This review has been accessed  times since April 16, 2001
Westhues, Kenneth. (1998). Eliminating Professors: A
Guide to the Dismissal Process. Lewiston, N.Y.: Kemper
Collegium Publication, The Edwin Mellen Press.
Pp. 218
$29.95(Cloth) ISBN 0-7734-8210-5
Reviewed by Peggy Brandt Brown
University of North Texas
April 16, 2001
When a friend of mine who works in a different department of
my university read Kenneth Westhues's Eliminating
Professors: A Guide to the Dismissal Process, he said
the book made him laugh and offered him some insights. My
friend said he could look around his department and see who
was in one of the five stages of dismissal that Westhues
delineates. Westhues means for his book to be humorous,
which it is, but only to a point. Westhues is an angry man
who uses his book to vent his frustration at the process in
which he is caught. It is insightful, but over and over I
came back to what the book could have been as compared to
what it is.
Westhues is a sociology professor at the University of
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, who wrote Eliminating
Professors between September 28th and December 11th of
1997. The dates are important because while he was writing
the book, he was waiting for an outside judge (or arbitrator) to
deliver a final, binding decision to the president of
Westhues's university concerning his side in a discipline
case in which he had been involved for four years. The book
is divided into five parts and in each section Westhues
spends time telling his readers what is happening with the
continuing delays in the delivery of the outside judge's
verdict. The "Outside Judge" is a top level administrator
from another Canadian university who continually is unable
to make his deadlines for reasons anyone ever involved in
the active administration of a university can imagine.
Eliminating Professors is a catharsis of Westhues's
anger and stress while he is in that particular limbo of
academe. As Limbo is the abode of souls barred from heaven,
so is Westhues barred from his normal academic life because
during this time he is on a semester sabbatical. As he
writes, he is unsure if he will be able to return to the
place where he has spent his professorial life for the last 22
years. This is not an objective work that gives no
indication of the author's life or bias. It is a cry
against what has been happening to him and a venting of his
frustration and bitterness.
Westhues states that he undertook to study "the process
by which people get eliminated from groups, organizations
and societies. Such a study struck me [as] a sociologist's
duty, to answer a public need" (p.vii). He
continues:
Every corporation faces the problem of how to
eliminate an employee with whom its contract is not simply
at will, that is, dissolvable for any or no reason. Tenured
professors are but an extreme example of employees who have
a claim to permanence, often also seniority, autonomy, high
salary, emotional ties and substantial investment of self.
Employees of this kind are hard to terminate. Formally,
they can be dismissed only for cause.(p.ix).
He asserts that he is writing about the patterns that groups
follow to expel someone from the social circle. He offers
his work as a handbook for line administrators in higher
education and for managers and officials concerned with
human resources issues. But the book is not a guide, but
rather a satire with all administrators portrayed as
unethical, manipulative, vindictive, and just plain nasty
people while the other actors are either dupes or innocent
souls who are persecuted while trying to work in places
where they only think that "values on critical,
independent thought, academic freedom, tenure, and
individual rights continue to hold sway." (p. 115)
Westhues collected 25 case studies of other people who were
being forced to leave places they had worked for long
periods of time. Most, but not in all the cases, were
academics. From these cases, Westhues synthesized a
construct he calls Dr. PITA which stands for Pain In The Ass,
which pretty well describes
these people. They are the ones
who are out of step. Over and over his most vivid examples
are people who are ethic minorities and frequently
internationals whose native languages are not English. He
maintains that the root of the problem is tenure or some
other kind of continuing status that prevents the
troublemaker from being fired. If the person did not have
tenure, he or she would have been fired Westhues claims.
The only thing the administrator (who wants this human
problem to go away) has to do is ignore any claims of tenure
or of a "lifelong or career-long moral commitment
between colleagues, an imagined bond of reciprocal trust.
Each was expected to tolerate the other's rants and ravings,
no matter how unsound, unbalanced, unmarketable, or
unpopular"(p.17). For Westhues, there is never a
legitimate reason for the removal of a tenured PITA.
The book is divided into five parts that parallel the
concept of workplace mobbing developed by Heinz Leymann.
The first part is called "Overview and Objective"
and discusses who Dr. PITA is and why a university would
want to get rid of such a person. Westhues describes ten
alternative exit doors through which Dr. PITA can be pushed.
These are retirement, fabricated resignation, transfer,
death, "long-term disability/physical illness, long-
term illness/mental illness, early retirement, dismissal for
cause, downsizing or financial exigency, and constructive
dismissal or, in the USA, when Dr. Pita decides to sue the
university for damages.
The second part of the book discusses the two initial stages
of the elimination process which are ostracization and
harassment. Westhues calls these techniques "torment" and
they include many ways an administrator can make life
miserable for a professor. During these stages the
professor's department begins to mark Dr. PITA as different
and a person who does not belong. In this section, Westhues
discusses a worst case scenario. In 1992, after over eight
years of turmoil, Dr. Valeery Fabrikant brought a high powered
rifle to his workplace at Concordia University in Montreal
and shot four professors dead and severely wounded a fifth.
