Are morally compromised institutions worth restoring?
Question for you
I’m going to share a little about my past. This will also answer some questions that I get from readers about how I got into interpersonal narcissism given it wasn’t the focus of my doctorate, but rather the hidden curriculum of my training. I occasionally discuss culture because I prefer to share what I know from living, pattern recognition, years of applying knowledge to practice, learning and refining to help others prevent and overcome relationship hardship. My writing aims to affirm and challenge beliefs about drivers of human behaviour, including our own.
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I used to be a developmental biology and cancer researcher. I believed systems biology was going to be my future profession. Even the discipline sounded cool.
I did my doctorate in a basic biology lab that used a number of model organisms to study developmental processes - how complex organisms develop from more simple cellular arrangements. The focus of my research was on the embryonic development of Drosophila melanogaster - the humble fruitfly - and how one protein impacted the development of the embryo.
At the time (and to this day) most scientists are interested in the events occurring inside a cell and between cells. It’s easy to isolate the contents of a cell and manipulate how proteins function inside a cell. Not me. I got to focus my attention on a very unsexy area - the extracellular matrix.
The matrix as we call it, is a large network of proteins that compartmentalise tissues, provide support and structure to tissues in an organism. These crystalline networks span the length and breadth of an organism and do more than provide scaffolding for tissues and organs. They have a massive influence on cellular behaviour and function. Cells can’t move around the body without the matrix. Stem cells can’t reproduce themselves without a matrix providing instructions. Organisms die when these networks don’t assemble or get modified properly. While these meshworks are pretty but unsexy to study, they are damned important for survival. My protein of interest mainly functioned on the outside of the cell and my research demonstrated that this tiny protein plays a part in the early immune system and is required for the proper assembly of collagen into an organised network during fruitfly development. If you’re busting to read my thesis you can find it here.
Academic life was good. It seemed that the right people were getting accolades for their work. While they were some favourites in the different labs, everyone was expected to work hard and get results. No one could get by without them, regardless of how much their supervisor adored them. Our tiny department had people from all over the world and around 50/50 split of genders as students and postdocs as well as principal investigators. Principal investigators got along well and seemed to support each other’s promotional efforts. We even had a Professor Emeritus whose work contributed to a Nobel prize.
My research project was risky and challenging, innovative and creative. I adored my peers. My supervisors and other group leaders respected each other, even during debates about interpretations of results. This was in the early 2000s in a diverse multicultural university, during 9/11, Intifadas (I went to Israel twice in 2001), ICQ messaging, web cams, slow Google searches, MySpace and long before parasitic wellness and DEI initiatives took root. Activism was reserved to the various leftist student groups handing out flyers outside that find their way to notice boards in student lounges, resident halls and other common spaces. I was pretty naive about national and international political issues except for US Presidential elections and the ongoing issues in the Middle East. Most of my reading was recreational or peer reviewed publications rather than on the news.
My postdoctoral experience in another country was very different to my doctoral one. I gave birth to my first child before I began my postdoctoral project and worked in a colleague’s breast cancer research lab until then. I found biomedical research more competitive and the pressure to churn out results and papers was stronger.
It could have been the daze of new motherhood, culture shock, a lab with more resources at my disposal and navigating life in a foreign land that was destabilising. I felt like I had stepped into a different reality where people’s behaviour didn’t match their words. I squashed down my reservations and dedicated myself to my work. I continued what I’d studied during my doctorate but with a cancer biology twist. This time my research involved identifying how my protein of interest impacted tumour growth and metastasis using several insect and human models. The lab culture felt very different to the medical research labs that I hang out in during grad school.
Over time I started pinpoint what seemed off to me. I was seeing behaviours among senior leaders that were unethical. Favouritism, deception, mutiny, negligence, short cuts, guilt tripping, manipulation, infidelity and tokenism. I witnessed knowledge vampirism of a colleague’s work by trusted group leaders, gaslighting and exclusion from their own work.
I wanted to attain my dream of climbing the ranks of academia and continued to convince myself that I wanted this. Motherhood changed me and opened my eyes to the lack of support to early career scientist mothers. Being a constant outsider to in-group cultures made it difficult for me to ever fit in. I was failing my dream. In order to succeed, I needed to behave like the successful researchers did. I needed to become like them.
As I started to assimilate into the dominant culture and focused on playing politics, I became more judgemental and less competent in my work. I would show disdain for people who tried to challenge my thinking and responded with an air of superiority. I started to express many of the narcissistic behaviours that I would condemn others for showing.
I hated myself. I felt like I was failing on all fronts. As a mother, wife, friend, and scientist. But rather than take responsibility, I would blame everyone and everything around me.
In the times when I actually enjoyed my work, I was able to see that overexpressing my protein of interest to disrupt the matrix caused cells to invade tissues more aggressively. If the tissue wasn’t a closed compartment, it’s possible that the cells would have continued to invade and metastasise throughout the organism.
