| hahaha I had a PhD defence in 2018 in the UK. Criticisms included: "I don't trust your maths"
"I don't feel this analysis is right, but I can't describe in what way"
"you are clearly not very knowledgeable"
and many other similar things. Asking me a question and then before I can open my mouth answering it yourself, and then insulting me for not answering it was the start of the viva defence and it set the tone for the rest. I was also heavily criticised for not having cited a paper that came out in-between submitting my thesis and the defence, despite this being literally impossible to have done so, and, despite having already had gotten a job in that time, was given limited time to do additional experiments, write whole new chapters, new code, do new experiments, etc. Ended up adding 90 pages of material to the thesis. In the end I had to quit the job I had just got, because It would have been impossible to not fail my PhD program and keep the job. Afterword's, in behind closed doors discussions it was revealed that one guy had pushed for almost all of the required extra work deliberately to try to make me fail, because I had done something he could not. |
I mean, personally, I don't really care about reputation of academia, but given that you described a horrible story where somebody basically tried to ruin your career, and given that you decided not to name specific people or institutions, it seems that the whole (UK) academia will have to take the reputation hit for the alleged scandal.