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In my comments yesterday, I remark that "I do not think I have done well enough as a professor to warrant reaching out to my students for aid; I do not think I helped enough of them well enough to deserve help from them in return." I know that the comment comes off as somewhat self-pitying--and it should, because it is, at least in part--but I also know what students have written about me across years. There are some who have praised me highly, to be sure, including at least one who took a paper written for my class to an international conference, where it was received well. But there are far more who have condemned me with varying degrees of vitriol--and I have likely deserved quite a bit of caustic remarks made about me.
I look back over such things with mixed feelings, as I think is true for many who have been in the profession. I did not attempt to become a scholar so that I would be liked, necessarily; I did so because it seemed the only thing for me to do, because I had (and have, I confess) a love for the materials I treat that I wanted to share with others, because I wanted to make a difference in people's lives that would go with them. And doing those things does mean that people who would otherwise be comfortable must be made less so, which will necessarily attract some opprobrium. Most folks would rather be comfortable than just about anything else. Disrupting that comfort strikes people closer than they can handle, so they lash out. I understood that, certainly.
There were parts of me--I suppose they are still there, but I am trying to fight them back, to stifle and suffocate them so that they wither away and can be amputated--that took that need to discomfort people as an excuse to be a bully. Many students have written of me that they thought I was more concerned with proving myself smart than with helping them be so. They were more correct than I was willing to admit at the time; they are more correct than I would like to admit even now--but right is right, and I have been a jerk and a bully for a long time, the more so when I was in a position that an attribute that got me bullied could be used to bully others. And I was not a child that such behavior could be forgiven. I was an adult, pursuing or holding one or more graduate degrees; I ought to have known better.
Recognizing that, tacitly then and explicitly, belatedly now, I am filled with chagrin--as I ought to be. I acted badly towards those who ought to have had better from me, whom I had thought I would be better to than I was. I try to be better, but given what I know, I am likely not doing enough. And it is too late for the one line of work, in any event; anything other than the sculleries of the ivory tower is closed to me, and I do not know that I want to scrub academe's pots for much longer. (But I likely will; I still need the money, and there is one school that seems willing to keep giving it to me, at least for the moment.) How much of the lesson I can transfer to other work is not clear to me, but I suppose some of it, at least, should carry over.