Note: if this post were an article, I would say it should be two posts. I am sorely tempted to revise it that way. I will resist this, as I have “real writing” to do, including real article manuscripts which need to be divided in two. And Undine’s excellent post on blogging and “real writing” conserves the distinction just made, but my feeling is that blogging is the real writing. It’s harder and I have no formula for it, and no training at all in creative prose. Some time I will have to take time, real time, and truly work with the corpus I am gathering here. But for now I will resist, I will resist work on this post for the sake of Work.
PREFACE
On Moving
One of my former undergraduates, a quite eccentric person who does not easily fit in socially except in very arty and/or nerdy crowds, has moved two thousand miles away on a job and seems to be doing fine. His new area is interesting, and when he is not at work he explores it. These explorations lead him to meet people who share his interests and who see that his eccentricity is not weirdness but originality. Now he has some very classy Friends. I believe it is because he is in a magnetic mode. He does interesting things that he enjoys. He makes enthusiastic comments to people and invites them to share more such activities. They see that it will in fact be fun, and they become his Friends. You must be interested and interesting to make Friends, but his example shows that if you are this, it is not actually so difficult to live.
When I was a brand new assistant professor in a new town, I shocked the other assistant professors because I had a map and an oil company credit card. I drove all around the area, as I always do, to find the best bookstores, art galleries and hiking trails, and I investigated interesting volunteer jobs. Through these venues I soon had Friends, who would come to my Parties along with the other assistant professors. This had not been difficult to accomplish, but the other assistant professors were amazed that I had done it. Some started having Parties of their own, and would invite me with instructions to bring these marvelous outside Friends. They found my outside Friends magical, but were not sure how to find their own.
How do you do it? said a beautiful, desperate woman to me by telephone when her girlfriend left her and she had no residual social life. She had always studied at small schools where social life was included in tuition, and then she had moved as part of a couple. Now 30, she was facing the days alone for the first time.
On Staying
Many graduate students in foreign languages are very different people from me and have even more different trajectories. For instance, I was an American interested in foreign languages who studied them here as a regular student — a T.A. without a patron. Other graduate students were interested in their own languages, and had been imported to my graduate school by their patrons. This is a first difference: I was at home and they were not; I was studying something other than my own cultural traditions, and they were not. This, I realize now, meant that although they were the ones who had moved the furthest to go to graduate school, I would be better at moving in general.
Another major difference between me and the other T.A.’s was that I was taking a dual degree in two cross disciplinary programs, whereas they were taking one degree in the department where we all taught. So theirs was a much narrower world than mine, although I did not realize it then. Living without a home department, a posse or a patron, I knew how to find places on my own. This was explained to me one day in Santiago de Cuba, where I was and where I had arrived on my own to a famous building. The people in the building said, how did you get here all on your own from your hotel? I said, by walking, it is not very far. They said, but you knew to come here, and how to find it, without being told. This is unusual, they declared.
They then cited the names of several famous professors who had been brought to this building by guides, and who, according to the people in the building, would not have known to look for it on their own. I was amazed to discover that American anthropologists would not know how to travel. But now having seen the operations of so many foreign assistant professors, similar to the foreign T.A.’s with whom I used to work and study, I now revise my sentence to say, many professors do not know how to travel. They have lived in graduate student groups, and then joined assistant professor groups. They stay within their circles. Without these circles, they are lost. This is a phenomenon for an anthropologist to study.
It is a serious problem for those who are not hired to a place with a ready made social life (and there are such places, I have been to them). I think that part of the “professionalization” of graduate students might be lessons in how to have a life if you are not hired to a place which serves you one on a platter.
I
For older faculty there are many reasons why, if you hire one new faculty member, you should hire six. Then there will be a posse. The posse can lean on itself for support and take over the department if it so wishes, while you write your books. If there is no posse, your new hires will lean on you. For me this is increasingly difficult because I have by this time lived through so very many assistant professorships, mine and others’. I am just not at a new assistant professor place, and I have not been for some time.
And sometimes it seems that every week brings me a new challenge in terms of dealing with addicts, abusive people [AAPs], and their allies [As]. In some cases said AAP is an assistant professor [AP]. An AP who is also an AAP is an APAAP. Each APAAP has many As, including myself at times, because we are so well aware that we should be understanding of their difficult transition from graduate students to faculty members, and that we should not be abusive to them, or give them cause to grieve us for discrimination.
In my new life, which begins today, I will not be blackmailed in this manner. No matter how many times I am told that saying no to unreasonable demands is discrimination or abuse, I will remember that it is not.
