Lost the capacity to handle workplace cruelty.

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Or maybe I've never really had to deal with it before. Long story, but I'm staff and adjunct faculty at a university, and got totally thrown under the bus a few months ago. Kept my job, stellar performance review and all that (as it should've been; they pay me less than a grad student, and I'm working for them like I'm being paid $80K), and this is ordinary academic politics -- but wow, these are awful, sick people. And I don't want to work for or with them. I find the whole experience permanently demoralizing, it seems, and it's taken me months to recognize that I don't have to go on doing them favors. And that I'm still interested in doing my own work (am a writer).

Extricating myself doesn't seem easy, though -- I'm a single mom, actually do need the money, and got the job after 6 years' trying to get something more stable than endless freelance. I know in my heart that this problem -- awful people -- will exist anywhere there's a large enough stack of money to support us and offer some security. I also know that in eight years I can go back to living like a writer, on nothing, and stop trying to live in these people's world. In the meantime though I find myself going around and around in a little circle about what to do, and it leaves me suicidal at times. (To answer questions: no, I don't have anyone else who will help me; no, I can't move to find a better job.)

I'm very tired.

The only thing that helps me is focus, persistence, skills---and finding an ally. Even then, very tough. Is there anyone you can lean on even a little at work?

I wish I knew how to handle office politics.

Are there no other universities in your area? You kept your job this time, but just saying that makes it sound as though you had something to worry about. Before something like that happens again, can you at least start looking around, while you still have that "stellar performance review"?
Unless they're working you so hard that you can't focus on anything else.

Other staff are very sympathetic, because they're all abused by faculty, and there's this freaky upstairs/downstairs thing that happens. It's really sick, and for the first time, I find myself thinking that tenure's a big mistake, we ought to do away with it and have everyone on 3-year contracts. Even the faculty who saw this going on and were sympathetic are powerless to do anything about it. They aren't willing to apply much moral suasion to the situation, either, because after all I'm only staff and expendable, whereas they have to live with these nutjob-colleagues for the rest of their careers. I'm not worth fighting over, in other words.

The thing is, though, I don't want to go huddle in a club with other abused and snuffle and suck it up and return bravely to work. That's sick, too. I'm totally happy to do a job, provide services, be pro about it, give far more than they're paying for -- but this stuff is crazy and horrible, and mostly I'm shocked and really sad to see people behaving this way. In retrospect I'm not really surprised, because I showed up and was seriously entrepreneurial, very visible, and made a splash, also made immediate friends with deans, started building an undergrad internship program, was instrumental in new degree program development, that kind of thing. And I work with some deeply insecure people who tall-poppied me right away.

What it is: I'm much too old for this sort of nonsense and have work of my own to do, and not many decades left for it. I don't want to spend time or energy on academic politics and have already decided i will not. but I also see that I don't want to be in this environment. I do hear other people saying that this department or that department is better, but I think this is nonsense. Nearly all of universityland is a scam, and it all operates roughly the same way, run by terribly fragile egos housed in overaged adolescents. So I doubt very much that one corner of it is substantially different from another, if you're working there.

@Tahitii: no, I'm way out in the middle of nowhere, and this is the local land-grant flagship. But it doesn't matter. If I could get by working part-time retail or some other drone job I'd be fine with that, it's a day job. I just can't earn enough that way to support a kid. The university job also comes with excellent benefits for part-time work.

Hi, as one fallback position, I like "family matter I have to take care of."  Now, it is half quitting.  Please be advised of that.  It might well result in lost of job.  But I think it's the more mature way of calling in sick.  And I think it's kind of a power move and a move of quiet confidence not giving more information.

And if you need to report something which escalates or continues just as bad, I like the method of "beginning to be a problem," even if it has clearly been a problem for some time.  

The bystander effect of people witnessing mistreatment or bullying behavior and not doing anything, really because they don't want to be inconvenienced or don't have the skills, and then thinking of a high-sounding reason not to get involved, I think is one of the least flattering traits of human beings.  And yes, we on the spectrum probably do this as well, but I think it's probably more of a problem with neurotypical persons.

Maybe take the tact that you're busy.  I know that if I need to think and write on a pad in a semi-public place, I might open a book just so it seems like I'm conventionally busy.

