Academia is TOXIC! Here's why...

20+ years of trying to prove that you are smarter than everyone else is bad for the human character.

I think acedemia can attract people with strongly narcissistic traits

I always thought if you're so gifted or skilled with intellectual ability then why guard your ideas against others? A truly thoughtful person has a fount that keeps flowing. I think academia is toxic because the people at the top are not the thoughtful ones. The lying, conniving, treacherous ones climb over them. The system rewards bad behavior.

Academia broke me. I ended up with an advisor who had a reputation for being unethical but no one would actually tell me straight,they just gave vague warnings....long story short she still has tenure there and I quit academia and was so depressed I couldn't work for a year. She used all my dissertation research to publish and present stuff under her name with her other favored mentees listed as co-authors. My name wasn't listed. Lesson learned. Never again. 🙄

It's the rampant elitism that gets me. These people will spend their lives critiquing social structures and be completely oblivious to how they treat staff. There is sometimes this air around that if a person doesn't have at least a masters they are not worth talking to. It's completely ridiculous.

I did a PhD in mechanical engineering (at a "top 10 of the world" ranked university) and my experience was nothing but amazing. My advisor was the MOST ego-less person I have ever seen. He would not hesitate to ask a question infront of undergrads saying that he didn't understand something without a flinch. His only goal was to help us and work on things he thought were interesting. He seemed to attract nice people, as half of my colleagues from back then are still among my best friends that I meet regularly. HOWEVER, I worked a lot of PhD students from other groups and oh boi..... there are the stories became true. Horrible narcicisstic bosses who abused them and all kinds a shit. But just to say, there ARE still amazing people in academia...

I think one big thing missing in this list is: journals aren't interested in publishing negative results. If you have a plausible hypothesis, but you test it and disprove it, you won't be able to publish it. Meaning: you don't have anything to show for whatever time & resources you sank into testing that hypothesis, and worse: someone somewhere will get the same idea and sink their own time and resources into testing it not knowing that it has already been tried.

Got out after 11 years and far, far happier in the private sector. My main three observations: 1) a lot of academics treat “normal” (ie less qualified) staff like absolute $h!t and it disgusted me. I hated seeing Dr X or Prof Y talk down or be outright rude to technical or admin staff all the time for no good reason other than their “rank”. 2) Academic committees are a massive waste of time. Everyone wants their say, everyone wants to be right and at the end of it no decisions are made and no one is accountable. The can just gets kicked further down the road 3) not enough funding for even the people that should be funded because their work is of sufficient quality. This means that being good enough doesn’t cut it. The route to advancement is to stab people in the back (or the front)

I remember a guy telling me he went into science and academia but was really turned off by the toxic competitiveness and petty jealousy among fellow students. He believed this would get less and less as he went on to the real adult worlds and higher levels. He had a sort of fantasy of the most logical, mature, the most 'scientific' unbiased people would await him in the end. To his horror, he insists, if anything it became far more toxic with more petty career jealousy than ever before. The only difference is that it was more sophisticated, clever, more elaborate.

I wish universities are more rewarded for data sets, like quality data sets, and an open platform for all academics to open a scientific discussion where they can post their text and visual based analysis to the data set. I prefer this over papers. It shouldnt also matter if the data is similar to others- this is even equally important to promote replicability,Pressure on making papers rather than doing the research itself is ridiculous.

Toxic is an understatement. I was once invited to a party at the dean’s residence. I’ve never met such a bunch of preening, venal, incompetent and just plain dumb human beings in my life. I’ve met trees with more personality than most of them. I’m from a family of university educated people. Their failings are prodigious, deep, and impossible to ignore.

I stood my ground and got rid of as a 'troublemaker'. Being shrewd, ruthless, and compliant are the qualities that get rewarded the most

A PhD student is a pawn for this toxic behaviour. As I near the end of my PhD I have continually questioned their actions and so many times and been told to stop rocking the boat! Especially if that person has heavy influence and or control over funding allocation. Breeds problems. Had the luck to meet two researchers (one at a uni and one at a industry research company) who do not compromise on their research and have made names for themselves for doing so. Gives me hope and renewed passion for sticking by my standards! Thank you for summing up all this turmoil and toxicity beautifully. Previously I wondered if it was just in my head.

