That Cult You're In

Nobody joins a cult.

That’s what NXIVM whistleblower Mark Vicente said. And he’s right, of course—nobody who is in or has been in a cult looked at that cult and thought, “that’s a cult—I must join it!”. People end up in cults because they think they’re joining a group, a community, a career, a vision—something that adds value to their lives and promotes learning or creates a sense of purpose and belonging. They join because it’s sold to them as a solution to life’s problems. Something different. Something better.

Dr. Karen Kelsky introduced a 2021 TEDx Talk with the following:

I want to talk to you today about a cult that is recruiting some of America's best and brightest young people. This cult has centers in every major city and many small towns, and it keeps its victims for years. Those who get caught in its clutches end up coming out years later unemployed, deeply in debt, sometimes even homeless, and physically and mentally battered.

That's not something you'd willingly join, right?

Are you sure about that?

Because what Dr. Kelsky is referring to here is universities. The episode title is “Academia is a cult”, and without intending to create too much controversy with this statement, I agree with that assertion to a certain extent. Academia might not be universally damaging and dangerous, and, of course, we couldn’t have all the major research breakthroughs without it, but there are several aspects of academic culture that are covered in what Dr. Steven Hassan writes in his Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional (BITE) Model of Authoritarian Control.

There are many things in the BITE model that are not applicable to academia—here, I’m just focusing on the ones in each section that are, because I’m not intending to actually classify academia as a cult. The aim is to highlight some of the toxic culture that leads to severe stress and negative outcomes for academics. These are serious issues, and if we don’t recognize them as such, it will be impossible for them to change.

Under Behavior Control, we have regulate individual’s physical reality and discourage individualism; encourage group-think. Regulating a person’s physical reality means somehow forcing them to live and interact in a certain way that they have little control over; for example, dictating where a person lives and who they have relationships with. Obviously, universities don’t force this, but because of some of the Emotional Control aspects that academia fits in the BITE model (fear of others disapproval; no happiness or fulfilment possible outside the group, terrible consequences if you leave, shunning of those who leave, never a legitimate reason to leave), especially at the early career stage, academics feel like they have to move frequently for various contingent positions that might, but probably won’t, lead to tenure track employment. They’re told they shouldn’t do all of their training and early-career positions at one institution or even in one city because it makes them less competitive, and ties to an area or community are dismissed as unimportant. This often leaves people physically separated from their spouses and families while they chase after the secure careers they have been promised throughout their training. They’re often told that their work is the most important thing and that making sacrifices in their personal lives is worth it because of the success they’ll achieve if they ‘make it’ in academia. In reality, as Dr. Kelsky said in her video, very few PhDs end up with tenure track careers, and that sacrifice is all for nothing.

A university environment seems like it should be a place where individualism is encouraged and group-think discouraged, but at many institutions, that atmosphere is only present as a surface-level illusion. After I left academia, I had several conversations with individuals who held high-level university positions about what is wrong at the systematic level, and one of the most common themes in those conversations was the fact that you can only be successful and get things done in your own individual way if you have the right ‘individual’ thoughts and are ‘in’ with the right people. Anyone else can’t, and when there’s a problem with what is considered right, the only thing you can realistically do is accept that it’s a problem you can’t change. If you try to do something about it, you’re in the ‘out’ group. People might be told not to talk about concerns about a faculty member’s behavior, not because that behavior isn’t concerning, but because it’s accepted due to who they are, the influence they have, or the position they hold—the solution is to just keep getting your work done and ignore the problems, and the blame get shifted onto the person on the receiving end rather than the one causing the problem. It’s your fault that you’re not resilient enough to tolerate it and, apparently, nobody’s fault that there’s something requiring resilience to tolerate in the first place (BITE model Thought Control: forbidding critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy; teaching thought-stopping techniques which shut down reality testing by stopping negative thoughts and allowing only positive thoughts, including denial, rationalization, justification, and wishful thinking; Emotional Control: make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader’s or the group’s fault).

That aspect of suppressing the ability to do something about toxic behavior feeds into the Information Control aspect of the BITE model, which contains distort information to make it more acceptable and systematically lie to the cult member. Those are quite strongly worded phrases to apply to academia; however, they unfortunately fit with several aspects of the culture. As Dr. Kelsky said, many people are conditioned to believe that they are going to be the exception in academia. They will be part of that 2% that gets the tenure track position. People who do PhDs are driven, academically talented, and have typically demonstrated that they are exceptional in some way throughout their pre-PhD education. They have always achieved what they set out to achieve and they believe that will continue, even when they’re in an environment that is filled with equally driven, academically talented, and exceptional people. The statistics aren’t hidden, but as Dr. Kelsky said, academics ignore them. Professors, mentors, and colleagues distort the information and help convince others that while the job situation overall is bad, it’s acceptable for them because they’re exceptional and they won’t be affected. These lies are often told unintentionally, but unintentional misinformation doesn’t make it any less untrue.

