Academic Crimes and Misdemeanours, and the Acute Vulnerability of Grad Student Researchers

This blog post was inspired by The Guardian‘s top-ten 2025 list of long-form features. This article, by Scott Sayare, is fascinating: The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins. I’d missed it, back in May when it appeared, during my busiest teaching season. It’s necessary reading for academics as we craft New Year’s resolutions to be more collegial, collaborative, and generous in our work.

According to Sayare, the field of paleoanthropology is beset by the “wild imbalance between the number of palaeoanthropologists, which is large, and the number of objects available for them to study, which is very much not.” And that’s one of the more neutral statements that Sayare makes about this academic discipline, which also appears to be deeply divided on the basis of methods, theories, and approaches to academic celebrity.

As a consequence, grad students’ careers crumble and internecine battles prompt new job searches. One senior scholar decided to exit the fray: “Though he remained a professor of the University of Poitiers, he took a research position in Paris. ‘I was attacked, I was insulted, I was threatened,’ he said, of his time in Brunet’s group. ‘Poitiers is the asshole of the world.’”

This is refreshingly, well, frank.

Contemporary media coverage of academic battles is fairly limited. I’m old enough to remember when, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, journalists reported breathlessly on the MLA Convention, the annual gathering of scholars in literatures and languages.

The “theory wars” were raging. Stanley Fish was famous.

(The real crisis, of course, was in the decades-long post-1960s employment slump, which affected a heck of a lot more scholars than disputes between Derrideans and analytic philosophers. But that got less public attention.)

Newspaper editorials opined and Harper’s and The New Yorker provided deep dives into the controversies over the canon wars (so many wars), the closing of the American mind, the theory turn, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonialism . . . and those long conversations, which have evolved and developed more nuance, have arguably only become more urgent. But now the media coverage of humanities research looks very different, in part because the media ecosystem has transformed, and mostly shrunk.

I don’t anticipate running into a lot of reporters at the MLA in Toronto in a couple of weeks.

But back to academic crimes and misdemeanours, as my title promised.

There are some excellent Canadian novels about miscreants in academia, and my favourite is Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, which I’ve been trying to fit into my book project. It’s not really a mystery, and there are no actual crimes, unless we count attempted academic fraud/plagiarism.

But Suzette Mayr’s novel, which draws inspiration from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and other gothic fiction, offers an important corrective to portraits of contemporary academia by featuring a Black lesbian protagonist who was recently tenured on the basis of her forthcoming book on a long-neglected Black prairie woman writer.

Most of the Canada academic mystery novels I’ve been working on over the past few months feature casts of characters lacking in diversity, and the few portraits that are included are sometimes dismayingly stereotyped. This has been a troubling aspect of my project, generally, given the relatively recent increase in diversity in Canadian crime fiction authorship and protagonists. Sharon Beaucage-Johnson’s M.A. thesis on the depiction of Indigenous women in fiction by Brenda Chapman and Gail Bowen addresses this topic in valuable ways.

So Edith’s struggles as the humanities building crumbles around her is especially welcome as a depiction of academia’s ongoing exclusions and barriers. Edith progresses from a put-down and put-upon grad student to a semi-confident tenured faculty member. But then her grad advisor/nemesis re-appears, threatening once again to derail her career. (This may be a good point at which to acknowledge how brilliantly supportive my grad advisor and committee members were when I was working on my dissertation: I was luckier than I realized at the time. Huge thanks, and yet once more, to Jill Matus, Mary Nyquist, Maggie Redekop, and my external reader, Manina Jones.)

Mayr identifies the ways that scholars from historically underrepresented groups are susceptible to having their work appropriated, and this resonates with my own sense that scholars in the humanities are less zealous about acknowledging the work of their grad students and research assistants than they could be. Because single-authorship conventions dominate our research output, the contributions of emerging scholars are not always identified as clearly as they are in the collaborative research and multiple authorship conventions in psychology or biochemistry, for instance.

So a plea to colleagues working with grad students: instead of just thanking them in your Acknowledgements, what about some co-authorship or co-presenting opportunities?

Because as Sayare’s article points out powerfully, the new and emerging scholars in our fields face formidable challenges, even absent scholarly battles; they benefit from extensive and ongoing mentoring of their fledgling careers.