Traumatized Mentoring & STEM
Don’t let your trauma turn you into a spokesperson for the establishment.
A Black student studying a STEM major recently asked me how I overcame difficult moments. I think it’s possible I failed as a mentor in my response: rather than talking about what I had done for myself, I talked about the people who showed up for me. I talked about Mr. Wilson, who noticed when at the age of 12 I went from being his top student to failing his algebra class because my single mom was at home sick with a mystery illness and I wasn’t handling it well. I talked about Mr. Buckner, who noticed when at the age of 14 I went from being his top student to failing his calculus class — for reasons that are actually still sort of mysterious to me but probably have to do with puberty.
At every stage of my education and professional development, I can think of a time when I was in danger of leaving the path I had set out for myself and someone — sometimes several someone’s — took steps to not just support me, but lift me up and get me back on track. This is not to say I don’t deserve credit for my accomplishments. I am the one who made the plan at age 11 to become a professor and no one else is teaching my senior undergrad/graduate astrophysics course this semester. But as I wrote last week in Quanta Magazine, there have been people along the way who held the door open when I got stuck and struggled to make my way through it alone.
I’m not saying anything new when I say that no one accomplishes anything alone. But we don’t often acknowledge that our interdependence with other people takes on a certain complexity in a world where power is not evenly distributed and where the systems that govern our lives are often organized around abusive extraction.
I think about this the most as a scientist who has spent over half her life in academia, beginning as a frosh at age 17 and now as a first year tenure-track professor at age 37. As I’ve written (e.g. here, here, what feels like a bajillion other blog entries and somewhat extensively in my forthcoming Spring 2021 book release The Disordered Cosmos), there is much to deplore about academia and about the scientific establishment. Science (as it is understood professionally) has long been integral to socioeconomic systems that helped extract labor and resources from indigenous people. Academia has deep roots in the Catholic Church which is at this point fairly famous for its human rights abuses, and it is also a system that was developed with a certain kind of white man in mind. People like me weren’t part of the equation except as bodies to extract labor from — for example through Harvard directly benefiting from slavery in Barbados, where my mother was born. Maybe my family was owned by the institution I went into debt to attend.
There is no question that academia is abusive. I’ve mentioned in my writing that I’ve experienced sexual harassment and sexual assault from fellow academics. There’s been racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia. I’ve written about them extensively. At the same time, I’ve done my best as someone who was never formally trained for it, to mentor students in ways that would hopefully help them avoid the worst of academia and to support them by making professional connections whenever I felt I was in a position to.
I have, in the process of doing this work, definitely been guilty of helping too much to the point of sometimes not being received as helpful. I have also, in the process of doing this work, helped so much that it was at my own expense and not sustainable, leading to disappointment and hard feelings. I am learning, I hope, from those mistakes.
I have also, I think, not been as thoughtful as I could have been about avoiding transferring my trauma to students with whom I come into contact. And I am not the only one. As I go over the advice I have gotten over the last two decades, particularly from women who are older than me (white women and women of color alike), I can see their own traumas embedded in their words. To not totally discount my work, I did very early on make a commitment to telling students that I thought they could be more accomplished than me and that there was always the very real possibility that they would not run into the barriers I had.
It has been my guiding principle — and something I’ve said to mentees many times over the years — that just because I couldn’t do something doesn’t mean the student in front of me can’t do it. I wanted to avoid, desperately, the projection that I saw from the women who gently tried to tell me that there were things I couldn’t do. It wasn’t because they hated me or didn’t want me to succeed but because they couldn’t see past the barriers society had erected for them and couldn’t imagine I’d have a better chance of getting over them.
White men have to stop trying to project their sense that these barriers don’t exist, and at the same time, some of the work that we have to do as minoritized people in academia (and probably any professionalized career path) is avoiding transferring our trauma while also acknowledging that trauma is a possibility. (For example, just because you had a terrible time as the first Black woman professor in your department doesn’t mean you should discourage someone else from becoming a first in another one. She may have a better time than you.)
More and more one thing I want people to know is that trauma is not a guarantee. And the fact of trauma does not automatically translate to the existence of an insurmountable barrier.
Maybe now what I wish I had said to the student who was asking how I had overcome difficulty was that in one case I was willing to tell someone that there was a problem. And in the second case, I was willing to listen to someone who had identified that there was a problem and proposed a solution. (I had to stay after school and tutor people for a semester — this professor’s first taste of teaching at school.) In both cases these were teachers who had enormous power over me. They were both men. And I was old enough and had enough of an analysis to know that not every teacher was on my side.
