Was anyone ever a graduate student research assistant or know someone who was? If you do, this really shouldn’t surprise you at all.
Professors are the very definition of hypocritical “limousine liberals” who are for the little guy in theory but treat absolutely everyone who isn’t at their “level” like dirt.
When my mentor went for his graduate studies in the lab of a ‘survived the Concentration Camps’ Biologist she told him.
“You be here half the day.”
“Why only half the day?” he asked.
She looked perplexed. “How many hours in day?”
“24” he answered.
“You be here working half the day.” she concluded.
12 hours. That was her minimum. “Half the day”.
And the work they do, half the day or not, is supposed to be in furtherance of a successful defense of a scientifically novel thesis. Not getting professor Chang's laundry done.
My daughter just started as a grad research assistant. What sort of things should she be prepared for being tossed at her?
This is especially true if you are a foreigner in a US graduate school. Student visas (rightfully) do not permit foreigners to work off campus, and since the university is most such students' only source of income, they literally have to put up with this in order to stay in school.
In a previous life I was a graduate student... the only reason I did not have to put up with this type of indentured servitude was because as a US citizen I could legally work other jobs.
Depending on the proclivities of your research director, graduate school is some combination of a formal apprenticeship, a term of indentured servitude, and pledging an old-school fraternity.
If you’re lucky, it’ll be mostly like the former.