Ghosting In Academia: When Other Scholars Ignore You
Ghosted in science: how to move on when a potential collaborator suddenly stops responding
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01771-x
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As affiliation request processing at IGDORE is done by volunteers, I could relate to this (@Enrico.Fucci might as well!):
Ie, that catastrophic systemic defunding means we no longer have sufficient administrative staff to send the emails to candidates when they are no longer under consideration. Because it was the administrative staff who sent them back in the day! And now those staff are gone, or overwhelmed with other work. … Because accountable hiring systems require money, money in the form of administrative staff, and reasonable work demands.
It Takes Money to be Moral: Thoughts on Academic Ghosting - The Professor Is In
The application form notes:
IGDORE receives many affiliation applications and is staffed by volunteers. As such, we can only send responses to applications that are approved.
When you write to people decline their applications, many of them write back, asking questions or complaining. Sometimes they have a valid point and we should re-consider their application, but as volunteers, dealing with that is just very draining, so we avoid starting such discussions by ‘ghosting’ people who aren’t approved (but at least the form lets applications know that we will do this!). Still, this doesn’t feel great, and if/when IGDORE employs administrative staff to help with the affiliation’s management, we plan to start notifying and providing some feedback to unsuccessful applicants.
(FWIW, I think that ghosting and not providing feedback to unsuccessful applicants is also quite widespread in industry, particularly for small companies)
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