Faculty Incivility: The Rise of the Academic Bully Culture and What to Do about It (review)

According to the first paragraph of the first chapter of Faculty Incivility, incivility occurs any time one person does something that offends or displeases another person:

The interpretation of what is civil and what is uncivil is in the perception of the receiver, not the sender. That is what makes the behavior so insidious, because the meaning behind the interaction could be anything from complete sincerity to sarcasm to flagrant manipulation. It could also be harassment, incivility, passive aggression, or bullying as translated by the receiver. The intent of the sender is insignificant.

(p. 3; emphasis mine)

If I accept this analysis, I am faced with a dilemma. I promised the editors of RHE that I would review this book. The ethical standards of academia demand that I do so in accordance with my judgment of the book's merits as a scholarly work. Yet because I judge the book to have very little merit as a scholarly work, I must either violate my professional responsibility or—assuming that the authors would be displeased or offended by a negative review—commit an act of incivility.

Surely the book's intention cannot be to undermine academic peer review, one of the cornerstones of scholarly progress. Yet in repeatedly insisting that "regardless of time, place, or intent, the definition of the situation as civil or uncivil is left up to the victim of the action, not the perpetrator or actor" (p. 6), the book does just that. Any action that someone else does not like, such as rejecting a professor's application for promotion or tenure, is uncivil. Conversely, any action no matter how heinous that does not give offense—perhaps because the victim is self-loathing or masochistic or unaware of the action or its significance—is not uncivil.

Of course, it is true that in work, as in life generally, people can take offense or be displeased by a wide range of actions taken by others. But incivility in all its forms, including the three most discussed in the book—bullying, "mobbing," and harassment—refers to behavior that is both offensive or harmful and unjustified, inappropriate, or mean.

Faculty Incivility fails to recognize that bullying means taking unfair advantage of a position of superior strength—for example, forcing subordinates to do things that they should not have to do. It is not bullying when a boss requires an employee to perform a task that falls within the employee's job description even if the employee does not wish to do it. A department chair who indicates to a junior colleague that publication in scholarly journals is required for a grant of tenure is not guilty of bullying, but one who suggests to a junior colleague that co-authoring with the chair is required for tenure is.

Likewise the book views mobbing as any situation in which one individual is forced to submit to a collective decision. If this is true, then majority voting is uncivil, and one is left to wonder how academic departments (or societies at large) are supposed to resolve their differences.

Harassment, as the book recognizes, is the form of incivility most likely to implicate both university policy and federal and state law. At times in the chapters devoted to "characterizing" and "challenging" the "bully culture," the book seems to suggest that universities should adopt codes of conduct prohibiting incivility patterned on existing policies and laws that prohibit racial and sexual harassment.

I say "at times" because embedded in what seems to be a discussion of the need for more explicit and aggressive faculty codes is the puzzling but, for this book, not atypical, sentence, "With no code of behavior (and we are not recommending one), the chances for greater incivility have the potential to fuel the bully culture" (p. 156; emphasis mine).) But once again the book fails to recognize...