In preparing the manuscript 'Distinguishing online academic bullying: new forms of harassment' for journal submission, my father, Professor Tim Noakes, and I drafted four versions. Its first title was 'Identifying and countering online ogres on Twitter'. This change in title evidenced how far we shifted from focusing on hyperactive, microblogging trolls' activities to a broad conceptualisation of online media's use for novel forms of intellectual harassment. The final manuscript describes diverse examples that academics directed against an influential scientific leader. Based on such distinctive forms of cyber harassment, we defined online academic bullying (OAB) as an emergent threat to academic free speech, scholarship and the academe itself. OAB is a drawn-out situation in which scholars experience harassment by other academics via online media (Noakes & Noakes, forthcoming).

In drafting earlier versions of the manuscript we prepared a lengthy contextualisation of how academic bullying and mobbing in toxic higher education workplaces sets the stage for OAB. In the first place, we believe that if the intellectual harassment of scholars by fellow employees at their shared academic institution employer is unlikely to take place if culturally unacceptable and strongly sanctioned. By contrast, at employers where academic bullying is tolerated, cyber harassment might seem acceptable and perhaps even desirable in extreme cases.

Robust debates in a bully-free academic workplace

In an overview of empirical research into academic bullying, Professor Loraleigh Keashly describes why the higher education (HE) workplace is unusual in providing an environment in which bullying may be encouraged and rewarded (2019). She flags that researchers must address the unique HE context, since its expectations and norms for faculty conduct can be very different. Whether in the norms for other employees at the same institution, as well as for other work contexts and industry. HE norms are critical for what gets identified and experienced as bullying- for example, academic culture emphasises knowledge production by scholars. They compete for status by pointing out the flaws and holes in each others arguments (Sternberg, 2015). The rules that support such agonistic aggression are quite different from the rules by which other workers in the university, and outside, are expected to abide (Christy, 2010. Fratzl & McKay, 2013). As the context of academic debate already begins in an environment of skepticism, the challenge for researchers in incivility and cyberbullying is to differentiate between positive (pro-social) and negative (anti-social) instances. The former may be a robustly critical process that supports scientific debate, while the latter can constitute abuse online speech in deference to, and in defence of, an established paradigm. 

We believe that the grave social, ethical and material ramifications of such online hostility between scholars and others in HE have been overlooked or underplayed. As a result, victims of OAB are unlikely to receive sympathetic institutional support in combating this abusive activity. Creating a sympathetic, healthy workplace in which bullying activities are not tolerated seems very difficult. It requires a combination of measures that are resource-intensive {see Table 1- compiled from the recommendations of Tracy, Alberts and Rivera (2007) and Twale and de Luca (2008)}:

In the OAB research project's first stage, we conceptualise OAB and academic cybermobs. Next, we plan to use grant applications and/or donations to explore the different approaches that insulin resistance experts follow in communicating state-of-the-art news via Twitter and Facebook’s contrasting affordances and ecologies. We will describe their informal academic debates, illegitimate ones and these experts' varied negotiations of cyber harassment. Our research participants will ideally be from very different contexts (national, disciplinary and institutional), but will all have been described as being formal targets of intellectual mobbing.

Precursors to toxic academic workplaces and cultures

To situate academic bullying, mobbing and OAB, we combined understandings from the ‘conceptual framework for bullying’ (CFB) (Twale & de Luca, 2008) and an organisation’s type of 'bullying conflicting culture’ (BCC) (Desrayaud, Dickson, & Webb, 2019). After describing the precedents to a toxic, bullying academic workplace using CFB, we then framed how the type of BCC contributed to the style of cyber harassment in the OAB space. We suggest that academic cyberbullying researchers should consider combining CFB and DCC perspectives for describing antecedents to academic (cyber)bullying: