Mentor-Mentee relationship: An Industry Perspective

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Nature of evolution: biological versus professional

In my view, all human beings undergo evolution on predominantly two fronts. The first one is biological and starts with our birth. This evolution takes us through several phases of growth from toddler, adolescence, adulthood until old age. The second evolution front is professional and starts with primary education. Once we complete our basic school education, the subsequent phases of this professional front, however, differ significantly for different individuals. Some of us choose to continue the education while others complete professional education or training and start a job. The evolution on the biological front is engrained in our DNA, and the phases are not optional. On the other hand, the evolution on the professional front almost entirely depends on us and our surroundings. Our professional evolution is often influenced by several factors such as family, friends, professional connections, financial and health situations.

 

Over the years, we as human beings have perfected many of the professional career tracks. After completing our school education, we know how to achieve a professional career goal in most instances. This notion is especially apparent for many professional careers in engineering, medicine, finance, law, etc. In many of these professional tracks, a candidate completes his/her professional education and joins an organization (commercial or otherwise). Let us term organizations operational in the above professional tracks as industry or industrial sector.

 

In virtually all of the above sectors, the mentor-mentee relationship is essential and impacts the success of individuals associated with those sectors. The nature of the mentor-mentee relationship may differ substantially between these sectors. I will explore some of these intricate peculiarities in the industry in this article.

 

Mentor-mentee relationship in an industry

Most streams in the industry sector focus on customer satisfaction. The majority of the industry leaders persistently explore innovative ways to keep their products/services competitive while adhering to legal and environmental regulations. In general, in the industry, a mentor-mentee relationship may consist of an individual (typically with higher professional expertise) connecting with another individual (or group of individuals) typically with lesser professional expertise.

 

Development in the existing work stream

In many companies, the mentor-mentee relationship revolves around improving the mentee’s expertise within the same company. This is especially pertinent to small/medium scale companies operational in the specialized products/services sector. In these companies, the mentor is typically an individual’s immediate manager. In certain cases, individuals may choose to have a mentor who is a senior member in the same department (typically a few levels higher in the same department). A typical example could be an engineer choosing a vice-president of the department to be his/her mentor.

 

In one of the software development companies, a young engineer chose the head of the company as his mentor. The mentee was very introverted but had high career aspirations to establish himself as a technical expert. The mentor, through periodic discussions with the mentee, learned the mentee’s aspirations. She (the mentor) first guided him (the mentee) to first become proficient in the specific software domain immediately needed for his current projects. Simultaneously, she encouraged him to publish his ideas through blogs and technology user forums for wider impact. To help minimize his anxiety of public speaking, the mentor encouraged him to periodically speak about his work in local team meetings. Additionally, she encouraged him to participate in local/global technical conferences to present his work. Gradually over time and practice, his expertise and confidence grew, and eventually, he established himself as one of the experts in that programming domain successfully.

 

In certain instances, the mentor-mentee relationship may get stretched when the mentee is expected to deliver on a task that is outside his/her competency zone, and the reporting manager is the only mentor of the mentee. If the mentor assumes that his/her role is mainly to monitor the mentee’s delivery, then the gap in the mentee’s competency may not get appropriate attention. Consequently, this approach may lead to animosity between the two. One of the reasons for the emergence of such animosity is that many organizations work on the philosophy that the employee’s professional competency is not the organization’s concern, but rather the employee’s concern. In today’s fast-changing world, such a notion of ‘enough with education and now deliver’ approach can quickly put tremendous pressure on both mentor and mentee.

 

Such relationships may have limited success, especially when it comes to individuals benefitting from each other’s expertise on a wider professional front. One way to improve such relationships can be when both mentor and mentee take extra efforts to widen the scope of the relationship. These efforts can include topics that are peripheral to their project focus. Additionally, connecting on an informal basis outside work may also help immensely to build trust and help them to figure out ways to improve the mentee’s expertise. Both mentor and mentee should work persistently to improve the professional well-being of each other, even if that’s possible only with a limited scope.

 

Development in an alternate work stream

Another dimension in the mentor-mentee relationship in the industry is when a mentor guides the mentee in finding an alternate role in a different workstream within the same organization. This option is more pertinent in companies with multiple departments spread across wide geographical locations. In several such multi-workstream companies, typically, the senior leadership encourages career progression through the change of roles after having remained in the same role for a certain time. This approach ensures that a qualified candidate gets to work in several workstreams within the company (e.g., in production, controlling, marketing, etc.) while progressing in his/her career within the company. Naturally, many mentor-mentee discussions in such companies revolve around this topic on identifying an individual’s aspirations and potential progression path.

 

Typically, the mentor in such a relationship maybe someone from a different workstream who may or may not have any direct connection with the mentee’s current workstream (for example, an engineer choosing a mentor from the marketing department). To ensure success in such a “broad scope” relationship, both mentor and mentee must carefully outline the expectations from the relationship. They should also agree on topics to focus on for the discussions and act diligently to achieve the previously agreed goals. In such relationships, the mentor’s responsibility is to guide the mentee to develop essential skill sets required for the next role. On the other hand, the mentee should ensure that he/she maintains his/her competency in the existing department. Simultaneously, the mentee should take extra efforts to acquire the competencies required for his/her next role.

 

In a product company, an employee in the human resource (HR) department wanted to move into the digital marketing department within the same company. He (the mentee) found a suitable mentor (a senior manager) in the marketing department. While accepting to be his mentor, the senior manager strongly encouraged the mentee to search for another mentor in his current, HR department. The mentee was surprised by this suggestion. The mentor explained to him that the transition from one role to another role is complex and time-consuming. He must maintain his competency in his current HR role before developing his new skill sets in marketing. The best to way ensure this is to search for a mentor in the same HR department. Reluctantly the mentee agreed to this. In a few months however, the mentee realized that the discussions with his HR mentor are helping him immensely to keep his performance in check while he pursued to develop his marketing skills.

 

The mentoring sessions can also be of immense help to the mentee in resolving conflicts. In a technology innovation company, a scientist was transferred from one research department to another. Despite the transfer, she (the mentee) continued her periodic discussions with her mentor from her older department. She soon realized that her manager in her new role (who herself was a senior scientist) was not properly following the research protocols sometimes. Being new in the department, she (the mentee) was unsure how to address this sensitive issue. She started discussing this topic with her mentor. The mentor suggested to her to encourage in-person discussions with her manager rather than email communications, as a way to establish mutual trust and transparency. The mentor cautioned her that the written communication may often be interpreted incorrectly/defensively, and one must be extra careful to ensure that the email should not be mis-interpreted. He suggested her to be pragmatic in pointing out the gaps in the research protocols through curiosity rather than to blame the manager. The mentor also suggested her to document the proper practices, their outcomes and present those in the group meetings. Over time, through periodic discussions and proper documentation, the manager realized her own mistakes in skipping some of the protocols. The manager not only incorporated her practices in the research protocols but also recognized her persistent vigilance and determination.

 

Development in technology innovation work streams

Over the years, several companies have established themselves as drivers of technology innovation in virtually all industrial streams. These companies are quite active in creating innovations through research and development. Employees working in such research-driven workstreams (typically scientists) usually work in collaboration with academia or national laboratories. Due to the research-driven work, the mentor-mentee relationship in such workstreams can involve mentors with strong research backgrounds either from the same company or even from an academic institution. In such relationships, it becomes critical for a mentee to ensure that the discussions with an external mentor (say from a university) do not involve any exchange of confidential information. The exception is when the mentee’s company signs up a confidentiality agreement with the mentor or his/her institution for scientific collaboration. The discussion topics may include the development of research protocols or steps that the mentee may take to establish his/her scientific footprint in the research community.

 

These so-called “hybrid” mentor-mentee relationships (i.e., the mentor is from academia and the mentee is from industry) are becoming popular in the industry due to the complexity of research targets. Equally interesting is the reverse scenario, in which the mentor is from industry, and the mentee is from academia. Such relationships are prominent in business administration course programs. In such cases, a mentor typically holds significant leadership or management experience from the industry and guides the mentee (e.g., students enrolled in the course program) on improving business administration and leadership skills. In these relationships, typical discussions revolve around case studies from industry (e.g., success stories, failure stories, best practices) and how to derive learnings from those.

 

Importance of personal attributes in a mentor-mentee relationship

In previous sections, I explored a few flavors of the mentor-mentee relationship and its relevance to different aspects of industrial development. In this section, I would like to outline a few soft-skill attributes which both mentor and mentee should be aware of for having a fruitful relationship.

 

First, both sides must understand that communication is the key to this relationship. Second, both sides must outline the scope and objective of the relationship as openly as possible. This expectation management is critical in maintaining a healthy relationship. Third, both mentor and mentee should agree to keep the discussions confidential. The discussions often involve sensitive topics, and hence, both sides must adhere to strict moral standards. Fourth, the mentor must ensure to be respectful and empathetic towards the mentee’s concerns. It is often the case that the mentor (due to his/her significantly substantial expertise) tends to become judgmental. Such an attitude can make the mentee apprehensive towards the mentor and may eventually lead to deterioration in the mentor-mentee relationship. Last but not the least, the mentor-mentee relationship should be based on mutual trust.

 

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that the mentor-mentee relationship is critical for anyone aspiring to become a successful professional, whether in academia or industry. Besides the technical know-how, the relationship often helps the mentee in exploring his/her aspirations and finding ways to improve his/her skills. Expectation management is critical in such discussions, and both sides must adhere to the highest social standards, especially when discussing sensitive topics. Finally, I would like to say that establishing a healthy mentor-mentee relationship is like constructing a two-way street. As long as we properly define the origin and destination, the relationship will help us reach our goal in an enriching way.

