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The core issue of academic misconduct is the 1:1 relationship between PhD candidate and mentor. The near absolute power asymmetry makes the PhD candidate near t

• raverbashing 3y ago
  Not only the mentor, but the whole academic system Thanks but no thank
• neonsunset 3y ago
  What does it have to do with “paternalism”?
  • jpmoral 3y ago
    paternalism the policy or practice on the part of people in authority of restricting the freedom and responsibilities of those subordinate to or otherwise dependent on them in their supposed interest.
    • nelblu 3y ago
      Thank you! I didn't know this meaning of the term. I always heard it as being used to describe a male dominated culture.
      • jpmoral 3y ago
        Maybe you're thinking of 'patriarchy'?
  • shikshake 3y ago
    The entire relationship between an advisor and the the candidate is paternalistic, the advisor holds so much control over the student’s future. I’m glad I quit in hindsight.
• roenxi 3y ago
  The academic system is to preserve a very specific culture that happened to be really good at uncovering the truth. You can tell that because otherwise none of the rigmarole around degrees makes a lot of sense. The only way I know of to preserve cultures is a really lopsided teacher-student relation where the teacher has absurd amounts of power. Otherwise the culture won't be preserved. There is this odd tension between academics and society where there was this system that was never designed for it is being treated like some sort of vocational certification system. It'll be a pity if academic culture gets destroyed on the way through. Anyway, TLDR; I agree that the academic system is archaic and paternalistic but if that is a problem people should expect to go build a new system. Preserving a culture is going to get archaic in less than a generation.
  • agubelu 3y ago
    > but if that is a problem people should expect to go build a new system Imagine you're walking on the street and see a helicopter crashed on a tree. You don't need to be a helicopter mechanic, or aeronautical engineer, or a pilot, to know that the helicopter shouldn't be on that tree. And you definitely don't need to propose new helicopter control methods to apply common sense and conclude that it's a bad thing that the helicopter crashed on the tree and we should try to not do that again in the future.
    • roenxi 3y ago
      Sure, but imagine you go to a university and see a pretty standard mentor-apprentice relationship designed to perpetuate a culture. We don't need to be psychologists to apply common sense and say it is done that way for a good reason and alternative approaches should be trialled in a different system. It would be good to have a better system, but we can develop it without risking the valuable academic culture. You can see how valuable it is because people keep signing up to it despite the archaic nature of its traditions.
• chairhairair 3y ago
  The power dynamic isn’t the inherent problem. Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years. The more central problem is the incentive structure of the academy. Genuine training outcomes cannot be measured by the bureaucracy and therefore don’t matter. Without solving the incentive problem nothing can really be improved. In aggregate the most successful PIs will be the most ruthless blood sucking fraudsters. A few exceptional empathetic geniuses will sneak through on principle, but mostly we’ll continue hobbling along.
  • Epa095 3y ago
    > Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years. Is this meant as a proof that however it's done now is perfect? There are many tweaks one can make to the model to make it less lopsided and still keep the fundamental apprenticeship model. I am willing to bet that if you look at how it's done around the globe there are many ways of doing apprenticeship where the power balance is different, and historically it's probably also been practiced in many different ways.
    • chairhairair 3y ago
      Apprenticeship is simply 1:1 training over some extended period. Of course, it can go well or very badly. Focusing on the structure of that relationship and hoping that more bureaucracy will protect the most vulnerable PhD students from misaligned advisors just doesn’t seem to work in my experience. The fundamental issue is the incentive structure. Without changing it you’ll just drive personal abuse further behind closed doors.
  • Sakos 3y ago
    > Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years. This is such a bizarrely vague statement that it's meaningless. You and I both have zero clue what the environment was like for apprenticeships in these hundreds of years, or how issues like this were resolved. Further, if the system of apprenticeship was historically as abusive as PhDs seem to be today, then I'm not sure we should look to it for guidance. Germany, for example, still uses apprenticeship for many careers. But there are a great many legal protections for Azubis (Auszubildende/apprentices) that protect them and provide avenues for changing companies and reporting issues. They have stronger legal protections than normal workers in some cases. It still isn't perfect and it can still be problematic to handle issues, but there's a system in place.
