Longing for Beloved Scientific Community
Reflections on why maintaining a robust community of scholars is so hard.
(Read to the end for a ridiculous emo realtor. Bock bock.)
Ever since I published the Q&A with Dr. Joseph Graves, I have been thinking about his mentorship strategy—that he talks about power constantly with his mentees—and how my educators didn’t do that (at least not very often).
I had what people would call a “good” experience in graduate school. My advisor and committee had my back and guided me to the career I ostensibly wanted. Unlike many grad students, I cleared the admittedly low bar of not experiencing harassment, hazing, bullying or worse from my advisor and committee.
I adore my PhD mentor, Henry Wilbur, and miss him constantly. Henry has a long gray beard, a twinkle in his eye, and a hearty laugh. He drinks decidedly too much Diet Pepsi and unabashedly wears Teva sandals with socks. He and his wife Becky are two of the best naturalists I’ve ever met.
Henry became my mentor because he got what I wanted to do: an interdisciplinary project that pushed at the boundaries of ecology and challenged me intellectually. We share a philosophy of science; he understood why I was drawn to observational work while still valuing the rigor of a good experiment. He treats people with humanity, whether they are a famous scientist or live in a trailer adjacent to field sites. I wanted to learn how to do science, and he taught me.
What I didn’t learn was the power structures in which I operated. I had no idea what a provost was, what a department head (much less a university president) did, or why my committee was all white with only one woman. I had no idea faculty were losing power in the academy, nor why. I had no idea why it was hard to bridge disciplines, despite the obvious need. I had no idea that plucky, cheap work like mine was devalued in the academy, because high-dollar work with expensive tech garnered better overhead. To the extent that I understood that these challenges existed, I assumed they were surmountable for a grad student. I think my program expected me to pick up clues about workplace structures on my own, but the reasons for the water we swim in are often hidden, the rules unwritten.
To be fair, academic science changed profoundly during the time I was in graduate school. If I had had the CV I graduated with during the year I entered graduate school, I would have easily qualified for many jobs at the institutions where I most desired to work. By the time I graduated, the Great Recession had decimated the job market, and my options were limited.
Even so, Henry made sure I had options; I did have job offers in science. But once I observed how contingent workers and friends in the humanities were treated, I couldn’t understand why these smart people weren’t doing more to stand up for one another. Of course, it’s the same old story from Nathaniel Bacon to today. Whether it’s based on race or job stability, caste systems enforce power differentials.
While headlines have focused on the ways that academia protects its worst actors, which is true, it’s harder to talk about the way that academic structures impede scientific communities. I liked working with the people in my early career. I wanted to keep working with them. What was awful is that there was no promotional structure for us to keep collaborating as we became more experienced. There is no good bridge between graduate school and midcareer. It’s a sink-or-swim gauntlet where a bunch of us become unmoored on sinking ships, among institutions that are working hard to stay afloat. Doing science means collaborating with people who are constantly mistreated by workplace structures, as Hope Jahren detailed almost 10 years ago in her memoir Lab Girl.
So I had a good experience in science, but it’s normal for the early career to be kind of… bad. Vulnerabilities are unevenly distributed, so that communities of specialists are torn apart for no good reason when hard times come along.
I keep thinking about the point in our interview when Dr. Graves talked about how Dick Lewinton’s departmental colleagues, including E.O. Wilson, prevented the acceptance of a Black PhD student (young Graves) by meeting on a day when Lewinton was absent. E. O. Wilson was emphasized in my undergraduate classes. I read his books, memorized his name for exams, and saw him speak when he visited my campus. (His lecture, I must add, was excruciatingly boring—surprisingly so, given the writing in his books.) I recall reading at least one of Lewinton’s papers in graduate school, but he didn’t receive nearly the level of hero worship that surrounded Wilson. I don’t think the people who taught me intended to lionize a person whose legacy has been plagued with accusations of racism, at the expense of another brilliant scientist who spoke truth to power. But because of power structures—whose books are edited and promoted, who gets invited as a speaker, who gets asked by colleagues to the room where it happens, and so on—they did.
Dr. Graves’s story interests me because he dropped out of graduate school and then later returned. I asked him about the decision to stay in or leave academia, and he recommended a paper he wrote on the topic, brilliantly titled, “Science in the belly of the beast.” In it, he gives the sage advice to compare one’s own goals to the goals of the institution one plans to work in, then details several unwritten rules in the profession, and ends with a lesson from my favorite Stephen King novel, The Gunslinger, that the journey matters more than reaching those goals. Dr. Graves found an institution that aligned with his goals of justice and equity in biology, but it required sacrifice: working at a chronically underfunded institution.
Speaking of justice-oriented folks staying in academia, I’m proud to say that even during a historically precarious job market where at least one position she was a top candidate for ended in a hiring freeze, my collaborator Kristen Koopman accepted a job as a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. That also means that she is gearing up to move to Philly soon and can’t write book reviews this week.
Graduating into a job market bust, as both Kristen and I did at different times, will affect a person’s entire career. Sometimes I think about what might have happened if I had graduated into a boom economy flush with science funding. If I had gotten a comfortable job, would I have felt called to be so outspoken? I doubt it, although I’m sure I would have done what I comfortably could. At the same time, I would have been able to contribute more to filling the research gaps that I wanted to work on when I began my career and are still there, because people like me leave. We’ve been leaving for centuries, as Banu Subramaniam details in her 2015 book Ghost Stories for Darwin. (Perhaps not so incidentally, she also had my PhD advisor Henry on her committee.)
Even though I’m glad for the journey I’m on and the path I’ve carved, I still dream of being able to work with my research friends. I think the research we could do would be innovative and push forward a slow-to-change field. But that would have been hard whether I stayed in academia or left. I am constantly on the lookout for ways to work with them. Regardless, no one is coming to save us, especially not with the Project 2025 insanity that is unfolding. This newsletter is a little beacon, one collaboration with a dear colleague, that I hope will weather the storm.
Recent Things I Wrote & Edited:
Mapping local economic consequences of federal cuts to NIH: How they did it, AHCJ
NYT’s ‘50 States, 50 Fixes’ exemplifies the climate journalism audiences need, AHCJ
Covering bird flu from an ecological angle, AHCJ
When the Body Turns on Itself, by Jane Buckner, American Scientist
Recent Things I Recommend:
The Origins of the Research University, Asterisk Magazine
How to tell if you’re dead, Nautilus
Our crisis is not loneliness but human beings becoming invisible, Aeon
What the University of Virginia Should Have Done, NYT Opinion
Tell Us What You Think
Please tell us here what sorts of content and subscriber perks you suggest. In the meantime, please subscribe to the free version and buy me a coffee here.
Something Fun:
A post shared by Kyle Huckabee | OR & WA Realtor (@kylehuckabee)