Not just the harassment and discrimination, but also the abusiveness of individual profs, like with the NYU Avital Ronell case that's been grabbing headlines.
My one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) observed that it's not unrelated to the awful tenure-track job market: people who were made to suffer abuse have nothing to lose, when there's nothing there at the end, after all the years of shittiness and awfulness.
As he put it, "Why not?".
This stuff is really endemic, and I think *all* the shit's going to pour out, more and more.
These situations are a natural outgrowth of the tenure system, which tends to advance people who humor the arbitrariness of others, and who see their own tenure as the highest good. Since there's no check-and-balances like with an Inspector General system like there is in our federal government and in municipalities, there's no one to "check in" with a random audit and make sure everything is on the up-and-up.
Lately I've been thinking that what higher ed needs is mandated internal audits of graduate education in any school that receives federal funds, and then randomized Dept. of Education audits of those internal audits, with wider probes where there's discrepancies.
That kind of thing would keep tenured profs on their toes, and nip anything like the Ronell case way the f*ck in the bud, before it had any chance to start.
It'd have to be very carefully defined so as to avoid any politicized penalization of academic content, but some things like unanswered emails, profs not working over summers, etc., are just basic professionalism in education and research, in which there's massive abuse of public interest.
At the most, this would also occur with maybe undergraduate theses, too. The most abuses seem to occur in cases of sustained pedagogical relationships around large projects.
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