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In Poland, 40% of those who had completed higher education did not survive the war. It was almost double that of the general population.The Nazis targeted intelligentsia in general, not only university professors.The fate of the professors varied from university to university.In Poznań professors were detained and kept as hostages under threat of execution in case of anti-Nazi resistance actions in the city.After Poznań University was turned into Reichsuniversitaet Posen in 1941, the majority of the professors were released. Most of them survived the war.Faced with numerous casualties in September 1939 university authorities turned Warsaw university into a field hospital. Academic activities were banned by the occupiers and went underground. Although 63 Warsaw university professors were killed during the 5 years of the occupation, the professors of the University of Life Sciences in Warsaw were not specifically targeted. Most of them survived. Together with the professors of the University of Technology they organised secret lectures throughout the war, maintaining some academic continuity. Much of their research and focus was directed towards the needs of the resistance movement. 200 mechanical and structural engineers graduated during the war, some with PhDs. In 1944, 300 academics were teaching 3500 students in secret.After the German takeover of Vilnius the professors there were sent to Stutthoff concentration camp where they were kept until the end of the war. Most of them survived in spite of tough conditions.As a result of a trap set up in November 1939 to arrest academics during Sonderaktion Krakau - Wikipedia , 184 professors were arrested in Kraków. 105 of them were professors of the local Jagiellonian university, the others had been invited over from other Polish universities. They were initially imprisoned, then most of them were sent off to concentration camps near Berlin and to Dachau near Munich.Following loud international protest by prominent Italians, including Benito Mussolini and the Vatican, those who were older than 40 were released from one of the camps at the beginning of 1940, with some more released on further international intervention in 1941 - around 100 altogether. Many elderly professors did not survive the tough conditions at the camps, where dysentery was common, food was scarce and there were no warm clothes.Many of those who survived Sonderaktion Krakau formed an Underground University in Kraków in 1942, in spite of German punitive edicts. Among the 800 clandestine students was Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II.At Lwów /Lviv university 73 professors were killed during the war, 25 of them (and their entire families) as soon as the Germans occupied the area in 1941.After the appeals relating to the Kraków professors the Governor General Hans Frank made a speech to representatives of the SS and German police in May 1940:"The fuss made about the Cracow professors was indescribable and inconvenient for German Reich . The whole affair would have taken a different course if we had settled the matter on the spot, i.e. liquidate the Cracow professors. I must insist, therefore, that from now on no one will be sent to concentration camps in the Reich but liquidated then and there or 'punished according to the law'. Any other procedure will encumber the Reich and create additional difficulties for us. Different methods are required here and must be employed henceforth". http://www.lwow.home.pl/Lwow_profs.htmlTwo days after the German capitulation in 1945 a group of Polish researchers and academics arrived in destroyed Wroclaw, still in flames, with the aim of creating educational institutions there. Among them was a biochemist, a geologist, a geographer and a surgeon. They were followed by several professors from Wilno/Vilnius and Lwów /Lviv, towns which no longer belonged to Poland; also by some academics from Poznań, Lublin and Warsaw.Before undertaking teaching they first had to take part in removing rubble, replacing broken windows, setting up laboratories and technical workshops. In response to ongoing fighting and banditry, in 1945 students spontaneously organised themselves into Student Academic Guard, a paramilitary group watching 24/7 over the university premises and the accommodation of the professors.The academics recreated the prewar structures, procedures and the climate of their former institutions.The most popular department were medical studies. Instead of the expected 200 students, 600 enrolled in the first year.Altogether in 1945/46 Wroclaw/Breslau university employed 50 professors and 120 assistants. Over 2.5 thousand students were enrolled at the university and 500 at the University of Technology. The buildings were still undergoing restoration for quite some time afterwards.Students in 1946:Warsaw university staff also had much rebuilding to do, which they had to somehow juggle with teaching.Before the war:After the war:The University of Technology suffered 60% destruction outside, 80% inside.Apart from the shortage of staff and facilities there was a new consideration.After the war the professors had to comply with the communist regulations imposed in Poland although most of them were anti-communist.Many of them took the view that they would even join the communist party against their convictions, if necessary, in order to retain control over academia. This way they still had the influence over the content and the research. Withdrawing in protest against the new regime would have meant that the regime would simply install its own people and have unchallenged free reign in indoctrination of young minds.The losses of the intelligentsia were great during the war. Intelligenzaktion alone was responsible for 100 thousand lives of the most educated people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion#Katyń massacre 22–24 thousand, Katyn massacre - Wikipedia.On the other hand, the number of prospective students also decreased dramatically during the war.Population of Poland 1938: 35 million.Population of Poland 1946: 24 million at best. Some historians put it at 18 million.

