This article doesn’t do a good job defining bullying, but the examples they give sound normal to mild compared to the private sector. “Extreme pressure to produce results” sounds more like typical (bad) management than bullying.
"At another internationally renowned laboratory, the pressure was reportedly so extreme people were driven to falsify data rather than incur the wrath of the director."
One difference between private sector (typically) and academia is that if you fake your results in the private sector, it will come out when the product ships and is no good. As we have seen with the reproducibility crisis in many fields of science, the feedback loop is much slower in academia. "Extreme pressure to produce results" is a very imprecise statement, but one issue I worry about is the primary investigator wanting to get someone else to fake his data for him, so he has plausible deniability if it should come to light.
I agree the article is rather imprecise, but I think there is a real problem.
> One difference between private sector (typically) and academia is that if you fake your results in the private sector, it will come out when the product ships and is no good.
I dont really think so. Pretty often, at that point no one remembers or care who was responsible for what and someone else will be pressured to spend nights fixing your mistakes.
The private sector also has strict regulatory compliance, taxation and legal systems to deal with. The accuracy and quality of work was vastly better than anything I saw in academia, which I continue to be shocked by in how sloppy much of it is. Companies can be fined huge sums and the perpetrators jailed etc., which most academic staff don't have to think about.
> one issue I worry about is the primary investigator wanting to get someone else to fake his data for him, so he has plausible deniability if it should come to light.
One major difference is it’s a lot easier to move around in the private sector.
If you have a bad experience at company A, you can easily start “fresh” at company B or C. References are relatively pro forma and don’t count for much. Academia, in contrast, runs on reputation. You’ll need a reference—ideally a glowing one—from your PhD advisor to land a postdoc position and fellowships. You’ll need more letters to transition to a faculty job, and even more to keep it. The contents of the letters actually matter too; none of this “she was employed in my lab for the indicated time period” malarkey. This gives a few people incredibly strong influence over your career, especially early on.
