January 05, 2025

Academic bullying is hidden in plain sight

 


...
 And, above all, there is no mention of emails, emails, emails: hundreds, thousands of them, full of unnecessary or impossible jobs – emails telling you off for not doing said unnecessary or impossible jobs – emails undermining you in front of others – emails magnifying minor failures – or emails damning with faint or ambivalent praise. Those emails sent on Monday mornings, to upset you at the start of the week – emails sent on Friday afternoons, so you dwell on them all weekend. Emails, emails, emails incessantly scything to and fro above you, like a razor-sharp pendulum, looming closer and closer…

In the tale by Edgar Allan Poe that famously depicts such a torture device (a scything pendulum, that is, not email), the reader hardly glimpses the torturers themselves. For all but the opening of the story, the Holy Inquisitors remain offstage, operating the torture machinery from afar. This is what technology of many kinds – from inquisitorial pendulums to institutional email to X/Twitter to academic acronyms – facilitates: for torture to be inflicted remotely, for the torturers to remain invisible.

Of course, the beauty of “cyber-bullying” and “trolling” is that the torturers can disown their own torture devices: It wasn’t me, guv’nor. I didn’t do nothing. Perhaps it wasn’t anyone. Perhaps it was the victim themselves crying “Wolf!” Remote bullying can efface itself, X accounts can be anonymised, passive-aggressive emails reinterpreted (Of course I didn’t mean that) – to the extent that the victims themselves come to be suspected of paranoia: There’s no one there, there’s nothing wrong, it’s all in your head, stop imagining things, stop attacking yourself...

... the languages of discipline and bullying can all too easily get mixed up, and the very cleverest bullies know this. So, the best hiding place for a bully is not behind a mobile hut, but within the very disciplinary system that is supposed to deal with them.

I was repeatedly threatened with disciplinary action by my professorial bully, to which my only recourse was to appeal to the same disciplinary system that was being used against me. To no one’s surprise but my own, it didn’t work: my bully’s command of institutional language far outstripped mine.

From: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/academic-bullying-hidden-plain-sight

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