Breaking the silence around academic bullying | Hacker News Reader

Breaking the silence around academic bullying

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This is an article about bullying and abuse by professors and managers of academic labs. It's a huge problem, because early-career researchers depend heavily on approval and references from PIs, and there's a strong element of path-dependence in many academic career situations: you often can't easily just quit and join a different lab. You're captive to the abuse.

As someone with two kids working in academic STEM research labs, I'm interested if people have any horror stories of their own to share about abusive PIs (just because I worry about my own kids and what they're going to face in their fields).

I asked this on a Slack the other day, and I got stories like "my friend's PI called and demanded he come in to work, but my friend's appendix had just burst; the PI said 'I don't care about your appendix'". Or the lab where the researchers had brought in special furniture to create a private area to cry in after the PI had finished berating them. Or the abusive lab with an anomalously high number of suicides.

Have them ask around about the PI first.

I’ve had PIs threatening me as PostDoc to void my contract and have me deported for wanting to take some vacation accrued over several years, or (different gig) for wanting to go to a job interview. And that was me as a married 30ish white male. Can’t imagine what it can be like for the 22 year young woman away from home for the first time.

This is a very important tip.

It's typically very easy to find former PhD students and postdocs that have worked with a given PI. Sometimes they are even listed in the PI's website, but if they aren't, they can be found by looking for the PI's papers and checking the coauthors, or in the case of PhD students by looking for PhD theses.

Find their email address and politely contact them, asking about their experience with that PI. Most people should be happy to respond, and that kind of information is invaluable.

I successfully kicked out a professor from academia who was a bully and was harassing many other people. But this costed me several years of my career and was extremely tough to do. Ironically, I eventually ended up in a worse place. Some things I have learned in the process:

* Bullying is much more common in experimental fields. From what I've seen, bullies are enriched in the population of >50 years old professor (male or female) who attracts tons of funding and publishes several articles per month. Publishing so often is, in general, a red flag.

* When joining a group, try to talk to graduate students and postdocs. People stopped joining our group because they knew it was led by a bully. In general, most students will be extremely honest about bad working conditions.

* Before joining, try to test drive the group in some way. For example, with a small rotation project. Usually, being an insider even during a short period will reveal all nasty stuff. We had many rotation project students and none of them stayed.

* A good heuristic is to join small groups where the leader, young or old, has skin in the game. Usually, younger PIs in small groups have more skin in the game and they tend to be nicer.

* Another good heuristic is to join groups where people regularly progress to other positions in academia.

> I'm interested if people have any horror stories of their own to share about abusive PIs

Things I have experienced first hand, either myself or graduate students:

* A male PI that hires attractive graduate students and gives them easy tasks to land Nature, Science or Cell co-authorships and at the same time tries to land sexual favors from them.

* A female PI that only hires female graduate students and is incredibly aggressive towards male students from other groups, trying to undermine their research.

* A junior faculty member who progressively asked some students to do more and more unreasonable tasks in a particular project so that they eventually refused. Got them removed them from the project clearly in order to get a better position for himself in the publication and to include some of his friends. All this close to submission.

* A group of junior faculty members who plotted to change first authors days before submission, without communicating with the downgraded authors. Needless to say, they upgraded themselves to first authors, without having contributed anything.

* Written threats to misrepresent research results.

When I was a PhD student, my papers almost always had author order alphabetical. I later learned that other fields cared about "first author". At first, I couldn't believe it - it's so obviously ripe for abuse. But I found out it's true - and abused.

I'm in a more senor position now and I still prefer alphabetic order. Having more power than coauthors has somewhat softened my stance though, as my preferences shouldn't be forced upon underlings.

But it is still baffling that anyone (let alone scientists) puts any stock in author order.

Your name doesn't start with "A" or "B", by chance? ;-)

You say it in jest, but I know a group whose head's surname started with a B and she was a staunch defender of alphabetical order... until someone joined who started with an A.

It doesn't, no.

I'm currently supervising 2 PhD students whose last name is alphabetically later than mine. I explained my reasons for my preference to them; that's how far I'll go. With one, we've had multiple collaborations outside the institution. In those cases, alphabetical order was typically arrived upon with all authors. In other cases it depends - we've had quite equal contribution papers which ended up alphabetically. We're now working on one that he conceived and executed. I'm basically the co-writing sparring partner, where I strongly prefer him to be first author.

