The Record and the Wound, Part 3: How Institutions Run Amok

Academic Mobbing and the Loss of Nerve

In Part II, I said I wanted to diagnose the failure modes that destroyed my medical career.

This is the first: academic mobbing.

Before I go back to Texas Tech, I want to show you the pattern in its clearest form, in someone else’s life and work.

Only then does my case start to really make sense.

The Waterloo crucible

Canadian sociologist Kenneth Westhues did not set out to study mobbing.

He was not a natural dissident.

For most of his career, he was a tenured, award-winning professor at the University of Waterloo and eventually served as department chair.

He believed in committees and ethics codes.

He trusted procedure.

Then the machine ate him.

In 1991, colleagues asked him to examine the case of Jack Edmonds, a world-class mathematician who had been abruptly pushed out of his job at Waterloo.

When Westhues read the file, it did not look like a normal tenure conflict.

As he later wrote, the record showed an “extraordinary degree of craziness, hostility, intransigence, and herd mentality,” an “intense ganging-up” by colleagues and administrators against a single professor.

Edmonds was eventually restored to his position, in part because Westhues was willing to say aloud that he saw a collective campaign, not a performance dispute.

Soon after, he defended an unpopular PhD student whose achievements, he believed, exceeded those of many faculty in the department.

He stood between that student and a determined department chair. That used up his last remaining institutional capital. The pattern that had engulfed Edmonds then turned on him.

“A collective movement of colleagues and administrators had begun to form against me, a campaign they would wage for the next five years. From an active, involved member of faculty, I would be transformed with amazing speed into a beleaguered pariah.”

Between 1993 and 1998, what he later called “the Westhues case” unfolded: secret departmental meetings, mass memos declaring him unfit to supervise graduate students, an “ethics committee” that found him guilty of misconduct and demanded a public apology, character attacks on the university website while his responses were refused, newspaper coverage, and a crisis that spread across Canadian universities.

He did what everyone is told to do. What I was told to do.

He trusted procedure. He filed grievances. He attended hearings. He wrote careful responses rebutting the allegations. He played by the rules.

The rules became the weapon.

The committee set up to hear his grievances collapsed twice in arguments over wording and jurisdiction and never got past technicalities.

The Ethics Committee’s report was so one-sided that he answered it with a document listing its own rule violations: “Twenty Flaws in UW Ethics Hearing Committee Report No. 94-3.”

He later realized something critical: the more “procedure” there was, the more power—not less—the mob had to turn private hostility into official stigma.

Special tribunals and codes did not restrain the mob; they gave it a stage under cover of official authority.

The same rules that were supposed to prevent abuse became a technique for hiding it.

In 1997, after several years of conflict and public controversy, Waterloo brought in an outsider: Peter Mercer, a law dean from another university, as independent adjudicator over the last ethics case, which involved a one-month suspension of Westhues.

Mercer read roughly a thousand pages, held a proper hearing, and did something rare: he overturned the internal tribunal, exonerated Westhues, cancelled the discipline, and granted him six months of paid research leave.

The university’s president resigned soon after.

Headlines announced that the professor had been cleared. Editorials said the case had been systematically mishandled for five years.

For Westhues, it was vindication, but more importantly, confirmation that his intuition had been right:

The problem was not a few bad apples.

The problem was the structure.

Within a year—and at his insistence—Waterloo abolished the Ethics Committee and its tribunal. Complaints of “ethical misconduct” were rerouted through normal academic channels: chairs, deans, external arbitrators, ordinary courts. No permanent inquisition. No kangaroo courts.

Five years later, when he wrote up the results, the predicted disaster had not occurred. Ordinary governance handled cases at least as well—probably better—than the special tribunal ever had. His verdict was not that the committee members were evil. It was that the structure “invites chutzpah and the authoritarian exercise of power.”

It dresses up factional conflict as neutral judgment. It becomes a secular inquisition aimed not at solving a problem, but at destroying a person’s credibility.

Drawing on sociologist Harold Garfinkel’s classic work on “degradation ceremonies,” Westhues argued that court-like workplace proceedings are almost a perfect instrument for transporting a disliked colleague into disrepute. Once a colleague is under “ethics” investigation, the conversation is no longer about disagreement. It is about criminality, deviance, and expulsion.