• jszymborski 3y ago
  Most universities have absolutely zero policy or protocol for changing supervisor. I had to do this and even though everyone involved were exceptionally kind people with the utmost integrity, it was made pretty clear to me that if my old supervisor would have launched an even halfhearted campaign against me (they did not), nobody at the university would have stuck their neck out for some junior grad student. And this was primarily b/c there is no established process. One should be able to: 1. Confidentially state to an ombudsman that you wish to change supervisor 2. Have the ombudsman obtain the consent of the would-be new supervisor to take on the student 3. Have the ombudsman inform the old supervisor that a decision had been made to change supervisor 4. The ombudsman, old, and new supervisors sit down and discuss what projects the student can keep persuing If anyone here is faculty at a university and cares about their grad students, please promote something like this.
  • romwell 3y ago
    I changed supervisors 5 years into my Mathematics PhD program. As in your case, everyone was cordial. But even so, it was immensely difficult, because, as you said, there was no protocol for "breaking up" with the supervisor I was working with. Luckily, he broke up with me when it became apparent that the academic relationship isn't working out, and he saw that I'm ~seeing other people~ attending conferences in a different field.
    • richrichie 3y ago
      I dropped out of PhD altogether.
    • willcipriano 3y ago
      I'd never make it in that world beacuse some guy I'm working with putting all these feelings into this relatively unimportant [0] working relationship freaks me out. It's like when you are growing up and you learn a girl likes you but is just way too in her head about it[1], thinking deeply about a relationship that isn't there, planning for a future with you without your input, makes my skin crawl. [0] In life terms, your PHD advisor isn't going to hold you after your cancer diagnosis for example. Obviously its important for playing the higher ed game. [1]https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/e/ea/Overly_Attached_Girlfriend.jpg/revision/latest https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/e/ea/Overl...
• ywnico 3y ago
  100% agree, this is the crux of the issue. Pretty much everyone I know, myself included, felt used and taken advantage of by their PhD advisors. The combination of complete control over their students (mainly due to being able to decide when/whether they can graduate) and the pressure of tenure and the publishing race makes it no surprise that so many professors slide into abuse. Reporting abuse while still a student is obviously extremely risky, and even reporting it after graduating can cause a career setback by giving up the recommendation letter. I wonder if it would be possible to expand the role of the PhD committee (which is currently pretty much relevant only for the thesis defense) to become a replacement for a single advisor.
  • vibrio 3y ago
    I agree with all you said but am not optimistic about empowering the committee as a universal fix. Power politics in academic departments were worse than any I’ve seen in my subsequent career. My committee was firmly under the thumb of my advisor. Any discussions I had with them about the pi being unreasonable were terse at best, and “we’ll talk in the next meeting when everyone is there” at worst.
  • Qem 3y ago
    > and even reporting it after graduating can cause a career setback by giving up the recommendation letter. Recommendation letters should be dropped as selection means. Leads to extreme subjectivity, unaccountability, and opens the door to abuse.
• swatson741 3y ago
  And adding insult to injury is that the PhD candidate won't even know how bad it is until it's too late.
• titzer 3y ago
  This is an extremely dark take that is certainly not true in most CS and EE programs. Students change advisors all the time and there are plenty of internal mechanisms to report misconduct and blow the whistle. The fact that the student felt bullied and pressured is of course extraordinarily unfortunate, but it has more to do with cultural issues and a particularly abusive and toxic working relationship set up in that research group and maybe institution. Blaming the system is wildly off base.
  • aydyn 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • ywnico 3y ago
    I'm glad to hear that some schools have good internal mechanisms and a nontoxic culture, but unfortunately I suspect this is not the case in general. In my case (a top school in the USA), even with copious and explicit evidence of misconduct, and a history of student complaints against my advisor, whistleblowing was a year-long nightmare during which the administration consistently backed the professor.
• contrarian1234 3y ago
  I talked to my advisor about this when we butted heads and he didn't see it this way at all. I am free to change advisors at any time and there is very little he can do to stop it. And thereby he looses all the time he invested in me. So it's really in his interest to make sure we get along. You just need to find another professor that likes you if you wanna switch. People don't jive with advisors regularly and at least in my department it happens regularly that people jump teams
  • Qem 3y ago
    > And thereby he looses all the time he invested in me. Attribution rules mean you're still likely to need listing your former advisor as co-author, unless you completely scrap your work and pivots to something completely different. So I wouldn't count that as a total loss.