Universities Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

The New York Times recently told the chilling story of a woman doctoral candidate who left her doctoral program in the late 1960s because she was sexually harassed and assaulted.  As she recounts it:

“There was no word for sexual harassment, there was no language for this, there was no Title IX, no administrator to report it to. I felt shame as if I had done something wrong, and there was no recourse. So I left.”

Well, despite Title IX and administrators to report such conduct to now, two women I know at the university where I was recently a visiting assistant professor were not a whole lot better off.  They each felt that their complaints about a graduate student they accused of stalking, harassment, and assault were grossly mishandled. One woman was my office mate, the other was a student who had taken five courses with me, and gone on a summer abroad program in London that I co-taught. Disgusted, my office mate left Michigan, and my student left the university before graduating because staying there was too traumatic.

Their stories and similar ones around the country inspired my new mystery State University of Murder.

Real people, places, events have never gone directly into my fiction: they’re transformed in myriad ways.  Those two women were widely covered in the media and their stories raised questions about administrative arrogance, malfeasance, and lack of humanity.  Traits that administrators at universities across the country demonstrate all too often.  I hear horror stories from friends who are teaching, and have heard them whenever I speak at a college or university.  Sooner or later somebody tells me about high-handed, grossly overpaid administrators.  It’s a national scandal.

In State University of Murder, professor Nick Hoffman has survived a mass shooting to find himself in a renamed department which has been moved to a different building in an attempt to tamp down the bad publicity generated by the shooting.  The brand-new new chairman, an import from France, is the height of grandiosity, not surprisingly with a first name like Napoléon.  Is the chairman mercurial and contemptuous?  Does he alienate nearly everyone he comes into contact with? Does he evoke murderous rage?  Absolutely.

As the mystery builds, I pay tribute along the way to the former assistant professor and the student who shared their stories with me.  And to the women students and faculty who find their universities toxic despite how far we’ve supposedly come from the 1960s.

Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-six books in genres from memoir to mystery and teaches creative writing online at writewithoutborders.com where he also offers editing services.  His latest academic mystery is State University of Murder and his June workshop is Mystery Writing 1.0.


Don’t Forget The Academic Underclass on Independence Day

A friend at one large university told me he’s been watching the eerie spread of administrators at his school: they’ve been taking over office space and even parking spaces like something out of a horror movie. Meanwhile, just like most other colleges and universities around the country, his school spends less money every year on tenure-track faculty, hiring adjuncts who do the same work at much less than half the pay.

More than 50% of the faculty at many schools are adjuncts. At some, it’s closer to two thirds, and without them, colleges and universities wouldn’t function. As NPR has reported, “to get a full course load, many adjuncts have to teach on multiple campuses, miles apart. Like academic nomads, their cars are their offices, and their backpacks are their filing cabinets.”

These “contingent” faculty form a vast underclass. Without real offices, many end up having to meet their students in lounges or cafeterias. Not only do they have piss-poor working conditions and health insurance, but they lack respect. That might seem low on the list, but it’s actually very important. Tenured faculty and department chairs often treat them like servants–or worse.

One adjunct I know was rudely dismissed from a one-on-one meeting with the department chair as if she was a Victorian-era maid who had begged her haughty mistress for an extra day off to take care of her sick mother. Her sin? She’d inquired about teaching a certain course she was actually over-qualified for.

Another reported being lied to about being reassigned from upper level courses and finding out later that the real reason was resentment from tenure-track “colleagues.” The psychological atmosphere is consistently draining, but too many adjuncts can’t quit because they need the jobs and have to swallow the insults—and teaching is their passion.

Day to day, adjuncts don’t just deal with arrogant and inflexible administrators. Sometimes even support staff treat them badly, because they know they can, and not enough campuses have fixed-term faculty unions that will stand up for them. And when there are unions, if tenure-stream faculty aren’t unionized, those faculty can regard the adjuncts’ unions with contempt, and may even feel threatened.

Adjuncts can have just as many credentials and publications as their tenured colleagues—but that doesn’t matter. The magical word “tenure” bestows an exalted status that they lack and reduces them to second-class citizens or worse in the madly hierarchical academic world.

College and universities profit obscenely from this cheap labor source. The system is arbitrary, corrupt, and unjust, nestled in the heart of an institution which supposedly enshrines humanistic values.

Are you an adjunct?  Have you been mistreated or discriminated against?  Feel free to share your story in the comments section below.

Lev Raphael’s Nick Hoffman mysteries are set at the fictional State University of Michigan and have been praised by the New York Times Book Review and many other newspapers and magazines.  A veteran of university teaching, he now teaches creative writing online at writewithoutborders.com.  Registration for his memoir workshop closes very soon.

Commencement Speeches Are Not Free Speech







