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No Incident Is Isolated
Rethinking How Academia Hears a Single Complaint
A few years ago, the world watched an industry built on charisma, gatekeeping, and closed doors come apart in public. #MeToo did not begin as a movement. The term has existed since 2006 but was popularized after the Weinstein allegations broke in 2017, revealing over three decades of sexual crimes which led to his immediate firing and eventual conviction. Throughout the years, the list of victims grew one private settlement at a time. Treated at first the way institutions always treat these things: as unfortunate, as unusual, as an isolated incident, as a matter between two people destined to be settled quietly behind closed doors and kept out of the trade press. What eventually broke that pattern was not that any single account became more believable. It was the recognition that an industry organized around a handful of people with total control over other people’s careers does not stop at producing one victim at a time, it produces many. Most of the victims, having watched what happens to the ones who spoke up – discredited, penalized, forced to change careers as they were now described as “difficult to work with” or “troublemakers” while simultaneously suffering from character assassination by the media – decided to never say anything. And as silence due to fear prevailed, so did the abusive behaviors. Once that recognition took hold, institutions could no longer treat a single report as a self-contained event. They had to ask, automatically, who else: who else is a victim and who else is an abuser. If you are reading this article today is because academia has not yet made that shift, and it needs to.
The professor’s office is not so different from the producer’s. Walk into any research group in Germany, and you find the same architecture of power that made #MeToo possible in the first place. One person — a supervisor, a principal investigator, a professor, a director (roles oftentimes held by the same person) — controls every key axis of the future of early career researchers: the contract renewal, directly connected to the visa for those from outside EU, the reference letters and publication process, indisputable cornerstones of a career in academia, the allowance of submitting the PhD thesis and its final grading, by definition the goal of all Doctoral Researchers. This one powerful person could in parallel impose a toxic working environment, normalizing working long hours, exceeding not only the contractual twenty-six hours per week (for 65% contracts) but also the legal forty-hour threshold (Figure 1). The dependency is total, and it is built into the structure of academic careers if not by design, certainly by negligence.
Figure 1: Based on the Power Abuse Survey conducted by the Leibniz PhD Network in 2025, approximately half of Doctoral Researchers work more than the legally accepted limit of forty hours per week while only 18% hold full time contracts. On a wider PhD survey published in 2023, 55% of 823 participants reported working more than 40 hours per week.
Testimonies of Doctoral Researchers asked about experiencing Power Abuse in the survey of the Leibniz PhD Network in 2025, exemplify that Power Abuse is not an isolated, one-victim incident:
“I would be surprised if there were any PhD-students […] that don’t get paid full time and are not expected to work full time. PhD-students are always exploited for additional labor because it is easy and effective. Academia is built on this cheap and yet highly specialized labor.”
“My supervisor is the head of [their] group. [They] does not provide any academic supervision. When I (and others) don’t deliver the scientific results [they] wants, [they] bullies us.”
“Almost everyone in our group including myself has been contacted frequently during evenings (by phone call even, not just email), weekends, and during vacations (even while in a foreign country with the expectation that you can continue working by connecting remotely with your laptop) to complete work that is “urgent””.
“We get regular comments when handing in Holiday requests. I think they are meant to be funny, but especially to new students or foreigners they can come of as intimidating.”
“The head of the research group exerts continuous pressure on staff by repeatedly emphasizing that the team is underperforming compared to other groups. In addition, there are frequent verbal outbursts directed at employees who, in the supervisor’s view, fail to meet expectations. The communication style is often aggressive and disparaging. In nearly every team meeting, it is stressed that there will be no contract extensions, as the performance is deemed insufficient.”
“Several lab members and I have been verbally harassed, bullied into not taking vacations”
“Difficult to remember all the small aspects of Power Abuse that our group has to face on a regular basis, but here the most severe ones that I personally experienced: My supervisor pressured all of us, especially the PhD students, to work more hours than our contract says ([they] thinks 10-12 hours per day is an appropriate work load), justifying [their] opinion with the statement that a PhD as the highest academic degree is not done within a 9-to-5 job and if we don’t agree with that, we wouldn’t deserve a PhD.”
Learning from the history of the #Metoo movement and from our own surveys, when a researcher reports any misconduct to the existing support structures – an ombudsperson, the works council, or HR – the honest, moral response should not be “let’s make it go away as quietly and quickly as possible”. It should be “who else in that group made a different, entirely rational calculation to stay quiet”, and according to our data, the answer is most likely “many more”. A single complaint from a lab, an institute, a chair, should never be heard as the whole story. It should be heard as the one account that survived the very real disincentives against speaking at all. If #MeToo taught us anything, it is that the absence of other complaints is not evidence of an isolated incident. It is usually evidence that the cost of complaining has been well understood by everyone else in the room.
This is not a call for more forms, more offices, or more procedures. It is a call for a different first reception by the support structures. When a report of data manipulation, systematic overwork, discrimination reaches an ombudsperson or a works council, the operating assumption should not be “isolated incident until proven otherwise”. It should be the reverse: “this is one visible thread of a wider pattern, until the institution has actually looked and found otherwise”. The burden of proof must shift towards the isolated nature of an event; the default assumption should be “this is a pattern”. And surely enough, if an isolated event is indeed proven, new questions of abusive behaviors would then arise. “Why was this researcher treated differently than the rest of the group” could initiate a new wave of investigation towards discriminatory behaviors likely based on race or gender. The re-appropriation of treating a single researcher’s report of misconduct as systematic, by default affecting everyone else under the supervision of the accused, is based on recognizing the excessive fear of repercussions, oftentimes outlined by the very same superior in the form of threats or blackmailing. For the record, the second reason for lacking voices exposing misconduct is the inability of the existing support structures to serve justice to the victims. But this topic deserves its own dedicated focus and will be covered in a future article.
