Abstract
Anyone who has attended an academic conference will have witnessed the number of exceptional projects and research produced by and conducted at various institutions, often led by one or two well-known professors. Despite mostly limited budgets, these professors, academic "rockstars", if you will, (Smyth, 2017, p. 99) manage to produce many publications in the form of books, reports, policy briefs, op-eds, and attend conferences while managing full teaching loads and supervising lots of postgraduate students. So how do they manage? Without faculty-appointed support, such as Teaching Assistants, these senior academics often use their postgraduate students to do the substantial groundwork in the name of so-called capacity building to get what is known as the much-needed experience they need to advance their careers. In this paper, I discuss toxic academic practices and their impact on new and emerging researchers. Through a critical analysis, I demonstrate that toxic academic practices persist partly because of neoliberal policy contexts created in and through marketisation and techno-rationalism. Using the theoretical lens of Betrayal Trauma Theory (Freyd, 1994) I suggest that creating healthy academic work environments is crucial to realising higher education policy imperatives in South Africa. In this paper, I contribute to an under-discussed challenge in the South African academy, and I highlight how universities, through their philosophies and policies, often reward poor academic behaviour and perpetuate toxic academic environments and discrimination.