Anonymous, A Campus Conspiracy (Impress Books, Exeter, UK, 2006) Click here for reviews of this comic account, reminiscent of C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, of administrative mobbing in a British university. The target here is sixty-year-old Harry Gilbert, Professor of Christian Ethics at St. Sebastian's College.
Especially in two ways, this novel captures recurrent themes in the real-life mobbing cases I have studied. First, once Gilbert is on the wrong side of the administration, the complaints about him come in one after another; he is always under the gun; defending himself consumes his waking hours. Second, accusations of sexual impropriety are central to the eliminative process (a student named Lisa falsely accuses Gilbert of trying to seduce her).
In two other ways, this novel is distant from the mobbing cases in my research. First, Gilbert's accuser is a manipulative liar who knows exactly what she is doing; in most of the mobbing cases I have studied, truth is threatened less by deliberate falsehood than by hysteria and moral panic, and outcomes hinge on how small events are interpreted. Second, this novel ends in the manner of Lucky Jim, with its protagonist heading off to a better job — in Gilbert's case a distinguished professorship in an American college enamoured of the trappings of English aristocracy. Few real-life mobbing targets escape so handily.
I find none of the characters in this novel easy to admire. In a cruel counterattack, for instance, Gilbert's wife plays a practical joke to humiliate the dean who has persecuted her husband; the dean then has a nervous breakdown. In this novel, academic life comes across as a pompous, petty parasite on society at large, one that only a fool would take seriously.
By Kenneth Westhues, from: Novels About Academic Mobbing
4 comments:
Spending almost all one's waking hours trying to defend oneself against the mobbing reflects my experience.
The process is a gradual wearing down of the target's/victim's strength...
...just like slow torture...
... so all you targets of work place bullying...
....make sure that you take time out to renew your strength for when you return to the 'lion's den'....
... we need all the resistance fighters that we can muster....
Aphra Behn
Dear Aphra
Take heart.
In my Oxbridge College (one of the crazy ones, as described by Hugh Trevor-Roper, where the lazy frumps have loads of time to fill (hey, it satisfies them) `urinating` on everyone who actually does the work, and is a real academic in all respects... when they had a `dress rehearsal" for their final go at me, I just told them to stop wasting my worktime with malicious attempts to get me slaving to their agenda of false imputations. But hey, I had tenure - they had to go for that in the end. I refused to slave to that agenda either, so i resigned. Look, all you can do within the mobbing den is reduce their capacity to hassle you...
Academics generally seem to be such cowards: by refusing to criticise and shun mobbers openly, and refusing to employ their victims, they only make the workplace more dangerous for themselves and expose everyone else to the same...
Just do the best you can.
Judith Goodhands
I have just been rereading Keith Westhues' excellent paper 'Ten Choices in Research on Mobbing'... from the perspective of my very own workplace bullying saga...
...I'm thinking about the notion of the target's perception of events versus the verifiable facts... that there will always be conflicting accounts of what is going on...
... I spent the day yesterday talking with an old colleague - ousted a few years ago from the very university where I work - well try to work - amidst the 'organizational pathology' that is the occupational practice of a prestigious research university...
...she played 'devil's advocate' and pushed me to identify the events where I had verifiable facts.... an interesting exercise...
...particularly when I am raw and bruised from the slow.. drip... drip of bullying torture...
...Westhues believes that it is important not to pathologise the target's distress...better to focus on power imbalances, professional jealousies and managerial incompetence...
...that it is important to focus on the situation, issue or behaviour not the person....
...that bullying is a subtle but devastating form of aggression....
...together we developed an analysis of what has happened and continues to happen in my university...
...an analysis that would be contested by those who have been involved in the bullying... but it provided some respite to move into the researcher role rather than the 'being a target of workplace bullying' role...
Resignation is a way out...but I'm interested in other routes...like fighting back...
In solidarity
Aphra Behn
Denounce workplace bullying today.
Don't stay silent.
Don't collude.
You could be next.
Aphra Behn
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