Teachers want principal out for alleged harassment

At least 20 teachers from Pitalo Elementary School in barangay Pitalo, San Fernando town, have asked the Department of Education to transfer their school principal for allegedly harassing them.

In a letter-complaint signed by the teachers addressed to Cebu Schools Division Superintendent Serena Uy, a copy of which was furnished to The FREEMAN, the teachers asked for the transfer of Doris Singson.

Aside from Uy, the teachers also asked San Fernando Mayor Lakambini Retuya to lobby to the DepEd provincial officials for the immediate transfer of Singson.

The teachers said that they are subjected to bullying and psychological harassment by Singson due to her alleged persistent aggressive and difficult to deal with behavior, humiliating them in front of their fellow teachers.

They also accused the principal of harassing the previous teachers who are assigned in the said school.

“She used profanity, threatening us of lawsuit and dismissal, constantly changing work guidelines, assigning unreasonable duties of workload which are unfavorable to a teacher, belittling her teacher’s opinions, tampering with a teacher’s personal belongings or work equipment, boorish comments, actions and gestures, retaliatory techniques, playing favoritism,” the teachers said in their letter.

Further, they said that the bullying repeated pattern of offensive behavior and psychological harassment by Singson “lowers their self-esteem and causes their torment, annoyance, behavior, feelings of frustration and helpless, increased sense of vulnerability, loss of confidence, inability to sleep, family tension and stress, inability to concentrate and low morale and productivity”.

They cited the case of their two co-teachers named Lissa Papas and Debbie Delgado who were diagnosed by their doctors to have suffered from severe anxiety due to work-related stress and were advised to rest.

Medical certificates issued by their respected doctors to both Papas and Delgado are also attached the letter-petition of the teachers.

“Since we all are suffering from the same workplace bullying and psychological harassment, we are worried that what happened to Papas and Delgado would also happen to all of us should the bully in our workplace remains. In that case we are contemplating of taking a mass leave of absence,” they further said in their complaint.

Retuya said that the teachers came to her office seeking assistance for the transfer of Singson.

The mayor said the teachers shared to her their individual traumatic experiences and symptoms of distress that are detrimental to the well-being of the teachers are evident.

In the interest of healthy and wholesome environment, Retuya recommends the immediate transfer of Singson to other school “to give both parties a breathing spell and to cool down boiling emotions.”

From: http://beta.philstar.com

Evil at work: bad bosses

They holler, throw things, scheme, connive, lie, cheat and generally make life miserable for untold millions of workers. They’re bad bosses. And by some estimates, half of all managers fall into that category. But what exactly is it that makes this scourge of the workplace so harmful? As it turns out, it’s in their nature.

For five years, Marilyn Haight, a business consultant in Arizona, studied scores of companies to see what makes lousy bosses tick. She found that truly bad bosses are not just incompetent—they purposefully set out to harm employees. With that in mind, she classified the men and women she studied into bad-boss “types” so employees would know what to look for, and realize who they’re dealing with. Using some of the classifications from Haight’s book, Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Boss?, we took a look at what makes both fictional and real-life managers so awful.

The Bully. When most people think of bad bosses, this is what comes to mind, says Haight. They’re loud, insulting, and frequently threatening. There’s no shortage of candidates who qualify as bullies, but one stands out: Albert “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap became famous for axing tens of thousands of jobs as a corporate downsizer in the 1990s. He ruled by instilling fear in underlings, until he himself got the axe from appliance maker Sunbeam. When asked once if successful managers could be friendly, he reportedly replied, “You want a friend? Buy a dog.”

The Pilferer. Pilferer bosses, as the name implies, funnel company assets into their own pockets, and convince employees to turn a blind eye to their schemes. Dennis Kozlowski, the former CEO of Tyco, is a typical example. At one time, he was best-known for his $6,000 shower curtains and a life-sized ice statue of Michelangelo’s David that dispensed vodka at one of his parties. Now he’s serving an eight-year sentence for stealing millions from his own company. He reportedly got away with it for so long because he spread the bounty around to others in the executive suite through million-dollar “relocation perks” and “special bonuses.”

