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At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem. You know that The Guardian wil

At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem. You know that The Guardian will present anything they can as an issue that requires institutional change. That's just what they do these say. If you're willing to engage in willful confirmation bias, you can take any large institution and find enough disgruntled people to to build a "case". I see nothing in this article about the authors trying to disprove their own hypothesis. "The Guardian sent freedom of information requests to 135 universities. Responses revealed a total of 294 complaints against academics at 55 institutions. A further 30 universities reported 337 complaints against all staff – academic and non-academic. Across 105 universities, at least 184 staff have been disciplined and 32 dismissed for bullying since 2013." Compared to the corporate world, that sounds incredibly low, actually. Of course, these days any official statistic with inconveniently "good" numbers can be dismissed on the grounds that there are systematic attempts to cover things up and institutional pressure not to report incidents. But that in itself is often a form of confirmation bias.

throwaway0255 8y ago
> At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem. I have a similar feeling about all articles from all sources (that I’m aware of) in journalism. Every time an article interests me enough to dig deeper into the subject, I find the original article was inaccurate and biased, and frequently misrepresents small but significant details to fit a narrative in a way that can’t have been a mistake. The way I consume news these days isn’t the greatest, but it’s the best I can do: I only read headlines. If a claim in the headline would cause the source major legal issues if untrue, I mostly trust that the event occurred, but not necessarily how they say it did. I ignore all other claims in headlines, and I don’t read the body of the article, because it’s usually just a thinly-veiled opinion piece by a non-expert, or worse, the dramatic prose of a journalist who seems to think their writing is the story. If there’s an event in a headline that seems to have actually happened, and it’s relevant to my interests, I research it independently.
- jackfoxy 8y ago
  I think the polite term for this is advocacy journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism I too have descended to being pretty much only a headline reader, partly because of the prevalence of advocacy journalism and partly from the shear volume of content of all types which assaults me.
  - throwaway0255 8y ago
    So "advocacy journalism" is basically a form of journalism wherein all the statements are technically factual, but the journalists intentionally and transparently ignore all other ethics and standards of journalism. I understand why this will outcompete real journalism, but I don't see how it serves anyone. It also saddens me that this practice has attained a degree of general acceptance that it's referred to as a "genre of journalism." I would refer to it as a more insidious and enduring form of propaganda.
- thwy12321 8y ago
  This is exactly what I do as well, but I dont have such a well developed theory of it. I do usually trust the comments section, not to expose the truth in the article, but to give me some idea about which way the bias may have been. Often times one or two commenters out of 500 or so will write something that could actually take the place of the article.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  Have you considered paying for news? If they are free, then you’re the product being sold. Aside from that, your approach makes little sense. You read headlines and comments, but headlines are notoriously bad, especially on free news, and comments are a jungle. I mean, anyone could tell you anything and not ever be held accountable, unlike actual media, but you’d rather spend time on anarchy, uninformed opinions and outright lies? Furthermore looking at this particular article, even if we say the numbers are lower than they are in the private sector, does that mean there isn’t a problem? We’re talking about people in power who are bullying their juniors who are trying to do research that may alter human history. Even if the numbers are lower than somewhere else, that’s still not good.
montalbano 8y ago
I appreciate your skepticism and would generally agree. However, in this case I believe the article is making a valid point. (Based on experiences of many friends across various universities, and my own experience.) Of course in some corporations bullying will be worse, but in many it will be nowhere near as bad. This is because there is much less money in academia generally that people have to compete for, and many desperately seek vain prestige (far more so than in industry.)
- Animats 8y ago
  "Academic politics is so vicious because the stakes are so low" - Henry Kissinger
  - jimhefferon 8y ago
    https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/
JohnnyGan 8y ago
>At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem. I don't think that the question of whether there is an institutional problem necessitates large numbers of incidence. For example, you could say that 99.99% of people don't get murdered, so if the police don't investigate murders, it's no big deal, after all it's just 0.01% of the population. I think the main question is: can the system adequately deal with incidences if they do happen. This is where I think the academic system is failing. Unlike the corporate world, PHD students are intrinsically tied to their supervisors. In an abusive corporate relationship, workers have the option to quit. However, that is often a much much harder option in academia. "Quitting" often means taking a serious hit to your reputation, and if you manage to find a new supervisor, it's likely that it will be hard to publish in the same field as your old supervisor. If you can't find a new supervisor, and have to fail out of the program, it's unlikely that you'll get the chance to work in that field again. For programs like Clinical Psychology, if you do not achieve a PHD, then the previous ~6 years of schooling will not count for anything. As someone who works in academia, but outside of the Grad School track, the power disparity between PHD's and their supervisors has always surprised me. In undergrad, I worked under a professor whose grad students took an absurdly long time to graduate. By absurdly long, for a Masters and PHD one student took 12+ years, and another took 10+ years. At first I thought it was personal issues that caused the delay. However, after working with him for a while, I could see how that would happen. Projects were started without any foresight. He knew close to nothing about any of the methods his students were using, so couldn't understand any of the requirements. Progress on any project would be sluggish, and if you didn't find results, excuses were made so you'd have to run analyses again with different parameters. It was fine for me, because it was just a part time job, and I got paid decently. If I were a grad student, however, this would have been a complete nightmare. There should be some sort of oversight over researchers and academics. Although we like to think scientists are stoic and noble in their search for knowledge, many are petty, vindictive and sometimes just clueless. Good grant writers/paper publishers don't necessarily make good managers.
- JohnnyGan 8y ago
  edit: TLDR - Imagine if you could negotiate a contract for 4 years and get paid $x, but your employer could arbitrarily decide to keep you for 8 years and still pay you $x. Even if the majority of employers are good and don't choose to do this, what kind of relationship does that create between you and your employer?
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
184 staff disciplined and 32 dismissed are not low numbers. Each case represents a formal investigation, because no one is going to be disciplined or dismissed without evidence - that way lies an unfair dismissal claim, and perhaps also damages for libel. Considering you seem to agree that institutional pressure is likely to lead to at least some coverups, how many cases would you want to see before you agree there's a problem?
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  That's one discipline case per institution roughly isn't it? Some of these universities employees many thousands of people. I don't think anyone thinks that any level of bullying isn't a problem, but it's hard to see it as a wide-spread institutional problem when it's just one person per university.
- walshemj 8y ago
  Over a 5 year period and over a large number of universities it is as some one has said a large company would have many more grievance cases and dismissal's. This is from direct experience in the UK
Barrin92 8y ago
>Compared to the corporate world, that sounds incredibly low, actually. This isn't surprising given that seniority and hierarchy in academics, as well as a general culture of conformity if one wants to advance their career is even more pronounced than in some of the worst corporate bureaucracies you can come across in the wild. I don't have any personal experience with the UK academic system, but having experienced academic work for quite some time I have absolutely no doubt that it's true and I think you can draw a direct line between the culture present in academia and bullying without attacking the Guardian for being biased. Stewardship, patronage, the extreme degrees of networking and personal relationships way too often place people in unbalanced dependency relationships that foster abuse of one sort or the other. It's no accident that many people have pointed to universities as one of the places were 'Girardian terror' is especially prevalent.
haaen 8y ago
You're so right about The Guardian. The opinion and political sections are full of politically correct, anti tech, anti freedom, pro SJWGLBT, anti common sense, pro decadence and anti wealth articles. Elon Musk wrote to the Guardian that it's 'the most insufferable newspaper in the world'. He is right.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > pro decadence and anti wealth Pro-decadence but also anti-wealth? Do you mean their philosophy is to spend as much money from their income on luxuries as they can in order to pass money down into the economy or something?
- walshemj 8y ago
  You've haven't read Simon Jenkins then the GMG's kitten strangler.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> Compared to the corporate world, that sounds incredibly low, actually. And it's even lower compared to prisons. And that tells us, what? It's OK to have some bullying in academia, as long as there's more bullying elsewhere?

