The FAARM Project

So not only did I search for an advisor who supported my non-academic goals, I was aware enough to ask other students what it was like working with their advisors. Thus, by the time I started my program, I knew that my advisor had a reputation for being “difficult” and “demanding,” particularly when it came to ensuring that his students were working enough. But I’d spent years navigating “difficult” supervisors in higher ed, and I thought I would be able to weather it.

And I did – like beach-front property in a hurricane.

The dirty secret is that only half of doctoral students graduate. The rest drop out, most often due to “poor work-life balance” and “poor relationship with research advisor.” The culture of graduate education is so toxic that, while in their programs, grad students develop mental health problems at rates six times that of the general population. They’re almost as likely to develop a mental health disorder as they are to graduate, and one in ten doctoral students are suicidal. This problem isn’t isolated to specific programs or universities; the trends cross departments, universities, and countries. It’s endemic to graduate education.

Even though I thought I knew higher ed, I had no idea what doctoral students were experiencing. When I began my program, I was confident that I would be able to manage the stress, meet my goals, and move on, with pride. I pursued policy-related professional development experience and put my experience in higher ed to good use as I became involved with graduate student government, first at my university, then at the national level. And I quickly learned that things were much worse than I had thought. My own experiences mirrored my conversations with students, where story upon story depicted a bleak picture filled with brow-beaten students desperate to escape. The trend was universal – graduate student mental health had been plummeting for a decade.

As I advocated for students at the university and in Congress, I became frustrated with just how little recourse students had. See, as it turns out, even though graduate students are both students and employees, they receive very few protections as either. Most of the federal protections for students center on classroom-related issues, like grades and exams – not verbal abuse in lab meetings or being forced to teach courses uncompensated because your advisor is “too busy.” But as employees, our protections end at “official” duties, like when we’re in a classroom teaching, not the interactions that we have with our advisors who oversee our education, even though they often dictate our employment responsibilities. As a result, very few of the types of interactions that we have with our “bosses” are protected under either set of regulations – and they just happen to be competitive workaholics suffering from imposter syndrome.

I did manage to survive my program, but I left broken. I developed a host of chronic health conditions tied to extreme stress and overwork, and I am now disabled. During my program, I spent about 60 hours a week working on either my research, my courses, my teaching, or doing professional development. If I wasn’t asleep or eating, I was working, at a doctors’ appointment, or, if I was lucky, putting my young son to sleep. And it still wasn’t enough for my (first) advisor, whose verbal abuse and harassment eventually led to every student leaving his lab – at around the same time we learned that not a single doctoral student had graduated from his lab in 10 years, a fact that had been conveniently hidden from us during recruitment. Still, the work hours didn’t get any better after leaving his lab, and so, over the years, I kept telling myself that this wouldn’t last forever, that things would get better once I graduated. I just needed to stick it out long enough. I almost didn’t make it.

Working long hours, particularly on a computer, led to me developing what one doctor termed, “widespread musculoskeletal dysfunction.” It began as neuropathic pain in my arms that, no matter what I did, wouldn’t go away. I spent approximately 75% of my 7-year program in physical therapy, though I couldn’t see my PT as regularly as I needed to because my student insurance capped me at 12 visits a year. I invested a lot of personal money into creating an ergonomic computer set up at home – and was subsequently criticized for not working in the office, even though the school wouldn’t help me with the necessary accommodations. I created splints out of chopsticks and ace bandages to strap my arm into so I could keep working when the pain got really bad. I developed ulcers from chronic NSAID overuse and ended up in the ER with internal bleeding. I developed constant pain at the back of my head, eventually diagnosed as occipital neuralgia, and during the last 18 months of my program, I suffered from chronic, intractable migraines. It took over two years of trying to find an effective treatment before I finally had surgery – occipital nerve release – during which they found extensive soft tissue nerve entrapment. The long hours at a computer had allowed the muscles and fascia in my neck to literally grow up and around my occipital nerves, effectively trapping them down and causing constant pain. It was so extensive that the surgery took nearly twice as long as expected. As I write this, I am 6 weeks post-op, and for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long, I have no pain at the back of my head. And yet, we still suspect there is additional nerve entrapment elsewhere in my neck, though we’re hoping to loosen it with more conservative treatments.

The long-term health problems that come from long work hours is well-documented. “Regulations are written in blood,” and employee welfare laws are no different. Workers and activists fought for 80 years to establish the federally protected 40-hour work week, and it has been law for almost the same amount of time. Workers’ compensation laws have been enacted in every state since 1948. And yet, there is an entire subclass of our population – students, no less – whose federally funded working and learning environments is somehow exempt from these protections and whose treatment by their employers receives little to no oversight.

My story is not unique. Only half of us manage to finish, and with each dropout, we hear the same narrative: “They didn’t want it enough,” “They weren’t passionate enough,” “They weren’t willing to sacrifice.” But there’s a reason that doctoral exams have long been regarded as a form of “academic hazing,” and while it may be tempting to say, “Graduate students are adults and can say ‘no’,” doing so ignores the power imbalances at play. The students who do push back, who do insist on boundaries with their advisors, are retaliated against – in funding decisions, teaching assignments, authorship positions – on top of whatever verbal abuse they might have to deal with. When my advisor’s harassment began to include blatant sexual harassment, my university’s Title IX office told me that, while no one should have to go through what I went through, there wasn’t enough class-based discrimination for them to do anything about it. See, he was verbally abusive to the men in his lab, too.

I sincerely believe that the vast majority of advisors are good people who would never intentionally cause harm. I don’t believe that my advisor was – or is – a bad person. But I do believe that academia breeds obsessive passion, which, unchecked, can lead to exploitation, neglect, and abuse. Academia recruits into its ranks those with near unquenchable curiosity, and then it rewards productivity without enforcing the corresponding checks and balances that protect the health and welfare of employees. With the added external pressure to “do more with less” in a publish-or-perish world, faculty are left overworked and overburdened, and they expect the students they train to keep up. Meanwhile, unaware students seek out the best researchers to train under, and then, to their dismay, often find that “best researcher” does not mean “best boss,” “best advisor,” or “best educator.” They then find themselves committed to a program without the recourses available to most employees, and because of the highly specialized nature of their work, they can’t just “find another job” or “transfer to another program.” And so, whether they earn their degree becomes dependent upon how much abuse they are willing to tolerate.

The system is broken, and its breaking us in return.

Kaylynne M. Glover, Ph.D.
FAARM Co-Founder and Policy Director