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Sep 7, 2018 · 12 min read
From my first day at Duke

I was accepted to Duke University in January of 2014. Like all those videos you’ve seen on twitter, I cried when I realized I was going to be the first PhD in my family. I had previously completed a Masters degree in American history at City College of New York, where I was (exceptionally generously) advised by Anne Kornhauser and Gregory Downs. Laura Edwards (author of Gendered Strife and Confusion, The People and Their Peace) was my intended dissertation advisor. I adored her books to a fault. In revisions to the essays that became my MA thesis I was told, more than once, to stop citing these works so much, and leave room for my own argument. I learned how to do that, but it was difficult — her arguments were so good.

Within the first few weeks of working together, it became apparent that Professor Edwards was not comfortable with the fact that I have epilepsy. The very first indication I had that my working relationship with Professor Edwards was not going well was not, and this seems important, about this fact, but rather about my intended dissertation project. She told me that I should jettison my M.A. thesis for a side project that I had created in matter of weeks. She became irritated when, confused, I asked a number of questions. “If you want to work on sexual violence,” she said, “do that. People write about it because it’s trendy.” I was very upset by this phrasing, and remained silent. After a few moments of this silence, she said, “You know I am joking.” I agreed that she was, because I didn’t know what else to do.

I had completed two original-research projects before being admitted to Duke, one of which I submitted for my MA, and the other of which I offered as my admissions essay. This isn’t because I am particularly clever, it’s because at this point in my career I wasn’t sure where my interests were, but I was an almost compulsive “burrower” as my advisor, Anne, called me. I stayed up late too many nights because I had convinced myself that answers were there, I just had to try harder. Sometimes I was right.

A few weeks after my first conversation with Laura, we had another meeting, and I told her we needed to talk about doing primary source research in the South, which, even if I had taken up the project she preferred, would have been necessary. Because Laura wasn’t comfortable with my research on sexual violence, I suggested we use my MA project, which was about local courts in Western Georgia, as a starting point. To do this kind of work, however, I was going to need on-site access to court records, which meant I would need to drive. Even if, in the course of our work together, we decided working with a more centralized archive was preferable, I needed her to help me make an informed decision, one that balanced the requirements of the profession with my personal situation. So I told Laura about my condition, and told her that, in consequence, I cannot drive.

In this meeting I asked her advice solely in regard to research. She told me she didn’t like get into “personal details” with her advisees. I can absolutely see why a boundary is necessary, but this was a conversation about research — how I would conduct it, and where. I would characterize her overall response as hostile. She would not communicate with me on this topic, and repeatedly suggested that in fact, I could drive. It was not until at least three meetings later (I was advised by peers and other professors to keep trying) that I flatly told her “driving is off the table, it will not happen.” She responded, visibly angry, that she had “grown up poor,” that no one had believed in her, and that I should therefore find a way to make my situation work. She used the phrase “bootstraps.” I reiterated that I could not, in fact, drive, that it is illegal for me to drive, and that I wanted nothing from her except advice on how to successfully research in my particular situation.

It should be noted here that I did, in fact, need her advice. If I had decided, on my own, to conduct research in a way that was convenient only to my personal situation, without consulting her, she would likely want to know how I arrived at this decision. If I had not disclosed this information — if I had told a small lie and somehow (miraculously) gotten away with it — I would eventually have faced my committee, dissertation talks, conferences, and they would all have been curious to know why my research took place solely in major metropolitan areas with public transit, unless I had some clear methodology explaining why that made sense.

As is procedure when an advisor/advisee relationship is disintegrating, I spoke with our Director of Graduate Studies (DGS). He suggested that I take cabs to research destinations. This seemed not only impractical, but mildly dangerous. There are plenty of remote locations where cab service is either not available or is spotty. My work involves sensitive subjects. It would have forced me to spend an amount in high excess of the amount of my summer grant, once I paid for rent, plane fare, and cabbed everywhere for a month. I did think about just paying for it, but it did not seem like a great idea to go to any location — rural or urban — and leave myself with no way out. I tried to discuss this with Laura, but she shamed me for bringing it up. I wholly admit the possibility that there may have been a solution here, one I overlooked — but this is just the point — I was a first year grad student, asking someone to help me find a solution to a problem, and instead, people were making me feel that I was the problem.