 

Prasad Phatak is scientist and manager (digitalization) for BASF Chemicals India Private Limited. Views expressed are personal.

 

This article is part of a Confluence series called “Mentor-Mentee Relationships in Academia: Nature, Problems and Solutions”. 

Mentoring: an anti-view polemic

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Sample Question Paper

2021

Semester 3

Module: Mentorship and its discontents

Time: Three hours

Questions

  1. The concept of mentoring is based on an ageist assumption that presupposes that seniority brings shareable wisdom with it. Discuss. (20 marks)
  1. Every act of teaching is an act of mentoring. Explain with reasons whether you think this has application in the Indian context. (20 marks)
  1. Every act of mentoring involves only two persons at a time and cannot be a public act as teaching in India inevitably is. Discuss this with reference to the economy of information produced by the Indic intellectual enterprise. (20 marks)
  1. Not every teacher can be a mentor nor every student a mentee. Present a case for or against this statement. You may use personal references to illuminate your case. (20 marks)
  1. Without being mentored, it is not possible to be a good mentor. Make a case for or against this statement. (20 marks)

 

Background, casually: My name is Jerry Pinto. I am a writer, a translator, an editor and a journalist. But my first paying job was as a teacher. I started teaching at the age of 14, students a few years younger than myself. I was then teaching Mathematics as a private tutor, arguably the lowest form of teaching, the kind that is despised by everyone. (Full-time teachers see the tutor as a parasite on the system; students see the tutor as a living mark of their failure and an imposition on what little free time they have from class and homework and so on.)

I began to teach journalism in my twenties so that for at least five years I was teaching in a classroom situation at the Social Communications Media (SCM) department of the Sophia Polytechnic and in various homes where I was a mathematics tutor. At the age of thirty, I stopped teaching mathematics and began to focus on my writing but I continued as guest faculty at SCM.  In the first twenty to thirty years of my teaching, I heard nothing about mentoring.

 

My understanding of education as it is practiced in India: Classroom education in India meant the transference of information. This information, we were told, was value-free. It was politically naïve. It is entirely likely that there may have been classrooms where Noam Chomsky was being taught in the same manner, a top-down in-filling. The teacher spoke. The student made notes. The student created answers, preferably six foolscap sheets for a twenty-mark answer. The student reproduced this and another teacher gave her something around 60 per cent.

This seems like a dysfunctional system but it seems to have worked for at least a hundred years, turning out, against the ideological structures on which it was built, defying its mind-numbing praxis, a reasonable amount of functioning adults.  (How functional? Perhaps we have only to read the newspapers these days to know how well or how badly the system has served us.)

In this situation then, the best teachers are those who produce the first classes and the first classes are those with the best memories, the best handwriting and the untiring arms. How do we fit mentoring into this schema?

 

Kinds of teachers: Here I would like to make a difference between good teachers, the best teachers and the legendary teachers. The legendary teachers are generally the sadists; they are equipped with an easy and ready wit and they take advantage of the inequality in the power equation in the class. Perhaps that was what drew them to teaching in the first place: a lifetime spent as a demi-god/dess with a battalion of eager acolytes to make or to mar with the whims of a god/desshead. The best teachers are the ones who produce the best notes and manage to guide their entire pedagogical model towards the highest marks. The good teachers are the gentle teachers and it is here that we might actually find some mentor material.

 

Implicating myself: I am myself a reluctant mentor. I believe that there is nothing so bad for the practicing writer as the teaching of writing. Your world is constricted to the academic space which is being turned, inexorably, towards the demands of industry. Your output is decreased by the amount of time you have to deal with mediocrity. (The good students are easy to deal with it; they need very little other than some support and tea and sympathy. The bad students are easy to deal with it; adjusting their grades a little will provide them with enough ‘inspiration’. The mediocre students are the problem; are they just late bloomers? Or will they get good enough to become B-List writers so precious to publishers’ backlists and festival directors?) And then there is the increasing amount of administrative work to which all academics seem heir. Finally, there is the new sensitivities of a student community that seems to walk the fine line between self-care and self-indulgence. How much can you push a student who says that she has mental health issues which do not allow her to work as much or as hard as she might like? How much can you not push such a student without completely losing all proportion to the rest of the class endeavour and the academic integrity of the course? Or is this pressure that we have long put upon our students merely an attempt at some form of payback, some way of taking revenge for the pressure that was put upon us? Are we simply saying to our students, ‘We suffered so it is only fair that you suffer’? How different is this argument from the one students use when they indulge in ragging?

None of this is what makes me a reluctant mentor.  I find the term difficult, I find the terms have not been set for the engagement and no one ever clarifies them.

 

Coda: I believe that mentorship can only be meaningful if the mentor and the mentored (I find the term mentee an ugly neologism that suggests mass-produced candy) are matched in terms of several vectors.

1. Willingness. Does the mentor wish to mentor? Does the student who is to be mentored wish for a mentor? This is the central question which seems to be ignored. Most teachers do not want to mentor the students who really need it, the academically struggling, the troubled, the lonely, the disengaged. Most teachers would rather have the academically bright students, the ones who are already turning their eyes to other skies, seeking visas and writing mission statements. In this sense, we are all then guilty of solidifying the status quo and maintaining privilege because these students, the gifted ones, the bright ones, are those who are nth generation learners. They have the benefits of understanding the system and they can play it effortlessly. They do not need us. We need them because these are the ones we generally teach.

2. Centrality of the student. When I was in college, it was clear that we were of secondary importance in class. We were told that we should make the life of the examiner easier. Please underline important points. Please write clearly. Teachers like… Examiners appreciate…The board is looking for…No one ever asked us what we were looking for. This has not really changed nor can it change in a time of syllabi by the cookie-cutter, curricula devised by bureaucrats badly disguised as academics, and most of all, the sheer pressure of the numbers. If we are to put the student at the centre of the mentoring exercise, how many can be mentored and how efficiently. If one has five hundred students sitting for an examination, how would you mentor even ten per cent of them? This means that the student ends up at the periphery again.

3. Congruence of intention. What is it that the mentor wishes to constitute as the core of the relationship? How is this defined by the student who is to be mentored? To my mind, the whole mentoring exercise requires the student to be a grateful recipient (again) of whatever the mentor provides. Does the student get a say? How can the student get a say? When there is an incongruence between the definition the student provides and the teacher provides, who is to adjudicate? How is this to be settled?

4. The lack of clear boundaries. Students seem to see the mentor as a cross between a parent and a therapist and a tutor. This is not what mentorship should be about. Mentors on their part seem to suffer sometimes from the Pygmalion complex, wanting to shape the student to create a certain maquette of the self. This is not what mentorship should be about.

5. Lack of clarity about outcomes. Can we understand what a good mentoring relationship is if we have no idea how it should begin, no idea of how it should be conducted, no idea of who should be asked to mentor, no idea about who should be allowed to mentor? Can we then ask for outcomes? Most institutions simply ask the student to grade their mentors. Mindful of the inequality of power, mindful of the possibility that one might need the mentor later for a recommendation or a letter, how are we to trust what they say?

 

Resolution: The mentoring exercise has been created out of some belief that students need more than what teachers can give them in the class. It has been created with two models: the perfect teacher and the perfect student. Their pas de deux is choreographed in the academic imagination as a perfect balance between Innocence and Experience.

No one who has ever mentored a young person will be fooled by it.

Mentoring in our present dispensation seeks to take a relationship that has to be stumbled upon by accident, by serendipity, by a willingness on both sides to take a gamble with their lives. Mentoring, it would seem, is always seen from the perspective of the person who has been mentored, how much they have got, how much they have benefited. This is not just unfair but it is also a measure of how little we think of the equity in the mechanics and mechanisms of education. Should mentors not be asked just as seriously how they benefited from the interaction too?

 

Resolution of the resolution: How does a mentoring relationship end? Presumably there is a moment when the student moves out of the academic setting and other students move in, also in need of mentoring. Presumably this moment coincides with the end of an academic term. Presumably only a relationship that is predicated on such an association could end at such artificial short notice.

Perhaps it might help if the ground were cleared of false hopes and expectations on both sides. Mentors need to know how little they are allowed to do and how little they can achieve and how heavy the investment is for that. The mentored need to know that their mentors are not there to find them jobs or get them placed in foreign universities.

It might help of both sides enter the agora on shared terms and both must return to that old value our systems seem to have neglected: learning by serendipity.

 

Jerry Pinto is a poet, novelist, short story writer, translator, as well as journalist. Views expressed are personal.

 

This article is part of a Confluence series called “Mentor-Mentee Relationships in Academia: Nature, Problems and Solutions”. 

Mentoring the Marginalized

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I want to briefly share my thoughts on three points: who needs a mentor, and why; who can be a mentor; and how can a mentor help?

 

I write from the perspective of a scientist in academia. Typically, no one teaches us how to be a scientist – rather, they teach us science: quantum field theory, organic synthesis, virology or algebraic geometry. Other things that are equally vital in order to be a functioning scientist or academic — how to choose and approach a research problem, how to reply to a referee report, how to write a grant proposal, how to plan the syllabus for a course, how to deal with hostile colleagues, or even how to be a good mentor to one’s own students – one is generally expected to have somehow picked up by osmosis. This is not terribly effective or efficient. As a result, many early-career researchers and teachers are left floundering.