The Suppressor. Haight says this is the most common type of bad boss. “They constantly put down the achievements of other people and don’t want others to look better than them,” she says. These bosses are often ruthless, like Miranda Priestly, the magazine editor who terrorized her employees in the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada (the character was ostensibly based on real-life Vogue editor Anna Wintour). Suppressor bosses demand reverence and subservience, says Haight, and working for one often makes you feel invisible.

The Pretender. Michael Scott, the boss played by Steve Carell on the popular TV show The Office, is clearly in over his head. In a recent episode, for example, he held a meeting with his employees to introduce a new office diet plan. He came in the room dressed in a “sumo suit” and proceeded to put up pictures of Jabba the Hutt in an effort to demonstrate the perils of overeating. But to be a truly bad boss, a pretender must also be evil. On that front, there’s no finer example than the Pointy Haired Boss from the Dilbert comic strip. Completely clueless, yet up to speed on the latest useless corporate buzzwords, he’s every employee’s worst nightmare. As Dilbert creator Scott Adams describes him, “He wasn’t born mean and unscrupulous, he worked hard at it.” It’s always a mystery how such bosses climb to their exalted posts, but Haight has a theory. “The more tenure you get, the less you keep your skills up, the less employable you are elsewhere, the more likely you are to be lord to the dark side,” she says.

The Cult Maker. Haight says this is the most insidious type of bad boss. These bosses want to be worshipped and surround themselves with fawning yes-men. Worse still, they gossip and gang up on dissenting employees to make their lives hellish. Think of the cult of personality that surrounded former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling. After Sherron Watkins, Enron’s vice-president of corporate development, wrote a scathing internal memo warning the company could implode, she was reportedly made to feel like an outcast.

Some say you can fight bad bosses by taking lots of notes and by keeping a record of everything your supervisor does. But that will likely only delay an inevitable choice: put up with your evil boss, or get out. Whatever you end up doing, it can be a deeply frustrating and lonely experience. “It’s often hard to get anyone, even your friends and family, to believe what you’re telling them about your boss because they can’t understand how someone could become a boss and do things that are bad for the organization,” says Haight. “For these people it can feel like they’re on a little island all by themselves.” But if it’s any consolation, Haight says there’s a surprising number of terrible bosses out there—so you’re definitely not alone.

From: http://blog.macleans.ca/2008/10/02/evil-at-work-bad-bosses/2/

The story begins...

...The story begins with a tenured Dr. PITA who had worked quietly for decades in a fractured department. A private sort of man, he kept to himself. He taught his classes, told jokes to passing colleagues, ran experiments in his lab, and went home to his family. He would later be described as "a dynamic teacher who appeals, particularly, to bright students who have a thirst for learning."

Dr. PITA was foreign-born and of recognizible ethnic origin. For this reason, professional jealousy, or who knows what, there was no love lost between Dr. PITA and his department chair. Mainly they stayed out of each other's way.

Then came the incident... A third accuser materialized, claiming Dr. PITA had trivialized her work and been unprofessional.

The chair, dean, vice-president and president all agreed that Dr. PITA had to be dismissed. He was suspended with pay pending an arbitrator's hearing of appeal. His research money was returned to the funder/ His lab was dismantled. Stories appeared in the press of an unidentified professor dismissed on a morals charge, but without details.

On account of the customary delays in scheduling, the arbitration did not commence until 16 months after Dr. PITA was suspended...

From: 'Eliminating Professors. A Guide to the Dismissal Process', by Kenneth Westhues

