Bullying as a career

Some years ago, the Government tried to improve the recruitment of teachers with the slogan ‘You never forget a good teacher’. That may be true, but you never forget really bad ones either. Most of all, you never forget the school bully. Bullying at school causes absenteeism, illness, and even suicide. Even after leaving school, the pain can live on. I know of friends who have had chance encounters with school bullies years later, and felt the same daggers of pain, anxiety and humiliation.

School bullies are usually portrayed in fiction as thick and cowardly, who inflict cruelty because of psychological abnormalities. In fiction, they are defeated in the end. But this is wishful thinking. An alternative fictional school bully is shown in Michael Palin’s Tomkinson’s Schooldays. Here, the school bully enjoys the exercise of cruelty, but uses it to gain exceptional favours including access to cigars, whisky and the pleasure of attractive young Philippine women. In Tomkinson’s Schooldays, being a school bully is an important career, leading directly to the Cabinet.

Bullying has been a profitable career for many others. Those who enjoy personal power over others and exercise it cruelly will not only succeed in life, but will usually accumulate an adoring circle of cronies. This is because bullying serves many functions. Apart from the obvious gains of encouraging compliance, it can generate solidarity. In mediaeval Japan, the shoguns created a caste called ‘burakumin’, who were assigned the most inferior status in society. All others could share the joyful common task of bullying and humiliating them. The British Conservative Party has a successful history of building support by identifying groups of victims who can not fight back, from immigrants, to single mothers, to the chronic sick on benefits.

In some cases, bullying is a response to specific impediments to management. An example would be in universities, where many staff are on ‘open contracts’ and can not be dismissed except for gross misbehaviour. University leaders wish to enhance the prestige of their institution (and hence themselves) by expanding research. Research is deemed to be an exceptional intellectual skill, not available to people who are committed to lesser forms of scholarship such as teaching. University leaders therefore aspire to recruit researchers in place of teachers, and offload teaching to even lowlier staff. But if teachers are open contract with a full workload, they can not be made redundant. Bullying is therefore employed. This can take the form of denigrating their work and closing the courses they run, excluding them from senior positions, allocating them to inferior work spaces, and threatening disciplinary action for minor (or no) infractions.

Heaven forbid that you might think this true of my own dear university, led as it is by saintly figures thinking only of the welfare of the staff and students in their charge.