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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 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.

>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.

>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.

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.)

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?

>> 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?

> 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.

I was once told a story by a professor at my undergrad about a new sessional instructor that just arrived at the school. Apparently a couple of years before, this sessional instructor was one of the top PHD students the country. He was going to grad school at one of the most prestigious universities, and his supervisors were the leading authors in their field. He published regularly since undergrad, and was teaching a couple of classes. One day, he found out that his supervisors were faking their results. These results were crucial to a couple massive papers for his supervisors. So he blew the whistle on his supervisors, and the papers got redacted. There were a couple of disciplinary measures for his supervisors, but within a few months they were back at work. This sessional instructor, however, was now blacklisted in his field. His advisors were editors for the top journals, and they had many connections to other researchers. I don't think he ever managed to finish his PHD, but they hired him as a sessional instructor for a couple classes at my school anyway. I think he now sells cars on the side to pay his bills.
I know an ex-postdoc who's promising career was cut short by also identifying and exposing fraud. I suspect it's more common than we think, and it's thoroughly wrong that being honest and professional can ruin your career in a moment. If you find all your research was based on fabricated data, what choice do you have? Expose it, or knowingly continue the fraud and be equally culpable. You're ruined either way.

The deeper problem is the environment which drives people to commit fraud in the first place. These whistleblowers are victims of that.

As someone who left after my PhD due to not having a good publication record, I've seen the nature of the pressure to suceed at all costs to advance in your career. It's brutal. I doubt most start out with bad intentions, but fraud is the ticket to success for a significant minority.

Someone should really make a film about this.

'The Academic'. You know, gritty, rugged. Like 'Godsford Park' but more about the politics of the fields of research. Through in a little bit of nuanced/amgiguous sex scandal as well. Get Ryan Gosling to play the bad guy for once.

There's a reason hearsay isn't accepted in courts because of its unreliability. But this doesn't strike me as potentially true at all. No university I know of would not take intentional academic fraud seriously. Even the mere mention of it would result in a serious investigation at minimum. It is the most alarming of accusations, and if it were found to be true, would utterly and permanently destroy a career.
> “Some students were driven to attempt suicide as a result, others broke down and simply vanished from science.”

It is hard to evaluate how much talent and how much suffering bullying causes. In every company I have been there had been some level of bullying. The result usually is that options were not discussed, people left or get depressed, long non-paid hours produced no real results as work was done in the wrong projects, etc... Bullying in school or politics has even worst consequences.

There is a lot of untapped potential in human society. Bullying has a high toll on society.

Reading that article conjured up some bad memories. I once as a grad student tried out for a big name scientist working at the LHC. The professor was harsh and abrasive, and while he called out bullshit, which was good and great, he also was extremely harsh and toxic in his criticism. I once attending a group meeting where everyone was walking on eggshells to avoid pissing him off. I remember as one of the more senior group members talking faster and faster as the professor tried to ask her whether she had finished some analysis. At that point I decided to leave and do something else, which ended up being the right decision both personally and scientifically (although the prof got promoted, their specific SUSY search ended up being unfruitful, and of course, the LHC didn't find evidence of SUSY).

Especially given the LHC's current negative results for physics beyond SM, is it not surprising few particle physicists are willing to confront the issues regarding SUSY's negative results? How many other leading scientists at CERN are like that and intimidate anyone who would dare to question them?

I guess this post did turn into a sort of a dig at CERN, but I think a more broader point is not only do these toxic people make everyone miserable, but they hamper science too when the bosses are abrasive AND end up being wrong. So, the whole argument of "abrasive => calls out BS => makes them effective managers" like that which was in the discussion about Linus is undermined.

Being a PhD student is basically working 50-60 hours a week for low pay, for a boss who pretty much has absolute power over you.

I've seen it all - scientific misconduct of every kind imaginable, professors impregnating postdocs, professors who regularly make their grad students cry, professors who neglect their teaching, etc. There are no checks and balances. The system often creates monsters.

There were three recent scandals at MPIs a few weeks to months back, the most recent one being: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/she-s-world-s-top-emp...

I'm glad that this new Guardian article highlights that it is a structural problem. When reading up on the MPI cases it seemed as if it was a problem of few labs only. Due to the power imbalance, as a to-be-PhD student you are strongly advised to experience several labs before making a decision where to go. Don't only look at metrics such as reputation. It is incredibly hard to find a good PhD advisor, and intuition trained by good and bad experiences does help.

Similarly bad are people in those labs who don't recognize the behaviour as such because they either have never experienced a non-dysfunctional lab or see benefit in licking upwards (they may hope they can be in the intimidating position one time). Every party enabling this seems to confuse abusiveness with strength and assertiveness. Is it Stockholm syndrome?

The supervisor's perspective is that grant pressure can be very stressful. But as soon as multiple people agree to the point that they file formal complaints the problem can't be the PhD student anymore.

I have still proportionally seen more functional than dysfunctional labs in science though, great labs do exist. I would expect that the problem is much worse in industry than in academia.

It should be noted that MPIs are extremely hierarchical organisations, where basically everything is run by directors who have a lot of freedom. When a director retires, the whole institute has to be reshaped.
> Due to the power imbalance, as a to-be-PhD student you are strongly advised to experience several labs before making a decision where to go.

This isn’t tractable in the UK, where students go straight from the final exams of their undergraduate degree, right into the thesis stage of a PhD.

The twist is the 'crybully' -- someone who bullies others and claims victimhood when confronted. In this way an accusation or counter-accusation of bullying can itself be a form of bullying.
The term "bully" is not helpful in the first place. It's too vague. It used to refer to kids who beat up other kids in school. That's a specific behavior. Modern usage had deteriorated into meaninglessness. It's kinds of ridiculous that the terms is used to refer to adults.

But what you said is essentially valid, except I would state it in even broader terms. Accusations of bullying became an effective way to launch a social attack, either proactively or in retaliation.

This is why you can't solve this by simply instituting punitive rules and committees that "fight bullying". Beyond certain very basic level (you get fired if you punch someone at work, clear cut case) they will get mercilessly abused.

What you really need is to increase autonomy of all participants of the system so people can act in response. No one should be completely in thrall to their boss or adviser. At the very lease people should be able to leave without being harasses and sabotaged at their destination.

I think the term for this is DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.

You see it in cases of physical and emotional abuse, sexual assault, and even substance abuse (most notably from alcoholics)

Majority of bullies claim victimhood when confronted.
This is the norm not the twist.
One peculiarity of the academic system (true to some extent in start-ups) is that people transition from researchers to managers without any real training or evaluation of their proclivity for management. While you may be a spectacular researcher, that does not mean that you have the disposition, skill, or compassion to be an effective leader. Of course, some are naturals and many others get ample experience in labs where there's a hierarchical structure. Still, the utter lack of evaluation and reflection on group dynamics, productivity, etc., strikes me as a real weakness for the way that we currently organize academic research.
It often frustrates me that this is true at universities that have business schools.

I can take an 8-week summer course on polishing my NSF CAREER proposal - I'd kill to be able to do the same for basic management skills (including hiring).

Exactly. It's a huge problem. A promising researcher can go from managing precisely 1 person, to have to handle a team of TA's to run a course, manage Masters and Ph.d. students, effectively working as a manager, with none of the experience or training they would get in industry. There aren't many naturals, there are a few who figure it out over time, and a lot who retreat into bullying just to cover their own inadequacies.
My time in the UK as a postgrad EU foreigner ten years ago was ok and I never witnessed anything shady. The system was built to avoid any sort of public confrontation, this being the norm in the UK: just mind your own business, refer to your direct supervisor, be transparent and you will be fine.
I feel this way at Harvard too... Professors seem only to care about their professional goals and esteem and I will often feel dismissed when I'm not directly serving those goals. I think it's only natural, but I would hope that more awareness about the issue might serve to change the culture.
I think it is endemic across academia.
Career sabotage, IP theft?! That's terrible. If it was a regular job it may be easy to leave or find another one, but doing a degree, especially a PhD, is a serious commitment and a lifestyle change. Outside of this, the bullying behavior is common enough across everywhere ... put a person with serious ego and control issues in a power position and they will end up a tyrant.
The article doesn't talk about IP theft at all. It doesn't even imply taking advantage by superiors. It doesn't explore motives for the abuse at all.
Similar abuses are happening here in Canada too.

