About a year and a half ago one of the professors in my division left for a position at another university. Now I don't know what any of the other professors really thought of him/her, they're all too professional to say, but among the students s/he was not well liked at all to put it mildly. S/he played favorites in a painfully obvious way among students in both his/her research group and classes. A number of students were also bothered by his/her assertion that S/N = 2 and n = 1 are totally acceptable.
After leaving for his/her new job, s/he and one of his/her especially despised grad students (really, this person was/is a total @$$hole) published a paper in a perfectly respectable journal. As we don't work in related/overlapping fields, I took no notice, until E forwarded me another paper this morning from the same journal, a "comment" on the previously mentioned paper.
In just over a page, the comment lays out in perfectly clear terms, why the conclusions in the paper this professor published were crap. Hilarious. This paper appeared online yesterday, and it's already made the rounds of this department. One of my labmates used to work for this professor, and switched into my group when he found there was no getting past not being one of his/her favorites. He pretty much roared with laughter when he saw this "comment" paper.
I have just about zero desire to stay in academia after graduation, but man, academic drama is super funny. I can't wait for the rebuttal to the comment.
I used to be a grad student. And now I'm not (thank goodness). I spent a year as a post doc in industry in Baltimore before starting a "real" job with the same company. These are my tales of science, food, travel, and life.
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