Talk:Iwate Prefectural University

Allegations that Iwate Prefectural University is a toxic work environment for professors in general

An Anglo-American man named Mr. Bern Mulvey seems to have had bad experiences with Iwate Prefectural University (IPU). For those you who do not know who Mr. Mulvey is, I will take a moment to explain. Mr. Mulvey has over 26 years of experience as a university teacher and administrator, including positions at public, private and national universities in Japan and in the USA. He was the dean at Miyazaki International College, which is notable because he was the youngest dean in Japan and one out of only seven non-Japanese deans in Japan at the time. After that, he became the first non-Japanese Part-Time Department Head at Iwate University (IU) and then the first non-Japanese European and American Languages and Cultures Faculty Representative at IU. He has been a union member, which includes serving as an officer, for 20 years, and has helped over 50 people with labour concerns during that time period. He is fluent in reading, writing and speaking Japanese, has cultural and legal knowledge, has degrees and publications, has connections, and so on. As you can see, Mr. Mulvey is a big deal in some circles.

It is important to explain the circumstances that resulted in Mr. Mulvey working at IPU. He had worked at IU until March 2015. He liked his position at IU and mostly got along with his colleagues. However, there were very high work demands, an ongoing hiring freeze, multiple pay cuts mandated by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), and constant pressure by MEXT to make wholesale curriculum changes to fix problems that did not even exist. Mr. Mulvey was under so much pressure that he even collapsed one day. Clearly, he had to do something for the sake of his health.

This is why Mr. Mulvey was so excited when IPU contacted him in the late summer of 2014 about working for them instead. The position at IPU was supposed to have the same pay, but far less administrative responsibilities, along with teaching duties more in line with his research and education. They began having serious discussions in August. He would replace a friend of his named Ms. Christine, who was taking an early retirement. He would be working with a colleague named Ms. Ogawa, who he had done a favour for by getting her a position at IPU. He would also be working with another colleague named Ms. Kumamoto, who had to take leave for a semester. He was asked to teach Ms. Kumamoto’s Western Culture Research Methods (also called “Research Methods in Issues of the West”) class in her place. This meant that Mr. Mulvey had to prepare and teach a class on research methods in Japanese to 20 Japanese university students on three weeks’ notice. He was acquainted with Mr. Ishibashi, the department head. Finally, he was acquainted with Mr. “A,” the only other foreign faculty member of IPU. He even has correspondence that shows that everyone at IPU was looking forward to working with him, and that they would work together to make IPU a better place.

Mr. Mulvey made the transfer to IPU, but he did not get everything formally into writing first. That mistake would come back to haunt him later. He discovered a department of 11 colleagues, five of whom had recently filed medical certificates for depression and rarely or never came to work, and three of whom had had formal harassment claims made against them in the past four years.

At the end of February 2015, Mr. “A” suddenly resigned his tenured position at IPU to take a non-tenured position for less money somewhere else. When Mr. Mulvey asked him about it, he was told, “You’ll know yourself soon.” He asked Ms. Christine about it, and she responded that most people got along fine in spite of disagreements. Of course, Ms. Christine was not fluent in Japanese at all, so she had no idea about the issues going on around her at IPU. She did write written statements in his defence when he got into trouble at a later date, though. He also asked Ms. Ogawa about it, but she never responded, which was a red flag. Unfortunately, Mr. Mulvey had already resigned by then, so it was too late to turn back.

Mr. Mulvey moved in on March 27, 2015. He was carrying boxes upstairs when Ms. Ogawa asked him to come to her office to discuss the English curriculum. He was happy to put the boxes aside and discuss what he thought was going to be English curriculum reform. However, she told him that he would use a collection of grammar exercises and other explanatory materials that she claimed were produced by her to supplement his English Conversation activities. Just for the record, she took these exercises and materials from multiple junior and senior high school textbooks, which means that she intentionally plagiarized these materials. The problem with this is that he did not join IPU to teach English Conversation, he did not have any English Conversation classes to teach, and he had already ordered textbooks for his other classes back in February. When he tried to point out the problem, and said that they should fully discuss materials and methodology over the semester and try to make a joint decision by the summer, Ms. Ogawa flew into a rage. She told him that she thought that he would be more “cooperative,” and asked him repeatedly if he knew his “place.” In spite of repeated attempts in writing on his part, Mr. Mulvey and Ms. Ogawa would not discuss English curriculum reform or anything else for the next two years.

Speaking of places, Mr. Mulvey’s place was a professor, whereas Ms. Ogawa and Ms. Kumamoto’s places were lecturers. In other words, he outranked them, not the other way around. However, Mr. Chiba at the Labor Bureau confirmed that the unofficial policy at the new department was that rank did not matter, and that there was no shared faculty governance in the usual sense, like in most Japanese national and public universities. There were no open discussions or decisions. Instead, they had department meetings, which Mr. Mulvey went to, but they would be told that everything had already been decided.

