When I was in graduate school and then for a few years afterwards (even though I had changed fields), I found it strange and fascinating that I and other friends who were in theoretical physics groups all seemed to have really good experiences on the whole (even while going through the normal day-to-day & month-to-month ups & downs of doing a PhD), whereas many (but not all) friends who were in experimental physics & engineering groups had noticeably more toxic & micromanagerial advisors who made those friends' PhD experiences correspondingly worse. For several years, I thought that it was simply an issue of the advisor's personality & mindset, because some friends earned PhDs from research groups whose advisors were much more kind & supportive, so on my own as well as when commiserating with friends who had toxic & micromanagerial advisors, I decried such toxic & micromanagerial advisors and expressed hope for cultural shifts that would reward experimental science & engineering research group leaders who could be more kind & supportive toward their graduate students.
Much more recently, at my current job, I have been working on a billable project that involves finding information for the client about building internal organizational trust, especially for encouraging productive conflicts of ideas. As I looked at those materials, I started to believe more strongly that kind & supportive advisors are exceptional in the experimental sciences & engineering despite being the ideal norm in other fields and that, unfortunately, research group leaders in experimental sciences & engineering may actually be structurally incentivized to behave in toxic & micromanagerial ways toward their graduate students. Moreover, I've come to believe that such structural incentives go beyond, though are compatible with, the idea that advisors who behave in toxic & micromanagerial toward their graduate students excuse or even defend those behaviors by claiming that their own advisors behaved similarly toward them and ascribing their own academic career successes to their ability to thrive when their advisors behaved in those ways toward them. (The latter point is essentially a career-specific manifestation of a cycle of abuse; it is often seen in abusive parenting when an abusive parent admits to being a victim of abuse by that person's own parents and claims to have come out of it "OK".)
The ideas underpinning these new beliefs of mine are related to each other and have many analogies in sports & sports management (the latter at least as far as I can tell as a layperson with respect to sports). I should note that these ideas are probably not new. The way that I am writing about them in this post is supported only by anecdotes from my own experiences as well as what I have heard about from relatives & friends, not by more rigorous data. Finally, as a reminder, all of these discussions only apply to the US (and maybe Canada, but I can't guarantee the latter). Follow the jump to see more about these ideas.
The following ideas explain why research group leaders in experimental sciences & engineering may be structurally incentivized to behave in toxic & micromanagerial ways toward their graduate students.
- On average, all else being equal, it seems to be far harder for a graduate student who wants to escape a toxic/micromanagerial advisor to secure a graduate research position (ending in a PhD) elsewhere than it is for an employee of a non-academic organization to find a job in another similar organization in order to escape a toxic manager. It is worth noting that this phenomenon is not unique to experimental sciences & engineering, but it does structurally set the stage to incentivize those research group leaders to behave in toxic & micromanagerial ways toward their graduate students. The analogy to sports is that until the last few years, in college sports, it was extremely hard for athletes to get transfers to other universities, so athletes had little leverage against toxic coaches or other hired personnel. The analogy is unsurprising because the difficulty of transferring between universities is structurally common to undergraduate & graduate students (whether athletes, researchers, both, or neither). To wit, many formerly successful college sports coaches have struggled to adapt to these changes to transfer & eligibility rules were implemented or retired when those changes were implemented out of concern that they would not be able to adapt (and remain successful).
- Second, experimental work by its nature takes a lot of time & effort for tasks that don't need a lot of thought. Although better work arises from researchers who deliberately make space & time to step back & think about their work from a broader lens, most PhD students in experimental science & engineering fields understandably have more modest expectations to simply do decent work & graduate with a PhD. Thus, even without pressure from the advisor, a PhD student in an experimental science or engineering research group will feel internal pressure from knowing the time limit of the program to spend as much time as possible to move only one or a few related experiments as far forward as possible in order to have a substantial PhD thesis. This will prevent the student from gaining a breadth of knowledge across many different kinds of experiments that can be applied across experiments and will therefore lead more easily to burnout for that student if progress on the main/sole experiment stalls (as student can't as easily creatively apply techniques from very different kinds of experiments to solve this problem or turn toward other experiments for a mental break. The advisor can easily exploitatively turn this structural vulnerability against the student's well-being by micromanaging the student & putting further pressure on the student to produce compelling experimental results, without trying to understand why the student may be struggling or why the expectations of amazing results may be unrealistic.
