Easter Greetings

Letter to Editor - Times Higher Education Supplement

The following is a letter to the Editor of THES in response to a request for suggestions/ comments:-

Dear Mr Kelly,

Thank you for your email. I look forward to being of assistance to Times Higher Education as a member of the Reader Panel.

At this time, I would, indeed, suggest that THES return to its prior practice of addressing one of the most pressing issues in Higher Education today, namely that of the epidemic of bullying and mobbing in our universities and further education institutions. In particular, I would draw attention to the practice of elimination rituals, whereby for various reasons, staff are eliminated from their positions through being pressurized in various ways in order to cause them to either resign on poor health grounds or to respond strongly, thereby creating circumstances by which they may then be subjected to dismissal on conduct grounds. Or else, various circumstances are created--i.e. "rules" that are targeted at selected staff members in order to place them in breach of policy, thereby justifying
dismissal.

This seems to happen disproportionately to disabled persons, to members of minority races and non-British born staff, who are vulnerable by virtue of their immigration status to being sent back to their native country without recourse to natural justice, as well as to to many individuals who are considered as whistleblowers and those who produce research that is either controversial or challenging to the power structures within their institutions, thereby breaching all semblance of protections for academic freedom. In the end, it is students who lose out when high-performing academics are destroyed by such practices.

I understand that one or more articles are/were in progress at THES on this subject, but that they were quashed by new management at THES on the basis that such articles would "offend" advertisers, namely British universities. I would hope that THES would have greater courage than to be beholden to their increasingly managerialist advertisers when it comes to reporting on important stories of wide public interest to people within the field and among the general public.

Sincerely...

Name withheld

Speak out!

No one speaks out because they fear that if they do, they will be the next target.

It takes great courage to speak out. But speak out, we must do!

And we must name names and point fingers, else speaking out will be like tossing a handful of sand into the desert.

Anonymous

We must work in solidarity

I work in academe but I was unaware of workplace bullying until my friend, an employee of the federal government, committed suicide in 2005. Since then I have been an advocate for Healthy Workplace legislation.

I formed a group http://groups.google.com/group/connecticut-bullybusters/. Many of the people in the group, or people who won't join for fear of someone finding out but who have contacted me, are state employees and work in state community colleges or universities. They are faculty, staff, and sometimes students.

We have an obligation to look directly at this problem, as colleagues, citizens and workers. Even if it hasn't happened to us, it certainly could. Reading the stories of bullied people, hearing them at meetings, is almost unbearable because lives are shattered. I came to this blog because of a post on the New York Times blog for an article on Workplace Bullying. We must work in solidarity.

Post by anonymous

Not only in America...

The story below repeats itself in many different versions and combinations in this country too (and perhaps many others). There are many (ex) academics who have suffered and continue to do so in a very similar manner to the story described below. Sadly, these things do no happen only in America...

-------------------------------

After a very successful career at a major U.S. private university, I accepted some time ago an offer from another major private university to become chair of a department that had been in trouble for years, with the mandate to bring its house in order and improve its stature both within and outside the university. With the help of a supportive dean, I was successful beyond anyone’s expectations, bringing the department to national attention and recruiting a sizable number of good graduate students in competition with the some of the best schools in my discipline.

There was a widespread perception that I was one of the best department chairs in the university —one administrator described what I had done for the department and the university as a “miracle.” It wasn’t easy, since faculty in my department were often at odds with one another, and one female faculty member was antagonistic to me from the outset, trying to undermine my role behind my back by spreading false stories among the faculty. She had limited success, since, apart from one important supporter, she alienated most of the other members of the department with insults and false accusations.

Some of those who have described their mobbing experiences have characterized themselves as “outspoken,” a trait which is supposed to be protected by academic freedom, but which can unfortunately lead to the active hostility of colleagues. I was just the opposite, supporting and encouraging all faculty and staff, including my antagonist and those who were less competent or productive among the faculty, in both their professional lives and their inevitable personal difficulties. My administrative credo was based on integrity, fairness, openness, and positive support for everyone.

