Retaliation

This post is the fourth post in a series of stories that, taken together, might help explain why I decided to take early retirement from UCI. My point in posting these stories is to say "This happened. It shouldn't have. Can you learn something from it, so you can prevent such things from happening where you are (or at least not be complicit)?"

Retaliation

 

Part I: The Problem

1. The Prelude

One day, out of the blue, I got an email from someone in the Dean's Office whom I had never heard of. I'll call her Q. I had co-organized a conference on campus. My university had billed the conference for renting a lecture hall, but itemized a sizable chunk as "restroom and lecture hall cleaning." Q refused to allow the conference grant to pay for that, since "restroom cleaning" wasn't allowed on federal funds. 

The conference had merely rented a room; we never requested restroom cleaning. After much work on my part, my university's event office produced a new invoice that didn't include the offending words about restrooms.

I didn't understand why I was dealing with Q at all. She wasn't the "financial analyst" in the Dean's Office responsible for my grants. Or rather she was, but no one had told me. Several months later a cryptic email implied that Q was taking over that role.

When it came time to reimburse speakers for a later conference, it was noticed that while a speaker had, as instructed, purchased his plane ticket from Amsterdam to Los Angeles from Delta Airlines at delta.com with Delta flight numbers, the 3-digit airline code turned out to be KLM's. This led to a ludicrous and lengthy bureaucratic snafu, made worse by staff sending emails with misleading information to more and more people without my knowledge before I could correct it. In the end, the speaker wasn't reimbursed from the conference funds because KLM isn't an American airline, even though the funding agency would have permitted it.

2. The Threat

One day around 4:30 pm, the Math Department's financial person called out to me as I walked past her office. She told me to go down to Q's office right away to sign an important form.

I felt rushed since I was traveling very early the next morning to the Joint Mathematics Meetings, but I dutifully ran down to see Q in the Dean's Office. Q wanted me to sign a certification of expenses for a grant. I asked to take the form home, where I had the information I needed to check the figures. She said no, she needs it now. It's already overdue.

Why such late notice? She blamed the holidays "and we got behind". When I refused to sign without checking if it were correct, she was annoyed, but eventually got out a form that had information I could use to try to check it.

I (politely, I thought) said I hoped that in the future she could give me more notice.

I don't remember exactly what words she used, but I remember that she made clear to me that she could retaliate against me and make my life difficult.

I stopped in my tracks, taken aback since I didn't think I had done anything wrong. Curious as to how she might retaliate, I asked her.

She said that she could send my grant reimbursement requests to the Compliance Officer, who would deny them.

3. The Retaliation

I wasn't worried about having my requests sent to the Compliance Officer, since I'm one of the most "by the book" people. If anyone was in compliance, it was me. I didn't see how Q could hurt me.

I soon found out.

A few days later, Q denied my request to use a grant to buy a toner cartridge for my printer. From talking with Q about it, I was left with the clear impression that this was payback because I expressed my displeasure about the last-minute signing.

Less than a year earlier, a colleague had purchased a toner cartridge using a similar grant from the same funding agency, so it seemed as if Q were specifically targeting me.

It got so complicated that I ended up buying a new printer instead of a toner cartridge. In subsequent grant proposals I explicitly listed toner cartridges, hoping that would make it harder for Q to reject such requests.

Over time, I began to notice a pattern. Q seemed to be putting unnecessary barriers in my path, and denying routine requests. Incomplete or misleading versions of my requests were sent to the Compliance Officer and others without my knowledge, omitting crucial information that would have shown that my requests were reasonable.

Some of the funding agencies' program officers asked me what was wrong with UCI; why was UCI being so unreasonable, by requiring them to give written permission for things that didn't need it, and by not letting me spend the funds the way UCI had budgeted?

Q even denied expenses I had gotten pre-cleared. R from UCI's grants office contacted me to help with the wording of a grant proposal's budget justification. She assured me that I wouldn't have a problem if I used the grant for a certain type of expense. I asked her to send me an email to that effect. She said there was no need, since UCI approves such expenses all the time. I told her that my requests for such spending had been denied. At my insistence, R emailed me to confirm the allowability of the expense. 

When Q later denied the expense, I emailed R, with a cc to Q. I immediately got a call on my cell phone from P, who was Q's supervisor. P told me not to contact the grants office or anyone else about this. It came across as a threat.

