I have stepped in it this time.  It’s a metaphor particularly apropos since, as I begin composing this blog entry, my department is in the middle of a sewage crisis.  It literally stinks.  Likewise, the way that my first blog entry was taken up by some graduate students stinks, too.  There are times when we all must deal with our own waste, metaphorical or otherwise.

My first blog entry sparked an email from a graduate student in my department. He questioned my decision to leave the speaker anonymous and requested more context for the sexist jokes I describe. According to his message, he attended the talk but only vaguely recalled the jokes. Our further exchange of emails, which he offered me permission to use, revealed that he had wrongly identified the speaker as a particular faculty member in our department.  The student, in fact, hadn’t attended the talk in question, but rather, another student misinformed him.  (This student hadn’t attended the talk in question either.) A few days later, I discovered the departmental gossip-mill flourishing.  Several students specifically read my blog after hearing through the grapevine that I was lambasting the faculty member.  Students openly admitted this motivation to me.  The Academic Matters website was accessed with seemingly lurid excitement.  What if faculty members heard I was using my blog for salacious gossip and, worse, slander?  How would this incident affect my doctoral defense?  My reference letters?  My experience of just going into the department?  Would it all stink?

The possible professional ramifications were stressful, but more upsetting to me were the personal ones (as if one could separate them). Why did it seem many students were more interested in taking up the blog entry as gossip rather than taking up the questions I had worked so hard to ask?  Since I clearly state the speaker was a guest at my university, am I an untrustworthy writer? Why was the gossip-mill considered a more trusted source?  And, the worst part, what about the faculty member, unknowingly(?) and falsely, being drawn into melodrama?

Certainly, there were students who engaged with me (and my entry) on different grounds, but this small incident of gossip and the questions that have arisen from it have led me to the topic of this blog entry: Gossip as a mechanism for navigating the academic landscape and managing the academic body.

gossip girl

What counts as gossip?  Gossip is often imagined as the malicious divulging of personal details.  It’s sensational.  Hurtful.  Destructive.  (Sadly, I’ve done my share of it.)  As we know, web logs are a source of sensational gossip in Canadian and US popular cultures.  Just think of the CW’s television series Gossip Girl, where the narrator has a gossip blog, or the infamous celebrity gossip website Perez Hilton.  Blogs are often equated with salacious topics.  At the same time, blogs have been cited within the genre of essays.  Bloggers run the gamut between sensationalists and, for instance, writers heavily influenced by the Montaignean form of essay (Danko et al 2008). Even though my blog was explicitly framed as academic matter, perhaps the blog format itself lent the entry to be taken up by the gossip-mill. And, perhaps, the topic of sex(ism) further aided my blog being sensationalized.  However, for a moment, I want to shift away from gossip as salacious and destructive. What if gossip is productive?

Karen Adkins (2002, p. 216) offers that gossip is “intimate, interested talk.”  It’s collective narrative that doesn’t require evidentiary support.  Instead, intimate, interested talk is more about the production of trust and intimacy between those who gossip, rather than trusting the accuracy of the information. Adkins further argues that gossip can provide a counter-discourse. Gossip is talk on the margins and can allow serious subjects not privy to formalized discussion to be given epistemic attention. That is, it allows things even to be a topic of discussion; it produces a space to discuss matters that are frequently cordoned off into ‘the private’ although they may be about ‘the public’. So, rather than thinking about gossip as negative or positive, Adkins offers gossip as productive.

While Adkins frames gossip in general, Passmore (1998) speaks to “academic gossip” in particular.  Passmore suggests that gossip is “central to academic formation” (p. 1332), and gossip and its oral form are explored in recent work on the history of the university (Clark 2006). Particularly in the context of exponentially expanding publication numbers, gossip serves as a “knowledge network”; it underpins changing lines of research and informs us of the latest research findings (Passmore p. 1335). In fact, when seeking research on academic gossip, again and again, I encountered reference to “academic gossip” within authors’ acknowledgments.  Frequently, academic gossip was openly expressed as part of bonding with other people; present were both an explicit sense of intimacy and the sharing of intellectual ideas within a knowledge network.  Acknowledgments provide space (in the margins of peer-reviewed research) to celebrate “academic gossip” as underpinning research and writing.

Thinking of gossip as productive within/of the academic landscape, in what follows, I ask: How does gossip serve as a mechanism for graduate students to learn the tacit rules of academia, to navigate the academic landscape?  I then question gossip’s role in managing the academic body.  How might we as graduate students re-think gossip’s role and our own?

Words travel

As a graduate student, the gossip network in my department and discipline has helped me to navigate the academic landscape where the rules, tacit or even formalized, are often ambiguous.  Disciplinary, institutional and departmental histories and politics go unwritten – at least many of the parts that are really helpful. Professor A and Professor B have incommensurable ideas about the appropriate methodology for such-and-such; think twice about putting them on your committee together as it may hinder your completion.  Something like happened to a former student.  Professor C and Professor D work well together; their styles are complementary.  Work with them on that departmental taskforce issue.  Professors E, F, and G may go out to a bar with you one night at that professional conference, but limit how much alcohol you consume.

