follow-up on the last post

The previous post was actually meant to take off from my friend’s situation and give more general advice. But she was unconvinced by a couple of parts of it, so here’s a brief follow-up:

1. My friend wonders, understandably and politely, if the “abusive relationship” analogy was influenced by the fact that she is a woman. But I can honestly say that I was thinking of men who linger in abusive relationships when I wrote that part.I hope she’ll just trust me here: the images in my mind were of male friends who have grovelled in mistreatment for ages. It happens, believe me.

2. Here’s another thing she said: “To say that’s it’s basically like getting a driver’s license is a good way to think about it, but you and I know that’s just not how it works, and the responsibility for the psychic undermining that often takes place needs to be better addressed by departments, not just at the individual level.”

I should have been clearer. I’m not saying that’s how it works; I’m saying that you should pretend that that’s how it works as a way of finishing and moving on.

She’s also right that it often happens at a departmental level, so that changing individual advisors just isn’t enough.

3. “Really. It just seems to me that if it’s just a matter of not getting caught up in ‘weaving a crisis story’ in order to get to work on what’s important, then why all these posts by several folks about trolls, grey vampires and minotaurs in academia? Somethin’ ain’t right, and I really don’t think it’s a matter of ‘self-inflicted wounds.'”

There are definite constellations of nasty, dangerous people. K-Punk’s figure of the “troll master” is the most dangerous of all at the graduate school level. These sorts of people drastically distort the psychological space in a Department (though they are often strangely powerless outside it; I can think of at least three good examples, but for obvious professional reasons can’t name them here).

Here what was meant to be the point of my last post… It’s not all in your mind. University professors have plenty of psychological issues, and they do often play them out with students. However, students often make it much worse for themselves. It’s better to look at the situation in purely practical, problem-solving terms, because there probably isn’t much you can do to reform a department, and certainly not to reform the psyche of an individual Minotaur.