Disgruntled Scientist

The life of a PhD graduate is beset with ironies, like the fact that earning the title Doctor of Philosophy makes them neither doctor nor philosopher, or that their PhD, the highest academic degree in their discipline, can actually hurt their chances in that discipline's job market. The justification for not hiring them is also ironic: they’re overqualified and overspecialized, which is the career equivalent of “it’s not you, it’s me”, and just as annoying. What about their chances of stable employment at higher education institutes—the very ones that offer and profit from PhD programs? Not great either. Earning a PhD gets you closer to academic tenure the way buying a stationary bike gets you closer to winning the Tour de France.

Finding a job after a PhD is nontrivial and difficult, a source of stress and anxiety for PhD graduates who, by the nature of their work, are sheltered from the realities of the job market until it’s seemingly too late. (Or so they’re told.) It so happens that stress and anxiety are also good for business, evidenced by an upsurge of career coaching companies that specialize in helping PhD graduates transition out of academia and into the private sector. Chief among them, and self-styled pioneer of the field, is the company Cheeky Scientist (abbr. CS). It is also the most controversial. Several articles revealed that the company engages in malpractice typical of an online racket: dubious advertising, aggressive sales tactics, and refund policies that are allegedly not honored. Those exposés, which were high-profile by academia’s standards, along with testimonies and complaints from aggrieved customers, showed enough evidence that CS is at best a little shady, at worst a full-blown scam.¹

A more intriguing aspect of the controversy, aside from the alleged business fraud as such, is the company’s heavy-handed use of marketing language that exploits its clients’ fears and anxieties. This is something that the exposés touched on, which in my view deserves more attention. To be sure, preying on the frightened and anxious is hardly news in marketing. But being that I was among the potential prey in this case, this imbued the story with a masochistic allure. It drew me in the way someone’s drawn to pick at their own scabs. Aside from that—morbid curiosity and imagined grievance-is there a point to delving into CS’s marketing, or any company’s for that matter? In a way, no. Singling out with criticism the marketing behaviour of one company, no matter how predatory it seems, feels like an exercise in futility. To be subjected to marketing is so much a part of existing in contemporary society that complaining about it carries the same weight as complaining about the weather: it’s mildly cathartic but essentially pointless. The moment you’re awake (still a prerequisite as of the time of writing), you become a silhouette in the shooting range of advertisers. Calling CS’s or any company’s marketing predatory is as damning as saying that a professional fighter is violent. Calling it aggressive is a charge that’s equally empty. If you accept marketing in toto as a legitimate form of human interaction, then it’s odd to complain when someone does it with vigor.

What makes an ad unlawful, and more importantly, what makes it malicious in the public mind, is not its rapaciousness or its tenacity, but rather its truthfulness or lack thereof. A malicious ad, presumably, is one where the advertiser intentionally misleads the consumer about the hard facts of the product. This definition can protect the consumer from obvious instances of false-advertising, but it ignores a truism about marketing, which is that it hasn’t been strictly about products or hard facts for a very long time. What marketers sell, by their own smug admission, is not just the products, but the ideas that underpin them. In other words, in most marketing campaigns or advertisements, there are two things on offer: one is concrete, tangible, and explicit; the other, abstract, intangible, and implicit. The problem with the latter is that you can’t send it back or claim it’s defective— not just because it’s an abstraction, but also because you, the consumer, helped create it.

Take this example. If I pay a premium for a carton of free-range eggs, in lieu of cheaper battery cage eggs, on the premise that by doing so I’m in a small but non-negligible way helping the animals, becoming part of the solution, as it were, and thus a better person— and I’ve been convinced that such a hyphenated label for the eggs I’ve purchased, combined with a picture on the carton of a hen so perfect in its gallinaceous form that it gives other hens body image issues; that this, indeed, was all I needed to ascribe to that belief: that I’m a good person—then what happens later if I become disillusioned with my purchase? Not with the eggs qua eggs, mind you, which probably taste like eggs, but with the premise that my buying them in any way helped the animals or made me a good, virtuous person? Can I accuse the company of false advertising? Well, no, not unless I could prove that they misled me about what that label (free-range) truly meant, or that they failed to comply with a legal definition of it. Because when it comes to preaching the idea that I’m a good and virtuous person—which was so integral to the egg carton you could virtually crack it, the idea, and fry its insides in butter—it’s obvious that the company did its due diligence. After all, no one held a gun to my head when I shelled out the price for those eggs; I was happy to do it.