The other student feels it's important for his career to be first author, so he is. I certainly hope he's wrong (for my career so far it didn't matter), but I'm not taking that chance.

I'm 2nd author on a 2-author paper where my only contribution was answering a couple of questions on how to use some software, and then proofreading the couple of paragraphs that mentioned it. I didn't even read most of the paper, let alone know what it was really about. Surely there's a need to communicate the fact that my contribution is less than that of the real author?

I agree, but order isn't the way to do that, as it could mean you did 49% or 4%. A better system would be to just explain what each author did.

In the last few years, an increasing number of journals are adopting that kind of system.

No doubt. Or not even have such minor contributors as authors in the first place. Perhaps you should have to have actually written part of the paper, like an actual author, or at least done some novel research of your own. Technicians and others who assisted with it, even did all of the grunt work could just be acknowledged if they want some fame. But I guess that authorship is a kind of payment-by-exposure instead of actual money and enough people are desperate enough to take it.

Could you elaborate on your gripe with order, or how that would be abused?

In my field, 1st author did most of the work, typically the responsible grad student, then authors 2 to n-1 supporting characters, maybe contributed some data, some script, wrote a paragraph. Last author is PI.

Sometimes you’ll have a 2nd author who ended up contributing like the 1st as the paper progresses, that’s really the only ambiguous situation, but you can switch that around for a conference or follow-up.

Looked like the second one worked under the first one after graduation.

I've heard of two instances in my social circle of PIs turning on students for no good reason and divebombing their academic / research careers intentionally through the reference recommendation system you mentioned. (One ended up in software engineering, which they incidentally picked up while studying their other field).

- It is a pretty scary situation to have someone above you with absolute power over your entire career track which you may be a decade in to pursuing.

- It's extra scary that the system's incentive structure of can create feedback loops that reward abusive behavior and grow its prevalence. PIs have a certain realm of absolute power -> they can choose to use it to irresponsibly ride others to increase that realm. And there's little downside and possible recourse for the abused. Higher ups see: More awards! More publications! (Wait, where'd those students go...)

That said there are lots of good PIs out there doing awesome stuff and treating their teams well. Definitely worth finding ways to get the real scoop on the PI. Former lab members, for example, or anyone outside of the "just don't upset the leader" incentive structure.

Makes you appreciate how valuable it is for incentive systems to be tethered to financial reality and for the supply of job-slots to be rapidly responsive to success at creating value. Non-profits and certain pockets of politics are missing some piece of this sort of reality results tether/job-slot responsiveness as well.

A tip for people who are being harmed by the recommendation letter system: some countries don't use recommendation letters that much. For example, in Spain, many PIs don't ask for recommendation letters at all. Others (like myself) may ask, but only view it as a possible positive signal if the recommender happens to be someone I know personally. But I would never discard a candidate for a lack of recommendation letters if their CV and interview show that they're good. I have never understood why Americans trust those letters so much when they depend mostly on factors that aren't correlated with candidate quality (personal relationship between the candidate and their references, personality of the letter writer that might lead them to be more or less enthusiastic, cultural expectations, even writing skills of the letter writer, etc.)

Of course, I'm aware that changing countries is out of the question for many people, but for those who are willing, applying in places where they aren't important can be a way out.

There are definitely bullying, abusive people out there in academia (just as there are in industry too). I think the references thing you mention is one reason why so many people seem to put up with it.

But there are also very many extremely caring, dedicated people in academia, who love mentoring and building up their students and postdocs.

One major challenge, especially in STEM, is that the main way to tell the abusive apart from the supportive is through watercooler/gossip networks -- but so many young college graduates in STEM fields find gossiping distasteful, or don't see the nature of the mentor/mentee relationship as being super critical, or feel awkward asking lab members what they think when they visit, or don't feel like they have the social capital to spend asking, or just plain worry that the question itself will speak poorly of them -- and as a result they often don't find out what they're in for until they're in it and it's too late to extricate.

Committing to work for someone for 5 years is a huge deal, and you should be pretty sure you'll have a good working relationship before you start!