At one point, however, I was forced to remove one of the less competent faculty from a minor administrative role she had abused for years, not only for poor administration and repeatedly upsetting other faculty and students, but because I couldn’t believe anything she said to me. At approximately the same time, I also had to let go a part-time adjunct who, in four years, had proved herself manifestly incompetent in a vital area of the department’s activities. The latter individual was a close friend of the former, and both of them had friends in the department.

In a matter of months, this group had organized its first mobbing effort against me, and joining forces with the original antagonist and her supporter, voted that my appointment as chair not be renewed. The dean was taken aback, interviewed most of the faculty individually, and declared himself “sickened,” by their conduct. Nevertheless, he believed I had lost too much support to continue as chair, insisted on my resignation, and admitted in the process that the same group of faculty, if they got their way in this matter, would probably cause further trouble in the future. I am reminded of a story circulated at my previous university about its president admonishing a faculty member about to take a dean’s position at another institution, “Never fire anybody. No matter how bad he or she may be, everyone has friends, and those friends will be after your blood.”

That president’s attitude had seemed to me an inappropriate way to run a university (there were some rather poor officers in his administration), but both his words and those of my own dean proved prophetic, for not only did I lose my chairmanship, but for the next couple of years I was subjected to a series of public slanders from the mob that had ousted me and their male supporter, to the point of where I complained in writing to one of them—my long-term antagonist. What happened afterward was a wholly unexpected shock.

A few months later I received a letter from what was by that time a new, interim dean (who was being vetted as the permanent dean), saying that a group of women in my department had accused me of sexual harassment and other offenses, a committee had been appointed to oversee an investigation, and an outside attorney had been hired to do the investigating and report to the committee and the dean. The process was very secretive, in violation of every aspect and safeguard of the university’s own policy (which had never been published and was kept hidden from me and my attorney) as well as in violation of every safeguard for handling such matters published and recommended by the U.S. Department of Education.

Nevertheless, the investigator made it clear through numerous comments to me and to several other witnesses, that she not only found no fault with me, but also found my accusers so outrageous that at one point she blurted out, “How can you work with such people?” She also declared that she planned to recommend that the university hire a psychiatrist to assist the department. Her judgment concurred in detail with the more general assessment of the university’s highest personnel officer (also a woman), who declared the ringleaders “crazy and hysterical.”

The report of the investigator was not what the dean wanted, since he couldn’t afford a group of women complaining that he was insensitive to their grievances while he was still under consideration as the permanent dean. He has therefore kept the report under wraps ever since and refused under any circumstances to release it. Meanwhile, from friendly departmental witnesses I learned that the mobbers had been meeting secretly for several months, intimidating and threatening students and staff, and acting in general like a typical lynch mob obsessed with groupthink. I also learned that the investigator had uncovered numerous instances of outright fabrication on the part of the mobbers, in addition to false statements, radical distortion, and pettiness in all their other allegations.

Nevertheless, the two faculty committees eventually involved in the investigation were easily misled by the dean and the university’s legal office, documents were withheld from them by university officials, they did not interview witnesses themselves, nor was I given adequate opportunity to respond to either committee. At the end of the investigation, the dean tried to get me to resign my tenure in return for a couple of years’ salary and the threat of dire consequences if I didn’t. I refused, since senior positions in my field are scarce as hen’s teeth and my discipline isn’t marketable outside the academy.

Without my ever seeing the written complaint the mobbers had submitted and without a hearing, the dean then banned me from my department, my salary and benefits were cut, and I was suspended from teaching for a period of time. I do not fault the faculty committees for ill-will, or even overweening arrogance, but for naiveté in being unprepared to believe that there wasn’t anything to the hundreds of accusations the mobbers had thrown at me (their meetings had generated some truly wild stories and hysteria), and for incompetence in running a complete and fair investigation. Sometimes where there is smoke there is no fire, but only purveyors of smoke.

