In our chemistry department a few years back, a grad student who was failing started poisoning another graduate student they worked with closely by putting carcinogens in their foods and drinks. Colourless, odorless, flavourless, thanks to his chemistry knowledge. He was eventually caught and I'm not sure what happened to him, thrown out for sure, perhaps arrested.

Chemists are crazy.

And that's how we replaced half our chemistry department in a year.

A professor was hired to start a research center/institute, got paid a lot of money and came in with tenure. He was pretty weird to begin with, but as time went on it became apparent that he wasted all the funds intended for starting the center -- nothing was happening but the accounts were diminishing.

The whistleblower hotline was provided with a bunch of data that strongly suggested he was funneling a lot of that money to a company owned in part by his brother, in addition to a lot of blatant and casual misuse of funds (buying personal and convenience stuff for himself and staff).

Things started heating up and they called him in for a hearing about it. The very next day we found an indignant letter announcing his resignation and accusing the entire department and college of unethical behavior slipped under the door. He skipped out in the middle of the night leaving a big pile of deliberately damaged equipment in his office.

The university didn't pursue him. I believe it was because they were in the middle of a scandal involving faculty and students in another department and just didn't want to hear about it.

Students were completely unaware.

In the English department, one of the professors got arrested for domestic violence, divorced his wife, then got another english professor pregnant and eventually married her. And they all saw each other at department meetings. Super awkward.

Edit to clarify: The husband and original wife were both professors. He had an affair with another English professor. Wife found out and there was a major fight, cops were called, he was arrested for DV but I believe the charges were dropped. He filed for divorce, moved in with the other professor, got her pregnant, and he and the ex were still fighting over child support and alimony when I left. I was the pregnant professor's TA, but I was definitely Team Original Wife.

I was a professorial assistant to the Italian department and one of my favorite professors did a showing of a very famous Italian film Swept Away on a weekend.

This was an outside of class activity, which no one was required to attend. At a college, with college-age students. Just a "we don't have time to watch this in class, so we'll watch it over the weekend in the auditorium."

The movie in question would be considered...controversial by American standards. But Italian film standards it is also controversial, but considered a pretty important film for anyone studying film. It deals with some pretty intense issues involving dynamics between men and women, wealthy and poor as well as, depending on your interpretation, a "assault" scene.

I was working in the department when we did this movie showing and so I got a front row view of it blowing up. Apparently some freshmen, who are 18 years old, attended the screening and complained to their parents, who complained to the school. The school decided the best option was to fire my professor.

The Italian department went to bat for him, reminding the school that adult students attended the screening voluntarily. The school knew they couldn't get away with firing him specifically for that, so at the end of the quarter they revoked his contract renewal (he was supposed to come back the next year) for "lifestyle choices that conflict with university standards."

Dumb move. I don't know who on the universities legal team wrote it that way, but they should be fired. The professor in question was Pakistani and openly gay, living with his husband. As far as I understand it, he took their butts to court for discriminatory dismissal. They settled out of court for an unknown sum, but it was enough that my professor and his husband moved out to Italy where he now works at a university there and is very happy.

No one outside of the Italian department knew what happened. Professor was there one quarter and gone the next with no warning whatsoever.

When I was going through my PhD program, a buddy of mine had his professor DIE on him. Young guy, in his forties, got hit by a car. Boom.

Not-so-fun fact: when a professor dies, their grants go away. If a grad student is on the verge of finishing (just writing up their results), they can sometimes hop to another lab and get by. My friend, however, was only in his second year.

He had to start over with a new project in a new lab. Essentially lost two years of his life on a project that yielded absolutely nothing.

Woo, grad school, so uplifting!

One of our male English professors was being stalked by a female student, to the point he had to get a restraining order against her. The only reason my class knew was because she saw him in the hallway, entered our classroom and made a huge scene the first day of class, and security had to be called to make her leave. After that, the door was always locked for that class and whoever was in the back row were scouters to let in late students. He also had to cancel class to go to court for the situation at least once.

