Dodging Ashtrays: On the powerlessness of the graduate student

Late last year, I revisited a New York Times piece by Errol Morris on Thomas Kuhn. There is a lot to chew on in this multi-part essay – I returned to it as part of preparing a lecture for my students on the scientific revolution, as it helps flesh out the historical conundrums of studying science in that time period. However, the central anecdote that gives the series its title – “The Ashtray” – ended up occupying much more of my head space than anything else.

To make a fairly short story shorter, Morris, as a young graduate student, insisted on challenging Kuhn on one of his main theoretical tenets, and Kuhn responded by hurling an ashtray at his head. Morris then goes on to consider this move in a philosophical sense, as what one does when they refuse to engage with the logic of an objection but instead just categorically reject it. But to me, Morris’ swift analytical turn seemed startling and inappropriate: Wait, what did he do? He threw an ashtray at your head?! So your faculty adviser attempted to physically assault you for being critical, and now we’re already moving on to make a cute analogy out of this extraordinary abuse of power?

So while I was sitting there thinking, “holy shit,” I also realized I had read this before, while I was a graduate student, and apparently didn’t think much of it then. But a lot had happened since then. Since then, I had two close friends forced to rearrange their dissertation committee because of the same adviser who played incredibly cruel games with the power they held over them. In one instance, the professor in question informed my friend that if she agreed to take the funding offered to her by the organizers of a conference to attend, then she would jeopardize receiving letters of recommendation from her own dissertation adviser. For whatever inscrutable reason, her professor did not like her prioritizing this excellent opportunity. So they threatened to withdrawal their support. Instead, my friend ended up withdrawing from her adviser, as she rightly recognized that there was no working with someone so obscenely bent on exercising, and abusing, their power.

I also first read the essay before I became familiar with the extraordinary callousness with which women, people of color, and people with mental health disabilities could be treated by the academy. I was aware of the pressure placed on all of us, sure; but my own privileges had allowed me to skate around the worst of grad school anxiety fairly deftly, an option not open to most. But as I became more integrated into the social life of a circle of grad school friends, the stories started piling up. One friend felt so belittled and dismissed by a member of her comps committee, it is not an exaggeration to say that this professor played a role in her eventual decision to drop out. Multiple other students expressed fear of the same faculty member, so much so that they kept as mum as possible about their struggles for fear of retaliation.

So there is a sampling of the kind of everyday culture of being an asshole that is normalized in the academy. What is especially troubling about these incidents is how few options graduate students caught in these situations have. First, switching advisers and mentors is never an easy process; from the threat of retaliation to the bureaucratic transaction costs, the strain and stress of deciding to make a switch is considerable. However, this assumes that you even have any other options on hand – what if your department does not have anyone else in your field? What if you came to your department specifically to study with this faculty member, and can’t afford to have your freshly minted research lack their explicit endorsement on the job market? What do you do then?

If, in my graduate program, there were procedures and protocol set up to deal with such dilemmas, neither I nor any of my colleagues were ever made aware of them. Instead, we were forced to scramble for solutions in the back-channels; talk to this or that member of the faculty who might know what to do, or might have advice about how to proceed, and might also simply reassure the traumatized student that what was going on was not their fault. Perhaps the situation was not so dire that the student felt they had to switch advisors but, couldn’t someone else perhaps talk to the faculty member about not being such a jerk? No, apparently. The best response we got was that yes, so-and-so is infamous for these transgressions, but you either grin and bear it or you find a way out. Worse, some students were gaslighted, told they were just imagining these insults to their dignity and top-down commands about what kind of historian they had to become. What are you talking about?, some were asked. I always thought that faculty member to be very friendly. You must have misunderstood.

The lack of institutional recognition of professors abusing their power over their graduate students becomes less surprising when you encounter some of the excuses that emerge in even spectacular cases. Last year a story broke that the renowned literary professor Avital Ronnell had been accused by a former student of sexual harassment, the details of which made perfectly clear that Professor Ronnell had undoubtedly abused her power. And yet, scores of academics jumped to her defense, and along with circulating a letter of support, several key talking points popped up on academic social media circles. Some of these were truly astounding in their combination of cluelessness and callousness. Some said that since Ronnell was herself a woman and a feminist, she couldn’t really sexually harass anyone, despite that in academic terms, she clearly held the more powerful position. Others lamented that with increased institutional response to such incidents, a soul-crushing puritanism would be imposed on the sexy life-of-the-mind world of academia, reducing all student/faculty interactions to mere bureaucratic routine. This last one really floored me. OH NO, the #MeToo movement is going to make it so we can’t even blur the lines between academic exchange and exploring our inner kinky selves anymore? What a fucking tragedy.

But maybe this is a real problem for someone who can’t tell the difference. And therein lies, I have to speculate, one cause of these pathetic reactionary arguments against the demands of the #MeToo movement. Many academics come into the field with fantasies of gaining social and cultural status swimming around somewhere in their head. This in itself is not a horrible sin nor impossible to empathize with; it’s ok to dream of a day where people regularly describe you as brilliant or insightful, and who doesn’t want to be treated as though their thoughts and opinions mean something and matter in this world?

This should not, however, be a primary motive for pursuing academic work, and combined with a lack of judgment or self-criticism, it can lead to such spectacles as fellow academics penning entire books on why it is important to preserve the possibility of a professor, say, hitting on their grad students. Even the anecdote at the center of Morris’ essay speaks to the trope of the illusive but alluring professor – Kuhn apparently smoked like a chimney (alas, another fine aspect of departmental life this politically correct/anti-work-space-filled-with-poison era has taken from us) while dictating what talks his graduate students could and could not go to, and it’s hard to read such stories and not imagine the proverbial faculty room with leather chairs and wise men with cigars and whisky glasses sitting back enjoying their mastery over both the mysteries of life and their young proteges. That only the most exclusive of universities still have the faculty lounge and that they occasionally let women and non-whites in as well has not, it seems, detracted too much from the allure. Of course it is hard for me to prove that this fantasy of personal power is really at play that much here; but, fortunately, every now and then someone goes ahead and admits as much.[1]

Whatever the peculiarities of the trope of the professor as wise/sexy authority figure, at the end of the day we are talking about the pull of power and its capacity to convince those who wield it that it is essential to doing all the good they do. In academia, however, it feels particularly galling to discover that those who task themselves, more often than not, with the study of how power works and what forms power can take then go on to fail miserably at preventing the abuse of power in their own institutions or even recognizing that such abuse constitutes a real and serious problem. Of course not all historians, sociologists, literary professors or political scientists study or even express interest in power dynamics, but plenty of them do; and yet that seems to be no reliable check against their own susceptibility to falling under its spell. Perhaps the lesson here is just as old as time – power corrupts and therefore, structures matter. No amount of training, cultural conditioning, or mere finger-wagging will prevent some people from abusing the institutional power granted to them.

This is why it is so important that we begin to demand some forms of accountability for abusive professors. While protocol exists for severe cases, such as sexual harassment, we should note how poorly they have served so many of us and, moreover, insist that this is not enough. Nobody should have to subject themselves to derision or emotional manipulation on a regular basis to get through an already brutal system of gatekeeping. When working with a particular faculty member becomes incompatible with someone’s mental health, the onus should not be on the student to “prove” that their adviser is an asshole. Of course, this will invoke all the usual fears of false accusations and lurid tales of the bitter and vengeful student. But such problems are not an excuse to prefer the powerlessness of the much more common case of the grad student without any options. Our priority, as always, should rest with those with nowhere to go.

[1] The incident linked to above was actually addressed here at this blog by L.D. Burnett, resulting in more bad behavior from the professor facing criticism.