I quit my Marketing PhD after 6 months because my supervisor started to behave like a startup guru, always trying to get the next bigger collab on-board without having finished any of the current projects. He also delegated most work to lower-ranked staff and cared zero about putting any effort into lectures, prepapration for lectures, grading, and organization of courses. I was his direct assistant and I kid you not, I had double the workload than he had. Every week he wanted 1 or 2 meetings with me out of boredom and so that he seemed "busy". Sometimes, the meeting with me was his ONLY schedule for that day, so he sometimes dragged meetings out for 3 hours. I once felt physically ill after a meeting with him because I couldn't stand up, I couldn't open a window nor refill my glass of water. I am so glad I quit last month and don't have to see that old man ever again!

I am grateful my Professor hasnt been toxic to me and this is my third year. He is a respectful person.

Oh my gosh yes. I’ve heard profs at big time schools like the University of Chicago trash talk faculty at public institutions or community colleges not because of a certain prof’s arguments but strictly because of where they work. How horrible!

This is slightly off topic, but I’ve been wanting to rant about this for so long. My uncle is a philosophy professor at a fairly elite college. You can’t talk to him about anything without him completely belittling you, making presumptions about you being lesser in intelligence or taste or life experience, and he will straight up insult you if you try to argue with him like you don’t know what you’re talking about, even if he’s totally wrong. His wife is an attorney and while they’ve had amazing careers and started from nothing, they are both just so fucking out of touch. They (when I say “they,” I really mean him, since she never questions or pushes back on any ideas he has or decisions he makes) were antinatalists for the longest time and would belittle my parents and my aunt for having children, but I guess they had a midlife crisis when myself, my siblings, my cousins, and their friends’ kids all grew up and they felt left out or something. They adopted a baby a few years ago and I get the impression that they assumed, if these people of lesser importance and intelligence could raise children, it must be easy. Well, the kid is spoiled, doesn’t respect them at all since they have no idea how to discipline him, and they’re misdiagnosing him and over medicalizing his tantrums when it’s literally just a result of their ignorance. My mother singled handedly homeschooled three kids, used food stamps and hand me downs from friends to get by. My aunt raised four kids, one with severe OCD, while she had cancer. But we don’t know how hard it is to raise children because they can’t go jogging anymore, this kid is different from us and so much harder to raise, so the experiences of my parents and my mom’s sister don’t matter. It’s just really annoying and hurt my confidence as a child when I stayed with them for a summer, when everything was about how I don’t know anything and that formed me into a people pleasing, self denying person who wanted approval from my “superiors,” in my teens. I’m 22 and I don’t care anymore but looking back it impacted me more than I realized. They say they’re feminists, but don’t take any woman seriously unless she doesn’t act or look like the women in their circles and insulted my mother by calling her an ignorant housewife and my aunt for “popping out babies.” They say they’re anti racist, but they fail to see how they’re separating their child, who is African American, from his culture and neglecting things like proper care for his hair texture, since they’re white and don’t even have any black friends. They say they’re socialists, but they’re so far removed from the struggles people have and they didn’t understand why young people were choosing to live with their parents instead of moving out and assume it’s because they’re more conservative, and not because that’s their only option. I used to be really ambitious and academically inclined and while I still enjoy topics like philosophy I never, ever want to become that far removed from common experiences and up my own ass. It seems miserable to be like that anyway because I’m sure they’re used to being like that because they have to seem competent with their peers and it’s just a personality trait now.

I have never experienced this toxic environment in academia until I moved to do my PhD from Colombia to Canada. These first world countries have a no community environment, everything so individualistic, and not so much help to others because no one should know how I going or what I am doing. I got so disappointed of academia in the first world, the motor is money, not community!!! (I am sure not everywhere, but is what I feel)

My wife is working on her masters and I’ve been disgusted by how she’s been treated. She has two abusive co workers who are protected from HR by management. And management is actively sabotaging my wife’s masters because she turned down doing a phd because she just wants to be done. So there delaying her masters to keep her researching for them longer. And the funny part… those two abusive coworkers are phds but they’re not involved in any research. They’re in their 50s and 60s and are literally doing the manual labor of digging holes and pouring concrete for my wife’s project.

Some academics are highly intelligent and world leaders in their fields. Others are just big kids who never grew up and never left school.