How might I make all things new such that the things that have happened to me don't happen to others in the future?
Well, all of the notions that occur to me are downstream of the change in thinking that I suspect is the necessary shift, but in seriatum, according to the chronology of my experience:
- Less limitation on the making of theatre, especially in NYC. Tens of thousands of actors, and the craft guild channels things to preserve a narrow model that provides immense profits for the industry, while idling the vast majority of its membership. This asymmetry also makes it easier for the few people in control of things to effectively blacklist people, even when those people are well outside the small fraction of people who play the game (sometimes in quite outrageous circumstances) and who are able to consistently be involved in making theatre.
- In the law schools, there should be avenues of appeal that students are formally entitled to use to challenge outrageous behavior by the faculty, and these mechanisms should not be constituted by the members of the faculty who are in the same area as the challenged faculty member.
- In the academy generally, every degree examination panel should be public and posted, and it should be mandatory (as in the UK) that an outside member not selected by anyone involved in the process, but competent in the specific topic, sit on the panel and lead the examination. That is within reach. Out of reach, but worthwhile: mandatory outside grading of final examinations, including for undergraduates, as in the UK. These two changes are the only way to keep the university from becoming a mechanism for professors to build their private networks of influence.
(This one is somewhat orthogonal to my actual experience, as in my case, the faculty simply refused to schedule a dissertation defense. But there's no real way to fix that without much larger changes, since it's already a contravention of a basic principle. (Although it appears to have been the standard practice in the USSR when the candidate was deemed politically unacceptable.))