Many if not most universities in Australia do have such a policy. At James Cook University, for instance, the Higher Degree by Research policy states:Advisory Panel members must not have a marital, de facto, intimate or close family relationship with the candidate, nor should there be any reason to believe that there is such a relationship between an Advisor and a HDR Candidate. [HDR Supervision Procedure]Monash University’s procedure states:Academic units will not appoint a supervisor who is a relative or close associate (e.g. friend, spouse or business partner) of the student and which could give rise to real or perceived advantage or disadvantage to the student. Should a close association subsequently develop during the course of enrolment, the academic unit /program must make arrangements for alternative supervision, in accordance with the Conduct and Compliance Procedure – Conflict of Interest (including Conflict of Interest in Research).[…]Where a supervisor (staff member or adjunct appointee) is or is seeking to co-supervise a graduate research student with another staff member or adjunct appointee with whom they have, or have had, a close personal relationship, a serious conflict of interest exists that is to be avoided, as per the Code of practice for supervision of doctoral and research master's students and Conduct and Compliance Policy and supporting Conduct and Compliance Procedure – Conflict of Interest (including Conflict of Interest in Research).If a supervisor believes or suspects that they have an actual, perceived or potential conflict of interest in relation to the proposed supervision arrangement, they must immediately declare it and, unless a conflict of interest management plan is approved, withdraw from the proposed or existing supervisory arrangement.Formalisation and enforcement of such policies is starting to become stronger.

At the outset, let me say that I'm answering from the perspective of a successful computer science professor at an elite institution. That means I can't really complain about my undergraduate students, graduate students, teaching load, research funding, salary, etc. (I mean, I can, but you wouldn't and shouldn't take me seriously.) That's a pretty long list. Now just imagine that one or more of those would not apply to many (most?) faculty. That already generates a significant list of downsides.But even from a happy position, one can identify problems:Most of my funding comes from federal sources. Federal protocols can be stultifying. You can lose whole days to doing silly things in painful ways.Even colleagues who are collegial and intelligent and charming can prove to be remarkably unable to perform their share of service. Because academia looks down on service generally (Shriram Krishnamurthi's answer to Do professors enjoy the time they spend on administrative tasks?), this provides cover for such non-performance. As a result, people who are conscientious end up over-burdened and, proportionally, under-rewarded (because there is little academic glory in having kept trains running on time). Indeed, the system is almost optimized for abuse in this regard.Universities are not very well-run places. Most academics are not really trained (and many are perhaps not even qualified) to run large organizations. This isn't to say industrial organizations or non-profits are any better run, but you can encounter unique forms of disorganization and misorganization when you leave academics in charge (and this is compounded when they bring in “management types” to compensate). A good university is one where people largely leave you alone (which my institution does for the most part); a bad one is one where this poor execution is visited with regularity on the faculty.There is a fair amount of glory-seeking by administrators, which can lead to questionable or even disastrous outcomes. This happens in all walks of life, but academics ought to be smart enough to see through this whereas, unfortunately, they fall for it (I blogged about this some time ago: http://notes-from-a-sticky-wicket.blogspot.com/2007/07/provost-paradox.html).There is an opportunity cost in terms of salary, stock options, perks, etc., which is especially significant in my line of work. Obviously, these are (believed to be) compensated for in other ways (tenure, freedom, teaching, etc.: see Shriram Krishnamurthi's answer to Why do people pursue academic research even though it pays less than industrial research?).Finally, most subtly, and perhaps most ironically: it can be hard to concentrate. Contrary to the general public's image of professors are lone eccentrics locked in garrets, most faculty are actively engaged in numerous activities at once. It becomes very difficult to actively withdraw from all of them to work on just one thing, in depth, at length. To some extent this is just our inability to say no, but there are also genuine obligations that we have to fulfill and that we can't defer endlessly unless we want to be the kind of people who take but don't give. The stream of conference reviewing, journal reviewing, proposal reviewing, chairing of things, writing of reports, etc., can all take up a significant amount of time, and more to the point, your concentration suffers death by a thousand cuts.Do these sound like significant problems? They aren't; many are, as the Web would have it, #firstworldproblems. On the other hand, there are people who argue that we face existential threats to the entire enterprise (rising college costs, MOOCs, etc.), which are much more significant concerns for those who want to be professors.