Those stats are correct. Academia's structures are perfect for an abusive environment, just like the military.
Grad students are effectively chained to an advisor after the first couple years, lest they try and start over (which the department might explicitly prevent by having a mandatory maximum of years before graduating). That advisor has no explicit training in management or preventing sexual harassment or anti-racism. And like all shit in our patriarchical shitty society, many will be shitty and patriarchical and sex pests.
If your advisor does something shitty, what can you do? Generally speaking, you should be able to continue work, change advisors, and be supported as someone harmed by your employer. The advisor should be fired or massively demoted or forced into trainings and barred from having new students depending on the severity. That's what should happen. In reality, students rarely have the options or resources to do this on reasonable timeframes and feel coerced and stuck: sacrifice 3-5 years of work and their degree or keep working under the whims of a piece of shit for at least several more months, possibly until you graduate. This is one reason that grad students unionize, in fact: to make this less shitty.
Academia makes these situations inevitable by treating grad school like an apprenticeship and providing no structures for accountability by the workers. It even promotes these situations by protecting shitty professors, particularly when they bring in big grants. And the entire system makes these situations more likely because every step of the way, empathetic and minoritized people are filtered out by the existing shitty patriarchical people in charge. Even worse, just like in business, there is a reward for cutthroat and antisocial behavior, and I'm not surprised that so many profs that I interacted with only cared about publishing and prestige and bringing in gobs of cash to follow their intellectual interests, and barely cared at all about ensuring their students' success.
Disregard for the labor and humanity of grad students is baked into the system at the economic level as well. Either unpaid or poorly paid, grad students are hired based on the promise of getting a PhD and then m, presumably, a professorship, since that's the only thing they train you how to do (research, teaching, presentations, publishing, grant writing). But there aren't enough slots at every next level of the pipeline to professor. So they underpay based on a promise that won't be fulfilled and everything is dependent on the whims of one jerk (advisor), so it's unsurprising that their precarious position is further exploited.
Grad school should be ended until we figure out what the fuck is going on.
Edit: fun fact: I know of a professor who was censured for fucking up his student's prospects by abandoning them to go work on a side project. There were other problematic aspects to him as well. The university said, "okay, no more students for you for 3 years". 1 year after being censured, he was elected chair of the department.
1 year after being censured, he was elected chair of the department.
incredible. by default i don't trust anyone at chair level or above. the higher up they are, the more certain it is they are a purely opportunistic pod person / cannibal.
full disclosure, i work in the academy, though in a public service position rather than research or education. i am staff and my position is to launder the reputation of the institution to the community by fulfilling the institutions promises. naturally, my work/salary receives no monetary support from the university and i have to find external grants.
but what really chaps my ass is that, despite my decades of experience in the field, my BSc., my M.S., my graduate certificates, my management training and experience in the sector, my peer reviewed research publications, and my nationally awarded creative outreach work experience in multiple support disciplines, the institution and faculty treat me like i'm an unskilled peon because i don't have some bullshit PhD in some obscure garbage. whereas some fuckup faildouche who stuck around long enough that their committee gave them a phd to go away is automatically assumed to be a great manager and great at budgeting projects, worthy of a multiyear contract with hard funding for their own support staff, and, of course, significantly more money and job security. we're talking people under 40 who can't open a fucking pdf, but get to pretend like such basic job skills aren't necessary for them because they live in a palace of the mind. so they chew up and spit out underpaid staff to learn and do all the shit they can't be bothered to figure out.
one would imagine that, with the oversupply of graduate degrees compared to tenure tracked positions and the absolute glacial pageantry of hiring someone into a TT position, that they might be able to weed out the most useless assholes. but no. it's a coin toss as to whether they get a normal person or a toxic smooth brain.
Absolutely, and thank you for sharing your experience. It tracks perfectly with my understanding and experiences as well.
Also, a great point about staff, including soft money faculty / staff, being more competent than so many tenure-track folks but getting screwed by prestige shit. Universities are deeply corrupted by prestige-chasing, itself definitely tied up in the market to attract "the best" (often: the richest) students so that they can further finance a bunch of shit like big fancy buildings nobody asked for.
