Critical Storytelling

Front matter

Critical Storytelling

Critical Storytelling

Critical Storytelling

Contents

Flexing Muscles 74 Ingela Nilsson

Lessons I Learned at University 78 Ricarda Schier

Benevolence or Bitterness 81 Antony T. Smith

CHAPTER 1 The Same Old Story?

An Introduction

Julie Hansen and Ingela Nilsson

Storytelling is seen by many as a universal human impulse, a way for individuals and groups to communicate experiences and make sense of life. It is also a social and cultural activity in which not everyone has an equal voice. As the Czech dissident and later president Vaclav Havel argued, “an examination of the potential of the ‘powerless’ [...] can only begin with an examination of the nature of power in the circumstances in which these powerless people operate” (Havel, 1985, p. 23). For those with a chance to make themselves heard, storytelling can be an empowering act that exposes injustice. Storytelling can forge a path toward better endings. By daring to tell our stories, we enter into a process that is larger than ourselves.

This volume of essays arose out of the courage of scholars and students to share stories of the academic workplace that are often only spoken of in hushed tones, if at all. The essays explore individual experiences as well as underlying institutional structures, providing original perspectives on bullying, sexual harassment, discrimination and other forms of power abuse in academic workplaces. Topics include the risks of unequal power relations for graduate students and junior faculty, the roles of gender and ethnicity, the negative effects of the tenure system and limited mobility, and the implications of new public management for academia.

This is not a reckoning with any particular institution, department or individual, but an examination of collective problems. Narratives like these comprise a necessary first step toward change. The culture of silence surrounding harassment and power abuse in the academic world needs to be broken, so that it will not always be the same old story, but a better narrative that we can call our own.

The academic world presents many obstacles to sharing such experiences. As some of the contributors observe, it can be difficult to overcome the misplaced sense of shame that victims of power abuse and harassment often feel, despite the fact that they have done nothing wrong.! The nefarious phenomenon of victim-blaming can be effectively mobilized to protect perpetrators by discrediting their victims. Shame and victim-blaming in connection with

© JULIE HANSEN AND INGELA NILSSON, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_001 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Cc BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

2 HANSEN AND NILSSON harassment are not specific to academia, yet some of the peculiarities of academic workplaces arguably present further obstacles to speaking out. As Sarah Viren (2021) notes, “academia is a hierarchical industry, one in which a small minority of those with secure jobs or tenure have huge sway over decisions about job security for the remaining majority” (para. 56). A tight and competitive job market can lead to a higher frequency of harassment (Blomberg, 2016, p. 51). Studies indicate that bullying in a workplace often does not stop until the harassed individual has left it for good (Blomberg, 2016, p. 35), but this option is not always available, or even desirable, for academic workers. Another risk factor appears to be emotional investment in one’s work (Blomberg, 2016, p. 51). The fact that successful scholars tend to be devoted to their work may render them more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

Often there is a lack of institutional support, knowledge and transparent practices for dealing with work environment issues, even among some Human Resources departments. For those in academic leadership positions, incentives to acknowledge problems may be low (Twale & De Luca, 2008, p. 22). Researchers note that “heads of departments today hesitate to admit that harassment takes place at their workplace, as they see it as a disqualification of their own leadership abilities” (Björkqvist et al., 1994, p. 174). Some employees who file complaints face retaliation or unethical behavior on the part of the administrators and consultants entrusted with conducting investigations (Friedenberg, 2004).?

Yet there are compelling reasons for everyone with a stake in the academic world to speak out against power abuse. Research has documented the various consequences of workplace harassment for victims, and they include depression, anxiety, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide (Björkqvist et al., 1994; Blomberg, 2016). These unacceptable costs are not limited to individuals, however. Although more difficult to measure, the institutional losses for universities are undeniable, and these can spill over onto students and the quality of the education they receive, as well as overall research quality and output.

