I'm collecting tales of academic shaming. There are novels about this phenomenon--Philip Roth's Human Stain, Francine Prose's Blue Angel, and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace are the most prominent of these--and I'd welcome references to other stories, novels, or plays that I might have missed. Even better, though, are personal experiences. I'm interested in the minutiae of academic policing, the ways shaming and shunning are used within academic space to shape the limits of acceptable opinion and to suppress or dismiss views, beliefs, ideas, behaviors, and methods that are deemed, for whatever reason, heretical. The best way to get at that phenomenon is through anecdote, and so I ask for yours. Anything goes--what you describe can be drawn from your own experience as shamer or shamed, or it can be something you have observed in others. I'm interested both in the how of the shaming and the feel of it, in what was done and in what it was like to do, or to be done to.

Feel free to reply to me privately, if you would prefer not to respond in the comments.

Thanks in advance to all.

Jane Tompkin's memoir, _A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned_, is partly about the role of shame in education and, as she once explained in a public talk, how she wanted to punish herself for inflicting shame on others.

Academic shaming is also one of the central themes of Thomas H. Benton's series of First-Person columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The series begins with this one, on leaving a big university for a small, rural, liberal-arts college:

http://chronicle.com/jobs/2001/12/2001120301c.htm

Many of the columns in the CHE dwell on shame or, perhaps, academic guilt is a more common topic: how we can never escape the treadmill. (E.G., My kids are opening presents on Christmas morning, and I am feeling guilty about not working and worrying about the MLA convetion, which always starts two days later.)

I'm not sure if this was exactly you had in mind - but one of the most haunting examples, to me, of academic shaming is in the play The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

It's not specifically about shaming, but Richard Russo's "Straight Man" does an excellent job of showing how ridiculous academic life can be.

Although it's just a potboiler mystery, Robert B. Parker's Hush Money deals with the issue to some degree.

And it's been a long time since I've seen it, but is something like Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour what you were thinking of?

I can point you to two real-life instances that happened at my grad school while I was there, that were both well-publicized. Is that what you're looking for? Where should I email the stories?

Best,

M.

At my academic medical center, a mini-revolt by several doctors against an abusive boss was derailed in part through the shaming aspect of forced psychiatry evaluations. The implication of course was that disagreement with the boss was evidence of mental illness. That the psychiatrists played along was shocking at first (given their penchant to fake the "evaluation" and instead take you out for a cup of coffee), but, viewed throught the lens of organizational behavior, completely consistent.

Ms. O'Connor--

Of all the fictional depictions of academic shaming the gold standard has to be David Mamet's "Oleanna". I saw the play at a small off Broadway theater with William H. Macy and when I left the theater I was exhausted and devestated. Years later I still think about the unresolved dilemmas posed. Allbestregards.

John Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts probably belongs on your list.

Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. There is more than enough shame to go around in that short adventure.

Definitely not about shaming per se, but an excellent academic satire nonetheless and one that many people don't seem to know about: _The Lecturer's Tale_. Unfortunately I don't have my copy at the moment, so I can't tell you the author's name.

Philip Roth's _The Human Stain_ and Wilfred Cude's _The Ph.D. Trap_.

Add to this list Chip Lambert of "The Corrections."

James Hynes wrote The Lecturer's Tale. And there's a fair amount of shaming in his previous book, too: Publish and Perish. That's a brilliant set of three long stories (or short novels).

There's plenty of shaming in Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution and Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe.

I have one or two stories that I will share, because I think they best show how shaming can infiltrate every aspect of a person's academic life. In this case, the purpose was to make me conform to the kind of life that this one professor perceived academics should have.
I was a research assistant for this professor (and it is this experience that finaly pushed me over the edge into deciding to leave grad school and pursue my own life), and one day out of the blue, he called me into his office and decided that we were going to meet on Monday. The Monday in question was a holiday, and I informed him that I had made plans to be out of town for that weekend and would be back that afternoon, but not earlier. At this, he pushed back his chair, turned bright red, and informed me in a loud voice, working very hard to maintain his composure as he said in the nastiest voice I had ever heard him use, "You are an academic and you work every week, and every day. Only *secretaries* take national holidays off."
This, by the way, is also something of the sort that he told his wife (also a professor) when she asked him to go for a walk with her while we were working in Italy: it was either his birthday or her birthday, and he told her that he had too much to do and she needed to stop distracting him--he was famous among us for his abilities to turn hour-long projects into month-long extravaganzas of pain-- and there was a bit of a row about it. Later, he told another of the grad students that "she should just realize that she's the wife of an academic and get over it."
This could just be this man's hangup, but in my experience, it is an attitude that is more generalized.
As for how it made me feel, I felt small and horrible, as if I had really done something wrong, and apologized profusely for my shortcomings, but then I suddenly felt a bright flash of clarity zip up my spine and into my head that made me weak in the knees: I realized that I hadn't done anything wrong in the slightest, and he had no real power over me except to use the shame tactics.

I did not cancel my trip as he requested.
Not sure if this is what you were looking for, but it certainly made me feel shamed.