July 20, 2006

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

It’s not every day that the president of a major university has to create a committee because some of her professors aren’t working well together. But that’s what Susan Hockfield, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did this week — in the wake of reports that a prominent neuroscientist discouraged a rising star in the field from accepting a position.

Looking for a job?

See all 209 new postings

Browse all job listings:

Faculty: 3,626
Administrative: 1,892
Executive: 169
FEATURED EMPLOYERS

Hockfield’s action followed complaints from a number of senior scientists — first disclosed by The Boston Globe — that Susumu Tonegawa, a neuroscientist at MIT and a Nobel laureate, had discouraged Alla Karpova, considered one of the finest young talents in the field today, from accepting a faculty job at the institution. Tonegawa reportedly let Karpova know that if she accepted MIT’s offer, he and members of his lab wouldn’t work with her. Others at MIT have defended Tonegawa, saying that all he did was state his wish not to work with Karpova.

The key players in the dispute aren’t talking, and Karpova has clearly landed on her feet — turning down MIT and accepting a job with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, in Maryland. But many academics think that the MIT dispute — whatever actually happened — points to issues that affect many young professors and that may be particularly difficult for women entering male-dominated fields. A senior professor in a department doesn’t need to be a Nobel laureate to make life miserable for a new colleague, after all, and most junior professors don’t have the options Karpova had.

A far more common variation of the MIT scenario is the “curmudgeon factor,” as described by a tenured professor who asked not to be named as he didn’t want to start a fight with his department’s resident curmudgeon. His department recently recruited a bright young scholar whom the curmudgeon probably won’t like and might have scared off. So the department did its best to leave him out of the search process, and to minimize time that the two spent together. “We covered it up,” the professor said, adding that he and his colleagues were committed to helping their new hire by “running interference” when she arrives on campus and has inevitable run-ins. But they didn’t want to lose her so — unlike Karpova at MIT — she never got to hear from a senior scholar how much he didn’t want her to join the department.

“Is what we did appropriate and proper?” said the professor who helped recruit her. “Probably not. But we didn’t want to lose her.”

Mary McKinney, a clinical psychologist who coaches professors on their careers, said that about one-third of her practice comes from academics who are having difficulty dealing with senior colleagues. And of those facing “difficult political situations” in their departments, four of every five are women. “My sense is that women are more likely to have difficulties with senior colleagues and advisers for many reasons. First of all, conscious and subconscious discrimination is rampant and unfortunately I hear outrageous as well as subtle instances of bias,” she said. In addition, she said that women, on average, “may be more sensitive to interpersonal dynamics” and it is “generally less accepted if women play hardball in tough political situations.”

While McKinney said that these problems affect men and women in academe, and in all disciplines, she wasn’t surprised that the case giving this issue prominence involved scientists. Hostility or lack of cooperation from senior colleagues is “especially devastating for junior academics in the sciences because career success hinges on effective collaborations rather than independent research.”

McKinney and many others said that Karpova probably did the right thing in turning down MIT. However prestigious a department, few red flags should attract attention more than a sense that the top people in a department are less than enthusiastic about bright young talent coming in.

“In a healthy department, you are looking to hire the smartest people you can, and you want them to be at least as good as you and preferably better than you, and senior people want to work with them and collaborate with them,” said Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, has written extensively on power relationships in higher education in his books Will Work for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis and Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education.

He said that his department has always been one to welcome young talent, but that as he travels around the country, he’s sad to find out how common it is for departments to be “armed camps” where senior people abuse junior people (or at least certain junior people). Nelson said that it is important for departments to take responsibility for such situations. If there is one professor causing problems, a department should make sure a new hire can work effectively around that person. “This should be settled before someone arrives in a department,” he said.

When that doesn’t happen, many people say young scholars should run. Most senior people who are opposed to a new hire aren’t going to change, said Christopher J. Lucas, a professor of higher education at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and co-author of New Faculty: A Practical Guide for Academic Beginners (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). “You really need to know what you are getting into here. And this could be so disruptive at a time you don’t have much traction, that you would be ill-advised to take this position,” he said.

That’s hard advice for some people to take, especially if — like Karpova — the job offer is at the kind of institution many would consider a dream employer.

Elizabeth Ivey, a physicist who is provost emerita of the University of Hartford and past president of the Association for Women in Science, said that it is the responsibility of administrators and faculty members to prevent young scholars from being treated unfairly at any stage of the search process. “It is incumbent on administrations to be sure, before they authorize a search, that there is agreement among all parties about how this is going to work. If you as a provost want to have interdisciplinary work done, and these days you do, you’ve got to make it clear that will happen.”

At the same time, Ivey said candidates — especially female candidates — need to know that not all administrations do that advance work. “This goes back to something I’ve tried many times to help my postdocs and graduate students understand,” Ivey said. “You need to look very carefully at what’s going on in the laboratory — how many women are there? are they happy? — before you jump into a program.” Many times that she’s given this advice, Ivey said, it hasn’t been taken. “They want to go for a ‘name’ program because they believe it will do more for them in the future. It may depend on how much they can survive.”

So how can people survive in such situations?

Seek help from your enemy. Richard M. Reis, an electrical engineer at Stanford University who runs the Tomorrow’s Professor listserv, said he would advise people to seek out their critic and invite him to give a guest lecture in a course. Such a move, Reis said, “puts them in a mentoring role and can diffuse things,” and creates a forum to establish a relationship. “Avoiding the person would not be a good strategy,” he said.

Smother your enemy with kindness. Emily Toth, a professor of English at Louisiana State University, said she too would encourage professors to avoid taking a job with hostile senior colleagues. But if one must, the author of Ms. Mentor’s Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia, said the up-and-coming scholar should be “unfailingly kind” to the senior people who are obstacles, especially in public. “If you are unfailing kind in public, and they behave badly, they look churlish.” Ms. Mentor would also stress that by being extra gracious, the senior scholar can change his view without losing face. However obnoxious that person may be, “your life is a whole lot easier” if he can be won over, she said.

Seek out allies. Donald E. Hall, author of The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual, holds an endowed chair in English at West Virginia University. But he remembered joining the faculty at California State University at Northridge in 1991, a time when his department was undergoing a lot of change — and some senior colleagues about to retire were less than enthusiastic about the new arrivals. “I sought them out and I made it clear that while my agenda was my agenda, I was in no way trying to alter their way of being,” Hall said. But he didn’t stop there — and he made sure he had connections to administrators and faculty members in other departments. “The offices that surrounded me weren’t the only ones that connected me to the campus,” he said. “I was never going to be at the mercy of one small group of faculty members. I worked to have allies — people who understood me and my work — all the way up the chain of command.”

— Scott Jaschik

Want it on paper? Print this page.
Know someone who’d be interested? Forward this story.
Want to stay informed? Sign up for free daily news e-mail.

Advertisement

Comments