The power dynamic isn’t the inherent problem. Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years.
The more central problem is the incentive structure of the academy. Genuine training outcomes cannot be measured by the bureaucracy and therefore don’t matter.
Without solving the incentive problem nothing can really be improved. In aggregate the most successful PIs will be the most ruthless blood sucking fraudsters. A few exceptional empathetic geniuses will sneak through on principle, but mostly we’ll continue hobbling along.
> Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years.
This is such a bizarrely vague statement that it's meaningless. You and I both have zero clue what the environment was like for apprenticeships in these hundreds of years, or how issues like this were resolved. Further, if the system of apprenticeship was historically as abusive as PhDs seem to be today, then I'm not sure we should look to it for guidance.
Germany, for example, still uses apprenticeship for many careers. But there are a great many legal protections for Azubis (Auszubildende/apprentices) that protect them and provide avenues for changing companies and reporting issues. They have stronger legal protections than normal workers in some cases. It still isn't perfect and it can still be problematic to handle issues, but there's a system in place.
> Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years.
Have you ever read historical books about what it was like? Because quite a lot of that system was pretty abusive and controlling. Power differecial did caused quite a lot of harm in the past.
> Apprenticeship has been a successful training model for many hundreds of years.
Is this meant as a proof that however it's done now is perfect? There are many tweaks one can make to the model to make it less lopsided and still keep the fundamental apprenticeship model. I am willing to bet that if you look at how it's done around the globe there are many ways of doing apprenticeship where the power balance is different, and historically it's probably also been practiced in many different ways.
Apprenticeship is simply 1:1 training over some extended period. Of course, it can go well or very badly.
Focusing on the structure of that relationship and hoping that more bureaucracy will protect the most vulnerable PhD students from misaligned advisors just doesn’t seem to work in my experience.
The fundamental issue is the incentive structure. Without changing it you’ll just drive personal abuse further behind closed doors.
The more central problem is the incentive structure of the academy. Genuine training outcomes cannot be measured by the bureaucracy and therefore don’t matter.
Without solving the incentive problem nothing can really be improved. In aggregate the most successful PIs will be the most ruthless blood sucking fraudsters. A few exceptional empathetic geniuses will sneak through on principle, but mostly we’ll continue hobbling along.