How to end supervisor bullying at uOttawa
Baha Abu-Shaqra, PhD (DTI uOttawa)
Network Engineering (career change)
Sometimes the people who fight your success are your supervisors or managers.
When my former academic advisor at the University of Ottawa Rocci Luppicini abruptly cut me off after a short postdoc in February 2021 and I complained, my uOttawa PhD thesis advisory committee (TAC) members punished me by denying me any academic support, including reference letters and research collaboration. Beside Rocci, my TAC in the PhD in DTI uOttawa Program, School-EECS, Faculty of Engineering, included uOttawa professors Liam Peyton and?Andre Vellino, both of whom encouraged me to shut up and acquiesce to bullying (see Related content for specifics and evidence documentation).
Read my letter to?uOttawa President Jacques Frémont?about how to easily implement policy reforms to prevent?supervisor bullying?of uOttawa students: uOttawa President Jacques Frémont ignores university bullying problem.
I discovered University policy/culture condones covering up supervisor bullying, and accountability for harm caused by bullying and arrested development/malicious sabotage is non-existent.
Don't get me wrong, the University administration asked me to fill out forms about my grievances. I quickly discovered the administration was handling me by being selective about which regulations apply and even about whether or not I can be considered a student.
That's politics for you.
Anyway, filling out the forms would not have done anything to alleviate my situation. What would have helped me is support from my TAC members.
I obtained my PhD in?Digital Transformation and Innovation?in April 2020 from the PhD in?DTI uOttawa?Program,?School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Faculty of Engineering, on the topic of ethical hacking sociotechnology?(thesis title,?Technoethics?and?sensemaking: Risk assessment and knowledge management of ethical hacking in a?sociotechnical?society).
I launched Academic Bullying (formerly, Supervisor Bullying) to make my story known. But structural reform is needed.
Why reform?
If liberalism is grounded in a belief in reason and an aversion to coercion, bullying has no place in Canadian higher education and all possible measures must be exhausted to restrain bullying.
When things can go wrong, they do.
Some bad apples will always exploit policy holes – and when bullying goes on unrestrained, it becomes culturally ingrained.
We’re especially concerned here with the dreadful imbalance of power between graduate students/postdoctoral researchers and tenured university professors.
The question for good governance is what underlying structure, what policies, exist to minimize the likelihood of bullying of students and of compromising their academic career?
When The Guardian published a series on bullying in academia, bullying victims contributed articles anonymously (see Academics Anonymous).
The numbers are hard to come by, whether nationally or at uOttawa. Because if you blow the whistle, you will be punished by a ruthless corporate system.
The case for policy reform in higher education to curtail?supervisor bullying?of students and postdoctoral researchers is easy to make. Reform itself is easy to implement.
Through minor policy reforms at the organizational level, one university at a time, Canada can begin to claim a global leadership position in combating supervisor-student bullying by working to eradicate university policy holes that can be exploited by unscrupulous university professors to the detriment of individuals and society.
University students cannot continue to live in constant fear of having their hard work trashed at the whim of a supervising professor.
There is also a great economic ROI potential when Canada gains a competitive edge in the global market of post-secondary education by positioning itself as the country in which a student or postdoctoral researcher is least likely to be bullied.
Suggested reforms
Here are some easily implementable suggestions for improving university policy governing supervisor-student power relations to reduce the likelihood of bullying and exploitation of students at uOttawa and other Canadian universities.
1) Extend the applicability of the provisions of human rights policies to at least 10 years, given that human rights are imprescriptible. Even if a long time has passed on an incident, justice must still be served.
The relevance of violations of human rights cannot be capped at a mere few days–which is what you find in the provisions of the?University of Ottawa’s Policy 110?where a student has a five-day window to file a complaint about being harassed by a supervisor. This is just tokenism or window dressing: any half-witted university professor can maneuver the situation, back down momentarily and later on extract "revenge."
In the context of uOttawa, an expeditious reform measure to reduce the likelihood of an abuse of power happening in the future by a university professor to other graduate students and postdoctoral researchers is to reform Policy 110, to extend its provisions to university alumni for up to 10 years, at least.?
In my case, a small change to?Policy 110?– extending its coverage from its current five-day timeframe–could have prevented my former supervisor from taking liberty in trying to wreck my academic career (and succeeding in at least making me lose time and money).
2) Two university professors independently are required to give a verdict (recommendation) on moving the PhD thesis manuscript forward to the written evaluation.
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3) Regulate and formalize reference letter writing. Reference letters should not be used by supervising university professors as some kind of bargaining chip or as a way to intimidate or subjugate or extort a graduate student or postdoctoral researcher. A document stating the hard facts should not be an instrument of coercion.
4) Establish an amnesty office designated specifically to handle supervisor-student disputes pertaining to intellectual work/issues of authorship and workplace bullying/harassment. Graduate students cannot be penalized or shushed in any way for wanting to speak out and expose demonstrable injustices against them by a university professor.
5) Postdoctoral fellowships with the same PhD supervising professor should be discouraged because it can create a form of professional “dependency” and unspoken and sometimes unfair expectations.
6) Make the eradication of bullying a strategic goal and a corporate value and priority. In this vein, the corporation can deliver awareness training about how bullying and exploitation of students can happen, the possible consequences, and the available remedies and countermeasures.
7) Enact a whistleblower?protection policy. Some universities are already doing this.
Bullying is a systemic and cultural problem. And only policy reform, awareness training, and visionary leadership can set the wheel of reform in motion.