edit: In part 2, she mentions her advisor. But clearly her advisor was not someone she thought could help her. That alone makes her experience sound awful, and her environment dysfunctional.
Based on quick Googling, it looks like humanities phD completion rates are around 50% at best - which makes it sound like no one is all that "invested" in these students' successful completion.
I took that to mean that since her advisor told her that her committee was unlikely to read her dissertation before the defense, she took comfort in believing Dr. Mao - a member of the committee but a separate person from her advisor - would also not read it.
The other half of the double-whammy is there are a lot of humanities degrees with no marketplace value beyond "has a degree" unless you have a PhD, so anybody in the position to impede your doctorate has more power than he would in a STEM field.
It isn't. I've worked in a research group that focused in a specific engineering domain, and once I've noticed that my own supervisor published a paper with the results I got from computer simulations and informally shared with him to ask for his input on the findings. Essentially he took my plots, tweaked their appearance by changing color schemes, labels and ranges, and wrote a paper around those plots.
I couldn't do anything about it because in practice the only proof I had were the plots, and the paper was on a subject that was supposedly the advisor's specialty. Furthermore, back then my tenure track depended directly on that man's say. So, even if I had irrefutable proof that he usurped my results to publish his own paper, blowing the whistle on him would end my career.
defenses that revel in ripping apart at least six years’ worth of work without taking the time to acknowledge its value are shockingly common
I had annual meetings with my committee. This wasn't optional, it was a hard requirement set by the department. That way, when a committee member has a concern, they don't wait until the very end to raise it.
I'm not sure if humanities in general are horribly dysfunctional, or just her school.
I think everything in the humanities is substantially different than anything in STEM
I feel for the author, it sounds like a terrible situation.
But oh my gosh THE FEELS. This is so emotionally written that it's almost impossible to derive any legitimate facts from the story. It's like a bad romance-gone-wrong novel written from the perspective of a perpetual victim.
Parts 1-3 are bad enough. Her follow-up is even worse. Oh yes, everyone is terrified of millennials. Haha. No. You're not qualified to scare us. You just think you are, and every stupid little setback sends you into a deluge of tears (how many times did she describe her crying in this story?).
She might have been entirely in the right with her allegation, I don't know. It's too hard to tell amidst her poor me inner dialogue of pain and suffering and tragedy.
One thing her college life didn't teach her was any semblance of resilience. That life isn't always fair. That some times you suck it up. I mean, no one died, her career wasn't over (unless she insisted it be over, which apparently she did), and she got her PhD.
And she got her PhD AND got to keep her integrity. So, why's she quitting again?
Read the post less as an argument in court and more as a therapeutic response. And don't be a dick. If you had worked for years (grading lame papers and eating ramen for real because you don't get paid anything) and someone was about to steal or did steal the only thing of value you've got due to that work, you'd be upset, too.
Twice.
Once the evening after she'd be savaged during her dissertation defence. The second when she was attacked over her late submission by the Dean who'd she'd earlier gone to for help.
Maybe try using your fingers if you find counting so difficult.
EDIT: non-adviser committee members didn't usually co-author a paper, but I never heard of a committee member or professor appropriating a student's work. I don't mean to say it doesn't happen, because if it was, it would probably be well hidden. I'm just not sure if it happened in my field and I was oblivious, or it didn't.
Can't said I didn't feel nauseous reading this though, I can imagine this happening because of too much isolation.
(That was also really well written.)
Seems to be the Art History dept at Rutgers. She specializes in postcolonial feminism, there is a Ma-o there with a specialization in decolonial feminism.
EDIT: this is pure speculation, and not of much utility. I just happen to be eating lunch and clicking around.
>Petty accusations were leveled at me, critiques of why I hadn’t used certain scholars, and even the very foundation of my entire dissertation was brought into question.
