“If this has been happening since 2009 why have you not reported until now?” It took a lot of thought to find a concise and true, but also polite and acceptable answer. I said, “Because the attacks now clearly affect the students and the university directly, not just me, and they have changed in nature, now going to integrity and character, not to facts that any interested party can check.”
It’s also because now someone else has gone on the record in writing, so I don’t feel as unsafe. I’ve reported workplace abuse twice before and been found inconvenient, and been retaliated against. I didn’t say those things because they make the story too complicated.
The truest answer would be yet deeper. “We were both being persecuted by an instructor who had already gotten two tenure-track people thrown out, and I was afraid that if the department lost a third tenure-track person, we would lose the line. I also identified with my tormentor insofar as we were both being tormented by that instructor.”
That story is simply not believable because who would believe an instructor had that much power? Even we could barely believe it, it took us a long time to accept that it was true. And yet it was.
But how do you complain about such a thing? I did not see it as winnable, could not see a way to frame the issue that would be heard. And a department where you could successfully complain about such a thing would be one where such things did not happen in the first place.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 