The topic of university mobbing beats in my heart like Klaas's ashes. This time, a wave of layoffs has hit St. Petersburg State University (see para. https://openrussia.org/post/view/3772/). I sincerely sympathize with my colleagues and hope that this article, as well as other articles on mobbingu.net, will help them overcome the emotional consequences of bossing and mobbing.
It is quite obvious that mobbing cannot be viewed in isolation from the political and socio-economic contexts that contribute to making the previously impossible possible — university professors in the middle of the academic year (!) lost their jobs. The mechanism of repression and the signs of persecution are as old as the world (cf. Renee Gerard's “Scapegoat”), but the conditions and reasons for implementing them, despite their obvious stereotypes, may vary. I will elaborate on the standard/timeless conditions and reasons for university mobbing, draw attention to the specific features of the current situation with university mobbing in Russia, and it is unlikely that I will be able to ignore historical analogies.
Like apple from apple tree and mobbing from bossing
It is quite obvious that respected teachers have been fired for various reasons. The motives could be either real or far-fetched, but they all served the same purpose: to free teachers from their jobs. Tatiana Lapshina, a psychologist and website consultant, explained the emergence of mobbing at the university as follows: “I was faced with a complete inability to do anything with a hired employee if he broke unspoken rules before the contract expired. I suspect that this combination of great responsibility and low administrative capacity can lead managers and deans to support mobbing.” This assumption was absolutely correct until recently. Let me explain why.
In Soviet and post-Soviet times, the head of the department/department, in order to “get rid” of a negligent/middle/disloyal subordinate, really needed to use “mass energy”, namely, to initiate mobbing in the team when an objectionable colleague passed through the election procedure, the climax of which was voting at a department meeting. The manager could only wait for the next election to free the team from “ballast”. For many years, department mobbing, complicated by competition, remained almost the only repressive mechanism at the university. The leader in whose interests the mobbing was carried out was usually eliminated, yielding the battlefield to his subordinates, as it was not profitable for him to “shine” in this act of bullying for various reasons, including fear of ruining his reputation not among the first. I will outline several prerequisites for mobbing to “mature” from bossing (for more details on university mobbing, see Psychological terror (mobbing) at the department as a form of professional destruction).
1. A leader who believes in his impunity or irremovability (beneficial to his superiors, convenient to the victim “majority”) usually begins to selflessly intrigue and move “pawns” and employees on the chessboard, as he understands perfectly well that the longer he stays in office, the more dissatisfied and potential competitors appear in his team. An aggravating factor can be considered the pressure “from above” experienced by a manager of any size.
2. The opaque nature of the organization's professional and financial activities. Information about how everything happens at the department/faculty — how people are appointed, how bonuses are paid, who goes on a business trip or internship more often than others, how salaries and “bonuses” are calculated — this is classified information. It is owned by the boss and sometimes by those “who are more equal”. “Sacred knowledge” and a halo tightly pinned to his head give the leader the inalienable right to control people's destinies.
3. The lack of a well-functioning system of personnel promotion and career opportunities.
(I foresee possible objections to this point: “The university's promotion system is well established! It's obvious: teachers must be re-elected every 2, 4, 6 years.” My answer is this: “streamlined” does not mean that the promotion mechanism will be launched for the benefit of a particular employee (see paragraphs 1 and 2). In this case, the competition and the elective position of university staff are exactly what makes teachers so vulnerable that they do not allow general anti-mobbing legislation to be directly used to protect them even in Europe and the United States. It is for this reason that almost all Western universities have their own internal documents on preventing mobbing and overcoming its consequences. Insulted teachers first go through an anti-mobbing procedure at a university, and only then, on the basis of a decision taken by the Anti-Mobbing Commission, can go to court (see para. Implementation of the anti-mobbing procedure at the Jagiellonian University).
And at ours, and at the department..
In order to better understand how this timeless mechanism of reprisal against an objectionable teacher starts, let's imagine a conventional department, all coincidences with which, please, consider all coincidences to be random. Who and for what position will be nominated in the next election depends entirely on the head of the department, as well as the distribution of the workload, which acts as a “sword of Damocles” in an election situation, as it affects the fate of the candidate. The manager skillfully manipulates people on the eve of the elections: negotiations are underway with the “candidates”, conditions are being put forward. Sometimes you don't even need “negotiations” — the prerequisites for a teacher's real and imaginary well-being may not be voiced. Everyone remembers very well that cathedral “tablets” with these “conditions” have been lying in the dust since Soviet times.
The department will always have employees whose growth will be artificially restrained and those who are “more equal than other animals”. And if a scapegoat is chosen as the manager, the teachers are likely to start bullying him together, since leaving work will definitely be in the interests of some of his colleagues: some will get the free “hours”, the remaining “half time” will help someone survive until retirement, and the most “equal” and zealous employee may even be promoted. Not all members of the department know what exactly is in store for a colleague, but only those who are “more equal than others”. Most of our conventional department is a victim majority ready to vote “properly”, and those colleagues who “plow” in several places come to the department only for meetings, know the “victim” poorly and support the team's decision due to their ignorance and workload. Of course, there are also members of the department who use the mobbing situation for personal purposes, for example, wanting to get even with their old opponent, and some for psychological reasons (for various categories of “mobbers”, see para. How to strangle a mobber in you). I think I will leave our conventional department here for a while with its universal method of reprisal.
Science and control
Among the conditions and reasons for creating a mobbing situation in higher education, I deliberately did not mention the existence of a “scientific school”, graduate students, or a “family contract”, as I did not want to complicate the repressive scheme with these, of course, important but variable circumstances. However, there is one fact that I cannot ignore, since it is directly related to the competitive basis of teaching and either contributes to the development of a specialist's scientific and teaching career, or serves as its “gravedigger”. I mean carrying out research activities, without which it is impossible to proudly carry the banner of your university, get a promotion or simply work as a teacher. At the same time, science classes are every teacher's “Achilles' heel”. When embarking on this path, a graduate student or young teacher should remember that with each step, the web will begin to thicken, preventing the potential victim from making an extra move without regard to the opinions of a huge number of people he did not even know existed before. And historical conditions make this helpless, bare “heel” of a teacher even more vulnerable to the arrows of resentful colleagues and a short-sighted leader. Suffice it to recall that it was ideological control in Soviet science that allowed the state repressive machine to deal with those whose scientific activities were branded “alien” and “imperialist”, who were thrown out of institutions for mentioning the names of ideologically alien scientists, writers, and philosophers in their articles and dissertations; who were slaughtered without a knife at academic councils because their works did not comply with Marxism Leninist-Leninist servilism is a mandatory citation of the classics of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and scientists, “party comrades”. People whose views and ideas in science did not coincide with the party's scientific line were persecuted and repressed, including physical destruction. Those appointed by the victims were used by the authorities in the fight against alien “isms” - “cosmopolitanism” and “international Zionism”. If we add up all these necessary and sufficient reasons, conditions and circumstances of university bossing, which often disguises itself as mobbing, it turns out that the university teaching profession is one of the most vulnerable professions in terms of emotional abuse of an employee. As a university lecturer and “professor's daughter”, I have lived in the information field of university problems all my life and have always known that the academic environment is fertile ground for emotional abuse by management and colleagues. I heard a lot from my father about employees of universities and research institutes who were forced to leave their department or institute without being given the opportunity to defend themselves at their native university or stabbed to death while defending themselves. I know teachers who were put into a situation of moral choice in cathedral mobbing — either you're with us or you're with a scapegoat. I know how smart, thin and reverent people broke off when defending their dissertations. I know firsthand what happened to those who were “carried” past grants they deserved and sometimes simply necessary for scientific growth, leaving them on the sidelines of their cathedral and sometimes scientific careers.
