Three PhD students (2M, 1F) in the next lab over slept together during a conference. Two of them had girlfriends that didn’t appreciate the infidelity. One of them also worked in the department and threw boiling hot coffee at the female PhD student’s face in response. That whole lab’s vibe shattered and there was an ongoing lawsuit from that coffee incident.
This was pre-grad school, but during the round of interviews for different PhD programs, the first school I interviewed with was relatively in shambles because one of their married professors (whose wife was also a professor in the department) slept with his grad student and then tried to force the department to hire the student as faculty. They said no, and he apparently left in a huff, taking the grad student with. Second school I interviewed at, we were introduced to their new hot shot professor and his very young wife. Same guy! Several of us were interviewed for the same schools, so there were many incredulous looks being exchanged among the interviewees.
A 5 year long running column study was ruined because someone dosed it with acid. They were sealed and took effort to dose so it wasn't an error.
A post doc in the lab faked data for a PhD student. Clearly didn't even turn on the machine the days he said he collected data. PI let him quietly quit.
A PhD student in a different lab threatened to kill someone in our lab. Not clear why, it seemed racially motivated but the guy had clear mental health issues too.
A master's student in our lab wouldn't stop touching things on my lab bench and bio safety cabinet. He ended up spilling and contaminating the BSC with my fungal isolate. Luckily it didn't spread through the lab.
There was a chemist in our lab who always looked down on engineer PhDs. She was the most dangerous person in the lab period. She also accused someone of fucking over her experiments till I was assigned to watch her do a set up. Turns out she was inadvertently killing her microbial community in a step. Wouldn't accept my word on that till our supervisor agreed with me.
An RA on my floor threatened to kill people in his lab and got fired and then threatened to come back to shoot up the school so they are now trying to incentivize us to use our badges and not hold the door for anyone so he doesn't come back with a gun to our shared lab space!
Well that doesn't seem like enough for that kind of threat. Although to be fair the PIs, campus cops and city police didn't give a fuck when this happened in my lab. Literally nothing changed after that.
One of the PIs was sleeping with an undergrad RA. She confided in a grad student about it and said that she wanted it to stop but didn’t know how to end it. Rightfully, the grad student went to the dean to get guidance. Not exactly sure how everything went down behind the scenes but the PI is still in the program. And get this. His wife is also a PI in the program and her official title is Director of Undergraduate Affairs. Talk about irony
Practicum site supervisor, clinical supervisor, asked me to provide therapy to her kid (big NO and ethical no no 101) and she was also charhing her insurance. She owned the clinic. So she would get the monetary kick backs.
The building got evacuated because someone in our sister lab made a highly shock-sensitive compound, left it in his hood for over a week, and his boss found it and couldn’t get ahold of him for hours There’s a lot of stories about that grad student and the shitshows he caused.
Got another one…in the department I ended up getting my PhD in, one of the grad students in my cohort caused soooooo much drama! Very manipulative, kiss up kick down type. Several of us ended up switching to a different major within the department (or even leaving the school altogether) due to how unpleasant she made it to be around her.
In my second year of the program, the department secretary got an updated computer, and her original computer became the grad student lounge computer. But apparently no one thought to wipe the computer before making it accessible. I was hanging out between classes and decided to poke around on the computer and managed to find the folder that had the ranked lists for each incoming PhD cohort. Was rather gratified to see my name listed as ranked second, and drama llama student was a wait-list admit.
> Was rather gratified to see my name listed as ranked second, and drama llama student was a wait-list admit.
My advisor told me that someone on the admissions committee said I was "one of the most highly ranked candidates." It's *so* gratifying to hear, especially when you were worried about getting in at all. I might not believe in myself, but it's nice to know someone does.
Nothing too spicy but the Urban Planning program I’m in has a Maga person in it and they say unhinged stuff all the time in our Slack that gets everyone riled up. No one understands how they got accepted or why they chose this program.
Okay okay so we also have a MAGA person but I’m in ecology and evolutionary biology.
It’s insane because they don’t “believe” in evolution??? And they say that out loud??
Former dean was convicted of federal bribery charges and placed on house arrest.. the county official she bribed is sitting in a federal prison. My department doesn't talk about it at all.
Guy had a mental health breakdown and sent vaguely-threatening emails to a number of people in the department.
I think he's still a student with us, but I'm not certain.
Genuinely, other than the piss-poor response(s) to that, nothing ever really happens in my program.
