Member-only story
Quietly killing us with compliments
Kind words don’t always convey the best intentions.
She looks sixteen, but she’s a professor. That’s what the dean said about my friend when introducing her at a faculty orientation. The look on her face told me everything. Sure, she laughed. But you could practically taste the back of that dean’s hand. Never mind that she’d published a novel with a major New York press, plus short stories in places like The Paris Review. The headline was now how young she looked.
Some of you might be rolling your eyes. You’re thinking the dean was just making a joke. He was just giving my friend a compliment.
He was just teasing her.
Maybe that was his intention. But here’s what happened. For the rest of the year, nobody took my friend seriously. She had to play perky, preppy high schooler just to get travel reimbursements processed.
If she ever tried to act normal, people questioned her. Was there something wrong? Was she sad? Why was she being so rude?
Even other women talked down to her. At department meetings, everyone felt entitled to explain to my friend “how academia works.” The intelligence or insight of her comments didn’t matter.
