Monthly Archives: July 2025

academic freedom, education, mobbing

Target: outspoken professors

You’re an academic, and you’ve been charged with misconduct. A university committee will be carrying out an investigation. You’ve done nothing wrong and have evidence to prove it. Should you be worried?

            If you’ve just read the new book Professors Speak Out, edited by Nicholas Wolfinger, you will have reason to be terrified. The book’s subtitle, The Truth about Campus Investigations, is slightly misleading. These are personal stories about only certain sorts of investigations, namely ones designed and/or run with an agenda to harass, discredit and get rid of an academic seen as troublesome.

            More than one contributor refers to the process they experienced as being a kangaroo court, but these stories are all from the United States or Canada. They reveal investigations as a tool of reprisal rather than a search for the truth or an avenue for justice. Reprisal for what? That’s the interesting part.

            These cases are recent, most within the last decade, and many relate to alleged transgressions concerning race, gender and religion. For example, professor-of-English Dennis Gouws writes about “three occasions when some faculty members and administrators at my college took exception to me because I disagree with the current women-centered orthodoxy in higher education” (85).

            Only a few contributors provide such a succinct summary of their experiences. These are highly detailed accounts, and in some cases it’s hard to see what triggered the attacks. Yet, undoubtedly, these stories give only a glimpse of the full complexity of what happened.

            Wolfinger happened to end up with contributors from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. They include scientists, social scientists and artists; distinguished scholars and non-tenured adjuncts; anarchists and political conservatives; and professors of various national origins. Despite this variety, one recurring feature stands out: unfair treatment.


Nicholas Wolfinger

            Health professor David Wiley writes, “I was asked to resign before being shown the evidence against me and the deadline for my resignation (March 26, 2018) occurred one day before we were given a copy of the final report” (156). Education professor Stephen Porter writes, “Going through the grievance process made me aware of how these proceedings are stacked against the accused faculty member, and how universities willingly ignore their own regulations” (277).

            Given story after story of prejudice and procedural abuse, readers might wonder whether anyone can survive a hostile investigation. Thankfully, Wolfinger includes several cases in which targeted academics retained their jobs. His own case is one of them. But the survivors were not unscathed. The stress, financial cost and disruption to collegial relationships were enormous in nearly every case. Even for those who were cleared, being investigated was no walk in the park. As philosopher Mark Mercer comments, “The process, as any faculty member who’s been targeted knows, is part of the punishment” (261).

            As readers, we hear only from the targeted academics and not from their accusers. This is inherently one-sided. Some of the contributors come across as outspoken, even abrasive individuals who might well have rubbed their students and colleagues the wrong way, perhaps even deserved what they got. After all, shouldn’t getting along, not rocking the boat, take precedence over academic freedom? That might be the feeling motivating administrators who weaponise formal procedures.

            I might have been sceptical about some of the accounts, except I had been through something similar myself. Following a five-minute incident between two of my colleagues, the dean asked the head of the equal opportunity unit to investigate, and everyone in our unit was called in for an interview. We were assured that this process was to heal rifts, but then I discovered there were many findings against me. There had been no complaint against me, nor was I given an opportunity to respond to adverse claims. I hadn’t even been on campus when the incident occurred.

            As soon as I realised what was happening, I went straight to the president of our branch of the academics’ union, who got the investigator’s report thrown out. Until then, the dean was ready to act on the report’s findings. But damage had been done to several of my colleagues and to our unit. I was one of the lucky ones, because nothing more serious transpired, but it gave me an inkling of how traumatising such investigations can be, and how completely unfair.

            There is a longer history of cases predating Wolfinger’s efforts. Many of them can be captured by the term mobbing, which is collective bullying. Kenneth Westhues is the leading figure in the study of mobbing in academia. Drawing on his own experiences at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, he wrote a book titled Eliminating Professors. He followed this by writing and editing books about academic mobbing in which contributors told their stories, setting up a website with a vast number of stories and resources, and arranging and participating in conferences on mobbing.

            Though Wolfinger doesn’t use the term mobbing, many of the cases in his book fit the pattern highlighted by Westhues and other mobbing researchers. Indeed, the campus investigations showcased in Wolfinger’s book can be considered tools used in a process of mobbing. Several contributors report various forms of harassment aside from investigations. Law professor Jason Kilborn writes, “One thing I have learned in this situation is, once you are marked as an ‘undesirable’, the petty persecution never ends” (239).

