Understanding and Preventing Faculty-on-Faculty Bullying

 

...To some degree globally, the academic profession has moved from a well-defined core of elite scholars to a more peripheral faculty who have for university financial concerns penetrated that gradually declining, highly guarded, elite core... 

... As a result, the academic profession sacrifices some autonomy and academic freedom as university leadership becomes more capitalistic, corporatized, and market driven. A ccording to the labor process theory, incivility and bullying can occur as a result of this market-driven, capitalistic worker relationship...

... ivory towers could not possibly be thought of as harboring toxic work climates with menacing bullies and uncivil tormentors. Furthermore, faculty may no longer have that sense of fit they felt when hired into their academic department. As a result, stress arises. So does uncertainty. New negative behaviors and dormant ones begin to surface in the work setting. Often these shifts become the negative response to unsettling change that manifests itself in incivility and bullying...

... In hiring a new faculty member, Lang recalled, “we cast our votes for either a department that would continue to replicate its current values or one that would head in a new direction, the endpoint of which was not entirely clear” (p. 96). Being the minority supporter for a junior colleague placed Lang in jeopardy among senior faculty majority voters. His ethical beliefs and convictions might interfere with his tenure vote in a few years. As his academic year progressed, he assessed that it at least went well for him in his classroom while he still ruminated over the outcome of his search committee service. Meanwhile, Lang tried to make sense of the “cross- and undercurrents of department intrigue and just to try to take everything at face value” and feared being sucked “back into the vicious cycle of departmental politics”...

...Lang concluded that his best offense in the department entailed proceeding “with my head down, my mouth shut, and my eyes and ears wide open”... In any institution, and the university is no exception, much is veiled purposefully and much operates in the shadows from the consumers who study there, from the taxpayers who indirectly fund the enterprise, and the faculty, staff, and administration who choose not to peek under the veil...

From Understanding and Preventing Faculty-on-Faculty Bullying