A knowledgeable staff person told me that what I needed to know about the staff in the Dean's Office was that they acted like the mean girls in high school.

The staff member who ran the Math Department, S, told me that switching my grant from Q to someone else wouldn't help as long as their supervisor P was against me. Switching might make things worse.

S's willingness and ability to help me were limited since she was hired by and reported to the Dean's Office, not the Math Department (and would need recommendations from the Dean's Office staff for her next job).

Dealing with Q drained more and more of my time and energy, for several years. It felt as if things were spiraling out of control and taking over my life. Each time an email from her arrived in my Inbox, I felt fear in the pit of my stomach.

Part II: My Search for a Solution

4. The Ombudsman 

I amassed a lot of documentation of actions by Q that impeded the mission of the university rather than facilitating it.

I had been admonished (by someone who soon became department Chair) to never go outside the department, but this was a problem with the Dean's Office, and my fiduciary responsibility for the grants required me to do something.

The Dean had repeatedly made his hostility to me clear; going to him would make things worse (as I was soon to find out).

I met with the campus Ombudsman. I summarized the situation, and said I'd like to explore options for solving the problem and learn what to do in such situations. I hoped he could help solve the problem, but he didn't seem to have much to offer me. I left unsatisfied.

5. "Smile More"  

I learned from K, who was the Chair of the Math Department, that the School of Physical Sciences' Equity Advisor had arranged for the head of UCI's grants office to meet with a small group of people from Physics and Chemistry who had complained about their experiences with that office. At K's suggestion, I went to the meeting.

When the head of the grants office gave us his email address and phone number, I asked whether it was OK for us to contact his office directly. He said, "Of course." I pointed out that the financial people in the Dean's office had told me not to. I also said that, unlike others at that contentious meeting, I was happy with the grants office; my bad experiences were with the Dean's Office.

At the end of the meeting the Associate Dean for Research came up to me and said that the Dean had told him to find ways to make himself useful. He offered to help me.

This sounded promising. I asked S and K for advice, and they agreed that it made sense to talk to the Associate Dean before involving the Dean.

Unfortunately, my three meetings with the Associate Dean felt like encounters from Hell. If I had known I'd have to go through such an experience, I either wouldn't have become an academic, or at least wouldn't have come to UCI.

We met in the student affairs office. He began our meeting by saying that we needed to have some chitchat to make me more comfortable (yes, he really said that). He then told me a very long story that he had told me before, about his daughter, wife, and grandmother. I hate to have my time wasted; I find it disrespectful. As it turned out, his chitchat took time that could otherwise have been used to explain the problem that needed to be solved.

When I started to mention the problem, he told me that I needed to find out what makes Q tick; each financial analyst is different and has her problems and quirks, and it's important for me to spend time getting to know what Q's were and figuring out how to deal with her. He told me a story about being unreasonably and repeatedly denied something, but he had no choice because that's the way they do things here. He went on for awhile about all the hoops I would have to jump through to get people who were doing unreasonable things to do things more reasonably. His main solution was that I should smile more. He seemed to want me to show my gratitude for this valuable piece of advice.

I had just read a series of articles on why men should stop telling women to smile more, so I didn't especially appreciate the tip. I had behaved professionally with the staff. Some of my male colleagues not only didn't smile, but behaved reprehensibly towards staff, and were treated better by them than I was. No one was telling my male colleagues to smile more.

Eventually, I said that the staff's job is to further the mission of the university and help the faculty do their jobs. It seemed as if Q and P were impeding the work of the university. Wasn't the Dean's Office responsible for making sure that Q and P knew what their jobs were and that they did them properly? His response amounted to: we can't fire them and we can't change them and we're stuck with them. New people would be worse since they wouldn't know what they were doing and would get things wrong.

He took a phone call in the middle of our meeting, and then explained to me what it was about. More wasted time that could have been better spent. Since he was clearly very uncomfortable with me, I wondered whether he needed some chitchat, so I took that opportunity to initiate some. This led him to tell me a story about his mother that he had told me before. It seemed like a standard "my mother, wife, or whatever is a woman who has been treated badly, and since I know that, I'm not sexist" story that people use to immunize themselves against accusations of sexism, and then think they can get away with anything. From the way he spoke about his mother having worked while he was young, it sounded as if he resented her for it.

