The shooting deaths of three biology professors at the University of Alabama at Huntsville this month, allegedly by a colleague who had recently lost an appeal of her tenure denial, seemed to many observers to confirm the worst about faculty workplaces. In conversations on The Chronicle’s Web site and elsewhere, people have seized on the killings as evidence that academic life today is a petri dish for madness: The high stress of the tenure process, the pressures to be brilliant at research and teaching, the cloistered environment, the extent to which internal politics affects people’s careers—it’s a combination that could damage even psychologically healthy people.
Others object that every profession has its own stresses—look at medicine, police work, high finance. And, of course, many people point out that no amount of anguish over a derailed career justifies murder.
What does seem clear is that many aspects of the academic workplace get in the way of recognizing mentally ill employees and offering them the help they need.
“Academic culture really neglects issues of the psychological health of its workers,” says David Yamada, a law professor at Suffolk University and founding director of the New Workplace Institute, a nonprofit research center. His particular expertise is bullying.
Less Reaching Out to Faculty Members
While student mental-health awareness and services have improved, especially since the shootings at Virginia Tech, in 2007, Mr. Yamada says most colleges do not have programs designed to promote mental health among faculty members—"maybe because we haven’t yet had a poster case for it.”
In fact, we have. Though the culprits in high-profile homicides on American campuses have tended to be students, in 1992 an associate professor of mechanical engineering named Valery Fabrikant went on a shooting rampage at Concordia University, in Montreal, that left four people dead. The killer had a long history of abusive and threatening behavior at the university. An independent investigation of what went wrong, known as the “Cowan Report,” found that, among other failings, administrators had dodged the problem, treating his misconduct “as an issue of academic quality.”
Some things have improved in 18 years. The colleges considered most progressive by mental-health experts offer programs through their human-resources departments that include short-term crisis counseling. But there is less effort to communicate to faculty members than to students the availability of such services or the warning signs of psychological stress.
“Adults are fully capable of seeking counseling services independent of the university system,” says Dennis Heitzman, director of the student-focused Center for the Study of Collegiate Mental Health, at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. “Faculty and staff don’t have the same in-your-face kind of information that students get.”
The damage that results from ignoring mental health among faculty members is very rarely murder, but it often borders on mayhem. Accounts abound of temper tantrums, distraught assistants, and departments paralyzed by the dysfunction of some key member.
Few Studies of Stress in Academe
Little research exists on the mental and emotional stresses particular to higher education. But a 1987 study of one field that provides a nice control group, psychologists, found that academic psychologists reported significantly more job-related stress than did those in private practice, and that they approached “mildly pathological levels” of “overthoroughness and concerns about colleagues’ evaluations.”
In fact, according to data from the Standard Insurance Company, which provides employee health-care coverage for more than 1,000 colleges and universities, people in higher education are more likely than those in other sectors to go on disability for psychological reasons. “Seven percent of the claims for other professions we cover are primarily caused by mental or nervous disabilities,” says Stanley Kulesa, assistant vice president for benefits, “but for college and university employees it’s between 12 and 13 percent.”
The problem is that the people in the direst need of help are the least likely to seek it on their own. “The faculty view of themselves is that they are the experts; they have a vested interest in appearing to be in charge,” says one former associate dean who dealt with several faculty members suffering from depression or substance abuse.
And colleagues of a troubled person, as distressed as they are by the behavior, may not recognize it as mental illness. Professors can go days or weeks without substantial interactions with one another. Once they do interact, “there’s a pretty high tolerance for eccentricity, and the sense that really smart people are often quirky,” says David R. Evans, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty at Buena Vista University, who writes for The Chronicle’s On Hiring blog.
“Where’s the bright line between nonconformism and madness?” he asks.
Spirited debates, questioning, intellectual pushing—these are hallmarks of academic life. “But there’s a difference between that and chest poking, name calling, slamming things down, throwing things across the room,” says Cathy Nicholson, director of human resources at the University of Arizona’s health-sciences center. “Sometimes people have a hard time distinguishing and don’t want to be the one who draws that line in the sand.”
Ms. Nicholson says staff members are likelier to report bad behavior than deans or department chairs are. “They’re concerned about ruining someone’s career,” she says.
And the rules for managing faculty behavior are not clear. “Collegiality and collaboration” may be described in a faculty manual as sought-after values, but they are rarely formal criteria for promotion and tenure. There’s a reason for that, Mr. Evans says: Historically, “collegial” has too often been code for “just like us.”
“Excellent people have been driven out because of cultural differences,” he says.
Eccentricity vs. Danger
The question becomes, “What’s just someone being themselves, and what’s dangerous?” says Darci Thompson, director of Life&Work Connections, a counseling service at Arizona. After shootings left four people dead on her campus in 2002, the university developed a system in which a threat-assessment team made up of people from different divisions of the university can gather quickly if someone expresses serious concern.
“Different people may be used to a different level of behavior,” says Ms. Thompson. Including people from outside the department on the team “helps provide a broader picture.”
Another problem is that academic administrators rarely have any training as managers, as the “Cowan Report” pointed out. What’s more, it said, “the majority of academics who become academic administrators ... are accustomed to work in a milieu where the exercise of authority is considered in bad taste.”
Groups like the American Council on Education, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and the Council of Independent Colleges have tried to solve that problem in recent years, offering workshops for department chairs that cover topics like conflict management and dealing with underperforming faculty members.
“This year I anticipate that the conflict-management sessions will touch on the issues raised by Huntsville,” says Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges. “Academic life is not what it used to be. The rising tensions of faculty life and what that means for professional development—there should be more attention to that.”
Even once they’ve determined that a faculty member has a mental-health problem, many department and division heads think there is little they can do about it. It is illegal to remove someone for simply having a mental illness, and “people don’t want to be accused of violating someone’s rights,” says Mr. Evans, of Buena Vista.
“‘Academic freedom’ gets thrown around a lot, and people often feel that tenure protects people no matter what,” says Arizona’s Ms. Nicholson. “That’s not true. Tenure doesn’t give you the right to act in a way that makes people uneasy.”
But Lawrence White, a vice president and general counsel of the University of Delaware, says public colleges in particular should make sure they have strong reasons for expressing the belief that an intervention is necessary. “You incur legal risk if you’re engaging in casual supposition,” he says.
In 2008 a federal appeals court sided with a public university’s decision requiring a tenured art professor, who showed “bullying” behavior, to submit to a psychological evaluation in order to remain employed. (In the case, the practice is now being challenged on different legal grounds.)
Better, says Ms. Nicholson, is to avoid having to give such an ultimatum, by educating people about mental health and informing employees and their managers of available treatment in a supportive, respectful way.
The danger of insisting that the Huntsville killings had nothing to do with academic culture, says Mr. Yamada, of the New Workplace Institute, is that colleges and universities will miss an opportunity to take faculty members’ mental health more seriously.
