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Academic Parity Newsletter June • July 2021
Word of the month: Taking pride in burnout by workaholic academics affects their peers and may trigger bullying.
Finding workaholic colleagues in academia is probably easier than in any other workplace. Not only do academics tend to spend their free time reading an extra manuscript, writing a new paper, doing additional measurements, evaluating reports, etc. but they also often brag about it and feel proud of being thick-skinned and resilient. Even though the workaholic academics might enjoy the way they work and consider it as an investment to reach their professional goals, they will induce, even unintentionally, extreme levels of top-down or peer pressure in the group.
Despite the restricted official working hours in many countries, it is very common that younger researchers adopt a lifestyle that involves working late, extra hours, at the weekends, etc., simply because their superiors or senior colleagues have set such a precedent. Adhering to the official number of working hours in such environments might even be interpreted as underworking by the supervisors. Eventually, conflicts start to arise when (PhD) students are compared by their superiors based on their number of working hours. Many have reported that they were bullied in group meetings simply because of adhering to the official working hours. It should be noted that, even indirectly, always praising those who work extensive hours and blaming others for their under achievements, would intoxicate the working atmosphere and leads to unnecessary and unhealthy competition between the members of the group.
Yes, the work-life balance may be officially encouraged by the universities and research institutes, but in practice, the cultures of the research groups develop independent of the official recommendation, unless if the senior members of the group, even more importantly the head of the research group, comply with the guidelines. It is very important to notice that people who join a research group come with extremely different personalities, lifestyles, family statuses, and responsibilities out of the working hours. Thereby, what works very efficiently for one group member, does not necessarily apply to other members of the same group.
Finally, success and productivity in academia do not necessarily correlate with extensive working hours and in extreme cases, burnout ruins one’s efficiency and productivity. Thereby, instead of pushing the group members to spend longer hours at work, it is more practical if working strategies and planning are discussed and continuously revised within the group at an individual level. It is highly advised that the group members (supervisor and individual students) set short- and mid-term goals based on clear and reachable criteria e.g., based on SMART* (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) concept. (* SMART Goals – Time Management Training From MindTools.com).
Further read can be find in Workaholic academics need to stop taking pride in their burnout | Times Higher Education (THE)
News coverage:
1) #MeToo comes to STEM. The NIH shared new data detailing complaints it has received in recent years, comprising of more than 300 complaints against NIH-funded scientists. Consequently, 75 investigators were removed from their grants. Read more Sexual Harassment Complaints in Academia Are Up Since 2018 | The Scientist Magazine® (the-scientist.com)
2) G. Rusteholz, M. Mediavilla, and L. Pires published a case study on the IMPACT OF BULLYING ON ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE, in IEB working paper 2021/01, which can be found in Impact of bullying on academic performance. A case study for the Community of Madrid (repec.org)
3) Dr. Mahmoudi in one of his recently published articles in SSRN addressed the issue of academic bullying in the scientific workplaces. Read more Academic Incivility: What Can I Do? by Morteza Mahmoudi :: SSRN
4) Virginia Gewin published a Nature Career paper titled “How to Blow the Whistle on an Academic Bully”. Read more here: How to blow the whistle on an academic bully.
5) Katie Langin published a Science Career paper titled Nature paper on “Academic bullying is too often ignored. Here are some targets’ stories”. Read more here.
(Newsletter prepared by Saman Hosseinpour and edited by Paritymovement.org)
Archive
Academic Parity Newsletter February • March 2021
Word of the month: Online academic bullying (OAB) is more severe than ever, during the Coronavirus pandemic.
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 16th 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
(Newsletter prepared by Saman Hosseinpour and edited by paritymovement.org)
Academic Parity Newsletter November • December 2020
Word of the month: Online academic bullying (OAB) is more severe than ever during the Coronavirus pandemic.
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.
[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.
Follow us @AcademicParity
Academic Parity Newsletter September • October 2020
Word of the month: Mobbing in academia.
The word “mob” is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “to crowd around or into noisily, as from curiosity or hostility” [1] In academia, mobbing is used as a backdoor retaliation strategy for bullies to pressure targets to withdraw their complaints and/or to make biased and usually falsified allegations against targets to put them in the corner. A person may be mobbed or bullied in the workplace by a group composed of co-workers or higher-level ranked people “ganging up” on a target in different ways which include physical and mental manipulations to disgrace the target via humiliation, intimidation, spreading rumors, discrediting, and innuendo behaviors. The ultimate goal of this type of mobbing is often to isolate and force the target to leave the workplace. Although mobbing may exist in any workplace, Due to the nature of competition, hierarchical staff ranking system, and complicated relations among staff, educational institutions such as colleges and universities among various organizations exhibit higher instances of mobbing [2] as one of the toughest and most complex types of bullying.
Academic mobbing develops in three distinct stages; a) indirect negative communication among co-workers, other than the target, b) direct negative communication with the aims of blatant and direct confrontation with the target, and c) formation of a poisonous atmosphere among the entire department or the organization via negative communication. The extent of academic mobbing varies from a personal level to the university level and beyond that all of which will exert negative mental and physical health effects on targets. It should be mentioned that the health risks that are imposed as a consequence of academic mobbing are not only limited to the targets but extents also toward their family members.
Knowing some general useful alleviation steps will assist the academics to mitigate the mobbing effects. Some of the steps that can be taken as a remedy against academic mobbing include; i) acquaintance, ii) vigilance, iii) positive and effective communication, and iv) resilience and resistance against mobbing.
