Hundreds of academics at top UK universities accused of bullying
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
You know that The Guardian will present anything they can as an issue that requires institutional change. That's just what they do these say. If you're willing to engage in willful confirmation bias, you can take any large institution and find enough disgruntled people to to build a "case".
I see nothing in this article about the authors trying to disprove their own hypothesis.
"The Guardian sent freedom of information requests to 135 universities. Responses revealed a total of 294 complaints against academics at 55 institutions. A further 30 universities reported 337 complaints against all staff – academic and non-academic. Across 105 universities, at least 184 staff have been disciplined and 32 dismissed for bullying since 2013."
Compared to the corporate world, that sounds incredibly low, actually.
Of course, these days any official statistic with inconveniently "good" numbers can be dismissed on the grounds that there are systematic attempts to cover things up and institutional pressure not to report incidents. But that in itself is often a form of confirmation bias.
I have a similar feeling about all articles from all sources (that I’m aware of) in journalism.
Every time an article interests me enough to dig deeper into the subject, I find the original article was inaccurate and biased, and frequently misrepresents small but significant details to fit a narrative in a way that can’t have been a mistake.
The way I consume news these days isn’t the greatest, but it’s the best I can do: I only read headlines. If a claim in the headline would cause the source major legal issues if untrue, I mostly trust that the event occurred, but not necessarily how they say it did.
I ignore all other claims in headlines, and I don’t read the body of the article, because it’s usually just a thinly-veiled opinion piece by a non-expert, or worse, the dramatic prose of a journalist who seems to think their writing is the story.
If there’s an event in a headline that seems to have actually happened, and it’s relevant to my interests, I research it independently.
I understand why this will outcompete real journalism, but I don't see how it serves anyone.
It also saddens me that this practice has attained a degree of general acceptance that it's referred to as a "genre of journalism." I would refer to it as a more insidious and enduring form of propaganda.
Aside from that, your approach makes little sense. You read headlines and comments, but headlines are notoriously bad, especially on free news, and comments are a jungle. I mean, anyone could tell you anything and not ever be held accountable, unlike actual media, but you’d rather spend time on anarchy, uninformed opinions and outright lies?
Furthermore looking at this particular article, even if we say the numbers are lower than they are in the private sector, does that mean there isn’t a problem? We’re talking about people in power who are bullying their juniors who are trying to do research that may alter human history. Even if the numbers are lower than somewhere else, that’s still not good.
Maybe it has one (e.g. particularly bad neighborhoods) but it would be a weird conclusion from just the number
(I didn't read the article, did not feel that was relevant to this specific response)
I agree that headlines are bad, which is why I discount them almost entirely, as I mentioned in my original comment.
I'm not sure why you don't think it makes sense for me to trust my own independent research over everyday news sources. I think it makes a lot of sense.
I never said anything about comments. HN is the only place I read them, and I'm not treating them like they're a news source. It's just an online conversation happening among people in tech.
I haven't expressed an opinion about this Guardian article, or the root commenter's assessment of it. But if the numbers are higher in the private sector, that would suggest top UK universities have a bullying rate below that of the general population and comparable populations, which would suggest that those institutions do not have a bullying problem.
It looks like the root commenter is saying that the Guardian article is suggesting the opposite, and based on those statistics, the Guardian article is wrong. The root commenter is additionally claiming that this is consistent with a pattern they've noticed of The Guardian writing skewed articles to fit a narrative of institutional injustices.
As an experiment, I read the body of this article and did a bit of research, and I would agree with the root commenter. Within the opening paragraph, I'm already losing confidence in the article:
> "Hundreds of academics have been accused of bullying students and colleagues in the past five years, prompting concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."
Citing population sentiment is a common form of misdirection in journalism. "People are concerned that ...", "we're receiving emails that say ...", "people on twitter are ...", these are all just misdirection. There are billions of people in the world, there are people concerned about everything. Twitter has over 300 million active users, every point of view on every topic is being tweeted by everyone all the time.
Citations of unquantified population sentiment are factual in all cases and for all arguments and all narratives. Journalists do this to give support and credibility to their narrative (which is often skewed), and to make it appear that they aren't the drivers of that narrative (when they often are).
As an example, Wolf Blitzer can point to a scrolling list of tweets that are all unified in any point of view on any subject at any time, based purely on Twitter's broad demographic and volume of tweets. It doesn't actually mean anything at all, other than that Twitter still exists and people still communicate.
