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Showing posts with the label Workplace bullying

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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Learning the unwritten rules

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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...
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