If she thinks those things are "petty," she is not a rigorous scholar at all. The omission of references to certain scholars, especially if those scholars have relevance to her own subfield, should absolutely be questioned. These sort of questions test the depths to which she has gone in her own research. As a contrived example, if an art history student doesn't reference David Hume in a dissertation about aesthetics, I would absolutely question why. If said student did not cite Hume because they did not know of Hume, it is then obvious that the research was not rigorous at all.
If she wants to be considered an expert in her field then she should be able to answer these questions precisely and with good reasons. I also thought it was funny that she complained about the committee not raising those questions when she submitted her proposal years ago. That's the whole point dummy... a proposal is just a proposal, if it sounds halfway decent it gets an approval. The expectation is that you will delve into all the background and research necessary to address any critiques that may come up at your defense. An approved proposal does not in any way imply a seal of approval for every detail of the dissertation... come on now.
Also, this quote from the third part of the story:
>The similarities between the two papers were instead attributed to a paper written a few years prior by a colleague of Dr. Mao. It was then suggested that I had plagiarized that essay in my paper, as evidenced by my paper’s ‘similarity’ to this essay, as well as to the fact that I had not cited the essay. I had never heard of this essay of which I was now accused of plagiarizing, much less read it.
I wonder if the author even read this earlier paper after she received this letter? She notably does not go into it. I also can't believe how she says "I had never heard of this essay ... much less read it." As if that is a valid response to this sort of response? Consider the following (oversimplified) back-and-forth:
>A. Hey, this person plagiarized me because he said the same things I did, but he said it after I did.
>B. Actually, we think both of your papers are similar to a paper that came before either of you.
>A. But I didn't read that paper so I didn't plagiarize that paper. Therefore, since Dr. Mao read my paper and I didn't read the earlier paper, he must have plagiarized me, and not the other paper.
Do you see the gap in logic??
Obviously if she never read the earlier paper she is innocent of plagiarism, but if the earlier paper is legitimately similar to hers, then she has no claim to say that her work was plagiarized. She doesn't seem to understand the fact that simultaneous, independent development of similar ideas is in fact, very common in academia. Newton and Leibniz independently created calculus at the same time, which is well known.
A more recent example is that in 1964, three different papers were published, independently, in the same year predicting the existence of the Higgs boson, which we have all heard about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_pap...
While I fully believe that she did indeed face an extremely hostile academic environment, I don't think the facts, as they are presented by the author, are enough to convince me beyond a reasonable doubt that there was indeed plagiarism with ill intent. She seems unwilling to face the prospect that someone else might have thought of her ideas before she did. If she is serious about her claims, she will provide references to each of the three papers in question: her own, Dr. Mao's, and the earlier unnamed paper which is cited as pre-empting both of them. Then we can see if there is real merit in her claim. As it is now, this is just whining.
She also mentions submitting multiple drafts and requests for feedback, over the course of years, which Dr. Mao (who based on the description appears to be her thesis advsior) ignored. E.g. when she says "Dr. Mao had provided me with next to no feedback on my dissertation--- nothing substantial anyway. Emails with drafts went unanswered. There was the occasional promise to read it the following month, which always went unfulfilled."
If the very basis of the dissertation "had no validity" or the missing references were so fundamental as you imagine, her thesis advisor should have mentioned those things before the day of the defense.
She also seems to state (though she is less clear about this) that actual substantial wording from her essay (not just ideas) were copied. Several credible people she consulted (including her fellowship director) seemed to concur. I suppose it's possible for substantial amounts of exact wording to be "accidentally" plagiarized, but it's a lot less likely.
At least in the sciences, your thesis committee is supposed to continually/regularly keep tabs on your progress, and help ensure you're making progress towards a passing dissertation. This is the committee's responsibility.
>An approved proposal does not in any way imply a seal of approval for every detail of the dissertation... come on now.
For sure, but the committee should know how things are progressing. In the sciences, the thesis defense is not really a "defense". It only gets scheduled when everyone basically agrees you will pass, and it's more of a celebration. It's very rare to have hostile defenses, and extremely rare for someone to fail. (If that happens, it's usually due to politics.)
>As if that is a valid response to this sort of response?
