Gang Stalking United

http://www.ocufa.on.ca/Academi…..obbing.pdf

Twenty years ago, Swedish psychologist Heinz Leymann gave the name “mobbing” to this terror, taking the word from Konrad Lorenz’s research on aggression in non-human species. Mobbing of alien predators and sometimes of members of the same species occurs among many birds and primates. Something about the target arouses a fierce, contagious impulse to attack and destroy. Mobbers take turns vocalizing hostility and inflicting wounds. The target usually flees. Sometimes it is killed and eaten.

Violent mobbing is endemic to our species. Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has analyzed lynching as a cannibalistic “ritual of blood.” Teenage swarming is similar, as in the murder of Reena Virk in Victoria, B.C., in 1997. Her friends set upon her in a frenzy of bloodlust, reviled and tortured her, and eventually held her head under water until she was dead.

Leymann studied the nonviolent, polite, sophisticated kind of mobbing that happens in ostensibly rational workplaces. Universities are an archetype. If professors despise a colleague to the point of feeling a desperate need to put the colleague down, pummeling the target is a foolish move. The mobbers lose and the target gains credibility. The more clever and effective strategy is to wear the target down emotionally by shunning, gossip, ridicule, bureaucratic hassles, and withholding of deserved rewards. The German word

Todschweigen , or death by silence, describes this initial, informal stage of workplace mobbing.

This is often enough to achieve the goal. Many targets crumble, flee to a job elsewhere, or take early retirement. Others surrender to the collective will, behaving thereafter like a dog that has been bested by another dog in a fight for dominance. If the target refuses to leave or acquiesce, the mobbing may escalate to a formal outburst of aggression. Mobbers seize upon a critical incident, some real or imagined misbehaviour they claim is proof of the target’s unworthiness to continue in the normal give-and-take of academic life. A degradation ritual is arranged, often in a dean’s office, sometimes in a campus tribunal. The object is to destroy the good name that is any professor’s main resource and to expose the target as not worth listening to. Public censure by the university administration leaves the target stigmatized for life. Formal dismissal with attendant publicity is social elimination in its most conclusive form.

In its more advanced stages, mobbing is rare. Leymann estimated that fewer than five per cent of ordinary workers are mobbed during their careers. The percentage among professors may be a little higher.

In his comprehensive book on academic freedom, York University historian Michiel Horn recounts some famous cases from Canada’s past of what would today be called mobbing. Biochemist George Hunter’s firing from the University of Alberta in 1949 is one example. Historian Harry Crowe’s ouster from United College in Winnipeg in 1958 is another.

My own research has been on recent mobbings in academe. About two dozen of the 100 or so cases I have analyzed are from Canadian universities. Because McGill University closed down its inquiry into her death, the 1994 case of Justine Sergent is especially noteworthy. She was a successful neuropsychologist, whose adversaries positioned her on the wrong side of the local research ethics board.

Sergent received a formal reprimand and grieved it. The

Montreal Gazette learned of the dispute from an anonymous letter and ran with the story. “McGill researcher disciplined for breaking rules,” the headline read. The humiliation was more than Sergent could bear. She and her husband, Yves, wrote poignant letters the next day and then committed suicide.

My most detailed study has been of the seven-year mobbing of theologian Herbert Richardson at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. His formal dismissal in 1994 was the most publicized in Canadian history. The case is unparalleled in its complexity and documentation and in the insight it offers into current cultural trends.

Other recent Canadian mobbing targets include theologian Hugo Meynell at Calgary, linguist Hector Hammerly at Simon Fraser, social work professor Kathleen Kufeldt at Memorial, and mathematician Jack Edmonds at Waterloo.

All these cases are contentious. Stigma, once officially imposed, is generally thought to be deserved. Like everybody else, professors want to believe the world is just. Academic mobbings are as hard to correct as wrongful convictions in courts of law.