Swedish academics suffer widespread threat and harassment – most of it from their own colleagues and students
Last week, Ally Louks (now Dr. Louks), an academic at the University of Cambridge, posted a picture of herself on the social media site X with her fresh PhD thesis titled “Olfactory Ethics: The politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose”. The post received a surprising amount of attention – it has been viewed more than 100 million times, and has attracted over 11,000 responses. Although most of it was apparently benign, a large proportion was misogynistic and hateful – including death threats. It highlights the hazards for academics engaging with the public, especially on topics with a political dimension, and even more so while being female. But how common is this type of incident? Should academics avoid engaging the public? Our team at the Swedish secretariat for gender research has just published a report about experiences of threats, violence and harassment in Swedish universities which sheds some light on these questions. Notably we found that much of the abuse academics experienced came from within the university sector, rather than as a result of …