Abuse isn’t an “advising style”: Consequences of MIT sheltering abusive mentors
blog.usejournal.com
blog.usejournal.com
Good advisors will probably have a few students who will speak up for them, and great advisors almost certainly will. In contrast, bad advisors will probably have a few students who give middling recommendations, cryptic comments, or outright warnings. Good departments typically have meet-the-current-students-without-faculty-present events to facilitate exactly this discussion. If the potential advisor does not happily put you in contact with current or recent students, that alone is a red flag.
This is not foolproof. Even a great advisor may have one bitter student, and a generally terrible advisor might still have some good student relationships. But having a bad advisor will make grad school so much harder. This is a situation where doing a bit of due diligence can have a huge impact.
I was lucky; I had a great advisor, and I was always happy to talk to potential students, since I wanted my advisor to have more good students. Talk to students!
Also, if one or more occurs, gtfo before the stress gets you.
It was ... not a healthy environment.
Some warning signs would have been easier to see from the same coast, and some of them were obvious in hindsight.
I suppose there's a poetic irony that even in places where you can really transcend people still find a way to hurt eachother.
The advice on talking to students is absolutely correct. And to be very clear, if you do not find any good labs in the schools you were admitted to: Do Not Go To Grad School At All. Reapply to other schools and wait. A year waiting is worth the 4 on the backend being a drone in a bad lab.
Far as I know, there isn't a searchable database of 'suicides per school'.
The only one I knew personally died for reasons unrelated to the Instititute— in fact it was one of his bright spots in some ways (though he suffered dreadfully from the imposter syndrome as well so in other ways it made things worse).
However MIT can be a very difficult place and I don’t want to gloss over that. And I think the institute could do a lot to improve things.
What the actual fuck? Why would anyone who loves their wife or husband choose to enter such a program? (Best-case scenario: a few years of data produced this anomalous result, someone noticed it and decided to draw attention to it, and it has since scared away all married students, so that there will never be any future data points to contradict it.)
Still, from what I know about medical school and residency in general, any place that periodically assigns 24-hour work shifts just because is ... perverse.
Edit: Ok, it's not 100% "just because"; there are some rationalizations. https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/residency/3-tips...
It's worse than you think: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-become-a-n...
Once a person has taken on the debt from med school, it's extremely difficult not to continue. Residency programs know this.
I agree that the 24-hour shifts are ridiculous. I could see some potential benefit for reducing the number of shift handoffs (e.g. 12-hour shifts expose patients to 2 shift changes per day, but 8-hour shifts expose patients to 3 shift changes per day), since shift handoffs have been shown to be the source of miscommunications. However, as your link points out, there is no decrease in standard of care resulting from removing 24-hour shifts, so that is not a reason to keep 24-hour shifts.
Also, thank you for the link on it, though the tone of that article was definitely odd. It took the lack of effect of shift duration on patient care as a reason to extend shifts back up to 24 hours, rather than concluding that there is no reason to keep shifts at 24 hours. Similarly, it takes as a given that after a 16-hour shift, you only get 8 hours off, rather than treating that as another sign of poor shift scheduling. (From the article, “When you’re on a 16-hour shift that ends Monday at 11 p.m., you still have to come back to the hospital on Tuesday at 7 a.m.,” she noted. “When you’re on a 24-hour shift, you leave on Tuesday at 7 a.m., and you don’t have to report back for duty until Wednesday. That is a better arrangement. You have the rest of the day to do things.”)
Yeah, I interpret it as self-serving propaganda and mendacity. I will assume the worst at every turn—for example, that the supportive quotes are cherry-picked; that they insert pictures of smiling doctors to try to make people think those opinions are normal; that they made certain that the dissenting doctor's opinion was described as "a minority opinion", and was immediately followed with "Dr. Mathis did acknowledge, however, that the ACGME change in requirements was here to stay"; that the "members of the AMA’s Resident and Fellow Section" they apparently polled were cherry-picked; that they asked several poll questions and chose to report the one with the most favorable result (and that "Do you think it's a good idea?" scored worse than "Do you think it's better than 16-hour shifts?"); that they reported it as "a majority" because it sounds higher than "52%"; et cetera.