Mob, v t, to kill by pack

May I clarify that this is no attempt at scholarly lucubration but rather a personal story of why an Argentinian emigrated to the United States by way of Venezuela; chose an academic career hoping to realize his main values through it; emigrated later to Canada (there is hardly any place farther north to go); found university life – especially in recent years – rather different from what he expected; experienced bias in his profession (mostly from being in a minority of one, as sometimes we all are); was mobbed when he interrupted his quiet research as a highly successful, tenured full professor with an international reputation in his field when he saw it as his moral duty to speak up against a major administrative blunder that hurt thousands of students; had to persist for five months with emails until the university president finally acknowledged, through clenched teeth, that a problem had existed at all; had to endure repeated tricks, attempts at humiliation, and false accusations, including secret lies in court; spent an eye-opening night in jail; saw the phoney story about his “mental instability” and his “tendency to violence” planted by the Administration on the front page of Vancouver newspapers destroy his public reputation; experienced a mixture of redress and personal compassion when the university president had to resign his position because of mental illness (most of his blunders resulted from an obsession with sexual harassment, whether real or in his mind, a crime for which he proudly announced a policy of zero tolerance, always seeing the females as victims in these juicy sex stories, even in cases where the women made false claims and the men were clearly innocent); enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing his biography included in the University of Toronto’s Canadian Who’s Who beginning in 1998 (one year after being forced to retire four years early from his university); had to spend five very stressful years and a fortune in lawyers in vain attempts to wipe out the mud and worse thrown at him by the vice-president who then sued him for defamation; developed a limp when given an overdose of medication for his court-related stress; survived quite well through spiritual resources and by immediately going into the second career that should have been his from the start; yet had to endure the ultimate humiliation of being held in contempt of court because a reporter wrote a story with recent events – which he didn’t learn from the defendant and were supposed to be kept under wraps. (Sorry, that was indeed a long sentence. Former professors of linguistics occasionally write like that.)

...The undoubtedly bright university administrators who mobbed me were not lacking in foresight; they obtained a court injunction forbidding me from making any comments about “anything mentioned in the mediation,” an illegal phrase as wide as a Mack truck which I objected to, for in the mediation a great many things, old and new, and without relevance to this particular case, had been mentioned. Any lawyer worth his or her salt would have objected strenuously to this encompassing phrase, but mine accepted it.

... Academic life can be very stressful, especially for those who think differently from the crowd. Long before my mobbing, I remember that for some time, almost every morning, as I approached my campus building from the parking lot, I suffered from nausea. (The section of the department where I did most of my teaching was controlled by four people with political and religious views very different from those of three others, including myself. The interference with the minority’s careers was such that one gave up his promising academic career to run a motel, another died young of a stroke, and I was the only one to survive till retirement age – well, almost). Life has never been fair, but if academic life were even a little fairer, only incompetent deadwood – which I never was – should have to get sick when coming to work.

...At about the same time, the Administration succeeded in having their disingenuous side of the story published on the front page of the two largest newspapers in our province, complete with the smiling face of the “miscreant,” which the adjoining text defamed as emotionally unstable and dangerous.

Evidently the worst “sin” a professor can commit on a campus is to become a dissident against his university administration, even though that has long come under the rubric of “academic freedom.” Again, many colleagues protested for weeks the suspension of my email and other things being done to me, but gradually – as often happens with campus crises – things quieted down, I being the only one indulging in forced quietness.

...My legal ordeal – which lasted almost five years because of my determination to “clear my name” – was very expensive and a source of almost continuous stress, with negative effects on both my physical and emotional health. As for “clearing” anyone’s name, the great majority of people, including many professors, are far more likely to remember an adverse front-page story than to notice any small, neutrally worded announcement that may appear years later somewhere in the back of the same publication. One of the tragedies of mobbing is that once a reputation has been destroyed, a person can never recover it fully...

By Hector Hammerly, Late Professor of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University

From: http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/hhammerly-ess.htm

Management briefing: bullying in the workplace

Workplace bullying is on the rise and the public sector is the worst offender, a report has found.

The Government estimates that bullying costs the UK economy £13.7 billion, with 100 million days in productivity lost every year.

In Bullying at Work: the Experience of Managers, 70 per cent of managers polled by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) said that they had witnessed bullying in the past three years and 42 per cent had been bullied themselves, with unfair treatment, verbal insults, unwanted sexual advances, blocked promotion opportunities and physical intimidation among examples named.

When asked about their experiences, managers said that instances of bullying were not only top down. Some 55 per cent had witnessed bullying among peers, and one in three had seen subordinates bullying their managers.

When bullying did occur, it often went unchecked. Almost half the respondents (47 per cent) said no action was taken by their organisation.

There appear to be multiple reasons for the trend. Root causes named include a lack of management skills, cited by 71 per cent of respondents, 59 per cent said that personality clashes were the problem and 44 per cent blamed authoritarian management styles.

The CMI report compared the results with the same survey conducted three years ago and found that bullying appeared to be on the rise across all organisations. On a 5-point scale, individuals gave their employer a score of 2.37 to show the extent of bullying in their workplace, up from 2.25 in 2005. The public sector received an average 2.60.

