And that’s the grade I’m most proud of
by Michele Merritt
Grad school. The memory of it is enough to send me into existential dread. I came out of it alive, relatively unscathed, with a tenure-track job (after a couple years working the Visiting Assistant Professor circuit), and now have the coveted status of being tenured. It’s not my dream job, not by a long shot. The school is in rural Arkansas. Travel money is scarce, and the teaching load is high. Still, I made it. It would be wrong to say I accomplished all of this alone. My dissertation committee totally had my back through the process, and if it weren’t for some really great connections and opportunities, I might not have been so successful. But that’s how all academics find their way. Your mentors are supposed to help you get started. So no, I will not say I accomplished everything alone. No one does. But one thing I know for sure: I didn’t make it to this point by cheating.
Well, I did cheat, on my husband, early on in grad school. I found myself goo-goo-eyed in love with a professor. We had an affair. I left my husband. The affair ended and I dated another graduate student for several years. He was an emotionally and physically abusive narcissist. Now, I’m happily married with children and it all seems a distant memory. But it’s one that shaped me profoundly.
As soon as the affair got going, I worried what others in my department would think — that I’m getting special perks as a student or that I might get better teaching jobs because of it. I never took any classes from this professor once the affair began. I had only taken one class with him prior to it.
The class was difficult and I got a B. It was the only B I got in all of grad school. Despite my ability to earn an A+ in graduate symbolic logic, this particular class destroyed me. I complained about the grade to him in a half-joking/half-serious manner. He offered to retroactively change it, mostly to shut me up, he said, half-jokingly/half-seriously. Part of me considered taking him up on it. I mean, having a 4.0 out of grad school would be nice, and it couldn’t hurt my job prospects, right? But I said no. Why stoke the flames of my already suffocating insecurity about what I was doing with him and what others think about me because of it? And besides, I earned that B, fair and square. Just like I earned the only A+ in my symbolic logic class because I solved a proof on the final exam no other student could. I didn’t need a grade to tell me I was smart enough. At least that’s what I told myself. As a woman in a male dominated field, it is hard to find your voice and truly believe that what you have to offer the discipline is valuable. I definitely struggled to believe I really had what it took to be a professional academic. Dating a professor was certainly not helping me along this path.
Wanting to be more ‘normal,’ I started seeing a graduate student in my program. It was casual at first, and the affair with the professor was still an on-again/off-again thing. It seems the professor was just as confused as I was about life, because he would goad me to ‘go all in’ with this graduate student. “He’s more on your level,” he said. Translation: he won’t get you or me into trouble, there will be no quid pro quo, and so on. Indeed, the affair should have been disclosed to the university, as per the institutional code of conduct. He knew this. He never reported it. Neither did I. But it wasn’t my job to do so. I was not in the position of power. It made sense then, for him to be nudging me toward a ‘legal’ relationship. And I was growing weary of his waffling back and forth about leaving his partner. (Yes, this whole time, he was still with his longterm girlfriend, despite telling me that if I left my husband, he would leave her. I had long since left my husband.)
Taking the professor’s suggestion, things began getting more serious with this graduate student. As jealousy would have it, Mr. Professor man wanted me back. He offered to take me to Europe for the summer where he would be working. He said if I worked with him there and got my dissertation done with people he knew, it was likely that he could get me a job with him as sort of spousal hire. I asked him if he was going to actually leave his girlfriend. He said he would once we got over there. So, I was supposed to pack up all my shit, leave the graduate student I was growing quite fond of, leave all my friends, move to Europe, and assume then he’d leave his girlfriend? I might have been insecure and unsure of myself, but that whole scenario was the final nail in the coffin of our affair. I declined.
I went on to date the graduate student for a tumultuous and terrifying few years. While the professor might have been a bit manipulative, he paled in comparison to the nightmare this other guy was. He was charming at first and obviously intelligent. We drank together late into the evening, discussed philosophical problems, joked, played darts, had lots of wild sex. It was great. Then suddenly, it wasn’t. He slowly began trying to control me, and the insidiousness with which he did so still shocks me to this day. By gradually chipping away at my already fragile sense of self-worth, he was able to mold me into a version of myself that I cannot even recognize when I look back.