            There is another context: suppression of dissent. Decades ago, I investigated cases in which environmental researchers and teachers were targeted. Some of them had articles blocked, others were denied tenure. Subsequently, several colleagues and I edited a collection, Intellectual Suppression, which included stories about the harassment of dissident academics in Australia and other countries. Suppression of dissent is what happens regularly to whistleblowers: reprisals for speaking out about problems at work.

            Wolfinger has provided a service in securing contributions that so vividly, often horrifyingly, highlight the way academics can be targeted: harassed, discredited and, in many cases, eliminated. This can be usefully seen as the latest instalment in a much longer history of cases of mobbing and suppression of dissent. Stephen Porter, in a postscript, nicely sums up how universities can be unsafe places: “Colleagues will team up with administrators to target faculty who are in any way outspoken, whether by espousing wrong political views, or speaking up about sexual harassment or research misconduct; administrators will ignore university regulations whenever it suits them; absolutely no one will have your back if you end up in their sights.” (387)

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Marina Granato and Alison Moore for helpful comments.

activism, whistleblowing

Know when to say no

It’s worth knowing how and when to be defiant.

Sunita Sah grew up in the UK and always tried to please people in authority. In short, she was compliant. She trained as a doctor, working in Britain’s National Health Service and consulting for the pharmaceutical industry. She then switched to studying psychology and moved to the US. And a few experiences changed her.


Sunita Sah

            When she went to a hospital with a sudden chest pain, the doctor ordered a CT scan. Sah knew, from her training, that it was unnecessary and had risks from radiation exposure. She had reservations, but in the end she acquiesced. But the experience made her reflect on why she had given in.

            A year later, she was in a similar situation. When she went to see a specialist, on arrival she was told she needed an x-ray before seeing the doctor. It was the way this practice operated. She insisted on seeing a doctor first. This time, despite being pressured, she didn’t comply. And she did more. She wrote an article for a medical journal condemning the practice of requiring x-rays before seeing a doctor — it was a way to bring in more money via unnecessary tests — leading to changes across the country.

            Another thing that changed Sah was studying the famous Milgram obedience experiments. US psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to see whether US residents would obey instructions to hurt someone else. The idea was to see whether they were any different from the Germans who had carried out the Nazi genocide during World War II. What Milgram discovered shocked everyone. Ordinary people were brought into a lab and told they had to administer shocks to a test subject to get them to learn.

Most of these ordinary people were willing to increase the voltage to the top level, even as the test subject (an actor) was pleading and moaning along the way, and eventually seemed unconscious. Why did these test subjects comply with the scientist overseeing the experiment (also an actor)? Milgram concluded that most people were obedient to authorities, losing their moral agency.

            However, in reading Milgram’s work, Sah noticed something else. Most test subjects showed signs of distress even when they complied. They didn’t just automatically obey. They were tense. Some objected even as they complied. Sah interpreted this to mean that there was an internal struggle going on between what their inner voice was telling them was wrong and what the external authority was telling them to do.

Compliance and consent

Compliance is not the same as consent. Sah uses the medical idea of informed consent, which requires five elements.

  • The capacity or competence to make a decision
  • Knowledge of the situation
  • Understanding of the available information
  • Freedom to decide, without pressure
  • Authorisation, meaning actively saying yes or no.

When I install new software, I have to tick an “agreement,” which is a long document with lots of technical and legal clauses. Hardly ever do I read it. I comply, but this isn’t informed consent because I don’t fully understand the information provided. And there’s pressure to tick “yes” because otherwise I can’t get access to the software.

            Another example is vaccination. Young children don’t have the competence to decide; their parents choose on their behalf. Some parents study information about vaccines, but many just go along with what their doctor recommends. Often, doctors pressure parents to have their children vaccinated, and some governments mandate childhood vaccination to attend school. It might be for the best, but when parents agree, this is compliance rather than consent. During the Covid pandemic, the issue of consent became personal, and for many workers there was extreme pressure: vaccinate or lose your job. The goal of authorities, for better or worse, was compliance.

            Sah’s focus is on defiance. She defines it this way: “Defiance means acting in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise.” It means saying no when there’s pressure to say yes. When Sah refused an x-ray before seeing a doctor, she was being defiant. When Jeffrey Wigand exposed corrupt behaviour by his employer, tobacco company Brown & Williamson, he was being defiant.

