It is very sad that Huixiang lost his life over a paternalistic, archaic system. And he isn't the only one who was badly impacted.
I had to do this and even though everyone involved were exceptionally kind people with the utmost integrity, it was made pretty clear to me that if my old supervisor would have launched an even halfhearted campaign against me (they did not), nobody at the university would have stuck their neck out for some junior grad student.
And this was primarily b/c there is no established process. One should be able to:
1. Confidentially state to an ombudsman that you wish to change supervisor
2. Have the ombudsman obtain the consent of the would-be new supervisor to take on the student
3. Have the ombudsman inform the old supervisor that a decision had been made to change supervisor
4. The ombudsman, old, and new supervisors sit down and discuss what projects the student can keep persuing
If anyone here is faculty at a university and cares about their grad students, please promote something like this.
As in your case, everyone was cordial. But even so, it was immensely difficult, because, as you said, there was no protocol for "breaking up" with the supervisor I was working with.
Luckily, he broke up with me when it became apparent that the academic relationship isn't working out, and he saw that I'm ~seeing other people~ attending conferences in a different field.
[0] In life terms, your PHD advisor isn't going to hold you after your cancer diagnosis for example. Obviously its important for playing the higher ed game.
[1]https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/e/ea/Overl...
It sounds like you're taking about "that world" while not being a part of it, or having a clue about how things work there.
Mentorship is a relationship, and the relationship with one's advisor isn't just lifelong — it's enshrined in history forever.
Look up the math genealogy project. I can track my academic lineage hundreds of years back simply by going up the chain of who-was-whose-student.
The combination of complete control over their students (mainly due to being able to decide when/whether they can graduate) and the pressure of tenure and the publishing race makes it no surprise that so many professors slide into abuse. Reporting abuse while still a student is obviously extremely risky, and even reporting it after graduating can cause a career setback by giving up the recommendation letter.
I wonder if it would be possible to expand the role of the PhD committee (which is currently pretty much relevant only for the thesis defense) to become a replacement for a single advisor.
Recommendation letters should be dropped as selection means. Leads to extreme subjectivity, unaccountability, and opens the door to abuse.
The more central problem is the incentive structure of the academy. Genuine training outcomes cannot be measured by the bureaucracy and therefore don’t matter.
Without solving the incentive problem nothing can really be improved. In aggregate the most successful PIs will be the most ruthless blood sucking fraudsters. A few exceptional empathetic geniuses will sneak through on principle, but mostly we’ll continue hobbling along.
Is this meant as a proof that however it's done now is perfect? There are many tweaks one can make to the model to make it less lopsided and still keep the fundamental apprenticeship model. I am willing to bet that if you look at how it's done around the globe there are many ways of doing apprenticeship where the power balance is different, and historically it's probably also been practiced in many different ways.
Focusing on the structure of that relationship and hoping that more bureaucracy will protect the most vulnerable PhD students from misaligned advisors just doesn’t seem to work in my experience.
The fundamental issue is the incentive structure. Without changing it you’ll just drive personal abuse further behind closed doors.
This is such a bizarrely vague statement that it's meaningless. You and I both have zero clue what the environment was like for apprenticeships in these hundreds of years, or how issues like this were resolved. Further, if the system of apprenticeship was historically as abusive as PhDs seem to be today, then I'm not sure we should look to it for guidance.
Germany, for example, still uses apprenticeship for many careers. But there are a great many legal protections for Azubis (Auszubildende/apprentices) that protect them and provide avenues for changing companies and reporting issues. They have stronger legal protections than normal workers in some cases. It still isn't perfect and it can still be problematic to handle issues, but there's a system in place.
Have you ever read historical books about what it was like? Because quite a lot of that system was pretty abusive and controlling. Power differecial did caused quite a lot of harm in the past.
Attribution rules mean you're still likely to need listing your former advisor as co-author, unless you completely scrap your work and pivots to something completely different. So I wouldn't count that as a total loss.
Blaming the system is wildly off base.
In my case (a top school in the USA), even with copious and explicit evidence of misconduct, and a history of student complaints against my advisor, whistleblowing was a year-long nightmare during which the administration consistently backed the professor.
There is this odd tension between academics and society where there was this system that was never designed for it is being treated like some sort of vocational certification system. It'll be a pity if academic culture gets destroyed on the way through.
Anyway, TLDR; I agree that the academic system is archaic and paternalistic but if that is a problem people should expect to go build a new system. Preserving a culture is going to get archaic in less than a generation.
Imagine you're walking on the street and see a helicopter crashed on a tree. You don't need to be a helicopter mechanic, or aeronautical engineer, or a pilot, to know that the helicopter shouldn't be on that tree. And you definitely don't need to propose new helicopter control methods to apply common sense and conclude that it's a bad thing that the helicopter crashed on the tree and we should try to not do that again in the future.
It would be good to have a better system, but we can develop it without risking the valuable academic culture. You can see how valuable it is because people keep signing up to it despite the archaic nature of its traditions.
Thanks but no thank
the policy or practice on the part of people in authority of restricting the freedom and responsibilities of those subordinate to or otherwise dependent on them in their supposed interest.