throwaway0255 8y ago

> At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem. I have a similar feeling about all articles from all sources (that I’m aware of) in journalism. Every time an article interests me enough to dig deeper into the subject, I find the original article was inaccurate and biased, and frequently misrepresents small but significant details to fit a narrative in a way that can’t have been a mistake. The way I consume news these days isn’t the greatest, but it’s the best I can do: I only read headlines. If a claim in the headline would cause the source major legal issues if untrue, I mostly trust that the event occurred, but not necessarily how they say it did. I ignore all other claims in headlines, and I don’t read the body of the article, because it’s usually just a thinly-veiled opinion piece by a non-expert, or worse, the dramatic prose of a journalist who seems to think their writing is the story. If there’s an event in a headline that seems to have actually happened, and it’s relevant to my interests, I research it independently.

jackfoxy 8y ago
I think the polite term for this is advocacy journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism I too have descended to being pretty much only a headline reader, partly because of the prevalence of advocacy journalism and partly from the shear volume of content of all types which assaults me.
- throwaway0255 8y ago
  So "advocacy journalism" is basically a form of journalism wherein all the statements are technically factual, but the journalists intentionally and transparently ignore all other ethics and standards of journalism. I understand why this will outcompete real journalism, but I don't see how it serves anyone. It also saddens me that this practice has attained a degree of general acceptance that it's referred to as a "genre of journalism." I would refer to it as a more insidious and enduring form of propaganda.
thwy12321 8y ago
This is exactly what I do as well, but I dont have such a well developed theory of it. I do usually trust the comments section, not to expose the truth in the article, but to give me some idea about which way the bias may have been. Often times one or two commenters out of 500 or so will write something that could actually take the place of the article.
eksemplar 8y ago
Have you considered paying for news? If they are free, then you’re the product being sold. Aside from that, your approach makes little sense. You read headlines and comments, but headlines are notoriously bad, especially on free news, and comments are a jungle. I mean, anyone could tell you anything and not ever be held accountable, unlike actual media, but you’d rather spend time on anarchy, uninformed opinions and outright lies? Furthermore looking at this particular article, even if we say the numbers are lower than they are in the private sector, does that mean there isn’t a problem? We’re talking about people in power who are bullying their juniors who are trying to do research that may alter human history. Even if the numbers are lower than somewhere else, that’s still not good.

montalbano 8y ago

I appreciate your skepticism and would generally agree. However, in this case I believe the article is making a valid point. (Based on experiences of many friends across various universities, and my own experience.) Of course in some corporations bullying will be worse, but in many it will be nowhere near as bad. This is because there is much less money in academia generally that people have to compete for, and many desperately seek vain prestige (far more so than in industry.)