This is unfair, but I expect it's the best starting point for understanding.
> Similarly, it takes as a given that after a 16-hour shift, you only get 8 hours off
Yeah, it appears to be easier to work for an additional 8 hours and get the whole next day off, than to persuade those who choose the shifts to let you come in a couple of hours later on the day following a 16-hour shift.
I do have opinions about how to select doctors. For example, surgeons in particular should be selected a lot more for manual dexterity, and less for ability to memorize facts that appear on the MCAT.
Meh. Sounds like the number of divorces was still less than the number of students. And possibly less than the number of marriages -- the definition provided doesn't even establish that 100% of marriages among the students failed.
Talk to them, and look up what they're doing. If a lot of former students ended up where you see yourself in 10 years, that's a great sign. If a lot of former students are in dead-end careers, that's a bad sign.
Of course, that discriminates against tenure-track faculty, but avoiding tenure-track faculty is good advice too. Tenured professors have the luxury of being able to care about you. Tenure-track need to do what it takes to succeed.
(The flip side of this advice is often presented as the junior faculty are more likely to help you write a lot of papers, if that's your goal. But again, look at the person. )
(I agree completely with talking to former students, of course. More information is always good. )
From my time in grad school, I don't mind working at 3 am (and most other grad students I knew, at least without families, didn't mind that either). The problem was the abusive nastiness. You're presuming student and faculty interests are otherwise aligned. They're not. The most successful paths to academic success I've seen include:
* Spending time raising money, hiring a ton of students, and getting a few good publications by law of large numbers
* Attaching students to many projects, and when one shows promise, sprinting to do most of the work to claim first authorship on a breakthrough result (at the expense of collaborators), and neglecting the rest of the projects / students (at the expense of the rest of the lab).
* ... and so on.
There is also a question of who becomes associated with the breakthrough: the student or the advisor? Yes, the first/last author split in publication helps, but at the end of the day, someone goes out and gives talks, media interviews, etc. I've seen plenty of student s-ed because the faculty member (who often did minimal work) takes credit for their work.
And there are megaprojects, where there's one nice result at the end, and a half-dozen graduate students who work on it doing menial engineering/lab work. Labs like that end up with zero students going for faculty (or other highly-competitive) jobs.
In other words, aside from baking data, most tactics to academic success involve carefully optimizing the odds, and burning a number of students and/or collaborators to have tenure-granting results associated with the faculty member.
As a footnote, back in the day, I was blessed with a terrific advisor, but the MAJORITY of faculty at MIT are abusive douche bags, and the system is set up entirely to protect them. And most students I know who left MIT into faculty slots did that by cheating at least a little bit, whether through credit theft, baking research results, or otherwise. Most MIT grad students don't cheat, mind you, but most highly successful ones do (and yes, I am in a position where I've seen many of these case play out at MIT, and a few at other institutions). Those go into tenure-track positions, and abuse their students the same way they were abused.
Former students also have a better viewpoint. Many people don't realize they were abused until years later, when they can look back on an experience objectively. Among my cohort, the number of people who would say they were abused today are much greater than the number of people who would have said it at the time.
He would go to people and say "I heard so-and-so sucks" and if he didn't suck people would adamantly stand up for so-and-so, but if he DID suck, there would be a lackluster response.
I heard Steve Jobs is totally amazing and wonderful and cool and wise but sucks so hard at noticing talent he has fall back on techniques like randomly claiming people suck and seeing the response. Bet you'd get a lacklustre response from that.
How many of his students complete their PhD and how long that takes. That's it. There is no other metric. None. You might think 'but...' No! Don't do that.
For example, some advisors are very hands-on in terms of giving guidance on projects, while others (like my own) are very much hands-off and lets the student find their own way. The latter worked for me, but isn't everyone's cup of tea. The former is great for students who like more guidance (esp at the beginning of research) but is not for every student. The same goes to other areas of advisor-advisee relations: paper writing, job hunting, etc.
