Rahmat Wibowo, under the guise of an academic essay on doctoral mental health, defamed real individuals by branding Dr. Inaki Anduaga a micromanaging, two-faced 'real world villain' and accusing Sulthan Bimo Rizqullah of cruel, misogynistic, and vulgar self-glorifying conduct.

Do Graduate Studies Corrupt the Soul? A Study Case of Doctoral Villain, Dr. Inaki Anduaga and Sulthan Bimo Rizqullah RahmatWibowo - June1,2026 From the viral observation that fiction's greatest villains wear doctoral hoods to the very real crisis playing out in universities worldwide — aninvestigation across culture, psychology, and the ethics of knowledge. Sergio Parra @ 'SergioParra Villains always have a PhD. Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, Dr. Doofenshmirtz, Hannibal Lecter, or Dr. No. Even Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Evil. Meanwhile, the good guys usually stop at a master’s degree, like Master Yoda, Master Roshi, Master Splinter, Master Miyagi, Shifu, or Luke Skywalker himself. Graduate studies corrupt the soul. Ow ve “Graduate studies corrupt the soul," Asingle tweet translated from Spanish, fired off at 8:21 in the morning became a small internet sensation because it voiced something millions instinctively recognised but had neverarticulated quite so cleanly. "Villains always have a PhD," wrote Sergio Parra, and then he listed them: Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, Dr. Doofenshmirtz, Hannibal Lecter, Dr. No, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Evil. Meanwhile, he noted, the heroes of ourstories Yoda, Roshi, Splinter, Miyagi, Shifu, Skywalker stop ata master's degree. His punchline: Graduate studies corrupt the soul. The observationis, of course, comic. Itis also, as the best comedyis, uncomfortably close to something true. This article takes the joke seriously not to endorse it, but to trace the threadsit pulls ‘on. Whatis it about the doctorate, in culture andin lived experience, that earns this reputation? And what does the actual research say? I. The Villain with a Diploma: A Cultural Anatomy The association between advanced learning and moral dangeris ancient. Marlowe's Faust sells his soul not for wealth but for knowledge. Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein is destroyed not by a monster but by the untempered ambition of auniversity-trained mind. Conan Doyle's Moriarty holds a chair in mathematics. The "Morally Ambiguous Doctorate" is anamed and documented trope in the study of popular narrative: [1] the "Dr." prefix functions as cultural shorthand fora character who possesses extraordinary intelligence and correspondingly extraordinary danger. [2] As one analysis noted, the PhD in fiction operates as "a compact, believable way to explain technical competence, provide institutional settings and resources, and explore cultural anxieties about expertise and technology." The villainous doctorate is efficient storytelling and efficient myth- making. It persists because audiences acceptit, because somewhere in the collective unconscious, learning beyond acertain point feels transgressive. There is anotable asymmetry in the fictional hierarchy Parra identifies, The good teacher Yoda, Miyagi, Splinteris designated a Master. a word rootedin mastery of self and of craft, in transmission rather than accumulation. The villainis a Doctor. aword derived from the Latin for “teacher,” but in practice signifying someone who has completed an original, solitary investigation into the furthest edges of knowledge. One title implies relationship; the otherimplies singular achievement. Fiction, apparently, distrusts the singular. Doctor vs. Master Fiction's moral hierarchy of academic titles and what it reveals about us The Mental Health Reckoning [3] A2019 survey of 6,300 graduate students across North America, South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe published in Nature found that 36% had sought help for anxiety or depression related to their PhD studies. This was up from 29% just two years prior inthe same survey series, A separate UK survey of 50,000 graduate students published in the same period echoed these findings. [4] One survey of 2,279 graduate students, 92% based at U.S. institutions, identifted that 41% reported moderate to severe anxiety and 32% reported moderate to severe depression. Doctoral students, according to the same research, are six times as likely as the general population to experience both depression and anxiety. [5] A Belgian study found that 32% of PhD candidates were at risk of developing a psychiatric disorder. [6] A comprehensive review of 163 studies on PhD wellbeing identifted four major external stressors supervision quality, personal life demands, departmental structures, and financial precarity and five internal ones: motivation, writing anxiety, academic identity, self-worth, and self-efficacy. The Impostor at the Lectern [7] Doctoral students describe the transition from