Stolen Work: Karma Comes Home to Roost
A memory revived by Kim Kelly Stamp’s “When My Work Was Stolen…”
When I got my first position as a college professor, I was thrilled to start making my name as a scholar. Despite a high school guidance counselor telling me it would be best to aim for a career as an elementary school teacher, I’d always wanted to be a professor and do research. Deep dives into knowledge, that’s my thing.
I was the first person in my family on either side to be a professor and my parents were thrilled. Both flew from Tennessee to California to see my doctoral graduation. Years later, my Dad would walk the halls of my university in Texas, just to hear students and professors call me “Dr.”
My post-doctoral fellowship had allowed funds for me to travel for archival research in Europe and to attend conferences nationwide. I had even had one piece published and another accepted. Now, as a full-time professor, it was time to take the research world in my own little niche by storm.
In trying to balance a full-time teaching load with research, I was concerned that papers I was submitting to conferences were rejected while less solid papers were accepted. Perhaps I was confused about the quality of my work? But, as a scholar and performer in the arts, we are accustomed to self-criticism; it’s a way of life. An F# in a C major scale can never be right, so we fix it. I sought help from more experienced scholars.
A colleague and alum from my upscale grad school told me that I wasn’t confused, my work was good, quite good, but a former professor, let’s call her Dr. X, from my master’s program was sabotaging my success. This was stunning. I’d thought she’d be proud that I was continuing her research area in the Italian Renaissance. But apparently not. The colleague said Dr. X, an internationally known area specialist (though she rarely traveled outside the US), was a queen bee and didn’t welcome the “competition.”
The colleague suggested I submit to European conferences where Dr. X had less “pull.” I did and was successful. Fortunately, my college had funds to support my travels as one paper after another was accepted in Glasgow, and Florence, and Melbourne, and more.
Then, to my great pride, I was invited to speak at a conference in London alongside speakers from Oxford and Cambridge. These “speaker by invitation” conferences, as opposed to “submit and hope for the best,” events were a wonderful honor. They meant that the highest levels of the field felt that you were their peer. I’d hit the big time. And get this, my former professor, the queen bee, was also invited.
I planned to go to the famed British Library where great thinkers like Karl Marx, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Twain had penned their works. I planned to have treacle tart, visit Agatha Christie’s museum at Brown’s Hotel, and have high tea. As a golden-age mystery fan, the ability to combine my reading hobby with my research goals in one visit was a dream come true.
In the audience for my former professor’s paper, I’m sure I glowed with joy sitting there in my tasteful black dress, black and blue jacquard professorial jacket, and cute ankle boots (after all, some scholars from France might be there so I wanted to look “sharp,” as my mom would put it). But listening to what Dr. X was saying, my smile faded and my face froze as it became clear that she had stolen my research. She had stolen research from a paper I had submitted for a conference in the U.S., a paper she, as chair of the program committee, had rejected from that conference!
When she saw me sitting there, third-row center, she began to stumble and awkwardly tried to rephrase the paper on the fly. I just sat quietly and stared, so mindful, so demure. Others in the audience wondered what had happened to her because this was not her normal kind of research (it dealt with stats and she was not good with numbers. It also dealt with details of translation; she always hired a translator.)
Years ago, as it turns out, I had shown a preliminary draft of that piece to a scholar who remembered it. That someone was also at the London event. I never said anything, but the word began to spread in academia that she had stolen my work. I just kept submitting and being accepted in Europe.
Then, with the support of European scholars, my papers began to be accepted in the U.S. I was the Josephine Baker of academia. Dr. X got fewer international invitations.
Then, out of the blue, Dr. X invited me to participate on a panel she had set up for a national conference in New York. This was a first. I agreed.
Boldly, I asked if she’d have coffee with me. Sipping espresso, we resolved some of our issues when she admitted she had believed some academic gossip that had no relation to truth (I had the receipts). She’d taught me for two years, but it never occurred to her to ask me — but whatever.
That partially explained the rejections but didn’t explain the theft in London. I let it go. And I guess since I had taken the high road or people had begun to look a her funny, she never stole another work of mine and stopped interfering in my success. But that’s not the end of the story.
Perhaps as a result of the word getting out about my travels on that high road, the invitations for me to contribute chapters to essay collections and entries in reference books had increased exponentially alongside my acceptance rate to national conferences. Then came the coup de grâce.
I was asked to revise two of her works in the decennial update for the most important reference book in our field. Because her research was sadly out of date and I had to research and rewrite both entries from scratch, I could have been petty and left her name off the pieces, but I split the difference. After all, the contributions she had made to the field deserved respect.
I kept her name alongside mine on the piece most closely associated with her own work and used mine alone on the article I would probably have been asked to write all those years ago, had it not been for her interference. But I did feel a bit guilty for not feeling one bit guilty at leaving her out of the second article credits.
Despite herself, she taught me one final lesson. I never wanted anyone to suffer as I had. When junior scholars have needed help launching their careers, I’ve been eager to help, even using my professional reputation in the role of co-author, or connecting them with other senior scholars to help get their first peer-reviewed articles out. It’s been wonderful to share in their successes.
There’s only been one backfire, but that’s a tale for another day.
