ERIC Number: EJ1119509
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015-Jul
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-2347-6311
EISSN: N/A
Mentoring as a Way to Change a Culture of Academic Bullying and Mobbing in the Humanities
Metzger, Angela M.; Petit, Angela; Sieber, Sharon
Higher Education for the Future, v2 n2 p139-150 Jul 2015
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 is 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.
Descriptors: Bullying, College Faculty, Work Environment, Humanities, Mentors, Prevention, Models, Graduate Students, School Culture, Peer Relationship
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A