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[losemygrip]

Bullies are bullies: smack them in the face (metaphorically if not in reality) and they stop. If I show fear, they pick up on it. If I worry about my next paycheck, they know it. If I approach it like a dead man walking - one with nothing left to lose, they see it and lighten up.

So true, gadfly.   This is what I keep telling my faculty.  However hard s/he pushes, push back just as hard.  As chair, I can only do so much to help them if they won't stand up for themselves. 

At least in my case, this bully has very little power, but s/he POSTURES as though s/he does, and for some reason people believe it.  I have FAR more power over their tenure than does said bully, and yet they're all more afraid of him/her than of me.  There's a long history, and people just can't seem to get past it. 

I've been lucky that in two recent skirmishes, the bully triumphed in one (due to a slight mishandling by the dean and me, as well as massive wimpsmanship by the faculty), and I in the other.  But this last skirmish leads me to believe that I have administrative support at the very highest level (hint hint) for treating this sociopath like the egotistical pipsqueak s/he is.

[brainstorm]

The worst work place is where the chair/dean is the bully, making
so many people miserable. Such hostile evironment always creates a group of
pets who are willing to suck up the chair/dean's a@s, willing to spy on the other
decent group; and willing to do anything to please her or him.

Your work place becomes a living hell.

[bud04]

So true Brainstorm. So true.

Is this why that woman didn't get tenure that you brought up on the other thread?

[brainstorm]

Bud04:

No, this is not related to my colleague. We used to have such bully head in the
past.

 

[vampyjess]

There is a wiki, IIRC, that collects "bad universities," but it's never been specific enough or updated enough to be helpful to me. 

What is really needed is a ratemyadministrator.com, where people could post anonymously.  Admins could respond but I imagine it would quickly put the kibosh on some of the behavior we see posted about on the fora.

And another thing that would help would be a wiki that listed jobs by positions, so that it was easy to see that a job has turned over again and again.  Or at least collecting department turnover rates could be very enlightening. 

What a fantastic idea!

[oldfullprof]

All of my department chairs have shown bullying tendencies at times.  Number 3 was an outright sociopath, who tried to insert himself in my research, made threats, and then had me non-renewed when my performance was superior.  Number 4, my current chair, actually came in my office yelling after I received tenure.  It seemed I had run the chair's evaluation for our department and for another department in a way she did not like.  The policy as writ said either way was acceptable.  I yelled back at her.  In my mind the chair is a first among equals, not a superior.

Dr. Sneaky had caused this conflict by tiptoeing down the hall to "report" me, rather than talk to me directly.  

A couple of weeks later, she was back in my office because I had mentioned to someone I was considering turning a female colleague in for sexual harrassment if she did not stop yelling conjectures about my sex life in the hallway.  Rather than offering to investigate, she yelled at me again.  This time I listened calmly.  She then reported me to the dean for being excitable.  I was able to tell the dean that the chair seemed to have some problems.  She and I get along fine now four years later, so he may have talked to her.

I could have so had her on this one, but I decided not to drop the bomb.

The two senior men in my department, Dr. Sneaky and Dr. Snapper, have been partial bullies at times.  Dr. Sneaky in particular bullied a non-tenured woman, another urban sociologist.  He specializes in "zingers," minor putdowns designed to show his superiority.  Dr. Snapper gets mad when others don't share his fears, for one thing.  When he was on a search committee I chaired pre-tenure, he called me up enraged because I did something slightly differently from the way he would have.  He's frequently very wrongheaded about things, but acts very superior withall.

Ninty percent of me likes our chair, and Drs. Sneaky and Snapper.  But the other 10 percent seems pretty unacceptable.  Both Sneaky and Snapper are very kind at times, so their crazy stuff is usually unexpected.  

[oldfullprof]

Oh, I should also mention.  Dr. Sneaky went around to all faculty to tell them I was having a conflict with the chair and the sexual harassment woman.  So everybody looked at me strangely for about a year.  This more or less alienated the non-tenured faculty from me because they began seeing me as deviant.  (The SH wolman and I were both newly tenured when we had our set-to.)  Low-key mobbing? I dunno.

All had complained to me about Sneaky's zingers at one time or another.

I'm easily the most published person in the department, if that means anything.  One distancing factor may have been that I have been involved in or led a faculty development unit at least 1/2 time for the past six years.  So I have had either a one or two class load as opposed to four classes. 

[msparticularity]

der_gadfly, you make excellent points, namely: bullying isn't harassment unless a member of a protected class is the target, and when you stand up to bullies, they deflate, leaving only a pointed hat and a pair of shoes on the ground.
Workplace bullying is addressed in lots of websites, esp. emanating from the U.K., where there is a vigorous campaign to unmask and oppose it.
In my experience, there is no rational reason for the bully to act as he/she does.  You can't rationalize the behavior and say, well, this or that must be lacking in the bully's life.  I believe certain personalities just go around looking for people to bully, one way or the other.  The Academy offers the perfect opportunity: after all, we are trained to stand up and pontificate to a captive audience; some of us have been groomed as intellectual bullies our entire lives; a lot of us have egos the size of Manhattan; and quite a few are woefully lacking in social skills. 
All I know is: every time I have stood up to a bully, that bully has backed down and gone away snarling and grumbling.  Often you have to go it alone.  Most people avoid such confrontations, hoping the bully will reform.  But left alone, the cancer spreads.  It must be excised. 

While much of what you say is true, how does this model account for a situation in which there is a power differential: i.e. a junior person being bullied by the chair of the department, or the chair of the P&T committee, or by a dean? How ought a junior person stand up to a bully (who says things like, "your academic work is crap" or "who cares about women's history--it's just tampons and quilts, isn't it?" or "I'm not paying for you to give a paper at American Studies!  That's like paying to let you go somewhere and masturbate!") who holds actual power over your career at present and in the future?  This isn't simple school yard stuff.  And I'm asking honest questions here, because many of these "just stand up for yourself" answers don't, to my mind, address the complexity of the experience of being a bully's target.

Onion, I think your situation was particularly pernicious because you were not just experiencing bullying (in its legal sense). You were actually a victim of sexual harassment, including withholding resources related to your work based upon criteria arising from sexual harassment. The sexual harassment consisted not only of belittling your field on the basis of its connection with femininity, but also crude and explicit comments directed to you about your own sexuality. These clearly fall within protected categories.

My own experience has been that a lot of bullying seems to arise from competition over resources that are scarce--or are perceived as being scarce. Some backbiting and blustering seems to be fairly normal, but it goes critical in departments that are ineffectively managed, where the admincritter who ought to be making these decisions based upon merit is instead allowing whoever is loudest to run things. 

[hongkyongnae]

hello and thank you all for some interesting posts about bullying.

i recently went over to the dark side and entered admin after 16 years as a prof. while i enjoy my new position this thread has made me wonder when the day will come when faculty members will come to me asking for help because someone is bullying them.

i have a question for those of you in upper admin. assuming you have done due diligence and have found that someone truly is bullying other faculty, staff, students, what sort of options or recourse can a dean deploy to redue or remedy such situations? i realize this is a broad question, so to give some focus and encourage specificity:

1. scenario one - what options are there if the bully is a department chair?
2. scenario two - the bully is a senior faculty?

i assume a long record of bullying in each of the above (rarely does such behavior suddenly appear after many years of being a good colleague.) also, i am soliciting both carrots and sticks as options. (though, why a carrot would be particularly attractive has always been beyond me.)

thank you all in advance.