Dealing with unpleasant people in conferences My current strategy when seeing unpleasant, toxic academics in conferences is to ignore them, but I'm wondering if people have other suggestions.
When I was a grad student, I spent a few months at a research institution. I was in the computer room trying to print something, but it wasn't printing. Then a senior academic (mathematician) came in and I told him that the printer wasn't working. It turned out that he just wanted to make a photocopy, and that was fine. He told me, &quot;It's working.&quot; Then he proceeded to get very angry and said, &quot;You're lying! You're a liar!&quot; I wanted to explain that it was the printer that wasn't working, but he interrupted and continued to call me a liar and stormed out.
Well! I continued my work but in later talks at the conference he would be quite nasty. For example, he would sit next to someone and tell them, &quot;I want to sit here, not over there&quot; referring to me. This was a senior mathematician who spoke at the ICM at some point in the 1970s.
I just ignored him but the whole situation was unpleasant and over something very petty. What is the correct protocol for dealing with people like this?
Unpleasant people? If you are convinced that you did not do anything to deserve their castigation (and from your story, it sounds like you didn't), purse your lips, raise a slight Spock brow, wait a second, and go/look somewhere else. Nothing shows your opinion about them more clearly than this wordless sequence. They will be seething, but you have better things to do.
If you can not avoid interacting with them, be unwaveringly polite, but distant. You may even exaggerate the politeness by using &quot;Sir&quot; etc. This increases distance.
It's not your job to educate someone who failed to learn basic manners at school. Their manners are not your responsibility.
If they stalk you at a conference, indifference is another strategy. Non-reactivity is boring and they will look for a more reactive victim.
Of course, many conferences have these code-of-conduct declarations now and you could try to invoke them, but I have no idea how effective that is in a case like yours.
Personally, I distrust the effectiveness of formalized rules of behaviour for anything but really egregious and obvious breaches of conduct, and even then I am not sure they really work, unless you belong to a well-delineated group that is seen as requiring special protection. But, your mileage may vary.