And scads of half-wits who righteously approve of every incremental move without a thought for the result.

Together with lying blatantly ALL THE TIME, wishing (with fearful intensity) to destroy the country, your political opponents, the family, the legal system, the economy, the military, the health system…and any concept of meritocracy truth, dignity and justice.

Those are pretty stiff requirements…but the Democrats seem to have untold scads of uber-competent applicants…

I know someone quite well who as a grad student spoke with his advisor about an original research idea he wanted to pursue for his doctoral thesis. The advisor heard him out and discouraged him from pursuing that particular avenue for some reason or other; convinced him it was not a good avenue for research and probably wouldn’t be approved. This was in economics and required no special equipment or human subjects, just various databases that the grad student (and of course the professor) had access to. So the grad student did his doctorate on something else – and the professor pursued the research and published it, completely unattributed to the student, of course. The econ professor was quite well known.

M J R

Sounds like Anne has heard vague rumors of how publishing works but never published anything herself.

Students who are just taking classes from a professor almost never are publishing papers at all, and there’s nothing that happens in office hours after class that could possibly give rise to a published paper. There’s virtually no undergraduate coursework that could give rise to a published paper, since publications are supposed to be original research and not things you find covered in a textbook, though sometimes an honors class will result in a student doing original and publishable work which goes above and beyond coursework.

The students who publish with a professor are working on a research project with that professor. If they are STEM graduate students they are almost certainly getting paid from that professor’s grants in addition to getting credit on the paper.

I don’t know how it works everywhere but in my academic career the professor leading the team typically got credit as the LAST author, unless they had actually done the lion’s share of the work. Writing up the paper was not considered “the lion’s share of the work”, share of the actual scientific work being written about was the determining factor.