Wolf Blitzer pointing at that list will increase the prevalence of tweets reflecting that unified point of view. This Guardian article stating that their FOIA findings are "prompting concerns" is in itself what will prompt those concerns. "People are concerned" actually means "we are telling you to be concerned." It's all just misdirection and deception, there's no honest reason for a journalist to cite sentiment in this way.
A more honest writing of that opening paragraph would be something like: "Academics in UK universities have been the subject of complaints at a very low rate. I am trying to prompt concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."
Reading through the rest of the article, the bias in this case is quite blatant:
* 135 UK universities became: "top UK universities"
* A filed complaint became: conclusive proof of bullying
* 294 complaints at 135 universities over 5 years became: hundreds of presumably recent complaints at "top universities"
* Less than 1 complaint against an academic every 2 years per university became: "a culture of harassment and intimidation in Britain’s leading universities"
To me it seems that The Guardian told their journalists to leverage FOIA requests for news stories. So their journalists try to think of a FOIA request that might get dirt for a good story, then send in that FOIA request, and then when the FOIA is fulfilled they just write whatever story they were hoping to write when they originally thought up the FOIA request.
After reading the article, the headline itself actually appears to be an outright lie. It says "hundreds of complaints at top universities", but they only found 294 complaints in total from all UK universities. Unless every university in the UK is a "top UK university", the headline is a lie.
The Guardian also leads the article with a stock photo of people wearing academic regalia with their heads down and backs to the camera, which paints an image of guilty and shamed academics.
Relating this all back to how people consume news:
* Reading only the headline, and believing it, would've made me very misinformed
* Reading both the headline and the article, and believing them both, would've made me the most misinformed
* Reading both the headline and the article, believing none of it, and doing independent research to disconfirm all of it made me slightly more informed on this subject (if you can even call it that) than the average person, and took 20 minutes of my time
* The approach I detailed in my original comment, which would've been to read only the headline, recognize that in this case it bears no consequence for The Guardian whether any aspect of the headline is true or not, and therefore ignoring it completely, would've had a neutral effect on how informed I am, but would've only taken 1 second of my time
In this case I regret reading the article at all, and I think I would've been better off just reading the headline, recognizing that it can't be trusted, and ignoring it like I normally would.
There is still utility in headlines though, which is why I still read them. If the story is, for example, that someone won an election, or that a proposition passed, or that someone died, or that a hurricane is coming, or that a company was acquired, etc., then that will be stated in headlines and you can confirm almost immediately that it's factual.
The large majority of important news events are in that category.
From there, if the subject is important enough to me, I'll do independent research. That research usually won't involve reading news articles, because I've found them to be extremely inaccurate in almost all cases.
Of course in some corporations bullying will be worse, but in many it will be nowhere near as bad. This is because there is much less money in academia generally that people have to compete for, and many desperately seek vain prestige (far more so than in industry.)
I don't think that the question of whether there is an institutional problem necessitates large numbers of incidence. For example, you could say that 99.99% of people don't get murdered, so if the police don't investigate murders, it's no big deal, after all it's just 0.01% of the population.
I think the main question is: can the system adequately deal with incidences if they do happen. This is where I think the academic system is failing. Unlike the corporate world, PHD students are intrinsically tied to their supervisors. In an abusive corporate relationship, workers have the option to quit. However, that is often a much much harder option in academia. "Quitting" often means taking a serious hit to your reputation, and if you manage to find a new supervisor, it's likely that it will be hard to publish in the same field as your old supervisor. If you can't find a new supervisor, and have to fail out of the program, it's unlikely that you'll get the chance to work in that field again. For programs like Clinical Psychology, if you do not achieve a PHD, then the previous ~6 years of schooling will not count for anything.
As someone who works in academia, but outside of the Grad School track, the power disparity between PHD's and their supervisors has always surprised me. In undergrad, I worked under a professor whose grad students took an absurdly long time to graduate. By absurdly long, for a Masters and PHD one student took 12+ years, and another took 10+ years. At first I thought it was personal issues that caused the delay. However, after working with him for a while, I could see how that would happen. Projects were started without any foresight. He knew close to nothing about any of the methods his students were using, so couldn't understand any of the requirements. Progress on any project would be sluggish, and if you didn't find results, excuses were made so you'd have to run analyses again with different parameters. It was fine for me, because it was just a part time job, and I got paid decently. If I were a grad student, however, this would have been a complete nightmare.
There should be some sort of oversight over researchers and academics. Although we like to think scientists are stoic and noble in their search for knowledge, many are petty, vindictive and sometimes just clueless. Good grant writers/paper publishers don't necessarily make good managers.