 

For the ‘osmosis’ to work, one has to be embedded in an environment rich with experience and advice, be it from seniors or peers. Women and individuals from other marginalized groups are significantly less likely to be in such an environment, or be in a position to benefit from it. (I will discuss mostly the situation of women, because this is what I am familiar with. However, I am aware that similar challenges are faced by academics from historically disadvantaged and underrepresented groups.) A significant fraction of such mentoring advice tends to be communicated in informal situations, e.g., over a coffee in the office canteen, or over a drink after work (clearly, solvents are required for osmosis to occur!). Women are often excluded from such interactions — either because it is not considered socially acceptable for them to mingle with their colleagues and seniors (in a pub or bar, for example – yes, this can be true even today) or because they simply do not have the time for such socializing, due to the pressures of family responsibilities. Further, if a young woman spends considerable time talking to a mentor (who, due to statistical probability, is most likely to be male) this frequently leads to prurient speculation and the spreading of vicious gossip. In such a situation, many women often choose to restrict their interactions with their colleagues to formal professional meetings, thus missing out on opportunities for being mentored. Men may also hesitate to mentor a younger woman colleague, for fear of having their motives be misunderstood. So, yes, the “old boys’ network” does exist, and is indeed exclusionary.

 

Could one solution be for senior women to mentor junior women? Yes, of course, but there are two problems with this: one is that there just aren’t enough senior women in academia to mentor all their younger female colleagues and students, especially if one wants to match the area of professional interest. The other is that these senior women tend to already be overcommitted, e.g., due to having to be the ‘token woman’ on a number of administrative and professional committees. I have long functioned as a mentor to a number of young women (and men), and frequently found myself being approached by junior researchers who explicitly asked me if I could be their mentor. Though sympathetic to their needs, I sometimes hesitated, since I worried that this would require a heavy commitment of time on my part, and I felt that I was already stretched too thin.

 

Over the years, I have come to realize two things in this context: one is that effective mentoring need not always require a very sustained and detailed engagement between mentor and mentee: even the occasional little nudge provided by the mentor can make a big difference to the mentee’s life and career. The other is that mentoring can also be provided by a group, composed of both peers and seniors.

 

I have been moved by several young women telling me that I played an important role in shaping their professional trajectories. What impresses me is that the effort on my part was minimal: urging a student who had got into to a famous university for her PhD, but wasn’t seriously thinking of accepting, to grasp the opportunity (she now has a PhD from there). Pointing out to a woman who was scared to submit her paper to a prestigious journal that she had nothing to lose by trying anyway (her paper was accepted). Suggesting to a woman who was visiting an institute abroad for a workshop that she make appointments with faculty members there, to see if she could initiate a collaboration (she was awarded a highly competitive fellowship from the institute, and has published two papers together with faculty members there). Each of these interventions took just a few minutes of my time: to listen to a description of their situation, and proffer advice – but apparently had a huge impact, altering the course of their careers.

 

That such ‘little interventions’ can help tremendously I have found also to be true in scientific work.

 

I have been involved in setting up a mentorship program for African students in my field of density functional theory. Typically, these students are in the first generation of researchers working in this field at their home institutions, and thus do not have anyone available locally to help them get ‘unstuck’ when their calculations do not work out. It often takes me or another mentor just five minutes to listen to their problem and suggest a solution – e.g., changing the value of an input parameter so that a computation converges, or pointing out that some flag has been set incorrectly on an input file.

 

To help mentor female physicists from developing countries, I have been co-organizing ‘Career Development Workshops’ at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy and the ICTP-EAIFR in Kigali, Rwanda. These workshops give women in physics a space in which to share their experiences, meet successful women physicists who can serve as role models, and also acquire the kinds of ‘soft skills’ (writing papers and grant proposals, making presentations, etc.) that I have mentioned above. We also work with a drama therapist who helps the women come to terms with challenging situations or traumatic experiences in their lives or careers, e.g., the conflicting pulls of career and family, or a hostile work environment. Each group of about 60 women contains physicists from all over the world who are at different stages of their careers. Strong bonds are formed within the group, and everyone mentors one other, with contact being maintained via social media after the workshop ends. Participants have described these workshops as being ‘transformative’ experiences that have given them a huge boost in confidence.

 

Similarly, to mentor African students in our field of physics, we have set up ASESMA (African School in Electronic Structure Methods and Applications). In addition to focused workshops where both physics and soft skills are taught, there are monthly follow-up ‘clinics’ where, after a brief discussion of a particular technical topic, students can share the problems they are facing in their research work, and the whole group suggests solutions.

 

I have already mentioned that an issue that we encounter frequently in the drama therapy sessions in our workshops is that of how to deal with conflict of various kinds. There is no simple one-size-fits-all solution, but discussions with peers and mentors can help one find fresh perspectives and answers. Due to cultural reasons, many women seem particularly uncomfortable when faced with conflict. Moreover, those women who do choose to engage in a conflictual interaction are often perceived by others as being ‘inappropriately’ aggressive and rude (whereas a man behaving in the same way would not evoke the same negative reactions). In such a situation, one feels hemmed in and frustrated, and talking to mentors helps enormously. In one of our workshops, a participant working within a strongly patriarchal environment suggested that a solution was for women to “be like a snail”: move ahead slowly, slowly, so that no one even notices that you are moving forward; when there is danger, retreat within your shell; and when the danger passes, move forward slowly again. This advice was completely different from the way I was taught to behave, but I could appreciate that for many women, this might be the only safe and viable option. It also made me rethink the way I had been raised, and realize that there can be many different ways of handling conflict.

 

To conclude, I wish to reiterate that a huge and frequently unaddressed problem in science and academia is that people feel that they are faced with the task of climbing a huge mountain, all by oneself. Mentors can be the sherpas who lend a helping hand and share some of the burden, so that one no longer feels quite so alone.

 

Update (26-Oct-2021): The link to ASEMSA was added.

Shobhana Narasimhan is a Professor in the Theoretical Sciences Unit at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru. Views expressed are personal.

 

This article is part of a Confluence series called “Mentor-Mentee Relationships in Academia: Nature, Problems and Solutions”. 

Wind beneath the wings

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In academics there are very few milestones to indicate life-transitions. When the rest of the people join a “job”, most of us join for a PhD program where we continue to feel (and in many instances be treated) more as a student than a fully-functional adult. Rinse and repeat with a post-doctoral program. By the time one finds a job, two things happen – on the one hand, one is old, worldly wise in their own way and with set thought patterns and on the other hand, having to negotiate a new world filled with people with much stronger and far more rigid personalities. A mentor would make it easy for a young researcher to navigate through these complexities.

 

Mentoring, needless to say, requires a mentor and one or more mentees. A mentor is usually   someone who is experienced and is willing to share their experiences with the mentees. The experiences could be professional, personal or both. A mentor differs from a supervisor – mentors are (usually) not paid for this work, they work for overall development of their mentee and not just their academic needs and are aware of their role being that of an advisor and not that of an instructor. A few are lucky to have the PhD/Post-Doc supervisors as mentors, some find a mentor from among other faculty members or a senior colleague from one’s own institute or outside of it, either someone of one’s own gender or otherwise . While clearly there are no rules for who forms a successful mentee-mentor team, the relationship between them is expected to be healthy.

 

Being as nebulous as it is, the mentee-mentor relationship demands the respect for invisible lines. While the mentor should be keenly aware of the extent of mentoring required and not try and micromanage the mentee, the mentee needs to keep in mind that the friendliness of the mentor does not imply the lack of professional and personal boundaries.  For example, I have personally benefited from a simple advice given to be the first time I was a co-panelist with one of my own teachers. I was told not to use “sir” to address to address him, as I am prone to, but retain the respectful tone I have. This helped me to project myself in a professional manner.

 

For a successful mentor-mentee relationship, both partners should possess certain qualities. The mentor should be not only knowledgeable but be someone who can see the larger picture and indicate customized paths of progress for each of their mentees. This involves guidance in improving skill sets as well as giving pointers on the art of camouflaging or overcoming individual personality follies.  For example, being taught to speak confidently despite probably having plenty of self-doubt (aka the impostor syndrome), goes a long way in building real confidence in the mentee. Mentors should value the mentee as a person and also as a professional. This requires the mentor to be empathetic; empathy that is bereft of ego. A point of friction between mentors and mentees is usually when the former feels that their “advice” has not been followed in toto by the latter, often forgetting that their mentees are adults with their own world-views and that the relationship should be one of mutual respect. The mentor should also be able to guide the mentee to find solutions to their problems rather than supply solutions – like that proverb about teaching a person to fish vs. giving them a fish. A mentee, on the other hand, should be someone who is eager, willing to learn, is honest and is willing to accept both praise and criticism. It helps if both the mentee and mentor share similar life and career goals and beliefs and both maintain the necessary confidentiality, since a lot of personal information including failures and feelings are likely to be shared.

 

Mentoring Young Adults

Early in student life, students are either too playful to take academic activities seriously or are not serious about their career goals or are plain unaware of their own higher potential – all of which call for a mentoring. Many students take their student life casually because they have not been made aware that success in academics (and life in general) is due to delayed gratification – that results are not instant. Motivational speeches from a mentor work with this group as do narration of anecdotes or biographical success stories. Those students who are aware of their career options are often in need of someone with the right connections to help them move closer to their dream careers. Students who are not aware of their own potential benefit interacting with a mentor who not only sees the potential but spends time and effort in honing it. Irrespective of the category, at this early stage of a student’s life, mentoring usually calls for the mentors to identify a mentee and groom them, since the mentees are too young to be able to identify their mentors or often, realize their own needs.  The mentee needs to be open-minded about the mentoring, and that is often a huge challenge given their age. Mentors of this age group need a lot of patience and often switch between being firm and flexible to work around the mental blocks of the mentees. While only a few among the larger populations of students can be mentored and the mentee-mentor relationship often short termed, the joy of watching a young adult transform into a high-functioning professional is unmatched.