Despite solid data and the existence (in some places) of legislation and policies intended to prevent problems, many academics are sorely unequipped to recognize and deal with power abuse in their chosen profession.? Many believe it will never happen to them, yet research shows that “[a]nybody may become a victim, provided that the individual has less power than the tormentor” (Björkqvist et al., 1994, p. 175). The Swedish organizational psychologist Stefan Blomberg (2016) debunks a common myth about workplace bullying:

There is a widely held idea that it is primarily people who behave in an eccentric or strange way who become targets of bullying. Our clinical

THE SAME OLD STORY? 3 experience on this is clear, however. The majority of those targeted are strong, highly functional and successful individuals, whom others— colleagues, coworkers or supervisors—perceive as a threat. Many of those we encounter in clinical contexts describe feeling shocked when the bullying process begins, because they could have never imagined that they would fall victim to it. The idea that targets of bullying are eccentric or divergent makes an exception appear as the rule. This idea can also be fueled by our own fear. If only eccentric or divergent individuals can become targets, it may be easier to situate the risk beyond ourselves. (p. 50, authors’ translation)

Of course, perpetrators and victims are only part of the story. More numerous are the bystanders who witness wrongful actions in their work environment and face a choice between turning a blind eye (complicity), joining in the destructive behavior (collaboration) or taking action to challenge it. All too often, bystanders choose complicity or collaboration.* Standing up for colleagues in such a situation entails risks and requires courage, but a collective effort to do so could be a catalyst for change.®

Collective is the key word here: the problems explored in this volume are collective in nature and call for collective solutions, requiring us to put aside competition in favor of collegial solidarity. Parker J. Palmer (2017) posits the following:

The external structures of education would not have the power to divide us as deeply as they do if they were not rooted in one of the most compelling features of our inner landscape—fear.

If we withdrew our assent from these structures, they would collapse, an academic version of the Velvet Revolution. But we collaborate with them, fretting from time to time about their “reform,” because they so successfully exploit our fear. Fear is what distances us from our colleagues, our students, our subjects, ourselves. (p. 36)

At their worst, academic hierarchies can feel unsurmountable and paralyzing, particularly if one is fighting these problems alone. Yet as the voices in this volume attest, we are not alone. There is strength in numbers, and together we in the academic profession can do better than the status quo.

We are grateful to the authors who took on the challenge of putting their experiences into words. They come from a variety of geographical places and backgrounds. Some have already left academia, while others are just embarking on promising careers. Circumstances allow some to publish under their

4 HANSEN AND NILSSON own names, while others have chosen anonymity to protect themselves or others. For every story that appears on the pages of this book, there are many more waiting to be told. We are especially grateful to those of you who contributed by sharing with us your unwritten stories, reading drafts, and offering invaluable advice and encouragement along the way. Your voices resound in this volume, too.

And now we invite you, our readers, to turn the page and begin to heed these stories. Their narrators speak to you through different forms, styles and genres. The plots and themes may already be familiar, or perhaps they will surprise you. Regardless, we hope you will contemplate alternative endings, because we believe it doesn’t have to be the same old story.

1 Stefan Blomberg (2016) observes that it can be difficult to measure the frequency of workplace bullying precisely because most people do not want to categorize themselves as victims of it out of shame (p. 52).

2 For discussions of the phenomena of bullying and mobbing specifically in academic workplaces, see Keashly and Neuman (2010), Lewis (2004), Twale and De Luca (2008), Westhues (2004), Zabrodska (2013) and Zabrodska et al. (2011).

3 In recent decades, numerous academic career guides have been published, some of which have the word “survival” in their titles. They dispense advice on how to write productively, how to get published, how to get tenure, how to balance teaching and research, but most remain silent on how to cope with abuses of power.

4 Fora taxonomy of the different kinds of reactions observed in connection with destructive work environments, see Thoroughgood et al. (2012).

5 A recent study found that witnesses of bullying at work who did not intervene ran a heightened risk of becoming a victim themselves (Rosander & Nielsen, 2021). For more on the role of bystanders, see Niven, Ng and Hoel (2020).

