Blog – The Open Secret: A Piece on Academic Bullying

This piece is called the open secret because I discussed it recently with Kam, another of the Dementia Researcher bloggers. After the Nature article on bullying in academia she posted on Twitter that it was an ‘open secret’ that some people in academia were known for bad behaviour and yet still were given platforms and funding and airtime by the establishment. So today we’re going to explore behaviour and hierarchy and think about what might be done about changing things in the future.

I’ll start, surprisingly, by not referencing a podcast. Instead, I’ll recommend you go and find a website called The Organizational Plumber, it’s run by Dr Zoe Ziani who has a PhD in organizational behaviour and writes a lot about workplace culture and science. I’m basically gutting and rewording her article on bullying in academia because it was so good, I struggled to find any aspects of academic life she had not considered. I will, of course attempt to expand on her work with my own unrequested opinions and we shall see where we end up.

Ziani begins, as I shall, by discussing how challenging it is to define bullying in the workplace. When I was 10, a kid in my class called my little sister names. When I was 12 the same kid was part of a group that called me names. When we are kids it’s very easy to define bullying. But as an adult, nobody is tripping me up as I walk along the corridor or laughing at the flowers on my umbrella. As an adult I might suffer any one of a number of types of behaviour that are much more challenging to pigeon-hole.

In an example article I read on one anti-bullying website, the victim described her bully as covering all her behaviours with the catch-all of ‘unsolicited mentoring’. She was behaving poorly in the ‘best interests’ of the victim. She said that

“I know her conversations are manipulative and subversive in a way that makes them very hard to describe without making myself sound whiny and thin-skinned. “It’s not what she said, it’s how she said it” is a very poor-sounding complaint, yet it’s important to understand that bullying is not always overt.”

There are obvious examples of bullying in the academic workplace. I know a colleague who was called an ‘[expletive] feminist’ in a meeting in front of collaborators. I know a student who was repeatedly told they should be staying until midnight if they wanted to get everything done. But there are, as the example above suggests, also more subtle ways of bullying.  I know a friend who described her bully as gaslighting her, telling her to carry out specific projects and then, when she presented them to him, yelled at her for doing them and claimed he never asked her to. I know a student who was pressured into experiments she was uncomfortable with, who said she could not voice her issues because her bully had been reprimanded before for his poor behaviour and now only took meetings in person so that there was ‘no record’. I know a colleague who hid her second pregnancy from her supervisor because she was apparently so angry when she got pregnant the first time that she didn’t want to risk a repeat performance until she absolutely had to.

Ziani points out that bullying such as this thrives because of organizational structures. The antonym to ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ is almost ‘monkey see, monkey do’. If we are surrounded by people achieving success and being rewarded, despite poor behaviour, there is little incentive to behave well. She highlights that there are some major structural features that are particularly conducive to bullying and that these are also particularly prevalent in academia. Specifically, an imbalance of power, a laissez-faire leadership style, a culture where the ends justify the means and a unidimensional hiring and promotion process.

The power imbalance issue is problematic and obvious. The person higher up the chain has more power and more influence and is therefore more likely to be believed and supported. The laissez-faire leadership is also problematic and obvious, if nobody up the chain is punishing poor behaviour, or even just incentivising good behaviour, then chaos will ensue. For the ends justifying the means Ziani provides other cultural examples. The army, high end restaurants. The idea being that you’re going to need people who can work in higher pressure situations so ‘being tough’ on them helps turn out people who will be better at the job. In academia we’re supposed to be discovering things, undertaking good research practice and nurturing the next generation of scientists. I would argue the ends, in this case, almost negate the means if bullying is the means.

Studies have shown that up to 42% of academics report experiencing bullying at some point in their careers, with early-career researchers, women, and minority groups being particularly vulnerable to this behaviour. It often manifests in the form of sabotage, exclusion, excessive criticism, or abuse of power by senior staff.

But is there anything we can do systemically to combat this?

When I discussed this piece with a friend, she mentioned that in the US there is a demand, on large program grants, to state where all your underlings have gone. Her line was ‘if you’ve churned out 27 yoga instructors that’s probably not a good sign’, no disrespect to yoga instructors intended. We have no such policy in place in the UK. The introduction of the narrative CV encourages people to highlight how they’ve helped others develop but, as we’ve established on several podcasts on the subject, men will naturally embellish their achievements in these areas. Even if they haven’t been a great mentor, they will say they’ve supervised thirty PhD students to completion. The fact that twenty-seven of them are now yoga instructors is neither here nor there to them. It is unreasonable to hope that all their minions stay in academia, there simply isn’t space, but there should be a way to record for three of their last five-year grants, their post-docs have quit half-way through to work for someone else in the institution. When the rats start jumping the ship, the answer is not to repeatedly plug the holes with more money, no matter how shiny the ship, the answer is to allow the ship to sink.

But this needs to be led at the level of the funders. The institutions are acting as businesses and their bottom line is what matters, not – despite what all the motivational emails say – research culture. I feel like for large program grants, where the PI will be put in charge of a team, previous junior team members should be independently asked for references. ‘You used to work for this person, why did you leave?’ This would work in both directions. If the PI was a great mentor and encouraged growth then that would be highlighted – ‘I left because they found me a position in this great institution, working with one of their collaborators, now we work together on new projects in different institutions and my own network is bigger’. If they weren’t then this would also be obvious – ‘I left because I felt undervalued and neglected’. Because I was talked over and ignored’. Obviously this could be open to abuse, students with grudges, students who simply didn’t get along with their supervisor because of personality clashes, but I feel like overall, a happy team implies a decent boss and it’s not like the system we have now is not open to abuse.

Because at the moment there is an environment where poor behaviour is almost encouraged. Of the examples of bullies I cited above, one has been given airtime on television and at conferences, one was recently awarded a prestigious societal membership, one remains in his job despite being repeatedly reported to HR, who’s response to his behaviour was to send his victim for counselling. Departmental newsletters circulate lauding the achievements of these people whilst their juniors suffer, often in silence because they think that nothing will get done if they do complain. Or that if they complain it will somehow damage their own reputation. And sadly this is often true. I suspect I’m damaging my own reputation right now.

Zaini suggests that the reason poor behaviour is encouraged is because of the unidimensional hiring and promotion structure within academia. She points out that academics are hired on their funding history and their publication record, not their interpersonal skills, meaning that you end up with what she describes as ‘brilliant jerks’. But this again harks back to the fact that these people often had poor examples, they were not taught how to be good leaders and there is, and I fear I am sounding like a broken record here, very little incentive for them to be so. If they have gotten to where they are by lying, cheating, inflating their own achievements and stomping on those below and have gotten away with it, why would they stop?

And here is the major issue with academia. Because of the inherent lack of career stability that most of us suffer, we are prone to putting up with behaviour that, in other industries, would not be tolerated. We are encouraged to be ‘resilient’ and to ‘suck it up’, that this treatment will enable us to thrive in our next job, that we will be better people because of it, that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. But given that somewhere near a third of academics have experienced bullying and harassment, where in ‘normal’ workplaces this is closer to a fifth, perhaps this attitude of resilience is part of what underlies the problem.

And I don’t know what to do about it. Beyond calling it out, as much trouble as this will get me in. Because this should not be my job, this should be the job of the leaders in our industry. Because by ignoring it, all they are doing is raising a generation of researchers who will also ignore it. A generation of researchers who will see that they too, can behave poorly whilst simultaneously forgetting that they suffered at the hands of poor behaviour. To quote Yoda …

“To answer power with power, the Jedi way this is not. In this war, a danger there is of losing who we are”.

Dr Yvonne Couch

Author

Dr Yvonne Couch is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Fellow at the University of Oxford. Yvonne studies the role of extracellular vesicles and their role in changing the function of the vasculature after stroke, aiming to discover why the prevalence of dementia after stroke is three times higher than the average. It is her passion for problem solving and love of science that drives her, in advancing our knowledge of disease. Yvonne shares her opinions, talks about science and explores different careers topics in her monthly blogs – she does a great job of narrating too.

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