Plans of Study
My friend A___ is beginning his graduate Plan of Study. The Plan of Study is where we list all the relevant courses we took or will take to get our PhD. It is, of course, nowhere near as simple as that sounds. Think Gilliam's Brazil and you'll be in the right ballpark. The Plan of Study is something we grads must do before we can take our preliminary exams. We do it largely without any real help from our advisors since they are too important to have to know how to do this sort of thing. As with most things in grad school, we get it done with a lot of help from our friends.
So I told A___ I'd look for my Plan of Study to see how I did it. As I was looking I found lots of scraps, memorable moments from my increasingly lengthy graduate career. Ugh. This trip down memory lane made me cringe. Whenever I see 1998 on a graduate transcript I shiver and think Good Lord Almighty will I ever be done?!!??
Then I came across artifacts from when I transfered from my old program to my current one. And beneath that stratum I found the few bits of physical evidence from the episodes I think of as "When My Former Advisor Completely Lost His Shit". It is somewhat reassuring to look at these things now and then. It ireminds me of what I got through and why it's taking me longer than is normal to finish. It's not like I'm fucking malingering....ok, well I'm dragging my ass a little, but I look at this stuff and I realize that I have had much more work to do than most of the grads I know. And it is legitimate work. Not only have I had to do the normal work of a PhD student, I've had to get my masters in self advocacy, harassment, and university policy while I was at it. Included in that never defended thesis was also a long chapter on maintaining self esteem and holding it together under pretty significant threat and with very little institutional support.
You're wondering what the fuck I'm talking about. I'm pretty sure my former advisor, we'll call him "Professor Psycho Jerk", wanted an inappropriate kind of relationship with me. I can't say for sure he wanted sex and the like, although he made a point to mention on more than one occasion that he had been on a date since being married. No, the date was not with his wife. And he brought up sex a bit too often for my comfort level. A friend who had spent some time living in my advisor's country of origin told me that this sex as a conversation topic was just cultural (Mediterranean) and that I should use that knowledge to modify my American context when I interpreted it. Ok. This fit since while I've had my share of sex, romance, and the like, I am not exactly Miss Glamorous and I am not used to assuming that men are throwing themselves at me.
So I couldn't say for sure that he wanted sex, but I can say as I felt his behavior was becoming less professional and I tried to insert some tactful distance and professional boundaries in there, he got nutty.
We had always had what I considered a casual, informal academic relationship. I liked this because I am not a formal person. I don't stand on ceremony or any of the sort of social garbage that I feel muddies the social interaction between two (or more) people communicating. So we'd have an impromtu conversation that started off with a question about sound change in English, moved to Proto-IndoEuropean reconstruction, discuss tone as possible feature of early languages, talk about how linguistic reconstruction of the kind that leads to theories of ideal syllable structure is possible using languages like Sanskrit, etc. But we'd also talk about his kids, why he chose to study at MIT, my educational experiences, some current events stuff, and philosophy. It was nice.
But then there was the important professor (who had been my advisor's advisor), world famous and all that, who my advisor called me over in front of but didn't introduce me to. My advisor had given me an A+ in his class that year. They just don't give A+ in grad school folks, so I assumed he would introduce me as his star pupil, 'cause clearly he thought I was (A+, right?). Instead, my advisor put his arm around my shoulder and urged me to come to dinner with them. The older famous professor chuckled and looked away, chatting with the other faculty who had introduced their (male) advisees. I remember thinking maybe my advisor had told the professor who I was before he called me over, but felt a nagging discomfort growing. Then there was the meeting about my qualifying paper which had to be at my advisor's house because he had to be there to watch his children. When I got there, his children were nowhere around and he kept turning the conversation to him (whether or not he looked old) and his marriage.
The last straw was the "welcome back/beginning of the year" party my advisor was planning to have at his house in Fall 2000. He consulted me on nearly every detail. The nagging discomfort was turning into something more like a siren. Finally, I told him "really I think you should serve whatever you want. I mean, I don't think I should have so much say on this. I think it's great that you want to host this party, but I might not even be able to go, so please don't put so much on my opinion...."
