Breaking the Cycle of Bad Mentoring (opinion)

Being a Ph.D. student is hard enough: The intellectual demands are immense. The financial uncertainty is real. The isolation can be suffocating. But the statement I have heard most often from graduate students isn’t about coursework, funding or publishing. It’s this: “My adviser was awful.”

I recently finished my Ph.D. in linguistics and am now a postdoctoral researcher. Over the past several years, I’ve mentored undergraduate and graduate students while navigating my own transition from student to early-career researcher. As someone who studies children and how they acquire language (which happens sometimes by imitation), I’m perhaps too aware of how much we learn by watching others and how easily we repeat what we’ve absorbed, even when we know better.

That’s the core problem with mentorship in academia—we inherit it. And without intending to, we risk passing on the parts that hurt us most.

Academia is structured around apprenticeship. We are trained by advisers who were trained by their advisers, forming intellectual lineages that stretch back decades. Culture travels down these lines. So do norms about overwork, emotional distance, harsh criticism and blurred boundaries. I have heard advisers justify their severity with phrases like “That’s how I was trained,” or “It made me stronger.” The implication is that hardship is not just inevitable, but necessary.

But survival is not the same as thriving.

As a graduate student, I experienced moments of profound doubt—not about my research, but about my worth. Feedback sometimes felt less like guidance and more like judgment. I internalized these signals. Many students do. We assume that if we are struggling, it is because we are inadequate and unworthy of being in graduate school. What makes this especially insidious is that many advisers do not intend harm. They are overwhelmed, undersupported and juggling impossible workloads. Yet intention does not erase impact.

Universities are increasingly acknowledging what graduate students have known for years: Rates of anxiety, depression and burnout in doctoral programs are severely high. Mentorship often determines whether those pressures feel manageable or crushing. An adviser can buffer stress or amplify it. When mentorship becomes unpredictable, overly critical or neglectful, students hesitate to ask for help, delay sharing work out of fear and sometimes avoid meetings altogether—not because they are lazy, but because anxiety consumes cognitive bandwidth. I have seen brilliant students shrink under constant comparison. I have seen others normalize mistreatment because “that’s just academia.”

Breaking these cycles requires first recognizing that they exist. It requires humility from mentors and courage from students.

For mentors, this means interrogating our own training. What feedback styles did we find motivating? Which ones left scars? Do we equate rigor with harshness? Are we transparent about expectations, or do we rely on students to “figure it out”?

One of the most transformative shifts I made as a mentor was simple: I began articulating expectations clearly. Instead of assuming students knew how quickly I would respond to emails, I told them. Instead of expecting them to intuit authorship norms, I explained them. Clarity reduces anxiety. Ambiguity breeds it.

Another shift was reframing feedback. Critical feedback is essential in research, but there is a difference between critiquing work and critiquing a person. Comments like “This argument is underdeveloped” are actionable. Comments like “This makes no sense” are deflating. The former invites revision; the latter invites shame.

I also learned to set limits around work for myself and my students. Academia often rewards constant availability, but modeling overwork teaches students that rest is failure. I now avoid sending nonurgent emails late at night and explicitly tell students I do not expect weekend responses. I also take appropriate time off to recharge and encourage my students to do so, too. Small signals matter more than we think.

Students, meanwhile, are not powerless—though it can feel that way. Naming what you need is difficult in hierarchical relationships, but it can be transformative. Asking early questions like “What does a successful first year look like to you?” or “How developed should drafts be before I send them?” can clarify expectations before ambiguity becomes anxiety.

Seeking multiple mentors also helps. No single adviser can meet every intellectual and emotional need. Building a small network—committee members, senior graduate students, postdocs—distributes support and reduces the weight on any one relationship.

Most importantly, students should remember that struggling does not mean failing. Doctoral training is designed to stretch you to your limits. Feeling uncertain or overwhelmed is not evidence that you do not belong.

The narrative that academia is inherently brutal is seductive because it absolves us of responsibility. If suffering is inevitable, then no one is accountable. But mentorship is not a force of nature. It is a practice. Practices can change.

Breaking harmful cycles does not require perfection. It requires reflection, transparency and a willingness to prioritize people over prestige. It requires mentors to see students not as extensions of their CVs, but as developing scholars and whole human beings. It requires institutions to reward good mentorship, not just grant dollars and publications.

When I think about the students I have mentored, I do not remember their citation counts. I remember their questions, their anxieties before presentations, their excitement about their research. I remember the responsibility I felt—not to toughen them up, but to support their growth.

Academia will always be demanding. Research is difficult. Funding is competitive. Jobs are scarce. But difficulty need not be compounded by preventable harm.

If we are honest about the ways we were hurt and brave enough not to pass that hurt on, we can build something better. Mentoring relationships grounded in both rigor and respect. Ambition alongside empathy. A next generation of scholars who didn’t have to endure what we did.

It doesn’t have to be this way. And the cycle can stop with us.