Monthly Archives: December 2012

Bullying in Higher Education

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Bullying in Higher Education

Workplace bullying can occur at any workplace, including a university. Any employee can be a target, including college and university faculty. If you are a target of workplace bullying, you may not even recognize the behaviors at first (see below). Furthermore, employees who are bullied are not often targeted because of some failure or fault. If you are criticized, misrepresented, threatened, undermined, excluded, or just passed over for recognition, you were as likely targeted for your pluses as for any minuses.

According to Bully Online, the web site of the former UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line, the top six reasons for being bullied are

  • being in the wrong place at the wrong time
  • being good at your job
  • being popular
  • unwittingly drawing attention to another person’s incompetence by being competent
  • blowing the whistle on malpractice, fraud, illegality, breaches of rules, regulations and procedures, or raising health or safety issues
  • having a high level of integrity and emotional maturity.

 

Worn down in the U.K.

From Tim Field, founder of a bullying hotline in the United Kingdom:

“These reasons are derived from over 10,000 cases from my UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line and cases reported through Bully OnLine. Jealousy and envy are motivators of bullying. Employees who are bullied have often unwittingly blown the whistle, usually on someone else’s shortcomings, failures, breaches of procedures, etc. After the bullying starts, the moment a bullied employee asserts their right not to be bullied, they are effectively blowing the whistle, and the bullying intensifies. Specious (plausibly deceptive) allegations, misrepresentation, fabrication and unwarranted use of disciplinary procedures follow, culminating in the inevitable unfair dismissal or ill-health retirement.”

 

TIME Magazine's whistleblowers of the year

Whistle-blowing, for obvious reasons, is right up there in the list of top factors. From Field again:

“You discover by accident that your boss is fiddling the books. You realise that customers are being mis-sold investment products. Your professional colleague is guilty of malpractice. You’re asked to endorse an activity which you know to be in breach of health and safety regulations. What do you do? Comply? Look the other way? Or do you report it?

In many cases, if you report what you’ve found, you’ll be bullied out of your job.”

Field points out that “The UK Public Interest Disclosure Act now offers some legal protection for concerned employees who blow the whistle. However, the consensus amongst those involved in whistleblowing cases over the last ten years is that the Act has too many get-out clauses to be effective.” A law with loopholes is better than no law, since it signals a shift in society’s attitudes–but the law was passed for a reason.

 

Fear and loathing on campus

Most people do not recognize bullying at first. Forget about over-aggressive dodgeball or being crammed into the gymnasium locker. In the white-collar world, including academia, bullying is less often one dramatic incident than “an accumulation of many small incidents, each of which, when taken in isolation and out of context, seems trivial.”

What is bullying? The following list of examples is condensed for convenience. 

People who are bullied in the workplace find that they are

  • constantly criticized and subjected to destructive criticism. Explanations and proof of achievement are ridiculed, overruled, dismissed or ignored.
  • subject to frequent nit-picking and trivial fault-finding
  • undermined; false concerns are raised, or doubts are expressed over performance or standard of work, doubts expressed for control rather than for performance enhancement.
  • overruled, ignored, sidelined, marginalized
  • isolated and excluded from what’s happening
  • singled out and/or treated differently. Nit-picked for minor mistakes when major infractions (such as absenteeism, or alcohol impairment in the workplace) are permitted for selected  others.
  • belittled, degraded, demeaned, ridiculed, patronized, subject to disparaging remarks
  • threatened, shouted at, and/or humiliated
  • set unrealistic goals and deadlines, either unachievable, changed without notice or reason, or changed when they near achievement
  • denied information or knowledge necessary for undertaking work and achieving objectives
  • starved of resources
  • denied support by their manager and thus find themselves working in a management vacuum
  • either overloaded with work or have their work taken away, sometimes replaced with jobs less appropriate to training and experience
  • subject to excessive monitoring, supervision, micro-management, recording, snooping, etc.
  • forced to work long hours, without remuneration and/or under threat of dismissal
  • receive negative or intimidating calls or memos, notes or emails, immediately prior to or during weekends and/or holidays
  • invited to ad hoc meetings that turn out to be disciplinary
  • facing unjustified disciplinary action on trivial or specious or false charges
  • coerced into reluctant resignation or early retirement

Since academia tends to like to keep things quiet–look at the statistics, if you can find them, on sexual assaults on campus, and student suicides–entrenched bullying can find a comfortable home there. The problem is exacerbated by factors such as budget constraints, which enable a bullying manager to contain or to get rid of employees in the guise of cost-cutting, and a large contingent workforce. Our colleges and university administrations also tend to keep expanding, while faculty shrinks in proportion to the whole, and an ongoing proliferation of faculty ranks divides the instructional workforce. Furthermore, our educational system is everybody’s favorite whipping boy in the first place, so frequent reorganizations are the name of the game. Reorganizations, in academia as in other workplaces, provide smokescreens for institutional bullies. Careerism, in short, is the bully’s best friend, as it is the rapist’s best friend.

