I agree the individual differences are larger than the categorical differences. From my time in grad school, I don't mind working at 3 am (and most other grad

I agree the individual differences are larger than the categorical differences. From my time in grad school, I don't mind working at 3 am (and most other grad students I knew, at least without families, didn't mind that either). The problem was the abusive nastiness. You're presuming student and faculty interests are otherwise aligned. They're not. The most successful paths to academic success I've seen include: * Spending time raising money, hiring a ton of students, and getting a few good publications by law of large numbers * Attaching students to many projects, and when one shows promise, sprinting to do most of the work to claim first authorship on a breakthrough result (at the expense of collaborators), and neglecting the rest of the projects / students (at the expense of the rest of the lab). * ... and so on. There is also a question of who becomes associated with the breakthrough: the student or the advisor? Yes, the first/last author split in publication helps, but at the end of the day, someone goes out and gives talks, media interviews, etc. I've seen plenty of student s-ed because the faculty member (who often did minimal work) takes credit for their work. And there are megaprojects, where there's one nice result at the end, and a half-dozen graduate students who work on it doing menial engineering/lab work. Labs like that end up with zero students going for faculty (or other highly-competitive) jobs. In other words, aside from baking data, most tactics to academic success involve carefully optimizing the odds, and burning a number of students and/or collaborators to have tenure-granting results associated with the faculty member. As a footnote, back in the day, I was blessed with a terrific advisor, but the MAJORITY of faculty at MIT are abusive douche bags, and the system is set up entirely to protect them. And most students I know who left MIT into faculty slots did that by cheating at least a little bit, whether through credit theft, baking research results, or otherwise. Most MIT grad students don't cheat, mind you, but most highly successful ones do (and yes, I am in a position where I've seen many of these case play out at MIT, and a few at other institutions). Those go into tenure-track positions, and abuse their students the same way they were abused. Former students also have a better viewpoint. Many people don't realize they were abused until years later, when they can look back on an experience objectively. Among my cohort, the number of people who would say they were abused today are much greater than the number of people who would have said it at the time.