What? Academia really very obviously doesn’t seem like a cult to me, and I have thought about this topic a lot. This makes me think you are using words very differently from how I would use them (and to be clear, in a way I think is pretty bad for discourse, since it makes it much harder to discuss actual cults).
I would invert this point! If someone speaking about cults actively thinks that academia is a cult, I wouldn’t trust them! (The military in contrast seems indeed very cult-like to me, and I don’t have any objection to using cult concepts to describe that)
I suspect we disagree on defining academia rather than cult, which was still imprecise of me. Let’s take a humanities grad program
The only acceptable success criteria is being at the top of the pyramid within academia. People who quit for the outside world are disparaged and viewed as having wasted years of their life and others’.
You move have to move to a new location every few years and can’t afford to socialize with anyone but other academics.
You are probably paying a lot for the privilege of being there, often via debt.
Even people who start with stipends often find those run out before they finish, leaving them with the choice of abandoning 5 years of work or taking on debt for the last years.
If you’re not already from the right class, going to the program will cause you to change in ways that pull you from your family.
Depression/anxiety rates for grad students are sky high, and improve when they quit.
Your advisor can ruin your life with no consequences.
Members believe themselves to be special and answering a higher calling.
I agree that academia is less of a cult than the military, which can literally imprison you, but it’s on the spectrum.
Ok so to compare to my experience in a STEM PhD in the UK, which may be different:
False. Loads of people leave and everyone things that’s normal and laudable, assuming they go on to do something else they value
Part a is true, part b is just not true, you can socialize with whomever you want.
Nope, you are in fact being paid
Its absolutely possible to write up before your money runs out, and many people do. Some don’t but that’s uhh frankly because they’re lazy.
Yeah maybe, sure
Yeah
Maybe? But not much more than any other job. You can quit if you don’t like it, and if your advisor gets a reputation for being mean, they’ll find it hard to hire new people.
Not really? Maybe? IDK. Maybe if you extend “special” to mean “good at biology” and “higher calling” to mean “important research”.
This seems importantly different from cultish specialness and higher callings in that they’re approximately true
7 is instructive, I think. It actually is important whether or not your group’s beliefs are true, or at least close-to-true, because if the beliefs are true then that’s a strong signal the process generating those beliefs is anchored in reality. This means there’s a limit on how far those beliefs can go, since they’ll (hopefully) stay tied to the set of all possible true belief systems.
For example, if your group “believes the world will end within your lifetime” then it’s pretty important whether that group believes this due to climate change or due to a biblical apocalypse. Lumping those groups together would be quite silly, for the most part, even though both are likely false.
Likewise, it makes sense to distinguish PhD students believing they are special (good at biology) and answering a higher calling (important research) from MAPLE members believing they are special (the only hope for humanity’s spiritual salvation) and answering a higher calling (contacting the techregore through samadi).
#2, #3, #4: Somewhat true IMO, but these are much more true of cults than they are of academia. It’s not that hard to have non-academic friends or family as an academic.
#1, #5: I don’t really associate these things with cults? They’re negatives, but in a way that’s not related to cultishness.
It seems to me like academia is more like a caste or a class, which share many adverse features with cults (high demand, loyalty oriented), but differ by having well defined stereotyped relations with other castes or classes within a society.
Pretty much anyone in academia will tell prospective students “don’t do a phd” or at least “you should only do a phd if narrow criteria are met.” This seems to be quite the opposite of a cult. My PhD is in the social sciences not the humanities (but I’m somewhat humanities adjacent), so my reactions to your points above are: 1. The vibe in my experience is always “doing a phd is pointless unless you want to go into academia; if that’s not your plan, you should do something else” and no one really disparages you for quitting. In fact, there’s generally a pro quitting vibe, and the average advisor will, if anything, push a student who is on the fence about quitting towards it rather than away from it. Advisors are perfectly happy when their students land roles in industry, and the emotion most adjacent to the one you’re describing comes from jealousy. I will admit (and I think most others will) to a jealousy towards the earnings of people I knew who weren’t remotely smart enough to hack it in academia, dropped out to do whatever the hell UX research is for tech companies, and now make 5 times what I do under better working conditions. 2. I’m sure I don’t socialize more with other academics than the average person socializes with people from their industry. In grad school, nearly all of my friends were fellow grad students, yes, but that was just proximity and ease of forming the connections rather than any discouragement. We all thought the people who managed to make outside friends were cooler than us. And, the moving around thing breaks up the cultishness if anything plus once you get a TT job, you don’t move any more. 3. You pay a lot in opportunity cost, but I don’t know anyone who took on substantial debt during their grad school years. 4. Compared to what? You probably moved away physically to do it, but it pulls you away from family less, I think, than going off and becoming a corporate lawyer in a far away city. 5. Is that true of cults? Yes, it’s very true of PhD programs and everyone is super aware of it. 6. More so than anyone else’s boss? And the massive power of the advisor is really found in the lab sciences much more than the humanities/social sciences. It also depends on the exact dynamic. Universities have stronger than average protections around things like sexual harassment. 7. Sure, true. But, in my experience, they’re also a cynicism/self-consciousness around that you don’t find among, say, MDs or cops.
