"...Dim witted grad student that you can't really trust..."

Reminds me of the phrase "graduate student descent" for training neural networks...

I've been noticing more casual dismissiveness towards grad students lately. They are certainly often treated as the grunt laborers of academia, in areas where career prospects are downright stupid. I generally feel it would be more productive to at least pretend that they're being trained to be independent, aggressive researchers in their own right, though.