Higher ed has a special talent for making credentialed people feel disposable, and nothing accelerates that feeling like a new boss whose opening line is “are you actively looking for another job?”

A PhD holder got reshuffled during a second re-org into a role that has nothing to do with her doctorate, away from a department that at least used part of her brain.

Her old team is fighting to get her back, but in the meantime she reports to a former life coach who started their professional relationship by questioning whether she planned to stick around.

So when the boss also refused to use her preferred name, she was starting to feel quite unwelcome in the role.

Keep reading for the full story.

My new director keeps using my full name, asked me if I was “actively looking”…

I work in higher ed which is already full of misanthropes with zero social skills, but I’m currently under the management of a new director who is a former life coach prior to entering higher ed.

Fine, great, everything is a mess in higher ed right now. We’re on our second re-org.

This employee didn’t get off on the right foot with this new boss at all.

My first meeting with the new director, two months ago, she asked me if I was “actively looking” for a new job because I have a doctorate. What?

That’s how our relationship started.

Regardless, she was pretty unhappy in this job.

I have a PhD and my brain is rotting in this job they re-orged me into from an administrative position in a department that was at least tangentially related to my PhD.

My old department is having a fight with the administration over it during this second re-org. It’s a whole thing and I’m over it.

But that isn’t the only complaint she has with this boss.

Anyway… now there’s this going on where she doesn’t use my nickname that everyone else uses. At all. It’s been two months.I introduced myself with my nickname.

Everyone here uses my nickname, which is really simple. It’s just a diminutive of my full, multi-syllabic, Slavic name.

This boss refuses to respect her preferences at all.

She doesn’t. In every bit of correspondence where someone uses my nickname, where I sign my nickname, she uses my full name.

I can’t decide if it’s passive aggressive, AI prompting her in Gmail, or if it’s something else.

All of these concerns are coming together to make her feel really unwelcome there.

For me, I make people use my full name if I don’t know them well or if I get vibes. It’s kind of a security blanket for me, so I’m inclined to just let her keep doing it.

I normally wouldn’t care, because I love my name, it’s beautiful, but compounded with the remarks about my future here, it’s off-putting and I feel like I’m being telegrammed to find somewhere else to be.

This doesn’t sound like a great work environment at all.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman whose HR department advised her to quit if she was that unhappy, so she did and found herself in a role reversal years later.

What did Reddit think?

Her boss should be showing her a lot more respect.

This user isn’t quite following her boss’ career trajectory.

It’s quite possible this is all a big misunderstanding, at least according to this commenter.

Perhaps she could just shared a canned response whenever her boss rudely asks about her job prospects.

First impressions are everything, and this boss definitely didn’t make a good one.

Still, when you work this closely with someone, you’re supposed to at least attempt to get along. But this former life coach clearly thought she was above that.

As if she hadn’t disrespected this employee enough, refusing to call her by her preferred name was just the icing on the cake. She can’t get much lower than that.

This employee deserves to have a job where she feels sufficiently challenged — and where she has a boss who actually respects her.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a person who spent nearly 3 decades climbing the ladder at work only to be fired in a meeting that lasted less than a minute.