That ordeal became Westhues’s life’s work.

What “mobbing” is

In early 1994, Westhues reached for the phrase “mob action” to describe what was happening to him.

Then he discovered the work of Swedish psychologist Heinz Leymann, who had already spent years studying the same phenomenon under another name: workplace mobbing.

Leymann described mobbing as a pattern in which coworkers “gang up” on a target and subject them to sustained psychological harassment—typically at least once a week for months or years. He developed an instrument, the Leymann Inventory of Psychological Terror, listing 45 typical mobbing actions and specifying their length and frequency to identify mobbing events.

Later authors have elaborated the definition in similar terms: a systematic, hostile and unethical campaign aimed at expelling an employee from the workplace, using gossip, humiliation, isolation, and procedural maneuvers rather than open physical violence.

The key features are:

• It is collective. There is usually a core of instigators, but the campaign spreads to others, sometimes to “the whole department.”

• It is prolonged and patterned. This is not one bad argument; it is months or years of recurring behavior.

• It uses structure. Policies, tribunals, “ethics” processes, and outside consultants are weaponized to convert social hostility into official condemnation.

• The endpoint is elimination. The goal is to drive the target out—by resignation, firing, illness, or, in the worst cases, suicide.

A 2018 review by Tatar and colleagues found that in one sample of 64 mobbing cases, more than 90% of victims met diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Recent work has sharpened the picture.

Academic mobbing in higher education is now systemic. In 2006, Westhues wrote that “mobbing is today widely accepted as part of normal academic politics.” Things have not improved since then. A 2025 bibliometric analysis in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse reviewed 600 studies on workplace mobbing and concluded that mobbing is now a recognized subfield and that both top-down and horizontal mobbing have become “widespread”.

A number of other scholars agree with this assessment, with experts at the National Communication Association writing in 2015:

In our review of extant research, Joel Neuman and I found that 25–35 percent of faculty have been targets of workplace bullying, with 40–50 percent reporting they have witnessed someone else being bullied. The communications used include threats to professional standing (e.g., rumors, gossip, dismissing ideas), isolation/ exclusion (e.g., ignoring, interrupting, turning others against them), and obstructionism (e.g., failing to provide needed resources and information, interfering in work activities). Women faculty and faculty of color appear to be at greater risk for bullying. Bullying among faculty is most often peer-to-peer, yet frequently the bullies are of senior status. Of particular note is that in approximately one-third of cases, more than one actor is involved, what Ken Westhues calls “academic mobbing.”

A 2025 review of the mental health and economic burden of mobbing estimated that about one in five workers worldwide has been exposed to workplace mobbing, and that roughly 70% of victims never report it at all. The authors highlighted not just PTSD and depression, but long-term productivity losses and costs to health systems and employers.

In other words: what happened to Westhues was not a one-off Canadian tragedy.

It was an early, unusually well-documented instance of a systemic failure mode of modern institutions now being studied around the world, including in medicine and academia.

How mobbing unfolds

From hundreds of case files across North America and Europe, Westhues distilled a typical five-stage progression.

1. Avoidance and ostracism. The target is left off emails and committees. Invitations dry up. Colleagues turn away at the coffee machine.

2. Petty harassment. Small aggressions accumulate. Office space is moved. Access is made difficult. Requests vanish into a bureaucratic void.

3. A “critical incident.” Something happens—or is framed as having happened—that “shows what kind of person he really is.” That incident becomes the pretext: something has to be done.

4. Procedural aftermath. Suddenly there are hearings, appeals, mediations, investigations. Process itself becomes the main weapon of the mob.

5. Elimination. The target quits, is fired, forced into retirement, put on disability, dies from stress-related illness—or takes their own life.

He also offered a 16-item checklist of indicators.

Some of the most important are:

• By normal criteria, the target’s performance is at least average, usually above average. Colleagues quietly resent them for “showing them up.”

• Rumors and gossip circulate about the target: “Did you hear what she did last week?”

• A single incident, real or exaggerated, is taken as proof of deep character flaws.