Marketing in this hypothetical isn’t so much a transformation of the eggs, or the conditions of the hens that laid them, as it is an ascription of certain qualities to the consumer who’s eager to do well by the hens of the world, or at least appear as though they were. And the consumer is an active participant in this process, because they saw from the get-go those qualities in themselves. In the case of CS, if the (hardly) tangible thing on offer is a career coaching program that helps you get a job after a PhD, then what are the ideas, if any, that underpin it? And what makes them appeal to CS’s target clients?

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Among PhD career coaching businesses, CS is the one whose marketing strategy most resembles the behaviour of a ‘pickup artist’, aiming to persuade PhD graduates to buy their program by ‘negging’ them—a concept so repugnant to human decency that even the mention of it calls for a hot shower.² Their online marketing content comprises a deliberately confusing mixture of mild praise of PhDs as candidates for industry jobs and scathing put-downs of them as wannabe academics.

This marketing behavior, which reflects the company’s whole ethos, can be distilled into a single backhanded compliment: a PhD graduate, CS claims, has very valuable skills, but they undervalue those skills by staying in academia, which ipso facto makes them, the PhD, a sucker. In the CS worldview, anyone who works in academia in any capacity short of tenured professorship is someone who’s fundamentally shortchanged, whether they know it or not. They’re exploited, duped, unhappy, and doomed for perpetual career uncertainty and precarious living— until CS helps them land a real job.

To their credit, CS doesn’t pander to the academic dispositions of PhD graduates (assuming such uniform dispositions even existed). In fact, they tell those graduates that in order to become successful in the job market, they should diminish as much as possible anything academic about themselves, which results in a hodgepodge of inconsistent advice.³ Instead of appearing academic, they should orient every morsel of their being according to the whims of the archetypal corporate hiring manager, on whose pulse CS has a spittle-moistened finger, apparently.

In their own words, the founders of CS are “a group of former PhDs who, after years of toiling in the academic sector, found themselves feeling disenchanted by the frustration, limitations, and red tape that came with their work”. By identifying as “former PhDs”, those founders gain a two-way advantage. First, it lends their fear mongering credibility, enabling them to affect an in-group zeal about the problems of PhD life that would look out of place coming from an outsider (about half the memes they post are actually kind of funny and relatable). This is important, given how insular academia is, and how esoteric some of its problems are.

Second, this identification with the disgruntled PhD, their one and only target client, allows CS to creatively reimagine what that client looks like. The founders draw on their own (possibly genuine) experiences in academia to create a victim-client in their own image, breathing life into them, a life predestined for misery and hardship. The reimagined CS client is a pale, spectral replica of the aspiring scholar they once were. They aimlessly haunt the halls of academia and scavenge the jobs page of LinkedIn in search of a miracle. They’ve just changed their CV’s template for the umpteenth time. They’re too old and overqualified for entry-level jobs but neither qualified nor experienced enough for anything else. Their cover letters have started to resemble the desperate pleas of unrequited lovers from centuries past. Crucially, this reimagined client suffers from stunted agency. They’re not someone, CS opines, who willingly seeks industry employment after earning a PhD, like a well-adjusted adult citizen who’s happy with the free choices they made, au freakin’ contraire. They’re someone who’s crippled by regret and resentment, stuck in a sunk-cost loop. They’re in a toxic, codependent relationship with their captive, their abuser, the almighty and sinister academia, hoping to escape but having forgotten where the door was. Someone needs to kick that door open and rescue them, and by rescue I mean bamboozle $4,998 out of them for a few webinars.

Many PhDs and postdocs resemble in spirit the demoralized ghouls CS imagines them to be, meaning that CS’s stereotyping of them is only in part fictional. Fear mongering (or the fear appeal, as marketing people shamelessly call it) works best when the weaponized fear has some basis in reality. And the reality is that early career academics are afraid. We ought to be. The average PhD student or graduate in academia has to deal with any number of the following: job insecurity, low pay, long hours, toxic work environments, poor or nonexistent supervision, impossible standards, ambiguous metrics for measuring said standards, and fierce competition. Universities are increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized to their detriment, academic publishers cynically profit from putting publicly funded research behind paywalls, governments across the world are cutting funding for research and higher education, and university students and academics— as in the U.S. recently—are in the crosshairs of right wing assaults on basic freedoms.