And realizing that you're facing an entrenched bullying situation.

Maybe skimming in a sense, still doing the things most important to the job, but also taking time to look for new projects in freelancing?  Now, I personally have never or seldom been able to follow the conventional advice of looking for a job while I have a job.  But you may have greater skills than me in some important areas.

Well, I realized what to do. And what it comes down to is that I'm stopping -- already have stopped, really -- giving them free labor. I've been doing several times what I've been paid for, so that's done now.

The other thing is that my university has this weird setup -- I don't know if this is common to universities, or what -- but it's like they think they're playing entrepreneurism, where they give you a job and then half your job is to persuade...er...whoever might turn out to be important, and nobody really knows who that is...that your job's essential and that they should continue to pay for it. This is nuts, of course, and I shouldn't have agreed to play in the first place. They also do this thing where you're invited to knock yourself out in hopes that they'll pay you adequately someday, and I guess that's because they're accustomed to abusing grad students. I don't know. The whole ethic is bats. Anyway, I'm done with it.

I'll talk with my boss next week, and make it plain that I'm happy to work chain-of-command style: if she and the department chair, jointly, have some idea about something faculty want, and I can deliver, I will do it. It's her job to persuade faculty that they want it, not mine. If it turns out they don't want it, she takes the hit, not me. If faculty can't decide what my job is, this is not my problem either. But I'm done inventing the job and being entrepreneurial, particularly for the laughable pay. The idea factory has closed up shop. They need to figure out what it is they want to pay me for, and if the answer turns out to be "nothing"....well, okay, then, c ya.

I'm actually pretty angry now, because I can see how openly this was a setup, they set me up, and I went for it, cheap.

Yes, people are happy to let you work yourself to death for minimal pay and still complain about you. Glad you're stopping the free labor, I was stuck I that trap for awhile. Hard to stop fully I admit, though.

It sounds as dysfunctional as the way Kroger grocery store treats checkers!  I have heard that universities will try and get three adjunct persons to do the work one full-time faculty member used to do, and with benefits and pay combined, pay the three adjuncts only half of what they used to pay the full-time person.

I would use time as the main selling point.  With your boss, just tell her you don't have the time, plus you're not really sure it's your job as a part-time person to sell all the this, well, maybe it's a good thing, but I just do not have the time.  That is, I might undersell and maybe even try and find a bit of a humorous streak.

It really does sound crazy.  It's like they take a dysfunctional system and overlay a language of entrepreneurism.

And I'd keep the meeting with her on the short side, like under 10 minutes.  It's like too long a meeting can come back and bite you.  Or, even if she sincerely interacts and likes you during the course of the meeting, in the inevitable later 'balancing act,' as a part-time person you will come out on the losing side, as you well know.    

This seems accurate, any idea why?

God, I'm probably the wrong person to ask, but not a lot of people want to chew over someone else's grievances endlessly, and 10 min is actually a lot of talking time. She does like me, very much, but you're right, Aardvark, about the losing-side thing. In fact I just pushed her to reword part of my annual review, because she wanted to "rebalance" by talking about faculty's appalling behavior there, and I thought it made it sound as though I was partly responsible. (By "pushed her" I mean I told her I was really upset, and wanted to come talk to her and find out what she actually meant, and also that I wasn't going to acknowledge receipt of the review in that form. Even though I'd gotten the highest score possible overall. University people are crazy and I didn't want to have stuff in my written record that could be interpreted as "troublemaker".)

Adjuncts most places are paid astonishingly poorly. I'm lucky -- I'm being paid actual money for the teaching I do, though no, it's nowhere near what faculty get. The structure of the place...I was walking around today, and realized what the problem is, why things go so deeply toxic in universities, and why they stay that way, with people suing each other, and marching off to ombudspeople, and issuing threats and the like: Nobody's really in charge. Lines are seldom bright. You can't fire most of the faculty, so you can't stop them from bullying people, and you can't force them to...do anything, really, except teach a few classes. If they do it badly, all you can do is shuffle them off to teach something else. Everything that happens has to happen by endless bouts of politicking and many, many rounds of meetings. And it's all compounded by the genuine belief many of these people have that they're somehow special in the universe, that they're on a more important mission than other people are, and that it's right and meet that the public should be forced to pay them high salaries. (Not that they believe they have high salaries.) Why are they special? Because they have PhDs and know a lot about [very narrow subject which is crucial to the wellbeing of humanity]. They also can't escape each other, because it's almost impossible to get a tenured-professor job anywhere at this point. So this is where people actually wait for each other to die. No joke. And in the meantime they slink around frightened of each other, or planning attacks and recruiting allies.