Edit: to address a main point in the article: don't get me wrong, there certainly is such a thing as abuse. "Compatibility" isn't everything. I was just pointing out that it is an important consideration in choosing advisors; a great advisor for your friends may not be great for you.
> I need from you a few paragraphs describing your personal interests,
> advising style or philosophy, background and professional interests.
> ... I'm preparing a document to give the freshman for them to use to
> select an advisor. I need to receive your info by early next week.
I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, majored in mathematics and Computer
Science at Yale University, and I got my PhD in Computer Science at CMU. I've
lived in Paris, Hong Kong, Peking, and New Jersey.
I tend to look for weak, uncertain students and feed off of their
insecurities; by preying on their poor self-images, I manage to temporarily
assuage my own feelings of inadequacy and failure. I've also found
undergraduate advising to be a terrific vehicle for venting a lot
of my own pent-up rage and frustration.
I'm not sure if this counts as a philosophy, but it's the closest thing I've
got to an "advising style."
> Thanks again for volunteering to advise!
My pleasure."how long you been working on this?"
"Almost 10 years."
"Seems really long."
"Yes, normally it's 5 years but I can't enough time to finish it. I'm always working on Prof. Engineer's research projects."
"I mean can't you just leave?"
"No, not at all. You are completely beholden to your advisor. Can't get money, lab time, assistants without them. I'd have to walk away from all my research."
I was gobsmacked. Professor Engineer was teaching a course I was taking, though he wouldn't recognize me in my shop bunny suit. His attitude towards students was nothing like his attitude towards his graduate researchers. This was not the first story I heard and I assumed that's how grad school worked.
A PhD is an individual research degree - ideally you’re supposed to be working on your own ideas not someone else’s.
[1] Academic science is one of the most feudal environments I have ever personally experienced, and human genetics perhaps even more so. A few large groups of collaborators with connected pedigrees share post-docs and promote each other’s work, and fund young researchers coming up through their network. Any researcher who crosses one of the lords of human genetics could be excluded from a whole patronage set, and sources of funding, as these networks populate the grant-review boards.
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/01/17/d-5/
[2] It also illustrated a truth in academia from what little I’ve seen and experienced within it: it is a highly feudal culture defined by patronage networks and an ordered understanding of the relationship of superiors to subordinates. As they say: “You come at the king, you best not miss.”
And since I was working between classes it made it easier to change.
- Says he prefers Chinese students because they shut up and do the work without asking
- "Your first research idea belongs to me"
- Has apparently thrown coffee mugs at students
- Walks out or stops grad seminars he is unhappy with
He stays, because he brings in a lot of money.
Ignoring "be a decent human being" for a moment, and only looking at the money (because this is one way to communicate with dysfunctional corps): companies have a duty of care to protect their staff from harm, and this includes mental distress. By not addressing the abuse the company is leaving itself open to costly legal action.
Should they accept it? I guess not, but once it's normalized they partake as well and it doesn't change.
One kicked a PhD student out of her lab after he spoke to a local news reporter about his line of research without her approval. Not even a scientific article, just a personal interview. He started over in a new line of research.
And abuse takes a lot of forms. My advisor once went eighteen months without ever laying eyes on one of his doctoral students.
Because the author is relaying their personal experiences as a student at MIT.
(2) Quant hiring is super-competitive. most physics students wouldn't get jobs. A lot of quants are physicists, but the converse isn't true.
(3) And students? Not so much. Quants like to hire Ph.Ds or possibly ABDs.
Ones who are ALSO good programmers can go the CS route, but most aren't. You need to do basic programming to do physics, but not industry-grade software engineering.
Most don't want to do the work (not implying laziness -- it's about interest / fit / etc.).
Come to think of it, the news stories I remember (just off the top of my head) of advisors pushing their students to the point of suicide were chem. advisors.
I walked over to do that, discovering that he was actually going to happy hour at the airport, and from there India, and wouldn't be back for a month. Ended up getting locked out of classes as I couldn't register.
When I was a grad student I talked to grad students from a lot of other schools. I went to conferences, made friends, sent emails to folks doing research in my field. In the course of events we compared notes on advisors. As a consequence I knew that the professors in my department weren’t outliers.
