The Sad Humiliations of Academic Ghosting

I often think about the first time a colleague ghosted me. It was about two months into a burgeoning friendship and collaboration. For months, we texted constantly, reviewed each other’s writing projects, talked about work, and gossiped about the latest #AcademicTwitter drama.

Then, abruptly, without explanation, my colleague ceased all communication — as if dead. Like a literal ghost, they became impossible to trace. But they remained a persistent presence in my thoughts.

It’s strange, being haunted like this in a professional context. It feels more intimate than it should. I’ll be waiting for my 5-year-old daughter to zip up her jacket and find myself thinking about it, wondering why. It is precisely this not-knowing, the lack of information, that distinguishes ghosting from rejection. “That ambiguity,” wrote Adam Popescu in The New York Times, “is the real dagger.”

This is not my only experience with ghosting in the academy. Sometimes, when brushing my teeth, I think about the job-search committees that never bothered to let me know I was no longer under consideration. While picking up stray socks, I’ll remember the mentor who ignored email after email. Driving into work, I’ll be reminded of a collaborator who simply dropped off the face of the earth. The whole thing is humiliating.

I’m not alone. I spoke to dozens of academics, from graduate students to department chairs, who described feeling muddled, discombobulated, and disoriented by this lack of closure, this ambiguity. One professor, who called herself a “whistleblower” at her university, described feeling the “triumvirate of Ds”: “discarded, defeated, disposable.” An assistant professor in Germany observed, after several colleagues who accepted her invitation to edit a special issue of a scientific journal disappeared, “I can’t help but think that they would never have ghosted a senior (male) academic from the Ivy League.” For many, being ghosted resulted in enhanced feelings of isolation in an already isolating profession.

Although it often is not, ghosting feels like a “deeply cruel, calculated, and personal” act — a deliberate choice, to quote a tenured professor I spoke with who was ghosted by two deans and a chair. Some ghosters I talked to characterized ghosting, in their case, as due to apathy, a kind of accidental dismissal. Zeb Larson, a freelance journalist and independent scholar, chalks this pervasive phenomenon up to academe’s “weak structures for any reciprocity.”

Those weak structures affect you differently depending on who you are. Those with power can appear and disappear at will, without consequences. For the ghostee, though, the pain and humiliation linger. “It felt,” as one academic told me, “as if I was not worthy of even one conversation.” Another said that being ghosted made them “feel like human garbage, some sort of unhygienic filth to be scrubbed from the work environment.”

wikimedia commons

Perhaps the most common instance of academic ghosting is how candidates are, or rather aren’t, rejected in job searches. You’ll get an interview, a campus visit, rounds and rounds of meetings and emails with your prospective employers — and then, nothing. In March 2019, Amanda Licastro, now a digital-scholarship librarian at Swarthmore College, spent three days at another small college on the East Coast as a finalist in a job search, giving teaching and research talks and meeting numerous people. By the time May came, she still had not heard anything from the committee, so she accepted another institution’s offer. Months later, when she was cleaning out her department locker and mailbox, she found a form letter saying that the position was no longer available.

“No one from the committee contacted me, wrote a personal note, or even signed the letter,” she told me. “I still can’t believe after spending likely over a thousand dollars on interviewing me and eating several meals with me no one bothered to even send me an email.”

A department chair at a small liberal-arts college who was recently charged with setting up procedures for a faculty search told me that his attempts to offer candidates maximum transparency were shot down by the administration. “It has to do with some misguided sense that giving candidates this ‘bad news’ will make them sour on our institution and make it harder to recruit them later if we wind up inviting more people to campus.” For him, these sentiments are out of touch with the way information is now disseminated online — and graduate students’ sober understanding of the state of the job market.

Indeed, the Academic Jobs Wiki has entries dating back to 2009, as Karen Kelsky, founder of “The Professor is In,” pointed out to me. For administrators to have to say “you are no longer under consideration” is awkward at best, she told me. “It’s like pulling teeth to write those emails. Administrators don’t want to do it, they don’t know how to do it, and there’s no one picking up the slack.” She chalks up the pervasive nature of ghosting in part to academics’ “guilt and profound denial” over the state of academic hiring today. To not keep academics updated on their status is “cowardice, evasion, and avoidance.”

