The (im)possibility of complaint: on efforts of inverting and (en)countering the university

ABSTRACT

Over the past decades, research has documented how endemic racism, sexism, and ableism are in academia. Universities have complaint procedures to address these issues. Much research focuses on individual experiences of making a complaint and the institutional uptake of complaints and demonstrates how such ‘isms’ are located in the individual rather than in the institution. This paper instead scrutinizes how complaint procedures mask and reproduce the structures with which complaints are concerned resulting in the complaints’ limited transformative abilities. I demonstrate how complaint procedures only allow for treating complaints as isolated, singular and unusual events that require temporary solutions, which ensures that complaints and complaint work are peripheralized while the white patriarchal ableist core of universities remains intact. Complaints as efforts of inverting the white patriarchal university are too limited as they are quickly reverted. Hence, what is needed is more than a mere procedure but a total inversion of the institution to make difference fit which requires work that goes in and beyond one’s institution.

KEYWORDS:

• Academia
• complaint
• diversity
• infrastructural inversion
• whiteness

Introduction

The university is a key site through which gendered and racialized inequalities are (re)produced (García-Peña 2022). Universities claim to combat such inequalities by introducing diversity policies and opening their doors to women and people of colour. Upon their inclusion, women and people of colour experience how universities still operate through sexist, racist, and exclusionary logics (Sian 2019). In response to persistent complaints about such inequalities, universities invest in complaint procedures which are a key focus in feminist and diversity research. Although most studies document experiences of harassment, discrimination, and making complaints (Kirkner, Lorenz, and Mazar 2022; Marshall, Dalyot, and Galloway 2014; Mousa and Abdelgaffar 2022), there is increasingly a focus on the institutional handling of complaints, exposing a gap between institutional promises to take complaints seriously and actual practices of resisting complaints and change (Bull and Rye 2018; Majewska 2020; Phipps 2020; Whitley and Page 2015). Therefore, scholars argue that complaint procedures are ineffective in tackling inequalities (Bondestam and Lundqvist 2020). Such ineffectiveness results from the informality-institutionality binary of the academic complaint practice which entails the inclination to informalize complaints and the simultaneous institutionalization of complaints via formal procedures. Both isolate, individualize and render complaints into private ‘cases’ so the public character of what they make appear disappears throughout complaint processes (Ahmed 2021; Bacchi 1998).

It is therefore relevant to study how universities produce such disappearances by drawing lines between the personal and the institutional when complaints about racism, sexism, and ableism attempt to counter such individualization through an insistence on exposing and inverting exclusionary institutional structures (Majewska 2020). This paper addresses how universities informally and affectively draw lines between the incidental (complaints) and the structural (the university’s business as usual) to produce the disappearances of institutional structures. Therefore, I ask: ‘What do complaint procedures do to the structures with which the complaints are concerned?’ By drawing on interviews with 25 (non)academics from various Dutch universities I answer the research question.

I extend current analyses of complaints as private ‘incidents’ by demonstrating how complaint work itself – by which I mean the ongoing (affective) labour required to articulate a complaint, to experience, hear, address, and change that with which the complaint is concerned and the aftermath of doing so – is rendered into incidental, and extra work that exists apart from one’s (academic) core work to ensure the disappearances of institutional structures. Such disappearances are ensured through the Dutch will to informality and aversion to hierarchy which assumes that all are equal to articulate and resolve complaints among themselves through an ongoing process of speaking out against, negotiating, and understanding differences to eventually produce a ‘consensual’ understanding of that difference (Van Reekum 2014).

As such, this will turns people over to each other as ‘equals’ while obscuring power relations and turning complaints into being about incidents. More importantly, this will ensures that performing complaint work about institutional exclusionary structures is seen as engaging in incidental, extra labour that disrupts the university’s core work and therefore requires a temporary solution. When offered a temporary solution the institutional exclusionary structures that complaint work temporarily makes appear disappear.

In what follows, I develop a theoretical understanding of complaints situated in Dutch academia. Thereafter, I explain how testimonies were collected and analysed. I show how when complaints make white masculine ableist structures appear, complaints are heard as being about incidents and as being incidents to make these structures disappear. This produces a distinction between ‘incidents’ (complaints) and the business as usual (the university’s structures). In it, the work of complaint exists apart from the university’s structures and therefore cannot invert nor become part of the university’s structures. Finally, I reflect on this study’s contribution to research on complaint.

Breaking the silence: complaint research in academia

Upon the promise of inclusion many gendered and racialized others entered academia only to experience how universities still operate through exclusionary and discriminatory structures (Sian 2019). Universities promise to take complaints about such structures seriously by investing in complaint procedures, which are a key focus in feminist and diversity research. Although I draw from research on sexism, feminist complaints, and sexual harassment, I understand complaints as those specifically concerned with the racist, sexist, ableist, and exclusionary structures of the university. Research on discrimination and harassment in academia shows how complaints are silenced through the ambiguity of what can constitute harassment, lack of clear procedures (Kirkner, Lorenz, and Mazar 2022; Marshall, Dalyot, and Galloway 2014), the ‘honourable’ status of professors, and fear of retaliation (Mousa and Abdelgaffar 2022). Other studies highlight organizational factors perpetuating such harassment (Bull and Rye 2018: Phipps 2020; Sidelil, Cuthbert, and Spark 2022) such as hierarchy, a masculine competitive academic culture, and of silence (Naezer, van den Brink, and Benschop 2019; Smith and Freyd 2014). Both research streams underline that complaint procedures are ineffective in tackling inequalities and might exacerbate them (Bondestam and Lundqvist 2020).

According to Ahmed (2021), such ineffectiveness in handling complaints is not the result of some accidental inefficiency but of strategic inefficiency which is ‘not just the failure of things to work properly but is also how things are working’ (Ahmed 2021, 90). Such strategic inefficiency is related to the efficiency with which institutions reproduce themselves. Complaint procedures become a means of social reproduction due to their ability to make complaints disappear. As Ahmed (2021) argues such disappearances are often produced in the first stages of the complaint process in which informality is employed to ‘positively’ stop the complaint from becoming formal. This informality, which takes the shape of conversations behind closed doors, ensures that formally there is no trace of what was attempted to resolve informally. Yet, Majewska (2020) argues that the institutionality of the academic complaint practice is how a complaint – that ontologically crosses the boundaries of the personal and the public and aims to undermine the organising structures of the university –, is turned into a private case so that the public character of what the complaint makes appear disappears. In other words, the current complaint practice in academia exists upon an informality-institutionality binary that isolates and individualizes complaints to resolve them.

I aim to study what complaints – that attempt to resist such an individualization through an insistence on exposing and inverting institutional exclusionary structures –, can do to disrupt the university’s workings. Before doing so, I explain the Dutch academic context of complaint.

Complaint procedures in the Dutch ivory tower

In the Netherlands, the legal requirement for complaint procedures is anchored in the Working Conditions Act of universities under the umbrella of protecting employees’ psychosocial workload. Universities must create a safe working environment for their employees by crafting complaint procedures for ‘undesirable behaviour’ and appointing confidential advisers.¹ The document defined complaints as ‘an expression of dissatisfaction about the way in which (an employee of) the Executive Board or student has behaved towards the complainant or another person in a certain matter. This may include verbal, non-verbal, or otherwise physical, digital, or SMS communication.' ² Complaints are understood as resulting from individual behaviours rather than from institutional workings. Since 2021, universities must appoint an ombudsman for employees who can investigate, receive, and handle complaints.

The first step in the complaint procedure is informal as

it is preferable that a complaint is resolved in consultation with the person(s) directly involved and their manager to the satisfaction of the complainant via the informal process. If this informal process does not lead to the desired solution or if the complainant does not wish to use the informal process for any reason, the formal procedure is available for the handling of the complaint.³

While research on complaints in Dutch academia is scarce, one study demonstrates how managers, department heads, and deans informally ensure that complaints remain informal by normalising, individualising, questioning the complaint, encouraging dialogue, or silencing the complainant (Naezer, van den Brink, and Benschop 2019). If complaints were handled, complainants were often offered solutions targeting the complainant themselves, e.g. coaching and training.

Such a handling of complaints with a preference for informality, dialogue, and coaching emerges from what Van Reekum (2014) describes as ‘dialogical Dutchness’ in which the Dutch became imagined and articulated as people who are inclined to open dialogue, consensus-seeking, tolerance, debate, informal relationships, and egalitarianism. According to such a discourse, the Dutch come to live with differences through an ongoing process of explicitly speaking out, negotiating, and understanding. Yet, Ghorashi (2014) noted that whenever people of colour complain about Dutch society for being racist and exclusionary, they are turned into the ungrateful Other. As Wekker (2016) explains

the part of white self-presentation on display is one that experiences a sense of deep loss, that things aren’t the way they used to be any more for Dutch people; we are being questioned in our own home by ungrateful guests, whom we have received as gracious hosts. The guests have overstayed their welcome and are pointing out everything that is wrong with us (149)

Despite self-images of being a tolerant country open to dialogue in which all occupy equal positions to articulate their complaints, some people may be (not) heard in specific ways to dismiss their complaints.