You didn’t do this?
I think about it a lot and how I’m sure a lot of brilliant people are not able to fulfill their potential due to these issues.
The underlying issue is the huge power differential between advisers and students. Whenever there is such a power differential, abuse is almost inevitable.
I fear that unless that power differential gets addressed, any solutions are going to just be superficial band-aids on a festering wound.
Power is certainly a part of it but the underlying issue comes down to oversight + accountability. Both in specific written rules and in general societal norms that influence how those rules are used.
You can only get a real measure of a man, or woman, when they have power over you.
The several candidates came forward to HR, but HR apparently wasn't able to do anything about it because "it wasn't physical" and it "wasn't against a member of the staff". Completely disgraceful from the Uni . The only reason any justice was done was that those close to the matter did not renew their contract, so they were essentially let go. HR IS USELESS!
I would still consider the Uni if I were you! What were you thinking of doing there?
More people need to talk about changing labs as well. A surprising fraction of PhD students do this and is fairly normal as well. I switched labs in the middle of my PhD and had the unusual and lucky opportunity to be able to take my work with me.
Note that I've seen advisors who came through an older system (ie, if this prof was older) not mesh well with new groups of candidates.
You OBVIOUSLY need to talk to a few students - ideally those with a somewhat similar background to yours - to get a sense of fit.
Some notes.
In old system, if a grad student had kids (usually you waited till much more plentiful back then tenure track position to start family), the (male) grad student's partner stayed home full time with the children. Now families often have two working / studying parents - so your grad student is MUCH more likely to have more parental responsibilities - which despite what anyone says IS a big distraction (yes, I know lean in says you can have it all, but raising kids is wonderful but also takes time).
Manner of speaking etc. The article mentions the advisor making fun of how folks speak (??). That's a weird thing to make fun of frankly, but groups someone advised used to be very homogenous. I notice this just with age gap - so much more shorthand / casual communication style.
"My advisor’s words would pierce right through me and the period at the end of each sentence felt like a punch in the gut."
Pretty intense stuff! A period = a punch?
BTW - I think 80% of the phd system is a bit of a racket :) But that's only because I got to hear (daily) complaints about advisors and research and being a phd candidate (and then postdoc hell continues this!!).
I suppose people who are inclined in that direction would get out some other way before things get that bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Streleski
Edit: Here is a NYT article about 2 other incidents
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/science/27murd.html
According to this article, Streleski bludgeoned his professor, not his advisor
19 years into a doctorate program...
Why do you think it's "far more likely" that the student is the problem?
Think about it: say you are a judge and you wanted to _really_ understand why someone is divorcing their spouse. Would you listen to just one spouse or both?
It's very uncommon for student complaints to affect a professor's employment, especially a tenured one. As long as the professor brings in grant money, doesn't piss off the entire department, and graduates at least a few students, they are probably fine. It would take something beyond generic cruelty to students for a person that checks all three boxes to not "stick around" --- think something illegal or against university rules, and with clear evidence.
I'm getting sick and tired of people taking on the role of judge, jury, and executioner, with zero corroboration or hard evidence.
This went on for decades before there were consequences:
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/geoff-marcy-exopl...
What do you make of the Me Too movement?
And no, you don't get to pick where you apply #metoo and where you don't. You either "believe all women" or "require evidence". There's no pick-and-choose.
His case shows it's possible to make it to the top, and to stay there for decades, as an abuser.
You're emphasising whether it's possible to get to the top as an abuser, stay there as an abuser, and die before getting caught. This has little bearing on my point, although we know from the Jimmy Savile case that it is indeed possible.
> There's no pick-and-choose.
As I just stated, I'm not interested in discussing this. My point here is specific.
I feel like you must have worked hard to not give credence to things you've heard from folks about their jobs, Phds, etc.a
Or perhaps not known many people who've been in a toxic work situation.
But grad school has been talked about as a toxic nightmare for like a decade now ...
Here's the dirty secret: competent wifebeaters look like really splendid people to all the world. The incompetent ones without social skills are weeded out early, that leaves the good ones.
