Intellectual pipsqueaks abusing their freedom of speech in your WhatsApp stream? Cyber harassment of scholars is just an extension of academic bullying. Use this sticker to show perpetrators that you don’t engage with frothy lightweights and academic cyberbullies.

There should be a ‘Beware, academic sewer ahead!’ sign for warning one against university campuses that are plagued by incivility. In rotten ivory towers, Academic Bully Culture embraces harassment that can range from camouflaged aggression to overt bullying and academic mobbing. The result is a rank environment in which goblins, trolls and ogres compete for one-upmanship in who can make the worst attacks on their shared target. Use this sticker to show a troll: ‘Get back under your sewer grate’!

It can take truckloads of cash to keep certain sections of Super Costly Academic Brand X functioning. Paying for costly laboratory equipment and scientific research is expensive. Few sponsors and donors can contribute with ‘no strings attached’. There is a danger that the recipients of this largesse may lose their independence and freedom of speech, especially when guided by entrepreneurial faculty and administrators. Use this sticker to flag your unease with embedded academics and their “independent” scholarship.

Some academics sincerely think that becoming a well-known ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ is a worthy pursuit. Desperate for attention, they regularly appear in the media, keen to tell the public exactly how to think concerning the latest hot topic(s). Share this sticker to spotlight the shallow aims and expertise of such “scholarly” contributors.

Similar to a dogpile, an academic mob features anti-collegial creeps who eagerly attack their outnumbered colleague. Emboldened by joining an academic or cyber mob, the mob dogpilers embrace strategies that they would be sanctioned for in non-toxic workplaces. Share this sticker for flagging such uncollegial behaviour.

  The ivory tower can be a safe space for academics to express bullshit arguments that may baffle student brains, but are not taken seriously elsewhere. Such academic grifters seem to prefer being “public intellectuals” to doing the hard work of becoming scholars or making contributions that stand up to review by other experts. Serious scholars expressing opinions that challenge conventional views are particularly attractive to lazy bullshitters in seeming an easy target to criticise and gain kudos via digital media. Masters of contradiction, academic bullshitters follow the rhetorical strategy of a gish galloper; bombarding their online audiences with multiple weak arguments and switching arguments each time their targeted scholar or other experts respond. Rather than doing the hard work of understanding their targets’ argument, bullshitters prefer to misrepresent it and make personal attacks on their target. Share this sticker to flag their BS!

Academic eccentrics already enjoy forms of license that would be unacceptable in any other workplace. Uninhibited online and emboldened by their seeming distance from their target, academic line crossers take pleasure with forms of cyber harassment that they would be punished elsewhere: Insult a colleague publicly? Yes, #slayqueen. Share personal details? Doxx away that privacy! Conceal a colleague’s major contribution to your publication record? Yip, that’s what you get for taking an unorthodox position! Show the line crossers you know them by popping this sticker into their toxic message streams.