I have become a casualty in the never-ceasing hostilities between part-time and full-time teaching faculty members. This is quite paradoxical because there is absolutely no reason for this animosity to exist at our university. We don’t have any exploited adjuncts or Visiting Professors. This isn’t one of those horrible situations were a mass of people with PhDs are working in bad conditions and with no benefits so that a few people with the same qualifications can enjoy the perks of stable employment, leisure, and healthcare plans.
We have part-time lecturers (without PhD degrees) but they are unionized. The union is strong and works hard to protect their rights. For instance, now that I have to come back to work unexpectedly, nobody has to lose their contract and face loss of income because of that. The university prefers to keep paying the instructors who will not have to teach to breaching their contracts.
This is why I have no idea what causes this hatred towards full-time teaching faculty. And I cannot explain this need to call a colleague who recently had to bury her child and harrass her aggressively over the phone for disrupting the normal cause of events with her untimely drama.
If my return to work caused people to lose the income they were counting on, I would be able to understand the frustration this might cause. It is still not OK to attack people in my situation and I would never do that no matter what. Still, I can understand the stress of facing loss of income. What I cannot understand is the completely spurious stress of having to administer some stupid quiz in a way you didn’t anticipate.
You might think I’m imagining generalized hostilities on the basis of a single unpleasant situation. This is not an isolated case, however. Just last month we had a similar thing happen to another colleague. This colleague was a part-time instructor at the department. She has this sunny personality that makes it impossible not to like her. She is also the most helpful, responsible and hard-working person anybody could imagine. But right after she got her PhD and accepted a tenure-track position at the department, the very same part-time instructors (led by “Jennifer” from my previous post) began to hound her in a very angry and nasty way.
And this is just what happened this semester. I never happened to be on the receiving end of this animosity because I keep to myself and never dispute the collective decisions pertaining to the teaching of lower-level courses. This is the very first time I have had to share responsibilities with part-time instructors, and this is the result.
I’ve spent the whole day shaking and crying, feeling completely shell-shocked. If there is one thing nobody should ever do to a person in my situation is try to make her feel guilty. I already feel overwhelming and irrational guilt, and adding to that is simply cruel. This is why I believe that only a profound feeling of hatred could make one direct a “How could you do this to me?” diatribe to somebody who has experienced this kind of a loss.
Clarissa's Blog 
There are a lot of places you can send Jennifer… (I’m asking you to think in Spanish of course!)
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I can send people places in many languages, too. 🙂
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I know but Spanish is so good for that!) Ha, ha!
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I had exactly the same experience. When I had lost everything, people began to make out I was somehow a villain and began righteously attacking me. It does horrify you to learn what people are capable of doing, but really this is a form of blindness and projection, that doesn’t come from knowledge or even strategic thinking (although it can seem that way).
Sorry this is happening to you. The best thing I have found, in these instances, is to play dead. Mob mentality is not defeated by confronting it directly.
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The righteous anger is precisely what is so shocking in all this. I find it very hard to understand people who are so different from me. It is incomprehensible why they create such drama over snall insignificant things.
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You know, I think some people don’t like dignified suffering. It makes their own issues seem so trivial by comparison. So, maybe they go on the attack for that reason.
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Wow. I can’t believe you have to team teach with this person. (Responding to that fro the previous post, here.) The animosity sounds unbearable, and you really don’t need one more thing.
I have no idea how I would handle this if I were you. Part of me likes to think I’d take whatever high road there is and try to be polite, but neutral and aloof. But another part of me feels like I couldn’t even be in the same room with such a troll. One day at a time, I guess…
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The worst part is that this was so unexpected and unprovoked that I was caught completely off-guard. There is absolutely no reason for this person to have anything against me.
