dealing with abusive and toxic academic environments

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The environment at my university is, without a doubt, toxic and abusive in ways I'd expect to read in a pulp romance novel (including professors coercing their students into relationships and, in one case, running a prostitution website off the university servers for which he slept with and vetted prostitutes. There was some question about whether or not he was trying to recruit students for the website.) I've filed complaints before, to be ignored and/or lectured on not being more tolerant of other people's needs/culture. I even testified in a lawsuit against my university, because myself and nine other students (and three faculty) complained about the unethical and unprofessional behavior of one of the professors. Nothing came of it.

The lawyer successfully argued that because we were all over 18, it really didn't matter how the professor behaved. If we were over 18, obviously anything that happened was with everyone's consent. (And the idiot jury bought it.)

At this point, I genuinely feel like I'm going to have a nervous breakdown. I'm almost done with my second master's degree, but the faculty in my department have made it impossible to get a job doing the statistical analysis I love to do.

If there's no recourse (and I even reported to the goddamn federal Department of Education here in the ole USA, let alone filed complaints at the compliance office here and talked to reporters), what the hell can I do to prevent myself from just dropping out?

They're willing to let me graduate (as long as I'm totally okay with being publicly humiliated, grabbed, having my tits stared at, being slandered, etc), but I've caught professors in my department teaching material which is not just fundamentally and grossly incorrect, but also stands a high likelihood of sabotaging the careers of students who graduate having taken their word for how to perform research and statistics. The definitions given are sometimes literally the opposite of what textbooks define for the term, and often only a small fraction. The professors who teach the quantitative work actually mock people who would want to learn how to do that sort of work while teaching it. And any student stupid enough to say they like quantitative work (like me, for instance), gets thoroughly decimated via gossip, rudeness, bullying, having the professor lay hands on them, or is otherwise strongly encouraged to drop out.

Anyone got any sanity savers, or at least a better way to think about it? They are driving me crazy.

You should probably focus on getting your degree and worry about whether you have learned enough later. It is crazy but shockingly that is how this world of ours works a lot of the time.

If you don't get the degree you could end up like me - someone who has few academic papers to prove their intelligence. I don't think you would enjoy receiving no replies to job applications like I do.

What you've had to put up with is out of line but all hope is not lost. You can't always win a situation immediately. Once you've graduated your personal status will have increased and from that point you can begin to consider how to address the abuse you've faced.

Why not swallow your pride for now and do whatever it takes to get your qualification, and at the same time use a voice recorder to try to gather evidence of the abuse. By secretly recording people you could have something you could later use to prosecute more effectively.

Perhaps continuing activism with some of the nine other students? It's just much more effective to engage in activism with even a couple of other people. And maybe even Hollywood movies as examples of when a situation is a healthy workplace romance and when it's some bully abusing a position of power.

Aardvark: Trust me, healthy is not by any stretch of the imagination a description of relationships involved. If your students have to take Valium to go to class, ain't nothin' healthy about it. Or, in the case of one student, if you have a panic attack any time you set foot on campus. I had to escort her to most of her classes in her final semester because she was afraid of being harmed. The students who were willing to talk to me were terrified, and often medicated--some of them expect me to defend them or to prevent them from being hurt.

I tried. Half my f*****g hair fell out from the stress, I stopped eating and I could barely get up and get dressed, but I defended them, counseled them, and escorted them to file complaints. I held their hands, sat with them and shamed others for carrying rumors about them. I tried to organize them so we could present a united front.

Unfortunately, we never really had any cohesion as a group. The ways that we were individually threatened (including being threatened with a loss of funding or being sued if we talked to each other about it) made sure that most of us are generally uncomfortable with talking about it. In my case, the rumors included slandering my mental health and insisting that I was violent, so other students were (with a few exceptions--the students who were most bullied) actively afraid of me.

I was asked for feedback earlier this semester on my university experience. I gave the reviewer an earful of my experiences and the experiences of other students I know. Maybe something will be done about it. At this point, I'm exhausted, burned out and with very little support. Certainly no one is stepping in and defending me or escorting me to class.

It'd make a great movie, with a different ending, but it's s**t to live in.

Winner: Yeah, I've come to the conclusion that I just have to hold my nose and finish. I have no idea what will be left of my mental health by this upcoming fall, but I don't want to be pushed out either.

Thank you for helping other people, and thank you for fighting the good fight.

I was involved in anti-war activism during the build up to the first Persian Gulf war and the war itself in 1990 and '91. I very much needed a fallow period and a re-growth period and to step away from activism for a while. And your situation and the battles you have fought seem a lot more serious and a lot more immediate. And I'm sorry officialdom responded so poorly. And that people in positions of power, who were not directly involved, and therefore had a chance to help, in accordance with their professed values, did not.

When I said the part about the Hollywood movie, I was thinking that people in general understand hostile work environment, at least in the abstract. Although when we get to specific situations, people will sometimes say well, this isn't "really" sexual harassment, when in fact it really is. Now, with quid pro quo harassment, I think people understand it even less well, or some people understand it for the clear abuse of power that it is, and other people don't seem to.

Aardvark: Thank you for thanking me. No one thanks me. No one has ever thanked me--the best I get is comments about how 'tough' I am.

I can't wait to step away. I'm constantly sick--stomach maladies, insomnia so bad I sometimes don't sleep for 48 hours, migraines, tension-related muscle damage, nausea, etc. I can't concentrate. I can barely remember appointments. I've gained weight I've never had before.

I don't think people understand hostile work environments in the same way fish don't understand water--they're swimming in it.

It amazes me how many people can be told about incidences in my life who insist that they can't possibly be sexual harassment (like a colleague who asked to talk privately to me and dropped his pants, whipped his cock out and started masturbating, or a student who insisted on scheduling late appointments with me and tried to coerce me to get in his car, or the professor who failed one of my exams and when I went, with his slides to talk to him about it, spent the whole time staring at my boobs, touching my arm very close to my breasts and accusing me of plagiarism on a closed book, closed note exam). The administrative response to all of the above, BTW, was to ask what I was wearing and how I could have led these men on. During the last incident, I also got a lecture on being culturally sensitive, since the professor in question was not from the US by birth--I was told by the head of his department that this was all part of the professor's "teaching style", and that he had an end goal for it, for which I should be patient.

I don't think they understand, either, because an amazing number of people think that the universe is just, and that extraordinary events like the following only occur in response to some sort of provocation. Or they think the universe is trying to teach me a lesson (I have almost punched people for telling me this.) If it was possible to declare war on an idea, I'd love to declare war on the just world fallacy.

Sometimes, things are just sh***y.

Oh the joys of tenure.

There is no other profession on earth where you can work an X number of years, and then be immune from being fired unless you commit a crime.

Have you ever thought about going to the news? If you had some proof of some of this, I can imagine the media LOVING this.

I and two other professors did originally, but the university is an important employer in town, and the proof we had (letters, testimony, documents from the complaint process) appeared to them to be too much of a risk to run.

We originally went to the local news and the Chronicle of Higher Ed.