At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem.
You know that The Guardian will present anything they can as an issue that requires institutional change. That's just what they do these say. If you're willing to engage in willful confirmation bias, you can take any large institution and find enough disgruntled people to to build a "case".
I see nothing in this article about the authors trying to disprove their own hypothesis.
"The Guardian sent freedom of information requests to 135 universities. Responses revealed a total of 294 complaints against academics at 55 institutions. A further 30 universities reported 337 complaints against all staff – academic and non-academic. Across 105 universities, at least 184 staff have been disciplined and 32 dismissed for bullying since 2013."
Compared to the corporate world, that sounds incredibly low, actually.
Of course, these days any official statistic with inconveniently "good" numbers can be dismissed on the grounds that there are systematic attempts to cover things up and institutional pressure not to report incidents. But that in itself is often a form of confirmation bias.
>Compared to the corporate world, that sounds incredibly low, actually.
This isn't surprising given that seniority and hierarchy in academics, as well as a general culture of conformity if one wants to advance their career is even more pronounced than in some of the worst corporate bureaucracies you can come across in the wild.
I don't have any personal experience with the UK academic system, but having experienced academic work for quite some time I have absolutely no doubt that it's true and I think you can draw a direct line between the culture present in academia and bullying without attacking the Guardian for being biased.
Stewardship, patronage, the extreme degrees of networking and personal relationships way too often place people in unbalanced dependency relationships that foster abuse of one sort or the other. It's no accident that many people have pointed to universities as one of the places were 'Girardian terror' is especially prevalent.
>At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem.
I don't think that the question of whether there is an institutional problem necessitates large numbers of incidence. For example, you could say that 99.99% of people don't get murdered, so if the police don't investigate murders, it's no big deal, after all it's just 0.01% of the population.
I think the main question is: can the system adequately deal with incidences if they do happen. This is where I think the academic system is failing. Unlike the corporate world, PHD students are intrinsically tied to their supervisors. In an abusive corporate relationship, workers have the option to quit. However, that is often a much much harder option in academia. "Quitting" often means taking a serious hit to your reputation, and if you manage to find a new supervisor, it's likely that it will be hard to publish in the same field as your old supervisor. If you can't find a new supervisor, and have to fail out of the program, it's unlikely that you'll get the chance to work in that field again. For programs like Clinical Psychology, if you do not achieve a PHD, then the previous ~6 years of schooling will not count for anything.
As someone who works in academia, but outside of the Grad School track, the power disparity between PHD's and their supervisors has always surprised me. In undergrad, I worked under a professor whose grad students took an absurdly long time to graduate. By absurdly long, for a Masters and PHD one student took 12+ years, and another took 10+ years. At first I thought it was personal issues that caused the delay. However, after working with him for a while, I could see how that would happen. Projects were started without any foresight. He knew close to nothing about any of the methods his students were using, so couldn't understand any of the requirements. Progress on any project would be sluggish, and if you didn't find results, excuses were made so you'd have to run analyses again with different parameters. It was fine for me, because it was just a part time job, and I got paid decently. If I were a grad student, however, this would have been a complete nightmare.
There should be some sort of oversight over researchers and academics. Although we like to think scientists are stoic and noble in their search for knowledge, many are petty, vindictive and sometimes just clueless. Good grant writers/paper publishers don't necessarily make good managers.
>I don't think that the question of whether there is an institutional problem necessitates large numbers of incidence.
If an institution has lower number of incidents than population average than it's rather ridiculous to claim that it has an "institutional problem" with those incidents.
And I assure you, HR people in any big corporation would laugh at those numbers.
Now, if your argument is that Ph.D. serfdom magnifies the consequences of every incident, than I fully agree. Read my comment below. Rather than instituting "oversight", however, it would be much more rational to end Ph.D. serfdom. It has other negative consequences, which wouldn't be solved by some "supervisor police".
Marvin Minsky and Alan Kay spoke at length about how US academic system today stiffles creativity and long-term research. Seems it wasn't always like that, and the different wasn't in more oversight. Quite the opposite, actually.
>For example, you could say that 99.99% of people don't get murdered, so if the police don't investigate murders, it's no big deal, after all it's just 0.01% of the population.
Beyond certain point adding more police does nothing to curb murder rates. It's not a linear relationship.
>If an institution has lower number of incidents than population average than it's rather ridiculous to claim that it has an "institutional problem" with those incidents.
You can't draw any conclusions from the data presented in this article. It does not offer a per capita number of events.
> If an institution has lower number of incidents than population average than it's rather ridiculous to claim that it has an "institutional problem" with those incidents.
"If an institution has lower number of incidents than population average than it's rather ridiculous to claim that it has an "institutional problem" with those incidents.
