this project.
Deeming herself the expert on all thing’s technology, she seized
control of the project. “I’ve been working in educational
technology for years, especially mobile technology as a way to
reach underrepresented communities. I don’t think you know
anything about that.” The Viper did the research and creative work,
and I ended up installing software updates on 40 mobile devices,
one at a time. She also took all of the mobile technology home after
the project ended, so that nobody else would be able to use it for
any purpose she wasn’t part of. I cautiously raised this issue with
the dean, believing that the equipment belonged to the university
and not to her individually; the dean agreed but did not want to
intervene and provoke the Viper’s maniacal wrath. Even though I
spent huge amounts of time on course development, teaching and
advising, feelings of inadequacy filtered into that part of my work,
too. In my school, students can choose their own advisor; not
wanting to be picked on by the bitter colleague or ignored by the
inattentive benevolent colleague, a large number of students chose
the faculty member who was available and eager to please—me. At
one point I had 23 graduate student advisees, while the Viper and
two other colleagues, together, had nine. The school had no
mechanism for faculty to say no to new advisees. I could not find
enough time to advise each of them sufficiently and so I felt I was
failing them, too.
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BENEVOLENCE OR BITTERNESS 85

My sense of inadequacy in teaching came from course evaluations.

My mentor and colleague expressed anguish at the end of one
semester for getting a combined student course evaluation score of
3.8 out of 5. “I’ve never gotten such a low score in my whole
career. I normally get at least a 4.8 or higher!” I had never gotten a
4.8. What was I doing wrong? Was I failing my students as well as
my scholarship? When I send in my tenure file, will my senior
colleagues see my student course evaluation scores and shake their
heads in dismay? Clearly, I wasn’t doing enough or working
enough, so I tried harder. Every day. For almost six years, until I
turned in my tenure file with decent course evaluation scores,
several grants and a reasonable number of publications.

4 Attitude

Once I turned in my tenure file, I did experience a gradual change

of attitude and all the emotions that come along on such a stressful
and arduous journey. First, I felt a sense of profound relief,
followed immediately by fear—after all, the Viper was on my
promotion and tenure committee. Her unpredictability and
moments of random wrath petrified me, so I remained terrified
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until, months later, I received notice of my successful tenure and
promotion.

86 SMITH

Fear was mixed with gratitude during these months, as I came to

appreciate several senior colleagues (including Grace) who went to
battle for me and neutralized the negative maniacal critiques and
actions of the Viper. Outnumbered and outvoted, all she could do
was seethe and plot petty schemes to make my tenured life
miserable, which she did until her recent retirement. Nobody
bothered to throw her a farewell party, although she had been at our
institution for almost 30 years. I wondered, what might have
happened if I had been in a school with three bitter senior
colleagues and one benevolent one, rather than the other way
around? I shudder to think about it.

Immediately after receiving tenure, I went on sabbatical for a year

with high hopes of resetting my work/life balance to make the next
20years sustainable, positive and interesting. I tried, but the
following year I was appointed to leadership positions for a number
of years. In a small school with retiring senior colleagues and
newly hired junior colleagues, I found I could no more say “no” as
an associate professor than I could as an assistant, although the
reasons were different.

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Looking back across this journey to tenure, it seems that once we
arrive, we either become benevolent or bitter. Do I manage a better
work/life balance, find my teaching stride and a research niche, and
be a benevolent colleague like Grace, or do I stay off kilter and
miserable like the Viper, spreading bitterness in every meeting and
class session? Assistant and Associate are both nine-letter words,
but what they represent are worlds apart. Shifting into the new title
and role of associate (tenured) professor was a positive experience
for me overall, as I realized I was ultimately free to pursue the
scholarship I found interesting. It wasn’t a publish-or-perish choice
anymore; I hadn’t perished, so now I could choose. I’m not sure if
this has made me a benevolent colleague, but it certainly has kept
me from becoming bitter. I say no to service work, but judiciously. I
look out for and try to protect my new junior colleagues from too
much service work. I choose research projects carefully, focusing
on what interests me most. I take weekends off—all of them! I will
go up for full professor soon, but the difference is that I get to
choose when, based on my own sense of readiness. That makes all
the difference. It will be my decision, not the hourglass trickling
sand irreversibly, the way it did on the pathway to tenure.

Perhaps the pathway to tenure could be different, more supportive

and less arduous, making the outcome more likely to be
benevolence rather than bitterness. I wonder, is six years enough
time to prove worthiness? Are junior faculty scholarship activities
sufficiently supported by university structures? Can junior faculty’s
time be protected, limiting their service load for work that is highly
time-consuming yet counts for little on a CV? It seems that

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universi- ties have no difficulty in demanding and expecting high
amounts of work and effort to achieve tenure. The true difficulty
lies in actually supporting junior faculty to succeed in their teaching
and scholarship so that they grow through the process in a positive
and supported way, emerging from their pre-tenure chrysalis of
panic as benevolent butterflies rather than bitter worms.

CHAPTER 16

Observations from a Non-Academic on Academic Life

Ken Robertson

We met about three months before he defended his dissertation.

One might say that it was not a likely recipe for success in terms of
starting a new relation- ship. While I had recently left a depressing
job for a new one as Construction Project Manager, he was
feverishly putting the final touches on his dissertation. Only fellow
academics (or their significant others) can understand what those
last weeks are like before defending the culmination of years of
research and hard work. In those early days of our relationship, our
only opportunity to meet was when he would come into the city to
see his advisor and we’d be able to work in a quick dinner.

As an ABD (All But Dissertation), he had already accepted a

tenure-track position at the University of Washington. I later
learned that it is not common for degree-granting institutions to
warmly welcome their own newly minted PhD graduates with open
arms, which seems rather like shoving the baby bird from the nest. I

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had always thought that years of academic study were a kind of
litmus test, which, if passed, would lead to employment and future
success at their department. Wrong! Most commonly, you have to
apply elsewhere to find gainful employment and you would be wise
to have a back-up plan. So, having survived graduate school and
gotten a PhD, you are immediately turned out to swim with the
sharks in a very competitive environment. Tony had already been
called to interviews across the country, but his first was with his
university and they offered him a tenure-track position. Having a
bird in the hand, it seemed wise to accept. The interview and his
choice to accept occurred before we met, so as much as I like to
think I’m a pretty good catch, I can’t take credit for being the
reason he stayed in Seattle.

The first year or so of dating we shuttled between my small city

apartment and his larger suburban one near campus. The benefit of
my apartment: it was close to all the fun (and distractions) a city
can offer. Benefits of his? He could walk to campus in 10 minutes
and owned an Asian shorthair cat that would curl up on his lap as
he typed out his dissertation. Tony never stayed over- night in the
city the day before he taught a class. He needed that evening and
next day to prepare. Like many people, my thoughts of academic
life were that

© KEN ROBERTSON, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_016

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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88 ROBERTSON

professors had a pretty good gig. You work hard to get there, but
once you get your job and tenure you can coast. Summers are free
for “research” trips and time spent reading books on the beach.
Over the course of his early years in academia, I learned that none
of those assumptions was remotely true. Achieving tenure would
become the first big academic mountain we’d need to climb. I say
“we” not because I am an excellent research assistant or typist, but
because as partner I found myself in a supporting role. I literally
had no idea what I had signed on for. Achieving tenure is a much
more arduous and capricious prize to seize than most non-
academics perceive. I had assumed that once you have that PhD in
hand, you have a clear path to success, with all the support of your
university. Although a PhD is definitely a milestone (some might
call it a mill stone), it really is just a toehold for the next six years
of arduously pushing the rock up the hill like a poor academic
Sisyphus to achieve the nirvana that is tenure.

Teaching in and of itself, along with all of its ancillary duties, is a

full-time job. As a young academic, you somehow still need to find
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the time to conduct research, publish your work, provide service to
your school by participating in various committees and review
panels, and still show up at conferences in your field to present
your research. Oh, and if you could please, why don’t you write a
few grant proposals and bring in some dollars for your school and
university. I was incredulous that typically 50% of grant funds are
held by the university as “overhead cost.” It’s kind of like doing
well at your job and as a reward they give you a 50% pay cut.
While there are a wide range of salaries for academics, you don’t
go into it for the money. University compensation seems grossly
out of balance with expectations and makes me wonder if the tenure
process is really good for academia in the long term. To me it seems
that the playing field is not level for all players. If you are a single
parent, for example, how do you accomplish tenure and still have a
family life?

As I learned these truths of academic life, I pondered how our new

relation- ship would find space to grow and thrive. Even in the best
of circumstances, relationships are hard work and I wondered if
there would still be time for discovery and fun? How do you
provide support for someone who needs you but also needs you to
give them space to get through the epic volume of work laid out
before them? As Tony wrote and wrote and wrote, I would occupy
myself with other things. Sometimes that meant going to a movie
on my own or planning a social event he might not be able to
participate in. The more he wrote, the more I felt like it would
never stop. It was as if he was working on an end- less term paper
—one that with a little bit of luck he might be done with in six

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years. In my career I oversee development and design for large
senior housing projects around the US, and I could not imagine
sitting down and working on the same project for that long of an
extended time frame, refining the details over and over again. In my
management of architects and interior designers, I often get to a
point where I tell them “Pencils down,” meaning this is as good as
it’s going to get, let’s move on to the next steps of the project and
get it built. My project work has a distinct beginning and end. You
typically work as a team and share the experience with others. You
gain experience from doing it, but you also get to move on to the
next project and often with a new team of colleagues. There were
many Saturdays and Sundays Tony spent working. We would try
and save one of the weekend days for something fun that we could
do together. A day trip or a hike, dinner and a movie. Somehow his
demanding academic pace had to be reconciled with our
relationship. The scale often tipped toward academia, but to his
credit, he managed to keep me in the picture. As a partner of an
academic, I have learned that at times you must draw on a deep
well of patience and understanding. I certainly failed at times, but
the more our relationship grew, I understood that I had a role to
play as well. To support, to listen and to occasionally make myself
scarce

when he needed time for focused work and reflection.

OBSERVATIONS FROM A NON-ACADEMIC on ACADEMIC

LIFE 89

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I travel a great deal for my career and routinely use my corporate
credit card for business travel, hotels and meals with clients. In
academia there is no such thing as an expense account, let alone
any kind of reasonable budget to support your work. You are
expected to attend and participate in conferences all across the
country on a travel budget that usually only covers airfare and
accommodation for one such event per year. The expense of any
additional conferences is laid at the feet of young academics to
absorb from their already less than stellar annual salaries. When I
asked Tony about this, he said it was the nature of things at
universities–an expectation without financial support. I thought that
not much business would be conducted in this world if employers
did not cover expenses. If it’s the expectation of your employer that
you need to travel as a condition of your employment as well as for
the success of the business, then it stands to reason that your
employer would be taking care of this cost. Not so in academia. For
young academics, who often might be shouldering student debt, this
seems doubly unfair.

Over the years, I have joined Tony at various faculty social events.
As a spouse of an academic, I can tell you that the occasional social
gatherings are a bit awkward for someone like me who is not able
to connect on an academic level. I think of these as “putting all the
smart people together in a room.” It’s not that people aren’t social,
but with such infrequent gatherings, there is awkwardness. Talking
about non-academic topics is a bit challenging in these group
settings. I think if you are an academic who toils away on your own
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for the most part, it can be daunting to be in social interaction with
your peers.

90 ROBERTSON

Professionally, when you put a group of people with a high level of

intelligence in the same room, you will find that they generally
possess very differing conceptual framework filters, and thus
conflicts can occur and you end up with fractious moments. I have
watched with fascination and some degree of horror as common
workplace problems or squabbles can quickly turn into something
otherworldly. Being correct in your work and research is vital for

an academic. Much of the conflict I have observed does not come

from the work or research but rather from the endless
administrative tasks and committee work. How do you approach a
problem? How do you structure a program?

What kinds of support are necessary for students? I have often

observed manipulation on a grand scale among academics. Every
job has office politics, but for an academic they seem to evolve in a
way that is completely foreign to me. In my professional life,
people come and go. Some you like, some you don’t. If you
disagree with someone or their approach to a problem, hopefully
you can negotiate a path forward to some kind of resolution.

Occasionally you have a boss you don’t like and your choice is to
either work out your differences, put up with it or quit. The private

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sector isn’t a workers’ paradise, but generally speaking you find
like-minded colleagues and with a little luck they can become your
friends, too.

In academic life, you find colleagues with whom you might be able
to collaborate on research, or commiserate over committee work,
but the stakes are high. There is a competitive dynamic among
junior faculty. The overarching goal is to achieve tenure and the
pathway is not always clear on how to get there. Do you need to
curry favor with an older, more experienced faculty member?
Should you volunteer more of your precious time to support an
issue or cause they are championing, or are you merely someone on
whom more work can be off-loaded? Faculty meetings can be
contentious and problems and resentments can build up over time.
And with typically infrequent injections of fresh talent, and
sometimes long stretches between meetings with col- leagues due
to busy schedules, there often is not enough time to build good
working relationships. With effort, good relationships can develop,
but it is often not the natural course of things. Relationship-building
that might take weeks or months to achieve in private sector work
environments might take years in academia, if ever. You really have
to work at it.

There is no playbook on how to achieve tenure but make no

mistake that there is a game to be played. That may sound sinister,
but without the kindly guidance of a true colleague or mentor, it can
be a very long six years. As I watched my spouse toil away for six
years, I never really had any doubt that he would achieve tenure. As
for his endless term paper, he did indeed finish it. Tenure was not a
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gift, but rather earned by hard work and sacrifice. I now know what
it takes to achieve this and I’m proud of his efforts.

OBSERvATIONS FRom A Non-ACADEMIC on ACADEMIC

LIFE 91

Currently, our next destination on this journey is promotion to full

professor. He is almost there and I have no doubt that he’ll make it.
He possesses a drive and ambition that most private sector
employers would love to harness. And I’m getting better at
knowing when to push and pull the levers of support when needed.
I also know when it’s a good time to go see a movie on my own.
Balance, effort and striving to be better are not just academic
pursuits, they are also really great relationship fundamentals.