He seemed to think I needed him to ask Q and P why they were treating me the way they were. I said I didn't need to know that; I knew it, and they were treating me in ways they wouldn't treat my male colleagues. I told him I hadn't wanted to bring that (sexism) up, but it seemed I had to (to get him to take me seriously, and also to help him realize that it would not be helpful to ask them why). When he didn't seem to be taking me seriously, I eventually said that I felt that what Q and P were doing had reached the level of harassment.

He wanted to go to the supervisor P on his own, to "get her side of the story". I pointed out that he didn't yet have my side of the story. I wanted the opportunity to tell my side of the story first, before he talked to P.

He said he knew what my goals were. I asked him what he thought they were. I no longer remember his reply, but I do remember that I was aghast by it; it was clear he had understood nothing.

I said that my goals were for Q to try to resolve things with me before taking it elsewhere, and if it couldn't be resolved, then she should cc me on the communications about it. The Associate Dean said he wanted to go further; when they deny something they should come up with a different way to get the job done. I said I thought that was great. This was the only positive part of the conversation. Outside of that, I felt he was talking down to me, insulting my intelligence, and not taking me seriously.

We had started at 10 am. Eventually he told me he had another appointment at 11. I had arrived with voluminous documentation, and close to 11 o'clock he finally agreed that I could show some of it to him so he could begin to see my side of the story. But he refused to clear even a small space on a table for me to put down the paperwork until I insisted that he do so (and he complained to me about that).

By 11, due to all the time wasted on chitchat, I had only shown him the documentation for one of the many incidents, and it wasn't clear he understood it. We hadn't agreed on what he would talk to the supervisor about, but he opened the door for his next appointment and was already starting to deal with them. He didn't want to make another appointment with me, but I said that before he talked to the supervisor we would need to talk more to get on the same team, so we wouldn't be at cross purposes. This conversation was with zero time left, with the door open and lots of people around. I felt rattled. We agreed to meet again.

6. "Don't put anything in writing. It antagonizes people."

To keep our next meeting as short and businesslike as possible, I arrived with a simple written summary of the problem and a reminder of the goals. I handed it to the Associate Dean at the end of the meeting. He said he would destroy the paper. Astonished, I said I didn't consider it a secret, and I would also email it to him to make sure we were on the same page.

He insisted that the next step was for him to speak to P, the supervisor. Now it was in the Associate Dean's hands.

To try to find out what happened with P, I had to come back for a third meeting.

At that meeting, the Associate Dean made clear that standard practice at UCI is to treat well the people you like and treat poorly the people you don't like. He gave me examples of that, and he thought they were all OK.

I protested that there are laws about unequal treatment. People can't just treat women or Blacks worse in the workplace because they want to. People are supposed to do their jobs, whether or not they like someone.

I had assumed that Q would deny that she had threatened to make my life difficult. From my talks with the Associate Dean, it dawned on me that Q might not deny it, since she might not realize it was wrong; according to the Associate Dean, that's just the way things are done at UCI.

The Associate Dean kept advising me to smile more. Q and P would treat me better if I smiled more. After repeatedly restraining myself from telling him what I thought about that, I finally told him that I wasn't looking for advice on changing my personality, I needed the Dean's Office to step in and solve a problem. When he continued to give me the same advice, I said that I would prefer that he not keep telling me to smile more. Trying to be helpful, I said that I hoped that he would eventually think about why a female professor might not be happy with him repeatedly telling her to smile more.

At that, he became furious. He said that I was accusing him of sexism and that was intolerable and he wouldn't stand for it. He was clearly very angry with me, and glared at me for the rest of our meeting, even after I repeatedly apologized for the misunderstanding.

This had become quite adversarial. I worried that he might file charges against me with the Office of Equal Opportunity & Diversity. I could no longer hold back the tears, and was visibly crying. He got angrier.

Changing tack to try to lighten the mood and stop him from glaring at me so ferociously, I joked that he should smile more. He was not amused.

He told me not to put anything in writing, because it antagonizes people. He meant P and Q.

I looked at him, stunned. What I had on my side was the truth, which I could prove because I had convincing documentation; documentation I only had because things were in writing. Without that, it's all hearsay. Putting things in writing seemed like the height of professionalism.

While I can understand why some things might go more smoothly if they don't start out in writing, my advice is to be wary of people who advise you to never put anything in writing.

What does it mean when people who only know your name, before they've met you, treat you worse than your colleagues? Getting desperate and wanting him to take me seriously, I reiterated that I was concerned that the treatment of me might constitute discrimination.

