So I mentioned in my last post that my postdoc ended with me getting my Fellowship. I thought that I had eventually got away from a PI that was holding me down. I felt that being a PI would have been my get out clause.
When I formally started my new contract, I went out excitedly spending all my consumables money that I had to start to piece what would then become my formal lab space. When the large bits of equipment came in and I started “moving in” so to speak, I was faced with a lot of angered members of my ex-PI’s lab group telling me that I had “taken up too much room”, even though the building and lab manager assigned me space to place my equipment in the relevant areas of the lab.
In academia, it is expected that people will moan about something or other – that tends to be the demographic personality of “The Academic”. What I hadn’t anticipated, though, was my equipment being broken/sabotaged by someone in the department.
Departmental meetings were particularly difficult. My team were often given a hard time by the senior academics – more so than the average grilling that they’re accustomed to. It quickly became well-known in the department that this particular academic didn’t like me and had no qualms letting people know how they felt. This was very unprofessional of them, considering I had kept everything to myself (bar telling my then boyfriend, otherwise I doubt I would still be around).
Other issues that began were rumours being spread that I was “demanding office space” for myself. I only became aware of this when someone who came back from parental leave – who had been away for the best part of a year – TOLD me I was known to be a diva in the department. Unless I had had a stroke of some description, I distinctly recall waiting 3 months until I was assigned an office space.
Petty issues like this went on for the best part of two years. In between all of this drama I did somehow manage to get some description of work done. It was surprising that I managed to publish, go to conferences, teach, and build a network of collaborators. Eventually the collaborators decided that I should find other people to work with, because my ex-PI in the department was working with them too, and they couldn’t ruin their relationship with the ex-PI.
This was pretty disappointing, given that I was giving these collaborator’s a huge boost to their CV’s – they chose to include MY just-under-a-million-pound grant on THEIR CVs, even though they hadn’t provided any input other than they would be a part of it *IF* I got awarded the fellowship. To them their relationship with a destructive academic was more important, and they were not interested in supporting a future leader. Disappointing.
My mental health went down the shitter. As all academics, your job/projects are everything and so they take a very strong toll on your confidence and mind when, no matter how hard you’re trying, you’re being faced with blockade after blockade.
I had nowhere to turn, as the ex-PI was the department go-to person for complaints and other issues faced by students/staff in the department.
By this point I had decided I was leaving academia for good – but not until I gave the ex-PI a hard time for acting like such a monster.
I finally submitted a bullying and harassment complaint at HR against the ex-PI, gave them all emails/photos and name dropped all the people who were all to happy to tell me things that this ex-PI had said about me and what was said. I mean why was this ex-PI so comfortable telling them things against me? Why were they ok to listen to it? Why did they tell me?
This was a 6-month gruel.
I was moved to a different department because I was seen as a trouble-maker, although my lab was still in the same department, but I didn’t have to interact with that particular academic anymore.
The University obviously pulled rank, got together and said that after their “extensive” investigations it was all a case of “misunderstanding and miscommunication” rather than bullying and harassment, and that no further action will be taken.
The ex-PI was given a promotion.
Six months later I was still in the same situation I had been earlier. What I then decided to do was basically get back to the department where it usually hurts them most. Financially.
I over-spent on my grant by tens of thousands of pounds on specialist items and extending my contract for as long as possible (while doing no work for them at all – I stopped teaching etc), which meant they had to cover the costs that went over from annual budgets & find alternative chumps in staff who were willing to take on my extra teaching duties for free. This was particularly funny for me because they had intended to use the left over grant money, that didn’t get spent before the deadline, on other staff contract extensions inside the department.
I destroyed the lab equipment that I built in the department that the ex-PI had intended to use for another member of the ex-PI’s staff (so that they could use it after I left, so that they could further their career).
By this stage I had two other jobs that I was getting paid full time for as well as this shitty, drudge of an academic post. I didn’t tell the HR department that I had two other jobs because the LEAST they could do was give me my redundancy pay for the all the hardship I had endured. I wasn’t about to tell them I had other jobs. I just insisted on being as disruptive to them as feasible. The contract at the university came to a silent close, I got my redundancy pay and I continued working my other two jobs, getting a pretty good sum of money coming in to my bank account every month.
Now I was a particularly disruptive employee by the time I got to the end of this contract. I made it very difficult for people around me, just as they had done to me. Piling on the financial burden to the department, especially since this was happening when student admission numbers had started dwindling due to COVID, was a great win for me.
By no way am I saying you should do this too.
The entire point of this post is to tell you that this shit happens all the time and to NOT take the level of bullshit I did. It’s not the end of the world if you have to leave academia, you can get out and get your way. You will have to burn your bridges (so you HAVE TO be sure that you’re 100% done with academia) if you’re the kind of person I am and require the final upper hand, especially when you’ve been treated like shit for so long.
Don’t let some archaic organisation let you think otherwise.