CHAPTER 17

Harassment and Abuse of Power from a Global

Perspective

Or the Importance of a Conversation

Anonymous 7

This essay tells highly personal stories, which nevertheless convey

uncomfortable recurring motifs, as well as possible blind spots—

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things we did not know yet. As we do know, however, many people
in worldwide academia—students, scholars and administrative staff
of all genders—fall victim to abuse of power or harassment at some
point in their academic journey. Most of the problems can
ultimately be traced back to a basic pattern, in which those with
power abuse those who are “weaker”—who lack resources and
backing by peers, institutional power or stable employment. But
this pattern comes in many guises. Some people face verbal or
physical harassment. Others have to watch their work being
plagiarized or are forced to do things they do not want to do. There
is no single, unified narrative.

While working in an academic institution in a country where I was

not born or educated, I gradually became aware that the problems
of abuse of power and intimidation are often culturally determined,
at least to some extent. Sometimes it was even explained to me: It’s
just part of the culture and you just have to adapt. It convinced me
that awareness of cultural aspects is crucial for a better
understanding of the nature and scope of harassment and abuse of
power. In this essay, I do not just reflect on my own experiences,
but also on those of others, with the aim of learning from the
experiences and considerations of people from different cultures
than mine.1 What can we learn from each other by telling our
personal and often painful stories, and how could an awareness of
the cultural dimension of abuse in the academic world help us
process our own experiences? What is the cultural dimension of our
particular experiences, and what is more general? And what does
the global nature of abuse and harassment imply for the

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responsibility of academics towards the worldwide academic
community?

© JULIE HANSEN AND INGELA NILS SON, 2022 |

DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_017 This is an open access article

distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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1 Consolation and New Insights

It was not easy to find the right form for this essay. I started over at
least three times, if not more. Every time I tried to write down the
events that upset me as a PhD student, they seemed so trivial that I
wondered exactly what had happened, and if my experiences
actually qualified as forms of intimidation and abuse of power. At
the same time, these memories evoked strong emotions, which were
difficult to put into words.

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The breakthrough came when a colleague shared her experiences
with me from the time she worked at a university in Northwestern
Europe.2 Just like me, she was a foreigner and educated in a
country that, although it was “Western,” was very different from
her new homeland. One of the things she noticed was a different
attitude towards hierarchy. She told me, I felt that hierarchies of
rank were more closely adhered to in comparison with the bulk of
my experience in my home country [the US], which places great
emphasis on independence and individual choice. In many cases, it
is considered bullying to pull rank on someone or to force or
intimidate a person into doing something they have the option of
not doing. It took me some time to realize this aspect of my new
culture, which I would consider falling under more serious abuse of
power when faculty make unreasonable demands in caustic and
insulting ways of those with lower rank—whether administrative
staff, grad students or post-docs.

My colleague’s words helped me to formulate my own experiences.

I realized that what she described was exactly what had upset me
early on in my aca- demic career. I found it very difficult to process
these events back then, not least because they were sometimes
covered up by “higher”-ranked people such as my supervisors, or
colleagues who should have protected me, such as confidential
advisors, and ombudsmen. It was immensely comforting to hear my
colleague say years later that she had faced similar problems. “This
is not an aspect of the culture prominently displayed or vocalized,
even though it is a major source of anxiety and depression among
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employees which continually leads to massive burnout and high
turnover rates.” Apparently, my experiences were not as trivial as
they had seemed. They had been experienced by more people than
just me.

My colleague also confirmed what I already sensed, namely that the

culture of my new homeland was more hierarchical than that of
other countries. I had grown up and gone to school in a country
where there was little distance between teacher and student. They
could communicate and work together on an equal footing more
easily than in my new home country. In the latter, however, it was
more acceptable that people with a “higher” position would
delegate certain tasks to lower-ranked people, often without much
possibility to refuse the request. My native colleagues had fewer
difficulties than I did in accepting these requests, as they considered
them part of the culture in which they were raised. It made me
aware of the fact that the ways in which power relations are
constructed and perceived by people are culturally determined. I
also realized that there must be a strong cultural dimension to the
problems of abuse of power and intimidation in academia.

94 ANONYMOUS 7

2 No Single Narratives

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One of my most formative and positive experiences as a PhD
student was when I was invited to participate in a summer school
for PhD students, on a topic that was very close to that of my
dissertation. Apart from the fact that I gained a lot of substantial
knowledge on which I am still building in my cur- rent research, it
was an unforgettable experience on a human level. Normally, at
academic events branded as “international,” you will mostly meet
scholars from the rich, privileged (and therefore highly-ranked)
universities of the “West.” However, the organizers had deliberately
chosen to invite a mix of students from different cultural
backgrounds. I remember students from Venezuela, Georgia,
Sweden, Poland, Belgium, France, Cuba and Syria (the latter two
making jokes about having fled from there by boat, a joke few
others would be in the position to make). The summer school was
free of charge, in contrast with other international academic events,
which are usually quite expensive and therefore out of reach for
many scholars—especially the younger ones from less-privileged
institutions. Most summer school students had only minimal
financial scholarships—if any—and probably would not have been
able to afford the summer school had it not been free. Extra
scholarships were awarded to those who could not pay the travel
expenses.

This experience reminded me of the fact that there is much

financial inequality in the academic world, depending on the wealth
of one’s institution and/or home country. I also learned that if you
are in the privileged position to have sufficient financial resources,
you can actively do something to reduce that inequality, for

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example, by selecting and paying for people who normally do not
have the resources to participate in international events. Scholars
can make a difference in global academia by using their funds
intentionally.

I also became aware of certain blind spots in my own thinking

about the academic world. Because we often know only our own
story and do not get in touch with academics from other cultures,
we do not realize—or do not realize enough—that there are other
stories as well, especially when it comes to power relations within
the academy. If I had not attended this summer school and talked to
scholars from other cultures, I might have believed that abuse of
power was mainly something between a professor and student, or at
least between academics that are not on the same rung of the
academic ladder. I would not have realized that abuse of power can
also result from the unequal division of resources and asymmetrical
relationships between wealthy and less-wealthy academic
institutions in different parts of the world.

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PERSPECTIVE 95

3 Intercultural Conversations

While wrestling with this essay, I stumbled upon Hans-Georg

Gadamer’s idea of the fusion of horizons. According to Gadamer’s
Truth and Method, “Under- standing is always the process of a

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fusion of these horizons supposedly existing for themselves” (2004,
p. 306). I was familiar with Gadamer’s idea from my philosophy
classes as an undergraduate, in which it was discussed as part of the
question of how to obtain knowledge. I did not know that this
model also deals with intercultural communication. According to
Gadamer, in order to under- stand the other, we have to demonstrate
a willingness to listen to what the other has to say. One has to learn
to “look beyond what is close at hand—not in order to look away
from it but to see it better, within in a larger whole and in truer
proportion” (p. 305). In this conversation with the other, one’s
earlier expectations are fused with the new experiences and
simultaneously superseded by a new horizon of understanding.

It occurred to me that Gadamer’s detached way of looking at things,

beyond the matter close at hand, might be a good way to give place
to my personal and painful experiences of harassment and abuse of
power, and to gain more insight into the nature of these problems in
academia. What was general, and what was culturally specific? I
also realized that Gadamer’s call to open up and listen to the other
was probably the only way to detect blind spots in my own thinking
and to better know what my responsibilities are towards my col-
leagues in the academic world.

Over the past few months, I have spoken with academics from
different parts of the world whom I’ve met during my, at this point,
relatively short journey through the academy. I spoke with D., a
lecturer from the United States, with R., an assistant professor from
Mexico, and with G., a lecturer from India. I deeply admire their
courage and willingness to share their stories with me and am
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grateful for all the things I learned from them. Here I would like to
share some of the recurring elements I discerned in the stories of
my international conversation partners, as well as some of the blind
spots I had, as a scholar trained and later employed at one of the
many wealthy, privileged universities in Northwestern Europe.

96 ANONYMOUS 7

4 Blind Spots

One of my blind spots was due simply to the fact that the form of
power abuse did not originate in my own culture. This is the
problem of caste discrimination in India, pointed out by my
colleague G. from India. Caste discrimination is a serious obstacle
to attaining a PhD position, she says. “Candidates are selected
based on their caste affiliations, which are clearly identifiable
through their surnames. The practice continues in the process of
appointment of supervisors.” It also affects the evaluation of the
research of PhD students. “Often a high caste professor is appointed
as the supervisor for the student from a similar background and a
professor from a lower caste background is appointed to advise a

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student from lower castes. This creates much inequality, especially
since students from the lower castes are evaluated by teachers from
higher castes on their research presentations, oral exams and thesis
defenses.” Before my conversation with G., I had never thought
about the implications of the caste system for academic life in
India. If you would have asked me, I would have supposed that it
would not have affected academic life that much, trusting that
humanities scholars in India would be more sensitive to such issues
of discrimination. Some undoubtedly are, and are perhaps fighting
these problems. Others may have blind spots, just like me.

Other blind spots had to do with problems of which I was vaguely

aware, but which I had not given much further thought. An example
is the abuse of power arising from institutional discrimination,
something which is certainly present in Europe, too, although it is
not talked about much. My Mexican colleague R. works at an
institution she defines as “outside the core of the academic world
defined by the big universities and international rankings,” a
“renowned but low-resourced institution compared to others in and
beyond Mexico.” The institution is seen as peripheral to other
universities in the Spanish-speaking realm.

The perceived “lower” status of R.’s university has a direct impact

on her access to the academic world. “Alterity is a critical issue in
this context,” she observes. “Decisions such as acceptance of an
abstract for a conference, or invited lectures, are many times guided
by tacit prejudices about the other.” It leaves her in a “vulnerable
position,” she says, not least because she does not have the
institutional resources to fight back, but only her own personal
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ones. As R. seems to suggest by “tacit prejudices,” the
discrimination is at least partly the result of the fact that scholars—
especially those from wealthier and higher-ranked institutions, who
are in charge of most of the international aca- demic events and
communication channels—are guided by certain presuppositions
about which they may not even be aware, and about which they
never really talk to another.

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PERSPECTIVE 97

R.’s story makes it clear that such asymmetric inter-institutional

power relations also reinforce forms of abuse in academia. She
herself became the victim of plagiarism and sloppy source
referencing. R. discovered that parts of her research—both central
ideas and previous publications, and newly presented sources—had
been used by scholars from higher-ranked universities in Mexico
and other Spanish-speaking countries who even copied parts of her
writings, most often without reference to her work. Having
discovered this, she wrote to the editors of the publication and
pointed out to them the similarities between the texts in question.
The editors expressed concern, but evaded the issue. R.’s complaint
was essentially dismissed.

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R. felt that her concerns and complaints were not taken seriously,
and that her case had suffered from the fact that she did not have
the affiliation and contacts that the other scholar could have had.
Instances of plagiarism and sloppy citation, seemingly informed by
asymmetric power relations, are usually kept under the radar.
However, they invoke the question of to what extent they are part of
a much bigger problem in which scholars use their position at the
expense of scholars in more vulnerable positions.

I discovered more easily-overlooked examples of intimidation and

abuse of power in academia. G. tells about how it was made
impossible for her to get a PhD position because she had the
“wrong” political views. “Soon after I completed my master’s
degree, there was an opening for a temporary teaching position for
which I applied. The interviewer mentioned that although I was the
most qualified candidate, they would not offer me the position. The
under- lying reason was well-known to all the candidates—a
difference of political opinion. The faculty were strong supporters
of the right wing and I wasn’t.” G. learned “to maintain a safe
distance between professors of a different opinion, religion or caste,
and not to openly state her opinion.”

Such occurrences, in which academics are put in a vulnerable

position or abused because of their personal views or beliefs, also
occur at European universities. I remember how a colleague once
asked me not to tell anyone that he was a Christian, because he was
afraid that he would be taken less seriously and bullied. There
seems to be a tendency among scholars not to be open about their
personal convictions, especially when they are different from what
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is considered mainstream at a certain faculty or university. This
situation is widely accepted and often remains unquestioned. It is
one of the blind spots in the discourse about abuse of power and
intimidation at Western European universities.

98 ANONYMOUS 7

5 Recurring Elements and Trends

From my conversations it also became clear that in addition to blind

spots— which sometimes have to do with culture-specific
dimensions of harassment and abuse of power—there are general
elements that keep recurring in different cultures. Some are at the
root of abuse of power and intimidation; others rather aggravate the
problems.

One of these recurring elements is what D. calls a “bottom-line

approach to higher education” in the US. She means that
universities are expected to make money from their academic
activities, “to turn a profit, turning students into customers, and
faculty into disposable cogs in a machine.” Many of these
detrimental developments are also threatening the European
academic world, D. feels, where “output is greatly emphasized, as
if research institutions are factories, sacrificing quality in favor of
quantity.” The bottom-line approach leads to inequality and
discrimination, D. says. “Hiring committees tend to select internally
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favored candidates or only seek graduates of elite institutions or
male, white candidates of European descent. Tenure committees
demand more of women and women of color than they do of their
white male counterparts of European descent. And temporary
(adjunct) positions are steadily replacing full-time positions.”

One of the most striking recurring elements is the difficulty victims

experience in raising issues of abuse in academia and fighting
against it. “Being a woman in academia,” R. says, “I have
experienced and witnessed the difficulties of fighting against
plagiarism when you appeal to male committees at more powerful
institutions that have to resolve your case but seem more interested
in defending their journals, colleagues or institutions. No fair play
at all and nearly no institutional resources to help you.” D. suggests
that this is an institutionalized problem. “Sexual harassment and
intimidation of faculty of lower rank and students are often kept
secret, with the abuser—sometimes serial abusers—with prominent
standing in the scholarly community protected.”

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PERSPECTIVE 99

The fear of speaking out can be reinforced by the cultural context.

