When RateMyProfessor Meets the #MeToo Movement: Bottom-up Bullying in Academia Ruth McKay 1 , Bill Irwin 2 , Randy Appel 3 1 Carleton University, Canada 2 Huron University College, Canada 3 Waseda University, Japan Abstract The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have created increased awareness around inappropriate work behaviour. According to these two partially overlapping movements, some organizations have been permissive in enabling employees to misuse their positions to assert undue power over others. Managers also recognize that complaint processes may be inadequate in resolving these issues. This paper uses a #MeToo lens to investigate student bullying, mobbing, and sexual harassment enabled through RateMyProfessor.com (RMP). For this research RMP is used as a proxy for social media sites that are visible and curtained to public viewing. It also considers how the need for the academy to operate as a hyper-commercialized business may be contributing to the silence of universities on the misuse of sites such as RMP. Main research questions include the following. Why is harassment of faculty through social media sites such as RMP permitted and even valued? How do social media sites’ content and audience differ from university evaluations of faculty? 1. Introduction Universities are reviewing and revising behavioural guidelines and policies to create environments less conducive to bullying and other forms of harassment, but what happens when employees are impacted by a third party, such as RMP, in which institutions of higher education have no control? Keim and McDermott [9] note that within the academy, bullying can occur between students and faculty, with students able to play the role of perpetrator as well as victim. Students engaging in inappropriate behaviour through social media are the major focus of this paper. The questions are, do comments on social media classify as harassment? What is driving it? Why do institutions appear to remain quiet about inappropriate comments concerning faculty visible through social media? In today’s work environment, influenced by the #MeToo and the Time’s Up movements, we should reexamine the impact hurtful comments posted on RMP may have on academics. RMP is a contributor to a perfect storm: the confluence of bottom-up bullying, sexual harassment, academic consumerism, and the freedom/anonymity of on-line social media. This paper examines how the combination of these elements can lead to a problem for academic professionals. We also compare feedback on social media to that of more standardized course evaluations used as part of normal university procedures. Initially introduced by social activist Tarana Burke in 2006 as a way of offering support to women from marginalized communities who have been victims of sexual assault and harassment [17], the #MeToo began to gain momentum when celebrities encouraged the use of this hashtag on social media platforms, such as twitter and Facebook, as a way of bringing greater attention to wider issues regarding the prevalence of sexual misconduct women often face in the workplace. The Time’s Up movement is a more formal organization resulting from celebrity efforts to move beyond the ‘naming and shaming’ of perpetrators of sexual misconduct in order to create greater societal change. Both movements have grown from their initial foci to address a greater variety of issues, methods of remedying the situation, and ways of helping victims. The popularity of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have also had a wide-ranging societal impact with tens of thousands of retweets on twitter and a significant increase in web searches related to sexual harassment as a result of the increasing attention brought about by these movements [2]. Since the initial viral spread of these social justice efforts via social media platforms, the focus has continued to expand to include an ever-wider range of topics, and these movements should no longer be viewed as being reserved to issues faced by a single gender or in a particular environment. Furthermore, as a grassroots campaign without an overarching source of control or guidance, the #MeToo movement continues to shift and adapt to the needs of the communities in which it is adopted. Under this expanded view of the #MeToo and Times’s Up movements, we use the critical lens provided by these campaigns as a way of analyzing the treatment of academic professionals as revealed International Journal of Digital Society (IJDS), Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020 Copyright © 2020, Infonomics Society 1591