If an institution has lower number of incidents than population average than it's rather ridiculous to claim that it has an "institutional problem" with those incidents.
And I assure you, HR people in any big corporation would laugh at those numbers.
Now, if your argument is that Ph.D. serfdom magnifies the consequences of every incident, than I fully agree. Read my comment below. Rather than instituting "oversight", however, it would be much more rational to end Ph.D. serfdom. It has other negative consequences, which wouldn't be solved by some "supervisor police".
Marvin Minsky and Alan Kay spoke at length about how US academic system today stiffles creativity and long-term research. Seems it wasn't always like that, and the different wasn't in more oversight. Quite the opposite, actually.
>For example, you could say that 99.99% of people don't get murdered, so if the police don't investigate murders, it's no big deal, after all it's just 0.01% of the population.
Beyond certain point adding more police does nothing to curb murder rates. It's not a linear relationship.
You can't draw any conclusions from the data presented in this article. It does not offer a per capita number of events.
Doesn't that depend on how they're counting?
Marvin Minsky? Wow. Could I read that?
Kay just for good measure: https://youtu.be/lVy8n7Q-dmM?t=2613
He has a lot of good talks on education.
That might only suggest that other institutions have larger problems.
Considering you seem to agree that institutional pressure is likely to lead to at least some coverups, how many cases would you want to see before you agree there's a problem?
This is from direct experience in the UK
This isn't surprising given that seniority and hierarchy in academics, as well as a general culture of conformity if one wants to advance their career is even more pronounced than in some of the worst corporate bureaucracies you can come across in the wild.
I don't have any personal experience with the UK academic system, but having experienced academic work for quite some time I have absolutely no doubt that it's true and I think you can draw a direct line between the culture present in academia and bullying without attacking the Guardian for being biased.
Stewardship, patronage, the extreme degrees of networking and personal relationships way too often place people in unbalanced dependency relationships that foster abuse of one sort or the other. It's no accident that many people have pointed to universities as one of the places were 'Girardian terror' is especially prevalent.
And it's even lower compared to prisons. And that tells us, what? It's OK to have some bullying in academia, as long as there's more bullying elsewhere?
The deeper problem is the environment which drives people to commit fraud in the first place. These whistleblowers are victims of that.
As someone who left after my PhD due to not having a good publication record, I've seen the nature of the pressure to suceed at all costs to advance in your career. It's brutal. I doubt most start out with bad intentions, but fraud is the ticket to success for a significant minority.
'The Academic'. You know, gritty, rugged. Like 'Godsford Park' but more about the politics of the fields of research. Through in a little bit of nuanced/amgiguous sex scandal as well. Get Ryan Gosling to play the bad guy for once.
It is hard to evaluate how much talent and how much suffering bullying causes. In every company I have been there had been some level of bullying. The result usually is that options were not discussed, people left or get depressed, long non-paid hours produced no real results as work was done in the wrong projects, etc... Bullying in school or politics has even worst consequences.
There is a lot of untapped potential in human society. Bullying has a high toll on society.
Especially given the LHC's current negative results for physics beyond SM, is it not surprising few particle physicists are willing to confront the issues regarding SUSY's negative results? How many other leading scientists at CERN are like that and intimidate anyone who would dare to question them?
I guess this post did turn into a sort of a dig at CERN, but I think a more broader point is not only do these toxic people make everyone miserable, but they hamper science too when the bosses are abrasive AND end up being wrong. So, the whole argument of "abrasive => calls out BS => makes them effective managers" like that which was in the discussion about Linus is undermined.
I've seen it all - scientific misconduct of every kind imaginable, professors impregnating postdocs, professors who regularly make their grad students cry, professors who neglect their teaching, etc. There are no checks and balances. The system often creates monsters.
I'm glad that this new Guardian article highlights that it is a structural problem. When reading up on the MPI cases it seemed as if it was a problem of few labs only. Due to the power imbalance, as a to-be-PhD student you are strongly advised to experience several labs before making a decision where to go. Don't only look at metrics such as reputation. It is incredibly hard to find a good PhD advisor, and intuition trained by good and bad experiences does help.
Similarly bad are people in those labs who don't recognize the behaviour as such because they either have never experienced a non-dysfunctional lab or see benefit in licking upwards (they may hope they can be in the intimidating position one time). Every party enabling this seems to confuse abusiveness with strength and assertiveness. Is it Stockholm syndrome?
The supervisor's perspective is that grant pressure can be very stressful. But as soon as multiple people agree to the point that they file formal complaints the problem can't be the PhD student anymore.