undergraduate to graduate study as moving from being a “big fish” to a "small fishin a sea" from visibility to invisibility, from structured success to uncharted uncertainty. The PhD offers no clear benchmarks: How many papers constitute success? What if experiments yield nothing? What constitutes progress when the frontier of knowledge is, by definition, where the maps run out? [8] In this environment, impostor syndrome becomes epidemic. More than half of postgraduate students meet criteria consistent with depression. Those who feel like impostors tend to avoid asking questions, hide weaknesses, decline to collaborate, and resist applying their knowledge creating, paradoxically, the very gap in competence they fearbeing discovered to have. The doctorate, meant to produce confidence in original thought, can instead systematically undermine it 1s the dlsertation that does Yrs a heart crue and eo.” Publish or Perish: The Ethics of Survival [9] The "publish or perish" culture defines modern academia: career advancement depends not on the depth or originality of ideas but onthe quantity and venue of publications. [10] For doctoral students, this pressure arrives early. Research has linked it to increased depressive symptoms, sleep disturbances, and critically research misconduct. The drive to publish can lead to p-hacking (manipulating statistical analysis to achieve publishable results), HARKing (Hypothesising After Results are Known), anda systematic avoidance of replication studies contributing directly to what scientists call the "reproducibility crisis." [11] The pressure can also accelerate ethical transgressions: data manipulation, plagiarism, "salami publishing" (slicing one study into many to multiply output), and submission to predatory journals that accept anything fora fee. The graduate student who entered academia to pursue truth may find themselves, years later, playing an elaborate institutional game in which truth is one variable among many. [12] As one analysis puts it starkly “publish or perish can result in unethical oreven hazardous practices, an erosion of research quality, and a shift in priorities from teaching, mentoring, and knowledge-creation toward the academic success of individuals and institutions." The very institution built to produce knowledge may, under these conditions, systematically incentivise its distortion. Ill. The Anatomy of Corruption What Actually Goes Wrong The "corruption" Parra's tweet gestures at is not, in the real world, a sudden transformation into villainy. Itis slower, quieter, and far more sympathetic. Itis what happens when exceptionally capable people are placedinside a system thatis structurally misaligned with the values that brought them to learning inthe first place. Identity Erosion The doctoral process requires a student to internalise a newidentity that of the researcher, the expert, the original thinker. This is profoundly destabilising The old self (high-achieving student, "the smart one") must be dismantled. The new self is perpetually unfinished. In the gap between these two states, many students experience what psychologists describe as a crisis of academic identity: asense that they are performing expertise they do not yet possess, inside an institution that cannot afford to acknowledge the performance. The Power Asymmetry [3] One-fifth of doctoral respondents in the Nature survey reported being bullied one-fifth reported experiencing harassment or discrimination nearly always from those senior to themin the academic hierarchy. The supervisor- student relationship, structurally similar toa feudal relationship of patronage and dependence, creates conditions in which abuse intellectual, professional, sometimes personal goes unchallenged because the power differential makes challenge existentially costly. The Loneliness Laboratory Researchis, at its core, a solitary endeavour. The dissertation the central artefact of the doctorate is explicitly a demonstration of individual, unaided capacity. This structural solitude, combined with the social dynamics of a competitive department, can erode the cooperative instincts that healthy intellectual communities depend on. The scholar who enters the PhD wanting to advance collective knowledge may emerge having leamed, deeply and by necessity, the arts of self-protection and individual advancement. IV. The Counter-Evidence: Not All Doom [13] A longitudinal study from Aotearoa New Zealand, comparing students who entered PhD programmes with those who did not, found something more nuanced than popular narrative suggests. PhD students showed a small decrease in mental wellbeing relative to baseline but the effect was “orders of magnitude smaller than one might expect based on previous cross- sectional research.” The more striking finding was that those who did notenter doctoral study showed an increase in wellbeing, which made the PhD group appearworse by comparison. Amarked deterioration in mental health, the