I am going to try to explain in the most exhaustive way that I can how a culture of bullying and slandering was nurtured and developed at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages and how the management of CUHK, in spite of having enough evidences of it, tried repeatedly and stubbornly to hide it and deny any knowledge about the shameful behaviour instituted there as normal practice for a long time (I could say that until the complaint of a Danish/German teacher and my own complaint made it impossible to keep denying the wrongdoing). I don’t know the exact number of language lecturers affected, and not all cases should be equalled without paying attention to individual details, but since what I went through seemed to be a well instituted practice I guess that quite a good number of people passing through that place in those years were affected. Even to this day, no formal apology or reparation has been offered by the university, and silence and a shrug of shoulders are their most frequent reaction. What’s more, slandering, rumours and malicious gossip are still used by people linked to that University (or even by careless or malicious individuals who take the said rumours and slandering once emanated from CUHK to defame me professionally, taking advantage of the institutional silence and stubbornness of CUHK in refusing to give any proper apology, reparation or clarification in an open and transparent way to the issues that I am about to present).
I arrived at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages as a language lecturer in the summer of 2011. From the very beginning, and always in an oral way, so no trace of these “declarations” could be used against them, members of the management insisted, out of the blue, that I should take the Department as a “family” (I didn’t know at the time that it was going to be a very dysfunctional and mean family indeed) and that I had the “obligation to get along well with my workmates” (I didn’t understand at all what they meant by this and, since I was taking for granted at that time that mutual respect and trustworthiness were supposed in any working environment I didn’t pay much attention to those, let’s call them, unofficial warnings). However, they were expressed in quite an unfriendly and stern way, which created a certain degree of weirdness and stress from that point on. One of the Executive Officers at that time was the one passing these messages to me. There was also a German lady, another language lecturer, who pretty much acted as the unofficial “boss” amongst other lecturers, who gave me repeatedly a very intriguing message: “We don’t like people who creates trouble at this Department” (I could have replied that, in general, I, or anybody else, do not like people who creates trouble, but since I did not understand the nature of the warning/threat at that point I didn’t gave it much thought). Another thing that stroke me as unusual was that the Executive Officer at that time insisted once and again that “the Head of Modern Languages, the German lady I mentioned before and herself always acted as one and took all the decisions in a consensual way” (this way of acting more like a gang than a University Department should have warned me about the danger there but I could not see what they meant then).
I had arrived to take the position of a previous language lecturer who had suddenly departed with the excuse (probably fake, I could say now) of a seriously ill close relative. I am going to jump in time and say that, months later, another lecturer told me that she recalled the said departed girl to have come back one day from an informal lunch with the two German full time lectures looking pale as a ghost and totally horrified. She left shortly afterwards. Just join the dots and you can start understanding what was going on in there.
During my first year, the Supervisor of the language section, a German man, was out of HK under not very clear reasons. Even though one of the Executive Officers was extremely insistent on being informed about all personal and professional interactions within the job, and at the same time eluded any explanation about expectations or demands related to the criteria to renew working contracts there, the year passed without too many inconveniences arising to me. There were plenty of inconsistent and not very pleasant issues arising in the daily interactions, many of them due to the lack of transparency or the absolute inexistence of clear rules to be taken as a guideline of professional conduct within the Department. I even got yelled at by the said Executive Officer when I asked about the said rules and expectations. As I said, the year passed, and even though the working atmosphere was far from nice and friendly, especially because the management (the Executive Officer and the German lady who acted those months as temporary supervisor) encouraged gossiping and pitting staff against each other, we moved into the 2012/2013 academic year.
