Academic bullying is hidden in plain sight

It’s November 1983. I’m in the final year of primary school. It’s playtime and I’m alone, hiding in the wasteland behind one of the school’s mobile huts. The hut’s painted a similar green to my school sweatshirt, so I’m hoping I’m camouflaged, like the chameleons we’ve been studying in class. I’m hoping I’m safe.

I’m not: two minutes later, my arch-nemesis Lee Hardwick (not his real name) sidles round one side of the building, his three sidekicks round the other. I’m cornered.

“Don’t be scared,” says Lee. “We only want a little chat with you.” He seems reasonable, placatory: “I’m not that bad, you know. But you and me, we never seem to get on. I dunno why.”

“You’re bullying me,” I say. Lee snorts: “Don’t be silly. I’m not a bully.”

Bullying always erases itself, effaces its own existence. No one openly admits to being a bully – at least, not while it’s happening. Bullying exists only in denial (“I didn’t do nuffin, miss”). This self-erasure is one of its hallmarks and I can’t help feeling it should be part of any definition.

Definitions of bullying generally mention “power imbalance” between perpetrator and “victim”. Yet most forms of power like to proclaim themselves – either through display, public self-assertion or institutional recognition. Bullying, by contrast, is usually a private matter between bullies, sidekicks, victims and (where relevant) bystanders – something that happens behind mobile huts. Even when the results of it involve the victim’s public humiliation, or general awe at the bully’s dominance, the means by which these ends are achieved must be kept under wraps.

Indeed, bullying can sometimes go to great lengths in self-concealment, radiating the blame outwards, such that it becomes the victim’s own fault that they are being victimised.

In 1983, Lee Hardwick already understands this: “You know,” he says, “things could be different between us, Taylor. You don’t have to treat me as your enemy. I dunno what your problem is. You take everything too seriously. If you wanted, we could be friends. I tell y’what, let’s shake on it – no more aggro.” He holds out his hand. I take it.

He pulls me towards him, as though to embrace me – then trips me up, pushes me to the ground. While he watches, his sidekicks pile on top of me, one pinning my arms down, one holding my feet, one sitting on my legs. The last pulls down my trousers while I try to writhe free.

“Don’t worry,” says one. “We’re only, like, doing to you what the headmaster does to kids every day, with his cane or whatever.”

“And you love that sort of thing, don’t you, Taylor? – like a girl or ballerina or poofter would.”

“Yeah, and you know what boys do to girls,” says Lee.

“What?”

“They rape them.”

“Yeah! Let’s do a rape!”

I’m scared: “Please…”

Given what happens in the next couple of minutes, it’s clear in retrospect that my tormentors have, as of yet, an imperfect grasp of what the R-word signifies. We’re still at an early stage of learning the language of sex, gender and violence, picking up half-comprehended words from brothers, parents, TV.

Bullying is always a linguistic phenomenon as well as a physical one, and usually the linguistic element is primary, physical violence only the enactment of insults, promises and threats. So an inadequate grasp of language can sometimes alleviate its worst excesses.

In this instance, my bullies’ imperfect comprehension of the terms they use saves me from something a lot worse than what actually happens. When the boys get bored, throw me my trousers and run off, I’m left with bruises, grazes and furious tears – but that’s all. Thank God.

Bullies, though, eventually grow up. While, statistically speaking, many leave bullying behind as they get older, some learn to use language much more precisely, weaponising it in ways that Lee Hardwick and his sidekicks could never have dreamed of. In my own experience, at least, it’s been highly educated and articulate adults – not children, not nightclub bouncers – who are the most adept bullies, due to their sophisticated command of language. That’s why university academics can be such superlative bullies. In effect, they have PhDs in it, while kids like Lee Hardwick haven’t even passed their GCSEs yet.

The bullying I experienced as a kid was relatively straightforward (“You’re a poof, Taylor.” *Punch*). The bullies in my school were big, lumbering beasts, who weren’t interested in developing complex linguistic frameworks for what they were doing, beyond common epithets (“poofter”, “queer”, “ballerina”), let alone long-term strategies.

So I was by no means prepared for the kind of brutal psychological bullying I came across some decades later, as an “early-career academic”. Coming from a middle-of-the-road Stoke comprehensive, the sophisticated bullying I experienced from my then-line manager in my then-university was wholly alien to me. Here was a new mode of bullying which involved no overt physical violence – just strategies, bureaucratic terrorism, linguistic traps, carefully laid.