This reversal of approaching one complaint matters because what sustains abuse in academic hierarchies depends on each report being received as unique. A pattern, once named, is a structural failure that implicates a department, a funding culture, the whole way of managing a lab. A single complaint, left unconnected, is just one difficult personality clashing with another. Institutions have every incentive to default to the second reading. Colleagues, ombudspeople, and works councils have to actively resist it.
And then, there is a second, more disturbing reality. For as long as complaints are treated as isolated incidents, shame and fear will keep flowing in the wrong direction. It is the person who reports who currently carries the fear – of the non-renewed contract, the poisoned reference letter, the reputation as “difficult”, the years of work suddenly at risk. It is the person who reports who carries the shame, however unearned, of having disrupted a lab, named a supervisor, became the story. Meanwhile the person with the power that made the abuse possible in the first place typically continues exactly as before: same office, same authority over other people’s careers, same ability to keep publishing, supervising, and deciding who gets a future in the field, often for the entire duration of an investigation – in the rare cases one is made. This has to reverse as well. Waiting for the investigation to finish before removing any of the power gets the sequence backwards: it protects the position first and the person second, when it should be the other way around. And this is also where shame belongs. Not on the researcher who finally spoke, not on the colleagues who stayed quiet for years out of a survival instinct – but on the environments that let a single person accumulate that much unsupervised control over our lives.
Based on the same survey, more than half of Doctoral Researchers (53 out of 82 respondents) stated that one of barriers of reporting their experienced Power Abuse was fear for repercussions (Figure 2). Some of them specified:
“I don’t want to stop my PhD and get fired because of this.”
“I just wanna leave this place as fast as possible, and the best way is to avoid to have any extra problem by reporting these Power Abuses”.
“Precarious state of visa due to being an international researcher. Conflict might mean that I have to leave the country”.
Fear was still prominent even among the brave ones who took a first step towards reporting Power Abuse:
“I contacted with the ombuds person and the coordinator in the university. but no one from the institute due to safety reasons.” – note from author: the institute is the actual working place.
“I was in touch with the equal opportunity officer, who was very sympathetic and told me that reporting it might cause me risks, because at that point the perpetrator was also the supervisor for my PhD. [They] encouraged me to look into MaWi network and write a protocol and collect a protocol from witnesses in case I want to go forward with my case. I never did because I am afraid I won’t believed or be belittled (“that’s not so bad”) and because I am not sure of the repercussions it might have not only on me but on my whole status group. As far as I know, none of the other cases of bullying I am aware of were ever reported out of fear.”
Figure 2: The fear or repercussions after reporting a Power Abuse incident is within the top 2 reasons discouraging Doctoral Researchers from speaking up. The second one is the lack of confidence that the incident would be resolved.
So how can we assert our rights and seek justice in a system structured on steep hierarchies and absolute dependencies, a system based on fear and with support structures actively or passively discouraging us from speaking up? Solidarity between the Early Career Researchers inside the same lab, the same institute, the same field is our only safeguard until this system centers its workers over institutional prestige, elite reputations and power. The researcher who finally reports something is never alone; they are simply the one who spoke. Colleagues who have quietly endured the same supervisor owe that person more than private sympathy. Corroboration, even informal, is what turns “one difficult case” back into what it actually is: a pattern that has been visible to everyone except the people whose job is to see it. Solidarity is the sole reliable lever we have against the quiet resolution of “isolated incidents”, and the only weapon we hold to tackle the root of the problem: unchecked power.
#MeToo did not succeed because every account was independently airtight. It succeeded because enough people – inside institutions and outside them – stopped asking “is this one credible” and started asking “how many others”. Academia owes its own researchers that same shift in perspective. No incident is isolated. The sooner support structures, colleagues, and all of us treat that as the starting assumption rather than the surprising conclusion, the sooner the silence that protects abusive power in academic institutions stops being mistaken for its absence.
by Stavroula Litsiou with the support of the WG Contract Situation & Prevention of Power Abuse
Disclaimer: This piece was inspired by the author(s), drafted with the assistance of an AI language model (Claude, Anthropic) and then edited, fact-checked, and revised by the author(s). Specifically, the author(s) provided the arguments, the framing, and the specifics, the AI drafted them into a structured text in English language, and finally the author(s) edited the text, verified claims, added and removed sections. The final judgment on every sentence and responsibility for all claims rests entirely with the author(s). The entirety of the data analysis and interpretation was performed exclusively by the author(s).
Data availability and more information on the Power Abuse Survey conducted by the Leibniz PhD Network in 2025: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20670451
The wider PhD Survey conducted by the Leibniz PhD Network in 2021 and published in 2023 can be found at https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/89848
Further reading on the complicity of the system that supported sexual harassment in Hollywood: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/us/harvey-weinstein-complicity.html
© 2025 by Leibniz PhD Network Working Group Contract Situation & Prevention of Power Abuse is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.