He canceled the party shortly after this conversation.
Ok so I continued avoiding him, even on academic stuff. When we did meet, he was cranky and didn't like my analyses, or my style, or my scope, or my topic (which he had suggested), or the entire theoretical framework I was writing in (again, something I had chosen with his blessings the semester before). I avoided him more and more. Finally, after no communication for, oh, it must have been a month easily, he confronted me in the hall. He marched up to me and told me we had to schedule my defense for the qualifying paper I had been writing. I told him I wasn't ready to defend and that he knew this. He said that we had better meet then. At the meeting, there was not even a pretense of meeting about the paper. He just screamed and yelled and hollered at me for being "disrespectful". It was HORRIBLE. But I'm good at getting yelled at, my dad gave me plenty of practice. I know how to massage and assuage and manipulate assholes into calming down and backing off. I didn't sell myself out entirely, but I negotiated a peace which did involve me biting back my genuine reaction, one of utter loathing and disgust not to mention intense rage at him for behaving in this way. Had this not been my advisor, I think I would have thrown something at him. I am quite sure if I had been younger, I would have slashed his tires or worse. After a lot of soul searching, I decided I did the right thing, making sure I was safe at that moment. My next task was to work on ensuring my safety from further bad behavior on his part.
I went to my department head. Her only suggestion was to "stay off his radar". I went to the University Office that was supposed to handle harassment to let them know I felt my advisor was getting very inappropriate and to try to get something on record so I would have some kind of protection. Can I say that the words "They Sucked" don't even begin to describe the experience? In the end, I tried to stay off my advisor's radar for the rest of the academic year. I changed advisors to the only other guy in my department who studied anything like what I did. He was never there, was barely interested in my thesis until I incorporated his theory into it, and even then offered less help than I'd have gotten talking to my cat.
And soon the Spring semester ended. My then boyfriend T___ and I had moved in together and were so utterly happy. My divorce had just gone through. About two weeks later, I got this crazy letter from my former advisor saying "Rumor had reached him" that I was accusing him of sexual harassment.
And the funny thing was I had no idea what he was talking about. Turns out, someone was accusing him of sexual harassment but not me. In response to the accusation of harassment, the acting department head had arranged for a workshop on harassment. This is one of those things the campus Women's Center does, although with little actual success I think.
Now we are all caught up and I can go back to the artifact I found in my search for my Plan of Study. It was a letter written by another professor from my former department. He wrote this letter to describe an incident precipitated by my (then) advisor at the sexual harassment workshop.
As usual, I have changed the names to protect the mostly guilty, although there are a few innocents in there too. I changed the names of offices as well. While I want to share this, it was given to me in confidence by the person who wrote it so I do want to try to preserve some of that. Even though it's my business. You'll have to click on the picture to see it up close and legible like.
Based on my completed, submitted, and approved Plan of Study, I have been assigned a "termination date" of 2008 or something like that. But I get letters from the financial aid office telling me I have been here too long and no longer am eligible for aid. I get shit from old withered nearly retired and quite bitter faculty in my new department because they are too used to seeing me around. My division head thinks I should be done with my dissertation already even though I've only been in this department for three years. My Plan of Study had no column or box for this sort of thing, which sure is a waste. It seems like I ought to get some kind of credit for having gotten through this, maybe a certificate in Fortitude or an A+ in Coping. I feel like I should have something to show for the extra work I've had to do towards my PhD. Maybe I'll frame this letter.
3 comments:
Wow, I'm so sorry you've had to go through this. It's astounding how much power some faculty members have, especially senior faculty. Since they weigh in on junior faculty tenure cases, juniors don't feel safe standing up to them, so you need another senior faculty member on your side, preferably a full professor if your harasser is also a full professor, since full professors weigh in on the promotion cases of associate professors. Which is to say, you may have nobody willing or qualified to stand up for you. It's a terribly lonely situation, like being an abused child in a home where the nonabusive parent is afraid to stand up to the abusive parent.