Our heads of department or course directors would purposely keep dragging students (the act of pulling a student through their studies) even though they'd fail most classes. They'd purposely grade the student just above a pass even though the content of work was astonishingly bad because if they left or dropped out it'd look bad on the course's stats and drop out rate, not to mention the university not getting the student loan money.

From there, of course statistics would be ridiculously high for that particular degree so they'd then 'sell' this to prospective students and parents. This is currently still going on.

Source: am a lecturer at a university and yes it disgusts me.

Currently it's that the head of one of our research institutes and few of his colleagues somehow managed to award themselves about $1 million USD each as a bonus. In my country it takes about 70 years of work on an average salary to earn that kind of money. Also the same prof possibly forged some data in paper 10 years ago. Who knows how it's gonna end, but I'm sure more dirt is going to come out on this guy and his colleagues. It's an open secret at this point.

My PI (professor) for grad school had his lab raided by the FBI. This happened long before I joined.

Apparently, one of his first or second class of grad students in the 80's/90's decided that they wanted to use lab resources to brew some... well, what Walter White cooks in Breaking Bad. Very easy to do with the equipment we have. From what I am told, this student would stay late in lab after others had left to get this done.

In true Breaking Bad style, he fenced his stuff to some distributor and thought that was the end of it. But the purity of his product was so high that they were able to trace it back from the streets to him and the lab.

A sting operation shut down the lab while the dust settled, and my professor was cleared of all wrongdoing, since none of this was under his direct control, and all campus resources were being misused by the student.

State "Intelligence Bureau" told the professor that it was the largest and purest operation they had seen in the state at this time.

I'm married to an adjunct at a Community College.

There's an incredible amount of politics (like--you can't even fathom it) regarding full-time profs and adjuncts. It's like a "best friends club" to get full-time or tenure that is almost entirely impossible to get in to unless invited.

My wife is CONSTANTLY working, taking more classes than she should be allowed to as an adjunct because they NEED her (she's course qualified to teach classes that very few other professors are), and is incessantly being given extra duties (work with this group of full-timers to put together the symposium, etc.). Her profile on "ratemyteacher" is ridiculously good, as are her scores on the anonymous surveys they have every student take. She goes above and beyond at every turn to make sure her students have every opportunity to succeed, and I can tell you without a moment of doubt that she will literally never become a full-time professor at this college and it is exclusively because of the clique that starts at the top and trickles down.

Might not sound dramatic, nor make for a good post -- but she's one of COUNTLESS adjuncts at COUNTLESS schools that are going through exactly the same thing.

A prominent professor was sleeping with his students. Actually, he met his wife that way, and then had a huge issue with dating OTHER students after getting married. Lawsuits were threatened, he resigned and moved 1,000 miles away very quickly. No news, no public info released... it was all just known through the grapevine of staff gossip.

This was in the midwest, but it seems this happens at every school based on comments. No, I'm not going to say where.

I think students would be surprised just how much drama happens. I am talking everything from major drama like lawsuits that universities have kept quiet or EO complaints to colleagues whining at each other because one thought the other one rolled her eyes at the other one.

I just went to a faculty meeting that was so tense and angry that I legitimately wanted to leave the room and it was over a small semantic difference of opinion about a policy that literally does not matter because it is departmental and not university wide so it’s going to get struck down anyway.

Oftentimes I am happy to go to class or meet with students in my office because that is the fun part of the job And usually drama free until the last week of classes when everyone starts hustling for a higher grade.

Night shift janitor made some really good moonshine. Some of the professors and grad students would leave cash in our top desk drawers when we left work, and the next day, a mason jar of hand-made shine would be waiting there.

He's since moved on from that department, but was good people.

I used to be a custodian at a prominent university and one of the TAs in the art department would routinely leave her studio a pigsty and then assured her students "not to sweat the mess, we're just giving the janitor something to do".

A number of students complained about her sense of entitlement and she was rejected for a professorship for calling me a "janitor" instead of the proper nomenclature: custodian.

