Recently, after confiding with members of my thesis committee about my struggles to stay motivated and optimistic in my fourth year of my neuroscience Ph.D, one of them suggested I visit his lab to talk to his students, who he informally characterized as ‘depressed.’ I hadn’t suggested my own depression (I count myself as lucky to have only experienced transient emotional lows during grad school), yet this prof – a sharp guy, one whom I hold in very high regard – thought I’d find comfort knowing that his students were depressed, too.

The solution, my committee agreed, was for me to put my head down and wrap up my degree. In their defense: that’s my plan.

Clearly, science faculty know their students are unhappy. There are numerous resources now being offered to graduate students (like meditation, peer support groups, conferences on ‘having an awesome time doing science’), popular articles being written about graduate student well-being and job prospects, and a broad consensus that all is not well in the culture of training future scientists.

Yet I often hear from fellow grad students, and sometimes see for myself, that there exists a gap between the documented problems in scientific culture, and the willingness of faculty to do anything about those problems. Quite the opposite, actually.

Some anonymized, second-hand, paraphrased quotes from PI’s, in response to student complaints about scientific culture and graduate student wellbeing:

“If you take care of your science, your science will take care of you.”

“Too much time is being wasted on talking about these problems instead of just doing science.”

“I never had to complain about this stuff when I was a graduate student.”

We’re told as graduate students to seek out resources for self-help. To stay social. To nurture hobbies (but only those taking very few hours per week) that will bring us joy outside of the regular, inherent failures of our experiments. Though to be fair, the only person at Berkeley who isn’t a graduate student who has encouraged me to take care of myself in the absence of obvious distress is my departmental admin. Science bless his heart.

But something I have yet to hear is: we need to train our faculty in order to make scientific culture healthier and more sustainable.

I’m not suggesting we put faculty on trial. I’m suggesting we require that faculty engage in the necessary process of reforming academic culture in the coming decade.

What are some off-the-top-of-my-head ideas? Maybe all faculty should be trained in mentorship, to start. Managerial skills are often a prerequisite to being a manager in most fields, but in academia, these skills are conspicuously absent. Many faculty are notorious mismanagers – something to laugh off in the face of their discoveries.

But moving beyond just training, maybe the very rules purporting to govern professional behavior on campus should actually be applied to faculty. Maybe we need some intermediary for students to anonymously and privately voice complaints about inappropriate faculty conduct. An intermediary with the power to put faculty on notice without risking a student’s relationship with his or her mentor. Ask a nearby graduate student whether they think this is necessary.

Or dare I say it. Maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with lifelong tenure. With allowing academic prestige to always compensate for lapses in professional responsibility over time.

There are some signs that people are working on this as we speak. This past summer, I attended a workshop on incorporating scientists into K-12 curriculum-building and teaching, as part of ComSciCon 2014. The keynote speaker for this optional segment of ComSciCon was Todd Zakrajsek, who (I kid you not) is the Executive Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence at UNC at Chapel Hill. (I hope this type of job soon becomes standard at all universities and colleges) He shared a great hypothetical analogy during his presentation (heads up, it’s not about K-12 learning – it’s about training experts).

Paraphrasing Dr. Zakrajsek:

“Imagine you have two people: a 50 year old, and a 20 year old. The 50 year old has driven a car to work every weekday for over 30 years. The 20 year old has been driving for four years, but is a racecar phenom. He’s been professionally trained to be an expert driver, but the sum of his driving hours is far fewer than that of the 50 year old. Would we ever dare claim the 50 year old would be a better driver than the 20 year old race car driver, simply on the basis of more experience?”

The answer is no. Of course we wouldn’t. So why don’t we require that faculty excel at mentorship prior to hiring them, or at the very least require that they learn how to professionally manage their students and employees?

Today, a professional symposium began in Boston attempting to deal with some of these issues. Entitled “Future of Research,” the symposium features some talks that give me hope. The intent is to “give voice to graduate students and postdocs in the ongoing dialog about policies that shape the scientific establishment.” I’m not in Boston, obviously, but I’m looking forward to hearing responses to the symposium over the weekend. A sampling of the talk titles:

“Reimagining the Endless Frontier”

“How to train your PI”

“Disequilibrium, Disillusion and the Postdoc Dilemma”

“Responding Constructively to Symptoms of Malaise”

“Aligning graduate and postdoctoral training with the needs of our biomedical workforce”

“What Makes you Happy?: Finding Your Niche in Time of Tight Research Funding”

“The Future Scientific Workforce – Positive Approaches in a Time of Change”

Oh, and it looks like Elizabeth Warren might be speaking as well. I don't know her at all, but she seems to be comfortable speaking truth to power.

If science faculty truly care about science, they will hopefully soon join hands with their disgruntled, disillusioned, but still hardworking and science-obsessed mentees. Campuses need to encourage more frank discussions about the obvious relationship between workplace environment (managed by faculty) and student well-being. Good scientists know when it’s time to troubleshoot an experiment, rethink a hypothesis, retract a claim. It’s about time all scientists worked towards troubleshooting scientific culture.