
Why I left Academia: Part I - dvnguyen
https://www.allisonharbin.com/post-phd/why-i-left-academia-part-1
======
avs733
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-
wher...](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) [2] [https://www.allisonharbin.com/post-phd/mob-mentality-and-
tox...](https://www.allisonharbin.com/post-phd/mob-mentality-and-toxicity-in-
academia)

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

------
scott_s
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.

~~~
upvotinglurker
They have primary advisors, but (based on experience working in an
administrative position at a US university) I get the feeling humanities
programs are very different from STEM subjects. The decision on whether one's
work is "correct" and worthy of a phD is so subjective, and prevailing
theoretical trends are so arbitrary and subject to change, that it's easy to
reject a dissertation based on cliquish whims. She may have believed,
plausibly given her experience, that her primary advisor would take Dr. Mao's
side like everyone else. (If Dr. Mao wasn't her primary advisor, which it kind
of sounds like they were, since it was their job - which they did not do - to
send the dissertation to the rest of the committee?)

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.

~~~
scott_s
Based on those sentences, I had concluded Dr. Mao _was not_ her advisor: "I
had to email my dissertation mostly un-read by my advisor to my entire
committee (a scandal in and of itself), because, as my advisor wrote in a
terse email to me, they did not have time to read it. Despite the gross
negligence that this brazen declaration signaled, I was relieved by this,
because it meant that I would go straight into my defense with a very high
chance that Dr. Mao had not discovered what I feared they would."

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.

~~~
upvotinglurker
Yes, the sentence can be read either way (as "the advisor" and "Dr. Mao" both
referring to the same person, who had not read the dissertation, or two
different people). Dr. Mao's role seems to be kept almost deliberately vague -
possibly in response to her lawyer's advice as stated in Part III?

She does seem to state that her defense was conducted by three people - Dr.
Mao, Dr. Hortense (who she did "go to" and got an unhelpful response), and
"The third person in the room, another professor on my committee" who appeared
surprised by the proceedings.

~~~
kmill
> kept almost deliberately vague

I think it's a mix of lawyer advice and a disavowal of Dr. Mao as her advisor
-- a way to maintain some dignity. The member of the dissertation committee
who is most likely to be "impossible" to remove is the chair. More evidence
for the roles: "I told Dr. Hortense in this November email that I was worried
about my ability to pass my defense, especially if Dr. Mao was not going to
read it prior to sending it out to the entire committee."

~~~
scott_s
Yes, I now agree with you and upvotinglurker. That also explains the mystery,
and the hidden horror: her advisor plagiarized her.

~~~
vkou
She also mentioned that she would have been elated if Dr. Mao had just
credited her in a footnote when he published her work. I imagine that this is
shitty, but common in student-adviser relationships.

------
_raoulcousins
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.

~~~
hyperbovine
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.

------
bluenose69
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
> 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
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
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.

------
tugberkk
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.

------
baby
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.)

~~~
thearn4
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
Why would it bug you? It's mostly like having a blog, except that you don't so
you use a pre-print platform.

------
RealityNow
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)

~~~
aaron-lebo
[http://raceethnicity.rutgers.edu/menu-i/graduate-
assistantsh...](http://raceethnicity.rutgers.edu/menu-i/graduate-
assistantships/207-allison-harbin)

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
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.

~~~
TimonKnigge
Not to stoke the fire but she's on this [1] page with Flores as advisor.

[1] [http://arthistory.rutgers.edu/menu-iii/current-
students/curr...](http://arthistory.rutgers.edu/menu-iii/current-
students/current-student-list)

------
lisper
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.

------
pdonis
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
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.

------
labster
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
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.

------
jorgemf
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.

------
sevensor
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.

------
slolean13
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

------
setgree
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/economist...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-01/economists-
profit-by-giving-things-away)

------
JepZ
Such stories always remind me of that one:

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-
higgs-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-
academic-system)

------
dsfyu404ed
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.

------
bachmeier
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.

------
Invictus0
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
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.

------
erdojo
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
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
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.

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

~~~
kmill
The relationship is unclear, but I think "Dr. Mao" _is_ the advisor/committee
chair.

------
phoenixstrike
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_pap...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_papers)

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.

~~~
kmill
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.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>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.

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.

~~~
kmill
Yes, thanks for clarifying what I said into what I meant. If this essay was
really such a problem, it is rather suspicious that it suddenly appeared as
the basis for both of their respective works. "I'd never heard of it" could
indirectly mean "and I doubt Dr. Mao had, either." I'm curious whether this
essay was cited in Dr. Mao's work...

------
hprotagonist
"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.

------
edison85
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

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

------
stillhere
>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.

------
atemerev
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.

------
boona
> 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.

