Mentoring as a Way to Change a Culture of Academic Bullying and Mobbing in the Humanities

Abstract

In 2009, the Chronicle of Higher Education defined ‘academic mobbing’ as ‘a form of bullying in which members of a department gang up to isolate or humiliate a colleague’. In their call for a special issue on mobbing for Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, editors Stephen Petrina and E. Wayne Ross explain that

if rumors are circulating about the target’s supposed misdeeds, if the target is excluded from meetings or not named to committees, or if people are saying the target needs to be punished formally ‘to be taught a lesson’, it’s likely that mobbing is under way.

This article addresses academic mobbing at colleges and universities in the United States (US), surveying current literature on the topic and discussing three instances of mobbing in the humanities at a regional state university in the US. The article also proposes an innovative mentoring programme as a long-term solution to this problem of bullying.

Specifically, this article presents a mentoring model designed by a doctoral humanities student who has herself been mobbed; this model proposes mentoring at the graduate level to counteract and, it is hoped, eventually eliminate a culture of mobbing in the humanities at the doctoral student’s current university and other schools. The graduate mentoring programme presented in this article seeks to change a culture of mobbing into one of cooperation and support, by helping the next generation of academics live up to the true creative, collaborative potential of the humanities.