One of the workshops I’m most commonly asked to give at my university is usually called “Alternative Careers in Science.” I don’t give it that name myself–it’s what the group inviting me, or the program director, always calls it.They don’t mean becoming a music composer or a patent examiner; they mean getting a job that isn’t a professor in academia. Because, to them, anything else IS alternative, and, ergo, inferior.

Here’s a list of the common characteristics of a cult:

1. Authoritarian structure

2. Isolation from society and use of mind control techniques

3. Control of the environment

Let’s look at academia and graduate training from this standpoint:

1. Authoritarian structure

How many blogs are there by grad students writing about their frustration with their advisor, or Post-docs and PI friction? One person has the power.

2. Isolation from society and use of mind control techniques



Some of the lists of mind control techniques are both amusing and horrifying when viewed in the context of academia and grad students:

Peer Group Pressure – Suppressing doubt and resistance to new ideas by exploiting the need to belong.

Confusing Doctrine – Encouraging blind acceptance through complex lectures on an incomprehensible doctrine.

Verbal Abuse, Sleep Deprivation and fatigue – Creating disorientation and vulnerability by prolonging mental and physical activity and withholding adequate rest and sleep.

Dress Codes – Removing individuality by demanding conformity to the group dress code.

Financial Committment – Achieving increased dependence on the group

Controlled Approval – Maintaining vulnerability and confusion by alternately rewarding and punishing similar actions.

Yep. That lab coat you have to wear doesn’t seem so innocent now, does it? :)

Who do grad students and faculty hang out with? Other grad students and faculty. Students and faculty are pressured to put long hours in at the lab, which further isolates them.

To succeed, you must learn a way of speaking and thinking that is utterly unlike that of others. We teach students a “special language” of science, which is incomprehensible to outsiders. (Try having a non-scientist examine an issue of Science, if you don’t believe me. )

We teach a special way of writing, which makes information even less accessible to outsiders. In fact, I’ve had a paper criticized for being “too literary.” In other words, “I could understand it easily, so it must not be any good.”

3. Control of the environment

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s where it becomes very clear. A career in Academia is the Only True Way. Anything else is inferior:

“Mystical Manipulation: “principles” can be put forcibly and claimed exclusively, so that the cult and its beliefs become the only true path to salvation (or enlightenment)

Demand for Purity: The world becomes sharply divided into…the absolutely good and the absolutely evil… tendencies towards guilt and shame are used as emotional levers for the group’s controlling and manipulative influences (emphasis mine)

You didn’t publish your thesis? Wait, it was in that journal? You want to get a job WHERE??

Confession: sessions in which one confesses to one’s sin are accompanied by patterns of criticism and self-criticism, generally transpiring within small groups with an active and dynamic thrust toward personal change (emphasis mine)

Journal club and peer review, anyone?

Doctrine Over Person: If one questions the beliefs of the group or the leaders of the group, one is made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to even question….one is made to feel that doubts are reflections of one’s own evil when doubt arises, conflicts become intense

“I just wasn’t good enough for tenure.” “She just isn’t strong enough to deal with the normal demands of working in a lab.” “She’s too sensitive about her race.”….etc.

Dispensing of Existence: those who are not in the group are not enlightened; impediments to legitimate being must be pushed away or destroyed….if one leaves this group, one loses their salvation/transformation, or something bad will happen to them

Alternative careers =not a faculty member = not my choice, therefore, inferior choice.

I really hate doing that ‘alternative career” workshop, so I started giving this little presentation on cults at the beginning, whenever I talk to grad students. The reaction has been really amazing–the grad students love it.

The faculty hate it. They find it insulting. Huh.