Two lawsuits, two windows into the dark side of departmental self-governance. Underlying each: The gross unprofessionalism of people who are utterly twisted by a lifetime spent in academic environments that do not reliably differentiate between petty personal grievances and legitimate professional judgment. The departmental cultures depicted in these two cases are as warped as they are exemplary--what has gone wrong in them could go wrong just about anywhere in academe, particularly in humanities-based disciplines where assessment is necessarily far more subjective than it is in the sciences. Indeed, it would be the odd humanities department that doesn't contain the seeds of similar disasters.

I'm sure things like this are partly a matter of people whose personalities have been influenced for the worse by the academic environment, but would also guess it's partly a matter of institutional governance characteristics. The "non-hierarchical" model of the self-governing department, with all the senior people involved in key decisions, has to lead to a lot of emotional stuff in cases that could have been handled quietly and straightforwardly in a more traditional management structure. Not to say there can't be benefits to the self-governing model, but there are costs as well. I also wonder about the role of Human Resources department and of university General Counsels. These people can play a very helpful role in difficult personnel situations--when they are good and when people bother to get them involved before it's too late.

Good to see you blogging again, Erin.

David Foster, it's the "when people bother to get them involved before it's too late" that's the key to so much of this. I'm not accusing all academics of this tendency, but the sort of people who are going to be inclined to behave this way are also exactly the sort whose egomania will lead them to believe even thinking about the legal consequences of their actions is beneath them, something for the plebes outside the Ivory Tower.

And those are the sorts of people that make me, as a trial lawyer, drool with fiendish delight, because they really are their own worst enemy.