41 lines
5.0 KiB
Plaintext
41 lines
5.0 KiB
Plaintext
=== Preston (24, Albuquerque, NM (student housing, UNM area)) ===
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voice: Evan
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emotional_register: Hyper-articulate and slightly manic — the voice of someone who has been alone with a thought too long and needs to hear it out loud to know if it's real
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secret_want: To hear that the ideas were worth stealing — that 'temporal debt' is actually a good concept — because if it is, at least the loss means something
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CALLER (Preston, 24, Albuquerque, NM (student housing, UNM area)): Okay so I know how this is going to sound and I'm asking you to stay with me for like thirty seconds before you make up your mind about me.
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LUKE: That's — okay, keep going.
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CALLER: I've been working with my advisor, Dr. Henriksen, for two years now. Every Thursday at four o'clock we meet in his office and we talk through ideas for my dissertation. Two weeks ago I introduced a concept — I called it temporal debt, which is basically the idea that institutions carry forward unacknowledged obligations from past decisions, right? It's about how the past isn't actually past in the way we pretend it is.
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I said it out loud. Just said it. Didn't write it down because we were just talking, just thinking through something I'd been mulling over.
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And then — and this is where it gets — eight days later he posts a conference paper to academia.edu. And in this paper is a section on institutional obligations that carries the exact structural logic of what I said. He uses different language, obviously, but the architecture of the argument is mine. It's the same thing reworded.
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I've read it seventeen times, Luke. I've underlined the relevant passage in three different colors of pen. Red for logical structure, blue for conceptual dependencies, green for the anthropological framework he's using. My copy looks insane. I know it looks insane.
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But here's the thing that's eating me alive: I have no proof I said it first. It was just a conversation. There's no email, no notes he took, nothing. And now I'm
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LUKE: That's — okay, keep going.
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CALLER: ...I'm lying awake at night wondering if I'm actually losing my mind. Like, if I can't prove something happened, did it happen? That's a real philosophical problem, right? But it's also maybe just me being paranoid at one in the morning.
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The other thing is — and I hate that I'm thinking this — but I looked back at his 2021 essay. The one on institutional memory that's why I came to UNM in the first place. I applied here specifically to work with him because of that essay. And there was a grad student he had in 2019 who left the program suddenly. Just disappeared. And now I'm reading that essay again and I'm seeing things in it that feel like they might not be entirely his, and I don't even know if I'm pattern-matching or if there's actually something there.
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So either my advisor is systematically taking ideas from his students, or I'm constructing this whole paranoid narrative out of nothing, and I genuinely cannot tell which one is true. And I don't know what to do with that. Do I say something? To who? Do I destroy my academic relationship with someone I came here to study with? Do I just... let it go?
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I make coffee during the day, by the way. Pour-over coffee. My coworkers call me the professor and usually it's funny but tonight it's making me feel
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LUKE: And then what?
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CALLER: Like I'm a character in someone else's story. Like I'm not the one making decisions, I'm just the one things are happening to.
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That's the part that's really getting to me. Because if he took the idea, then at least the idea exists, right? At least temporal debt is real enough to be worth stealing. But if I'm making this up, if I'm just seeing patterns that aren't there because I'm exhausted and paranoid, then what am I? Just a guy who didn't sleep and convinced himself he was wronged by someone he admires.
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I need to know which one it is. Or I need someone to tell me what the right move is when you can't know which one it is. Because either way I'm fucked. Either I stay quiet and let it happen, or I say something I can't prove and I'm the grad student who cried plagiarism. I'm the one people don't want to work with. I'm the unstable one.
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What do you do with an injustice you can't prove? How do you live with not knowing if you're being wronged or if you're just broken?
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LUKE: And then what?
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CALLER: I don't know. I called you. I'm calling at almost one in the morning because I don't know what else to do.
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I thought maybe if I said it out loud to someone, if I heard myself say it, I'd know whether I sound crazy or whether I sound like someone who actually has a legitimate problem. But I still don't know. I still can't tell.
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Do you think I should talk to him about it? Do I go to the department chair? Do I just drop out and find a different advisor and pretend this never happened? Because that's an option too. Just leave. Start over somewhere else where I'm not spending every Thursday afternoon wondering if the person across the desk from me is taking pieces of my brain.
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What would you do?
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