The silence of Norman Lamb MP

What follows is a cautionary tale.

 

I am a casualty of bullying in a British university, having sustained acute psychological injury (depression and post-traumatic stress disorder/PTSD) inflicted by academic colleagues and others.  The abuse led me to attempt to end my life.  The university offered to pay me a six figure sum to withdraw a grievance I had lodged and vacate my position, but there were echoes in the offer of the abuse that had been so damaging to me and I rejected it.  The university's tactics became increasingly grotesque, leaving me with no choice but to resign.

 

I doubt that the word "recovery" can realistically be used when one has sustained this kind of injury, but one hopes that somehow life will become at least tolerable again.  The grim reality, though, is one of constant struggle against prejudice surrounding mental ill health and against exploitation of the vulnerability arising from one's disability.  But there is something potentially positive in all of this, that being the possibility of being able to help others through perhaps increased understanding of the nature and effects of brutality.  It was with this in mind that I took the decision to write to Liberal Democrat MP, Norman Lamb.

 

Mr Lamb has been described in a national newspaper as "one of Britain's leading campaigners for improvements in mental health care" and he has said of himself in a publicly broadcast interview that it is his "mission" that every person should be "treated as an equal citizen" and that all people suffering with mental ill health should be treated "with the utmost respect".  I really believed that contacting Mr Lamb would be a safe exercise and I conveyed this in my letter to him, saying that as someone who had repeatedly been given cause to feel betrayed and degraded by privately demonstrated contempt or indifference of individuals or bodies who professed publicly to care about the plight of vulnerable people, I would not be writing to him if I did not feel that he was genuine and committed in respect of the concerns that he articulated.

 

One of the challenges faced by people like me, identified in my letter to Mr Lamb, is the problem of stereotyping, prejudice and other cruelty in the National Health Service, including mental health services.  Discussion about mental health services is dominated by reference to a lack of funding, but as I explained to Mr Lamb, having witnessed psychological abuse of patients by staff in those services and having experienced such abuse myself, I am very concerned about the issue of attitudes and the way that this is linked to society's apparent disconnectedness from the (interconnected) values of social responsibility, compassion and commitment.

 

Other very painful details of my experiences and my current circumstances were explained in my letter, as was my willingness to make a contribution to any discussion about positive change that might be effected in the various areas and structures where the existing culture can pose particular challenges for people living with the agony of mental ill health.  I invited Mr Lamb to let me know if I could make such a contribution with, or through, him.

 

Having sent my letter by a secure form of delivery, I knew that it had been delivered to Mr Lamb's constituency office (and it was signed for by either him or someone with the same last name).  I did not receive a reply and wrote to Mr Lamb again seven weeks later.  I could not believe that he could show such cruelty and felt that I should give him the benefit of the doubt.  My second letter, as courteous as the first one, asked if he could send me, by a secure form of delivery, a copy of any reply he had sent, or any reply he might wish to send.  I enclosed a £10 bank note to cover the cost of postage.  That letter, too, was delivered to his constituency office (and again, signed for by either him or someone with the same last name).  Four weeks on, his silence continues.

 

What does this tell us about Mr Lamb's claims of commitment to promotion of the equality and dignity of those suffering with mental ill health?  If Mr Lamb does not wish to engage in a dialogue with me about my experiences, that's fine.  But where is the compassion, the decency, the humanity, in not even saying, in whatever way, "I hear you and good luck"?  Is his silence not a form of abuse?

 

I hope that this cautionary tale will help others concerned about Britain's appallingly backward approach to mental ill health.  Perhaps there are less painful ways of seeking to make a difference than reaching out to public figures whose media profile may be misleading.

 

Anonymous

10 Years Bullied Academics Blog, 2006 - 2016

This blog started on May 14, 2006. Ten years later, we count a total of 666770 page views, or roughly about 180 visits every day on average. These are very worrying numbers.

