My professor says I would not graduate my PhD, but I fulfilled all requirements

A long time ago I was given an opportunity to spend some time working at a lab in a foreign university. I was invited to explore the possibility of doing a PhD there and got an appointment with a professor that might have become my PhD supervisor.<p>When I got to that appointment someone was already in his office. The professor invited me in, but told me to sit and wait until they finish with the other student. He then proceeded to berate the guy in front of me. He used no kind words. Told him his work on the PhD thesis was completely incompetent, he wasted his years and stuff like that. It shook me deeply that someone would do that to his student, not to mention do it in front of a stranger.<p>Needless to say, I passed the offer to do the PhD at that place. It&#x27;s still one of my most vivid memories from the time I spent there - which was otherwise full of interesting work and I&#x27;m grateful for the people that made it possible. I still wonder if that was real or the scene was played to find out if I&#x27;m able to handle pressure like that. In either case, it left the impression of a toxic environment that I did not want to have a part in.

Unfortunately the final stages of PhD is a very sticky situation for many people. It boggles me (after my own PhD defense), how arbitrary the arguments are for &#x27;sufficiency&#x27;.<p>I learned it by experience that if a advisor wants the student to graduate, he will go the extra mile to make sure the committee &amp; department are okay with it. Same holds in the opposite as well. Unfortunately there is too much power vested in the hands of a few for good or the bad.<p>The OP in SE tells about 8 papers, but what is unknown is if the papers connect the dots in his thesis theme. I know lot of people who hop around several topics in their PhD work &amp; the hypothesis presented is either connected weakly or none at all (For e.g. in my case a early virtualization paper couldn&#x27;t fit into the overall theme of system optimization. It&#x27;s a published paper but how does it contribute to the story? It doesn&#x27;t. I couldn&#x27;t even add that to my thesis).<p>It is also quite possible that OP misconstrued &#x27;preparing the thesis&#x27; with &#x27;sufficiency to defend&#x27;. Too often advisors tell this so that grad students catch their loopholes early, as to where the logic &amp; conclusions don&#x27;t fit the story thread. And for this, they are also not totally at fault because PhD research work is supposed to be novel (and thus merits earning the degree). He is at times as clueless at the developing picture as the student himself.<p>That being said, he should have been paying more attention if he has already authored 8 papers together with student. It sounds more like the PhD Farm&#x2F; Paper mill lab type of place. Hard to make guesses without the content of the research work

If your PhD student publishes 8 papers with you and you only then notice or claim that they cannot graduate that is an enormous failure in supervision and mentorship in every imaginable case. Either the student is really not fit to do a PhD, or their research is not worthy of a PhD or you are intentionally sabotaging the student. All those options indicate a serious failure on the side of the PhD supervisor.

It is really hard to judge a situation with so little and one sided information. But the person got useful advice specific to german phd processes and whom to contact for advice with some insight.<p>Retelling of emails and conversations always makes me sceptical, especially about the followups. The professor suddenly wrote<p>&gt; that I would not be graduating anymore<p>For sure, this must have had a followup question from the PhD student of what to do next then. Or some form of discussion.

Murray Rothbard waited a decade to get his PhD. His supervisor didn&#x27;t like his politics and never let him graduate. Rothbard had to sneak in and graduate after his supervisor left to join the Eisenhower administration.<p>I&#x27;m surprised that PhDs aren&#x27;t further abused. Your multi-year investment can be taken away at any time on a whim at your supervisor&#x27;s discretion. It&#x27;s a great deal of discretionary power.

&gt;After about four years of research, my supervisor told me to write my thesis. After I sent him my thesis, he told me that he now thinks my work did not have enough scientific soundness<p>What even happened here? Did he not once talk to his supervisor during the time he wrote his thesis. To me this is quite bizarre, you would want to talk to your supervisor regularly <i>surely</i> you have to have some questions about the content, details, structure and formalities.<p>The most interesting question here is <i>why</i> the professor has that opinnion about the thesis. I think the total irrationality of the professor, which is alleged is very weird. And until there is some clarity on that this whole thing is impossible to unravel.<p>The obvious thing to do is talking to other professors and administration about this. What do they think about this?

If that&#x27;s the professor&#x27;s scientific judgment, then there is no reasonable way to challenge it. If the supervisor doesn&#x27;t support a thesis, then it&#x27;s going to be hard to convince a PhD committee of its merits.<p>Before doing anything else, that PhD student needs to find a new supervisor ASAP.

is he wanting to publish your work under his name? it happened to a friend of mine in Italy.<p>Long story short, I had to physically prevent him from running the guy over.<p>He eventually got his PHD and is now doing cool neurology stuff that I don&#x27;t really understand.

I am not sure why people post these questions. How is the audience supposed to answer the question without knowing the relevant information? Can you share your CV, publication, your advisors reason that you don’t qualify, etc?<p>I have seen problems with supervisors as well as students.

Unfortunately, the power dynamics between tenured professors and graduate students is very skewed to the prof. I spent some time in academics and for the most part things worked fine, grad students worked through the programs and support from the profs ranged from meh to excellent. However, every once in a while there would be case where the prof was overtly attempting to screw over the student. Just blatant abuse of power. Avenues for recourse for the student were weak at best, especially if the prof did things that was in their discretion to do, like evaluating the &#x27;soundness of the science&#x27;, but not break any actual rules. The only real solution was for the student to find another prof to take over as their supervisor, but it wasn&#x27;t always possible for them to keep the same project because of funding and proprietary info, etc. So the student could just end of losing years of work.

Why are people surprised? Master apprentice relations are closer to equality than master slave but it’s not like there’s any pretence of equality or some kind of mutual respect in the way the system is set up. Similarly with PIs and postdocs. You would be hard pressed to design a system that was better at encouraging abuse.

I think it&#x27;s a bit bizarre that someone edited his suicidal thoughts out (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academia.stackexchange.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;190464&#x2F;revisions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academia.stackexchange.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;190464&#x2F;revisions</a>)

Possibly, the result presented is not consistent with what is expected, and might cause damage to the professor. Either because the result is really wrong, or it is in a field which is driven by researchers group think bubble, not reprodrucibility.

To me, this reads like he had papers that were good, but then the thesis itself is bad or too little new stuff.