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Can you expand on what regulations you feel are lacking and how you'd like to see them implemented?

> Can you expand on what regulations you feel are lacking [..]

It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another (the PhD student).

Without changing how the entire system works, I'm not sure how you fix that by means of regulation.

It's not really unchecked though. There's the department vice chair, department chair, the college dean, the dean of student affairs, a student senate, a faculty senate, etc. etc... there's a structure here for resolving grievances.

> there's a structure here for resolving grievances

That may look good on paper. Yet a 20-something student vs an academic surrounded by supporters and wielding power and influence, it's only ever going to go one way.

I've personally been on the wrong end of it. After reviewing my options, noting that my supervisor had just been elected Fellow of the Royal Society in London, I decided to bite my tongue, complete my PhD, and leave.

The relationship was so broken I didn't even say goodbye to my supervisor (literally cleared out all my stuff from the lab very late one night), and I've never spoken to him, or had any contact with anyone in his research group ever since.

"it's only ever going to go one way."

I have seen it go the other way as well.

Yeah, that's all just a dog and pony show. If you escalate an issue with your advisor through any of those channels, your career is toast. You might as well just quit.

gwbrooks 1531 days ago

Agree, and let's also remember that these are wholly voluntary situations. Unchecked power is a pretty big charge in a situation where the student can (Yes, at a cost) always walk away.

> Agree, and let's also remember that these are wholly voluntary situations

Someone is in a position of power over someone else, and is exploiting that, and a response is to claim that this is a "wholly voluntary situation"?

Really?!

I take it you think we should do away with workplace discrimination laws, the minimum wage and OSHA too. I for one, wish there were more thumbs in my canned chili. It's been a little bland lately.

rajin444 1531 days ago

> It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another

Why is this fundamentally wrong? Short of a truly equitable society (which I think most agree would be a dystopian nightmare), I don't see this as fixable. The problem is that the power is abused.

The best way to fix this is high trust societies, not creating one more institution with a disproportionate amount of power.

> Why is this fundamentally wrong?

It's the unchecked nature of the power.

Politicians have upcoming elections to worry about. Tenured professors ... what do they worry about?

> Tenured professors ... what do they worry about?

Class assignments and number of classes taught per semester, teaching times and locations, class sizes, advising assignments, committee assignments, TA allocations, grader allocations, internal grants, withholding or revoking consulting permission, withholding internal department funding, lack of promotion (there is still a ladder after tenure), and most of all reputation, which in academia has higher currency than currency.

Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said), and if they don't do their job they can still get fired (I've seen it happen), or their lives can be made miserable.

If there's an issue of academic dishonesty then there there are processes at journals, conferences, and funding agencies to address concerns. I've also witnessed these processes work as intended.

> Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said)

We are apparently talking about very different kinds of professors at very different kinds of institutions.

Unless he were to actually commit a crime, I don't think there is anything my ex-boss could have possibly done which could have ended up with him being removed from his post. He was simply too important to the institution in terms of his reputation and his ability to attract external funding.

How he treated his students was really neither here nor there, as long as the money and the citations kept rolling in.

Tenured professor here:

- Promotion. Tenure is awesome, yes, but there are two full academic ranks at my institution above associate professor with tenure, and if I want them, I need to continue to do the same things that got me tenure. Graduate students, get grants, publish papers, etc.

There's also further ambitions like chair, dean, etc. that are often literally elections.

- Internal allocation of resources. Will one of my students be my department's choice for a fellowship? If there's a space crunch (there's always a space crunch) can I get the space I want? If there's internal funds to help support pilot projects or the like, am I on the short list for those?

- Reputation. This is important to me. I want it to be known that "my lab" turns out good people. And that we do good work. This is not only actually a criteria for promotion, but also something I want (I didn't go into academia for the money). It's what gets you invited to things I want to be invited to.

This also includes things like whisper networks. Students warn other students.

- Grants. A number of grants look at things like mentorship and students.

watwut 1531 days ago

If there is nothing to stop the abuse, abuse escalates and gets normalized. This happens any time there is large system with unchecked large power.

