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Targeted Harassment of Engineering Education Researchers: How to Connect with Community and Support Your Colleagues Under Attack

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Conference

2019 CoNECD - The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity

Location

Crystal City, Virginia

Publication Date

April 14, 2019

Start Date

April 14, 2019

End Date

April 22, 2019

Conference Session

Track: Special Topics - Social Justice & Reform Technical Session 2

Tagged Topics

Diversity and Special Topic: Social Justice & Reform

Page Count

27

DOI

10.18260/1-2--31796

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/31796

Download Count

393

Paper Authors

biography

Alice L. Pawley Purdue University, West Lafayette Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-9117-4855

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Alice L. Pawley is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Program and the Division of Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. Prof. Pawley's goal through her work at Purdue is to help people, including the engineering education profession, develop a vision of engineering education as more inclusive, engaged, and socially just. She runs the Feminist Research in Engineering Education (FREE, formerly RIFE, group), whose diverse projects and group members are described at feministengineering.org. She received a CAREER award in 2010 and a PECASE award in 2012 for her project researching the stories of undergraduate engineering women and men of color and white women. She has received ASEE-ERM’s best paper award for her CAREER research, and the Denice Denton Emerging Leader award from the Anita Borg Institute, both in 2013. She was co-PI of Purdue’s ADVANCE program from 2008-2014, focusing on the underrepresentation of women in STEM faculty positions. She helped found, fund, and grow the PEER Collaborative, a peer mentoring group of early career and recently tenured faculty and research staff primarily evaluated based on their engineering education research productivity. She can be contacted by email at apawley@purdue.edu.

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Erin A. Cech University of Michigan

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Erin Cech is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. Before coming to UM in 2016, Cech was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research and on faculty at Rice University. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego and B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Sociology from Montana State University. Cech’s research seeks to uncover cultural mechanisms of inequality reproduction--particularly gender, sexual identity and racial/ethnic inequality within science and engineering professions. Her current research projects focus on the recruitment and retention of women, Native Americans, and LGBT individuals, and the role of professional cultures in the inequality in STEM.

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Stephanie Farrell Rowan University

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Dr. Stephanie Farrell is Professor and Founding Chair of Experiential Engineering Education at Rowan University (USA). Prior to 2016 she was a faculty member in Chemical Engineering at Rowan for eighteen years. Dr. Farrell has contributed to engineering education through her work in inductive pedagogy, spatial skills, and inclusion and diversity. She has been honored by the American Society of Engineering Education with several teaching awards such as the 2004 National Outstanding Teaching Medal and the 2005 Quinn Award for experiential learning, and she was 2014-15 Fulbright Scholar in Engineering Education at Dublin Institute of Technology (Ireland)tephanie Farrell is Professor and Founding Chair of Experiential Engineering Education at Rowan University (USA) and was 2014-15 Fulbright Scholar in Engineering Education at Dublin Institute of Technology (Ireland).

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Donna M. Riley Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Donna Riley is Kamyar Haghighi Head of the School of Engineering Education and Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University.

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Abstract

Over the last few years, there has been an increase in the number of STEM education scholars who have been harassed due to the topic, design, or claims of their scholarship. This harassment has included social media attacks, phone calls, hate emails, threats of violence, and more. The American Association of University Professors considers targeted harassment of faculty one of its featured campaigns; the AAUP notes that the recent increase in the number of harassment reports now extends beyond the communities who have historically endured such attacks to include climate change researchers, and scholars working in ethnic studies, gender studies, and LGBTQ+ studies. Harassment differs from academic critique in its tone and content - it does not constitute debate on the technical, cognitive, logical, conceptual, or other points that scholars disagree on, but instead is repetitive behavior that is threatening or violent in tone, often inaccurate in content, and designed to silence the researcher by making them afraid to state their claims aloud or in writing. Engineering education equity scholars have increasingly been targeted both by well-funded operations such as Campus Reform as well as by other engineering faculty. This targeted harassment of scholars threatens academic freedom; organizations like AAUP have developed new resources to both support scholars who are targeted, and organize universities employing such scholars to stand in vigorous defense of academic freedom. In this special panel session, we will present recent cases of harassment in the engineering education research (EER) equity field, solicit more stories in order to connect with more scholars that may think they are alone and unsupported, provide specific examples of how universities have responded or should respond when their scholars come under attack, and share resources and advice on how to support scholars under attack at their universities.

Pawley, A. L., & Cech, E. A., & Farrell, S., & Riley, D. M. (2019, April), Targeted Harassment of Engineering Education Researchers: How to Connect with Community and Support Your Colleagues Under Attack Paper presented at 2019 CoNECD - The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity , Crystal City, Virginia. 10.18260/1-2--31796

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