 

Policy counts

Thus the person being bullied may not realize it for weeks or months, as our British cousins remind us, until the moment of enlightenment comes. Workplace bullying tends to fixate on trivial criticisms and false allegations of underperformance, with little overtly offensive language. It tends to take place in secret, behind closed doors, without witnesses or notes taken. (Be alert about department or program meetings at which no one takes minutes, of which there is no written record, which only some faculty are required to attend or at which only some faculty can vote.) It takes place at work and/or at social occasions related to work. In any case, the target is seen as a threat who must first be controlled and subjugated–and if that doesn’t work, eliminated–often for conduct that the target herself/himself would not have recognized as threatening, like trying to do a good job.

Not to belabor a point, but the results can be a bit discouraging. Some managers or supervisors may appear to invite suggestions but dismiss each idea not already incorporated into the program. They may register a suggestion as a complaint and a complaint as an offense, even while claiming to invite faculty input. They may betray trust and misuse authority behind the scenes. When employee morale deteriorates, this method of operation discourages innovation and creativity, even amid claims that faculty autonomy, independence and creativity are being supported.

What to do? Recognize that you are not alone. Academic bullying is regrettably widespread, but the silver lining is that you are not alone.

Regrettably, public policy in the U.S. has fallen behind that in the U.K., which has a national helpline that includes adults–workplace bullying–as well as children. In this country, most attention to bullying has focused on children and young people, and rightly so; most attention to bullying in the educational system has focused on students, again rightly so. There is, however, a Facebook page on bullying in higher education. The bulliedacademics blogspot has an email contact address.

High time. Some apparent cases of academic bullying have had dire outcomes.

 

More on the Romney campaign’s internal polling

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Romney internal polling–myopia rather than rose-colored glasses

I don’t call these post-mortems, but in this election follow-up, The New Republic has disclosed some useful information. The gist is that Mitt Romney’s campaign thought it was likely to win because internal polling at the end said so. The Romney team’s own last-minute projections for six key states showed Romney possibly winning enough electoral votes for victory.

 

Romney and Ryan in Wisconsin

Here, from TNR:

“In an exclusive to The New Republic, a Romney aide has provided the campaign’s final internal polling numbers for six key states, along with additional breakdowns of the data, which the aide obtained from the campaign’s chief pollster, Neil Newhouse. Newhouse himself then discussed the numbers with TNR.”

The six states chosen for outtakes are Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

 

Red states, blue states, purple states by senate representation

The first thing you notice about the Romney internal numbers is that they were nearly right where they focused on votes for Romney. In alphabetical order, here are the states lined up with the Romney campaign’s projections for Romney, and Romney’s actual results:

  • Colorado:            Romney vote projected at 48%. Actual Romney vote 46.1%
  • Iowa:                     Projected Romney vote 46.5%. Actual Romney vote 46.2%
  • MN:                       Projected Romney vote 43.5%. Actual Romney vote 45%
  • NH:                        Projected Romney vote 48.5%. Actual Romney vote 46.4%
  • PA:                         Projected Romney vote 46%. Actual Romney vote 46.7%
  • WI:                         Projected Romney vote 45%. Actual Romney vote 46.1%

The late polls were nearly accurate. In five of the six states, the Romney campaign came within two percentage points of predicting Romney’s actual vote, and in New Hampshire the campaign miss Romney’s actual numbers by only 2.1 percent. In three of the states, the polls were off by less than one percent. One could expound on the Romney campaign’s obliviousness to a key fact about New Hampshire–namely its closeness to Massachusetts, home base or epicenter of Romney’s unpopularity. But the fact remains that most of the Romney team’s numbers were close to the mark. It will be interesting to see the campaign’s late polls for Florida, Ohio and Virginia, if they are ever released.

