The insight in Schneider’s analysis [
q.v.]
of the “ineducability of administrators,” their common reluctance to
rescue mobbing targets or even to grasp the concept, derives from his
use of Max Weber’s favoured method of social research,
verstehen,
his stepping into administrators’ shoes and looking at things from
their point of view. Schneider’s similar insight into the peril faculty
associations put themselves in if they support the target has the same
origin: understanding from the inside the political constraints on the
association leadership.
Schneider is right that
mobbing is a “loaded characterization” and
mobber a “stigmatizing term.” By definition, the mere application of the term
mobbing to
a sequence of events in a university (or any other organization) is
going to be contested by the instigators and the main participants,
since it implies that reason and evidence do not support what they are
doing, that in mobilizing for a colleague’s humiliation and eventual
elimination, they have been “carried away” by collective passion into
wreaking unwarranted harm on their scapegoat (another loaded term), as
well as on the values underlying academic life.
This problem in the scientific study of mobbing is so fundamental one
is tempted to switch to some other specialty. Why make trouble for
yourself? All the social scientist has to say is, “By standard measures,
it looks to me that so-and-so has been mobbed.” The beleaguered target
may say thanks, but the great majority of those involved will do all in
their power to keep this diagnosis off the table, and if they feel
obliged to respond, they may well ratchet up their attack on the target,
or even broaden it to include the scholar who has called it
mobbing.
To whom, then, can one look for acknowledgement that a mobbing has
indeed occurred, and for action toward turning back the mob and rescuing
its target? Who will take the risk of disagreeing with an angry crowd?
There is no formulaic answer. A mob is sometimes stopped by a single
person – a dean, a professor, maybe a secretary – with strength of
character enough to stand up and say, “Cut it out. Lay off. There will
be no ganging up in this workplace.” Far more mobbings than ever make
the news are nipped in the bud by one man or woman who has guts. A
famous example occurred long ago in the Middle East. A brave,
charismatic rescuer shamed mobbers into slinking away by saying, “Let
him who is without sin cast the first stone.” That rescuer, of course,
was himself mobbed sometime later, fatally.
To the question of how to correct a mobbing, a further answer is that
if the mobbing has reached an advanced stage, the odds of full
correction are close to nil. Leymann could not cite a single case from
all his years of research, in which the mobbing target was given an
apology and fully reintegrated into the workgroup. Once you’ve been
collectively expelled, you can never quite go home again. The most one
can hope for is mitigation of the target’s losses, in terms of
reputation, respect, position, income, health, friendships, family. The
realistic question is how to achieve as much mitigation as possible –
the difference, for instance, between departing with a large buyout or
with nothing but life and the chance to start over somewhere else.
Regardless of how much correction is won, the correcting agent is
generally from outside the organization in which the conflict has
occurred. Mobbing comes into clearest focus at a certain distance.
Outsiders’ vision is less clouded by mobbers’ passion. Once informed of
the evidence, outsiders can more easily see what has gone on and label
it accurately. Further, outsiders are less vulnerable to the mobbers’
wrath. They face fewer penalties than insiders do for framing the events
(to use Schneider’s term) in a way that transfers some blame from the
target to the righteous enforcers of virtue.
Here are four examples of outsiders who have played in some cases a corrective role.
First, the courts, which are sometimes helpful if the mobbers have
been clumsy enough to commit a clear violation of the target’s rights as
an employee or citizen. An example this spring was a jury’s finding for
Ward Churchill, in the latter’s suit against the University of Colorado
for wrongful dismissal. This verdict did not exonerate Churchill and he
will not likely get his job back, but clearly, it restored a fair bit
of what his adversaries had robbed him of.
Second, arbitrators and other outside adjudicators established for
dispute resolution by university policies and collective agreements.
Like courts, these quasi-judicial bodies sometimes rescue mobbing
targets, depending on how flagrant are violations of the relevant terms
and conditions of employment. The rescue is partial at best. In a case
of administrative mobbing at Waterloo, where the target had been
formally dismissed on trumped up grounds of sexual harassment, the
arbitrator overturned the dismissal and ordered reinstatement. But by
the time judgment was handed down, the target had been suspended for two
years, his lab had been dismantled, his nerves were shot. He eagerly
accepted the university’s offer of a buyout.
Third, the media.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s
relentless exposure of mobbings at Southern Illinois University over the
past five years is a good example of the limits of the press’s power.
Despite national embarrassment in this prestigious medium, the lethal
regime of President Glenn Poshard is still in place. But this is also an
example of the power of the press. Mobbers’ victory is total, and so is
the target’s defeat, if the facts of a case are never even exposed to
public view.
The Chronicle’s stories have scraped a little of
the dirt from the names of professors besmirched at SIU, and to that
extent, lessened the extent of their social elimination.
Fourth, organizations like the
AAUP,
FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), and
NAS (The
National Association of Scholars), for which academic freedom is a core
value, and to which professors routinely appeal, if their freedom is
infringed upon. I devote half of my book,
The Remedy and Prevention of Mobbing in Higher Education,
to two mobbing cases at Medaille College in Buffalo, New York, which
were in great part corrected by the administration there, once AAUP
exposed them in a report and threatened the college publicly with
censure. FIRE has had many similarly dramatic successes, which it
customarily trumpets on its website.
Among other outside organizations that may play a corrective role in
academic mobbing are professional and learned societies, accrediting
bodies, churches, granting agencies, student organizations, and interest
groups that agitate on behalf of whatever social category (women, gays,
Jews, blacks, Evangelicals, Palestinians, or whoever else) the mobbing
target belongs to.
To the many targets of academic mobbing who write to me, I routinely
suggest taking pen or pencil and listing on a sheet of paper every
outside body that might conceivably be helpful if called upon (then to
weigh this list soberly against a list of all the outside bodies the
mobbers might be able to recruit on their side)...
From:
http://qufa.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/kenneth-westhues-correction-of-mobbing-episodes-in-higher-education-2009-posted-3-december-2012/