study concluded, is "not aninevitable consequence of entering graduate study." [14] Swedish cohort study reached similar conclusions: PhD students are not significantly more vulnerable to depression or anxiety than comparable peers. What disparities exist appear to develop within doctoral programmes which suggests that the problem lies not inthe act of advanced study itself, but in the conditions under whichitis conducted This is a crucial distinction. The soul, it turns out, is not corrupted by knowledge. Itis corrupted by isolation, by impossible expectations, by systems that value output over inquiry and quantity over truth. These are institutional failures and institutional failures can, in principle, be reformed. "The health ofthe next generation of researchers demands systemic change to research eultres.” V. Wisdom Without a Title: What the Masters Know Return, fora moment, to Parra's heroes. What distinguishes Master Yoda, Master Miyagi, Master Splinter from their doctoral counterparts in fiction? It is not merely a credential. Itis a relationship to knowledge itself. The Master's knowledge is embodied, transmitted, relational. It exists to be given away. The villain’s knowledge is possessed, defended, hoarded a resource ina competitive landscape. There is something here that the best graduate programmes try to cultivate and that the worst ones systematically destroy: the understanding that the point of knowing is not to know more than others, but to understand more fully, and touse that understanding in service of something larger than oneself. The Islamic tradition speaks of imnan’ beneficial knowledge as distinct from knowledge that serves only its possessor. The Sufi teachers who shaped so much of global intellectual heritage understood that the student who learns in order to surpass has already missed the lesson The fictional villain with a PhD has, ina sense, mastered the technique of a discipline while failing its spirit. Dr. Frankenstein knows how to create life; he does not know why he should, Dr. Doom is the smartest man in the room: he has never learned that the roomis not the world. Hannibal Lecter understands human psychology with forensic precision; he has no compassion. The doctorate, in these stories, is a vehicle for the intellect that has grown faster than the soul VI. The Real World Villains Potrait of Dr. Inaki Anduaga from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ell all care is that you hours a day, that ing ally sitting in fr laptop and doing prop so proceed at 5 ? missing daily and report it async? will guaranteed the proper work place itis up to you to decide but for me to catch up with daily ill be commuting the paperwork also stated 5-9 indo ithout Al? Or are you relying on Al to do everything? i rely on ai to do the iac since need to loop through all of the azure cli output to import it since this is the domain of developer to write code not to setup the infra that means i rely on write code to know the best practice but still can review the approach Micromanagement & Clock-Watching Inaki fxates on "4 hours physically sitting in front of alaptop" rather than outcomes. This is textbook presenteeism —measuring input time instead of deliverable quality, which kills trust and autonomy. Contradiction on Work Arrangements He complains about commuting time eating into work hours, yet the paperwork he approved states 5-9 Indonesia time. He created the structural problem himself, then blamed youforit. Competency Gatekeeping Without Context "Do you know howto do this without Al?" is a loaded, dismissive question. A good manager asks what approach you're taking and why, not whetheryoucan doit the “hard way." Using Al forlaC generation while understanding the outputis a legitimate and modem engineering practice. Two-Faced Management Image 3is the most telling: Inakitells someone else "Rahmat is doing a good job, happy with him" with celebration emojis — while simultaneously interrogating your competency and monitoring your screen time. Positive feedback should go tothe employee, not about them toa third party. No Psychological Safety The interrogative tone ("are you relying on Al to do everything?") creates an environment where you can't be honest about your tools and workflow. Sulthan Bimo Rizqullah from Institut Teknologi Bandung pinter+kemaki d celahnya deknen salah mengira ak 1n modal tampang gante Bukan karena Tuhan melindur hluk kyk gini Jejak digital - Bloomberg Technoz Prabowo: Keracunan Cuma 0,007%, MBG Harus Dinyatakan Berhasil ‘Azur Yura Remedari Purana, bim= setuju deng: nyataan presiden, orang 10 punya biji peler sisa 50% aja masit On the Curse Tweet Wishing that bad karma won'treturn to someone's childrenand then (justifying it not through divine mercy but through the claim that "no sane woman would have children with someone like this" is cruel and misogynistic inits framing, It weaponizes relationship status as an insult Onthe Vulgarity The comment under the MBG/Prabowo article is simply crude and adds nothing of substance to political discourse. Reducing policy critique to a crude anatomical joke reflects poor judgment, especially ina public forum. Overall Pattern Bimo presents himself as intelligent and principled, yet his public posts consistently prioritize self-glorification and shock value over substance. The gap between his self-image ("nearly perfect,” OSN medalist) and his actual online conducts the real story here. VII. Toward a Healthier Doctorate If graduate studies can corrupt not through magic but through conditions then the corrective is a change of conditions. Researchers and institutions are beginning to articulate what this looks like in practice. [5] In the United Kingdom, Research England and the Office for Students launched a dedicated Catalyst Fund for interventions in doctoral researcher wellbeing, funding seventeen university- led projects. The Student Minds charity launched the Wellbeing Thesis; the UK Council for Graduate Education convenes an annual international conference onresearcher mental health 19] Voices within academia are calling for a fundamental rethinking of evaluation metrics: away from publication quantity and impact factors, toward research depth, collaboration, and integrity. Pre- registration of studies, open peerreview, and the deliberate rehabilitation of replication research are among the structural proposals on the table. The goal, ultimately, is not to produce fewer doctors but better ones scholars whose advanced study has deepened their humanity rather than narrowedit. Scholars who know, in the oldest sense: not merely in the head, butin the bone. Conclusion: The Degree Is Not the Destination Graduate studies do not corrupt the soul. But they can, under the wrong conditions, create the conditions for corruption: isolation, competition, ethical compromise, identity fragmentation, and the slow substitution of knowledge-as- power for knowledge-as-understanding. The tweet that spawned a million views was not wrong to sense the danger. It was only too efficient to locate the cause in the credential rather than the culture. The villain with a PhD is a mirror, nota destiny. He shows us what advanced learning becomes when the institution forgets its purpose. The master without one is areminder of what it could be whenit remembers. The soul, it turns out, is not corrupted by the degree. Itis corrupted by what we are asked and what we agree to become in order to earnit. References TV Tropes. Morally Ambiguous Doctorate. TV Tropes Wiki tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki,php/Main/MorallyAmbiguousDoctorate Quora discussion. How come so many supervillains have PhDs? quora.com/How-come-so-many- supervillains-have-PhDs Nature Editorial (2019). The mental health of PhD researchers demands urgent attention. Nature, 575, 257- 258. doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019- Evans, M., Bira,L., Gastelum, J.B., Weiss, L.T., & Vanderford, N.L. (2018). Evidence fora mental health crisis in graduate education. Nature Biotechnology, 36, 282-284. doi,org/10.1038/nbt.4089 Understanding the Mental Health of Doctoral Students. Encyclopedia, 3(4). MDPI, 2023. mdpi.com/2673- 8392/3/4N09 Van der Haert, M. et al. (2020). In the eye of the storm: the mental health situation of PhD candidates. Perspectives on Medical Education, 9, 353-355. PMC7737569 Chakraverty, D. (2020). Impostor Syndrome: When your accomplishments make you feellike a fraud. Doctoral Supervision Blog, IM Ahmedabad. s! ervisingphds. wordpress.com University of North Carolina, Department of Pharmacology. Shining a Spotlight on Imposter Syndrome. med.unc.edu/pharm Gonzélez Flores, J.E. (2025). Academic Fatigue of Young Researchers: The Price of the Publish or Perish Culture. Cureus, 17(I), €97223, PMC12715826 Poppelaars, E.S. etal. (2021). Publish- or-perish culture: A PhD student perspective. Research Communities by Springer Nature. communities.springernature.com Psychological Science Observer. Research Ethics at the Graduate Level. APS, February 2016. psychologicalscience.org Marjanovic, Z. et al. (2024). The card game of publish or perish: a satirical approach to the reality of academic publishing. NCBI/PMC. PMC11399718 Stuart, M., & Jacobson, L. (2021). A Longitudinal Study of Mental Wellbeing in Students in Aotearoa New Zealand Who Transitioned Into PhD Study. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 644189. PMC8172967 CEPR /VoxEU. (2024). Reassessing the mental health crisis among PhD students. cepr.org/voxeu/columns/reassessing- mental-health-crisis-among-phd- students Zhang, F., Litson, K., & Feldon, D.F. (2022). Social predictors of doctoral student mental health and well-being. PLOS ONE, 17(9), €0274273. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274273 Parra, S. [@SergioParra_]. (2026, March 23). Villains always have a PhD.. [Tweet/X post]. X (formerly Twitter). 1M views. rights re Impre