PhD students at Indonesian universities say that the quality of supervision in the nation is often poor, and that many supervisors engage in inappropriate behaviour. Credit: epsgalery85/Shutterstock

When Rully Charitas Prahmana went to the United States as a visiting lecturer, the academic culture shock was extreme. “I was surprised to see an academic supervisor go cycling with his PhD students on the weekend,” says Prahmana, a mathematics lecturer at Ahmad Dahlan University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and a visiting researcher at the Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

Prahmana can’t imagine that kind of interaction at home, describing himself as being in the minority for occasionally holding informal discussions with students in a warung , small street-food stalls or restaurants that are common across Indonesia.…