1.5 years later, how to make sure unprofessional behaviour by former mentor has consequences?

I was a post doc at a large US university for a year and after took another postdoc position in my home country. My mentor was a tenure track assistant professor. It pretty soon became clear that working together was going to be difficult due to different ideas on how to approach and manage projects. Furthermore, I might eventually not have been the best fit for that position given the somewhat different topic of my PhD work. This ended in a complicated work relationship, in which several requests on my side calling for meetings to discuss ways to improve the situation were ignored.

All the while, in my opinion, I was treated abusively: in group meetings in front of the whole lab, I felt humiliated by unconstructive discussions and was called out for the too little progress I made. In smaller meetings with up to two other lab members, I was shouted at by my mentor and told I didn't deserve my PhD etc. Sometimes, reasonable questions of mine were answered in a passive-aggressive way. Furthermore, the significant amount of time I spent in helping more junior lab members in their (very ambitious) projects was not appreciated.

At the time, I asked a university official in charge of postdoc affairs for advice. I was being told that a formal complaint at HR or the department head would most likely have no direct consequences. I furthermore feared retaliation, mostly because my J1 visa and housing depended on that position. For these reasons, I did not take any further action.

At one point, I decided to quit the lab after the initial agreed-upon one-year duration of my stay. Two and a half months before I wanted to inform my mentor in a one-to-one meeting about my decision, but two e-mail requests for that meeting ("to discuss the fact that my contract ends", which is how I worded it) were ignored. I eventually managed to get hold of my mentor after a group meeting and in the following conversation, after asking me why I think the whole thing didn't work out, they did not acknowledge any wrongdoing or unprofessional behavior on their part, even after I brought up several examples.

Other, more junior lab members (PhD and master students; I was the first and only postdoc) reported similar incidents of unprofessional behavior, but also didn't speak up. My guess is that they, too, were fearing retaliation and didn't want to jeopardize the relationship with their supervisor.

My question now is how to achieve the following (in decreasing order of importance):

While I am aware that there are several questions on this site about similar issues, I believe mine is different because I left that lab a year and a half ago. I fear that, after such a long time, simply contacting the department chair will come across as bitter and and as wanting to retaliate at the end of my academic career.

edit:

As per Dan Romik's suggestion: I'm not only interested in advice how to achieve the above goals, but also whether this is actually adviseable. Also, as the time span of 1.5 years indicates, this isn't a super urgent matter for me. But I've been thinking about this question for a long time and I really appreciate all of you answers, most of them taking very different point of views! I don't know which one to accept - a natural choice would be to follow the suggestions I find most promising and see how it works out. Although not being accepted, this wouldn't make the other answers less valuable.

7 Answers
7

First, there is probably little that you can do to change anything. It has been too long. People won't remember, and as you say, it will sound like sour grapes.

Second, find a way to heal yourself and put the experience in the past. Seething anger, even when justified, will probably hurt you more than resolve the past abuse. Make sure that you go into future positions with open eyes, after exploring the environment before you dive in.

Third, while this doesn't excuse the behavior, your mentor was then very likely under a huge amount of stress and had no experience with the situation he was in. A tenure-track assistant professor is under a lot of pressure to produce for himself. That pressure alone, combined with inexperience might explain (not excuse) blow ups and inappropriate behavior. It may be that his own fear of failure was such that any provocation, no matter how slight, caused an overreaction. Perhaps he knows more now and is in a different place in which abuse of colleagues isn't his first response anymore. You can hope that is the case, but you can't affect it much. There are jerks (and worse) in academia.

There is no excuse for the situation you faced, of course. But if the institution isn't willing to address it, there is little you can do effectively and without blow-back on yourself.

Academia is built on professionalism and goodwill. In academia people are expected to be experts of highest possible calibre, excellent in both teaching and research, capable of managing both funds and people, communicate complex ideas to various audiences, predict and mitigate risks, meet and exceed expectations of colleagues and stakeholders, achieve impossible and remain calm and smile all the time. This is a glamoured picture of academia, produced by the success-centred culture of modern society.

