The best tip I’ve ever heard is from professor Tara Brabazon’s vlogs. If you deal with a terrible person who is prepared to compete with you to the end of times and has absolutely no moral compass to keep him/herself in check, the best thing is to wish them well and not to play their game, because once you enter their game, you are playing into the narrative they have built for you and you’re giving away your power to them, letting your happiness be dictated by their whims. That does not mean that we have to tolerate the dreadful behaviours (aka “keep things civil”) because nine out of ten these situations will slowly push the boundaries of what's socially accepted to weird territories, which will hurt the more precarious among us at the university. We need to deal with these issues of bullying and “mental warfare” as a group or organisation, not as individuals.
Something like this happened to me recently. A highly renowned scholar in my field who is an editor-in-chief of a famous journal rejected my article within a week by sending a made up trashy response by a single peer reviewer. Although I had suspended that that person has some issues with me, I never thought that it was a real thing. My article then was accepted by even more prestigious journal. Now I am planning to send a copy of my article to that guy 😍
I’ll be starting my tenure track position this fall but have already had something like this happen to me. It was out of my hand that everyone in the field knew what has been done to me. Luckily for me everyone is shocked by what the other side did to me. Also luckily, the heads of my school and department both helped me in the process. I’m still worried about the repercussions in the future (reviews of articles and grand proposals). I look back on everything that happened and like you said - I can look at myself in the mirror and I’m happy with the way I acted. And my warpath is similar to yours (publish, publish, publish), so I think I’m in a good place.
Publishing your book early sounds like the relationship between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. Darwin hated the version of the Origin of Species he published but eventually had to after sitting on it for about 20 years...
This was amazing. I started watching thinking, "When I have a nemesis I get really competitive--like, not even with THEM, but with myself, trying to be the best me I can be. I wonder if he's going to say that's unhealthy..." But you ended up completely advocating for it. I AM HERE FOR THIS.
