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Comment by shoguning | Hacker News Reader

Professors have too much control over grad students and academic labs are too insulated from the greater institution. Profs have basically no oversight on how the treat and/or pay grad students. Any institution serious about tackling this and many other issues needs to reform the employment relationship with grad students. Grad student funding should not be coming from one professor's grant money, but the department.

Independence in scientific direction? Yes. Independence in personnel management? No.

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Yes, this is the real problem, not just in science but in virtually every industry. What you have are stove-pipe organizations [1] where individuals (a) have a single superior or "boss" that they "direct report" to (b) that boss decides the individual's fate (salary, bonus, promotion, etc) and (c) reviews of performance and feedback only flow downwards. Science may be the among the worst of such organizations because you've got department heads who wield near tyrannical power over faculty (at least until tenure is achieved) and then you've got advisors wielding tyrannical power over grads.

There's a fundamental organizational change that needs to happen within universities...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stovepipe_(organisation)

Everywhere I'm familiar with the graduate student pay scale is set at the departmental level

Even at places where the pay scale is set at the departmental level, professors have discretion on whether they want to pay you over the summer. That's 1/4 of your salary.

Also, funding comes straight from the professor. If your advisor decides they don't have funding, you're out of luck and working on the side, unless your department is nice enough to give you a teaching assistant job.

I sure it varies, but at my university the supervisior is obligated to pay the difference between what the department paid and what was promised in the offer letter.

Consider yourself lucky.

<<Independence in scientific direction? Yes. Independence in personnel management? No.>>

Is this possible?

It's hard. Bosses can (and should) be able to fire for poor performance, but then an abusive boss can invent a "performance" reason to fire an underling for resisting harassment. And it does happen, all the time, which leads to a lot of underreporting of harassment, for fear of getting fired. It's no different from the need for whistleblower laws, really.

A heavy, bureaucratic firing process protects underlings (somewhat) from abusive bosses, but at a cost of protecting incompetence. You'll see this in any big corporation, and a great many academic jobs as well.

The whole idea of tenure in academia is to protect academics from retaliation so they can speak freely. But their lab assistants and secretaries and such get no such protection.

With regard to firing grad students:

I think it is quite rare to see grad students fired. Typically there are two strategies to get rid of a graduate student:

1) Just graduate them (either with a masters or with a undeserved PhD)

2) Make their lives miserable so they quit.

I don't think switching the source of funding for graduate to the department really prevents either of these from happening.

Maybe, but it makes it a lot easier to transfer to a different lab. It's also part of a cultural frame of mind. In broad strokes, here are two approaches institutions can take to recruiting grad students:

i) Admit tons of grad students, treat them like shit and just assume many will drop out/quit so you don't have to do any long term planning on resources/admissions.

ii) Plan projects and resources, vet candidates and treat grad students well. Attrition will be lower so this does allow for longer term planning. In addition, here the institution and department are involved in the planning/resource allocation and presumably personnel issues as well. In general culture will be professional.

IMO i) gives signals that harassment and other mistreatment is tacitly allowed. With ii) the grad students are valued and signal is given that this should be a professional environment. Another generalization, but I have observed American universities, especially engineering departments are close to i), European universities (some countries more than others) are closer to ii).

Switching funding is different from removing funding. Right now, when a grad student's academic expenses are covered by their work for a specific professor, the professor can revoke that grant - firing them from their work, and also taking away the money that is paying for their grad school (and probably paying their rent as well). If the student is independently wealthy or willing to take on massive additional loans, they might stay in school. More likely, they are forced to drop out or switch programs.

Not to say switching funding to the department is a solution, but a professor's power over the funding is definitely a significant problem and source of great risk for students who are being sexually harassed by their professors.

Why do you think centralised management is going to be any better?

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