Higher education prides itself on values of inquiry, community, and social justice. Mission statements emphasize belonging, respect, and shared responsibility. Yet within the everyday rhythms of academic life, a troubling pattern often emerges: civility is optional for those with the most privilege, while staff, students, adjuncts, and early-career scholars disproportionately absorb the costs of incivility.
Across my years as a professional staff member, a long-time student, and now a researcher and managing editor of a research journal, I have seen the same dynamic repeat across institutions and roles. Incivility from full-time and tenured faculty is not uncommon—and it is rarely addressed. Research increasingly describes this as part of a broader academic bullying culture in which hierarchical norms and systemic protections allow certain individuals to behave in ways that would be unacceptable in other workplaces (Bokek-Cohen et al., 2023; Okotoni & Kugbayi, 2024; Soltani et al., 2025; Twale & Luca, 2008). This well-documented, and surprisingly, well-researched aspect of academic culture represents a darker side of higher education that is widely acknowledged but rarely addressed (Bosetti et al., 2025; Kemp, 2024; Malodia et al., 2025; Mrayyan et al., 2024; Shali et al., 2025; Weaver et al., 2025).
What the Research Tells Us About Incivility
Workplace incivility is typically defined as “low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm, in violation of norms for mutual respect” (Andersson & Pearson, 1999, p. 457). Studies of higher education find similar low-intensity but chronic behaviors, from dismissiveness to exclusion to demeaning comments, across classrooms, departments, and scholarly communication channels. In terms of professional or non-academic staff, this type of behavior from faculty is often manifested in minute ways such as failing to attend meetings they requested; expectations of responses or work delivered outside set work hours; requests outside of the staff member’s job duties; passive-aggressive comments; expecting responses or meetings over the lunch hour or outside of business hours; or even escalating at times to emotional manipulation. Academic bullying research further documents how such behaviors become normalized in academic environments due to entrenched power structures, ambiguous norms, and limited accountability mechanisms (Bokek-Cohen et al., 2023).
While behaviors vary in severity, the impact is clear: incivility harms learning, organizational climate, retention, and well-being. What is less often acknowledged is who gets to be uncivil without consequence, and who must endure it. Current research around incivility in higher education largely focuses on nursing education. Study after study reveals that educators, students, and administrators in nursing programs encounter incivility in one form or another on a regular basis (Kemp, 2024; Malodia et al., 2025; Mrayyan et al., 2024; Penconek et al., 2024; Shali et al., 2025; Small et al., 2024; Weaver et al., 2025). While this body of research is robust, it also highlights a notable omission. A persistent gap in the literature on faculty incivility is the absence of professional and non-academic staff perspectives. The literature documenting the experiences of instructional designers, IT professionals, registrars, financial aid and institutional research staff, academic affairs personnel, administrative assistants, campus operations staff, and all the other campus community members that support students and faculty on a daily basis is scant. If administrators, students, and faculty experience incivility, it is reasonable to ask why professional staff would be exempt from similar treatment. The absence of staff-centered research mirrors the same hierarchies that enable incivility.
Power, Privilege, and Whose Expertise “Counts”
Higher education’s power structures extend beyond titles: they shape whose expertise is recognized and whose is overlooked. Many professional or non-academic staff members hold the same degrees as faculty or even more advanced degrees or industry expertise in areas essential to institutional success: instructional design, assessment, technology leadership, student services, accessibility, and research.
Yet research on organizational climate shows that professional and non-academic staff occupy structurally devalued roles that make them more vulnerable to incivility and less likely to have recourse when mistreated. Bullying studies highlight how status differences and role ambiguity create ideal conditions for inappropriate workloads, belittling behavior, and disregard for professional boundaries (Björklund et al., 2021; Bokek-Cohen et al., 2023; Soltani et al., 2025).