The ability to excel gives a teacher a “problem”
The mobbing situation is no less common among teachers than, for example, in the acting environment. These two professional environments are united by a huge emotional and psychological dependence on their work: the opportunity to speak in front of the public/students, love for the public/students, the prestige of the profession, belonging to the intellectual elite, the realization of creative/scientific ambitions, and a relatively quick opportunity to achieve success. And, in fact, teaching is akin to acting — to captivate the audience, forcing them to expand their ideas about the world and their place in this world. Think of your favorite teachers. Surely among them there are those who were characterized by their egodemonstrative behavior, the ability to teach brilliantly, be “strange” and interesting. I think I would not be mistaken if I say that students care not only about “what”, but also about “how”. They always recognize the teacher's professional and personal background. Until recently, student ratings were not taken into account in the overall teaching “baggage”. Moreover, popularity among students was often considered bad form in academia. There are cases when a teacher appointed to be a “victim” was accused of being popular with students. Only then did the charges use an ominous word with the time-honored “ism” at the end — populism. This charge was part of a mandatory “set” of stereotypes of persecution and bullying. And the persecution and harassment themselves were often carried out in order to besiege a “presumptuous” colleague who forgot who he should be grateful to for every step he took in his profession and science, and for his popularity among students. I will express a controversial idea: the very situation in which the career of a scientist or the fate of a brilliant teacher or a students' favorite depends on the team's consciously formed or spontaneously formed opinion is an anomalous and unhealthy situation. The professional knowledge and skills of a scientist and teacher were most often formed as a result of his personal intellectual efforts, under the influence of talent and hard work. By and large, a teacher or researcher is an “individualist” who owes nothing to anyone except his supervisor or mentor. A higher school teacher should only work conscientiously and comply with all the requirements related to the performance of his professional duties. He must grow as a scientist and researcher. And everything else he supposedly “should” belongs to the heavy legacy of totalitarian times, when words like “individualism”, “personal growth”, and “career” sounded like a verdict. Soviet collectivism has metastasized even in areas of activity whose development directly depends on relying on the best, talented, outstanding, able-bodied, who, sometimes, have no equal. Let me give you an example from a field far from university topics. When I read “Planet Konstantin”, a book by aviation historian Vladimir Savin, a gift to me in 1994, about the fate of Konstantin Alekseyevich Kalinin (1889-1938), an outstanding pilot and aircraft designer, who was shot in 1938, I was struck by one fact. Konstantin Kalinin created his famous “K” aircraft at the design bureau at the Kharkiv Aircraft Plant. At the end of the 1920s, clouds began to gather over the plant's general designer. Other accusations at one of the plant's party meetings included the following: “The Chief Designer takes all the achievements of GROSS and HAZ that the aircraft bear the K brand after the first letter of his last name. To the last charge, Kalinin replied that “K” came from the first model of his car, the K-1 meant “Team -1”, and disagreements in interpretation should not interfere with the work of the design bureau.” How strange and absurd this accusation seemed to me at the time. The General Designer has been accused of using the first letter of his last name in the aircraft brand, which means “pulling the blanket over himself”, which means putting himself above the team! How did this become possible?! When I asked me at the time, my father answered that at that time it was a very significant accusation with far-reaching consequences: “Higher than the collective means you can rise above the decisions of the party and the government, which means that you are not afraid and do not feel grateful for being shown the way to go. And all this meant that you were capable of absolutely anything, including betraying the interests of the party and the state.” I had to remember this conversation in 2011, when I myself was nailed to a pole of shame at a meeting that became one of our cathedral mobbing practices. At that meeting, I was accused of individualism and of “ignoring the interests of the department” because I had to prove at the level of rector, vice-rector and trade unions that the courses I had successfully proposed, developed and taught were my burden, which they should not have distributed among colleagues behind my back, in my absence and on the eve of my elections. I remember the manager's formidable words: “There are no “your courses” here. All courses here are mine.”
