by Ann E. Cudd
I have a senior colleague, a man whose work is in metaphysics and epistemology, while mine is very decidedly not, who regularly tells me what I am doing wrong. He acts as if he is speaking as a mentor but he makes me feel self-conscious and self-critical where I am not normally. He comes to my office after faculty meetings to offer critiques of things that I have said in the meeting. And he finds other ways to suggest that I am not doing well. For example, he tells me my involvement with some of the interdisciplinary studies programs (like gender studies and Black studies) won’t help me advance my career, even though that work is very important to me and central to my research and teaching. It’s hard for me to know what exactly I can file a complaint about. I’m not shy or sheepish or unable to speak for myself, but I need to find a way to stop this because it is making me unable to do my job well.
I am sorry to hear that you have had to deal with such discouraging remarks from your senior colleague, someone who should be encouraging and supportive. It may be that he was opposed to hiring in your field, but that by no means justifies his treatment of you. When a department acts collectively to hire a new colleague, they are, in my opinion, duty-bound to support that colleague regardless of their area of research. Furthermore, you are entitled to your opinion in faculty meetings and to pursue the area of research that inspires you to do your best work, as well as to affiliate with colleagues in any other area in the university or beyond who make up your intellectual community. That’s what academic freedom is, after all, and you are entitled to it regardless of your tenure status.
From your question, it is not clear how much support you receive from other colleagues, especially your department chair. If possible, you should enlist their support. If you have an officially designated mentor in your department, you should let them know what is going on and ask them for assistance. They could explain to the problematic colleague that their advice is not helpful and is making you feel bad and adversely affecting your work, and that to continue it is bullying behavior. In fact, I think it is important to name this behavior as such. This makes clear the seriousness of its effect on you, and puts the person on notice that the behavior, if continued, could be actionable.
If you do not have a mentor, or if the mentor is not effective in stopping the behavior, you should go to the department chair with the same request for assistance. As soon as the problematic colleague repeats the behavior after having been talked to about it, it is reasonable to file a formal grievance according to your university’s policy. This will normally begin with the chair, who will by now be aware of the bullying behavior.
Of course, not all chairs are good at engaging colleagues in difficult conversations. And your colleague may not stop the behavior without escalating further. Another resource is an ombuds, if your university has one. That person will be able to explain all of the resources available to you and the steps in escalating a grievance. If there is no ombuds, then your next stop is at the dean level–you should start with the contact associate dean for your department or with the—or with an associate/vice provost for faculty affairs.
However, filing a grievance against a senior colleague is always fraught. The person may react well and apologize for his behavior and give you space to be a fully vested member of your department. But some will react very badly, and you may need to write off that person’s support for your promotion and tenure case. That is not an automatic killer. I have endorsed many tenure cases as dean or provost with one or a few votes against the candidate, particularly when circumstances like this are explained in the chair’s or dean’s letter. In such cases, the written record of having filed a complaint can be very important. If necessary, you can introduce this fact into your dossier if you get a negative tenure recommendation by the department. I have even seen candidates tenured despite a negative recommendation from their department if there are such facts.
You may not believe that it is worth this effort to stop your problematic colleague’s behavior. You might just want to be left alone, although it sounds like you have tried to indicate that to your colleague to no avail. In that case, I have alternative advice. If there is a trusted senior colleague who generally supports your view in department meetings, that can help deflect the critical comments in meetings. You could ask them to look for opportunities to make supportive comments. Then you could mention those when your problematic colleague comes to your office after the meetings and say that you believe your opinion shares support and needs to be heard. As for the advice about your career, you should address that straight on to say that this is the research area that you are inspired to work in and in which you can do your best work. If it is an area that the department specifically hired you work in, then you should say that. Then tell him that, with all due respect, he is not an expert in the area and so his advice is not helpful.
Above all, keep focused on your own writing and research goals. Please know that there are so many of us in the profession who welcome your new ideas and perspective. Philosophy needs people who will push forward in new directions. Many of us have also faced this kind of discouragement and persisted to the point where the APA looks very different than it once did. This blog is evidence of that. So, know that you are not alone in the wider profession.
Ann E. Cudd is the Provost, Senior Vice Chancellor and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Analyzing Oppression (Oxford University Press, 2006), editor with Nancy Holmstrom of Capitalism: For and Against: A Feminist Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Her work focuses on the intersection of economics and philosophy in a feminist vein.
