9 ms·

Why I left Academia: Part I

170 points by dvnguyen 9y ago

sevensor 9y ago
I've heard and read a lot of grad school horror stories, and I've seen some unfold before my eyes, but this one takes the cake. I'm impressed she escaped with her sanity.
baby 9y ago
I have a hard time relating to this story, as it's easy to be public about what you're doing and what you're finding. We also have pre-prints in order to secure a spot. 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.)
- upvotinglurker 9y ago
  Pre-prints as a way of declaring ownership of your research findings (or whatever the humanities equivalent is) seem to be much less of a thing in the humanities. For example, I've heard the fear of someone "stealing" your ideas before you can get formal credit raised as an objection to libraries' attempts to create open access pre-print databases. At my university, dissertations must be submitted and "published" online (a replacement for the two paper copies that used to be printed and stored in the university library), but some students exercise the option of putting an embargo on the online copy, so it's not readable by the public until after they've found a press to publish the book they plan to turn it into.
- thearn4 9y ago
  While this is true, the "flag planting" nature of pre-prints also kind of bugs me. But I know this has been discussed on HN before.
  - baby 9y ago
    Why would it bug you? It's mostly like having a blog, except that you don't so you use a pre-print platform.
- Balgair 9y ago
  In humanities? We barely have them in Bio outside of CRISPR stuff.
tnecniv 9y ago
I admit I'm puzzled as to why she went to the dean first instead of her advisor?
- kmill 9y ago
  The relationship is unclear, but I think "Dr. Mao" is the advisor/committee chair.
Invictus0 9y ago
The inability for even well-known universities to hold accountable their own is well-documented and discipline-independent. Whether pertaining to sports, sexual assault, or plagiarism, universities muster an incredible institutional inertia that smothers and insulates the university from any claims of wrongdoing, no matter how blatant.
- howlinabout 9y ago
  To be fair, though, I've seen horror stories that work in the opposite direction as well. 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.
jorgemf 9y ago
I feel sad she couldn't report it because of the consequences. This only gives more power to the people who do it. But it makes me more anger the response of the dean that she couldn't report it or her career would be ruined.
phoenixstrike 9y ago
After reading parts 2 and 3, here are my thoughts. >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_papers 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.
avs733 9y ago
It is worth reading all three parts of this story...especially the last one. 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-where-the-old-devour-the-young-is-a-field-that-is-dying-a-post-about-graduate-student-empowerment https://www.allisonharbin.com/post-phd/2017/8/1/a-field-wher... [2] https://www.allisonharbin.com/post-phd/mob-mentality-and-toxicity-in-academia https://www.allisonharbin.com/post-phd/mob-mentality-and-tox...
- metaphorm 9y ago
  this makes me feel ridiculously vindicated for dropping out of my PhD track in philosophy and starting over in Computer Science
hprotagonist 9y ago
"Lucky Jim" by Kingsley Amis should be essential reading for grad students. This author's story sounds pretty familiar, but without the comedic revenge denouement.
scott_s 9y ago
As someone who was a computer science grad student for a long time, this is horrifying to read. But I'm confused. If I had experienced something like this, I would have immediately spoken with my advisor; my advisor was not as invested in my successful graduation as me, but he was the second-most invested person, academically. Are art history programs different in that students do not have primary advisors? 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.
- eeks 9y ago
  Same here. I cannot believe the amount of organized dishonesty. I have a Ph.D. in CS; if anything remotely similar had happened to me, my advisor would have stepped in strongly. Also, my field is a very small world and such a behavior would have discredited the vilain almost on the spot. Maybe this kind of behavior is more common in liberal arts?
  - Balgair 9y ago
    Bio is more like humanities, it seems, than CS. I've seen Primary Advisers sabotage students in defenses before, it's not fun, and it's not uncommon (~15% of them, maybe). Don't ask me why, but it happens. I even saw a PI sue a student for 'work not completed' after he graduated and the PI signed the forms. The student just went back to China and nothing came of it, but for a few months there it was pretty hairy trying to educate the student in US laws and calm him down.
  - geezerjay 9y ago
    > Maybe this kind of behavior is more common in liberal arts? 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.
_raoulcousins 9y ago