 

Often in the initial stages of a mentee’s life, the mentees need to be instructed. As they grow confident, the mentor should slowly switch roles to being an advisor. Much like a tree guard that has to necessarily come off when the tree begins to grow, the mentor should also cease being an instructor when the  mentee grows.

 

Mentoring Research Scholars

It is when one is a research scholar that one really needs and benefits from a good mentoring,  and often that is exactly the period when it is not available, usually since supervisors neither mentor themselves nor let their scholars be mentored by someone else. Since the returns on mentoring efforts are intangible and of no value in academic progress metrics, some supervisors are just not motivated enough to be mentors and often view their research scholars as mere workforce to produce tangible research output. Additionally, some do not let their scholars to interact with   other faculty, thus nipping the chance of networking and finding a mentor in the bud. Often, faculty members genuinely do not see themselves as mentor material. Thus, it is a small percentage of research scholars who are lucky enough to find mentors who guide them to personal and professional success. Lack of customized career path plan while doing a PhD is often the reason many bright scholars’ careers do not take off. While doctoral committees are in principle supposed to play the role of mentors, it is usually not the case. Every scholar would benefit from having a friendly mentor – someone who can be like an older aunt or uncle in a family – experienced, willing to listen and advice in a polite manner and most importantly, not be overcritical.

 

Mentoring relationships in higher education differ from those at school level since the career goals of the mentee and mentor are often in conflict with the relationship, with both vying for  the same metrics of success. Unless the mentor is mentally strong, it is easy for them to feel jealous at their mentee’s success, since it is human to believe that other people’s success comes easily while one has to struggle for the same. The ideal case – where every research scholar has a mentor to tell them the exact skills to hone for academic success in their field, conferences to go to, introduce them to the right people in the field and help them sketch a good post-PhD career path – is when the full potential of the young researchers will be available to the academic community and to the society at large.

 

Mentoring Colleagues

The system expects young faculty members to flip a switch and go from being a student (post- doctoral fellows in India will agree with this terminology!) to being an expert teacher-researcher-administrator-supervisor. Time needs to be spent in building healthy personal relationships among colleagues – time that is difficult to find in the midst of jam-packed workloads and personal goals for success. Interactions, often over infinite cups of beverages, help in identifying and bonding with more experienced colleagues. Building up robust mentee-mentor relationships among colleagues is beneficial all over – the mentees can work to their full potential without the fear of making mistakes, the mentors help in maintaining previously set academic standards and guide the younger generation to take it higher, and the system is doubly benefitted with academic productivity and a happy  workplace. A new colleague of mine who was made a member of the board of studies for the first time told me that the small chat we had before the committee meeting about what the functions of the committee were, what was expected of them, some tips on how to present an academic disagreements at the meeting etc., were extremely helpful not only in ensuring a successful revision of syllabus, but also in getting it done with no feathers ruffled!

 

When opposites meet

Coming together of opposites in a mentee-mentor relationship brings in its own set of complexities. Take the example of one of them being educated abroad, and thus having better language and communication skills, better academic scitometric indices etc., while the other lacks significantly in one or more of these departments. This can lead to the latter feeling inferior and thus not being open-minded about the relationship. Such a situation requires extra effort on the part of both people in building a healthy, trustworthy relationship where one can speak of their success/failures without feeling embarrassed or the fear of being judged. While patience and kindness on the part of the person with the better academic qualities, and open-mindedness on the part of the other person will enable a nurturing relationship, any trace of arrogance or resentment will be detrimental to the very cause of mentoring.

 

If there is an additional layer of gender intersectionality involved, there could be emotional transference, which if prohibited or unrequited, could easily escalate into a whole other set of problems.  The transference could be positive (idealization, attraction etc.,) or negative (hostility, frustration etc.,). The transference could be between the mentor and mentee or, in the case of negative emotions, be taken out on others. All of these require sensitivity in handling. While both the mentee and mentor are equally responsible to ensure a healthy relationship, the mentor has a slightly larger role to play since they are more experienced and in an unsaid position of power in the relationship.

 

One problem sometimes seen is that if the mentor is a woman/gender-minority and the mentee is  not, empathy and polite behaviour, which are seen as virtues in a mentor, can quickly be gender stereotyped or taken for granted, often leading to such mentors having a brusque demeanor. Speaking of gender in mentoring, sharing of tips on interacting with other people, especially of other gender, help ease the cultural discomfort a younger colleague could possibly feel. Sharing of tips acquired with experience by the mentor, such as keeping the door open when having conversations, having a sober demeanour and a physical distance when interacting in private and keeping all casual comments to public spaces, asking a student who is crying to take a break and come back along with a friend etc., can go a very long way in building and maintaining a professional reputation of the mentee.

 

Summary

In summary, mentoring relationships in academics could be between a teacher and taught, or between colleagues at the same institute or from entirely different institutes. They could be between people of the same gender (and other intersectionalities) or not. Interpersonal relationship is the basis of a mentee-mentor relationship, and hence there can only be broad guidelines, but not rule-books, on how to nurture the same. However, there are some essential elements – both the mentee and mentor should be enthusiastic about the mentoring relationship and be willing to invest in it. There should be mutual respect. Both should be willing to share their experiences and emotions so that the mentor can understand and guide ,and the mentee need not experience, or at least anticipate, some of the more difficult situations. The mentor needs to know how much to mentor and when to let go, not try and create clones of oneself.

 

Mentoring partnerships need to be mutually beneficial, for the two partners to form a team. The mentor needs to be proud of their mentee’s progress and growth and not bring in professional jealousies. The mentee should be willing to share the credit of their success with their mentor, for whom this may be the only compensation for all their efforts.

 

V Madhurima is Professor of Physics at Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur. Views expressed are personal.

 

This article is part of a Confluence series called “Mentor-Mentee Relationships in Academia: Nature, Problems and Solutions”. 

Not Another Brick in the Wall

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The Context

We have spent most of our lifetime in the classroom. Twenty plus years as students and about forty years as teachers; years that have been so varied: traumatising, boring, interesting, inspiring— a whole gamut of emotions pass through our beings as we run through a life spent in a space that has been variously characterised as a part of the ideological state apparatus  (Althusser, 2006), a disciplinary space within which our subjectivities are formed  (Foucault, 1995) and a punitive straitjacketing machine dedicated to churning out more and more “bricks in the wall” (Waters, 1979). As people who passed through the educational system in the 1960s and 70s as students, many of us have experienced the punitive side of education (particularly in primary school)- rote learning, corporal punishment, and humiliation; in some ways, the Pink Floyd song[1] resonates with us. And certainly, it gave us the resolve to approach education and the student-teacher relationship very differently when we became teachers within the higher education system.

 

Our opportunity to explore novel pedagogies and to work with the idea of co-creation and mentoring received an impetus with our media education work in the early 1990s with students of social work and design, where we sought to make critical theory relating to understanding images and media texts relevant and accessible through activity based learning, involving in some cases, the production of media artefacts (K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro, 2003). We then extended this in the form of workshops with a diverse range of groups, from school children and teachers to parents and activists. We were able to deepen this involvement with the mentoring of young people when we started an MA programme in Media and Cultural Studies in 2007 at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. We played a key role in designing the programme, whose stated objective was to facilitate the creation of “thinking doers” and “doing thinkers”. Working on designing and setting up the programme with a group of colleagues was for us an exciting opportunity where we had a fair amount of freedom to shape it in ways that allowed for introducing modes of learning that emphasized group work, learning from each other, co-creation of media materials of various kinds (often in collaboration with field based processes and organisations) and critical reflection on the self and the world in general and the teaching-learning process in particular. In this paper we will discuss one of the courses we introduced, which involved the collective production of a documentary series by the class in the third semester of the programme, as a case in point to illustrate the pedagogy that the programme is committed to.

 

Mentoring Media Production

The size of the class we were working with was small. We started with 12 students and the maximum size we worked with was 28. This allowed for the formation of close relationships, both between the students and between the teachers and the students. For this course, the class is divided into small groups of four or five that work together for the whole semester. When dividing the class, as mentors we keep in mind the requirement that everyone should get a chance to work with everyone else. Hence, we ensure that the groups are different from those made in the previous semester for production group work. Secondly, we try to ensure heterogeneity in the group, in terms of gender and other markers of identity and a good mix of competencies, such as ability to write, technical and graphic design skills, fluency in local languages and ability to work in the field. The process involves the students collectively deciding on a theme related to the city that they might want to make a film on. The theme should be sufficiently broad and complex to allow for a series of films. Sometimes we suggest a theme, but the students may or may not want to work on it. Once the theme is decided, we all collectively (including the students) bring in a range of resources (books, articles, films, websites) and resource people researchers, local activists) to discuss the theme and help develop a perspective as well as understand what are possible field locations and local groups that the students might work with. Simultaneously, students spend some time visiting various locations and meeting people, in an effort to narrow down what sub-theme they would like to work on. The collective brainstorming on the theme might also include personal sharing of experiences. For instance, when we worked on the theme Castemopolitan Mumbai, exploring the pernicious presence of caste in the city, we started with a session where each one of us, both students and mentors, shared our experiences of becoming aware of caste and caste discrimination or privilege. This helped all of us understand each other and where we were coming from. This first part of the course, working on the concept, ends with the groups each presenting their concept notes and eliciting feedback from the whole class. Subsequently, the work proceeds mainly in groups, with the mentors meeting each group regularly to discuss their progress on their documentary work. The entire class meets at regular intervals, for instance to present their shooting scripts, to share two or three iterations of their rough edit and to present their final films. One of the ground rules we set is that the participants have to use the institutional equipment and not their personal equipment. This is to obviate the potential tension of members with privileged access to their own equipment dictating terms to the group.