That year the German man who was officially the Supervisor came back and things took a turn for the worst towards the end of the Spring semester. The remaining full time German lecturer, a Danish woman, told another lecturer and me, during a lunch, that she had been repeatedly bullied and scolded by the Supervisor. The severity of the bullying was such that she had started receiving therapy support from a professional psychologist (and I have to say that this guy, apparently, gave quite good advice to her; I remember this one since then: “when there is a psychopath in a working place, usually the psychopath stays and normal people leave”). The problem of my workmate resonated with me for two main reasons: I had experienced a sort of bullying/moving from three Spanish lecturers at a previous university in this city and, secondly, I had gone through an unpleasant experience with the said supervisor myself a few months before in which these man had yelled at me on the phone and accused me of breaking some “mysterious” (non-existing, actually) Department rules and threatened me with not renewing my contract at the end of the academic year (after I put all these things in an email, following his phone call, and demanded an explanation of where was the said rule or any other rule I had to follow and why I should be threatened with dismissal so suddenly and inexplicably, by the way, he lowered his tone and even apologized for the severe scolding…). All in all, I offered the Danish/German lecturer my sympathy and support and told her that “the door of my office was always opened if she needed shelter”. Little I knew at that time that this was going to be the end of my working days at CUHK. She took my offer quite literally indeed and twice she came into my office running away (even physically) from her two German “workmates”. When I asked her details about the way that she was being bullied she explained to me the procedures: the German supervisor would scold and threat her, demand her teaching materials, notes, etc., and yell at her repeatedly. After this, the other German lady, who was very often present when the scolding was taking place, would go to the victim and tell her something like this: “I am sorry that this has happened, you know that I am your friend, but he is right and you should obey him and stop challenging him”. The bad cop/good cop style of bullying somebody and destroy that person’s assertiveness and will to resist, we could call it. It was pretty obvious to me that my workmate was being severely bullied by two people, not one. And the higher management at the Department was perfectly aware of it and seemed not to have any problem with the issue. Shameful indeed.
Please blame for being empathic, but after having my workmate sheltering in my office or asking me to accompany her somewhere else to get rid of her “colleagues” and seeing her cry, I felt compelled to report the case and my incident with the Supervisor to the Head of the Department. Was this going to improve the situation? Definitely not.
The said supervisor, shamefully but expectedly, denied all accusations and rejected the mere existence of any incident in the past. The head executive officer, at the same time, started dropping pieces of paper or post-its in my office door asking for a meeting with the Head of the Department (obviously she didn’t want to leave any trace in the future of these irregular procedures). The thing that worried the management of the Department most, surprisingly, were not the bullying accusations, but the fact that I had requested to record or videotape any meeting, which they immediately rejected and presented as an unacceptable request. I have to say that while all this was going on, my workmate, the one being bullied, had already presented a formal complaint to the Head of Department about her case, receiving pretty much the same treatment as me for it (denial, covering up, shifting attention to whatever else that could be used to avoid dealing with the accusations).
In my first meeting there were three Linguistic professors from the Department, three Chinese ladies, including the Head. Another one, by the way, were later to become something like the “shadow” of the said Head, always behind or next to her or to other people involved in my vilification. She even seemed to be instructing them about what to do next. This lady had been the previous Head of Department; I do not know yet why she was removed from her position (although I can imagine it). I would say that the Head of Department during my time there was pretty much an “extension” of this apparently very controlling lady. Going back to that first meeting, to my great surprise, the 3 ladies, who presented themselves as a disciplinary panel, tried to find all kind of twisted reasoning and excuses to dismiss my complaint, they even questioned the existence or worthiness of any incident, and pretty much insisted that my behavior was not acceptable. Not a single word about the behavior of the supervisor, by the way, who was always depicted as a very nice person… Remarkable to me was that at some point during the meeting that former head of Department to whom I referred before burst into sudden tears and couldn’t control her crying for something like 5/10 seconds. I guess that bad conscience sometimes knocks at everyone’s door.