And I assure you, HR people in any big corporation would laugh at those numbers."
That might only suggest that other institutions have larger problems.
edit:
TLDR - Imagine if you could negotiate a contract for 4 years and get paid $x, but your employer could arbitrarily decide to keep you for 8 years and still pay you $x. Even if the majority of employers are good and don't choose to do this, what kind of relationship does that create between you and your employer?
I appreciate your skepticism and would generally agree. However, in this case I believe the article is making a valid point. (Based on experiences of many friends across various universities, and my own experience.)
Of course in some corporations bullying will be worse, but in many it will be nowhere near as bad. This is because there is much less money in academia generally that people have to compete for, and many desperately seek vain prestige (far more so than in industry.)
184 staff disciplined and 32 dismissed are not low numbers. Each case represents a formal investigation, because no one is going to be disciplined or dismissed without evidence - that way lies an unfair dismissal claim, and perhaps also damages for libel.
Considering you seem to agree that institutional pressure is likely to lead to at least some coverups, how many cases would you want to see before you agree there's a problem?
Over a 5 year period and over a large number of universities it is as some one has said a large company would have many more grievance cases and dismissal's.
>> Compared to the corporate world, that sounds incredibly low, actually.
And it's even lower compared to prisons. And that tells us, what? It's OK to have some bullying in academia, as long as there's more bullying elsewhere?
> At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem.
I have a similar feeling about all articles from all sources (that I’m aware of) in journalism.
Every time an article interests me enough to dig deeper into the subject, I find the original article was inaccurate and biased, and frequently misrepresents small but significant details to fit a narrative in a way that can’t have been a mistake.
The way I consume news these days isn’t the greatest, but it’s the best I can do: I only read headlines. If a claim in the headline would cause the source major legal issues if untrue, I mostly trust that the event occurred, but not necessarily how they say it did.
I ignore all other claims in headlines, and I don’t read the body of the article, because it’s usually just a thinly-veiled opinion piece by a non-expert, or worse, the dramatic prose of a journalist who seems to think their writing is the story.
If there’s an event in a headline that seems to have actually happened, and it’s relevant to my interests, I research it independently.
I think the polite term for this is advocacy journalismhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advocacy_journalism
I too have descended to being pretty much only a headline reader, partly because of the prevalence of advocacy journalism and partly from the shear volume of content of all types which assaults me.
So "advocacy journalism" is basically a form of journalism wherein all the statements are technically factual, but the journalists intentionally and transparently ignore all other ethics and standards of journalism.
I understand why this will outcompete real journalism, but I don't see how it serves anyone.
It also saddens me that this practice has attained a degree of general acceptance that it's referred to as a "genre of journalism." I would refer to it as a more insidious and enduring form of propaganda.
Have you considered paying for news? If they are free, then you’re the product being sold.
Aside from that, your approach makes little sense. You read headlines and comments, but headlines are notoriously bad, especially on free news, and comments are a jungle. I mean, anyone could tell you anything and not ever be held accountable, unlike actual media, but you’d rather spend time on anarchy, uninformed opinions and outright lies?
Furthermore looking at this particular article, even if we say the numbers are lower than they are in the private sector, does that mean there isn’t a problem? We’re talking about people in power who are bullying their juniors who are trying to do research that may alter human history. Even if the numbers are lower than somewhere else, that’s still not good.
Consider a city where the murder rate is half of the country wide one, it would be a little unusual to claim it has a institutionalized murder problem based on those numbers.
Maybe it has one (e.g. particularly bad neighborhoods) but it would be a weird conclusion from just the number
(I didn't read the article, did not feel that was relevant to this specific response)
I'm not aware of any paid news sources that fit my needs, maybe you can recommend some.
I agree that headlines are bad, which is why I discount them almost entirely, as I mentioned in my original comment.
I'm not sure why you don't think it makes sense for me to trust my own independent research over everyday news sources. I think it makes a lot of sense.
I never said anything about comments. HN is the only place I read them, and I'm not treating them like they're a news source. It's just an online conversation happening among people in tech.
I haven't expressed an opinion about this Guardian article, or the root commenter's assessment of it. But if the numbers are higher in the private sector, that would suggest top UK universities have a bullying rate below that of the general population and comparable populations, which would suggest that those institutions do not have a bullying problem.
It looks like the root commenter is saying that the Guardian article is suggesting the opposite, and based on those statistics, the Guardian article is wrong. The root commenter is additionally claiming that this is consistent with a pattern they've noticed of The Guardian writing skewed articles to fit a narrative of institutional injustices.
