3/5/2018 The Academic Mob and Its Fatal Toll - Quillette

The Academic Mob and Its Fatal Toll

written by Brad Cran

“I get the queasiness of no due process. But . . . losing your job isn’t death or prison.”
Dayna Tortorici (Twitter)

“If you compare dissent via social media to lynch mobs,

then you don’t understand dissent, social media, or lynch mobs.”
Jen Sookfung Lee (Twitter)

In 1992, the ethics committee of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University accused
neurology and neurosurgery professor Justine Sergent of failing to properly obtain their approval for her
work using radioactive isotopes to study the brain function of pianists. Sergent claimed no wrongdoing
other than, at most, a technical mistake of not re-requesting specific approval to study pianists reading
sheet music when she had already received approval to use the same technology to study brain function in

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people reacting to images of human faces. The following year she was officially reprimanded for the
alleged breach but filed an appeal in arbitration.

Over the next two years, Sergent’s dispute with the ethics committee grew
bitter and she claimed it was based on personal grievances and not on the
validity of her work. Sergent fought to defend herself and the integrity of her
work but the steam of pettiness aimed at her increased. In an attempt to
further tarnish her, an anonymous source (presumably from within McGill),
mailed a letter to the Montreal Gazetteaccusing her of fraud in her scientific
practice.
Justine Sergent

The Gazette then published an article entitled “Researcher Disciplined by

McGill for Breaking Rules.” Shortly after the Gazette published this article, Sergent wrote a letter in which
she stated that her love of research was too great to ever consider tampering with data. She defended the
quality of her work and stated:

I was a young, successful, woman scientist, and this may not be welcome attributes in the
scientific world or at least in the mind of some people. I had a rich and intense life, but there
comes a point when one can no longer fight and one needs a rest. It is this rest that my husband,
who has supported me in all aspects of my activities and my life, and myself have decide to take.

On April 11 1994, with the assistance of her husband Yves Sergent, Justine Sergent committed suicide by
carbon monoxide poisoning from a motor vehicle that was parked in her garage with a hose running from
the tailpipe and into the window of the car. Yves Sergent then composed his last letter:

It is 3:30 a.m. on April 11, Justine is dead, and it will soon be my turn…I’ve just spent the most
horrible hours of my life, seeing to the fulfillment of Justine’s last wish. My hour has come, I will
join Justine forever and I hope this attempt does not fail.

Yves Sergent returned to the car and sat in the drivers seat. He attempted to slit his own throat but failed
to hit an artery. He later died, like Justine Sergent, from carbon monoxide poisoning.

On April 12 1994, Justine and Yves Sergent were found dead in their garage sitting beside each other in
the drivers and passenger seats of their car. This is the devastating power that an academic mobbing can
have on its targets.

In a 2016 article for University Affairs entitled “Academic Mobbing, Or How To Become Campus
Tormentors,” Eve Seguin wrote, “Mobbing is social murder and, by definition, people cannot survive their
own murder.”

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We would be hard-pressed to find people in society deserving of punishment so severe that those who
receive it take their own lives. This in itself makes academic mobbing an inhumane act. The deaths of
Justine and Yves Sergent were not isolated extremes; punishment imposed on an individual by a group is
almost always unethical because the group as a whole will never fully understand the punishment they
have collectively administered.

Kenneth Westhues professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Waterloo has become an
internationally recognized authority on academic mobbing and defines it as:

[A]n impassioned, collective campaign by co-workers to exclude, punish, and humiliate a targeted
worker. Initiated most often by a person in a position of power or influence, mobbing is a
desperate urge to crush and eliminate the target. The urge travels through the workplace like a
virus, infecting one person after another. The target comes to be viewed as absolutely abhorrent,
with no redeeming qualities, outside the circle of acceptance and respectability, deserving only of
contempt. As the campaign proceeds, a steadily larger range of hostile ploys and communications
comes to be seen as legitimate.

To be cast out and shunned as an academic is not only to lose your identity but also to lose your entire
way of life, from your social circles, your sense of intellectual accomplishment, and even your ability to
provide for yourself and your family. Once you are shunned from an academic institution there is little
chance you will ever make it back in. The University system is too competitive for second chances.

In 2004, Dr Janice Harper was halfway to tenure in the University of Houston’s Department of
Anthropology when she was lured away by an offer from the University of Tennessee Knoxville to go there
and build up their cultural anthropology program. At UTK Dr Harper would begin research on two
ambitious projects that would require an unflinching look at the damage done to powerless people by
powerful entities. The first was a study of the town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which played a pivotal role in
the Manhattan Project, and the second was a study on the use of depleted uranium in munitions which
she planned to publish as a book with Left Coast Books, Weapons of Dust: The Cultural and Scientific
Battlefields of Depleted Uranium.

The gender divides in the department were palpable and Dr Harper found herself subjected to a common
problem women face in the workplace: men could speak openly at faculty meetings but when she
presented a contradictory opinion to her male colleagues she was accused of complaining.

“I was on the forefront of change and trying to get women hired,” Dr Harper said. “I was an outspoken
woman in a department that did not have a history of outspoken women, or pretty much any woman at
all. Since its founding in the midcentury, the department had only tenured two women, one of whom left
and the other retired.”

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In 2007, after Dr Harper filed an allegation of sexual harassment against a colleague at UTK, she became
socially isolated in her department. Her classrooms were moved from week to week; she was removed
from all committee assignments and not notified of faculty meetings. Just a few weeks earlier her
Department Chair had written that she was “indispensable to the department,” but after she reported her
concerns to him about the employee, he told her that because she had made her report, he could no longer
support her for tenure.

Dr Harper confided in a colleague that the social isolation and uncertainty were making her feel suicidal
and, although she assured her colleague she would not take her life, the colleague reported to the
university that Dr Harper was “making death threats.” She was then interrogated by campus police as a
possible threat to the safety of students, which resulted in her file being forwarded to the FBI Department
of Homeland security along with accusations that she was possibly a nuclear terrorist.

Shortly thereafter, Dr Harper was interrogated by the FBI as a possible threat to the safety of faculty. “At
one point, they were interrogating me about my ‘obsession’ with bombs, asking questions like, ‘Do you
always make a habit of talking about bombs in your classes?’ to which I replied, ‘Would that be in my class
on warfare or my class on the atomic bomb?’”

The allegations against Harper were largely based on testimony that her department head solicited from
two students; one claimed that Dr Harper might have been planning to build a hydrogen bomb to blow up
the campus stadium. The student cited a lecture Dr Harper had given in which she explained the
difference between acts of violence that destroy infrastructure opposed to ones that destroy an important
symbol within a culture. She said that if someone bombed the Stadium on the UT campus, it would be an
act of symbolic destruction because it would not affect the infrastructure of the campus.

The other student alleged that Dr Harper’s then ten-year-old daughter had threatened the life of her
Department Head (who happened to be a diabetic) by joking that she intended to bake him a batch of
chocolate cookies.

In what appears to read like a Hollywood comedy, the UT Police Report reads as follows:

Dr Harper did ask her daughter to tell their guests what the daughter was going to do for Dr
Kramer. The daughter replied she was going to make him some chocolate cookies. [REDACTED-
NAME] said that Dr Kramer is diabetic and “you don’t give a chocolate cookie to a diabetic and
think something good gonna happen to them.”

I informed [REDACTED-NAME] that I would be contacting the Joint Terrorism Task Force and
DOE Security about this possibly violation.

Harper fought UTK and despite the absurd nature of the allegations levelled against her, her department
successfully cast her out by denying her tenure. Harper followed with a lawsuit but couldn’t hold out

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financially and was forced to settle out of court.

Those thrown out of the academy must transition from living within the security of their dream job to
suddenly trying to find their place in society with no income, no health care, and serious health issues
such as PTSD, depression anxiety, and often more serious health complications that stem from trauma.
The damage runs deep and the health implications are severe.

“First there’s the shock,” Harper later wrote in her book Mobbed!

[Y]ou can’t believe what’s happening. Then there’s denial. It’s not really going to go that far,
someone’s going to see what’s going on and intervene and make them knock it off. You’re going to
get through it and get on with your job. Then there’s the anger and rage – you’re outraged at how
you’re being treated. Then as the treatment turns Kafka-esque and the shunning and betrayals set
in, you turn to bargaining. You try to make a deal to get them to let up, to just let you keep your
job – and then when that’s clearly not going to happen, to just let you keep your career.

In a recent interview Dr Harper said:

I received an email from a friend saying she knew I had been telling the truth and had heard me
over the years telling her about what was going on there, but given what I’d been accused of, she
wondered how well she really knew me. That was the day I put my degree in the paper shredder (I
now keep it shredded in an antique beaker on my desk). I knew then that if that was how she felt,
someone I considered a good friend, it would be how everyone would eventually feel and I
wouldn’t ever teach again.

As traumatic and damaging as the experience was, Dr Harper applied her anthropological expertise to
understanding the social processes that led so many people to rapidly turn against her once the decision
was made to cast her out. As the mobbing intensified, she continued teaching courses on warfare and
genocide, and began to note parallels between how people are persuaded to turn against their neighbors
and fellow citizens in genocidal contexts, and how people in any group setting can be persuaded to join in
dehumanizing and abusing someone marked by leadership for exclusion and destruction.

The result of her work was a series of articles in The Huffington Post and Psychology Today, as well as a
book, Mobbed! What to Do When They Really Are Out to Get You, in which she challenged the anti-
bullying movement’s focus on “the difficult employee” or “evil bully,” and called instead for a focus on the
group psychology that leads otherwise good people to inhumanely attack another person without terms or
limits.

By examining primate and other animal behavior, along with witchcraft accusations, the McCarthy era,
and the mid-eighties hysteria that led daycare workers to be accused and convicted of impossible feats of
child sexual abuse, Harper suggested that mobbing is a primal behavior that humans engage in whenever

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they have been encouraged by someone in a position of influence or power to view another member of a
community as a threat to that community. Once that happens, patterned and predictable stages of abuse
will follow, and these will not let up until the target has been eliminated from the group or so
disempowered that their continued presence in the group has no significance.

“Ultimately, mobbing didn’t break me. It made me,” Harper said. “It taught me a great deal about myself
and others and made me a far more patient and compassionate person. But it’s a cruelty and violence that
is both unnecessary and far more damaging than I think even the attackers can imagine.”

In her essay “The Anatomy of an Academic Mobbing,” Joan Friedenberg states that “most mobbers see
their actions as perfectly justified by the perceived depravity of their target, at least until they are asked to
account for it with some degree of thoughtfulness, such as in a court deposition, by a journalist or in a
judicial hearing.”

The flip side to the depravity of the target is the righteousness of the mob. What makes members of the
mob so passionately inhumane is that their position as righteous becomes instantly wrapped up in the
successful destruction of the target. As Friedenberg writes “An unsuccessful account leaves the mobber
entirely morally culpable.”

Moral culpability creates fear and stokes irrational behavior, not within the target but within the mob
itself. If a mob fails to cast out the target then eventually the mob will have to come to terms with the
rights of the person they tried to destroy and the fact that all people, regardless of manufactured
depravity, are deserving of humanity and basic fair treatment.

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Every effort will be made to increase the allegation count, magnify the severity of each accusation,
reinterpret any past actions of the target as malicious, and wipe away any sign that the target ever had a
single redeemable quality that could point to the fact that they are undeserving of total destruction and
shunning. For this reason “bullying” is a common accusation levelled against mobbing targets. As Dr
Harper warns targets in Mobbed!

The reason you will likely be accused of bullying is because it is a category that is currently widely
condemned. The no tolerance for bullies mindset that has permeated the workplace, however well
intended it may be, has created a universally abhorred category to place unwanted workers. Once
placed in that category of “bully,” no one will care what happens to you.

No matter how educated or enlightened a person may think they are, when faced with the primal nature
of a mobbing most people will betray their own principles and move to the safety of power. The people
most closely associated with the target may then become the target’s fiercest attackers since there is no
better way to create distance from the primal danger of a mob than to attack with vigor. Once they begin
attacking their own identity as righteous then becomes intertwined with the depravity of the target.

“Through the psychological process of cognitive dissonance,” Dr Harper wrote in Mobbed! “it will be
essential that they convince not just others, but themselves, that what they did was two things—one,
necessary, and two, the only thing they could have done…I am going to tell you that the closer people are
to you—as a friend—the more likely they will turn against you. They will prove to be extremely
aggressive.”

Of course, mobbings also have devastating effects on the families of those who are mobbed. If members of
a mob believe that they are righteously punishing a single person then they have no understanding of the
collective force with which they are attacking not just an individual but also those closest to that
individual, such as spouses like Yves Sargent or children like Dr Harper’s daughter.

“My daughter went through major trauma at the fear of not knowing where we were moving,” Dr Harper
said, “Trauma at having seen people she considered her godparents, not to mention her babysitter (one of
the students to make the allegation that Dr Harper was building an H-Bomb), turn me over to the police
and FBI, watch me interrogated by the FBI. And now she has virtually no memory of me as a professor.”

“Things have worked out well for her,” Dr Harper said, “but she still bears the scars. So many people end
up divorced, or their spouses endure the depression and anger they can no longer understand. So when
you write about what happens to us, remember what happens to our families.”

Brad Cran served as the Poet Laureate for The City of Vancouver from 2009-2011. You can
read selections of his writing at bradcran.com. Follow him on Twitter @bradcran

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