Thirty recent cases of professors whose colleagues attempted to drum them out of the department, and a background story on mobbing behavior among professors. Two of the victims listed on this site have names that should be well known in the theory community: Jack Edmonds and Adrian Bondy. Via MF.



Comments:

None:
2008-11-12T18:20:25Z
My experience is that unfair mobbing is a minor problem compared to the problem of professors behaving badly because they know that can't be fired because of tenure, and the rest of the faculty failing to take any actions to at least express non-approval of the bad behaviour.
11011110:
2008-11-12T18:24:54Z
Yeah, it should be pointed out that in many of the listed cases the victims also behaved badly. And as you say, many professors behave badly and either get away with few consequences for their behavior or shrug off attempts at correcting them. But prosecuting them for failing to accurately account for their office supplies doesn't seem like the right way to fix the situation.
mcfnord:
2008-11-13T03:09:55Z
I should also emphasize that few mobbing targets (indeed, few humans) are wholly innocent of mistakes and faults. Many victims of lynching in the old South were guilty of serious crimes, but that does not alter the fact that they were lynched. Does this seem curiously subjective to you? We might always object to lynching, but should we similarly object to mobbing? In my own commercial experience, mobs... mobs get things done. I have formented mobs to purge the workplace of people I identify as barriers to success. I guess this is encapsulated in the Lorenz quote that we can bring mobs under rational control... or that mob behavior can be rationally deployed. But once deployed it has its own rules. Like scientists in any field, we name and explain an empirically identifiable phenomenon. Our primary goal is to understand it. This means in addition that moralizing is of lower priority. It is plain to me, for example, that most human mobbings are unreasonable, untruthful, unnecessary, harmful, wrong. hmmm i guess if you define it that way then no i am not involved in mobbing. When I do it, I entreat other humans to engage with me in reasonable, truthful, necessary, and right objectives. It happens every few years, usually at Microsoft, where many managers believe mobs are legitimate quality assurance tools. hmm
None: When academic politics gets ulgy
2008-12-09T17:32:35Z
Your story is one-sided. Edmonds and Bondy are/were great researchers, but unless you are a student under them, or a colleague with them, you will never understand the kind of people they are. Edmonds, for example, is dreaded by students. He tosses insults and rude comments at students. Bondy, on the other hand, has turned "lazy".
11011110: Re: When academic politics gets ulgy
2008-12-09T17:44:43Z
I was trying not to take a position on those cases, beyond citing them as instances of a more general phenomenon, actually. As livejournal user mcfnord stated above, when this kind of mobbing occurs, there's usually a reason for it. The question, though, is whether it's an appropriate way of handling whatever problems might exist — it seems to violate all our norms of due process.