News coverage:
Prof. Mahmoudi (Michigan State University) together with the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University launched a new survey which will help with studying the role of coronavirus pandemic on academic bullying. Here is a link to the survey.
A survivor’s guide to academic bullying came out in Nature Human Behaviour in August [3]. In this paper, the author shares key lessons that targets of academic bullying can employ to protect themselves and fight back.
Yonah Budd held a Straight Talk Live on academic bullying on 17th Oct. 2020. To learn more about Yonah’s thoughts on this, follow his recorder talk in [4].
Leah H. Somerville (a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University) and June Gruber (an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado in Boulder) pinpointed three troubles that women face with in science and provided a remedy to tackle them in their recent letter in Science [5].
#NoAcademicBullying is a hashtag to share, discuss, and follow the cases of academic bullying on Twitter.
Follow us @AcademicParity
References:
[1] Merriam-Webster, Definition of ‘mob’, (Since 1828).
[2] M. Mahmoudi, Academic bullies leave no trace, Bioimpacts, 9 (2019) 129-130.
[3] M. Mahmoudi, A survivor’s guide to academic bullying, Nature Human Behaviour, (2020).
Academic Parity Newsletter July • August 2020
Words of the month: “Academic bullying affects non-academic staff, as well”.
In the discussions around academic bullying often undergraduate and graduate students, junior group leaders, as well as junior and senior professors are in the focus. Nevertheless, non-academic staff, including laboratory technicians, workshop staff, support staff, and administrative staff are reportedly subjected to bullying in academic organizations (e.g. universities and research institutes). Most probably the major trigger in this regard is that the non-academic staff, despite their essential and undeniable role in maintaining the functionality of the organizations, are regarded as “inferior” by their academic colleagues. Compared to the studies focusing on bullying among academic staff, very little to no systematic research is conducted to specifically address the problematic treatments of non-academic professional staff in academic organizations.
News coverage:
Workplace Bullying is a serious issue among academic surgeons: A recently published Letter in JAMA Surgery indicates a high prevalence of workplace bullying among academic surgeons in the US. The authors indicate power differential as well as the common culture of acceptance and code of silence as the main factors for the occurrence of workplace bullying among surgeons and provide statistical insights about ist prevalence and barriers to its eradication. According to this research, based on the questionnaire filled by a total of 775 respondents (residents and professors), 59 residents (39.9%) and 212 faculty (40.0%) reported being bullied, and 83 residents (58.5%) and 283 faculty (54.3%) witnessed bullying. Fear of retaliation and negative consequences were pinpointed by the authors as the main reasons for the lack of reporting. Reference: doi: 10.1001/jamasurg.2020.0263
In another study within medical universities, C Björklund et al. reported “lack of support, low control, inconsistent role demands, poor leadership, poor organizational climate, high sickness absence, and high sickness presence“ as early stage predictors of future bullying in an academic setting. Reference: doi: 10.1080/03075079.2020.1729114
In the article “Address faculty bullying with these strategies“ by L. Hollis, an Associate Professor in the Community College Leadership Program at Morgan State University in Maryland, Prof. Hollis lists strategies and suggestions to collectively address workplace bullying on campus as a less stressful and time-consuming procedure than a public lawsuit. Reference: doi: 10.1002/dap.30710
And last but not the least, Prof. Mahmoudi and his colleagues at ParityMovement published series of notes regarding legal aspects of academic bullying (The absence of legal remedies following academic bullying. Reference: doi: 10.34172/bi.2020.08), How the conventional academic ranking can cause bullying (The urgent need for modification of scientific ranking indexes to facilitate scientific progress and diminish academic bullying. Reference: doi: 10.15171/bi.2019.30), and How the current unprecedented circumstances may increase the bullying rate in academia (COVID-19 pandemic may fuel academic bullying. Reference: doi: 10.34172/bi.2020.17).
Academic Parity Newsletter May • June 2020
Racial abuse and bullying during Coronavirus outbreak
The outbreak of Coronavirus over the past months has affected communities at different socioeconomic levels, world-wide. Almost all companies and organizations are currently dealing with the negative impacts of the spread of Coronavirus and trying to adopt the new regulations including social distancing, to minimize the risk of further spread of the disease while maintaining their performance at the highest possible level. For many occupations these new measures equal remote working from home, having online meetings, and possibly taking care of children at home. While professors and lecturers in academia try to seize the chance to transfer lectures to online platforms, read and respond to the manuscripts that have been piling up on their desks, write new grant proposals, the less experienced academics and students probably need more support not to fall out of the track of their research activities.
Unfortunately, these unprecedented circumstances have triggered prejudice and discrimination against individuals of certain origins, a phenomenon also known as xenophobia. In March 2020, the New York Times reported a spike in the cases of bullying against Asians at schools in the USA east coast(ref. 1). The San Francisco State University has found a 50% rise in the number of articles related to anti-Asian discrimination in the period of February 9th and March 7th(ref. 2). In Switzerland, a Taiwanese student from University of Lucerne was mocked by seemingly educated seniors, for being Asian.
Although stigmatization and xenophobia might not be considered extreme, they can easily go too far and turn to active bullying, discrimination, and racism. Many universities have already taken this issue seriously and have provided pathways for reporting the specific cases of inappropriate bullying, or harassing behavior due to Coronavirus. Apart from the apparent discrimination against mainly Asian students, the imposed travel restrictions have created hidden obstacles for the admission of foreign students in the USA or within the European Union(ref. 3). Many students with university admission are denied student Visa and many holding their student Visa are banned from traveling, a situation which limits diversity in academia in the long run.
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