Gossip Girl, PhD

I read an interesting first person over at the Chronicle of Higher Education. An assistant professor recounts a rumor that was spread about her in graduate school (that she was having an affair with an administrator, and that's why she got a plum teaching assignment), and how it was perceived from many different angles.

It was a good reminder of the painful downsides to academic gossiping. It's juicy to know -- and retell -- which scientists are hooking up with one another. We've all passed on gossip that later turned out to be untrue or was outdated... and we should hold our tongues more often for fear of hurting both the innocent and guilty.

But a case can be made that a certain amount of "gossiping" is necessary for social interactions in science... for instance, knowing two scientists are romantically involved can prevent awkward conversations/situations at conferences. Having heard through the grapevine that a professor is on the job market would prevent you from approaching her for a postdoc just because her lab is geographically convenient. I think that many forms of gossip serve as the way we pass on essential knowledge of the social aspects of academia more than we might like to admit.

The author of the Chronicle article wasn't sleeping with her superior, but there are many pairs of romantic partners we encounter in science, and it's not uncommon for one of the pair to be the boss of the other. Usually this is out in the open, for instance, one person is the PI of the lab and the partner is the lab manager. A non-trivial number of grad students marry their advisors... and the first part of the relationship is clandestine, if just for the fact that most universities consider such a relationship unethical. It's good politics to know that you can't behave the same way with that lab manager, that grad student, as you can with someone who isn't relating their whole day's events to a member of the faculty over dinner. And if the superior is giving advantages and plum assignments to their romantic partner underling... it's good to have advance knowledge so you might not get as upset, and to know the minefield you'd be negotiating if you complained about the unfair treatment.

Couples, if they share a lab, open their relationship up to some level of scrutiny as their relationship impacts lab interactions. I have known several people who got along great with their PIs, but not with the PI's wives, who were the lab managers. In all of these cases, the PIs slowly became converted to their wives' perspective, and a few of these students were outright asked to leave those labs. This could mean that the lab managers had more detailed knowledge of the students and were faster at seeing that the students weren't up to snuff... but that certainly isn't how the students perceive their situations. In the case of partner PIs who jointly head a lab, the same dynamics can occur. And as dual hires have become a regular occurrence, scientific divorces are also becoming more common, and these splits can have devastating effects on the career of their trainees. Even if a trainee stays with the same major advisor, they lose the benefits of the joint lab, which might have been one of the more attractive parts of taking their position, and they often lose time to switching institutions -- one, if not both, of the divorcees usually moves to a new position.

It's prudent for any prospective graduate student to try and discern lab dynamics. We hope that we get honest information from the existing lab members and, hopefully, all parties exercise discretion and not pass anything on further. When romantic partners work together, a prospective student really does have to guess at the nature and health of the partnership in order to determine how stable their six-year educational experience might be... and trying to find out information on the romantic relationships of people in a department is something that's hard not to call "gossip."

Beyond workplace romances, one person's gossip is another person's cautionary tale of unethical behavior, or how a university/professional society/journal really works. One of the most memorable things from my graduate career was the hair-raising tales of breaches of ethics that the oldest member of the department had personally witnessed in his 50 years at the university. One of the stories ended up with an unfairly blackballed postdoc killing herself, another ended up with a person graduating with a PhD even though s/he had acknowledged, in writing, that they had faked their data. All of his anecdotes were anonymized... is that the difference between gossip and sage stories passed on to younger scientists? That would certainly cover all the science bloggers who change names, create untraceable abbreviations for locations and remove details so they can relate what's been happening without as much fallout in their professional lives. I find this sharing very useful -- it's good to know I'm not alone, it's good to know what other indignities others are suffering (and if I can preemptively protect myself from them), it's good to have a place to vent about the confusing and unfair aspects of academia. Such posts may very well qualify as gossip but they also are a key aspect of professional development in 21st century academic science.

We pass on informal critiques on the quality of fellow scientists and their work to colleagues all the time. I have sometimes considered that a professional responsibility -- if you know that the conclusions of a paper are incorrect because of subsequent work the group conducted, but they neither published the new work nor retracted the paper, shouldn't you tell people how to correctly interpret that paper when it comes up in conversation? It doesn't seem like gossip to offer inside knowledge on one of the many papers that received less than perfect peer review... but is it gossip if you preface it with "well, you know they'll never correct this, but..." and roll your eyes?

I think the style of delivery is part of what we consider gossip. For instance, it's a dry and unembellished fact about some labs that they are slow to publish -- sometimes they are years behind on publications. However, that same information can be more dramatically related in a story about a frustrated student who didn't get any papers out until they were done with their first postdoc and the choice words he had for the PI... It's more entertaining to tell a fable than a fact.

I'd say some gossip is a necessary part of a researcher's apprenticeship. I imagine that discerning social relationships and passing on information about past events is part of the training for every kind of career (except for a reclusive novelist?). We need to learn what the informal hierarchies are, what's the best way to approach that dean, the de facto way things work. The problem seems to lie more in the propagation of lies than in gossip per se, and maybe in what areas of a scientist's life are up for public consumption. But we probably can't create any blocks that prevent false rumors from being spread around, not while personal candor bordering on gossip is such an important part of the social fabric of science. However, I'm not in any way suggesting we start gossiping more...