• Emotion-laden, defamatory rhetoric appears in emails and memos.

• Formal expressions of collective hostility emerge: petitions, votes of censure, coordinated letters.

• It becomes dangerous to defend the target; people who speak up are warned or punished.

• Established procedures are bent or ignored; the mob “takes matters into its own hands.”

• Attempts to bring in independent review are met with outrage.

• Both sides start to fear violence, even when no credible threat exists.

When you see those elements, you are not looking at an ordinary workplace conflict. You are looking at a degradation ceremony aimed at destroying a person’s standing.

For the rest of this series, I will use two simple guides:

• a five-stage map of how mobbing unfolds; and

• a sixteen-point checklist of indicators that a case has crossed the line from ordinary conflict into mobbing.

The five stages are:

1. Avoidance and ostracism. The target is left out, avoided, and quietly pushed to the margins.

2. Petty harassment. Small aggressions and inconveniences accumulate, often under cover of “procedure.”

3. A critical incident. Something happens—or is framed as having happened—that allegedly reveals “what kind of person he really is,” and becomes the pretext that “something has to be done.”

4. Procedural aftermath. Hearings, investigations, committees, evaluations. Process itself becomes the main weapon.

5. Elimination. The target resigns, is forced out, put on disability, or otherwise removed, often with a lasting stain on their reputation.

Westhues’s sixteen indicators include:

1. Above-average performance. The target is at least average, often above average, in performance or standing.

2. Rumors and gossip. Stories circulate about the target’s supposed misdeeds.

3. Exclusion. The target is left out of meetings, committees, and informal networks.

4. A “critical incident.” One event is held up as proof of who the target “really” is.

5. Punitive consensus. A shared conviction emerges that the target must be punished or removed.

6. Strange timing. Sanctions arrive at unusual times or in unusual ways.

7. Defamatory rhetoric. Emotion-laden, hostile language appears in emails, memos, and talk.

8. Formal condemnation. Petitions, votes, coordinated letters, and disciplinary findings appear against the target.

9. Secrecy and solidarity. There is a strong emphasis on confidentiality and sticking together.

10. Dangerous to defend. Defending the target becomes risky; diversity of views collapses.

11. Venial sins into a mortal sin. Minor offenses are added up into one alleged “gross” offense.

12. Stigmatizing labels. The target is portrayed as deviant, unstable, or otherwise beyond the pale.

13. Bent procedures. Established rules are ignored, bent, or selectively enforced.

14. Resistance to outside review. Attempts to bring in independent oversight are blocked or resented.

15. Punished appeals. Appeals for outside help are treated as betrayal and escalate the campaign.

16. Mutual fear. Both sides come to fear violence, even when no credible threat exists.

In later parts, I will mark, as I go, where these stages and indicators appear in the record of my own case, and place each event on a simple chronological timeline.

Who gets mobbed

Here is where the literature becomes sobering.

Standing out

Westhues’s own synthesis is blunt:

To calculate the odds of your being mobbed, count the ways you show your workmates up: fame, publications, teaching scores, connections, eloquence, wit, writing skills, athletic ability, computer skills, salary, family money, age, class, pedigree, looks, house, clothes, spouse, children, sex appeal. Any one of these will do. And don’t forget: refusing to run with the herd, any herd, is reason enough for the herd to turn on you.

Any one difference can be enough. The problem is not poor performance. The problem is standing out.

Psychiatrist James Hillard, writing in Current Psychiatry in 2009, makes a similar point. He notes that targets are often marked by any visible difference from the workgroup—ethnicity, an “odd” personality, or high achievement.

He also flags whistleblowers and union organizers as especially vulnerable, and lists academia, government, and religious organizations as high-risk environments.

Reuven Kotleras, writing in Advanced Development in 2007, focuses on highly gifted adults. Their traits—moral intensity, perfectionism, aesthetic sensitivity, overwhelming perceptiveness, “overexcitabilities,” and a search for meaning—make them stand out and sometimes irritate colleagues. Ironically, Kotleras notes, those same traits can also impair their ability to interpret what is happening to them once a mobbing begins.

A synthesis drawing on Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) data and other surveys finds that witnesses typically describe targets as compassionate, kind, cooperative, agreeable—and, crucially, often unable or unwilling to fight back.

They are, as many experts note, some of the organization’s most conscientious workers.

“Self-directed” employees

A 2024 Psychology Today piece by counselor and suicidologist Araya Baker describes what he calls self-directed employees—people who are internally motivated, creative, willing to challenge the status quo, and deeply purpose‑driven. Summarizing the research, he notes that self‑directedness correlates with purpose, resourcefulness, and self‑acceptance. These employees often become hypervisible because they challenge authoritarian, hierarchical, or paternalistic power structures.

They may be singled out as “troublemakers” or “rule-breakers,” making them prime scapegoats when envy or resentment builds. Baker argues that successful self‑directed employees can be just as vulnerable to bullying, rooted in malicious envy, as more traditional scapegoats. Once institutions label them, newer colleagues quickly learn to treat them as dangerous outliers.

High-risk professions and sectors

As mentioned, across studies, three sectors consistently show up as mobbing hot spots: academia, government, and religious organizations. These are the kinds of institutions that cloak themselves in moral language, have ambiguous goals and dense bureaucracies, and rely, in theory, on unusually conscientious, gifted, or self-directed people to function. You could hardly design a better environment for mobbing if you tried.

These are also the institutions that can least afford for mobbing to become widespread within them. Unfortunately, this may be exactly what has happened.

What mobbing does to institutions

In any safety-critical institution—hospitals, universities, labs, regulators—the basic promise is simple: people must be able to say when something is wrong without being destroyed for it. The point of these institutions is to protect patients, pursue truth, and uphold public obligations that are too important to leave to private conscience alone. The social contract of medicine depends on it.

That promise is fragile. It only takes a few visible counter-examples before people start to believe the opposite: that speaking up is dangerous, and that loyalty to medicine and public health means staying quiet.

Mobbing is what those counter-examples look like from the inside.

Most writing on mobbing focuses on the victim’s suffering. The toll is severe.

High rates of PTSD, depression, anxiety, and psychosomatic illness are reported among mobbing targets, particularly in clinical and academic settings. In severe cases—especially where mobbing is prolonged and unaddressed—suicide risk rises, confirming Westhues’s qualitative observations. Long-term disability and withdrawal from the labor force are common, particularly among highly gifted or highly specialized professionals who find it difficult to re-enter similar roles.

But the institutional costs are arguably even more steep.

If we only look at the suffering of individual targets, we miss what is most dangerous: what one mobbing episode does to the institution over time.

A single, visible mobbing episode—especially when used as retaliation for raising concerns—sets off a chain of effects:

one mobbing episode → retaliation signal → climate of fear and silence → moral injury → patient harm and institutional decay.

The rest of this section walks that chain.

One mobbing episode as informal retaliation

On paper, many institutions have zero-tolerance policies for retaliation. There is a whistleblower hotline, a code of conduct, an ethics office. The written system says: if you report misconduct, safety concerns, or legal violations, we will protect you.

In practice, when the person who raised concerns finds themselves at the center of a sustained campaign of shunning, rumor, trumped-up disciplinary procedures, and performative “investigations,” the message is unmistakable. The problem is no longer the misconduct or safety issue. The problem is the person who refused to look away.

This is where mobbing functions as a back-door retaliation system.

Instead of an official demotion or firing in direct response to a report—which would be obviously retaliatory and often illegal—the organization handles things socially. The target is isolated. Their reputation is quietly undermined. Petty rule violations are unearthed and magnified into “grounds” for formal action. Show trials and “fitness for duty” evaluations appear. On paper, no one has violated the whistleblower policy. In reality, the target is punished, and everyone can see it.

All of this sits on top of the individual-level damage described by the mobbing literature: severe psychological harm, suicidality in extreme cases, long-term disability, and withdrawal from the labor force—often among the clinicians and academics who were most invested in their work and least replaceable.

The episode is real and terrible for the person in the middle of it. But the institution-level story starts with what this episode signals to everybody else.