They really have to forbid profs names to appear on student papers. It would remove a lot of the incentive.

It's probably the same in canada and the UK, but academic advancement in the US has just as much to do with personal relationship as with merit. How much your professors like you and who they know is essential for how you progress within academia. Beyond recommendation letters, it's your professor's access to the academic network ( lab openings, research opportunities, etc ) and other jealously guarded opportunities. These professors are truly gatekeepers to your success.

"After graduation, Zhang had a hard time finding an academic position. In a 2013 interview with Nautilus magazine, Zhang said he did not get a job after graduation. "During that period it was difficult to find a job in academics. That was a job market problem. Also, my advisor did not write me letters of recommendation." The reason behind this is that Zhang's research pointed out the mistakes made by his advisor Tzuong-Tsieng Moh's previous work. Moh was very unhappy with this and refused to write the job recommendation letter for Zhang.[11] Zhang made this claim again in George Csicsery’s documentary film Counting From Infinity while discussing his difficulties at Purdue and in the years that followed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang

What? The goal of a PhD is to train somebody to be a researcher and collaborator. The best way to do this is to collaborate with them on research. Collaborators deserve authorship.

I understand that many labs are hierarchical with ideas solely handed down from top to bottom, but removing advisor authorship is a big step.

Apropos to nothing, the headline reminded me of Monty Python's Meaning of Life rugby match between the students and the masters.
Aside from the legitimate cases, there's a lot of trash complaints that you get when you lower the bar for accusations...

Every person with a pet grievance, no matter how BS it is, will come out of the woodwork...

Especially when everyone has been raised all emotionally, told they were little geniuses and would achieve everything "they wanted to", and was promised to be the King/Queen of the World just for showing up...

This situation is exasperated by the "everyone deserves to go to university" concept.

Taking the sub-105 IQ set and putting them situations where they are not capable of competing winds up creating unhappiness all around. No doubt some of that dynamic fosters a bullying mindset in professors.

HR managers appearing more concerned about avoiding negative publicity than protecting staff

But this is literally the job of the HR department. That is why Workers need guilds or unions as a counterweight.

This article doesn’t do a good job defining bullying, but the examples they give sound normal to mild compared to the private sector. “Extreme pressure to produce results” sounds more like typical (bad) management than bullying.
"At another internationally renowned laboratory, the pressure was reportedly so extreme people were driven to falsify data rather than incur the wrath of the director."

One difference between private sector (typically) and academia is that if you fake your results in the private sector, it will come out when the product ships and is no good. As we have seen with the reproducibility crisis in many fields of science, the feedback loop is much slower in academia. "Extreme pressure to produce results" is a very imprecise statement, but one issue I worry about is the primary investigator wanting to get someone else to fake his data for him, so he has plausible deniability if it should come to light.

I agree the article is rather imprecise, but I think there is a real problem.

One major difference is it’s a lot easier to move around in the private sector.

If you have a bad experience at company A, you can easily start “fresh” at company B or C. References are relatively pro forma and don’t count for much. Academia, in contrast, runs on reputation. You’ll need a reference—ideally a glowing one—from your PhD advisor to land a postdoc position and fellowships. You’ll need more letters to transition to a faculty job, and even more to keep it. The contents of the letters actually matter too; none of this “she was employed in my lab for the indicated time period” malarkey. This gives a few people incredibly strong influence over your career, especially early on.

Since £9k tuition fees they are the private sector, and very much act like it.
Professors often told me my choice of programming language (JS) or database (MySQL) wasn't real technology but only toys.

Somehow I expected them to be more reflected...

The miscarriage story is really ambivalent. It supposes two extremely contrasting opinions without offering a solution.

So far, it's a case of miscommunication. To blame only the students and subordinate workers for lack of understanding would be one-sided. But the article doesn't offer a nice explanation nor a solution to the exemplary problem. I wouldn't expect either that pregnancy at the work place was a good idea. I am actually rather opposed to it in general, and for more free time for mothers.

By the way: One has to wonder whether the situation was any different at the newspaper producing this article.