Why I Feel Sorry For My Professor

My keycard to the -80°C freezer didn’t work again.

I walked down the lab and scanned the door lock next to my lab bench.

The lock blinked red.

I tried again.

It blinked red again.

Was I locked out of the lab now too?

It was a little before 8AM and I was trying to start an experiment that the professor wanted me to run.

Our relationship had been strained over the past month because I told him I wanted to graduate and transition into an industry job. He didn’t take this well and told me that any PhD who doesn’t become a professor in academia is a failure.

Over the next few weeks, he had started withdrawing his support of me and my thesis project. He started canceling meetings with me at the last minute. He started recording any time I spent out of the lab in between the hours of 8AM and 10PM and emailing reports of my absence to my department.

He also stopped working on the most recent paper that I was first author on and sent a letter to a journal to request that my name be lowered from first to third author on another paper that was already in press. I think he expected me to leave the lab in response to all of this but I was in my 5th year and I couldn't imagine leaving without my PhD at that point.

My professor became increasingly manipulative and aggressive.

First, he started locking me out of various rooms to prevent me from doing experiments and then using the fact that I didn’t complete an experiment as evidence against me to my department.

Then, one day, he came over to my lab bench and asked me about an experiment that I wasn’t able to do because he had locked me out of one of the rooms that had the reagents I needed.

I didn’t respond because I didn’t know what to say and because I was scared out of my mind.

It’s weird for me to write that I was scared because I was in my late 20’s when all of this happened and was technically a grown man. Still, I remember being very intimidated by my professor. I saw him as some sort of demi-god who had complete control over me, my career, and my life.

Impatient, my professor yelled, “Answer me! I’m the boss!”

The whole lab fell quite.

He yelled again, “Answer me right now or I’ll write a letter to your department and you’ll never get your PhD.”

The lab next to us fell quite too.

I’ll never forget this part - the professor managing the other lab closed his office door once my professor started yelling. At the time I just thought this other professor didn’t want to get involved but now I just see him as someone else scared and broken by the academic system.

I sat there frozen. I was completely unable to compute what was happening.

My professor stormed over to me, grabbed my arm, and shouted in my face one more time, “Do you understand me!?”

I said, “yes, okay” meekly.

He let go of my arm and walked away.

Everyone acted like nothing had happened.

I packed up my stuff and left the lab for the day. I went to the office of one of the Dean’s who had worked with my professor for several years previously at another university.

The Dean was surprised but didn’t seem to be able to offer much help.

This was a common problem I ran into in academia over and over again. There was no accountability and there was no system for correcting poor management, let alone bullying, harassment or other extreme cases of inappropriate behavior.

A report by Nature defines this problem very clearly...

“The ‘feudal’ master-servant relationship existing between a PhD supervisor and his or her student1 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 explains why this problem has continued over the past 15 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."

A Trend Of Poor Mentorship

A few weeks after my professor’s outburst, I received an email from my professor informing me that a date had been set for my thesis defense and that there was no need to come back to the lab.

This entire downward spiral happened because I wanted to get an industry job and because I challenged my professor’s authority.

Like a lot of PhDs, I thought this was my fault.

I thought I was alone.

Looking back though, I realize that I was just one of many PhDs and PhD candidates that my professor had either forced out of his lab or tried to force out of his lab.

The year before I started graduate school, he had forced out a postdoc just a few months after the postdoc’s contract started. My first year of graduate school, he had forced out a Research Assistant (RA) in the lab.

I remember hearing him yell at this RA and watching her leave his office crying three different times before she left.

My second year of graduate school, he forced out a second-year graduate student because he said she was “too dumb” to get her PhD. Then, my third year of graduate school, he tried to force out a 5th-year graduate student because of an authorship dispute.

I should have seen the writing on the wall and started to protect myself from this behavior but instead, I did what most PhDs do in terrible lab situations - keep quiet. I thought that if I just did what I was told and acted like everything was normal, it would all go away.

But it didn’t go away. It just got worse and worse and worse.

I failed to speak up about what was going on in my lab until it was too late. I allowed myself to get isolated because I already felt isolated.

I wasn't as alone as I thought though, and if you're going through this, you're not alone either.

As an example, just this year, BuzzFeed News reported that at least two professors at the prestigious Max Planck Institute have been bullying and otherwise abusing PhDs for years. The Institute and it's associated Society knew what was happening for at least two years, yet, failed to correct these professors' behavior.

It Wasn’t My Professor’s Fault

James Lane Allen, an American novelist from Transylvania University once wrote, “Adversity does not build character, it reveals it.”

The adversity my professor was facing had exposed his poor character. Nothing more or less.

Still, everything that happened wasn’t entirely my professor's fault.

My professor was older and was brought up in academia at a different time. In the 1970’s, over 70% of professors would go on to get tenure. As such, he couldn’t fathom why anyone would do a PhD and then leave academia. He thought I was a moron for wanting to leave academia and therefore not worth his time. (I know this because he called me a moron repeatedly.)

