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Ever since I took on a significant service role a couple of years ago, I swear that 90% of my time and effort has been spent on interactions with one individual. This is a person who has, in recent years, risen to the status of department diva. There have been several divas over the years, depending on who was best funded at a given moment in time, which is infuriating in great part because there’s so much more to being faculty than raising grants. Divas generally avoid doing anything they don’t want to do and wield weaponized incompetence in order to get out of obligations, for example, by demonstrating hilarious inability to connect to videoconferencing platforms or make PPT slides or find files in online repositories we’ve all been using for years. In contrast, they are absolutely relentless when they do want something and don’t care how much of other people’s time or energy they waste, how far out of the ordinary their requests are, or that their unremitting pressure when they really want something often amounts to badgering. Some divas keep threatening to leave, necessitating repeated retention offers and wasting a lot of people’s time, effort, and political capital.

The current department diva asks for things nobody else asks for and often changes requests last minute, which leaves multiple people scrambling to accommodate—in other words, this is a person guided by whims they want catered to without any consideration for what anyone else has going on or for how other faculty behave. Diva also changes the story of why something needs to be done, as if human memory and email records didn’t exist, putting the onus on the other party (like me) to waste time trying to prove what the truth is. Yes, this resembles a key player in national politics. Trying to work with someone who has a tenuous relationship with the truth makes a person feel like they’re losing their mind.

What’s even worse is that the junior peole in Diva’s technical area are all following Diva’s lead and are thus developing into temperamental, unhelpful members of the department. They complain all the time and expect to be treated as more precious than their peers from other areas who are somehow able to do the work without being petulent. All because their field is currently hot, and because their most senior person (and, after some retirements, the only senior person) is now without guardrails.

Diva doesn’t seem to have heard no often, if ever, and I understand why. Most people are conflict-averse, so someone like Diva gets their way by bulldozing over human obstacles. But I’m far less conflict-averse than the norm (and presumably far FAR less than a woman in supposed to be) and, in fact, have bulldozing tendencies myself that I am aware of and hopefully vigilant enough about reining in. However, I absolutely absolutely abhor bullies, and in certain cases, such as when I see a faculty member putting undue pressure on support staff, I see red. So Diva and I have been clashing a lot and I feel it’s been getting worse. Diva’s escalating because of my now repeated challeges to his sense of entitlement and, let’s face it, because Diva, like many men, does not actually respect women, not in any real way where the respect for women could survive the man’s ego being bruised, and certainly not enough to prevent him from pushing until he gets his way. I am very stubborn but I’m also a woman, and I know that a man with a hurt ego can turn vindictive and dangerous. Most people want to avoid irritation, but I fear that the very fact he’s receiving pushback at all might be getting him more incensed and thus unpredictable. I don’t believe he will plot ways to retaliate because he’s way too self-involved for that and the likes of me don’t exist unless we cause friction when in contact with his needs, but one never knows.

What say you, blogosphere? How does one deal with difficult people without giving in to their every whim? Because conflict avoidance got us into this mess to begin with.