“I’m thinking of leaving academia,” a friend tells me. “I’m pretty sick and tired of all the political games”. This should have been shocking news. He was the type of person that seemed perfectly suited to being an astrophysicist. I never foresaw him doing anything else.

I wasn’t surprised though. In my time as a PhD student, I heard countless episodes of political game-playing by postdocs and academics. For example, my housemate (a PhD student in the biological sciences), would frequently come to me with a new story about how his supervisor would attempt to use any leverage available to make him do work to advance the supervisor’s own career instead of my housemate’s PhD. “We are just pawns on a chess board to them.” he would often say. 

He meant this figuratively. He didn’t realise academics sometimes literally use students as pseudo chess pieces. When I needed to change offices due to a couple of toxic colleagues, I found that the process was a prolonged one. Most of the academics recognised that a desk, occupied or not, was a status symbol. The more desks each academic presided over, the higher their status. It was like some sort of weird conglomerate of empires. Giving up an empty desk space meant losing “territory”. My supervisor, despite thinking this was dumb, had to negotiate a PhD student “swap” with another research group. 

Before I started my PhD, I saw academics as mature, upstanding members of society. It was certainly a shock to the system to discover that, on occasion, some academics acted like toddlers in a sandpit squabbling over who has the better sandcastle. In these power struggles, PhD students are the spades – tools to be used by academics which can be disposed of at any moment, once they have served their purpose.

Power Plays

The power abuses by PhD supervisors on their students can cause disillusionment on one end of the scale, to significant mental health problems on the other. What is worse, many abuses occur simply to increase perceived status. This was the case in my story. 

My PhD supervisor arrangement was somewhat unique. Two academics and a postdoctoral student all had active roles in my supervision. This was because I started my doctorate in the middle of a funded research project. I joined as the fourth member of the team.

All three academics had different ideas of what I was supposed to do for my PhD project. My primary supervisor, Robert*, saw my role as primarily collecting experimental data. The postdoc believed I should spend most of my time developing simulation software. My second supervisor, Ralph*, wanted to steal me away entirely from the project to work on his own personal theoretical research. I know the respective intentions of each academic because they told me. 

During the main weekly project meeting, each academic mentioned the tasks they wanted me to do, concluding I should do all of them. I took on more tasks in the three other weekly meetings with each individual academic. Because of imposter syndrome, I feared saying no. So, for the next year, I was essentially trying to do three PhD projects. I would often work well into the evening, on a few occasions up until midnight, 6 – 7 days a week. 

Low mood slowly eked its way into my life. It started with the weekends. I would spend most of them watching T.V. shows or films trying to distract myself from the pain. A few months later Mondays became infected by low mood too, then Tuesday…Wednesday… Before long, the entire week was infected. Low mood was my new normal. 

Robert and the postdoc cared about my wellbeing. Unfortunately, they didn’t communicate, or coordinate with each other very well. Both were mostly unaware of just how much work I was putting in. When they asked if I was doing okay, I said I was okay. When they nudged me to stop working and go home, I did, then continued working from home. I was desperate to do well, and terrified of losing my PhD.

Ralph, on the other hand, didn’t care about me at all. To him, I was a tool to be used to help increase his status. Ralph had aspirations of becoming the physics department head – I know this because, again, he told me. One time, Ralph explicitly asked if I could do some work unrelated to my PhD that would make his application stronger. I wish I could say that I chose not to do the work because of principles. The reality was I had too much work on my plate to get to it in time. 

When the time came to write my first year PhD report, I found it a struggle. I had never properly learned how to write scientifically while an undergraduate due to unfortunately timed spells of depression. 

University procedure required me to send my report to Ralph first. I was worried he was going to judge the report harshly and expressed my concerns to several colleagues. They all reassured me there was nothing to worry about. They said the report was only supposed to be a record of my progress and that most academics barely even read it. Generally, my colleagues were correct. Most academics did not see the first-year report as very important. Ralph, however, was not like other academics.

He treated my report as if it was a submission to an academic journal. I received an email with the report attached and covered in red ink – apart from the last half of it. Ralph commented that it was so bad he didn’t see any point in finishing it. 

