PhD students, listen up. I'm going to talk about some behaviors by advisors that are not okay, but some students might not know that are not okay. Thread (1/n).

#1 Advisors expecting students to work on weekends by default. Barring any deadlines, your weekend is your time. You shouldn't be expected to work on weekends, unless you want to, or you need to due to a paper deadline once in a while.

#2 Advisors calling/texting you on your cellphone after work hours to check up on your work. Again, aside from special situations/emergencies, this is not normal behavior. Your time after work is your time. You should use that time to unwind and relax, not be forced to work.

#3 Advisors following you on your personal social media accounts to "keep tabs" on you and how you spend your personal time. This is absolutely unprofessional and not okay. You are entitled to your privacy outside of your workplace.

#4 and this is extremely important: advisors constantly using stipend/immigration as a way of threatening you to get you to do things. Withholding funding and terminating someone as a student is an extreme measure of discipline, reserved for very extreme situations.

#5 Advisors intentionally not supporting you to go to conferences and workshops despite having funding, or forcing you to pay out of pocket to go to professional events. It is their job to support your career development, and that involves helping you attend events and network.

#6 VERBAL/PHYSICAL ABUSE IS NOT OKAY, and in most cases is illegal. I have quite a few stories of people whose advisors were verbally abusive towards them, shouting at and berating them in front of their peers.
You have options. You can complain to your HR dept!

#7 these are just some of the more egregious examples of the abuse that some graduate students face that I have seen or heard about. I have seen advisors use "nanny cameras" to monitor their labs, shout obscenities at students in public events calling them "a waste of money" etc.

#8 it bears mentioning that I was fortunate enough to be advised by some of the best advisors that one could ask for and they taught me a lot. And for that, I can't thank them enough. This is all the more reason I think I need to give my voice to people who are not as fortunate.

#9 I still hear current PhD students casually mentioning these extremely abusive behaviors to me to this day, as if they are normal. Some of these behaviors have dire consequences, from severe depression to self harm and suicidal thoughts. We need to do better as their mentors.

#10 Our institutions need to have resources dedicated to supporting students in these situations. In almost all of these cases, the students feel powerless and voiceless. They do not speak out because they fear deportation and losing funding, and I wouldn't blame them.

#11 For a lot of them, being deported is detrimental, and absolutely not an option. People fear that their institutions side with their abuser, and that they would end up losing even more.

#12 Unfortunately, these are not as rare as we might like to think, which is why we need to have a conversation about how to begin to tackle these problems. How do we ensure that students have a safe space to talk about these issues?

#13 Should grad student unions be the only ones burdened with helping students? What about universities where grad students do not have unions? How do we create accountability frameworks for tenured and senior faculty to prevent them from abusing their power over students?