In addition to what Seth says, there’s the simple fact that academia doesn’t put meaningful organizational effort into preventing people from leaving! While some professors will personally try and guilt their grad students and postdocs to stay, the faculty don’t strategize together about how to set up high-pressure interventions. Retention is barely an afterthought, since there’s always a glut of candidates.
“Dysfunctional thing that leaves people feeling like failures” does not put something in the cult cluster.
My brother and most of my cousins are marines. Obviously the armed forces has cult-like aspects (command hierarchy, motivating ideology, whole-life institutions), but even there I dunno. Most people ~10 years in just treat it like a normal government job with a pension. There’s no stigma (and even a kind of prestige?) for leaving and getting a normal civilian job and writing a book about how everything is terribly mismanaged / your experience was shit. More often I get the vibe that active service members nostalgically resent the bouncy-castling & HRification that’s happened over the last forty years and wish it was more like what they imagined from TV.
This video showed up in my Youtube recommendations today, and IMO is quite good coverage of what early military education looks like, which yes, really strikes me as obviously extremely cult-like:
(The title and thumbnail is more clickbaity than the actual video, which has a lot of really great footage and mostly measured analysis of what’s going on in these bootcamps)
I think there are just two different clusters (or, like a macrocluster and a microcluster) that need names, and we don’t currently have two good names other than maybe “cult” and “cultlike/cult-adjacent/cult-spectrum.” There’s clearly some spectrum of which academia, various flavors of extreme startups and high-commitment-but-basically-good ideologies, etc, are on – various shades of “it’s hard to leave, hard to imagine leaving, there’s pressure to think a certain way, it’s often unhealthy, there are leaders you can’t question, etc.”
And, it’s useful to be able to refer to scientology and various flavors of legit dangerous thing of which maybe the military is an instance (haven’t really thought about that exactly).
For that matter, “weird new intense ideology that absorbs person’s life” (even if totally healthy) is also a cluster that feels like it needs a name, and I also don’t have a great name for that either other than “kinda culty.”
Are you like “yep, that framing seems right, and it’s really important to reserve ‘cult’ for the middle one” or do you disagree with that framing?
Academia seems just really not that similar to anything I would call cult. The standard experience of anyone I know in academia is overwhelming loneliness, almost complete cynicism about the shared mission by almost everyone involved, and an almost complete absence of guidance on how you should structure your life.
Like, academia these days strikes me as mostly similar to working at a very large, very professional, badly paid organization.
And then in addition to that you actually do have one of the strongest cultural anchors of any culture in the world in rewarding genuine disagreement. It’s not perfect, but academia is much higher on contrarianism and status mobility. It’s also very low on controlling your public speech compared to anywhere else.
Like, I have very large disagreements with academia, and am not in love with it, but it strikes me as one of the least cult-like social systems out there. Almost every large corporation seems more cult-like to me, by almost any reasonable definition of the word. Startups are much more cult-like.
Okay, I am sold on “actually academia kinda does the opposite of love-bombing,” and that the disagreement with EVN was indeed about “academia” rather than “cult.”
Same. I was in academia for 23 years and while I recognize some pressures that are cultlike, it lacks certain features that are pretty definitional for me: isolation and use of sleep deprivation to instill beliefs. An academic friend did his PhD on cult psychology and those were his defining features.
What? Academia really very obviously doesn’t seem like a cult to me, and I have thought about this topic a lot. This makes me think you are using words very differently from how I would use them (and to be clear, in a way I think is pretty bad for discourse, since it makes it much harder to discuss actual cults).
