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It's fascinating to me that universities largely escape criticism for how incredibly toxic they are for pretty much everyone but those at the top.

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Part of the challenge is how individualized the struggle can be. There are certain common trends you can find across a large population of grad students, but the details an individual is confronted with have to do with their subdiscipline and relationship with their advisor and their department.

Then there’s the issue of the fact that the core requirement of the PhD — developing a new idea with merit — is just hard. It takes a lot of time and work to do that in the best circumstances. I liked my department and my advisor and felt that they did the best job they could given their resources, but I was still pushed to my breaking point at times.

Any attempts of reform are immediately met by faculty calls for the protection of academic freedom. They believe their position is so special, they're beyond reform efforts.

I remember when faculty tenure review at a major academic institution was being modified to newly include "student success activities" as part of the review process. Essentially, tenured faculty would now be assessed on how much they positively impact the lives of their students. The amount of pushback from faculty on this new criteria was insane and demonstrated the self-centeredness of most tenured faculty. The crying about "academic freedom" would make your head spin.

They were right. All of the institutions where the ratings come back to the professors / staff have had a detrimental effect on academic rigor: need to earn the grade is out the door, easy programs / lessons, get the good assessments, move on.

It should be possible for a university to ensure that "student success activities" include more than just good grades. Hope that's what's done in practice.

Particularly when juxtaposed with public schools. It seems like partly a difference in values and partly an accident of history that teachers of children have a powerful union and a lot of societal support, but many teachers of adults need to rely on welfare programs.

I feel like people outside universities just don't care (because why should they?), and people within universities, at least the one's I've been in, are very, very, aware of this toxic culture, but pretty much powerless to do anything about it.

I'd also add that within universities and national labs, survivorship bias obscures these problems to many higher ups. Many simply have no experience with the problems, or even worse, they dismiss the problems as trivial based on their own success stories of climbing the ladder. From their perspective, it is hard to see how these problems could be fatal to your career, since they are the survivors and never have encountered anything fatal to their career by definition.

This happens in virtually every work environment where your worth is measured by something immaterial like “creativity”. Because the output isn’t empirically measurable, your personality is what sells your worth and guess what types of people are best at that, assholes

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