It pains me to hear stories of unsupportive advisors in academia. In particular, it boggles my mind when I learn of faculty who do not support their advisees’ decisions to leave academia. This challenge came up during a Beyond the Professoriate Online Career Conference session. Many participants fear blowback from their advisors. One panelist mentioned that, after they left academia, their advisor stopped speaking to them for over a year.
One of the primary explanations for advisors who are unsupportive of their advisees leaving academia is that faculty have personal and professional investment in their advisees getting certain kinds of positions. I can’t verify either of these claims (personal or professional) but they certainly seem true. Professionally, a faculty member whose advisees get certain kinds of jobs implies something about that faculty member – their connections, perhaps, or their mentoring or research. The effect, in turn, is that faculty reap certain rewards from positive implications such as a positive reputation in their field. Personally, the argument goes, the faculty member wants their advisees, especially those they favor (let’s not pretend faculty don’t favor certain advisees), to follow the path they did. This desire could be because they truly believe in academia as a site for change and want their advisees to carry the torch. It could also be more selfish: by their advisees reproducing their career paths, these faculty may feel validated by that path. It is important for higher education professionals to confront these faculty and emphasize the reality that most PhDs will not get tenure-track faculty positions. Any career advice for PhDs and grad students that makes no mention of alternatives to tenure-track is professional malpractice, and any person offended by interest in those alternatives is deluded. At the same time, there is plenty of criticism to go around when it comes to career advice. Elsewhere in the Beyond the Professoriate conference, panelists expressed unilateral positivity about jobs outside academia, including how they enjoyed working with their managers, resolved workplace conflict simply through brief conversations with HR, and landed their jobs simply through great networking. In short, what some of these post-acs are doing is doling out a different kind of professional malpractice: unequivocally stating the bad in academic jobs and the good in jobs outside academia. Three panelists’ great experiences with HR and their manager does not mean corporate managers and HR units are positive across the board. (Although I briefly considered that all non-higher ed managers could be better, a colleague reminded me that Ask A Manager would not be a thing if managers were all that supportive and effective.) During one session, a participant remarked in the chat that non-academic employers seem better in general. This comment went un-addressed. The sunny experiences of corporate life went unchallenged. To me, this malpractice reflects the same personal and professional investments post-acs have in leading others to post-ac jobs. Professionally, if a person can attend a Beyond the Professoriate conference and afterward land a post-ac job, then it suits Beyond the Professoriate to have facilitated that transition. And personally, if a post-ac can convince someone else to leave academia, they might feel vindicated in their own departure. Certainly these are not the only impulses for post-ac advice; a great deal of advice is rooted in genuine caring. But as long as post-ac professional development ignores the complex nature of post-ac opportunities, it is professional malpractice. What I want post-ac advice-givers (like those at Beyond the Professoriate and, to some extent, The Professor Is In), to do instead is to present these post-ac paths like any other professional path: complicated. Corporations, non-profits, and universities all present potential employees with problems and benefits, which manifest in each organization within those fields in different ways. Moreover, individual job-seekers will interpret problems and benefits differently. Without this more complex view of post-ac, post-ac coaches risk repeating the harms of the faculty they regard with disdain.
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I don’t think some people realize how an act of abuse ripples out. A person misuses their power, abuses and exploits the people around them, that person has harmed those people directly. The harm continues, though, as it sits on the victim/survivor(s). The weight carried is a harm. If and when victim/survivors choose to speak up, they can lighten their load. But the response after speaking up rarely turns into accountability, and the harm continues.
When a person who has abused others and has taken no accountability for their actions is given a platform, or is allowed to retain their platform, that is a harm to every victim/survivor who recalls the platforms their abusers have been offered, the platforms they have been denied. These harms are amplified for minoritized communities, against whom certain kinds of harms were, and still are, normalized through generations of repeated damage. When I know a person who has abused their significant other is rewarded in our field, I ask myself what my life would’ve been like if my abusive ex had been in our field as well. It is easier, it seems, to be taken seriously as a victim/survivor when the perpetrator is someone who can be easily dismissed, an outsider. I think of the man who lived in my building and would get me alone in the elevator so he could ask me intrusive questions or show me his genitals; if he were a prominent member of my academic field, would I be able to say so much in a blog post? But then a prominent member of my academic field – more than one, I have no doubt – sexually harasses my peers, and I am reminded of our precarity, our disposability, when the perpetrator is not someone so easily demonized or cast out. It hurts me. I am mad at myself for being thankful that the people who have directly harmed me have little to no power over me, and I feel the pain of being cornered, I feel the weight of harm, when the platform is occupied by my peers’ abuser. When powerful people, especially those with some celebrity status, are revealed to be abusive, harassing, exploitative, or otherwise complicit in the harm of others, I sometimes see others ask, “why are you surprised?” I’ve asked this myself; why were people surprised, for example, that Katy Perry – who wrote songs joking about gay people self-harming and equating queer love to meaningless play, who has used black and brown and queer bodies as props – sexually harassed and assaulted people she had power over?
