Ironically, she stopped at a Masters, after this same university forced her to restart her phd thesis 3 TIMES, due to changing staff. She worked on it one semester, then they changed her major professor. Worked on the 2nd one another semester, and they again changed her major professor. Considered a 3rd time and she just threw her hands up and said, fuck it, which I don't blame, at all.
She's still a full-time faculty member, has written/designed 3 courses for them, that are taught by herself and others to this day, and gets kudos every semester from students she's taught.
The college system is slightly less uncaring than the government. The big difference is the college system drains 20 years of your future income with insane pricing and if you get shit on due to THEIR changes, that's just your happy ass.
I think the main problem with issues like this that happened to your partner is people fear making waves so much that they don't even consider going to a lawyer to enforce the implied contract that she had as a grad student with both the university and the original thesis professor.
Legal action is used even by unions to enforce their rights and contracts. If you don't have a union, legal action is the only strength a cog in the machine has. Use it, or get run over.
I'm not just writing out of my butt, I've successfully done this once. It is risky, but is it realistically any worse than what happened in this situation? It's not as if there's only one university awarding PhDs. And if you're swapping professors left and right, it's not as if staying at the university is really benefiting your original research goals.
One of the many things that pissed me off about it was they didn't even try to match her up with a prof in her specialty. Just threw her to the next prof available, because "Fuck it, not my life. That'll be $14k..thanks!"
She's still a full-time faculty member, has written/designed 3 courses for them, that are taught by herself and others to this day, and gets kudos every semester from students she's taught.
The college system is slightly less uncaring than the government. The big difference is the college system drains 20 years of your future income with insane pricing and if you get shit on due to THEIR changes, that's just your happy ass.