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The Mobs of Academe
Wednesday, April 12, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time
"Workplace mobbing" is a concept borrowed from the animal kingdom: Like birds who gather together and swoop down on a predator, jeering at it and scaring it away, employees may gang up on a colleague whom they see as a threat. They exclude, punish, and otherwise humiliate their target, then get rid of him or her after a "critical incident" that colleagues say confirms what they always suspected.
Guess which kind of workplace is among those that experience mobbing most often? That's right, colleges and universities.
Academe is a perfect petri dish for the culture of mobbing, according to the sociologist Kenneth Westhues, thanks to its relatively high job security, subjective measures of performance, and frequent tension between individual professors' goals and the goals of the institution. The victims of mobbing are not always wholly innocent, he says, but the campaigns against them are often based on fuzzy charges, take place in secret, happen fast, and are full of overheated rhetoric. And yet academics tend to think they are immune from the groupthink that characterizes mobbing.
How can academics cultivate more awareness of their own herd instincts? How does a well-functioning academic department handle conflict? Should colleges eliminate quasi-judicial bodies, like ethics committees, which in Mr. Westhues's view may simply dignify petty squabbles? France has passed anti-mobbing legislation. Is that a solution in the United States?
Or is "mobbing" an inflammatory term, a cheap way to seize the moral high ground?
» Mob Rule (4/14/2006)
Kenneth Westhues is a professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo who has written a five-volume series about mobbing in academe and who frequently visits college campuses to collect data on episodes of mobbing.
Tom Bartlett (Moderator):
Greetings everyone. I'm Tom Bartlett, a reporter at the Chronicle, and I'll be hosting our chat today with Kenneth Westhues about his truly fascinating research on mobbing. Mr. Westhues is a professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo and we're pleased he could join us. If you haven't already, you should read the article by John Gravois on our guest's research.
We already have lots of great questions and I'm sure there will be more. So let's get this mob -- er, chat -- started.
Kenneth Westhues:
Besides thanking the Chronicle for accurate, insightful reporting of the mobbing research, I want also to thank the very many Chronicle readers who have emailed me in response to John Gravois's article. I plan to respond to each one, but it may take a while.
Question from Susan, medium-sized private liberal arts college:
I was actually mobbed before I could even break into academe. The head of the mob was my very own academic advisor who turned the rest of my dissertation committee (all but one) against me. I had discovered a few years into my search that my advisor was sabotoging my career. I graduated with a published book with credentials and opportunities that incensed my advisor. I am now partially in academe having landed two one year positions and am a top candidate for a tenure track position in a branch campus of a major university. My question or comment is that the mobbing can take place at any level in academe and how does one deal with this? I have been psychologically scarred by this and couldn't do research for years. I continue to look for a position and my advisor still holds his tenured job, though with some trepiditions from the administration and colleagues as to his suitability for graduate advising. How can I heal?
Kenneth Westhues:
Mobbing is especially tragic when the target is a young scholar who has not yet had a chance to acquire credentials to fall back on. The graduate student most at risk is an independent thinker whose scholarly record (e. g., publications) threatens the supervising professors. So yes, of course, mobbing happens at all levels. My priority has been on the mobbing of professors because if professors are not secure, graduate students working with them are even less secure.
How does one heal from the humiliation of being mobbed? The general answer is, "Slowly." Support from family and friends is indispensable. Some kind of professional counselling may or may not be helpful. Healing happens above all as the mobbing target regains confidence by renewed achievements in whatever is the relevant field -- or in an altogether new field of work. It can be really, really hard for a mobbing target to "move on," but it gets easier with every day of successful negotiation of relationships at home and at work. Good luck.
Question from J Tull, big university research institute:
As a tenured and very successful faculty member approaching retirement, I have been puzzled by faculty mobbing for my entire career. Periodically, intelligent people actively misinterpret information about someone and act in a manner that causes considerable suffering for that person. The characteristics mobbing are now much clearer to me thanks to Kenneth Westhues remarkable insights.
My question is simple. Are there specific, practical steps one can take within a department to minimize or curtail mobbing? My experience has been that administrators will simply cope with issues as they are forced upon them and that reasonable faculty members stay out of the conflict because it makes them very uncomfortable.
Kenneth Westhues:
This is the all-important question. Mobbing researchers vary in how they answer it. Some favor writing anti-mobbing clauses into faculty handbooks and collective agreements. This is a specific, well-intentioned step, but I have doubts about how practical it is. That is, I don't think it works. Commentators on the anti-mobbing legislation in France say the actual outcome has been clogged courts and more subtle mobbing techniques.
Here are three specific, practical steps in which I have more confidence.
First, encourage administrators and colleagues to inform themselves about the mobbing research (the mobbing.ca website is a rich resource, so is the book, Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace, by Noa Davenport and her colleagues in Iowa, or one can simply google "mobbing"). The more aware we make ourselves of the human tendency to mob, the more able we are to control that tendency in ourselves and others.
Specific step number two is to keep campus media for discussion and debate alive and active. A vigorous campus press helps a lot. So do chat rooms for faculty. I often quote Churchill's line, "It is always better to jaw, jaw, than to war, war." Yes, it sounds better with a British accent.
Third and probably most important, stand with mobbing targets. In most healthy, productive, well-functioning departments and faculties, one can identify individuals who do not let colleagues get mobbed. Such individuals have the guts to say at crucial moments, "Cut it out." They are what researchers call "guardians" of prospective targets. They are willing to be seen with a mobbing target and to speak up for him or her when that is a risky, unpopular thing to do.
Question from Joan Friedenberg, Southern Illinois University:
In the article on mobbing, Rich Fedder is quoted as saying, "Mobbing is such a colorful term that it tends to pre-empt debate. " But how realistic is debate AFTER the mobbing has occured? If mobbers want debate, shouldn't they try that before resorting to mobbing? Isn't it like calling for diplomacy after you've already attacked?
Kenneth Westhues:
Research on mobbing gets interesting when it is publicly applied to specific cases. Most of us (Mr. Fedder included, I suspect) readily agree that humans sometimes gang up and form mobs for destroying a designated enemy. The rub comes when somebody suggests that this is what my friends and I have done in this specific case. In this circumstance, we prefer to keep questions of mobbing off the table of debate.
Ms. Friedenberg, a linguistics professor and mobbing researcher at Southern Illinois, is right: a campus climate of free, open, vigorous discussion and debate tends to prevent mobbings from happening in the first place. It bears mention that Ms. Friedenberg, more than anyone, deserves credit for making research on mobbing a topic of public discussion at SIUC. Without her, John Gravois's excellent article could not have been written.
Once a mobbing occurs, debate tends to focus on the moral worth of the mobbing target: exactly how despicable is Professor X? When the debate is framed that way, Professor X can hardly help but lose. In such a situation, questions of mobbing do not pre-empt debate but broaden it to include the possibility that Professor X is not despicable at all, instead deserving of respect like anybody else in the give and take of campus life.
Tom Bartlett (Moderator):
Just a reminder: Keep those questions coming. Click the link above to ask whatever's on your mind regarding mobbing.
Question from Doug Giebel, Montana State University, Great Falls:
Hello from Montana.
As one whose mobbing experience is detailed in Professor Westhues's book "Winning, Losing, Moving On," I have found that administrators and boards of regents often protect abusers and refuse to examine, investigate or even discuss serious allegations of workplace mobbing. My repeated requests to discuss the issue with top executives and board members were either denied or ignored. What can be done to overcome administrative indifference to mobbing and related abuses, especially when even successful legal action has little or no influence over established administrative decisions and practices?
Kenneth Westhues:
It's good to hear from Mr. Giebel, I appreciate his contribution to the research literature. I think he would agree that the longer range goal is a democratic structure and culture of governance in the institutions of higher education, a pluralism of power. We need to foster dialogic relations between administration and professoriate, also students, staff, alumni, and the larger community. As he and I both know, this is easier said than done. Bill Lepowsky, a mathematician and mobbing researcher in California, has a great quote from Frederick Douglass to the effect that powerholders never give up without a fight, never have and never will. So there is nothing to do but create structures of countervailing power (a union is one possibility but not necessarily the best one). And above all speak the truth freely and openly. Giebel himself is a good example, having won a precedent-setting federal case for freedom of expression.
Question from support staff of a famous English University:
Why do you only concentrate on academics? Support staff in administrative posts in Universities also get mobbed. I know because I raised issues that managers did not want to know about, and in the end 3 managers ganged up on me to force me out. I had a breakdown, suffer depression, and have not worked for almost 3 years. They kept their jobs. HR personnel do everything to protect the bullies.
Kenneth Westhues:
Thank you for this good question. The answer is that support staff are academics, too: part of the academic community, no less deserving of respect and workplace dignity than professors and students are. Not having tenure, support staff are especially vulnerable if they get on the wrong side of their superiors in the administrative hierarchy.
This inquirer says that HR personnel "do everything in their power to protect the bullies." All prospective mobbing targets should bear in mind that the Human Resources Department is by no means an impartial body but an arm of the administration, and tends to take its directions from top management. Since this inquirer is from a UK university, he or she may be especially interested in the 2002 doctoral thesis of Duncan Lewis at the University of Wales, "The Social Construction of Workplace Bullying: a Sociological Study with Special Reference to Further and Higher Education." Lewis offers there a perceptive analysis of HR departments.
I'm sorry for this inquirer's personal troubles. I've heard the story often, and from many nonprofessorial staff members as well as from professors.
Question from Sue Smith, comprehensive university:
Any advice to two full professors who are being mobbed and happened to be married?
Kenneth Westhues:
I think it's generally recognized that when two professors in the same academic unit are married to or partnered with each other, this fact inevitably impinges to some degree on the politics of the academic unit -- sometimes in a beneficial way and sometimes in a destructive way. When it is one's own husband or wife who has been ganged up on, it is hard to stand idly by, but the result is often that then both husband and wife are targeted. In one nonacademic mobbing case I have studied, the wife was targeted first, mainly in informal put-downs day after day, her husband joined her in complaining to management about how she was being treated, whereupon management intervened to stop the harassment of the wife while going after the husband full-force in a formal dismissal attempt. I don't know that I have any special advice for a couple who are beleaguered in this double-trouble way, beyond sitting down with paper and pencil and sketching out in as cooly analytic a way as possible exactly what are the interpersonal dynamics involved, precisely who is going after whom for what reason and out of what interpersonal networks, and then trying to act constructively on the basis of such an analysis. I might also mention to all family members of mobbing targets that the effects of mobbing on the target's home life are often devastating; this topic deserves much further research. Good luck to Ms. Smith and her spouse in getting out from under collective ill will.
Question from Carey E. Stronach, Virginia State University:
1) How frequently do you see administrators encouraging faculty to mob their intended victim? 2) Do you ever see administrations turning down large research grants because they don't want a particular faculty member to have the prestige and/or financial rewards that go with the research grant?
Kenneth Westhues:
Hey, great to hear from you, Mr. Stronach, and let me seize this chance to applaud your trenchant analyses of the current mess at Virginia State University. AAUP's statement censuring VSU is well worth reading; it's on the web. So is the condemnation by the National Association of Scholars. The answer to your first question, of course, is yes, and your institution is a prime example. Low-achieving lackeys on university faculties are easily mobilized by top administrators to go after whoever the top administrators don't like. As to your second question, administrators tend to favor the enlargement of the institution's research budget. It's only in the most extreme situations that an administration would squelch a professor's research grant in order to "get at" the professor. All observers agree that VSU is currently in an extreme situation, and I look forward to a favorable decision in sociologist Jean Cobbs's court action against VSU.
Question from Big Bill, "Independent Scholar":
I was the target of mobbing last spring. It was facilitated by my dissertation advisor, who has so far kept my revisions at bay, so that I am unable to finish my degree. It cost me my job, and probably, my career. Worst, though, was how my so-called colleagues decided shortly after my arrival that they had to interpret every glance, body posture, etc., as evidence that I needed to go. What recourse does a person have, other than the type of extreme measures that make the weekly broadcast of "Dateline"?