            Wigand is a famous whistleblower. His saga became the basis for a Hollywood film, The Insider, where he was played by Russell Crowe.

Whistleblowers like Wigand are, in Sah’s terms, defiant. But not all whistleblowers are defiant, at least not initially.

            As I read Sah’s book, I thought of “inadvertent whistleblowers,” the ones who stumbled on a problem at work — a discrepancy in the accounts or missing supplies — and innocently reported it to the boss, thinking it would be checked out and fixed. Little did they know that they would become the subject of unrelenting reprisals. Strangely, they were compliant, in the sense of following the rules and expecting problems to be fixed, but still paid the price. Some inadvertent whistleblowers try to acquiesce, but others resist. They become defiant because of the way they were treated.

The stages of defiance

Sah breaks down the process of defiance into five stages. The first stage is a tension or tingling that something might be wrong. This can be when an employee senses that something is not quite right.

The second stage is conscious recognition that there’s a problem. It’s going from a vague feeling to full awareness.

            Sah calls the third stage “escalation,” which can involve talking about the problem with someone else. In Milgram’s experiments, this stage occurs when the “participant” talks back when the experimenter says to increase the shocks to the supposed learner. For employees, it might be talking to others on the job about their concerns — or talking to the boss. The fourth stage is threatening to stop complying, and the fifth stage is an act of defiance.

            For whistleblowing, distinguishing stages 3, 4 and 5 is not always easy. Talking about concerns can sometimes be enough to trigger reprisals. Just asking questions — “Where did these deliveries go?” — might be stage 3, but a boss can treat it as equivalent to defiance. Despite this ambiguity, understanding Sah’s stages can be useful, offering a sort of self-diagnosis about how you are responding to a challenging situation. As Sah puts it, “Many of these stages don’t necessarily look like our iconic images of defiance: that’s the point.”

            In referring to “iconic images,” Sah is thinking of figures like Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move from her seat on a bus in 1955 triggered large-scale resistance to segregation in the US South. Rosa Parks became famous, but most acts of defiance are quiet and little known, such as when a “temporary” employee, after five years of service, is not granted maternity leave and speaks quietly to her boss. Sah’s point is that the stages of defiance are relevant to everyone, including the vast majority of everyday instances.

Compliance, defiance or both?

Defy is an engaging and thought-provoking book. It is a useful reminder that in many cases, compliance and defiance are not the result of careful consideration but rather responses to circumstances, of acting without knowledge and reflection. We often think of compliance being unthinking, but defiance can be too. Think of the teenage boy who rejects his father’s requests simply because they’re coming from his father. This is not what Sah would call a “true no.”

            Sah’s examples made me think of situations involving compliance and defiance at the same time. Think of a climate protest against a fossil fuel development. Some protesters are well informed and are taking action based on their deepest beliefs. They are defiant. But some protesters may be there because they are going along with their friends. They are compliant in relation to their protester friends while being defiant against the fossil-fuel development.

            The same thing can happen on the other side of the climate clash. Some climate sceptics are well informed, having studied the arguments in depth, but others reject what they see as a climate orthodoxy — the view that global warming is serious and caused by human activities — just because they don’t like solar and wind power. They are defiant against climate orthodoxy but compliant with fellow sceptics.

Lying low

Sah argues that we should act in accordance with our values. But that’s not always easy to do, and here’s where she introduces a concept that can be useful to whistleblowers: “conscious compliance.” Sometimes we know something is wrong, and that the right thing is to openly oppose it, yet instead of defying, we comply — because the consequences of defiance are too great. This is what potential whistleblowers often need to do: they need their job, to support their family, to be safe.

            In some cases, lying low and complying can be part of a long-term plan to oppose wrongdoing. Conscious compliance can be temporary, for weeks, months or even years, while collecting evidence and waiting for the right opportunity to take action. This might be called “strategic compliance” followed by “strategic defiance.”

            Sah believes that people can transform themselves through practice to become “moral mavericks” who are willing to speak up in accordance with their values. She says, “Now more than ever, in our schools, in our homes, on our streets, and in the halls of power, we need moral mavericks. We need to encourage them, foster them, celebrate them, and become them.”

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Paula Arvela, Jungmin Choi, Suzzanne Gray and Erin Twyford for helpful comments.

This review appeared in the July 2025 issue of The Whistle.