Why are we allowing faculty ‘whips’ to do university managers’ dirty work?

“Take care, stay safe, and watch out for the whips!”

This was the sign-off message in the last email I received from a colleague who was recently made redundant. He was referring to the senior professors who, in UK universities, are increasingly taking on unofficial departmental roles akin to those of parliamentary whips, doing deans’ and heads of departments’ dirty work to ensure that the executive’s will prevails.

Goodness knows that there are increasing amounts of dirty work to be done. Redundancies were a recurring issue even before the pandemic prompted worried universities to launch a wave of redundancies. Now they have almost become a fact of normal academic life as the cost-cutting continues long after the major threats to university revenues posed by Covid-19 have receded.

And gone are the days when solidarity and collegiality were the norm and redundancies were handled in a supportive, respectful way. Indeed, it is not uncommon for university administrators to openly endorse the use of brutal and exploitative managerial practices drawn from the business world. Yet heads of department and deans appear increasingly unwilling to get their own hands too dirty. Rather, they hand the axe to a willing band of academics in the twilight of their own careers who may previously have been heads or deans themselves and who, while they are too well respected to be got rid of, are generally modest achievers and too expensive to keep – unless they can convince HR of their high ongoing value to the department. My colleagues and I call these the faculty whips.

Tragically, many academics think of these long-servers as caring and benign mentors who, after a hard day’s work of their own, try their best to help their struggling colleagues. But their real role is to make the lives of “underperforming” academics unpleasant, to the extent that they agree to negotiate an exit package.

Academics are accustomed to appraisal and assessment schemes, and we thrive on constructive criticism – that comes with the territory: it isn’t something that would hasten us towards the exit. Faculty whips know this. Thus, manipulators that they are, they resort to underhand persuasion methods, such as clever borderline bullying, gaslighting and verbal aggression in one-to-one meetings. “When push comes to shove, there are no witnesses or a digital trail – it’s their word against mine,” an academic who was recently forced into retirement told me.

When he was the government's chief whip, Gavin Williamson famously kept a tarantula in his office, allegedly as an intimidation tactic. I once joked with colleagues that at least our whips do not keep killer animals as office pets. But they do appear to relish a similar self-image as ruthless operators. Stories abound of their unhealthy fascination with figures such as Machiavelli, Vito Corleone from The Godfather or the brash media tycoon Logan Roy from the TV series Succession. Colleagues in the process of being forced out have heard faculty whips quote tone-deaf pseudo-proverbs such as “It’s not personal – it’s strictly business”, “It is better to be feared than to be loved”, and “You wanna do good things? Be a fucking nurse”.  

It is time that such behaviour was called out. I understand that these are hard times, and most academics are living with the constant fear of losing their jobs and livelihoods: the last thing they want to do is invite the whips’ wrath. But, silence is no longer an option. The sad truth is that no matter how nefarious the faculty whips’ actions are, our cash-strapped universities have no incentives to tackle a practice that saves them money. Yet if we don’t confront it now, whipping will only become ever more entrenched, exacerbating the culture of fear, distress and anxiety in universities – and potentially working against official efforts to address prejudices such as ageism, sexism and racism.

University staff in the UK are already out in the streets in their thousands demanding that managers rethink their priorities. Yet many academics, particularly those from minority groups, find it hard to garner the courage to confront micro-aggression by senior colleagues. We should stand in solidarity with all fellow academics who are bullied and manipulated into believing that they have no other choice but to leave their tenured positions.

In the end, though, the question is what the academics with the actual – as opposed to self-assumed – power will do. Will they continue to give in to the demands of university administrators for savings by empowering their hatchet men and hatchet women to make struggling colleagues’ lives a misery? Or will they instead provide those colleagues with the support that they need to be successful teachers, supervisors, grant-winners and researchers?

To adopt the famous phrase of the late US secretary of state and academic Madeleine Albright, there’s a special place in hell for academics who do not support each other.

Aymen Idris is senior lecturer in the department of oncology and metabolism at the University of Sheffield. He dedicates this piece to all academics in the UK (and around the globe) whose careers ended prematurely, and to the enduring spirit of those who remain.