In India, G. notes, “Most often incidences [of abuse] do not come to
light for fear that the student will lose all that he/she has worked
for. The common reason for all these instances in India is caste,
religious or political difference, sense of hierarchy and seniority,
and sometimes personal enmity or disagreement. These cases are

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not only local, as the instances mentioned above come from across
the country. The abuse of power based on religion or caste is mostly
seen as a part of culture, rarely do people speak or raise a voice
against it.” I had the same experience in my own country, where I
heard from both undergraduate and postgraduate students that they
did not dare report certain abusive behaviors of their professors
(verbal intimidation, the making of unreason- able requests). On the
one hand, this was out of fear that it would harm their careers, on
the other hand, out of the conviction that a complaint would not
matter anyway, because the abuse was part of the culture.

6 Broadened Horizon

What did I gain from these conversations with colleagues around

the world? They helped me come to terms with my own
experiences, find words for them and realize that they were not
trivial but did matter, because others had similar experiences. I
learned that there is no single story but many, even if the basic
pattern is usually the same, involving the abuse of the more
vulnerable by a more powerful person. I also broadened my own
horizon of understanding, detecting blind spots in my own thinking,
especially when it comes to expectations, habits and social
structures at the base of abuse of power and harassment in
particular cultures—India’s caste system, for instance, or the
unequal power relations between institutions within a country, or
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among countries. Such elements, which are usually culturally
specific, easily escape the attention of people who do not belong to
the given culture. Sometimes they contribute to keeping
asymmetrical power relations and all their consecutive problems of
abuse and intimidation intact.

It also confirmed for me that there are elements and trends

recurring in stories of abuse around the globe. Such recurring
patterns may help to make this essay relevant to people from areas
that go unmentioned here, such as Eurasia, Africa and Oceania. The
idea that we share a story is a relief—I’m not the only one who had
to deal with verbal intimidation by supervisors, who felt forced by
higher-ranked colleagues into uncomfortable situations and was
confronted with the grey zone of plagiarism by a close colleague.
But the fact that there is something like a shared story is also
hugely alarming. For if we are aware that there is a problem with
abuse in academia which is even global, why does the problem
continue? Another essay is probably needed to answer this
question, even if it is clear that unequal power relationships within
and between institutions and countries play a crucial role.

100 ANONYMOUS 7

The conversations with my international colleagues made me

realize that abuse in academia is indeed a global problem that
requires a global approach. There are many ways to raise awareness
and contribute to a solution: expanding our networks with
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colleagues in more vulnerable situations or from dis- advantaged
institutions and countries; inviting them to join our academic
events, give lectures or submit papers to our books and journals;
and financially supporting colleagues who lack the means to
participate in international
academicevents.Ithinkscholarsworkinginmoreprivilegedandwealthy
environments have a particular responsibility to use their resources
and influence in ways that reduce the problem of inequality, which
is often at the root of harassment and abuse of power.

Moreover, as I learned while writing this essay, it helps to

intentionally engage in conversations with scholars from around the
globe in order to become more aware of the scope of the problems
of power abuse and harassment in academia. We can detect our
shared stories, our own blind spots and our tacit assumptions only if
we open up to the other person, engage in real and honest
conversation, and listen to their experiences.

7 My Struggle

If a conversation is so important to understand the other person,

should we talk to our abusers? The answer will be different for
everyone. Some people will never want to see their abuser again,
because the offense was too grave or the memory too raw. Others
have the courage to expose wrongdoings, which is a very tough
thing to do. Still others like me do not dare to enter into a
conversation or name wrongdoers for fear of further damage.
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Exposure is crucial to break the silence surrounding the abuse and
disclose the truth. One of the things I struggled with while writing
this essay was whether I should put my own name on it. I did not
have the courage, being afraid that it would affect my career, which
I have worked so hard for. At the same time, it seemed unfair to me
to present my side of the story without giving my col- leagues the
possibility of responding. By this I do not mean that I would like to
cover things up or defend my offenders. But we all have our own
stories of what happened, and they are inevitably impacted by the
fact that we originate from different cultures. I think the truth only
comes to light if we open up to another in a real and honest
conversation, in which we explain how we experienced things, and,
if possible, try to bring each other’s horizons somewhat closer.

But what if, like me, you do not dare have such a conversation, or if
it is simply impossible? I learned a lot from the book Free of
Charge (2005), by the Croatian-American theologian Miroslav Volf,
whose thinking about dialogue, exposure and forgiveness was
directly informed by the fact that he grew up in a family belonging
to the Protestant-Christian minority in former Yugoslavia, at a time
when the country was torn by deep ethnic and religious tensions.
Volf suggests that exposure is not necessarily about disclosing the
culprit, but the deeds. He refers to William Shakespeare’s play
“Measure for Measure,” which tells about Claudio, who is
sentenced to death for getting his beloved pregnant. Claudio’s sister
Isabella asks the judge to show mercy and to spare her brother’s
life. She says, I have a brother is condemn’d to die. I do beseech

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you let it be his fault, And not my brother. (Shakespeare, quoted in
Volf, 2005, p. 141)

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Volf notes the following about the passage: “To be just is to

condemn the fault, and, because of the fault, to condemn the doer as
well. To forgive is to condemn the fault but to spare the doer” (p.
141). Elsewhere, Volf states that forgiveness entails two things:
first, “to name the wrongdoing and to condemn it” (p. 129); and
second, “to give the wrongdoers the gift of not counting the
wrongdoing against them” (p. 130). One can see why exposure and
forgiveness should go together. On the one hand, mere forgiveness
of the offender without identifying the wrongdoing can easily result
in a situation in which the wrong is covered up and the potentially
abusive situation perpetuated (something that happens all too often
in academia). On the other hand, mere exposure of the fault without
forgiveness can lead to bitterness and resentment (some- thing that
is often seen in academia, too).

Volf helped me to come to terms with my own story of intimidation

and abuse in academia, suggesting that it is also okay to expose
faults without naming the wrongdoer. With this in mind, I have
tried to keep a distance, leaving the culprits for what they are, while

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exposing some general trends in abuse and harassment in academia
and blind spots in mine (and possibly others’) thinking about the
problems. Sometimes it is enough just to trace the contours of what
went wrong without publicly condemning individual perpetrators
and counting wrongdoings against them, in the hope that it opens
up the space for a real conversation in which we can better find
each other.

Notes

1 My leading questions were inspired by Regulska (2018). Many

of the problems exposed by the #MeToo movement as
underlying causes of sexual harassment are similar to those
underlying abuse and intimidation in academia in general.

102 ANONYMOUS 7

2 I have tried to give as faithful a representation as possible of

what colleagues wanted to share with me verbally and on paper,
quoting their words verbatim. Moreover, I have submitted this
essay to them for approval. Still, it is ultimately mainly the
expression of my own position on the problem of harassment and
abuse of power in academia.

References

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Gadamar, H.-G. (2004). Truth and method (2nd ed., J. Weinsheimer
& D. G. Marshall, Trans.). Continuum.

Regulska, J. (2018). The #MeToo movement as a global learning

moment. International Higher Education, 94(5), 5–6.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
325701024_The_MeToo_Movement_as_a_Global_Learning_Mom
ent

Volf, M. (2005). Free of charge: Giving and forgiving in a culture

stripped of grace. Grand Rapids.

CHAPTER 18

What My Younger Self Would Have Said, Had She

Spoken up, and How My Present Self Would Have
Replied

Ingela Nilsson

“There was this seminar the other day and I really didn’t get
anything, or at least close to nothing. Everyone else seemed to
understand, nodding and smiling and laughing, so I did what I
always do: mimicked them, feeling stupid on the inside while
laughing along on the outside. Some part of me knows this is
wrong, but I’ve been doing it for so long it’s too late to admit I
don’t quite belong. Otherwise, people would realize that I don’t
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know all these terms they’re using, that I haven’t read all those
books they refer to in passing as if everyone had read everything.
But above all, I don’t want to expose myself by asking a wrong or
stupid question. They would laugh, and even if I could laugh along,
my embarrassment might shine through and it would all be over.”

“What would be over?”

“Eh … this! Being part of this world, learning things, having

coffee, going for drinks, being at university, you know. I like it
here, it’s very different from any- thing I ever knew, and I’ve made
friends. In fact, they are my best friends— we do everything
together, from morning to late at night.”

“But look, if you cannot tell them, you don’t understand something,
are they really your friends? Do they really know you? Aren’t they
just a bunch of guys who enjoy having a young woman in their
circle?”

“What a mean thing to say! Of course, they know me, they know
who I am now: one of them. And what’s wrong with being the only
girl anyhow? In fact, it makes me feel special, I get a lot of
attention. And I’m not some dumb chick, you know! I’m a cool girl,
one of the guys, they respect me for that and treat me the same way
they treat each other.”

“Seriously: you cannot believe that. You’re like a mascot to them,

they think you’re cute. And how can you claim you’re just one of
the guys? Did any of them speak up when you filed a complaint
against that professor with the sexist translation exercises? Did any
of them stand up for you? No, they did not. They are using you as a
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front figure when they dislike something, you get to be the angry
girl who takes the fire and the blame. You will see, that’s how it
works.”

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BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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104 NILSSON

“What a bitch you are, just because you can’t remember what it’s
like to be young—I bet you’re just jealous, wishing you were in my
place. They’ve actually been really supportive.”

“Like when they wrote that poem about your breasts? Or left you
alone late at night with that guy trying to seduce you? Look, I don’t
doubt their affection for you, but I bet most of them are just as
scared as you are of looking stupid or making a mistake. You
become an alibi, a kind of reflection of what they don’t have the
guts to be.”

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“You’re so mean, I never want to speak to you again.”

“That’s fine, we will never have this conversation anyhow. I just

hope you won’t get too hurt and give up your integrity, it’s the last
thing we can afford to lose.”

“I’ll be fine, if you just get out of my head.”

CHAPTER 19

The Ghostsof Academia

Veronika Muchitsch

I am haunted by a particular kind of ghosts.

At times, they materialize in the subtle sting of mistrust upon new

encounters. At others, they form a knot in my gut, heavy with anger
and disenchantment. They embody the specific kind of pain caused
by the ruptures between feminist theory and proclamations, and
lived feminist practice in academia.

I have struggled with following this perspective in this contribution.

Many of these specters echo encounters with scholars, who are self-
proclaimed feminists and feminist theorists, whose work I had
admired, and still admire. Others formed within institutional
contexts that off-handedly declare commitment to feminist politics,
and, most excruciatingly, within scholarly networks, whose

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pronounced purpose it is to scrutinize and fight intersecting forms
of subjugation including those along lines of gender, sexuality,
class, race and ethnicity.

I have struggled, as well, because giving voice to my experiences

would risk diverting attention from other, more explicitly
misogynist, displays of abuse of power. And because pointing to
these problems threatened to cancel out the experiences of feminist
companionship and support that have carried me through my early
career in academia.

But my ghosts would not dissolve. They expanded and multiplied

with time, with reflection.

So, I knew I needed to paint their shadows on these pages.

© VERONIKA MUCHITSCH, 2022 |

DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_019

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BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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 CHAPTER 20

The Unbearable Shame of Crying at Work

Anonymous 8

Like many academics, I have over the years experienced various

situations of abuse and harassment. I developed coping strategies
that helped me to move on, but they were not necessarily positive
for me. I believe that opportunities to share and reflect on
experiences of abusive situations provide one of the most
constructive ways to find healthy strategies to counteract this type
of behavior. I was spared during my first semesters in academia.
Apart from a few incidents of wandering hands at department
parties, most lecturers treated me with respect. I was completely
unprepared, however, for my first encounter with my future
supervisor in France. I was excited to be there, but when I went to
see her after class, her gaze remained trained on the wall behind
me, signaling clearly my inferiority and insignificance as she coldly
explained that she would not meet with me until next year, and only
if I passed my master exams. She also advised me that on days
when students came out of her office crying, it was better to
postpone the appointment. During my five years as her graduate
student, there were many such days when I consciously avoided her
out of fear of bursting into tears in front of her and everyone else.
All her students feared committing faux pas in her presence, as she
could be mean enough even on a good day.
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This was the history of the department. Her predecessor had made
her suffer tremendously for years and years as a lecturer and it was
only by playing power games that she had finally attained this
position. She was not a particularly brilliant or successful
researcher, but she was a ruthless strategist who held the entire
department in thrall to her persona.

She was not ready to open up to anyone at that time. Later on,
during the long periods of illness that finally led to her death, her
attitude changed, and one day soon after I had defended my PhD,
she apologized for how she had behaved during my first years as
her graduate student.

I was lucky to be able to work on my PhD at an international

research institute, although I didn’t have a grant and had to work in
different projects on the side. It was a vibrant environment with
scholars of all ages and nationalities passing through. Being abroad
made them more open and accessible than at their home
institutions. I was happy and inspired to share ideas with
researchers with common interests and with whom scholarly
exchange was independent of age or gender. Or at least that’s what I
thought.

© JULIE HANSEN AND INGELA NILS SON, 2022 |

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108 ANONYMOUS 8

One day I was sitting together with a local colleague on a little

bench outside the library of the international institute. He was a
senior researcher, but we often sat there together, discussing our
research, new publications or interesting buildings. But today was
different. The air was thick. He obviously felt it, too, for he was
sweating and breathing heavily.

“It’s very simple,” he said, “you do something for me and I’ll do

something for you. You can begin by filling in this form and
returning it to my post box within a week. Then I’ll know and can
make arrangements accordingly …”

Who in my position wouldn’t want a grant to spend a semester at a

prestigious research institute? It would be an ideal opportunity to
write my dissertation with a full salary, with access to an amazing
library and renowned scholars. But it was not due to my intellectual
capacity, research topic or innovative methodology that I would
receive this. None of these things were of interest in this exchange
of services. Shame, disgust and guilt surfaced in my mind and I
could feel the tears burning. But I didn’t want anyone to know
about this shameful experience, so I kept a straight face. A few days
later he reminded me to turn in the grant application. I did so
without having filled it out. He pretended it had never happened,
but he never, ever discussed research with me again.