Despite their expertise, many professional or non-academic staff are still treated not as collaborators but as de facto secretaries or assistants, regardless of their actual roles, credentials, or areas of specialization. Some faculty default to professional or non-academic staff as the people who should schedule their meetings, fix their technology, produce their materials, or handle tasks far outside the staff member’s job description. This pattern reinforces the idea that these staff members exist primarily to serve individual faculty needs rather than to contribute professional knowledge that advances the institution. These dynamics often intensify in online and digital learning environments, where email, learning management systems, and remote collaboration can magnify power imbalances and strip interactions of relational context.
The Social Justice Paradox
Perhaps the most painful dynamic is what I call the social justice paradox. Many faculty members build careers around equity, critical pedagogy, decolonization, accessibility, or anti-oppressive practice. Their scholarship interrogates power and advocates for inclusive futures.
Yet those same individuals sometimes display incivility toward professional or non-academic staff, students, adjuncts, or graduate workers: groups who often sit lower in the academic hierarchy. Academic bullying literature notes this contradiction as well. Individuals who espouse progressive values may still participate in or perpetuate interpersonal harm when their own status is threatened or when boundaries are not clearly enforced (Dancy & Hodari, 2022). Emerging research on workplace incivility consistently shows that its impacts are not evenly distributed. Women, staff of color, disabled staff, and those in contingent roles experience compounded vulnerability when incivility intersects with other forms of marginalization.
Social psychology research on moral hypocrisy and moral self-licensing shows that individuals who vocally endorse progressive or ethical positions can nonetheless behave inconsistently with those values in everyday contexts, a dynamic that helps explain why some faculty who publicly champion social justice may nonetheless act uncivilly toward staff or students when their own status or convenience is involved. Research finds that people may appear moral or even advocate for fairness yet still act in ways that contradict those ideals, especially when moral behaviors are cognitively abstract or self-serving rather than embedded in relational practice (Merritt et al., 2010).
This contradiction undercuts the institutional commitments to equity that campuses publicly champion. Justice cannot be a scholarly posture while dignity remains negotiable in everyday interactions.
How Our Structures Enable Incivility
Incivility does not persist by accident. Several systemic factors make it difficult to address when the source is a tenured or high-status faculty member. Equally important is the role of leadership silence. When chairs, deans, or administrators downplay repeated concerns as interpersonal issues rather than organizational risks, incivility becomes institutionally sanctioned. It is important to note that these campus leaders are often former faculty themselves.
1. Tenure and Academic Freedom as Unintended Shields
Research on academic bullying consistently finds that hierarchical protections, especially tenure, enable harmful behaviors to go unchecked because colleagues and administrators fear retaliation, grievances, or conflict escalation (Bokek-Cohen et al., 2023; Soltani et al., 2025). Organizational power research suggests that authority rooted in expertise, rank, and tenure can normalize differential treatment in workplace interactions, reinforcing hierarchical cultures where incivility is more easily tolerated (French & Raven, 1959).
2. Union Contracts and Bureaucratic Silos
Union protections are essential, yet complex grievance processes can discourage departments from addressing interpersonal issues (St. Pierre, 2019). Academic bullying cases often escalate precisely because no one feels empowered to intervene early (Björklund et al., 2021).
3. The “Difficult Genius” Narrative
The myth of the brilliant but abrasive scholar remains alive in higher education. Bullying scholars note that intellectual prestige or grant productivity often outweighs interpersonal behavior when institutions decide whether to intervene (Bokek-Cohen et al., 2023).
4. Ambiguous Intent and Cultural Silence
Because incivility is often subtle and deniable, targets may doubt their perceptions or avoid reporting. Bullying research shows that ambiguity about what “counts” as inappropriate behavior is one of the most persistent enabling factors across academic environments (Soltani et al., 2025).
5. Norms of Incivility Embedded in Scholarly Culture
Incivility is also embedded in scholarly communication itself. Peer review, for example, is infamous for unnecessarily harsh comments, dismissive tones, or gatekeeping masquerading as rigor. The ubiquitous “Reviewer #2” joke reflects a broader culture in which unkindness is framed as intellectual authority. As Coates (2024) argues, adversarial review norms normalize disrespect and model incivility as a professional practice.
