My Campus Administration, Faculty Association, Senate, and Me: A Case Study in Academic Mobbing

Introduction

This chapter recounts recent experiences of the author, a tenured associate professor close to normal retirement age, with the University of British Columbia (UBC), its Faculty Association (UBCFA, or simply, FA), this association’s relationship with the author’s campus administration at UBC Okanagan campus (UBCO), and the relationship of the campus administration with the senate of the campus. The chapter is a specific and personal case study of academic mobbing, defined as “an insidious, non-violent and sophisticated kind of psychological bullying that predominantly takes place in college and university campuses” (Khoo, 2010, p. 61). The chapter is one of a series of works the author has written and published in recent years on the institutional analysis of UBC, especially UBCO and the FA (Wylie, 2017, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c, in press). A comprehensive account of some early in time aspects of this case study is published elsewhere (Wylie, 2018c) and hence is not repeated in this chapter.

The inquiry draws on narrative and self-study methodology requiring a close, critical process of inquiry and reflection (Clarke & Erickson, 2003). Self-study is paired with narrative (Hendry, 2010, p. 73). Care however was taken to anonymize as much as possible, other than the actual institution. The chapter explores how administrative managers at the campus, who de facto control the senate, deny and explain away inconvenient information, and how the FA supports them do it. The article demonstrates a turn on ‘don't shoot the messenger’ wisdom, as sweetheart unionism, defined as “collusion between management and labour” in terms “beneficial to management and detrimental to union workers” (Dictionary.com, 2018) and an all-administrative academic governance (Ginsberg, 2011), goes out of its way to muzzle and sideline critics and whistle blowers. The analysis is partially grounded on a particular theory of human reception of inconvenient data:

The objective of the chapter is to generate conversation, dialogue, feedback, input and future inquiry into the issue of academic mobbing, in the spirit of critical engagement as well as insight into new courses of action.

Background: Academic Mobbing

Although the case study of this chapter is primarily a personal account of events, it is of course useful to locate it within the professional literature on academic mobbing. Estimates put mobbing at 15-20 per cent of all participants in the workplace in the United States (Davenport, Schwartz and Elliot, 2011; Hoel and Salin, 2003). Of the 100 or so academic mobbing cases known in Canada and the United States to one expert in the field, around two dozen were from Canadian institutions (Westhues, 2005). Others characterize such phenomena as “low incidence, high severity” (Gunsalus, 2006, pp. 124-25). Yet others argue that the phenomenon is pervasive (MacDonald, Stockton and Landrum, 2018). One commentator cites that an estimated 12 per cent of mobbed professors end up committing suicide (Seguin, 2016, para. 14). One infamous example is that of Justine Sargent, a McGill University neurologist, who committed suicide with her husband in 1994 (Cran, 2018).