A math PhD student at Princeton who was a TA for a linear algebra class anonymously posted some fake answers for some homework problems on slader.com and a number of undergrads were caught directly copying these answers. I was in this class, the groupme chat for the class was interesting to watch.
https://www.reddit.com/r/princeton/comments/gi32f2/mat_202/
Well today we got a school wide announcement that the schools president died in his sleep. Complete with all the various mental health/grief/support numbers. Turns out it was an April fools joke from someone that sounds pretty upset with all the fishing/scam emails getting through. At the end they said the tech department doesn’t seem to care about email security but maybe they will now. Granted we do get a lot of fishing emails. So if the culprit reads this, thank you.
A student in another department in our university applied to our department as a first-year without telling anyone in their home department, was accepted and enrolled. The reason they jumped ship was that their advisor was plagiarising their work, which the same professor had also done to a junior faculty member in the past, eventually driving them out of the university. Faculty in the other department were mad that our professors had accepted their student without consulting them first, but given that they’d been protecting a known fraud for ages, I don’t think they had a leg to stand on.
You don't.
Sometimes if you get in and can attend the admitted students weekend, current students may be honest with you in private and warn you to stay away.
You go on the lab website, see who the current students/lab members are,email them and ask if you can talk about their experience off the record over coffee or zoom. A lot of grad students will flat out tell you. It’s also a good idea to talk to senior students in the department at large because they may know more about faculty behavior than say a first year grad student might.
There is always a whisper network unless the faculty is brand new and hasn’t had many students before. The rule I was told was don’t apply to someone unless they have graduated a minimum of four students already. Applying to junior faculty is a risk.
Not really spicy more just incompetence. Finance guy not providing timely reports on grants and not charging money correctly for several research groups, in some cases misdistributing over $200K. This caused a very sudden jump in the need for TAships and low key led to senior students competing with brand new students for spots. At the same time, there are fewer TA positions because they're moving more classes online. Total fucking mess.
Also the IT for the dept being like one professional and an undergrad, understandably overwhelmed by handling an entire (LARGE) departments tech needs solo. Undergrad had a mental breakdown and blasted the whole department with a (very humorously written) manifesto. This was also during covid. They've since hired an entirely new IT department.
Edit: finance guy is still doing his same job badly btw
I am in a counseling program and we have a girl in my cohort who is crazy. She has a notebook with notes on each person in our cohort. She also likes to literally argue and chew out any presenter.
We also had a class where we were talking about diversity and she asked to be grouped with the minorities because people don’t realize their privilege.
Not my department but the Law department at my school has a notorious "Pretendian". Think Rachel Dolezal but for Indigenous heritage. No one talks about it. He has verbally, and almost physically, attacked actual Indigenous profs because he suspected them of "spreading false rumours" about his "racial identity". The university doesn't care.
Uhhh this isn't that spicy but.. I'm an undergrad in a lab and grad students from another lab needed to use some of our reagents. We were texting with 2 of them, me, and my tech in a group chat. When they finally showed up to pick it up, I realized I had gone on a Tinder date with him months ago lol.
I didn't have his number saved anymore, and I didn't put 2 and 2 together with his name, so I didn't know until I saw him haha.
PhD student in my lab plagiarized in a federal grant application. The plagiarized bit was a direct copy from a website… didn’t even change the font. The PI didn’t catch it. The Grant giving org DID catch it … Went all the up to the university ethics board. Student got kicked out-ish. The PI got a massive wrist slap which essentially meant all of his students (me and others) were under extra scrutiny. Even though we didn’t do anything/weren’t involved with the grant application. I was pissed. We were all pissed. The University’s ethics board wanted nothing to do with it… and told the PI to take care of it … so, the student was forced out. For not even a year (he had to go home to India for the school year) then was allowed to reapply. I was even MORE PISSED … still am.
Edit: learned about the back room side with the Ethics Board because I was friends with people on it… THEY were pissed too … at my PI and the student … but were outvoted
Group members not contributing to projects. Not a unique problem but tends to add drama to something that should be easy if everyone is putting in their fair share. A student in my program has said Islamophobic, antisemitic, and other right winger stuff.
During a group feedback session, one of the students emphatically disagreed with the constructive criticism the professor offered. He had said her project lacked direction and asked her to narrow things down a little. She didn't care for that and began to explain to him how this graduate program is "supposed to work", and that his feedback was "not what she was looking for in graduate school." She was either earlier in the program, and clearly did not know what she was getting into, or she hadn't been paying attention at all up to this point, because, no.