Though I may ask why others are surprised, I have to admit I am still often surprised when I learn of the harm that people use their power for. And maybe I shouldn’t be – the status quo allows for the powerful to abuse that power; indeed, the status quo encourages the powerful to abuse their power. Police murder with impunity, billionaires and their policy-making friends collaborate to ensure the continued upward movement of money, and white people feign victimhood when they’re asked to do the smallest things in the name of racial justice. These harms, from the microaggressive to the atrocious, are harmful in no small part because our society is structured in a way that permits and encourages them. If harms are part of what is happening, they should not surprise people. And many are not surprised. Sometimes I am not surprised. I was not surprised to learn about the ways William Strampel, former dean of one of my alma mater’s medical colleges, abused women. I was disgusted, but not surprised. I was not surprised when a friend shared that a mutual acquaintance had been harassing younger graduate students on dating apps. I was disappointed, but not surprised. Why did it surprise me, then, when I learned last week that a senior scholar in my field has been cultivating a toxic environment, particularly targeting people of color? Why did it surprise me that a white woman who studies issues confronting communities of color was directly harming individuals in the same communities? At first, I chalked my surprise up to white privilege; this line of thinking was, I saw her white skin and assumed innocence. This line of thinking: Her whiteness bought her the benefit of the doubt, my whiteness clouded my judgment. As I’ve thought over the last week, the presence of whiteness remains part of my calculus, but I’m no longer sure that’s all. I keep wondering: am I surprised because I hope? Because I hope that those who have power will do good. Because I hope that people will commit themselves to solidarity, vulnerability, and justice over self-promotion and damage. Is my hope foolish? Maybe. Is it from white, patriarchal socialization that tells me the powerful can heroically do right, save others, and still retain power? Maybe. I don’t totally know. Perhaps hope is a mechanism of self-defense; if I do not hope for at least the occasional reprieve from the damage of the powerful, then I cannot bother to leave my home in the morning. By hoping for solidarity, I may find some; by hoping for justice, I can work toward it. I am surprised, pulled up, taken aback when my efforts are interrupted, not entirely because I am foolish but because I hope some of these powerful people may be possible collaborators, co-conspirators in transforming our field, our academy, our society. I made soup tonight. It didn't take too long to make but I did have to wait for a bit after crushing herbs with my fingers so the soup had time to simmer. I ended up with too much thyme on my hands.
Assessment experts prefer to live in wood houses because they rue bricks.
Wood isn't the only building material they like. Sometimes they like their structures like their learning objectives: concrete. Did you hear about the assessment experts who named their child Emily Valerie? E. Val for short. I am afraid of zombies. This is perhaps a strange thing to share publicly because I take pride in rejecting concspiracy theories and myths as truth. Zombies do not exist in the real world, full stop. There is no reason to be afraid of them… and yet I am. I am afraid of becoming a zombie because of a freak accident, I am afraid of my loved ones becoming zombies and being forced to confront the choice of killing them or letting them eat other people's brains. I am afraid of zombies.
The first time I felt this strange, foolish fear diminish was when my favorite podcast, Good Job Brain!, shared that one of the biggest problems with zombie movies is that scavenger birds would almost certainly eat all the zombies before the zombies could get to brains. I remember exactly where I was when I heard this tidbit; I was dogsitting for friends who lived in the suburbs and was driving from their house to a coffeeshop to get homework done. I breathed a sigh of relief. If zombies do come to be a reality, I told myself, vultures will save us. Some months ago, a friend explained that she was a catastrophizer. I immediately identified with this term. I assume my quick attention to worst case scenarios is connected to my fear of a zombie apocalypse. I now catastrophize thusly: if I do not land a faculty position in my field this cycle, and am not hired for a postdoc or an administrative job either, then I will move in with friends and/or family near my hometown and work as a barista. (Do you think Starbucks will recognize that summer I worked for them eleven years ago?) The faculty job market has been written about ad nauseam and for me to just type that it's exhausting and demoralizing is exhausting and demoralizing in itself. I am on the faculty job market now. I submitted my first batch of applications last month. When I told a friend that, for a variety of reasons I expected to hear nothing in response to those applications, she was aghast. How dare they? Why is this process this way? Her words helped me realize that, hey, this isn't okay, and it's okay to feel exhausted and demoralized. Nevertheless, I keep applying to faculty jobs. I get advice on Twitter, I write document after document (including cover letters, teaching statements, research statements, diversity statements, and even the occasional hybrid specialty statement requested by a search committee.) I would like to be an assistant professor, I would like to teach and research and have a little office where I talk to students about their big ideas. I even get excited about the mundane, like wearing a cute outfit to my first faculty meeting and printing something from the department printer. It's all silly, I know, but these are the things I think about as I write my cover letters and research statements and the like. In my moments of despair and frustration and confusion, I also read quit lit. Quit lit is