One of my favorite profs basically banned anything that wasn't conducive to learning from his classroom.

Want to use your laptop in class? No.

Haven't eaten all day and want to munch on chips? No.

Asking questions that could very easily be solved on your own? No. (he would answer questions that were remotely important to the topic at hand, but he would tell you to write your question down and then figure it out yourself after class if it was a simple or dumb question - e.g. "what does W3C stand for?")

Interrupting class to ask to go to the restroom? Blank stare. (Found that one out the hard way... intensely embarrassing for my freshman self)

Turns out, the second you advocate for yourself by pushing back in a mature way, his respect for you increases tenfold. Not to the point of being completely okay with you doing anything, but he addresses you as an adult and has a rational discussion about his policies.

Having him as a prof really helped prepare me for the real world. I think younger people really underestimate (is there a word for reverse-estimate?) the value of personally encountering strife and conflict in relation to people in power.

I had always seen myself as being extremely anti-social (no, I do not mean non-social; I am the type of person who will jump because you tell me to stand still, even if it means my life), and I was taken aback at his rational response to that behavior. Everyone else in my life had fought me on it, tooth and nail, but he engaged me on it.

He asked me to explain why I thought his policies were unreasonable. He tried to convince me that they were reasonable as though he needed to convince me - every other authority figure in my life until then had made it clear that they had no need to convince me, and that I needed to either fall in line or fail out.

It's interesting to talk to my former classmates about him. They seem divided about 50/50 between people who loved him and people who hated him. Those like myself who loved him are the ones who pushed back when he did things we thought were unfair or unreasonable; he responded respectfully and reasonably to that. Those who hated him are the ones who either accepted or ignored his rules; those who accepted the rules resented them, even though they never put forth effort to change them; those who ignored the rules resented them even more, and most ended up failing out because they refused to show up for class.

I think the tl;dr for my experiences - at least as it concerns students - is that professors are people, and they need to be evaluated and engaged as such. Far too many students (at every level) unconsciously perceive their teachers as god-like beings, yet they are anything but. They are humans, just like everyone else - with perhaps the only difference being that professors are much more likely than the average individual to perceive themselves as effectively invincible*. It may be true that the institution supports their behavior and shields them from repercussions, but institutions rarely force a student's hand any more than they force teachers to fall in line; students fail to realize that as a group they are vastly more influential and powerful than any one professor could ever hope to be.

(*I say this as the son of a professor. I honestly believe that my dad is incredibly humble compared to the vast majority of professors, yet I can still see the areas in which his career has boosted his self-esteem far past what is reasonable.)