True, but it is concerning if they're bringing up possible plagiarism by her and Dr. Mao, while not following through on any kind of punishment/censure of the two of them.
> If she is serious about her claims, she will provide references to each of the three papers in question: her own, Dr. Mao's, and the earlier unnamed paper which is cited as pre-empting both of them. Then we can see if there is real merit in her claim. As it is now, this is just whining.
I'm sure she would love to, but is afraid of having to deal with a frivolous lawsuit, as her lawyer warned her about.
> "I had never heard of this essay ... much less read it." As if that is a valid response to this sort of response?
A big question is why didn't Dr. Mao mention this essay during the defense. I read the "why had this not been brought up to me four years prior when I submitted my dissertation proposal" as just one example of Dr. Mao's continual poor advising. Others are mentioned throughout the series.
> She doesn't seem to understand the fact that simultaneous, independent development of similar ideas is in fact, very common in academia.
Maybe she understands, maybe she doesn't -- I found this part of the series to be more rushed, and I believe it would be a gap in logic to assume she doesn't. She talks about how the university suggested that she might have plagiarized the essay herself, which is probably why she focused on this line of narrative. "[My lawyer] pointed out that if the department really believed that I had plagiarized this new essay, it seemed ridiculous that they would agree to grant me my Ph.D. Further, he reasoned, if I had been the one doing the plagiarizing, why did they agree to let me keep the portion of my dissertation that contained the now infamous content?"
It's true that there are many unanswered questions, but I don't think it's right to read her series as an attempt to prove her case. It's telling a story that's well within the realm of believability. This professor also has a history of at least one such case brought against them just a year before.
Mao and the department have a strong motivation to find work that predates both the papers in question so they can present a possible sequence of events in which neither parts consciously copied the others work.
I didn't follow the ideas of Mao's suggesting that she had copied something in the literature. It seemed to be the material that she said Mao copied from her, but if that's the case, wasn't Mao plagiarizing? Or was Mao the author of that earlier work (and therefore a self-plagiarist)?
It's a great read, and I think the author should consider a job as a writer. Maybe all that work paid off, after all, in honing her ability to hold the readers' attention. Writers can do a lot of good for the world.
It is not hard to fake timestamps in git. There are many tools used to generate patterns for the Github contributions graph.
If you want to move a file back in time in git, you just have to do some rebasing and edit the commit times.
However, if you do not have time I would strongly suggest reading her synopsis and critiques that appear after the end of the core story [1-2]
[1] https://www.allisonharbin.com/post-phd/2017/8/1/a-field-wher... [2] https://www.allisonharbin.com/post-phd/mob-mentality-and-tox...
Otherwise, this is a really sad story. Personally, I would have went legally and publicly ballistic immediately, but I know -- people are different.
There was never an effective course for justice for her. Grad students are the least powerful group at universities, she's a woman. Single digit millionaires have no effective access to the legal system, especially in IP cases. She would have done better to take the hit, get into a faculty position, and eventually respond from a position of power.
I feel sorry for her, but unfortunately we're stranded on this planet amongst the rest of our species.
Plus the points she mentions in the fourth part of her posts is the one that made me turn my stomach over, because it is the one argument that i always knew myself, but could not grasp. It's the same reason why i left. You are not wanted because you will take the job someone already occupies.
As a tenured prof thinking hard about how to make a career transition out of academics into a slightly different field, I have plenty of stories of corruption and rewarded incompetence. This essay is a good read, but at this point I'm kind of desensitized to it.
However, universities are cautious for the same reason that justice often moves slowly and deliberately, and sometimes the guilty are not punished: because the innocent are also falsely accused.
I'm not saying this to defend universities that protect pervasively corrupt individuals or communities, which does deserve criticism. But for every story I've heard like this, where you have researchers taking credit for work not theirs, or plagiarizing, or falsifying data, or engaging in physical or sexual assault, I'm aware of other stories, where someone has falsely been accused of sexual harassment or assault, or is the victim of slander or lies. I've had colleagues who had their research labs wrongly entirely shut down because of attention-seeking behavior from another faculty member, wanting to play the role of savior. In situations like those it doesn't matter if some lawsuit procures some settlement or compensation, because a different, more pernicious type of damage has been done.
