Academic Bullying

Via Feminist Law Profs, I learned of a post at Historiann.com, in which she suggests the obvious: when the victim of workplace bullying, get the hell if you can out rather than wait around to make a great legal case.

Workplace bullying is interesting through a generational lense.

With regard to whatever sense of institutional loyalty is necessary for workplace bullying to continue, Bomers are, of course, the last generation to believe in institutional loyalty to any degree. Xers are a lot more practical (some would say cynical) about institutional loyalty to employees, having seen many Boomers end up on the wrong end of the institutional loyalty equation when it turns out that the employee is too costly/unpopular/loud-mouthed to justify the institution's loyalty. Millennials, on the other hand, are more likely to revive a sense of institutional loyalty, but they'll probably also require that the institution treat its employees with a modicum of dignity and respect.

Xers are in a weird place in this equation. Xers on faculties have been hazed (to varying degrees depending on the particular institution's culture, of course) just as their Boomer predecessors were hazed before them. But the hazing that Xers have endured is on top of a lifetime of a lack of parental involvement in issues like schoolyard bullying. So Xers end up falling into approximately three camps: the SuperBully, the Traditional Disaffected Xer, and the Rabid Anti-Bully. The Super Bully combines the ordinary bully's sense of "do unto others" with a lifetime of poor treatment and inadequate supervision to become a workplace bully, the likes of which is just hard to imagine. This leads to a lot of denial on the part of the tenured Boomers, who literally cannot imagine that the bullying behavior is happening as is reported. It leads to a lot of heads in the sand by fellow Xers (see Disaffected Xer category above). This, of course, gives the Super Bully lots of leeway to continue the bullying at warp speed. The object of the Super Bully either becomes a Super Bully in order to cope or moves on. He or she will aspire in their next post to be a Disaffected Xer.

When the Millennials enter the picture, though, it's hard to believe that their lifetime experience with anti-bullying campaigns and helicopter parents is going to allow them to stand for that kind of treatment. In addition, Millennials travel in packs, where Xers are solitary creatures. So the likely response by a Millennial to academic workplace bullying is to fight back and mobilize his or her peers in an anti-bullying campaign. Any Boomers still remaining on the faculty will likely be amenable to anti-bullying policies (after all, they do still have those "peace" tattoos on their left shoulder blades). Watch for Xers to fight for their right to bully (it does sort of always seem like the bad behavior is called to a halt just as we're about to get going really good with it -- see, e.g., Just Say No). Ultimately, I think the Millennials will be successful in their anti-bullying efforts (particularly if even one Xer on the faculty has had a bullied kid and can see the parallel in the situation), but watch for some nasty faculty meetings while the Xers have their say.