… the story of Kevin Morrissey’s suicide closely. He was the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, a small, ambitious literary magazine at the University of Virginia, and he staged a very public suicide, first calling the police to say someone was dead, and then shooting himself in downtown Charlottesville.
Many people are accusing the journal’s top editor of having bullied Morrissey into suicide. Every day, the story gains in intensity and complexity.
The top editor is clearly a most aggressive, unpleasant character; but it’s a long way from this personality type, and the nastiness it can express, to his being responsible for the death of a man who for a long time suffered from clinical depression.
UD wants to keep an open mind, though. She’ll follow the story here. Meanwhile, here’s a skeptic. Here’s another one.
August 31st, 2010 at 11:39AM
The skeptics aren’t terribly convincing. Wasserman educes nothing new. Bissell, despite his general “kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known” stance, admits the existence of a toxic office relationship and points out that Genoways couldn’t fire Morrissey. In such circumstances people have been known to try to harass the employee into quitting.
August 31st, 2010 at 11:50AM
It’s a good time to review what bullying is. Bullying is common. The university, or company, or whatever, often has no clue as to what bullying is, how to detect it, or how to respond to it. Typically, they’ll find a scapegoat, kill the messenger, blame the victim, or some combination. The real problem with bullying is that the executives have set up an organizational culture that tolerates and encourages bullying, at least tacitly. Employees who are victims or bystanders of bullies, feel they work for a bad company with asshole executives. Bullying demoralizes employees and people leave.
People who bully feel that they are trying to make things better. They feel that if you’re not on an employee’s back all the time, then work won’t get done (this is known as “Theory X” in Organizational Behavior). Bullies typically use email. They also use rules and protocols as hammers. Bullies like this observe rules so closely that each individual email appears fine, within the rules. It’s the pattern of the emails that shows the problem. The constant emails grind on the employees. Even though the bullies claim they’re trying to make things better or more efficient or whatever, there is no evidence that any benefit occurs because of bullies. They may claim, that without bullying emails, things would get worse. Bullies believe they are right in what they do. They don’t see themselves as bullies. They are deluded and won’t stop unless they’re made to. Outsiders see that the constant grinding is not to produce a smoother surface, but to grind an employee to dust. Bullies bully as an end in itself. There is no goal.
Victims and bystanders at first don’t believe what’s going on. They respond to the individual emails. They think if they change themselves or the environment, then the bullying emails will stop. Nothing they do will stop the emails. When victims and bystanders go to the company executives, they will be told (1) What’s the problem with this email, it looks OK, (2) You (the employee, usually an underling) need to talk to this person and smooth out the situation, (3) Why come to us now, when you didn’t complain about the prior emails? or (4) You need to work with this guy.
The Workplace Bullying Institute advises that victims and bystanders take the bully aside and talk to that person. Personally, I haven’t seen that work, probably because bullies are deluded. They don’t see themselves as bullies.
I’ve been a bystander to a bully. The victims complained and their complaints were ignored. I confronted the bully, a colleague. I asked him to stop. He continued. I told him to stop. He continued. I called him an asshole eight times in an email and arranged my email filters so that I no longer received emails from him. The advantage of calling someone an asshole in an email is (1) there’s academic definitions of asshole and I think all bullies qualify and (2) the email gets sent further up the chain of command, creating a paper trail. The disadvantage is that the person calling someone an asshole is seen by administration as a trouble-making messenger and will be shot. I’ll let you know what happens.
August 31st, 2010 at 6:24PM
From the ground in Charlottesville, I can say it’s shaken the town’s literary community. Forced them to confront the “job” aspects of the business of writing. Swirling discussion on just how much of an editor’s job is in the office over the manuscript stack, how much is on the road raising funds and promoting public image.
The local alt-weeklies are having a field day. UVA’s new President had it thrown on her desk essentially her first week on the job.
Genoways is aggressive in manner, but I wouldn’t call him unpleasant, at least not to casual acquaintances or outsiders. Then again, I never worked for him.
It’s a thoroughly rotten mess in which no one is coming off well.
September 1st, 2010 at 2:14AM
Granted, I think Harold Ross’s letters should be read because they are simply glorious, but they also give a very closely-focused picture of a tension between cantankerous, grizzling, abrupt insensitivity and an incredible – sometimes penitent – graciousness. Both of which came in handy. It’s daft to advance Ross as a model of editorial temperament, but he did have a knack for checking himself: the more impressive because his rudeness could be so intense.
September 1st, 2010 at 12:09PM
being hostile in the workplace is not just a management style
September 2nd, 2010 at 11:22AM
I read a lot about workplace bullying at one time. One thing I learned is that a surprising percentage of suicides turn out to have been dealing with workplace bullying. Kenneth Westhues is the expert on this phenomenon as it occurs in academe:ttp://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/
Crucially, Westhues is partial to talking about workplace “mobbing” rather than “bullying.” In my own experiences with the phenomenon, I agree wholeheartedly with him. Academic institutions are structured so as to enable systematic group mobbing behavior in which no one is responsible and no one appears to be a ringleader. Focussing solely on bullying frames out the issue of context and can be misleading.
September 2nd, 2010 at 11:59PM
Also on Grounds in Charlottesville–and had the so-called privilege to work with some very tense VQR staffers over the summer. It’s a tragedy, but if nothing else Morrissey’s death has exposed that there was some funny business going on at the VQR (strange hiring practices, inflated salaries, nepotism, etc.). And regardless of who is “at fault” for this man’s death, UVA’s HR department was well aware of what was going on in this office and made really minimal steps toward mediating the conflict. Bad practices all around.
Also, this article by Genoways ( http://motherjones.com/media/2010/01/death-of-literary-fiction-magazines-journals ) is pretty interesting, though not ground-breaking.
September 3rd, 2010 at 12:11AM
Interesting, Kate.
I wonder if one aspect of this story involves the usually very beneficial university ethos of kind of leaving people alone. I think universities really value autonomy; while they may be aware of weird stuff going on in certain units, they tend (not all of them, of course, but many of the better ones) not to interfere — I guess they’re figuring that things will work themselves out eventually, etc.
In the particular case of a small literary magazine, the attitude, frankly, might be: Odd neurotic creative types over there; we can expect some bumpiness from them, but it’s somehow the sort of turmoil that’s in the interest of generating a quirky artsy magazine…
September 3rd, 2010 at 10:12AM
Absolutely, I’m sure that’s the mindset that HR had, which was compounded with hullaballoo surrounding the incoming president. However, Morrissey called HR what…14 times in his last week which was after TG sent four out of six of his staffers home thinking they were fired despite the fact he has no power to fire anyone. We know HR had a mediation session with the staff, but it sounds like there was no plan of action enacted. Chalking the tension in the staff up to temperamental artists is dismissive and suggests a certain level of negligence on their part.