[mathattack]

I think you should look at the incentives...

In the academic world, tenured professors are rarely fired for bad behavior. Their primary incentive is to create grad students who cite their work. (“Expand on the path they’ve laid”). This means they can tune out or abuse anyone not part of their citation factory with relatively little cost. As long as there is a ready supply of new students each year they are fine.

In the professional world the incentives are from the market. If you can’t generate revenue or funding you die. Leaders of small companies can be abusive to get things done. As the companies scale, abusive leaders find it harder to attract talent and bad managers tend to get weeded out by the market for talent. (Jobs and Musk are exceptions) As companies turn into monopolies focused on scale there are less external pressures and toxic behavior can return as turf wars trump market pressures.

[weregiraffe]

>Their primary incentive is to create grad students who cite their work.

That's not true, the primary incentive is to generate new articles, which allow you to get more grants, which allow you to hire more grad students who generate even more articles.

And the primary incentive of the grad student is to write as many articles as well, because good articles are what will allow them to advance in the academy. So really, motivations of supervisors and grad students generally align, and abusive PIs basically sabotage themselves.

[bananaquant]

From my experience, this alignment of interests is more tricky than it seems.

Sure, the overall goal is to publish as many papers as possible, but their topic more often than not is solely determined by the advisor. Those papers may not end up helping the student to get a job upon graduation, unless their topic is one of the more exciting ones and the universities are actively hiring new faculty to pursue such things further. Tenured advisors are often not concerned about this issue since they already have their job.

It is also likely that the papers are backed by the current funding received by the advisor. It is exceedingly difficult for a former student who has become a new faculty member to get funding for similar projects because they would literally have to compete with their advisor for it. Some of the more cordial professors that I've seen would actually co-write future grants with their former students, so that everyone could benefit. But oftentimes I've seen professor impose a ceiling on a student's career aspirations, so they would be eliminated from competing for the funding in the long run. Regrettably, this often happens to bright ambitious students, who have made a mistake of revealing their ability to function independently early on.