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In a job interview a couple of years later, I mentioned the situation
as an example of how I had dealt with harassment, and I later
learned that this had got me the position. It was outside of
academia, but it was also an opportunity to finish my PhD without
exchanging services with anyone.

When I returned to academia as a postdoctoral researcher, I needed

to go on longer research trips to reconnect with the field and my
topic. I also re- established contact with researchers I knew from
before, many of whom were close to retirement, but very
knowledgeable in the field. One of them had spent all his
professional life working on the same period as I specialized in.
When I was on a research visit in the city where he lived, he invited
me to stay at his house.

“Come and stay at my place,” he said. “No reason to take a room at

the institute, there are so few. I can introduce you to my networks
here and we can discuss your work after hours.” I agreed, of course,
eagerly.

This was followed by several exciting meetings with interesting

colleagues, long days of archival research and long evening talks
about the history of the discipline and the current research
environment in our field. It was such a pleasure to finally get to
know a senior researcher who understood and appreciated my
work. There was a wonderful intellectual connection that developed
and made me feel more confident about my own value and
contributions as a researcher.

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THE UNBEARABLE SHAM E of CRYING AT WORK 109

One night I was awoken by someone slipping under my covers.

“I can’t sleep,” he said. “I need to feel the warmth of another

human being.”

I slipped out of bed, went into the kitchen that smelled of cold
tobacco and spent the rest of the night on a plastic chair smoking
and staring into the dark, concentrating very hard in order not to
cry. The bond of trust and equal dialogue had obviously only
existed in my mind. All that was left now was sadness, anger and
disappointment. I left early in the morning, before he woke up.

We stayed in touch because his work was intertwined with mine

through documents and connections that I could not disregard or
avoid without coming across as unprofessional. I remained silent
for years, until he passed away. In the numerous recommendation
letters, he subsequently wrote for me, one sentence was recurrently
used—a person with an extraordinary integrity and loyalty.

The vulnerability to harassment may decrease over the course of a

career and with age, but exposure to abuse of power, unclear
distribution of (or exclusion from) responsibility and non-
transparent decision-making processes are power strategies that can
be just as intimidating, confusing and disorienting. The effects of
such behavior can be similar to that of gaslighting, when the
perpetrator manipulates another person into doubting their
perception of reality. When such a situation recently occurred at my

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workplace, my reaction was surprisingly different from twenty
years ago. Instead of heavy, cold silence and guilt spreading in my
mind, I could not stop myself from expressing anger and
frustration. As floods of angry tears rushed over my face, I gave
voice to my thoughts about the situation. This time I conveyed my
opinion to a person mature enough to take the emotional reaction
and who was wise enough to allow me the space and time I needed
to reformulate my thoughts into some- thing constructive.

But I was also confident enough to express my anger and cry

without shame, and mature enough to take a step back, analyze the
situation and find a solution that was positive for me.

Harassment and abuse, whether emotional or physical, are ways of

maintaining power structures. They can also be a source of pleasure
for the perpetrator. They are means of controlling or isolating
strong individuals who are perceived as a threat, or weaker
individuals considered easy prey, denigrating their intellectual
capacity and equal rights.

One recurring observation I have made of academia in general, and

the humanities in particular, is that students and young researchers
are especially vulnerable due to the nature of the field, lack of
funding and lack of permanent positions. This situation opens up a
space for individuals in power positions to abuse or harass those
with less power. Sometimes this behavior seems to be hereditary
within a department, following the logic of “my
professor/supervisor did this to me, thus I’m entitled to behave the
same way when I attain the same position.” Sometimes it is
attributed to a certain individual who is so brilliant that no one
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dares to question their behavior, although it is clearly that of a
bully.

110 ANONYMOUS 8

The culture of silence and guilt that protects the perpetrators needs
to be addressed and dealt with. I know from experience that it is
difficult to deal with something like this on your own. In addition,
the unbearable shame of crying in an academic environment makes
us keep it all to ourselves. It took me two decades before I was
confident and mature enough to cry without shame in front of my
boss. We need to raise awareness and create possibilities to share
experiences and get advice anonymously. Although it may be
difficult to eliminate harassment and abuse completely from any
workplace, opening spaces where experiences can be shared can
strengthen those exposed to it and diminish the personal and
professional damage it causes.

CHAPTER 21

Panic Button

Ingela Nilsson

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A colleague and former student sent me a draft essay the other
week, asking for advice about where to publish it. It was a brilliant
text, discussing gendered aspects of translation and the strong,
basically corporeal sense of not belonging that women sometimes
feel in certain contexts and environments. I was impressed, but also
distressed, because the essay contained a personal anecdote from
her time as a student. The (male) teacher had written a sentence for
translation on the whiteboard and said “This sentence is about you.”
She was the only female student in the room. “I tried to understand
how this sentence, a sentence that commented a woman’s body in
sexual terms, could be about me. I was not a body? I was a
student.” The function of this memory was to describe her own
discovery of being reduced to a body, being reminded of her flesh.
Framed by citations from Christine de Pizan and Simone de
Beauvoir, it made for a strong case, but the reason why my heart
started beating (in my own body) was that this incident had
happened under my watch—at a time when I was responsible for all
our undergraduate teaching.

I instantly tried to remember who had been teaching what course

back then, in an attempt to identify the person who had done this to
her, feeling ashamed and embarrassed that something like this had
happened without my ever knowing or noticing. But it was a futile
effort, because the time at which this would have happened was not
only distant in time but also rather muddled in my memory, due to
the kind of situation I had found myself in back then: new at the job
and under constant critique from colleagues who wished someone
else had been in my place. Was it even possible that she told me or

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wrote about this in an evaluation and I had simply forgotten? That
thought made me even more distressed, reminding me of how easy
it is to miss other people’s distress when one is feeling unhappy,
tired and weak.

Then I remembered an email I had received a few months back

from another young woman, a PhD student whom I had met at a
few occasions. We had shared some bad experiences of a colleague
misbehaving and wrote messages every now and then. In a recent
email, she had suggested a remedy for bad behavior in drastic but
memorable words:

© INGELA NILS SON, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_021

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BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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112 NILSSON

Increasingly, when talking to friends and colleagues about these

experiences, I have found myself wishing that we could install a

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size able red but- ton on each desk in our academic environments,
linked to a loud buzzer and a large neon red sign of the word
INAPPROPRIATE at the back of the room. This is (though perhaps
only half) a joke of course, but I think the idea illustrates the lonely
feeling that goes with how often even public inappropriate behavior
goes unchallenged. I have even experienced how awkward laughs
that ensue from the discomfort of the audience can be perceived (by
victim and perpetrator) as encouragement of bad behavior.

A panic button! That is what my student should have had on that

occasion some ten years ago! A red button and a neon sign going
INAPPROPRIATE! The shame would have been turned away from
her and instead bounced back at that teacher, whoever he was. In
fact, that email put words to something that had been at the back of
my mind for quite some time: the culture of silence that reigns in
classrooms and lecture halls, in seminar rooms and lunch rooms, in
any kind of academic setting that I have ever known. We see things,
we hear things, but we pretend as if they are not there. I don’t even
think it’s out of spite, most of the time; it is rather an inability to
cope, an embarrassment or awkwardness, not knowing how to deal
with inappropriate behavior. The author of the email had recognized
that as she wisely went on:

Clearly, as a community, we simply don’t know how to respond, or

rarely have the presence or wherewithal to do so appropriately
when these circumstances present themselves (and I recognize this

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in myself as well). Perhaps it’s a good idea, in absence of a red
buzzer button, to offer simple ways to speak up, or other things to
do, when inappropriate behavior presents itself in a public setting.

Yes, but this is the trick question, isn’t it? What other ways to speak
up do we have, when there are no panic buttons and when so many
are afraid to break the silence? I cannot even count the times that I
heard people say “Someone should have stopped him, “or “Why
didn’t anybody tell her?” I’ve said it myself, too. Spent sleepless
nights trying to understand what stopped me from being the one
who opened her mouth and saved someone else from a bad
situation.

At the time when my student was being reduced to a body in a

classroom of our department, I was trying to cope with being the
object of what I would probably now call harassment. Back then it
was seen rather as having “problems with colleagues.” And of
course, there were people who were convinced (and still are) that I
was as much of a problem as the others. It’s in the past now and I
have no wish or need to revisit that shame of not being able to fit in
or even properly defend myself, but I remember an amazing person
in the department of human resources—one of the few people who
seemed to take my problems seriously. After having listened to
some of my stories, she said with- out hesitation: “These are master
suppression techniques, you need to learn how to deal with them.
“She explained to me how people would use these techniques in
order to keep their own power and repress that of others. They were
often directed against women and minorities, including younger
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colleagues or people considered “too young for the job.” They
could consist of things like making others feel invisible by ignoring
their comments in a seminar or taking a phone call in the middle of
a conversation, ridiculing or shaming them for their ideas or looks,
or simply withholding information by not telling them about a
meeting or event.

PANIC BUTTON 113

It was such an eye-opener. Suddenly I could see the pattern of what

had been happening since I was a student, not just to me but all
around me. All those seminars of listening to male colleagues
repeating what female colleagues had just said, but suddenly
receiving attention and praise. All the eye-rolling at things other
people said or the way they dressed. All the times my colleagues
had held back information, interrupted me or told me what to do,
since they had “so much more experience.” But recognizing and
knowing didn’t make it much easier to deal with. It was still
shameful to be the object of other people’s techniques! Why me?
Why now? After all, I had worked in other places where I had been
getting along just fine with people, being respected and pretty well
liked. What did I do wrong?

114 NILSSON

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It was also painful to come to understand that women use the same
techniques as men, especially to other women. So far in my career,
I hadn’t had much of a problem with other women, but now that I
had a proper job, all female colleagues, or at least those who were
older than me, seemed to hate me. One told me how sad and
worried she felt about the male candidate who didn’t get the job.
Others simply ignored my greetings in the corridor. Yet another
invited me to lunch just to explain why I should never have been
offered the position in the first place. It was devastating but slightly
fascinating: to go through all that trouble just to humiliate someone
over lunch! Oh, if I had only had that panic button … But I didn’t,
and being humiliated by other women was somehow worse than
being ignored or bullied by men. It felt like being back in high
school, being watched by the mean girls who deliberately talk loud
enough for you to hear. The feeling of wanting to disappear, just not
get out of bed in the morning because you know there will be
another day of whispering and smirks and dismissive comments.

I know that my memories are exaggerated. I know that I have made

all this much worse than it was in my head, simply because it made
me so miserable at the time. I’m convinced that some of the people
around me never noticed. I kept my head high; I clearly stated my
ideas and stood my ground. To some extent, I think that made it
worse, provoking those who wanted me to show more respect not
only for them as persons, but for the system as a whole. A decisive
turning point for me was a discussion with a senior administrator, a
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man who had worked at the university for some thirty years and
who had seen everything. We were having lunch and I complained,
as usual, about how people treated me as a little girl and didn’t see
me as a real professor of X because I didn’t fit the template, just
couldn’t live up to people’s expectations. It wasn’t the first time he
heard me saying that. He looked at me and sighed, then said: “But
look, now you are the professor of X at this university, so a
professor of X at this university is just like you.”

It sounds silly now that I try to put it on paper, but that was more
useful than anything others had said to cheer me up or support me.
It finally gave me the strength to fully accept my new role and not
to care so much about what others think. It helped me decide who I
wanted to be in academia, which was exactly whom I had already
been but with more self-assurance and confidence. It didn’t stop
people from being mean to me, but it helped me cope.

PANIC BUTTON 115

And I don’t regret my experience of harassment, regardless of how

painful it was, because it has helped me to see and notice what
happens around me. There are no panic buttons, so we all need to
take our responsibility and raise our voice when colleagues
misbehave. Those of us with permanent positions have the greatest
responsibility because we have nothing to fear, but we are all part
of the system, from undergraduate students to the vice chancellor:
we are the system, so when the system fails, we need to do more
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than just blame it as an abstract entity. We speak up not only for
ourselves, but for those who come after. To make the system better.
I strongly believe in that, but some things in particular still worry
me.

One is all the things I know I don’t see, even though I think I’m
being watchful. The anecdote of my student is only one example,
but a scary one because it happened so close to me and I feel I
should have known. Other things have happened in close proximity
without any suspicions on my part. The male col- league whom I
thought was simply a bad and lazy supervisor, even a bit of a
womanizer, but who turned out to secretly harass his most attractive
male students. How on earth could I not have known, having spent
so much time at the center of that environment? Did I not want to
see? Did I care less for the young men than I would have for young
women? Was I less suspicious because of my gendered
presumptions of who harasses whom? Why didn’t anyone tell me?
Did I not appear as a person who could be trusted? These questions
are haunting me and I think they should. Only by questioning
ourselves can we make things better.

The other is the way in which I see women behave to other women.
I now most often get a better treatment than I did fifteen years ago,
but that’s clearly because of my current status and my age—I
finally look old enough to be who I am, more or less. But the fact
that I am treated better doesn’t help when I see constant gender and
age discrimination all around me, not only from men but from
women. In fact, anything that stands out as odd is being commented
on and often made fun of, regardless of what kind of deviation from
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the norm it is. Being a heterosexual man in gender studies is also a
deviation of sorts, let’s not forget about that. Or a straight blond
woman in queer studies. We’re all judgmental, that’s for sure. And
why should women be better than men, you might say—but why on
earth should women keep suppressing other women when so many
men are finally starting to change? The topic is very tricky, because
criticizing other women is not comme il faut. It easily falls back on
you: aren’t you then a nasty woman who doesn’t like other women?
The commonplace of women being mean and competitive by nature
is so prevalent, it even contributes to the way in which we accept
all kind of things going on around us, because we don’t want to be
accused of being a bitch. It saddens me and drives me crazy.

