There are plenty of petty turds in academia today who do similar things, ruining the careers and significantly negatively impacting the lives of students. When they decide that they do not like a student (for _any_ reason), they have unchecked means to make that student's life miserable, make them jump through extra hoops, get them removed from the program, psychologically torment them, etc.
I don't understand why this is the strongly held narrative here.
Those are some pretty major misses for a PhD candidate physicist. He would have been forwarded of this since he was forced to take one of the exam panels courses!