In reaction to what had been done to me, I attempted, at great expense, to sue the university, but without success—my suit was dismissed on a technicality. Private universities can get away with vastly more misconduct than the courts allow public universities. However, I did obtain detailed information about the dishonesty that attended this matter from beginning to end, not only on the part of the complainants, but on the part of the dean and the university’s legal office. The information, to me, was worth the price of the lawsuit. The subsequent decade has been difficult, in part because of the detailed information about injustice that I uncovered and have been unable to use to any effect. Even though I have interviewed elsewhere as a finalist for several administrative positions, the necessary disclosure of my difficulties with my present university terminated each of those possibilities. Openings for senior professors in my field have been rare, and although I’ve been a finalist for both positions I’ve applied for, in each case I lost out to younger candidates. In recent years, in response to my formal complaint about the dean to the Board of Trustees, my annual salary increases have been reduced to a pittance in relation to everyone else’s. So much for academic freeedom.

My professional life at my university is now filled with ironies. My teaching has been restricted to an introductory course for non majors that others in my field don’t want to teach, nor am I allowed to do any interdisciplinary teaching or teaching in other departments, even though in the past I had taught highly successful interdisciplinary courses and courses in two departments other than my own.

Fortunately, the students who register for my present course are mostly quite good, and I receive some of the best student evaluations in the university despite the deadening effect of teaching the same thing year in and year out. But I have no opportunity to work with majors in my field, and I am deprived of being part of the life of the university, which I always enjoyed. On the other hand, since I am not included in or asked to do anything other than teach my course, I have far more time for my own research and publications than ever before.

Outside the university I have an international reputation for my scholarship, integrity and personality, and I am treated with great friendship and respect by colleagues elsewhere. I am frequently invited to international conferences and asked to speak and give workshops on endowed series at other institutions. I’ve served on doctoral committees at other universities and on review committees for departments in my field, including the Ivy league. I’m constantly asked by younger colleagues for fellowship recommendations, and by department chairs for tenure and promotion evaluations, including some from the most prestigious departments and universities in the country. I am regularly asked to do peer reviews for the most important journals in my field.

No one either inside or outside the university who knows me believes any of the allegations of the mobbers, and the effect of my being disciplined and rusticated has been to bring disapprobation from colleagues all across the country on my university, my former department and the colleagues who mobbed me. In the past decade the department has been mostly ruled by the mobbers and their supporters, and each in a series of chairs has ruined a specific aspect of the department. The once thriving graduate programs have either disappeared or are hanging on by a thread; no longer are there applicants from important undergraduate departments in our field. Recruiting of new faculty has also been problematic because of the widespread negative reputation of the department. These chairs have further fouled their own nest by retaliation against faculty and staff who supported me or who even insisted on remaining neutral. Firings of faculty and staff over the past decade have been legion, including non-tenured faculty who were outstanding in their subject areas. Even the university administration is fed up with a department that is the source of constant problems.

Nevertheless, the dean not only overlooks this kind of behavior, the university has refused to investigate numerous thoroughly documented grievances of serious retaliation, despite piously advertising each year that it does not permit retaliation of any sort. Many current faculty stay away from the department, only showing up for their classes and avoiding as much contact with its ruling clique as possible.

All this has happened in the decade in which I have been gone from the department and had no influence over it whatsoever, so I clearly was not the problem. Almost all faculty and all of the staff are afraid of the current chair, who was the leader of the mobbers (this appointment alone illustrates the irresponsibility and cynicism of the dean). The department is now in almost as bad shape as it was before I arrived. Recently the university has instituted a code of conduct, emphasizing professional integrity, which all faculty are required to sign, but whose standards none of the department chairs who followed me, nor the dean himself, who is widely criticized throughout the university for dishonesty, could ever meet. But of course, they will never be held to account.

How have I coped with all this over the past decade? It hasn’t been easy. On the one hand I have very few duties and still receive a full-time salary and benefits, even if somewhat reduced, and can continue to do so as long as I wish. This is comforting financial security. As an academic cousin of mine put it, “You’re in academic Heaven—you just had to go through academic Hell to get there.” When I talk to colleagues at other universities about my situation, they sometimes jokingly ask, “How can I get such a deal?” But I hardly view it as heavenly. In my innermost being I’m a teacher—at my previous university I won all the major teaching awards—and it’s very frustrating not to be able to expand my teaching into new and interesting areas or to be able to engage majors and graduate students in my field. It’s difficult not to be able to share in the life of the institution through committees and interactions with colleagues—something which I always found interesting and rewarding, even if sometimes overly time consuming. I had for decades been an active and forceful supporter of women’s role and rights in the academy, but I now find myself uncomfortably suspicious of women in a way I never was. I now wonder what someone to whom I’ve been pleasant, supportive, and helpful might be plotting behind my back.