116 NILSSON

This fear of being a trouble-maker or annoying in any way stops us

all, but especially women, from acting as panic buttons, and in the
end, it really stands in the way of a better academic work
environment. One of the things I learned from my advisor in the
human resources department was how to confront people using
master suppression techniques by simply asking then, nicely, what
they meant by saying this or that. This is not something that always
works, especially if the technique in question is to ignore someone.
But this is where we need each other: if someone ignores me, I
want to have a person there who says, “But why are you ignoring
her?” When one of the men repeats something, a woman just said

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but now gets acclaim, I want someone—and not always me—to
say, “But that is exactly what X just said.” When someone said, “Is
green nail polish really suitable for a professor?” I wish someone
had said, “Why do you comment on her looks?” We have to be each
other’s panic buttons—there is no other way. But if we all dare to
do it, the behavior will change.

To my former student, I want to say that I’m sorry. I wish one of the
other students had interrupted the teacher and said, “Why do you
talk to her like that?” I wish I had been there for you, to tell you
that you are not just a body, but that being a body is also not a bad
thing. Perhaps I was too caught up in my own problems to see or
understand yours, which is not an excuse but possibly an
explanation. Yet I hope, and know, that you have learned from that
experience, that you would never to treat others like that and that
you would speak up if someone does it to someone else.

Wouldn’t it be great to have panic buttons in every academic

setting! But in the meantime, let’s simply speak up. Nice could be
the new brilliant.

Quit

CHAPTER 22

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Thomas Oles

I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do—

namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise,
nay, my consternation, when, without moving from his privacy,
Bartleby, in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer
not to.”

I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties.

Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or
Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my
request in the clearest tone I could assume; but in quite as clear a
one came the previous reply, “I would prefer not to.”

H. MELVILLE (Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,

1997, p. 21)

An early evening in late March, several weeks past my forty-eighth

birthday. I am seated in the departure lounge of Salt Lake City

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Airport, wrapped in a Loden coat and staring into a half-empty
plastic sushi tray on my lap.

I am on my way home from an academic conference. I chaired a

panel on fieldwork with some close colleagues. It all went well.
Interest was expressed, much future collaboration promised. It fell
to me to sum up. Field work is about chance, I whispered, my voice
ravaged by laryngitis, about risk. It is about the learning that comes
of being vulnerable, exposed, raw. In the field you can and do get
hurt. In the field you are never really in control, never really the
master of your fate, and in this it is like life, I said.

We call ourselves a tribe, this group. Who knows how we found

each other. We came together this year as we do most years, to
affirm friendship, offer support, steel ourselves anew for another
year filled with the mundane disappointments and degradations of
university jobs. “Academic positions” is too grandiose for us. We
are not superstars. We do not write our own tickets. The offices
where we toil are small, they look onto loading docks and brick
walls. We live all over the world in places we tolerate, barely, for
the paycheck. We

© THOMAS OLES, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_022

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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118 OLES

dream about someplace better. We spend (or spent, before the

Covid year) a great deal of time in airplanes and even more in
airports, waiting for flights delayed, rerouted, rebooked, cancelled.
We have learned to turn those hours to our advantage. In departure
lounges and airport bars, at ticket counters and security checkpoints
and border control, we are always throwing together our next
lecture, trudging through our students’ prose thickets, tending the
ever-unruly email gardens.

I had such high hopes for this hour. But the room is packed: every
9seat occupied, children splayed at their parents’ feet, young people
propped against the walls. To a one, all are device-entranced. Blue
fluorescent light reaches every corner of the room and leaves only
the darkening world beyond the plate glass as refuge. I lift my eyes,
slowly trace the pink ridge of the Wasatch Front. It has just snowed.

You must quit, I think.

Do I say the words aloud? Do I even “think” them at all? They

seem at once more and less than a thought. A conviction, an
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epiphany? No. This is a statement more like “it is Tuesday,” banal
and self-evident. No chain of reasoning leads up to it. It needs no
argument, no explanation. It arrives just so, without fanfare, from
some place far beyond thought, beyond reason or plan or
consequence. But it demands utterance.

Now, years later, I know where the words come from. It is the
“swamp brain,” the reptile inside me fed up with the frontal lobe
and its chatter, its endless ifs and however and at the same times.
Fed up—and not fed.

You must eat, the reptile orders.

It has my attention now. It is angry. Yes. I suddenly realize I am

dizzy, have not taken a single piece of food all day. I look back
down at the pieces of sushi, each a sad little expression of the
industrial food machine. I am about to take one when the frontal
lobe barges back in, yelling.

Crazy!

not so bad— the children—

what about money?! she will never accept— things will surely—

QUIT 119

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I wait for the words to assemble themselves into sentences,
sentences into arguments as they usually do. But the words are
sheepish. They sit there, random once shiny objects sticking out of
the muck. The ruler of the muck is amused. Have your fun, he says
to the front brain. Go ahead with your crystal palaces. They will all
sink in the end.

The reptile is in no hurry. It settles back while the words drag

themselves to attention (they have had so much practice). This
institution is toxic, they recite. It will never change. They fired you
without cause, then tried to cover it up. You hate your colleagues;
you hate your students. They are poisoning you. And— final insult!
—the pay is lousy; you are going broke. And then suddenly
emerges the sentence I will not forget, the sentence I will bear with
me every day from then on, fully-formed, lapidary, like fully grown
Athena from the head of Zeus: I would rather never work in
academia again than work in this university another minute.

As rhetoric, not too bad. Perhaps the words will convince my

skeptics. But the problem with words is that they are fickle. Once
they get going there is no stopping them. Almost immediately, they
turn on me:

OK, but what will you do? This work is all you know; all you can
do. Sure, universities have their problems. This one might be a bit
worse than others, but how can you be certain you will end up—
deserve to end up—with some- thing better? Don’t be so hasty. You
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are innomental state to make such a consequential decision.
Cooldown, tot up the ledger. Wait a month or a year or two or three.

My spirits sink with each clause, each premise. I am so damn good

at this. But I am not the only one paying attention. The reptile is
there, too, watching and waiting. It, too, knows a thing or two about
words, and it has plans for me. I am just about to add the next
proposition when it lunges forward, hisses and strikes:

Dear Dr Oles,

I understand that you received a UK Visas and Immigration letter

stating that your residence card application has been refused. This
letter confirms that you no longer have the right to work in the UK,
therefore the University cannot legally continue your employment
at this time. Your employment will terminate, as of today, on the
grounds of statutory enactment. As this is a summary dismissal no
notice or payment in lieu of notice is due to you. This decision has
been reached after seeking legal advice and guidance from the
University’s contact within the UKVI Premium Customer Service
Team who confirmed that the University can no longer legally
employ you.

Yours sincerely, L R

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Senior Human Resources Administrator

120 OLES

I step back and wait for the old sting. I know it well, for I have
worried these lines to threads since first reading them. They came
attached to a late email from my chair (last task, no doubt, before
he headed off for the long weekend). The email was festooned with
empathy. I stood at my desk and stared at the screen, words oozing
and ramifying before me. My son was eight months old, my
daughter three years, mine the only salary. The world was inverted.
There was nowhere to turn, no succor to be found. I— we—were in
hostile territory. I walked down to them in the park below, where
they were playing with neighbors. The smiles of pity, the polite
assurances (all a mistake, will be put right soon enough) enraged
me. They—will—regret—this! I said, but thought: You.

Dear L R,

I was surprised and disappointed to receive your correspondence

dated 06 April 2015, in which you inform me that I have been fired
as of today on grounds of “statutory enactment.”

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I would have appreciated the opportunity to discuss my plans for
appealing this erroneous decision with you before being summarily
dismissed over the Easter holiday on the basis of advice from the
“UKVI Premium Customer Service Team. “I have attached to this
letter my Home Office appeal and supporting evidence. I have also
instructed my solicitor to review the circumstances of my dismissal,
and request that you immediately forward him complete transcripts
of any and all legal advice obtained from the Home Office in
relation to my case.

Naturally I have suspended execution of all duties associated with

my position pending resolution of this matter.

Sincerely, &c

I wait for the venom to hit the skin. And wait. Adrenaline and
dopamine ebb away by increments. Still nothing. Finally, I relax.
Not only have the words lost their potency, I realize, they actually
bore me. How can that be? Have I grown immune from exposure?
Am I just too weary, too worn down by airports and greasy food
and stale conference hotel air? The reptile knows my brain too well
to give me time to answer. As quickly as it deploys its venom it
sucks it all back in again, like a film in reverse. All the words are
gone. All, that is, except one. Quit, a verb and a noun and an
adjective. The 27-page entry in the OED tells me the word comes
from Anglo-Norman and Old French quitter, meaning release,
discharge or exonerate. To abandon, relinquish, renounce (an
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obligation or a debt). To leave, go away. To pay a penalty, to match
or balance or

redress. Torid of something undesirable or troublesome. Like

retching.

QUIT 121

Before the retching, though, the swoon. That sour certainty of sweat
and bile. I mechanically avert my eyes from the sushi, try to ignore
the food-court fragrance behind me. I look back out the window,
where it has grown dark. I take imaginary gulps of jet fuel-spiked
air. Perhaps I can get some work done. I reach down to the floor to
pull out my laptop, then freeze. No. The reptile is not done with me,
not yet. It crouches there, grinning, waiting. It knows.

The old definitions are ambiguous. Torid of something

troublesome. But who is troublesome and who is troubled? Who is
ridded and who does the ridding? What is matched, to whom is the
penalty paid? Who owes, and who forgives? “I wolde wel quyte
your hyre” Chaucer wrote, but Melville’s Bartleby never says the
word. His boss does.

Who is troublesome? I am troublesome. I am a bad colleague.

I am not a “team player.”

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A team player would not file a grievance and insist on a formal
apology— not when he is reinstated three weeks later and receives
hush money in the bargain. A team player would not go to the press.
He would not speak to a lawyer. He would keep his head and play
the long game. He would go meekly before that tribunal of students
convened by his “line manager” (we all work on the shop floor
now), charged with … what, exactly? Defying the learning
outcomes? Going off-script on assessment? Holding a class meeting
at an open-air museum? (Yes, I was indeed censured for this.)

No matter. Team players “welcome the opportunity to clear the air.”

Team players play ball. They do not tape record every meeting with
superiors. Denied promotion to a rank they have already held in
another institution; they do not protest. They accept the committee’s
verdict (“it was decided that you are not quite ready for promotion
at this stage …”) with grace. They stick it out, try again next year
and all the years after that.

Team players do not prefer not to. Team players do not fold. Team
players do not quit.

122 OLES

It is not that I do not know the rules of this game. I know I should
smile like a good colleague. But I have grown sullen in my privacy.
I sit there, immobile. Some words are issuing from the Head of

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School seated beside me. Student. Experience. Transparency.
Openness. Mutual. Respect. I turn and notice the straight teeth, the
sequined shoes, the open palms, practiced and unquitterly. I remain
a study in not smiling. When the floor is mine (“Thomas, is there
any- thing you would like to add at this point?”), I turn and fix an
icy gaze on my accusers. Who called for this meeting? I bark,
deliberately rude. Much general squirming, then two hands slowly
rise of the fifty assembled. Do I imagine the awkward laughter? It
makes no difference. My sentence arrived on the docket. Max
Weber, now he knew the rules of this game as well as anyone. He
saw them being written. In 1917 Weber gave a short speech to a
group of doctoral students. To my mind it is the truest thing ever
said and written on the modern university.

“What is the situation of a graduate student who is intent on an

academic career?” he asked (Weber, 2004, p. 4). The first part of
the answer concerns the transformation of the university into a
capitalist bureaucracy, scholars into wage laborers alienated from
the means of production. Their position is “as precarious as that of
every other ‘quasi-proletarian’ in existence” (p. 4). But while “the
old constitution of the university has become a fiction,” Weber
thought, one “feature peculiar to a university career” remained (p.
4). Luck.

I personally owe it to a number of purely chance factors that I was

appointed to a full professorship while still very young in a
discipline in which people of my own age had undoubtedly
achieved more […] I have developed a keen eye for the undeserved
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fate of the many whom chance has treated, and continues to treat, in
the opposite way and who have failed, for all their abilities, to
obtain a position that should rightfully be theirs (Weber, 2004, p. 4)

Weber’s luck ran out a year later. In 1918 he was dead of Spanish
flu at the age of 53, my age today.

I see now what Weber saw then. But when, exactly, did I see it?
When did I learn that I might be tolerated, but would never
advance? When did I know not only not to smile, but that I would
not forgive myself if I did? When did I learn to tape my
conversations with superiors? When did I understand that each
email, however trivial, was a piece of evidence in a case not yet
assembled against me? When did I learn that I was a means to
others’ ends? When, come to think of it, did I even read that Weber
essay in the first place? Was it the cause of my knowledge, or its
effect?

QUIT 123

I search for some watershed between the two selves, ante-quit and
post- quit, AQ and PQ. The PQ self sits here now, years later,
worrying these words. That self knows. But how exactly did the
other self-meet its end?

No matter. We make stories to forget, not remember. This one will

do.
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∵

I rise and walk over to the recycling station. I balance the empty
tray (somehow, I have eaten the remaining pieces) atop a hillock of
identical landfill-bound receptacles, then start down the hallway
back toward security. Eyes fixed on the psychedelic purple carpet, I
walk slowly, gingerly, testing each creaky floor- board so as not to
rouse the baby next door. That baby is a light sleeper. Worse, he
babbles. Once he gets going there is no putting him down.

The reptile—now he does not like children. He is old and cranky.

He wants his peace and quiet, and he wants my undivided attention.
Will he follow me a little way? Am I worth his time?

So far so good. I continue down the concourse, lazily

contemplating the variegated doughnuts and Brigham Young
effigies. I wait for the front brain to awake, the old fighting words
to return. But the baby sleeps on. And then I realize it is no
accident. The reptile has done more than follow. It is there on my
back, black claws digging into my shoulders, long head pivoting
slowly back and forth. I feel the stored heat through my coat. It has
me now. I stop amid the current of travelers, look without seeing.
My muscles go slack, my frame goes heavy and—I float.
Thanatosis, they call this, tonic immobility. So that’s it. I am
playing dead, and the dead are done with words.

