Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

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This brings up something very important for grad students to know these days, since I've heard of wronged students at various universities over the years...

Any grad student who encounters academic dishonesty by their advisor (at least in the US)... First go talk to a lawyer. A lawyer of your own, not connected with the university (except perhaps as an alum). Not a dean, not an ombud, not the kindly professor who's a friend to all students, not that other professor who sounded especially forthright in class.

Ask the lawyer for a free initial consultation. Where you might find they're comfortable handling this situation, or they might recommend a better lawyer for it. They can also talk about how the costs would work for your situation. You can check out a few lawyers this way.

Once you have a lawyer, they can advise you how to approach the university, and/or approach the university themself, to protect you, and to get the harm to you fixed.

Getting a lawyer doesn't mean you can't work things out with the university, and finish successfully.

But if you try to do it on your own, trusting university channels, there will likely be people who don't believe you, people who are friends/colleagues of the person committing misconduct and not wanting it to be a big deal, people scared of the person's influence, and people who will ruthlessly cover up wrongdoing to cover either their own butt or the university's. Also, if a dishonest advisor suspects you are a threat, they are in a position to easily ruin your career with impunity, and you don't want to gamble on their true character.

You need help navigating that.

You can come back from this. You just need the the help of a lawyer, so even the sketchiest elements of the university will know they have to take you seriously, and deal with you fairly. And a lawyer can help make sure that they follow through on fixing it.

Also, whatever you do, don't let yourself be destroyed like this person in the article did. It sounds like he didn't feel he had options, was extremely stressed, probably sleep deprived, temporarily disenchanted with the field by the situation, and had been physically threatened. His case was tragic. Don't let another tragic case happen. You have more power than you think, and you'll feel better about the field and life once this BS is fixed.

I think this is bad advice. Bringing a lawyer to the academy is a fundamentally adversarial move, and barring exceptional circumstances will not go well (some female academics denied tenure in the 80s did do well from lawsuits on gender discrimination grounds).

Doesn't a professor committing academic fraud constitute exceptional circumstances?

If an advisor at the university is doing misconduct, the grad student should consult a lawyer.

The lawyer doesn't yet have to be facing the university, but you need advice.

All the anecdata I've heard is that elements of the university will be adversarial and underhanded in response to legitimate and constructive raising of something that elements would rather be buried.

The sketchy people will want to make the student go away, ideally an international student who can be sent back to their country, or otherwise neutralized. It's harder to come back from that. Having a lawyer from the start helps avoid being neutralized.

Some universities might be more or less sociopathic than others, and a rare school might be genuinely warm and fuzzy and benevolent in every aspect. But I strongly recommend starting by assuming that, for some elements of the university, it's much like a big for-profit corporation in behavior, only one accustomed to better PR and less accountability.

(I have a fondness for university ideals, and there are particular ones, and especially particular professors, who I respect highly. But there's realistic advice some people really need to hear, if they don't want to throw away brilliant careers in which they've invested their lives thus far.)

Academia is a club of purportedly professional peers, with a strong social norm of supporting one another. If you bring a lawsuit against your advisor you might be able to get them fired, but you will kiss any chance of a career goodbye.

That said, I’d be curious to know of any examples of students bringing lawsuits against their advisors, and what the legal and professional outcomes were for student and advisor.

I didn't say bringing lawsuit against anyone. The lawyer advises how to approach the university, possibly approaches the university themself, and monitors how things are developing.

What you say highlights an aspect of the risk and harm to grad students that I didn't articulate, but is implicit in my suggestions of how to approach this. (And there's also a related aspect of "damaged goods" that a wise person told me about: even if it was clear that the student was totally in the right, the mere fact that they got burned by someone else suggests they might have lingering problems from the stress, and people would prefer a bright-eyed clean slate student.)

You need the right level of the university to know they have to take you seriously and cannot just neutralize you. And preferably before other university people compound the problem with "coverup is worse than the crime", creating more reason to cover up.

Approach this game-theoretic, and make it in everyone's best interests for the university to do the right thing, early -- before the underhanded and the arrogant scattered throughout positions of influence in the university do what they would do otherwise, and make the problem much harder to fix.

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