Somewhere along the way, the value of getting an education became lost in the strive to get the most education possible. I hesitate to recommend grad school to anyone now because when I look at my career and the careers of friends and former colleagues who have left academia, it’s clear that a PhD wasn’t necessary for any of us to achieve what we have now, and without doing one, we would have been further along in what we’re doing now. I was personally extremely motivated by ‘finishing’ my education through doing a PhD—it wasn’t something I really thought twice about doing as it was simply the natural progression. Research and academic culture are heavily intertwined with undergraduate training at many institutions, so we have a situation where people are often being educated to become academics within that system instead of having an education focus on other careers. We bring undergraduates into research labs early in their studies to give them experience for future roles, and in doing so, start creating the next generation of PhDs striving to reach goals that are quite often unattainable. Shifting the focus of education to include the wide range of career options that are available would be beneficial. Not everyone who is interested in and good at science is going to be a fit for an academic role, and that is OK… except within academia, sometimes it’s not.

The Thought Control and Emotional Control sections of the BITE model include adopting the group’s ‘map of reality’ as reality and promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness (identity guilt, not living up to your potential) and phobia indoctrination resulting in irrational fears about leaving the group/questioning the leader’s authority (no happiness or fulfilment possible outside the group, terrible consequences if you leave, shunning of those who leave, never a legitimate reason to leave).

Does academia really do these things? Absolutely, it does. Those individuals who are interested in and good at science who end up in PhD programs and then decide they want to apply their talent an expertise outside of academia often find themselves receiving criticism for that. The ‘map of reality’ of many faculty and mentors in academia is that achieving in academia is the ultimate success—anything else means you’ve failed and have taken a backup option. I was somewhat jokingly referred to as a ‘failed researcher’ after I moved into my first alt-ac position, and while I know the person who said it wasn’t entirely serious, I still felt the need to point out that you can’t fail at something you weren’t trying to do. Yes, I had wanted to be a researcher when I first started my PhD, but even by the end of the second year, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted long-term. I didn’t fail to become a researcher, I simply stopped trying to be one.

But that wasn’t known. Not by the people I was working for. Why? Because thinking critically about the doctrine of becoming an academic researcher is sometimes not allowed. I had a postdoc mentor who said he would fire anyone who said they weren’t pursuing an academic career—he was only interested in training future academic researchers. I was only interested in keeping my job until I could actually get hired in an alt-ac role. “Keeping your job” is a constant concern for postdocs and those in early-career short-term positions, not only because the contracts themselves are short. The longer I spent interacting with postdocs, the more apparent it became that job security was non-existent—50% of the postdocs I knew were actively terminated from their postdoctoral positions before they ended, usually with very little notice. The reasons for this were often getting experiment results that the PI didn’t like, having opinions the PI didn’t like, or being interested in a research area that the PI wasn’t interested in. In one particular lab, postdocs tended to last about six months. Their expertise would be valued and praised, and then suddenly, things would change, and they’d be ‘useless’, ‘never doing any work’, and ‘stupid’ (actual things I have heard being said; BITE Model Emotional Control: extremes of emotional highs and lows—love-bombing and praise one moment and then declaring you a horrible sinner).

This kind of thing and everything mentioned here can cause extreme mental distress, questioning of identity (as an academic), questioning of reality, feeling like you’re not living up to your potential, and fearing others’ disapproval, among other negative outcomes (debt, difficulty getting jobs, homelessness). The way that academia highlights the academic path as the ultimate success, convinces everyone they can achieve that, and then ultimately lets most of the people who try to achieve it leave feeling like they’ve failed, wasted time, lost a huge amount of money, and compromised their mental health is extremely damaging and should be talked about more.

I don’t have any solutions to these issues. But I think it’s important to talk about them. Change is only possible in the future if people are willing to share their opinions and perspectives on where things are going wrong, and I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I can highlight these because I’m not in academia anymore. It might make me unhireable in academia in the future… but by now, it’s probably obvious why I wouldn’t want to go back!