Still, there were strange, hidden connections between school and university forms of bullying, which only became clear in retrospect. For a start, the apparent separation of physical from psychological violence is never absolute. Bullying is always a compound of both, even when one element appears absent. Physical violence is never entirely absent from workplace bullying, even when it remains concealed, offstage. The physical aspects of bullying still haunt the violent language used (“firing”, “sacking”, etc), as well as the threats implied by that language (the potential deprivation resulting from being “fired”, etc). And then there are the devastating physical and psychological effects of being bullied: stress-related illnesses, depression, PTSD and, in the worst cases, suicide.

For the most part, though, physical violence operates underground in workplace bullying, as its unconscious. Hence, the problem with describing my experience of bullying at university is that it lacks much overt drama: if one of the defining characteristics of bullying is self-erasure, intelligent adults become ever more brilliant at hiding what they are doing, usually in their victims’ minds.

It’s relatively easy to describe my behind-the-mobile-hut-confrontation with Lee. But adult bullying is often internalised, near-invisible and also immensely dull – a covert, day-in, day-out process of psychological erosion, of bureaucratic tides coming in and out.

The dullness can actually form part of the bullying. In any bureaucracy, the person who has most patience, who’s able to sustain petty schemes over long periods, is going to come out on top. It’s a matter of survival of the most officious.

But that sort of dogged persistence doesn’t necessarily make for a good story. It’s part of what makes psychological bullying, as opposed to someone punching someone else in the face, so hard to identify and tackle. Primarily inward-looking, there’s not much to point to that’s tangible, no obvious spectacle to gawp at. It certainly doesn’t make for a Hollywood blockbuster: Taylor v the Professor, now in 3D. Where Paper Cuts Get Personal.

No: for the most part, the bullying I experienced in an early university job was insidious, subtle and too complexly boring – a matter of details within details, a sort of bureaucratic fractal – to recount in full. Sometimes, halfway through explaining a particular incident to a friend in the pub, I’d find myself trailing off, bored by the intricacy of my own lecture-theatre horror story.

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By and large, stories about work life shy away from the maddening minutiae of admin, the purgatory of paperwork, the low-level terrorism of day-to-day management. This is one reason why I’m suspicious of campus novels: they usually substitute sensational (and interchangeable) stories of murders, affairs, drugs, for the everyday banality of university evil, the red-tape nightmares populated by committees, senior management committees and unofficial, behind-closed-doors gossip committees.

They ignore the disciplinary hearings, secret disciplinary hearings, spreadsheets, regulations, spreadsheets of regulations, league tables, student feedback, fabricated student feedback, complaints, drummed-up complaints, spreadsheets of complaints and committees of drummed-up complaints.

And, above all, there is no mention of emails, emails, emails: hundreds, thousands of them, full of unnecessary or impossible jobs – emails telling you off for not doing said unnecessary or impossible jobs – emails undermining you in front of others – emails magnifying minor failures – or emails damning with faint or ambivalent praise. Those emails sent on Monday mornings, to upset you at the start of the week – emails sent on Friday afternoons, so you dwell on them all weekend. Emails, emails, emails incessantly scything to and fro above you, like a razor-sharp pendulum, looming closer and closer…

In the tale by Edgar Allan Poe that famously depicts such a torture device (a scything pendulum, that is, not email), the reader hardly glimpses the torturers themselves. For all but the opening of the story, the Holy Inquisitors remain offstage, operating the torture machinery from afar. This is what technology of many kinds – from inquisitorial pendulums to institutional email to X/Twitter to academic acronyms – facilitates: for torture to be inflicted remotely, for the torturers to remain invisible.

Of course, the beauty of “cyber-bullying” and “trolling” is that the torturers can disown their own torture devices: It wasn’t me, guv’nor. I didn’t do nothing. Perhaps it wasn’t anyone. Perhaps it was the victim themselves crying “Wolf!” Remote bullying can efface itself, X accounts can be anonymised, passive-aggressive emails reinterpreted (Of course I didn’t mean that) – to the extent that the victims themselves come to be suspected of paranoia: There’s no one there, there’s nothing wrong, it’s all in your head, stop imagining things, stop attacking yourself.

At worst, the people expressing such concerns onstage turn out to be the very same torturers who are invisibly operating the technology behind the scenes: What a shame, you need help, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. Very, very good care.

That’s because one of the paradoxical signs of bullying, in my limited experience, is kindness. Beware academic mentors, people who wear their pastoral skills on their sleeves: to care for someone, to take them under your wing, is to exercise a dangerous power. If nothing else, it imposes a debt of gratitude upon them. It also has the added benefit of muddying the waters when it comes to complaints, tribunals, solicitors. The bully can point to moments of kindness (carefully recorded, of course) that seem to undermine the complainant’s claims: But look how nice I was on this and that occasion.