After that meeting, days passed, during which time I could notice quite some workmates avoiding me, sometimes in the most ridiculous and weird of the ways like looking at the ceiling when passing close to me. I was to learn later that some might have been questioned after my complaint (questioned about my person and my professional conduct, by the way, not at all about my complaint) and instructed, very probably, not to talk to me. Isolation to destroy determination, old trick of bullies with managerial power…
Some days later, I received a letter from the head of the Department dismissing all my complaints, pretty much accusing me of aggrandizing any incident and, literally, telling me that I “lacked collegiality” and I had hurt my workmates for it. What??? That supervisor was depicted as such a sensible and decent human being, he was apparently suffering a lot because of my accusations…even these days I find hard to swallow the shamefulness and hypocrisy of what that letter said. Even worse, it seemed that after my complaint, all my workmates in my language section had been called to separate meetings and asked to give a detailed account about my person and the interactions with me. Whatever they said, I guess, was decontextualized, magnified and taken for facts (instead of opinion or even malicious gossip, which was the way my complaints were treated) and used to accuse me of lacking collegiality and not fulfilling my professional duties (these are plain false accusations, I have to make very clear here, and to this day I have not been provided with any proof of when and how exactly I failed to fulfil my duties…maybe because such a thing never happened). Let’s put all this in the context of my Danish workmate’s complaints of bullying being also dismissed and ignored, and together, I think, we have a crystal-clear case of bullying/vilification. Anyone could see this thing, don’t you think so? Well, not the management of CUHK, apparently.
To contextualize the case a bit more, that year there was quite a fuzz with the renewal of contracts. We were in May already, and a number of teachers were finishing their contracts that summer. Curiously, most of the teachers who did not seem to be very sympathetic or docile enough to the management (by the management I mean, mostly, these 2 German lecturers previously mentioned) did not get their contracts renewed until very late that academic year. There were already complaints and an air of “what’s going on?” circulating amongst those affected. After our complaint, the Danish teacher and me, of course, did not get any news of renewal from the Department. I was actually offered a non-renewable 6 months contract (just an excuse so I couldn’t sue them for not renewing my contract at that time after my complaint) only 48 hours before the expiring of my contract. How do you like or justify that, Personnel Office of CUHK?
Since I am married to a local person and I have a family here, therefore I have strong ties to Hong Kong, I decided to accept the so called “offer” of that 6 months non-renewable contract, in spite of considering it mean and unfair, so I could be allowed some more time to find another job and be able to stay in the city. Let me explain a bit how was that meeting 48 hours before the expiring of my contract, because that was quite weird and shameful: the Head of the Department and another office staff were in a room with me. I was given a closed and thoroughly sealed envelope (very difficult to open it, I remember, incidentally) and, after I managed to open it and read the content of the new “contract”, the Head of the Department started scolding me and blaming me for my attitude and complaints. I interrupted her, told her that her previous and current accusations to my person were offensive, fake and even slanderous, and therefore I was seriously considering getting a lawyer and suing her. I said that she had to justify and present proof of everything that I had been accused of, and I put a recorder on the table because I was conscious of the dishonesty in the management and the need to collect legal proof of what was going on. Her face contorted in the weirdest grin, she stared at me in horror for something like five seconds and then she, literally, stood up and ran away from the room. In the meanwhile, the office staff (who, I believe, is currently the Head Executive officer of the Department) had started crying like a child. After a while, she collected all her papers hastily and left the room, leaving me alone to puzzle about how far shamefulness, impunity and misbehavior could be extended and normalized at that Department (I have to say that I believe that quite some staff, especially at the lower levels, there were not fully aware of the implications of what they were being instructed to do and/or very often acted just out of fear of losing their jobs if they disagreed).
And that was it for the remaining six months at my staying in that Department. I was not given any further chance to have a meeting, in spite of requesting it. I repeatedly sent formal letters to the Head of Department demanding a proper justification and proof of all the accusations thrown against me, and she ignored them all (she even avoided me physically, looking at me with horror every time we crossed each other in the corridors, in spite of my being as polite as I could be in that situation). My Danish/German workmate, the one bullied, quitted her job, feeling emotionally exhausted and disappointed. Some of my Spanish workmates deliberately avoided me and refused to talk to me about any issue related to the last months (I believe that they were instructed to act like that, or maybe it was just bad conscience). And everything went on as usual, apparently: bullying and slandering triumphed again in that place, all properly covered and normalized by the management of the university.