Gill Trevelyan, the head of good practice services at Acas, the arbitration service, said that high levels of stress associated with professions such as teaching or healthcare were a big factor.

“One of the main reasons for managers to adopt bullying behaviour is when they are under pressure or stress themselves,” she said. However, the figures could also owe to greater awareness of bullying in the public sector, making employees more likely to report incidents.

“In other workplaces that have a more aggressive culture, such as a financial trading floor, these practices may be seen as normal - although not necessarily right,” Ms Trevelyan said. It pays for organisations to be vigilant. Bullying contributes to ill-health, and organisations that tolerate it can be held to account under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.

A ruling by the law lords in 2006 made it clear that the principle of vicarious liability under the Protection From Harassment Act 1997 applies in the workplace, so employers may be held liable even if they have not acted negligently or were unaware of the problem.

The best course of action is to have clear policies to define what constitutes bullying and to make employees aware of procedures, Ms Trevelyan said. Effective management is crucial. “Managers who take a more consultative, consensual approach rather than ‘command and control' are less likely to be seen as bullies,” she said.

From: http://business.timesonline.co.uk

Apology following Elimination

We do therefor hereby signify to all in general (and to the surviving sufferers in especial) our deep sense of and sorrow for our errors in acting on such evidence to the condemning of any person, and do hereby declare that we justly fear we were sadly deluded and mistaken, for which we are much disquieted and distressed in our minds, and do therefore humbly beg forgiveness, first of God for Christ's sake for this our error, and pray that God would not impute the guilt of it to ourselves not others. And we so pray that we may be considered candidly and aright by the living sufferers as being then under the power of a strong and general delusion, utterly unacquainted with and not experienced in matters of that nature.

From the statement of the jurors for the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, made in 1697, five years after their conviction of 150 men and women for various forms of witchcraft.

From: 'Eliminating Professors. A guide to the dismissal process', by Kenneth Westhues

Universities have been listed among the worst in a survey on bullying of university staff across the UK

Northern Ireland’s two universities have been listed among the worst in a survey on bullying of university staff across the UK.

The University of Ulster and Queen's University feature in the “worst” category for staff being “always” or “often” bullied.

The UU was 7th on the national list compiled by the University and College Union (UCU). The union has named and shamed the universities with the worst reported levels of bullying ahead of Friday’s national Ban Bullying at Work Day. Queen's was 19th.

Of the 143 respondents from Queen’s, 11.9% said they were always or often bullied. At the UU, just over 10% of the 148 respondents said this was the case.

The University of East London had the worst ranking with almost 17% of the staff surveyed saying they were always or often bullied. In 19 institutions at least one-in-10 respondents to the UCU survey reported being ‘always’ or ‘often’ bullied.

A University of Ulster spokesperson said: “The University of Ulster has received a copy of the UCU survey and is in the process of assessing its validity and relevance.

“The university has a comprehensive bullying and harassment procedure agreed with the local trade unions. The aim of the procedure is to provide a safe and harmonious working environment and to provide mechanisms to address any issues raised.

“All staff and students are expected to comply with the policy, and to assist in the promotion of a good working environment free from any form of bullying and harassment.”

Queen’s University said: “Queen’s University is a large employer and has an extensive range of policies to support staff in the workplace.

“The university views bullying at work as unacceptable and has procedures in place to fully investigate complaints of this nature and take appropriate and timely action.

“An analysis of the last two years indicates only three cases have been brought to the attention of senior managers for examination under the agreed procedures. The university has comprehensive consultative procedures in place with all its trade unions.”

Over 9,700 UCU members working in higher education across the UK were surveyed and the results reveal that 6.7% of members said they were always or often bullied at work and 16.7% said “sometimes”. Only half (51%) said they were fortunate enough to “never” be bullied at work.

Less than half of all respondents in higher education (only 45.1%) said they were never subjected to personal harassment at work, 7% said they were subjected to it “always” or “often” and nearly one-in-five (18.8%) said they “sometimes” suffered personal harassment.

UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said: “Bullying at work can take many forms and all of them create stress for the victim.

“Everybody has the right to expect to work in a safe environment free from bullying. We believe bullying to be a deep-seated problem in higher education and we want to know what organisations such as the Universities and Colleges Employers’ Association (UCEA) are doing to tackle the problem.”