I let myself be swept down the hallway tributaries of Salt Lake City
International Airport, emerging just enough, at each successive
terminus, to swim back up again. An hour, maybe two has passed
when I hear the muffled syllables of my name. Last call … Proceed

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immediately … Your baggage will be off- loaded…I crawl onto the
bank, stand up and enter a newspaper stand. Do not exceed two
capsules daily, the maximum strength sedative label admonishes. I
rip open the box, take six and bear my precious passenger toward
the gate.

Later, but not much later, you will run out of the house, down the
steps and into the spring night. You will not have a map. Before
long you will remember your empty pockets and bad shoes. Not too
late to turn around, but you will continue, each step another sunk
cost. One mile, two miles past grey houses and gravid
rhododendrons. Three miles and you will feel the land slope on
your breath. You will see the mountains, giant black waves frozen
mid-crest, and press on, upward, the way choosing you. At no place
in particular you will stop, turn, look. The city is a distant yellow
galaxy at your feet. You stand there in the rain and blackness,
waiting.

124 OLES

So, this will be your life now. You will work for universities again,
but never again will you be not quit. That fall, you will understand,
is absolute. The road back (you will know because you will try to
find it) is washed out, gone. A knowing means (you will know
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because you will try to do it) cannot bend itself back into an
unknowing end.

Well, what on earth kind of life will that be, you ask. A life exposed
and raw, certainly. A life more resigned and remote, probably. Some
will say, a life poisoned by cynicism and darkness. But also, you
will come to learn, a life less fearful. A life more fierce, more truly
your own. A life—here now is another, much bigger word—more
free.

The moment of change is nothing special. You will not see it

coming. One day, like Bartleby, like me, you will simply withdraw
behind the screen, to your privacy, and remain there. The event is
not heroic or grandiose. You cannot give it a name. It is just what
happens when the reptile, long mute, finally demands to speak. It is
just what happens when you see—in some airport, stuck in traffic,
almost too late—you are a means, not an end. It is just what
happens when you cut your losses and walk away from the table. It
is what happens, what will happen, when you quit.

References

Melville, H. (1997). Bartleby the scrivener: A story of Wall Street.

Simon & Schuster. Weber, M. (2004). Science as a vocation. In M.
Weber, The vocation lectures (D.

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Owen & T. B. Strong, Eds.; R. Livingstone, Trans.). Hackett.
(Original work published 1917)

CHAPTER 23

Diving Deeper

The Redemptive Power of Metaphor

Helen Sword

When the higher education research and development center that I

had nurtured and led for seven years was quietly taken behind the
barn and shot in the head (figuratively speaking), I felt
disempowered, grief-stricken and angry. The whole operation was
performed in such a secretive, cynical way—apparently designed
by senior management to avert criticism rather than to ensure
institution-wide consultation—that whatever faith I had once held
in my university’s self-declared values of inclusiveness, fairness
and research-led inquiry was left battered and broken at the scene
of the crime, along with some of my center’s most cherished
initiatives, not to mention the careers of several valued colleagues.

Unable to avert this abuse of institutional power (although

goodness knows I tried!), I decided to focus on changing what I
could control: my own emotional response to the event. Harnessing
the power of language to shape reality, I turned to metaphor to help
me restore and restory my personal narrative. I started by
interrogating the shot-behind-the-barn metaphor that I had been
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using to frame that narrative, posing a series of questions adapted
from a rubric that I had developed as part of an earlier research
project on the emotional habits of academic writers from across the
disciplines:1

1. Domain Does my metaphor invoke the natural world, the world

of human experience, or both?

Key principle: DEEPER metaphors typically invoke both nature

and culture.

2. Emphasis Does my metaphor emphasize the event itself, the

unfolding of the event, or both?

Key principle: DEEPER metaphors typically encompass both

process and product.

3. Emotion Does my metaphor convey positive emotions about the

event, negative emotions, or both?

© HELEN SwORD, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_023

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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126 SwORD

Key principle: DEEPER metaphors typically emphasize the

positive aspects of an event while also acknowledging its
negative side.

4. People Am I present in my metaphor? Are other people part of

my story? Key principle: DEEPER metaphors typically include
both the subject and the subject’s social networks in the
narrative.

5. Empowerment Am I an active, engaged protagonist who faces

challenges and is open to learning new skills, or does the
metaphor depict me a powerless pawn caught up in someone
else’s game? (Do I control the story, or does the story control
me?)

Key principle: DEEPER metaphors typically grant personal

agency to the subject while also acknowledging the influence of
powers beyond their control.

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6. Resonance Does the metaphor have personal resonance—that is,
does it speak to me in some meaningful way? Does it have
universal resonance— that is, does it speak to others?

Key principle: DEEPER metaphors are personally relevant to the

subject while also speaking to a wider audience.

These questions are intended not as “either/or” alternatives but as

“both/ and” prompts leading to the development of what I call
“DEEPER metaphors.” The “taken behind the barn and shot”
metaphor, I quickly realized, fails the DEEPER test on almost every
count. For example, it focuses on a fait accompli rather than a
process of becoming; it presents a narrative of helplessness in
which my colleagues and I feature as a passive victim rather than as
human beings possessed of agency, spirit and heart; and it allows no
space for positive transformation or intellectual growth.

DEEPER metaphors are capacious and complex, embracing not

only the positive aspects of human existence but also what educator
Parker J. Palmer (2007) calls the “shadow side,” the sharp edge that
leads us to change and grow. Diving DEEPER into the emotional
wreckage of my own experience—a seabed strewn with sadness
and shame—I eventually rose to the surface with a new metaphor,
recasting my shot-behind-the-barn narrative as an intrepid ocean
voyage instead:

DIVING DEEPER 127

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The seagoing waka

Seven years before the big wave hit, twenty intrepid voyagers set
sail in a seagoing waka, a large double-hulled canoe designed to
traverse vast distances and explore unknown territories. As their
navigator and Rangatira (leader), it was my job to set the course,
read the star signs and inspire my loyal crew to pull the oars, trim
the sails and keep us on an even keel. Together we rode the ocean
currents and caught the trade winds; together we sailed past
whirlpools and through tempests; from time to time, we forged
alliances with other adventurers, lashing our vessel to theirs to
share stories and trade provisions. When at last our beloved waka
went down, swamped by a tsunami too massive for us to weather,
the bonds that we had forged during our seven-year adventure
helped us all make it safely to shore, the weakest among us buoyed
up by the strongest. Some of my shipmates went off to crew on
other boats; some built new lives working the land; a few ended up
marooned on the rocks, too exhausted and dispirited to pick up the
pieces of their shattered careers and start anew. As for me, I
climbed to the top of a hill and built a light- house there, a beacon
of hope for weary travelers in need of a safe harbor as they traverse
those same perilous seas.

My new metaphor helped me to shift the focus of my story from

institutional violence to human agency and to paint an emotional
landscape tinged with darkness yet suffused by light. However,

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when I subjected the metaphor to the twelve questions from the
DEEPER rubric, I uncovered two central weaknesses. Firstly, my
ocean voyage metaphor lacks personal relevance or resonance; I
have never even sailed on, much less captained, a seagoing waka
and have no direct affiliation with the Polynesian cultures (Māori,
Tongan and Samoan) from which I have appropriated some of the
metaphor’s most compelling features: the seagoing waka; the
lashing of the canoes, the art of star navigation. Secondly, in my
eagerness to reclaim agency and empowerment for myself and my
crew, I have allowed the metaphor to go overboard (so to speak) in
its representation of administrative decision-makers as an
unstoppable force of nature. We were not in fact struck down by a
natural disaster such as a tidal wave or a tempest; rather, our vessel
was deliberately sabotaged by senior managers in an act that
resembled the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior (the Greenpeace ship
infamously limpet-bombed by French government agents in New
Zealand to prevent its crew from protesting nuclear testing in the
South Pacific), rather than that of, say, the Edmund Fitzgerald (the
Lake Superior freighter that sank with all hands aboard after
reportedly being swamped by a rogue wave).

While neither of these shortcomings would, on its own, necessarily

have forced me to scupper my waka metaphor, together they
contributed to a nagging feeling that the sea voyage trope wasn’t
quite working. Reluctantly I abandoned ship and cast about for a
redemptive metaphor with greater personal resonance and a darker
edge. Eventually I settle down the art of mosaic-making, a

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metaphor that I have frequently used to describe my writing
practice and now broadened to include academic leadership as well:

128 SwORD

The mosaic path

I love collecting objects that have been discarded or passed over by

others—stained glass offcuts, chipped crockery, river stones,
seashells— and assembling them into new works of art, creating
unexpected juxta- positions of color and form. When the intricate
mosaic walkway that I had spent seven years designing and
grouting into place was bulldozed by autocratic university
administrators and replaced with a straight and narrow footpath, I
understood their motivation: my joyfully meandering pathway was
too non-conformist, its colors too rich, its energy too vibrant, to suit
their dehumanizing neoliberal agenda. But a mosaic, having been
created from fragments, can be reassembled in new configurations
even after having been blown apart. I now spend my days on a
beautiful South Pacific Island laying out another crazy paving, this
one even more colorful and playful than the last. This time,
however, the pathway runs through my own property rather than the
university’s; never again will I risk having my life and art
consigned to a dumpster by philistine landlords.

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The mosaic metaphor helped me recognize my former academic
leadership role—indeed, my entire scholarly career—as a creative
practice that, like all art-making, is richly fulfilling but fraught with
risk. At the same time, the DEEPER rubric prompted me to pose
some hard questions thrown up by the metaphor: for example, what
does it mean to be a scholar whose creative energies feed on the
smashing of icons? As a leader, do I treat those I lead as mere
tesserae in my mosaic, to be manipulated and glued into place? My
metaphor becomes even more powerful and emotionally nuanced
when I cast light into those shadows, reaffirming my commitment
to what academic activist Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2019) calls
“generous thinking” and celebrating my colleagues’ roles as co-
creators of a pathway that we designed and built together. Like me,
they are now picking up the scattered pieces and laying out new
mosaics of their own. In the years to come, I expect that our paths
will intersect in unanticipated ways, linked by a shared history and
ethos.

DIVING DEEPER 129

I do not mean to suggest here that metaphorical language can

always pave over pain, nor that beleaguered academics should
respond to all administrative abuses of power as I have done in this
instance, by retreating to an island (literally as well figuratively)
and giving up on institutional activism. My decision to start my
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own business as an international writing consultant, building new
pathways into writing for scholars around the world, has come
towards the end of a long career spent fighting in the university
trenches for causes such as gender equity, cultural inclusiveness and
student-centered teaching. If I were ten years younger, a different
set of metaphors might have inspired me to gird my loins
emotionally and return to the fray. (Rest assured, however, that I
would not have persisted with the military trope for long; its
shadow side is too dark to dwell in, even if academic life does
sometimes feel like a war zone.) Either way, redemptive metaphors
have helped me find my way for- ward. Indeed, the very process of
writing this essay has accelerated my trans- formation from a self-
perceived victim of circumstance to a maker and shaper who has
taken my future into my own hands. By diving DEEPER into
metaphor, I have salvaged my sense of personal agency, affirmed
my creative resilience and emerged from a fetid swamp of negative
emotions into clearer air.

Note

1 Adapted from an exercise in Sword (2019).

References
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Fitzpatrick, K. (2019). Generous thinking: A radical approach to
saving the university.

Johns Hopkins University Press.

Palmer, P. J. (2007). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner

landscape of a teacher’s life

(10th anniversary ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Sword, H. (2019). Snowflakes, splinters and cobblestones:

Metaphors for writing. In

S. Farquhar & E. Fitzpatrick (Eds.), Narrative and metaphor:

Innovative methodologies and practice (pp. 39–55). Springer.

EPILOGUE

The Privilege of Writing One’s Story and Reading Those of

Others

Ingela Nilsson

It is 2021 and we are preparing this volume for submission and peer
review.

In a museum shop I see a notebook, on the cover it says: “If you

don’t write your story, who will?” I like this, I buy a whole bunch
and hand them out to my friends.

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I read a new book by Elif Shafak, How to Stay Sane in an Age of
Division (2020). She argues that if you cannot tell your own story,
you will not be willing to listen to the stories of others. This suits
both my personal view and my aca- demic interests, so I talk a lot
about this book, plan for an essay or a blog post about the
transformative power of stories to bring people together.

I take part in a seminar on minority narratives and my colleague, a

historian specializing in the Armenian minority of Turkey, points
out that stories— despite their potential for consolidation and
understanding, also risk creating or sustaining conflicts and make
violence on the one whose story is not heard or understood. This
statement is unsettling in its simplicity. I repeat to myself what has
by now become almost a mantra: if I don’t tell my story, then some-
one else may. But is it really that easy?

Critical storytelling has received increasing attention in recent years

and even formed a new field of studies—with this series as an
important platform for publication. In the wake of classical and post
classical narratology, storytelling has come to play a significant role
in several academic fields, not the least in Psychology and Conflict
Studies. A basic assumption for most of these studies is that
narration is a human constant, or that “the act of constructing
stories is a natural human process” (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999, p.
1243). In that sense, the position of Roland Barthes, one of the
foundational fathers of narratology, is still formative for the field:
narrative is seen as “international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is
simply there, like life itself” (Barthes, 1977, p. 79).1 A central
implication, then, is that to understand how stories function is a
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way to under- stand human beings. For someone like me, a literary
historian who has been working on narratological angles of both
fictional and factual texts for some twenty years, this is obviously a
crucial assumption.

© INGELA NILS SON, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_024

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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THE PRIVILEGE of WRITING ONE’S STORy AND READING

THOSE of OTHERS 131

At the same time, the increasingly common cue to “control your

narrative”—a kind of self-help exhortation to “craft the life you
want for yourself” (Riley,2017)—gives the impression that each
individual story is “true,” as long as it is personal and sincerely
narrated as a kind of “serious storytelling” (Lug- mayr et al., 2016).
But it goes without saying that if each individual has their own
story and their own version of any given event, these stories are
bound to clash with each other. This is indeed what is happening at
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this point in time, on both micro and macro levels of society: from
the presentation of “my story” on individual Instagram accounts to
recurring major narratives of Male and Female, East and West,
Christianity and Islam. In such a situation, is the encouragement to
craft and tell our own story even helpful?