The question isn’t whether those problems are serious, which they are, but whether their seriousness somehow explains or justifies the CS grift. And if that weren’t the case, then how did the grift succeed? As in, how is it that a distasteful and badly put-together grift like CS, with no more style nor substance than an infomercial, isn’t laughed out of existence immediately, when its target is ostensibly one of society’s most educated and critically-minded groups?

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Contrary to popular belief, academics do in fact spend most of their time on research and education, which are intellectual and creative activities. This is especially true for PhD students and early career researchers, who are less burdened by bureaucratic duties than their senior counterparts. Scientific research is on par with the creation of art, in that it’s a source of joy in and of itself. This means that the labor of PhD students and graduates in academia is of the kind that can be done, in theory, for its own sake. It’s an autotelic⁴ activity from which you can sometimes earn a living. As in art, this joy of research—which in part stems from the autonomy inherent in it—is in constant tension with external forces that undermine it. A primary source of this tension is top-down control, whether from PhD advisors, university bureaucrats, government, or market forces.

This tension however is less obvious in academia than it is in the arts. By definition, both the artist and the researcher require autonomy and creative freedom to work. Both, moreover, have to compromise some of that autonomy and freedom to accommodate external demands. But the researcher, specially one belonging to the market-friendly STEM fields, sees themselves today less as a creative who requires independence, and more as an instrument of the economy, albeit with a scholarly sheen. Their stint in academia, despite the leeway of creative freedom it affords, is seen as a temporary state, a breeding ground for the technocracy they aspire to join, and not in anyway indicative of the true nature of how they ought to work and live. This isn’t to say that the average artist capitulates less to external forces than the academic, but rather that the academic isn’t even aware that he’s capitulating. Creative freedom and all the cultural baggage it carries is not a salient subject in academic circles. For the young artist, the struggle between artistic integrity and the desire to earn a living is a known phenomenon, the knowledge being rooted in their vocation for the arts. (One can hardly imagine an art student, specially if they come from a working class background, who hasn’t heard from a young age that their decision to study art isn’t financially sound.) By comparison, the young scientist is naive; not in the sense that they’re idealistic about the nature of their profession, but that they’re not idealistic at all. Their impression of the market demand of their skills (which demand has lately proven more theoretical than real) has distanced them from the realities of other creatives, both in spirit and practice. They’ve all but forgotten that they still exist in a world that’s ruled by powers hostile to the very idea of what they do, to the spirit of free inquiry that undergirds their work. This is the reason, for instance, that the concept of a sellout scientist is less common than a sellout artist. The scientist’s job is to continuously produce scientific output, to make profits for companies, or to acquire funding for universities. Thus, a fissure between their motives and the work they do is hardly noticed. In fact, it’s not a given, for most people, that scientists even have motives of their own.

So what does this have to do with CS’s marketing? (Everything.) In an environment where the scientist has lost touch with the true nature of their vocation, the additional loss of their career prospects (sad and unjust as that loss may be) will have a disproportionally negative impact on their morale, because those prospects—and the little prestige they enjoyed in society—is all they had left. Value and meaning no longer have place in the halls of academia. They’ve been replaced by careerism and an obsession with public relations. Thus the modern PhD graduate is flanked on both sides by the same kind of cynicism. On one side, it’s the market, which can only view their labor as a means to an end, and on the other, academia, which is ever increasingly corporatized and becoming a marketplace in itself. And who best to take advantage of this moral confusion than CS? Its founders, the self-proclaimed “former PhDs”, embody the worst aspects of the corporate and academic worlds. To the PhD graduate, they’re the ultimate class traitors. They offer nothing but a false hope of relief from academia’s problems through an idealized view of corporate industries, which they likely misunderstand as much as they do academia. If they knew anything about industry, they’d be selling something other than snake oil.

Does being an early career academic feel like you’re a roasted suckling pig at the banquet of more senior and privileged academics, gagged with an apple that would have broken your tiny suckling pig jaw had you been alive, but it’s a good thing you’re already dead and roasted to skin-crackling perfection (a crackling so good a close-miked recording of it could be the go-to stock sound effect for crackling in high-budget motion pictures), so it’s only pitiful, this post-mortem apple gagging, in the eye of an outside observer, and not painful or humiliating in any literal way to you, the already dead and crisply-roasted and gagged suckling pig?

