There are really only three things that can ruin your life in academia: outright malice, sheer incompetence (which is worse than malice) and silence. The first two are the most startling, leaving you gasping in surprise, since it is beyond you that someone would do something like that. Silence is easy and logical—you just need to avert your eyes. Malice is strangely easier to deal with, despite being infinitely more painful. It leaves little room for ambiguity, as it is usually quite clear that the intention is to hurt and batter. This makes it easier to comprehend—it is of course awful to be hated, but you can categorize it as nastiness, and occasionally it is so egregious that you can actually report it.

Abuse through incompetence, however, is harder to pinpoint, and the perpetrator is protected by their incompetence. This kind of abuse is usually committed by those in leadership roles, by mishandling a situation—for example, a malevolent campaign against a junior colleague by a senior one. Nothing can be done about this, hence incompetence is the perfect shield. This can be painfully shocking, since it can really beggar disbelief how someone employed and paid handsomely to take responsibility can bungle it so badly. Ambiguity regarding whether there is incompetence or malicious intent brings extra pain, and an added layer of paranoia. It also undermines trust in authority and in the possibility of holding a harasser accountable.

Incompetence can also manifest itself silently, through rage-inducing sins of omission. Passive failure, by pretending something never happened, follows the law of least resistance. Inertia is something we all understand, and it can even elicit envy—imagine being able to just sit and close your eyes, and not have to fight for survival. The averting of eyes is particularly beloved by academic management, since it also has an engrained aspect of gaslighting—making someone question their perception and reasoning, since the silence indicates that nothing bad has happened, and thereby the problem is dealt with as if it never existed.

By choosing not to interfere and denying any problems, the collegially elected chairs and administration aid in portraying someone who has been inappropriately touched and stalked as a delusional brazen minx who actually wanted it badly, or the passed-over junior female colleague as a ruthless hysteric, untethered from reality, who needs to wait her turn, or the harassed grad student as a confused incompetent hussy who should never have been admitted to the program. With this framing and the decision to take no action, there is nothing the abused can do, and the non-action stasis leaves everything hanging in perpetuity. You are left in a vacuum, without breathable air, the non-action having suspended everything, and the environment has become uninhabitable—you must leave. Management has thus solved the problem by forcing out the slag, the floozy and the madwoman.

There are many things that can be done at an institutional level to improve academia, such as better labor practices with better contracts and safety nets. Academic career advancement could be made less feudal, so that you are not dependent on the goodwill of your liege lord, with transparency in hiring, especially in short-term contracts. It should be in the interest of a vice chancellor to ensure there are clear avenues for reporting harassment and holding people accountable. Yet at many universities, harassment is investigated and arbitrated within a department, and everyone who has ever worked in a department knows that no one is neutral in such situations. Enamored with the idea of collegial leadership, I hesitate to call for a more professionalized managerial stratum at universities, but I have gradually come to the conclusion that collegial leadership does not work in the most fraught departments, since it places power in the hands of people who have already established friends and foes. There are very few incentives to improve the situation; the calm of the status quo where no one is questioned or has to alter behavior is infinitely more alluring than the mess of change and examination. Despite improved labor law governance in academia, inertia is beguiling and all too easy.

I have no sweeping suggestions for solutions, since academia looks different from the perspectives of different departments, universities and countries, even if they share the same kinds of abuse and harassment. When problems arise, good leadership is essential, but rare. That colleagues have a sense of responsibility and call each other out and act, instead of averting their eyes, is also essential. This is not even a culture of fear and retribution, but a natural inclination to take the easy way out. Inertia is also connected with shrinking funding in academia, as everyone must fend for themselves as money and time disappear in cut-backs and reorganizations. Permanent positions are essential for a fair, democratic and vibrant academia, since stability is necessary in order to be a responsible and conscientious colleague.

In the magical #MeToo autumn of 2017, where change seemed possible and I finally learned that it is not okay if someone masturbates in front of you without consent (thank you, Louis CK!), the online journal Eidolon published an article by Donna Zuckerberg on the books that were never written and never will be, because their potential writers have been harassed, shamed or just so worn out that scholarship was not possible: “But in its shadow is a second library—at once infinite and infinitesimal—of essays, articles and books that will never be written because the people who would have written them were pushed out of the field by harassment and abuse” (2017, para. 1).

This story of lost libraries mainly concerns sexual harassment, but it can easily be expanded to include all forms of abuse in academia. Abuse that is not expressed in a sexualized manner and not specifically sexist is in many respects just as tiring and shaming as that of a sexual nature. This abuse is also practiced more visibly and openly, perhaps under the guise of supervision or scrupulousness. Specific excuses can include expressing worry about someone’s aptitude for academic work, with fake concern for a specific individual’s personal suitability, and exclusionary approaches such as certain information not being disseminated, with some particular person always falling off the email list.

As a classical philologist, I am of course obsessed with lost texts—all that has been lost through the ages and ravages of time, as well as the haphazardness of preservation—and I think about this ghostly library every day. It includes a text or two by me, when I was too tired, beaten and angry to produce them. The lost library should be as longed for as the (probably exaggerated) Library of Alexandria, as the dispersed books that traveled with the Byzantine princess Sophia Palaiologina to Russia, or the volumes that Ansgar and his men abandoned to the Norsemen when attacked in their missionary travels.

Texts are created from language, and this is a reminder of how hard it is to speak of abuse in academia. We all prefer exacting and precise terminology, but where stories of abuse are concerned, there are only tentative phrases, with glosses and subordinate clauses galore. Once again, the #MeToo autumn, while having devastatingly little impact, at least started to lay the foundation of a language for speaking out about and narrating abuse and harassment. The non-sexual arena is in many ways equally fraught. We are still far from having the vocabulary and narrative framework to be able to talk about this, to be capable of discussing the imbalances of power in a mutually intelligible language that encompasses the past, present and future. Translation, contextualization and interpretation is hard, especially when the one trying to tell the story is developing the language. Language cannot grow in a vacuum, when there is a refusal to listen and see. Yet the evolving language helps the abused find words for what happened. This is a delicate and precarious means of communication among the bewildered, which may remain secret for some time to come.

In all probability, I will continue to work within the same field as my harassers and their passive enablers for a very long time. I will see how others support and laud them, and how they will be given opportunities to hurt others. I can leave, of course, and I probably should, especially if I want to leave the anger and sadness behind. I might one day, but for now, I control my anger and grief, and I think of the library of lost books, and how one day it will no longer be a secret library, but a public one, where we can learn, invent and discover words, and ensure they are correctly transmitted and interpreted.