Power differentials experienced too long can create character flaws, even when originally used constructively and with all good intentions.
I saw the cliche of a professor taking a students original and significant work, done without their direction, and quickly presenting it as mostly theirs, after adding their critical professorial value by waving the result around for their colleagues to congratulate them on.
The nice short paper that resulted was notable for an author list starting with the professor, followed by at least a dozen of the professors colleagues, and ending with the student who had solved the problem whole by themselves.
I also watched a professor's highly evolved and useful ability to dodge and protect his team from endless administrative performative/mata/made-up work in a university department translate badly to a business partial-ownership situation where their slippery ability to shirk work onto others gave them strong leverage over a project. Leverage that had much worse indirect effects than the obvious direct one of not contributing a lot.
This was someone with many great qualities, but also an internalized entitlement and talent for control.
I'd think that could be managed with the help of faculty peers and the levels of administration, but barriers:
* Students who are mistaken, entitled, and/or lying... is a thing. Which do you trust, and is there a crying-wolf effect applied to students as a whole.
* At the faculty level, they're colleagues, often friends (sometimes more), are more likely to being seeing a better side of people with problems, and will tend to identify with other faculty. (Though there's also internal dramas, but they might unite against the common enemy that is students.)
* The administration can be made up of people with similar problems (especially overconfidence, and aggressive self-interest).
* In some facets of university structure, it can be strictly a business, no vestigial ideals of academia, only branding. Which is a problem both for how they behave in those facets, and for students haplessly trusting the university when a sociopathic facet is involved.
A big one is students have far more to lose. “Solutions” are generally worse than the problems they address.
Grad-student / professor-advisor relationships are extremely personalized as well as career impacting. And not hot swappable.
Losing an advisor and getting any kind of rep can be disastrous. Degrees can flounder and die in an awkward aftermath.
I have no idea how faculty & peers should help, after the fact. In both examples above, people knew & didn’t approve. But stepping in would have been war - with the probability of everyone regretting everything.
A culture that emphasized ethical student treatment, with specific examples about research and going into business with students, might be preventative.
But on the going into business side, a lot of universities want to parasitically insert themselves into that too.
To me that is a conflict of interest with their educational mandate, but administrations think they must feed to grow & grow to feed.
Power differentials experienced too long can create character flaws, even when originally used constructively and with all good intentions.
I saw the cliche of a professor taking a students original and significant work, done without their direction, and quickly presenting it as mostly theirs, after adding their critical professorial value by waving the result around for their colleagues to congratulate them on.
The nice short paper that resulted was notable for an author list starting with the professor, followed by at least a dozen of the professors colleagues, and ending with the student who had solved the problem whole by themselves.
I also watched a professor's highly evolved and useful ability to dodge and protect his team from endless administrative performative/mata/made-up work in a university department translate badly to a business partial-ownership situation where their slippery ability to shirk work onto others gave them strong leverage over a project. Leverage that had much worse indirect effects than the obvious direct one of not contributing a lot.
This was someone with many great qualities, but also an internalized entitlement and talent for control.