But I was willing to understand that the world isn’t made out of binaries. As I have moved through the ranks of academia, I have not only had to continue believing this, but I have had to rely on this fact. There are terrible faculty out there, like the white people who treat minoritized students as a professional opportunity. But there were also the faculty who gave me shelter, who wrote me letters, and who made phone calls on my behalf. Sometimes they are complex. There’s one very famous white male professor who has never looked me in the eye or spoken to me even though we were in the same department for several years. He also quietly sent a note to hiring committees telling them to choose me because he thought I was a brilliant thinker. I also had an advisor who was incredibly important in supporting my professional success, who also knowingly wrote a paper with my sexual harasser.
I was willing to ask for help. I was willing to take help. I was willing to accept that people can be imperfect and still be a source of support. When people think of me as a strong person, they imagine that I’m very good at going it alone. That I’m very good at rolling with the punches in my hate mail. That I am not afraid to speak truth to power. (That’s not true — it’s always scary!) While I try to say thank you to people individually, it’s possible that in my rush to tell the truth about what’s wrong with academia, I haven’t done a good enough job highlighting the people who have been what’s right about it for me.
I want to give examples, just to make sure my point is clear:
Nadya Mason has been a mentor to me since she was a postdoc and is now tenured Black woman physicist goals for me. One of the most important lessons she’s taught me is the importance — for everyone involved — of saying “no.”
Priya Natarajan has always given me wonderful advice, most especially but not only about interesting directions to take my science in, even when it was quite different from what she was thinking about.
Julianne Dalcanton, who is now the chair of the University of Washington Department of Astronomy, is the person who introduced me to Ann Nelson, and she has repeatedly stepped up for me, encouraged me, and always had an open door for me even though I was never in her department or area of astronomy.
Anna Watts, one of the few women in the Netherlands to hold the title of full professor in astronomy, has similarly been a vigorous advocate for me, and she’s the reason I work on neutron stars now.
Vinothan Manoharan, a professor of physics and applied physics at Harvard, has for over a decade been one of my closest friends and confidants. When I was going through a tough academic time, he called me sometimes several times a week to talk strategy.
Alan Guth gave me a research group home when I needed one, wrote a paper unusually quickly with me. Alan also was very patient with me when I was very timid at first because I was intimidated by him, and he taught me what it looks like to be incredibly thoughtful and methodical.
David Kaiser welcomed me with open arms, immediately welcoming me to join a project he was starting when I joined the Guth group, and has always been incredibly encouraging of my efforts to forge a path in Science, Technology, and Society studies even though what I do may not be at all interesting to him (I have no idea haha).
Arlie Petters made sure I took General Relativity and taught me that professors could care about the success of students in their classes.
I could actually really go on. Ask anyone who read my dissertation acknowledgments: they were four pages long!
These people are real. But, academia is also trash and a lot of that has to do with the people who tend to be allowed to succeed in academia. But academia isn’t special in this respect. And this has a positive side: there are good people here too. The difference I see between academia and other professions is that this is a particularly badly paying working environment given all of the abuses that go on, for example compared to the legal and medical professions. The proliferation of #MeToo stories across every facet of human society makes clear that we aren’t special but rather much like the rest of human society.
And I was lucky to be able to stick around when I wanted to stick around. Not everyone gets a fighting chance to stay in academia. I worked hard for what I have, but hard work is often not enough. Wherever you are on this spectrum (in academia, kicked out, chose to leave, somewhere in between), if you have experienced academic trauma and are doing mentoring and advising, I challenge you to think about your own trauma and try to understand that what your trauma tells you is true is not always true. I should have realized this earlier as someone with PTSD — trauma rewires your brain and effectively can lie to you. Once you’ve thought about this, think about what power you have to influence other people’s perceptions of their own environment and how you are using it. Are you promising people that they too will be traumatized? Are you telling them that they can’t do it? Are you telling them that they can do it but their heart will be trampled in the process? Are you telling them that they are powerless?
There were many times I felt like I didn’t have the power I needed to protect myself, but I was never powerless. I always had the power to ask for help. I always had the power to organize with others. I always had the power to speak up, even if it came with consequences. I have chosen speaking up far more often than I have chosen silence, and I am grateful for people like Sarah Tuttle (for example) who made sure that I have rarely done it alone.
So, on to another mistake I have made as a mentor and writer. I have not done a good job of communicating this to students in my writing about academia, although it is always something I try to emphasize in my talks: students have more power than they often think they do, and wielding it is a matter of strategy. Indeed, students, there will be faculty, staff, and friends who will help you. Never let anyone convince you otherwise. The helpers may not be omnipotent, but they are real. And if you’re not sure how to seek out mentoring, I wrote up some thoughts about that here. ❤
MrProfChanda insisted I put a song at the end, so here is a song:
