In our earlier newsletter this year (May/June 2020), we discussed the potentials of racial abuse and bullying during the Coronavirus pandemic. Since then, and with the escalated number of Covid cases, world-wide, the concerns regarding other negative impacts of the pandemic, especially in workplaces have increased, dramatically. New forms of cyberbullying have emerged, simply due to the increased level of online educational activities within schools, research institutes, and universities. For instance, cyberbullying through video (also known as Zoom bombing) are associated with the exacerbation of stress and mental health conditions, in children, adolescence, and their families.

Depending on the number of Covid-19 cases and deceased numbers, governments have implemented specific regulations to restrict contacts, force isolation and self-quarantine, and recommend working from home. Lack of unified regulations specifically tailored for academic institutes and universities, however, can lead to serious issues in the short and long terms. In many cases, the official regulations are very broadly defined and specific decisions and actions, for instance allowing/forcing the home-office, are left to the heads of divisions or individual professors. While in many research groups such as theoretical groups or those working in social sciences and humanities, working from home might be considered as a viable solution, the experimental groups are struggling with running their research with limited access to the laboratories. Nevertheless, the competition for publishing research works, especially in the fields that are directly related to Covid-19 (e.g. medicine, nanotechnology, engineering, etc.), is extremely high and senior scientists and professors are expected not to fall behind in this race. Depending on the status of the leader of the research groups (e.g. tenure track professor Vs. Full or chair professor) and their personal view of the current circumstances, the members of the research groups may be expected to somehow expiate their reduced scientific output. For instance, graduate students may be forced/highly recommended to still work in the labs despite the clear recommendations for limiting the presence in universities to the absolutely necessary activities. Extra pressure is in fact put on the students who are close to graduation. The supervisors sometimes even justify their decisions for demanding students‘ presence in the labs taking advantage of the unclear and non-specific regulations.

Besides graduate students, the mid-career researchers, especially those on limited contracts, are also highly affected by the Corona pandemic. They should meet the demands for maintaining the scientific productivity of the group at high levels despite the fact that they do not necessarily possess all the experience and means to cope with such unusual circumstances. Meanwhile, their endeavor to secure an academic (or industrial) position seems harder than ever because of the large number of retracted positions in both academia and industry. In certain countries, the number of years one can be employed on fixed-term contracts (e.g. postdocs) is limited by law irrespective of the scientific excellence of the researchers. It is obvious if the academic system refuses to urgently update the regulations and consider these exceptional situations, eventually, a large fraction of the mid-career researchers would lose their chance of continuing their career in academia.  

News Coverage

Read more about the challenges and burden of the Covid-19 pandemic for child and adolescent mental health [1].

Interesting career advice was published by Dr. David Mihalydy, an independent scholar and freelance writer, to help the students bypass bullies and get to graduation. Further read to David’s suggestion can be found on Inside Higher ED [2].   

Prof. Mahmoudi and Prof. Keashly published their viewpoint on academic bullying in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, “Filling the Space: A Framework for Coordinated Global Actions To Diminish Academic Bullying” [3].

Academic Parity Movement will hold its first conference on workplace bullying among STEM faculty on March 16th 2021 (10:00-15:00 EST). The registration link to the workshop can be found here.

(Newsletter prepared by Saman Hosseinpour and edited by Paritymovement.org)

References:

[1] Fegert, J. M.; Vitiello, B.;  Plener, P. L.; Clemens, V., Challenges and burden of the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic for child and adolescent mental health: a narrative review to highlight clinical and research needs in the acute phase and the long return to normality. Child Adolesc Psychiatry Ment Health 2020, 14, 20.

[2]

[3] Mahmoudi, M.; Keashly, L., Filling the Space: A Framework for Coordinated Global Actions To Diminish Academic Bullying. Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2020) 

#NoAcademicBullying is a hashtag to share, discuss, and follow the cases of academic bullying on Twitter. 

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