Everything you do is for the worse
I gave a light outline of the necessary and sufficient conditions for university mobbing in Soviet times, but with the help of this well-functioning repressive and managerial mechanism, managers successfully continued to deal with “excess people” in the post-Soviet years. Frankly speaking, this heavy legacy of old times, which burdens the difficult life of a university teacher, has not only not become a thing of the past, but has also been exacerbated by the expected and much-needed reform of the higher education system. Russia embarked on the path of European higher education reform by joining the Bologna educational system in September 2003. The reforms were moving slowly, and the realization of the need for change was even slower. The Bologna system, despite its obvious shortcomings, has a number of advantages necessary to “cheer up” any higher education representative by giving him a European vaccine. The requirements for a teacher's scientific activity have increased (taking into account the citation index and a certain number of conferences and publications per year). The competition for the position has become a professional initiative. The reduction in hourly rates and part-time workers has led to an increase in the workload of full-time teachers. And the creation of a flexible system of training modules filled with interesting and applied elective subjects has forced teachers to expand their professional horizons, developing several new courses every year. I would also consider the positive results of the Bologna process to include the accreditation of universities by external institutions and the inclusion of Russian universities in the European university rankings. An important role in increasing the competitiveness of a university is played by such cumulative indicators as: the scientific merits of each teacher, the ability of university staff to quickly adapt to new conditions, taking into account the rating of subjects and teachers among students, and the citation index. It would seem that this is teaching happiness: show your best, don't run to different universities looking for “hours”, but work hard and efficiently at the same job, promoting science and collecting students' “likes”. However, the “gene of persecution and bullying” can (and already does) ruin the picture of renewal. Increasing competitiveness involves fighting for the survival of every teacher. And how, one might ask, in such a situation, to combine improving professional performance with a “shameful” emphasizing of their strengths that is entrenched in the minds of Soviet and post-Soviet people, instead of considering them as a result of the “collective activities” and “care” of individual heads of state and institutions who, under the conditions of educational reform, are becoming more and more like “states”? Over the past three years, such changes have taken place in the Russian higher education system that have created all the conditions for the revival of the ideology of “collectivism”, among other Soviet-era ideologies that suddenly shone with neon signs.
Latent mobber
“Didn't our lives even have a gap between the past and the present to say that people have changed in some way? For example, I have been working at a university since 2004 and have never faced bullying and persecution by colleagues,” a colleague asked when I started predicting that the situation with university mobbing would deteriorate in the coming months. I can say that my friend was definitely lucky to have colleagues and managers. But she was most fortunate over time, as her teaching career took place during a period of stable economic situation in the country. Most likely, the “fat years” really normalized the atmosphere in labor collectives for some time. Wealth or just a decent life did their job: people relaxed and, in individual jobs, grace came. However, in any economic situation, it is impossible to completely eliminate mobbing at the workplace. In jobs where there is a high level of competition, the threat of mobbing or bossing will always exist. It is only partly true that periods of economic stability help to reduce the level of aggression in society. If this statement were absolutely correct, the statistics on mobbing in Europe would be completely different. According to the latest data from the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, an average of 4-5% of employees in the EU are mobbed at work.
Until recently, I also naively thought that under the influence of favorable circumstances and the normalization of the economic situation, people themselves had changed... But they did not change. What narcologists like to warn about just happened: if a person breaks down after years of abstinence from alcohol, alcoholism affects him even more than it did before the period of stability. In my opinion, the same thing happens to the latent mobber that sits in each of us who has absorbed the word “repression” in our mother's milk. As soon as society has the conditions necessary for mobbing to occur, our inner latent mobber is ready to “drive” and “poison” so as not to be among the persecuted and poisoned. And now, before our eyes, conditions are again beginning to develop that each of us is faced with a choice: to persecute, to remain silent or to fight.
When I learned about the teachers dismissed from St. Petersburg State University, I immediately imagined the condition of their colleagues. In order not to become the next candidates for retirement and, perhaps even, to strengthen their positions in this situation, they had to support the management, namely: take the burden of objectionable people, vote correctly, and not show public sympathy for the victims of university mobbing. Most likely, they did not even understand that they had become participants in mobbing, since no one explained to them that bullying includes, among other techniques, for example, ignoring colleagues and excluding them from the department's communicative space. Let us recall how our wave of tacit condemnation of a colleague who had been guilty before the management washed away not only the scapegoat himself, but also our shame for what he had done. I suppose that almost every one of us, university professors, became such a mobber “involuntarily”, vaguely guessing another victim of persecution and their possible fate. This, in fact, was the beginning of each of us's journey to Calvary. Moreover, on this path, those who will bear the cross will someday switch places with those who are now silently seeing them off or hooting their tracks.
Without “St. George's Day”
What about our conventional department? What is it like to work there as a teacher now in the new economic conditions, conditions of increased competition and the next revival of the “latent mobber”? It is obvious that there will be people at this department who cannot keep up with the new requirements. They are the first candidates for layoffs. A new breath will open up for those employees who are always ready to fly to the top quickly, but when flying, they invariably confuse where the “top” is and where the “bottom” is that they can no longer build off. Grants, projects, internships are really worthwhile things to fight for in the current conditions, including through mobbing and bullying and all their attributes — lies, slander, emotional violence. Those who are “more equal than others”, as well as relatives and “inner circle”, will again be in a good position. Of course, those who really meet all the new requirements will also win, but in some universities only if they convey to students the very truthful truth that you will not find in the whole world more truthful. Teachers who are able to mimic the environment will also benefit. You won't envy the head of the department/department/faculty in the new conditions — his situation is worse than that of the governor. He should write more reports, encourage employees and make them meet European university criteria. His superiors are putting pressure on him from above, while his colleagues, who do not want to do the doubled workload for the same money, are putting pressure on him from below. In addition, he needs to somehow adapt to the new “party and government line”, as well as cling to some financial source so as not to leave his subordinates not only without travel allowances, grants, bonuses, but also without salaries, since everything I listed was “flowers”. The “berries” began with the realization of the economic crisis, which is the illegitimate children of political and institutional crises. The objective processes associated with the necessary reform of higher education tragically coincided with the deterioration of the economic situation in Russia and in almost all countries of the former USSR.
In this situation of undeclared crisis, almost all teachers find themselves in the position of serfs whose further professional and material well-being now depends entirely on the “landowner”, “manager” and their equally bonded colleagues. A teacher I know once told me that there is no place for mobbing at a university where employees are busy. I would agree with this point of view if I didn't know that even in a team of “overworked” teachers, there are situations of mobbing and bullying, precisely because they are busy and unable to give up the “overload” for fear of losing their jobs. Almost all teachers lost their “combined jobs” and stayed at the same place of work. Thus, without publicity, serfdom was introduced without “St. George's Day”. I must say that a similar practice of being loyal only to one's own university also exists in the West. Nevertheless, teachers there have the opportunity to use Yuriev Day, namely, to participate in open competitions for positions at other universities. In the total absence of an honest and open competition for external teachers, an employee's departure from his institute is certainly possible, but, most likely, it will be a “nowhere” trip. The current difficult economic situation, together with education reform, significantly restricts teaching and personal freedom. The teacher is increasingly faced with a dilemma: “Although I have a heavy workload here, I have a full-time job. Elsewhere, I won't be offered a bet, and it's impossible or problematic to combine.” In the current conditions of crisis and impending unemployment, a colleague is likely to choose a “bird in hand” and immediately fall into the trap. Let me remind you that the situation of teachers is also aggravated by the annual competition. Previously, teachers who measured their professional life in competitions could relax for two and some six years, but now some universities have begun to take part in elections or through the procedure for renewing contracts once a year. Thus, teachers not only work “under the sword of Damocles” as before, but also live under constant stress. And then there's that sticky word “loyalty”...
The flow of tension
Few people paid attention to the fact that Russia has undergone such reforms in the field of education, when salary increases for teachers and university professors began to depend directly on the school principal, rector, and dean. Thus, a strong foundation was laid for vertical bossing. The vertical in education was established in order to subordinate it to the general vertical of power. And where there is such a vertical, only loyalty is valued. And where loyalty is the main criterion for professionalism, there is fertile ground for university bossing/mobbing/bullying. We have already “gone through” all this, with the only difference being that at that time we were “poor” and didn't bite each other's throats for distributing funds for research projects. I would like to note that the distribution of funds for projects is now under special control by the management of all universities, so I foresee that the struggle for their distribution will be colored in the colors of the mobber and buller banners. Why are there projects! In the near future, teachers will have to travel on business trips and conferences “for their own” or with funds from a grant. And the events of the past two months show that delays in paying salaries at some universities are turning from a “nightmare” into an objective reality. In addition, the “demographic hole” has not yet been crossed, and an objective decrease in the number of students is a very important factor affecting the university's rating and the position of academic staff. I foresee that inter-university competition will soon increase, as not only “duplicate specialties and programs” at different universities will be closed, but also “duplicate” faculties and the universities themselves. And this will already be a fight between the titans, in which all means, or rather, all means for mobbing, will be good.
Mobbing? No, bullying!
There are no statistics on workplace mobbing in Russia and in post-Soviet countries at all, just as the definition of “mobbing” itself has no place in legal documents and the active vocabulary of Russian people (see para. About the benefits of barbarism). Managers at all levels benefit from a situation where there is no concept that points to an institutional crisis, for example, in education or medicine. The concept of “mobbing” requires urgent measures to overcome it. And the words “bullying” and “persecution” are not terms and are perceived only as the emotions of an offended person. That is why insisting that “this phenomenon does not exist in our country” means wishful thinking or simply lying (cf. Lying on cockroach legs).
“They won't rot a decent person in vain..”
It is quite obvious that objectionable teachers will repeatedly go through all known mobbing/bullying procedures. These repeated stories of bullying show that academic staff are one of the most vulnerable categories of employees whose employment can be terminated by the administration at any time under the guise of contract expiration, lack of workload, lack of student sympathy, lack of sufficient publications in important journals and a low citation index...
In light of recent events related to the dismissal of teachers from St. Petersburg State University, I wondered why there are so few literary texts in literary Russia about academic/university life and about university mobbing/bullying? “Few” is not the right word... I only remembered the story by mathematician Elena Sergeyevna Wentzel, who, under the pseudonym I. Grekova, wrote her “Department” in 1977, which tells about the life of the Cybernetics Department of a technical university. Why so few? Oh yeah! We don't have mobbing or bossing. We have cases of bullying at the workplace. But they are so rare that no matter who I ask about university mobbing, I always come across the answer: “I didn't hear it. And what is this?” It is quite obvious that university academic staff does not want to “air their dirty laundry”. Some try not to remember their bad deeds on the way to academic prosperity, while others, victims of bullying from colleagues, believe that the situation of emotional abuse in which they find themselves casts a shadow, first of all, on their reputation. In a society where there has not been a historically formed tradition of respect for the individual and his rights and freedoms, society's condemnation always falls on the victim of persecution, not on the persecutors.
They won't rot a decent person for nothing, students told me when I told them about mobbing/bullying. This answer points to the “justifiable” psychology of latent mobbers. Most likely, the children have already gone through the experience of mobbing (both as a victim and as a persecutor) at school and college and are already mentally ready to support the bullying of an objectionable person in adulthood. How many decades or centuries will it take to get rid of the “gene” of Malyuta Skuratov and Fedor Basmanov?
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