The retaliation signal and the climate of fear and silence

Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking—things like asking questions, admitting mistakes, or challenging decisions. In one field study of 51 teams, higher psychological safety predicted more learning behaviors (asking for help, discussing errors) and better performance. A meta-analysis of 136 samples found that psychological safety is consistently associated with higher engagement, information sharing, creativity and performance, and lower burnout.

In healthcare, work on psychological safety sharpens this further: in clinical teams, it means staff feel able to report errors, raise concerns, and ask for help without fear of punishment. A non-punitive, supportive culture is one of its defining attributes. Studies of inclusive leadership—leaders who invite input and respond supportively—show that such leadership strengthens psychological safety among nurses, which in turn increases speaking up.

But if people see that speaking up leads to embarrassment, punishment, or career damage, they update their shared belief to “it isn’t safe to speak up here.” It does not take a decade of abuse to flip that belief. A single, visible instance of retaliation can be enough.

That is what a mobbing episode does.

Everyone who watches understands that the official story—“we are just addressing performance issues” or “we are concerned about collegiality”—is less important than the unofficial lesson: if you push too hard on safety, ethics, or misconduct, we can do this to you too.

People adapt. They go quiet. Pinder and Harlos call it quiescent silence when people stay quiet out of fear and self-protection, and acquiescent silence when they stay quiet because they believe nothing will change anyway. Across studies, fear of retaliation and lack of trust in management show up again and again as central reasons people do not report problems or unethical behavior.

When supervisors and leaders use aggression and social punishment to enforce that silence, the effects are predictable. Meta-analyses of workplace aggression show that aggression from supervisors—which often includes retaliatory behavior—has strong negative effects on job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and strong positive effects on psychological strain and turnover. Whistleblowing studies tell a similar story: employees who perceive retaliation after reporting wrongdoing show lower organizational commitment and higher intentions to quit; women and employees who have less power are especially likely to experience retaliation.

When this becomes normal—when “everyone knows” that speaking up is dangerous—the organization develops a climate of silence. Fear of retaliation is widespread. Problems go unreported. Learning stalls. Errors repeat. Silence driven by fear and low trust leads directly to lost opportunities for improvement and poorer performance. Negative, fear-based climates are associated with lower job satisfaction and higher turnover. In safety-critical settings specifically, organizational trust is one of the levers connecting safety climate to actual behavior: when staff trust the organization, they are more satisfied and less likely to leave; when they do not, the opposite holds.

Now add mobbing to that.

When mobbing is tolerated as the way “difficult” staff are dealt with, it sends a simple message internally: if you raise your hand about anything important, the group may come for you.

People stop surfacing bad data, inconvenient risks, or ethical problems—not because they do not see them, but because they have seen what happens to the last person who spoke.

New research underlines how quickly this eats into the workforce. Mobbing—especially attacks on professional status—turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of degraded quality of work life among early-career clinical nurses. This erodes engagement and drives attrition in exactly the cohort—young, trainable clinicians just starting their careers—you most need to keep.

By now, one mobbing episode has turned into something else: a generalized climate of fear and silence.

Moral injury: what this does inside people

There is another cost, less visible but just as corrosive: moral injury.

Litz and colleagues define moral injury as the lasting emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual distress that can follow perpetrating, failing to prevent, or witnessing acts that violate deeply held moral beliefs—or experiencing betrayal by trusted authorities.

In healthcare and other civilian roles, research on moral injury shows strong associations with burnout, depression, PTSD symptoms, and intentions to leave the profession. Causes include being forced to provide care workers believe is unsafe or inadequate, or feeling betrayed or abandoned by leadership. During and after COVID-19, several studies emphasized betrayal-based moral injury—feeling let down by institutional leaders—as both common and strongly correlated with distress.

Retaliation against staff who raise safety or ethical concerns is a textbook example of institutional betrayal. The target experiences betrayal by the very system that is supposed to rely on—and protect—their moral vigilance.

But it does not end there.

A recent systematic review of witnessing workplace bullying found that observers—not just targets—show increased stress, emotional exhaustion, and lower job satisfaction. Work on bystanders and moral courage shows a similar pattern: people who witness harm, believe it is wrong, and feel unable to intervene often experience guilt, shame, and lingering moral distress.

