Or rather you'd never had known about it. Much worse things have happened in private companies, only a few of which ever make it out in the press.

Of course a lot of abuse happens in private enterprise. But typically, senior management is much much more proactive about it than department chairs and provosts. There's very few Fortune 500 companies where you could publicly get away with the kind of abuse that's just part and parcel of being a grad student or post doc at a major research university.

It might still happen either because it's well concealed. Or it might happen at smaller or poorly managed companies. But at the typical functional, large corporation, egregious abuse of your subordinates essentially guarantees that you'll be terminated if/when it's brought to senior management's attention.

Academia is different because tenured professors are given far more independence and autonomy. By contrast middle managers are tightly monitored and controlled by their own line managers. The typical large corporation strives very hard to promulgate a homogenous corporate culture across the org. Whereas academia as a system encourages professors to be fiercely independent maverick. That has both pros and cons, but one of the major cons is that it tolerates a lot more abuse and dysfunctional management towards the non-tenured subordinates.

Your rosy picture of industry is surprising to me. It could be right, and the few takes I've heard (eg. recently, google's AI ethics mess) being only one side or exceptions that prove the rule.

But I have currently no reason to expect better from industry, and will want some proof before putting it on a pedestal.

Abuse happens to people who don't have other options. If you abuse someone who has a white collar job, they generally leave quickly.

If you abuse a poor grad student who has to complete research to pay back his loans which cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, he will generally put up with it.

You mean the number of suicides at foxconn? The forced labour that is likely contributing to many of the large mobile phone company bottomlines. The blatant benchmark fraud that happens all the time by all the large GPU and CPU manufacturers, I could go on. But I don't see the press all over this 24/7 t all, maybe some small niche outlets sometimes. In comparison the scrutiny that the academic world is under (if we relate to the affected people and effects) is much, much larger

> You mean the number of suicides at foxconn?

There are fewer suicides at FoxConn than would be expected given the age profile and number of their employees. If you employ hundreds of thousands of people some of them will kill themselves for reasons entirely unrelated from work. If they live in work dormitories they’ll do it at work.

Your example proves my point: Foxconn is 1/2 a world away, and news from that part of the world never penetrates pop culture.

That we have heard about it, implies a degree of scrutiny.

When Google fires an AI researcher in a sensitive position, it's an international event.

If Exxon executives committed suicide in the face of some kind of forced fraud/corruption, it would be a national story.

Yes, I agree. It seems to me that academia feels external to the power structure, so it rarely gets the same kind of attention as industry because it doesn't stir up resentment.

They are part of the power structure, they're just 'protected'. Most publications don't want to be seen as promoting a narrative that goes 'against science' even though of course it's not. There's no room for nuance in populism.

Protected, or just less noticed.

It's more the fact that academia is granted a greater degree of leniency because it is fundamentally something that is societally required for innovations to take place. Genuine ingenuity requires room to flourish, so in the West at least, the theory is you leave tge Boffins alone to do their wizardry.

The part I don't understand is how extorting the students to fund bloated Administrative processes, sport teams, stadiums, and executive staff ever became a thing, nevermind the incestuous relationship with academic publishing. Almost all great work I've seen came not out of gnashing of teeth and publish or perish, but out of a labor of love or an odd obsession with truly understanding something until you could practically get it across to a 5th grader.

"I can explain how, don't ask me why too many times, still figuring that part out."

The faculty have very little say in most of those aspects of universities you're complaining about.

The media is just a crazy sideshow that cherry picks a tiny subset of stories to run or people to destroy when it fits the right narratives. When it comes to real scrutiny, I'd say faculty are under vastly more than people in industry. Though yes, google as an entire entity will analyzed more than some random professor. But the rank-and-file professor is also probably in far more constant danger of being ruined than almost any individual in a comparable role in industry. Also more than most businesses that no one cares about.

Academia is not protected because of some intellectual notion of 'innovation' so much as they are on the right side of the bias presented in most publications. Most writers and commentators I think have venerable views of academia and probably err towards supporting that narrative publicly.

While it's true that Profs may be under excessive scrutiny in some ways, which frankly might make them skittish - they are obviously not under 'the most important' kind of scrutiny which relates to the material legitimacy of their work in terms of 1) reproducability 2) fudging results and borrowing ideas and 3) misappropriation of credit 'up the chain of power' and 'from other peers'.

Hence this article, and some other issues of legitimacy within academia.

I think almost everything boils down to the fact that the low-hanging fruit have been had in science, and though there are 20x more scientists alive now than just a few generations ago, in many ways we're getting diminishing marginal returns - and even worse - it's incredibly hard to know which teams to back, and which not to.

In the fog of war for funding, it leaves more room for back-stabbing than in most other places, even in the corporate world where at least there is some degree of job security.