Things were different now though.

Recent reports including a review by The Royal Society found that only 0.45% of PhDs now become professors.

Worse, the average postdoc length had increased to 6-10 years.

Worse still, universities had started to hide how many postdocs they had by labeling senior postdocs as “non-faculty staff” or “research associates”, even though the PhDs in these positions continued to get paid very poorly and not have access to any retirement benefits or, in some cases, healthcare.

My professor was fully entrenched in the academic system and knew nothing else.

I asked him one time if he had any industry contacts and his answer was simply “No, why would I?”.

My professor was simply from a different time.

When he was in graduate school, professors were untouchable. They could do and say anything they wanted. They could call international PhDs dumb and yell at graduate students without any repercussions whatsoever. He experienced this behavior and now it was his turn to be on the other end of it.

On top of this, my professor, and everyone else at our university, was dealing with the financial crash of 2008.

Labs all around us were shutting down and grant funding was at an all-time low. His most recent RO1 grant had just been denied for the 2nd time and he was up for tenure in 18 months.

Things were grim.

Academia had failed my professor, just like it was failing me.

Academia, through lack of accountability, lack of people management training, and through lack of support systems, had turned my professor into a scared, narrow-minded bully who couldn’t control his emotions.

The problem is not getting any better.

In fact, recent studies show that 47% of professor's want personnel management training but are unable to get it, and a surprising 21% do NOT want lab or personnel management training even though they've NEVER had it. My professor fell into the latter group.

I honestly believe I would have turned out the same way as my professor had I spent 10 years in a postdoc like he did after getting my PhD. Fortunately, I transitioned into an industry career instead.  

I'm Grateful I'm Not Like My Professor

After working in industry for many years, I’m grateful that I didn’t turn out like my professor.

Yet, for the first two years of graduate school, I wanted to be just like my professor. I started graduate school in 2006 with one of the largest entering classes of PhD students at the university.

I quickly found a lab that was doing exciting research and started spending 18 hour days in the lab.

Seriously, 18 hour days.

I was so eager to impress my professor that I simply stayed in the lab until he went home.

The second day I was in the lab, I got in at 8AM and stayed until 2AM the next morning. In retrospect, that was a horrible decision because afterwards I was expected to work until at least 10PM every night.

I didn’t mind the work though because it was all new and exciting. At the time, my professor was happy. He had just got his first RO1 grant funded a year early. He was running a new lab and government funding was still relatively high. The future looked bright.

My professor was not only happy at the time, but his behavior was positive, logical and alluring. He seemed to know everything. He had money and seemingly had power. He was buying new instruments left and right, and he let us buy whatever reagents we wanted. It was like he didn’t have a care in the world.

Every lab meeting he would buy us at least 6 pizzas from the best pizza shop in town and we would talk about everyone’s research and tell jokes, and everyone got along great.

Who wouldn’t want this life?

That’s when I knew I wanted to be just like my professor.

Of course, all of this changed after being exposed to who my professor was under stress. I went from wanting to be him to wanting to avoid being like him at all costs.

I used to envy my professor, now I just feel sorry for him.

1. I feel sorry for my professor because he had no financial training.

One of the reasons my professor was so stressed after the 2008 financial crash is because he had blown a large percentage of his grant funding in 2006 and 2007.

He wasn’t tracking his spending well and was clueless when it came to simple financial concepts like how to read and react to a profit and loss statement.

2. I feel sorry for him because he had no people management training.

My professor was a poor leader because academia didn’t care about his ability to manage people.

He was brought up in a system that rewarded his technical skills and completely ignored his transferable skills, or lack thereof.

Academia gave him titles like “academic advisor” and “mentor” without testing his ability to advise or mentor.

3. I feel sorry for him because he thought his career was a success.

My professor believed that being able to end the careers of postdocs or graduate students that were 15 years his junior made him powerful. He believed that making someone cry or calling someone dumb was winning.

He also believed that he was being paid well and doing noble, cutting-edge work when in fact his salary was far less than the average PhD gets paid in industry and his work wasn’t noble or cutting-edge.

There’s nothing noble about being paid less than you’re worth to do work that requires you to constantly beg for funding.

There's nothing cutting-edge about piecing together just enough data to get the next grant funded and then using the grant funding you get to work on something other than what the grant was supposed to fund because you already know that the data you put in the grant won't lead to a substantial or translational discovery.

In today’s world, the biggest discoveries are made and the biggest salaries are paid in industry.

While postdocs continue to pile up and faculty positions continue to decline in academia, PhD salaries and opportunities in industry continue to climb.

My professor is part of a system that is slowly dying and I don’t envy the decline. I feel sorry for it.

Are you a PhD?

If so, do you want to be a professor?

Tell me why or why not in a comment below.

To learn more about transitioning into industry, including how to gain instant access to industry career training videos, case studies, industry insider documents, a complete industry transition plan, and a private online job referral network for PhDs only, get on the wait list for the Cheeky Scientist Association.