By the time the climate of fear and silence has set in, the damage is not only cognitive (“it isn’t safe to speak up”) but moral (“this place betrays people who try to do the right thing”). Mobbing therefore injures not only the person under attack, but also the colleagues who watch in horror and feel they can do nothing. Even those “untouched” by the formal conflict lose commitment.

At this stage in the chain, the institution has created a workforce that is afraid, ashamed, and increasingly detached. That has predictable consequences for the people they are supposed to serve. In healthcare, that’s patients.

From silence to harm: patient safety and institutional integrity

In medicine, the consequences are brutal and concrete. Communication failures among clinicians are a major cause of medical errors and adverse events. Studies of incident reports and root-cause analyses repeatedly identify speaking up about safety concerns as crucial for preventing harm and improving the safety culture.

At the same time, nurses and other clinicians often cite fear of retaliation, fear of being labelled “difficult,” and a belief that nothing will change as central reasons they do not report unsafe care or challenge more senior staff. An integrative review of employee silence in healthcare between 2016 and 2022 confirms that silence is common and is linked to poorer staff well-being and safety outcomes.

Systematic reviews of psychological safety in healthcare teams show that higher psychological safety is associated with greater error reporting and, in several studies, better objective patient-safety outcomes—fewer complications, fewer preventable adverse events, fewer reported errors that reach the patient.

Conversely, investigations of hospital systems with high rates of avoidable harm or avoidable deaths repeatedly describe a “culture of fear”: staff intimidated or bullied after raising concerns, whistleblowers pushed out, and widespread reluctance to speak up. These reports explicitly link fear of reprisals to unsafe care and failure to learn from errors.

When an institution retaliates against dissent—especially dissent tied to safety, ethics, or law—it is not just trimming an inconvenient branch. It is sawing through one of the main load-bearing beams of patient safety: the willingness of staff to speak up.

Reviews on the economics of mobbing underline the broader institutional damage. They highlight lost productivity from presenteeism and absenteeism, increased errors and poorer service (especially in health care), recruitment and training costs when experienced staff leave, and growing legal exposure as courts and regulators begin to recognize mobbing and “moral harassment” as actionable harms.

Put differently, mobbing does not just hurt individuals; it undermines competence and information flow and creates institutional dysfunction. It tells everyone exactly how the system responds when someone insists on accuracy, ethics, or patient safety.

By this point in the chain, the institution is not just morally compromised; it is less accurate, less safe, and less capable.

Long-term selection and hollowing-out

Outside healthcare, the same pattern appears. Surveys in large companies and public bodies routinely find that fear of retaliation is the main reason employees do not report discrimination, harassment, fraud, or other misconduct.

Major regulators—EEOC, OSHA, DOJ—now explicitly frame retaliation as a direct threat to compliance and safety because it chills reporting. Research on ethical leadership shows that when leaders are seen as self-serving or unethical, fear of retaliation stays high and employees keep problems to themselves, increasing risk for the organization..

Now add what the mobbing literature says about who tends to be targeted. The typical target is above-average in performance, unusually conscientious or gifted, self-directed enough to challenge bad policy, and morally sensitive enough to notice when the institution is lying to itself.

Over time, a system that drives such people out—or forces them into silence—selects for a different type: conformists over innovators, bureaucratic survivors over vocation-driven professionals, people who will not risk their standing to tell the truth.

That selection runs straight into the leadership pipeline. These are not the people institutions want in leadership, yet toxic feedback loops put them there. Over decades, the damage compounds and cascades through the institution. This is not a small risk; the curve for exceptional leaders has a razor-thin tail. These processes thin it even further and leave mediocre, sometimes unethical leadership in their place.

The result is institutions that look stable on paper but are hollowed out in reality. They become less able to correct error, respond to crises, provide competent services, or avoid repeating the same harms on the next generation.

At the start of the chain, it looks like “one difficult employee” being “managed.” By the end, it is what it really is: a system selecting against the people it most needs and quietly training everyone else to look away.

That is not just my problem.

It is your problem if you ever need a competent doctor, scientist, or teacher—or any well-functioning institution at all.