This sort of weaponised kindness can be deployed remotely, too. One of the times I came closest to losing my mind, under the shadow of my professorial bully, was when a mature student told me, as if spontaneously, that my boss cared for me, that they were concerned about my mental well-being, that they really liked me and wished I liked them back. I went away thinking: Oh, perhaps I’ve been unfair to them. Perhaps I was wrong all along. Perhaps it’s all been in my head.

Rationally speaking, I knew it wasn’t. There’d been too many rows for me to have imagined everything. But the cognitive dissonance introduced by the student’s words, and other strange moments of kindness from my bully (“I can help you with that”, “I so enjoy working with you, Jonathan”, “We’re such a friendly team here, aren’t we?”), induced a terrible vertigo.

Looking back on it now, I believe – rightly or wrongly – that the student in question was primed, and the strange nuggets of kindness among the bullying were mines, deliberately laid.

This was non-linear warfare, kindness-as-sadism, where part of the strategy is to playfully gaslight your enemy. Author Rachel Vail calls this “subtle bullying”, an incongruous type of bullying “that comes with compliments and praise…appreciation [and]…kind words”, along with “manipulation [and]…abuse”. Adult bullying is rarely if ever monolithic, and incongruity can be one of its most powerful weapons, driving the victim round the bend: It’s them – No, it’s me – No, it’s them – But they're being kind  – No they're not, they're being ghastly – But they say they're being reasonable…

It reminds me of Lee Hardwick reasonably suggesting, “We can be friends” and “Let’s shake on it”, seconds before attacking me, pinning me down.

Lee was an amateur, though, compared with my long-ago-boss at my long-ago-university. They seemed to plan years ahead, laying bureaucratic mines that could blow up in your face on the Last Day of Judgement. It took me almost that long to overcome my callow bewilderment, to comprehend what was happening. Vail says something similar about her own experience of subtle bullying: “It certainly never occurred to me that I was being bullied. I thought I was happy, or should be…But I wasn’t happy. I was a wreck. I was being manipulated with kind words, bullied in such a subtle way the only bruises were invisible to me.”

This is the false consciousness of psychological bullying: that victims are unaware (or deliberately kept unaware) they are being bullied, sometimes until long afterwards. Bullying can conceal itself from the victim, as well as from the environment in which it operates. As anti-bullying activist Tim Field says, “‘Not recognising what is happening’ is one of the main reasons that people put up with bullying for so long.”

One reason why the victim may not be able to recognise or name what’s happening to them is that they’re denied access to the very word “bullying”. When I finally lodged a formal complaint against my bully, I was told I wasn’t allowed to use the word “bullying” in my statement to the university. I had to use other, supposedly less loaded terms, instead.

As I’ve suggested, bullying is often predicated on a linguistic hierarchy – on who wields greater command of particular kinds of language. And this linguistic hierarchy might involve who commands the very word “bullying”, its meaning and definition: No, of course we’re not bullying you, don’t be silly, we’re just horsing around. Don’t you have a sense of humour? Or: No, of course we’re not bullying you, we’re concerned about you and your mental health. Or: No, of course we’re not bullying you. If you look at Regulation 3.5.12 you’ll see that you’re in the wrong, not us. Or: No, of course this isn’t bullying, it’s just a matter of exercising our legitimate authority. We’re higher up the university hierarchy than you, and we say this is discipline, not bullying.  

And there’s the rub: sophisticated non-linear bullying frequently conceals itself by using the language of institutional discipline. In any educational institution, “illegitimate” bullying is always in danger of collapsing into “legitimate” (so-called) hierarchical discipline. This is bullying’s ultimate strategy of self-erasure: the weaponisation of the institution’s own language of power.

In other words, the languages of discipline and bullying can all too easily get mixed up, and the very cleverest bullies know this. So the best hiding place for a bully is not behind a mobile hut, but within the very disciplinary system that is supposed to deal with them.

I was repeatedly threatened with disciplinary action by my professorial bully, to which my only recourse was to appeal to the same disciplinary system that was being used against me. To no one’s surprise but my own, it didn’t work: my bully’s command of institutional language far outstripped mine.

“We’re only doing to you what the headmaster does to kids every day,” Lee Hardwick said to me, back in 1983. In nascent form, herein lies the secret of the most successful bullying: it can assume the colours – the physical and linguistic patterns – of the system in which it operates.

Camouflage can be the most subtle form of concealment, and bullies are usually far better chameleons than their victims. 

Jonathan Taylor is associate professor of creative writing at the University of Leicester. This article is based on extracts from his book A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons, published by Goldsmiths Press next month.