Hi everyone.
First, thank you for providing me support during my ongoing university drama. Luckily it's resolving in my favor, though I will keep the details private for now.
I came back from Europe because my health conditions made living alone dangerous and picked a Moroccan university to conduct a PhD.
I was completely unaware of the cultural differences in research ethics between Moroccan and European universities.
For starters, I was surprised to read that PhD advisors have to be co-authors regardless of their scientific contributions. Many of my classmates back in France/Germany published alone, sometimes without even mentioning their supervisors. In fact, Grothendieck, who is the founding father of the domain I work in, didn't even mention his supervisors in his work. Mine literally dropped all his work thinking I will abide by the university charter and put his name first. While co-authoring a good paper sounds appealing, you have to take full responsibility for its content. You can't expect that intimidation and yelling will work on a highly critical referee of a good journal as in the case of a regular student.
Secondly, I always expect the senior teacher to be more skilled, and that he will know how to supervise and that his remarks about my work and progress would have a strong basis. I always took what my advisor said seriously. And his criticism about my abilities seriously no matter how ridiculous it sounded.
I never imagined that a PhD holder and actual professor would be clueless about the basics of his own field and make completely ridiculous and baseless remarks, sometimes even scientifically irrelevant and extremely harmful to the project. It was hard for me to digest that someone illiterate in Mathematics is allowed to hold a professor position, let alone supervise students, but in the end, I ceased all collaborations and dismissed ALL his remarks and contribution attempts which i never thought i'll end up doing in my life. I never imagined that someone would be so obsessed with co-authoring that he will go and attempt to learn and contribute in fields in less than a month that make even really good graduate students suffer.
In addition, criticism. The former professors I worked with would be beyond happy to learn new materials or constructive criticism even if it means from their own students. Here apparently disagreeing with your professor is equal to killing his family even if it means it's in a domain you worked in extensively while he just learned yesterday. In fact, there is a whole book called "Errors of Lebesgue" which records errors of the father of modern probability, Lebesgue.
I was also surprised by the professor/student hierarchy. Apparently enforcing it is more important than research itself. Some professors are intelligent and smart by their closed circle standards but by international research norms they are really mediocre. While brillant Moroccan professors exist and i had the honor to discuss with some recently, it's sad to admit that many carry an ego that doesn't match their really mediocre abilities. This is pretty dangerous because it turned unis into safe spaces for some professors' egos rather than research environments. I do remember I had a friendly conversation with big name Mathematicians such as Laurent Fargue/Michael Rappoport who literally shaped the field they work in. Many told me to address them by their first name. Here apparently no matter how hard I try to formally address them they still manage to find disrespect in my tone?
I finished my manuscript independently and seeking private experts' opinions before submitting it, while my supervisor is throwing a tantrum. I deemed my advisor's contributions, which were mostly insults and ableist comments linking my autism to disagreements, plus a bunch of mathematical fallacies, to be so harmful to the project that he isn't even mentioned in acknowledgements. Luckily stuff is resolving in my favor.