 

Group work has several advantages in terms of helping each student to feel involved in their work and to grow as a person and as a documentary filmmaker. Firstly, it allows group members to mentor and learn from each other. Secondly, it allows each member to build on their strengths and capabilities and contribute to group work. The hierarchies that tend to exist due to class/caste background tend to get questioned, as students who know local languages are more comfortable in interacting with communities that don’t speak English and often lead the field process. However, working together can also lead to group dynamics that are inimical to collective functioning. It is here that by meeting groups regularly we monitor group processes and intervene when necessary to help them resolve their differences. Some issues that arise include domination of the group by one or more members, lack of involvement of some members, and difficulty in arriving at a consensus as to how the film should be made. In these cases, we speak both to the group and to individual members and in most cases the problems are resolved to the point that the work can carry on. There are sometimes simmering differences that continue to persist. There are also difficulties that arise in the field: breakdown of relationship with the subjects, subjects moving away or even being evicted in the midst of documentation, or technical difficulties which end up in students losing the material that they have documented. As mentors, we have to advise the groups about how they tackle these issues. Sometimes it could mean mobilising our contacts in the field to come up with a Plan B so that the film could get completed. Throughout the period of film-making, we emphasize the point that the process is as important as the product: maintaining harmonious relationships within the group, learning from each other, engaging with subjects in an ethical manner that respects their dignity, privacy and right to choose is more important than making a ‘good’ film. To this end, we insist that our students show their film to their subjects before they finalise it. Also, we have a public screening at the end of the process, usually at the national film festival that the School of Media and Cultural Studies organises, where we invite all the subjects of the various films made to be present and to participate in the discussion. We have seen that this is often an empowering experience for the subjects. The process of working with communities and producing these films has been an eye-opener for many student participants, changing their relationship with the city and its people. We as mentors of these films also learn something new in the process.

 

While I had evidently been aware of divisions and sharp inequalities in Mumbai, I was not directly aware of how deep it ran. This series then became a turning point as my first really critical engagement with the city.”[2]

 

Some of these productions contributed to on-going campaigns in the city like Bombay Ki Kahani, Mumbai Ki Zubani,[3] remembering the 20th anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid and its aftermath. Some of the films of the Remembering 1992 were also shown at prime time by NDTV 24/7, thus helping the campaign and taking these films into the public sphere.

 

“When our films became a part of a city wide campaign, for us, who have come from different parts of the country, we felt very much a part of the city and felt the responsibility to tell the story in a proper manner so that it could make a difference.”[4]

 

Challenges Faced by Students

In the past few years, we have found that the incidence of depression and other mental health issues is increasing among students. The reasons are probably many and complex, but a predominant one is conflict with the family due to a clash of norms and values and the parents’ attempt to impose their expectations on their daughters and sons; it could be the impatience of parents to get their daughters married, or the family’s inability to accept the sexual orientation of their young wards, or just young people’s sense of low self-worth due to pressures to succeed. Coping with this situation with sensitivity is a challenge to teachers, given institutional requirements such as attendance and assignments. There is only so much leeway that the teacher-mentor has, to make allowances for difficulties that students face in coping with academic requirements. This also becomes challenging when group work is involved, and the student is unable to participate adequately in group processes.

 

Though many educational institutions now offer medical and counselling services, these are often unable to deal effectively with the difficulties that students face, particularly students from non-English speaking, low-income backgrounds who are Dalits, Adivasis or members of OBCs. The changes in the scholarship regimes, where they must pay fees and other charges upfront and are later reimbursed by the state (sometimes after they graduate, if at all) also makes surviving in a city like Mumbai very difficult for these students. While the institution and the School they study within do try to help through student aid, the amount that they get is often inadequate. These structural constraints have made education even in state funded institutions increasingly challenging for students from marginalised communities. And if the student drops out due to these circumstances, as has happened in a few cases, we as mentors feel a sense of frustration at our inability to help students beyond a point.

 

Learnings and Outcomes

Many of these films that we have mentored have become the spine to a series of web archives around the city under the rubric of DiverCity (available here), which contains other crowd-sourced materials such as films, music, poetry, interviews, news reports, academic writing and citizens’ reports amongst other materials. The subsequent work of putting together these thematic archives is beyond the scope of the course, though it has in most cases been done by alumni who have stayed on after completion of the programme to work on creating the archive. The attempt in creating these thematic archives (the themes include the 1992 communal violence, the mills in Mumbai, caste, waste and waste workers, Mumbai streets and migrants)  is to situate student work in a larger context- exploring new ways of connecting the ‘inside’ of the university with the ‘outside’. This has also enabled us to expand  the horizon of the documentary as a form, facilitating its interaction with other texts, taking on the new media ecologies and modes of consumption, where non-linear interaction with texts is the order of the day. As mentors, who have spent our lives in very different mediascapes, we have learnt a lot from our students, alumni and younger colleagues in the course of our work with them on building the archives in a collaborative mode. The archives, which are available for use under a creative commons license, also help students escape regimes of state and market control and facilitate further research as well as multiple entry points in approaching the city of Mumbai. There are of course limitations, given the digital divide: limitations of language and Internet access as also issues of sustainability.  However, they offer possibilities for critical pedagogies and research interventions that are informed by inclusion and social justice. As mentors of this process, we feel we have grown in insights and in our relationships with students through this process. Despite all the constraints mentioned earlier, at the end of the day (or for us, the end of a career of nearly forty years of teaching-mentoring) we feel that co-creation with students, on themes that connect us to the spaces we live and work in, offer immense possibilities for personal growth and for generation of socially relevant knowledge that could be the starting point of further exploration for other learners.

Notes

[1] The title of this paper refers to the iconic song ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, written by Roger Waters and performed by Pink Floyd in 1979, a strong indictment of the formal education system, available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U

[2] Quoted in (Faiz Ullah, Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar, 2018)

[3] More here: https://bombaykikahani.wordpress.com/

[4] Ibid

 

Bibliography

Althusser, L. (2006). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New Delhi: Aakar Books.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Vintage Books.

Waters, R. (1979). Another Brick in the Wall [Recorded by P. Floyd]. On Another Brick in the Wall. Harvest and Columbia Records. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U

Faiz Ullah, Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar. (2018). DiverCity- Independent Documentary as an Alternate Narrative of the City. In A. E. Devansundaram, Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution. New York: Routledge.

 

Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar are retired professors, School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. They are documentary filmmakers, media educators, and researchers. More about their work can be found here. All views expressed are personal.

 

This article is part of a Confluence series called “Mentor-Mentee Relationships in Academia: Nature, Problems and Solutions”. 

The Many Ways of Doing a PhD

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The PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) is more or less the highest degree that can be obtained in higher education. A PhD is awarded to a person who has shown evidence of conducting original research and has produced significant new knowledge in a chosen area of work. Most people work towards obtaining a PhD either because it has become an essential requirement for employment in research, teaching and other science and technology institutions or because it is fashionable and coveted even outside academia and research institutions, such as in business and industry, for example. Research towards a PhD is always carried out under the supervision of a senior authority in the field who is variously called the guide, supervisor or mentor. And the person working towards a PhD degree is variously called student, research scholar or mentee. I will deliberately use these labels interchangeably.

 

Different modes of getting a PhD

Given that a PhD can be obtained in almost any branch of knowledge and the very different motivations for obtaining this exalted degree, it is not surprising that there is great variation in how a PhD is obtained. Although variation occurs in many dimensions and is continuous, I think it is useful to recognise three dominant modes of obtaining a PhD. For convenience, I will call these (1) Independent, (2) Collaborative and (3) Apprenticeship. The variation captured in this classification significantly impacts the relationship between the students and guide or mentor and the mentee. But, as I will show, these different modes of obtaining a PhD have important ramifications well beyond the mentor-mentee relationship. Because there is so much variation around these modes, my description below probably pertains to the extreme manifestations of these modes—the tips of the peaks surrounded by broad and deep valleys.

 

In the independent mode, the PhD student chooses a research problem, conceptualises and plans it, conducts the research and writes up her results almost entirely by herself.  The mentor, as it seems most appropriate to call her in this mode of PhD, is a friend, philosopher and guide, in the best sense of this phrase. The role of the mentor is to offer advice, critique the work of the research scholar, suggest alternate ways of executing the work or interpreting the results, draw attention to the older literature and to other colleagues and scholars with whom the mentor may be more familiar because of her age and experience.

 

When the mentor similarly mentors two or more research scholars pursuing their PhDs in this independent mode, the group also provides an intellectual atmosphere and camaraderie with scholars interested in similar scholarly pursuits. Such camaraderie becomes mutually beneficial to all the research scholars. Usually, the mentor and her mentees are embedded in a larger department or institution, and these provide additional help and support. The research scholar may benefit from various academic resources that are part of the mentor’s establishment and the institution but the mentor seldom explicitly supports the research scholar’s work financially. While research scholars may be generous in their acknowledgement of the mentor’s advice and help, they seldom co-publish the outcome of the research. The mentor is usually pursuing her own independent research, perhaps not unlike the research scholar’s, although it may be more advanced, more complex, and more long-term.

 

In the collaborative mode, as the name implies, a research scholar and her mentor share everything—choosing the problem, conceptualising and planning it, executing and writing it—more or less equally. Even in this mode, the research scholar may contribute more than her mentor in some components of the research, especially in the execution of the research plan. In an ideal situation, the research scholar and her mentor complement each other, bringing different matching skills to bear on the research. One of them may be more theoretical, and the other more empirical, one of them more mathematical and the other more experimental, one of them may have a more biological background, and the other may come from a more chemical, physical or engineering background and so on.

