Hey now, no need to resort to name calling ("dummy"). I think you are reading far to much in her statements about her worth as a researcher to be charitable.

Hey now, no need to resort to name calling ("dummy"). I think you are reading far to much in her statements about her worth as a researcher to be charitable. "Petty" is easily read as being attached to "accusations" and not the rest of the sentence. Her point in that passage is that she wasn't given a chance to present her work and they decided to ruthlessly attack it. She said she was able to fend off attacks politely -- I see no reason to assume that she was not "able to answer these questions precisely and with good reasons." > 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.