Invisible, Unmanageable, and Inevitable: Online Abuse as Inequality in the Academic Workplace

Online abuse is a growing problem in higher education. For postsecondary institutions, the increasing prevalence with which faculty members are targeted with online abuse raises important questions about what it means to provide a safe and equitable work environment that promotes equality for diverse workers in the digital age. This article draws from a series of 10 interviews with academic administrators to assess the capacity of higher education institutions to address online abuse of faculty. Findings show that, while administrators recognize how online abuse reproduces inequality in the academic workplace, various procedural norms keep this problem at a distance, invisible to management, and beyond the scope of institutional responsibility. Following Jones and Pringle (2015), we argue that this procedural distancing relegates online abuse to the terrain of the unmanageable, which, in effect, helps to render inequality inevitable for the most marginalized faculty members. Finally, and to counteract the presumed unmanageability of online abuse, we identify several alternative interventions that might be used to address online abuse and help to mitigate the inequality it produces in academia and beyond.