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

Also: UCU today names and shames the universities with the worst reported levels of bullying, ahead of Friday's national Ban Bullying at Work Day.

They are:

• University of East London
• Kingston University
• De Montfort University
• University of Lincoln
• University of Salford
• University of Glamorgan
• University of Ulster
• Bangor University
• Manchester Metropolitan University
• Birmingham City University
• University of Greenwich
• University of Westminster
• Oxford Brookes University
• University of Gloucestershire
• University of Hertfordshire
• University of Dundee
• University of Portsmouth
• University of Bradford
• Queen's University Belfast

-----------------------------------------------
Tackling bullying - a UCU conference

UCU will be holding a national conference on tackling bullying and harassment in the tertiary education workplace on 27 November in London.

UCU conference centre, Britannia Street, London, WC1X 9JP

Britannia Street office location map

Speakers include:

Dr Iain Coyne, University of Nottingham
Hannah Essex, College and University Support Network, and
John Bamford, UCU health and safety advisor

There will also be practical workshops in the morning and afternoon, on campaigning against bullying and negotiating anti-bullying policies, and results from UCU's forthcoming survey of bullying and cyber-bullying.

7th November 2008 - Ban Bullying at Work Day

The Ban Bullying at work campaign is spearheaded by the Andrea Adams trust – the first charity in the UK dedicated to raising awareness of workplace bullying.

Last year’s Ban Bullying day was very successful, with over 300 organisations involved and an estimated 3 million of the UK’s workforce taking part in events on the day. The website was accessed by an estimated 3 million people up to and including November 7th. All campaign promotional items were completely sold out and several thousand co-branded posters were sold across Europe.

A very successful PR campaign saw us on BBC News, GMTV, Sky News, the ‘Today’ programme, 23 regional BBC radio shows and a wide range of newspapers and magazine articles which all helped get the campaign the attention it deserved.

As the UK’s leading authority on workplace bullying, the Andrea Adams Trust is committed not just to helping individuals and organisations deal with the problem, but to extending our understanding of the nature and scale of workplace bullying through extensive partnership working. For more details of the Trust’s work click here.

The Fundamental Question: Do You Side With Bullied Targets or With Perpetrators?

We are a blame-the-victim nation. Part of this is human nature. Cognitive psychology teaches us that when faced with two conflicting internal beliefs when bullying strikes a friend -- "I like my co-worker friend" and "Bad things happen only to bad people" -- there is a tendency to want to reduce the conflict, the dissonance, by changing one of those beliefs.

The result is that we individuals are more likely to abandon the bond we feel for our friends in order to support the internalized twisted worldview that if tragedy visits someone then that person must have deserved it. Sounds bizarre, right? But this distortion, called the fundamental attribution error, is our tendency to overestimate the role individuals play in their fate.

Under the artificial cover of "toughness" or "responsibility," we humans rationalize remarkable cruelty perpetrated senselessly against others. Though domestic violence is now criminalized, it is still rampant because of the insipid belief that if a spouse gets battered, the batterer must have rationally acted on the basis of something the battered one made him do. Poppycock!

When we learn that Americans now torture others in violation of all international and moral laws and against our traditions, too many of us justify the torture because we believe that innocents would not be tortured if it was not necessary. This blame-the-victim trend is becoming all too American!

Similarly when we witness a peer being bullied in the workplace, it arouses such negative emotions in us, that too often we make ourselves feel better by ostracizing the victim and ending our historical relationship with him or her. We turn our backs on our fellow human beings out of the selfish desire to not feel empathy for them when we see their pain. Empathy causes us to feel the pain ourselves. The deliberate distancing from others probably explains a growing alienation that drives epidemic levels of depression and social dysfunction in our society.

As a society, we discount or diminish workplace bullying and psychological violence with hollow, dehumanized phrases like "managerial prerogative must be ensured" "don't interfere with the ability of businesses to be competitive" or "this country was built by mean, aggressive sons of bitches ... some people may need a little appropriate bullying in order to do a good job ... they are really just wimps."

