The Case for Policy Reform: Tyranny

The case for policy reform in Canadian higher education to curtail supervisor bullying of students and postdoctoral researchers is easy to make. Reform itself is easy to implement. The point of reform is efficiency and fairness.

You may have heard someone say “academia is very political.” What they likely mean is that academia has a very hierarchical power structure. Somewhere around the bottom is the students. The policy governing power relations between university professors and students is so rigid, such that when a professor decides to bring down the proverbial hammer on a student, the student will likely be penalized if they spoke out about their grievances by a corporate system wanting to keep its public image shinny. Which is what happened in my supervisor bullying case, involving University of Ottawa professors Rocci Luppicini, Liam Peyton, and Andre Vellino.

whistle on a blackboard - the case for policy reform-tyranny 1200x900px — “It’s time to call time on bullies’ attempts to humiliate, ridicule, and undermine.” (Image by Getty, Nature)

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 tenured university professors and graduate students/postdoctoral researchers (hereafter graduate students or students) in Canadian higher education which can manifest in tyranny.

It should be emphasized, the point of asking for policy reform is not in any way to suggest that Canada has some kind of rampant student abuse or harassment problem at the hands of tenured university professors, nor is it to put down or to try to tarnish the well deserved stellar image of the post-secondary educational system in Canada, that would be just absurd. Canada has one of the best educational systems in the world, this point is not open to question by any reasonable person.

Nor is the point here to request the curtailing of privileges of tenured university professors. The choice is not between shackling professors or curtailing their privileges and/at the expense of bureaucratic efficiency. There is no tradeoff here to ponder. Rather, what is being argued for here is minor policy reform for the benefit of all stakeholders (Canada, the universities, students, and professors), for the greater good and at no cost to professors or to anyone. Au contraire: just benefits.

Why reform?

While one in five of the graduate students who responded to Nature’s 2019 global PhD survey reported experiencing bullying, close to 60% of them “reported feeling unable to discuss their situation without fear of personal repercussions.” As a female student in Belgium put it, “I have witnessed and been the subject of bullying and intimidation by an academic supervisor … The absolute impunity of the top academic professors is astonishing and the biggest threat to young researchers (including mental health).”

Truth be said, the situation applies to many countries the world over: the power of university professors to dominate or to harm graduate students is legendary. But it does not make it right or ethical or democratic. Or good for business.

Canada should be different. Canada is a democracy, and the laws governing supervisor-student social relations should mirror broader society. University policies regulating human rights should parallel that of broader society. 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. This is just tokenism or window dressing: any half-witted university professor can tactfully maneuver the situation, back down momentarily and later on extract revenge, which is likely what happened in my case with Rocci.

In my case, a small change to Policy 110 – extending its coverage to a few years from its current five-day timeframe–could have prevented my former supervisor from taking liberty in trying (and succeeding) to wreck my academic career and to cause me an outrageous amount of harm and psychological damage.

Why reform? The simple and important answer is that it is for the greater good.

Reforming policy governing supervisor-student power relations in Canadian universities is the right thing to do on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis of what’s ethical, fair, and efficient (socially, morally, and economically).

Fairness: Most students will not report bullying (due to a social stigma and/or fear of reprisals); human nature (power corrupts);

Rights: In Canada, higher education institutions receive tax payer funding (government funding)–they are a public good and hence accountable to the general public in considerable measure.

Efficiency: Reform saves the emburdened students precious time handling a bully supervisor; professor/university accountability improves governance and fairness.

Table: Pragmatic cost-benefit analysis of policy reform

Stakeholders	Pros	Cons
Canada	Improved human rights performance/record (regarding students’ rights to fair treatment, to self-actualization opportunities, to equality in security/self-defence opportunities). Provisions governing human rights should mirror broader society (no five-day caps). Less mental health treatment for students who have experienced bullying or psychological trauma. Improved international image and a corollary economic benefit.	None.
The University	Improved image and a corollary economic benefit. Less down time spent in colleagues of a bully supervisor covering up for his/her unethical/immoral/belligerent acts and/or taking over duties to maintain a shiny image or to keep things running.	None.
Students/postdoctoral researchers	Improved mental health/psychology of students as they are freed from the constant terror of a whimsical or a tyrannical supervisor. The bullied becomes a bully.	None.
Professors	Curtail the likelihood/potential of moral corruption (power corrupts).	None.

Pragmatic cost benefit analysis of policy reform

Suggested reforms

Four humble suggestions for fixing the system of graduate studies supervision in higher education to make it more fair and efficient:

1) Two supervisors are required to give a verdict (recommendation) on moving the PhD thesis manuscript forward to the written evaluation.

2) Reference letters should be regulated and standardized or formalized. Reference letters should not be used by supervising university professors as some kind of bargaining chip or as a way to intimidate or coerce or subjugate or extort or humiliate graduate students. I have no rights after all these years to a document stating the hard facts.

3) Establish an amnesty office designated specifically to handle claims of 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 be open about personal grievances about demonstrable injustices against them by a tenured professor.

4) Postdoctoral fellowships with the same PhD supervising professor should be discouraged because it can create a form of professional “dependency” and create unspoken and sometimes unfair expectations.

It is very easy to reform.

In the context of the University of Ottawa, a simple and fast solution 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.

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