The empty chair

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While I was finishing a paper at home, a colleague from the administrative staff posted a photo on the internal network: an empty corridor, with the caption, “The summer silence on campus… where is everyone?” The reactions were predictable:  😊   🏖️   😎 Light-hearted, no doubt. And yet beneath the jokes ran something more persistent: a quiet undercurrent of suspicion. “You must be at the pool every day, right?” Or, to my students: “You must be left to fend for yourself, your supervisor is never around.” It made me wonder: when did being present become the ultimate proof of working? If I really had spent all that time by the pool, I would probably have an Olympic medal by now – not a pile of unfinished articles, reviewer comments, and looming deadlines. In academia, two worlds quietly coexist. For support staff, the campus is the workplace. Work has fixed hours, fixed locations, and above all: visibility. If you are there, you are working. If you are not, apparently you ...
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I was anonymous. Not anymore.

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This blog has always had a name. Just not mine.

When I started writing here, I had good reasons to stay anonymous. I was writing about colleagues, institutions, and systems I was still part of. Not to settle scores — but to name what rarely gets named: the unwritten rules, the quiet power plays, the mechanisms that shape academic careers in ways no handbook ever mentions.


I took care. Names disappeared. Genders were swapped. Incidents from different people and different places were combined into single stories. The pattern remained. The individuals did not.


But a pattern without a face has its limits.

Why now

I am retiring. Not quite yet, but soon. After more than thirty years in academia — as a PhD student, a researcher, a professor — I am stepping back from institutional life. And with that step comes a certain freedom. The freedom to say: this is what I saw. This is what I experienced. And this is my name.


That is not a small thing in academia, where reputation is currency and careers are long. I am aware of what it means to put your name to observations like these. I am also aware that staying anonymous indefinitely would gradually hollow out what I am trying to do here.

What I protected, and why it still holds

Let me be clear about one thing: the anonymisation was not cosmetic. Every person described in these posts is unrecognisable — not because the stories are invented, but because they are composites. A gender here, a detail there, a setting shifted. What remains is the pattern, not the person.


If someone reads a post and thinks: this sounds familiar — that recognition says something about the pattern, not about their own identifiability. Academia produces these situations reliably, across institutions and countries. That is precisely the point.


I am not naming anyone. I never will.

Who I am

I am Ineke Mennen. Professor of Applied Linguistics, specialising in second language acquisition of pronunciation and intonation — the field I stumbled into, almost by accident, in Thessaloniki in the early 1980s, when I kept missing the questions in conversation because Greek interrogative intonation does not rise the way Dutch or English speakers expect. That misunderstanding became a thesis. The thesis became a career.


I have worked at several universities, in the Netherlands and in the UK. I have supervised PhD students, secured research grants, served on committees, and navigated the same unwritten rules I write about here. I know this world from the inside.

What changes, and what doesn’t

The blog stays the same. The posts already published remain as they are — the anonymisation holds, and there is nothing I would unsay. What changes is simply this: you now know who is writing.


There are more posts to come. Some of them are harder than what you have read so far. About the mechanisms that allow bad behaviour to persist — not despite good intentions, but sometimes because of them. About age discrimination, quiet and systemic. About the difference between institutions that protect people and institutions that protect themselves.


I have been careful. I will continue to be careful. But careful does not mean silent.

A note to my students and former colleagues

Some of you may find your way here. If you do: the unwritten rules I describe are not unique to any one department or university. They are features of the system, not accusations against individuals. If something resonates, I hope it is useful — not uncomfortable.


And if you ever wanted to ask me about any of this in person: now you can.


— Ineke Mennen

(although quite a bit older than on this picture)

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