The contributions in this volume are responses to such an

encouragement: please share your story of academia with us, of
harassment, abuse, of unfair treatment, so that we may feel less
alone in our daily struggle. Share not only your anger and
disappointment, but also your experience and strategies— help us
find ways to make things better. And do that in any form you want,
as long as it is candid. Unless you have skipped the previous
chapters and went straight for the epilogues, you have just read the
results of this request. It is a collection of tales and experiences as
diverse as the individuals behind them, yet sadly consistent.

If classical narratology focuses primarily on structure and order,

storytelling is rather about the social, cultural and political activity
of telling and sharing stories. It takes us back to where Barthes
started: as human beings we need stories not only for entertainment
and comfort, but also for our shared memories, for stating moral
values, for education and cultural preservation. Critical story-
telling takes us one step further in the direction of the individual: its
aim is to find alternative perspectives, to question previously
unquestioned narratives and norms, to expose oppression and
envision possibilities for change.2 In that sense, it wishes to avoid
metanarratives and reach for minority angles. Such a definition
makes me think of Svetlana Alexievich as a critical storyteller par
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excellence, relentlessly telling the stories of the unheard. The fact
that she was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize shows how not only
important but also appreciated such perspectives are: “for her
polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our
time.”3

Ironically, Alexievich was nominated by a committee consisting of

Swedish Academy members tacitly accepting the kind of gender-
based abusive practices that would cause an international scandal a
couple of years later; this is a good example of how hypocrisy is
present on all levels of society, including its most sacred intellectual
circles.4 But regardless of those events, the polyphony underlined
in the press release of the Academy is essential, not only in
Alexievich’s writings, but also in critical storytelling in general:
individual voices may not easily be heard, but the function of
polyphony is infinitely useful. First, it shows that the individual
story is unique and not like any other; second, it demonstrates that
all these individual stories have several similarities despite their
differences; and third, it offers comfort and support to an endless
number of individuals thanks to the above. Polyphony, moreover,
demands of the reader or listener a critical stance, since many
voices offer no unanimous message. They demand critical
reflection, which in turn encourages the investigation of
possibilities for change (Morley, 2014).

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The stories collected here all bear witness to such theoretical
processes, even if representations such as poems, drawings and
fragments are presented with- out footnotes or academic references.
As editors we have also had the privilege of following the benefits
of the writing process itself—our own, of course, but also that of
our contributors. Many of them have underlined the painful and yet
liberating experience of “writing their story,” and here the
narratological perspective needs to be brought back in: this is not
just a question of “being heard,” but also about finding the right
form and structure for your narrative. Because it is the construction
of a sequence of events, argue psychologists, that helps us deal with
emotional distress:

Once an experience has structure and meaning, it would follow that

the emotional effects of that experience are more manageable.
Constructing stories facilitates a sense of resolution, which results
in less rumination and eventually allows disturbing experiences to
subside gradually from conscious thought. Painful events that are
not structured into a narrative format may contribute to the
continued experience of negative thoughts and feelings.
(Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999, p. 1243)

So, forming a story about life experiences improves mental health,

something that has marked psychotherapy since Freud. This is
related to the sense of meaning that a narrative sequence creates; in
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the words of Hannah Arendt, “the story reveals the meaning of
what would otherwise remain an intolerable sequence of events”
(Arendt, 1979, p. xx; Wilkinson, 2014). This is how myths and
folktales play such a central role in most cultures, by offering
models of interpretation for life experiences: stories offer good or
bad examples of behavior and in this way helps socialization, from
antiquity onwards (Ingemark & Asplund Ingemark, 2021, esp. p.
151). As society changes, or stories travel from one culture to
another, the narratives inevitably change too, offering new models
of understanding life.

THE PRIVILEGE of WRITING ONE’S STORy AND READING

THOSE of OTHERS 133

Storytelling thus remains at the very heart of who we are and how
we under- stand ourselves, but a problem (among many) is that our
own story can only be seen and constructed in hindsight. As noted
by feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, “Life cannot be lived
like a story, because the story always comes afterwards, it results; it
is unforeseeable and uncontrollable, just like life.” (Cava- rero,
2000, p. 3). This reveals the problem with the notion of “control
your life- story” projected in social media and by self-help guides,
noted above, because it means that one tries to impose order where
there is none (yet). Indeed, another kind of story that is common in
our time—conspiracy narratives—function in a very similar way:
they transform senseless events or “facts” into more or less well-

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ordered accounts (Butter, 2021). Somehow, we need to find a way
to deal with the constant friction between our own story—the
construction and telling of which can lead to our well-being—and
the overarching narratives of a global world, in which many of us
feel lost and alienated.

Critical storytelling is an important tool here, employed in many

forms and for multiple purposes, from “the slippery slopes of
silencing” of women (Solnit, 2014, pp. 4–8) and the #MeToo
movement to the “common story” of minorities and refugees (e.g.,
Nguyen, 2018). And despite the perhaps overly critical comments
above—which, I think, have to be part of Critical Storytelling—I
do think that we have to follow Shafak’s cue and start by telling our
own story, in order to be willing to listen to those of others:

If wanting to be heard is one side of the coin, the other side is being
willing to listen. The two are inextricably connected. When
convinced that no one—especially those in places of power and
privilege—is really paying attention to our protests and demands
we will be less inclined to listen to others, particularly to people
whose views differ from ours. […] if perpetuated and made routine,
the feeling of being systematically unheard will slowly, gradually,
seal our ears, and then seal our hearts. (Shafak, 2020, p. 15)

This may seem like a simple and even naïve observation, but it
takes us back to my colleague’s caution about the violent potential
of stories. Indeed, narratives not only benefit mutual understanding,
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they also “constitute crucial means of generating, sustaining,
mediating, and representing conflict at all levels of social
organization” (Briggs, 1996, p. 3; my emphasis). When Jean
François Lyotard in his famous book La condition post moderne
(1979) described Postmodernism as “incredulity toward
metanarratives” and urged a focus on local stories rather than grand
narratives, he initiated a new way of thinking about competing
stories as fractured narration. This was later applied in postcolonial
theory to the way in which both imperial narrative and indigenous
narratives are always part of the conflict: the stories that conflicting
groups tell themselves and each other are, in practice, the
ideological fuel of either strife or reconciliation. So, if we believe in
storytelling as a method in both academic and social contexts, we
need to be willing to acknowledge also those qualities and potential
abuses of narration, finding a critical balance between the
singular/individual and the plural/collective in both representation
and analysis.

In a recent and somewhat unexpected publication by Princeton

University Press—a graphic novel on political violence in Turkey
in the 1970s—social anthropologist Jenny White has chosen this
particular media in order to reflect the kaleidoscopic or fractured
nature of the stories she came across in her interviews:

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Why a graphic novel? When doing the interviews, I had no specific
agenda and allowed myself to be surprised by people’s stories and
motivations. People’s memories of the time were vivid and often
they seemed to relive their experiences in the telling. It occurred to
me that academic analysis flattened these stories as it folded them
into discussions of abstract issues, like factionalism. Perhaps I
could make the same points by allowing people to tell their stories
in graphic form and thereby retain the nuances and contradictions
of history as it is lived. (White & Gündüz, 2021, p. 9)

The result is a vivid and truly polyphonic narrative: personal and

emotional, yet educational and critical.

White’s emphasis on nuances and contradictions must be taken into

account not only for history, but for human expression at large.
Stories clearly possess more power than is often acknowledged and
they should therefore be taken seriously, not just as a means of
expressing one’s own identity, emotions and aspirations, but also—
or perhaps above all—as a way of understanding others in relation
to ourselves. In a world currently disposed towards group- think
and filter bubbles, we need to heed not only those who are
systematically unheard, but also those who want to be heard for all
the wrong reasons. If we do not accept the kaleidoscope that
include accounts we do not like or agree with, we cannot expect
tolerance and solidarity from others.

Critical storytelling must accordingly include self-examination and

acceptance. When we narrate our experiences, as we have done in

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this volume, we should challenge both ourselves and our readers.
This act of sharing stories should not be merely about feeling better
for having presented our version of events, but also about accepting
different perspectives even in shared experiences. We must be
willing to listen also to those we see as perpetrators, pro- vided that
they would be willing to listen to us. There is no point in creating or
sustaining conflicts through storytelling, only in using it for
expanding our cognitive horizons and engaging in a process of
mutual learning about each other and ourselves.

THE PRIVILEGE of WRITING ONE’S STORy AND READING

THOSE of OTHERS 135

Let us be honest: academia has not exactly taken a lead in this

respect, but it is never too late for change. It has already been thirty
years since Thomas E. Barone urged his readers to employ the
method of story sharing in educational contexts in order “to make
palpable and comprehensible the pain and cruelty of isolation
inflicted on people” (students, teachers and administrators). He
wanted us to use our “privileges to tell stories that enable readers to
locate the sources of that pain.” That is what we—the voices in this
volume—have now done: we have used our privilege to tell stories,
now it is up to you, our readers, to read them with a critical gaze
and then tell yours.

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 Acknowledgement

The writing of this chapter has been undertaken within the frame of
the research program Retracing Connections
(https://retracingconnections.org/), financed by Riksbankens
Jubileumsfond (M19-0430:1).

Notes

1 The assumption of universalism has been rejected by

postclassical feminist narratology, arguing that it was “founded
on an androcentric bias” (Page, 2006, p. 4). Beyond that aca-
demic field, it seems that narrative as a human constant remains
rather unchallenged, but see also below on narrative as
inevitably polyphonic and fractured.

2 This is how the Critical Storytelling series is defined at

https://brill.com/view/serial/CSTO and how it is defined in
several prefaces to previous volumes, esp. Braniger and Jacoby
(2019, pp. xv–xvI); for the confusing claim that they have
coined the term, see however Barone (1992), also cited below.

3 For the press release in different languages, see

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/ literature/2015/Press-
release/

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4 One of the best accounts of these events remains Voss
Gustafsson (2019), translated into several languages but sadly
enough not into English; see https://ahlanderagency.com/
books/the-club-a-chronicle-of-power-and-abuse-at- the-heart-
of-the-nobel-scandal/

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136 NILSSON

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Riley, M. (2017). Control your narrative. https://medium.com/the-
ascent/control- your-narrative-D55602295DD7

Shafak, E. (2020). How to stay sane in an age of division. Profile

Books. Solnit, R. (2014). Men explain things to me. Haymarket
Books.

Voss Gustafsson, M. (2019). Klubben. En undersökning. Albert

Bonniers förlag. White, J.,& Gündüz, E.(2021). Turkish
kaleidoscope: Fractured lives in a time of violence.

Princeton University Press.

Wilkinson, L. R. (2004). Hannah Arendt on Isak Dinesen: Between

storytelling and the- ory. Comparative Literature, 56(1), 77–98.

EPILOGUE

Gathering Voices for a Better Academic Workplace

Julie Hansen

Academic life, then, is a wild venture.

MAX WEBER (“Wissenschaft als Beruf,” 1917/2008, p. 30)

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What conclusions can be drawn from the stories in this book? Are
they just a handful of exceptional cases, or the tip of an iceberg? It
is difficult to generalize about the academic workplace. The
opening dictum in Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina—each
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way—arguably holds true for
university departments, too. Happy departments are characterized
by transparency, constructive leadership and what organizational
researchers call “psychological safety.” Amy C. Edmondson (2019)
defines psychological safety as a climate in which people are
comfortable expressing and being them- selves. […] they feel
comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of
embarrassment or retribution. They are confident that they can
speak up and won’t be humiliated, ignored, or blamed. […] They
tend to trust and respect their colleagues. (“Introduction,” e-book,
n.p.)

By contrast, the symptoms of unhappy departments can be hard to

diagnose and even harder to treat. If, as David Damrosch (1995)
posits, “the modern university is built upon alienation and
aggression” (p. 78), then those of us who inhabit it risk becoming
blind to these qualities. After all, stereotypes of academia
encourage us to tolerate divergent behavior. As Darla Twale and
Barbara De Luca (2008) observe, “College faculty have been
characterized as quirky, eccentric, and absent-minded. Unexpected
behaviors are considered normal to the insider in addition to being
thought simply odd to any outsider” (p. 101).1 Reputation-
conscious university administrations have been known to go to
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great lengths to cover up power abuse. Academics, for their part,
are often poorly equipped to recognize it when it occurs.

© JULIE HANSEN, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_025

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC

BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

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138 HANSEN

Fortunately, academics seeking to better understand the

psychosocial dynamics of their profession will now find a growing
body of scholarship devoted to work environment issues in higher
education. Other sectors were the focus of the earliest research on
adult bullying that came out of Scandinavia in the 1990s, but since
the turn of the millennium, behavioral scientists in Australia,
Europe and North America have begun to focus more on
academia.2 A number of recent studies indicate that academic work
environments are particularly susceptible to bullying, harassment
and power abuse.3 As Kenneth Westhues (2004) notes, “a
university is a complex maze of overlapping rules, purposes,
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positions, committees, and codes,” and thus the mechanisms of
power abuse are also complex (p. vI). Twale and De Luca (2008)
observe that the “unique organization structure of the university
supports an equally unique academic culture,” which in turn
provides “a breeding ground for incivility, bullying, and mobbing”
(p. 93). Loraleigh Keashly and Joel H. Neuman (2010) maintain
that “the academic environment has a number of organizational and
work features that increase the likelihood of hostile interpersonal
behaviors” (p. 49).

As the stories in this book show, power abuse looks different from
different positions in the academic hierarchy (see Chapter 10 by
Hanna McGinnis, Ana C. Núñez and Anonymous 4 for a discussion
of this point). Culture-specific dimensions can be discerned within
this global problem, as the anonymous author of Chapter 17 shows.
Power abuse can also play out differently in different educational,
economic and political systems, with harsher instruments of abuse
occur- ring in authoritarian regimes. Nevertheless, organizational
psychologists and sociologists have identified a number of factors
associated with power abuse in academia. These include (but are
not limited to) low job security, institutional structures,
organizational culture and a disconnect between academics’ own
ideals of their profession, on the one hand, and real working
conditions, on the other.

