I think there’s a default assumption in academia that students bring the motivation and perspiration to their work. The advisor doesn’t pull them through the program; the student pushes and the advisor guides.
My spouse and several friends have PhDs and I do not, so my exposure is secondhand, but when I hear that circle of friends/friends-of-friends complaining about poor advisors, I often hear details about the grad student’s behaviors and expectations that make me think that situation wouldn’t turn into a raging success in industry either, but would result in “My manager isn’t promoting me, therefore they are a bad manager.”
So... former tenured professor here. I've seen both sides of the coin. I've had grad students who I felt like pulling my hair out about because they expected you to guide them through every single little thing. They were very good at following instructions to a T, but they had to have every single instruction, and if you didn't provide it, they blamed you for not providing enough guidance.
On the other side of things, I've seen extremely abusive colleagues, with recurring problems with grad students (and faculty). All sorts of abuse, from just outright aggression, including physical aggression, to coercion into academic fraud, you name it. In a couple of cases things have gotten attention but most of the time nothing happens, or the student just eventually exits the program without a degree because they've had enough.
I agree with others that the primary difference is that it seems like in the nonacademic world people have more flexibility to move elsewhere. There's a lot of fuzzy overlap between the academic and nonacademic world, but at the moment even in the best circumstances academics is rife with corruption and problems, depending on what field you're in. When you erect a pyramid scheme and come to institutionally depend on it, you're bound to run into problems.
>The advisor doesn’t pull them through the program; the student pushes and the advisor guides.
I've got a PhD, as does my spouse. I think this gives too much credit to the advisors. Some of them make you push a lot harder than others. Some actively derail your life.
Sometimes each person has a totally different experience with a advisor than others because the advisor treats people differently.
When I was in grad school, one of the rockstar professors had a clear bias towards a particular gender and ethnicity. He had a formal complaint filed against him that sucked up a lot of the students time, but basically resulted in his life getting easier (they said he would be relived from all teaching duties for a year).
My advisor was a perfect fit for my research interests. He was an amazing teacher. But he was basically anti-social and never had any desire to do any of the networking stuff other professors did for their students. The networking stuff is really important for your career if you want to stay in academia.
Some advisors would almost drag their students to conferences and introduce them to other researchers, professors, etc. My advisor just shrugged his shoulders and had no interest.
>I often hear details about the grad student’s behaviors and expectations that make me think that situation wouldn’t turn into a raging success in industry either, but would result in “My manager isn’t promoting me, therefore they are a bad manager.”
I think the difference is that in industry you can more easily change jobs and switch to a manager that is aligned with your personality. In Academia, there's typically only 1 or 2 advisors who are a fit. The only choice is to switch schools, which is a lot more difficult than changing jobs.
Current PhD in cryptography here, and I’ve observed similar dynamics in my lab—some profs are entrepreneurial, some have a “system” for all their students to follow, and some are classic cloistered academic types interested only in their research.
I’m also at least 10 years older than any other student in the lab, and I can see how someone in their 20s who hasn’t had a lot of jobs/bosses might have certain expectations about an advisor and be highly disappointed or even feel wronged.
Some people fail to grasp the idea that the world does not always work surround them. And they have a very different definition of "abuse" than others, which basically goes to: you are abusing me if you don't actively take care of my emotions. For those people, it is much easier to find "abuses".
Academic supervisors are not your personal friends. They have no interest in observing your emotions, because they have a millions other things to take care of. Negative comments about you is very likely based on their subjective assessment of you. And the reason they don't talk about those to you and give you advise, is probably that you have a history of failing to accept negative assessments. Your have "needs" to finish your degree and progress to your next career stage doesn't mean you are qualified for advancing, nor you are entitled of help from your supervisors who may not be satisfied with your work or talent.
I think it is also part of fault on the cultural. Teachers / advisors just can't directly tell you how bad you are. This creates generation of students are only used to positive comments and can't take negative comments.
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Another point to add: because of the political environment and MeToo movement and such, it becomes more dangerous for academic supervisors to develop personal relationship with their graduate students. Especially those graduate students who need emotional support, can appear to be way more dangerous to get involved with than other students. And nerdy professors' confidence of appropriately handling relationship with those students could be zero. So the potential risk of taking private meetings to talk with you through things is just way too high to overlook.
> They have no interest in observing your emotions, because they have a millions other things to take care of.
This is probably the only falsifiable part I could find from your comment as the rest seems to pertain to unfalsifiable speculation about "kids these days" -- so with that said, I'll say that academic supervisors and especially business managers /do/ have a very specific interest in observing your emotions if they're remotely competent.
Human personnel burnout and underperformance risk is extraordinarily expensive. One approach to risk management is to simply delegate it to the subordinate, and if anything goes wrong, fire that subordinate. Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work very well in practice. For one, the agency to actually address the root culprit of burnout and/or underperformance usually lies disproportionately with leadership. It has to, otherwise, hierarchical human organizations could never logistically scale.