The Impact: Human, Organizational, and Ethical Costs
For Students
Studies link faculty incivility to lower engagement, reduced learning outcomes, increased stress, and damaged sense of belonging. Bullying cultures amplify these harms by making students unsure where to turn when mistreated (Harrison et al., 2022).
For Staff
Incivility contributes to burnout, turnover, and the loss of highly skilled professionals whose expertise is critical to institutional functioning. Bullying literature shows staff are uniquely vulnerable because they cannot easily escape harmful interactions with faculty who hold power over processes, culture, and decision-making (Bokek-Cohen et al., 2023). When incivility disrupts collaboration between faculty and staff, the consequences extend beyond individual harm to include delayed course development, accessibility compliance gaps, and weakened quality assurance processes.
For Faculty and Departments
Bullying undermines collegiality and disproportionately drives women, BIPOC scholars, and early-career academics out of the profession (Soltani et al., 2025).
For the Institution
A culture of incivility weakens cohesion, harms innovation, and erodes trust. Respectful environments perform better, retain talent longer, and support healthier collaboration. Over time, incivility creates a hidden curriculum of survival in which staff and students learn avoidance strategies rather than collaboration, quietly shaping institutional culture in ways that undermine trust and innovation.
Toward a Culture Where Civility Is a Professional Expectation
1. Make Civility and Collegiality Part of Evaluation and Leadership Criteria
Academic bullying research consistently recommends incorporating interpersonal conduct into tenure, promotion, and leadership selection to counterbalance structural protections (Bokek-Cohen et al., 2023).
2. Elevate Staff and Student Voices
Because bullying disproportionately affects those with the least authority, elevating staff and student perspectives through climate surveys, 360 feedback, and anonymous reporting is essential (Coates, 2024; Harrison et al., 2022).
3. Provide Faculty Development on Communication and Power-Aware Practice
Interventions grounded in civility training, conflict resolution, and leadership development can counteract incivility when they are part of ongoing institutional culture-building (Clark, 2013; Twale & Luca, 2008).
4. Clarify What Academic Freedom Protects
Institutions must explicitly differentiate between protected critical discourse and harmful interpersonal conduct.
5. Name the Issue Publicly
Bokek-Cohen et al. (2023) and Soltani et al. (2025) stress that naming academic bullying as a systemic issue is the first step toward meaningful reform.
A Call to Higher Education
Incivility is not universal in academia but where it thrives, it is never random. It reflects systems that protect the most privileged actors while asking everyone else to quietly endure harm. Professional and non-academic staff deserve the same dignity as faculty. Students deserve learning environments free from hostility. Adjuncts and early-career academics deserve respect, not conditional collegiality. Faculty deserve to follow their scholarly pursuits with support and without derision.
As a sector grounded in the pursuit of knowledge and justice, we must ask ourselves:
What kind of academic culture are we willing to tolerate? And what might we create if civility and dignity were not optional, but expected of everyone—especially those with the most power?
If higher education is serious about equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging, then civility is not peripheral to that work. It is foundational. Future research must move beyond faculty-centric models of academic incivility to center the experiences of professional staff, whose labor sustains the daily functioning of higher education yet remains largely invisible in the scholarly record.
References
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Björklund, C., Vaez, M., & Jensen, I. (2021). Early work-environmental indicators of bullying in an academic setting: a longitudinal study of staff in a medical university. Studies in Higher Education (Dorchester-on-Thames), 46(12), 2556–2567. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1729114
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As senior researcher at OLC, Carrie designs, conducts and manages the portfolio of research projects that align with the mission, vision, and goals of the Online Learning Consortium. She brings with her over 15 years of experience as an online educator and instructional designer with a passion for research. She has peer-reviewed publications covering a variety of topics such as open educational resources, online course best practices, and game-based learning. In addition to a strong background in higher education teaching and instructional design, Carrie brings with her extensive experience in customer service and small business management. She holds a PhD in Educational Technology from Arizona State University, an MS in French from Minnesota State University, and BA in French from Arizona State University.