This seemed so strange to me as a former operations research PhD student. Most people were co-authoring all of their papers with their advisers. There was nothing to steal because the adviser is already an author on all of it. The rare single-author paper was usually a side project of no interest to the adviser. 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.
- scott_s 9y ago
  I felt similarly. In computer science, we tend to publish our work as we go, so the dissertation is just weaving all of that work together into a coherent narrative. (Or coherent-ish.) I wonder if the humanities are more susceptible to this kind of abuse, maybe because they don't publish as much during the process? Long turn-around time on publishing articles could exacerbate this.
- gozur88 9y ago
  Seems like you would have known, or at least heard rumors. Word gets around when people do that kind of stuff.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kenferry 9y ago
  The expectations around co-authorship vary from field to field.
- hyperbovine 9y ago
  There is just no comparing a STEM Ph.D. with what the author was doing (Ph.D. in art history). I literally think the STEM degree should have a different name, S.D. or something. Penury, ~8-yr tenure in grad school, book-length thesis, zero job prospects (academic or otherwise).. it's just a totally different world from what you experienced.
labster 9y ago
Sigh. What happened to her was terrible. But I would have just taken the deal to get the Ph.D. Yes, it's theft, it's a year of work lost. But we live in an unjust world. If you have physical property stolen, sometimes you just have to take the loss and move on. 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.
- cavDXF 9y ago
  It should not. Moral decay is a result of the system itself. Not that it is something new, but it gets more and more adamant when more and more people or employers want a PhD. Standards for post graduate students have been lowered (at least in my country) over the last 30 years to cope with the demand. 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.
tugberkk 9y ago
This reminded me of the movie: Flash of Genius http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/ 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.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
boona 9y ago
> The fresh hell I’d suddenly found myself in ... a graduate student going up against a tenured professor who had everything to lose should the allegations be proven true. > 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.
RealityNow 9y ago
I only skimmed through Part I, but why is the author hiding the professor's and dean's name? Nothing is going to change if the guilty aren't publicly outed. (Obviously names should be accompanied by evidence to support the accusation)
- upvotinglurker 9y ago
  In part 3 she states that her lawyer advised her to be vague to reduce the chance of the school bringing a frivolous lawsuit against her (which could bankrupt her even if she "won").
  - AlgorithmicTime 9y ago
    She should contact Ken White at Popehat for free speech legal advice. He likes to help people with finding a first amendment lawyer who will work pro bono.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  http://raceethnicity.rutgers.edu/menu-i/graduate-assistantships/207-allison-harbin http://raceethnicity.rutgers.edu/menu-i/graduate-assistantsh... 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.
  - pfooti 9y ago
    yah, based on part 3, where it's mentioned that Mao had an exhibition in Los Angeles, it seems like either Zervignon or Flores would fit the profile - both had exhibitions in LA and are in fields that are close enough to Harbin's work. Probably one's Mao and the other is Hortense. Most dissertations are available online (and usually mention the committee members in the front matter), although this one might be withheld for obvious reasons. EDIT: this is pure speculation, and not of much utility. I just happen to be eating lunch and clicking around.
    - 9y ago
pdonis 9y ago
After reading through the whole story, my biggest question is: where can I find her dissertation (particularly the final chapter where she says the stuff she always wanted to say about her field) online?
- kreetx 9y ago
  Read through the whole story too, and would like to see all three: the paper sent to Dr Mao, the Dr Mao's writing, and then the paper published "a few years back" which Dr Mao was supposedly basing his writing on. Otherwise, this is a really sad story. Personally, I would have went legally and publicly ballistic immediately, but I know -- people are different.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Two things come to mind here. 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.
ohdrat 9y ago
squarespace is not handling the load for this article... nice problem to have.
atemerev 9y ago
Things like that happen in all fields, but some are worse than the other. On average, humanities are worse than scientific disciplines. Biology is worse than computer science. Computer science is worse than physics. In pure mathematics, hardly anybody cares about politics at all — it either checks out, or it doesn't.
stillhere 9y ago
>When the day of my defense came, I got to campus early—far too early—and spent most of my time perched underneath some monument to a long-dead white man while chain-smoking and obsessively texting everyone I knew. No reverence for the dead or their legacy or any help they provided.
erdojo 9y ago
I started off reading this with the expectation I'd be right in joining the fight with her. It is, after all, a pretty bad allegation, us ladies have to stick together, and I'm ready to take a side! 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?
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  You don't finish a PhD without being resilient. Seeing as how her work is about postcolonial feminism, she's probably very aware of how unfair life is. 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.
  - potatoyogurt 9y ago
    It's also an enormous betrayal from a part of her life from what she probably viewed as the most significant part of her life (assuming the facts are as described). That sort of betrayal is really hard to handle.
- stupidcar 9y ago
  "how many times did she describe her crying in this story?" 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.
edison85 9y ago
Great writer, but very sad story. The support she has from the academia community as a whole tells me something really does need to change here
bluenose69 9y ago
It's too bad humanities people tend not to use plain text that are checked into git, with hash codes and time stamps that are hard to fake. That way, she could have shown the various Deans that her work predated that of Dr Mao. 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.
- thethirdone 9y ago
  > It's too bad humanities people tend not to use plain text that are checked into git, with hash codes and time stamps that are hard to fake. That way, she could have shown the various Deans that her work predated that of Dr Mao. 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.
  - KingMob 9y ago
    This is something a blockchain is actually good for. Just submitting a hash of the work into a block proves you wrote it before a hash in a later block.
    - thethirdone 9y ago
      Definitely, a blockchain is just about the only way to do this without trusting a third-party. Git on a blockchain sounds like an interesting idea. I wonder if anyone has done that.
- Balgair 9y ago
  Oh, yeah, none of those committees would have cared, let alone known what git was to begin with. It's not about the truth, it's about the posturing.
bachmeier 9y ago
There is definitely some information missing from this story. If the case for plagiarism was as clear-cut as the author makes it sound, the reaction of the university officials was very unusual. There is an email trail for the student's version of the story, and the student had a lawyer, yet all of the university administrators sided with the professor to protect Dr. Mao? 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.
slolean13 9y ago
It's too long and contain details i am personally not interested in, but i can feel your frustration and the way you want to keep your sanity is by using a detailed description. I ain't gonna read the part 2 hoping the best for you. But no matter what there is some point in everyone's life where they get stuck like this, a strangling situation. Either go with the flow and live like others because normal people live like that, don't they? They adjust and give up in front of the system and people more powerful than them, but sometimes if we want to fight them we will have to put everything on line, our career, relationships and even life. Outcome might be favorable for you but ultimately the system is like that, its the basic nature of power, morally you won't have done that if you were in his place but practically thats not true because he did iy to you, so in real world you can't beat the system! Accept the fact or if you really wanna fight and have some dramatic revenge episodes, go for it but be ready to lose things, but hell yeah you will feel alive more than those normal people
JepZ 9y ago
Such stories always remind me of that one: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
lisper 9y ago
The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is an academic culture where an advisor doesn't get kudos for an idea that their student came up with. This (again AFAICT) is unique to the humanities. In technical fields, an advisor gets points when their students succeed, to the point where if a student fails a Ph.D. defense it reflects badly on everyone on the committee. Because of that, by the time you get to your defense, it is a foregone conclusion that you will pass unless you screw it up badly. If that is not the case, your committee won't let you defend. (That leads to its own set of dysfunctional dynamics, but it's nowhere near as dramatic or emotionally taxing as what happened here.) 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.
setgree 9y ago
Hello, 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/economists-profit-by-giving-things-away https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-01/economist...

170 points by dvnguyen 9y ago

I've heard and read a lot of grad school horror stories, and I've seen some unfold before my eyes, but this one takes the cake. I'm impressed she escaped with her sanity.

baby 9y ago

I have a hard time relating to this story, as it's easy to be public about what you're doing and what you're finding. We also have pre-prints in order to secure a spot. 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.)

upvotinglurker 9y ago
Pre-prints as a way of declaring ownership of your research findings (or whatever the humanities equivalent is) seem to be much less of a thing in the humanities. For example, I've heard the fear of someone "stealing" your ideas before you can get formal credit raised as an objection to libraries' attempts to create open access pre-print databases. At my university, dissertations must be submitted and "published" online (a replacement for the two paper copies that used to be printed and stored in the university library), but some students exercise the option of putting an embargo on the online copy, so it's not readable by the public until after they've found a press to publish the book they plan to turn it into.
thearn4 9y ago
While this is true, the "flag planting" nature of pre-prints also kind of bugs me. But I know this has been discussed on HN before.
- baby 9y ago
  Why would it bug you? It's mostly like having a blog, except that you don't so you use a pre-print platform.
Balgair 9y ago
In humanities? We barely have them in Bio outside of CRISPR stuff.

tnecniv 9y ago

I admit I'm puzzled as to why she went to the dean first instead of her advisor?

kmill 9y ago
The relationship is unclear, but I think "Dr. Mao" is the advisor/committee chair.

Invictus0 9y ago

The inability for even well-known universities to hold accountable their own is well-documented and discipline-independent. Whether pertaining to sports, sexual assault, or plagiarism, universities muster an incredible institutional inertia that smothers and insulates the university from any claims of wrongdoing, no matter how blatant.

howlinabout 9y ago
To be fair, though, I've seen horror stories that work in the opposite direction as well. 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.

jorgemf 9y ago

I feel sad she couldn't report it because of the consequences. This only gives more power to the people who do it. But it makes me more anger the response of the dean that she couldn't report it or her career would be ruined.

phoenixstrike 9y ago

After reading parts 2 and 3, here are my thoughts. >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_papers 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.

avs733 9y ago

It is worth reading all three parts of this story...especially the last one. 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-where-the-old-devour-the-young-is-a-field-that-is-dying-a-post-about-graduate-student-empowerment https://www.allisonharbin.com/post-phd/2017/8/1/a-field-wher... [2] https://www.allisonharbin.com/post-phd/mob-mentality-and-toxicity-in-academia https://www.allisonharbin.com/post-phd/mob-mentality-and-tox...

metaphorm 9y ago
this makes me feel ridiculously vindicated for dropping out of my PhD track in philosophy and starting over in Computer Science

hprotagonist 9y ago

"Lucky Jim" by Kingsley Amis should be essential reading for grad students. This author's story sounds pretty familiar, but without the comedic revenge denouement.

scott_s 9y ago

As someone who was a computer science grad student for a long time, this is horrifying to read. But I'm confused. If I had experienced something like this, I would have immediately spoken with my advisor; my advisor was not as invested in my successful graduation as me, but he was the second-most invested person, academically. Are art history programs different in that students do not have primary advisors? 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.

eeks 9y ago
Same here. I cannot believe the amount of organized dishonesty. I have a Ph.D. in CS; if anything remotely similar had happened to me, my advisor would have stepped in strongly. Also, my field is a very small world and such a behavior would have discredited the vilain almost on the spot. Maybe this kind of behavior is more common in liberal arts?
- Balgair 9y ago
  Bio is more like humanities, it seems, than CS. I've seen Primary Advisers sabotage students in defenses before, it's not fun, and it's not uncommon (~15% of them, maybe). Don't ask me why, but it happens. I even saw a PI sue a student for 'work not completed' after he graduated and the PI signed the forms. The student just went back to China and nothing came of it, but for a few months there it was pretty hairy trying to educate the student in US laws and calm him down.
- geezerjay 9y ago
  > Maybe this kind of behavior is more common in liberal arts? 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.

_raoulcousins 9y ago

This seemed so strange to me as a former operations research PhD student. Most people were co-authoring all of their papers with their advisers. There was nothing to steal because the adviser is already an author on all of it. The rare single-author paper was usually a side project of no interest to the adviser. 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.

scott_s 9y ago
I felt similarly. In computer science, we tend to publish our work as we go, so the dissertation is just weaving all of that work together into a coherent narrative. (Or coherent-ish.) I wonder if the humanities are more susceptible to this kind of abuse, maybe because they don't publish as much during the process? Long turn-around time on publishing articles could exacerbate this.
gozur88 9y ago
Seems like you would have known, or at least heard rumors. Word gets around when people do that kind of stuff.
deleted 9y ago
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kenferry 9y ago
The expectations around co-authorship vary from field to field.
hyperbovine 9y ago
There is just no comparing a STEM Ph.D. with what the author was doing (Ph.D. in art history). I literally think the STEM degree should have a different name, S.D. or something. Penury, ~8-yr tenure in grad school, book-length thesis, zero job prospects (academic or otherwise).. it's just a totally different world from what you experienced.

labster 9y ago

Sigh. What happened to her was terrible. But I would have just taken the deal to get the Ph.D. Yes, it's theft, it's a year of work lost. But we live in an unjust world. If you have physical property stolen, sometimes you just have to take the loss and move on. 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.

cavDXF 9y ago
It should not. Moral decay is a result of the system itself. Not that it is something new, but it gets more and more adamant when more and more people or employers want a PhD. Standards for post graduate students have been lowered (at least in my country) over the last 30 years to cope with the demand. 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.

tugberkk 9y ago

This reminded me of the movie: Flash of Genius http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/ 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.

deleted 9y ago

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boona 9y ago

> The fresh hell I’d suddenly found myself in ... a graduate student going up against a tenured professor who had everything to lose should the allegations be proven true. > 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.

RealityNow 9y ago

I only skimmed through Part I, but why is the author hiding the professor's and dean's name? Nothing is going to change if the guilty aren't publicly outed. (Obviously names should be accompanied by evidence to support the accusation)

upvotinglurker 9y ago
In part 3 she states that her lawyer advised her to be vague to reduce the chance of the school bringing a frivolous lawsuit against her (which could bankrupt her even if she "won").
- AlgorithmicTime 9y ago
  She should contact Ken White at Popehat for free speech legal advice. He likes to help people with finding a first amendment lawyer who will work pro bono.
aaron-lebo 9y ago
http://raceethnicity.rutgers.edu/menu-i/graduate-assistantships/207-allison-harbin http://raceethnicity.rutgers.edu/menu-i/graduate-assistantsh... 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.
- pfooti 9y ago
  yah, based on part 3, where it's mentioned that Mao had an exhibition in Los Angeles, it seems like either Zervignon or Flores would fit the profile - both had exhibitions in LA and are in fields that are close enough to Harbin's work. Probably one's Mao and the other is Hortense. Most dissertations are available online (and usually mention the committee members in the front matter), although this one might be withheld for obvious reasons. EDIT: this is pure speculation, and not of much utility. I just happen to be eating lunch and clicking around.
  - 9y ago

pdonis 9y ago

After reading through the whole story, my biggest question is: where can I find her dissertation (particularly the final chapter where she says the stuff she always wanted to say about her field) online?

kreetx 9y ago
Read through the whole story too, and would like to see all three: the paper sent to Dr Mao, the Dr Mao's writing, and then the paper published "a few years back" which Dr Mao was supposedly basing his writing on. Otherwise, this is a really sad story. Personally, I would have went legally and publicly ballistic immediately, but I know -- people are different.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

Two things come to mind here. 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.

ohdrat 9y ago

squarespace is not handling the load for this article... nice problem to have.

