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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
I'm glad you've had a positive experience: everyone deserves a respectful work environment, both because it's the Right Thing to do and because it improves productivity.
That said, you're countering a researched article, and the experiences of the vast majority of people in this thread, with...your anecdatum.
Does it seem that absurd to suggest that, wherever you put an abusive person in a position of power with much at stake, abuse happens regardless of setting?
I for one couldn't tell whether the poster you're responding to is writing sarcastically or not. ("Most people are vegan" really?)
That said...
> That said, you're countering a researched article, and the experiences of the vast majority of people in this thread, with...your anecdatum.
The article claims the following:
> For example, a recent large survey-based Swedish study (with 38 918 participants) on academic bullying revealed that 1 in 15 people have experienced academic bullying over the past years
I'd be shocked if the number of workers experiencing workplace bullying in industry is much less than "1 in 15"...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your comment here broke the site guidelines, including these:
- "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." (you went on a quintessential generic flamewar tangent)
- "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." (you did exactly the thing that we added this rule to discourage)
p.s. I'm not saying that such phrases aren't provocative—they are provocative. That's why we (HN commenters) have to be the ones to interrupt the predictable provocation process, if we're going to have the interesting, curious, diffy* conversations that this site is supposed to be for.
pp.s: it looks like your account has been using HN primarily, if not exclusively, for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that cross that line (for more explanation, see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), regardless of which ideology they favor. Accounts that are using HN primarily for this sort of argument are not only not using HN as intended, they're contributing to destroying it—I'm not saying intentionally, but we still have to ban such accounts because the flames burn just as fatally either way.
I'm not going to ban you for it right now but if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to using HN as intended in the future, we'd appreciate it. That means a lot of things, but most importantly it means using the site primarily out of curiosity. Curiosity and battle are disjoint motivations.
The guideline implicitly asks you to read the submitted story and understand it well enough to make an educated guess as to what the thrust of the story is, or what interesting phenomenon motivated it. Then, when you comment on the story, you're asked both to weigh whether you're adding more heat than light, and, most especially, whether the heat you're adding is connected with the core of the story.
Here, the story is not at all about race; it's about the underreported and under-studied phenomenon of early-career academic researchers who are effectively captive to abusive PIs and professors. Lots of people on HN are, or have in the past been academic researchers; many of them have horror stories. The notion that this abuse might be taken more seriously is a very big deal.
Instead, for a good long time on this story, we had a thread that was commanded by a the most boring possible political argument one can have on HN: the debate over woke-ism. We have the "most provocative thing" rule precisely so we don't lose the ability to talk about important things just because an article happens to veer into some third rail or other of whatever cultural drama is happening right now on HN.
It's not just woke-ism; when this guideline was first being discussed, the signal example of it was a thread where Amazon had just introduced Route53, and the thread was commandeered by HN's 482459th debate about Snowden. We have the guideline because this pattern recurs regularly.
It's also an especially nasty abuse of HN to make an inflammatory political argument in an off-topic thread on a story, because people who take HN seriously will want to avoid taking the bait and giving oxygen to the political tangent. That is: it's a way of not only introducing a provocative tangent to a story, but of ensuring that only the least reasonable conversations about that tangent can occur.
It's essentially message board arson.
(This thread is dead and collapsed now, so I guess we're freer to talk about it).
>Note that bullying appears to be related to power differentials more than to gender, meaning that the reason why perpetrators are overwhelmingly male is because men disproportionally occupy powerful academic positions. Obviously, women in powerful positions can be bullies, too [[29, 30]].
Stating that white heterosexual men are at the intersection of privilege is quite different from "mandatorily demonizing white men in everything they publish." That is quite the chip on your shoulder, I think.
I am a cisgender, straight, white male in tech (not in academia) and I don't think it's a big deal to acknowledge that I benefit from quite a few privileges as such. I don't get harassed sexually, noone bats an eye when I mention my partner, society doesn't expect me to bear children, I have a very decent income, I get a default level respect for my technical abilities just by virtue of showing up.
I have many friends in leftist, queer, activist circles and don't feel demonized in the slightest. What I do, and I don't feel diminished at all by doing so, on the contrary, is learn and listen to how people not having all these characteristics have a wildly different life experience. If someone rails against white patriarchy or whatever, realize that that is very much a thing in many people's experience, and you might be blind to it by virtue of being a white man.
The great thing about intersectionality is that even if you're a white man, that is not all you are. You can use an intersectional framework to address areas where you are indeed a minority, be it because of your financial background, physical or mental disabilities, physical or mental illnesses, etc... Being a white man, yet an immigrant in the US, is a different experience than being a citizen.
I always find it puzzling that critics think that intersectional studies are about vilifying "all white men", when the premise is actually the opposite. A white man with mental illness from a working class background would not be part of the "very narrowly defined group that enjoys intersectional privilege". Nor does enjoying the intersectional privilege assume that you are a harasser, a bad person, just that other people probably encountered harassment more often than you.
> I always find it puzzling that critics think that intersectional studies are about vilifying "all white men", when the premise is actually the opposite. A white man with mental illness from a working class background would not be part of the "very narrowly defined group that enjoys intersectional privilege". Nor does enjoying the intersectional privilege assume that you are a harasser, a bad person, just that other people probably encountered harassment more often than you.
I think where people get lost is rhetoric. You're getting lost because:
> I am a cisgender, straight, white male in tech (not in academia) and I don't think it's a big deal to acknowledge that I benefit from quite a few privileges as such. I don't get harassed sexually, noone bats an eye when I mention my partner, society doesn't expect me to bear children, I have a very decent income, I get a default level respect for my technical abilities just by virtue of showing up.
You believe this is uniform enough that it can be said definitively. They're getting lost because they see the subject continually brought up but then walked back with statements like:
> Note that bullying appears to be related to power differentials more than to gender, meaning that the reason why perpetrators are overwhelmingly male is because men disproportionally occupy powerful academic positions. Obviously, women in powerful positions can be bullies, too [[29, 30]].
All that tells me is that we don't really know how to talk about any of this correctly yet.
It is uniform enough in the sense that I don't experience the discrimination people experience due to being non-white, or poor, or gay. Maybe I experience discrimination as a white man, so far I haven't been aware of it, and if I were able to decode it as such, that would be a valid intersectional study. I posit for example that were I to live in say, Japan, I would experience discrimination due to my race. That the article seems to address mostly western if not american academia is valid, imo. That it "demonizes" white men? Way less so.
My point overall is that not everyone is on the plane of existence you're on. For a cis-gender heterosexual white man that has reaped all of the privileges of being so it's probably pretty easy to see your perceived privilege talked about so patently. If you're someone who hasn't uniformly enjoyed those privileges this language is probably triggering. I don't think that intersectionality is about demonizing white men, but I do think it struggles with phrasing that is eventually used by some people to communicate that message.
I perceive some of my privilege, which is that I am not subject to non-white racism, etc... I have a few crosses to bear otherwise (autistic, bipolar, chronic illness, immigrant), and I can relate to being in the minority quite well too. This is actually why I find intersectionality a productive lens. I can be both privileged and discriminated against at the exact same time. I can be both respected for my technical skills by virtue of my looks, and in the same field be discriminated because I communicate differently. Being white doesn't shield me from all discrimination, but it shields me from some.
Intersectionality is a productive lens to view societies problems through. My experience is largely the same as yours, though slightly different circumstances. The problem in a lot of online, and in real life, discussions is that the intersectional ideas people have been exposed to are through amateur activists who don't have a view on intersectionality beyond themselves. This isn't really new in social paradigms, to my knowledge, people often recognize the struggle of others definitionally but fail to recognize it in the person standing in front of them. The experience of which is probably not pleasant.
You asked why people get triggered over this, this is my hypothesis. Don't take that for me not liking intersectionality.
appreciated, and indeed, people often have a hard time empathizing. One reason why I both enjoy twitter in order to connect with some communities, and the discourse never really feels fulfilling.
> Stating that white heterosexual men are at the intersection of privilege is quite different from "mandatorily demonizing white men in everything they publish." That is quite the chip on your shoulder, I think.
It's very much a racist statement in my book. Of course, that's the core of the intersectional ideology, a racist ideology. The first and most important divider when it comes to classes is wealth. Identity politics as practiced by intersectionalists served the elite well.
If one pushes that obnoxious and absurd intersectional logic to its paroxysm, then one can deem people from jewish origin "at the intersection of privilege". Sounds antisemitic? Indeed, because that whole ideology is indeed racist at its core, under pretense of "social justice".
Your complaint has virtually nothing to do with the article, which is about a widespread and serious problem in academia. It's not about wokeism; it's about labs in which PIs berate and grind down postdocs and employees. You won't find many academic STEM professionals that don't have horror stories, and there are whisper networks about which PIs to avoid.
The topic of "whiteness" comes up in a small section of the article that discusses the fact that there has been far less reporting of the phenomenon than would be expected from how "open" this secret is. You can agree or disagree with whether whiteness or maleness has much to do with it, but you can't reasonably disagree with the broader point of that section of the article: academic STEM research is way worse than you'd expect looking at it as an outsider.
This is a particularly egregious instance, because this article discusses a phenomenon that should be especially interesting to HN (overwhelmingly widespread abuse in academic science labs), and yet here we are bickering over whether the article used the word "whiteness" appropriately in one paragraph.
I have a strong understanding of the guidelines of this site, and I do see how you might want to invoke them for this thread, but considering the subjective nature of this topic, I am comfortable that my comment remains acceptable. These sorts of statements absolutely impact my perception of the strengths and applicability of the (strongest possible) interpretation of the linked blog post.
Also, I would say that you're comments in this subthread do not assume the strongest possible interpretation of the commenters point. You're coming across as actively hostile, frankly.
So if an article casually threw in some disparaging remarks about Blacks, Asians, or Jews (or, as was the case here, implied the entire problem the article was talking about was disproportionately their fault), they'd be expect to let the accusations stand unchallenged, because they should only address more interesting parts of the article?
If you continue by :" Note that all presidents abuse their power and the issue is more about the unearned powers presidents have than being Jewish or from the Ivy league" i would find it weird but Ok, wouldn't you?
Taking a piece from a single paragraph, ignoring not only the context, but also the following sentence because it weakens your argument, how would you call that? Do you think it's fair? Do you just like storytelling so much you also lie to yourself?
> Do you just like storytelling so much you also lie to yourself?
Please don't cross into personal swipes, regardless of how another commenter is or you feel they are. That only makes everything worse. Your comment would be fine without that bit.
To be clear: are you suggesting the article is demonizing a specific demographic?
The article says:
> Note that bullying appears to be related to power differentials more than to gender, meaning that the reason why perpetrators are overwhelmingly male is because men disproportionally occupy powerful academic positions.
This seems to be about as demonizing of a demographic as saying “with great power comes great responsibility.” Tenured professors may not have mutant superpowers, but they do have tenured superpowers, and some of them abuse these superpowers. In my personal experience, there is no evidence to suggest that the perpetrators are especially correlated with any particular demographic other than being people who are able to do the specific problematic things they do. The perpetrators who abuse those they advise [0] are people who advise other people. There is no shortage of examples of cis, straight, white, able, male, etc people in academia harassing others who are every bit as cis, straight, etc as they are. There are, of course, also examples of males with power harassing females with less power and many other combinations.
And there are many, many examples of people harassing other people in ways that were seen as normal and even expected in an earlier era. Some of the perpetrators here genuinely do not realize that they’re doing anything wrong, and some of the victims may also not feel that they are being wronged. There are huge gray areas here! One thing that society could do a lot better is to realize that many of these perpetrators are not bad people, that they should not be vilified or canceled, but that they should learn to do better in the future.
So, while I’m sure there is a whole host of problematic and maybe even “woke” literature that is over-the-top on demonizing a demographic, I don’t think this article is it.
[0] “Advise” here is a term of art. There are academic advisors and research advisors who have very specific powers over those they advise that, in general, are only vaguely related to the common meaning of giving advice.
That sounds rather Euro-centric. Non-majority-white countries are also heavily represented in academia - China, India (and most of Asia, really), and the Middle East pop to mind - whites don't enjoy "intersectional privilege" there.
In fact, at most scientific conferences, Antarctica is usually the only continent not represented, so it's doubly unusual for academics to suddenly become so blinkered.
Blue politics believes they own diversity, but lack the knowledge of different cultures and backgrounds to understand that western liberalism is not the default position of the world.
The same as red politics it's designed to be a "you're X so your reasons and facts don't matter.".
Unfortunately universities are filled with warm bodies and students that cannot survive in the private sector. Therefore they need tax funding to get paid to do research. Grants are based on what's politically popular, and so here we are.
An easy way to resolve this will be to remove federal student loans. They're predatory and cause students to spend their lives in an echo chamber of psuedo science at tax payer expense.
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with bullying in academic research labs, where no amount of "ninjitsu" is going to solve the problem that your abusive PI exerts enormous control over the trajectory of your career, which will depend in some significant way on the recommendation they're willing to provide for your next position.
It's even worse when there's some sort of immigration situation involved, as in, your PI can fire you anytime and then you go back to whatever hellhole you managed to get out through your work and dedication over the years.
The power imbalance between professors and students in that situation is abysmally huge. The things they do to students are unbelievable until you see them happening (e.g. PIs asking for sexual favors, neglecting their students, humiliating them, making them work on stuff they're not supposed to, and the list goes on and on).
I went through a horrible experience myself, where my daughter got kidnapped by some staff from KAUST (they played the "you are in a remote country with no laws, we can do whatever we want to you"-card). It led me to leave academia for good; I'm actually doing much better now in the industry but it was a very traumatic experience and it saddens me to think about how many people are still being abused in this context by assholes like that.
I am more than willing to work on something to put an end to this, if any of you in this thread are interested, shoot me an email (check profile), it's starting small but it's getting off the ground now :).
I'm in the process of setting up a blog to talk about that (and other cases like mine), I am also bootstrapping a non-profit to help students in distress.
As soon as these things are ready, I'll happily share them with the community.
I think two changes would contribute a lot to fight harassment in academia:
I - Ban letters of recommendation as admission/hiring criteria;
II - If there's a strong disagreement between student/advisor, causing them part ways, by default should be assumed the student has the rights to carry the research on with another advisor.
> If there's a strong disagreement between student/advisor, causing them part ways, by default should be assumed the student has the rights to carry the research on with another advisor.
Barring particular grant/funding terms, is there anything that stops this from happening today?
Graduate studies are highly specialized, and the higher the level and the later the student is in their career, the more specific it gets. Often, the specificity becomes so narrow that the only other PI working on anything similar could be more than 2000 miles away.
I hope this doesn't sound horribly ignorant as I am not well versed in academia. Couldn't students form some kind of union organization and pool their efforts to get proper representation?
It seems to me that to combat abuse is for every student in every school to stand together. Create an organization that supports mental health of students and staffs lawyers, ect.
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.