The DGS also spoke disparagingly of my situation, making light of the possible solutions I offered, and casting doubt on the existence of my health condition. In my last meeting with him (on this topic) he advised that I visit Duke Disability to be certified as disabled if I wanted to continue pursuing the issue. The problem I saw with this was that 1) I don’t consider myself disabled — a complicated identification issue, I know, but this simply isn’t how I see it, and I felt this was forced on me by Duke, when they began to see me as a “liability” and 2) I was not (at any time) seeking funds for physical accommodation or deadline extensions, which is why students often seek out (and shouldseek out) the office of Duke Disability (DD); I was simply asking my advisor to do what she would do for any other student. I did make inquiries at Duke Disability because I felt I was obligated, but learned (from them) that it is at the discretion of DD whether a disability is categorized as psychological or physical in nature. From that point on I did not feel comfortable working with them, or giving them access to my private health information.

In the spring, I was assigned (by the same DGS) to work as T.A. for a known harasser, Dean Wilson. Wilson, who taught a large lecture course, introduced myself and my fellow T.A. by saying to the class of over 100 students “they sure look interesting, don’t they? But we will find out if they are. We will find out if they have anything to say.” On one occasion he sat next to me and sang a song about fraternity brothers impregnating sorority girls. Angry after I pointed out that President Wilson had screened “Birth of a Nation” in the White House, he began a lengthy discourse, for no obvious reason, on Jayne Mansfield’s appearance and eventual demise (this concurrent with the Duke noose incident). He let (mostly male) students question the grades they were given and my authority in the classroom. His male students felt comfortable discussing strip clubs with him — one of these email conversations was “accidentally” forwarded to me. After one particularly frustrating lecture, Dean Wilson wanted to talk to after class. I had to be somewhere. He grabbed me by the arm as I was walking away and pulled me backward, sharply. I yanked my arm away. I complained, repeatedly, to the same DGS. To his credit, this DGS did arrange a meeting with a different Dean, and arranged for a third, female, part to be present at this meeting. It was arranged on a short time line, and must have been a headache for everyone involved. The day the meeting was scheduled to take place, a friend and I were threatened in a parking lot by a man, white and approximately 50, who seemed to have knowledge of events in Dean Wilson’s classroom. My friend was superhumanly cool. I felt like was going to throw up and also like I wanted to cry, lie down, burn things, wail. I called off the meeting. People were annoyed and I lost some credibility. I didn’t care. This was not what grad school was supposed to be. I was not supposed to be afraid.

I went through my first year in Grad school essentially without an advisor. I should note that, while students often do not formally declare an advisor until their second year, most do have informal relationships with professors, and all receive the benefit of some kind of mentorship. I went without this for nearly all of my first year. In the second semester of my first year, I took a course with Professor William Reddy, who then agreed to become my advisor. This move entailed a radical shift in focus, and with that, a huge amount of work. I changed my field from American history to European, and with the help of Professor Reddy, formulated a new research topic, specializing in 18thcentury France. I heard from many people in the department that this was an “unusual” move, unlikely to succeed. Nonetheless, it began to look as though I was through the worst. Professor Reddy and I had a rare mentor/mentee relationship; we genuinely enjoyed working together. He went to bat for me with the department, but also did not hesitate to let me know when I was giving something too much of my attention. Working with him, and on our dissertation project (and it was ours, not only mine) gave me something to strive for again. I was still hurt and confused by Professor Edward’s behaviour, but I was moving forward.

Professor Reddy suggested that I enroll in Professor Jenhangir Malegam’s seminar, and ask him to serve on my committee. I did. This was a terrible mistake. After about four class sessions, Professor Malegam expelled me from his class, in which I was the only woman. He sent everyone out of the room except me, came back in, and began an argument with me, much of which, unfortunately, I don’t remember very well. It may be hard to believe that anything in a place so cossetted as Duke could create legitimate trauma, but this did. I’ve blocked a lot of it out, and in subsequent months my body shook (not seizures, just fear) and became rigidly tense. He told me “You don’t need to be here” and told me that he would withdraw me from his course. He also told me he would not be on my committee, a statement, that, while it seems obvious enough, is, in the context of a small department, intended to convey that he would do his part to see that I did not progress toward completion. The only explanations he offered were 1) that I typed too loudly and this disturbed his unstated but “well known” no-laptop policy and 2) I had paused too long before answering a question. It may be obvious but explanation #1 is ableist and it’s possible that he knew that, otherwise why not put said policy on the syllabus? and as to explanation #2, demonstrating this level of anxiety about “pauses” indicates to me that Malegam knew about, and had definite opinions concerning my private health information. Which would not be at all be surprising, but is definitely not ok.