 

Voting in Florida

Furthermore, the Romney campaign actually underestimated the percentage of the vote that Romney went on to get in three of the states. Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin–percentages highlighted here in red–actually went for Romney in slightly bigger numbers than his own campaign projected in internal polls. This is not wild miscalculation.

Where the Romney team did miscalculate wildly was the Obama vote. This is key: In a presidential election there is more than one candidate running, and dismissing the other major-party candidate the way you would dismiss Virgil Goode is not viable assessment.*

Here are the six states with the run-down on the Obama vote, as calculated by the Romney campaign, and President Obama’s actual outcome:

  • Colorado:            Obama vote projected at 45.5%. Actual Obama vote 51.5%
  • Iowa:                     Projected Obama vote 46.5%. Actual Obama vote 52%
  • MN:                       Projected Obama vote 47.5%. Actual Obama vote 52.6%
  • NH:                        Projected Obama vote 45%. Actual Obama vote 52%
  • PA:                         Projected Obama vote 49%. Actual Obama vote 52.1% 
  • WI:                         Projected Obama vote 49%. Actual Obama vote 52.8%

Again, the underestimates–i.e. all six states–are highlighted in red.

Now the most obvious comment is that Romney’s tacticians made the fundamental mistake of underestimating their opposition, the error warned against by strategists for millennia. However much you wish to despise the person/king/opposition, allowing your assessment to be distorted by your emotions is an elementary error. Machiavelli, whose critics gave Machiavellianism a bad name, would have recognized it. That Machiavelli himself died a despised and forlorn exile is beside the point.

Back to 2012–in regard to the Romney calculations, even hard-nosed numbers crunchers could not see that their numbers re Obama were way off. It did not even strike them as unrealistic that a popular incumbent president was polling, according to their picture, at 47.5 percent in Minnesota and at 46.5 percent in Iowa?

There are several factors at work here.

  • One is ‘demographics’, which as we know did not play well for the GOP in the 2012 elections. Nor should it have. It stands to reason that the people making those well-exposed public comments about immigrants–often basically running against immigration–would be no better at evaluating what they were doing behind the scenes. The same personnel are now scrambling to find new shades of lipstick for the hog, mostly by promoting a few Latino politicians and a few fauxish immigration reforms. Back during the campaign, they kept well away from the people they were characterizing rather than wooing.
  • Another is the millennial generation. It’s not just that cell-phone users tend to be under-polled; it’s that old measures do not always work. WARNING: OVER-GENERALIZATION AHEAD: Aside from Occupy Wall Street, millennials do not tend to be demonstrative. Demonstration with them tends to be a last resort, not a first. They are not vehement at first hue, they do not ask for things stridently. On the plus side, they tend to respect human dignity, they tend to appreciate courtesy, and they tend to let other people have a say. One can imagine how Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich would have fared with this cohort.
  • That leaves the third factor, not explored by TNR, of race. Romney strategists and even Romney pollsters operated in a partial blindness that left them unable to imagine other people voting differently from the way they themselves would vote, and the different race of the president made that back-of-the-eyelids view more plausible. Calling this ‘racism’ does not explain anything. It is a simple facet of the human brain to find difference, or newness, harder to understand than the familiar. Change is so hard to adapt to that even positive change–a promotion, winning the lottery–is stressful.**

For Republican campaigners and campaign operatives, the natural myopia was compounded by their other characteristics, or the related characteristics of their side–a continuing antipathy to genuine information, an unwillingness to see anything positive on the other side, and a corresponding willingness to shout down any unwelcome perception on their own side. These are useful attributes for the politicians who are hired guns for privilege rather than independent thinkers, just as they are useful for the media personalities like them–Limbaugh and Krauthammer et al. These are the qualities that strengthen a Gingrich or a Bachmann to run a campaign as shameful as the policies espoused by the candidate. But for running a national campaign, where winning depends on knowing something outside your own sphere of influence–not so much.

They were hoist by their own petard.

 

*In the interest of full disclosure: according to genealogy research mostly via ancestry.com, Mr. Goode and I may be distantly related.

**[Update Dec. 4: Overt racism was cultivated by the campaign, as we know. Sometimes the overt racism is attributed to blue-collar  voters; this is false sociology. Persons with wealth, status and at least nominal education can and do participate in racist acts and speech.]