Defining, Locating, and Addressing Bullying in the Wpa Workplace - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607328151 ISBN 13: 9781607328155

Publisher: Utah State University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Defining, Locating, and Addressing Bullying in the WPA Workplace is the first volume to take up the issue of bullying in writing programs. Contributors to this collection share their personal stories and analyze varieties of collegial malevolence they have experienced as WPAs with consequences in emotional, mental, and physical health and in personal and institutional economies.
 
Contributors of varying status in different types of programs across many kinds of institutions describe various forms of bullying, including microaggressions, incivility, mobbing, and emotional abuse. They define bullying as institutional racism, "academic systemic incivility," a crisis of insularity, and faculty fundamentalism. They locate bullying in institutional contexts, including research institutions, small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and writing programs and writing centers. These locations are used as points of departure to further theorize bullying and to provide clear advice about agentive responses.
 
A culture of silence discourages discussions of this behavior, making it difficult to address abuse. This silence also normalizes patterns and cultivates the perception that bullying arises naturally. Defining, Locating, and Addressing Bullying in the WPA Workplace helps the field to name these patterns of behaviors as bullying and resist ideologies of normalcy, encouraging and empowering readers to take an active role in defining, locating, and addressing bullying in their own workplaces.
 
Contributors: Sarah Allen, Andrea Dardello, Harry Denny, Dawn Fels, Bre Garrett, W. Gary Griswold, Amy C. Heckathorn, Aurora Matzke, Staci Perryman-Clark, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, Erec Smith
 

About this title

About the Author

Cristyn L. Elder is associate professor of rhetoric and writing and cofounder of the Stretch and Studio Composition program at the University of New Mexico, for which she was cowinner of the 2016 Award for Innovation from the Council on Basic Writing. She received the 2015-2016 award for Outstanding New Teacher of the Year and the 2015 Golden Louie Award for Outstanding Faculty Student Service Provider, both at the University of New Mexico.

Bethany Davila is associate professor of rhetoric and writing and cofounder of the Stretch and Studio Composition program at the University of New Mexico, for which she was cowinner of the 2016 Award for Innovation from the Council on Basic Writing. She received the 2013-2014 award for Outstanding New Teacher of the Year at the University of New Mexico, the Best New Scholar Award in 2012 from Written Communication, and the Dimond Best Dissertation Award in 2011 from the University of Michigan School of Education.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Defining, Locating, and Addressing Bullying in the WPA Workplace

By Cristyn L. Elder, Bethany Davila

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2019 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-815-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Foreword Shirley K Rose, 
Introduction: Bullying: Not Just Politics as Usual Cristyn L. Elder and Bethany Davila, 
1. "Shocked by the Incivility": A Survey of Bullying in the WPA Workplace Bethany Davila and Cristyn L. Elder, 
2. Of Sticks and Stones, Words That Wound, and Actions Speaking Louder: When Academic Bullying Becomes Everyday Oppression Harry Denny, 
3. "Nevertheless, She Persisted": Strategies to Counteract the Time, Place, and Structure for Academic Bullying of WPAs Aurora Matzke, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Bre Garrett, 
4. The Making of a Bully Culture (and How One Might Transform It) Sarah Allen, 
5. Quiet as It's Kept: Bullying and the Contingent Writing Center Director Dawn Fels, 
6. Breaking the Silence of Racism and Bullying in Academia: Leaning in to a Hard Truth Andrea Dardello, 
7. Race, Teaching Assistants, and Workplace Bullying: Confessions from an African American Pre-Tenured WPA Staci Perryman-Clark, 
8. A Barbarian within the Gate: The Detriments of Insularity at a Small Liberal Arts College Erec Smith, 
9. The Professional Is Personal: Institutional Bullying and the WPA Amy Heckathorn, 
10. Remediation via Mandate: The California State University's Early Start Initiative as Manifestation of Systematized Bullying W. Gary Griswold, 
11. "I Can't Afford to Lose My Job" Anonymous, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"Shocked by the Incivility"

A Survey of Bullying in the WPA Workplace

Bethany Davila and Cristyn L. Elder

In their opening chapter to The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration, Jillian Skeffington, Shane Borrowman, and Theresa Enos (2008) identify ways writing program administrators (WPAs) (most of whom are women and many of whom, whether male or female, are junior faculty) fight to do their jobs. They provide examples of both the professional and personal challenges WPAs can face and share the results of their "Web survey of WPAs," designed "to profile the work of writing program administrators in broad strokes" (Skeffington, Borrowman, and Enos 2008, 8). The authors begin their discussion by listing the questions they did not ask, including, as they note, the most important yet implicit question "are you okay," a question to which "many junior faculty with administrative duties cannot respond positively on either a personal or professional level" (Skeffington, Borrowman, and Enos 2008, 9). In many ways, we designed our survey — the focus of this chapter — to address an aspect of that unstated question ("are you okay?") by asking WPAs and those who work in the WPA workplace whether they have experienced bullying and, if so, to describe the details of those experiences. Through the results of our survey, we identified bullying as a common peril in the WPA workplace. In addition to contributing to WPA scholarship on what has heretofore been termed working conditions or politics (phrases we take issue with in the introduction to this collection), this chapter also contributes to scholarship on bullying in higher education by defining the categories of the Negative Acts Questionnaire–Revised (NAQ-R) — a research instrument used to collect data on workplace bullying in primarily Anglophone settings — and by identifying an additional category that is relevant to and perhaps beyond the WPA workplace.

Ultimately, this chapter describes the scope of bullying in the WPA workplace as well as the prevalent patterns within the broad term workplace bullying. Through this work, we aim to draw attention to unacceptable behaviors that have been largely normalized and often go unaddressed. By showing the unacceptable prevalence of bullying in the WPA workplace, we will not only send the message to targets of bullying that they are not alone, but we also hope to inspire others to work against the behaviors and patterns described below. In other words, we intend for this chapter to serve as a call to action for our field.

The Survey

To investigate the extent of bullying in the WPA workplace, we surveyed and interviewed self-identified stakeholders in writing programs at colleges and universities across the United States. In this chapter we will share the results of this survey, which sought to answer these questions: what does bullying in the WPA workplace look like, and how often does it occur?

We began the anonymous online survey by asking participants (recruited through professional academic listservs, namely, WPA-L, BW-L, WAC-L, and SLW-L) if, based on the one definition of bullying we provided, they had been bullied in relation to their work in the WPA workplace. For participants who answered "yes," we asked them to describe their experiences. In addition and alternatively, participants were given the option to provide their contact information so we could interview them about these experiences. Our goals with these first two questions were to identify the scope of bullying in the WPA workplace and to collect information about the kinds of bullying people have experienced.

The next section of our survey followed an established method of measuring workplace bullying: asking participants to read a list of acts or behaviors and to indicate how frequently, if at all, they had experienced each of those acts in the previous twelve months. The list we used was a slightly adapted version of the NAQ-R, which is "a reliable, valid, comprehensive, yet relatively short scale, tailor-made for use in a variety of occupational settings" (Einarsen, Hoel, and Notelaers 2009, 27). The full list of the acts and behaviors is included with our findings in this chapter. We followed the protocol tested in association with the NAQ-R and asked participants to limit their responses to a specific time frame (the previous twelve months). This time frame helps distinguish between bullying, which involves "repetition (frequency), duration (over a period of time) and patterning (of a variety of behaviors involved)," and other negative but isolated workplace experiences (Einarsen, Hoel, and Notelaers 2009, 25). However, a few respondents specifically stated either that they did not follow those directions or that if they hadn't done so, their answers would have been considerably different, as their experiences with bullying happened at prior institutions and didn't fit within the twelve-month time frame. Participants' answers to this section of the survey help us better understand the kinds of bullying WPAs might face and the frequency of specific acts of bullying.

Finally, the survey collected demographic information and (again) asked participants to provide contact information if they were willing to participate in a follow-up interview.

Participants

A total of 124 people answered at least one question in the survey. However, only 114 participants provided demographic information by answering one or more of the questions at the end of the survey, and 104 of those respondents also reported having experienced bullying. Because the rest of the chapter focuses on the responses of those who both completed the survey and experienced bullying and because 50 percent of those who did not report bullying also did not provide demographic information, we report only on demographic information for the 104 participants who reported on their bullying experiences. See Appendix 1.B for data from the ten respondents who did not report experiencing bullying but did provide demographic information.

Of those who reported experiencing bullying, the majority (74%) of respondents were between the ages of thirty and sixty, indicating that the issue of bullying spans careers, from early to late. Sixty-five percent identified as female, 22 percent as male, 1 person as transgender, and 1 person as "cis"; roughly 11 percent did not respond. Approximately 80 percent identified as white, Caucasian, or Anglo. The remaining respondents identified as Asian (2%), Hispanic (2%), African American (less than 1%), multi-racial (2%), or "other" (less than 1%); nearly 13 percent did not respond to this question.

The combined majority of respondents to our survey had tenure (38%) or were on the tenure track (19%), indicating that for this group tenure did not offer foolproof protection against experiencing bullying. Fifteen percent were non-tenure-track administrators, just under 4 percent were lecturers, 3 percent were graduate students, and nearly 11 percent noted that their positions either spanned these categories or weren't represented in the options we provided; approximately 11 percent did not provide this demographic information.

Most of our respondents were employed at research institutions (39%) and liberal arts colleges (28%). Nearly 7 percent worked at community colleges, and just under 3 percent were at technical/professional colleges. About 13 percent worked at institutions that do not fit those categories, and approximately 11 percent did not provide this demographic information.

Frequency and Types of Bullying in the WPA Workplace

Of the 123 people who responded to survey question #1 on whether they had experienced bullying in relation to their work in the WPA workplace, an initial 77 respondents (63%) indicated that they had. However, an additional 27 respondents who said no initially to question #1 and 1 person who didn't answer the question went on to report having frequently or occasionally experienced behaviors listed on the NAQ-R. Therefore, 105 respondents (85%) reported having experienced bullying in the WPA workplace. This figure is on the high end of the prevalence range (38%–90%) previously documented in higher education and US workplaces more broadly (Vega and Comer 2005, 104). Of course, we can't know if this accurately represents the prevalence of bullying in the WPA workplace; it could be that those who completed our survey did so because of their previous experiences with bullying. However, the responses we received do illustrate that bullying in the WPA workplace is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Among the 105 survey respondents who reported that they had experienced bullying in the WPA workplace, more than 50 percent indicated that they frequently or occasionally experienced this bullying in one or more of the following ways:

• Being ignored or excluded (67%)

• Someone withholding information which affects your performance (59%)

• Having your opinions ignored (59%)

• Spreading of gossip and rumors about you (52%)

Furthermore, 34%–45% or more of participants noted that they frequently or occasionally experienced these bullying behaviors:

• Being ignored or facing a hostile reaction when you approach (45%)

• Being humiliated or ridiculed in connection with your work (45%)

• Being exposed to an unmanageable workload (41%)

• Being shouted at or being the target of spontaneous anger (41%)

• Being ordered to work below your level of competence (40%)

• Excessive monitoring of your work (38%)

• Having insulting or offensive remarks made about your person, attitude, or your private life (36%)

• Having key areas of responsibility removed or replaced with more trivial or unpleasant tasks (34%)

Finally, fewer than 30 percent of respondents reported that they frequently or occasionally experienced the remaining behaviors/responses:

• Persistent criticism of your errors or mistakes (28%)

• Repeated reminders of your errors or mistakes (26%)

• Having allegations made against you (24%)

• Being given tasks with unreasonable deadlines (22%)

• Pressure not to claim something to which by right you are entitled (sick leave, travel expenses, etc.) (20%)

• Hints or signals from others that you should quit your job (18%)

• Intimidating behaviors such as finger-pointing, invasion of personal space, shoving, blocking your way (17%)

• Being the subject of excessive teasing and sarcasm (14%)

• Threats of violence or physical abuse or actual abuse (2%)

• Practical jokes carried out by people you don't get along with (0%)

These results tell us that in addition to the high prevalence of bullying in the WPA workplace recorded in this survey, the respondents most often experienced behaviors that held them or their work at a distance and maligned them or their work.

Experiences of Being Bullied in the WPA Workplace

In survey question #2, we asked participants to describe their experiences of being bullied in the WPA workplace (or to provide contact information so we could interview them about these experiences, or both). Because the NAQ-R categories listed above are not defined in the literature on workplace bullying, the fifty-two qualitative responses that describe participants' experiences with bullying (which includes all responses to question #2 except for the responses that only provided contact information) allowed us to define these categories through examples and by differentiating categories. In addition, these responses revealed an additional category that does not appear in the NAQ-R — threats to job security — which we discuss with the other categories below. To put the responses to question #2 in conversation with the NAQ-R, we first coded the data according to the NAQ-R categories listed above and then used respondents' language and specific experiences to provide dimension to those categories. It is important to note that we sometimes coded experiences in multiple NAQ-R categories. For example, when respondents described a pattern of behavior in which their bully or bullies "demanded reports immediately," we coded this in the categories "being exposed to an unmanageable workload" and "being given tasks with unreasonable deadlines," as that kind of behavior fits both categories equally well. Coding qualitative data in multiple categories reflects our belief that forcing a behavior or interaction into only one category would involve privileging one interpretation over another. In addition, coding data in multiple categories allows us to better understand the related and overlapping relationship among the categories of the NAQ-R.

Below, we define the NAQ-R categories and group them according to the effect of the bullying behaviors on respondents: exclusion and isolation, undermining individuals and programs, exerting control over individuals and programs, and verbal and physical intimidation.

Exclusion and Isolation

As noted above, survey respondents reported that they experienced being ignored or excluded (67%) frequently or occasionally in the past twelve months. This behavior is very similar to the behavior having your opinions ignored (59%). To distinguish between the two, we coded responses related to silencing or dismissing a person under the first behavior and the dismissal of someone's expertise or authority under the second. Examples of being ignored or excluded include participants being told that they "weren't supposed to speak" or weren't allowed "to bring up concerns" in various meetings. One participant even noted that the individual was "deliberately left out of meetings." In some instances colleagues or administrators wouldn't talk to the respondent at all. Behaviors in this category ignore people through exclusion. Having your opinions ignored, in contrast, involves silencing, demeaning, or undermining a person's ideas. Multiple respondents described experiences with taking on an intensive project, presenting results, and then "learn[ing others] had gone behind my back to reverse the decision or put something else into place." In another example, a respondent noted that the person's dean had told them that "WPA work was less important (and less intellectual) than that of my colleagues." In this case, the person's entire field had been ignored because it was perceived as "less important and less intellectual" in comparison to the other fields represented in the department. A third, related category, being ignored or facing a hostile reaction when you approach (45%), places emphasis on physical interactions and the moment of encounter. There are no examples of this type of bullying in the qualitative data.

The category someone withholding information which affects your performance (59%) includes experiences with withheld resources as well as information. Sometimes bullies blocked respondents' access to information, meetings, or data. Other times they "stole" from WPA budgets, changed reporting lines, or denied support when respondents came to them for help with unethical situations and behaviors. In all of these examples, the withholding of information and resources had negative consequences for the targets' work performance and efficacy. Because the participants had the right to access the withheld information and resources, this category — in the context of the WPA workplace — overlaps almost entirely with the category pressure not to claim something to which by right you are entitled (20%). This latter category also included an example of a respondent being bullied into not claiming the right to "teach for another program."

Undermining Individuals and Programs

Although the category spreading of gossip and rumors about you (52%) might seem self-evident and does include gossip and rumors about individuals, most of the responses that fell within this category had to do with gossip and rumors related to a writing program. For example, two respondents noted that faculty members spoke poorly of their rhetoric and composition graduate program or courses to students. Another WPA cited an experience with a department administrator in which the individual was coerced into agreeing with the administrator or he would "raise caps on comp courses and tell people it was [the WPA's] fault." Several respondents noted that gossip and rumors were used as a method of undermining their authority within their department, college, or institution. As such, this category is similar to having allegations made against you (24%), in part because comments are made without the target present. However, the latter category includes descriptions of specific complaints or charges (even if inferred) as opposed to gossip and rumors that are more general. For example, some respondents were accused of "insubordination," of "changing policies and procedures," of not doing their jobs, or of being unqualified for their positions.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Defining, Locating, and Addressing Bullying in the WPA Workplace by Cristyn L. Elder, Bethany Davila. Copyright © 2019 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607328151
• ISBN 13: 9781607328155
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 212
• Editor: Elder Cristyn L., Davila Bethany