u/CJ_Southworth

Part of this is about seeing who else has realized, after being out of a bad place for awhile, just how bad it is, but part of it is also about helping other people still "in the trenches" understand the long term effects of staying in a toxic place. I would love to think that there is, at most, a small handful of you who are dealing with toxicity in your workplace, but I read the posts. I think that's probably a vain hope.

I taught for 20 years at a Liberal Arts-based Community College, and I poured everything I had into it. For the first ten years, I was split between student support services (tutoring, new student services, orientation activities, whatever else they threw at us, even when we had no qualifications--like eight months serving as the disability services coordinator when the previous person walked out) and adjunct teaching. No insurance, no PTO, and the constant promise that "next year, you'll go full time."

I finally was able to step into teaching full time after they basically killed a professor. For several years, she had very obviously been struggling with mental and physical health issues, and the only thing done about it was to bitch about her behind her back and throw more responsibilities at her so she would fail. She literally died in her office. And our AVP complained about how "unnecessary" it was for her to die on campus--she was even then still a "problem" for having literally DIED on the job. And I know, looking back, that I was part of the problem too. I didn't join in on the backstabbing, but I also didn't really stand up for her when people were downing her. And I deal with the fact that keeping my mouth shut and "not causing trouble" may have been part of why she died.

When I stepped in, mid-semester, to take over her course load, all the "perks" that first year full-time faculty had to get their feet on the ground--no committee work, reduced advising load, no overloads, etc.--were completely off the table. I taught 21 credits (15 was the full-time load) per semester for the first full year of teaching, because they refused to find someone to take over in the college success courses I had to teach as part of my support services position. I not only had to do committee work--I was chairing two committees at that point and the co-chair of a first-year experience initiative (which was handed down as a mandate by the college senate and then, once it was done, was voted down completely because, despite the insistence that we needed to implement one when we were assigned the task, they decided that it was too much work when we brought the proposal to them after a two-year process of research and development).

I was harassed for being gay and non-binary by several faculty and a few staff members, and every time I tried to report it, I was told that it wasn't a big deal and it would be much worse for me to try to make a big deal of it than it was to just learn to "relax and let it go"--one of the people doing this was an advisor in the student intake center who refused to put male students in my classes because she was somehow under the impression that being non-binary was the same as multiple-personality disorder and that I would "confuse" males (keeping in mind--we're talking adult, college-age men) if they were "forced" to take a class with me. She wasn't even spoken to, and I was given a lecture on how I simply had to understand that some people might not "understand" my "lifestyle" and to let it go because it would, once again, be "worse" for me to push the issue.

Then we wound up with a president with no previous classroom experience whatsoever who was of the "you run it like a business" mindset. (Feel free to groan along with me.) This included laying off all of the student retention positions to save money--no tutoring, no dedicated advisors for new student intakes, no counseling services, nothing--and then, when enrollment dropped (because if you aren't "retaining' students, guess what happens--it's kind of right there in the name, after all) held a campus wide meeting in which she demanded to know within a certain time frame ("by the end of business the last day of this semester" and there were less than two weeks remaining at that point) what we were going to do about it and that she didn't "want to hear anything about 'it's because we cut tutors.'"

What we learned was that her expectation had been that all of the faculty would automatically pick up the duties of both a tutoring center with multiple, full-time professional tutors and all new student intake advising in addition to our current schedules--this in a year when we had already been denied any raises because "the budget was tight." (Meanwhile, she and the rest of admin weren't bound to the contract for their salaries and negotiated their own raises.)

And still, I poured everything I had into the job because I was one of those annoying "true believers" who thought "the mission" was everything and every sacrifice was worth it. I taught full time, I commuted three times a week to finish my doctoral program (a two and a half hour commute one-way), and still held it all together.

And then, when my health started to fail, I was immediately made to feel like I wasn't a team player because I had medical appointments. Keeping in mind--all of these appointments were on my time, but they meant there were days where I wasn't just there and "available" when I didn't have other responsibilities. We weren't "time clock punchers." But I was "letting down the team" on the days I left after my last class because I had testing or another consultation. I taught on days when I could barely walk from pain, when I had trouble speaking because I was in massive sensory overload and didn't know at the time that I'm autistic, when I was excusing myself from class so I could throw up in the faculty bathroom and then go back to teaching.

And when the breakdown came, partially from all of the stress, but partially because I was put into serotonin syndrome three times within a year and a half because the medical system in our area isn't as thorough as it should be, I was qualified for FMLA (since I was in the hospital and had no choice in the matter but to stop working). You'd think that would be some sort of realization, but I should have learned from the professor I replaced--they didn't care about anyone's well-being. I was sent a letter before the new academic year started saying that I needed a note clearing me to return to work (even though I was supposed to be on sabbatical that semester) or I would be "dropped from payroll."

So much for support. I'd missed two months at the end of the year. I was in terrible shape--serotonin syndrome messes you up pretty bad, and there was still all the other medical issues going on. But I got the doctor's note because I didn't want to lose the job.

I don't know what I bothered fighting for at that point. Like my predecessor, the moment I returned, there was no support. There was a lot of ridicule behind my back, dumping more responsibilities on me that I was expected to just handle...and then COVID hit.