I had an abusive diss committee member (not my advisor, thank goodness). He never came on to me, but he was a clinical narcissist with serious Woman Issues. He was sleeping with one of the junior faculty women, who was also on my committee. Incidentally, he was on her tenure committee and didn't take himself off until it became public knowledge that they were sleeping together. Had I known that I'd never have had them on my committee. I still don't know what caused it all (he had always been decent to me before), though I suspect he thought I was the one who told everyone they were an item. I had seen them perhaps a year earlier out at a restaurant, and hadn't thought anything of it because our faculty were sociable. But, you know, guilty consciences fill in the blanks (same thing that led your advisor to assume that YOU had launched the sexual harassment charge against him).
To make a long story short, he was VERY abusive to me, alternating screaming sessions with periods of shunning. His specialty was to tell me to do very specific, lengthy analyses, then, after I'd spent 10 hours doing them, say, "I never told you to do that." I thought I was losing my mind. He hated my advisor, a woman who was/is more successful than he (surprise, surprise). The whole thing was so stressful that I lost 15 lbs. in 2 weeks. I wouldn't receive a proper diagnosis (Graves' Disease, an incurable autoimmune disease that can be kicked off by intense stress) for another two years. I was hired at my first job ABD; he was the only one still refusing to sign off on my diss. Finally my advisor and an outside committee member caught him in the "I never told you to do that" act (they had witnessed that he HAD told me to do that), and my advisor confronted him. Trapped, he threw up his hands and signed off on the diss. I still remember the date: October 17, 1997.
My advisor actually retired early because this guy made life in this particular department so unpleasant. I did get some minor satisfaction a few years ago when he and his now-wife (former junior faculty mistress) got job offers at another university, and the folks in my old department OPTED NOT TO EXTEND A COUNTER-OFFER. There is no bigger f*** you than that. It's the only way to drive out a tenured faculty member. *gleeful smile* Naturally they left, but not until he'd granted an interview to the *student newspaper* claiming that he'd been mistreated. I see him at conferences every year and occasionally catch him staring at me. It completely skeeves me out. We haven't spoken in almost 9 years, and that suits me just fine.
Anyway, in the wake of this experience I gathered stories from other female grad students about how they were mistreated. Your story fits right in. My favorite is the story of my friend whose advisor (a woman) started dating her (my friend's) ex-boyfriend. How's that for a boundary violation? Some people do NOT understand the notion of professionalism.
So what's the prognosis for you? Can you finish this thing under somebody else's advisorship? It would be a real shame to let this dude rob you of a degree you've worked toward for so long.
Blaaagh, Graves' (glad you got a Dx, sorry it took 2 yrs, you must've thought you were losing your mind) and blarrggh, your committee! I have spent this year carefully watching and speaking with key faculty members I want on my committee. My division head keeps pushing this new guy Maggers, but this is Maggers' second year as faculty, ever. He also kinda sucks. So no Maggers and a not large department means I have to shop very carefully for my committee. My ex's committee had a "too many cheifs" problem that caused him no end of grief. Sounds like the problem with yours was they were trying out for their own reality show. VH1 presents.... What would we call it? "The Committee"? I'm thinking very Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Yikes.
As for my finishing up - The semester after I got the e-mail from Prof Psycho Jerk, I began the process of switching to a different department. As you know, there really is no such thing as a "transfer" in grad school. So I had to sacrifice most of what I had done in my prior program to get out. It did suck, I worried that I was letting him win by giving up, but then staying there was not a healthy option. I try to look at it like this. When I get done, I will have an interdisciplinary background that might in fact help me get a job. What's a sort of poor is that the department I switched to was great under this one woman who was in charge for years and years, but she stepped down very recently. There's a little troll of a man in charge now who prides himself on being a contrarian and on not asking for help even when he's clearly in over his head. So it's markedly less great now. I just need to get out while the getting's good....
Let's all wish happy thoughts for me to defend my proposal by the end of Spring semester. I want a couple of psychic "wooop woop"s. That oughtta help.
Happy Happy Thoughts coming your way, Babe.
this is why I like to call it "academentia". >;-)
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