Gossip is pretty tough to get a read on though. What one person might read as extremely overbearing might not be a problem to another student who is very driven and less sensitive. I've seen some real awful people who shouldn't be inflicted on anyone first-hand, but I've seen some that are a bit misunderstood because they're maybe a little brusque and aren't good advisors for everyone, but can be great mentors to the right person.

Simple, more relatable example: the professor whose class gets very bimodal reviews--amazing, learn a lot, or unfair, too hard, etc.

So these things are subjective and I worry in this climate doing things reputationally isn't the right approach. I prefer subordinates be empowered to push back against PIs and switch, at least have a level of freedom more similar to a regular job market where if someone is too awful, at least they won't be able to keep students and post-docs. I don't know how to accomplish this though, it's a very hard problem.

Sure, I think everyone but the bullies would prefer your second approach. In the meantime, though, reputation is kind of all you have.

I’ll add though that if your gossip network is only giving you “overbearing/not” signal that’s petty weak tea. In my experience recent phd students of an advisor are typically happy to give an honest off-the-record take, that includes how driven you need to be, what to bring to meetings for them to be productive, etc etc. Each student will bring their own perspective and experiences, and may not be well connected to others’ (eg, a male student might not know that years ago his advisor’s last female student suffered harassment).

But ask a few of them and you’ll have a lot more data than you started with.

Also critical is to ask whoever is writing you a letter to begin with — especially if senior, they will often have useful perspective on potential advisors.

> the abusive lab with an anomalously high number of suicides

source?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Jason_Altom

One of three in a short period

One of my friends was a PhD student and the supervisor bullied them. Ended up having a panic attack and eventually quitting their PhD 3 years in…

Had to change supervisor… who do you complain to..would you be believed?!

I don't know if the Publisher would believe as if they don't see that the ideas are the same that they have to send the proof to the people I am complaining about. I don't know if the court will believe, as they are not domain specialists and will judge by the letter of the law.

Not exactly a horror story, but here it one. I decided to send proofs to a well-known academic publisher in order to report colleagues who had used findings from my lesser-known research papers (published in lower-profile journals) and my PhD thesis as their key conclusions. The Publisher started an investigation, but I was told that my colleagues would need to see the evidence first. The Publisher would not disclose my identity, I was certain that my "colleagues" would have figured it out. So, I made the decision to call them first and ask for clarification. They requested me to send them their text and works for which I was claiming authorship while acting as though they had no idea what I was talking about. After I sent the email, they called back, berated me, and threatened me with a lawsuit for defamation for using the words "Below is the text from the paper, which contains ideas taken from my publications.". They explicitly used the words "by all possible means". Then asked for apology. I did apologize and urge the Publisher to halt the investigation, but was this the proper course of action? Back then I was scared, but I am angry now. My sin is that my papers and Ph.D. results are not published in the big academic publishing companies (so they cannot find the plagiarism), except for one in Elsevier.

For what it worth — this is mentioned in the article but not emphasized — it doesn't end with student status. Bullying targets everyone up the academic career trajectory. Students are especially vulnerable I think but it can happen to anyone.

Seems like it’s the same as industry. Horrible bosses and good bosses, but much harder to be mobile in academia

I know many students (grad-sometimes undergrads) that had there name taken off publications last minute just for submission. And, this is at one of the most liberal wel know universities in Canada. No action possible.

Also, I know many students that performed work for 2-4 years, and the supervisor kept saying it's not good enough. Red flag is when your program is 3 year PhD, or 1 year master, but most people leave around 6-7 years, and 2-4 years respectively. Where is that problem? Ask the average time people take to do their PhD's. If they can't get you finished, while you enter with straight A's top 10% of your class. What is going on here?

I had a very difficult PhD advisor. They were a bit of a celebrity in the field and it showed in their attention to image and presentation, both of themselves and the work: speaking in inspirational profundities while actually expecting the opposite, obsessing more with the optics of the lab and work than the work itself, pushing for PR that distracted from actual research, etc. They were constantly belittling and dismissive to most updates while being unable to advise in a meaningful technical capacity, which fostered a stale air of depression around the lab.

I was once threatened to get kicked out of the lab due to missing an internal deadline for a paper draft, several weeks out from the official deadline (which is very strict by comparison; most other PIs were fine with students starting to write a week - or even just a few days - before the deadline). We were already working against our late decision to aim for a submission, and a whirlwind of academic and personal events made this a very stressful period that they were unsympathetic to. That paper ended up being the only accept out of the whole department.

