Yesterday I was exhausted, so I sort of phoned in my post. I wanted to revisit something from earlier this week, though: that idea of mobbing.
I want to walk you through the way the scenario played out. Again, I want to preface this by saying I’m not looking for sympathy or anything of the sort. I just want to illustrate how such things happen so that when this happens to others they won’t feel so alone.
That’s the major issue at the root of academic mobbing (and job-place mobbing, I’d assume): because of the nature of those who tend to attract people who want to use the sort of “gas-light” mentality there is an inborn predisposition to take responsibility for problems. That is what always happens for me. I try to fix something, someone gets mad, and I try harder to fix it and to apologize to the person. And it never gets better.
So when last I left you with this scenario, it’d gone like this:
- I proposed a team project (not uncommon in academia- I proposed more team projects this week)
- The project was accepted.
- A long period of time passed. Months. Then it was time to start planning for the project itself.
- The terms of how the project were meant to work appeared to change
- I emailed the person in charge and said “we were going to do X, is that still going to work?”
- I got Professor-splained to about how my idea wasn’t going to work.
- I slowed down. I rephrased what I was trying to say and offered alternatives.
- Same response.
- I offered even more alternatives and sympathized with the situation.
- The person running the program for the project came back hard with more professor-splaining and suggested that I remove members of my team and replace them to make the project work.
- At this point, *I* became uncomfortable with the idea of cutting two people from a project without talking to them, so I CC:ed them into my response. I offered even more alternatives. As a 15 year vet teacher and a five year VAP I offered some advice.
- The person running the program completely and totally miscast my response and came at me, hard. I would venture to say it was unprofessional, but at the very least it was an attempt to assert power and project whatever failure was happening onto me.
- I apologized. Because that’s what grown-ups do when there’s a misunderstanding.
Since then, the following happened.
14. I suggested that one of the other two members of the project team take the lead because the two of them do similar work and I wasn’t going to continue conversations behind their backs about cutting them from the project.
15. I volunteered to do whatever the other two members of the team wanted so that things could go smoothly for them. I willingly put myself and the actual proposed project aside.
16. I offered, in the name of being professional, to step away if I was causing a problem.
17. Without accepting my apology, and without apologizing, the person running the project informed me she was going to meet with the other member of our team.
18. The two of them chose to remove me from the project.
19. They informed me via email.
So this leaves me down a CV line and a not-insignificant amount of research funding. The reason it happened is that the person running the program didn’t understand my application but accepted it and was then completely and utterly inflexible in response to my numerous hat-in-hand attempts to find a compromise. This person then took my heartfelt attempt to offer advice and to suggest a way to avoid doing this to someone else as an attack and attacked me.
Most importantly to me as a human being, this other person who wouldn’t work with me at all, who spoke down to me repeatedly, NEVER EVEN ACCEPTED MY APOLOGY. Because nothing says professional like refusing to acknowledge someone’s remorse for insulting you, apparently.
And I’m cool with it, because it’s over. I’ll miss the opportunity to work with my colleagues, and I’ll miss the funds that would have helped me during what is about to be the lean part of my financial year. I will miss the chance to add a cool line to my CV and to introduce some new people to gamification as a pedagogical tool.
But I tell the story because I’m finally at the point in my life where I realize and will proudly say I didn’t deserve what happened to me in this scenario. This was about someone else’s need to presume power and ignore the needs of others.
I know this happens to good-hearted, productive, right minded academics every day. I know they stay silent, like I have for 20 or so years, and they internalize it. They take it, and they slowly get neurotic about why people see them in such a strange way. I want the people like me to realize sooner than later that people being vindictive and selfish isn’t their fault. I almost turned myself inside out at the end of my PhD studies over this exact issue; I was so sure people were right that I started to question my own identity in ways a person shouldn’t ever question their own identity. If one person can read this and not torture themselves the way I have in the past tortured myself, if one person can read this and realize they were just the one standing there when something went wrong and it “got on them,” then it’s worth the effort. People matter. Sometimes people matter even more than WE matter to ourselves.
I’m going to talk about it every time this happens to me from this point forward. About the full professors who slam the doors to my labs. About the people who ignore my input because I’m not of their rank. About the people who claim I do Indigenous studies wrong because a white scholar who hasn’t read any Indigenous studies would know better than me.
And someone will tell me that’s unprofessional. I really don’t care if a person who can’t bring themselves to accept an apology they basically demanded thinks I’m unprofessional. I come from a profession where too many people get it wrong– not a huge number, but enough that it’s too many, because one is too many. Maybe the whole construction of what it means to be a professional scholar is the problem. The idea that being an academic is an exercise in building a profile, trying to be some sort of academic star who can presume to be “right” might be the error. Maybe I’d rather be unprofessional and see where that gets me, if it’s unprofessional to put others first, to actually be student centered, and to call people on it when they do something racist, sexist or classist.
I will celebrate my good colleagues until I am out of breath. I love most of the people I work with, and I’d go to the mat for them any time they needed me to. But when someone does it wrong, I’m going to bring it up.
Because when I try to do the right thing people claim I’m being combative.
Let’s see if being combative, then, is the right thing. That seems to be the lesson some want to teach me. Let us see if it works.