A sociology professor at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, Kenneth Westhues, has researched a workplace bullying phenomenom called “mobbing.”
Westhues defines “mobbing” as, “an impassioned, collective campaign by co-workers to exclude, punish, and humiliate a targeted worker.” The term has gained international recognition, in Europe the term “mobbing” has become a common phrase and France has even passed anti-mobbing laws. Despite anti-mobbing/anti-bullying policies, Westhues’ research shows that the phenomenom is still alive in academia today. A group of European academics host a mobbing blog for academics to discuss the issue as well as serve as a forum for academics who have personally experienced mobbing.
How does the academic culture and institutional practices allow mobbing to develop and persist in the world of higher education?
From The Unkindly Art of Mobbing, by Ken Westhues:
“At a practical level, every professor should be aware of conditions that increase vulnerability to mobbing in academe. Here are five:
• Foreign birth and upbringing, especially as signaled by a foreign accent
• Being different from most colleagues in an elemental way (by sex, for instance, sexual orientation, skin color, ethnicity, class origin, or credentials)
• Belonging to a discipline with ambiguous standards and objectives, especially those (like music or literature) most affected by post-modern scholarship
• Working under a dean or other administrator in whom, as Nietzsche put it, “the impulse to punish is powerful”
• An actual or contrived financial crunch in one’s academic unit (According to an African proverb, when the watering hole gets smaller, the animals get meaner)
Other conditions that heighten the risk of being mobbed are more directly under a prospective target’s control. Five major ones are:
• Having opposed the candidate who ends up winning appointmentas one’s dean or chair (thereby looking stupid, wicked, or crazy in the latter’s eyes)
• Being a rate buster—achieving so much success in teaching or research that colleagues’ envy is aroused
• Publicly dissenting from politically correct ideas (meaning those held sacred by campus elites)
• Defending a pariah in campus politics or the larger cultural arena
• Blowing the whistle on, or even having knowledge of serious wrongdoing by, locally powerful workmates”
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon says:
Bullying of Academics in Higher Education
The bullying of academics follows a pattern of horrendous, Orwellian elimination rituals, often hidden from the public. Despite the anti-bullying policies (often token), bullying is rife across campuses, and the victims (targets) often pay a heavy price. “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.” Winston Churchill.
http://bulliedacademics.blogspot.com/
13th May 2007 at 12:47 am
Lee Carleton says:
Academia likes to pretend that tenure is for the purposes of protecting free expression, but clearly this does not always apply – especially to students and the non-tenured. Students are acutely aware of these various campus hypocricies and misleading PR tactics, both of which serve to alienate them from really engaging in academic life and tempting them to become mere “box-checkers” on their list of courses.
In my case, I served for 8 years at a prestigious and conservative private university as a teacher with high course evaluations & plentiful positive student commentary. After being promoted to Assistant Director of the Writing Center where I continued to develop a hypertext of Huxley’s Brave New World along with other digital projects, I was invited to participate in an email discussion of digital tools in the classroom. When I noted that students might balk at paying $40K+ per year for tenured faculty who have no familiarity or interest in digital composition, the head of the English Department assembled a team to drive me out cleverly disguised as a “Writing Center Advisory Board.”
After being sent to Stanford and Cornell to study their writing programs in preparation for a revision of ours, my position was eliminated because “we no longer offer the course you were hired to teach” even though I was instrumental in researching and articulating the courses that were to replace it. I may have evoked additional ire when I successfully started the first living-learning community on campus called Earth Lodge, the first of about ten themed-housing options. The program received the greatest number of applicants and student feedback was passionate about its positive intellectual and personal impact on them.
Finally, I could not prove a connection without access to email exchanges, but these events coincidentally occurred after the Dean had to settle a suit for sexual harassment. I was the second of two very popular and successful teachers whose positions were eliminated at that time – perhaps to cover the expenses of the settlement? He still works at the university making a 6-digit salary while I struggle to raise a 2 year old girl and a 5 year old boy with only adjunct work and a wife on a public school salary – and all while I attempt to complete my PhD.
I’m certainly having second thoughts about working for that achievement if bullying is becoming the accepted culture in academia. Many students who witnessed this whole fiasco are having their own doubts. One very talented student even abandoned his plans for graduate study in Education which is a real loss. Bullying is a cancer on higher education that may become another nail in its coffin unless and until more people (faculty & students) speak up and expose the bullies and hold them to account.
13th May 2007 at 12:23 pm