I eventually /did/ get kicked out, after venting years of pent-up grievances during a mental breakdown for which I was seeking treatment. I can't tell which part of that episode upsets me more: finding out through a notification of my fork of my project repo being deleted, or that they did this despite - or maybe because of - knowing that I had scheduled counseling appointments. That they could do this without any warning or mediation - per university policy - hammered home the point that under the subterfuge of caring and inclusivity, academia still treats students like replaceable cogs in a paper mill.

I limped and hobbled my way to graduation and have since been much^3 happier in industry. From what I've heard of the department, it sounds like nothing has changed and controversies - some particularly heinous - continue to get swept under the rug. Academia is in need of a wholesale reset to flush out the toxic mentalities that breeds these bullies in the first place.

Sorry that happened to you. It should never have happened. The older I get the more I realize there are so many broken people in positions of power in this world that it feels overwhelming.

My son, at college last year, ran into something similar, but much less serious. A professor on a power trip wouldn't let him make up a lab when he had a Dr's note he was at the hospital for walking pneumonia. He got an incomplete in the course and still has to take it.

Broken people in positions of power can due massive amounts of damage to this world. It's unclear how we humans can limit that. I believe the "woke" movement was, in part, a response to it.

I have no solutions.

> attention to image and presentation, both of themselves and the work: speaking in inspirational profundities while actually expecting the opposite, obsessing more with the optics of the lab and work than the work itself, pushing for PR that distracted from actual research, etc.

A theory I’ve heard from a few people directly: the groups working in the ugly, ordinary, boring buildings on campus are more likely to be doing the best work. Flashy buildings often don’t have impressive functional architecture, just looks, they attract vanity and image obsessed, and push out people who care the most about substance in academia.

I had a friend with a similar experience at UM.

Pushed out of the PhD program, had to settle for a Masters. Told by many faculty, "Women can't do math". Really impacted her mental health. She got abuse even from female faculty.

Some students were clearly favored over others, for reasons nothing to do with ability or necessarily gender. Rich girls with similar grades didn't have it as bad, for example.

Then of course was the male professors who sort of implied that there was perhaps something that could be done to improve their standing in the school. What that thing was was left unsaid. One doesn't have to wonder.

In the late 90s I was a student representative on a University committee tasked with putting together a policy on hazing after some incidents with sports teams.

We had great difficulty putting together a definition which didn't also describe large parts of the academic system, including tenure.

This is just what humans do in status hierarchies where the aim is to achieve more status. The military, the priesthood and imperial concubines will be just as bad. They tend to be monolithic structures, so you can’t just defect to another hierarchy. The solution is to create more varied ways to do research outside the academy.

there are so so many lovely kind mentors out there who really do want the best for you. however, my advice for anyone looking at a new lab:

1. ask every junior person if they have any interpersonal issues or if they have heard of any issues

2. ask them what their day to day looks like - micromanaging from the PI, competition within the lab, supply issues, etc are all red flags. hear people when they say something small that you could overlook (e.g. "oh yeah we are expected to work 80 hours a week but its fine!", "my PI can be a little intense but its fine!") -- this usually points to deeper issues.

3. directly ask about any harassment problems to the lab managers and junior people if you feel comfortable. its very easy for harassers to hide in these big institutions and you don't want to be stuck with one.

4. ask your current PI - oftentimes there will be gossip networks and your PI will be aware of issues and can steer you away from bad actors.

Does the abuse take the form of behaviors besides harassment found in other workplace environments, or is the behavior specific to the academic setting? I expected the later but the article seems to describe the former. Is this academic bullying or is it more like “workplace harassment in academia”?

I think the differences are not hard-edged. Rather, academia is a "category" because of particular circumstances that allow bosses to groom victims and escape scrutiny. Perhaps two notable features are:

1. Your career is dependent on staying in the good graces of your present and former bosses. When I changed industry jobs, I didn't get permission from my boss, I'm pretty darn sure nobody ever contacted any of my former bosses, or seriously questioned why I was looking for a new job.

2. There is literally no direct supervision or observation of professors. They are free agents, in both teaching and managing their subordinates (grad students, postdocs, research staff). Most of those people probably have never even met their boss's boss. They are completely isolated within their silo.