That is why it is fundamentally wrong. Because it ensures widespread abuse.

You can't have power exist and expect it to not get abused.

But this problem is totally fixable. We need to reduce the role that the advisor plays. Grad students should be able to switch labs and universities like most people switch jobs. Once they publish some set number of papers, they get a PhD. No thesis, no committee. The advisor basically is demoted to a fungible manager.

ModernMech 1530 days ago

> Grad students should be able to switch labs and universities like most people switch jobs.

Maybe this fixes the problem of abusive professors wielding their power in wrong ways, but it creates new problems as well. For instance, it shifts the very nature of a Ph.D. from a deep exploration of a single topic to shallow explorations of many topics. If you tell me I need 4 papers to get a Ph.D., I'm going to get 4 papers from the easiest venues on the most shallow of topics, because why go any deeper?

And are these solo author papers? What if you were 1 author out of 30 on one paper, and 1 author out of 2 on another? Are each of those 1 paper credit?

Do paper credits transfer between universities? Do some schools require more papers than others? Who gets to decide? Do some disciplines require more papers than others? Again who gets to decide? What about journal papers versus conference papers versus workshop papers? Do presentations count? Do poster sessions count?

If you are in my lab and I've spent time and money training you, what's my recourse if you just quit on me to join another lab?

> If you are in my lab and I've spent time and money training you, what's my recourse if you just quit on me to join another lab?

None. Every employer the entire world over deals with this. The fact that this makes you feel entitled to continued labor by "your" students is the entire problem.

mumblemumble 1531 days ago

Decent labor standards would be a start.

Universities are rather analogous to sweatshops in how they operate and the economic reasons for doing so. And I suspect that, in much the same way, this state of affairs represents a sort of Nash equilibrium that cannot be significantly altered except by an outside force changing the rules of the game.

In grad school we definitely had decent labor standards though. I mean, I was worked really hard, but I can't say I was worked any harder than I was in private industry. And the pay wasn't great, but it was more than enough to support myself, and the understanding has always been that you get free tuition as part of the deal, which is pretty great, so that makes up for a lot of the pay deficit. I could see better pay for students with families, but other than that I think grad students have it pretty good these days.

An example of a specific labor standard you'd like to see implemented would be welcome.

Ar-Curunir 1531 days ago

As I’m sure you know, Most PhD students stop taking classes by the end of the 2nd year, and focus entirely on research and teaching thereafter, which means that the “free tuition part” is just a sham to avoid classifying PhD students as workers, and to hence avoid paying them for their labour.

As a grad student you are there for an education and your education doesn't only (or even mostly) happen in the classroom. If grad students want to be treated more like employees and less like students, the relationship between student/advisor will shift more toward an employee/employer relationship. This may result in more pay but it will also result in different expectations. For example, if you want to be treated more as an employee, then I would have a lower tolerance for mistakes a student would make. If you want to be an employee I will start hiring for skills rather than potential. As employer/employee relationships have developed maxims like "fire fast", this attitude change may work against grad students.

Also just to be precise, tuition isn't just to pay for classes, it goes to pay for all of the resources you use as part of the university community. If you are done your requirements you will still have to pay tuition. And students don't stop taking classes by the end of year 2 (or 4 depending), they stop taking required classes. Since your advisor pays your tuition, you can negotiate with them if you want to take more than the minimum. You are done your requirements after 2-4 years and don't have to take more classes, but of course you can (I did). Maybe this is something unions can help with.

This.

My indulgence for "I spent three months going down this rabbit hole because it might have proved interesting" is way hired for graduate students than it would be for research staff, because that's part of them being students.

Siira 1531 days ago

Not to mention that PhD students would mostly be self-learning anyway.

QuarterReptile 1531 days ago

>Universities are rather analogous to sweatshops in how they operate

Could you explain further?

One very specific example I'd like to see is protection for foreign students on visas in the event that they report academic misconduct - there's lots of ways they can lose their funding after that, even if there's not retaliation, and that's bad for the system.