For the first decade of the U.S. movement against workplace bullying, we have applied rationality to the irrational process of destructive interpersonal bullying. We appealed to businesses with bottom-line fiscal impact. Bullies are too expensive to keep. Employers did not care. If they are in business ostensibly to make a profit or to sustain quality government services, they should care. However, our experiences on-site with employers as consultants as well as the empirical data we gathered in a series of surveys expose employer indifference to workplace bullying. Without a specific law posing a litigation threat, employers blithely carry on as if bullying never happens, even denying it when it is reported to them.

As for "personal responsibility," there is a double standard. Victims are responsible, but the bullies-perpetrators never take responsibility. Their explanations are always some form of the target "made me do it." Weak employers allow the bullying to happen with impunity, without accountability, as if helpless to stop the abuser on their payroll.

According to the 2007 WBI-Zogby poll, in 44% of cases of reported bullying, employers did nothing. (In an additional 18% of cases, they worsened the situation by turning on the victim-complainant.) Rationally, employers can afford to do this because 80% of bullying is legal.

Bullying is morally wrong.

Doing nothing is not a neutral act when an individual pleas for relief from the emotional misery bullying inflicts. Doing nothing is denying the person credibility as an adult. Doing nothing is sustaining the status quo and defending the perpetrator, however implicitly or indirectly. How dare HR, the primary agent responsible for implementing or blocking the employer's response to reported bullying, side with the bully (most often in management, 73%) against the employee who naively came to HR for "help"!

So at the beginning of our second decade, we must not be reticent about calling perpetrators and those who support them immoral. It is not our subjective morality that is violated, but the deeper sense of human dignity that is undermined when victims of bullying are not supported. We need to rekindle our compassion for those less fortunate than us whose fate was not their own making. Bully apologists have an indefensible, unconscionable position of favoring abuse.

Once we are bullied and feel the full force of a laser-focused campaign of interpersonal abuse, we drop the smug justifications for the bully. If we work long enough in enough different places and encounter enough incompetent bosses, we are likely to be bullied ourselves in our work life (37% of U.S. workers are). The only people who still doubt that bullying happens are the ones who have never suffered an unexpected, univited disaster or catastrophe. Events humble arrogant superiority known only to those lacking experience in bullying, direct or witnessed. But we should not have to wait for everyone to be personally bullied so that they understand how destructive bullying can be to personal health, careers, families, and employers.

Paraphrasing comments from a recent U.S. president: you are either with us or with the perpetrators. The fundamental question is to which side are your willing to commit?

There are not two equally compelling morally equivalent sides to the violence at work dilemma. No one targeted by bullying invited or wanted the intolerable misery. There is no "win-win" amicable mediated settlement possible in bullying situations. To tolerate a little bit of abuse, to appease perpetrators, is unacceptable. It is a moral compromise that leads to societal decline. It triggers retrospective questions such as, what have we allowed ourselves to become?

The choice is simple, actually. Do not squirm to make it complex. The ethical human choice transcends corporate or institutional needs.

Either side with the perpetrators of violence and rationalize and excuse the escalating trend toward hostility and abuse in the workplace

or

side with the targeted individuals who asked for nothing more than to be left alone to do the jobs they once loved.

From: http://bullyinginstitute.org

Avoiding Academe's Ax Murderers

Many years ago when I directed a doctoral program in my discipline, I invited a celebrated scholar to hold a daylong "master class" for a select number of senior graduate students. He lectured for a few hours and then opened the session to questions. "Dr. Famous," one student asked, "what do we need to know to survive our first year as assistant professors?"

A notorious enfant terrible, our mischievous guest stunned everyone with his reply: "Remember that every department has at least one ax murderer, but you won't know in advance who it is so you'd better be on your guard."

While our guest was clearly playing to his audience for a laugh, he was also articulating what has become a lamentable fact of faculty life: Many academics regularly engage in a kind of "gotcha" politics.

The propensity to pounce ruthlessly on a politically wounded colleague is rapidly becoming a favorite spectator sport in academe. I am continually astonished by the gusto with which some faculty members will leap to attack a colleague at the slightest hint of an allegation of misconduct, even when the accused is a close friend. Or by how vigorously some department chairs will initiate proceedings against a faculty member when informal discussions might have resolved the issue in question.