3. Many of the workers are just starting in their careers, thus are less likely to have the experience and confidence to confront a toxic boss.

I always re-iterate in these discussion that I had a great professor in grad school, and we're still friends.

At some level, I think all bullying is the same, but I do think there are some differences in the forms it takes, or the consequences.

This might be controversial, but my personal impressions are that there is more denial about bullying in academic than many nonacademic settings. This is part of the point of the article I think ("breaking the silence" of the title). There's a sense that academics is "above human weaknesses" or something, and there's a certain culture endemic to a lot of entrenched promotion and tenure that denies the existence of these things, or minimizes it. I think this denial leads to certain issues in turn, like more serious consequences for victims. Any field with similar denial would probably be similar.

Probably related to this is that the oversupply of academics and competitiveness in it I think leads to more significant consequences for victims, and coupled with institutional denial (if not cultural denial), I think it leads to fewer ways to rectify it, with fewer consequences for aggressors.

I think the nature of tenure leads to extreme forms of it. You can't fire at will someone you dislike or want to target, if you're a bully, so you resort to extreme falsehoods and slander basically to get them to leave. Basically (putting aside reasons for leaving like not wanting to do academics anymore, or wanting a change of career, or family issues, etc.), if it takes someone doing something really bad to leave a tenured position, they either have to be doing something really bad, you have to make it look like they're doing something really bad, or you have to make it so bad for them they end up doing something bad. This leads to weird situations where in another field you might just axe an area, but in academics if the political whims shift, you might have the people in power mudslinging about colleagues just because they're not interested in research area X and want to make the entire department look like themselves.

I feel like this is great, and all of us have horror stories of very abrasive people in Academia. That said, it's a shame they won't talk about the structure of Academia itself which eventually ends up in this situation where terrible people have power. Wagging fingers won't solve the underlying issue here and as long as there is no serious reckoning with the general culture of taking advantage of the desperate, terrible people will always find themselves in positions of power here.

I seriously hope something happens on this issue. Virtually every young academic I know tells me this is everywhere and the most toxic people are usually who move up the promotion ladder, by stepping on and forcing the decent ones out. Actual talent seems to be secondary to skill at removing rivals and piggybacking on others.

I just got approved in a MSc program and I'm already getting upset with the group I joined, they think they'all sooo important. I have an industry job as well and if it gets worse I'll just tell 'em to fuckoff.

Never ever join a grad school programme unless you are an Olympiad medalist working under a Nobel laureate. 95 out 100 return to industry with huge lack of relevant skills and a large opportunity cost.

This is highly field dependent.

I read the pattern and what is being described, is not exclusive to academia. It is a typical workplace.

A few lost jobs and horrible bosses later I can summarize the experience as follows:

1. Bullying is legal. Unless it’s provable that it is based on one of the protected classes.

2. Because it is legal, companies side with the aggressor to deny everything and absolve themselves from liabilities.

3. Bystanders rarely help you. They may show solidarity, but will not step in on official channels.

4. Lawyers are expensive and it’s very hard to pursue any claims.

5. Documentation is very hard because modern workforce is trained on how to not get sued (unless someone is really stupid)

6. Some laws like “two party consent” for recording that is meant to protect privacy, has the unintended consequences of enabling abuse.

TLDR; harassment is legal and okay. Workers have limited protections.

It may be significantly worse in research:

1. PIs are under incredible pressure themselves

2. PIs are as a rule not formally trained in management, nor have they tended to "apprentice" in middle-management positions

3. Research is heavily reputation-based, which creates huge power disparities between employers and employees: lab employees need references from their employers, who can withhold them for capricious reasons

4. All of these factors also applied to the PI themselves, when they were starting their career, so it's normed; PIs may see it as a form of "dues-paying"

These dynamics are not in fact present in most ordinary market jobs. The jobs where the dynamics are at play --- say, as an assistant to a producer at a media company --- are notorious for it.

Indeed, while I don't want to diminish the cost and disruption of walking out of a job, it's much less likely to have long repercussions in industry than academia. In all of the industry jobs that I've never held, nobody has ever asked me for a letter of recommendation, and I don't think any of my employers have even checked my references. Also, changing jobs in industry without the blessing of your current employer, even after a brief tenure, raises no eyebrows.