By the way, if anybody is wondering whether those of us who complained about the awful management at that place had had any professional issue before our complaints, the answer is categorically no. The Danish/German teacher had the highest score at the Department in her teaching evaluations that year. I came second. My teaching appraisal that year was really flattering, all praise and laudatory words (of course, this was before we complained about the Supervisor). Believe it or not, that guy really liked me as a teacher/lecturer. I guess it’s a pity that I don’t like bullies or people who yell and threat their staff whenever they feel like. It might be my flaw, that I cannot work with psychopaths and I feel empathic with people who are being bullied, and that probably disqualifies me to work at CUHK…
So, going back to those six months, I decided to give myself a break from all this unpleasantness and focus in teaching my courses and looking for another job. Of course, the management presented the absence of the Danish/German teacher as an unexplained personal decision, nothing else… As I said, that kind of issues seemed to have become normal happenings in that Department through the years. Towards Christmas that year (2013), incidentally, my officemate quitted his job quite suddenly and unexpectedly. He was quite aware of all the issues I have been explaining, since he had witnessed the effect of the bullying on the Danish/German teacher and the effect of the slandering on my person. I suspect that he might have been pressed by the management of the Department to testify/sign something negative against my person, and that might have forced him to take the honorable path of leaving that place. It’s just a suspicion, but it’s a strong one indeed. I have to say that he, amongst quite some other people, are part of the good memories and decent staff that I met at that unfortunate place.
Let’s fast forward to the end of my contract at CUHK, and then I gathered energies again to present my case, this time not at the Department level (which had proven to be useless and unleash backlash against the victim complaining) but at the Personnel office level. Weirdly, they only replied to me with phone calls, always rejecting to communicate by email (again, trying to avoid any trace of wrongdoing or misbehavior that could bring the University to the Court?) and insisting that no recording of anything at all was allowed. Incidentally, let me say that the so-called staff union of CUHK was useless at that time, since the representative in the Department was the German lady who had taken active part in the bullying of the Danish/German teacher (this person even told me at the beginning of the 2013/2014 academic year that “I deserved to be punished for what I had done”)… I had a couple of meetings with a lady representing the Personnel office (I was not given much information about her rank or duties there), she listened to me, and that was it. Nothing else. I had also, under the advice of PTU staff, used a Personal Data Request form to demand transcripts of all meetings and reports concerning my person since I had presented my complaint. There was a secretary always present in all the meetings, and she was supposed to transcribe all that happened and was said there. I was reassured of it in the first meeting I had with that so-called disciplinary committee. Guess what? They gave me nothing because they claimed that there was nothing of it in that Department. All gone, vanished. Even worse, I was given a document that had been sent out of the Department (for instance, to the College I was part of, Wu Yee Sun) without my knowledge, in which the Head of my Department questioned my mental health and asked everyone to beware of my words and behavior. Quite offending, I would say. And I was never informed of it until I presented a legal request.
Since I considered this “erasing” of documents/evidence unacceptable, I invited the Danish/German teacher to come with me to the Professional Teachers Union (PTU) and present two separate complaints through them. We were sorely scolded from CUHK for taking this step, by the way. It seems that they don’t like to “clean their dirty staff” out of their house doors (even if they refuse to “clean” anything at all)… Some time later, by the way, my workmate told me that the answer that PTU received about her complaint was just “plain silly”. I was in my last weeks of work at CUHK and I was requested to meet the Dean of the Faculty at the time and present him with an account of what had happened. I tried my best to do so (although my account, definitely, was not as exhaustive as this one that you’re reading) and I have to say that the Dean seemed to me a very polite but quite careless person concerning my complaints of bullying and vilification inside his Faculty. He briefly listened to me, dismissed the accusations thrown against my person and my professional duties as “not so bad after all” and said that “all these reports about your conduct will be put in a separate plastic folder and kept there, closed, and out of public access” (to these days, I still do not quite understand the meaning of these words, if the accusations are fake, remove them. If not, prove them with strong evidence. He was taking malicious gossip and personal likes/dislikes at face value and accepting them as professional evaluations like that’s ok in Academia, c’mon…). I was too exhausted and upset enough to engage in a confrontation with the Dean and refute his downgrading of importance to my case. I just reminded him that bullying and slandering were happening at his Faculty, and that at least from that moment he was aware of it. I presented a number of requests (very insufficient, as time has proven) of which only a few have been fulfilled, and only partially, and then I left CUHK after the most unpleasant working experience of my whole life. I thought about suing the University, but I was warned by PTU staff that it would drag a lot of money, time and energy out of me and that, unfortunately and shamefully, the only cases of bullying and moving really getting nice compensations in the Courts in this city were those which ended in raping and/or suicide. I was quite shocked to hear this. Since neither the other complainant nor me had been either raped or forced into suicide, apparently, things were possibly too light to be really taken into account by the legal system in Hong Kong. Terribly, terribly saddening and shameful.
