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From The Faculty Chair
Professor A is preparing for a class that is about to start. This is her first semester teaching at MIT, so she is pulling together a great deal of new material, and is trying to get something photocopied quickly at the department's headquarters. Since she shares a secretary with five other faculty members, she decides to do it herself. She is standing at the photocopying machine, when Professor B, a male senior faculty member in the department, comes by and hands her 10 pages and tells her to, "Please make 20 copies of this for me. I have a class in 20 minutes."
Professor A, who is young and inexperienced, is taken aback. Saying nothing, she accepts the papers. In retrospect, she is angry and upset. Why did this very senior faculty member treat her so inappropriately? And, perhaps more importantly, what sort of place to work is this going to be?
Professor B, when later asked, comments that he was never introduced to Professor A, and that when he encountered her at the photocopying machine, he assumed she was someone on his department's support staff. Professor A was young, female and standing at the photocopier. The support staff people he has known are mostly young and female, and he "naturally assumed she was a secretary."
I confess that this precise situation is a composite of several different reported encounters. Despite the fact that I fictionalized the details, many female faculty members I have spoken with report at least one version of this sort of encounter. From the senior faculty member's viewpoint, the encounter is a harmless case of mistaken identity; its meaning for his younger colleague is far different. She feels undermined and angry, and often will attribute harmful intent. Even when he later apologizes with a remark that he made a mistake that was understandable given the circumstances, she emerges from the encounter feeling diminished in her new role as a faculty member.
An interesting thought experiment is to ask how a young, male faculty member might view the same situation. First of all, the whole incident is far less likely to occur. When I first joined the faculty, I was very young, and I looked more like a student than a professor. Nevertheless, I never experienced an incident such as this one, and to my knowledge neither have my male colleagues. Moreover, the interaction would have had different psychological meaning. I would have interpreted the problem much more as a mismatch in ages than as gender-related. While I might have been somewhat offended, I doubt if I would have felt as deeply hurt as my hypothetical female colleague. In part, this is because I knew that in the long run, I would become part of the mainstream of what was then my department's culture. My hypothetical female counterpart is far less certain of this. The encounter resonates with, and reinforces, a sense of insecurity about how she will be treated in the future.
Most of us have the experience of talking to two different people who were at the same meeting. As each describes what transpired at the meeting, you wonder whether they were on the same planet, let alone at the same meeting. This is particularly the case when the meeting involved discussions in which both of the participants have strong, emotionally charged initial positions. Tenure and salary reviews, disciplinary proceedings and meetings with students about poor grades, all come to mind as situations where such divergence in reports of what happened is commonplace.
In the same way, two people may emerge from encounters such as the one I described above with very different interpretations. One person's unintended case of mistaken identity may be a serious, harmful event for the other person. This has consequences for all of us concerned with creating an academic community in which everyone has a sense of belonging.
At a departmental dinner meeting, Professor C, a younger, African-American colleague, is sitting across the table from senior Professor D. The two are in different parts of the department and haven't met before. They are discussing John Smith's new research in the senior colleague's field. The younger faculty member ventures an opinion that this new work may well turn out to be important, not knowing that it has the unfortunate property of contradicting research of his older colleague. Professor D reacts in a way anyone who knows him well could have predicted, by announcing in a loud voice that, "Smith's work is utter and complete nonsense. It is filled with major errors that almost anyone can see."
Professor C takes this as a personal insult. He doesn't know quite what to say at that moment, so he gets up and walks away from the table. Professor D is somewhat bewildered, but assumes that Professor C has another meeting to go to, assuming that otherwise he would have stayed and talked more.
In my imaginary debriefing, Professor C views this encounter as yet another insulting form of racial prejudice. He reasonably assumes that he has been summarily dismissed as a respected colleague, and that Professor D views him as not really meriting the faculty position for which he has worked so hard. Life was difficult enough being the first black faculty member the department ever hired without having Professor C already criticizing him. Others in the department reassure him that Professor C always expresses his views like that, and that it isn't an issue of race, or anything else, but at worst personality conflict.