I would invert this point! If someone speaking about cults actively thinks that academia is a cult, I wouldn’t trust them! (The military in contrast seems indeed very cult-like to me, and I don’t have any objection to using cult concepts to describe that)
I suspect we disagree on defining academia rather than cult, which was still imprecise of me. Let’s take a humanities grad program
The only acceptable success criteria is being at the top of the pyramid within academia. People who quit for the outside world are disparaged and viewed as having wasted years of their life and others’.
You move have to move to a new location every few years and can’t afford to socialize with anyone but other academics.
You are probably paying a lot for the privilege of being there, often via debt.
Even people who start with stipends often find those run out before they finish, leaving them with the choice of abandoning 5 years of work or taking on debt for the last years.
If you’re not already from the right class, going to the program will cause you to change in ways that pull you from your family.
Depression/anxiety rates for grad students are sky high, and improve when they quit.
Your advisor can ruin your life with no consequences.
Members believe themselves to be special and answering a higher calling.
I agree that academia is less of a cult than the military, which can literally imprison you, but it’s on the spectrum.
Ok so to compare to my experience in a STEM PhD in the UK, which may be different:
False. Loads of people leave and everyone things that’s normal and laudable, assuming they go on to do something else they value
Part a is true, part b is just not true, you can socialize with whomever you want.
Nope, you are in fact being paid
Its absolutely possible to write up before your money runs out, and many people do. Some don’t but that’s uhh frankly because they’re lazy.
Yeah maybe, sure
Yeah
Maybe? But not much more than any other job. You can quit if you don’t like it, and if your advisor gets a reputation for being mean, they’ll find it hard to hire new people.
Not really? Maybe? IDK. Maybe if you extend “special” to mean “good at biology” and “higher calling” to mean “important research”.
This seems importantly different from cultish specialness and higher callings in that they’re approximately true
7 is instructive, I think. It actually is important whether or not your group’s beliefs are true, or at least close-to-true, because if the beliefs are true then that’s a strong signal the process generating those beliefs is anchored in reality. This means there’s a limit on how far those beliefs can go, since they’ll (hopefully) stay tied to the set of all possible true belief systems.
For example, if your group “believes the world will end within your lifetime” then it’s pretty important whether that group believes this due to climate change or due to a biblical apocalypse. Lumping those groups together would be quite silly, for the most part, even though both are likely false.
Likewise, it makes sense to distinguish PhD students believing they are special (good at biology) and answering a higher calling (important research) from MAPLE members believing they are special (the only hope for humanity’s spiritual salvation) and answering a higher calling (contacting the techregore through samadi).
#6, #7: Sure
#2, #3, #4: Somewhat true IMO, but these are much more true of cults than they are of academia. It’s not that hard to have non-academic friends or family as an academic.
#1, #5: I don’t really associate these things with cults? They’re negatives, but in a way that’s not related to cultishness.
It seems to me like academia is more like a caste or a class, which share many adverse features with cults (high demand, loyalty oriented), but differ by having well defined stereotyped relations with other castes or classes within a society.
Pretty much anyone in academia will tell prospective students “don’t do a phd” or at least “you should only do a phd if narrow criteria are met.” This seems to be quite the opposite of a cult. My PhD is in the social sciences not the humanities (but I’m somewhat humanities adjacent), so my reactions to your points above are:
1. The vibe in my experience is always “doing a phd is pointless unless you want to go into academia; if that’s not your plan, you should do something else” and no one really disparages you for quitting. In fact, there’s generally a pro quitting vibe, and the average advisor will, if anything, push a student who is on the fence about quitting towards it rather than away from it. Advisors are perfectly happy when their students land roles in industry, and the emotion most adjacent to the one you’re describing comes from jealousy. I will admit (and I think most others will) to a jealousy towards the earnings of people I knew who weren’t remotely smart enough to hack it in academia, dropped out to do whatever the hell UX research is for tech companies, and now make 5 times what I do under better working conditions.
2. I’m sure I don’t socialize more with other academics than the average person socializes with people from their industry. In grad school, nearly all of my friends were fellow grad students, yes, but that was just proximity and ease of forming the connections rather than any discouragement. We all thought the people who managed to make outside friends were cooler than us. And, the moving around thing breaks up the cultishness if anything plus once you get a TT job, you don’t move any more.
