Abuse of power at Germany's elite research institution [video]
9 comments
·March 16, 2025throw627357
tg180
This isn’t just a problem specific to German academia, it extends across the entire European academic landscape.
I've always wondered why professors and supervisors, after experiencing these abuses themselves, continue to perpetuate them.
The only explanation I've come up with is that the system naturally weeds out those who resist or speak up by stalling their careers. As a result, it selects for individuals who don’t make trouble, those who passively obey and endure even the worst forms of dysfunction.
In the end, this leads to the normalization of abuse, with people rationalizing it as "if I went through it, others should too", a way to protect their own ego.
The only thing even worse is when the abuse turns passive-aggressive: denying opportunities without ever saying it outright, hostility disguised as kindness, ambiguous and demoralizing feedback, delaying responses, making people miss crucial deadlines, assigning pointless or overwhelming tasks. They excel at this too.
If I ever had children, I would never let them attend a European university.
disattention
This exists in the US as well. I've personally experienced and witnessed it happen within labs at an R1 University. The accountability structures are woefully insufficient to protect students and junior researchers, and the incentives are perverse as to actually reinforce the practice.
I've seen frequently that talented technical contributors are academically handicapped because they bring too much value to the lab for them to graduate quickly. I've personally had my own funding threatened if I didn't work "at least 60 hours each week" on my ex-advisors work (which was in no way related to my degree or research interests). I was fortunate to find another advisor and funding source quickly, but most advisors are absolutely profiting in their career off the backs of their students; leveraging both carrot and stick to fuel their ambition. It's a problem of modern academia and I'm not sure how to fix it.
rockyj
Unfortunately, this is not just applicable to Europe, this is applicable in a lot of places in the world. Imagine this in a hierarchical, subversive, "elders are always right" societies in Asia (or South Asia).
throw627357
> I've always wondered why professors and supervisors, after experiencing these abuses themselves, continue to perpetuate them.
From their perspective, it's simply about the ends justifying the means.
You've learnt that relentless pressure and extreme demands, to an extent that elsewhere in society we would call highly abusive, produce results - they did for you, or you wouldn't be there.
This goes as far as rationalizing offensive personal insults as helpful tools - negative feedback can be very motivating to a driven person.
(That's not something I made up, I heard that point made nearly verbatim from a famous Max Planck director.)
sa-code
Is there any established literature on accountability?
I'm interested in how to bake accountability into an organization. I don't like the idea of using whistleblowing as a crutch because things have to get really bad for someone to blow the whistle.
jackcosgrove
I'm not sure if there is any literature to this effect, but an institutional arrangement that has known flaws is one in which peers nominate future peers for membership. Academia is an example of this arrangement.
When evaluating whether an institution is accountable, a good default question to ask is, "Is power plural?" In the terminology of the American political order, this is called checks and balances. It's not perfect, but a system of overlapping institutions, whose members are chosen by a plurality of methods and from a plurality of backgrounds, and which have oversight over each other in a loop, are more accountable than unitary institutions.
I'm sure some have attempted to answer this analytically, basically making a "directed power graph" to measure how plural power is, and then correlating that with measures of accountability such as corruption perceptions. This is a huge topic and the second paragraph is my opinion, but that's because I think that's what such an analysis would show.
throw627357
Max Planck is not accountable in this respect simply because it so far hasn't needed to be.
They are good at external scientific evaluations, and regularly ace them. Culturally, that's the only thing that matters to this institution.
They do not have a non scientific supervisory board, they don't think they need that, because it's all about the science. What you call abuse, they call dedication to the cause of advancing human knowledge.
However, this type of reporting is extremely dangerous to them. One of the most valuable resources to them is highly skilled, motivated and driven applicants for positions at all levels.
The more this gets out into the light, the more they will need to build the organizational culture to actually do something real about it.
That said, so far, these things are very easy for them to wait out. Very few victims speak out, because either that puts an end to their career, or they are happy to have put that time long behind themselves.
pstuart
I've long been interested in this as well.
Daylight is the best disinfectant -- having goals, non-goals, budgets, and expenses as publicly auditable data is a good place to start.
Going deeper, I've had this notion of making a hybrid communication/documentation tool that embeds micro contracts that can be audited. Easily solved by ye olde HN simple weekend project ;-)
I personally know all about it, having spent many years in that system.
Warning, long comment. Skip forward to the paragraph starting in "Where it becomes specific to Max Planck" if you already understand the psychological roots of toxic work environments in academia.
Some of this is due to the psychology of the scientific mentor-mentee relationship, which has toxic elements nearly everywhere.
Essentially, you have young, highly ambitious people fresh out of college, who dream of achieving big things in science.
They go work for people who have achieved everything they dream of, and who have been successful to a degree only one in thousands of young grad students will ever be. (That's literally the odds if you go work for a Max Planck director.)
The supervisors also happen to have the power to waste many years of the grad student's life - a power only comparable to being able to hand out long prison sentences on a whim.
This alone is a social situation perfectly suited to generate abuse and toxicity. The worst supervisors will cynically take advantage of the situation. The best ones only will have been corrupted by years of bootlicking and pandering into thinking of themselves as the second coming of Christ.
Up to here, this is a structural problem common to all elite research institutions.
Where it becomes specific to Max Planck is in its so-called Harnack principle, a principle that essentially codifies a cult of genius, making it the explicit goal of the society to give nearly limitless financial freedom and executive power to the institute's independent directors and putting the entire organization into these individual's service.
This principle turns that ostensibly modern institution into a time capsule of late 19th century Germany, a Wilhelminian relic. It's poignant and fitting that the society was renamed from Emperor Wilhelm Society after the war.
That this institution specifically is the crown jewels of German science is truly a danger to the standing of German science in the world. Because the society is completely 'democratically' run by its directors, who profit fantastically from the status quo, and due to the near complete lack of accountability and oversight, it is unable to reform.
The moment people speak up against this system, their career is over - making it very easy and convenient for the society to ignore those voices as "anonymous". Of course they are! The fact that we hear about this anyway, every few years, over decades, should tell you all you need to know.