I left with the impression that the Associate Dean's primary concern was for him to maintain a good relationship with P.

7. "Going across campus"

I arranged to meet with Q and S (the math department manager) so we could agree on how I could use my grant. Afterwards, I asked S if I should send an email to all of us confirming what we agreed on. She said no, that would make it too adversarial, but she was there and we all agreed. That meeting seemed OK on the surface, but when S asked me how I felt about it, I realized it had been strange enough that we needed to change my financial analyst.

But worse, the meeting triggered Q to create a problem out of nothing. Before we could initiate the switch, Q called a meeting with S and me for the following morning, a Friday. She didn't tell me what it was about, but from what I learned from S, it was clear that P and Q were creating trouble for me. K agreed to join the meeting (and we let P and Q know that in advance).

The meeting had a surprise guest, namely the Dean who hates me. It was clear he had been told something by P or Q, but I have no idea what.

When we had put the finishing touches a year earlier on the budget of a grant proposal, the math department's financial person had informed me that according to Q, we couldn't ask for overhead costs on a certain part of the budget. I pointed out that the funding agency allowed such charges, but if UCI doesn't want to charge it that's fine with both me and the funder, as long as UCI will not charge my grant more in overhead than what it budgets in the proposal.

At the meeting with the Dean, Q and P claimed that not including that overhead in the budget was a mistake, so they were going to charge my grant for it, even though UCI had signed contracts with the funder agreeing not to. This seemed unreasonable, especially since it was Q herself who had insisted that I remove that line from the budget.

At the meeting, no one else corrected Q when she told us things that weren't true. I find it very difficult to keep quiet when someone says something that's documentably false and potentially harmful, so I automatically corrected her. K told me afterwards that that made me look too aggressive. The Dean seemed unhappy and left without talking to me.

A member of the Dean's staff with whom he was friendly had kindly given me advice in the past. Later that day, she tried to talk with the Dean about the toxic climate in the Dean's Office, but he was angry with me and told her to butt out. She told me I definitely shouldn't talk with him soon. Given his strange reaction, she didn't think she'd ever be able to talk with the Dean about the poisoned climate, which she called a "climate of `no'".

On Monday K, who was my department Chair, met with the Dean to try to briefly inform him of my side of the story. Afterwards, K reported that the Dean's tone was heated. The Dean said that he heard about me not just from Q but from others around campus, more than he hears about other people, so he assumes it must be at least partly my fault. When K told him that Q had basically threatened to make my life difficult, the Dean said he didn't believe that.

K asked about these "other people" he hears about me from, and the Dean said I was going around talking to anyone who would listen. The only names he mentioned were his friend on his staff and his Associate Dean, neither of whom were "across campus". K told him that the Associate Dean had asked me to let him help. The Dean disputed this, and added that the Associate Dean is on Q's side.

The Dean told K that I had caused trouble by speaking directly to UCI's grant office, since I'm not supposed to do that. K told him that at the meeting that the Associate Dean and I went to, faculty were explicitly invited to talk directly to that office.

The Dean insisted that I was the one who wanted to have the contentious meeting that he had shown up at. K told him that I hadn't wanted that meeting at all. The Dean claimed (contrary to all the evidence in the email chain) that Q and P didn't want to meet then.

The Dean said there was probably some blame on all sides. K told him that he had seen the details of some of my issues and he thought my frustration was completely reasonable.

8. The Ombudsman redux

By now, I was spending a large portion of my weekends stress-vomiting, and worrying about what obstacles Q would next put in my path.

I went back to the Ombudsman, told him about the new developments, and asked what should happen next. I said I felt I was being harassed. I also said, "I feel as if I'm entirely alone in this and don't have anyone looking out for me. It's making me ill and absorbing all my time, and I've reached the point where I can't take it any more."

I broached the possibilities of getting a meditator, or reporting the Associate Dean and Q to UCI's Office of Equal Opportunity & Diversity (OEOD).

The Ombudsman said that OEOD manages liability. OEOD would interview all parties and make a determination. It would lead to awkwardness in future relationships, which OEOD can't resolve. He made clear to me that it would be a big headache and time sink, wouldn't help, would take over my life, and could easily make things worse. This agreed with what I had heard from others, including an Equity Advisor.