Björkqvist, K., Osterman, K., & Hjelt-Back, M. (1994). Aggression among university employees. Aggressive Behavior, 20, 173-184.

Friedenberg, J. E. (2004.) Political psychology at Southern Illinois University: The use of an outside consultant for mobbing a professor. In K. Westhues (Ed.), Workplace mobbing in academe: Reports from twenty universities (pp. 259-289). Edwin Mellen Press.

Havel, V. (1985). P. Wilson (Trans.). In V. Havel et al. (Eds.), The power of the powerless: Citizens against the state in central-eastern Europe (pp. 23-96, J. Kean, Ed.). Routledge. (Original work published 1978)

THE SAME OLD STORY? 5

Keashly, L., & Neuman, J. H. (2010). Faculty experiences with bullying in higher education: Causes, consequences, and management. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 32(1), 48-70.

Lewis, D. (2004). Bullying at work: The impact of shame among university and college lecturers. British Journal of Guidance & Counseling, 32(3), 281-299.

Niven, K., Ng, K., & Hoel, H. (2020). The bystanders of workplace bullying. In S. V. Einarsen, H. Hoel, D. Zapf, & C. L. Cooper (Eds.), Bullying and harassment in the workplace: Theory, research and practice (3rd ed., pp. 385-408). CRC Press.

Palmer, P. J. (2017). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life (2oth anniversary ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Rosander, M., & M. B. Nielsen. (2021). Witnessing bullying at work: Inactivity and the risk of becoming the next target. Psychology of Violence. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/vioo000406

Thoroughgood, C. N., Padilla, A., Hunter, S. T., & Tate, B. W. (2012). The susceptible circle: A taxonomy of followers associated with destructive leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 23, 897-917.

Twale, D. J., & De Luca, B. M. (2008). Faculty incivility: The rise of academic bully culture and what to do about it. Jossey-Bass.

Viren, S. (2021, May 25). The native scholar who wasn't. The New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/magazine/cherokee-native-americanandrea-smith.html

Westhues, K. (Ed.). (2004). Workplace mobbing in academe: Reports from twenty universities. Edwin Mellen Press.

Zabrodska, K. (2013). Prevalence and forms of workplace bullying among university employees. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 25, 89-108.

Zabrodska, K., Linnell, S., Laws, C., & Davies, B. (2011). Bullying as intra-active process in neoliberal universities. Qualitative Inquiry, 17(8), 709-719.

CHAPTER 2 The Polyphony of Academia

An important part of my job as a university professor is listening to people's stories. Since academia is such a multicultural, inclusive and diverse environment, I hear an amazing range of voices and stories. It’s an ever growing collection for which I’m running out of space. Where to put them? Will they go bad if I don’t store them correctly? Should I sort them under specific categories? I need a solution, they are taking over my office, my spare time, my life. All these voices, spinning round and round in my head, urging me to listen to them:

I read the article over and over, hoping I was mistaken, that I wasn’t reading my own words under someone else’s name. But to my great horror I could only conclude that I had been right from the start: this was a chapter from my dissertation, published under the name of one of my supervisors. I didn’t know what to do, so I contacted my other supervisor to ask for advice. She said it was not the first time and asked me to produce evidence that the material was really mine. I spent a week digging up dated files, putting together a time line, but in the end it didn’t lead to anything—the article is still out there and I had to refer to it in my thesis instead of the other way around. And now you're telling me how important it is to be open and share our work with others, how the hell am I supposed to feel about that?

I mean, it’s really sad to see how she keeps treating her PhD students, and not the least the women, but what am I supposed to do? I’m just one of them, with no power, and anyhow I have to think about my own situation, because if I defend them I will get into trouble myself. It’s not so easy, you know, if I don’t put myself first, no one else does.

