Isaiah Hankel's The Power of a PhD
Isaiah Hankel's The Power of a PhDThe ‘feudal’ master-servant relationship existing between a PhD supervisor and his or her student has another facet seldom broached by academics. That is bullying. Employment legislation prohibits bullying at work, but, because PhDs are not salaried or contracted, they are not legally ‘employees’ and so are vulnerable to capricious supervisors.” A report by The Guardian further explains why this problem has continued over the past fifteen years: “In other industries, the human resources departments are really strong on bullying, and if there is any accusation of bullying, it’s taken seriously. But in academia, there’s a culture that the line manager or head of department has absolute power. They can make or break your career, and people very rarely [get help]. I have spent several years working for a drug company and there the climate was much more professional. You were trained to look after the people in your group and to look out for any warning signs ... universities are 10 or 20 years behind [...] The Failure of Academia The average graduate student across all fields now takes 8.2 years to get their PhD and is thirty-three years old by the time they defend. Up to 80 percent of those PhDs end up unemployed or in low-paying postdoc and teaching assistant positions, which, according to the government, are training positions rather than real employment. The average time spent in postdoc positions has swelled from just one year to anywhere from six to ten years—what is now referred to as “chasing postdocs.” Worse still is that universities have started to hide how many postdocs they have by labeling senior postdocs as “nonfaculty staff” or “research associates,” even though the PhDs in these positions continue to get paid very poorly without access to any retirement benefits or, in some cases, healthcare. Full-time professorships have been replaced by poorly paid “professor in title only” part-time, adjunct, and contract professorships, which is why the New York Times recently dubbed academia as “Adjunctatopia.” PhDs have gone from being revered experts the world relies on to invisible laborers trapped in a pyramid scheme supporting only a handful of full-time professors. This is why there is, as The Boston Globe frames it, a “Glut of PhDs,” which has resulted in, as Policy Options Politiques describes it, a “PhD employment crisis” that is “systemic” and can’t be fixed. It’s also why so many PhDs dream of transitioning out of academia, even though they have no idea how to do so.