I worked at a large university and right before I started, the long time dean of the school went on sabbatical. I didn’t think anything of it until two months later when I found out that the university forced him to take time off because he blew almost all of the schools budget on fancy dinners with donors (were talking like $1000+ on drinks and heavy meals), showed up to official university events with... um a sniffle, let's say, and kept a second admin assistant as essentially his mistress.

He had a private bathroom with a shower installed in his office. He sent the school into a major budget crisis and was a PR disaster waiting to happen. It was a huge mess. The acting dean who stepped in got a lot of crap for how much damage control she had to do.

Ultimately he returned a few years later just as a part time faculty member. But still, totally wild.

The housing and dining databases at the University where I work are all housed on a single windows XP machine that no one has admin access to. The guy who wrote most of the code passed a few years ago and no one knows how to access the system other than as a user. They have been working for three years to get something new in place, but nothing can translate the data in a way they want, and no one seems willing to build new from the ground up.

We have north of 20,000 students. If that system died tomorrow, no one could access their dorms or eat at the dining halls.

I was a grad student in a major university. The department pretty much all loathed one another, and the professors had multiple alliances that were probably more complex than Game of Thrones.

At one point in time, a group of professors had aligned to overthrow the dean, and they were so successful in doing so that the dean wasn't fired: they were demoted to department secretary.

It was brutal. I had a colleague who had people on their doc committee get into an argument and refuse to sign off on anything they did, not because of the quality of the work, but because the professors hated each other.

Graduate students are treated like trash. We're cheap labor so the tenured professors can keep publishing without doing anything and the professors looking for tenure can get the publications they need. Basically, the entire "publish or perish" culture in academia is really toxic. Unless you get lucky with a nice advisor you're screwed.

Also, university administration cares nothing for graduate students. At my school, our president announced a cash appreciation gift to every staff person making under a certain amount. Every graduate student on campus thought that included us as well, because to every logical person, we're staff eligible for benefits and work full-time.

Nope. We're only "students" when it's convenient for the university and makes their numbers look good, and considered "staff" only because we're getting paid barely above the poverty line. At least I get health insurance?

I work at a college in the midwest. A few years ago, our president very quickly resigned. Turns out his son was growing herb in their basement and was dealing out of their house. Whether the president knew or not is still being debated but he still resigned.

Apparently there were quite a few rich kids who didn't study, go to class, contribute, or maintain a GPA above a 3.0 who's parents shockingly paid for them to get into those schools.

Academia sometimes draws ridiculous people. I had a dean once who caused so much turmoil so often by simply denying objective reality when it didn't suit her.

I was assigned to spearhead a project to repurpose a section of our building. I drew up the plans and she refused to believe the blueprints on square footage. So I measured it myself. She pretended it wasn't the case. It wasn't large enough to accommodate its new purpose, but according to her it was because in her mind it was 30% larger.

I went over her head and ended up in meetings with higher administration trying to get them to understand. They all took her side. She proceeded to make my life a nightmare for the remainder of my time at the University.

Professors were purchasing tricked out laptops with their budgets shortly before leaving the university. The university in turn would let the professors purchase the hardware for a song because it was “used”. We’re talking $2000-3000 machines being purchased 6 months down the line for $500. Someone finally caught onto to this scheme and now nobody can purchase the used hardware.

I worked for the maintenance department one summer while in college, and got exposed to a lot of the drama in that department. Highlights include:

The school deciding that they didn’t want to deal with the union anymore, so they started hiring for all non-teaching positions as temps, then firing them after six months and rehiring them thirty days later. This was done because temps didn’t have to be union, and also because once a large enough percentage of employees were non-union, they could start hiring non-union employees on a permanent basis.

The entire third shift cleaning crew (except the team lead) was made up of people with disciplinary issues. This included a man who’s been caught multiple times stealing underwear and setting up cameras in girls’ showers. At least once, the girl in question was under 18. None of this was ever told to the students — the head of facilities and planning knew this was an issue and just did checks on all the bathrooms in the building this guy cleaned once or twice a month.