Even though I’ve tried to continue with my life in this city, I have to say that professionally I have been subject since then to further slandering and fake accusations from some staff members of that Department. And the inaction, reluctance, or even protection of CUHK has given some staff directly related to the cases of bullying/vilification that I have presented above freedom and impunity to keep harming me, professionally and therefore personally, under the umbrella of that university. Even in their so-called inner investigations and actions against staff who might have abused the name of the institution to engage in unethical practices CUHK has shown an absolute disdain and disregard for victims of the said behavior so as to refuse to communicate with the victim and put administrative hurdles to access any information liable to be considered slandering. The double standards that they have repeatedly applied to perpetrators and victims are indeed shameful: victims never receive any apology, compensation or redress for the suffering caused. Perpetrators are allowed to stay in their job, shielded from external requests of explanations of malicious gossip that they might have spread in the name of CUHK (for instance, when being panel members of job interviews), or even fired and then rehired shortly after (the Supervisor who was a bully is an example of this). Comparatively, it clearly seems to me that CUHK treats immensely better bullies, psychopaths and slanderers than their victims. I feel that any minor misbehavior that I might have had during my time at that institution while being under immense pressure (I did get upset and extremely frustrated at a couple of times after witnessing the shamefulness and lack of ethics at that Department, but slamming a door, getting angry or not being the best of friends with a workmate should never be compared with the vilification, defamation and process of “professional assassination” that I had to go through, and I am still going through somehow, under the total inaction of the University) has been magnified and thrown at my face repeatedly while the bullying and defamation has been minimised or even ignored time and time again.
Looking back in time, when I left that Department, the university was still keeping there (and they even boasted shortly after of their total control of that place) the trio who, together and consensually, created and put into practice this “culture” of bullying (the Head Executive Officer and the two German full time lecturers). They also kept there the two Linguistic professors who had given official nature and knowingly accepted these practices, effectively removing anybody who complained about them. If I go even further, people who, following this spirit of toxic corporativism, had allowed the management to take words extracted in shady, secret meetings (which transcripts “mysteriously” disappeared later) and use them as false accusations against my person, are still there and have been repeatedly rewarded for their “loyalty” (I have to say that this is the case of, at least, one language lecturer of my section, who, apparently -I remark the “apparently” because I am not sure about whether she had been informed of the full context and the use planned to her words-, said that I had refused to offer help in the language level that she was coordinating, which is absolutely false and probably impossible to prove). After my departure from that Department, I very sadly got to know that one lecturer was spreading inside that place a serious accusation against me, saying that I had threatened her at some point. That is categorically false and the Department should not allow such comments to circulate freely and be taken at face value. The German lady who had bullied her workmate out was engaging also in a very similar practice. I dare any of them to transform their slandering into a public, transparent accusation (which they cannot do, since they are lying). These rumors and defamation can become quite persistent, and I have suffered already having to attend a job interview and overhearing some of these gossip and false stories told on my back in the form of “I have a friend/know somebody who said that he…”. CUHK is directly responsible of nurturing and encouraging these malpractices. The double standards and the hypocrisy and lack of interest in removing the use of malicious gossip and slandering from the university seems pretty obvious to me. I dare the University to reply to me in an open and transparent way if they disagree to my account, and have the decency and courage to put an end once and for all to this culture of malicious gossip and slandering that they have nested at the said Department for too many years already.