Kenneth Westhues:
This question is similar to the first one that came in today. My answer should be shown earlier in the colloquy. What any doctoral student in this situation needs to do is sit down and carefully, imaginatively assess available options. There is a good book, The PhD Trap, by a fellow whose name I forget just now. What a lot of first-rate, idealistic PhD students fail to recognize is the hard realities of power relations in graduate programs. The cruel fact is that good scholarship is not always rewarded. Another cruel fact is that in most institutions, graduate students have little power. Sometimes the best option is to cut one's losses and go somewhere else, painful and unfair as that may be. Good luck, Big Bill!
Question from Concerned Spouse, Big 10 institution:
My husband is a recent victim of mobbing. First, I really appreciate your research since it helps to make sense of what really seemed irrational to us. He is now trying to recover and it seems to me he is going through classic signs of grieving -- grieving for the "friends" and department he loved.
Do you think it is best if we just both pick up and move to another school? Or will that be worse in the long term? Does he need to confront those folks who ganged up on him for healing?
Kenneth Westhues:
Thanks for standing by your husband. Not to be melodramatic, but that can make the difference between life and death. William White, in his good book, The Incestuous Workplace, makes the point that in workplaces as in families, one who leaves under a cloud often has a lot of trouble "getting over it," and continues to crave, even many years later, acceptance by the excluders, people who -- in the larger scheme of things -- should not make that much difference. So maybe confrontation is the answer and maybe not. There is no point fighting battles one is almost certain to lose. Your word "grieving" is apt. The loss of a job in which one had substantial investment of self is indeed akin to losing a loved one through death. If some exciting alternative for the two of you arises a good distance away, I'd say, "Go for it." Good luck.
Question from Louise, liberal arts school:
How much work has been done on administrators-- and presidents in particular--being mobbed by faculty? It seem very prevalent.
Kenneth Westhues:
Time is running out, so I'll be brief. Short answer: "Ask Lawrence Summers." Barbara Kay, a columnist with the National Post in Canada, wrote an insightful column (it's on the web) applying the mobbing conceptualization to what happened to Summers at Harvard. There are lots more cases.
Question from J Nordine, Distance Learning:
I've seen the department chair lead the mob with a few loyal faculty. How is that to be dealt with?
Kenneth Westhues:
This pattern is common. The starting point for any possibly effective action to stop or turn back a mobbing has to be a careful analysis of the structure of the mob. Who, one asks, is the instigator, the "chief eliminator"? Sometimes this is the administrator who formally leads the exclusionary action, but sometimes such an administrator is only responding to the ardent wishes of some number of colleagues. The goal, generally speaking, is to "break up" the mob, to try to take some kind of action that will get the professors to behave as independent, reasoned thinkers, as they're supposed to be, instead of like a bunch of sheep.
Question from Sara, American University in the Middle East:
what is the role played by the silent majority in a mobbing situation? --- the group that makes up those who are not the person being mobbed nor part of the group doing the mobbing --- is there evidence that they make attempts to stop the action or do they play ostrich to the situatiion?
Kenneth Westhues:
A good question, I suppose the final one in this colloquy. We all should cultivate in our vocabularies the word "bystander," the one who -- as you say -- plays ostrich. Mobbings cannot succeed without big silent majorities, lots of bystanders. What's that quote about the triumph of evil because good men do nothing? Good women, too. The flip side is that very many mobbings are nipped in the bud because just a few people have courage enough to object publicly.
Tom Bartlett (Moderator):
Great chat! I'm sorry we didn't get to all of your questions. Thanks to everyone who participated. And special thanks to Kenneth Westhues.
Kenneth Westhues:
Very many thanks to everyone who sent questions, and to Tom Bartlett for moderating this colloquy. Hearty encouragement to academica in any discipline who are willing to train their scholarly talents on this destructive pathology in academic life, and help produce a more thorough, evidence-based understanding of it. In this way we can, with luck, enable our institutions to better serve their noble public purposes.