But what that means is that you're flat out wrong. Not only do business managers have a vested interest in managing the emotions of their subordinates, but it's ostensibly one of their strongest interests because it's one of their most dangerous risks. You realize this when you begin to accrue experience either being bitten by this first hand, or watching your peers become bitten by this. And you know the old saying. Once bitten, twice shy.
The reason you don’t have personal relationships with students is not because of MeToo or the current political environment, it’s because it’s inappropriate, and always has been. And please don’t tell me it’s because of nerdy academics not being able to handle it.
If you find yourself meeting with a single student anywhere but the office, discussing things that aren’t related to work, for any significant amount of time, then you need to at least carefully examine the situation. Save that for your friends and family.
Good managers know that developing personal relationships with your team members is not how you lead a team.
What you said is definitely a new social norm because of the modern political environment. In the old days, it is perfectly fine for advisors to develop personal friendship with their favorite students.
This is a bit sad though, one of the Professors at my University used to invite even his undergraduate tutor group to his house for dinner with his family to get to know them better.
It was a bit unusual but it seemed to work, I mean he was one of the most popular professors and you felt like you could approach him about anything.
Although to be fair, I suppose that wasn't a single student, and they probably spent most of the meal discussing Physics and their goals at University.
I see nothing wrong with inviting study groups, research groups, or even small groups of 2-3 students over for dinner, on outings, etc. In fact, I think it's perfectly appropriate, and a great idea.
The issue in my mind comes when you are having INDIVIDUAL meetings in social contexts, with either employees or students. The first question to ask yourself is, "could this be construed as a date". The second question is, "if I wouldn't have this meeting with someone in my romantic attraction group, because it wouldn't be appropriate, then am I unfairly disadvantaging my students who are in that group"
First, even if you define taking care of graduate students as part of their job and they fail to do so, it does not mean they are abusing their graduate students.
Second, the expectation of coddling is a very very recent phenomenon. Graduate students are usually expected to be functioning adults, not teenagers. Absorbing negativity and handling them by yourself is usually expected to functioning adults.
Third, academic supervisors are very likely to be people good at things, not good at handling people stuff. The major reason they are supervisors of their labs is they are good at things they do, not they are good at taking care of people.
> Second, the expectation of coddling is a very very recent phenomenon
I think the expectation of (and complaints about!) coddling are actually historically very well trodden. There's a great reddit thread about this [1] which details historic complaints from the Greco-Roman era all the way to the present.
> Some people fail to grasp the idea that the world does not always work surround them. And they have a very different definition of "abuse" than others, which basically goes to: you are abusing me if you don't actively take care of my emotions. For those people, it is much easier to find "abuses".
I promise you, we completely understand that the world doesn’t revolve around us. It is made painfully clear every day that the working world is built for white men who have buried their emotions.
There’s also a big difference between taking care of a persons emotions and giving them the space to have emotions. You can’t expect employees to be machines, and the further from “straight white guy” you are, the more work you have to do in every aspect of your life. But you have less energy to prop up those emotional walls and bury yourself in work.
It all depends what you’re optimizing for at the team level; pure speed and efficiency or quality of output. Are you able to measure their contributions, or are you just measuring things that are easy to quantify? What assumptions get backed into that? If you have so much work that it can’t be done in 40 hours a week, either hire more people or shift schedule. I do this all the time to protect my teams from the PHBs who would want them to do crunch time every week otherwise.
This generation is just fed up enough with the whole situation and has enough leverage to set some boundaries.
I didn’t say they did; I just said that life gets harder the further your intersectionality is from “straight white man”. I’m explicitly not trying to blame white men for anything because that’s not helpful for the conversation. All I’m saying is that someone with different intersectionality might not understand the challenges in someone else’s life, so placing your expectations on them from a normative/conforming position isn’t necessarily fair.
> All I’m saying is that someone with different intersectionality might not understand the challenges in someone else’s life, so placing your expectations on them from a normative/conforming position isn’t necessarily fair.
Ironically (or perhaps just sadly) that is exactly what you did to "straight white men"- you put expectations on how they live their lives, deal with stress, and how much stress they have in general.
I think you are perhaps downplaying the role that mentorship and collaboration can play in one's career. All of the most successful graduate students I know are very driven, yes, but they also, more often than not, have an advisor who is invested in their success and belong to a strong support system of other students.
I'm not as quick as OP to start throwing the word "abusive" around, but I have witnessed a number of unhealthy student-advisor relationships. Sometimes it's because the advisor is facing a busy period in their own career and doesn't have time for the student, sometimes it's just personalities clashing.
I think you are missing the point if your belief is that the majority of students who don't succeed in graduate school just aren't driven enough. Even a motivated student needs assistance to focus that motivation on something productive.
I agree very strongly with your second sentence (and your last sentence). Do you see those as being meaningfully different from an advisor guiding an already-driven grad student?
> The advisor doesn’t pull them through the program; the student pushes and the advisor guides.
