Now that I am speaking so openly, and feeling much more like a living person than a voice from beyond the grave, I might as well continue. The really difficult thing about being in Spanish in my department has been that French meets, so French knows what it is doing and knows what the university is planning for it, but Spanish is excluded from these meetings of adults. So we are always under-resourced and under fire, but rarely included in professional discussions about the direction of the department. Meanwhile there is no professional language program director so there are always bitter fights about the freshman program.
My impression was that of having been cast into Hell: I must interface with these infernal, low-level fights, but may not have access to any higher level discussion of the present or the future. And I was always assigned, primarily, to appease the wrath of the M.A. instructor who was friends with the chair and who was mortally angry that I had a Ph.D. and had been hired TT. It seemed that this chair secretly agreed with them, because that wrath was fomented on through multiple generations of chairs (although it must be said, they also had the support of the AA, so the AA would listen to them and then tell the chair du jour we were bad)?
Anyway, this person harassed every TT faculty member and managed to get one of them out. The rest of us didn’t know what to do since it seemed so ignoble to accuse an instructor of harassment, and because it was so clear they had the support of the chairs and deans and we did not. The worst of the situation was ended when we finally blew a fuse, all of us together, about it to the then chair about few years ago, and then somehow about 5 years ago, with yet another chair, it stopped entirely (it may have to do with there being a new AA as well). But we got really scarred by this, all of us.
I became afraid to say anything because early on, I was at a restaurant with this man I was seeing, who wasn’t at the university, and we were discussing office politics at our jobs. We were both genuinely confused about what was going on with leadership at our respective places (and this guy was local, Cajun, etc., so and he was as confused as I), and we were kind of fascinated to find that in very different industries we were dealing with the same problem–that had to do, we were discovering, with individuals leveraging institutional resources for personal and family gain.
I was not mentioning any names and neither was this guy, and we weren’t speaking ill of anyone, we were genuinely trying to figure out what was happening to us. The VERY NEXT DAY my chair appeared in my office and said everything I had said had been overheard and reported to him, and his feelings were hurt. I was untenured and terrified. So I shut up. For 27 years. Said everything was my fault. Sacrificed for the pain of the Cajuns and the people who did not have PhDs. Then, on Dec. 21, 2025, I inadvertently let the mask slip. In my own house. And I was REALLY terrified, OMG, someone is going to report on this.
That was why I started posting on FB in self-defense: if someone was going to report anyway, I might as well let it rip. I have probably freaked out a lot of people and this post may freak them out more. I am exaggerating, they will say; we didn’t mean that, they will say. I know not everyone meant that, but I’m not exaggerating because look at the destructive effect all of this has had. I have been willing to say it was all our fault, and so on, but an objective analysis says it’s been a failure of leadership; proof of that is that things did improve when leadership did.
Mostly though, the reason I felt I’d died was that one couldn’t have any information from or participate in discussion with professors because one wasn’t in the right language, but had to be tortured by an instructor for having the PhD and being TT. No, I don’t think it’s fair, and I wouldn’t to this to anyone, and I’m not going to take it any more. AND: the reason I am saying this here is that I have tried to say it to leadership, ask for change, and they’ve always said no. So if you screenshot this and take it to my department, be sure to realize, I tried to talk to them, begged to, did everything within protocol that I could. For 27 years. Now I have had it and I refuse to be dead any more.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 