Incivility...
My colleague Beverly Davenport Sypher talks about the negative effects of incivility within organizations.
One such fairly powerful form of incivility is spreading baseless rumors. That rumors can have powerful effects, I have experienced this in my own life, and have seen in the lives of colleagues and graduate students. Rumors can be debilitating; they can limit your productivity and affect you emotionally. Rumors can be powerful particularly in academic climates as professionally academics are taught to take their integrity fairly seriously. And yet rumors are only just as powerful as you let them be. The moment one chooses to treat the rumor as a form of incivility that ought to be treated as such (a form of incivil discourse), one curbs the capacity of rumor to have much of an impact.
Beyond the individual response though, I also believe that as collectives, we have responsibilities toward dealing with rumors as forms of incivility. And here, I have once again also been on the other side, in actively listening to rumors and therefore, in implicitly enouraging them. Therefore, the more I have thought about this, the more I have come to the sense that it is equally important to actively discourage rumors within organizations. So when X comes up to me and tells me about what Y is doing to Z, I have the choice of stating that I am not interested in hearing about it. The best strategy in dealing with rumor mongerers perhaps is in not giving them the space that they so seek to fill out with malicious gossip.
Ultimately, it is perhaps all our job to take malicious gossip seriously and to treat it for what it is: a malicious weed that has no place within academic organizations that pursue knowledge.
One such fairly powerful form of incivility is spreading baseless rumors. That rumors can have powerful effects, I have experienced this in my own life, and have seen in the lives of colleagues and graduate students. Rumors can be debilitating; they can limit your productivity and affect you emotionally. Rumors can be powerful particularly in academic climates as professionally academics are taught to take their integrity fairly seriously. And yet rumors are only just as powerful as you let them be. The moment one chooses to treat the rumor as a form of incivility that ought to be treated as such (a form of incivil discourse), one curbs the capacity of rumor to have much of an impact.
Beyond the individual response though, I also believe that as collectives, we have responsibilities toward dealing with rumors as forms of incivility. And here, I have once again also been on the other side, in actively listening to rumors and therefore, in implicitly enouraging them. Therefore, the more I have thought about this, the more I have come to the sense that it is equally important to actively discourage rumors within organizations. So when X comes up to me and tells me about what Y is doing to Z, I have the choice of stating that I am not interested in hearing about it. The best strategy in dealing with rumor mongerers perhaps is in not giving them the space that they so seek to fill out with malicious gossip.
Ultimately, it is perhaps all our job to take malicious gossip seriously and to treat it for what it is: a malicious weed that has no place within academic organizations that pursue knowledge.
Comments
Post a Comment