Mean and Nasty Academics: Bullying, Hazing, and Mobbing

“Tenure is supposed to protect scholars from outside control, but it does a lousy job of protecting them from one another.”
-- Kenneth Westhues, quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education

I don't usually post my newsletters here, but I think this is a subject that needs to get more airing. So here is the text of my latest newsletter, called "Mean and Nasty Academics." (If you'd like to sign up for my bi-weekly (sometimes less frequent) newsletter, go to this page, which also lists the bonuses you will receive.)

Another reason I'm posting this newsletter issue is that I have received some interesting replies from my newsletter readers that will help those of you struggling with these issues. I will put these replies up in later posts.

Mean and Nasty Academics

"I was surprised to experience hazing as a graduate student, not once, but continually and by multiple professors… I watched how some of the other women faculty members in the department were treated, and they were second-class citizens at best." (Twale and De Luca, 2008, p.84)

"A tenured full female prof gets up to talk, and an untenured junior faculty man tells her that her ideas are not really important, that it may be a concern of hers but not ours. And the entire faculty went along with it, including the women... Be invisible. We weren’t supposed to say anything, even the strong women who could hold their own. Women sensed they were in a powerless position." [Ibid, p.85]

As an academic coach, I could add many more examples of graduate students and professors of all ranks being victimized by mean, nasty, harsh, underhanded, passive aggressive or bullying behavior at the hands of other academics.

The only reason I don’t give you details of what my clients have told me over the years is that I need to protect the identity of the victims. However, I’m not giving anything away if I tell you that I have heard numerous examples of departments ganging up on one individual, of professors being shunned, of tenured professors harassing other tenured professors, and of incredibly harsh treatment of graduate students by their advisors or other professors.

Bullying and emotional abuse don’t only exist in academia (see Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace). But Darla Twale and Barbara De Luca, the authors of Faculty Incivility: The Rise of the Academic Bully Culture and What to Do About It, suggest that there has been an increase in “bullying, mobbing, camouflaged aggression, and harassment” (p. xii) within academia.

In working with people who have been the victims of bullying, I find that one of their first needs is reassurance that they did not do anything to deserve such treatment. So let me say that No one, ever, under any circumstances, deserves to be humiliated, undermined, insulted, shunned, marginalized, ganged up on, or even spoken to harshly. If it has happened to you, you did not cause it to happen. And you are not alone.

What Can I Do About Bullying?

There is no space here to review the reasons that academics can be so cruel to one another. Instead, I’ll focus on what you can do about it. The following suggestions are summarized from the Twale and De Luca book; additional comments from me are in brackets.

Avoid becoming part of an abusive department. Before you attend graduate school or accept a job, do your homework. Look at faculty turnover rates, policies and guidelines regarding harassment, and level of enforcement of such policies as seen in grievance filings and resolutions...

Written by Gina Hiatt, Ph.D.

From: http://academicladder.com/mean-and-nasty-academics

Whistleblowers...

Whistleblowers are part of society's alarm and self-repair system, bringing attention to problems before they become far more damaging. Australian whistleblowers have spoken out about police corruption, paedophilia in the churches, corporate mismanagement, biased appointment procedures, environmentally harmful practices and a host of other issues.

Although whistleblowers are extremely valuable to society, most of them suffer enormously for their efforts. Ostracism, harassment, slander, reprimands, referral to psychiatrists, demotion, dismissal and blacklisting are among the common methods used to attack whistleblowers. Bosses are the usual attackers with co-workers sometimes joining in.

Many whistleblowers are conscientious, high-performing employees who believe that the system works. That's why they speak out. They believe that by alerting others to a problem, it will be dealt with. Many do not think of themselves as whistleblowers at all - they believe they are just doing their job. So they are shaken to the core when the response to their public-spirited efforts is to vilify them as disloyal, to question their work performance, to withdraw emotional support and to mount attacks. As well as suffering financial losses and severe stress, whistleblowers are at increased risk of relationship breakdown and health problems.

Even worse than this, though, few whistleblowers seem to bring about any change in the problem they speak out about. The treatment of whistleblowers is a double disaster for society: capable and courageous individuals are attacked and sometimes destroyed, while the original problems are left to fester.

