I got a comment this morning about the outcome of the the appeal meeting at Ohio University for Bill Reader's tenure case. You may recall that I wrote about this in detail in my post on The No Asshole Rule Versus Compassion for the Mentally Ill. The meeting appears to have been an ugly scene. According to the report in the school paper:
"A
standing-room-only crowd of students and faculty members in Baker
University Center 219 heard Dean Greg Shepherd and Director Tom Hodson
defend their decision to deny Reader tenure, calling him a
non-collegial bully incapable of working with current tenured faculty."
Reader and his supporters offered a much different perspective:
Reader painted
a drastically different picture in which professional jealousy and
personal disagreements motivated Hodson and three tenured professors to
conspire to ruin his career.
Toward the end of the nearly
three-hour hearing, Assistant Dean Eddith Dashiell said she's
considered the school a "hostile work environment" since 1997.
"The
school of journalism has had a history of bullying," Dashiell said,
adding that the behavior of the school's tenured faculty during her 18
years in Athens has made her feel threatened and uncomfortable.
It is impossible to know the truth based on the facts in this report. But it is possible for all of us to take this as a cautionary tale. When you as a boss let things fester and don't deal with "asshole problems," be it among a single colleague or many of them, you risk having things degenerate into a a total mess like this one. When everyone starts calling everyone else an asshole, as is happening here, then it is a sign to me of an asshole infested place. As I wrote in The No Asshole Rule, when you are embedded in such a situation, it is very difficult to avoid becoming an asshole both because emotions and norms are so contagious, and if you spend your days confronting one asshole after another, often the only way to survive is to throw the crap back at them. Again, I don't know how much of this is true of the School of Journalism at Ohio University, but regardless of what happens after this case, it seems to that the leaders — probably at the School level– need to step and figure out what is going on and how to stop it. In such situations, a change in leadership is usually necessary even if particular bosses are not to blame, they are so entwined with old destructive patterns and perceptions that replacing them is necessary for starting anew.
Finally, to repeat my main advice about asshole infested places like this one seems to have become (I hope I am wrong, but if you read the above story, it sure seems like a reasonable inference), the best thing you can do is to figure out how to get out as fast as you can if you are trapped in such a human cesspool.
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