As an experiment, I read the body of this article and did a bit of research, and I would agree with the root commenter. Within the opening paragraph, I'm already losing confidence in the article:
> "Hundreds of academics have been accused of bullying students and colleagues in the past five years, prompting concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."
Citing population sentiment is a common form of misdirection in journalism. "People are concerned that ...", "we're receiving emails that say ...", "people on twitter are ...", these are all just misdirection. There are billions of people in the world, there are people concerned about everything. Twitter has over 300 million active users, every point of view on every topic is being tweeted by everyone all the time.
Citations of unquantified population sentiment are factual in all cases and for all arguments and all narratives. Journalists do this to give support and credibility to their narrative (which is often skewed), and to make it appear that they aren't the drivers of that narrative (when they often are).
As an example, Wolf Blitzer can point to a scrolling list of tweets that are all unified in any point of view on any subject at any time, based purely on Twitter's broad demographic and volume of tweets. It doesn't actually mean anything at all, other than that Twitter still exists and people still communicate.
Wolf Blitzer pointing at that list will increase the prevalence of tweets reflecting that unified point of view. This Guardian article stating that their FOIA findings are "prompting concerns" is in itself what will prompt those concerns. "People are concerned" actually means "we are telling you to be concerned." It's all just misdirection and deception, there's no honest reason for a journalist to cite sentiment in this way.
A more honest writing of that opening paragraph would be something like: "Academics in UK universities have been the subject of complaints at a very low rate. I am trying to prompt concerns that a culture of harassment and intimidation is thriving in Britain’s leading universities."
Reading through the rest of the article, the bias in this case is quite blatant:
* 135 UK universities became: "top UK universities"
* A filed complaint became: conclusive proof of bullying
* 294 complaints at 135 universities over 5 years became: hundreds of presumably recent complaints at "top universities"
* Less than 1 complaint against an academic every 2 years per university became: "a culture of harassment and intimidation in Britain’s leading universities"
To me it seems that The Guardian told their journalists to leverage FOIA requests for news stories. So their journalists try to think of a FOIA request that might get dirt for a good story, then send in that FOIA request, and then when the FOIA is fulfilled they just write whatever story they were hoping to write when they originally thought up the FOIA request.
After reading the article, the headline itself actually appears to be an outright lie. It says "hundreds of complaints at top universities", but they only found 294 complaints in total from all UK universities. Unless every university in the UK is a "top UK university", the headline is a lie.
The Guardian also leads the article with a stock photo of people wearing academic regalia with their heads down and backs to the camera, which paints an image of guilty and shamed academics.
Relating this all back to how people consume news:
* Reading only the headline, and believing it, would've made me very misinformed
* Reading both the headline and the article, and believing them both, would've made me the most misinformed
* Reading both the headline and the article, believing none of it, and doing independent research to disconfirm all of it made me slightly more informed on this subject (if you can even call it that) than the average person, and took 20 minutes of my time
* The approach I detailed in my original comment, which would've been to read only the headline, recognize that in this case it bears no consequence for The Guardian whether any aspect of the headline is true or not, and therefore ignoring it completely, would've had a neutral effect on how informed I am, but would've only taken 1 second of my time
In this case I regret reading the article at all, and I think I would've been better off just reading the headline, recognizing that it can't be trusted, and ignoring it like I normally would.
There is still utility in headlines though, which is why I still read them. If the story is, for example, that someone won an election, or that a proposition passed, or that someone died, or that a hurricane is coming, or that a company was acquired, etc., then that will be stated in headlines and you can confirm almost immediately that it's factual.
The large majority of important news events are in that category.
From there, if the subject is important enough to me, I'll do independent research. That research usually won't involve reading news articles, because I've found them to be extremely inaccurate in almost all cases.
Pro-decadence but also anti-wealth? Do you mean their philosophy is to spend as much money from their income on luxuries as they can in order to pass money down into the economy or something?
You know that The Guardian will present anything they can as an issue that requires institutional change. That's just what they do these say. If you're willing to engage in willful confirmation bias, you can take any large institution and find enough disgruntled people to to build a "case".
I see nothing in this article about the authors trying to disprove their own hypothesis.
"The Guardian sent freedom of information requests to 135 universities. Responses revealed a total of 294 complaints against academics at 55 institutions. A further 30 universities reported 337 complaints against all staff – academic and non-academic. Across 105 universities, at least 184 staff have been disciplined and 32 dismissed for bullying since 2013."
Compared to the corporate world, that sounds incredibly low, actually.
Of course, these days any official statistic with inconveniently "good" numbers can be dismissed on the grounds that there are systematic attempts to cover things up and institutional pressure not to report incidents. But that in itself is often a form of confirmation bias.