Standing in the Crossroads

by Shaker mouthyb

[Trigger warning for sexual harassment, coercion, violence, and classism.]

Hi, I'm Carrie Cutler, the student cited in Sunday's Chronicle of Higher Education article about the involvement of a tenured professor at the University of New Mexico in a BDSM service.

You know me as mouthyb.

I'm standing in the crossroads of a discussion that has absolutely got to happen. The influx of students without middle class resources and training, the academic system as it exists practically, and the enforcement of sexual harassment laws have all dovetailed into a godawful mess at my university.

I have been living in an environment where it's possible for a professor to actively solicit students into sex work, telling them it will benefit their careers. I work where the explicit and implicit understanding is that professors are capable of doing what they wish to graduate students, with the consent and backing of the administration. I have been going to class in an environment where professors have felt the need to talk as I stand there, fuming and afraid, about how good things used to be, before someone (me) started complaining. I have been scheduled consistently to speak at mandatory events, sitting with the professor whom I filed an OEO complaint against, a professor who told the students around me that I will kill them if they befriend me.

In a post-Virginia Tech era, that is a potent threat.

Dear academia, there's a discussion we need to have about what constitutes tenable working and learning conditions.

I'd like to give this situation some context. Like many students attempting to climb from the working poor and into an intellectual, middle-class career, when I was told I would be admitted to graduate school, I was elated. I was also incredibly nervous. It would be difficult not to notice, in college, that people 'like me' aren't often allowed into graduate school. I am tattooed, pierced, and I carry my class markers in behavior and expectation. I don't expect I am insured success, and that makes me distinctly nervous.

I spent my entire undergraduate career being reminded over and over that the particular mix of experiences I have are not typical of the population around me, at least not the students who are selected for grad school or recognition. I also have no family support or financial resources. In fact, like many female students from my background, my family attacked my choice to continue in college as selfish and unnatural.

I came into grad school ignorant of the social structure of it and completely without the class conditioning which makes figuring out some of the cues for that social structure possible. What I did have was the determination to intellectually compete with the people around me and to learn what was acceptable. I hoped that being an excellent student would make me acceptable.

Students, especially graduate students coming from these class backgrounds, are uniquely vulnerable to manipulation for that reason. We are desperate to prove we are supposed to be there, because we can never forget that we were not expected to be, and we have no idea what the rules are.

The system itself—the way authority is constituted and expressed, the knowledge we are assumed to have— is very much a function of class conditioning. It is often assumed, by students and faculty who share that coding, that if you are the right kind of person, you'll know these rules without being told. What to wear, whose writing to like, who to be able to name-drop, what to write about or talk about, how to approach an advisor and negotiate the labyrinthine paperwork and funding snarl; I had no idea what the hell was going on. Being an undergraduate is absolutely not preparation, at least at my university, for being a graduate student.

It was not difficult for the professor to solicit me. She appeared to share some of my class markers—the scuffed leather boots, the jeans and tattoos. I was afraid every day that I was in grad school, not because I was incapable of the intellectual work or lacked ambition, but because I kept making small social gaffes. And so, what seems to most people to be an egregious lack of judgment on my part seemed more natural.

After all, she had tenure. And if she had made tenure as she was, there was hope for me.

Much of the reason this case has made it into the national media has to do with the blow-up which followed. I can boil it down to a simple question. If you can't leave without being forced to explain why you 'allowed' someone who threatened your career to take advantage of you, and the administration has made it clear that they will not investigate complaints, what possible hope do you or any of the other students around you have of performing the tasks you've paying for?

I stayed because I had nowhere else to go, begging people to be on my committee. Despite their being told, by that professor, that I might murder them, I managed to convince a group to sign on as my advisors. I'd love to say it was because I'm talented, but it's probably a matter of people annoyed at that professor.

I'll be graduating next semester, and hopefully moving on to a PhD in Sociology. I feel like I have something to contribute to the study of how poor and working class students might fare better in the academy.

The experience has left with me several observations on the system. Grad students, for those outside the system, have to work directly with someone to get into graduate school. They are in an increasingly small environment, subject to a great deal of non-requests to perform unpaid labor, are transient as compared to the professors who work closely with them, and are often unaware of the dynamics of an academic workplace, which are pretty damn unique. The experience of grad school is designed to mold the student into a representative of the academic system, which entails changing more than the pool of knowledge they have to draw from. It entails changing them.

For this reason, the kinds of interactions which a professor has with their advisee are not limited to grading their papers and talking to them about publication. And in that implicit part of graduate school, there is great opportunity for abuse. If you are a graduate student, and especially a student from a class or social background which is not middle class, you are required to trust that the advice you are getting from your advisor accurately models what you have to know. For all you know, it is accurate.

It can be difficult to change advisors, because you have hope that the person you might transfer to will not take advantage of you, as well. There are not many tenured professors in a particular sub-field at a given university.

In mine, there were two.

Because I am already obviously not the 'right kind,' what incentive does the university system have to pursue complaints from a member of a transitory population? There is an encoded power discrepancy in academia between student and faculty, which the rape culture interprets as irresistibly sexy, because it interferes with consent.

It is an implicitly accepted part of academia that your advisor has considerable control over your career, and that occasionally that control extends into the sexual. It is shrugged off by enough academics, in the vast amount of the discussion on this situation among academic blogs, for the reaction to be a collective shrug.

You lose some, many of them say. They probably didn't belong, anyway.

I have heard a few professors in my department, when I've mentioned the social component of graduate school, refer to knowing what to do as something you have or you don't coming in, and definitely something they want to minimize their responsibility toward. It's messy and time-consuming.

I teach, myself, and I publish. This year alone, I have published 12 poems in the domestic and international markets, in addition to my teaching duties, research and work on my dissertation. I have sympathy for the time commitments which seem to spring up everywhere in academia. There are only so many hours in the day, and I am typically committed 50+ hours a week. My assignment puts me in two classrooms, teaching alone, every semester. I am paid slightly over $15k a year, unless I take on additional duties, making my time worth slightly less than I could make waiting tables for the same amount of time. I am nearly constantly hungry, tired and under-caffeinated.

If you know anything about the history of academia, you know why it doesn't matter that we're typically over-committed, tired and swamped in new duties. For the first time in history, it is possible for students who are not coming from positions of relative class privilege to get the kind of education and social cache reserved for the classes over them. And, for the sake of whatever we hold holy, it's about fucking time to have that discussion about privilege, about what is to be expected and the power discrepancy between student and professor.

It's about time we talked about what we're going to do with the new demographics of the student population.

And that discussion, if we're planning on presenting college as a way for people to make their lives better and as one of the shrinking ways to have a career, had better not boil down to better ways to discourage students from coming.

You know, since they aren't the right kind.