It is more than a year since the whole world experienced a new and long-lasting challenge, the Coronavirus pandemic. While in many regions, the vaccination against Covid-19 is rapidly increasing, it will still take time before things get back to “normal”. Until then, many employees including academics will carry on using online platforms to carry on their routine activities. It is highly probable that these online platforms will remain popular even after the global immunity against the Coronavirus, simply because of the vast potentials of such platforms in connecting scholars independent of their geographical locations and time differences.

Therefore, it is very important to pay closer attention to the new types of bullying and harassment in higher education, including online academic bullying (OAB), digital forms of intellectual harassment, and scientific suppression as surfacing threats. Evidently, in the lack of clear policies against OAB in universities and research institutes the victims are not protected whilst the boundaryless nature of online interactions in many cases even encourage the bullies in their abusive behavior through exploiting the anonymity in online platforms and social media.

In a recent article published in Heilyon the authors discuss different aspects of OAB and flag certain ethical concerns with respect to dissident scholar’s usage of online platforms.

From a different perspective, the rapid development of cyber technologies has left a relatively large gap between the “young” and “old” generation of scientists. Unlike the traditional face-to-face system of education in which the more experienced academics are considered as “superiors”, in online platforms, the younger generations enjoy certain privileges. The more senior scientist might not be aware of all the settings and options of individual online platforms, which may put them in an inferior position, especially during online lectures. Simply sharing a picture taken from lecture slides on online platforms and public forums, can cause damages to the lecturer’s reputation, in the lack of context (See here). 

News Coverage

1) The second part of the Academic Bullying Workshop, Applications and Strategies to Reduce and Ultimately Eliminate Academic Bullying in Higher Education (organized by TEACHING & LEARNING INNOVATION) will be held on Tuesday, April 6 at 1:00pm to 2:20pm (GMT-5), registration is needed (https://workshop.utk.edu/workshopinfo.php?workshop=791).

2) Academic Parity Movement held its first conference on workplace bullying among STEM faculty on March 16^th 2021 (10:00-15:00 EST). The conference received a large number of active participation by academics from all over the world and the keynote speakers and the panelists shared their views on academic bullying and the policies against it. Taking advantage of the online platform, many questions were asked during the conference and multiple documents, links, and references were shared (most of which are also included in this Newsletter). The participants also enjoyed more extended discussions on specific topics through the online breakout rooms during the conference. The participants also reflect their opinions during multiple polls by the keynote speakers, during the conference. The videos of the conference are being available to the public here. 

Following are some of the links and documents on universities’ policies that were shared during the conference:

University Wisconsin Madison – Hostile and Intimidating Behavior Policies, Procedures and Practices

University of Wisconsin Madison Website including policies, procedures and training on Hostile and Intimidating Behavior

University of South Carolina – Columbia

Workplace Bullying Policy for the University of South Carolina – Columbia

Faculty Civility Advocate Role per Policy – Including Annual Reporting

Collective Faculty Civility Reports

Harvard University, Anti-Bullying/Harassment Policies and Procedures

Harvard Medical School/School of Dental Medicine/School of Public Health Ombuds Office 

Harvard University Discrimination and Harassment Policy Review – January 2021

Harvard Medical School /Harvard School of Dental Medicine: Abusive and/or Intimidating Behavior Policy

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