Ghosting is not only suffered by newly minted Ph.D.s at early stages of their career, though. Julia H. Lee, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of California at Irvine, was recently a finalist for a senior position at a private institution on the East Coast. After her virtual campus visit, the chair sent “a warm email” letting her know they would decide shortly — only to never follow up again. For Lee, this kind of ghosting is an “expression of deep structural inequalities” that the university perpetuates: “Jobs are scarce, applicants are aplenty — so what difference does it make if we do or don’t notify people about their status in a job search?” Another professor I spoke with described a similar scenario — three rounds of interviews and a teaching demo on the topic of the department’s choosing — only to never hear back, even when she sent follow-up emails. “Am I so valueless they can’t even be bothered to tell me to go away?”

Ghosting on the job market is perhaps the most commonplace, but there are other, more insidious forms of ghosting in academe. Several graduate students told me of being suddenly ghosted by an adviser, sometimes midproject, despite institutional policies in place to prevent this kind of behavior. This form of ghosting comes with financial implications: Students must navigate expired funding and extra tuition, unread dissertation chapters in hand.

The student-adviser relationship is both personal and professional. Many of my sources described the esteem they once held for the adviser who ghosted them; one described “intense feelings of personal loss.” More than one person I spoke with used the phrase, “It breaks my heart.” As one graduate student wrote, “I trusted my dissertation chair with my life, admired her to the point of always being kind of starstruck around her, and would have practically died to get her approval or praise on anything.”

Such disappearing acts have material effects far beyond hurt feelings. Advisers who ghosted delayed graduation — resulting in more semesters and, consequently, more tuition. Another told me that her adviser ghosting her and other students cost them “thousands of dollars.” One academic, who was ghosted by an adviser in her M.A. program, went as far as suggesting that the academy is complicit in “financial fraud” by not holding accountable its members whom students rely on for future success.

Perhaps the cruelest incarnation of academic ghosting is enacted on those with little power in the academy: contingent faculty and those in need of accommodation and inclusion.

For adjuncts still reaching for a tenure-line position, asking for a letter of recommendation years after graduation should be as easy as asking a committee member to revise an earlier letter. Sometimes all that’s needed is an updated date. After having to wrangle dissertation committees into a successful defense and maintaining years and sometimes decades-long relationships with advisers, an adjunct’s having to make this request is almost comical in its simplicity. It seems absurd to abandon a mentee after all of this.

It is heartbreaking, then, that many of my sources spoke about advisers ghosting them after graduation. Katina Rogers, author of Putting the Humanities Ph.D. to Work, described her adviser’s disappointment, and ensuing silence, when she decided to pursue an alt-ac career. When he ignored an email she wrote him to tell him her book had come out, she described feeling “a little bitter, a little pathetic for reaching out to him in the first place, and a little like an academic fraud.”

How to hold ghosts accountable? How to relearn how to communicate with one another? How to face conflict in clear, direct, and truthful ways? As the psychologist Jennice Vilhauer told The New York Times, “It’s really important to remember if someone ghosts you that behavior says more about them than you. It’s about their discomfort.”

It’s easy to say that ghosting demonstrates a lack of respect, that it is unprofessional and immature, and that those of us who’ve been ghosted need to toughen up, respect the process, and not take it personally. What’s more difficult is to tackle the structural conditions in the academy that allow for ghosting in the first place — because this haunted house is crumbling around us. The rafters are rotting, rats are scurrying across the floor. Spider webs crisscross the windows, and old couches covered in white plastic collect dust. Still, many of us feel at home here, leaving only when it’s clear there’s no room for us any longer, when it’s clear we’re talking to the walls.

Kelsky told me that, as it stands in academe, “Everybody is burnt out, everybody is exhausted, everybody is utterly overwhelmed.” But some scholars, especially those who are early career, women, and people of color, are trying to deal with these conditions. We are desperately trying to renovate — to make the whole place safer, more welcoming. We are trying to add rooms, to guide guests through the various mazes, to build a more stable foundation. We take on this labor because renovating is the professional thing to do; building an academy where structures encourage us to be accountable to one another, to set and communicate boundaries, and to show up as best we can — that’s the work.

We owe each other more.