It didn’t take me long to realise that my behaviour was no different to the tumours making toxic amounts of a protein infusing a microenvironment, supporting their growth and metastasis. If I had more power and greater status, like the other leaders in the unit, I could have manipulated those in my lab to outcompete others through behaviours I mentioned above as a tumour does to masquerade as host cells, deceive the body’s defence system, hijack its immune system to protect it and exploit the environment’s resources for its energy supply to help it take over the body.
I wasn’t familiar with the concept of narcissist back then but I did know that I had developed a very sick relationship with the institution. The institution didn’t intentionally do anything to me. It didn’t intend to subject me to moral distress, high throughput publish or perish mentality, burnout culture, fake meritocracy, pyramid scheme or to the the features of a narcissistic relationship. That I didn’t see it from the start or that I didn’t listen to my reservations from the start is on me.
I wasn’t going to survive there much longer. I saw obedient people with their blinkers on not rocking the boat and getting on with their work. I saw the charismatic leaders picking favourites and playing lab members against each other. Others were considering a Plan B but lacked courage to leave the devil that they knew. I knew I had to hit eject at some point before I lost myself completely. I eventually did without any papers or public records of my time there.
After hanging up my lab coat, I grappled with a lost identity and broken dream through an intense Dark Night of the Soul. I became obsessed with group behaviour and how one person can influence many to emulate them. If it could happen to me, it could happen to many. I saw more links between tumour invasion and metastasis and narcissistic relationships, including how bad ideas hijack people’s minds and emotions to eventually spread throughout institutions. This is one of the avenues that brought me examine the role of the environment and social conditions on human behaviour. I’m grateful for everything that occurred back then that led me here.
Which brings us to what’s happening today in our academic and other institutions. There is an association between institutionalised and bureaucratised DEI implemented by Social Injustice Warriors and widespread demoralisation. There is a call among many to restore the morality of institutions from their current demoralised state and find a way to save them.
I have a different take because I already experienced the demoralising nature of highly competitive and unethical cultures of practice and moderate cults. I have little faith that unethical, narcissistic institutions that were once ethical can return to their state because that would require institutional leaders to go down a path of truth and accountability. It is as unrealistic as expecting a narcissist who has succeeded in raising their status and prestige to be willing and able to examine their actions and take responsibility for the negative consequences of their decisions. It requires a group of people on the inside with strong enough character and conviction to override the actions of narcissistic leaders with support from those on the outside who can influence what happens on the inside.
This clip from one of my favourite K-dramas sums up why you can’t expect demoralised people who are benefiting from their status and prestige in the system to have the ability to become moral (without a fall from grace, shake up from influential people in their lives, and damning consequences that force self-examination and accountability).
“We have an apple here. This side is rotten. And this side isn’t. It’s half-rotten, half-edible. Then is this apple rotten or not? We don’t call it a half-edible apple, but a rotten apple. You say most of the judges and prosecutors are diligent and don’t play politics. You’re correct. However defending them won’t make the rotten apple fresh again. The worst thing is that the fresh part ends up rotting in the end.”
Vincenzo Cassano and Hong Cha-young - Vincenzo episode 10 (slightly different translation to the clip).
I don’t believe that institutions that continue to benefit from attracting and activating morally compromised and immature adults can have a change of heart without a widespread disaster that destroys its reputation and/or through deprivation of resources.
Once an institution normalises a new baseline of moral behaviours, can enough people within an institution restore morality without the equivalent of God showing itself like the revelation on Mount Sinai?
What do you think?
Can these institutions be saved?
Are these institutions worth fighting for or is it wiser to flee, find kindred spirits and form new institutions with safeguards against history repeating?
If you could subvert the subversion, how would you go about it without the same unintended consequences?
Thank you for reading and for your thoughts about this question,
Nathalie
This post was inspired by thought provoking posts:
What Happened to Academia by
Restoration by
Everything published by
The mammoth effort to expose rot by
The work and commentary by
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I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.
While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting, overriding and deprogramming our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.
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My impression is academia is truly a horrible place to work.
Excellent essay, thank you for sharing. It makes me think about milk.
My career has been varied, but nearly three decades have been in food and the first ten I ran a dairy distribution company. I learned very early about microbe counts.
Milk and other food isn't wholesome and tasty one day, then suddenly spoiled and nasty the next (regardless of the code date). Spoilage is a function of how many bugs are alive in the milk. Their number is a function of the starting point (after pasteurization), time, temperature, and integrity of the packaging.
I think the same applies in the academy. The "bugs" were always there but conditions changed (I saw the start when I began college in '91). It's been the equivalent of leaving the jug open and on the counter for days.
I don't know how the curdled, stinking mess can be "restored." Shifting metaphors, maybe it's like a house with a big meth lab. The shell can probably be saved, but everything inside has to be gutted and built new.