Animats 8y ago
"Academic politics is so vicious because the stakes are so low" - Henry Kissinger
- jimhefferon 8y ago
  https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/

JohnnyGan 8y ago

>At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem. I don't think that the question of whether there is an institutional problem necessitates large numbers of incidence. For example, you could say that 99.99% of people don't get murdered, so if the police don't investigate murders, it's no big deal, after all it's just 0.01% of the population. I think the main question is: can the system adequately deal with incidences if they do happen. This is where I think the academic system is failing. Unlike the corporate world, PHD students are intrinsically tied to their supervisors. In an abusive corporate relationship, workers have the option to quit. However, that is often a much much harder option in academia. "Quitting" often means taking a serious hit to your reputation, and if you manage to find a new supervisor, it's likely that it will be hard to publish in the same field as your old supervisor. If you can't find a new supervisor, and have to fail out of the program, it's unlikely that you'll get the chance to work in that field again. For programs like Clinical Psychology, if you do not achieve a PHD, then the previous ~6 years of schooling will not count for anything. As someone who works in academia, but outside of the Grad School track, the power disparity between PHD's and their supervisors has always surprised me. In undergrad, I worked under a professor whose grad students took an absurdly long time to graduate. By absurdly long, for a Masters and PHD one student took 12+ years, and another took 10+ years. At first I thought it was personal issues that caused the delay. However, after working with him for a while, I could see how that would happen. Projects were started without any foresight. He knew close to nothing about any of the methods his students were using, so couldn't understand any of the requirements. Progress on any project would be sluggish, and if you didn't find results, excuses were made so you'd have to run analyses again with different parameters. It was fine for me, because it was just a part time job, and I got paid decently. If I were a grad student, however, this would have been a complete nightmare. There should be some sort of oversight over researchers and academics. Although we like to think scientists are stoic and noble in their search for knowledge, many are petty, vindictive and sometimes just clueless. Good grant writers/paper publishers don't necessarily make good managers.

JohnnyGan 8y ago
edit: TLDR - Imagine if you could negotiate a contract for 4 years and get paid $x, but your employer could arbitrarily decide to keep you for 8 years and still pay you $x. Even if the majority of employers are good and don't choose to do this, what kind of relationship does that create between you and your employer?

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

184 staff disciplined and 32 dismissed are not low numbers. Each case represents a formal investigation, because no one is going to be disciplined or dismissed without evidence - that way lies an unfair dismissal claim, and perhaps also damages for libel. Considering you seem to agree that institutional pressure is likely to lead to at least some coverups, how many cases would you want to see before you agree there's a problem?

chrisseaton 8y ago
That's one discipline case per institution roughly isn't it? Some of these universities employees many thousands of people. I don't think anyone thinks that any level of bullying isn't a problem, but it's hard to see it as a wide-spread institutional problem when it's just one person per university.
walshemj 8y ago
Over a 5 year period and over a large number of universities it is as some one has said a large company would have many more grievance cases and dismissal's. This is from direct experience in the UK

Barrin92 8y ago

>Compared to the corporate world, that sounds incredibly low, actually. This isn't surprising given that seniority and hierarchy in academics, as well as a general culture of conformity if one wants to advance their career is even more pronounced than in some of the worst corporate bureaucracies you can come across in the wild. I don't have any personal experience with the UK academic system, but having experienced academic work for quite some time I have absolutely no doubt that it's true and I think you can draw a direct line between the culture present in academia and bullying without attacking the Guardian for being biased. Stewardship, patronage, the extreme degrees of networking and personal relationships way too often place people in unbalanced dependency relationships that foster abuse of one sort or the other. It's no accident that many people have pointed to universities as one of the places were 'Girardian terror' is especially prevalent.

haaen 8y ago

You're so right about The Guardian. The opinion and political sections are full of politically correct, anti tech, anti freedom, pro SJWGLBT, anti common sense, pro decadence and anti wealth articles. Elon Musk wrote to the Guardian that it's 'the most insufferable newspaper in the world'. He is right.

chrisseaton 8y ago
> pro decadence and anti wealth Pro-decadence but also anti-wealth? Do you mean their philosophy is to spend as much money from their income on luxuries as they can in order to pass money down into the economy or something?
walshemj 8y ago
You've haven't read Simon Jenkins then the GMG's kitten strangler.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> Compared to the corporate world, that sounds incredibly low, actually. And it's even lower compared to prisons. And that tells us, what? It's OK to have some bullying in academia, as long as there's more bullying elsewhere?