I will remember as well what a friend said, namely that some people cannot be helped, and especially not by sympathetic listeners or “friends.” They need to be challenged and grounded. I think there are great advantages to the presence of distant full professors with mysterious lives. There is no way I could communicate to anyone in just a few conversations all that I have learned about universities over the past two decades or so — much less to a new assistant professor who desperately wants me to share their position.
II
The more amazing experiences I have had with AAPAPs include this lovely vignette, which took place when I was myself a new assistant professor:
PZ is in her office, working, with a sign on the door saying on deadline — please do not disturb. Someone keeps knocking on the door, and trying the (locked) door handle. Finally she says, Who is it? She is amazed to realize she recognizes the voice of an AAPAP which says only, C’est moi. She opens the door, assuming it is an emergency. What can I do for you? asks she. I have come to ask whether you would like to smoke a piece of the rock with me, says the AAPAP.
That was easy to handle because it was so entirely outrageous and also because this man, not being in my home department, was easily avoided. The same AAPAP was a famous sexual harasser, although for some time victims were too intimidated to stand by their complaints. One clever victim, however, realized after dinner that she was going to be raped on the way home. She therefore led this AAPAP to a graduate student party (Let’s stop off at this party first, there will be good liquor) where she informed Mexican participants that the AAPAP had impinged upon her honor. They lured him to the parking lot with a promise of drugs, where they jumped him and ran him off, warning him that it would be worse next time. Naturally he did not dare to file charges. Later on I heard he had died of an overdose in another city.
III
Most AAPAPs are more subtle than this, although you would be surprised, given the nature of academia, at how daring many of them are. But abuse does not really work unless the abuser also has or exhibits highly attractive human qualities, which function to mask the abuse, and also finds the victim’s weakness. AAPAPs typically have the aforementioned human qualities, but grossly underestimate the power of their marks.
And I am a youthful person and not married, and I have friends younger than myself, with whom I can be seen out. That does not mean I do not also have friends older than myself, whom I see in houses. But I am often asked for social solidarity by AAPAPs who decide I must be as lonely as they are. I am not, but they do not imagine this. I feel sometimes like writing a guidebook, How To Develop Recreational Interests and Make Like Minded Friends in a New Town. People seem to go on match.com, when what they really need are hobbies. When match.com begins to fail or wear thin, they want to enmesh with the university the way they did with their graduate school cohort. The married ones, of course, do all right, which I suppose is why men need to be married, but the unmarried ones need my guidebook — although the guidebook will only work for those who do actually want to have a life.
Dear new faculty: if you are wise you will not telephone old faculty at home when you are drunk. You will not press your psychoanalytic or editing skills upon them too insistently. You will not make insulting personal remarks. You will not attempt to spread rumors to them, or ask them to join you in slandering their colleagues. At work you will not discuss sex in graphic terms. Neither will you make self destructive threats. AAPAP, realize that even the least powerful old faculty member is not a graduate student. Do not make a fool of yourself.
IV
One common sally of the typical AAPAP is to say, “I know what your history is, what your errors have been, and how you have suffered. You are still the best academic on this campus in my view, and I can show you why in terms any academic would accept. Your friends are my professors, and they are now closer friends of mine than they are of yours. You and I are very similar — moreso than you could know. Trust me. Do as I say. Do whatever I say. It will save you.” I have heard this line more times than I can count. It does not make the AAPAP look very good in my eyes or in the eyes of our friends, that is, of his former professors.
To add to my impatience, there is the fact that I have been listening to hard drinking professors pronounce words like these to each other in both Spanish and Portuguese for an unusually long time. My own first assistant professorship felt like déjà vu to me for that reason. Further entry level jobs followed upon that one, and I heard the speach again and again. It impresses me less favorably every time I hear it. It is really ludicrous to hear it from people ten and twenty years newer than I.
Another common sally is “You know, I realize you are Anglo, but you do not seem Anglo to me.” This is a line men in bars use on Junior Year Abroad girls, hoping to get them into bed by flattering their language skills and cultural competence. It is the height of absurdity to attempt to use it in an academic setting on a colleague 15 years older, but AAPAPs do it. It truly amazes me that they think it will work to get me to do anything, much less vote in any bloc.
V
If any AP reading this post is given to saying such things to their senior colleagues, I hope they now realize how redundant they sound. I also hope all APs realize that we do know what they are going through and are trying to alleviate the situation. Yet the best thing for them may not always be to hold their hand. And when the APs reveal themselves as AAPs, it is very tiresome.