We sat in the office of the head of department, and she told her version and then I was supposed to tell my version, but even as I spoke I felt the doubt growing in the room, even in myself—is this really how it happened, or had I misunderstood everything? Was this in fact just a “version,” as the chair put it, or was it the real thing? In the end, I didn’t file a complaint

© INGELA NILSSON, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_002 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

THE POLYPHONY OF ACADEMIA T because the whole situation made me feel so insecure and I had no witness to either the “incident” or the meeting. There are so many guidelines, rules and even laws, but somehow they rarely seem to work in practice.

It’s not as if he did anything, I mean nothing sexual, he didn’t touch me or anything, never. It was just the way in which he talked about women, always bringing up sexual situations from novels or films or the real world. The framed poster he had in his office, depicting half-naked women in some sort of ancient setting. The way in which he would always stand too close to you, forcing you to raise you head in order to look him in the eyes. The handwritten notes he would leave in your pigeon hole, instead of sending an email. Or even emails that were somehow too private, but never crossing the line. But he never did anything, of course, it’s not as if it was harassment, it was just super uncomfortable. But that’s life, you know, all these men acting more or less correctly in the open but secretly waving their dicks. What can you do?

So I said, “This is not OK, you were so mean to him, this is no way to behave, you should apologize.” But even though they had all heard what had been said and had seen the student fighting back his tears at the comments of the senior professor and then leave the room crying, no one wanted to support my complaint. The student was inexperienced and spoke broken English, the professor was a large man with a red face and a loud voice, knowing how to exert his power. They all knew that if they objected to his behavior, they might be next. My written complaint was countered by a letter from the dean, explaining that this is “simply the way he is,” nothing to be upset about.

Everyone knew about his right-wing ideas, of course, they were no secret and when he invited people over for drinks he was rather outspoken. But, I mean, it was his house and it’s a free country, right? Of course, that last event was unpleasant and people obviously got very upset, the Nazi thing might have been too much. But still, telling the whole story to the dean and then forcing him to apologize in public like that, it was pretty harsh, considering what a beloved teacher he had been for so long. What was the point, really, what did she gain by turning him in? Anyhow, it was all forgotten after that and things went back to normal, he kept teaching for at least ten more years and was awarded a pedagogical prize. We all make mistakes you know, we're just people.

I agree he’s a bit creepy, that’s no secret, but it’s your responsibility to handle him. Make sure you dress decently, button up your shirt properly— not like today—and don't wear short skirts. Don’t provoke him and he probably won't do anything to you. This is the way it is, so you might as well get used to it, that’s what I did, it’s what we all do.

Then she went on and on about all the important places she'd been to and the important people she’d met and knew, and how much they appreciated her, and I really tried to look interested because after all she is my senior and my supervisor, but in the end I felt that I had to say something, so I waited for her to take a breath and then I cut in, telling her that my article had been accepted by that journal. I expected her to be pleased, since she had read it and actually been quite helpful, but she looked at me as if I had offended her, then forced a smile and said “congratulations.” She then turned to her desk, shuffled around some papers and told me that our meeting was over, she had important things to do.

I was at the point of crying and then someone at the back of the room stood up and said, “Enough now, let’s move on. But first a five-minute break.” It was a professor I had never met before, from a different university, and as I was smoking a cigarette during the break, still fighting back my tears, he came up to me. At first he said nothing, just lit his cigarette and stood there, smoking. Then he said, “Sometimes people still do that to me, try to make me feel small, intimidating me in front of others. But then I imagine them as tiny people with tiny voices, of little or no importance. Let them whimper.” He put out his cigarette, nodded to me and left.

Ihave tried putting the voices in the freezer, but they come back and haunt me, sitting on the kitchen shelves, whispering from behind the bathroom mirror, sometimes sitting at the breakfast table while my partner and I have our eggs. I make up a Linnaean system in my head: Helplessness, Power abuse, Boundaries ... Why so few stories in the categories of Respect, Integrity, Solidarity? There must be more such stories, I’m sure there are more, but right now I just need to find space to store them. Not in my head, but perhaps in a book. Yes, a book might be a good idea. Taking us from despair to hope. Yes, a book, they all have to go into a book.