3. You pay a lot in opportunity cost, but I don’t know anyone who took on substantial debt during their grad school years.
4. Compared to what? You probably moved away physically to do it, but it pulls you away from family less, I think, than going off and becoming a corporate lawyer in a far away city.
5. Is that true of cults? Yes, it’s very true of PhD programs and everyone is super aware of it.
6. More so than anyone else’s boss? And the massive power of the advisor is really found in the lab sciences much more than the humanities/social sciences. It also depends on the exact dynamic. Universities have stronger than average protections around things like sexual harassment.
7. Sure, true. But, in my experience, they’re also a cynicism/self-consciousness around that you don’t find among, say, MDs or cops.
My undergrad professors heavily encouraged me to reapply to grad school (in biology) because I was so special and good.
In addition to what Seth says, there’s the simple fact that academia doesn’t put meaningful organizational effort into preventing people from leaving! While some professors will personally try and guilt their grad students and postdocs to stay, the faculty don’t strategize together about how to set up high-pressure interventions. Retention is barely an afterthought, since there’s always a glut of candidates.
“Dysfunctional thing that leaves people feeling like failures” does not put something in the cult cluster.
My brother and most of my cousins are marines. Obviously the armed forces has cult-like aspects (command hierarchy, motivating ideology, whole-life institutions), but even there I dunno. Most people ~10 years in just treat it like a normal government job with a pension. There’s no stigma (and even a kind of prestige?) for leaving and getting a normal civilian job and writing a book about how everything is terribly mismanaged / your experience was shit. More often I get the vibe that active service members nostalgically resent the bouncy-castling & HRification that’s happened over the last forty years and wish it was more like what they imagined from TV.
Yeah, my sense is long term service is really mostly like working at a large corporation, but early boot camp experiences are very cult like.
Also plausible this changed over the years.
Also, I do have to point out that some cultishness really is necessary in order to do the job of maintaining an effective military.
This video showed up in my Youtube recommendations today, and IMO is quite good coverage of what early military education looks like, which yes, really strikes me as obviously extremely cult-like:
(The title and thumbnail is more clickbaity than the actual video, which has a lot of really great footage and mostly measured analysis of what’s going on in these bootcamps)
We need a video from MAPLE to compare. :D
I think there are just two different clusters (or, like a macrocluster and a microcluster) that need names, and we don’t currently have two good names other than maybe “cult” and “cultlike/cult-adjacent/cult-spectrum.” There’s clearly some spectrum of which academia, various flavors of extreme startups and high-commitment-but-basically-good ideologies, etc, are on – various shades of “it’s hard to leave, hard to imagine leaving, there’s pressure to think a certain way, it’s often unhealthy, there are leaders you can’t question, etc.”
And, it’s useful to be able to refer to scientology and various flavors of legit dangerous thing of which maybe the military is an instance (haven’t really thought about that exactly).
For that matter, “weird new intense ideology that absorbs person’s life” (even if totally healthy) is also a cluster that feels like it needs a name, and I also don’t have a great name for that either other than “kinda culty.”
Are you like “yep, that framing seems right, and it’s really important to reserve ‘cult’ for the middle one” or do you disagree with that framing?
Academia seems just really not that similar to anything I would call cult. The standard experience of anyone I know in academia is overwhelming loneliness, almost complete cynicism about the shared mission by almost everyone involved, and an almost complete absence of guidance on how you should structure your life.
Like, academia these days strikes me as mostly similar to working at a very large, very professional, badly paid organization.
And then in addition to that you actually do have one of the strongest cultural anchors of any culture in the world in rewarding genuine disagreement. It’s not perfect, but academia is much higher on contrarianism and status mobility. It’s also very low on controlling your public speech compared to anywhere else.
Like, I have very large disagreements with academia, and am not in love with it, but it strikes me as one of the least cult-like social systems out there. Almost every large corporation seems more cult-like to me, by almost any reasonable definition of the word. Startups are much more cult-like.
Okay, I am sold on “actually academia kinda does the opposite of love-bombing,” and that the disagreement with EVN was indeed about “academia” rather than “cult.”
Leverage was also much more lonely than love-bomb-ey
Same. I was in academia for 23 years and while I recognize some pressures that are cultlike, it lacks certain features that are pretty definitional for me: isolation and use of sleep deprivation to instill beliefs. An academic friend did his PhD on cult psychology and those were his defining features.