Faculty incivility: The rise of the academic bully culture and what to do about it

Darla J. Twale and Barbara M. De Luca
Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 2008, hardcover , 240pp., $40.00,

ISBN: 0470197668

University of Dayton Professors Darla Twale and Barbara De Luca set out in Faculty Incivility: The Rise of Academic Bully Culture and What to Do About It to confront the threats posed to civil culture in American higher education by 'bullying, mobbing, camouflaged aggression, and harassment in the academic workplace' (p. xii). Approaching these phenomena from historical and sociological perspectives, the authors incorporate a broad array of research literature on workplace aggression and the recent evolution in the demographics of academic workplaces.

This integration effectively portrays the challenges faced by many incoming graduate students and junior faculty members who may struggle to adjust to the written and, perhaps more often, unwritten rules of behavior within their new institutions and departments. While their research is instructive for those readers considering or entering academic careers, Twale and De Luca do not quite convince the reader of the increased prevalence of academic incivility in recent years; their analysis also muddles the relationship between the academy and the external environment.

Twale and De Luca open the book with an observation: 'Lately it seems that people in academe have become less civil to one another.' The remainder of Faculty Incivility strives to explain why this perceived increase in uncivil behavior has occurred. To explore this question, they first discuss the nature and evolution of academic culture. Members of each professional field abide by standards of conduct determined by the culture of their field; affronts to that culture are generally discouraged or repudiated. In higher education, however, according to the authors'...