Nature Careers podcast: Bullying in academia: why it happens and how to stop it
Your browser does not support the audio element.Morteza Mahmoudi witnessed bullying behaviours during a series of lab visits following his PhD in 2009. He now studies the topic alongside his role as a nanoscience and regenerative medicine researcher at Michigan State University in East Lansing. In 2019 he co-founded the Academic Parity Movement, a non-profit which aims to end academic discrimination, violence and bullying across the sector.
Throughout this series we’ve looked at the threats to scientists and to science itself, threats to freedom and safety that can end careers and block avenues of research. And I really think, you know, whether it’s bullying, harassment, such as racial discrimination, or its anti-queer sentiments and discrimination, I think a lot of these things arise because people are unable to put themselves in somebody else’s position and identify with the axes of that other person’s personality, which might mean that discrimination is more likely to occur to them than it is to them themselves.
We are, we are talking more about bullying and harassment. You know, there are podcast series and op-eds about about the importance of this, and we’re trying to recognize the importance of good academic conduct and positive academic environments as an integral part of the academic process. Since 2019 the organization has aimed to provide external resources for targets of academic bullying.Morteza Mahmoudi: 05:15
And it was interesting that between two weeks after publication of these pieces, the number of feedback that I’ve got was like hugely higher than all of the feedbacks that I’ve got for over 200 papers that I had in the field of nanomedicine and regenerative medicine. I always encourage people to also consider the fact that this is not a problem that only affect targets. It also affect like other people. For example, if a target is in like a medical setting or in healthcare, academic bullying, or other types of bullying and harassment, can increase wrong decision-making in medical procedures. So it even affects patients.
There were like hundreds of targets, who a portion of them complained to the university and nothing happened. Basically perpetrators got protected for a variety of reasons. For example, one reason is that their interest is intertwined with university’s interest. They bring huge amount of money and funding to the university. Universities gets overhead.
The other thing is to inform themselves, or basically educate themselves, about the internal and external resources that are available to them to get help. But at the same time, the recent awareness about the issue of academic polling basically forced other stakeholders to come in and take some actions.
For example, if funding agencies gets involved in the cases, and they basically ban universities that have higher rate of bullying cases from funding they provide, then universities are forced to take more fair actions about, like those issues.
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