After the initial events took place, I was in pretty deep shock. If a student of mine had, let’s say, thrown a chair at my head, I would have gone through many layers of meetings, paperwork, and parent calls, and still — he or she probably would have only taken a few weeks off. But Malegam had just unilaterally disposed of me, and a colleague had just sat right there in the hall outside the classroom and watched him do it. I still assumed that the department, the grown-ups, would form a committee, investigate, do something. Maybe there would be a mediation process and then I would learn what he had been thinking when he expelled me for seemingly no reason at all. There was nothing. This is still unbelievable to me. Absolutely no one, apart from my own advisor, even discussed it in my presence. Not the people whose work I edited, not the people who told me how glad they were I had chosen Duke, not even the people I had cooked food for with my own hands.

It was a career-breaking move, and, I believe, it was meant to be. The following fall, I enrolled in a required pedagogy course and (also required) methods course. Though I did well in both of these courses, I had to work harder than my peers, and was the subject of a good deal of mockery in my methods course. This was a direct result of the fact that 1) I had to change focus in yr. 1 and 2) I had been withdrawn from a course in yr. 2 and therefore been deprived of a research/writing opportunity. Therefore, in year 3, when I took our required grant writing/ portfolio preparation course, I was lagging behind my peers. The portfolio system has many benefits, but it does not take into account the possibility that faculty themselves may be the agents of student “failure.”

The department knew what had happened, knew they had not addressed it, knew that it was quantifiably slowing my progress to degree, and, nevertheless, placed the burden on me. They did this not only in the sense that they refused to change deadlines, there were also numerous subtle barbs in the classroom. For instance, when I offered my proposal for workshop, the professor, Philip Stern, who was now Director of Graduate Studies, mocked the use of French text, saying “Now you are just showing off” and encouraged other students to do the same. Perhaps it does not need to be said, but the dissertation was about France. This is common practice. The underlying assertion of Professor Stern’s statement was that I was too stupid to be doing the work I was doing, and something was out of joint. There were numerous jabs about “performativity” the underlying subtext being that I was “performing” i.e. lying about (that’s not what performativity means, I know) my condition. There was the former Jeff Sessions aide who delighted in the hope that, if Trump was elected, disabled women (subtext being, women like me) would have to trade sex for health care. In a class where I felt relatively safe and spoke about my concerns, I was met with a cohort member who revealed, without a shred of apology, that what he thought of when I brought up the subject was “his mother, who works with the intellectually disabled, she was very burdened by it.” These small, frequent psychological barbs took a toll. I found it difficult to speak in class at all because I knew anything I said, even observations that, in someone else’s mouth would be considered original and clever, would be considered ridiculous.

I was pressured out because 1) it became clear that there would be no relenting on the timeline — it would remain the same, despite the fact that others had made mistakes, not me, and despite the fact that those errors had never been internally adjudicated. I was essentially forced to take a semester leave, because without it, I could not have passed Professor Stern’s methods course. The reason I could not have passed it was that I needed a (pre-existing) research paper in order to do so (this is the portfolio system, in which PhD students build a portfolio of work which, ideally, enriches the dissertation itself). My peers didn’t have this problem, but Professor Malegam had thrown me out the course where I would have written this paper. So, in order to avoid an F on my record, I gave up a semester worth of funding. Important to note here that the strictness of this timeline is not uniformly enforced. 2) My advisor let me know that the department had little to no intention of funding me any longer than they were contractually obligated to. (Upon acceptance, we are given a funding offer for 5 years. It is rare, but not impossible, for them to wiggle out of this by saying that the student has not fulfilled their end of the bargain. It was not wholly clear to me, but either Duke was not going to fund my 4thyear, or they were not going to fund me after the 5th.) My advisor said, and I believed, that my work was good enough to be funded without Duke’s help, if we could get past the committee stage. There is limited funding for French historians, however, and it is even more limited for those historians in the early stages of their careers. My choices were: a) fund myself after Duke quit funding me but until I became self-sustaining, at which point Duke would likely take credit for my efforts and possibly some portion of my scholarship or b) save the money and emotional effort. I chose b, I don’t regret it, but I miss my work and I am angry that they took it from me.

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