[aspaceman]

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.

[jkhdigital]

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.

[aspaceman]

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.

[Kye]

There needs to be a term like "manufacturing consent" for the false beliefs that come from trend pieces.