1 Peculiarities of the Academic Workplace

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Already in 1917, the German sociologist and political economist
Max Weber devoted a lecture entitled “Wissenschaft als Beruf” to a
consideration of fac- tors that influence scholarly careers.4 One of
these is sheer luck. Whether an academic achieves promotion is,
according to Weber, “a matter of pure chance.” This observation is
worth quoting at length:

GATHERING VOICES FOR A BETTER ACADEMIC

WORKPLAce 139

Of course, chance is not the only factor, but it is an unusually

powerful factor. I can think of almost no other career on earth in
which it has such a large part to play. I am especially well placed to
say this, as I personally owe it to a few instances of sheer chance
that at a very early age I was appointed to a full professorship in a
discipline in which at that time my contemporaries had undoubtedly
achieved more than I had. And I feel that this experience has given
me a keener awareness of the undeserved fate of those many others
whom chance has treated unkindly and still does, and who despite
all their ability failed to reach the position they merited as a result
of this mechanism of selection. (Weber, 1917/2008, p. 28)

A century later, journalist Sarah Jaffe argues that in contemporary

American academia, “the distinction between tenure track and
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adjunct track is an accident of timing” (2021, p.163).Those lucky to
be hired into a tenure-track position must cope with years of
pressure to impress the senior colleagues who will ultimately
decide whether tenure is granted (for more on this, see the chapters
by Antony T. Smith and Ken Robertson). Those hired as adjuncts
on part-time or short- term contracts comprise a growing
“untenured underclass” lacking job security and decent working
conditions (Fleming, 2021, p. 94; Jaffe, 2021, pp. 161–181).

This situation has been exacerbated by academia’s adoption of

neoliberal principles. New public management (examined in the
chapters by Cecilia Mörner and Wim Verbaal) has been
implemented differently in different places, but everywhere,
academics report increased workloads and chronic stress, as well as
subjection to what is termed “corrosive” or “destructive leadership”
(Thornton, 2004; Einarsen et al., 2007).5 Many point out a
fundamental incompatibility of the mission of higher education
with neoliberal tendencies, such as quantification, commodification
and commercialization (Davies, 2005; Fleming, 2021). Francesca
Coin (2017) observes that in the wake of neoliberalized academia,
“scholars have felt a growing conflict between their ethical ideals
and the array of measured, meaningless and bureaucratized tasks
that fill their lives” (p. 707). Neoliberal audit culture and top-heavy
management clash with established traditions of collegial self-
governance in academia (Jaffe, 2021, pp. 161–181). “Fear is now
the go-to technique for motivating faculty and staff,” concludes
Peter Fleming. “Managers choose this method since it’s far easier to
issue orders fait accompli via email than talk with colleagues and

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build a consensus” (Fleming, 2021, p. 4). Bronwyn Davies (2005)
asks, “What then can we say that academic work is? Within
neoliberal regimes we can no longer say it is the life of the intellect
and of the imagination” (p. 1).6 All this serves to create “conditions
that incite incivility, workplace bullying, and other forms of
employee abuse” (Zabrodska et al., 2011).

140 HANSEN

Jaffe discerns a downward trajectory in the conditions of academic

work that is pushing more and more of the professoriate into the
security-lacking precariat, depriving them at the same time of
power and putting them at greater risk of exploitation.7 Jaffe
describes “precarious academics” (along with artists, musicians,
writers and athletes) as “workers who are expected to find the work
itself rewarding, as a place to express their own unique selves, their
particular genius. In these jobs, we’re likely to be told that we
should be grateful to be able to work in the field at all, as there are
hundreds of people who wish they had the opportunity to do jobs
half as cool” (2021, p. 20).

Of course, work won’t love you back, as noted in the apt title of
Jaffe’s recent book-length critique of this “labor-of-love ethic”
(2021). The belief in a calling is a double-edged sword for
academics, to whom it accords “a sense of purpose, meaning and

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satisfaction” (Barcan, 2018, p. 106), yet also renders them
vulnerable to burnout and exploitation (Jaffe, 2021, pp. 161–181;
Malesic, 2022).8 Aca- demic culture encourages self-exploitation
“as a meritorious form of conduct” (Coin, 2017, p. 711), manifest
on the individual level in feelings of inadequacy and failure, as well
as the belief that the solution lies in working ever harder and
longer.9 In this way, academics are poorly served by their own
devotion to their work. “The constant mis-match between
organizational strain and per- sonal values,” notes Coin,
“produce[s] burn- out and ethical conflicts particularly in those
individuals who perceive academic labor as a passion or a labor of
love” (2017, pp. 712–713). Many academics identify closely with
their chosen profession, which means their sense of self can be on
the line when things go wrong with the work environment. “Rather
than a labor of love, academic labor sometimes appears an abusive
relationship, an exploitative system characterized by high
expectations and uncertain prospects” (Coin, 2017, p. 713). In this
respect, the view of academics taken by the burgeoning field of
Critical University Studies—i.e., an unembellished understanding
of them as workers performing labor—provides a necessary
corrective to the prevalent (and often self- destructive) devotionalist
approach.

The above factors—job precarity, neoliberal transformations and

academics’ high ideals of their own profession (the list is not
exhaustive)—all increase the risk of power abuse. They also
contribute to a culture of fear, shame and silence, which indirectly
support power abuse by serving to isolate and alien- ate academics

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from one another, making it easier for department chairs, deans and
other administrators to divide and conquer faculty.10 As Damrosch
writes, “Alienation breeds a defensive aggressiveness; this
aggression in turn magnifies the alienation, and the whole unhappy
cycle begins again” (1995, p. 96). The question is how to break this
cycle.

GATHERING VOICES FOR A BETTER ACADEMIC

WORKPLAce 141

2 Where Do We Go from Here?

Although not all the stories in this book can be said to have happy
endings, they illustrate various constructive responses to power
abuse in academia. While some of the authors have chosen to leave
academia, others remain within its walls (at least for the time
being). It is a testament to the deep investment of academics’
identity in their profession that a decision to quit is often met with
surprise and even disbelief on the part of colleagues. This kind of
investment can make it hard to imagine alternatives to the status
quo, rendering “the idea of leaving voluntarily inconceivable”
(Barcan, 2018, p. 115).

Yet more and more academics who feel their working conditions to
be untenable are taking this leap—at least if we are to judge from
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the new genre dubbed “quit lit.” These stories, told in blogs and
columns of publications such as The Chronicle of Higher
Education, “transform the act of quitting into a political process
whereby the subject abdicates its competitive rationality to embrace
a fundamental loyalty to different values and principles” (Coin,
2017, p.707).11 If it is true, as Fleming suggests, that “everything
about us that isn’t quantifiable is now desperately searching for a
way out,” then an exodus is per- haps to be expected (2021, p. 81).
Ruth Barcan sees “a grave risk that rather than merely fighting for
survival in the academy, more and more people will choose to
thrive outside it” (2017, n.p.).

Quit lit thus raises issues of crucial relevance for the future of
academia and—not least of all—the well-being of academics. As
Barcan argues in Aca- demic Life and Labour in the New
University: Hope and Other Choices (2013):

The serious questions raised by academics about how healthy,

viable and prosperous a life a prospective academic might have
within a university are […] grave interrogations of the intellectual
and personal sustainability of a mass system organized around
exploitative labour, whether that be the precarious labour of the
ever-increasing casual staff or the overwork of the diminishing
tenured staff. Such questions concern us doubly—as they bear on
both the individual welfare of thousands of workers and the higher
education system’s capacity to systematically, impartially and care-
fully generate knowledge into the future. (p. 217)

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By publicly voicing discontent with the status quo, the authors of
quit lit lay down a “stepping stone in a collective discourse that
ought to transform an inner conflict into a political alternative”
(Coin, 2017, p. 708). Collective is the operative word here, because
no matter what solutions we may find for our- selves at the
individual level, lasting change at the institutional level requires
collective action.

It is indicative of a culture of silence that the salutary effects of quit

lit are achieved only after individual academics have made an exit.
Thus far, there has been less discussion of work environment
problems from within universities (a kind of ‘stay lit,’ if you will),
but this, too, is a conversation that we as a profession need to have.

142 HANSEN

3 Solidarity as an Antidote

Academic workers are “remarkably lousy at translating their

frustration into a sustained movement,” as Fleming laments (2021,
p. 9). Yet recent years have seen examples of successful collective
action by academic workers in the United States and the United
Kingdom. Some of these have taken a page from the playbooks of
other professions. “The university’s culture of individualism […]
mitigated against academics’ collective action for a while,” explains
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Jaffe, “but as the conditions of academic workers began more and
more to resemble those of those other workers, academic workers
began to reach for the tool of the working class: labor unions”
(2021, p. 173).

A good example of the crucial role of collegial solidarity in the face

of power abuse is found in a Swedish television documentary from
2021 about whistleblowers whose employers had retaliated against
them. Train driver Ola Brunnström was threatened with termination
after criticizing, in his role as union representative, the company for
which he worked. We see him entering the meeting at which his
future hangs in the balance, cheered on by co-workers protesting
his firing by threatening to strike. Their message was heard by
those in power, and Brunnström kept his job. “It’s an emotional
roller-coaster to be fired one day and have your job saved by your
colleagues the next,” he says in the documentary. “This show of
solidarity also rescued me personally, my psyche and well-being. If
you are alone and try to fight a battle without back-up, things can
end badly. But sometimes you feel that you simply must fight”
(Sveriges Television, 2021).12

Academic workers would do well to heed the wisdom of Ola

Brunnström. Abuse of power in academia can be counteracted if
we confront it collectively. “If we are even partly responsible for
creating institutional dynamics,” as Parker J. Palmer argues, “we
possess some degree of power to alter them” (2017, p. 206). It
does not always have to be the same old story. By working to
overcome the divisive effects of the individualistic, ego-driven and
hyper-competitive aca- demic workplace, by forming coalitions
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and community, we can build a kinder and more sustainable work
environment. For the creation of such a movement, giving voice to
our experiences in stories like these is just the first step.

Notes

1 Damrosch (1995) also notes the normalization of deviant

behavior within academia: “The sociologists who discuss
behavioral patterns among academics speak quite directly about
the unusual—or even deviant—nature of the contemporary
academic personality. Thus, Michael Cohen and James March
describe academic modes of decision making as ‘pathological’;
but this is not a criticism, for they simply see such pathologies
as the norms of an abnormal world […] Seeking an analogy to
campus patterns of interaction, another sociologist refers
matter-of-factly to prisons” (p. 105). Damrosch concludes: “We
should not remain content with a state of affairs that leads
sociologists to compare universities as a matter of course to
prisons and mental asylums” (p. 107).

GATHERING VOICES FOR A BETTER ACADEMIC

WORKPLAce 143

2 The phenomenon of workplace bullying was first studied by the

Swedish psychologist Heinz Leymann (1992). For recent
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 research on workplace bullying, see Einarsen et al. (2020),
which defines it in the following way:

Bullying at work means harassing, offending, socially

excluding someone or negatively affecting someone’s work. In
order for the label bullying (or mobbing) to be applied to a
particular activity, interaction or process it has to occur
repeatedly and regularly […] and over a period of time […].
Bullying is an escalating process in the course of which the
person confronted may end up in an inferior position becoming
the target of systematic negative social acts. A conflict cannot
be called bullying if the incident is an isolated even to rif two
parties of approximately equal “strength” are in conflict.(p.26)

3 For statistics on the prevalence of bullying in higher education,

see Keashley and Neuman (2010); Zabrodska and Kveton
(2013).

4 Translated into English as “Science as a Vocation.” I cite here

Gordon C. Wells’ translation.

5 Einarsen et al. (2007) identify three categories of destructive

leadership: tyrannical, derailed and supportive–disloyal. The
first two are associated with abusive behavior toward
subordinates, while the third shows concern about “the welfare
of subordinates while violating the legitimate interest of the
organization” (p. 213).

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6 Davies (2005) summarizes the effects of neoliberalism in the
following way: “a move from social conscience and
responsibility towards an individualism in which the individual
is cut loose from the social; from morality to moralistic audit-
driven surveillance; from critique to mindless criticism in terms
of rules and regulations combined with individual vulnerability
to those new rules and regulations, which in turn press towards
conformity to the group” (p. 12).

7 For a definition of the precariat, see Standing (2011). Jaffe

writes:

Increasing enrollment has not come along with increased full-

time staffing, and salaries have stagnated as class sizes have
increased. While European universities still offer more security
than many US institutions, the situation of part-time faculty in
the Americas […] is a bellwether for the rest of the world. By
1999, an estimated one- fifth to one-half of European countries’
academic staff were “nonpermanent.” In the United States
between 1975 and 2003, according to the AAUP, “full-time
tenured and tenure-track faculty members fell from 57 percent
of the nation’s teaching staffs to 35 percent, with an actual loss
of some two thousand tenured positions.” (2021, p. 171)

8 Jonathan Malesic (2022) defines burnout as “the experience of

being pulled between expectation and reality at work” (p. 12).
His own experience as a tenured professor prompted him to
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 write the book entitled The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains
Us and How to Build Better Lives.

9 On the topic of academic imposter syndrome, see the chapter

“Feeling Like a Fraud: Or, the Upside of Knowing You Can
Never Be Good Enough” in Barcan (2013). Chapter 10 in the
current book, by McGinnis, Núñez and Anonymous 4, touches
on imposter syndrome and academia’s “expectation of
unfaltering passion.”

144 HANSEN

10 On the role of shame in power abuse, see Lewis 2004. On the

risks associated with a culture of silence in the workplace, see
Edmondson (2019).

11 For a study of quitting as a response to workplace bullying, see

Lutgen-Sandvik (2006).

12 My own translation of the Swedish transcript, which is

available here: https://www.svt.se/ nyheter/granskning/ug/ug-
referens-hall-kaften-och-lyd

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