The situation is even worse for grad students, who leave empty-handed if they walk out. I had a great advisor, but I also heard horror stories from friends.

I'd say for postdocs it's subtly different, if not necessarily better, than you suggest. With the kind of move we're talking about here, people will often (have to) move out of academia altogether. It's just too rare to find a position that you can transition into smoothly at short notice, and the young academic lifestyle doesn't allow for building up a lot of savings. The burnt bridges to your previous lab won't matter much in industry or government and your experience will typically be valued, but the price is that you are walking away from a career path that might have been your first choice.

What really worries me is that everybody who ends up a PI has been through this harrowing process, so it perpetuates itself; just broken people breaking people. A dramatic way to put it, I guess, but I don't know what else you can say about a PI demanding someone come into a lab on the same day as their appendectomy.

As a once broken PhD student and now early PI, je refuse to perpetuate the shattering. I'm still figuring it out, but i can it is very much at the core of my work.

From what I'm aware, two party consent laws usually have exceptions for when a person feels like they are threatened or in danger in some way

I s/harassment/bullying/'d the title above, in the hope of making the article's scope clearer.

The word 'harassment' tends to snap to the grid of culture war categories, which led to some offtopic flamewars. Hopefully we can avoid those in Take 2 of this thread.

Tangential anecdote. I like to think about physics a lot and I regularly write things down.

One time, I was so excited about the concepts I had been playing with, that I decided to go talk to a Stanford physics professor (who I had never met).

I just went to campus, started walking around the physics buildings and ran into him. He was gracious enough to let me walk with him for about 10-15 minutes while we talked. At the end he said my stuff was interesting, but it would take a lot of time to develop, that he was too old to help me and that instead I should talk to a younger professor at Caltech (he gave me his name).

I thanked him for his time and help, then looked up the professor he mentioned, saw a phone listed for his office and called. The Caltech professor picked up the phone, I explained the situation to him and then he told me I had been pranked.

He said that it was a running joke between them to “send” the clueless/crazies to each other.

Needless to say I felt like crap. At the same time it made me realize how unnecessarily cruel some people can be.

These were super recognized professors in their fields, one of them a Nobel prize winner. Both probably incredibly busy/demanded people. Yet, they go out of their way to make others feel shitty.

I wonder how they treat their students.

Name names? Shitty people should be at least known to others.

Its also literally the antithesis of what a professor, an educator, should be.

What good is this anecdote without the name of the snotty elitist professor?

That's fucking funny. I would be so amused if that happened to me. But then the second guy called you clueless/crazy, so I guess it depends on how the perpetrators executes the prank.

Might be funny from the outside. But I put myself out there, felt very vulnerable and then they just made fun of me.

They could have told me that whatever I was saying didn’t make sense, they could have pointed the way to books/classes/papers, but instead they just bullied me.

I can recognize this prank and others. Also love harmless fun. What about circulating a paper around his other peers, asking for feedback, adding the professor name as co-author?

Honestly I'm put off by the authors' use of critical theory and intersectionality. But the fact that this harassment does exist and should be eradicated is unquestionable, and any effort to raise awareness and fight it should be commended.

This article barely seems to use critical theory (do you mean critical race theory? the article is barely about race. the article falls solidly into Wikipedia’s definition of “critical theory” simply on the basis of its overall topic.)

For better or for worse, “intersectionality” here seems to mean primarily acknowledging that more than one independent variable exists that may affect privilege or ability to be easily harassed and that the effects of these different variables are nontrivial. I do think the article could have been slightly clearer by avoiding uses of the word “intersectional” and its derivatives, but the article actually seems pretty good at explaining what it means.

What exactly are you put off by?

Harassment is generally about power structures and power imbalances. You can’t examine the phenomenon without looking at power structures, which are embedded in organizations and institutions.

Critical theory also relates directly to analyzing societal power structures.

As such, any conversation about harassment is de facto on part of the ground covered by critical theory.

At the same time, I don’t see any reference to critical theory in this article, no citation to research or prominent researcher in that area.

So I don’t understand your where you are getting the impression that this article is about critical theory. Talking about harassment cannot avoid talking about power structures. I can understand the overlapping territory muddies the water here but if you think the article is about critical theory then you may be reading too much into it.

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