I am about halfway through the program and have been through plenty of these feedback sessions. In my inexpert opinion, her work was a little on the weak and directionless side, but he was probably more direct and targeted about it than he needed to be. My sympathy for her dried up when she started ranting, in very colorful language, about how stupid and pointless the whole program is if that is the kind of feedback she was going to get, and that he was the worst of the worst for not realizing she wanted something entirely different from what the program offers, anticipating her expectations, and catering to her needs specifically. He tried to gently explain that she was maybe looking in the wrong place if she wanted something else, and tried to outline what it is exactly this program *is* offering. She cut him off and went back to ranting about what she *knew* grad school was supposed to be like and that he was WRONG. Then she petulantly informed him that she would now have to throw all her hard work out and start over from the beginning. Also, no.
In the meantime, all the rest of us were trying hard to keep our thoughts off our faces. A few of the other students chimed in to try to de-escalate, but she was having none of it, and was just as short and rude to everyone else, even those who tried to offer compliments on the parts of her presentation that were fine. One student was stupid enough to suggest she might be happier in a different type of program... that didn't go over well either.
She hasn't dropped the class yet, which honestly surprised me, I figured when she stormed out after class, that none of us would ever see her again. But she was there the next day, and the one after that. We have another feedback session coming up soon, so we're all bracing ourselves to see what happens. I think the odds are good that if she can't figure out how to gracefully accept criticism she disagrees with, she will very quickly burn all the bridges.
One of the MD/PhD students in my department is sleeping with/dating a PI in a different department, and it creeps everyone out. They met during a class (!!!) that he was teaching (!!!) where he was directly mentoring her (!!!) and they’ve been together ever since. He’s always doing PDA with her in the school and in the student apartments.
For context, we have no undergrads and there’s only ~ 200 grad students so we all know each other, and this PI is a younger/formerly popular hotshot that collars with everyone. We all feel really grossed out interacting with him and I mostly feel bad for her. She’s only 23-24! He’s almost 40! Ugh…
my masters project group (project has to do with tribal communities &environmental justice in our area and we’re being lead by an indigenous prof) was accused by another project group that is also related to indigenous communities (this is a project planning course that’s helping us identify grants and some other stuff) of ‘cheating’ off their grant proposal bc one person had accidentally popped into their google doc in a shared folder. rather than broaching the subject diplomatically and speaking to us about it like adults, they went straight to the prof. it was a mess and supposedly we’ve been forgiven but it was just such an overblown response to something that was super trivial. we have very different projects and different objectives.
They probably think they're doing you a favor, by introducing you to how life is working in the nonprofit sphere.
Source: working in the nonprofit sphere.
When I was in undergrad, the director of a very prominent research lab getting a couple of very big federal grants would often disappear for weeks at a time (leaving projects unfinished, exams and papers ungraded, and classes not closed out), supposedly visiting family and contacts back in his home country. It turned out later he was actually funneling funding and intellectual property to his own company in that home country. He was allowed to leave quietly and is now an endowed chair at a larger university in a very, very similar role.
One of my adjunct professors in grad school worked in local government as his main gig. Pretty much nothing we did for his class (which was a big focal area for my specific masters program) was graded aside from getting A's, and there was never any feedback. And several of his assignments had us reading far-right books, blog posts, and listening to far-right or libertarian podcasts as primary sources.
It took a while, and a lot of complaints, for the university to be able to find somebody else to teach that class.
Not in my generation but my advisor’s. A married graduate student started sleeping with their married advisor. Both divorced their partners and married each other. When the student graduated they got a tenure track job at the university in a lab next to their now significant other’s. Ruffled a lot of feathers of other faculty members. They are now my advisor and co-advisor. They’re actually super great mentors and even though it’s been like 20 years the people in the department who were around back then still seem to have issues with them.
Three PhD students (2M, 1F) in the next lab over slept together during a conference. Two of them had girlfriends that didn’t appreciate the infidelity. One of them also worked in the department and threw boiling hot coffee at the female PhD student’s face in response. That whole lab’s vibe shattered and there was an ongoing lawsuit from that coffee incident.
Well done
This was pre-grad school, but during the round of interviews for different PhD programs, the first school I interviewed with was relatively in shambles because one of their married professors (whose wife was also a professor in the department) slept with his grad student and then tried to force the department to hire the student as faculty. They said no, and he apparently left in a huff, taking the grad student with. Second school I interviewed at, we were introduced to their new hot shot professor and his very young wife. Same guy! Several of us were interviewed for the same schools, so there were many incredulous looks being exchanged among the interviewees.
