My colleague says it is a uniquely authoritarian institution in a highly authoritarian culture and region. She compares it to Mexico in the 1820s but after reading an article about Argentine culture under J.M. Rosas as cruel and terrifying I am starting to wonder whether we are really 1840s Argentina.
“Just get a book, dear.” “Just find a sympathetic administrator.” “Just organize your time better.” Those phrases are something a priest might say to be pious — and this is yet another thing I do not like about academic advice, it is a set of pious fictions designed as ideological manipulation, to keep the subject looking inward and to interdict any political analysis or group solidarity. But they are not phrases a person who could see reality would say, or anyone who had to interact with reality without the protection of the Church and the robe.
My student says people here feel entitled to interfere and interrupt in any way possible. It is abusive, he says and this is the problem with enmeshment cultures, he says: there are no boundaries, thus no rules, thus constant chaos and mental exhaustion. There is not a way to adjust to this or accept it, and the best way to resist its ill effects is to remain aware of the actual structures. Any time you begin to blame yourself, you step into the maelstrom and you will find work blocked.
Instead, you have to remember that they do not have your interests at heart. Every time they say you must compromise with them, they are trying to play on your heartstrings so that you betray yourself, your field and the profession, and not for the sake of the students or the unit but for the sake of the further advancement of a few. The byproduct of this will be your own destruction.
These things were clear to me, utterly clear, in the first job I had like this one, but by the time I got to this one I had learned to feel sorry for professors. I made compromises. Guess which strategy had me publishing the most!
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 