In 2009, the Chronicle of Higher Education defined 'academic mobbing' as 'a form of bullying in which members of a department gang up to isolate or humiliate a colleague'. In their call for a special issue on mobbing for Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, editors Stephen Petrina and E. Wayne Ross explain that if rumors are circulating about the target's supposed misdeeds, if the target is excluded from meetings or not named to committees, or if people are saying the target needs to be punished formally 'to be taught a lesson', it's likely that mobbing is under way.This article addresses academic mobbing at colleges and universities in the United States (US), surveying current literature on the topic and discussing three instances of mobbing in the humanities at a regional state university in the US. The article also proposes an innovative mentoring programme as a long-term solution to this problem of bullying.Specifically, this article presents a mentoring model designed by a doctoral humanities student who has herself been mobbed; this model proposes mentoring at the graduate level to counteract and, it is hoped, eventually eliminate a culture of mobbing in the humanities at the doctoral student's current university and other schools. The graduate mentoring programme presented in this article
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.