Unmuting (hi)stories of complaint

To study what happens to institutional structures when exposed through complaints, I interviewed 25 (non)academics to learn with and from them about (their) complaints. Complaints were informal (12) and formal (7). For others, the interview itself was an opportunity to articulate their complaints which they did not voice institutionally. I draw from these interviews to study how the disappearances of institutional structures are produced throughout the complaint process.

Gathering testimonies

In 2022, I shared a call in my network and on the university’s website for informants to participate in a study on complaints in Dutch academia. I expressed the need to make (hi)stories of complaint visible and asked those who are marginalized (based on ‘sex’, race/ethnicity, class, body-ableness, sexual orientation, and gender identity) to share their stories. To hear their stories is crucial as their different experiences teach us about the various workings of complaint procedures. Many people responded and offered short testimonies in their e-mails.⁴ Informants held academic positions (19) and non-academic positions (4). Academic informants are early-career researchers (junior researchers, PhD-candidates, and postdocs) on temporary contracts (7) and experienced researchers (assistant, associate, and full professors) employed on fixed contracts (12). Non-academic staff included student and confidential counsellors and HR practitioners. Two informants left academia because of how their complaints were handled. Informants are of colour (12) and white (13) among whom were Dutch nationals (18) and non-Dutch nationals (7). They identify as female (19, 7 of colour), male (all of colour) (5) and non-binary (1). Two informants have a disability.

Each informant received an informed consent document explaining the study, researcher information, confidentiality, data protection, withdrawal, and quote amendment rights. Concerns about anonymity were raised by some, particularly due to being the only person of colour in a department and/or the specificity of their complaint. I assured informants before and after the interviews that they could communicate their concerns. Before journal submission, informants received the article to review their quotes. Three informants amended their quotes to ensure their anonymity. The interviews – conducted via Zoom (21) and face-to-face (4) –, lasted 1–3 h. As some informants already shared a specific experience that led to their complaint which they wanted to discuss, I offered the possibility of an open or semi-structured interview.

In both cases, I made use of (some questions from) a topic list that covered three themes: (1) experiences that led one to (not) complain and its consequences on their mental-physical health; (2) the institutional handling of (in)formal complaints; and (3) consequences of making complaints on mental-physical health and careers. The data (e.g. emails and documents) provided to me by informants mostly guided the open interviews (5). Most informants chose a semi-structured interview (20) as they expressed that their complaints could not be traced back to one specific event but that their complaints resulted from their experiences with exclusionary institutional workings. While the open interviews generated more insight into how universities make complaints disappear, the semi-structured interviews demonstrated the difficulty of making institutional structures appear and how institutions ensure these structures disappear.

To understand the production of such appearances and disappearances, I made a complaint summary of each interview to compare relevant institutional aspects in what made one complain, what institutions do to complaints and complainants, and more importantly, what complaint procedures do with that of which one complains. My analysis focused on the affects involved in the (re)appearances and disappearances of structures which complaints aim to expose. Specifically, I focused on how structures got muted and concealed (Whitley and Page 2015) through certain affective responses such as nodding, laughing, frowning, sighing, becoming angry, or expressing regret (Ahmed 2021). For example, when analysing a complaint testimony of a senior white woman about the bullying she recalled how the rector ‘brushed the complaint off’. The rector told her she talked to the professor and that he was sorry for his behaviour. No further actions were taken. I understood the apology as an affective resolution of institutional exclusionary structures.

The knowledges I present here is entangled with my own body. As a Muslim woman of colour, I experienced racism and sexism throughout my academic journey. I only complained when my master's thesis was deemed by some as not academically ‘objective’ or ‘rigorous’ thereby postponing my graduation. The complaint was not resolved informally so I continued the formal complaint process. Throughout that process, I felt the anxieties and exhaustion around complaint processes. These experiences allowed me to attend to the affects involved in complaint procedures in the interviews. While I was a doctoral researcher interviewing others in similar or higher positions, my informants and I were aware of our power differences due to our gender, race/ethnicity, body ableness, academic status as we acknowledged how our different bodies shape our experiences. Many informants related to me in terms of race/ethnicity (‘You know how it feels when white people question you’) and gender (‘You probably also have these experiences as a woman’), while others acknowledged our differences (‘You are a woman of colour, so you experience sexism and racism on top of it’). The recognition of our sameness and differences fostered a certain safety and solidarity in the interviews. It also unveiled the connectedness of these experiences and how institutions can undo such connectedness by making institutional structures disappear.

Unfolding complaints: on the (dis)appearances of institutional structures

Complaints are about white masculine ableist structures which they make appear. As they make these structures appear, complaints are heard as being about incidents and as being incidents to make the structures disappear. This produces a distinction between incidents (complaints) and the business as usual (the university’s structures) which ensures that the handling of complaints becomes peripheralized so complaints cannot invert nor transform the university’s structures. I start with an excerpt to demonstrate how such distinctions are produced.