From: http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/05overland.html, by Professor Brian Martin

Bully in Sight: How to Predict, Resist, Challenge and Combat Workplace Bullying

...A feature of bullying which is not generally appreciated is that in the months (which may exceed a year) which immediately follow cessation of employment (whether through termination or ill-health absence) the traumatised victim is often physically unable to touch anything which reminds them of their experience. Many victims report the strange feeling of sitting in front of large piles knowing the ease with the formerly handled paperwork but feeling paralyzed, unable to touch, read or process any of it...

From: Bully in Sight by Tim Field

Yamada Featured on Bullying in ABA Journal - US

I appreciate Chris Cameron (Southwestern) alerting me to the news that David Yamada's (Suffolk) scholarship on bullying in the workplace got him not only mentioned in this month’s ABA Journal, but also photographed – smile and all – on page 16 (different photograph here, but same great smile).

Some of the article highlights:

In the last several years, legislation has been introduced in 13 states to allow people to sue their employers for bullying or offensive behavior even when the conduct doesn’t meet standards for discrimination or infliction of emotional distress . . .

Much of this percolating legislation was modeled on a draft by David Yamada, a professor at Suffolk Univer­sity Law School in Boston who has been working with Namie. “There are some serious gaps in the law in terms of workplace bullying,” says Yamada, who studies harassment in the workplace.

Yamada says he has experienced or witnessed bullying behavior in the legal world and in academia. Typic­ally, he says, people victimized by bad bosses end up quitting. “It strikes me as being horrifically wrong,” Yamada says, “that targets are the ones to pay the price."

Yamada intends for the legislation to cover at least two categories of workplace bullying. The first is the boss who openly berates employees. The poster child for this type of personality, he says, is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. During his 2005 confirmation hearings, he was accused of being a “serial abuser” and “quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy.”

But Yamada’s proposal doesn’t stop with giving employees grounds to sue the yellers and screamers. He says he would also allow workers to sue for “the more hurtful and insidious” types of conduct—the backstabbing, subtle undermining and sabotaging that exist in many workplaces.

Kudos to David for single-handedly developing and implementing the strategy behind this anti-bullying in the workplace movement.

From: Workplace Prof Blog

Management turns perpetrator as bullying cases soar

As many as seven in ten employees have felt bullied at work with almost half of bullying instigated by management.

The research conducted by Peninsula employment law service shows that bullying has increased significantly since 2003, with 69 per cent of employees saying that they have been exposed to bullying in the workplace, compared to 52 per cent in 2003.

Worryingly, just under half (44 per cent) say the bully is a member of management whilst 56 per cent who have felt victimised say that they were bullied by a work colleague.

Sadly, 62 per cent of those who feel they have been bullied in work say that it has had a detrimental impact on their personal life.

David Price, head of employee relations at Peninsula said he ‘urged’ employers to have a system in place where workers could speak to someone if they felt bullied and said bosses should consider having an Equal Opportunities Policy and an IT policy to prevent cyber bullying.

“When talking to employees it is apparent that those that are bullied by management or their employer are reluctant to work as hard as those that are not bullied. Silent bullying presents a major problem, where someone feels isolated when left out of group discussions and decisions. Employees and employers need to remember that harassment is in the eye of the recipient and the question employers need to consider is whether the situation could be considered severe enough for the employee to take legal action,” said Price.

The research showed that 69 per cent of workers would never consider reporting bullying to their employer whilst 89 per cent are not sure whether their employer has policies relating to bullying and harassment at work.

HR Zone, 20th February 2008

Eliminating Professors - Necessary Harm

...Given the social dynamic in this workplace, it is easy to see why the higher-ups did nothing to rein in the Jerk in. Addressing PITA's complaints would have meant taking on not just an individual harassing male but a cohesive group of male and female workers that was functioning productively in the overall organizational context. Each successive higher level of union or management authority to which PITA appealed was faced with challenging, disrupting, and overruling an even larger part of the organization. How much damage to morale and productivity can a senior official reasonably be expected to risk, for the sake of shielding one partially disaled woman from jokes other women laught at?

"Even so," you may say, "somebody should have done something." This comment has been made in every case I know of Dr. PITA's elimination from a uniersity faculty. It is a common exhoration of kind-hearted people working somewhere else...

From: Eliminating Professors, a guide to the dismissal process, by Kenneth Westhues

The Goebbels doctrine

'Repeat a lie hundred times, and it becomes truth.'

Bullies are...

Bullies are most likely to:

· Not challenge change

· Be low achievers with low self-esteem

· Be non - Enthusiastic (rarely volunteer)

· Have low integrity

· Have no ethical standards

· Not known for their commitment to human rights, dignity and respect

A favorite tactic of bullies...

A favorite tactic of bullies is to falsely accuse his/her victim of something so outrageous that the victim is stunned with humiliation.

The decent or religious worker is accused of viewing pornography at work, the dignified moral worker is accused of sexual misdoings, the libertarian is charged with being a racist, the most honest worker is branded a thief. [In the meanwhile, the truly incompetent are safe at the apex of the academic hierarchy.]

It doesn't really matter that the bully often can't make the charges stick, the harm is already done. There's that element of guilt by association placed in the minds of others.

From: http://www.badapplebullies.com/index.htm

Tensions high at Liverpool Hope over hiring of dean - UK

Dedicated teaching staff have been turned into "instant failures" as the result of a drive to boost research at the traditionally teaching-led Liverpool Hope University, some staff have claimed.

Tensions over the university's direction came to a head this month with the appointment of Jon Nixon as dean of education. There are complaints that the appointment not only lacked transparency but unfairly penalised long-standing teaching-focused staff in an institution that was founded as a teacher-education college for women.

Professor Nixon, who has been at the university for two months, was appointed without any advertising of the vacancy. His appointment was widely predicted as a "done deal" before it was officially confirmed.

The university's vice-chancellor, Gerald Pillay, has said that he is seeking to "raise the bar" by appointing more professors and increasing research opportunities. Liverpool Hope's education deanery - primarily the teacher-training department - is said by the university to be developing a "growing research culture".

Before Professor Nixon's appointment, staff there were told that the new dean would be selected from among professors only. Some of the department's lecturers, most of whom are women and include former schoolteachers, considered this decision unreasonable. The previous dean, Elizabeth Gayton, was not a professor.

Announcing the appointment, Professor Pillay said: "With an excellent academic track record over a long period, Professor Nixon demonstrated, through his own work at three other universities and numerous publications, the importance and interdependence of research and professional practice. Both are important pillars of the education deanery's strategic vision."

One staff member said: "Many of the people here were brought in because they were excellent practitioners. Using research as the criteria for promoting excellence is turning them into instant failures. To make a change like this takes a lot of understanding of the context, but that understanding doesn't seem to be there."

All new lecturers are required to hold PhDs, and existing staff are being advised to obtain them if they wish to progress. The lecturers maintain that in teacher training, staff with a wealth of practical experience are more useful to students than tutors with research backgrounds who have spent little time in schools.

The source added: "People here have a love for this place, and for the students that is palpable. It's the kind of thing that takes 25 years to build up and could so easily be destroyed."

Professor Pillay has faced previous complaints about selection processes. Shortly after his arrival at the university in 2003, he appointed three men as assistant vice-chancellors amid suggestions that there was no proper application process.

"They were all white, middle-aged, middle-class men," a university insider said. "Apparently it had been decided that no one else was suitable, so there was no point in advertising."

At the time, staff asked for the university to produce a formal policy document on senior appointment processes, but so far none has been forthcoming. Appointments to principal lecturer and associate professor posts require a lengthy application and five referees. Staff want a similar process to apply to senior appointments.

A Liverpool Hope spokesman said the university had followed normal practice in appointing members of its senior executive team. While all professors in the education deanery had been invited to express an interest in the dean's position, only two did so, he said.

"Candidates who expressed an interest were considered carefully. The successful candidate was by far the more experienced of the two," he said. The Liverpool Hope spokesman added: "In appointing to senior academic positions, the university seeks in the first instance to give opportunity to those most senior and experienced among its own staff. If this does not provide the most appropriate candidate the university advertises internationally, as it has done for the past two professorial appointments."

From:http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk