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.
