Meggin’s Current Articles

Antioxidants For a Toxic Academic Work Environment – Two Behaviors That Start (& Increase) Toxicity

15th September, 2009 - Posted by Meggin - No Comments

How in the world do toxic work environments get started? Is it just one thing or is it a ‘perfect storm.’ Two areas to be aware of if you are working to keep your academic work environment positive and productive are language and fear.

Language

When kids would tease me in school, my mom would always say, “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.” I remember as a child thinking, ‘That’s not true, Mom,’ because words did hurt.

That was true then and it’s still true now. Although as an adult working in a university (nearly always) we don’t have to worry that someone is going to physically assault us. So the ’sticks & stones’ aren’t the biggest worry in the academic environment. Words, however, are.

Smart people (which colleges and universities are full of) know how to use language to hurt others (just as they also know how to use language in a multitude of other ways, but in this article, we’re talking about the areas to be on the look out for to prevent an environment from being toxic). Here is an example from Robert Sutton’s excellent book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, which is in my top ten most recommended books of the last few years. He won a teaching award early on in his career at Stanford. One of the senior faculty members made an ‘offhand’ one-sentence remark and it still stings him to this day.

As the director of the Excellence in Teaching Program at my university, I cannot tell you the number of faculty who would say to me after winning a teaching award, “I wish I had never won this.” This was due to the fact that there were “colleagues” who would say things like, “Well, good thing you won that because you sure aren’t much of a researcher.” Or, “Everybody knows you won this because you’re so easy on the students,” or any number of other rude, mean-spirited, untrue, and ungracious statements.

Fear

Fear can be propagated in many ways. Two of the main types of fear that increase the toxicity of an academic environment include fear of failure and fear of loss. Faculty can have this overriding fear that they

1) won’t earn tenure,
2) will lose their jobs,
3) won’t be able to find another job,
4) will not get the best students in their labs, and so forth.

This is a power play by other faculty who want to get some faculty (especially newer faculty) ‘in line’ and so they hold tenure votes and the like over others’ heads. Over the years, I have heard from an incredible number of faculty members about how fearful they are – and about what they do due to that fear. For example, they don’t speak out in faculty meetings,

If you are seeing language being used in such a way that people are hurt, marginalized, or made fearful, then recognize that it will not improve unless you and others take a stand to ensure that it doesn’t. And, if you are seeing fear, particularly among new faculty, faculty of color, women, or other underrepresented groups, be bold about finding the fear-mongers and working to turn that behavior around.

Sadly, toxicity exists in the academic work environment. If you would like to access a free teleseminar (*Antioxidants for a Toxic Academic Work Environment*) that was hosted by Gina Hiatt of The Academic Ladder (http://www.AcademicLadder.com), feel free to go to

http://meggin.com/academicladder.php where the handouts and recording are available.

(c) 2009 by Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D., “The Ph.D. of Productivity”(tm).