Perhaps most difficult of all, however, has been the shattering of my belief in the societal role of universities as committed to truth and as bastions of justice and ethical conduct. I’ve seen plenty of bad behavior by both individual faculty and administrators over my long career at four different private institutions, but I had never before encountered or even heard of a systematic, sustained Orwellian environment, not only within a department, but at the central core of a university. The very foundation of why I became an academic in the first place has been dislodged, and I find myself in that otherworld of big brother who officially declares that black is white and who defines reality, not according to facts and objective judgment, but according to what is expedient for the pursuit of authoritarian power and control. I feel like an alien in my own country, a refugee with no place to flee. I’m sure that most other “mobbees” are in far worse circumstances, though probably are not any more angry, than I.

Name and institution withheld at writer’s request for fear of further retaliation.

Hourly paid lecturer wins full-time staff rights in landmark ruling

An hourly paid lecturer has won her legal fight to be recognised as an employee by her university, giving her pension and holiday rights in a case that her union said could have ramifications across the sector. Although Kaye Carl's contract with the University of Sheffield expressly stated that she was not an employee, an employment tribunal said it had been persuaded to "look at the reality not the label".

All hourly paid staff counted as self-employed by their institutions should reassess their situations in the light of her win, the University and College Union said. UCU policy officer Jane Thompson, who appeared as a witness for Ms Carl, said: "The arguments put forward by her employer are ones we've heard before. We suspect that there are a lot of people in her situation, who have been told they are self-employed but who are employees (based) on the facts."

Ms Carl started work at Sheffield in 2002 as a tutor in shorthand teaching 20 hours a week. Her contract described her as a "contractor" and included a clause stating that nothing in the document "may be interpreted to make the relationship of employer and employee between the university and the contractor".

She was told at interview that the post would be on a self-employed basis and that she would have to submit invoices to the university. However she later submitted claim forms and the university deducted national insurance, at the employee rate, at source.

In 2006, Ms Carl became aware of legislation aimed at protecting part-time workers and complained to the university that she was being treated less favourably than a full-time tutor with regard to pay, holiday entitlement and pension.

At a pre-hearing to decide employment status, the tribunal found that Ms Carl had "had the trappings of self-employment thrust upon her". There were no negotiations at her interview over rate of pay, it pointed out, as one would expect if it had really been a meeting about a business arrangement.

Ms Carl's right to use the university car park, her inclusion in the university handbook, the payment of her expenses and sick leave and her use of the grievance procedure all pointed to her being an employee rather than someone conducting her own business, the tribunal concluded. The university has now accepted that Ms Carl has pension rights and that she is entitled to holiday pay.

Ms Carl represented herself after lawyers employed by the UCU, Thompsons Solicitors, advised that she was unlikely to win. "Many universities now are in the process of regularising casual workers, and I am sure many individuals are employed in the way that I was," Ms Carl said.

A judgment on the substantive part of the case, which will decide whether or not Ms Carl was unfairly treated compared with the university's full-time employees, is expected shortly.

A spokeswoman for Sheffield said that the university is committed to all its employees and is "currently leading the way on the regularisation process of atypical workers". She said that the university strongly denies claims that Ms Carl was treated less favourably on the grounds of her part-time and fixed-term contractual status.

By Melanie Newman, Times Higher Education

The Unkindly Art of Mobbing [in academia]

At a practical level, every professor should be aware of conditions that increase vulnerability to mobbing in academe. Here are five:

• 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);

• Belonging to a discipline with ambiguous standards and objectives, especially those (like music or literature) most affected by postmodern scholarship;

• Working under a dean or other administrator in whom, as Nietzsche put it, “the impulse to punish is powerful”;

• An actual or contrived financial crunch in one’s academic unit (according to an African proverb, when the watering hole gets smaller, the animals get meaner).

