Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the intersection of Academic Mobbing, Bullying Mentors, and Citational Mischief (ABC), often leading to paradoxical autocensura to avoid further cooptation and self-erasure, and its impact on unsettled fields of study with a regression toward the uncreative mean.

Paper long abstract:

Autocensura (Wagner 2022) often takes many subtle forms in academia often involving national, disciplinary, and other epistemic and institutional networks as simply the way one learns to “do business.” However, academic censorship is also shaped by striking events best characterized as an outcome of a toxic stew of a culture of tribal mobbing sensitive to labels and loyalties and entitled bullying by elite gatekeepers. This paper addresses the intersection of Academic Mobbing, Bullying Mentors, and Citational Censorship (ABC), often leading to autocensura--if the target survives personally or professionally. Thus, from mobbing research, there are specific targets, perpetrators, minions, not-so-innocent-bystanders, and naïve collaborators. However, unlike traditional bullying events or institutional mobbing, academic mobbing by elites, take various forms of censorship in how they shape narratives and interpretations of the target’s work within transnational networks they’ve groomed to be weaponized in mostly covert ways, relying on the many backchannels and Janus-faced faux professionality of elite confidentiality and anonymity. If the target survives such a systematic distortion and erasure by powerful gatekeepers (which may largely remain confusing or unknown to them as they simply fail, lose hope, suffer PTSD-related burnout, or never connect the few dots they have), the only means to survival is a kind of paradoxical extreme of walking away while remaining in the academic game to avoid both the mobbing and ongoing self-censorship as anathema to the academic, let alone scientific, project and for one's psychological safety. It is unknown how many walk away from an academic career altogether.