Westhues analyzes Fabrikant's case identifying the different
stages of elimination the administration used to get
Fabrikant to leave and how the process only created an
overpowering rage in its victim.
Stage Three is called "the Incident" and is the
subject of the third part of the book. The Incident is an
event which the administrators can use to start official
investigations or some type of proceedings against Dr. PITA.
Westhues implies that the incidents are always overblown and
frequently instigated or even fabricated to provide an
excuse to proceed against Dr. PITA. In this section
Westhues made an interesting argument about sexual
harassment being society's current catch-all of moral
indignation, a cause for moral panic, but ruined his point by
implying that all sexual harassment claims are
chimeras. It is demeaning to people who have been sexually
harassed and have had the courage to come forward. He also
seems unaware that many businesses are dealing with the
issue of sexual harassment by spending time and money on the
development of policies, training, investigations and
enforcement. In many large businesses, people accused of
sexually harassing others are suspended immediately and
fired upon the completion of investigations that prove their
guilt. Appeals are handled in the courts. The process does
not take four years.
The fourth section of the book is called "The Aftermath
of the Incident" and deals with the procedures and
actors in the appeals DR. PITA usually makes against his or
her accusers. Westhues's satirical vein runs strong in this
section. He discusses judges, arbitrators, the media and
Dr. PITA's friends and how the administrators can block all
efforts made on the behalf of the beleaguered Dr. PITA.
Stage Five is simply "Elimination". Westhues was
writing this section in November, and his distress over the
lack of resolution of his own case is truly the subject of
this section. He does discuss mental illness as an exit
door an administration can use to shove out a PITA. In each
of the cases he cites, he depicts the professors as harmless
victims being pushed around. The administrators are
overreacting just to get the PITA out. As a licensed
professional counselor, I found these cases particularly
disturbing. Based on his descriptions of the situations, my
reaction is that there were enough true warning signs to
warrant caution. In his discussion of the Fabrikant case,
Westhues described what could happen. He made us aware of
just how bad things can get. In each of the mental illness
cases, if something had not been done and Dr. PITA had
responded violently, there would have been no excuse for
inactivity on the part of those involved.
Westhues raises legitimate concerns relating to the process
groups use to force former members to leave. However, the
loss of one person's employment is not comparable to the
Nazi's extermination of the Jews and other ethic minorities.
Repeatedly, Westhues quotes sources that draw that comparison.
If he wishes to compare the two, he could use the workplace
mobbing phenomenon, show its application to both situations
and discuss how this could be an example of a universal
human societal pattern employed in many situations involving
the distancing of one person from a group. He could have
supported his conclusions with other studies of similar
types. Yet he said, "Little holocausts are happening
every day in our most civilized societies."(p.vii).
Earlier I said I kept looking at what this book could have
been. The book I would have liked to have read could have
discussed how the entrenchment that tenure encourages is the
basis of the problem and could have suggested a new, more
humane way of dealing with embedded faculty. It could have
explored other, less damaging ways to remove people from
their workplaces. The Fabrikant case could have been used
as a worst case scenario and other solutions explored that
could have resolved the situation in less drastic ways.
Westhues could have made Eliminating Professors the
work of scholarship that he intimated it would be in his
foreword by using citations and naming sources and by careful
examination of the issues and literature relating to the
topic. He claims to be doing a study, but there is no
standard sociological methodology in this work.
If he had been a little more light handed, a little less
angry, and a little more balanced in his presentation, this
could have been a very humorous work. Westhues is writing
satire. Any man who can say, "most professors have the
media savvy of toads" (page 144) is not lacking in
wit.
Another colleague of mine who has been the victim of
workplace mobbing—a term she understood and identified
with immediately—said she would have liked to have seen
more on how a person in such a situation could "dodge the
bullet" as Westhues apparently has done. (However, we do
not know this for certain because the book ends before the
Outside Judge returns his decision. Three years later
Westhues is still at the University of Waterloo, but the
reader does not know if he is an active, accepted member of
his community again or if he exists at the edge of the
academic world, still in limbo if you will, as were some of
the Dr. PITAs in his case studies.)
Westhues's Eliminating Professors engaged me on
several different levels. Although it was not the book I
thought I was getting, it did cause me to think about and
question group and departmental dynamics in ways I had not
before. I became aware of new areas of research. I do know
different people got very different meanings and insights
from the work and on that basis alone I can recommend it.
About the Reviewer
Peggy Brandt Brown is with the Program in Higher
Education, College of Education, University of North Texas
in Denton, Texas. She is a licensed professional counselor
with the State of Texas although her license is inactive at
this time. Her areas of interest are higher education
administration, college students and suicide, and grant
writing for student services and student development
interests.
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