A miscommunication: on hearing complaints as being about incidents

When articulating (hi)stories of complaint, many informants expressed the impossibility of complaints to address the business as usual due to universities’ will to informalize complaints. At the heart of the will to informalization lies the idea that all are equal to articulate and resolve complaints (Van Reekum 2014). Yet such equality only exists in and because of the blindness to and denial of existing inequalities. A senior white woman academic expressed how she was struck by this idea:

One thing I was very struck by when I moved to the Netherlands and encountered in the Dutch context is this idea of ‘we zijn allemaal gelijk’ [“we are all equal’’] and there is no hierarchy but of course there totally is! We are not all equal! But this lack of a clear structure of who you go to for something puts us, at least me, as a new member of the teaching staff, relatively young, a woman, (..) it puts us at risk.

Such inequality blindness ensures a specific handling of complaints by handing people over to each other as ‘equals’ who can resolve complaints among themselves. A junior white woman academic who was told that her fixed contract was in the works, reported sick a while after. After which her fixed contract was put on hold. To escape from this hold, she complained to HR, confidential counsellors, legal counsellors, her line manager, and the management. She was advised to have an informal meeting with those responsible for her contract as she explained:

It's kind of we'll solve it among ourselves. But that's difficult if you don't agree with the people who make the decisions because then that among us doesn’t work. (..) I can’t be the only one who has had a bit of trouble with the management. But if we think: we’ll solve it among ourselves, then you really don’t have any idea. It is not visible, but it happens more often. If we would openly discuss how we solve these things among ourselves, then something must be arranged for that instead. (..) I don’t think that informality helps because it all remains invisible, especially how the processes run here.

A complaint about an ableist structure that spits bodies out once they are not ‘able enough’ to be exploited, is heard as a communication problem. To resolve the complaint, she must have an informal meeting with those who abuse their power by withholding her a fixed contract. The complaint is now about an incident in which the business as usual is temporarily disrupted because there is a miscommunication. Such miscommunication implies that various parties have differing versions of what happened and that they have equal power positions to voice those versions and reconcile them to restore the business as usual. Such an institutional will to informalization assumes that all are equal to articulate, negotiate, and resolve complaints. As the junior white woman academic expresses resolving complaints among themselves is impossible because of power dynamics.

Informality is another way of exercising power whereby a circulating complaint is led back and relocated to one meeting. The ableist structure that once appeared disappears when the complaint appears as being about an incident. Informal communication is not only a form of damage control by containing the complaint but in its containment further damages those who complain (Ahmed 2021). A senior white woman academic recalls how a white male staff member racially abused a woman of colour colleague:

A colleague was being racially abused by a member of staff and the response for many teaching directors was: just have a meeting with him. This is a woman of colour who is being racially abused by a white male member of staff. (..) It was like oh we can all just be friends; it is some sort of misunderstanding. I said no. It is not a misunderstanding. This is a man who has worked in academia for twenty years. He knows that you cannot do anything. (..) The thing that annoys me the most is that you would not give a non-white Dutch person that much benefit of a doubt of it being a miscommunication problem. No! You just know it!

Again, the institutional urge is to turn racism into a communication problem, that is, as a difference of opinion. As the woman of colour academic is advised to resolve such a ‘difference’ through informal meetings and negotiations as colleagues, she is subjected to more violence. A junior woman of colour shares how a professor made jokes involving penises when they were going on a study trip and how ‘in that moment the whole car just fell into silence.’ A car falls into silence on its way to recover from what happened. When I asked her if she voiced her experiences, she said:

We raise our concerns within ourselves but never file official complaints. We are so busy in our daily lives, and there is just so much involved in complaining. So much effort to report this. (..) He never really did anything. It’s more like making you feel uncomfortable.

Complaining is work on top of work; of identifying whether something is worthy of complaint. Fear keeps a structure from appearing because someone starts doubting whether what appeared did appear (Kirkner, Lorenz, and Mazar 2022; Phipps 2020). Another junior woman of colour lecturer expresses how she kept quiet about the sexual intimidation she experienced:

Why bother going up such a big hurdle? If I’m not sure about what can happen? Especially at work that I depend on for an income. It’s this high threshold. You usually must take the blows when you’re the victim. And there have been several things that they have not responded to already, so why would they now?

Those who need to complain often cannot afford to complain because there is too much to lose. Another way to further damage those who are already damaged, is by subjecting them to trainings where they learn how to ‘communicate’ to resolve the problem. A senior man of colour academic shares how a complaint was made against him by a white senior woman academic who felt ‘threatened’ by him. The complaint followed after he complained about his department’s complicity in (neo)coloniality as he explained:

You cannot talk truth to power. Once you do, they come down at you with all the institutional violence and try to force you back into submission.

Part of that institutional violence was to subject him to deep democracy training with the department. Deep democracy training is provided when there is a conflict between parties who are seen as occupying equal power positions. They are brought together to voice their opinions, and in hearing those opinions they resolve the ‘conflict’ by reaching a consensus. The institutional reflex is to hear a complaint about an institutional structure as a difference (of opinion) which can be resolved through an ongoing process of speaking out against and negotiating the difference to arrive at a consensual understanding of that difference. Such consensus necessarily means hearing and silencing some voices. He was then faced with a ‘choice’: if he wanted to keep his job, he just needed to learn how to communicate. This would require him to sit down with the department which ignored and excluded him as they disagreed with him. Doing so means being subjected to more violence through a denial of the same violence that got him there. The only way out is to be more damaged and not speak of the damage done to him. As such, the colonial structure disappears when he appears to have a communication problem.

Such disappearances of structures are enabled by, as the next paragraph shows, how complaints themselves are turned into incidents that negatively disrupt the business as usual.

And cut: on affective cuts, maintenance, and complaints as incidents

A senior woman of colour academic recalls how she experiences everyday racism at the university. She expresses how difficult it is to articulate this everyday racism, but that it became visible in interactions with colleagues. One of those interactions stayed with her:

Senior woc academic:

“It happens very often during interactions, then all those everyday racist things come up. There are multiple instances, but one that stays with me was when colleagues made “a joke”. These things are always meant to be just funny and friendly; they made slanting eyes. I said: that is racism. One person responded. The other did not. He just kept laughing like I was just joking too. (..). It is very difficult to articulate except at these concrete moments.”

ZE:

You told them: this is racism. One person kept laughing, but the other responded. What was his response when you told them this is racism?

Senior woc academic:

He stopped laughing. He was startled. He looked at me, and then he did not say anything. I also did not know how to break the ice. The other person just started talking again. The conversation just continued.

While having everyday interactions with colleagues is normal, what was normal is how the senior woman of colour experienced everyday anti-Asian racism. These everyday interactions and practices are not simply ‘individual’ manifestations of racism but are connected to macro structures (Essed 1991). As Essed (1991) puts it, ‘everyday racism is about the integration of racism into everyday situations through practices (cognitive and behavioural) that activate underlying power relations’ (50). Such behaviours become familiar and repetitive. It can be difficult to define racism given its ambiguous nature of reinforcing ethnic/racial power relations (Essed 1991). Hence, the senior woman of colour academic has difficulty articulating everyday racism.

However, when she experienced clear anti-Asian racism disguised as ‘humour’, she had no difficulty articulating what it was. To experience racism disguised as ‘humour’ is to be expected to take a joke. She refused to take the ‘joke’, but instead she laid bare the ongoing racism she has been enduring. It is at this exact moment, between her telling her colleagues this is racism and one colleague’s response to be startled, that the racist business as usual becomes visible. The laughter of one person disappears, while another keeps laughing because of what appears. The tension builds up because of what is revealed. Such tension can be seen on her colleague’s face who is startled and is felt by her as she does not know how to break the ice.

As looks are exchanged, a deafening silence remains with the diminishing laughter of one colleague, which mutes her complaint and resolves the tension. The conversation is picked up where they left off. It is an affective cut. When a structure is exposed by a complaint, affective cuts such as looks, laughter, and silence mark a distinction between an ‘incident’ and the business as usual. A complaint about a structure is turned into an incident. It unexpectedly disrupts the white masculine way of doing things (accepting racism by laughing along) and impacts it negatively by causing tension. Silence enables a return to the business as usual: a wilful forgetting and denial of everyday racism. These affective cuts make it impossible to complain about structures because the complaint itself is handled as an incident. That does not mean that the complaint is about an incident but that a complaint about a structure is heard as an incident.

A senior man of colour academic explained how he experienced ongoing stigmatization: ‘it is really those little things that they call micro-aggressions these days. Those little things, they are so small that I can no longer remember them all.’ Such remarks work as reminders that he remains an outsider (Sian 2019). When I asked him whether he addresses racism, he expressed:

We [people of colour] are not used to addressing problems, you see yourself as a problem. You think I am in; I need to keep quiet. I got in; I don’t need to make too much meshakil [Arabic for trouble]. You just do your job and then go home. It’s a bit of that guest labourer mentality.