The most visited post is 'Effects of Psychological Harassment' with a total of 6272 visits, followed by 'PhD students suffer from bullying supervisors' (4378 visits), 'Bullying of a PhD Student - One Wrong Word/Death by Paper Cuts' (3724 visits), 'Abuse of Phd students' (3708 visits), and 'Suspension of Ian Parker - International Protest' (2647 visits). These figures too, tell a story...

In terms of page views per country, the figures are: United States 241696, United Kingdom 141524, Germany 38066, Canada 23938, Russia 22994, France 21385, Australia 15795, Ukraine 12669, Poland 3844, and Turkey 2329.

This blog has been mentioned in the following papers/ news reports/ articles/ books:

• Samier, E. (2008). The problem of passive evil in educational administration: Moral implications of doing nothing. International Studies in Educational Administration, 36(1), 2-21.
  
• Fogg, P. (2008). Take that, You Bully!. Chronicle of Higher Education, 55(3), n3.
  
• McMullen, J. (2011). Balancing the right to manage with dignity at work. Perspectives, 15(1), 3-6.
  
• Birks, M., Budden, L. M., Stewart, L., & Chapman, Y. (2014). Turning the tables: the growth of upward bullying in nursing academia. Journal of advanced nursing, 70(8), 1685-1687.
  
• Coleyshaw, L. (2010). The power of paradigms: A discussion of the absence of bullying research in the context of the university student experience. Research in Post‐Compulsory Education, 15(4), 377-386.
  
• Cassell, M. A. (2011). Bullying in academe: Prevalent, significant, and incessant. Contemporary Issues in Education Research, 4(5), 33.
  
• Wyatt-Nichol, H. (2014). Strategies for Maintaining Sanity and Success. In Career Moves (pp. 9-16). SensePublishers.
  
• Pahadi, T. N. Secondary and Higher Secondary School Teachers’ Experience of Workplace Bullying: Prevalence, Nature, Effects and Prevention.
  
• Bartow, A. (2009). Internet Defamation as Profit Center: The Monetization of Online Harassment. Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, 32(2).
  
• Richards, J. (2007). Workers are doing it for themselves: Examining creative employee application of Web 2.0 communication technology. Work, Employment and Society (WES), 12-14.
  
• Keashly, L., & Neuman, J. H. (2010). Faculty experiences with bullying in higher education: Causes, consequences, and management. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 32(1), 48-70.
  
• Bullying in academia: ‘professors are supposed to be stressed! That’s the job. - The Guardian
  
• Duffy, M., & Sperry, L. (2014). Overcoming mobbing: A recovery guide for workplace aggression and bullying. Oxford University Press.
  
  and many more...

The obvious question to ask is what if anything has been achieved. Ten years ago the concept of 'workplace bullying in academia' did not exist except of the writings (and books) of Professor Kenneth Westhues. Now there is even a Wikipedia entry. Has all this changed anything? Perhaps not. There is certainly more awareness, and this is the first stage before... Any change is likely to take much time, but is this a good enough reason to give up?

Lastly, we need to mention the many who contacted us and requested anonymity while they were dealing with extreme cases of workplace bullying. Their fear was that if their names became known, this would compromise any chance of returning back to work, returning to a professional career. Sadly, the statistics indicate that once an academic is bullied out of work, very seldom they get the chance to get back their job. Often their professional career is ruined. And so, silence prevails while many suffer...

"Nothing strengthens authority as much as silence." Leonardo da Vinci
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men [or good women] do nothing." Edmund Burke

Bullying in Academe

Bullying behavior at your institution can result in lawsuits, high employee turnover costs, productivity declines, low morale and many other problems, writes Raymonda Burgman.

June 15, 2016

By Raymonda Burgman

Are you trying to lead a committee, department, unit, school, college, university or group through change yet have a bully on your team?

Whenever you meet with colleagues to discuss a change project, this person “aids” the team in eliminating information she says is not germane to the group’s scope of work or charge. As other team members start to speak, this person interrupts and changes the topic. Team members leave the meeting saying how productive the meeting was because they got to the heart of the matter. But the actual fact is that they do not know how to respond to the chilly climate during the meeting because they feel threatened or humiliated. And each feels isolated, thinking he or she is the only one who perceives the comments as harsh and off-putting.

