, 2 min read
Graduate student/faculty relations
Sharleen talks about how evil junior faculty can be in their approach with grad students:
(…) in academia, (…), there are limited options, and a poor grad student may have to work with the asshole who has naive, unethical, or objectionable approaches to working with grad students. Now, we could simply say, the ones who survive are the ones who deserve to get jobs/get the PhD. We could point out that the market is much tougher. But if we respond this way, we’re not critiquing the culture of academia (a culture which, if I may point out, is largely responsible for the other problems that we all bitch about); we’re justifying it.
I’m unsure why she points at junior faculty as the source of the problem. She’s probably got some personal experience going.
However, I agree with her criticism of the tough love approach to supervising graduate students. I don’t think it can be justified from a pedagogical point of view, it is not justified from a management point of view, and so, indeed, it might be some kind of power trip.
On the other hand, I disagree with her implication that there are no choices. In most cases, the graduate student can go with another supervisor. It might costly, but it is almost always an option. Or else, you can simply go out there and find a job and be happy.
Repeat after me: the world is big and there are almost always options. Unless you are a slave stranded somewhere, you can almost certainly find another job, another graduate program, another project… it might be costly, it might imply extra work, but it is most often possible.
The reason why these professors are getting away with treating graduate students badly is that graduate students allow it. If they chose not to go with this “evil” supervisor, there wouldn’t be any problems any more.
That’s how the real world works. Evil employers will have trouble finding good employees. The good employees will leave for a better employer. That’s the market at work.
The day when the employees stop leaving, because they are scared or tired, the market stops working and the trouble starts.
Generally speaking, academia doesn’t have so much a culture problem as it has a market problem: too many potential candidates for some positions leading to a general degradation of the working conditions for everyone involved.