"Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much."
- On Tyranny by Timothy D. Snyder
Keeping your head down and just dealing with it as a choice that you can make and it is the choice that they count on you making. But it's not the only choice.
> Can you “anonymously” report this without too much backlash? (I assume the answer is no: you clearly know it's wrong, and haven't done anything about it yet.)
This is so extremely common that I don't believe that there is anything to report. I reviewed dozens of papers under my PI's name throughout my entire PhD. Now that I have completed my degree, I never want to review another paper again.
Consider another unethical practice: sexual harassment, in many industries, was once so extremely common that there was nothing to report. Everyone in a position to do something about it knew it happened, yet it continued. People reported it anyway. Tanked some of the reporters' careers, but the practice is way less accepted now.
You've completed your PhD, so you're at less risk of backlash. Are you yet in a position where you can blow the whistle on what happened to you?
i had a kid (~last week) ask me to edit his PhD proposal (I guess in the EU you have to already have a project in mind?) and I said I would happily edit it for him if he first let me try to convince him not to do a PhD.
my hypothesis on the value of a PhD: if you are the kind of person that can finish an honest PhD i.e., real work that's not necesssarily novel (I don't give a flying fuck about "novelty") but actually requires you to stretch hard to achieve, then you don't need one and it will cost you years of productive/rewarding/lucrative work in industry (and 100% academia is not for you).
i don't know what the "on the otherhand" is though - I really have no idea how anyone comes away from this process thinking "hmm yes I want more of this pile of bs" so I have no idea what kind of psychopaths go into academia (for which the PhD is indeed a prerequisite).
Long ago, I used to think that in a world where I had more money than I could possibly need, getting a PhD and becoming something like a history professor wouldn't be a bad life. Let's just say that I no longer believe that would have been the case.
