Addendum.

In retrospect, it's interesting, too, how people outside my doctoral program responded to me, in academic forums. Like, back when I taught at the art school, one cool long-time staffer there with a Ph.D. who I was serving with on a committee told me privately, "You don't belong here, you belong at a top-tier research school." (That was a month or two before a tenured department chair there cooked up a paper trail on the basis of a handful of bad student evals from one class in order to jettison me from all my teaching; as another long-time faculty member there commented, "You intimidate him," a comment resonant with what a sympathetic writing program administrator later told me out of the blue right when I was making moves to severe myself from all academic employment, "The problem that you have is that you just shouldn't talk, if you say something, it will cause problems," which I took to mean that just by existing and possessing competency I risked jealousy and would have people go after me, and so I just should wall myself off and minimize myself and maximally strip down all interactions with other professors to some bland necessary core, which wasn't the case with most people operating in positions like mine... In other words, I triggered insecurity, and because of my economic and professional vulnerability, people would just go after me in absolutely insane ways, to blow me out of the water.) Too, after my one well-received research presentation at a regional conference last fall, on a topic that wasn't even the focus of my doctorate, two (younger) (tenured) profs asked me why I wasn't a professor. I told one of them who seemed nice that I had 3 wasted years in my program due to severe bullying and faculty were seeking to flunk me out with a full dissertation, to the point where I was keeping correspondence off of university servers in case I needed a lawyer like an academic mentor said might be necessary, and they were just simply aghast, that something like that could have happened to me. That same prof also just couldn't believe that a Dean would have crazy insane angry outbursts at people in student, staff, and faculty positions, with no repercussions at all, even when reported. That just doesn't reflect well on my Ph.D. program at all, when you just directly tell people about the faculty and administrative misconduct that has been there in recent years.