I'm dealing with a situation at work and I'd really appreciate some advice, because it's new to me and I don't know if I'm in the right or wrong. Without giving away too many specific details, here's the situation:
I work for a university. I recently gave a talk at a conference on an aspect of my job. There was something in that talk that my boss subsequently took to be a criticism of her personally (I was basically giving examples of good and bad practice, and one of the examples of bad practice turned out to be something she had personally worked on, unbeknownst to me at the time). It gets worse though... The person chairing the panel I was on was my boss' boss, and, because of Covid, this was a video conference broadcast online all over the world (not that many people watched, but anybody potentially could have watched)!
A couple of hours after the event I get a really passive aggressive email from her asking me to do something relating to my job and this conference presentation. Red flag number one. Then a day or two later I get another email asking me about my ethics application for this project (everything you do needs ethical clearance these days). Red flag number two. Evidently she had taken it on herself to look into the ethics application (which had been approved about a year beforehand) and, to cut a long story short, after several emails back and forth she did find a minor issue with the application that she's now using to get me to stop working on this project. Red flag number three, which is what got me to write this post, is that she's now using this issue to get me to ask her boss (the guy who chaired the panel I was on) to take down the recording of my talk (it was taken down ages ago anyway, but I don't think she knows that), even going to the length of telling me in an email what to tell this guy, of course none of it mentioning her!
On top of that, ever since, she's acted completely differently towards me, not just in meetings and stuff, but dumping loads of extra work on me and refusing to change when I'm scheduled to be in the office, which she always did in the past, and still does for other members of staff.
Anyway, what do you guys think I should do in this situation? I'm leaning towards just doing what she says for now and moving on in the summer, because if this escalates there's a good chance I won't be able to get a reference off her at all, and I might end up stuck here. Although I could make her life difficult if I told her boss everything that's gone on.
) virtually every other university anyway. Maybe use examples in the industry which are in the public domain already - too late for that now, but maybe in future? (I'm assuming the examples you shared in your presentation were not in the public domain - otherwise I dont understand why your boss is acting the way they are).