Reality, of course, is somewhat different: academics are people, too. We have strengths in some areas, but we need time to pick up the other skills. Your PI was good in securing external funding but not so good in managing meetings. You were good in helping other students but not so good in achieving the goals set for you. From what I see, you both under-performed in your roles.

I understand that you are frustrated and want to make sure there are consequences for your former PI for not standing up to your expectations. I assure you, not meeting the publication goals of the first grant is going to result in quite real consequences for your PI. It will be very difficult for them to secure another grant, which very likely will result in not having a tenure. Your PI's actions were possibly explained (but not justified) by this pressure.

Some years later, this brief encounter with your former PI will be only a small insignificant episode for you. I am not sure what you want to achieve for yourself by going after your former PI in the way you described. You want to hurt their career? — arguably, you already did quite well in it.

I would suggest to reflect on this episode and think about your future career. What could've you done better to reduce the unprofessional criticism and tunnel it into a more constructive way? How would you respond if a similar situation happens in industry? What procedures does your future company have to help resolve such issues? What makes a better professional and how you can become one?

I wish you good luck in your future career.

tl;dr: Don't waste your life on this but do take some action against the abuser. It will help you inside and also do a greater favor to the field.

As other answers stated, you faced a tutor pressured by a tenure track, and chances are your actions will result in little more than largely wasting precious time. However, I do believe something ought to be done about that.

What you describe is a typical situation in modern academia: staff abuses power and everyone else takes it, for fear of career & reputation retaliation, and the rotten ambiance keeps growing. The typical result is: almost everyone who was afraid of "having their careers ruined" by their abuser drop out anyway, leaving to the others staying a message that abusing others is totally cool.

I find this circle both irrational (i.e. why not stand for oneself if dropping out was a plan anyway) and pathetic (a system sustained by passive-aggressive fear of feeble workmates).

Mind that a fighter should be ready to getting hurt. If you expect to harm others without any consequences, you've just become like your abuser.

Provided you're willing to stand up and send the message to this person, think carefully what are your options. From your post, I think the shortest path to achieve your goals is to somehow neutralise this person. You cannot expect him/her to mend ways after so many having confirmed that abusing others is the sure way to the top. You should aim at having this person seriously exposed and if possibly sacked. If you're thinking of taking this affair merely lightly, just be bold enough to call and/or meet directly the maggot and spell out your best swearwords in the face.

There are several ways of exposing bad behaviour. Take a look, for instance into the following websites, tailored for academicians: (i) http://www.qcist.com; (ii) https://www.ratemypi.com. Contact his prior advisees, and gather their complaints, stories. Organise a meeting or online group to discuss these; ask them whether they'd like to speak out. Offer them help, blog about the joint experience. Tweet about it, give interviews, raise some drama! -- there's a lot of open support offered to harassed ex-academics nowadays. Do you think there might be any published misconduct in this person? Carefully read his/her publications and look for any glaring issues (plagiarism, data manipulation, apparent conflicts of interests). A scientific retraction is guaranteed to leave a permanent blemish, and attracts a lot of bad publicity. Suit up and go back to your institution, and formally complain to the administration; leave a written letter and rate the place online (e.g. Glassdoor.com ).

Take one thing for a fact: abusers are usually greater cowards than any fighter. In reality they should, as they have way more to lose than you. Test it out and you will find that. Also, what is the worst this person could feasibly do to you? Are you sure an academic has any actual power or relevant contacts outside of their department corridor? These people (and perhaps you) pretend to believe the world is contained inside their small ivory tower.

I am sure s/he will freeze to the bones when seeing you coming back from the past ready for a fight. On the other hand you will be feeling swell. If you will play this act, you will have to show your face.

Good luck.

I’m very sorry you were treated badly and wish you the best of luck with your career.

About your question, I don’t feel I can advise you on how (or whether) to proceed with your plan, but a couple of things I think you need to consider very carefully are:

You say part of your motivation is to “restore your reputation” among the professors in your former department. However I think the actions you are contemplating may carry a real risk of damaging your reputation, both in the department and potentially outside of it (especially if some sort of public scandal ensues as a result of your accusations). Unless your accusations are 100% based on facts rather than opinions and all the facts are impeccably documented, you will be exposing yourself to accusations of lying, exaggerating, making things up etc. Even if you tell the truth and have the evidence to back up all your claims, some people (in addition to the mentor, who obviously will become your enemy for life) may resent you for damaging the career of their colleague and think that your actions reflect poorly on you.