CODA
I have noticed that one of the ways abusive people garner victims is by appearing to suffer (or even actually suffering). People make allowances for them then. Jennifer, however, has pointed out that those who are suffering may well be abusive. This bears remembering.
I have also noticed that people who call me “temperamental, impulsive, and nervous” — these being most commonly and tellingly, although not exclusively men I turn down for sex — are people who are being intrusive and/or abusive. They see me shifting in my chair, like a horse that wants to bolt.
Although I am a quick thinker who does not like to dither, I am actually a very deliberate person. I am capable of being spontaneous, it is true. But decisions I may appear to make quickly, I have in fact weighed. I am tired of being called “impulsive” by patronizing APAAP men who do not like what I choose, “distant” because I have a life of my own, or “oppressive” because I have boundaries.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
A general decline in the importance of moral standards may well be due to the fact that patriarchal standards have become the only ones to go by, and are thus unchallenged. It’s like being governed by a one-party dictatorship. Even the patriarchs themselves cannot be wholly content with the way in which the more abusive attitudes go unquestioned. To allow anything to happen means that we really do not care about the bullies and the perpetrators. They can beat other people’s heads against the walls until the cows come home, but nobody is going to say anything about it.
PS– I meant to say, even the bullies are doing it for attention, which they get only a half-hearted version of, which does not serve to restore their humanity as well as a sound moral thrashing might.
And patriarchal standards often being just bullying “lite,” it can be hard for both perp and victim to know, when exactly is it that the line between regular patriarchal oppression and outright bullying is crossed?
Also, can one actually restore the humanity of a bully … ? … Because it is not that they do not know what proper behavior is, it is that their instincts lead them to any path toward a venue in which they may be able to force improper behavior. And punishment / getting caught or “called out” only leads them to seek more insidious ways of doing their work.
*
For Easter Monday we took the day off and went to a state park. In the morning we hiked, and after lunch we rented kayaks. I am tanned now.
P.S. I cannot believe I feel slightly guilty that we did not invite the current APAAP on our state park adventure. He wants social life and normally I’d have called any new AP for this. But there was no nicotine or alcohol involved in this adventure, so I don’t know if he’d have liked it, anyway. And I ended up talking a graduate student through her current crisis during part of the adventure, but the thing is she isn’t MY graduate student, so she is not my responsibility, I talked to her of my free will, and also her goal is to get out of her crisis, not to draw others to misery.
I’ve been preparing for my UK trip for the Marechera festival at Oxford 15-17 May. It seems I’m set to meet a lot of interesting people.
—
On the bully issue, I think it depends on how far the illness has penetrated to the core of their being. Some people will listen to an authority figure who shows them (ie. forces them to accept) that there are other ways. Bullies are deeply drawn to a feeling of power, which is why they try to get power over others. However, it is the vacuum of power within themselves that they fear. I can imagine that to be addressed by someone who holds a position of power, who is prepared to draw the line and say what behaviour goes and what behaviour doesn’t could be eminently reassuring for some bullies.
Oxford. I am half tempted to go.
Bullies. Yes. But: can they be trusted if there is no authority figure to keep them in line? I.E.: after boot camp or whatever, do they learn? In my experience they do not.
Yes– come to oxford. I am going to meet Marechera’s niece and someone who knew him personally (his name is george shire, and he is on facebook). I’m not sure how deep the political flavour of the events will be, but I guess that is what you make it.
—
Well, I think that the bullies only learn if the authority is able to leave a scorching impression on their mind (which must be necessarily mingled with genuine concern for the wellbeing of society and of others) that the behaviour was very wrong in the eyes of that authority.
I mean, it is lucky for the bully in question if he or she still has some residual respect for the concept of society. Many don’t anymore, and that means that their nagging internal emptiness cannot be replaced by some mental concept of “society’s” authority. So they go on feeling empty, and to try to resolve this feeling, they go on bullying.
Oxford, I am really tempted. I shouldn’t, because it would use up the only air voucher I have and eat a bit into my cash reserves, but I am attracted to this idea.
Scorching impression, yes.
However, I had a heated argument today with an IRL friend re bullies. I am more freaked out by them than she is … much more … maybe she is right but I think I am, because I am so fully aware of the harm they actually do. But I think her position is the more common one, and that it is what allows them to keep operating.
Her: you just have to draw a boundary for them, and they will stop bullying you.
Me: no, that is what you do for normal people, show them what you will put up with and not, and they will treat you as you ask to be treated. A bully uses this information to figure out how to better invade next time. That is why they so often say, “Tell me exactly what it is I am doing that you do not like, so I can stop doing it. I am simple like that.” What they mean is: give me instructions, as detailed as possible, on how to get your goat.
