Among Professors: Academic Life, Power & Survival

After your PhD comes the job search. And there, too, the unwritten agenda quietly governs what happens. My first position was a temporary teaching contract at another university. The job description was vague. They were looking for someone to replace one of two senior lecturers, in two completely different fields. At the interview, both lecturers were present. It quickly became clear that this was less about my suitability than about an internal power struggle. The question was who would get to offload a teaching responsibility. Of the three shortlisted candidates, two had a PhD in field A. The third had only a master’s degree, but in field B. The next day I received a call. The job was mine, but only if I agreed to teach field B. My expertise was in field A. The message was unmistakable. The lecturer from field B had won the internal battle, but his preferred candidate was not credible. So the position was offered to me, with the quiet expectation that I would decline. That way, they ...

One of the routine challenges of a PhD is presenting your work. As a poster. Or as a talk. That alone is nerve-racking, but the questions are the worst. What if you don’t know the answer? What if a single question exposes that your entire project is fundamentally flawed? Sleepless nights before a conference come with the territory. So does the fear of failure. My supervisor gave the classic, well-meant advice: listen carefully to questions. They can help you refine your experiment. It sounded logical. So I tried to do that. At a major international conference, I got a question from someone I immediately recognised as  the  expert in my field. She started by asking whether I knew one of her papers. I did. What followed was a long, dull monologue that grew increasingly technical and drifted further and further from my research topic. Halfway through, I had already lost the thread. Then came the punchline: “ Would you like to comment on that?” On what?  I thought. What came ...

If you spend long enough in academia, you come to know them: the colleague whose behaviour everyone whispers about in the corridors, yet whose name never appears on any agenda. I still remember the first time a senior professor made me cry during a lab meeting. I was the PhD candidate. The room froze. Afterwards, a well-meaning colleague pulled me aside and whispered, “Just avoid him. That’s just how he is.” The lesson was clear: the problem wasn’t his behaviour. It was my proximity to it. My survival depended on learning one of academia’s oldest rules: some transgressions aren’t offences to report, but pitfalls you need to learn to navigate. Back then, after months of harassment from that same professor, I was naive enough to consider filing a formal complaint. The head of the department strongly advised against it: the consequences would hit me long before they hit him. I wasn’t the only one to hear this. Many PhD candidates have left academia because of situations like this. Even la...

Some time after that first, painful conference — where I had been interrupted in public and yet was still offered a position — I received the description of the research project I would be working on. It lay in front of me, full of jargon and technical terms: the kind of text meant to impress funders and peer reviewers. I felt uncertain, seeking reassurance and hoping my doubts would be dispelled. I walked into the office of one of my own professors. I showed him the document and said, “It all sounds very technical.” He took it, read a few paragraphs, looked up, and asked, without a flicker of emotion, the question that floored me: “Don’t you think this might be a little beyond you?” No genuine concern. No inquiry into my motivation. No, “Let’s see how we can prepare you for this.” It was a verdict. An academic way of saying:   Stick to your lane. Was he protecting his own status? Or that of the field? Or was I really as incapable as I feared? Years passed. I became a professor my...

The idea of pursuing a PhD — let alone becoming a professor — was once beyond the realm of my imagination. In my environment, university served a single purpose: training for a solid, practical profession. It was the only path I knew. I followed it faithfully, earning a degree in a health-related field. Yet a sense of unease persisted. What followed was a ten-year odyssey through various specialisations — working with children, stroke patients, adults with intellectual disabilities — each move an attempt to find a niche that suited me. None ever did. The outcome was predictable: a severe burnout. A decade in the wrong career is a recipe for collapse.  I never imagined starting a PhD later in life, after a decade in another profession. Yet, within that breaking point lay an unexpected gift.  The catalyst that forced me to abandon the original path entirely and begin constructing another — one that led, improbably, to where I am now . I decided to study languages, purely out of ...