You are not the only one experiencing such situations. According to Morgan State University professor Leah P. Hollis, in Bully in the Ivory Tower: How Aggression and Incivility Erode American Higher Education, more than 60 percent of respondents in an independent study of 175 four-year colleges reported experiencing workplace bullying, compared to less than 40 percent of the general public.

A biting email message, excluding a colleague from the office happy hour invitation or using the silent treatment when asked for an opinion about a new idea proposed by a colleague -- these all are forms of manipulation that we now recognize as bullying. If a supervisor or colleague removes areas of responsibility without explanation, yells at employees in public, constantly monitors employees or sabotages or discounts the quality of an employee’s work, it’s bullying.

The University of Louisville Ombuds Office offers their campus a self-help guide on bullying and succinctly defines bullying as “repeated, unreasonable actions of individuals (or a group) directed toward an employee (or a group of employees), which is intended to intimidate and creates a risk to the health and safety of the employee(s).” In the academic environment, bullying derails not only our hopes for a collaborative workplace but also the learning and discovery that are our mission. And with so many people impacted, you can imagine the emotional and psychological toll: anxiety, insomnia, low morale, trouble concentrating and fear of humiliation.

In 2014, HERS partnered with several organizations to look at the pathways to senior leadership in higher education. The research, in which 35 women presidents and senior officers were interviewed, described positive and negative aspects of being top leaders in their respective institutions. Two negative aspects are eerily similar to bullying: scrutiny and criticism, and not fitting in or being heard. Resistance to change and lack of buy-in, in their most extreme forms, are also bullying.

Statistically, men perpetrate most bullying in the workplace, but women are more likely to bully other women and tend to use less explicit forms of bullying. Women may not physically bully, but they will use verbal or indirect bullying, social alienation, intimidation bullying, or cyberbullying. If you witness such incidents, you may question whether you left bullying on a grade school playground.

The High Cost of Bullying

For the leader who encounters a bully on her team, here are some reasons why you should take action.

Usually bullying is about fear and insecurity. Differences in others make some people uncomfortable and foretell troubling consequences if such behavior runs rampant on your campus for faculty members, administrators and students from diverse backgrounds. In her research, Hollis found that bullies disproportionately target women, African-Americans and members of the LGBTQA community. And if your college or university is pursuing vigorous diversity and inclusion initiatives, such groups will be greatly affected if a systemic bullying problem exists. The people your institution most wants to attract, retain and develop may have the shortest employment or time on your campus. Those targeted by a bully tend to lose their jobs or quit.

The cost of such staff turnover is high. Some researchers believe workplace bullying costs at a minimum $250 million annually throughout all workplaces. Consider replacing a chief career services administrator. According to data from the College and University Professional Association of Human Resources, the average salary for a person in that position is $74,423, and a conservative estimate is that direct replacement costs will range from 40-60 percent of that salary, or almost $45,000 at the upper end. The total turnover cost, which includes an assortment of benefits, search costs and other impacts to your campus, ranges from 90-200 percent of the employee’s salary. In the worst case, that means it may cost almost $150,000 to replace a single employee.

Can your campus afford to lose $1.5 million because 10 employees voluntarily leave your campus due to avoidable dysfunction? Employee retention especially matters today, given the limited financial resources available on many campuses.

And, in addition to such high turnover costs, your institution may face potential lawsuits, health care costs and productivity declines as a result of bullying behavior. At the very least, in a collaborative work environment, a bully or bullies will impede you from reaching desired outcomes.

Options to Pursue

How can you as an institutional leader help lessen the risk and incidences of bullying -- potentially saving money and building campus morale? Taking action by learning to be a better ally is best for handling and reducing the risk of bullying. Developing people is the business of higher education, and when we work together to reach our goals, we are at our best.