I had never taught online before, but I got a crash course in two months during that summer, and went into the thick of it in August. All the accommodations made for online classes--20% reduction in seats, no overloads--were out the window from the start and we all came back to courses that were overloaded by a minimum of three seats per section (fifteen more sets of papers to grade every time a new assignment came in), teaching full-time loads (which we had been told for years was "impossible" and would never be approved). And we got through it.

More or less.

And then I was done. They built a bullshit case. Our union president turned out to basically answer directly to admin. To the point that, after it was all done and I posted a rant similar to this on Facebook explaining what had happened, our UNION PRESIDENT personally visited every faculty member who had "liked" or commented on it because of "concerns" about their "interactions" with me during the afternoon after I posted it.

Oh, and the union president who was supposed to be helping me with my case fighting against losing my job was also one of the people who had filed a complaint in my earlier years of teaching that I was "teaching my sex life" in my literature class because I taught an award winning AIDS play and he overheard the discussion and decided that a gay person teaching anything with a gay character in it was obviously just being indecent. So so much for any help there.

And even five years after being finished with it all, I still have days when, in my mind, I defend the treatment I got. We get so bullshitted into believing that we're "part of the family" and a "team" and that everything in our lives that doesn't immediately serve them is simply a distraction.

I also worked with some truly wonderful people. The people who felt they could express their discrimination openly (and, apparently, they were right) were a minority of the people there, and I let the good people that I worked with constantly be an excuse for the terrible people that we worked for. I let the fact that I loved teaching and loved my students overshadow the fact that we were constantly taken advantage of by people who literally didn't care when one of us died. (My predecessor wasn't the only faculty we had died in the middle of a semester while I worked there, and none of them were ever even acknowledged by admin aside from the standard, "we regret to inform you that Professor X has passed away" along with the information about who was going to take over their classes. Anything in the way of remembrance events were put together by faculty and/or students.)

I let the fact that I won a few awards be the "evidence" that I was appreciated, even when the awards usually came with some backhanded comment from someone in admin that diminished it. I let the friendships I had with co-workers be my evidence that it wasn't a toxic environment.

I'd love to say that it's over, but after five years, I'm still a mess. I found out I had autism when I was diagnosed with autism burnout. Ten years ago, I was teaching full time, doing grad school full time, finishing my dissertation, running a small poetry press, and doing all those "other duties as assigned." Now going grocery shopping means coming home feeling sick and having to sleep for a few hours just to keep going with the day. I have to space out anything that means leaving the house, because even daylight is too much sensory information some days. Yesterday, I knew I needed to get some cleaning done and also needed to do some work on a website I'm helping a friend with, and it took so much energy trying to figure out which one to work on first that I wound up doing neither. The overachiever at my core looks at what I do now and constantly tells me what a mess I am and how I'm useless. Logically, I know better, but that doesn't stop that voice that nags at me that I serve no purpose to anyone anymore.

And I miss my classes. I miss teaching. I don't think I could handle it now. I think I could maybe handle the instruction part--but the grading? The committee work? The meetings? There's no way. I was barely holding anything together that last year, and I know I was still great "in the classroom" (even if that was in front of a webcam in my dining room because of lockdown), but I know I let down my students in many other ways, and I wouldn't want to go back to teaching if I can't do right by my students.

And for some reason, it finally came to me last night just how horrible it really was there. That job was killing me. It didn't have to, but the people in charge didn't care if it did.

The college is under it's second "never taught/it's just another business" president right now. Many of the people I used to work with have left--either retired, quit, driven out, or found a position elsewhere. I know the college is struggling, and I know it's not the fault of the institution, but I honestly don't care anymore if it crashes and burns. In fact, if that blame would actually fall on those who ran it into the ground, I would welcome hearing that the state was shutting them down. But I know that admin would just go on to mess up other institutions, and the people who really worked and sacrificed would be the ones out of work in a market that isn't really hiring right now.

So to those of you still in the field, doing your best to get through every day while being bombarded with "do more with less" and constantly told how the ridiculous failures of your admin are somehow your responsibility to fix, understand it's not you. It's them. We're in a system where the people at the top seem to have been actively trying to destroy education for years, and they're in their endgame right now--they're tearing down the Department of Education. Funding has been drying up for years. And none of the people who are the ones who are supposed to be fighting for the cause on that level are bothering. Instead, they're sitting in their offices, telling us that every failure is because we just aren't doing enough.

Don't buy it. Look after yourselves. Protect your health. And if the point comes when you know you need to get out, realize that isn't failing anyone at all--it's investing in your own well-being and health. Toxic systems don't clear themselves up when the toxin is leaching down from the top.

It's not worth suffering for. It isn't.

(Just to head off the people who will offer advice to sue, our contract had a clause in it that any sort of conflict like that needed to be addressed through arbitration, and once you've done that, the law firms won't touch you, no matter how bad the arbitration was. And even if I could sue, I couldn't do it at this point. I am too tired and too broken to go through all that stress for however many years it would take to--maybe--accomplish anything.)

Is there any evidence that there will also be a non-continuous mix?

When you realize just how terrible they were/if you realize how terrible they are...

World Cup Halftime Show!