Respect: esteem for or a sense of the worth or excellence of a person, a personal quality or ability, or something considered as a manifestation of a personal quality or ability: I have great respect for her judgment.
So can you respect someone who is a jerk?
This is a question I have struggled to answer for a long time. I, like so many others, have horror stories about my professors and people I worked with during my time in academia. Some were great chemists, others not so much. My grad advisor is one such person.
On first meeting him, my impression was that he was an OK guy who was quiet--maybe even a little shy. He is well published in the field of organic chemistry having worked on both methodology and natural product synthesis. His "pedigree" as it is called in organic chemistry, includes one of the "rock star" chemists known the world over.
In fact, he attended my college alma mater and we were awarded the same overall best senior chemistry major award some 20 years apart. I was excited when I was accepted by the major research university where he was employed and that he seemed to take a personal interest in recruiting me.
That excitement quickly changed to disappointment once I joined his lab as a first year grad student. He was moody and given to fits of throwing things when angry. Big things like large vacuum pumps. He never offered an encouraging word and had a nasty tendency to blame the chemist first when chemistry wasn't working instead of thinking how the chemistry itself might be flawed (I guess looking back that shouldn't be a surprise to me as he was the one who thought up the synthetic routes, etc.). He played favorites and made it clear to people when you weren't one of them. He claimed to want to help women in the field and then did every thing possible to run them down. He was and is still extremely two-faced. I could go on further but it is probably best to say that he is not one of my favorite people.
The more I learned about him, the harder it was to respect him. It didn't matter if he was a great chemist--he sucked as a human being. I initially made excuses for his behaviors but now, with some time passed, there are no excuses for the things he inflicted on his students. He is one of the biggest jerks (I typically use other colorful descriptions of him in private but since Blogger has standards and all....) I have ever known.
This week, I was speaking with some co-workers who had previously worked together before joining our current company. They were speaking of their former boss. Apparently, this former employer had many
I was stuck by a statement of one of my co-workers. He said even though he hated the guy, he still respected him because he did his job well. I asked him about the apparent disconnect--if all those "wonderful" qualities didn't spill over into his work and he said at times, yes, it did, but he treated everyone the same crappy way and that he usually knew what he was talking about when it came to business.
I asked how anyone could respect a jerk and another co-worker suggested that women tended to view people as a whole while men tended to compartmentalize which made it easier for men to respect jerks.
Interesting hypothesis. So can you respect a jerk?
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