 

The original idea for the research may come from either the research scholar or the mentor. The mentor may already have the rough outline of a problem and may have been looking for a research scholar who can conduct the appropriate field or laboratory work or computer simulations and complement what the mentor cannot do, finds hard to do or does not want to spend the time to do. Conversely, a research scholar may wish to continue working on a problem that she has already begun in her undergraduate or Master’s program and may be looking for a mentor who will help her take her research to the next level, which she is not able to do on her own.

 

There may be some inequality in contribution resources, with the mentor providing more funding and facilities. But in many cases, mentor and mentee apply for grants jointly, and the institution may provide many facilities and resources. Mentees may also have their own independently obtained fellowships, which include substantial research expenses.

 

In the collaborative mode also the mentor may be mentoring and collaborating with several research scholars working on related but quite different problems. The different mentees may also help each other or provide new ideas and perspectives on each other’s research. In a friendly and intellectually honest environment, many publications may result from the participation of several individuals. In this mode, the resulting publications are almost always co-authored by the mentor and one or more research scholars. Usually, mutually acceptable ways are found to apportion the different research outcomes into several students’ PhD theses.

 

In the apprenticeship mode, things are quite different. In the extreme case, the guide, as it is more appropriate to call her in this mode of PhD, has one or more long-term projects for which she has likely obtained large grants by promising specific outcomes. The long-term research projects, which can run for decades, are broken up into small chunks suitable for individual PhD student theses. The students have little or no flexibility in choosing the problem, the methodology to be used, or even the sequence of experiments. These are usually fairly well pre-determined and need to be executed as per plan. Because of the commitments made to the funding agencies, there is little scope for mid-course alteration in the plans, almost certainly not because of individual student preferences. Because of potential competition from other research groups and the interests of secrecy and priority, students often do not have the opportunity to discuss their work and be mentored by people outside the research group.

 

The broader significance of the individual student’s research is often unclear even to the guide at the time. In many cases, the final goal is realised decades after the students have completed their work and gone on to pursue their separate careers. If successful, most of the credit goes to the guide with little possibility of any further rewards to the various students, other than their PhD’s and some publications they have already got. The guide is often busy obtaining and managing grants, organising high profile publications, setting up new collaborations, serving on many committees and attending conferences.

 

The students do almost all the actual work as per the plans laid out. If the research groups are large, post-docs perform the task of the day to day mentoring of the PhD students. The students do get credit in the form of their PhD degree and some publications. The publications often have many authors. The breaking up of the group’s results into different publications cater to the larger interests of the group’s research agenda. The timing and content of the publications are often influenced by what competing research groups do. The contributions of the individual students in the publications they co-author can become quite hard to discern. Indeed, the single authorship of the students in their PhD thesis is glaringly incongruent with the multiple authors in the published papers.

 

Many uncomfortable and unreasonable traditions have cropped up in an attempt to overcome this difficult situation. These include the implicit but never explicitly stated the significance of being the first author, the last author or the corresponding author. It is not uncommon to find such absurdities as co-corresponding authors! Even so, the originality and independence of the students are hard to discern. The cost of this is borne by the students, as it makes no difference to the guide. Many selection and hiring committees often wonder about the contribution of the applicant to their multi-author publications, which has led to the demand for proof of originality and independence in the form of further publications at the postdoctoral level.

 

It is a matter of satisfaction that some journals have begun to expect authors of co-authored papers to state each author’s contributions explicitly. One could argue that this is not necessarily done honestly and that the power inequality between the student and the guide will once again work to the disadvantage of the student. Nevertheless, I think that this is a significant step forward. I hope more journals follow this practice. I suggest that journals should be evaluated based on such good practices rather than by their impact factors.

 

The social prestige of the different modes of PhD

I think that such variations in the ways of getting a PhD are perfectly natural.  But, unfortunately, we attribute very different levels of social prestige to PhDs in different modes. We tend to hold the independent mode in very high esteem and consider the research scholars who obtain their PhD in this mode as the best exemplars of researchers. We value research scholars who obtain their PhD in the collaborative mode somewhat less because they need their mentors to carry out their research. But, it is the students who obtain their PhDs in the apprentice mode that we hold in the lowest esteem. We doubt their ability to think and work independently and tend to give much more credit to their guides, even without any evidence for doing so.

 

We like to believe, and make-believe, that a PhD degree is granted only for independent, original research and not for being trained as an apprentice, nor even for collaborative work. Only the name of the research scholar appears on the thesis. In many cases, it is required that the guide certifies that the research embodied in the thesis is the original, independent work of the scholar. And yet, the guides have no hesitation in being co-authors in the publications that result from the thesis and may be entirely justified in doing so. Isn’t there something wrong in this double standard, in this discordance between practice and public posturing?

 

In my opinion, both the student and the guide need to come clean about their relative contributions and make the same claim in the thesis document and the ensuing publications. Such admission will require that we admit that there are multiple ways of working for a PhD and stop pretending that the PhD is a monolithic instrument. We need to understand why there is so much variation and realise that there is no simple relationship between the mode in which a PhD degree is obtained and the quality of the work, or indeed of the research scholars, nor even of the mentors. The different modes of PhD do not automatically map on to different, pre-determined academic qualities and standards.

 

The Causes of variation

Why is there so much variation in how research leading to a PhD degree is carried out? It would be a mistake to think that the observed variation is caused merely by the corresponding variation in the students’ intellectual abilities or the guides’ attitudes. Important as these factors may be, much of the variation can be attributed to the nature of the research. Let us observe that the independent mode is most common in the humanities and some branches of the social sciences. It can also be seen in the natural sciences, albeit very rarely. In the natural sciences, the independent mode is more common in mathematics and the theoretical sciences. In biology, it is more common in ecology and evolutionary biology. This is because single individuals can easily carry out research in these areas. Indeed, it often cannot be easily carried out efficiently by the participation of more than one individual.

 

The collaborative mode is somewhat more common than the independent mode in the natural sciences. In biology, there is once again a definite bias in favour of ecology and evolutionary biology as compared to cell and molecular biology, for example. Once again, this has to do with the nature of the research. The problems being tackled are amenable to collaboration between two or a small number of individuals and need relatively little expensive technology and facilities. The research problems come in relatively small, PhD-size packets and understanding the significance of current research does not have to wait for many more years of sustained work.

 

The apprenticeship mode, perhaps the most common mode in today’s experimental natural sciences, is a very different ball game. The research problems being tackled often require or benefit from the collaboration of many individuals. They are much dependent on technology and funding. More importantly, they need many years, if not decades of sustained work by large numbers of people, to come to fruition. Such problems do exist, and many of them are extremely important. Many such problems are in the more applied sciences such as vaccine development, satellite development and deployment, but they may also be found in the more basic sciences, such as in the sequencing of genomes or research carried out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Young people desirous of obtaining PhD degrees in these fields cannot participate in the research in the independent or small-scale collaborative mode. The apprenticeship mode is not only inevitable but also most appropriate.

 

Both students and guides may vary in their comfort levels in the different PhD modes, and intermediate PhD modes may develop in any kind of research. Nevertheless, it cannot be that the students’ intellectual abilities or the intrinsic attitudes of the guides will vary systematically between these different kinds of research areas. The apprenticeship mode of a PhD can be simply an intelligent adaptation by the student and the guide to succeed in solving a certain class of problems. We must accept that the different modes of PhD can be a function of the different natures of the research and do not necessarily reflect different academic standards or intellectual qualities. It is not difficult to imagine that the quality of a PhD thesis carried out in the apprenticeship mode can be equal to or, indeed, far superior to some of those carried out in the collaborative or even in the independent mode. The same applies, of course, to the research scholars working in these different modes.

 

When the mode of doing a PhD is chosen inappropriately, without adequate regard to the needs of the research problem at hand, research carried out in any mode may suffer. If the research scholar, for example, does not have some of the crucial skills required or has inadequate background knowledge of the field, research carried out in the independent mode may be of relatively poor quality. In fact, there would be great danger that the mentor would not worry too much about this as it is not her research. Hence the research scholar who has inappropriately chosen the independent mode may suffer. A research problem requiring extensive collaboration and massive facilities may simply be poorly executed in a simple collaborative mode between one research scholar and one senior scientist. Such a duo may lose out to a large research group with much funding and many collaborations.

 

Despite the very high quality of the research, the PhD thesis of a research scholar in the apprenticeship mode may not meet the standards of originality and independence that we proclaim for a PhD. We should accept that the level of originality and independence of the research scholar will necessarily vary between different modes of doing a PhD. If we insist that all PhD research should have the same exalted level of independence and originality, we should award PhD degrees only to those scholars who work in the independent or collaborative mode, and all research carried out in the apprenticeship mode should not qualify for a PhD. This, of course, would be a great pity because the apprenticeship mode provides wonderful opportunities to train a large number of young people to become mentors in the future, even if they mentor students only in the apprenticeship mode. Instead, we must find ways of assessing the potential of people to work independently, even though they may not have done so before, just as we may need to find out if they can successfully work in the collaborative mode even though they may not have done so in the past.

 

Indeed, it may sometimes be in the best interests of a young person to gain expertise by working in the apprenticeship mode and use the skills so gained later in life to do independent and original research. Originality and independence should not be deemed to be so sacred as to sacrifice the quality and importance of scientific research and training. It is not so difficult to calibrate the value of independence and originality depending on the nature of the research problem. I once met a very frustrated young student who complained that she had an excellent idea for research but could not find a guide who was already working on that problem. I explained to her that she should consider this her great fortune, put her idea temporarily on the back burner, work with any guide under whose mentorship she can acquire all the required skills needed to solve her original problem and tackle it later as an independent researcher.

