I am so scared...

...I just came across this blog, as I contemplate some of the consequences of bullying from a couple of PhD supervisors. The bullying is also (like the blog author and commenters) from the same origin as this blog. I am so scared, I have to write cryptically, even when this post is anonymous. I am not that far into the my research project, but already, if the comments and experiences I receive are as common as this blog suggests, then, the people who are entrusted with a duty of care to help and guide people are perhaps falling short of professional standards of implied common ethical practices and codes of conduct that might be more readily observed in other professions. I wish there was a forum for help and advice. I am fearful of tomorrow's consequences and I'm not sure what do to. I am motivated by my passion for the project I have proposed and the possibility of helping marginalised people. My project has significant impact potential, yet, I am not sure of my future...

Anonymous

Prompted by complaints, Temple taps law firm to probe education college leadership

...Conditions had reached a breaking point with Gregory M. Anderson, dean of Temple’s college of education and human development, she wrote to the university’s provost in August 2019. In a six-page memo, Goldrick-Rab complained about “hostile behavior” by Anderson and asked that she and the center she runs be transferred to another college within the university.

Anderson once stood over her and yelled for 14 minutes, she wrote, despite her repeatedly asking him to stop. When she told him she wanted a transfer, he allegedly responded: “You’re not going anywhere. You can’t — I own you.”

Asked this month about the memo, obtained by The Inquirer, she declined to comment. But her complaints weren’t unique. About half of the 70 full-time faculty in July signed a letter in which they raised issues about the dean’s leadership, saying faculty were “deeply concerned about faculty members’ loss of voice in our own college, and about a growing climate of fear, mistrust, and intimidation.”

...Temple would not describe the scope of the education college review. A faculty member interviewed by the lawyers said they indicated they were looking at the culture and climate of the college, the decisions around program changes, and whether there were questionable ethical decisions.

In a statement, Anderson said he is cooperating with the review.

“As a Black academic whose research focuses on access and equity, I am particularly committed to accountability,” he said. “University deans must make difficult, and sometimes unpopular, decisions each day. I believe once the process has concluded, the facts will show that all my decisions adhere to university policies and contractual obligations.”

...Aneta Pavlenko, a tenured professor of applied linguistics, resigned in December 2016 after she said the dean unfairly attempted to increase her course load and assign her to classes she wasn’t qualified to teach. The move, she contended, was part of retaliation after she shared an email with graduate students in 2014 about a plan to discontinue all graduate assistantships for doctoral students. She said a program coordinator position and other responsibilities also were taken from her...

From: https://www.inquirer.com/education/temple-gregory-anderson-education-college-complaints-faculty-20210118.html

“Bullying and harassment are rife in my workplace”: Adelaide Uni staff raise red flags

 

University of Adelaide employees have described a workplace culture of “veiled terror”, where bullying is “the norm” and senior leaders are focussed on turning the institution into a “degree factory”, an Independent Commissioner Against Corruption survey reveals.

In an email to staff yesterday – seen by InDaily – University of Adelaide interim Vice-Chancellor Professor Mike Brooks wrote that the survey findings made “uncomfortable and challenging reading”, but he was “firmly committed to improving the integrity and accountability” of the 140-year institution.

The survey results, linked to staff in Brooks’ email, were used to inform the ICAC’s “University Integrity Survey” of South Australia’s top three universities, which was released to the public earlier this month.

Surveys were conducted with staff at the University of Adelaide, University of South Australia and Flinders University between March and April this year to determine the “attitudes and experiences” of employees regarding corruption and inappropriate conduct at their respective workplaces.

Of the 1364 respondents to the Adelaide University survey, 31.6 per cent reported experiencing bullying and harassment at work, while a further 62.7 per cent claimed they encountered those behaviours in the past three years...

https://indaily.com.au/news/2020/12/17/bullying-and-harassment-are-rife-in-my-workplace-adelaide-uni-staff-raise-red-flags/

Imperial College London’s Alice Gast ‘very sorry’ for bullying

 

Imperial College London’s president has issued an apology and has faced a disciplinary hearing after an independent investigation concluded that she had bullied someone.