Yes, what you say is true. But on the other hand, bullies can only get to you if you are already wounded, since it is the wound in you that they seek to exploit for their own gratification. Often, I think, at least some of the bullies do not realise that what they are doing is crossing the line. The feel that they can get warmth and human solidarity from people who are wounded, so they often set out to wound you so that they can feel close to you and not feel so alone themselves. This was the case of my father, who has felt very alone in the world. They don’t think their behaviour is wrong because how can human solidarity — what they experience as “love” — be wrong? They think that is all they are after, and they have a right to demand it from you because they don’t like the idea of social alienation, which they experience all the time.
The only way to avoid the bully honing in on your existing wounds — of which you do have a few, as did I — is to change the wavelength you are on. Ideally, you need to nurture an altogether different system of values from the one/s the bully favours. If you are not thinking in terms of conventional values to begin with, he is less likely to be able to hone onto you, since bullies lack imagination and always assume simple and conventional thinking in others. Key point: don’t TRY to communicate yourself (in order to justify your position or whatever — as you have pointed out, this is the bully’s shaking down technique to get you to reveal your wounds). Always put the onus for communication in the court of the bully, since the bully is a leach and psychological vampire and has a poor capacity for communication unless you build the bridge between the two of you that would facilitate it.
“…bullies can only get to you if you are already wounded, since it is the wound in you that they seek to exploit for their own gratification.”
***Yes, but that only means I especially should avoid them and not try to negotiate with them.
“…at least some of the bullies do not realise that what they are doing is crossing the line. The feel that they can get warmth and human solidarity from people who are wounded, so they often set out to wound you so that they can feel close to you and not feel so alone themselves….”
***True, and *very* perceptive. However, I still don’t think this means it is my responsibility to teach them how not to cross the line.
“They don’t think their behaviour is wrong because how can human solidarity — what they experience as ‘love’ — be wrong? They think that is all they are after, and they have a right to demand it from you because they don’t like the idea of social alienation, which they experience all the time.”
***Interesting. But doesn’t that mean they expect love from an inordinate number of people — from all those who do in fact offer human solidarity? Don’t they realize how “off” that is? I mean, seriously.
“The only way to avoid the bully honing in on your existing wounds — of which you do have a few, as did I — is to change the wavelength you are on. Ideally, you need to nurture an altogether different system of values from the one/s the bully favours. If you are not thinking in terms of conventional values to begin with, he is less likely to be able to hone onto you, since bullies lack imagination and always assume simple and conventional thinking in others. Key point: don’t TRY to communicate yourself (in order to justify your position or whatever — as you have pointed out, this is the bully’s shaking down technique to get you to reveal your wounds). Always put the onus for communication in the court of the bully, since the bully is a leach and psychological vampire and has a poor capacity for communication unless you build the bridge between the two of you that would facilitate it.”
***Very interesting. That is of course my key error, generally speaking: trying to offer the bully an alternative / happier mental world. This leads to arguing with them about whether such a world is possible or whether they have the right to tell deauthorize me from living in it (which they usually try to do). I did this twice last week with my official work bully, and earlier today with this friend who lives to some extent, I believe, in bully world.
******
The unending argument with her and her group: they want more of me than I am willing to give. I explain, you are all too cannibalistic and invasive, and I only have so much to give. They want to consume more of me. They claim I need help drawing boundaries and they can give suggestions. I think they want to criticize me for having weak boundaries as a way to break me down further and eat up more of me than I am letting them eat now.
******
I just realized something else, too. People who want you to explain yourself, even as an admiring audience, are bullies to the extent that they are exhausting you / using your energy.
******
I wasn’t suggesting you should teach them how not to cross the line. The line is a psychological one, which is invisible to them, and which they do not have the willingness or capacity to see in any case. Bullies do not have the same reference points concerning what we take to be human nature. They do not have a reference of point in terms of human reason. So you can’t say, “you are being too cannabilistic and invasive” because “compared to what?” They have no reference point right there. Nor can they receive a happier mental world from you, unless it is a part of your flesh (they cannot seem to generate this themselves due to the lack of reference to reason). I’ve often thought to offer precisely this to the bullies, too, but they don’t want it if they have to generate it themselves.
