Dear professor, dear institute director, dear Minister,
I am a Ph.D. student, an “early career researcher”, and I need to communicate how my working in academia affects my mental health.
The most prominent issue I struggle with is precarity. I am going to graduate soon and my contract here will finish just as soon. Then, I will only be able to apply for a one- to two-year-long contract at a time. Each one in a different city, country, or continent, in order to meet the all-important mobility criterion. Hence, I cannot settle. I cannot make long-term projects. I cannot really take part in the life of the local community. Sure, I could put in the effort to make my German fluent, get involved in clubs, and connect with the baker across the street. But is it worth it if I have to leave the city next year and am never able to come back? Most of my social life ends up existing within the academic circles, which means with people who, like me, will not stay long in the city. I feel like I am floating around, delocalised, without roots. And this also makes me feel like I do not make progress in life, and like I will keep living like an international student, moving from dormitories to single bedroom flats for at least ten more years.
The reason I am here, in spite of the forced mobility, the low wage and the long hours, is my passion. I am passionate about learning and about creating knowledge that others can share and benefit from, and that is what drives me. But it became apparent very early on that what we are doing here is often mostly running after grants by prioritizing the trendy topics and types of results that will be considered by big journals. And this has to be done as fast as possible: no slow thinking, no step taken back and only doing minimal verifications, at the expense of reproducibility and thus of the creation of true knowledge. This way of doing science is not in line with the passion I have, and it rarely feels satisfactory. I rarely feel like I am fulfilling my purpose. The irony in that is that we are also expected to be passionate about our research. And to show it: P.I.s will always introduce their students as such, and it is not unusual to hear the lack of passion in an early career researcher be mentioned as a flaw.
The same P.I.s terribly lack accountability in their supervision. Despite the few fail-safe mechanisms that are the Ombud people and the reporting frameworks of funding agencies, many P.I.s feel like they have no boss and nobody can tell them how to supervise their lab members, however abusive they might be. I am lucky enough that I did not experience this in the worst way myself. But having most of my friends in academia, I saw several of them have their life projects and livelihoods turned upside down by their P.I.s exploiting them, mobbing them and getting them to leave their positions, essentially making working in academia impossible for them in the future. This makes me sick and at times ashamed of being in academia.
With this letter, I appeal to you to urgently change the management philosophy and the power structures in academia, for the benefit of the people in it and the benefit of science.
Sincerely yours,
A Ph.D. student in Dresden