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© MONICA HELLSTROM, 2022

CHAPTER 3 What My cv Doesn't Tell You Julie Hansen

A good cv showcases your skills and your academic and professional achievements concisely and effectively. It’s well-organized and easy to read while accurately representing your highest accomplishments.

“WRITING AN EFFECTIVE ACADEMIC CV” (2019)

The academic curriculum vitae is a special genre, designed to be both terse and exhaustive, plodding a straight and narrow path of education, employment, publications ... At the same time, it is selective, trumpeting high points only, never lows. Unexplained gaps would hint vaguely of failure.

A recent application for something or other prompted me to undertake the tedious task of updating my cv. As I added new entries, I began to reflect on the kinds of professional experience, often unsought and painfully gained, that a CV will never acknowledge. To fill in those blanks requires a less self-assured genre, one that allows for the winding implied by the literal meaning of curriculum vitae—“course of life” What follows is my attempt at an alternative Cv.

In her memoir Educated (2018), Tara Westover relates what it was like to study at Cambridge University in the new millennium. In the popular imagination, an arrival at Cambridge signals success, and so it is in the narrative arc of Westover’s story:

After the porter left I stood, bookended by my suitcases, and stared out my little window at the mythic stone gate and its otherworldly battlements. Cambridge was just as I remembered: ancient, beautiful. I was different. I was not a visitor, not a guest. I was a member of the university. (p. 255)

She tells of an unusual upbringing in rural Idaho, with survivalist parents who were prepping for Armageddon and kept their children out of school. Against these odds, the self-taught Westover manages to get a higher education, earning

© JULIE HANSEN, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521025_003 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

WHAT MY CV DOESN’T TELL YOU 11 a PhD in history. To Westover, education represents freedom and self-invention, yet when she arrives at Cambridge, she feels out of place.

The circumstances of my own entry into academia fall somewhere between Westover’s and those of the other students she describes as blending in seamlessly at Cambridge. After graduating from high school, I enrolled at the state university on the other side of the lake. The oldest things on campus were trees, but I entered its halls (Collegiate Gothic style, anno 1950) with a sense of awe not unlike Westover’s at Cambridge. True to its etymology, the place served up the universe from an infinitude of perspectives. I was drawn to study literature for its capacity to explore the full range of human experience through words alone.

As an undergrad, I had only the vaguest awareness that there could be a backside to this world that so entranced me. Not until later did I realize there is no direct correlation between intellectual refinement and treating others well. There were occasional rumors of misconduct, but I didn’t want to hear these stories, much less believe them. I told myself they were anomalies in an otherwise benign world. Decades later, my former undergraduate advisor and longtime mentor would relate over dinner some scandals from the era of my student days. I didn’t want to hear them then either, and my conflicted reaction sparked our first disagreement in years (but I’m getting ahead of myself here ...).

Looking back, I imagine that my aunt, the black sheep of the family and the only other one to earn a PhD, must have faced obstacles as a professor in the 1970s. When I was a teenager, she made me promise never to learn to speed type, on the logic that people can’t treat you like a secretary if you don’t have secretarial skills. I broke this promise, naively secure in the belief that, after the battles fought by her generation, I would never encounter sexism in my chosen career.

My undergraduate degree was made possible by a combination of scholarships, student loans and the modest help my parents could provide. High tuition made graduate school a long shot, but thanks to a fellowship from a prestigious university, I could afford to spend a few more years studying literature. It was in grad school that the contours of the downside of academic life began to sharpen. The graduate students tiptoed around a temperamental departmental secretary, lest she wield her informal power to our disadvantage. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 3 pm, my small cohort would breathe a collective sigh of relief at having made it through another seminar on medieval literature without freezing up or starting to cry. Misery loves company, but even this kind of camaraderie can crack and fissure. In the beginning we were four, then three—too few to withstand the atmospheric pressure. In an unforgiving environment, it becomes harder to forgive one another.