I think we are in agreement about the role of an advisor, but I sense that maybe we disagree about how active a role the advisor can be expected to take.
(forgive me below for exaggerating a bit to make a point -- I recognize we are literally arguing semantics :) )
When I hear "the student pushes and the advisor guides", it sounds to me like the advisor plays a passive, almost automatic role, like a mirror or like bumper rails in a bowling alley. Just by virtue of having received a PhD, one automatically becomes qualified to advise, and doing so requires so little effort that it is ridiculous to describe them as "good" or "bad" at it. Whether the student succeeds or fails is up to the student alone, and in the latter case, the advisor doesn't really mind, since there are dozens of fresh applicants waiting to fill the spot.
On the other hand, an advisor who is "invested" in the success of their students plays a more active role, like a coach. They see collaboration with and among students as essential to their own success, or at least as essential to their duty as a professor. They bring students into their own research, sharing their own knowledge (without spoon-feeding), successes, and failures. They put effort into building positive interpersonal relationships with students, perhaps through frequent group meetings and social events. Despite their busy schedule, they make an effort to give their students the impression that they are always available to chat.
With a few notable exceptions, most advisors I've observed make an effort to invest themselves in their students. They know what "good" advising looks like, but sometimes their career aspirations or administrative duties pull them away, leaving students neglected. In these situations, I think the structure of academia is more to blame than either the student or the professor.
The people who make it through PhD are either 1) lucky enough to find mentors/collaborators who are willing to play an active role in their PhD experience or 2) so motivated by external factors such as the need for a work visa that they are willing to push through a bad situation even if it takes 7-8 years to finish a 5-year program.
Thank you for that (and the exaggerated-for-explanation example was helpful rather than being strawman).
I now see where my use of “guide” could have been read to be passive (like your bathroom vanity mirror or a gutter-blocker in bowling) where I intended for it to be periodically actively influential (while still being absent hour-to-hour of the work). Your last sentence of your GGP comment was much closer to my intended meaning.
> Just by virtue of having received a PhD, one automatically becomes qualified to advise,
Minor comment but in the university I work for you can't be a primary supervisor until you've seen a student through to completion as secondary advisor. I'm not sure how widespread this requirement is though.
I’ve always wondered how people dismiss academic abuse. Now I know! It’s “cause the students are just lazy / expect to be told what to do”. Bullshit.
My previous academic advisor would take out his aggressions and frustrations on his students. One specific instance, he began yelling at the lab because there were footprints on the couch - (I had taken a nap last night after finishing work, whoops). “Whose responsibility is this?!” Obviously I didn’t come forward. It took half a second to brush the dust off the raggedy couch after he left. He expected some student to step forward and get reamed in front of the lab? I was in the military and I’ve never seen such a clear example of leadership incompetence or pure aggression. At least drill instructors had a reason to yell at you nonstop. Folks like this capture the aggression and ignore the point. DIs would always give you proper direction, they never reamed you for their relief alone (even if it seems that way).
I have a decent amount of experience with tough leaders: “One can only expect perfection if you practice it yourself”. Blaming your followers is the mark of an incredibly, incredibly poor leader.
Bad managers are bad. They take out their anger and incompetence on you. And the second you start complaining all the folks like you give the side eye and hem and haw and hmmm and hurrr. No matter how clear the anecdote or straightforward the abuse, there is always some way the student should have taken it in stride. That’s not what leadership looks like.
You’re bullshitting to confirm your biases about students. Thinking they expect to be coddled is just a bias formed through idiocy and if I had to guess, too many “oversensitive college students” stories.
And it sounds like you might be extrapolating based on one egregious example...
I think we can agree that there are abusive advisors, and immature/unmotivated students in academia. Can abusive professors get away with more than they otherwise could due to the culture of academia? Yeah, I’d probably agree with that. But that doesn’t mean academia is full of such people, or that every student who complains of abuse is actually experiencing objective abuse.
The point is rather that determining “objective abuse” is entirely tangential. No way to determine if my story (or any others) is true.
But in academia it can be true, and when it is true, there is nothing that can be done. To a further extent than industrial roles. Granted some jobs have the same problems, and I’ve felt much more powerless within corporate structures than any military one.
Determining objective abuses is for determining objective guilt - not for nudging the system. You can’t possibly believe that all claims of abuse are the imagined fictions of so many students in some sort of shared state of madness. Perhaps some, but that many? It’s ridiculous.
In my college, my assigned advisor was an instructor that could barely teach his own classes. I still email the rep I worked with originally cause I don't trust my advisor. He has no idea what he's doing or saying and I'm not jeopardizing graduating on someone who doesn't care.
My spouse and several friends have PhDs and I do not, so my exposure is secondhand, but when I hear that circle of friends/friends-of-friends complaining about poor advisors, I often hear details about the grad student’s behaviors and expectations that make me think that situation wouldn’t turn into a raging success in industry either, but would result in “My manager isn’t promoting me, therefore they are a bad manager.”