Agree. When i first heard this I was shocked.
Exactly as you say, he actually needed help.
If he wouldn’t listen to the professor’s feedback and adjust the grades then, yes, being a TA was not for him.
MOO I feel the prof must have tried to talk to him but he wasn’t open to feedback and as a last ditch before the steps for his removal we were set in motion they tried getting him some raw feedback from the class.
MOO, Notice his own master program prof allowed to write a “narrative” about his criminal thinking survey that he said he would conduct, but then didn’t, by his own failing to leave himself enough time process the data.
MOO, so he was treated kindly by a professor with the power to fail him for late work and then turned around and burned the undergrads assigned to him when he had the power.
Maybe. I don't give the doctoral program professor any breaks though. If what the student described really happened, the professor was wrong. Period. It doesn't matter IMO if he had already tried to talk to BK. He's the professor. He holds the power. If what the student described really happened, it might have "triggered" BK (although no way the professor could have known that so no blame there.) More importantly from the standpoint of acceptable professor behavior, just what did his atrocious stunt teach the class? Nothing good, that's for sure and nothing that will help this professor's future TAs interact effectively with students (if the professor is even given any more TAs if the story is true) nor will the stunt help any other professors' TAs. Just disgusting.
I'm not sure we should be so hard on BK's master's program though. We have no idea what sort of theses were proposed and completed by BK's classmates. Perhaps narrative work vs quantitative work is ok in that program. (Hard for me to believe but some programs actually prefer qualitative/narrative work these days.) And COVID was incredibly disruptive. BK and his thesis situation may not have been unusual. And to a great extent, unlike in a doctoral program, whether a master's student finishes on time does depend on the supervising professor and what he/she permits. For example, for BK to do his late survey, I'm pretty sure he would have needed permission from the IRB (Institutional Review Board that oks human subject research) His thesis professor would have had to sign off on the IRB application. Why did she agree to let him gather data so late? I suspect it may have been another adjustment made for COVID and not made just for BK and not made just at that university. Lots of stuff considered iffy or downright unacceptable was done at lots of universities because of the pandemic.
JMO