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.