- The contrast is to employees in government laboratories or private companies where jobs are permanent (though at-will). Those employees can feel more free to take more time with their experiments & work simultaneously on a more varied set of experiments. That said, it is worth remembering that in experimental science & engineering research groups outside of academia as well as in corporate R&D groups, there can be severe external pressures to produce certain results or technologies. This can lead to the same micromanagement & toxicity as in academia, though for slightly different reasons.
- One analogy to sports is the difference between test versus T20 cricket matches. In the former, the time limit of 5 days is much less looming (at least initially),so batters can be much more thoughtful & strategic about which balls they try to hit & how (and bowlers must change their strategies accordingly). By contrast, in the latter, the effective time limit set by the limit of 20 overs per team is much more obvious, so batters must be much more aggressive/desperate by trying to hit & score runs for every ball; if it were a test match, such aggression/desperation would easily lead to all batters being dismissed relatively quickly for a test match.
- Another analogy to sports is the growing concern among college sports recruiters of high school athletes that now, the common practice of very skilled child athletes specializing in one sport from elementary school is making mental burnout & severe repetitive stress injuries much more common for them than even 1 generation ago. This is because 1 generation ago, it was common for very skilled child athletes to play many different sports simultaneously & not specialize until college, thereby letting those children gain a broader appreciation of sports as well as sufficiently varied physical activity to creatively apply skills across sports.
- Natural turnover from graduate students graduating means that problems of an advisor micromanaging or being toxic toward graduate students do not lead to long-term negative effects for the research group or for that advisor's academic career as long as the research group remains academically productive with each new generation of members, even if such behavior has long-term negative effects on the students who graduate. These incentives for advisors who lead experimental science or engineering research groups lead to many of those advisors harshly pushing their students for the ultimately limited times that those students work in those research groups because the relevant result for those advisors' careers is only to have more high-profile peer-reviewed journal articles.
- This analysis does not consider cases of harassment that would involve human resource departments in the university or criminal misbehavior (like sexual assault) against students.
- An analogy to sports is that unlike how coaches of professional athletes try to work well with those athletes so that the athletes don't seek out trades to other teams (in team sports) or fire those coaches (in individual sports), coaches in universities have much more job security by being employed by the university in contrast to the athletes who turn over every 4 years. Thus, those coaches can get many victories even at the cost of the athletes' well-being by behaving excessively harshly toward those athletes. A notable past example was Bobby Knight, who toxically coached men's basketball at Indiana University for around 3 decades & led 3 completely different iterations of that team (separated by many years) to NCAA championships. That said, this may be changing in the future with the much greater ease of transfers as well as broadly decreased societal tolerance for such harshness when such leaders are in the public eye.
Similar problems as these in experimental research groups can happen in academic research groups focusing on computation or data science, which involve well-defined tasks that allow for micromanagement. However, these problems of advisors micromanaging graduate students to a toxic degree are much less common in the arts, humanities, social sciences, math, and theoretical sciences, for the following structural reasons (though those problems can in principle still happen). In those fields, just as in any field in academia as well as any workplace outside of academia, more common problems with advisors are them being absent as advisors, not communicating well, inappropriately offloading administrative responsibilities onto graduate students, and behaving badly toward graduate students in ways (like sexual harassment or assault) that are not recognizably work task-based micromanagement.
- PhD students in arts, humanities, and social science departments are much less tied to their respective advisors than in STEM fields.
- Data collection processes & data reliability in humanities & social sciences are much more volatile than in experimental sciences & engineering, so even hands-on advisors know from their own experiences as graduate students that it is unrealistic & counterproductive to push graduate students too hard for compelling data.
- PhD students in the arts, math, and theoretical sciences need to be given space & time to think through their ideas thoroughly and therefore fundamentally cannot be forced to make progress through advisors micromanaging them.
Thus, the structural imbalances in power & in time constraints between professors versus graduate students in experimental science or engineering groups create different incentive structures for professors compared to experimental science or engineering research group leaders outside of academia. This means that management consulting solutions like new workflows or standard operating procedures for communication that could work in experimental science or engineering research groups outside of academia would easily be ignored by experimental science or engineering research group leaders in academia.
