Abuse isn’t an “advising style”: Consequences of MIT sheltering abusive mentors

I am deeply sorry that the sentiment you express has been your experience. That is not the way it is or must be everywhere, and I hope you are treated better in the future.

Even so, I want to say explicitly that the idea that we should allow geniuses to abuse us and harass us because they are geniuses is dangerous and misguided nonsense. Being smart is not an excuse to behave poorly. With rare exception, producing something great for the world, or believing you are working on something great, is not justification for hurting others or not taking into consideration their needs or feelings, especially when they are working for you to try to help you.

I also think that your reduction of 100-hour-minimum work weeks, no free time, emotional manipulation to prevent reporting, and frequent unnecessary cruelty disguised as "advice" or "help" to "unkind comments" is absurd. If people chose this lifestyle, knowing what they were getting into, that's one thing (and even then, it would still be dubious to demand it in the first place) - but clearly the author and their peers were mislead and manipulated into it.

Finally, what is illegal and what is immoral are not the same thing, and we can and should hold people, as a society, to a higher standard than "guess they didn't break the law" when we put them in positions of power over other people.

Edited to add: I had the pleasure of working as an undergrad with several professors and PHD students in a research capacity. Some of these people, I would absolutely consider "geniuses" in terms of both intellect and achievements. I still speak with many of them, and consider some of them good friends. I never, not once, observed or heard of people being treated in the ways described in this article (nor was I myself), despite the relatively prestigious people I worked with and their relatively prestigious work. It is not that way everywhere.

No one "expects" to go through life without hearing insults, but that does not mean they should be tolerated. I fully expect to continue to hear racist, homophobic statements from US politicians. I do not want to, and I want to work to change that.

Sure, the real world sucks. I don't see that as a reason to prevent colleges from improving.

Unsolicited advice for any potential PhD students choosing between schools/advisors: you should try very hard to talk to current PhD students, preferably in person or at least over the phone or video call (at any rate, not in writing). Try to talk to as many as possible.

Good advisors will probably have a few students who will speak up for them, and great advisors almost certainly will. In contrast, bad advisors will probably have a few students who give middling recommendations, cryptic comments, or outright warnings. Good departments typically have meet-the-current-students-without-faculty-present events to facilitate exactly this discussion. If the potential advisor does not happily put you in contact with current or recent students, that alone is a red flag.

This is not foolproof. Even a great advisor may have one bitter student, and a generally terrible advisor might still have some good student relationships. But having a bad advisor will make grad school so much harder. This is a situation where doing a bit of due diligence can have a huge impact.

I was lucky; I had a great advisor, and I was always happy to talk to potential students, since I wanted my advisor to have more good students. Talk to students!

Friends told me that a former advisor started a side business counseling couples, and made some of his students pretend to be married participants during larger group sessions.

One kicked a PhD student out of her lab after he spoke to a local news reporter about his line of research without her approval. Not even a scientific article, just a personal interview. He started over in a new line of research.

The page that used to link to it said, "At MIT, my students chose me after reading a [little thumbnail bio](link to just the first paragraph) published by the undergraduate office. But you can see the [original, pre-censored version](the link you posted) that I mailed in." Much of Shivers's (excellent) humor has been purged from his home page; that may unfortunately be necessary in today's more puritanical times.