The economist snorts, and says, "If that was a real 100$ bill, someone else would have picked it up already."
There exist good advisors. There exist happy students. There also exist abusive advisors and systems to protect students are nearly nonexistent. This has nothing to do with "participation trophies".
Actually, that's how it works in the real world from my experience.
Most geniuses have terrible shadows that are as dark and long as they are brilliant and tall.
Most of us feel really lucky to get things done and be a part of something, and when we have to bear an unkind comment here or there... well, we're emotionally developed adults who balance the positive with the negative. It takes a lot of entitlement to expect to never hear anything negative or offensive or unkind.*
College should prepare you for the real world, not shelter you from it.
* Obligatory before someone makes a strawman: Of course if the advisor does something illegal, that's another matter, but the article never stated anything illegal being done. Just unkind from what I read.
Brilliant reply. Except... I never said my genius.
The fact that you make up arguments and distort what I said is evidence of the emotive nature of your response. I'll invite you to improve the quality of your discourse. I have respect for people who I disagree with as long as they can show the basic decency of engaging with what I said and not behave dishonestly by making up fake and silly arguments. I really dislike sophism.
Even so, I want to say explicitly that the idea that we should allow geniuses to abuse us and harass us because they are geniuses is dangerous and misguided nonsense. Being smart is not an excuse to behave poorly. With rare exception, producing something great for the world, or believing you are working on something great, is not justification for hurting others or not taking into consideration their needs or feelings, especially when they are working for you to try to help you.
I also think that your reduction of 100-hour-minimum work weeks, no free time, emotional manipulation to prevent reporting, and frequent unnecessary cruelty disguised as "advice" or "help" to "unkind comments" is absurd. If people chose this lifestyle, knowing what they were getting into, that's one thing (and even then, it would still be dubious to demand it in the first place) - but clearly the author and their peers were mislead and manipulated into it.
Finally, what is illegal and what is immoral are not the same thing, and we can and should hold people, as a society, to a higher standard than "guess they didn't break the law" when we put them in positions of power over other people.
Edited to add: I had the pleasure of working as an undergrad with several professors and PHD students in a research capacity. Some of these people, I would absolutely consider "geniuses" in terms of both intellect and achievements. I still speak with many of them, and consider some of them good friends. I never, not once, observed or heard of people being treated in the ways described in this article (nor was I myself), despite the relatively prestigious people I worked with and their relatively prestigious work. It is not that way everywhere.
One problem we have is the word abuse, based on the modern definition and usage, encompasses a range of activities from things that are only slightly unkind and rather run of the mill to extreme examples of verbal cruelty.
The particular points highlighted in the article don't strike me as being on the cruel side.
My understanding of the world is that the higher you rise, the thicker your skin needs to be.
Of course we shouldn't tolerate gratuitous cruelty.
But anyone who has ever worked with very high level people will know they can be capricious. And for most of us, getting to those high levels is an honor.
Personally in my career I've provided services to successful hard to deal with entrepreneurs. Was it a PITA? Yes. Did I learn a lot? Yes. The most demanding, harsh people are those that test your meddle and forge you in fire. Not the ones that are most pleasant.
The reason elite universities are elite is because they push people to the brink, they are designed to demand as much from a human being as can be demanded. See, my issue with the article has to do with the author wanting to be an elite researcher holding the highest and most elite title (a PHD) in the most elite university in the world (MIT) and not thinking it's going to be a ton of hours a week. IMO, that's how you determine who is elite and committed; by applying stress and seeing who can handle it at the highest level.
I mean, logically the guy who can work 80 hours a week will do more researcher, which will compound, and far outpace the productivity of someone who works 40 hours a week. This seems like a really logical and reasonable basis for how we've set up society and I've yet to meet anyone who is elite in their field who worked only 40 hours a week to get there.
Now, I'll concede: Maybe there was an accusation in that article you consider so gratuitos and bad that it's worth condemning this institution which for better or worse has figured out how to squeeze out human innovation and potential like nothing before in history. I'll also concede I might be jaded and just accepting of things that are changing and should change.
