A bullying scandal closed a historic astronomy department | Hacker News Reader

A bullying scandal closed a historic astronomy department

nature.com

45 pointsrntn30 comments

A great example of how cowards installed in a bureaucracy can bring down the entire organization. The "no assholes" rule for hiring should apply at every level, no matter how prestigious that asshole is. I wish this would be a warning shot for how organizations can be destroyed by lack of action, but I unfortunately doubt it. Bullying exists everywhere and people are mostly afraid to do anything about it and the only way around it is through strong leadership, which is sadly lacking everywhere. Even at famed tech companies, this happens ALL THE TIME and bureaucracy protects them.

I would be surprised if it’s not Sweden’s ridiculously strong labor laws and unions that protect the assholes in this case.

The article exposes in my opinion one of the great weaknesses of the way Swedish society works.

Generally Swedish society is very conflict averse and decisions are made trying to achieve consensus (or at least to give the impression they do), everyone's voice has to be heard and nobody wants to appear to actually force decisions.

This leads to a process that is slow when decisive action is required and particularly in light of bullying allegations ignores the impact of having the situation continue for a long time in order to appear fair.

I had a colleague experience a similar situation when his child was being severely bullied at school. Everyone was occupied with assessing the impact of a decision on the bullies and avoided making an decision, without considering the impact of dragging their feet on the bullied child

I recently saw a film about an art curator in Sweden ("The Square"?) that gave me a lot more insight into how that works. My experience in Japan also makes me aware of this sort of conflict avoidance (and my frustration with it), though it's still quite culturally different. It's more unnerving when done in English.

That could describe most of Swiss society as well. Endless discussions on every single topic in order to reach a "consensus". While superficially democratic and beneficial, you do see the limits of this approach when things are serious

How do you know they didn't consider the impact?

It seems more likely that they did and nonetheless decided to stick to the usual norm.

Two articles down, we finally find a description of the bullying:

"the astronomers describe situations ranging from Feltzing belittling students and other speakers during scientific talks, to Davies criticizing others’ research and intentionally excluding colleagues from scientific opportunities."

“two senior professors … are described to control the department through behaviour such as verbal aggressiveness, rude tone, control of employees, capriciousness and offensive behaviours”.

That sounds almost normal for industry.

Not to suggest that this isn't a serious matter for the people there (and some of this language might be understated, like "limiting oxygen to colleagues" as a euphemism for literally strangling a student)... but academia can still get much worse than this.

Having talked with lots of people in industry and academia, the worst stories are from academia.

Intuitive speculation...

An industry CEO with clinical ego problems can eventually grow an org chart of enablers and twisted culture enforcers, and might've even managed to stack the board, and might escape investor revolt for a long time. But the employees can usually leave without throwing away the careers in which they've invested their lives, know they have rights, can probably afford consulting a lawyer, etc.

Now contrast that industry situation with a (bad) university environment that similarly feels superior, and that it shouldn't be subject to outside rules, but additionally the abused often can't just leave, nor defend themselves: grad students, postdocs, tenure-track early-career needing support of the entrenched, poverty-level adjuncts needing the reference towards a full-time job, high percentage of foreign students on visa, underpaid support staff who took the job for discounted tuition for their children, etc.

I once heard a joke that the reason academia is so hostile is because the stakes are so low.

There's some truth to that saying about "academic politics", but I think it can also twist the understanding of a situation, so that people unfamiliar are less sympathetic than they should be.

Consider all the kids aspiring to pursue some field that at some point funnels through a university. They're not knowingly signing up for some niche bloodsport. And that's not what the situation actually is. The complaints about academic research dynamics in some fields aside, there's a more immediate problem of frequently unchecked bad behavior by individuals, often victimizing people who are in very vulnerable positions.

The term "academic politics" invokes our ideas of "politics", such as around those who run for elected office: that it's largely BS and lies, and only for those who have the stomach for that, and that everyone who plays it has to learn how to play dirty. Fortunately, that's not an accurate characterization of all that goes on in a university, and it's certainly not the traits for which we want to pass-filter all our researchers and university teachers. When some individual in a position of power is behaving badly, and the consequences rain down upon the defenseless, that's not "politics".