 

By not recognising the genuine and inevitable variation in the modes of doing a PhD and insisting on painting them all with a single brush, and holding them to the same exalted standards of originality and independence, we are doing great harm to research scholars working in some areas. Even more importantly, by not recognising that PhD done in different modes are quite different, we are blind to the inevitable consequences of these different modes of PhD research. And such blindness can have disastrous practical consequences, many of which I believe we are witnessing today.

 

The consequences of variation

There are several important consequences of the diverse modes of doing research towards a PhD. One of them concerns the motivation of mentors to mentor PhD students. Such motivation is lowest in the independent mode, somewhat higher in the collaborative mode and very high in the apprenticeship mode. I have heard many humanities and social sciences professors complain that their institution forces them to take on too many PhD students. They have told me that although they recognise that mentoring is an essential service, PhD students take away too much of their time which they could instead use for their own research. It is quite rare that the student helps in the research of the mentor in any significant way. Thus mentoring is viewed as a service that they perform because they are required to do so.

 

Mentors are somewhat more motivated in the collaborative mode because their research also depends on collaboration with their students. Nevertheless, they would rather take a fairly small number of students as they have to be a nearly equal partner with each one of them. Conflict only arises when their institution requires them to train more PhD students than they would like to.

 

In the apprenticeship mode, the situation is entirely different. Mentors would like to take on as many PhD students as the system will permit. It is not uncommon for senior-high profile scientists to have ten or twenty PhD students. The number of PhD students they can take is only limited by funding and institutional limitations. If we wish to develop a policy for increasing or decreasing the number of PhDs we want to produce per year, then the mode in which the PhD is done is a critical factor that will decide whether the policy succeeds or not. Indeed, the independent and collaborative modes of PhD are not conducive to an institutional or national effort to significantly increase the number of PhDs.

 

A second important consequence concerns the freedom that the research scholar has. In the independent mode, the research scholar has total independence. Because it is she who chooses the research problem, conceptualises it, plans and executes it, she’s free to change her plans at any time, perhaps even to abandon one line of research entirely and take another. Even if she decides to discontinue her PhD, this has relatively fewer negative consequences for others compared to the collaborative and apprenticeship modes. Therefore she is under less pressure to persist.

 

In the collaborative mode, there is somewhat less freedom than in the independent. Nevertheless, there is considerable freedom because the student has to negotiate with just one person – her mentor and the two of them may easily steer their collaborative research in a mutually beneficial manner.

 

It is in the apprenticeship mode that the student has the least freedom. The student should continue to do what she has been told to, and she has agreed to do; discontinuing would be seriously frowned upon as it may jeopardise or delay the larger research plan of the group, and it may negatively affect not only her guide but many other students and collaborators participating in the network.

 

Naturally, the different levels of freedom impact the life and comfort of the research scholars in significant ways. In general terms, the more freedom, the less stress and frustration, at least for students who prefer to work in the independent mode. The research scholar, especially in the independent mode and to some extent in the collaborative mode, is really following her passion and doing what she really wants. There is a much greater chance that she is enjoying her research because if she didn’t, she could always change. On the other hand, while some students may be very happy in the apprenticeship mode, it is easy to imagine that others may not be. The lack of freedom and the pressure to perform at a rate and at a level of efficiency that matches the rest of the research network can be very stressful. The difficulty of changing or abandoning the research midway can make life even more stressful. It is possible that students in this situation do not see themselves as pursuing their passion and enjoying their research but as being employees in a high-stress job. They may consider the end of the PhD a great relief, and many may like to take an extended break to recuperate.

 

If we wish to develop policies to maximise the happiness and well-being of research scholars, then the mode in which they are doing PhD will be an important factor in framing suitable policies. Indeed, the need for institutional intervention to prevent stress and frustration, unhappiness and disappointment, maybe much more required when an institution has many students working for their PhD in the apprenticeship mode.

 

Yet another consequence is in the area of apportioning credit. In the independent mode, the problem does not arise in the first place. There are relatively few opportunities for conflict in the collaborative mode and many ways of settling them quickly and amicably. It is in the apprenticeship mode that there are huge problems, often with no obvious solutions that do justice to all. A great deal of compromise and acceptance of good and bad luck may be required for reaching amicable settlements of any conflict.

 

In extensive research networks, it is often very difficult for anyone to know for sure who first had a brilliant idea, who first found something interesting or who was indispensable for the final result. Conflicts can occur not only between the guides and their students but even more seriously among the students themselves. I have already alluded to the problem of co-authorship. I know of many cases where authorship, rather than merely being a function of actual contribution, becomes an instrument of negotiation for past, present and future favours, even if the favours are strictly academic and in the cause of the research. As I have already pointed out, the students bear the brunt of the negative consequences of such conflicts. Once again, if we wish to design institutional policies for maintaining ethical norms and best practices in the research environment, it will become essential to consider the modes in which students and guides work with each other. Ideally, both students and guides should be flexible in shifting between the three modes as and when required. But if they cannot be flexible, then students should be very careful in choosing their guides, and guides should make their preference known beforehand.

 

Another obvious consequence is in the area of responsibility. Just as it may be challenging to apportion credit, it would probably be even more difficult to apportion blame when something goes wrong. Who is to be held accountable for errors in the data arising out of carelessness or deliberate fraud? Who is to be held accountable for data manipulation and plagiarism when there may be dozens or hundreds of authors on a paper? While these problems are almost non-existent in the independent and collaborative modes, they can assume severe proportions in the apprenticeship mode. It seems meaningless to make policy decisions in the organisation of a research environment without recognising the vastly different modes of obtaining a PhD.

 

Perhaps the most severe consequence is in the matter of the mentor-mentee relationships. The inevitable power imbalance between a young student and a senior mentor hardly matters in the independent mode. They may matter somewhat in the collaborative mode but are relatively easily settled, if necessary, with an easy divorce. But these problems can take on an altogether different and massive dimension in the internship mode. It is being increasingly realised that institutions need to put in place many policies and practices to create a healthy, friendly, honest, trustful and inspiring atmosphere where research is carried out. The lion’s share of research, at least in India, is carried out by PhD students. And yet, surprisingly little attention is paid to the diversity in the modes of obtaining a PhD.

 

In conclusion, I wish to reiterate that we must recognise the existence of significant variation in the modes of PhD research, accept the different modes for what they are, reap the benefits of their advantages and minimise the difficulties they may create. Institutions of research and higher education have a great responsibility in this regard, one of which is to find appropriate ways of evaluating mentors who work with PhD students in different modes. As for the individuals, both mentors and mentees, must recognise the diverse modes of PhD and choose wisely and be honest about it.

 

Raghavendra Gadagkar is DST Year of Science Chair Professor, at Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Views expressed are personal.

 

This article is part of a Confluence series called “Mentor-Mentee Relationships in Academia: Nature, Problems and Solutions”. 

Call for Articles: Mentor-Mentee Relationships in Academia: Nature, Problems and Solutions

Posted on , updated on by Moderator

Mentoring, and being mentored, are key aspects of the academic experience. A successful mentor-mentee relationship is enriching for both. This is a call for articles that explore different perspectives of this relationship: what works, what doesn’t and how does one navigate this relationship in these changing times. We request contributions that analyze these issues, as detailed below.

Here are the published articles in the series:

  1. The many ways of doing a PhD by Raghavendra Gadagkar
  2. Not another brick in the wall by Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar
  3. Wind beneath the wings by V Madhurima
  4. Mentoring the marginalized by Shobhana Narasimhan
  5. Mentoring: an anti-view polemic by Jerry Pinto
  6. Mentor-Mentee relationship: an industry perspective by Prasad Phatak
  7. Academic and social intelligence in the mentoring process: a view from the social sciences by V. Sujatha
  8. Of protégés and mentors by Ram Ramaswamy
  9. Transitioning between mentor-mentee roles: a grad student’s reveries and woes by Arunita Banerjee
  10. Mentor-Mentee relationship: the ideal and the real, a perspective by N Sathyamurthy
  11. Mentoring as radical practice by Byasa Moharana
  12. Practising art teaching by Krishnapriya C P
  13. Feminist mentoring: reflections from the classroom and beyond by Deepa Srinivas
  14. Disability, Difference and Inclusive Classroom: Some Challenges by Zarana Maheshwari
  15. Mentor-Mentee: A New Relationship by Shivani Agrawal
  16. Mentoring Mathematics Research by M S Raghunathan
  17. Mentor-Mentee Relationship by Venkatesh Raman
  18. A Friend Plus by Debabrata Majumdar
  19. Deferred Question of Educational Justice? Unveiling the Brahminic Insouciance towards Dalits’ Education by Sanil M. Neelakandan
  20. Mathematics Teaching in India: Present and Future by S. M. Srivastava
  21. On Mentor-Mentee Relationship by Biman Bagchi
  22. Teacher Student Relationship in a Classroom: Recognizing the Voices and Addressing the Silences by Anurekha Chari Wagh and students
  23. Mentoring in Academia: One Size Does Not Fit All by Anindita Bhadra
  24. Interview of Prof. S. Sivaram: Mentorship experiences

 

Also in the series:

  1. Helping Hand, a cartoon by Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti
  2. Response to “The many ways of doing a PhD” by Chitra Kannabiran

 

 

Details of the call

A. Mentor-Mentee Relationships

We plan to focus on three kinds of relationships:

A1. Teacher-student relationship in the context of classroom teaching
A2. Supervisor- PhD Student / Post Doc relationship in a research group
A3. Senior-Junior Faculty in a department / institute / university

 

B. Points of reference:

B1. The nature of the relationship,

This includes (but is not limited to) questions like:

i)  Should there be a hierarchy in the relationship? If yes, then what should be the nature of the said hierarchy?
ii) What are the rights and duties of each party?
iii) How to deal with / address issues like class, caste, gender,  sexuality, ethnicity, physical and mental ability, neuro divergence, mental health etc.?
iv)  How to deal with challenging and being challenged, questioning, and critiquing each other, calling out, cancelling-being cancelled, in the context of the mentor-mentee relationship?
v) How to develop respect for each other and ensure a supportive ambience amidst the pressures of deadlines and general productivity?
vi) Motivating each other in the pursuit of knowledge and developing a belief in the importance/ worth  of an academic life.