My teacher was Syrian. He was practically always at university, always tired, always acting off. Would sleep in his office, would forget to hand back assignments, would mix up basic things, cry randomly in the hallway. We later found out his family was being held hostage back home while he was teaching in Canada.

I had an advanced calculus teacher who'd come into class spectacularly high. He'd write down equations on the board from a book, and about 15-20 minutes in, he'd invariably excuse himself and take a bathroom break.

He'd then return, pupils dilated, and proceed to solve all equations in less than 5 minutes, all while monologuing non-stop about the topic for another five. Then he would dismiss the class and storm out, regardless of whether you actually understood or not. Most students seemed physically stunned and dazed by the whole process.

I don't know wether he was a freaking genius or just a deranged fiend, but I studied at a big university at the time, and recently I heard he was made head teacher of the math department. So I don't know what to think.

It's often speculated or rumored that university professors are sometimes attracted to their students.

But it can work the other way, as was the case with me when I was teaching Music History. One female student sat as close as she could get, followed me around, and was always doing "extra things" to win favor - to the point where it became obvious to her peers.

Rather than embarrass this student by discussing it with her directly (or fellow staff members and the dean), I patiently wound her down gradually over time until she eventually got the idea nothing would come of it.

Harassment. University (and department) recently had a big harassment scandal. We (grad students, and faculty) all know who the one unnamed person is but the university and department won't do anything about it. Dude's a full on creeper and we do what we can to steer undergrads away from him without coming out and saying he has harassed his students before.

Our building is literally falling apart and regularly floods. The reason we won't move is actually because two or three old faculty members threw a fit over having to move their offices (which, as I said, there's flooding and the buildings also have mold in them...)

Two professors in my department had been best of friends for over a decade and had a HUGE personal falling out. They couldn't even be in the same room together which made department meetings awkward or impossible. Both started recruiting allies in the department and basically split it down the middle.

It got so bad that a committee of faculty from other departments was convened to interview every faculty member and decide the fate of the department. One of the proposed options was shutting down the entire major. I had tenure at the time but tenure does not protect you if your department no longer exists.

There is a loophole in the rules that states that if you have tenure and your department dissolves you can keep your job if another department will absorb you. I met with three other departments and all three agreed to absorb me if I was cut loose (I was the debate coach so the departments were willing to absorb me to keep the debate team running).

Most of my colleagues did not have that leverage. Once 90 percent of the faculty realized the possibility of joblessness, everybody decided to play nice.

I was a graduate teaching assistant for the woman professor who taught the marketing class. Even though I was in a committed relationship she would regularly come on to me when I was at school.

One evening she called me in a panic telling me that she was feeling very depressed and really needed someone to be with her so that she didn't do something terrible. I explained to my partner that it was an emergency situation and that I couldn't refuse to help her.

What I didn't realize at the time was that it was a setup. My professor just wanted to hook up with me and couldn't think of any better way to do it than to feign severe depression and claim an emergency when the only emergency was that she was madly in love with me.

A former health sciences lecturer and her husband were arrested for keeping a man chained and locked up in their garden shed for 4 years and making him do renovations on their house.

Sooooo many professors only have a job because the university really wanted to hire their spouse.

I saw the worst case of this at the school where I got my masters. One of the newly hired professors was just plain stupid. His students were all morons too. Turns out the university really wanted to hire his wife, and they told the university they were a package deal.

The provost's office recommended a cost-cutting change in scheduling. The chair of the department I was in wrote a memo, not disagreeing, but only saying that the change would require careful planning to not disrupt the quality of the teaching, and that it may not be possible during the current school year to get the various curriculum changes approved. The provost pitched a hissy fit, and cancelled one of the department's tenure lines. Obviously everybody who was tenured couldn't be gotten rid of, but there were two not-yet-tenured professors, and the chair had to pick one to fire, as his punishment for not being sufficiently servile.

