To the Editor:
Rachel Mesch’s essay (“What Do We Do With Monstrous Mentors?” The Chronicle Review, December 12) struck a nerve and had me musing — how do we prevent the “monsters,” the destructive mentors, from forming? How do we attenuate their power and stop the institutional paralysis that enables their behavior? These mentors become a tumor in the academic milieu as fellow faculty and deans simply adapt and cope.
In 32 years as professor, department Chair, and academic dean, I met many “monstrous mentors.” I faced down one in particular (I’ll call her MM) from my own department: a 30-year-tenured full professor. Her problem behaviors had endured for decades and endless attempts to alert school leadership had failed. MM was a successful grant writer and was viewed as untouchable.
How had faculty protected MM for so long? What were the roadblocks to intervention? I was aware that she bullied her peers and superiors, and invoked her grant funding record (and husband’s law firm) to defend any behavior. Former deans were reluctant to build a case and take on a tenured full professor.
Then a new dean arrived and I became academic dean for the school. Little did I know that my first big “project” in the “boot camp” of my new role would be to take on the invincible MM. I first met with the former academic dean (of 18 years) and learned of her numerous conversations with the dean and entries in the personnel file. They had long agreed the risk was too great, and warned me: “Don’t touch it.”
I spoke with the former chairs of MM’s department, all who had documented ethical violations and misconduct over decades. I excavated MM’s 30-year personnel records, distilling into a 30-page chronology of behaviors, ethical violations, and actions taken, searching for recurring patterns. Finally, I contacted students and research assistants, many who were MM’s doctoral students who had resigned and walked away from their studies.
Faced with the weight of the allegations, MM resigned. But what led to the long-term paralysis of the milieu? I recalled the “competence-deviance” hypothesis (Marc Gold, 1980) in learning theory — the more competent an individual, the more deviance is tolerated in that person by those around them. Academic institutions protect faculty who are highly productive, successful grant writers, or acclaimed in their field. For faculty with recurring conduct violations (3+ in 5 years), a “trigger” policy for faculty evaluations would require a retrospective review as a path for intervention.
We must learn from these cases and examine how they contribute to organizational paralysis. Tenure and the protection of academic freedom do not apply to chronic unethical conduct. There is no more compelling time than now for faculty to tackle the problem of monster mentors and their destructive power.
Carol A. Kochhar-Bryant
CEO, CKB Evaluation Consulting, LLC
Professor Emerita, George Washington University