Other conditions that heighten the risk of being mobbed are more directly under a prospective target’s control. Five major ones are:

• 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 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.”

From: http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/unkindlyart.htm by Professor Kenneth Westhues

The Shame of the British Psychological Society - Last chapter in the Lisa Blakemore Brown saga

A year ago I devoted several postings to the disgraceful and ludicrous abuse of a clinical psychologist, Lisa Blakemore Brown (LBB), by the British Psychological Society (see collated postings including this one). The abuse lasted 10 years, and was apparently motivated by factors other than evidence, logic or concern for patients. It has in my view brought this society into serious disrepute.

The treatment of LBB started as an obvious travesty when a commercially funded patient "support" group and the BPS itself appear to have colluded to create a triggering complaint. What followed was a protracted farce. The BPS seems to have realized that its actions would not be hidden, and the farce was terminated this week. It has left LBB financially destitute, with a destroyed career and ill health.

The abuse of health professionals by professional leadership is a key threat facing the safety of medical practice. Such abuse often takes place simply because these individuals have expressed a view, or because they have raised concerns. Abuse by professional regulatory bodies is particularly troubling.

The BPS has some important questions to answer, and it is not "closed" as they suggest. There are questions about the integrity, motives and honesty of BPS procedures. There are questions about the factors motivating the entirely spurious complaints, and who arranged for their invention. There are serious concerns about the way in which the BPS attempted to abuse one of its members through the misuse of psychology itself, and the way in which the medical profession assisted.

By contrast, professional regulators have remained silent in the face of gross abuses of science, obvious lies, fraud and the deaths of patients -- where these problems involve commercial companies or a network of powerfully connected colleagues. The BPS remains completely silent on the widespread fraud which is increasingly apparent within the pharmaceutical psychiatric literature. The regulatory body governing medicine in the UK (the General Medical Council) has also remained silent, and has refused to entertain a complaint of professional misconduct from patients and families involving the medical leadership of GlaxoSmithKline.

The silence is deafening. Equally worrying is the fact that this abuse stirred scarcely a breath of protest amongst other members of the BPS. Few psychologists troubled themselves to ask the simplest of questions. Such silence is surely a badge of shame for any caring profession.

Lisa Blakemore Brown has now resigned from the BPS.

From: Scientific Misconduct Blog

Some interesting links

• The role of HR and management
  
  
• Dismissal as an academic boomerang
  
  
• Expired disciplinary actions...
  
  
• Staff are silenced by fear of reprisals
  
  
• Academic unions have their head in the sand...
  
  
• Skorupski's Law and other related laws
  
  
• Backfire basics - The keys to backfire
  
  
• Are they claiming that you are emotionally unstable?
  
  
• The spinless Mob...
  
  
• The Seven Principles of Public Life - Higher and Further Education
  
  
• Dignity at Work - A Good Practice Guide for Higher Education Institutions on Dealing with Bullying and Harassment in the Workplace
  
  
• The experience of injustice...
  
  
• The no-Asshole rule...
  
  
• Six degrees of collaboration
  
  
• Academic leadership - The bullying boss
  
  
• Procedures for making allegations concerning Higher Education institutions and the 2008 RAE - UK

Meet the Work Bully

'I believe bullying in the workplace is an issue whose time has come. It has always existed to some extent but has become critical for several reasons.

First, today’s managers are being selected for technical competence more than people skills in many industries, particularly high tech and medicine.

Second, jobs are not as secure and new jobs are more difficult to find. Outsourcing, recession, health insurance portability, and skill specialization all prevent escaping from a bully. These issues can create a vulnerability that makes someone an easy target.

Third, HR is much more focused for management’s interests than employee interests than in the past. It is much easier for HR to eliminate a bullied employee than to change the culture that allowed a bully to exist and/or become a manager. My guess the stories posted here are the tip of the iceberg, I could add several more myself.'

— Posted by Elizabeth, New York Times Well Blog