How Do Students View Their Mentor-Student Relationship?: A Cross-Case Analysis of Narratives of Academic Harassment in Japanese Graduate Education

　　This paper examines academic harassment of graduate students in Japan by their mentors. By cross-case analysis of student narratives, this paper examines how students view their relationships with their mentors.
　　In Japan, a variety of non-sexual types of harassment distinct to higher education, collectively known as academic harassment, has recently begun to attract public attention as a social problem. Academic harassment includes acts such as constant criticism, neglect, and distorted authorship credit in joint publications. Many universities now publicize measures against this type of harassment, and several quantitative surveys have shown that serious psychological damage is a possible result of such harassment. However, such surveys have focused on the ultimate outcome of the harassment; few sociological analyses have explored the actual process of harassment.
　　This paper describes how students view this process and the variety of problems they experience in mentor-student relationships recognized to involve harassment. Interview data was obtained from 17 graduate students and young researchers collected between 2009 and 2012, and this paper focuses on the narratives of six key informants from different disciplines. First, the interactive construction approach was applied to interpret narratives to reconstruct life stories and the cross-case analysis of these life stories was then conducted.
　　The results revealed three commonalities in students’ experiences of the relationship, regardless of their gender, academic discipline, and type of harassment experienced: 1) non-sexual, yet uncomfortable, closeness or distance with their mentor; 2) recognizing exploitation in the relationship; and 3) viewing their mentor as lacking integrity as a researcher, not as an educator. By elaborating on the interplay among these points, this paper describes the issue of academic harassment as relational, not as the specific attack behaviors described in previous works.