I have still proportionally seen more functional than dysfunctional labs in science though, great labs do exist. I would expect that the problem is much worse in industry than in academia.
This isn’t tractable in the UK, where students go straight from the final exams of their undergraduate degree, right into the thesis stage of a PhD.
You see it in cases of physical and emotional abuse, sexual assault, and even substance abuse (most notably from alcoholics)
But what you said is essentially valid, except I would state it in even broader terms. Accusations of bullying became an effective way to launch a social attack, either proactively or in retaliation.
This is why you can't solve this by simply instituting punitive rules and committees that "fight bullying". Beyond certain very basic level (you get fired if you punch someone at work, clear cut case) they will get mercilessly abused.
What you really need is to increase autonomy of all participants of the system so people can act in response. No one should be completely in thrall to their boss or adviser. At the very lease people should be able to leave without being harasses and sabotaged at their destination.
Yes, forced association causes bullying. There's no bureaucratic 'solution' that won't be gamed by the bullies. And there's no substitute for having good/brave people around the place.
A cursory look at the Wikipedia etymology contradicts the notion that it was ever limited to children, or that the current usage is significantly broader than it has been in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying#Etymology
I can take an 8-week summer course on polishing my NSF CAREER proposal - I'd kill to be able to do the same for basic management skills (including hiring).
'Another PhD student spoke of “abuse of power” by their adviser, which included “career sabotage, IP [intellectual property] theft and more general bullying such as belittling comments, often in front of or in response to senior academics”.'
They really have to forbid profs names to appear on student papers. It would remove a lot of the incentive.
"After graduation, Zhang had a hard time finding an academic position. In a 2013 interview with Nautilus magazine, Zhang said he did not get a job after graduation. "During that period it was difficult to find a job in academics. That was a job market problem. Also, my advisor did not write me letters of recommendation." The reason behind this is that Zhang's research pointed out the mistakes made by his advisor Tzuong-Tsieng Moh's previous work. Moh was very unhappy with this and refused to write the job recommendation letter for Zhang.[11] Zhang made this claim again in George Csicsery’s documentary film Counting From Infinity while discussing his difficulties at Purdue and in the years that followed."
I understand that many labs are hierarchical with ideas solely handed down from top to bottom, but removing advisor authorship is a big step.
Some profs are decent human beings, and the system runs. Some profs are sociopaths, and the system gets abused.
Other fields got their rules in place because of above. It is not fair to the profs that are decent human beings, but, ignoring the second point, makes it unfair to a lot more students that go through it.
Every person with a pet grievance, no matter how BS it is, will come out of the woodwork...
Especially when everyone has been raised all emotionally, told they were little geniuses and would achieve everything "they wanted to", and was promised to be the King/Queen of the World just for showing up...
Taking the sub-105 IQ set and putting them situations where they are not capable of competing winds up creating unhappiness all around. No doubt some of that dynamic fosters a bullying mindset in professors.
But this is literally the job of the HR department. That is why Workers need guilds or unions as a counterweight.
One difference between private sector (typically) and academia is that if you fake your results in the private sector, it will come out when the product ships and is no good. As we have seen with the reproducibility crisis in many fields of science, the feedback loop is much slower in academia. "Extreme pressure to produce results" is a very imprecise statement, but one issue I worry about is the primary investigator wanting to get someone else to fake his data for him, so he has plausible deniability if it should come to light.
I agree the article is rather imprecise, but I think there is a real problem.
I dont really think so. Pretty often, at that point no one remembers or care who was responsible for what and someone else will be pressured to spend nights fixing your mistakes.
Sounds familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_fraud
If you have a bad experience at company A, you can easily start “fresh” at company B or C. References are relatively pro forma and don’t count for much. Academia, in contrast, runs on reputation. You’ll need a reference—ideally a glowing one—from your PhD advisor to land a postdoc position and fellowships. You’ll need more letters to transition to a faculty job, and even more to keep it. The contents of the letters actually matter too; none of this “she was employed in my lab for the indicated time period” malarkey. This gives a few people incredibly strong influence over your career, especially early on.
Somehow I expected them to be more reflected...
JS distaste is widespread in the industry, as well.
So far, it's a case of miscommunication. To blame only the students and subordinate workers for lack of understanding would be one-sided. But the article doesn't offer a nice explanation nor a solution to the exemplary problem. I wouldn't expect either that pregnancy at the work place was a good idea. I am actually rather opposed to it in general, and for more free time for mothers.
By the way: One has to wonder whether the situation was any different at the newspaper producing this article.