Yes. I have it on good authority that it does feel like that sometimes. Which is to say that the conditions of PhD graduates in academia are unjust and they should improve. But that improvement shouldn’t come at the cost of denigrating our own institutions or the vocation of science itself, and it certainly shouldn’t (and won’t) come by viewing the corporate world as the better alternative, specially when its machinations are the very causes of academia’s problems.

I’m not in a position to compare academic work to all possible types of work a scientist might find in industry. I’ll even concede that working in academia, insofar as it’s still wage labor, is categorically oppressive. But I’m fairy certain that the CS proposition (namely, that work in corporate industries is significantly better because of higher wages and a better “work-life balance”) is wrong. It’s wrong because it’s reductive. Demanding a fair wage— which PhDs like all workers have a right to— isn’t the same as reifying the illusion that there’s nothing more to work than wages and benefits.

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While the unabashed disdain of academia is unique to CS, nearly all PhD career coaches⁵ have something in common when it comes to academia, which is their anaclitic relationship to it. Despite breaking out of its shackles, as they all proudly claim in one way or another, they still define themselves exclusively in opposition to it: they are always ex-academics, ex-PhDs, or ex-postdocs. Even bona fide cult survivors move on faster than those people. One notable example, a career coach who spoke out against CS’s predatory tactics, and who seems to fashion themselves as the caring face of PhD career coaching, wrote the following on their website: “For over a decade, I worked to become a professor. I had it all: 15 first-author publications, multiple dissertation awards, and a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship. (Line break in original, for dramatic effect, I suppose.) Then, in 2022, I quit.”

But what’s wrong with lamenting the loss of your previous career that you worked so hard to build? Nothing, really, except that in this case, it pinpoints the fault in those people’s attitudes, and how they’re antithetical to science. The joy of research is only one aspect of why science is a good vocation. Another aspect is that being in science makes you part of something greater than yourself. It allows you to contribute to a greater cause. But there’s a sombre corollary to greater causes, which is that you need them more than they need you. A greater cause should outlast the ebb and flow of your career, your successes and failures, your dreams and ambitions, and eventually, it should outlast you. And you should be happy that it does. And if you decry the cause the moment it stops serving your self-interest, then you never believed in it in the first place. This is so obvious it’s trite.

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1. For a fuller context, the alleged scam seems to go as follows: a prospective customer contacts CS (or conversely, CS reaches out to them on LinkedIn). A free ‘transition phone call’ is then arranged in which the prospect is subjected to an aggressive sales pitch: CS offers them a discount on a coaching program, provided they commit immediately. Also, the prospect is allegedly given a verbal guarantee that if they don’t find a job through the program, they’ll be entitled to a full refund. This pressures the prospect to sign a contract and make a payment of several thousand dollars, either in full or through a high-interest-rate loan. Then, one of two things happens. Either the customer doesn’t like the program after several months of participation and, not having secured a job yet, asks for a refund; or, soon after the phone call ends—sometimes as soon as a few hours—they experience a rude awakening, realizing they’ve just paid a lot of money for something they didn’t need, and they contact CS for a cancellation. In both scenarios, CS refuses their request on the grounds of some fine print in the refund policy that the customer failed to read during the aggressive and manipulative pitch. For more, see the following sources:

   - https://www.science.org/content/article/criticism-builds-against-ph-d-careers-firm-cheeky-scientist

   - https://www.science.org/content/article/inside-cheeky-scientist-s-controversial-business-tactics ↩

2. Scolding hot. To ‘neg’ somebody is to insult them with the premise that the resulting decrease in their self worth will make them more receptive to your advances. ↩︎
3. Examples: a) You need to be dressed formally in your LinkedIn profile photo. Not doing so signals to employers that you’re quote, unquote, neurotic. b) You should not communicate in your cover letters that you are ‘smart’. Nobody likes a smart person, specially not hiring managers. c) You should be constantly active on LinkedIn, but at the same time, somehow, not appear desperate to network or find a job. ↩︎
4. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, et al. "Flow." Flow and the foundations of positive psychology: The collected works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2014): 227-238. ↩︎
5. Two caveats: 1) Not all organizations or individuals who help PhD graduates find industry jobs are unscrupulous. Some act in good faith, one would hope, or at least meet a minimum threshold of legitimacy. I’m not concerned with those. And 2) Leaving academia or wanting to do so says nothing one way or another about someone's work ethic or moral character. ↩︎