the umbrella term for the many essays describing departures from academia. I sense that most of these are from undervalued fields such as those in the humanities that have disproportionate crises of precarity. However, I acknowledge that quit lit comes from all over – STEM, arts, and in my own field of education. I imagine quit lit does a lot of different things for a lot of different people. For the writer, it can be catharsis. It can also be a blog post to point friends and family to instead of explaining every time the "quitter" is asked why they stopped adjuncting or left grad school. More broadly, in the words of Douglas Dowland and Annemarie Pérez, quit lit requires a level of "vulnerability" that can be used "to expose an injustice, to reveal an insecurity, to show how a personal problem may also be a political one." Quit lit can thus be a call to action, a naming of harm that demands remediation. For me, catastrophizer that I am, quit lit is a relief. "What if," I ask, as I do about the preposterously unlikely case of zombie apocalypse. What if I am subjected to contingent position after contingent position, what if I am rejected from a hundred jobs and a hundred more? What if the day comes when I realize I will be, and decide to become, a "quitter," and write quit lit of my own? Quit lit answers those questions in a way that somehow comforts me; it responds simply, "you will be the author of a piece of quit lit." And, afterward, I will be one of many who the system failed – because that is how this works, it is not the failure of individals that leads to precarity and drop-out so much as it is the failure of an exploitative and harmful academy. And then, who knows? I can start by being a barista who lives in my brother's attic who cries sometimes and reads books and maybe writes. Or whatever else. Quit lit taught me that I can leave academia and… The rest is a mystery, but it's tangible for many. That tangibility means it can be tangible for me too, that I can have a life even if this faculty job search doesn't work out for me. Leaving academia is not death, and although it is a kind of end, it does not have to be my end. If worst comes to worst – whether it be the failure to find a job or the imminent threat of zombies – the vultures will save me. I delivered a modified version of this speech for the National Coming Out Day dinner at Michigan State University on October 11, 2018, on the theme of LGBTQ+ mentors and community.
It is so good to see you all here. This feels like a sacred space; Michigan State has had many wonderful LGBTQ+ activists and thinkers come and go over the years. This gathering is a continuation of that legacy of activism. Regarding gathering, I think of the words of activist and writer Sara Ahmed who said this: "If anything, I would see queer as a commitment to an opening up of what counts as a life worth living... To inherit the past in this world for queers would be to inherit one's own disappearance... The task is to trace the lines for a different genealogy, one that would embrace the failure to inherit the family line as the condition of possibility for another way of dwelling in the world." (1) This is one dwelling here. I think of the other places I have dwelled among trans and queer people. In the Resource Center, laughing and playing games. In Esquire and other gay bars where 50- and 60-somethings share their stories of the terrifying but necessary paths to survival. Backstage during drag shows, hearing the stories of trans women who did not feel it was safe for them to be out. Online after the death of my drag sister, Pacifica Rim, wondering why this happened. These spaces don't always last long and like the far-apart platforms in a video game level, it's hard to know sometimes how to get from one to the next. Little things like affirming words, reflection on the good times, and tiny, lovely little things like a mug of cocoa or seeing a happy dog feel like power-ups that help get us from one to the next. Our community spaces can become more frequent too, so that the jumps are smaller and more easily made. When we commit to Ahmed's conceptualization of queer, "a commitment to an opening up of what counts as a life worth living," we commit to crafting space - within and around our bodies, between our bodies and others. We commit to bringing other queers around our family tables and cobble together our makeshift, ever-shifting families. My mentors have done this for me - and my mentors aren't just the people whose offices I inhabit to get career advice. My mentors are the people who open up possibility. My advisor, a queer person who moves through the academy that has narrow concepts of what family is. My colleagues and friends whose gender-expansive identities laid a new path for me to take when I left my home as a domestic violence survivor and charted new territory as a transfeminine person. Just as Ahmed suggests we create a different geneaology, drag queen BenDeLaCreme famously declared, as she left the show RuPaul's Drag Race, "If you don’t like the rules, make your own. We create our own beauty. We define our own success." Our failure to conform to certain rules, to certain families, to certain pre-dispositions is exactly where our potential lies to live a rewarding life. This is not easy. But I hope you all, who are my heroes and my beloved for being here with me tonight, will continue to craft the space you and your loved ones need, and will continue to break the rules you don't need. These are how we will continue dwelling and make a new world for those who are yet to come. (1) Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology. https://www.dukeupress.edu/queer-phenomenology Working in a veterinary college the last two years has meant learning about a whole culture I was previously unfamiliar with. Many people know veterinary medicine the way I did: I have pets, so I go to a vet with those pets. I'm not sure many people know veterinarians go just about everywhere an animal is: farms, government agencies who manage public health and food concerns, campuses and other organizations where animals are used for research purposes, and more.
