[temp8964]

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.

----

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.

[yowlingcat]

> 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.

[temp8964]

You are right, I removed " (or business managers)".

For academic advisors the situation is different because graduate students come and go naturally.

[URSpider94]

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.

[temp8964]

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.

[alexgmcm]

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.

[URSpider94]

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"

[aborsy]

I agree with this.

[kome]

many academic supervisors are also just lazy to do what is part of their job tho, and they prefer focusing on the interesting part.

[temp8964]

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.

[yowlingcat]

> 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.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/7btv14/the_more_th...

[temp8964]

Except graduates students are not youth / children.

[wayoutthere]

> 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.

[temp8964]

How do those have anything to do with "white men"? I bet "asian men/women" advisors are probably even tougher.

[wayoutthere]

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.

[zdragnar]

> 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.