...The closest I have come to listing causes of mobbing was in a 2006 article in Academic Matters, where I identified ten factors that increase the likelihood of a professor being mobbed. Three were characteristics of the workplace:
A discipline with ambiguous standards and objectives, especially those (like music or literature) most affected by postmodern scholarship;
A supervisor – president, dean, department chair – in whom, as Nietzsche put it, “the impulse to punish is powerful”; and
An actual or contrived financial crunch in the academic unit (according to an African proverb, when the watering hole gets smaller, the animals get meaner).
The remaining seven factors on my list of vulnerabilities were characteristics of the target:
Foreign birth and upbringing, especially as signaled by a foreign accent;
Being different from most colleagues in an elemental way (by sex, for instance, sexual orientation, skin color, ethnicity, class origin, or credentials);
Having opposed the candidate who ends up winning appointment as one’s dean or chair (thereby looking stupid, wicked, or crazy in the latter’s eyes);
Being a ratebuster, achieving so much success in teaching or research that colleagues’ envy is aroused;
Publicly dissenting from politically correct ideas (meaning those held sacred by campus elites);
Defending a pariah in campus politics or the larger cultural arena;
Blowing the whistle on, or even having knowledge of, serious wrongdoing by locally powerful workmates.
“The upshot of available research,” I concluded, “is that no professor needs to worry much about being mobbed, even in a generally vulnerable condition, so long as he or she does not rock the local academic boat. The secret is to show deference to colleagues and administrators, to be the kind of scholar they want to keep around as a way of making themselves look good. Jung said that ‘a man’s hatred is always concentrated on that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities..."
Kenneth Westhues
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