atemerev 9y ago

Things like that happen in all fields, but some are worse than the other. On average, humanities are worse than scientific disciplines. Biology is worse than computer science. Computer science is worse than physics. In pure mathematics, hardly anybody cares about politics at all — it either checks out, or it doesn't.

stillhere 9y ago

>When the day of my defense came, I got to campus early—far too early—and spent most of my time perched underneath some monument to a long-dead white man while chain-smoking and obsessively texting everyone I knew. No reverence for the dead or their legacy or any help they provided.

erdojo 9y ago

I started off reading this with the expectation I'd be right in joining the fight with her. It is, after all, a pretty bad allegation, us ladies have to stick together, and I'm ready to take a side! 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?

aaron-lebo 9y ago
You don't finish a PhD without being resilient. Seeing as how her work is about postcolonial feminism, she's probably very aware of how unfair life is. 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.
- potatoyogurt 9y ago
  It's also an enormous betrayal from a part of her life from what she probably viewed as the most significant part of her life (assuming the facts are as described). That sort of betrayal is really hard to handle.
stupidcar 9y ago
"how many times did she describe her crying in this story?" 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.

edison85 9y ago

Great writer, but very sad story. The support she has from the academia community as a whole tells me something really does need to change here

bluenose69 9y ago

It's too bad humanities people tend not to use plain text that are checked into git, with hash codes and time stamps that are hard to fake. That way, she could have shown the various Deans that her work predated that of Dr Mao. 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.

thethirdone 9y ago
> It's too bad humanities people tend not to use plain text that are checked into git, with hash codes and time stamps that are hard to fake. That way, she could have shown the various Deans that her work predated that of Dr Mao. 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.
- KingMob 9y ago
  This is something a blockchain is actually good for. Just submitting a hash of the work into a block proves you wrote it before a hash in a later block.
  - thethirdone 9y ago
    Definitely, a blockchain is just about the only way to do this without trusting a third-party. Git on a blockchain sounds like an interesting idea. I wonder if anyone has done that.
Balgair 9y ago
Oh, yeah, none of those committees would have cared, let alone known what git was to begin with. It's not about the truth, it's about the posturing.

bachmeier 9y ago

There is definitely some information missing from this story. If the case for plagiarism was as clear-cut as the author makes it sound, the reaction of the university officials was very unusual. There is an email trail for the student's version of the story, and the student had a lawyer, yet all of the university administrators sided with the professor to protect Dr. Mao? 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.

slolean13 9y ago

It's too long and contain details i am personally not interested in, but i can feel your frustration and the way you want to keep your sanity is by using a detailed description. I ain't gonna read the part 2 hoping the best for you. But no matter what there is some point in everyone's life where they get stuck like this, a strangling situation. Either go with the flow and live like others because normal people live like that, don't they? They adjust and give up in front of the system and people more powerful than them, but sometimes if we want to fight them we will have to put everything on line, our career, relationships and even life. Outcome might be favorable for you but ultimately the system is like that, its the basic nature of power, morally you won't have done that if you were in his place but practically thats not true because he did iy to you, so in real world you can't beat the system! Accept the fact or if you really wanna fight and have some dramatic revenge episodes, go for it but be ready to lose things, but hell yeah you will feel alive more than those normal people

JepZ 9y ago

Such stories always remind me of that one: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...

lisper 9y ago

The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is an academic culture where an advisor doesn't get kudos for an idea that their student came up with. This (again AFAICT) is unique to the humanities. In technical fields, an advisor gets points when their students succeed, to the point where if a student fails a Ph.D. defense it reflects badly on everyone on the committee. Because of that, by the time you get to your defense, it is a foregone conclusion that you will pass unless you screw it up badly. If that is not the case, your committee won't let you defend. (That leads to its own set of dysfunctional dynamics, but it's nowhere near as dramatic or emotionally taxing as what happened here.) 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.

setgree 9y ago

Hello, 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/economists-profit-by-giving-things-away https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-01/economist...