My (associate professor) master's student wanted to support a friend by attending their friend’s doctoral dissertation defense. Both are in the same program and have similar interests. Traditionally, our program (public university) invites anyone to participate in the defense presentations. When the student arrived, a committee member (chair of another department) asked them to leave because they didn’t get prior permission to attend. I have been to dozens of these, and I’ve never seen this. I asked my chair about this and they said “it was the discretion of the ranking committee member to allow an audience.” 🤯 I felt awful for my student. As if we need our students to hate academics any more.

Anyone else experience this?