Over the years, I have served on or presided over inquiry panels convened to determine whether a complaint against a professor had merit. Invariably there would be a point in the proceedings — usually early on and before all the evidence had been considered — when some faculty member would pronounce indignantly that the accused was clearly guilty and that we should recommend the maximum penalty available. "He most certainly made an offensive remark in class; he should be suspended for at least a semester." Or, "She undoubtedly falsified her research results; she should be stripped of all future institutional support." Or, "This is clearly plagiarism; he should be fired immediately."

Although such pronouncements were always made solemnly, I could not help but detect a certain underlying glee — the kind you might find when a parent catches a child misbehaving.

When guilt is assigned before all the evidence and perspectives are heard, when the verdict is swift but premature, and when the recommended penalty is the most draconian available, we have entered the zone of gotcha politics. That zone has no room for judicious deliberation, reasoned debate, or compassion — which makes it especially out of place in an institution that has historically prided itself on championing reason, deliberation, and justice.

Undoubtedly, predatory behavior in the academic world is a convenient means of crippling or eliminating rivals. Why not accelerate your opponents' demise by advocating strenuously against them if the opportunity presents itself?

A business dean told me that one of his faculty members had become convinced that a popular associate professor regularly altered his teaching evaluations by slipping into the department late at night after students had returned their evaluation forms and removing any negative ones. The incensed colleague mounted a vigorous campaign against the associate professor, whose reputation was ruined in the process. Everyone in the college believed he was guilty. As it turned out, an extensive investigation proved conclusively that the professor was innocent; no tampering had occurred whatsoever.

The same people who are quick to ascribe guilt are often the first to violate confidentiality and fuel the engine of gossip and innuendo, which can, in effect, render irrelevant any official finding in the case. An individual may be exonerated in the end but found guilty in the popular imagination.

A favorite gambit of those who engage in such vicious politics is to enlist a student — preferably a graduate student — to do their dirty work. They will urge the student to file a complaint against a rival or spread malicious gossip. In fact, it is not uncommon to discover after some scrutiny that a student's letter of complaint against a professor was actually penned by another professor.

Gotcha politics are particularly brutal when they involve anonymity. A number of my fellow deans across the country tell me they are continually shocked by the viciousness with which some faculty members attack their chairs in end-of-year written evaluation surveys. Some evaluations contain abusive diatribes and preposterous allegations, all based on the flimsiest of evidence (or just on gossip).

University administrators regularly receive anonymous letters purporting to reveal some grievous act by a faculty member: This one has plagiarized; that one is sleeping with students; another is misusing grant money. Rarely does the anonymous revelation provide specific facts and details, much less do so in a coolly objective tone. More often it takes the form of a rant with little specificity.

The ever-increasing influence of blogs has exacerbated the problem. Blogs foster a culture of anonymity and unchecked expression without accountability. Bloggers can write whatever they want, regardless of the damage to others, and they can do so fully protected by the cloak of secrecy. In some universities, blogs dedicated to unseating the institution's president have proved quite effective. In response, some university presidents have instituted their own blogs and have made them easily accessible from the institution's Web site.

The kind of predatory politics I am describing thrive on righteous indignation and, as such, are self-serving: If you are in a position to renounce some perceived indiscretion or act of wrongdoing, then you can feel — at least to yourself — morally superior. No need to consider possible extenuating circumstances or alternate interpretations of the facts. After all, you have the high ground.

Perhaps the most extreme form of gotcha politics is the phenomenon recently dubbed "mobbing," in which a group of people collectively set out to damage or destroy a colleague's reputation. The Chronicle has reported fairly extensively on this trend and has detailed several cases in which professors and administrators have fallen prey to mob action.

We all have the right — indeed, the obligation — to point out potential misconduct when we become aware of it. Improper behavior needs to be identified and halted. But dealing with that behavior does not require ad hominem attack, abusive language, unsubstantiated allegations, or wolf-pack savagery.

It's not criticism that is in question; it's the tone and style of it.

Obviously, there is no way to legislate against gotcha politics or to prevent it by fiat. The only way to put an end to such incivility is for each of us to resolve not to be a party to such unprofessional behavior. It is in your own best interest to do so. After all, you never know when you might become the ax murderer's next target.

Gary A. Olson is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Illinois State University and can be contacted at golson@ilstu.edu. To read his previous columns, go to http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/heads_up.

From: http://chronicle.com