He is aware of his position as a ‘potential problem’. Being granted access to the university means remaining a guest who needs to be grateful. Staying quiet is a way to not appear as ‘ungrateful’, or, as a problem (Ghorashi 2014). Sometimes, however, someone is asked to speak up. A junior woman of colour academic experienced working in academia as horrible. When she shared with colleagues how lonely she felt because of the white Eurocentric business as usual, her supervisor scheduled a talk. She explained:

I think it was nice of her that she scheduled an appointment with me to discuss this. (..) She listened. She asked me questions. I shared multiple examples of why I felt this distance to others and why I felt alone. And that was it. It stopped there.

Listening is a technique of containment to stop a complaint from circulating within the institution and a white structure from being exposed. Enlisting someone to speak up about a perceived difference and to listen to it, is to produce a ‘consensual’ understanding of the difference being resolved (Van Reekum 2014). The complaint ceases to exist when the meeting ends. It is another affective cut. Years later she voiced again how isolated she felt. Now the supervisor told her that she isolated herself. To return to address a problem is to have the problem returned to you as you are the problem. Another junior woman of colour expressed how this fear kept her silent about her experiences as the only woman of colour in a white department:

This [annual evaluation moment] is the only moment I am given the opportunity to talk about it, about feeling included, about feeling safe given my minority background. That is the only moment that happens every year, but I don’t dare to talk about it. I am like “Hmm” and they also go like “hmm hmm”. Then everyone goes “hmm, hmm”. We all know something is going on, you know? They know that I am lying and that I am just keeping it to myself.

In fear of disclosing her complaint, the junior woman of colour academic nods. Her white female supervisors nod along. Nodding becomes a confirmation that they all know what is going on, but that what is going on is not coming out. To nod is to maintain the business as usual: next question. Hence, these affective cuts and maintenances render invisible the racist structures that become visible through complaints. This struggle against the disappearance of a structure emerges precisely, as the next paragraph shows because complaint procedures make it impossible to invert the university’s structures continuously.

On (un)making a case: the (im)possibility of infrastructural inversion

A senior woman of colour academic recalls how she was eligible for a fixed contract for a long time already. Yet, she was denied job security on multiple occasions and was expected to carry on with her workload on a temporary contract as she explained:

It was so unfair I just couldn't shut up about it. You know I was just up to here. You cannot just do this to people. We are people, we are teaching, we have children. Everybody is running from burnout to burnout. People when they are hired are falling into a burnout in six months, and I am here: still hanging in there and working, teaching, writing stuff, and then I get this again?!

Being up to here refers to what she has been carrying for too long, that is, the greediness of an institution that keeps stealing away her time and energy while leaving her in a precarious position. It also refers to what she had to keep inside to be there which causes her to be up to here. Complaints are often about the business as usual in which scarcity of time, precarity, work overload, exhaustion, anxiety, feelings of out-of-placeness, and aggression are normalized (Gill 2009). How can one complain about the usual, if complaint procedures only allow for complaints about what is unusual?

A junior man of colour academic expressed that ‘although nothing in particular happened’ he sometimes felt socially unsafe because: ‘I’m one of the few people of colour in my research group. The social unsafety that I experience is so complex. I feel like some sort of an outsider in the sense that you do not quite fit in.’ His complaint is about experiencing a white structure that he does not fit which he speaks out against to fit in (Ahmed 2021). He explained: ‘I keep using my voice. I want to be seen. I am not supposed to exist, yet I exist. People must see that, so our collective image of what a scientist looks like might change.’ Complaints are about making a structure visible by making oneself visible while one is made invisible by the structures only visible to them. Hence, complaints are efforts of infrastructural inversion (Bowker and Star 1999) in which someone exposes a structure and tries to invert it. Therein lies a particular difficulty: to complain about what is plainly visible to a few yet almost imperceptible to many.

A white non-binary disabled junior academic shares how they are registered as using a wheelchair, but that the environment was not adapted to them. Instead, they were expected to do the work to adapt the environment to them (Inckle 2018). Doing this work didn’t result in any structural change. Rather when they attempted to be scheduled in a wheelchair-accessible room, they ended up facing the ableist structures they complained about:

I once said that you are weaving a kind of tapestry of band-aids with people who are quite willing to help. There is simply nothing structural. You quickly find out that getting something is the result of individual favours and good will, but that also doesn't really make it possible for you to insist on something that actually works. At one point I finally got a scheduler to schedule me properly. He wanted to schedule me on campus because there was an elevator and a wheelchair-accessible toilet. But I can’t even get to that campus. (..) It does not work. Then he says: but I checked and there is a wheelchair-accessible toilet. It is great that finally after three emails back and forth, they got that, but they don’t understand it yet. But then you can’t make it difficult again, that you also want a room where you can actually reach the whiteboard. You’re fighting such a battle every time to move a little easier. But then that scheduler is gone, and you can start all over again.