He told me that one problem he had noticed at UCI was that staff think of the people they work with as part of their personal lives; rather than treating them professionally, they treat them the way they treat their friends and family. I pointed out that it's not healthy to treat their friends and family the way they treated me, and he agreed.

He advised me to trust my own judgment on whether to put things in writing, and on whom to talk to and what to say. He didn't want to help directly, since he didn't want to damage his own relationship with my Dean. But he said I could say that I "consulted someone within the administration who stated that putting things in writing is a recommended practice to minimize any misunderstandings".

Part III: The Denouement

9. The Scene at the Breakfast Lecture

The situation with my grants had gotten quite dire. Because of his personality and because he would defend his staff, several people had advised me not to go to the Assistant Dean (a staff member, not to be confused with the Associate Dean who was faculty) who was in charge of the staff.

K (my department Chair) went to the Assistant Dean to ask that control of my grants be taken away from Q and given to a different analyst. The Assistant Dean claimed to know the situation, and wanted to blame me. K pointed out that the Assistant Dean had heard only one side of the story, while K had heard mine and thought that my frustrations were justified.

Control over my grants was at last switched to someone else.

Based on K's heated meeting with the Dean, I emailed the Dean:

I have heard that you think that I am somehow at fault about something. If so, then that's a serious concern to me and I would like to clear the air so we can move forward.

I tried very hard to figure out the best ways to resolve a problem that had been building until it reached the level where it was interfering with my ability to do my job. My decisions on whom to talk to and when were made with the best information and advice I had at the time. I believe that the facts and the documentation support that I did nothing wrong.

There is no need to take any action based on this message. However, if you are going to use in your decision-making or professional dealings any allegations or rumors you've heard about me, I believe it would be only fair to first let me know what the allegations are and give me the opportunity to supply facts and information to rebut them. 

Hopefully, going forward with a new analyst and a clean slate, everyone will be able to work well together. As I have told you in the past, I would very much like to make UCI a better place, and to further the mission and goals of the university, and I remain at your disposal should you want my advice or ideas.

The Dean never replied.

Three months later, I ended up sitting at a round table next to the Assistant Dean as we ate breakfast before a talk in a School of Physical Sciences Lecture series. The conversation began amicably. At some point I asked him how things at UCI had changed over time. He said a big change was that you now have to be very careful about everything you do. I asked what he meant and he said it used to be you could fire someone if they did something wrong, and now you can't, since they hire counsel and fight it. You can't do anything about things that go wrong.

I said, "What if you can document it?" He said that documentation can take six months, so it's not worth it. He said something like "I know what you're referring to." Later he implied that for the issue that he knew about, I had overstepped in some way.

During our conversation, I noticed that a new video about the School was playing on a large screen. I watched in horror as they showed an interview of me that I had been promised wouldn't be used without my permission, which I had never given.

Rattled by both the video and the Assistant Dean, I pointed out that he hadn't heard the full story, and in particular hadn't heard from me about it.

He said that he did in fact know the full story. But I knew he didn't (both from what he said about it and since I had never spoken to him about it). He said that if I want to speak to him about it, I have to make an appointment to talk to him in his office. He said something like: this is a positive occasion and you're making it negative, and that's not OK.

I was taken aback by his hostility. I tried to change the subject, but he cut me off and repeated that he wouldn't talk to me here, since this is supposed to be a happy occasion. I asked for clarification on whether he was saying that I couldn't talk to him there about anything, and he said I couldn't talk to him about anything negative. I said that I had merely stated factual information (namely that he didn't have all sides), and I didn't understand why he thought I was making it negative. I was very shaken.

The Assistant Dean rudely turned away and made it clear he wasn't going to talk to me.

I don't know what the Assistant Dean was told, but if he had relied on documentable facts, rather than unverifiable rumors, there would have been no reason for his visceral anger towards me. In any case, there was no justification for the level of anger the Dean and the Assistant and Associate Deans dumped on me.

Almost all the problems were either documented by emails or witnessed. I was disappointed that no one wanted to see the documentation or learn the facts.

I had thought that the mission of the university was research, teaching, and service, and that the staff's role was to help fulfill that mission, not obstruct it. People should do their jobs and behave professionally, whether or not they're your friend. A former UCI administrator agreed with me that UCI is a place where it's all about whom you know and whether you're friends with them.

Thankfully, the person who took over supervision of my grants was a complete angel. Helpful, professional, and everything one would want in that job.