Bad mentors hurt people

I'm not an oracle or what have you, but nonetheless I regularly get requests for advice or something like career counseling. I suppose this goes along with the territory of what I'm doing here on this site. I feel bad when I can't possibly have the bandwidth to provide all of the support that people feel like they need.

These requests come in all flavors, but the most common by far comes from students and postdocs who are stuck in bad situations because they have a crappy advisor. These folks have one person above them with an unhealthy level of control over their career, and they're using this power in a harmful way. Sometimes the person doesn't even know they're being harmful! They think they're doing the right thing! But they're not. They're being bad advisors.

I've felt bad that I can't individually take on these situations and bring folks under my wing (which is small and weatherbeaten), so I did write some substantial advice reflecting on how to navigate a situation when you're stuck with a bad advisor. In short, you've got to get out or to stick it out. If you get out, then make a good escape plan. If you stick it out, build a community that has your back to take the place of the bad advisor and take steps to limit the damage they can do.

Here's an even more vexing problem: What do we do with these people when they are our colleagues? How do you handle a situation when a co-worker — and maybe even a friend – is performing disservice for their students?

Because power hierarchies in research labs are linear, any weak link can do harm all the way down and there are few mechanisms of accountability. Only in the cases of the most egregious behavior do we see intervention from leadership within institutions. In most cases, overtly bad advisors simply coexist with their colleagues and everybody forms a network of support for the victims who wind up trapped in that person's web.

Our job as science professors is to train the next generation of scientists. Mentoring people is what we do. If a professor is a bad mentor – if they regularly do harm by action or by lack of action – trying to stop them from harming people is tantamount to stopping them from doing their job. When I was in grad school, there was one professor (let's call them Prof. Horrible) who hadn't had a grad student in over ten years. That's because whenever students were invited out for the visiting weekend, all of of the current grad students and faculty would take aside the prospective students visiting Dr. Horrible and let them know that they are at risk of joining a toxic lab. They tell them to not come to the department, for their own safety. And it worked. The whole time I was there, Professor Horrible kept trying to recruit, and the department collectively kept students away. I can only imagine how much bitterness was frothed into the situation. This person is now retired. I never saw direct evidence of the bad advising, but there was ample evidence from the past in repeated incidents that the department had managed to contain the situation as best as they could.

The Dr. Horrible situation isn't as uncommon as you might imagine. It's actually a bit worse because departments rarely do as good of a job of containing their harmful faculty. Sometimes they're even in denial about their colleagues. I was considering several labs when I was seeking a postdoctoral advisor, and I learned later that two (well, actually, almost three) of them were notoriously destructive for PhD students. As in, crash-and-burn, really bad stuff. Did anybody warn me? Nope.

We all know what should happen for the Doctor Horribles. If they can't capably mentor students, then they're in the wrong profession. This should be caught before tenure. This is literally what tenure review can and should be about (instead of being a mechanism to extract more federal grant dollars and accelerating the publication evolutionary arms race). Moreover, mentoring should be criteria for hiring tenure-track faculty! But alas, it rarely is. Once a person has tenure, there's very little to be done unless their bad mentoring is so egregious that they can be fired for cause.

But there's a lot of murkiness in bad mentoring. It's perfectly regular for an excellent advisor to have a student in their lab who fails to thrive. They might end up with grievances, have complaints against their advisor, and blame their advisor for adverse outcomes. In a one-off situation, I think it's not necessarily that easy to step in and figure out what went wrong, and where responsibility lies. For a student to succeed, it takes more than a strong mentor, after all.

One problem student is a concern. Two problem students is a trend. Three problem students is an established pattern. Even if some students thrive, if there's some proportion of students who crash out of a lab, then this is a real problem. The PI of the lab is the real problem. It is not acceptable to recruit a variety of students into the laboratory, subject them to a variety of stress tests and abuses, and then keep the students who thrive under abuse and get rid of the students who aren't able to thrive in the lab. That's straight-up exploitation. But is it uncommon?

I recently had a conversation with a friend¹ who had a problem. They were coming to the realization that they're working with a person who runs a toxic lab. An otherwise good person, but their model of mentorship leads to unhealthy conflict and exploitation. What does one do in a situation? Reader, this is a rough situation to be in because it is so volatile.

What are the odds that a colleague or a friend will respond healthfully when you call them in to let them know they need to change how they do things? What are the odds that your institutional leadership will have your back if you feel the need to escalate? What can you do without triggering a retaliatory situation for you and your students?

I think in most situations, people are already doing what they can: protect the victims and try to prevent new victims from being created.

What more can we do? That is up to leadership. This is a problem that is literally above the paygrade of students and faculty in the department. When the Dean needs to step in and earn that bigger paycheck. At this point, universities fail to take action because they fear that lawsuits will be more costly than not taking action. What price can you put on the mission of the institution to support the development of students? This is why institutions try to take alternative steps to simply getting rid of the bad actor, and try to contain them.

I've been to too many departments with tenured professors who are bad mentors. Who were bad mentors when they got tenure. So the big picture fix is to make sure that we hire people for the right qualities. If you're bringing in someone who publishes a lot (which is, I think, the only kind of person most places want nowadays), then it's important to inspect the machinery to make sure that it's compatible with healthy training of students. My gosh, can you imagine how amazing a department would be if the hiring criteria were all about the quality of mentoring students received?

¹ Just want to be clear that this is genuinely not about anybody who I'm working with or is at my institution. Have I had the displeasure of having these people in my own department? In the past, yes. Now, not at all.