Mainpage: Mobbing in academe and beyond Webpage for
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Sociologist Kenneth Westhues |
Click here for a screencast of the presentation by Kimberly Lewis, Joel Inbody's mother, at the Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing, July 2024.
Click here for a PDF of Kimberly Lewis's paper about her son, "A Scholar Cut Down. A Son Lost," as presented at the Niagara Conference.
Click here for the page at the Edwin Mellen Press about Joel Inbody's book on academic mobbing, A Student's Account of the Mobbing that led to His Murder (2024, 572 pp.).
Click here for a PDF of Westhues's preface to Joel Inbody's book about academic mobbing, as published by the Edwin Mellen Press in the summer of 2024.
Altogether apart from his scholarship on mobbing, Joel Inbody was a promising young sociologist specializing in studies of relgiion. The Edwin Mellen Press published his intended doctoral thesis as a book in 2022, entitled The Praxis of Inequality: a Study of Three Ancient Agricultural Societies (Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia). The book argues that "elites in these agricultural societies enjoyed an upper-class lifestyle because they served food and drink offerings to gods. Those offerings were produced primarily by non-elites, who believed gods dined on them. But the truth is that elites divided food and drink offerings among themselves. Religion disguised the fact that feasting rituals for gods amounted to a redistribution of resources."
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Until 15 months ago, the part of Joel Inbody's life most relevant to the scientific study of academic mobbing was what happened to him a few years earlier in the doctoral program in sociology at the University of Massachusetts. He had written a detailed, factual, analytic account of his ouster from the university, grounding it in the research literature on mobbing. The Edwin Mellen Press published this account as a book in the summer of 2024. In April of 2023, Inbody became the target of an altogether different kind of mob, a coterie of half a dozen ill-trained, trigger-happy border patrol officers on a desert road near Las Cruces, New Mexico. This second mobbing was not unrelated to the first. Being forced out of a doctoral program in the field Inbody considered his vocation was traumatic. As he describes in his book, and as commonly occurs in academic mobbing, it meant a crisis in all aspects of his life: occupational, financial, familial, emotional, psychological. It was the cumulated crises in his life that led to his encounter with the border patrol officers in New Mexico. The present webpage consists of the following information about how Inbody was killed on the night of April 2, 2023. Depending on your browser settings, you may need to open one or another of these links in a new window.
The eight links just recommended are to information supplemental to that in Joel Inbody's book. That book deserves to be read and evaluated on its own merits, as if the author had never been killed on a desolate desert road in New Mexico. The facts remain, however, that the author was killed, his life permanently snuffed out, on the night of April 2, 2023, and that the circumstances of his final elimination are strangely reminiscent of academic mobbing, except quick, overt, blatant, violent and lethal. I expand on these points in my preface to Inbody's book. Click here to read it. Clarification: my general views on the police Let it not be thought that I am generally anti-police or have a bleeding heart for crime. The opposite is true. I worked for decades with the police department of my home city, lectured regularly in their Citizens Police Academy, and advised on community policing. Day after day, police officers put their lives on the line to ensure the safety and security of all the rest of us. They deserve respect and gratitude. Emotional disorder or mental illness sometimes poses a hard challenge for police. "Suicide by cop" is a real if rare phenomenon, wherein a person in distress attacks or rushes a police officer, so that the latter is faced with no alternative but to kill or be killed. A reasonable person cannot blame the officer in such a circumstance for killing the attacker. When, however, law enforcement officers themselves misbehave, when, for example, they themselves try to create a kill-or-be-killed scenario or when they kill somebody unnecessarily, this misconduct – whatever the reason for it, whether malice or carelessness or inadequate training or what has been called for millennia hysteria – must be recognized and corrected, lest it happen again. |
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