To offer a band-aid to complaints about an ableist structure is to minimize the issue that renders the ableist structure invisible. Every time that one complains and exposes a structure (e.g. pointing out the inaccessibility of a room or campus), a band-aid is put over it to mask the structure. As these band-aids become a tapestry of band-aids, the complaints and structures disappear by being kept under the tapestry. While complaints invert structures, such inversions are quickly reverted by using band-aids. Hence, what is needed is not ‘aid’ but an inversion of the institution as such: what is considered ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ needs to be inverted. The core is the ableist business as usual needs to become the periphery that is the work for an accessible environment and vice versa.

A senior white woman academic worked against white masculine structures, which broke her at one point:

There was no support at all, but there are snipers in the bushes who can shoot me because that happened at meetings. It is just when you get too smart as a woman, you are rendered harmless in some way.

Her smartness became visible in her efforts to invert white masculine structures by trying to hire a race scholar. Yet, in exposing white masculine structures, she exposes herself as a threat to those structures. When a decision must be made, she is harmed to render her harmless:

I tried to name the racism just for my integrity. (..) I hadn’t finished speaking yet, and this senior white man academic had steam coming from his ears. He started screaming at me. (..) The week before he intimidated me after I told him I couldn’t understand why you just exclude race as an object of study. (..) He said he was scared to lose their profile. I said some things about that. He became so angry. After the meeting, the chairperson of the committee and the others walked out of the room and saw that happen. (..) I was backed into a corner, and I couldn’t leave. He stood in front of me and said that the way I talked really hurt him personally. (..) That's what I also meant by I became too smart: Get back into your corner, I’m just going to appoint a professor here! Now you suddenly want to say something too? You are not supposed to! You just must organize a bit here and there for students, (…) but it was never meant for you to really get involved. That is made known to me a lot.

She was harmed because she is seen as harming the white masculine business as usual by making room for difference. Making room for difference means being backed into a corner of a room. She was never meant to really get involved. In other words, her work of inverting white masculine structures to make difference the business as usual was never meant to become the business as usual. Such infrastructural inversion through complaints is impossible, as complaint work is itself work that exists apart from the business as usual and therefore cannot become the business as usual. A junior man of colour academic shares how his promotor is bullied to force her out of the institution, which forces her to complain. He explains that this has negatively impacted him:

They [the management] act as if it doesn’t affect me because she is still here and doing her work. But in practice, it does, because she is so busy working while also applying for jobs and then also going through complaints procedures. So, she has much less time.

The management separates the complaint work of this professor from her ‘normal’ work. Such a separation implies that complaint work is always work that is ‘extra’. As work that is ‘extra’ complaints procedures only enable for little, all too limited inversions which are quickly reverted. An inversion of the institution through complaints is therefore fundamentally impossible as the business as usual remains intact. Complaints procedures become means of institutional reproduction. If universities want to take complaints seriously, complaint work can no longer be done in the margins but must become universities’ core business. In other words, making difference fit must become how universities operate. If not, universities remain blind to how their damaged core is damaging not only to others but particularly to themselves by refusing new possibilities of operating that are life-affirming instead of damaging, exploitive, and destructive.

Conclusion and discussion

While universities invest in complaint procedures, scholars argue how such procedures rarely disrupt the white patriarchal workings of universities (Ahmed 2021; Bacchi 1998; Marshall, Dalyot, and Galloway 2014; Whitley and Page 2015). A key question remains whether complaints can disrupt the university’s structures (Majewska 2020). Hence, I aimed to understand how complaint procedures produce the disappearances of institutional structures when complaints attempt to expose and invert them.

I find that the impossibility of (transformative) complaint emerges from the inability to complain about the university’s structures. Complaint procedures solely recognize singular, and unusual events that might happen within institutions but to their understanding outside of their institutional structures and responsibility (Bacchi 1998). Scholars therefore argue that universities continue to be positioned outside of the racism, sexism, ableism, and harassment happening within their walls as complaint procedures locate it in individuals rather than in the institutions themselves (Ahmed 2021; Marshall, Dalyot, and Galloway 2014; Whitley and Page 2015). My study underwrites such lessons and contributes to them by demonstrating how universities produce complaint work as being outside of their (core) business to wash their hands of any responsibility. Crucial therein is the Dutch will to informality and aversion to hierarchy.

At the core of this will is the assumption that all are equal to articulate and resolve complaints among themselves (Van Reekum 2014). Such equality can only exist in and because of the blindness to and denial of existing (power) inequalities. The gap between an appreciation of equality and the experience of hierarchy in articulating complaints has two important implications for the (im)possibilities of complaints. On the one hand, complaints about structures are heard as being about incidents arising from miscommunications which reflect temporary disruptions of the business as usual. Through dialogue and consensus seeking such miscommunications are ‘resolved’ to restore the business as usual.

