The Cost Of Having To Prove It
Seventeen years into building a graduate program from nothing, alongside students and colleagues I'd come to love and work that gave me more purpose than most anything before it, I felt the time had come. As I put in for retirement, I expected just one thing: to be named Professor Emerita.
I'd earned it through fifteen years as a scholar and tenured professor at a research university, then nearly two decades bringing a program at this one from an idea to a nationally ranked degree. I'd watched a colleague with a considerably thinner record retire shortly before me and be granted the emeritus title without having to ask.
So when I raised it with the person who had the authority to propose it, I expected a formality. Two weeks later, on a Friday evening, what came back instead was a lesser title, not the full academic honor. When I asked why, I was told this was simply what the committee had decided.
After the vision, the fourteen-hour days, the acclaim our results had earned, I felt hugely discounted. I cried so hard on the drive home that it was hard to see the road.
Then, underneath the hurt, something else showed up. I'd seen this shape before, more than once, in building a career as a minority woman. It is often careless but leaves few fingerprints.
It just hands the automatic version of something to one kind of person and asks the other kind to prove she has earned it.
So, I did. I spent twenty-five hours, maybe thirty, that weekend figuring out how. I read the faculty code line by line, extracting content and building my case on its merits. I wrote four careful pages and attached evidence. I knew fury wouldn't move anyone, but precision and data might.
I sent it Sunday night. By Tuesday morning I had my title. The committee had reviewed it, and I was told the president wanted it conveyed that this had never been intended as a slight.
I believed that, mostly.
I also knew that colleagues with lighter records hadn't needed a single page. I got what I deserved because I spent a weekend proving what others had blithely been given.
what Winning doesn’t Undo
The title got fixed. That part was a problem, and problems can be fixed: you find the code, you build the case, you send it to the right people, and if you're right and persistent enough, they correct it.
But something else happened that weekend that no correction touches. The fury I had to write around instead of through, knowing others never had to write around anything at all.
A problem can be solved. But a tension has to be carried, sometimes for the rest of your life.
There isn't a version of this where I get the title and also don't know what getting it cost. Both are permanently true. And here is the part that's equally true: I loved that university. I loved the people, the students, the work of building, from almost nothing, something that really mattered. Gratitude and clear sight aren't opposites. Neither cancels the other.
What happened to me had a name: injustice, small and survivable, but real. Across a long career, a pattern surfaces for some. Different details, different committees, the same calculus: what gets given, and what has to be earned twice.
Carrying This Kind Of Cost
Carrying this tension well is its own kind of skill, and it can be learned.
Start with whatever piece of it is actually still yours to act on. Most unresolvable situations have a smaller, solvable piece tucked inside them , and finding it matters. It won’t fix the whole thing, but doing what can be done keeps you from collapsing the entire situation into helplessness.
For whatever's left after that, the work shifts from doing to holding. Feel the frustration honestly, rather than letting it curdle into self-doubt about whether you'd truly earned what you were asking for. Hold the cost and the good in the same hand, so neither gets to tell the whole story by itself.
And when you can, advocate: for yourself while you're still the one standing there. Afterward, advocate for whoever comes next in the same position, so what you've learned doesn't just sit in you, unused.
Acceptance isn't resignation. It's the decision to keep loving work you can't make fully fair, without pretending it already is.
Practice Invitation
Think of a time you had to prove something that was simply granted to someone else.
Ask yourself: what was the solvable piece, the conversation, the case, the action, that was still yours to take? Did you take it?
Then notice what remained after that piece was handled. If something real is still there, that's the tension worth facing honestly rather than resolving falsely. Hold its cost and its good together. Then consider one way to make it a little easier for whoever stands in that position after you.
And that’s The Gist of It™.
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Marilyn Gist