Workplace Bullying in the Academy

Following on the last post about student-on-student bullying, this post discusses workplace bullying situations of the faculty and graduate student variety.  I will say up-front that this is a topic about which I try to be objective, but my experience as student with low power inherently influences my viewpoint.  I will tell the story of a friend who experienced psychological harm as result, and this undoubtedly influences my subjectivity.  Also, there may be some missing details and some awkward phrasing designed to hide peoples identities.

This bullying situation involves faculty and graduate students, so why do I call it workplace bullying?  I call it this, because graduate students in the sciences are typically paid by their faculty advisors to do research.  This is an employment situation where the faculty advisor is the boss and the student is the employee.  Some faculty advisors are extremely collegial with their students and treat them as almost equal proto-researchers.  But other faculty advisors perform the boss role.  Like any employment situation this usually works out quite well.  However, there are times that bullying situations arise.  While it is possible for a faculty advisor to feel harassed and bullied by their students, we tend to hear of situations where the student gets harmed.  However please keep in mind that there are infamous examples of students trying to kill their advisors, so the potential for bullying is certainly not unidirectional.

As before in Student Bullying in the Academy, I will try to avoid discussions of bullies and targets.  I think it is most productive to discuss the harm that results from bullying situations and to talk constructively about what could have been done differently.  This way of discussing bullying opens the conversation to include aggression by individuals who are not always aggressors or who may not have the intent to harm.  Since the target can only perceive intent through the actions of another, this means that the target and bully experiences might not agree.  This perspective also opens possibility that the target might as an aggressor either in retaliation or ignorance.  And the aggressor might be responding to a perceived harm done to them by the target either through action or inaction.

Many, sometimes contradictory, descriptions of bullying exist.  I prefer the description given in Prevalence, antecedents, and effects of workplace bullying: A review which says that bullying can be

"described in terms of: the intentionality of the behavior; the frequency (for example, weekly) and the duration (for example, about six months) of such behaviors; the targets’ reaction(s) to that situation; a perceived imbalance and misuse of power between perpetrator and target; inadequate support; and inability of the target to defend him or herself in that situation, where they have to
face constant negative social interactions, badgering, insulting remarks, and intense pressure. This
strengthens the aspect of power imbalance between the perpetrator and the targets as the perpetrator is believed to be in a position of strength as compared to the victim."  

There are two aspects of this description on which I will provide my opinion, the first is intent which was covered above and the second is frequency which need not be frequent if the person suffering harm has been severely harmed. Because the threshold for harm is lowered, and an aggressor can provoke harm easily with relatively benign or infrequent stimulus.

An Example
In presenting this scenario, I am inherently influenced by having only heard one side.  Because of this I will be presenting what happened to the best of my knowledge.

My friend was approaching their final years in graduate school and had two faculty advisors.  One of these had just moved to a different school.  My friend had gotten along well with both their advisors and had only received one performance-related request of something to change--one advisor had mentioned that my friend did not communicate well enough what was being working on.  Another aspect of this situation is that advisor had a collegial style of working while the other advisor had an boss-employee model of working.

The event that triggered the bullying situation was when the collegial advisor told my friend that they were not working hard enough and that they were lazy.  My friend asked when the problem started and got no answer.  There was no attempt to assess where my friend might be at or what they were doing.  They were also told that the advisor might not write a recommendation letter in support of applications for post-doctoral positions.

This was a situation of intense pressure from which my friend did not think they could escape.  Not only were career aspirations on the line, but as always my friend had a thesis to write which required their advisor's support. As typical in academia my friend was not told what was expected of them or how to retrieve the situation, but they decided the solution was to sacrifice their holidays to finishing a project that was half finished.

This gambit paid off.  My friend finished the project, submitted the paper, and had a successful meeting with their committee.  At this point my friend's advisor seemed very happy with their work and was told that it was good.  This should be the end of the story, however, it was not since a second bullying situation arose that may or may not have been related to the first situation.

My friend had decided that visiting their other advisor would be a good idea, so they arranged a 2 month visit to that advisor's lab.  No sooner had my friend arrived than that advisor took my friend into  confidence and started saying how the advisor was doing as little as possible to organize an event.  This way, the advisor could get credit for organizing the event without it taking up much time.  My friend was horrified, because they knew who would pick up the pieces: the staff.  My friend was also encouraged to manage collaborations with other colleagues so that my friend could minimize their contribution.  Again, my friend was horrified, because this was the antithesis of what they believe in.  Despite my friend's opinion of professed attempts to manipulate other people, they did their best to perform their role in the research project while continuing to work on their thesis projects.

My friend was also told that two of the students had been goofing off.  The students were threatened with the advisor taking away their project and giving it to my friend.  My friend did not find this amusing neither as a threat nor as a potential work-load increase.  My friend was quite disturbed that this comment transformed their social position from being a friendly outsider to being a threatening outsider.

From there things continued to deteriorate.  My friend received a threat that if they weren't productive enough, one of their projects would get taken away and given to someone who could do it.  They experienced sexual harassment perpetrated by the advisor--a reference on the part of the advisor to the potential for a sexual relationship between my friend and the advisor.  They had a rocky relationship with another member of the group  who added to the stress by arbitrarily mirroring the gestures of my friend and by seeming to enact a now-I-like-you now-I-do-not relationship.  This person repeatedly presented a catch-22 to my friend on the point of whether the advisor was a good person.  The stress of not knowing whether this student was a friend coupled with either an ambiguous threat or an ambiguous opportunity to support compounded the stress of the other interactions.

The advisor decided that since the project was not progressing rapidly enough, the students should stay up nights until it was finished.  The advisor did seem to have the philosophy that he should be there with them and that if he could handle being awake so could they.  Unfortunately, the power difference in the situation played a key role.  Over the course of two weeks, my friend watched their two colleagues get warn down and increasingly discouraged.  It got the point where my friend begged the advisor to stop making the students work so hard but was told that the students deserved it.

This last was too much for my friend.  They had been in this situation a short time, but it followed on the stress that had previously occurred.  My friend experience intense sleep-disrupting anxiety for the first time in their life.  They were extremely scared, and they had very negative opinions about their colleagues.  Indeed, my friend ended up interpreting the second bullying situation as being the result of the first.  This made these two incidences, one with each advisor, into one continuous bullying situation for my friend, regardless of the intent of the people involved.

My friend believes that the stress of this situation caused the onset of a sever psychological disorder.  While some people might be tempted to claim that such a disorder might be the source of an invented story about bullying, I would remind them that to jump to conclusions when they were not there is discrimination.  While hasty conclusions are dangerous, questions are always welcome.  My friend's perspective, no matter how it came about, is a valid experience of the world.  I would urge people to remember that it is more productive to entertain everyone's perspective and to constructively find ways to change situations.  It is also very important that people in positions of power consider carefully how their actions might influence those with less power, particularly since bullying situations and harm can occur without the intent to harm by anyone involved.

For this reason, I will not jump to conclusions about the motives of the people involved.  They had their own performance pressures to deal with, and they had other people to keep happy.  However, I do think many people could have acted in more constructive ways even to achieve the same performance outcomes.  Indeed, if there had been fewer threats, less harassment, and fewer negative social interactions, in the second situation my friend believed they would have been more productive.  As things happened, my friend wasted many weeks being too distracted and scared to work productively.  Similarly, the students with the second situation who stayed up nights might have also been more productive if they were not hounded into sleepless nights spent working.