Ralph wrote in the email that he had serious concerns and would express them to Robert personally. Ralph obliterated my already very low level of confidence. It proved to me that my imposter syndrome was justified. Before my eyes lay clear evidence that I did not belong in academia. I closed the email and turned off my laptop. Defeated and sleep-deprived, I got into bed and cried. 

Enduring the Ongoing Abuse

During the next three months, I spent long hours scraping a report together, aided by Robert. He was highly supportive and did not have the view I was a terrible scientist – I just needed a bit more help with my writing. This support had little effect with my confidence so low. Rewriting the report felt like nails on a chalkboard. Simply glancing at it caused me pain. 

Eventually, Robert and I finally arrived at something we felt was good enough. The structure still wasn’t great, but Robert assured me that Ralph would be fine with it. So, I sent off the report to Ralph. A week later, while Robert was off on a conference, an email from Ralph arrived in my inbox inviting me to the library café to discuss my report. A feeling of dread consumed me.

Ralph proceeded to destroy my report again, this time in person. He did mention a couple of things he liked, but most of our meeting consisted of me staring in shock while he went through it page-by-page, highlighting anything and everything wrong with the report. 

At the end, Ralph entered full-blown villain mode. He explained one of the unwritten rules in academia: If a PhD student quits before the first year is over, it is seen as the student’s fault. If a PhD student quits after the first year, it is seen as the supervisor’s fault. Ralph then double-checked to make sure I was only 11 months into my PhD. After I nodded, he postulated that perhaps the PhD was not the best thing for me. He would still need to talk things over with Robert of course, but based on the evidence, I was not cut out for the doctorate. 

I’m quite sure he chose the library café for our little discussion because he knew how fragile my emotional state was, and wanted witnesses to any scene. I did not want to give him this satisfaction and stayed quiet. We got up and made our way back to the physics building. He started to go straight back into casual conversation as if nothing of significance had just happened. When I arrived back at my office, I quietly put down my things, and headed off to the toilets. I shut myself inside and cried for a good half an hour.

In Ralph’s mind, I was his student. I was a stain on his perfect reputation, and I needed to be removed. Perhaps he had even convinced himself that he was helping me by pushing me out the doctorate door. 

When Robert caught wind of what Ralph had done, he was not pleased. Robert told me that he had no doubts about my ability and that I was more than capable of doing a PhD. I was doing well, in fact. When Robert returned from his conference, he confronted Ralph. I don’t know what was said. At the time I was not particularly interested. I already understood what was going to happen. Nothing. Accountability disappears in the realm of the powerful. I was allowed to change my second supervisor to someone other than Ralph, but the damage had already been done.

Despite having a very good primary supervisor, Ralph had managed to crush my confidence for nothing more than a childish power grab. It was one of many stressors that contributed to my declining mental health, and ultimately my decision to take antidepressants and suffer a severe reaction. 

After an eight-month break, I went on to complete my PhD. My examiner commented that it was a very easy thesis to read – so much so that he even took it on holiday with him. I was delighted. You see, readable writing within academia is exceptionally difficult. So difficult in fact that most PhD students don’t bother trying. Hence reading most theses feels like a struggle. In academic literature, it is so easy to slip into value-judgment statements and vague descriptions linking dry tables of data. Telling the story takes a lot of practice, and I had not acquired this when I wrote my first-year report.

Conclusion

My story of toxic supervision is not unique. Speak to PhD students at your nearest graduate school and it won’t be long before you hear stories of negligent, careless and abusive supervisors. Accountability for poor supervision is pretty much non-existent.

Without accountability, the powerful stay powerful and the abused stay abused. Pointless jostling for citations, glorification of overwork and emotional and physical abuse of colleagues remains rampant. Without an admission that science will always be socially shaped, the childish power struggles of academics will continue.

*Names have been changed

Dr Alex Mendelsohn (a quantum superposition of all gender pronouns) is not real. Dr Alex Mendelsohn is also not an artist. Well, technically they are real but using a pen name to protect their identity while they recover from a severe mental illness. Alex completed a physics PhD on a topic at some time in the past somewhere in the UK. They have started a blog: “The Anxious Physicist”, a substack newsletter: “The Psychiatric Multiverse” and set up a Twitter account: @AlexJMendelsohn

This blog is kindly sponsored by G-Research