The Women in Philosophy series is running a mini-series called “Ask a Senior Woman Philosopher.” The first installment was posted in August 2018, the second in December 2018, the third in January 2019 and the fourth in July 2019. If you have a question for which you would like advice from a senior woman philosopher but don’t have someone to ask or don’t feel like you can ask the senior women philosophers you know, send your question to the series editor, Adriel M. Trott, at trotta [at] wabash [dot] edu. Questions will be anonymized and a suitable respondent found.
These are great suggestions, Ann. Here’s a follow-up, especially if their department or college proves unwilling to address the questioner’s concerns: You might consider looking for a peer mentoring group that includes faculty at your career stage, but in other departments. Such a group can provide a safe environment in which to raise concerns. And some of your peers may have faced similar situations and found solutions that work around the constraints of your particular academic environment.
So sorry this is happening–hope your situation improves soon.
Thank you APA Blog for posting this and thank you Ann for your great advice!
I just wanted to add this following note, which is consistent with the advice Ann gave:
The faculty asking the question (whom I will refer to as Anonymous) did not mention anything about whether or not she approached the overbearing faculty member, on a professional yet informal, one-to-one basis (perhaps over email) to let them know about their concerns.
I would recommend this as at least one of the first steps, perhaps in conjunction with the others that Ann recommended or prior to taking those steps. Ann mentioned something like this in her response, but I wanted to stress having a professional, informal, one-to-one correspondence, and to suggest that Anonymous take an approach that takes a somewhat charitable interpretation of what the overbearing faculty is doing, which would also allow the overbearing faculty to save face while getting Anonymous’s concerns heard and relevant behavior corrected.
More specifically, I would start the conversation with something like, “I know you are trying to help me with my professional development, and you seem to be interested in making sure that I do all the things I need to do in order to receive tenure, but I wanted to let you know that your approach is actually counter-productive and detrimental to me. For example, it does not help me when you…and it only works to. . . . So, I would appreciate it if you refrained from continuing to do so. If you would like to support my professional development in a way that would be more productive for me, which I would really appreciate, I have found that the following types of approaches are more beneficial for me. . .”
From the description Anonymous gave of the overbearing faculty member, it seems that he might genuinely be interested in supporting Anonymous’s professional development, but he may not have a very good idea as to how to do so. Perhaps how he believes he is helping is the way he was trained, so he is doing what he does out of habit.
The reason why I am making this note is that I believe there are many male (as well as women, etc.) faculty members who, especially given our discipline’s drive to increase diversity, sincerely want to support and encourage marginalized and minority faculty members. The problem is that they don’t really know how to do so, mostly because they haven’t taken or find it difficult to take the marginalized or minority faculty’s perspective, or they have not considered or recognized that certain approaches just don’t work for everyone. This, of course does not mean we should simply allow overbearing faculty members to do as they please, but it means that we might also be a bit more sympathetic or empathetic about the overbearing faculty member’s difficulties and try to initially approach them with a more charitable interpretation, with a feeling of trust, cooperation, and respect.
I initially suggested an email correspondence because such correspondences allow the exchange to take place under conditions that would not necessarily lend themselves to heated exchanges and misunderstandings. In email exchanges, each person has the time they need to digest the correspondence and to craft an appropriate response. Plus, a record of such exchanges can be kept for any further action if it is necessary at some future time.
However, my personal preference would be to have a professional, informal, one-to-one, face-to-face conversation with the overbearing faculty, mostly because I would want to first demonstrate to the faculty member that I am willing to extend to them an attitude of trust, cooperation, and respect, which I would hope they would return by being open, non-defensive, and non-aggressive about what I intend to speak with them about. If this fails, however, I would most likely follow-up with more formal procedures, including a formal email and soliciting the help of my chair.
I would also consider the possibility that your colleague is trying to convey a departmental preference for a certain kind of work to you and try to get clearer on whether his preferences are widely shared. This might affect whether you want to stay at your current institution and is worth knowing. If you do approach your department head (which strikes me as much potentially quite difficult and fraught given that you might not know his or her view of your colleague’s behavior) this could be a way in to the conversation. Keep in mind that you can succeed in this profession even if your current job is not a good fit as long as you publish and do the other things necessary to stay competitive on the job market. Good luck!