A bully often lacks empathy, so you must teach and require this conduct if you are to make headway against bullying behavior. And you can’t assume that only certain types of people will engage in such behavior -- anyone can be a bully -- which is why you should make “no bullying” a broad mandate.
As you begin forming a no-bullying (and healthy) work environment, ask yourself and colleagues these three simple questions:

1. Does your supervisor have a positive attitude?
2. Does the administration respect all employees?
3. Do your colleagues respect you?

Answering these questions will help you identify the depth and breadth of campus programs needed for faculty members, administrators and students. Sponsoring or championing a course or workshop on ethics and civility in higher education -- open to all students, faculty and staff -- can serve as a signal of community standards of behavior. An active human resources department, which guides people and develops clear policies about bullying, as well as spaces and systems that allow employees to voice discomfort or concerns, is also important.

You must communicate and ensure that bullying behavior won’t be tolerated in any setting at any time. It’s for the greater good to have collaborative work environments where all employees are valued and appreciated.

At the heart of every campus are people who aren’t looking for salvation for one target of bullying but liberation for all of us as we pursue new modes of operation and systems. As campus leaders, our principal strength is that we are not lone agents of good. We can reach out and work with other people to eradicate bullying and create and sustain a community of thinkers, dreamers, learners and innovators. Bullying is everyone’s issue.

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/06/15/advice-dealing-bullying-behavior-essay?utm_content=bufferfad27&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=IHEbuffer

Abuse of Phd students

My PhD was a complete setup at Brunel university London. They accidentally sent me an email where one of the professors threatened to send me one of her scary emails (ONE OF HER SCARY EMAILS!!!). In a bid to cover up I got a letter of withdrawal in response to my complaint about the email. The review panel of doctors included one that advised me to use hard drug (YES HARD DRUGS) and I have a witness on the day he advised. The other two are addicted to nicotine gum (which results in bipolar). Sadly, one of them was my supervisor. I intend to fight for my right. Can anyone give me advice on how to bring this unworthy group down? Advise is needed. Oh, and I do have copies of the emails which they accidentally sent to me.

Anonymous

DEFENSIBLE ELIMINATIONS

Kenneth Westhues, 2006

The single best way to understand academic mobbing is to study many different cases of it, thereby to grasp the core reality amidst its many different expressions, details, and circumstances. 

Documentation on many such cases is available online (some recent ones here, for example), in my five books on this subject, on many other websites and in many other books.

A complementary way to understand academic mobbing is to study instances of professors being punished or losing their jobs that do not qualify as mobbing cases. One learns to recognize this organizational pathology the same way one does a poisonous plant: by inspecting not only varied specimens in varied locales but also a variety of nonpoisonous look-alikes. One way to grasp what academic mobbing is is to study examples of what it is not.

Below are four examples of professorial elimination that do not quite capture what academic mobbing means, though they resemble it in some respects. I hope to add further examples to this webpage in coming months — toward the end of bringing the subject of study into still sharper focus.

(1) Valery Fabrikant's loss of his job at Concordia University in 1992, and his imprisonment for life. There is a great deal of evidence, especially in the 1994 report by Harry Arthurs et al (summarized in the perceptive article by Morris Wolfe), of a process of administrative mobbing targeting Fabrikant in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is not far-fetched to understand his shooting spree in August of 1992, resulting in the deaths of four colleagues, as having been precipitated by many years of ill-treatment, harassment, shunning, and humiliation. Yet once Fabrikant had lashed back at his tormentors in murderous rage, there was nothing to do but lock him away. His being convicted of murder and imprisoned on that account does not deny his talent as an engineer or professor, nor should it be seen as retrospective justification of the earlier ill-treatment of him. But no fanatic ganging up at all is implied by the elimination not just from the university but from a free society of a man who has committed multiple murders. (For further discussion of the Fabrikant case, see Eliminating Professors, Chapter 10.)