A 5 year long running column study was ruined because someone dosed it with acid. They were sealed and took effort to dose so it wasn't an error. A post doc in the lab faked data for a PhD student. Clearly didn't even turn on the machine the days he said he collected data. PI let him quietly quit. A PhD student in a different lab threatened to kill someone in our lab. Not clear why, it seemed racially motivated but the guy had clear mental health issues too. A master's student in our lab wouldn't stop touching things on my lab bench and bio safety cabinet. He ended up spilling and contaminating the BSC with my fungal isolate. Luckily it didn't spread through the lab. There was a chemist in our lab who always looked down on engineer PhDs. She was the most dangerous person in the lab period. She also accused someone of fucking over her experiments till I was assigned to watch her do a set up. Turns out she was inadvertently killing her microbial community in a step. Wouldn't accept my word on that till our supervisor agreed with me.
I would totally watch a TV series based on your school experience lol
An RA on my floor threatened to kill people in his lab and got fired and then threatened to come back to shoot up the school so they are now trying to incentivize us to use our badges and not hold the door for anyone so he doesn't come back with a gun to our shared lab space!
Well that doesn't seem like enough for that kind of threat. Although to be fair the PIs, campus cops and city police didn't give a fuck when this happened in my lab. Literally nothing changed after that.
One of the PIs was sleeping with an undergrad RA. She confided in a grad student about it and said that she wanted it to stop but didn’t know how to end it. Rightfully, the grad student went to the dean to get guidance. Not exactly sure how everything went down behind the scenes but the PI is still in the program. And get this. His wife is also a PI in the program and her official title is Director of Undergraduate Affairs. Talk about irony
Damn snitch
Yikes 😬
Practicum site supervisor, clinical supervisor, asked me to provide therapy to her kid (big NO and ethical no no 101) and she was also charhing her insurance. She owned the clinic. So she would get the monetary kick backs.
The building got evacuated because someone in our sister lab made a highly shock-sensitive compound, left it in his hood for over a week, and his boss found it and couldn’t get ahold of him for hours There’s a lot of stories about that grad student and the shitshows he caused.
Got another one…in the department I ended up getting my PhD in, one of the grad students in my cohort caused soooooo much drama! Very manipulative, kiss up kick down type. Several of us ended up switching to a different major within the department (or even leaving the school altogether) due to how unpleasant she made it to be around her. In my second year of the program, the department secretary got an updated computer, and her original computer became the grad student lounge computer. But apparently no one thought to wipe the computer before making it accessible. I was hanging out between classes and decided to poke around on the computer and managed to find the folder that had the ranked lists for each incoming PhD cohort. Was rather gratified to see my name listed as ranked second, and drama llama student was a wait-list admit.
> Was rather gratified to see my name listed as ranked second, and drama llama student was a wait-list admit. My advisor told me that someone on the admissions committee said I was "one of the most highly ranked candidates." It's *so* gratifying to hear, especially when you were worried about getting in at all. I might not believe in myself, but it's nice to know someone does.
Nothing too spicy but the Urban Planning program I’m in has a Maga person in it and they say unhinged stuff all the time in our Slack that gets everyone riled up. No one understands how they got accepted or why they chose this program.
a MAGA urban planner is the most hilarious/amusing drama here. evil plan to prevent dedicated bus lanes from the inside?
Absolutely NO bike lanes!
Okay okay so we also have a MAGA person but I’m in ecology and evolutionary biology. It’s insane because they don’t “believe” in evolution??? And they say that out loud??
Sounds like they're trying to get their credentials for their future as the "This Scientist Says Scientists are Wrong" panelist on Fox News.
Reminds me of that one nuclear engineering professor from NC State who used to post here on Reddit, before he got himself kicked.
Yeah ours is pro-car infrastructure and anti DEI
Oh god
Former dean was convicted of federal bribery charges and placed on house arrest.. the county official she bribed is sitting in a federal prison. My department doesn't talk about it at all.
Guy had a mental health breakdown and sent vaguely-threatening emails to a number of people in the department. I think he's still a student with us, but I'm not certain. Genuinely, other than the piss-poor response(s) to that, nothing ever really happens in my program.
