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Showing posts with the label Workplace bullying

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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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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