Among Professors: Academic Life, Power & Survival

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 ...