That last one I learned through the grapevine.  However, I found that the lesson was more powerful later on when a faculty member brought it up in a more formal space.  Graduate students and faculty met over lunch to discuss an upcoming international conference.  “Don’t get pissed,” one professor told us.  You may be in a bar where faculty members are getting tanked, but it’s still a professional environment; you don’t want to be the subject of gossip by those who might hire you.  It’s happened before.  I recall students around the room look around at each other with little smiles as she spoke.  My friend next to me leaned over to ask, “She means that we shouldn’t get drunk, right?”  This memory is seared into my mind.  The rule was phrased so casually, and, until that moment, the topic of drunkenness had been limited to informal gossip. I liked that the professor had said it in front of everyone.  Everyone present, even those not privy to scandalous stories of drunken academics, would think twice about their comportment at conferences.

Gossip isn’t just about departmental politics and histories.  Gossip has taught me how to comport myself.  How do I present myself during my conference talk? As a teaching assistant, how do I act with authority?  How do I participate in a graduate seminar?  Yes, these questions are partially answered through formalized activities such as presentation and teaching workshops offered at the university.  However, the gossip-mill also teaches me, albeit often in the version of cautionary tales, how to perform my banal duties as an academic.

In the case of Dr. World Famous and the gossip-mill in my own department, I felt the gossip-mill was teaching me, “Hey, you, don’t rock the boat.”  Yes, perhaps the gossip-mill was signaling that sexism is alive and well in the academy.  Gossip provided a space to talk about the issue, but the gossip (to me at least) seemed to focus more on the salacious aspects rather than issues of agonism, positionality, or the lack of discussion about how to ask questions in colloquium.  As well, being the subject of gossip, I also felt I was being cast out.  A trouble-maker.

Laying waste: delimiting the academic body

Gossip is sanctioned and rewarded:  we are rewarded with friendship, in a place where many graduate students are new and are forming a circle of friends.  We are rewarded with insight about the politics of academia and ‘the rules’, with potential disciplinary accolades.  We are rewarded by creating ties with some faculty members, in our departments and more broadly.   Gossip is even part of how we are evaluated.  In academic evaluation, Ruth Barcan (1996) lists gossip equally alongside writing reports, working on promotion committees, having book launches, and constructing one’s academic self through the CV.  

Kevin Grigsby (2007, p. 4), in warning academics about the pitfalls of gossiping, states the following:

“Gossip has a social function.  While the use of gossip as a social control may immediately come to mind, research findings suggest that gossip may serve as a strategy for enhancing the status of individuals.  Through gossip, persons are recognized as members of a group, allowing participants to ‘negotiate aspects of group membership, and the inclusion or exclusion of others by working out shared values.’”

As a graduate student, I’d like to be a part of the body, rather than cast out, but social exclusion, as the quote above suggests, is a function of gossip.   Gossip is part of a larger landscape of social exclusion: academic mobbing. Along with behaviours such as being assignments meaningless tasks, bureaucratic hassles (like delayed requests), increased isolation (such as being left out of meetings), gossip contributes to the mobbing of our colleagues (Westhues 2006).  In a Canadian study of academic bullying (which is a process that often includes gossip), one-third to one-half of all stress-related illnesses were attributed to bullying (McKay et al. 2008).  Academic bullying has even led to suicide.  In this case, acts like gossip can be understood to delimit the academic body politic in the most basic of terms, the bodily survival or demise of our friends and colleagues. Further, Ken Westhues points out that the target of workplace mobbing are often those who are marked by difference (in terms of race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.).  Since acts like gossip seem to help us shirk responsibility (Passmore 1996) then it appears that no one is at fault when gossip’s effects escalate.  As a graduate student, am I learning to gossip in ways that lay waste to those who I want to have as my colleagues?  How might I rethink my gossiping behaviour?

Sewage crisis resolved for now…

Graduate students come and go.  In my discipline, we leave for fieldwork.  We (hopefully) finish our degrees and move on. And then there are times of (an almost institutionalized) isolation: studying for comprehensive/qualifying examinations and the solitary thesis-writing life. With unwritten institutional histories, tacit rules, graduate students’ mobility and isolation, what happens when all these collide in the academic landscape?  Perhaps gossip is an interstitial practice that helps to suture the gaps in knowledge, even if we can’t or should always take part in it.

note

I would like to thank my friends and colleagues who didn’t jump to conclusions about the identity of the speaker and who have pushed me to think further about these politics.  I would also like to thank Alice, Priya, and Matt for their help in working through this piece and for gossiping with me.

references 

Adkins, A 2002 The real dirt: gossip and feminist epistemology Social Epistemology 16 (3): 215-232

Barcan R 1996 The Body of the (Humanities) Academic, or, “What is an Academic” Australian Humanites Review

Clark, W 2006 Academic Charsima and the Origins of the Research University Chicago:University of Chicago Press

Danko, M, M Disler, K Evans, S Lakenen, D. Lazar, P Madden, D Matherly 2008 Roundtable: Teaching the Classical Essay Fourth Genre: Explorations in Non-fiction 10(1): 153-173

Grigsby, R.K. 2007 The Deadly Trap of Gossip: A Pitfall of Junior Faculty. Academic Physician & Scientist p 4-6

McKay, R, D Huberman Arnold, J Fratzl, and R Thomas. 2008 Workplace Bullying in Academia: A Canadian Study.  Employee Responsibility and Rights Journal  20: 77-100

Passmore, A 1996 Geo-gossip  Environment and Planning A  30: 1332-1336

Westhaus, K 2006 The Unkindly Act of Mobbing Academic Matters Fall:18-19