Unless academia is different than the rest of the world, she isn’t really anonymous. Not to the people that matter. Someone at Nazareth on the committee (or involved in the committee - like a department secretary), will or has dished over a glass of wine at a conference. The name gets passed around until its the Philosophy world’s worst kept secret. The she becomes the person who accused Nazareth of not negotiating in good faith and - whether its her or her supporters on the internet - making a sexist decision. Nazareth can’t tell its side of the story due to confidentiality and needs to take a hit to its PR, which they may feel impacts their fundraising. The other colleges say “we are glad that little scandal isn’t something WE need to deal with when making alumni calls for money - and we don’t WANT it to be - better not hire someone who is so classless as to do that when she gets pissed off and might impact OUR fundraising.”
She might make things better for other applicants - schools may feel its a risk to pull offers - or she may have made things worse - schools may feel that its a risk to allow negotiations and give “take it or leave it” offers so they don’t become the internets next “they treated me badly” story when applicants aren’t given the moon. But she hasn’t done herself any favors - unless she is sitting on another offer - and how many colleges are currently looking for tenure track Philosophy professors? At least, not until it blows over.
They can’t fire back–they’ve already said their policy is to not comment on HR matters in public. And I frankly have a really, really hard time believing she didn’t know they’d refuse to comment on the matter when she went public. That leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, because hitting someone you think can’t hit back is just wrong.
Of course, the cynical part of me wonders just what she’s worried the internet is going to dig up if she lets people know who she is. Because, as Ascenray says, that’s what happens in the internet age. You make a public accusation online, and the entire net starts digging to see what else they can find out about everyone and everything involved. The really cynical part of me wonders if any of this ever even happened–without her name, nobody has any way to confirm that the person writing these posts ever even applied for this job, much less got offered it and then had the offer rescinded.
I’m also not really comfortable with the defense that “of course she remained anonymous, you know how badly women are treated on the net.” I mean, yes, I know, she would be liable to harassment and all sorts of unwanted letters and calls and emails. But I don’t know that a man wouldn’t be subject to harassment and unwanted contact in the same position. Would people make the same allowances for anonymity if W were a man afraid of harassment? I honestly don’t think they would. It doesn’t really sit well to on the one hand say “These people treated me differently because I’m a woman, isn’t that awful? Shame on them” and then at the exact same time claim the protections of being treated differently because you’re a woman.
Women are treated with a level of hostility and threatened violence on the internet that men are not subject to in remotely the same degree. I guarantee you that if she would have posted openly she would immediately become subject to an uncontrolled flood of vile angry comments about raping her to teach her a lesson. This is simple fact.
“If you want to be treated fairly you should give the public a fair chance to violate you verbally all over the world by name and maybe more.” Sorry, no.
The very fact that the word “entitled” has been jumped on so quickly instead of just naive or badly advised is a reflection of this reality.
However, you are never truly anonymous on the internet, people get outed all the time with their real life identities. Its a risk she’s taking whether she posts anonymously or not, that she will be outed. In fact, I think its likely that at least in her circles, she already is.
And she didn’t even give the illusion of anonymity to the people at Nazareth - who are likely dealing with emails from complete strangers verbally violating them - without them making any choice in the matter.
Agreed 100% … If you want more money, maybe you politely express some concerns about the cost of living in the area. Everyone knows what you’re getting at. Sending a jarringly blunt email shows a complete lack of awareness.
It also reminds me of people who are compelled to establish dominance over others (as in someone who shows up purposely late for a first date to see if they can get away with it) - not a good sign at all either. Also, sexism might not have been an issue at all since there’s an excellent chance that the Nazareth hiring manager was also a woman.
As has already been mentioned in this thread, W is likely to be identified within her own professional corner sooner or later. Throwing Nazareth under the bus like this has got to be considered unprofessional in most circles, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this comes back to bite her sooner or later. She may have thought getting the story out was more important than maintaining her professional rep, but that the token effort to make herself anonymous cost her nothing and might help with harassment from random internet people.
Her 3/14 update also mentioned how she was “flabbergasted by the volume of moralizing comments on the original story” (paraphrased). To me, this suggests that she thought she was 100% in the right and that Nazareth did her an injustice. That may be why she chose to go public with it, even if she knew it might damage her career. This would also explain why she named the college. I’m not agreeing with it, but that’s one possible explanation.
But then again, she also said “Hopefully a few philosophers on the market can learn from my mistakes.” So was she trying to warn people about a hazard in the academic job market, or trying to shame Nazareth for withdrawing the offer?
So I guess I don’t know. This story is kind of all over the place.
No, no it doesn’t. Only if you want to read it that way and already have a preconceived notion of recent grads being entitled, spoiled brats. Look, I’m not even in academics (never got beyond a B.A.), I’ve been self-employed pretty much my whole working life, so I should be, one would think, critical of these “academic types” who expect the world to be handed to them on a platter, who feel that the world owes them, but I don’t hear any of that from her email.
Yeah, it’s been explained repeatedly that (1) none these requests are way out of line for the broader profession (2) at least one of them had already been granted informally (3) W wasn’t expecting to get any if them and her proposal was not even nearly in the firm of a demand, and (4) it’s likely that she was advised that these were reasonable things to ask for.
After all that, if you’re still sticking with “drips with entitlement” then it’s because you want to see it that way.
So basically, we’re down to a “does so”/“does not” type of argument. To me, those are the two lines that show good faith and not entitlement. Obviously, you read it differently.
It may surprise you to hear this, Melchior, but your non-expert conclusory posts in this thread aren’t convincing anyone. In fact, you actually changed my opinion from wholly against the applicant to mostly in her favor.
Making a request of such significance calls for a lot more humility and less flippancy. Some grovelling and begging was in order. When you are asking for leave before you have worked there even a single day takes a lot of gall.
And you keep saying that even after people have explained that these kinds of accommodations aren’t unheard of in the profession. Yes it just proves that a woman in her position is faced with people who are looking for the opportunity to punish her for being who she is.
That is no concern of mine. She showed a lack of respect and professionalism, not to mention common sense. She asked for too much and was not in a position to make such demands.