Some professors exchanged harsh words in the corridors, others didn’t speak at all. The majority were nice to students, but one seemed to take out aggression obliquely, on the graduate students supervised by a colleague he disliked. It was this that reduced me to tears at my oral exams. Afterwards I was mortified not so much by the belittling words, as by my own show of weakness in response. Many times since in my academic career, I’ve told myself I need to toughen up.

Another graduate student consoled me with the fact that no one in recent departmental history had passed their orals without breaking down. To the credit of the compassionate department chair, I received her apology the next day. She was not present at my exams, but had heard. Somehow, everyone had. She called the incident unforgivable and attributed it to a feud that had nothing to do with me. It helped to hear this, and I had, after all, passed with distinction. You’ve been vindicated, said my consoler. Yet that moment of undeserved humiliation influences how I approach exam situations to this day. Some colleagues might think I’m too quick to intervene on behalf of students, but I can't tell students to toughen up, seeing as that’s never worked for me.

At the same time, the intense experience of graduate school was addictive. Never have I learned so much in so little time (even from the one professor who was not so kind). I basked in the aura of brilliant minds. The faculty were generous with their time and knowledge, my dissertation advisor ever-patient and encouraging. A slow reader, I lived by necessity with my nose in a book, spending entire contented days in an overstuffed armchair in the graduate reading room (Art Deco, anno 1938). I made my way through long reading lists, transformed by what I consumed. I traveled to my first conferences and took summer research sojourns in Europe. Two Nobel laureates gave poetry readings at my department. I was acquiring a taste for the intellectual pleasures of this profession, and there was no question that the good outweighed the bad.

Not long after defending my dissertation, I got lucky on the job market and accepted a position in a department distinguished by a collaborative spirit. As a product of the American educational system transplanted to Europe, Ihad a steep learning curve to climb, but my colleagues gave me a leg up. It was from them that I really began to learn how to teach.

I was fortunate to come to such a welcoming department straight out of grad school, but I’ve since witnessed disasters in the academic workplace. I’ve seen a thriving department, overflowing with students, decimated by internal strife that no one could get a handle on. The solution in the end was to downsize, rendering half the faculty redundant. Before we reached that sorry state, however, there was a five-day group therapy retreat, led by a consultant in Birkenstocks with a mandate to diagnose and treat our deficiencies. We sat

WHAT MY CV DOESN’T TELL YOU 13 in a circle eight hours each day, urged to reveal our innermost thoughts and feelings. “There will be yin and yang, crying and screaming,’ the therapist had (rather alarmingly) explained to me over the phone when I tried (unsuccessfully) to get myself excused on the grounds that I was eight months pregnant. He assigned us divisive little tasks, like listing the five best and worst traits of each colleague. Reluctance to participate was viewed as an act of insubordination, of which there were plenty over the course of the retreat. If any good came of that experience, it was that it united us in collective distaste and resistance. On the fourth day, the therapist lost patience and accused us of undermining his work. “Never in twenty years,” he complained, “have I met such a hopeless group of people.”

Once an organizational psychologist, who had been hired by a university to investigate a harassment complaint, explained what he thought I needed to know: that being undermined by colleagues is a normal part of any workplace—the implication being that I should just toughen up. Needless to say, I haven't followed this advice, and it turns out that part of my education has entailed learning what I am no longer willing to accept.

Yet my worklife has been far from bad—consult my cv and you will see the high points. I have been the beneficiary of generous resources, monetary as well as less quantifiable kinds, such as encouragement, kindness and constructive feedback. I have experienced the deep satisfaction that comes from collaboration with colleagues on equal terms, unmarred by envy and competition. And the classroom always provides a welcome refuge from collegial strife.

The truth of the matter is that the course of my academic life has wound through both good and bad, and as time goes on, it’s getting harder to reconcile the two. Once, when intradepartmental intrigues got so bad as to make me ill, the physician who examined me asked where I worked. On hearing the answer, she shook her head knowingly, making it clear I was not the first from my profession to turn up in her clinic. Yet I continue along the well-trodden path, still hoping the good can be made to outweigh the bad.