Politics In Academia

The plain version: In many academic cultures the people at the bottom take the hits so the people at the top don’t have to. Grad students, postdocs, lab managers do the work and carry the risk.

When something goes wrong, it lands on them. When it goes right, the credit floats up. The people at the top get to stay vague about what they actually did, so if it blows up, they can say “I wasn’t really involved”. This is why choosing a supervisor is incredibly important.

That’s the whole idea.

Three moving parts:

1. Low-status people absorb the risk (they take the blame, do the grunt work, send the awkward emails).

2. High-status people get to stay vague (they don’t have to say exactly what they did or didn’t do).

3. So the powerful person stays protected no matter how it turns out.