So. it's supposed to be a college, right? Collegial? They talk about collegiality all the time because it's what they aren't, mostly, but it's their org structure. What they've actually done is to take the nastiest parts of English clubs and German military rank and used that as an organizational structure, because at the time -- when the young US was proving itself a real cultured nation and setting up universities -- it seemed fancy and universitylike. Along the way they mostly realized they can't actually run their own business because they don't know what businesses are. So they have administrations, which control the money, and it's all too boring to think about, sorry. But the top administrators are always faculty. Usually faculty who aren't very good at whatever it is they were supposed to be scholars of, or scientists who can't win grants.

Anyway. My job -- I can see how the salary line was cooked up. Essentially a dean said to the chair, "Where the hell is your money, why don't you guys get grants," and the chair stalled by saying, "We don't have any help with grants," so the dean approved half a clerical line and said, "You've got X years to make something happen." The rest of the faculty said "Cool, free slave," then squabbled a little about what exactly I'd be for, and laid it aside to fight about bigger things. One senior chick wanted me to do her clerical work; another senior guy wanted me to edit the hell out of his papers and proposals, because if there was one gift from heaven to him, it was a free editor. So I did in fact help him get a bunch of money, but the rest don't care, because I haven't gotten them lots of money.

When I showed up, though, I got told to sell my services to faculty, svengali them into believing I was necessary and lead them to my door so they'd use me. The idea here, I think, is that I help them en masse, edit and write for them, the grants roll in, and the dean gets off the department's back. And that's the stop where I get off, because they're hardly paying me to do the work, let alone sell anyone on anything. Also because I can't, I'm not in any position to go magic-politicking around, even if I wanted to. Which I don't. So I'm about to hand my boss a problem. I'll say, "Tell me what they want from me," and she won't be able to answer, because the faculty don't have an answer. They didn't order me in the first place. I'm just there to buy them time.

I can also see that the idea here is to try to pin it on me if faculty don't come to me, don't win massive grants, and don't please the dean. If I were interested in politicking, I'd short-circuit that by making friends with someone the dean wants to impress, but seriously no.

Anyway. I've now been there long enough that they're unlikely to go looking for someone more...magical, I guess. What's more likely is that the salary line goes away, which none of the faculty will care about: likely there are some who already have ideas for repurposing the salary line. Though that's not likely to happen this year, and by next year I'm safe: if the job goes away, I've got first dibs on any university job I apply for. Should I be dumb enough to try this again. I actually got lucky, with this job. I'd applied for a different one and watched someone with dibs get it. That one amounts to being the personal slave of a personality-disordered crazy lady for even less money than I make. The stacks of files of complaints against the crazy (and very tenured) lady fill a whole cabinet. The poor woman who got the job can't quit, though, because she needs the insurance, has a daughter who's seriously ill with a congenital disease.

I hear Target's not bad.

I don't understand why keeping things short is important, and would like to if anyone does.

But wow, Tarantella! The faculty thought they were getting a secretary/assistant to help them out, and you were actually hired to teach---more power to the chairman with more faculty? Or keeps people arguing and off balance? Either way, you threaten the power structure as neither faculty nor support, don't you? Being a threat to the hierarchy is a very uncomfortable position to be in. Very tricky to get through.

I threaten the structure by obviously not caring about the hierarchy. I've had a lifetime of naked PhDs, the letters don't wow me. Plus my degree's more prestigious than most of theirs, and as far as teaching goes, I've got one of the most prestigious jobs of its kind in the country, because I teach the famous subject here. And sci faculty don't. You may be sure they were very anxious to find out how much I was being paid.