As an example, Mr. Mulvey first found out at one meeting that he would not be allowed to work with the overseas exchange programs and would not even be allowed to meet people arriving from overseas. To expand on the part about not being allowed to meet people arriving from overseas, Ms. Kumamoto gave Mr. Mulvey a letter of appreciation to Ohio University (OU), stood next to him checking her watch after giving him five minutes to translate it, told him that he would not be allowed to meet the visiting faculty and students from OU that year, and followed up with “Maybe next year.” He even begged them repeatedly to tell him about and allow him to take part in faculty-student events, like the Halloween Party, but he was denied every time.

According to Mr. Mulvey, this was the first time that this sort of treatment had ever happened to him. He was simply not allowed to give any input in decision-making about school activities, English curriculum reform, etc. Instead, he was given the work that nobody wanted to do. As an example, he was made the first non-Japanese member of the entrance examination committee. This committee is so difficult that new Japanese committee members are assigned a senior colleague to help them with the large number of responsibilities. Instead of being assigned a senior colleague, Mr. Mulvey was given a large bag containing over 1,700 pages of information that he needed to know about his responsibilities, and then sent out alone to visit 11 high schools, among other things, in his first four months. In contrast to this, his Japanese colleagues went out in groups to visit five high schools on average.

Mr. Mulvey did try to do his best in order to prove himself to his new colleagues. On top of visiting 11 high schools, he had to give three extension lectures on three different Saturdays (while his Japanese colleagues gave one extension lecture on average), complete troublesome data-collection and number-crunching tasks (such as compiling from Japanese language surveys submitted by incoming freshmen), and so on.

One day, Mr. Mulvey asked about the discrepancy between the promised and actual work conditions, and requested more strongly that they include him in the events and decision-making process. In response to this, Ms. Ogawa and Ms. Kumamoto called a number of his students in and asked them to file a false harassment complaint against him.

Thankfully, his students were unwilling to do this and alerted him to this in writing. Not only that, but Ms. Ogawa also told two faculty members at other universities that she and Ms. Kumamoto would be doing this to him. The two faculty members happened to be friends of his, and informed him of this in writing.

Mr. Mulvey was shocked, because he considered Ms. Ogawa a friend. He tried to reach out to her in private and ask for an explanation, but she never responded. He documented the harassment and asked Mr. Ishibashi to intervene and mediate a discussion, but he refused. Instead, on March 9, 2016, after consulting with Ms. Ogawa and Ms. Kumamoto, Mr. Ishibashi stripped him of all duties beyond teaching.

Mr. Mulvey filed a complaint with the Labor Bureau. The Labour Bureau reviewed the evidence, decided that he had a case, and intervened multiple times on his behalf. The national and regional unions also intervened. When he consulted with those unions, he found out for the first time that false harassment complaints are often used to bully and intimidate people at universities in Japan. As a matter of fact, the three previously-mentioned colleagues in his department were also victims of false harassment complaints.

The false harassment complaint process works as follows. The person filing the complaint, who is Ms. Kumamoto in this case, calls in the students, either individually or in groups, talks about unstated and vague concerns or rumours that she claims to have heard about a certain teacher, tells the students that she was told by “other students” (probably fictitious in this case) that said teacher has been saying or doing inappropriate things in or out of class, and then pressures the students to file a formal harassment complaint. What is important to note is that the process does not require cause (e.g. the students have never complained about Mr. Mulvey, and his student evaluations for that semester were a perfect score on average), and that the specific contents of the complaints are kept confidential, which makes it very difficult to fight against them.

Believe it or not, Mr. Mulvey was lucky. His students protected him in writing. Four faculty members submitted written statements defending him. Mr. Mulvey even made sure to record conversations with Mr. Ishibashi, Ms. Kumamoto and Ms. Ogawa. Finally, he had an extensive support network inside and outside Japan because of those 26 years as a university teacher and administrator.

However, even with all the evidence, backing and connections that he had, he could only achieve a pyrrhic victory in which he was excluded and isolated but not harmed any further. The fact is that Mr. Mulvey never requested that anyone be punished. All he wanted was for the harassment to stop and to be allowed to do the work that he was hired to do. IPU refused to investigate. They never contacted the student witnesses and never spoke to the multiple faculty members who had submitted written statements supporting him. Furthermore, they refused to let him work. They reduced him to being paid to sit in his office doing nothing.