Learning about veterinary college has, importantly, also opened me up to a whole new realm of jokes. For example, a faculty member shared with me that she took several students to a swine barn where they examined a pig. While there, the faculty member asked her students to name the hairy structure right under the animal's mouth. None of them could. She explained, "it's the hairs on his chinny-chin-chin." I also find that, in faculty meetings, optometrists almost always vote for proposals, whereas equine specialists usually vote against. One of my roles in the veterinary college has been helping them redesign their curriculum. The faculty voted to redesign the courses to be based on organ systems. This vote was not immune to criticism, which made some faculty nervous. Our conversations have been (re)productive in moving the college forward, however hard it has been for some to digest. On the whole, I love having been part of this community. I go horse complimenting them, even if I am sometimes catty. My being AMAB and fem has meant that my participation in "women's" activities has been a mixed bag. I have groups of women friends I turn to as confidantes and with whom I get drinks and gossip, but it was only recently that I felt more "one of the girls, sort of," rather than "gay best friend." Also recently, I have come to learn the value and commonness of whisper networks.
The institution from which I will receive a PhD is, as I write, infamous for its constant, callous mishandling of sexual violence. This is a fact that haunts me, and a fact that had me considering leaving my PhD program. At some point I made peace with how close I am to finishing my degree and began to align myself with those in the MSU community who have chosen to stay and fight the status quo. I hope that doing what I can with what I have - in my case, reading and writing about sexual violence – can be helpful to victim/survivors and our communities. What I have not known exactly how to write about – or if I should write about – are the words and stories of sexual harassment, of abuses of power, of relationship violence that spread through informal networks. These are the whisper networks, a vehicle for knowledge that women and fems rely on when it is potentially dangerous to name abusers outright. Since a senior graduate student sexually harassed me a few years ago, and I decided to talk about it, I learned about that person's predilection for being, shall we say, pushy with other GBQ novice grad students and undergrads. When a beloved professor in my field was pushed out of his position, I learned through ladies' nights and behind-closed-door chats the beloved professor's abuses almost certainly stretched beyond what was covered in press. Behind-closed-door conversations also illuminated for me the violence of MSU faculty – including William Strampel, who women had been complaining about for years – as well as other faculty who continue to be on the university's payroll. It is apparently dangerous to speak publicly about these faculty (as it was probably dangerous to speak ill of Strampel or Larry Nassar before their names became dirt), but whisper networks afford women and fems some solace in speaking and living our truths without risking our careers and well-being. Knowing and sharing names of unrepentant harassers and abusers with one another binds us and creates space where our truth is real and affirmed. I recently had the pleasure of reading Andrea Long Chu's account of Avital Ronnell, a New York University professor who sexually harassed a graduate student who studied under her. So much of the article resonated with me; it is worth reading if you haven't yet. A line that especially stood out to me was this: "It is simply no secret to anyone within a mile of the German or comp-lit departments at NYU that Avital is abusive. This is boring and socially agreed upon, like the weather." Knowing something like this comes from personal knowledge distributed via whisper networks but naming it would have been dangerous. (How do I know naming Ronnell's abuse is dangerous? I direct you to the case of Nimrod Reitman, the graduate student who spoke up against her and has since faced harsh backlash, including a letter signed by several powerful scholars denouncing Reitman and questioning his credibility. I also would point you to so, so many other cases where people, especially women, have named their abusers and been criticized and threatened as a result.) It speaks volumes to me that there were already whisper networks functioning that warned people of Ronnell. One may argue that whisper networks function to keep dangerous people in power. After all, they are made up of whispers, not legal actions. However, Ronnell has now faced consequences (even if those consequences may have been tempered by the letter written by her powerful friends). So have William Strampel and Larry Nassar here at MSU. Where consequences have been minimal (as Roxane Gay argued they have been in the case of Louis C.K.), we can speak out for serious attention to justice and accountability. The "we" I indicate are those of us who are connected via networks they we have used to survive. These whisper networks that allow us to exercise a modicum of agency, to try to protect our friends and name our truths, are also our own way of organizing. Perhaps this is part of why #MeToo is so powerful and constant; we've been whispering it for years. Some people forget that "data" is a plural noun. The singular is "datum."
I know he's single, but datum? I don't think so. |
AuthorI am a higher education professional and sporadic blogger. I have opinions and tell puns. Archives
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