Alice Gast and Muir Sanderson, the university’s chief financial officer, have also been offered coaching, following an investigation into allegations of bullying and a dysfunctional culture, which came to light last week.

Jane McNeill QC, who conducted the investigation, found that Professor Gast had bullied one person, while Mr Sanderson was found to have bullied two colleagues between late February and mid-March.

The QC recommended that Imperial’s chair of council John Allan hold disciplinary hearings against the pair, which have now concluded, and that he should oversee reviews of the institution’s bullying policy and governance structure.

Imperial said it was in the process of implementing recommendations that annual appraisals for the president’s direct reports are conducted “with improved record-keeping and oversight from HR” and for the introduction of a 360-degree appraisal system – where feedback is kept anonymous – for senior leaders.

It will also implement further training on processes around bullying and harassment and on the use of settlement agreements for senior managers.

...Professor Gast said she was “sorry that, at times, I made some senior staff feel unappreciated and left out. I am very sorry that I bullied someone.”

“I have offered full apologies to colleagues who have been personally affected. Making difficult decisions, often under time pressure, is expected of a leader and I have fallen short. I have learned a lot from this experience and have focused on using it as a catalyst for positive change for me and my leadership team,” she said...

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/imperial-college-londons-alice-gast-very-sorry-bullying

Wayne’s world: How universities are crushing academics

 

...Depending on how determined a university might be to scale the research ladder, it could go as far as recruiting an entire suite of research “superstars” from overseas on a part-time basis, fly them in occasionally to Australian shores, maybe for a few weeks to give a masterclass or workshop, and then just as quickly fly them back out again to their respective home campuses. These “fly in/fly out” professors would, in return, hand over their bulky CV’s to their Australian hosts, who would put these towards the goal of climbing up the ERA ladder, in the hope of one day reaching the highest rung — the stratospheric “well above world standard” (whatever that means).

...The teaching-research nexus is further undermined when those who are charged with teaching duties are saddled with increasingly heavier teaching loads each year, so as to help fund the activities of the full-time researchers and the institutes that house them. As a result, a lecturer’s capacity for original research and to remain up-to-date in their field is weakened, and students do not get the benefit of the kind of expertise that should be part of a higher education.

A further consequence concerns the ways in which research is controlled and circumscribed, where the attempt to ascend the league tables or attract greater funds or citations increases the pressure towards hyper-specialisation and publication in a narrow band of outlets (usually obscure journals with ridiculously low acceptance rates). 

A tragic case in point is Stefan Grimm, Professor of Toxicology at Imperial College London, who had, by any reasonable measure, established a highly productive track-record over two decades in his field of research. Despite this, he was told he would, effectively, be fired if he did not bring in an “attributable share” of £200,000 per year in research funding. In September 2014 he killed himself, at the age of 51. In an email circulated to his colleagues shortly before his death, he wrote about his university’s managers: “What these guys don’t know is that they destroy lives. Well, they certainly destroyed mine.”

...Among the countless, painfully familiar comments on blogs and op-eds, I came across the following from an anonymous academic: “Here I am — I’ve ‘made it’ — and all I feel is resentment, burnout, and bitterness towards the university and the system.” Another, after going year in, year out, from contract to contract and campus to campus, eventually acknowledges: “I’m done, I can’t do this anymore. It’s not me; it’s the system. The system is broken. I am not a failure; the system failed me.”

The grief and anger, however, gradually morph into contentment and joy as one moves beyond the academy, finding in the most unexpected places (even the corporate sector) what one was denied for so long: their voice and dignity, a sense of liberation, feeling valued and fulfilled, and an anxiety-free work-life balance to boot...

The movie version of Wayne’s World ends in disaster: having sold out to the corporate world, Wayne ends up being fired from the very show he helped create, losing his girlfriend, and even losing his house and his friend Garth to a fire. But, being Hollywood, the plot is revised in order to reveal the “true ending” where its characters are reconciled to one another and finally find love and success.

The university sector in Australia has been in crisis for some time now — a condition that has been recently exacerbated by the loss of international revenue and the prospect of huge staff cuts due to the pandemic, as well as by government attacks on subjects like philosophy which do not produce “job-ready graduates” (or so federal education minister Dan Tehan says). But this also provides the university sector with a unique opportunity, if not its “last chance,” as it was recently put by Simon Cooper.
To seek to justify the value of higher education by “spruiking the economic and technocratic achievements of the university is to learn nothing at all,” writes Cooper. A wholesale reconceptualisation of the nature and purpose of the university is required...

From: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/universities-in-crises-and-what-to-do-about-it/12714252

Ten rules for succeeding in academia through upward toxicity

Think the way to forge a brilliant career in academe is to produce good research, teach skilfully and mentor generously? That arduous approach works for some – but there is an easier way.

Universities sing the song of meritocracy but dance to a different tune. In reality, they will do everything to reward and protect their most destructive, abusive and uncooperative faculty. The more thoroughly such scholars poison departments, programmes and individual lives, the more universities double down to please them.

Universities are even willing to ruin their own reputations and alienate their alumni to protect bullies and abusers. They might think that reputation management demands that such behaviour be swept under the carpet, but they ought to know that the scandals will break eventually, and that the cover-up will make them look worse. Some universities even hire people in the full knowledge of abuse allegations against them, thereby becoming invested in keeping secret their decision to put their students in harm’s way.

You too can become upwardly toxic; if you are the sort of person who likes harassing less powerful people, you will enjoy it, too. It is not necessary to actually be a genius scholar or administrator. Once enough people buy into the elaborate fiction of your irreplaceability, everyone will play along. To maintain it, universities will devalue the work of colleagues and students who are more brilliant, productive or collegial. These people, in turn, will internalise the message that they are inferior, and will be too busy dealing with their shattered confidence to pose a threat.

Your indiscretions – on occasion, even your crimes – will be kept quiet through regimes of fear. Threaten lawsuits, repercussions, closed-off opportunities. The more people cave to fear, the more they become implicated in shared guilt and work to maintain silence whether they want to or not. Colleagues who used to get along fine will be divided by resentment of their mutual failure to stand up to you.

Upward toxicity can work in any industry, but it is particularly effective in a career with few escape routes. If your students and colleagues want to get away from you, it could mean moving their family to another country, or even abandoning their life’s work altogether. Most are forced to deal with you for the long term.

There are many fringe benefits to being upwardly toxic. Use service assignments to benefit yourself at the expense of colleagues and you will magically find yourself doing less service. You will not get certain duties because you are not trusted. Of course, you can also ignore remaining work; your colleagues will learn to compensate accordingly.

Carry out a steady programme of harassment and gradually you will be released from duties to students, too. They will tell each other to avoid you. Your colleagues will take on extra work to protect them from your roving hands. Eventually, you will mentor only a select group of acolytes, who always do your bidding. If you behave egregiously enough, you may even win the grand prize: paid leave from teaching, which you can use to publish more research, bolstering your reputation for genius.

Still unclear? Try following these 10 easy rules:

1. Cultivate powerful friends. Gain power over as many publication organs and scholarly bodies as possible and use them to promote your clique.
2. Do nothing for anyone unimportant.
3. Find a less successful scholar who will fear and admire you. Flatter them into becoming your sidekick and count on them to denigrate your colleagues and defend your reputation.
4. Crush the confidence of students with the potential to surpass you. Or sleep with them. Or both.
5. Manipulate students and employees into feeling they owe you, long after you no longer have power over them. Make outrageous, unethical promises they will feel bad about accepting or refusing.
6. Promote a zero-sum model of success. Anyone else’s gain is your loss. Claim your students’ work as your own and reassign their best ideas to your favourites. Collaboration is for losers.
7. Systematically badmouth your colleagues so you can improve your own standing. Shut out the students of rival scholars. Mock those rivals for having less successful students.
8. Gaslight and spread misinformation about anyone who stands up to you. Complain about the “rumour mill” and “witch-hunts”. Accuse your critics of jealousy. 
9. Ask loudly why no one is willing to come forward officially to substantiate the rumours of abuse against you. If someone overcomes their terror, call them crazy.
10. Lie brazenly. Accuse others of lying.

By following these rules, you can absorb enormous amounts of attention, time and resources with impunity. Sure, there will be critics. They will grumble among themselves that universities ought to foster talent, not protect abuse, and that research and education should serve society, not the gratification of a few egos. They may even call for a breaking of the conspiratorial silence that drives good people out of academe and leaves psyches shattered.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/ten-rules-succeeding-academia-through-upward-toxicity#node-comments

Don’t worry. They will be too afraid even to share this article.

How Narcissistic Leaders Destroy from Within

When the person at the top is malignant and self-serving, unethical behavior cascades through the organization and becomes legitimized.

What traits do we look for in our leaders? Ask someone what distinguishes a forceful leader, in business or politics, and they’re likely to mention self-confidence and charisma. Great leaders, we say, are bold and strong-willed. They have a vision for creating something new or remaking a company or a country. They challenge conventional wisdom and are slowed by neither self-doubt nor criticism.

These are the individuals whom corporate boards tend to select as CEOs, especially in times of upheaval, when the status quo is failing. They’re adept at self-promotion and shine in job interviews. Then, once they’re in power, we find out who they really are.

Sometimes they’re as good as their promise. But many turn out to be not just confident but arrogant and entitled. Instead of being bold, they’re merely impulsive. They lack empathy and exploit others without compunction. They ignore expert advice and treat those who differ with contempt and hostility. Above all, they demand personal loyalty. They are, in short, raging narcissists.

Charles A. O’Reilly, the Frank E. Buck Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business, studies how the personalities of leaders shape the culture of organizations and the behavior of those who work in them. In a paper with Jennifer Chatman of the University of California, Berkeley, he reviews the literature on narcissistic leaders, encompassing more than 150 studies, and draws some somber and urgent conclusions.

“There are leaders who may be abusive jerks but aren’t really narcissists,” O’Reilly says. “The distinction is what motivates them. Are they driven to achieve some larger purpose? Do they really want to make the company or the country better, or accomplish some crazy goal like making electric cars mainstream and maybe colonizing Mars along the way? Or is it really all about their own aggrandizement?”

...Because narcissists are fundamentally driven by their own self-interest, lack empathy, and are less constrained by ethical standards, they can cause tremendous harm once in power and can even put the organizations they lead at risk, O’Reilly says.

Field studies have shown that narcissistic CEOs are more likely to engage in fraud and other types of white-collar crime, manipulate earnings, and pursue aggressive tax avoidance. And a 2013 study of U.S. presidents found that those who scored higher on the narcissism scale were more likely to abuse their authority (not to mention, on a personal level, their marriage vows).

Along with Bernadette Doerr of UC Berkeley, O’Reilly recently published the results of three experiments showing that narcissistic people in general have lower levels of integrity — meaning their words and deeds do not align — and that that they are more likely to lie, cheat, and steal in order to prove their special status.

Ascending to a position of power only reinforces these tendencies, O’Reilly says. “Being elected or appointed to office validates their sense of entitlement. At the same time, even without narcissism, power disinhibits — it encourages people to indulge their worst instincts — so now you’ve got the two working together.”

And when narcissists do achieve some success, it reinforces their belief that they know better than others, so that they feel even more justified in ignoring the advice of experts and relying on their own instincts. “Success chips away at their hold on reality,” O’Reilly writes in his review.