Anyway, is there a subtle sense in which you need the bully — ie. for him or her to conduct themselves in a more human and humanising way in order for you to feel better about the world? Watch out for even — or especially — the highest motives as they will bring you down too. You have to believe your own gut instinct about the bully, from past experience, and not let the idea that “he couldn’t be so bad after all” fool you. The superficially benign exterior is designed to do exactly that — until the whole process of bullying starts all over again.
They can’t experience normal human solidarity because of their lack of reason at the base level of their personalities, so they have to try to get their feeling of importance in illicit ways.
Anyway, don’t be sucked in by your own high-mindedness, which also harbours a disguised form of neediness. Be highminded with the highminded, and quarantine that which must be quarantined.
If this were Facebook, I’d leave a thumbs-up. As it is, I’ll write it out long-hand, as it were.
Merci Christopher!
Jennifer – yes. Good points. I can’t reveal why I need this bully to behave because it’s a current situation at one of my jobs.
I am being told I should be able to control hir by telling hir what not to do. This, as you point out, does not work.
I am also being told that ze is not as bad as ze seems. I do not believe this.
But you’re quite right and your point on the gut instinct is well taken.
The reason I need this bully to behave is that ze is in my work group and that is why I need hir to be happier/act better. I am being directed from on high to not think he’s so bad / be highminded since I am the eldest and we, the directors, need to look kind. Those on high do not want a discrimination suit and it is believed that by bending over backwards to be nice, we can avoid one. I wish all this were possible and true and that my kindness really could fix things but it just is not.
In reality, kindness from me here would just be vampirism, and futile vampirism at that, since the person in question is not going to be transformed positively by kindness. We’ll only be angry at each other — I because my sacrifice did not transform hir, and ze because I didn’t sacrifice enough.
P.S. I am also tired of patronizing housewives who think they can tell me how to do my job and think I am cold because I do not want to subject myself to their dicta.
In general I continue to be amazed by people who push on my boundaries and then, when I tell them to get back, tell me the problem is I do not set strong enough boundaries. My response is, I am doing it now, and I want you to stay two armlengths away, so that you cannot reach to bite my face.
They typically say, that is not fair, you should place me one armlength away and then keep your own arm up in case I try to bite your face.
This is absolutely ridiculous.
I really like this post, just a short comment on the issue of older faculty vs younger faculty and having a life of your own: whereas I recognise many APAAPs from your writing, I find that the abuse and the desire to bring one into their own power games and form”alliances” also extends from the older faculty to younger and that younger faculty is in fact being groomed: it a systemic requirement, a “virtue” without which one cannot hope to prosper in academia.
I was shocked once to find a member of the older faculty to spit bile about the fact that so-and-so just wouldn’t retire. (It was very well known that the two didn’t like each other.) She called this professor by a nickname and I was well aware who she was talking about but was quick to reply with an “innocent” question: I don’t know who it is you’re talking about, explain. She knew that I knew, of course. But neither did she explain nor did she ever try anything of the kind again.
Also, of all the graduate students who “prosper” (let us define this, somewhat dubiously, as – stay in academia and get jobs), they are regularly those who play tennis with older faculty, socialize almost exclusively with each other and older faculty, and know how to read minds of older faculty and of the system – without even being aware that telepathy is hapenning. I believe the system does not want you to have you a life of your own because it means you have thoughts of your own and then, maybe, someday you will bring them to your work and then, maybe, the world will explode.
So, getting back to abusive younger faculty – the fact that so many of them are abusive, usually AFTER being put through rigorous process of selection, indicates that this selection may not be primarily about scholarly merit but mainly and predominantly about other, implicit qualities – yes, about being abusive and prone to being abused and having no life and no friends of your own. As in a cult.
The fact that there are, thankfully, always exceptions and genuine people left in academia, and that, quite arbitrarily and randomly, even the abusers may here and there make an exception (random acts of cruel mercy), in my opinion only proves the rule: That being an AAP is nowadays a requirement for becoming and AP. My advice to young faculty (or even undergrads wishing to pursue this path) is to think long and hard what motivates them, how they fit in and if they don’t fit in and still wish to pursue this path, what is their survival plan.
But thank you so much for talking about this. I find silence is the worst: it makes you think you are crazy for thinking what you are thinking.
Thanks for this comment! Yes, typically and traditionally the abuse trickles down, not up, and although I don’t want to think your analysis is globally true, it may be. Frightening, although it would explain a lot, and although I am still resisting.
The person who inspired this comment, the APAAP, may be an AP, but he is also a middle aged man who, from what I can gather, is abusive in real life and possibly a sexual predator. It still amazes me that he thinks he can try these techniques on me, a senior faculty person, at work.
Do people not realize? I guess not…