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I’m so sorry this happened to you. A norma, emotionally and socially well-adjustel person in Jennifer’s situation would think “What can I do to make thos transition easy on my students and on my grieving colleague.” Not at all in the baffling way she reacted. I can hardly believe someone to act in such a way in such a situation, but people never cease to surprise me. I myself had a miscarriage, and although my situation was very different from your own, the people I let into my period of mourning responded with nothing but kindness. I can’t imagine having to go back to work and being civil with someone as oblivious and self-centered as your colleague.
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I am sorry to hear you have been on the wrong end of this person’s uncaring behaviour. However, don’t think it is necessarily intentional, more than likely it is just plain selfishness that is driving this person’s decisions. So remember there is nothing wrong with you, it her that has the problem.
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My three best guesses:
The reasons for the conflict go way back, possibly to something extremely trivial. Even though it may have been rectified (and/or the people involved long gone) the poison is still there.
Whatever the original reason (and irregardless of whether it has been righted) the hostile attitude gets passed on to new part timers as part of informal orientation, sustaining itself.
Jennifer is a poison pill, fouling any work environment she finds herself in.
It could be any one of them, it could be a combination of all three.
Doing anything about it (if possible at all) would require for more intense contact with other people than you want to deal with so you’re probably stuck with just trying to stay out of the line of fire. Good luck.
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What a horrible person this J! Can you somehow get out of the team-teaching, for example, go to your head of department and ask that she keeps teaching this course on her own as planned (since she is paid to do it anyway, they may go along with this)?
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I think that would be a very bad move, word would undoubtedly get to J, who will simply spread the news about what a difficult nasty person Clarissa is.
I think the best move is to go all zen and pretend nothing ever happened. Not so satisfying but it doesn’t give J more spoons (if she’s a pot stirrer which seems likely).
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Hope you feel better soon. You know you aren’t guilty of anything, and I wish you to begin feeling this as soon as possible.
As for “only profound feeling of hatred,” you are wrong here. Being not very smart and self-absorbed is more than enough, and happens much oftener than hatred.
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Tell Jenny that this is harassment and if she keeps complaining about the situation you will complain. If I understand well the many workshops I suffered about harassment in the workplace, this is, sadly, a logical thing to do at this point.
Later we can talk about resentful instructors.
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You should not have to work this semester.
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The HR says I can’t stay home past November 4. Oh well, it might not be that bad to go back.
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So ridiculous. But these wars tear my department apart constantly and cause people not to get tenure and not to advance in their research programs and so on. I am very traumatized by it. We are the evil privileged ones because we did PhDs, and we must be made to suffer for it, and are. I have lost entirely too much life to this, the weird obstructionism, the drama, maneuvering around it. Have had whole academic years when I started to shake when approaching the building, etc. Condolences.
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The way HR departments think about pregnancy/sickness/other leaves does strike me as one more example of the administrative tail wagging the pedagogical dog. It really is better for the students to have one instructor for the whole semester. Academic labor is simply different from other kinds of labor, and that needs to be taken into account.
That said, you are absolutely the last person to whom this woman should be complaining, especially since she’s not losing any money, just, apparently, having a difficult time handing over a class she has come to think of as hers. She should manage those feelings on her own, or with the help of friends/colleagues who have not just suffered a devastating loss. Or, if she’s really worried about the pedagogical effects, she could talk to your mutual chair.* Since the HR powers that be have foisted this situation on you, her, and the students, it’s also her responsibility to put the best possible face on the transition for the students, since that will affect whether they view it as normal and manageable, or an imposition (and their attitude will, in turn, affect their willingness to work, their tendency to make excuses for not working, etc., etc, and hence their learning).
It does sound like there’s an underlying pattern of hostility/unhappiness that is helping to shape her reaction. And I suspect that employment conditions for adjuncts may not look quite as good from their perspective (which may not include as much of the national picture), as they do from yours. But still, none of that is an excuse for failing to behave both professionally and humanely.
*If she tries to initiate another such conversation, I think you’d be within your rights to cut it off and ask your chair to serve as a go-between. Really, you shouldn’t have to manage her/her emotions; that’s the chair’s job.
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