I’m a pretty positive person. I generally enjoy philosophy and academia and I’m hopeful in a lot of cases when my friends are not. I also believe in always having a positive account in my research. So this post really isn’t about pessimism and “burning it all down”, even though it might read a bit like that. And I may end with a positive account, too.
I’ve recently entered an interesting stage which one might describe as “having been around enough”. The first time I noticed this was at a (virtual) school-wide workshop on antiracism organized by my friend Jingyi and a couple of other non-philosophy grad students. The speaker was invited from outside the school. Our dean was also there as a panelist. During the Q&A, I asked if the speaker had any advice on climate surveys. I designed a climate survey for our department, which I think it’s pretty good but not perfect. I’ve been thinking about how to improve it, but there’s remarkably little useful information online.
The speaker said some things (I don’t even remember what), then the dean chimed in to say that there has been a school-wide climate survey a year ago and he could get me in touch with whomever worked on it if I’m interested in knowing more.
The person who worked on it was, in fact, me. I was hired to analyze the school-wide survey after I conducted the one for my own department. I didn’t write the school-wide survey. All I can say is that it is really, really bad. In fact, something that well funded can be that bad was part of the reason that got me into survey design, and one of my dissertation chapters stemmed from this.
Of course, there’s no reason why the dean should know this, since I didn’t work with him (I worked with a couple of associate deans). So this isn’t a story about losing credit. Jingyi private-messaged me a bunch of LOLs and a faculty member emailed me a joke about it. It was a funny story.
A few weeks later, I attended the (virtual) MAP session (also co-organized by Jingyi) at the Eastern APA, which included a series of short talks on climate related stuff. The first talk was given by a faculty member and served as an overview. She went over a few key aspects of climate, all pretty standard to people who’ve gone to this type of events before. As is also standard, her talk ended with a list of resources.
The next part is new, though: I looked at that list, and realized that I’ve interacted with most of them and know people who’ve interacted with the rest. and know for a fact that they are all useless.
This realization surprised me a little. My first response was to try to introspect and see if I’m being too cynical and unfair. But then I thought: no, there’s something to it.
Part of this is also motivated by some stories I’ve heard recently (none of which I’m at liberty to share) where people who are supposed to “help” then stab you instead. It happens more often than a newcomer would expect, and it tends to have a disproportionally large psychological effect when it does. — It’s not about being stabbed, as many of us are routinely stabbed and we are used to it. It’s about being stabbed when we least expect it that hurts the most. But why do we not expect it? — we don’t expect it because these people are routinely presented as “problem solvers” in spaces where we’re supposed to honestly talk about problems.
As is often the case, I’ve been exceedingly lucky in this regard in that I got a mild version of it which hurt just enough for me to learn the lesson without damaging my soul. A few years ago I talked to the ombudsperson’s office. They were completely useless and not interested in helping.
Not all of these places are bad, of course. Every so often you meet someone who at least understands the problem and is at least honest about what they can/can’t do. I was reminded of one such instance too. A year ago I went to a “diversity mentorship training”, which I had very little hope in but thought I should go through a couple of these before I take a stance on how bad they are. It was better than I expected but overall not very useful. But that story is for another day.
At some point, a person from Office of Equal Opportunity & Diversity (OEOD) came to give a session on how discrimination and harassment are defined. At the end of the workshop, he gave a list of resources as per usual. I told him that I talked to these people on his list, they pointed me in a circle, and that the ombudsperson’s office was useless. He thought a bit and asked me to book a time with him.
So I did and we met. I didn’t think the problem I was dealing with fell within his jurisdiction, but he explained that he could help deal with it even if it didn’t. At the end of the day, not a lot of concrete steps were taken, which was not surprising. I still appreciated how much he understood the complexity of the problem. It was reassuring — perhaps reassuring enough — that his analysis of the situation was the same as mine. I wasn’t crazy. I have since referred a couple of people to him.
Although he is as close to a “solution” as I’ve ever come across, he still isn’t one. Most of these things are never “resolved”. At best, some mitigation is proposed; retaliation is not immediate; a promise for future safeguarding is made which may or may not be kept.
All of this is fine if we know that that’s what we are dealing with. Academics are used to disappointments — I mean this in the most loving way. The project that first came to you is very likely not going to be the final project that you finish. The experiment as is originally designed will not be the experiment that is carried out. We know how to deal with them and we mentor newcomers to learn to expect them. We tell people “it’s okay if you didn’t write as much as you wanted to over the summer” or “promising grant proposals are rejected all the time”.
Why don’t we do the same for climate related mentorship, then? Job-search workshops usually don’t end with a list of practices where it is expected that, if you follow them, you are pretty much guaranteed a job. And yet climate workshops often give off the impression that, if you just remember the list of resources at the end, you would be able to deal with most cases just fine. As a descriptive claim, it is false.
That’s all the depressing thoughts for today 🙂 The positive account is: maybe don’t do it next time.
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