19 ms·

Breaking the silence around academic bullying

111 points by larve 4y ago

jwond 4y ago
- tarakat 4y ago
  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.
- tptacek 4y ago
  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.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    If that section has little to do with the content of the article, why include it considering it's obviously inflammatory point?
    - tptacek 4y ago
      The guidelines on this site specifically ask you not to write comments like this: 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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.
      - tarakat 4y ago
        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?
        stonogo 4y ago
        In what world is "these people disproportionately hold positions of power" disparaging? The degree of mental gymnastics must be exhausting.
        tarakat 4y ago
        orwin 4y ago
        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?
  - jwond 4y ago
    - stonogo 4y ago
    - amluto 4y ago
      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.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  The article then immediately goes on to say >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]].
- devwastaken 4y ago
  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.
- larve 4y ago
  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.
  - kodah 4y ago
    > 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.
- deleted 4y ago
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- dang 4y ago
  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) Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? They're designed to avoid the tedious, repetitive flamewars this kind of thing leads to. 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. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=diffs%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
  - jwond 4y ago
    - tptacek 4y ago
      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).
darth_avocado 4y ago
I read the pattern and what is being described, is not exclusive to academia. It is a typical workplace. A few lost jobs and horrible bosses later I can summarize the experience as follows: 1. Bullying is legal. Unless it’s provable that it is based on one of the protected classes. 2. Because it is legal, companies side with the aggressor to deny everything and absolve themselves from liabilities. 3. Bystanders rarely help you. They may show solidarity, but will not step in on official channels. 4. Lawyers are expensive and it’s very hard to pursue any claims. 5. Documentation is very hard because modern workforce is trained on how to not get sued (unless someone is really stupid) 6. Some laws like “two party consent” for recording that is meant to protect privacy, has the unintended consequences of enabling abuse. TLDR; harassment is legal and okay. Workers have limited protections.
- feet 4y ago
  From what I'm aware, two party consent laws usually have exceptions for when a person feels like they are threatened or in danger in some way
- tptacek 4y ago
  It may be significantly worse in research: 1. PIs are under incredible pressure themselves 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.
  - analog31 4y ago
    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.
tptacek 4y ago
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.
- nautilius 4y ago
  Have them ask around about the PI first. 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.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
    This is a very important tip. 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.
- throwaway2294af 4y ago
  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.
Andy_G11 4y ago
- tptacek 4y ago
  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.
  - Qem 4y ago
    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.
    - lumost 4y ago
      > 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?
      - polygamous_bat 4y ago
        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.
    - dr_dshiv 4y ago
      I strongly disagree with 1 and strongly agree with 2.
sombragris 4y ago
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.
- amluto 4y ago
  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.
  - tarakat 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
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- viburnum 4y ago
  What exactly are you put off by?
- ineedasername 4y ago
  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.
dang 4y ago
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.
boredemployee 4y ago
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.
wanderingmind 4y ago
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.
- empyrrhicist 4y ago
  This is highly field dependent.
- deleted 4y ago
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erdos4d 4y ago
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.
ineedasername 4y ago
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”?
- analog31 4y ago
  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.
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- derbOac 4y ago
  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.
guender 4y ago
throwy1234 4y ago
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.
- e40 4y ago
  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. I have no solutions.
nico 4y ago
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. I wonder how they treat their students.
- buildbot 4y ago
  Name names? Shitty people should be at least known to others. Its also literally the antithesis of what a professor, an educator, should be.
- plussed_reader 4y ago
  What good is this anecdote without the name of the snotty elitist professor?
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- bhedgeoser 4y ago
  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.
  - 4y ago
cperciva 4y ago
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.
ninesnines 4y ago
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.
deleted 4y ago
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noobermin 4y ago
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.
Gatsky 4y ago
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.

111 points by larve 4y ago

tarakat 4y ago
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.
tptacek 4y ago
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.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  If that section has little to do with the content of the article, why include it considering it's obviously inflammatory point?
  - tptacek 4y ago
    The guidelines on this site specifically ask you not to write comments like this: 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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.
    - tarakat 4y ago
      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?
      - stonogo 4y ago
        In what world is "these people disproportionately hold positions of power" disparaging? The degree of mental gymnastics must be exhausting.
        tarakat 4y ago
        orwin 4y ago
        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?
- jwond 4y ago
  - stonogo 4y ago
  - amluto 4y ago
    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.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
The article then immediately goes on to say >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]].
devwastaken 4y ago
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.
larve 4y ago
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.
- kodah 4y ago
  > 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.
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dang 4y ago
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) Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? They're designed to avoid the tedious, repetitive flamewars this kind of thing leads to. 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. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=diffs%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- jwond 4y ago
  - tptacek 4y ago
    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).

I read the pattern and what is being described, is not exclusive to academia. It is a typical workplace. A few lost jobs and horrible bosses later I can summarize the experience as follows: 1. Bullying is legal. Unless it’s provable that it is based on one of the protected classes. 2. Because it is legal, companies side with the aggressor to deny everything and absolve themselves from liabilities. 3. Bystanders rarely help you. They may show solidarity, but will not step in on official channels. 4. Lawyers are expensive and it’s very hard to pursue any claims. 5. Documentation is very hard because modern workforce is trained on how to not get sued (unless someone is really stupid) 6. Some laws like “two party consent” for recording that is meant to protect privacy, has the unintended consequences of enabling abuse. TLDR; harassment is legal and okay. Workers have limited protections.

feet 4y ago
From what I'm aware, two party consent laws usually have exceptions for when a person feels like they are threatened or in danger in some way
tptacek 4y ago
It may be significantly worse in research: 1. PIs are under incredible pressure themselves 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.
- analog31 4y ago
  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.

tptacek 4y ago

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.

nautilius 4y ago
Have them ask around about the PI first. 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.
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
  This is a very important tip. 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.
throwaway2294af 4y ago
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.

Andy_G11 4y ago

tptacek 4y ago
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.
- Qem 4y ago
  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.
  - lumost 4y ago
    > 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?
    - polygamous_bat 4y ago
      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.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    I strongly disagree with 1 and strongly agree with 2.

sombragris 4y ago

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.

amluto 4y ago
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.
- tarakat 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
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viburnum 4y ago
What exactly are you put off by?
ineedasername 4y ago
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.

dang 4y ago

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.

boredemployee 4y ago

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.

wanderingmind 4y ago

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.

empyrrhicist 4y ago
This is highly field dependent.
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erdos4d 4y ago

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.

ineedasername 4y ago

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”?

analog31 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
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derbOac 4y ago
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.

guender 4y ago

throwy1234 4y ago

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.

e40 4y ago
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. I have no solutions.

nico 4y ago

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. I wonder how they treat their students.

buildbot 4y ago
Name names? Shitty people should be at least known to others. Its also literally the antithesis of what a professor, an educator, should be.
plussed_reader 4y ago
What good is this anecdote without the name of the snotty elitist professor?
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bhedgeoser 4y ago
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.
- 4y ago

cperciva 4y ago

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.

ninesnines 4y ago

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.

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noobermin 4y ago

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.

Gatsky 4y ago

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.