B2. When does the relationship break down and why?

For example, some possible reasons can be:

i) Performance / peer pressure (for both sides)
ii) Too high (overambitious) expectations
iii) Lack of responsibility/accountability from either side
iv) junior partner’s output being connected to senior partner’s performance etc.

B3. Possible solutions, including

i) Institutional remedial suggestions (both personal and administrative).
ii) Possible extra-institutional resolution strategies.

 

C. Guidelines:

a) Please comment on any 1, 2 or 3 of the above points of references (i.e. B1-B3), in the context of any one of the mentor-mentee relationships (i.e. A1-A3) stated above.

b) The style of the article should be simple, precise and lucid, presenting your thoughts and reflections on the theme. No personal attacks or statements targeting individuals please, such articles will be summarily rejected. The purpose of this series is not to merely focus on the hardships faced by any one side. The purpose is to define the nature of the relationship, identify the points of friction and the reasons for the same, and come up with concrete suggestions for resolving the issues.

c) The articles should be approximately 1,500 to 3000 words.

d) The articles should be written in English. Please distinguish between data and opinion. Cite sources for the former.

e) The editorial team will read and decide the merit of your article, and decide whether to publish it or not. We are primarily looking for well-written, logically well-constructed articles that present a relevant, and preferably fresh, point-of-view. We may also suggest you to revise the draft before publishing. In any case, the decisions of the editorial team will be final and binding.

f) Please email your article IN THE BODY OF THE EMAIL to confluence.caretakers@gmail.com on or before 31.10.2021 (Last Date extended). Please note that we are NOT going to open any attachments. Therefore, if you attach your article, we will simply not read it, and not get back to you either. It can take up to 2 weeks for us to get back to you with a decision.

g) Contributions must carry the real name of the author and aliases are not allowed. Please include a statement at the end of the article stating the name, status and affiliation of the author.
A sample author statement will look like: ABCD is a PhD scholar at XYZ University.

h) In case of any queries, please email: confluence.caretakers@gmail.com.

Scientific Integrity – the interaction of common human foibles and different interest groups

Posted on , updated on by Moderator

As scientists, we are as fallible as any other human being. We might like to think otherwise, but that is clearly not true as shown by the many reports of scientific misconduct and negligence, and many more reports that may come tumbling out of the cupboard in the future. The landscape gets much more complicated and murky due to the conflicting interests of different involved parties – science administration, publishers, companies, and more. With that in mind, can we at least try to understand the route to these misconducts and whether it can be stopped or at least strongly discouraged? The rest of my monologue is not to find excuses for scientific misconduct but to fathom ways to discourage it over and above the prescribed punitive measures (which are difficult to implement and even more difficult to implement uniformly and objectively). Like most issues, it is a multi-faceted problem and should be handled, I believe, in a more multi-pronged and nuanced way.

 

Science has changed dramatically over the last many decades. If we think of the quanta of funding, it has increased many folds as the public, in general, have been convinced about the importance of science and technology in their own lives. However, with this increase in funding, there is also a clamor for the glory that is associated with it. New flashy research has been imagined, sometimes really out of thin air, to justify the shiny bauble. Oversight and bureaucracy have also increased commensurate (?) with that. Now, we may like that or rail against that but one cannot choose to have more funding with reduced oversight. We can only hope that the oversight mechanism functions properly without undue hindrance, which is of course, extremely difficult to balance. However, I believe here is the real rub. Over the decades the research ideas have become more intricate (as expected) and consequently, more expensive. Therefore, to carry out justified research, a scientist needs to jazz it up with fancy buzzwords and high-sounding goals. Otherwise, it falls flat, and therefore, there is no funding for it. On the other hand, somewhere down the way, we (scientists and science administration) seem to have forgotten that research is mostly boring laborious repetitive jobs to reproduce and re-evaluate observations. Therefore, the first thing to be discarded along the way has been the due rigor of the work.

 

The quanta of funding and the prestige associated with it are even more in the case of industrial or corporate funding and start-ups based on novel ideas. The advent of cool-sounding pharma start-ups, as also behemoths such as Google and Facebook that started out of garages of college students and dropouts, and the movies based on those, have increased the hype to be a part of that cult. With start-ups opening up a dime a dozen in every university, it feels like innovation is at an all-time high (which may very well be true) and all human problems should have been solved (which most certainly is not true). Scientists, therefore, are vying to be the next such persona with ideas that are cool sounding, far-fetched, and again sometimes just flat out made up. This is further compounded by the science administration coaxing the scientists along that path for shiny press releases that promote those scientific organizations, funding agencies, as well as the lofty goals of science as a whole. It is, thus, a feeding frenzy of glory by the various interest groups, and the interest of the people and public seem to be de-prioritized.

 

The nuances and pressures of this system are even more evident when one notices the progression of funding over the last few decades. It has been the reigning trend that funding is getting increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few older established researchers and therefore, the younger less established ones are severely handicapped (available NIH (US) data in PNAS, 114(25), 6498 (2017)). This inequality might also be causing pressure to incentivise deceitful means.

 

The problem of lack of rigor and allure of the shiny bauble is compounded by a scientist’s innate unconscious bias. We all love our research and our hypothesis like our new babies and therefore, cannot find fault in it. Sometimes, we love it so much that we start believing that we do not need to prove (or disprove) it. One cherry picks results or creates them out of thin air. Maybe even the senior researcher forces the junior researcher unduly to obtain results that fit the narrative. The effect can range from gross negligence to criminal malfeasance. True scientific values and rigor lie discarded along the way.

 

Sometimes, we as a community do not pay so much heed to the malfeasance and negligence, possibly because of the perceived lack of real-life implications of it (the comfortable academic cocoon), irrespective of how snazzy the science sounds. For example, when a doctor makes a mistake, a patient dies, but when a faulty paper is published, nothing much of consequence happens, or that is what we think. However, this is clearly a mistake, as evident by the truly far-reaching impact of much basic research as also the much more near-term effects of many of the applied research. This has been made even clearer in the instance of the extreme near-term use of research (both sound and faulty) during the covid times. To underestimate the seriousness of academic malfeasance due to its primarily academic nature is an egregious fault of the entire scientific ecosystem.

 

Science as I mentioned before, is mostly incremental and painstaking, while science successes that are written about in history are path-breaking, astounding in scope, and exciting to listen to. Nobody questions or highlights the boring procedure, the many failed attempts, and the failed researchers whose incremental work paved the path for that astounding moment of scientific glory. Of course, narcissists that we are, we all want to be at the pinnacle of that scientific glory and not act as the vessel for the incremental invisible work behind it. Therefore, the natural temptation is to see the culmination of one’s work and ideas, which sometimes realistically are not even possible in a lifetime, however great the final idea is. To achieve the big picture in a short time, again it is the rigor that gets discarded.

 

This, of course, is made easier by the interests of pay-to-publish journals and phony conferences and awards. While it is easy to insinuate the pay-to-publish model for the faulty results and their even more faulty interpretations, some of the uber-prestigious “tabloid” journals are also to be blamed. These journals look for the jazzy elements of science and have started disregarding the rigor and reproducibility of data. Of late, there is an increase in data openness, which should be commended and indeed is the right direction to go. However, the inordinate importance that is paid to flashy science is still a big concern.

 

The ones I mentioned are very natural human foibles that get exacerbated by the hyper-competitive, shiny world of sexy science. Just as natural human foibles that are unlawful are treated with the law of the land with appropriate comeuppance, so should the foibles in the scientific arena (which we erroneously believe to be inconsequential due to its apparent lack of real life consequences). But can we do more?

 

The solution to many problems is quite similar – the stick and carrot approach. The stick denotes the consequences of scientific misconduct. There should be a very well defined standard set of dire consequences for different classes of misconduct, which will make its implementation somewhat uniform on people at different rungs of the scientific power structure. It is easy to understand and spell out what needs to be done but difficult to implement. Not the least because scientific misconduct almost always boils down to he said-she said and the share of culpability may not be easy to apportion. The other approach is that of carrot. Here, the entire scientific ecosystem needs an overhaul. The shiny ideas, of course, need funding, but so does “solid” incremental work. In downgrading the importance of these “small” contributions, we are missing out on the real big ones and also, tempting others to forge imaginary big ones. This method of course needs a change in the existing modes of funding, publishing, promotions, and all. Notable small changes have started from some of the EU country science funding agencies which explicitly state that they do not want the referees to judge based on impact factors (which is sometimes synonymous with cool-science factor) but on the individual component of the proposed work. The complete carrot approach is of course a lot larger in scope but may be thought of as a conglomerate of such small but positive steps in the right direction. Baby steps in that direction, could start with something as small as discussion of the problem, giving scientists a space to air out half-baked ideas as opposed to only earth shattering results, a more congenial environment that promotes collaboration as opposed to competition (at this moment collaborations are sometimes frowned upon) and so on. Essentially the solutions are the difficult stick approach and the excruciatingly difficult carrot approach. However, it is imperative that the problems be acknowledged and dealt with at the earliest, lest the problem festers into a more complicated cancer of the entire system and brings it down.

 

Debashree Ghosh is an Associate Professor at Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata. Views expressed are personal.