Ten minutes talking with this man single-handedly turned me off from attending Harvard grad school. Any environment that would promote him to (I believe) head of the department was not one I wanted to study in. Glad to see I made the right choice.
I’m saying this in part bc sometimes people outside of academia feel like “being department chair” means the person is super prestigious or well respected within the department or outside of it. Generally that’s not actually the case. It’s a bit of a demotion in terms of what academics care about. (Frequently it comes with a raise bc you need to offer a substantial carrot to get people to even take the position.)
Somehow, I imagine he didn't treat his grad students much better.
At the end of the day, individual faculty members and department standards make a huge difference.
Mostly because faculty is too busy trying to make tenure or climb the political pole to dean to audit their colleagues.
* I have family in academia, so started to grok where this was going at this point.
These kinds of things need to be heard more often so others can feel confident they aren’t alone in having ethics and have confidence in pushing back.