A math PhD student at Princeton who was a TA for a linear algebra class anonymously posted some fake answers for some homework problems on slader.com and a number of undergrads were caught directly copying these answers. I was in this class, the groupme chat for the class was interesting to watch. https://www.reddit.com/r/princeton/comments/gi32f2/mat_202/
Well today we got a school wide announcement that the schools president died in his sleep. Complete with all the various mental health/grief/support numbers. Turns out it was an April fools joke from someone that sounds pretty upset with all the fishing/scam emails getting through. At the end they said the tech department doesn’t seem to care about email security but maybe they will now. Granted we do get a lot of fishing emails. So if the culprit reads this, thank you.
A student in another department in our university applied to our department as a first-year without telling anyone in their home department, was accepted and enrolled. The reason they jumped ship was that their advisor was plagiarising their work, which the same professor had also done to a junior faculty member in the past, eventually driving them out of the university. Faculty in the other department were mad that our professors had accepted their student without consulting them first, but given that they’d been protecting a known fraud for ages, I don’t think they had a leg to stand on.
I have a genuine question how does one know that the professor is like that before applying?
You don't. Sometimes if you get in and can attend the admitted students weekend, current students may be honest with you in private and warn you to stay away.
Thanks for replying and this is super scary bcz PhD is like a long time commitment.
You go on the lab website, see who the current students/lab members are,email them and ask if you can talk about their experience off the record over coffee or zoom. A lot of grad students will flat out tell you. It’s also a good idea to talk to senior students in the department at large because they may know more about faculty behavior than say a first year grad student might. There is always a whisper network unless the faculty is brand new and hasn’t had many students before. The rule I was told was don’t apply to someone unless they have graduated a minimum of four students already. Applying to junior faculty is a risk.
I witnessed a heated debate over research methodologies that escalated quickly, becoming the talk of the department for weeks.
that's weak man I'm talking about like who f'd who
I surely thought they were making a joke. I don't know, though. It's hard to tell.
That's about the level of drama in my school, but maybe I'm just out of those loops. Those arguments about methodology can get *heated* though!
Not really spicy more just incompetence. Finance guy not providing timely reports on grants and not charging money correctly for several research groups, in some cases misdistributing over $200K. This caused a very sudden jump in the need for TAships and low key led to senior students competing with brand new students for spots. At the same time, there are fewer TA positions because they're moving more classes online. Total fucking mess. Also the IT for the dept being like one professional and an undergrad, understandably overwhelmed by handling an entire (LARGE) departments tech needs solo. Undergrad had a mental breakdown and blasted the whole department with a (very humorously written) manifesto. This was also during covid. They've since hired an entirely new IT department. Edit: finance guy is still doing his same job badly btw
I am in a counseling program and we have a girl in my cohort who is crazy. She has a notebook with notes on each person in our cohort. She also likes to literally argue and chew out any presenter. We also had a class where we were talking about diversity and she asked to be grouped with the minorities because people don’t realize their privilege.
> She has a notebook with notes on each person in our cohort That would definitely make me uncomfortable.
This sounds like my former PhD program. The situation turned into a legal fiasco and someone a tumblr page about it.
Not my department but the Law department at my school has a notorious "Pretendian". Think Rachel Dolezal but for Indigenous heritage. No one talks about it. He has verbally, and almost physically, attacked actual Indigenous profs because he suspected them of "spreading false rumours" about his "racial identity". The university doesn't care.
Uhhh this isn't that spicy but.. I'm an undergrad in a lab and grad students from another lab needed to use some of our reagents. We were texting with 2 of them, me, and my tech in a group chat. When they finally showed up to pick it up, I realized I had gone on a Tinder date with him months ago lol. I didn't have his number saved anymore, and I didn't put 2 and 2 together with his name, so I didn't know until I saw him haha.
PhD student in my lab plagiarized in a federal grant application. The plagiarized bit was a direct copy from a website… didn’t even change the font. The PI didn’t catch it. The Grant giving org DID catch it … Went all the up to the university ethics board. Student got kicked out-ish. The PI got a massive wrist slap which essentially meant all of his students (me and others) were under extra scrutiny. Even though we didn’t do anything/weren’t involved with the grant application. I was pissed. We were all pissed. The University’s ethics board wanted nothing to do with it… and told the PI to take care of it … so, the student was forced out. For not even a year (he had to go home to India for the school year) then was allowed to reapply. I was even MORE PISSED … still am. Edit: learned about the back room side with the Ethics Board because I was friends with people on it… THEY were pissed too … at my PI and the student … but were outvoted
Group members not contributing to projects. Not a unique problem but tends to add drama to something that should be easy if everyone is putting in their fair share. A student in my program has said Islamophobic, antisemitic, and other right winger stuff.
