The Envy of Excellence: Administrative Mobbing of High-Achieving Professors

 

Kenneth Westhues, professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo, in his 2006 book, The Envy of Excellence: Administrative Mobbing of High-Achieving Professors, Westhues developed a list of criteria to identify mobbing. Amongst them:

• The target is popular and high-achieving. Mediocre performers tend not to arouse the eliminative impulse in peers.
• Unanimity prevails among colleagues: “The loss of diverse opinion is a compelling indication that eliminative fury has been unleashed.”
• The charges are vague and fuzzy.
• Rumours and gossip circulate about the target’s misdeeds: “Did you hear what she did last week?”
• Unusual timing of the decision to punish, e.g., apart from the annual performance review.
• Adding up the target’s real or imagined venial sins to make a mortal sin that cries for action.
• A lack of due process.
• The rhetoric is overblown. “The more fervent, excited and overwrought the language used against the target, the less likely is the basis for exclusion of anything but a collective will to destroy.”
• The target is seen as personally abhorrent, with no redeeming qualities; stigmatising, exclusionary labels are applied.