Transparency

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Transparency is a beautiful word. It appears in strategic plans, in mission statements, in evaluation forms. But in practice? It's often the first thing to disappear when it comes to matters that truly matter. When I was asked to become vice-dean for research, it seemed like a great opportunity. The dean's assistant told me I would receive teaching relief, an attractive allowance, and — the icing on the cake — a sabbatical at the end of my term. I agreed, was elected. What turned out? No sabbatical at all. It had existed only in that one conversation. The teaching relief had to be arranged separately by the incumbent dean, who did so with a cc to the entire dean's office, writing that he was doing this "albeit with considerable reluctance" — as if I had asked him for a personal favour. Meanwhile the incumbent vice-dean, the dean, and the vice-dean for teaching all received teaching relief as a matter of course. The problem was never the teaching relief itself. The...
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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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