A School of Media & Public Affairs professor is leading an initiative to combat harassment of researchers through institutional policies and provide emotional and legal support for faculty researchers.
Rebekah Tromble, the director of the Data, Democracy and Politics Institute and an associate professor of media and public affairs, launched the Researcher Support Consortium, an initiative to provide guidelines for universities to deal with the harassment of researchers, earlier this month. Tromble said the consortium — which includes her and Kathleen Searles, a professor of political science at the University of South Carolina — aims to raise awareness of researcher harassment among the public and university administrators and provide schools with specific frameworks to support researchers’ well-being.
“We want real change here in the sense that the campaigns of intimidation and harassment, ultimately, they have fewer harmful impacts,” Tromble said. “And then you know that we effectively reduce the incentives for these actors to target scholars, precisely because they can’t have such a great impact.”
According to the consortium website, harassment of experts is a “widespread problem” and mainly affects researchers of contentious or politically polarizing topics like climate change and race and gender discrimination. Seventy-three percent of climate researchers who appear in the media at least once a month experience abuse, including doxxing, threats or attacks on the researcher’s reputation, according to a study by Global Witness, a nongovernment climate organization.
Tromble said she interviewed dozens of professors around the country to develop solutions for funders of research, institutions like universities and for individual researchers themselves. The website recommends that funders contribute to legal defense funds for researchers impacted by harassment and publicly defend faculty when they experience harassment.
The website also provides a toolkit for universities to support their researchers, which includes creating a form where they can report harassment to university officials and informing researchers in advance if the university plans to publish news regarding their research. Other university policies the website recommends include developing support teams for researchers with administration, human resources and legal personnel within the university and having a specific communications strategy that includes prepared language that is communicated broadly with staff to keep messaging consistent to deal with harassment.
The website recommends that individual researchers ask for support from their university officials and build a supportive community of people they trust around themselves.
“We want to make sure that people really understand how significant a problem this is and that there is essentially a playbook that’s put into action in these instances,” Tromble said.
Tromble said she started the project two years ago because of abuse she experienced after publishing her research on the spread of misinformation on online platforms on a research grant from X, formally known as Twitter. She said she experienced death threats and had to have police patrol outside her house due to the harassment.
“I decided that one of the ways that I could personally take my power back and really work to help others is to make this part of my own research agenda,” Tromble said. “I was already studying harmful things that happen online, and so I began to research in more earnest issues around harassment, online harassment, specifically.”
Experts who study researcher harassment said researcher abuse and intimidation negatively affects those receiving it and the quality of research being produced as a whole.
Isaac Kamola, the director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association for University Professors, said there has been a growing “politicization” of academic research in the last few years led mainly by conservative advocacy groups over research surrounding politicized issues like climate change and racial discrimination.
“Those political activists who benefit from disinformation or those fossil fuel companies that benefit from climate denial, when scientists come out and demonstrate the opposite, that there is a considerable amount of disinformation or that climate change is human made, then they tend to not like that knowledge as being produced within a university,” Kamola said.
Kamola said the backlash has led to increased harassment of researchers who produce work on contentious topics and that universities do not know how to support their research properly. He said the consortium “impressed” him with its specific policies for universities to implement like support teams for researchers.
“They oftentimes react by creating ad hoc policies where they just kind of are scrambling around trying to respond to a crisis in the moment,” Kamola said. “And what’s really great about the research support resources that were released, they get very clear advice about how to create durable campus policies and put together infrastructures on campus so that if this happens, there’s measures in place.”
Kamola said he has known professors who have had to take leaves of absence due to stress from harassment from their research or even leave the field of academia permanently.
“There’s faculty who have left the academy because they just don’t want to deal with it or have been forced out because of these manufactured outrages,” Kamola said. “You have this kind of general chilling effect of faculty changing the way they talk and how they talk and what they prioritize in the classroom.”
Sam McCarthy, a prevention educator with the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, an organization focused on supporting survivors of sexual harassment, said harassment negatively impacts the mental health of researchers who experience it and also creates fear among other researchers that it may happen to them.
“You can imagine that when you’re being threatened constantly and aren’t able to be in your home, that the effects of that would also trickle into your work, but the personal effects are also just terrible,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy said the impacts of abuse can worsen if researchers do not receive proper support from their universities because then they feel they cannot speak out about controversial issues they are researching.
“It’s not just individual faculty members that have been personally affected but also kind of everybody who knows that this is happening,” McCarthy said. “And then when the universities and the administrators don’t support the faculty and say that they have the right to academic freedom, then the faculty members worry about their job security.”