Not surprisingly, studies also show that narcissists’ belief in their superiority is based on scant evidence, validated neither by objective measures of intelligence or competence nor by performance reviews from peers or subordinates. One recent paper on corporate decision-making found that grandiosity in leaders was associated with greater risk-taking but not better financial returns.

As a result, narcissists often feel they don’t receive the admiration and credit they deserve, and they can seem pathologically consumed with resentment. That can take the form of petulance, aggression, unhinged public rants, and abuse of underlings. Narcissistic CEOs often involve their firms in costly litigation. In the narcissist’s worldview, other human beings must be either acolytes or enemies...

From: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/how-narcissistic-leaders-destroy-within

Was This Professor Dangerous?

Michael Jay Shively was rigorous — on that much, everyone agrees.

Over his 26-year career at Utah Valley University, the biology professor took pride in the anatomy courses he built and the hard work they required.

Students who made it through often credited Shively with their successful medical careers. He prepared them for the demands of urgent care or of the emergency room. Other students were less charmed by his deadly multiple-choice exams. The workload, they felt, was beyond reasonable.

He also butted heads with colleagues, including a junior faculty member in the department, who saw him as an imposing micromanager.

For a while, frustrations with Shively stayed dormant. Last year, they erupted. On March 25, 2019, Shively received a single-page letter from the president that listed six types of misconduct. The letter accused him of arbitrary and capricious course requirements and grading, and of violating the academic freedom of colleagues. The letter also accused him of  intimidating and threatening students and employees.

That day, he was suspended and escorted from campus.

An investigation ensued. According to his family, Shively grew anxious and depressed. He felt investigators were withholding details that would enable him to defend himself.

Nearly five months after he was suspended, before a decision was announced, Shively died by suicide. He was 73. This February, his widow sued Utah Valley, claiming the investigation had caused Shively to suffer “a spiraling decline.” Utah Valley denies any responsibility for Shively’s death.

...In early 2019, a group of students who’d been privately swapping concerns about Shively decided to speak up. A couple began collecting stories and eventually sent complaints through EthicsPoint, the university’s anonymous reporting portal, as well as emailing administrators directly.

On January 4, a visually impaired student filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that Shively had failed to accommodate him in a timely manner. (The case was closed in July after the office found insufficient evidence to support the discrimination claim.)

The next day, Steve Baker, a recent Utah Valley graduate and former department assistant, filed a complaint through EthicsPoint.

...That the university grossly mismanaged the investigation, and that the complainants raised legitimate and serious concerns. 

That someone can be a good friend to some, the faculty member wrote, while quietly abusing others.

What looks like guidance to a senior colleague can feel like control to the more junior. A professor’s high expectations can feel like impossible ones to students.

And what looks like discretion during an investigation can feel like isolation to the person under the microscope. Allegations can feel like an avalanche.

You might not see the damage. You might not have meant to do it. But it’s done.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers free and confidential support for people in distress, and for those who need to help someone else. To reach the hotline, call 1-800-273-8255. More information can be found at suicidepreventionlifeline.org.

From: https://bit.ly/2ZgSK9g

Ten rules for succeeding in academia through upward toxicity

Cultivate powerful friends. Gain power over as many publication organs and scholarly bodies as possible and use them to promote your clique.

Do nothing for anyone unimportant.

Find a less successful scholar who will fear and admire you. Flatter them into becoming your sidekick and count on them to denigrate your colleagues and defend your reputation.

Crush the confidence of students with the potential to surpass you. Or sleep with them. Or both.

Manipulate students and employees into feeling they owe you, long after you no longer have power over them. Make outrageous, unethical promises they will feel bad about accepting or refusing.

Promote a zero-sum model of success. Anyone else’s gain is your loss. Claim your students’ work as your own and reassign their best ideas to your favourites. Collaboration is for losers.

Systematically badmouth your colleagues so you can improve your own standing. Shut out the students of rival scholars. Mock those rivals for having less successful students.

Gaslight and spread misinformation about anyone who stands up to you. Complain about the “rumour mill” and “witch-hunts”. Accuse your critics of jealousy. 

Ask loudly why no one is willing to come forward officially to substantiate the rumours of abuse against you. If someone overcomes their terror, call them crazy.

Lie brazenly. Accuse others of lying.

From: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/ten-rules-succeeding-academia-through-upward-toxicity

What kind of people allow themselves to become a narcissist's 'flying monkeys'?

The narcissist is akin to the drug pusher. The flying monkey is akin to someone who hooks up with the drug pusher to score.

• Flying monkeys think like narcissists (splitting black and white, exaggerations, never letting the truth get in the way of a good story, painting twisted stories and interpretations, word salad for thoughts)

• Flying monkeys are addicted to the same emotional states as narcissists (the epic mindset, drama, crazymaking, chaos for emotions, excruciating boredom, black dog, love-bombing highs, sadism, schadenfreude, malicious envy, they’re haters) 

• Flying monkeys suffer the same character deficits as narcissists (low compassion, low truthfulness, low conscientiousness, callousness for character) 

• Flying monkeys are as twisted as narcissists (compassion for the narcissist, rapist, murderer, thug, and conveniently forget about the victim or their family, dark empathy, dark triad type personality characteristics for moral values. 

But there is one difference between flying monkeys and narcissists. Narcissists know how to obtain what they both seek, flying monkeys don’t. Narcissists are in direct communion with the realm that flying monkeys only fleetingly receive but crave.

So narcissists have better imaginations than flying monkeys to invent clever stories that paint a delightfully twisted morality, more chutzpah to violate boundaries that flying monkeys wished they had, and more violently high and low emotional states that drive them to action.

Flying monkeys admire and envy narcissists because they look up to them. They don’t see narcissism as a bad thing. In fact they don’t see narcissism the way we see it at all, they see it as a package with good traits they wished they themselves had. The drama that narcissists create are works of art to the flying monkeys, highly entertaining distractions that offset their own sordid and dull lives. Narcissists are often the centerpiece in their gossip and tales. Of course, they don’t call them narcissists, more like heroes.

Narcissists are like the novelist, director, artist. Flying monkeys are like their eager fans hungering for the next book, movie, or artwork. They can’t get enough of it because the work speaks to them like nothing else does, but they cannot produce any of it themselves. Actually flying monkeys produce abuse and twisted gaslighting in their daily lives, they just do not produce works of art of the caliber of their adored narcissist. Narcissists create the smut that flying monkeys consume. In return, flying monkeys pay obeisance.

Narcissists are like the powerfully delusional cult leader. Flying monkeys are like their delusional followers. Only someone capable of a sufficient degree of the right kind of delusion would find that cult’s doctrines enticing, otherwise, they would simply find it disturbing, twisted, or repulsive.

Only people who don’t find the things narcissists say or do disturbing, crooked, or repellant can stand them.

Being fooled by a narcissist and getting roped into their schemes to support their agendas and campaigns to ruin others for a season or two doesn’t count, it doesn’t make you a flying monkey. Narcissists are good at fooling others, and so all naive people will initially believe the narcissist is the hero, the good person, the injured party. We all have to go through the same thing to eventually learn about narcissists and their ways.

What makes someone a flying monkey is someone who sticks with the narcissist’s story despite evidence to the contrary, and manages to do so for a protracted period of time. The flying monkey agrees with the narcissist on a fundamental level, their core is similar to the narcissist. They agree with the tendencies of the narcissist, the compulsions, and most importantly the justification philosophies of the narcissist. 

They agree with the ruin they see the narcissist wreak, they agree with the narcissist’s justifications for bringing ruin to others, and they agree with the narcissist that despite all that, the narcissist is still the hero and the victim, not the villain.

If someone can keep that up for years, through watching the narcissist keep ruining and ruining, they really have to be a flying monkey, because only someone with no heart can keep that up for so long.

Veronica Welles