And it wasn't even for anything, just that the provost gave an order and they didn't snap to attention fast enough for his liking. He didn't care that they'd be getting rid of a good teacher, or replacing with a bunch of adjunct at the last minute, he just wanted to make a point. The lady who got fired was one of the best profs in the department, the students loved her, but the other one - also no slouch - had more seniority.

I was a graduate assistant at a university. Apparently the engineering department spent $2 million over budget on stuff, so the other departments (including education which was the department I worked for) had to reduce their budgets to make up for it. The students never knew, but most of the TAs found out because our bosses were all talking about how ridiculous it was.

PhD student here.

My department spearheaded an effort to get our previous dean of the college ousted with a vote of no confidence. She resigned shortly before the vote could take place so she wouldn’t have that in her work history.

The new dean demanded a sky-high salary to come here, and after arriving did an $80,000 renovation of his office suite. It happens to be next door to my lab, and we all think he’s a jerk because he hates that we, a working research laboratory, make noise. He’s come over to yell at us for interrupting his meetings before.

Also, my university tried to change the way that graduate students are funded in a way that would have removed a lot of students’ tuition remission. They tried to do this secretly so that no one would have time to raise a fuss, but one of the professors thwarted them by directly emailing the information he got to the graduate student council. We bombarded the administration with lots and lots of pushback and they halted the policy change.

I saw a teacher almost in tears because the student reps on the budget committee wanted to save several thousands of dollars a year by discontinuing the delivery of mountain spring water to the faculty buildings... that had drinking fountains... during a budget crisis.

That same teacher was one of the ones in support of discontinuing the bus service to the school, which was way outside of the city it primarily served, and was the cheapest college for more than half a state and served a lot of lower income students who relied on the bus. She was also in support of closing the cafeteria because, and I quote: “I don’t even eat there.”

Red-faced and emotionally distraught by the suggestion that a single luxury faculty service was maybe unnecessary.

In case any of you were curious where all that tuition money goes.

Someone poured radioactive material down a sink.

A guy secretly converted a storeroom into a home for himself complete with bed, furnishings and a fully plumbed in shower and toilet. No one noticed until long after he'd left.

An office remained sealed from the 1970s until the early 2000s, it was literally forgotten about and the door had been painted over. When it was discovered it was like opening a time capsule.

There was a bomb threat on campus and security forgot about a whole building full of people and didn't evacuate them. Luckily the threat was fake.

Most of the senior staff in the finance division were made redundant to save money without anyone making sure they knew how to run things without them. Turns out no one knew how loads of things worked and they had to re-hire them all as consultants (at considerably more than what they'd been paid originally).

Our last provost was on an interim basis after a quick succession of two others had been hired/fired. I assume they wanted to take some time naming the next provost because it's a big commitment. Provost search committee is formed, and every criteria is aimed at naming the interim as the permanent provost. This is the second highest position in the university after the president.

Interim Provost (IP) is in the job for months, and is in charge of a huge university-wide development plan. Seriously, the plan that is going to guide our path for at least the next 10 years, probably more. Millions, possibly billions, of dollars will go into this plan that is being sold as the future of making our university a top tier research institution. IP is sent around the country to sell this plan to alumni and donors. He talks a big game and makes it sound like he has dedicated his entire life and career to the university.

Just as this development plan is going to the regents for a vote, IP is confronted on the steps of the admin building by the husband of one of the women who works in his office. IP and the woman had been having an affair while they are both married to other people. One of my colleagues had seen them at the airport together, but didn't think anything of it since they were both in very top positions and could have been traveling together on university business. But yeah...they were just about to announce that he had the permanent position, vote on the new development plan, and his mistress's husband fought him on the steps of a building in the middle of campus in the middle of the day.

He resigned to 'spend more time in prayerful reflection' with his family.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who know about this, but most students just would not have cared. The university wants to do everything they can to keep it quiet because we have a reputation to maintain.

One professor punched another professor in the face for staying in the classroom a minute over class time -- with 9 minutes before Professor Punchy's class even started.

Both professors are still working in the department and I have no idea how the school kept it quiet.

