That's more true than people think. I can't tell you how many times as a college student that I've seen a prof assign his research work to the students as homework or a project, then take the best solution and have his grad students write it up and incorporate it into his ongoing research paper for future publishing. I saw this happen as a sophomore in the engineering program.
The fact is, most university Ph.Ds. are idiots. They teach a couple of classes during the day, that's all they do. They have an army of grad and undergrad students do their research for them, grade their homework, projects, and tests, teach their classes on Friday when they want to get a jump on the weekend, and teach their night lab sections. Most of them are grammatical idiots, so they don't even write up "their" work, the grad students do that. Then it publishes and the U prof gets an award for having done absolutely nothing except maybe walk around the guys doing the work, critiquing on the fly, and giving stupid suggestions that would crash the project if implemented. Oh, and they earn a six-figure salary for doing this. No wonder these guys stay at the university until they're so old they're petrified. They'll never get to go to the socials, get free travel, get all the free goodies, and make nearly as much money in retirement.
Contrast this with the real brains that work at the national labs. They don't get hired right out of school. They have to show that they have actual smarts and can actually PRODUCE something useful out in industry. The national labs are very selective because granting somebody a super-duper top secret security clearance is very time-consuming and expensive. They're not going to just give that to some warm body that they hope is going to work out.
What is really funny is that professors use these students as labor; like cleaning snow off their houses side walk, etc. I also can tell u that Harvywood has nothing on these creeps.