RateMySupervisor.com – a step towards more accountability for poor supervision?
Our communications ambassador Laura McCaughey, Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, shares her thoughts on how we could make research supervision more transparent.
We have likely all heard comments about staff members in our department who are “hard to work with”, “unkind”, and quite often unprofessional. If you have, you have likely also heard ‘you just have to learn to work with them’, ‘it’s just the way they are’ or ‘but, they are a good researcher’. This issue is all too common in academia. The rates of depression and anxiety amongst academics are high enough due to long working hours, extreme competition, short contracts and job instability, without it being made worse by an acceptance of unacceptable behaviour.
There are many different personality types in research and people are not always going to get along, that’s life. People also have bad days and can be difficult to work with at times.
However, when a pattern of behaviour begins to emerge and becomes not only known, but accepted amongst colleagues, then this needs to be addressed.
There are amazing supervisors out there who invest a lot of time and energy into their staff and students. These supervisors nurture future researchers and bring their staff and students up with them, giving them ownership and independence to succeed. Then there are supervisors who focus solely on their own career progression and turn talented people away from research forever. With the current academic system both types of supervisor are judged by the same merits, predominantly based on funding income and publications.
There are a number of undesirable traits in supervisors that you would want to avoid if you were made aware:
Using PhD students and post docs simply to advance their own career, giving little or no consideration to the supervisee’s career progression.
Time poor, absent, disinterested or overcommitted.
Rude, humiliating, antagonistic, disrespectful and bullying.
Overbearing, micromanaging and unable to give credit where it is due.
So how do you avoid working for someone like this? How do you find out the management and working style of a potential supervisor?
Asking people who work for them is a start but may only get you so far; these people may have an agenda to recruit more people to the lab or they may be worried that any criticism of their supervisor may impact their own career. Looking at the person’s position and prestige within a university also may not be entirely informative. Academics are readily evaluated and measured on their performance in teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses (using student feedback and satisfaction scoring metrics, for example), however the same evaluation is not normally applied for PhD and post-doctoral supervision roles. When applying for promotion in academia there is often no consideration given to how well a researcher runs their group, how well they support their staff or how well they develop and nurture the next generation of researchers. I argue that this is a glaring omission from the promotion procedure, as the career progression of an academic necessitates more and more supervision as a research group grows.
If the current model of choosing a supervisor is like taking part in the TV show ‘Married at First Sight’ wouldn’t it be great if there was a source, like RateMySupervisor.com, where you could see if the supervisors values matched your own? Supervisors could self-nominate their values and mentoring style but previous and current staff and students could also give anonymous feedback, resulting in a scoring system from excellent to poor on a range of classifications.
What sort of questions would be useful in a scenario like this?
‘Did your supervisor treat you with respect?’
‘Did your supervisor support your career progression?’
‘Was your supervisor interested in your work?’
‘Did your supervisor have time for your work and your work-related issues?’
Such a system has the ability to improve the whole academic environment, and improve value for money for the tax payer. There is a long way to go to address the issue of unacceptable behaviour in academia. However, as a starting point, I think the above questions need to be implemented into routine university assessment, with supervision of staff and students being a key metric by which academics are judged.
Twitter: @LauraCMcCaughey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-c-mccaughey-2022b477/