Another very real risk is that the mentor might sue you for defamation, and maybe even win. I suggest famialiarizing yourself with defamation law in the US (and any relevant local jurisdictions). Given how serious the topic is and how much is on the line, I would also recommend that you consult a lawyer before you take any actions that might expose you to a defamation claim.

Good luck!

I'd just like to add something that stuck out to me:

I felt humiliated by unconstructive discussions and was called out for the too little progress I made. ... Furthermore, the significant amount of time I spent in helping more junior lab members in their (very ambitious) projects was not appreciated.

From a different perspective, this could be seen as spending a lot of time on something that wasn't your responsibility and that was taking time away from things that were your responsibility. Your priority is to fulfill your specified duties first, then help others as much as possible. If their work not getting done or not getting done correctly was causing you problems, you needed to communicate that to your colleagues so that a solution can be found. Perhaps it would have been that your duties would have been shifted to include what you were doing; perhaps some other solution would have been found. Maybe it was their hope to decrease everyone's workload by getting those students to narrow their project into something more manageable; if so, your enormous assistance may have torpedoed that goal. Regardless, by communicating about it, you wouldn't be unilaterally deciding your priorities are different than your explicitly stated ones.

To put it bluntly, perhaps this other person became frustrated and acted out because they perceived you as shirking your responsibilities and interfering with theirs. Combined with the difficulties you mention coming to agreement regarding project management, they may have decided you were a sort of "trouble maker," so to speak. And perhaps even more frustratingly, they didn't feel they had the authority to be the one to confront you about it. Of course, none of this would excuse any of their behavior (least of all ignoring meeting requests), and I do not wish to defend the behavior. However, it would make the behavior a little bit more understandable, even if it was a totally wrong view.

This is all speculative, of course. We're only outsiders with limited details. But there's more often than not two sides to a conflict, so it's worth considering if the other side might have a point. I get the impression that you know that no one was perfect in this situation, but perhaps there are still important lessons about working with others that you need to be more aware of. So maybe asking yourself the question, "What could I have done better?" is in order. Doing so doesn't mean believing the other person was in the right. It just means accepting the reality that you can only really control yourself and the responsibility of doing the right thing as much as you are able.

I believe that this is a very general problem, and that there is little one can do. When the criticism comes from outside, there is no reason for anyone to take any action within the institution. When it comes from inside the institution, unless the behaviour is criminal, probably nothing will be done. It's a sad fact that there is almost no open criticism of tenured academics, especially once they have embedded themselves into the system.

I agree with you that we are propagating this system by not commenting, but I couldn't blame you if you don't. I think the chance of further harm coming from commenting is reason enough not to. And of course if you publish the name of the PI online, or reference them somehow, you could be sued for libel.

I like to think that eventually these people will be forced to "change their ways" when people decide that they can't work in these conditions. Unfortunately this is rarely the case, and so there are many PIs just like the one you described.

Most academic fields have at least ten people competing for each position. (PhD programs are notorious for accepting and training far more people than their fields can employ.) This is an unfortunate system, because you, and your misbehaving supervisor (not yet tenured), are both without power. Both of you can be replaced at the whim of the department's leadership.

Why do I mention this? Becausse you propose to engage in a power struggle to make this supervisor face consequences. A power struggle is not going to work, because, unfortunately, you have no power. (In USA in a commercial workplace you might have some leverage: mistreating people gets companies, not just individuals, in big trouble.)

You know, other people, with more power than you and longer-term relationships with this person, have surely taken note of this kind of bad behavior. You were only there a year. By giving your input you may be bringing peat to Newcastle.

If someone asks you, "should I do a postdoc there?" you can certainly recount your experience, and advise against it. But don't do it by email or in writing.

Otherwise, you have more to lose than you have to gain by trying to bust this guy. Chalk it up to experience, don't look back, and resolve never to treat people who work for you that way.

You will most likely find commercial colleagues much easier to deal with than academic colleagues. There's a company somewhere that will benefit from your rigorous training and expertise. All the best in your career.

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