She was so afraid to lose him that she would never stand her ground, even when she absolutely was in the right. She would let him say things like no matter what you do, you will always have the stain of sleeping with a professor on you, and not only would she not tell him to shut the fuck up, but she would crumble and cry and feel shame. He told her one day, when she came home all excited about a feminist philosophy reading group she was forming, that he couldn’t wait until she ‘got over this feminist thing,’ because it was just a phase and he hoped she would return to ‘real philosophy’ one day. He told her that even if she got a tenure track job, it would be because she was an attractive woman. He gaslit her entire life and she was powerless to stop him.
We broke it off several times, usually after some explosive fight, like the time he refused to believe that my eczema was a real condition and that if I just read some Aristotle, I would learn that it was all ‘in my head.’ Somewhere inside of me there was a person who knew he was a psychopath and I was not safe. We always ended up back together because I had become co-dependent. During one of our broken-up spells, we were out with mutual friends one night, and he asked if we might go back to his place and talk for a bit. I said ok. We got to his house and he slammed me up against the wall and started kissing me. I didn’t stop him because I was still in love with him. I missed him. But as the kissing progressed, I didn’t feel right. I told him I wanted to go back to the bowling alley where our friends were. He told me I didn’t know what I wanted and that this was my biggest flaw, as he threw me down on the bed. I tried to stop him, but he just continued, and I finally gave up. We went back out to the bowling alley after it was over and I erased it from my mind as best as I could.
The relationship finally ended a couple years later. I had been beaten down, physically and mentally, and when it came to a head one drunken night where he threw all of my belongings out into the street and told me never to return, I finally said ok and walked away for good.
He showed up to my dissertation defense a year or so later, just to rattle me one last time. He asked absurd questions and poked fun at my research. It got to me, yes, but I was finished — with him, with the university, with my graduate student life, with all of it. I had a job in South Carolina at the time, so didn’t even live in the city where I was defending my dissertation. I flew back to South Carolina after the defense and only returned once more to walk down the aisle, get hooded by my dissertation chair, and graduate.
I did not ‘get over the feminist thing,’ as my grad student boyfriend suggested I would. Instead, I consider myself even more of a raging feminist who gives zero shits about outing abusive men. Especially now, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, I am empowered to call it out for what it was. The affair with the professor and the abusive graduate student boyfriend taught me a lot about myself, and healing from all of it has been a decade long process. I’ve come out of it on the other side, I think, happy and whole. Like I said in the beginning, I got the job. I earned tenure. I have a family I love. I’m publishing cool stuff that interests me, and I do believe it has value for my discipline. And I don’t need either of these men’s approval for that to be true. I didn’t need it then, but certainly not now.
This professor went on to date another graduate student. (This is totally shocking, I know.) She has done really well for herself and I am happy for her. As a woman, in solidarity, I will not denigrate her accomplishments. She did eventually leave the program and completed her work elsewhere, though she now has a job where we were all grad students way back then. Arguably, she’s done most of this on her own merit. Still, I feel bad for her because I know what it’s like to be in that position, where everyone is looking at you, silently judging you, wondering how much of what you have was helped along by sleeping with someone in power over you.
That’s why I never let him change that B. It’s why I said no to him when he offered to take me to Europe for the summer. Something inside me knew I would never be able to live with it.
When my graduate student boyfriend told me the only reason I would ever amount to anything in my discipline would be because of my looks, that should have been the end of it, right then and there. But I didn’t have the strength yet. I wasn’t angry enough. Eventually, I got angry and stopped letting him dictate my value.
Anger is an important part of the search for truth and justice. But it is not the end. I’m no longer angry at either of these men. I just think they are pathetic.
I earned what I am today, fair and square. I’m a badass who loves herself, even when it’s really hard to do so. Impostor syndrome is legit and hard to deal with as an academic. I have my moments, to be sure. But I will never ever believe that I’m only here because I’m pretty, or that I slept my way into a job. I’m proud of myself. And I’m most proud of that B I earned a long time ago in grad school.
Michele Merritt, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of English and Philosophy, Arkansas State University. Read more on her works at michelemerritt.com
Post a Comment