Continuing our research into the technology-facilitated harassment and abuse that faculty members face, colleagues and I recently turned our attention to institutional policies and interviews with academic leaders to understand the ways in which institutions are (un)prepared to deal with faculty harassment. We published our results in Higher Education (which is a journal that I’ve been meaning to publish in for a while), and identified three areas of unpreparedness:

  • first, institutions focus on physical safety over non-contact harms (issue: the harms are numerous and multidimensional);
  • second, they envision perpetrators to be named, local, and part of the campus community (issue: anonymous harassment);
  • third, the reporting process is cumbersome and outpaced by the speed and frequency with which TFVA occurs.

These findings suggest areas for policy improvement and expanding academic leaders’ knowledge around the harassment that their faculty face.

You can find this paper here: Gosse, C., O’Meara, V., Hodson, J., & Veletsianos, G. (in press). Too rigid, too big, too slow: Institutional readiness to protect and support faculty from technology facilitated violence and abuse. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01043-7  or preprint (pdf).