(2) The firing of Lana Nguyen at the University of Regina in 2001. The Regina administration was prepared to let Nguyen resign quietly (a common indicator of non-mobbing) until news of her offense was leaked to the press. Only then did it commission the public inquiry by Stuart McKinnon and Constance Rooke, which laid out the facts of the case in detail. Essentially, Nguyen was an imposter. Holding only an undergraduate degree, she had laid claim to the PhD earned by her ex-husband and used it to land a position on Regina's engineering faculty. Students had protested en masse against her teaching. Her lawyer argued that male faculty, administrators, and/or students had ganged up on her. There may or may not have been some truth in that allegation, but the fact remains that she committed a clear offense, major falsification of credentials, and was not at all qualified to teach in an engineering faculty. Ganged up on or not, she deserved to lose her job. (For further discussion of the Nguyen case, see The Envy of Excellence, pp. 210, 228.)

(3) Eric Poehlman's resignation from the Universities of Vermont in 2001 and of Montreal in 2005. According to a press release in 2005, from the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Poehlman admitted that he falsified and fabricated data in articles and grant applications about his medical research. A student working with him had discovered the fraud and reported it to university authorities. While under investigation at Vermont in 2001, Poehlman moved to an endowed chair at Montreal. Investigations continued by both the University of Vermont and the U.S. government, which had funded his research. As investigators unearthed ever more conclusive evidence of his fraud and as criminal charges came to be laid, Poehlman decided to admit guilt and settle with the U.S. government. He resigned from the University of Montreal in January of 2005. This case appears from press reports as one involving a clear, academically fatal offense by a professor highly regarded by administrators and colleagues at both Vermont and Montreal. It does not at all appear to qualify as a mobbing case.

(4) The dismissal of history professor Leo Johnson from the University of Waterloo in 1983. Having worked with Johnson and read some of his work, I can personally attest to his talent and assiduity as an historian and teacher. Being a Marxist, he was not popular with the Waterloo administration, and he had never completed his Ph.D., but he survived on the faculty well enough until 1982, when he was charged and then pled guilty to nine counts of indecently assaulting young girls, and one count of having sexual intercourse with a girl under 14 years of age. He was sentenced to two years in prison. The university faced the choice of granting him unpaid leave to serve his prison term or firing him. Following the policy and procedures then in place, the university chose the latter. Then and now, I believe this was the right decision. Criminal conviction should not automatically result in a professor's dismissal. It depends on the crime. Sexual predation on children seems to me, as to most people, an offense more than serious enough to warrant elimination from a university position. (For further discussion of the Johnson case, see The Envy of Excellence, p. 36.)

http://www.kwesthues.com/defensible.htm

The many faces of Prof. Hassan Abdalla...

The one on the right...

Producing anxiety in the neoliberal university

 Abstract

This article investigates processes of neoliberalization of the academy. It argues that neoliberalism entails shifts from exchange to competition, from equality to inequality,and turns academics into human capital. It suggests that auditing systems are key mechanisms of neoliberalization that produce unhealthylevels of anxiety and stress in the academy. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the neoliberal production of anxiety in academic faculty members in universities in Northern Europe. The paper focuses on neoliberalization as it is instantiated through audit and ranking systems designed to produce academia as a space of economic efficiency and intensifying competition. We suggest that powerful forms of competition and ranking of academic performance have been developed in Northern Europe. These systems are differentiated and differentiating,and they serve to both index and facilitate the neoliberalization of the academy. Moreover, these audit and ranking systems produce an ongoing sense of anxiety among academic workers. We argue that neoliberalismin the academy is part of a wider system of anxiety production arising as part of the so-called soft governance of everything, including life itself, in contemporary late liberalism.

Introduction

...Why might we care about this? Perhaps the recent death of Professor Stefan Grimm of Imperial College, London, provides a particularly graphic example of the impact that rising levels of anxiety and stress are having in the academy. It also illustrates how that stress is linked directly to systems of “performance assessment.” Professor Grimm was found dead in his home in September of 2014 after complaining that he was to be fired by Imperial College for failure to meet professorial grant “income targets” of £200,000 per annum as a Principal Investigator (PI) (Colquhoun 2014; Parr 2014a, 2014b, 2015). One month after his death— which was ruled to be a suicide by asphyxiation—an email was sent from Professor Grimm’s Gmail account to colleagues at Imperial College that outlined what he deemed to be his poor treatment. This email stated:

On May 30th 13 my boss came into my office together with his PA and ask[ed] me what grants I had. After I enumerated them I was told that this was not enough and that I had to leave the College within one year max...

