Graduate Students

I listened to the first part of Helga Rhodes’ audiobook—-Dealing with Conflict and Confrontation, and cracked up in the tram back home. She talked about two types of conflicts: an overt conflict and an underground conflict. The underground conflict is conflict in denial. It’s the conflict that people know about, but no one talks about except among themselves in their little cliques. The one where, in the hierarchy of the workplace (or academia!), the big fish at the top rises an eyebrow and says: “Problem? We don’t have any problem”.

And for a very long while, yes 3 years in fact, my academic institution had the same reaction. We don’t have a problem, we are the next Princeton and next Princetons don’t have problems. But there were (and still are) problems, big serious problems that won’t go away unless you solve them.

So what happens when you have this kind of situation? When people feel they can’t bring up the problem because they are scared of what will happen to them? And when they do bring it up, they get treated as if they are the problem? What happens in an environment full of stress and frustration?

Helga said that people will start to fall sick. They fall sick a lot. Productivity dives. You end up spending more time updating your CV in hopes of finding a new job than actually doing the job that you have. People become more competitive. And massive thievery—-of office supplies, food, cleaning products, toilet paper, computer monitors. Oh, and beware of the coffee for it will most likely have spit in it.

This is the part where I cracked up in the tram. Because it is simply true. In Next-Princeton, all of those things happened. Next-Princeton is in fact, a textbook case of Underground Conflict. LOL it feels weird to be able to diagnose the illness of a whole institute.

(READ MORE)

academics_anon