I used to think, in my naivete, that good teachers attract good students, and that nice teachers attract nice people to be students. I still believe this is overall true, but with a corollary: nasty teachers will not really attract nice students, but nice/good teachers will attract not only nice students, they will attract nasty people as well (one could say that nasty people are all over the place - I really don't think nice teachers attract any more than their quota).
A good teacher might weed out students who don't fit in to her overall philosophy of teaching budo, but it seems that a nice teacher will not (and I think a bad teacher won't care). Certainly, when I was teaching at my old place, I was careful to guard what I felt the place needed to be, and I had to do it from time to time in the face of my old sempai, who never wanted to deny anyone membership. I would also give people a try, but unlike him, if a new student was disruptive or rude or bad-tempered, I did my best to minimize his (generally his) involvement, both to protect other people and in hopes that he would take the hint and find a place more suitable to train (i.e., not with us). To be honest, there were really only three times that we had people troublesome enough to warrant a real reprimand, and in the way things were being run at the time, either Otani Sensei or a majority of the yudansha made the decision. While I made suggestions, I never did anything by myself.
As I have pointed out many times, good manners are a top requisite in a sword dojo. The practice of iaido itself has been overlaid with rituals and politeness in order to deliberately impose a sense of decorum on practitioners. Swordsmanship is so potentially dangerous as a practice, there is simply little else that can be done. But, as I have found out, outward manners do not eliminate political intrigue. Factionalism can take place all the while the proprieties are being observed.
When a nice teacher retires or dies (I have had an example one of each), if the not-nice students are still present, it is a strong bet that one of them will be the successor, in spite of the wishes of the previous teacher. I have seen this happen two-for-two so far. The nice people are pushed aside, the not-nice people assert themselves the way they normally do in other aspects of their lives, and the character of the group changes. The nice people either hang on out of a sense of desperation or vestigial loyalty, or they will leave. Or they will become more like the new teacher themselves, consciously or not.
One of my naive ideas does still hold true: students will do as their teacher does. If the teacher is ignorant of the cultural context of practice, the students will exhibit next to no curiosity themselves. If the teacher is arrogant and thinks he knows more than he really does, the students will do likewise and think nothing of it. If a teacher is unscrupulous in his personal life (I know, I know - it's not anyone's business), the students will decide that maybe dealing honestly with people is not very important either.
Otani Sensei used to give us little homilies about behavior from time to time. Generally speaking, all of us, including me at the time, used to listen politely but then not worry about what he was actually saying. I had a moral education of a sort, so I used to blow off these exhortations the way I used to blow off church attendance as a teenager. But I now see there was a reason for his mini-lectures. He was trying to forestall what eventually happened - at least in America, aggression wins out, and the others either change to suit or go elsewhere.
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