In 2019, after being bullied and leaving my teaching career, I co-founded the academic equality movement with environmental activist Saya Ameri Hajebi. We created the organization to support researchers whose institutions ignore, mishandle, or betray them when they report academic bullying and misconduct.
After seven years and thousands of reported cases, I have reached an unexpected conclusion: academic bullying is not only a problem caused by institutions that fail to protect people who are targeted. Universities are also facing a growing problem of overreacting to allegations of bullying before the evidence has been properly investigated.
What should I do if I have been falsely accused of bullying?
Universities increasingly operate in fear that staff misconduct will be exposed publicly. Administrators know that a single viral social media post naming an alleged bully can damage a reputation built over decades. As a result, institutions may respond visibly and immediately instead of first conducting a careful, impartial investigation. Accused faculty members are often placed on leave, laboratories are closed, and access to students or research funding is restricted before the evidence has been examined in detail.
Even when an investigation clears an accused scholar—which happens more often than institutions would like to acknowledge—there is rarely meaningful compensation, a public correction, or a serious effort to repair the professional and psychological harm caused. I have seen this pattern repeat time and again.
Faculty members who attract substantial grant or industry funding are often more likely to have bullying allegations dismissed. Their institutions may be reluctant to act against people viewed as financially valuable.
By contrast, early-career researchers and faculty members with fewer financial resources may bear the greatest impact of an institutional crackdown. In some cases, complaints arise from routine academic responsibilities, such as enforcing laboratory safety rules or maintaining publication standards. When reporting systems are used against supervisors who are simply doing their jobs, this can become a form of upward bullying.
Underpaid and overworked: Overseas researchers fall prey to bullying
Conscientious academic leaders can become afraid to supervise others. Telling a student to repeat an experiment or explaining that a manuscript is not ready for publication may feel like a career risk. Faculty members who have been falsely accused of bullying—and even briefly removed from public life—often describe the experience as one of the most emotionally damaging periods of their careers, regardless of the final outcome.
This approach does not make science safer. Instead, it discourages effective leadership, makes good mentors harder to find, and pushes talented researchers out of academia.
Worse still, an unbalanced response to bullying allegations can allow harmful behavior to continue. People targeted by academic bullying may never have the opportunity to process what happened to them or receive meaningful support. Without accountability and healing, they may repeat the same behavior when they eventually move into senior positions.
The consequences of academic bullying affect students, colleagues, institutions, and families. In health care and biomedical research, the risks can extend even further: clinicians working under chronic stress are more vulnerable to fatigue, burnout, and mistakes that may endanger patients.
Source: www.nature.com