I listened to the first part of Helga Rhodes’ audiobook—-Dealing with Conflict and Confrontation, and cracked up in the tram back home. She talked about two types of conflicts: an overt conflict and an underground conflict. The underground conflict is conflict in denial. It’s the conflict that people know about, but no one talks about except among themselves in their little cliques. The one where, in the hierarchy of the workplace (or academia!), the big fish at the top rises an eyebrow and says: “Problem? We don’t have any problem”.
And for a very long while, yes 3 years in fact, my academic institution had the same reaction. We don’t have a problem, we are the next Princeton and next Princetons don’t have problems. But there were (and still are) problems, big serious problems that won’t go away unless you solve them.
So what happens when you have this kind of situation? When people feel they can’t bring up the problem because they are scared of what will happen to them? And when they do bring it up, they get treated as if they are the problem? What happens in an environment full of stress and frustration?
Helga said that people will start to fall sick. They fall sick a lot. Productivity dives. You end up spending more time updating your CV in hopes of finding a new job than actually doing the job that you have. People become more competitive. And massive thievery—-of office supplies, food, cleaning products, toilet paper, computer monitors. Oh, and beware of the coffee for it will most likely have spit in it.
This is the part where I cracked up in the tram. Because it is simply true. In Next-Princeton, all of those things happened. Next-Princeton is in fact, a textbook case of Underground Conflict. LOL it feels weird to be able to diagnose the illness of a whole institute.
Tumblr’s answer to the classic “Lorem ipsum…” is a quote from Confucius:
It does not matter how slow you go so long as you do not stop
And it took us a long time (3 years!) to get here, to this point where things are finally moving and people can no longer turn their noses away and say that there is no problem.
One big problem is the health insurance. It’s a very simple story. Graduate students and postdocs all had full public health insurances (which is compulsory!). Next-Princeton said: “We are changing you to a private health insurance, don’t worry it’ll cover the same things as your current one, and it’s private, so it’s good”. In the ideal situation, this works out and everybody is happy and better off.
Except it didn’t work out.
Lucky people (read: people with the correct citizenship) received a full private insurance, because according to the law, it’s just not possible to get them anything else. Unlucky people (read: foreign graduate students and postdocs) received a health insurance titled: “Health Insurance for Travelling Foreigners”. This insurance costs Next-Princeton about 40 Currency Units per foreign scientist per month. The lucky native scientists who possesed the correct passport each received an insurance that costs 120 Currency Units per month. And of course, these two insurances obviously do not have the same coverage.
At this point, it was very hard not to think that there was no latent xenophobia on the part of the people who were in charge. But maybe we were just reading too much into things. No, how can it be? This is an institute for research, this is Next-Princeton, things like this don’t happen. So with that conviction, we decided that this was just an administrative fumble—-it can be fixed, we simply have to talk to people and human intelligence will fix it.
We had a big meeting with the administrators to solve this problem. One of them related a “story” about how Indian students in Cambridge took advantage of the NHS to have full sets of gold teeth. Latent xenophobia doesn’t sound that latent. Administrators promised to solve the problem, and we handed them a petition signed by students and postdocs to be given to the directors of Next-Princeton in the next directors meeting.
To make a long story short, none of the directors saw the petition. So we went to talk to the directors themselves—-big Professors who were supposed to be clever people. They said they will solve the problem. And so on and so forth until we are here, three years later, and nothing has changed. In fact, every new foreign student that has entered Next-Princeton since, has been given the same “Foreign Traveller” insurance.
Here’s another problem: holidays. In Next-Princeton, aside from the foreigner and non-foreigner distinction that classifies how much your health is worth, there is also a distinction between those on a stipend and those on a working contract. A stipend means you are essentially given a scholarship. You don’t pay taxes and you get money every month to cover your expenses as you ‘learn’ in Next-Princeton. Postdocs get stipends too, not just graduate students.
Then you get the people on working contracts. This just means you get an actual working contract. You pay taxes. You have rights and you can claim certain benefits. You also legally have the right to have X number of holidays per year. In fact, if you don’t claim these holidays, you get a letter in the post reminding you to take holidays. All in all, very cushy.
As it turned out, even after tax, the students and postdocs on the working contract get more money anyway, so there really is no benefit in having a stipend.
On the other hand, having a stipend means that you are simply unlucky because Next-Princeton says that since you are given money every month to ‘learn’, you have to work every month of every year—-365 days per year. That includes public holidays too. And if you do get time off it’s only on the basis of the kindness of your professor. So if your professor likes you, you get away with 9 weeks holidays per year. And if your professor doesn’t like you, well, no holidays for you, unlucky boy.
And this is what happened and is happening in Next-Princeton. A self-organised caste of scientists. At the very top, you get the big professors who basically will never be kicked out of their posts. Then you get the fellows who fight each other to get that one permanent position. Then you get the postdocs and graduate students who are divided into:
I happen to be at the very bottom of this hierarchy. I have the wrong passport and I have a stipend. I have my “Health Insurance for Foreign Travellers” and I have been told by my Professor that—-don’t I know? I don’t have any holidays and that I should check my contract. I did check my stipend ‘contract’. It is one page long and it tells me how much money I get per month, how long I will get this money for and that if I am sick for more than two months, I will be automatically kicked out of my PhD. It says nothing about holidays. It also says nothing about how many hours I should work per day (13 hrs/day and a minimum of 3 journal publications per year is, according to my Professor, what the ideal graduate student is).
These are just two problems. There are more, but let’s not go into them now. Instead, let’s fast-forward to the present and I’ll finish this little anecdote.
We, the Unlucky Unlucky, decided that since we are rightfully and actually students of the university, we would go and see the people in the university. We went to see the office for foreign students, the ombudsman, the student union… but nothing really happened. Nobody, it seemed could do anything about Next-Princeton.
That is, until we saw the new vice-president of the university.
And you know… after three years of trying to cope, deal and solve these problems, it is such a relief to finally find somebody who can and does something. Who won’t just listen to you and play counsellor. Who isn’t just a big mouth talking about rights and fairness but then does nothing. It is such a relief. My faith in the existence of intelligence is renewed.
But now Next-Princeton is angry. All the big fish are angry. We didn’t have any problems and now we do have some because of you, they say. You went to the vice-president, how could you! Why didn’t you talk to us? We don’t ever remember you discussing these problems with us before! We thought these problems were solved! You went to the vice-president, how could you? Don’t you know that the new president of the university doesn’t like Next-Princeton? What if Next-Princeton becomes Maybe-Next-Princeton? How could you! You went to the vice-president!
Yes we went to the vice-president, it is his job to solve problems. And actually, it is your job too. The new Mercedes and Chrysler parked right there… those didn’t come for free you know. Using your brains to become a professor doesn’t mean that when you get the title, you don’t need to use it anymore, you know.
Just so you know, there are still problems. So can you please stop shouting at me and do something to solve it?
