How Funders can Support Researchers
An Increasing Number of Researchers are Facing Intimidation and Harassment. They Need Your Support.
Researchers working to shed light on some of democracy’s most pressing challenges are frequently at risk for online and offline attacks and harassment, well-organized trolling campaigns, and intimidation that aims to discredit, delay, or end their work altogether.
For researchers, coordinated intimidation and harassment is an occupational hazard. It is the important work that they do—the research they conduct—that places them at risk.
These attacks exact professional and personal costs—throwing the researchers, their families, teams, and institutions into crisis. They may endure a barrage of emotional abuse, explicit threats, the release of private information and photographs, and an onslaught of abusive emails, comments, and messages spreading libelous claims about their work and their personal character. Such attacks often move offline, in the form of frivolous lawsuits, onerous “inquiries” from politicians and activists, and serious physical threats.
Facing any of these tactics can feel profoundly isolating. Friends and family often struggle to understand what the researchers are facing. (“Just ignore the trolls!”) Fearing that they might come under attack, too, colleagues, community partners, and collaborators tend to distance themselves. And institutions often focus on protecting their own image, rather than standing up for and supporting their employees.
Feeling defeated and alone, researchers often question whether they should continue their work at all.
The implications for ongoing and future research are chilling. When research is deterred, stalled, our ability to inform students, the public, business leaders, and policymakers—to provide them with guidance supported by the best evidence available—is undermined. The knowledge we gain from this vital work is lost. And society as a whole is at greater risk.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Though everyone has a role to play, research funders can have a particularly significant and positive impact. For better or worse, researchers and their institutions will naturally be concerned about whether the attacks they are facing will cause funders to pull back. Showing your support early, and expressing it clearly and strongly, will help shore up the researchers’ confidence and reduce institutional uncertainty.
In practical terms, what can you, a research funder, do?
- Reach out to researchers and let them know that you value their work and that you have their backs.
- Continue funding projects that examine human and social behavior, culture, and other social and institutional phenomena at the heart of democratic society.
- Establish mechanisms for regular communication with impacted researchers. (Lack of communication will generate uncertainty and even fear that funders are backing away.)
- Speak with the researchers’ institutional leaders to communicate the same. Encourage these leaders to themselves help ensure that their researchers feel valued and supported. Ask them to take the researchers’ requests seriously and to consider the researchers’ mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
- When requested by the researchers, speak out publicly to defend their integrity, as well as the value and importance of their work.
- Contribute to legal defense funds.
- Work with other funders and research institutions to provide mutual defense and aid.
- Provide support for strategic communications.
Researchers can’t do it alone.
For too long, we have placed the responsibility for navigating these attacks on the shoulders of the researchers’ themselves. But they can’t do it alone. Funders can play an important role in easing the pressure, uncertainty, and fear experienced by researchers facing intimidation and harassment. They need your support.
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