It's all about power

E’s 10-page evaluation of their graduate advisor didn’t pull any punches. The first sentence flat out says, “As a mentor, [supervisor] is abusive” and the first subhead is “bestiality pornography in lab meeting.”

Yes, you read that correctly. A grown adult in a position of authority in an academic laboratory thought it was appropriate to show and discuss bestiality pornography in a work environment. If you’re asking “what is the context,” the context actually makes it worse: they wanted to subject test subjects to those videos in an MRI. Imagine being trapped in a tube watching a woman pleasure a horse.

As far as she and I know, that experiment never moved forward. Our best guess: thank your local Institutional Review Board.

But what made my heart ache was the remaining eight pages detailing the verbal, emotional, and financial abuse she and her colleagues endured: weekly one-on-one sessions that left people in tears, where the advisor tried to coerce them to throw their colleagues under the bus, and weaponized whatever they’d found was that student’s insecurity. For E, it was being called lazy and stupid; for an attractive blonde woman, they told her to dye her hair brown or else no one in academia would take them seriously. They also arbitrarily withheld stipends, undermined students’ work in front of their colleagues, told them to present the supervisor’s works as their own, and more. 

This week the Wisconsin State Journal published a great five-part series on academic abuse at University of Wisconsin-Madison. As I wrote in my column for Tone Madison “abuse goes beyond the nine employees the State Journal identified who were investigated for hostile and intimidating behavior, four of whom are still at UW-Madison, four at other institutions, and one retired. It goes beyond any one department or lab, and beyond UW-Madison.”

“Abuse is endemic to that power dynamic—one where a graduate student's ambitions, career, even their ability to remain in the country if they're international, all rest disproportionately in the hands of an individual who faces little risk of consequences for their behavior.”

That’s why institutions’ responses to reported abuse—usually mandatory training, reporting, or investigations that don’t actually punish abusers—are insufficient. E’s mentor was denied tenure at that lab, but they just moved to a different institution. That person is still supervising a lab and still has the power to make or break graduate students’ academic careers. 

No amount of training is going to stop abusers from taking advantage of unbalanced power dynamics, because they already know what they are doing is wrong. E documented how their mentor changed their behavior at conferences and put on a show of camaraderie with their team in front of their own mentors and colleagues. Time and time again, this individual’s behavior demonstrated that their priority was controlling their image. 

Placing the onus on victims to report their abusers is not an effective strategy. First, the abuse already happened; an effective strategy would actually remove potential avenues for abuse in the first place.

Second, it is so emotionally and mentally challenging to describe and explain abuse, it is remarkable whenever anyone does. I have been employed in abusive workplaces, one of which was so toxic I had a mental breakdown which took almost a decade to recover from. To this day, I have never done what E did; I have never put the abuse into writing. When I’ve tried to describe it the details are jumbled, I stumble over my words, and become anxious that I need to “prove” that it was abuse. 

My abuser was a Grade-A gaslighter. Whenever I tried to hold them accountable or even set boundaries, that person skillfully minimized the damage they did and flipped the script so that the issue was that I wasn’t skilled/smart/creative enough for the job and should have therefore been grateful to have it in the first place.

The recovery process is a landmine of realizations about how beyond the pale the abuser was. Imagine being stunned when your employer automatically believes you when you tell them you are ill and encourages you to take time off instead of saying passive aggressively “Wow, you get sick a lot.” Or when they actually care about your well being and personal life instead of trying to weaponize that information (“If you want to enjoy your wedding, you’ll have to work much harder for the next month”).

How anyone manages to report an abuser under those conditions is astounding, especially if that person has a prestigious institution behind them. Instead, graduate programs and research laboratories need to diffuse the power of individual advisors and hold people accountable when abuse is detected or reported. 

Exploitation and abuse holds not only the student back but also the institution. Ashley Ruba, a UW-Madison post-doc, on Twitter posted a thread with advice for graduate students, the first of which was “Don't work nights/weekends unless you have a hard deadline. Work 40hrs, no more… Do not waste your youth providing unpaid labor. Don't do it!!”

The first few hours after she posted, the top comments were dominated by people arguing that if someone is “passionate” about their research, 40 hours isn’t enough. Thankfully, over time more people chimed in to echo her call for better work-life balance in academia.

Because while some people believe that endless labor equals more productivity, there’s a large and growing body of research that finds that is not true. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

E’s advisor did not have any students who completed their degree during the five years E was with that laboratory—including E, who left and finished their Ph.D elsewhere. My abuser’s company failed months after I left. I learned about it from former coworkers who bought some of the equipment they sold off.

Meanwhile Ruba wrote seven first-author papers and won two dissertation awards.

“You don't need to be exploited and unpaid to be great at something important,” she wrote. “[Direct messages] are open if you have questions about grad school. [Direct messages] are closed if you want to talk about how grad students deserve to be underpaid [because] ‘passion.’”

Where I’ve been hiking

We went for a long walk along Lake Wingra on Sunday. And while it still very much felt like winter, you could start to see the signs of spring; namely the dozens of red-winged blackbirds bobbing on the reeds along the shore. I didn’t get any good photos of them, but there’ll be plenty of time for spring photos going forward. Right now, I’d like to give a fond farewell and final ode to winter hiking.

We went to Parfrey’s Glen State Natural Area when the world was still frozen solid and it was because of that deep freeze that we were able to see this area. The bluffs along the creek are steep but we walked on the ice and got much further along than I think we could have otherwise. It was slow, steady work, and I highly recommend shoes with good grip, but that payoff…

If you’re willing to brave Wisconsin’s amazing parks in winter, you’ll usually have the park all to yourself. All that glittering, gleaming, winter beauty, that singular peace and quiet—it’s all yours.

This one is from Levis/Trow Mound Recreational Area. There’s not much that compares to a walk in an evergreen forest blanketed with snow, the crisp air tinged with the scent of pine, and sunny blue skies peaking between the needles.

I don’t know how much of second (or are we on third?) winter we have left, but if you can, I recommend bundling up and getting lost in the woods.