Because of things like that, I think universities often tread very lightly, because if someone comes forward with a claim it's difficult to know where it will lead. Administrations have their own problems (especially with being top-heavy) but they should be cautious, given the crap I've seen.
Also, I must say I am very surprised of some of the comments made here. It is obvious that the professor stole from his/her student; and some people here are trying to blame the student for that. A little empathy please.
I think the real problem is that a huge proportion of academic research in the humanities is bullshit and deep down the practitioners know it. They survive, then, by insuring that only those willing to Play The Game rise through the ranks. Any hint of dissent is brutally crushed.
A few comments on this. I failed out of a PhD program a few years ago, FWIW.
1) I think that many of the experiences the author had would generalize to non-academic fields -- pretty much anywhere in which there are power imbalances and vested interests. I used to be a teacher's aide in a kindergarten classroom in a rough part of a U.S. city. One day, I watched a teacher hit a kindergartner with a closed fist. It was part of a pattern of violence. This upset me, and I asked my supervisor (not a teacher) whether it was worth reporting to Child Protective Services. The supervisor said that it was ultimately up to me, but that when one of their previous charges had reported a similar situation, it had gone nowhere, hadn't protected any kids, and had seriously damaged relationships between the organization I was a part of and the school district. Sometimes you see something wrong and you can't do anything about it because you're too low on the totem pole. I'd love to be a part of the world where that didn't happen, but I think that's equivalent to hoping that I not work on anything important.
2) This whole thing could have been avoided if she or her discipline had a strong norm of posting preprints online (so her committee member couldn't have scooped her so easily). A commitment to such things is one reason why economics is more influential than other fields [1].
3) Failing out of grad school was the most difficult experience of my life to date. At the time I found it terribly unfair and undeserved. Now I'm glad to be elsewhere. I hope the author feels similarly in time.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-01/economist...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
1) This is a fairly extreme but otherwise typical example of a bureaucracy sucking the soul out of someone naive enough to not see the "everyone vs everyone else" adversarial relationships throughout the system.
2) The smaller the scraps the harder they fight over them. In big, wealthy, profit generating departments there's enough recognition to go around. Departments left to pick over what's left are bitter places.
Other things:
She was afraid that Dr. Mao would find out about her dissertation essay. But if Dr. Mao plagiarized it, why wouldn't they already know about it?
Why would another professor beg a student to drop claims that Dr. Mao stole the work if there was an email trail?
The university let her use work that they concluded was plagiarized? She even raises that issue, so they more likely concluded that there wasn't enough evidence that Dr. Mao plagiarized.
"I learned that Dr. Mao had gotten over $300,000 in funding for an exhibition and publication based off of the same idea from the essay that I had originally suspected had been based off my work." But later: "I had found out about Dr. Mao’s exhibition a few months after I had sent them the original paper." So at most a few months had passed between seeing the paper for the first time and getting $300,000 for an exhibit. That seems fast to me.
Things make a lot more sense if the two of them had been having conversations about the topic, the student sent Dr. Mao a copy of the paper when it was done, and then Dr. Mao submitted their own paper. The facts just don't add up given this one-sided presentation.
This author's story sounds pretty familiar, but without the comedic revenge denouement.
No reverence for the dead or their legacy or any help they provided.
> I remembered that all of my friends had told me Dr. Mao took advantage of me, and their increasingly exasperated suggestions that I try to stand up for myself in some way.
>I had just been academically f*cked over. And there was nothing I could do about it.
>Her outrage only fueled my sense of injustice.
My impression after having read this article is that she seems have a strong victim hood mentality. I don't know if this says more about her, or academia. Humanities should help you discover yourself and build you into a strong individual, her experience seems to have done the opposite. I also believe she should leave academia, but she's going to be in for quite the shock when she faces the free market.