When I was 22, I worked at a community college chemistry lab. We handled all the chemicals and equipment that were used for the labs; just general chemistry I & II and organic chemistry I & II, so nothing too dangerous. We did, however, have a small cabinet full of chemical reagents that were technically too dangerous for me to handle. When those needed to be used, it had to be my boss that handled. I think I technically wasn't even allowed to be in the room.

Those were the rules, but the reality was that my boss was a mess. She was often (and I mean like most of the time) too busy dealing with issues from her personal life to do her job. There were countless times when she just wasn't around and I had to make important decisions by the seat of my pants. She constantly had me doing things that I wasn't supposed to be doing, like boiling down solutions of sulfuric acid to increase the concentration. Part of the reason she was such a mess was that she was already in trouble at work because she was caught having student employees do things they shouldn't have been doing.

Anyway, one day after classes were done, we needed to set up an experiment that required us to handle *pure (*lab grade; nothing is ever truly "pure") diatomic bromine. Not only was I not supposed to handle that reagent, but it was probably the most dangerous thing we had (at least according to my boss). She was busy on the phone with her ex-husband or something, and insisted that it was no big deal and that I should just do it myself. She's my boss, so I don't argue.

Well, I end up dropping a 1-2 liter bottle of bromine. It shatters, dark brown liquid spreads across the floor, and red bromine vapor immediately starts to fill the room. I get out of there as fast as possible, but I'm already seeing stars and feel as though I might faint by the time I get to our office, which is just down the hall. I truly can not describe the feeling of having bromine vapor in your lungs, but it's bad.

Without me even saying anything, she knows what's happened. The smell is unmistakable, my clothes were stained, and she probably heard the bottle shatter. She rushes to the lab. I realize that I need to wash this stuff off of me immediately, so I run to the shower we have in the spare lab room that we use for storage. I rinsed for probably 20 minutes - stark naked, mind you - letting the water wash over my open eyes the entire time.

I'm gonna cut it off there, but long story short, she got put on immediate suspension, and never returned to work. No students ever found out what had happened. I often hung out with other students while I was working when the faculty weren't around. Any one of them could have easily been in the wrong place at the wrong time and suffocated in that room before help arrived.

Wow....the stories I can tell.

For starters, there was this one famous research professor who brought in millions of dollars each year to the university in grant awards. He had three women - over a period of about six years - make very credible allegations of harassment and unwanted touching in the lab. How credible? The university paid out a total of nearly a million dollars to make threatened lawsuits go away without every being filed. The women? Curiously, each one was tall, athletic, blonde, and very attractive. They could have passed for sisters/cousins. The professor? Nothing happened to him. He's still there. He's still famous. Someone has been assigned to follow him around and make sure he doesn't touch the grad students anymore.

Then there was this time a Russian professor, who leaned hard toward paranoia and delusions, became convinced that a grad student was stealing his valuable secrets. He confronted the student and wasn't convinced of the student's proclamations of innocence.

So he befriended a campus cop - and paid the cop to handcuff the student in a classroom - where the professor and the cop both berated the grad student, threatened his life, pretended to swing at his face (they didn't hit him, but were screaming in his face and mock-punching him). The did this for FOUR HOURS. Finally they let him go - and he went straight to the local (non-campus) police station, trembling and in a near-state of nervous breakdown.

The cops showed up only to find that the professor had already left campus - apparently he left campus, went straight to the airport, and took the next flight to Russia. They arrested the campus police officer.

Long-story-short, the university paid off the grad student (six figures), he was permitted to transfer to another lab to finish his degree, the campus cop was fired (charges were dropped as part of paying off the grad student) and the professor came back from Russia in a few weeks and went back to his job. Nothing ever happened to the professor - he's still there.

Instead of firing a professor at my previous institution for being inappropriate with students they installed glass windows, replacing the walls on one side of his office. That way everyone could see in. But he didn’t get fired or reprimanded. Lesson: if your professor has glass walls, there might be a reason.