There are, of course, other signs of the rising levels of anxiety and stress amongst university faculty. The Guardian newspaper, for example, has put together a collection of more than 40 articles under the title Mental Health: The University in Crisis and with the by-line: “Mental health issues have become a growing problem among students and academics. This series will uncover a hidden side to university life ” (The Guardian n.d.). The New York Times recently published an article about the rise of suicide deaths on campus, linking many of these deaths to the “ culture of perfection ” that predominates in university settings, especially among academic faculty members (Scelfo 2015). This is not surprising given existing levels of work-related psychological stress in the academy...

Complete paper at: https://goo.gl/wkOczp

Tenure Denied - Dartmouth College

At Dartmouth, an Asian-American professor receives unanimous English department backing and is rejected at higher levels. The same happened to a black historian at the college. Many see a disturbing pattern. Tenure denials happen all the time, and they’re most often accepted by fellow professors and students as an unpleasant byproduct of the tenure system. But sometimes such denials rock an institution.

That’s what’s happening now at Dartmouth College, regarding the failed bid of Aimee Bahng, an assistant professor of English who faculty members and students alike say deserves a permanent position on campus. Beyond Bahng, concerned professors say the case speaks to bigger questions about commitments to minority faculty members, interdisciplinary research and shared governance at Dartmouth and beyond.

“The issue of faculty governance at Dartmouth is a heated one, and it extends to broader issues than [this] tenure case -- though that has been a trigger for many of the broader discussions we're having now -- and though it is widely perceived as unjust and shortsighted,” said Annelise Orleck, a professor of history at Dartmouth who criticized the tenure decision at a recent town hall about the findings of a campus climate survey. Several hundred faculty members, students and staff reportedly were in attendance.

In addition to the town hall, professors and students have taken their protest to Twitter under the hashtags #fight4facultyofcolor and #dontdoDartmouth; the latter features students and academics advising would-be applicants to avoid the institution. Public details on Bahng’s bid are few, and she did not respond to a request for comment. But fellow faculty members confirmed that she was unanimously approved by the department's tenure committee. Her bid fell short higher up in review chain, which includes the associate dean, the dean of the faculty and the arts and sciences faculty’s Committee Advisory to the President.

Dartmouth says it’s bound by confidentiality surrounding the tenure process, but that unanimous department decisions don’t always lead to tenure. And that’s true -- the departmental tenure committee merely makes a recommendation. Yet at many institutions, it’s rare for a unanimous faculty vote to be overturned. Orleck and others on campus say Bahng’s case is similar to several others in recent years, in which department votes for tenure and unanimous recommendations for tenure by outside reviewers are overruled by deans or the Committee Advisory to the President.

A number allegedly have been faculty members of color who were respected by their colleagues and students. One such case is that of Derrick White, now a visiting associate professor of history. White did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but his name and failed tenure bid last year -- despite the unanimous vote of his departmental peers and outside reviewers -- have been mentioned in many of the conversations about Bahng.

 In short, the most recent case appears to be something of the last straw on a campus that’s already facing criticism for what many see as a lack of commitment to diversity...

More info: https://goo.gl/BlkVP6

Useless UNISON...

I have been a UNISON member for just under 10 years. I ended up being disciplined and even though the process is still ongoing I believe and has been so for nearly two years, the rep clearly has not read any of the papers. When I put this to him in Jan 2016 and expressed my frustration that despite me explaining verbally to him and providing him with all the information he has requested he still doesn't understand. I am in a bullying situation and UNISION say that I have not followed advice so have refused representation...

Anonymous

UCU is not much better...

Charles Mitchell

http://www.paintinginitaly.com/charles-mitchel-painting-tutor