Those stats are correct. Academia's structures are perfect for an abusive environment, just like the military.
Grad students are effectively chained to an advisor after the first couple years, lest they try and start over (which the department might explicitly prevent by having a mandatory maximum of years before graduating). That advisor has no explicit training in management or preventing sexual harassment or anti-racism. And like all shit in our patriarchical shitty society, many will be shitty and patriarchical and sex pests.
If your advisor does something shitty, what can you do? Generally speaking, you should be able to continue work, change advisors, and be supported as someone harmed by your employer. The advisor should be fired or massively demoted or forced into trainings and barred from having new students depending on the severity. That's what should happen. In reality, students rarely have the options or resources to do this on reasonable timeframes and feel coerced and stuck: sacrifice 3-5 years of work and their degree or keep working under the whims of a piece of shit for at least several more months, possibly until you graduate. This is one reason that grad students unionize, in fact: to make this less shitty.
Academia makes these situations inevitable by treating grad school like an apprenticeship and providing no structures for accountability by the workers. It even promotes these situations by protecting shitty professors, particularly when they bring in big grants. And the entire system makes these situations more likely because every step of the way, empathetic and minoritized people are filtered out by the existing shitty patriarchical people in charge. Even worse, just like in business, there is a reward for cutthroat and antisocial behavior, and I'm not surprised that so many profs that I interacted with only cared about publishing and prestige and bringing in gobs of cash to follow their intellectual interests, and barely cared at all about ensuring their students' success.
Disregard for the labor and humanity of grad students is baked into the system at the economic level as well. Either unpaid or poorly paid, grad students are hired based on the promise of getting a PhD and then m, presumably, a professorship, since that's the only thing they train you how to do (research, teaching, presentations, publishing, grant writing). But there aren't enough slots at every next level of the pipeline to professor. So they underpay based on a promise that won't be fulfilled and everything is dependent on the whims of one jerk (advisor), so it's unsurprising that their precarious position is further exploited.
Grad school should be ended until we figure out what the fuck is going on.
Edit: fun fact: I know of a professor who was censured for fucking up his student's prospects by abandoning them to go work on a side project. There were other problematic aspects to him as well. The university said, "okay, no more students for you for 3 years". 1 year after being censured, he was elected chair of the department.
incredible. by default i don't trust anyone at chair level or above. the higher up they are, the more certain it is they are a purely opportunistic pod person / cannibal.
full disclosure, i work in the academy, though in a public service position rather than research or education. i am staff and my position is to launder the reputation of the institution to the community by fulfilling the institutions promises. naturally, my work/salary receives no monetary support from the university and i have to find external grants.
but what really chaps my ass is that, despite my decades of experience in the field, my BSc., my M.S., my graduate certificates, my management training and experience in the sector, my peer reviewed research publications, and my nationally awarded creative outreach work experience in multiple support disciplines, the institution and faculty treat me like i'm an unskilled peon because i don't have some bullshit PhD in some obscure garbage. whereas some fuckup faildouche who stuck around long enough that their committee gave them a phd to go away is automatically assumed to be a great manager and great at budgeting projects, worthy of a multiyear contract with hard funding for their own support staff, and, of course, significantly more money and job security. we're talking people under 40 who can't open a fucking pdf, but get to pretend like such basic job skills aren't necessary for them because they live in a palace of the mind. so they chew up and spit out underpaid staff to learn and do all the shit they can't be bothered to figure out.
one would imagine that, with the oversupply of graduate degrees compared to tenure tracked positions and the absolute glacial pageantry of hiring someone into a TT position, that they might be able to weed out the most useless assholes. but no. it's a coin toss as to whether they get a normal person or a toxic smooth brain.
Absolutely, and thank you for sharing your experience. It tracks perfectly with my understanding and experiences as well.
Also, a great point about staff, including soft money faculty / staff, being more competent than so many tenure-track folks but getting screwed by prestige shit. Universities are deeply corrupted by prestige-chasing, itself definitely tied up in the market to attract "the best" (often: the richest) students so that they can further finance a bunch of shit like big fancy buildings nobody asked for.