About Supervisor Bullying - Policy Reform Advocacy Website

This SEO-friendly website aims to serve as an important resource for IT and cybersecurity professionals and educators. It also serves as a low-key model for ethical policy reform activism.

Initially, I launched Supervisor Bullying for two main reasons. First, to tell my university supervisor bullying story involving my former graduate studies supervisor at the University of Ottawa Professor Rocci Luppicini. Subsequently, when I spoke out publicly about my grievances (in a LinkedIn post to Connections), the other two members of my uOttawa PhD thesis advisory committee, professors Liam Peyton (my PhD thesis academic supervisor for Area 2 of the PhD in DTI uOttawa Program) and Andre Vellino (my PhD thesis advisory committee member and PhD thesis examiner), denied me academic and professional support. I had been a graduate student at the University of Ottawa in excellent academic standing from 2012-2019.

Sadly, mine is far from a unique story in the world of academia. But enough is enough–don’t you think? Which brings me to the second reason. I launched SupervisorBullying.com to tell the stories of other Canadian university graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who experienced bullying, harassment, abuse, or exploitation at the hands of unscrupulous supervising university professors.

Read my letter to uOttawa President Jacques Frémont about how to easily implement policy reforms to prevent supervisor bullying of students: Letter to uOttawa President Jacques Frémont. You may also be interested in How to end supervisor bullying at uOttawa.

I obtained my PhD in Digital Transformation and Innovation in April 2020 from the PhD in DTI uOttawa Program at uOttawa engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), on the topic of ethical hacking sociotechnology (thesis title, Technoethics and sensemaking: Risk assessment and knowledge management of ethical hacking in a sociotechnical society).

We’re especially concerned here with the dreadful imbalance of power between graduate students/postdoctoral researchers and tenured university professors.

This policy reform advocacy website is dedicated to,

Documenting cases of university supervisor bullying, harassment, abuse, or exploitation against university students and postdoctoral researchers in Canadian post-secondary education institutions in support of the ambitious goal of affecting positive social change for the greater good;
Policy reform in Canadian higher education institutions to address policy holes (structural vulnerabilities) allowing university professors to bully and exploit graduate students;
Mobilizing for policy reform through raising awareness and organizing grassroots social change activities via engaging students and researchers, university professors, the media, and policymakers; and
Providing strategies and resources for dealing with university supervisor bullying, harassment, abuse, and exploitation.

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