Options for Responding to Harassment

• It is generally best not to engage with harassers, who are not looking for constructive debate. In a Pew Research Center poll, 83% of those who refused to engage said that it was an effective strategy in ending the situation.
• Block harassers in email and personal social media accounts.
• Use the “report incident” feature (most social media platforms have this) that allows you to report abuse and tell them about user behavior or content that violate their terms of use. For abusive emails, contact the company to report a user violation of their email user agreement.
• Forward all harassing emails as attachments to @email.
• Temporarily remove all personal and contact information from the faculty’s University webpage bio(s) and
  UMass People Finder. 
  • To be removed from the UMass directory, contact Matthew Dalton, Chief Information Security Officer (@email; 413-545-4475).
  • To remove faculty information from the departmental website and other affiliated websites, the webpage manager must be contacted. They are usually staff in the department and sometimes at the college. 
  • Third party services can remove web content and your personal information from the wider internet.
• Temporarily privatize social media accounts. 

• Most situations diffuse quickly. But in cases where the situation gains momentum or builds to such a degree as to threaten the professional reputation of the faculty member, a public statement or response to individual inquiries can be issued.
• We have a generic statement that is used when deemed appropriate, below. Be aware that a more tailored response will require the approval of the University General Counsel, delaying the response when it is important to act quickly. More detailed responses require investigation by the administration, increasing response time. Furthermore, we wish to avoid adopting the narrative of the harasser, which is often distorted or fabricated. 
  • Faculty members at the University of Massachusetts Amherst share their expertise on a broad spectrum of disciplines that enrich the educational experience of students, who benefit from discussion and debate of divergent views and are encouraged to develop their own ideas and beliefs. _________ is an established and respected scholar in their discipline and a valued member of our university. As with all our scholars at the University of Massachusetts, _________________ has the right of academic freedom necessary to pursue scholarship, research and teaching on important subjects. Healthy debate and disagreement is a celebrated cornerstone of academic freedom. Bullying and harassment of faculty members who exercise their academic freedom, however, is not, and we condemn it in the strongest of terms.
  • See examples of past statements from UMass and from other institutions in Appendix 1 on the Academic Freedom Crisis Toolkit main page. 
  • Contact Ed Blaguszewski (@email; 413-545-0444), Executive Director of Strategic Communications, in the Office of News and Public media for protocol. He will help assess the situation and coordinate a standardized response to press inquiries. 
• As a form of reputation management, sometimes faculty prepare a brief message explaining their position and circulate it among their departmental and disciplinary colleagues. 

While a public faculty member’s employment cannot be jeopardized on the basis of work that is protected under academic freedom principles, this does not mean that the University is always obligated to come to the defense of the faculty member. In some cases, the university may recognize the right of the faculty member to pursue such scholarship, but may choose to remain silent or even publicly disagree with the faculty member. This is particularly true with regard to the faculty member’s personal speech posted on social media wherein the university may disagree with the sentiment. (Faculty members should always make an effort in such cases to indicate that they do not speak for the institution.) 

In other cases, the university must assess the veracity of the claims made about the faculty member’s research. If claims of research misconduct are alleged, the University is obligated to conduct a preliminary screening to assess whether to conduct an investigation or dismiss the allegations. The university has a procedure in place for this process. In these cases, no further steps can be taken until the preliminary review has been conducted. It is important that chairs and administrators make clear to the faculty member that the preliminary review is a pro forma screening process, not a research misconduct investigation, and it is applied to all allegations. 

• Some faculty choose to engage directly with online harassers and that is their right. Responding calmly with facts sometimes works. Humor and kindness are also effective in disarming online trolls because that is not the reaction they wish to provoke.
• Some faculty publicly repost the abusive messages they have received to gain social media sympathy and help in defending themselves. Exercise caution in giving this advice though. It can simply perpetuate social media abuse against the abusers, no matter how deserving you feel it might be.
• See PEN America’s suggestions.

(also see Pew Research Center's suggestions)