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"She is just being strict:" The code for perpetuating abuse



"Being strict" if often a code for abuse in academia.

"Being strict" produces and enables cultures of abuse by legitimizing abusive faculty behaviors.

The guise of "being strict" justifies faculty behaviors that target students, making them acceptable, almost desirable to the university, as behaviors that protect and uphold the standards of academe.

Moreover, "she is only being strict" is often the justification that enablers of abuse in faculty cultures use to support perpetrators of abuse, while at the same time retaining their pretend-radical, privileged positions as so-called voices of societal conscience.

I can turn the other way and not say anything about ongoing abuse in my department as long as I can tell myself "Oh, she is just being strict."

Imagine a Full Professor that systematically abuses graduate students, berating them publicly, going off in a fit of rage without any reason and attacking their competence. The mode of attack used by the Professor is that the quality of the work produced by the students is not up to the mark.

Imagine a Full Professor that makes her post-doctoral fellows (fresh out of Ph.D.) write her grant applications, without guiding them through how to write these applications, and then berating them publicly for being "stupid."

Imagine a Graduate Studies Director who randomly makes up new rules, telling a woman student of color that her dissertation examination committee needs to have committee members who are not friends with her advisor. When pushed to show where these rules are written, she says "I am upholding the standards." When asked "What do you mean by friends?," she states, "Oh, your advisor and the examiner should not have said Hi to each other at conferences etc., or would never have met before."

Imagine a Head of Department who states to a graduate student submitting her dissertation that her dissertation draft first needs to be approved by the Head before it is goes out for review. When asked by the student where this is stated in policy, the Head notes "I am protecting the standards of the department." The Head further notes, "I need three months before the University deadline for submissions to read the dissertation" (shared 10 days before the submission deadline).

In academic cultures, the language of standards is often precisely the language of  abuse.

Ironically, what makes the abuse gain legitimacy is the very language of standards set in the backdrop of ever-shifting goalposts. The standards are never really clear, and it is equally unclear when the sword of standards will come down, and on whom. The effect of abuse is precisely in the guessing game, with graduate students performing their best disciplined behavior, in the hope that the sword will not fall on them the next time.

"Being strict" becomes the excuse for perpetuating abusive behaviors.

That the measures of "strictness" are applied randomly, without any basis in written codes of governance, and without precedence, gives power to the abuse and exaggerates its oppressiveness. 

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