("Politics" only kicks in when the abuser brings in enough money/prestige that that a corporate-oriented official wants to silence the messenger, or when members of the abuser's academic caste implicitly close ranks in ignorant solidarity. But the abused still aren't political operators.)

I agree with that. It’s also more about respect and feelings than industry. For the most part industry motives boil down to money. Academic motives are varied and often hard to measure.

This phenomenon is anecdotally true at least. I remeber years ago reading an article about running that mentioned the same thing. People who are "age groupers" are way more outwardly hostile and competitive than actual elite athletes (so the article was saying) and the conclusion again was that the lower the stakes the more seriously things get taken by those involved. There was actually also an article on HN a few months ago talking about the same thing in swimming as a metaphor for something else - there's three lanes, the top, middle and recreational, top and recreational are nice, middle are all assholes.

The joke goes way back. But decisions affect careers--those who have invested eight or ten years of post-secondary education hope to find a forty-year career. There is not (by banker's standards) a lot of money involved, but it is a big chunk of someone's life.

(I am not an academic, by the way, and never aimed to be one.)

The fact the department had to be dismantled to solve the issue indicates the bad actors had effectively taken over.

This is clearly a failure of leadership that dragged for way too long.

Those kind of personalities need to be punished early and decisively otherwise everything rots.

> Those kind of personalities need to be punished early and decisively otherwise everything rots.

Yes, but unfortunately that’s illegal here in Sweden, leaving bullies with the upper hand.

I found the report that documents the investigation into this bullying. After reading bits of it, I’m shocked that this kind of behavior was allowed to persist for so long. It was clear that everyone knew about the bad behavior for a long time.

https://academicrightswatch.se/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/In...

I can't reconcile this article with additional background [0]. Maybe what we see here is one party shouting loudest...

[0] https://academicrightswatch.se/?p=4766

That article (at least how I read it via Google Translate) seems to focus on the process and the testimony of one of the witnesses being flawed, but fails to address the fact that there was more than one witness to many examples of this bad behavior (and doesn't even refute that the bad behavior happened at all). So maybe the initial investigation wasn't perfect, but I'm still inclined to believe accounts of unacceptable assholery that were corroborated by multiple witnesses.

Here is the actual investigation report with the concrete examples of events https://academicrightswatch.se/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/In...

Too many things to quote but the lady sounds like a proper psycho

I still don’t know understand why astronomers had to leave a a specially built building. Can’t you reorganize and move away the two bullies and keep most people where they are to minimize disruption?

> The longer a bullying situation drags on, “the more traumatic the situation becomes”

Those two faculty characters learned dominance and submission behavior years ago, that is how they know how to do it. So now they do it to others. The article itself says plainly that the two senior figures had integrated loyalty through the departments. In other words, other senior figures supported them.

Somehow, active minds seek freedoms, while budget and authority seek confinement, dominance games and surreptitious meetings. Playing naive in the article does not solve these problems, it adds to outrage clicks. This article does nothing to solve this situation.

source: experienced dominant abuse in the workplace among otherwise highly intelligent people; knowledge of historical slave trading by the Swedish Empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_slave_trade

Apparently the astro science world is recurrently toxic:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05668-y

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/contractors-accuse-eur...

How do you create an organizational culture that prevents these dynamics?

A problem seems to be that smart jerks know that people would prefer to not be around them and therefore spend a lot of time/energy/intelligence making themselves organizationally powerful enough that people have no choice. I think this is sometimes called "playing politics". Prevention seems to require actors who are both politically savvy and kind, and that doesn't seem to be easy to find.

problematic employees need to be fired as soon as possible or they ruin everything they touch

This does not work in practice. Often the "problematic employee" has a management function and is the "golden boy" of the big boss. I have seen it two times, were an idiot "golden boy" nearly tanked a company. Everybody knows who the problem is. Only the big boss does not.

That doesn't negate the fact that firing them is the right solution. Just that the right solution is hard.

They still need to be fired, even with the boss protecting them.

And in the real world, how would you convince the top decision makers to do such, without causing more damage than what it prevents?

Don't ask Harvard, UPenn or MIT.

I don't know. But from the employee perspective I can tell you: It is never too early to fire your job!

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