In July 2017, Allison Harbin, an art history PhD graduate from New Jersey’s Rutgers University, uploaded several posts to her blog, titled “Why I left Academia”. In them, Ms Harbin claimed that an academic supervisor had used parts of her work, without acknowledgment, in their own paper.
Ms Harbin raised the case with the university, which rejected her claims, calling them “unfounded” and defending the supervisor, who was not identified in the blog. But in her posts, Ms Harbin said the response was “Orwellian”, claiming that some professors urged her not to say anything, and when she did, clubbed together to cover up what she said was academic fraud.
While the dispute continued, Ms Harbin’s blogs went viral. Within hours she was inundated with hundreds of emails from people sharing allegations about academic exploitation by their superiors, the institutional structures which make this behaviour permissible and a lack of support for those subjected to it.