Some people might see that as an ideal position to be in, but Mr. Mulvey still wanted to be allowed to do his job. The Labor Bureau and the union recommended that he continue to fight by bringing the matter to court. However, a court case would have taken years, and the maximum compensation according to Japanese law is supposedly ¥3,000,000 (21,563.34 USD) and one-third of the compensation would have gone to his attorney.

In the end, Mr. Mulvey quit and found a tenured position at a university in the USA. He is now outside of Japan. Interestingly enough, in their final conversation, Mr. Ishibashi warned him that he would never find work again, and that he “would see to it.” Perhaps he meant work in Japan?

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One Japanese faculty witness going by the name of Mx. “N” was willing to explain a number of details going on behind the scenes. Ms. Ogawa had an arrangement with Ms. Christine in which she would mentor her, control her, help her with translations between Japanese and English, and complain about how much of her time was being taken up by translation work behind her back. Ms. Christine had no fluency in Japanese, so Ms. Ogawa could get away with this. In addition, helping Ms. Christine allowed Ms. Ogawa to show off her English skills, which was the only area that she surpassed Ms. Kumamoto in. Mr. Mulvey did not know this, but Ms. Kumamoto used to bully Ms. Ogawa all the time before he joined IPU. Ms. Ogawa had hoped for a similar relationship with Mr. Mulvey, but it would never have worked due to his experience and his Japanese skills surpassing her English skills.

Ms. Ogawa knew very well how overworked Mr. Mulvey was at IU, so she helped him transfer to IPU in the hopes that he would feel indebted to her and that she could use him as a shield against Ms. Kumamoto. In other words, she had an ulterior motive, and was not just doing this out of the goodness of her heart.

The reason that Ms. Ogawa flew into a rage on March 27, 2015, was that she realized that her plan had failed when Mr. Mulvey did not “obey her command” to use the material that she plagiarized for English Conversation classes. Mx. “N” expressed disbelief at how unprofessional and deluded she was. After all, she had only worked full-time at IPU for four years, whereas he had worked at multiple places for at least 25 years, and yet she thought that she could make him use her plagiarized material, just because she was in IPU before him and she believed that she helped him get his position at IPU.

Even so, she still found Mr. Mulvey useful. When she was harassing him together with “The Psychopath” (that was her nickname for Kumamoto), she found herself acting as a bully for the first time rather than a victim. She liked the feeling, because she saw it as a promotion.

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Mr. Mulvey also points out that he left out a lot of things. As stated before, he has taped his conversations with Mr. Ishibashi, Ms. Kumamoto and Ms. Ogawa. The contents of those conversations are stunning, and not in a good way, either. For example, the reason that Mr. Mulvey knows that five out of 11 of his colleagues in his department are suffering from depression? It is that Ms. Ogawa and Ms. Kumamoto have a policy of badmouthing their colleagues. Yes, on November 25, 2015, those two announced that multiple faculty members were “ghosts,” because they had submitted medical documentation excluding them from work. That, and they also revealed the number of faculty members who had submitted medical documentation. Clearly, it is unwise to confide any secrets in those two.

He even has an email from the dean of IPU, who is not very bright. This email reveals that IPU did not contact the witnesses because Mr. Ishibashi, Ms. Kumamoto and Ms. Ogawa told them not to. According to what the Labor Bureau told Mr. Mulvey, the administration is made up of people who only got their positions via 天下り, which is literally translated as “descent from heaven,” but is better understood as “revolving-door syndrome” in the USA. Both terms refer to the practice of retired civil servants or bureaucrats being re-employed in high-profile positions in the private and public sectors. As Mr. Mulvey's story demonstrates, this practice, which is a form of legal corruption, has serious flaws in it. One big flaw is that these civil servants or bureaucrats are being put in positions that they have no experience or qualifications for. Another one is that these civil servants or bureaucrats have been living in an insular world, so they could not comprehend why Mr. Mulvey felt that he had a right to choose his own books, participate in activities and have a say in policy decisions.

Oh, and when another foreign citizen was hired on March 9, 2016, he was given all of the job responsibilities that were initially promised to Mr. Mulvey. When he protested this, he was told that he could “volunteer” to help the new hire, because he was much younger, had no significant publications, no full-time experience, no experience heading international exchange programs, and so on. However, Mr. Mulvey would not get any credit for doing this.

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Mr. Mulvey submitted this story to the following website on April 9, 2017, and it was subsequently posted on that website on April 11, 2017.

https://www.debito.org/?p=14552

In case you are curious as to where he is now, the following website seems to answer that question.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bern-mulvey-04560525

It is quite a story, is it not? Unfortunately, I am not sure if “Debito.org,” a blog, counts as a reliable source.

So, here is my question. Are there any reliable sources that show that Iwate Prefectural University is a toxic work environment for professors in general? Wise Bridges Fool Walls (talk) 23:50, 25 November 2022 (UTC)