When asked, my hypothetical Professor D views Professor C as unwilling to participate in the normal give-and-take of an intellectual exchange. He comments that the culture of the department has always been one of being very direct and blunt. "You can't make real breakthroughs in science if everyone tiptoes around trying to be overly polite all the time."
This is one of those interactions where both people bring their unseen, internal baggage to the table. Professor C is reacting to his previous experiences and from a sense of being an outsider by virtue of his race. He may have experienced a number of racially-motivated insults over the years. Professor D did his graduate work at MIT and has been part of his department's culture since he was an undergraduate. He values the custom of speaking frankly without worrying too much about causing offense. From his perspective, he was treating Professor C just like he treats everyone else, and he sees no reason to change his department's culture. In fact, he sees being less direct as insulting to Professor C.
Professor E is at a departmental retreat and takes a seat next to Professor F, one of his female colleagues. He casually asks her how her family is. She curtly replies that her husband and children are all well, and asks him how his research is going.
My hypothetical Professor F comments later that it always seems that her colleagues are asking about her family as though they think her work is unimportant. She is confident that they rarely ask their male colleagues the same question. Professor E, when later asked, says that he often inquires about family life in the work setting because he is truly interested. Moreover, he thinks that separating work and family life isn't all that healthy, particularly when most of us spend a huge amount of time at work.
My examples are all based on the assumption that the involved parties are acting without malice or conscious bias. I know full well that this isn't always the case, but, perhaps naively, I believe that it is usually true. So, with that as preface, here is my own, personal advice to all the parties involved.
To my senior colleagues: The professor who handed his photocopying to a young women and assumed she was a secretary, needs to do something that is simple to say and hard to implement. He has to recognize that even though he is right that most of the support staff personnel are female, the effects of the instances when such assumptions are wrong are serious. Wouldn't it be far simpler not to assume anything about people's positions based on statistically informed guesses? No harm is done by inquiring first by asking a simple question such as, "Have you seen any of the support staff around? I need help with some photocopying."
Professor C, whose blunt style unintentionally offended a new colleague needs to recognize that newcomers may not be clued into the department's culture. Moreover, as our faculty becomes increasingly diverse, that culture may need to change. The line between being direct and being rude is hard for many people to discern.
Finally, in my view, Professor E should continue to make family life an accepted topic of conversation as long as he is consistent regardless of his colleagues' gender. In my view, we need more of this around MIT.
To my new colleagues: I won't insult you by trying to convince you that among the nearly 1000 faculty here there aren't some whose actions will be motivated by outright bias. However, I believe that my hypothetical encounters are much more typical. I don't mean to suggest by this that you should ignore such situations; clearly, real harm is done in such encounters independent of the motives involved. I simply urge you to speak with the other parties, starting from the assumption that no malice was intended, and to try to convey a sense of how you were affected by it. Such conversations can be very difficult, but they can make the difference between long-term hostility and healthy, collegial relationships. Not all such discussions will go well. You may discover that there was, in fact, harmful intent. Your senior colleagues may feel unfairly accused and react accordingly. In spite of these risks, remaining silent in such situations contributes nothing towards reducing their frequency.
To all of us: Although I described encounters between two colleagues, there are often observers present as well. Most people's natural reaction in such situations tends to be an embarrassed silence. Despite this tendency, we all have an obligation to work on behalf of the community we want to create. Speak to both individuals involved, making it clear that the conversations may have had unintended, but nevertheless serious, consequences. If you work in a department where frank exchange is highly valued, try to communicate this to the new faculty members so that they are prepared. If you think someone is misinterpreting a well-intentioned question as bias, make sure you say so.
I am certainly not naïve enough to think that all our problems will be solved if everyone follows the above advice. However, MIT would be a better place for all of us if we could manage our collegial relationships better. Stopping situations such as the ones I describe, or at least trying to turn them into productive, learning experiences for everyone involved, can be an important first step.
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