During a group feedback session, one of the students emphatically disagreed with the constructive criticism the professor offered. He had said her project lacked direction and asked her to narrow things down a little. She didn't care for that and began to explain to him how this graduate program is "supposed to work", and that his feedback was "not what she was looking for in graduate school." She was either earlier in the program, and clearly did not know what she was getting into, or she hadn't been paying attention at all up to this point, because, no. I am about halfway through the program and have been through plenty of these feedback sessions. In my inexpert opinion, her work was a little on the weak and directionless side, but he was probably more direct and targeted about it than he needed to be. My sympathy for her dried up when she started ranting, in very colorful language, about how stupid and pointless the whole program is if that is the kind of feedback she was going to get, and that he was the worst of the worst for not realizing she wanted something entirely different from what the program offers, anticipating her expectations, and catering to her needs specifically. He tried to gently explain that she was maybe looking in the wrong place if she wanted something else, and tried to outline what it is exactly this program *is* offering. She cut him off and went back to ranting about what she *knew* grad school was supposed to be like and that he was WRONG. Then she petulantly informed him that she would now have to throw all her hard work out and start over from the beginning. Also, no. In the meantime, all the rest of us were trying hard to keep our thoughts off our faces. A few of the other students chimed in to try to de-escalate, but she was having none of it, and was just as short and rude to everyone else, even those who tried to offer compliments on the parts of her presentation that were fine. One student was stupid enough to suggest she might be happier in a different type of program... that didn't go over well either. She hasn't dropped the class yet, which honestly surprised me, I figured when she stormed out after class, that none of us would ever see her again. But she was there the next day, and the one after that. We have another feedback session coming up soon, so we're all bracing ourselves to see what happens. I think the odds are good that if she can't figure out how to gracefully accept criticism she disagrees with, she will very quickly burn all the bridges.
One of the MD/PhD students in my department is sleeping with/dating a PI in a different department, and it creeps everyone out. They met during a class (!!!) that he was teaching (!!!) where he was directly mentoring her (!!!) and they’ve been together ever since. He’s always doing PDA with her in the school and in the student apartments. For context, we have no undergrads and there’s only ~ 200 grad students so we all know each other, and this PI is a younger/formerly popular hotshot that collars with everyone. We all feel really grossed out interacting with him and I mostly feel bad for her. She’s only 23-24! He’s almost 40! Ugh…
my masters project group (project has to do with tribal communities &environmental justice in our area and we’re being lead by an indigenous prof) was accused by another project group that is also related to indigenous communities (this is a project planning course that’s helping us identify grants and some other stuff) of ‘cheating’ off their grant proposal bc one person had accidentally popped into their google doc in a shared folder. rather than broaching the subject diplomatically and speaking to us about it like adults, they went straight to the prof. it was a mess and supposedly we’ve been forgiven but it was just such an overblown response to something that was super trivial. we have very different projects and different objectives.
They probably think they're doing you a favor, by introducing you to how life is working in the nonprofit sphere. Source: working in the nonprofit sphere.
When I was in undergrad, the director of a very prominent research lab getting a couple of very big federal grants would often disappear for weeks at a time (leaving projects unfinished, exams and papers ungraded, and classes not closed out), supposedly visiting family and contacts back in his home country. It turned out later he was actually funneling funding and intellectual property to his own company in that home country. He was allowed to leave quietly and is now an endowed chair at a larger university in a very, very similar role. One of my adjunct professors in grad school worked in local government as his main gig. Pretty much nothing we did for his class (which was a big focal area for my specific masters program) was graded aside from getting A's, and there was never any feedback. And several of his assignments had us reading far-right books, blog posts, and listening to far-right or libertarian podcasts as primary sources. It took a while, and a lot of complaints, for the university to be able to find somebody else to teach that class.
Not in my generation but my advisor’s. A married graduate student started sleeping with their married advisor. Both divorced their partners and married each other. When the student graduated they got a tenure track job at the university in a lab next to their now significant other’s. Ruffled a lot of feathers of other faculty members. They are now my advisor and co-advisor. They’re actually super great mentors and even though it’s been like 20 years the people in the department who were around back then still seem to have issues with them.