Thread:Una74/@comment-71.58.210.121-20171010133156

Hi. I am writing because the academic wiki venting page contains some bizarre and slanderous material about me. Apparently this started three years ago, when a couple of unhinged people were vandalizing my Wikipedia page and then claiming that somehow I was bullying them. When Wikipedia editors placed my page under protection (and they had to do so repeatedly, because these stalkers are seriously obsessive), these people evidently moved over here to continue their abuse and insults. Gauging by the page’s history, this has gone on ever since 2014, and has lately been augmented by a whole new set of even weirder lies about me. One set of charges is that I have bullied and “trolled” one Rebecca Schuman, who was, at the time, the national higher education correspondent for Slate.com. This is false, as even the links provided by my cyberstalkers will show. The stalking seems to have started after Ms. Schuman and I mocked each other online. I am guessing that it began here, when someone tried to gaslight Ms. Schuman in remarkably nasty fashion. She was having none of it– she knew I was not leaving comments on her blog or conducting any kind of “subtweet campaign” against her, and we exchanged emails about this comment and then talked in person at a conference at Penn State– but my stalkers persisted nonetheless. See also this comment from that thread, which should have put the matter to rest, but stalkers will be stalkers. The other, newer set of charges is that I am trolling adjunct professors at Inside Higher Ed, but this is ludicrous on its face, since I have no way of determining the employment status of pseudonymous commenters (and, indeed, I replied to only one of them-- after repeated taunts and smears over the course of many months). I don’t know if these people are really adjuncts; I know only that they are lying about me. (Surely this goes well beyond the "expression of opinion" criterion for this wiki?) In both cases, though, the pattern is the same: I am being cyberharassed by bullies pretending to be bullied. But even if any of these lunatic claims were true, why would they have any place on a wiki devoted to academic jobs? The venting page should be (and once was) a place to talk about jobs and job listings, not a bathroom wall for personal slander. Whatever motivated my stalkers to come after me, it has nothing to do with academic jobs. Thanks for your time and attention. Michael Berube 