What Europe and the law are starting to do about mobbing

If this were just about hurt feelings, the law would not care. Increasingly, it does.

Across Europe, several jurisdictions now explicitly prohibit “moral harassment” or psychological mobbing in the workplace. French labor law, for example, bans repeated acts that deteriorate working conditions and harm dignity, health, or career prospects. Recent French appellate decisions have found employers liable for moral harassment and imposed significant damages. In the France Télécom case, the company (now Orange) and several executives were criminally convicted of collective moral harassment after a wave of employee suicides. The courts held that a deliberate restructuring strategy created an intolerable climate of “management by terror”.

Luxembourg has gone the route of a specific anti-mobbing statute. A 2023 law inserted a chapter on psychological harassment into the Labour Code, imposing obligations on employers to prevent and stop harassment. Spanish courts have treated mobbing (“acoso moral”) as an “occupational risk” that can trigger compensation regimes similar to those for industrial accidents.

In parallel, the field is institutionalizing intellectually. The Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing, first held in 2024 and continuing in 2025, explicitly aims to establish mobbing as a multidisciplinary scholarly field. The World Association for Research on Workplace Mobbing now publishes the Journal of Workplace Mobbing, whose inaugural issue collects papers from that conference.

In plain language:

• the phenomenon has a name;

• it has validated measurement tools and checklists;

• it has conferences and a peer-reviewed journal;

• and it is starting to reshape labor law, occupational-safety regulation, and case law.

Institutions that normalize mobbing as an informal governance mechanism are not just hurting people. They are placing themselves on the wrong side of a legal and scholarly consensus and inviting years of litigation, regulation, and discovery—not only with me, but with anyone else they decide to handle this way.

Why policies and procedures are not enough

If you stopped reading here, you might think the solution is obvious: more policies, better procedures, stricter enforcement. That is how modern institutions usually imagine reform.

The problem is that procedures can also be used to run the mob. A university can write an anti-mobbing policy with one hand and, with the other, convene a “professionalism” or “fitness” hearing that quietly excludes exonerating evidence, frames dissent as pathology, and delivers a foregone conclusion. On paper, every box is checked. In practice, the message to insiders is clear: if you create trouble, the machinery will come for you.

Europe’s new legal measures matter because they finally name the harm. But my case—and Westhues’s work on hundreds of cases before me—suggest that the deeper issue is not the absence of policies. It is the ease with which institutions weaponize their own procedures against the people who try to correct them, all behind the cloak of institutional legitimacy.

This series is, in part, an attempt to make that pattern visible. Later in this series, I will argue that academic mobbing is one of the blind spots of the proceduralist ideal: the belief that if the rules are written correctly, the institution will govern itself. In that world, even an anti-mobbing policy will serve the mob: it lends a veneer of legitimacy to what is, in substance, a status degradation ceremony.

In that world, even an anti-mobbing policy will serve the mob: it lends a veneer of legitimacy to what is, in substance, a status degradation ceremony.

What’s next

By now we have a working language for academic mobbing: the five-stage progression, the sixteen indicators, the risk profile of typical targets, the institutional chain from retaliation signal to moral injury to institutional hollowing-out, and the emerging legal recognition of “moral harassment.” By those standards, what happened to me at Texas Tech was not an idiosyncratic tragedy, but a textbook case of mobbing in a medical school.

From this point on, this series will have two living guides:

- the Westhues map above, where I will mark which stages and indicators have appeared; and
- a simple chronological timeline of my case, showing when each event occurred.

In the next part, I will begin filling in both. I will start where Part I and Part II left off: with the alleged “threat” that never made it into my dismissal hearing, was abandoned by the person who raised it, and yet somehow continued to circulate inside the institution. As that story unfolds, I will mark where it fits the stages and indicators described here, and I will place each step on the timeline.

In that episode, you can see the whole machine begin to move. A rumor becomes an allegation; an allegation becomes a pretext; a pretext becomes hearings, evaluations, and paperwork; and the record itself warps around it, as the facts are made to fit the story rather than the other way around. If you want to understand the mechanics of what happened to me—and what can happen to anyone who crosses a modern institution—that is the thread to follow. Part IV will pick it up.