Yeah, they hired me to do grants editing/writing (sort of; I was told to define own job), and soon after that found other opportunities on campus, including developing a new course and teaching it. My dept houses my course but doesn't pay for it, a setup that'll be changing soon. In the meantime my dept's numbers look slightly better, for free.

I'm going to have a rest, then investigate cost/benefit to a job in a store. I like stores. Bookstores especially but they hardly have those anymore.

I think this is a good read and is smart and realistic on your part. Anything negative that hints at a conflict is likely to make a later reader unsure and their initial reaction might be to shy away from you. A positive performance review should focus on what you've done well and your successes. And if that makes it boring and plain vanilla, so be it. That's a positive performance review.

With the grant writing and editing, I might underplay it, be relatively quick, see if you could assign some of the work back to the applicant. And I think you read this part correctly, too. The one guy who gets the grant appreciates your work, but the other people don't.

And really, if your job is to work there 40 hours a week, I'd kind of work 34. That is, a conscious decision to underdo throughout. And I think I understand that you've been working far more than forty. Wanting to do a really good job, but then you get a lot of blame for what's undone.

The whole environment just sounds Crazy-O Daddy-O. So, tenure's this great bulwark of academic freedom . . . mmm, not exactly.

PS I wish some of my professors had been positive toward my creative but slightly different papers when I was early in my college career.

Yeah, no. Tenure's nothing more than a golden coffin. People brave and unconventional enough to formulate the sorts of ideas that get you fired don't make it into the academy in the first place -- it's totally a courtier society. You're the customer while you're an undergrad, but once you're a grad student your ass is theirs, and you'll do as your told till you get that PhD. At which point you try desperately to look like the bestest, mildest, friendliest, right-mindedest of future departmental citizens until you get hired somewhere tenure-track. Then you lick every tenured ass that presents itself, and do whatever research is recognized as hot and points-scoring, something fashionable but not too, and you make a little splash but aren't too big for your junior-faculty britches, and then you get tenure (in the sciences, you should also have dragged home money). Then you settle in for a life of doing good work, but not so good you make everyone else look bad, and avoiding the attention of whatever truly vicious and batshit "colleagues" live in your department and have the power to make your life a living hell. And you recruit graduate students to do your work for you while promising them jobs that will never materialize. But you can be assured of remaining the Last of the Middle Class, all the way through to the grave. Unless of course your dean axes your entire department, in which case good luck finding another $80K job teaching about the films of John Hughes.

Tenure actually means that you will never again be safe if you say what you mean. Well -- until you're pretty old, anyway. Then you can be written off as cracked near-emeritus and hastened out the door.

So, the person has to come up with a medium creative idea and do so kind of according to schedule. Wow, it's a wonder people can function at all in these circumstances. I guess it's an indirect tribute to the human spirit.

It sounds like the mentality of scarcity. Too few jobs and this is what you get.

And the undergrad students are a third or fourth priority. I had some good professors, as well as some who seemed anti-student, or at least anti-weird or anti-different student. The metaphor from business and the negative exsmple to be avoided is: Without all these customers, we might actually be able to get some work done. (!) (!) (!)

Ugh. Met with my boss, who looks tired of talking with me about these things and impatient about the whole drama at this point. Whatever happened I looked nuts/breakdowny enough in her office that she told me to take the rest of the week off (which I sort of can; still have to teach, grade, wear the sandwich board for the class I teach next semester, etc.). I'm to tell her wtf I want to do when I come in next week: stay, go, keep part of the job, what. And go out with her and drink some wine. She's really very nice; I think I'm just trying her patience, though part of it's that she's angry at the faculty who've f****d up her excellent employee and plans for helping the dept.

Went home feeling seriously mid-breakdown, ill, exhausted. (Do not call crisis lines while doing this unless you're a playwright wanting material for your next modern farce.) Realized I'll actually be losing a good chunk of my piddly income. Took me another day to recognize we still won't likely starve in the next two years, minimum, and that I should move towards more happiness in work. (It's just been so f*****g nice making actual money, with all the jobs combined. As of this month, all cc debt cleared -- I'd been 5 digits in a couple of years ago -- and I could pick off my little student loan, too, if I wanted. And there's savings. But it's not worth living in a nervous breakdown.)

The students seem to be reliably great to work with, though.