On the other hand, if one insists on complaining about the university’s structures, affective cuts ensure that complaints become incidents that negatively disrupt the business as usual. The racist, sexist, and ableist structures that once appear, disappear when the person who complains appears as a problem (Ahmed 2021). As such, complaints themselves become incidents that require temporary solutions. This, in turn, situates complaint work as outside of the university’s (core) business which allows complaints to become ‘institutional non-problems’ (Sidelil, Cuthbert, and Spark 2022). Situated as such, complaints can never invert nor transform the university’s structures.

Indeed, complaints as efforts of infrastructural inversion (Bowker and Star 1999) aimed at inverting racist, sexist, and ableist structures to make difference the core (business) of the university only allow for little all too limited inversions which are quickly reverted. This is precisely because treating complaints as incidents that require temporary solutions ensures that the complaint work to make differences fit remains peripheral while the racist, sexist, and ableist core of universities is maintained. Besides the fact that racism, sexism, and ableism are often seen as incidents resulting from an individual’s actions that can be addressed through complaint procedures (Marshall, Dalyot, and Galloway 2014; Whitley and Page 2015), complaint work itself is made to be incidental. My study shows that attempts to locate problems in the institution are blocked. Such blockages are produced through the informality-institutionality binary inherent to the academic complaint practice. Both position complaint work as outside of the university’s core business either by rendering it into incidental work (informality) or an individual’s work existing apart from their and the university’s core work (institutionality).

The question remains how complaints can be transformative in between this informality-institutionality binary without risking the social reproduction of the institution. In this regard, future research could study the possibilities of counter-publics which are collectives of complainers both in and outside of universities to participate in transforming the academy (Majewska 2020). As long as the peripheralization of complaint work continues, the impossibility of complaints to enact transformative change remains. The inclusion of gendered and racialized Others in academia then amounts to nothing more than ‘the effort to make the machine run more effectively with those who were previously excluded by the machine’ (Davis, Spivak, and Dhawan 2019, 60). Even if those who were previously excluded are included and attempt to complain to transform the university’s structures, such complaints only cause minor disruptions to the university machine but do not change its workings.

If universities want to take complaints seriously and are not merely interested in making paper and good appearances, complaint work can no longer be done in the margins but must become universities’ core business. In other words, difference must become how universities operate. This implies fundamentally dismantling and inverting the university’s racist, sexist, and ableist structures. Such a change requires more than merely a complaint procedure or a change in terminology for universities to co-opt and lure Others in, it requires a continuous inversion of the institution itself. The first step for institutions is to recognize how their current mode of operating is damaging, exploitive, and destructive. Such recognition starts with centralising the institution as (part of) the problem in complaint procedures and continues by making complaint work part of the structures rather than work that exists outside of it.

More importantly, institutions have to fundamentally break with their structures of complaint in which only individual cases can be heard. Such individualization ensures that institutions can continue not to hear, know, and act upon complaints about the university’s structures by separating collectives into individuals and cutting structures into incidents. In doing so, much of what is happening within institutions can remain invisible as institutions control how and what things are made (in)visible (Phipps 2020). Instead, institutions must resist the separation of complaints by allowing collective ways of making complaints.

Second, those who find themselves in the margins must remember that no matter its institutional form, whether as complaint procedures or diversity policies, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (Lorde 1984). Instead, as ‘outsiders’ working in/against these universities, we need to encounter others with whom we can counter the institution (Phipps and McDonnell 2022). When institutions isolate and peripheralize us, our work, and our complaints, the counter-response is to turn our isolation into communion by turning our complaints as incidents into structures. That is to find others with whom we hold space to connect, nurture each other, heal, think, and rebel within institutional spaces (García-Peña 2022). After all, the university’s transformation relies on us surviving, rebelling, and thriving.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Sofokles.

Notes on contributors

Zakia Essanhaji

Zakia Essanhaji is a postdoc at the Department of Sociology at VU Amsterdam. Currently, she studies how whiteness as a form of boundary drawing allows for the (re)production of racialised and gendered boundaries of Dutch universities. In her dissertation, she studied how in and through the production of specific compositions of ‘the’ diversity problem, whiteness is being recomposed. As such, she argues there is no such thing as 'the diversity problem' but the problem of whiteness introducing white problems.

Notes

1 See complaint procedures for undesirable behaviour at https://www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/Arbocatalogus_psa.html

2 See complaint procedures for undesirable behaviour, p. 2.

3 See complaint procedures for undesirable behaviour, p. 1.

4 I contacted two informants because of hearing about how their complaints were handled. This underlines how once complaints are institutionally seen as dealt with, complaints (hi)stories continue to re-emerge.