And last, I believe most things should move away from reputation based systems to more meritocratic systems, so if you want to talk about removing the biggest whip that the article mentions (not being able to leave for fear of a bad reference) - I 100% support such efforts.
1. There is a common fallacy. Just because a system is getting good results (even the best results) doesn't mean that every part of it is well-chosen to contribute to those good results. It's entirely possible that it has bad parts that worsen the results, in spite of which the results manage to be good.
2. Article says: "My advisor was hemorrhaging students, yet no red flags were raised. ... Those who planned to complete their PhD left the group or left MIT."
This sounds like clearly a waste of resources, to have lots of people begin PhD programs and either abandon them or transfer. The phrasing of the paragraph seems to be saying that none of this particular professor's PhD students stayed with him long enough to get their degree—which, if true, means it's not just weeding out the bottom X%, but that it's driving everyone away. And if it's just one professor, that's one thing, but the article says that the administration dismissed all complaints by saying all faculty had their own "methods of advising". Which rings true to an account from a friend of mine:
As a PhD student, he was the "golden boy" of the department, doing very well. After some years, he wanted to get his degree, and said that some of his earlier work should suffice to qualify. His advisor said, no, I insist you keep working on this project, and if you don't, I will not recommend you and will generally prevent you from getting a degree. (I'm hazy on the exact details of what was threatened.) I think it was also impossible to have the other professors in the department recommend him—I think my friend said it was because they weren't willing to oppose the advisor. My friend went to the administration. They said, we believe in academic freedom for our faculty. He said, all right, I believe in suing you. They said, what do you want? He said, I'm not asking for anything outlandish—just bring in a well-regarded professor, a neutral party both sides can agree to, and have him judge. This was arranged, and the professor said, yes, this is worthy of a PhD. My friend got his degree, and left the university system permanently after that.
This literally tells me nothing.
What's the average completion rate in that field? What's it for other great professors?
"hemorrhaging", like "abuse" is very vague language. I don't like condemning people based on this. It seems like a slippery slope.
Again, if you can point out a particular accusation in that article you feel deserves complete condemnation and the type of upheaval we are seeing, please point it out. I'd like to learn.
Otherwise, I'll continue to see this as a failed Navy Seal complaining about how tough it is to become a Navy Seal without understanding that the difficulty is built into the concept of why it's elite. If it was easy, there'd be no status associated to it.
Sure, the real world sucks. I don't see that as a reason to prevent colleges from improving.
Absolutely. The problem I see is the deterioration of educational quality that seems to correlate with this improvement.
Also, at some point, you need to accept that to be elite, you need to do things that others can't and won't do. A high drop out rate to becoming elite is precisely what defines the elite title being sought.
But you still get one quadrant that's mostly assholes and another that's more reasonable people.
For a given event, the observed population is a factor of the number of distinct occurrences and the duration of each occurrence (eg, why Apple sales numbers are smaller than usage numbers). A kind genius will know when they are beaten, and wrap up the effort. The asshole will persist (increasing duration) and deflect (increasing anecdotes, and the likelihood those anecdotes will be recalled).
Essentially you have not only survivor bias in effect, but also the Availability Heuristic telling you that if it's easier to recall 5 instances of assholes instead of nice people, then there must be a lot more assholes.
100%. For me, Western Capitalism has been doing this my whole life.
When I was growing up, in the little town in Central America that I come from, no one EVER traveled on an aero plane. Now it's normal. It was normal for kids to not have shoes. Now it's unheard of.
I hope we can continue to make the world less shitty.
Also, I hope there's more niceness. I also hope the fight for niceness doesn't make the world truly shitty. There's plenty of historical examples of the fight for what's right leading to what's very wrong.
This may be true. But it's not right.
I'll tell you what happens in other countries: Cut all the tall poppies down.
I love my new home, America, because she doesn't do this and it happens in my original home country. I love the results of the American system, it's something I'm grateful to live in everyday. Unfortunately I've personally witness that mentality creep in here.
The perniciousness of the go along to get along system is hard to describe to someone who hasn't lived it.