St. John's University Dean Cecilia Chang Charged With Using Grad Students As Servants
    By Hank Campbell | October 1st 2010 06:55 PM | 3 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
    First rule of being a university dean; you don't use grad students as slaves.    Instead, you wait until they get a Ph.D. and then pay them slave wages and call them post-doctoral fellows.  

    Sheesh, everyone knows this, but St. John's University former dean Cecilia Chang was in charge of East Asian Studies so she knows more about Asians, namely that she could bully them into doing her laundry and whatever other menial jobs she had in mind and culturally they were going to have to take it.   Ahhhh, it's good to be in the humanities because you can show people your culture by exploiting them just like you would back home.

    Or she thought that Catholic good works means letting students chauffeur her kids around.   She also embezzled $1 million before being busted so she was teaching her East Asian culture studies students about tithing.

    Cecilia Chang
    But she looks really nice.  Photo: Ellis Kaplan/NY Post

    Since the average salary for a college dean in America is $212,000, and St. John's is not an average school, you'd think she could afford to pay illegal domestics the way everyone else in the New York does rather than treating students as indentured servants .   But the District Attorney in Queens is on the case, having handed her a 205-count indictment.

    Comments

    Donquixote5
    Dear Hank,


    Many thanks for your post. I guess the story isn't surprising at all. It is just an example of the general trend I have described here.


    Respectfully yours,

    Evgeni B Starikov
    Evgeni Starikov | 10/03/10 | 04:31 AM
    Hank
    Hi Evgeni,

    I read it but I didn't 'get' it.   That economist wandered back and forth between Utopian mumbo-jumbo and a longing for the good old days of the USSR.   In his world view, the very site you are on could not exist because we were outsiders attempting to crash into this closed world of Big Science dominated by long-standing, well-financed machines.    And yet here we are, more successful than Nature or Science in this arena and the only site more popular than us lost $20 million being so, while we are profitable.

    No one forces post-docs to be post-docs, whereas slaves clearly have no choice in the matter, but plain old economics drives prices down when there are too many.  The solution is managed expectations - will the time you spent getting a degree earn you more money in your chosen field than the time earning practical experience?   In theoretical physics, no, you have to write a pop science book but if you are going into a biotech industry position, you will absolutely make more money with a PhD.  In the obscure humanities (East Asian studies) anyone who thinks they are going to parlay that into a real job is out of their mind, their solution is to find a job in academia and there will be few of those, which will mean gaining a competitive advantage in any way possible.   But that is not an indictment of the system, it is an indictment of people who get PhDs in fields that will only make them qualified to work at Starbucks.

    People who don't care about money at all are a different matter, but they are competing not only with other like-minded research people, but those who stay in academia because they don't want to get a job - and those exist and they have managed their whole careers getting by so they have crafty personalities.

    So, much of the issue Gennadievich is concerned about is not an external one - Big Science holding people down - but rather an internal one.
    —
    Want more no-nonsense, independent science? Buy Science Left Behind
    Hank Campbell | 10/03/10 | 10:45 AM
    Donquixote5
    Dear Hank,


    many sincere thanks for your prompt response !

    The point is that since 20 years the world has radically changed, for the USSR and its dependencies have disappeared - together with all of their internal problems. And Gennadievich is just concerned about the modern world as a whole - and as it is - in particular, with the global academic world, which he certainly belongs to, so that his opinion can in principle be considered the one of a true insider.

    As for me, I have both the USSR university - plus 7 years of the USSR scholarship - and also 20 years of experience with the scientific research all over the world. I am definitely insider as well.

    My conclusion largely agrees with that of Gennadievich: the modern scientific world is in pain. It's suffering a huge decay being gradually but rather swiftly downplayed to become a kind of "artisanship" based upon the "scientific grant system".

    I agree with you when you point out that huge difference between the natural sciences and humanities. But there is still one common point - the wholeheartedly sincere interest in Finding the Ultimate Truth, be it in effect existent or not. And it is in fact this aspect that renders virtually any kind of scientific research so fascinating, gripping, heart-stopping - well, even addictive, if you wish ... This is NEVER about something like making money or material profit (which is itself addictive and heart-stopping as well, but purely on its own) !

    Well, many innocent young people who get in touch with the Holy Grail of the Scientific Research become really addicted - in the best sense of this word. In such a frame of mind they further get in touch with the vicious system of the "scientific grants", with all these boring and cruel "publish-or-perish" modalities, with all these boring and cruel landlords who abuse the charisma of the "professor" title - and so on, so forth. This is the turning point where the young guys get faced with the really harsh choice: to continue - or to change to another environment. In the most cases the addiction to the Scientific Research is overweighting, so that they have to become the "voluntary slaves" of the system. This is by far not the "slavery" you are referring to in your comment ! And yes, this is exactly where Gennadievich recognizes the clear return to medieval times, because the very notion of the "voluntary slavery" was pinned down and heavily criticized already by John Locke some 400 years ago ...

    ... The system in question already issues the "warning signals" - just mind the Amy Bishop case, who shot down her colleagues because she wasn't given tenure. You may downplay this happening as a kind of wild and almost impossible outbreak due to the mental illness of Dr. Bishop. This way you are right exactly to one half. The inhuman system of "tenure-tracks" and "tenures" is guilty to absolutely the same extent as the psychiatric condition of Dr. Bishop - Dr. Bishop's reaction is the pathological reaction to the injustice. And many different reactions to tenure decisions, other than just "going postal", are well known: suicides, heart attacks, depressions etc.

    Please mind the case of Grisha Perelman as well, whose refusal to get the high prizes is nothing else but an uproar against the modern academic system ...

    ... And also these are not only the modern cases ! In my most recent post about George A. Linhart I have told about the totally new and refreshing approach in thermodynamics Dr. Linhart was working on during all of his life, starting from the early 20-ies of the last century. We know this era as the one characterized by the exponential growth in all the natural sciences. But somehow the marvelous work by Dr. Linhart was cleanly forgotten. Why ? I have started to carefully investigate his CV and found that, after his getting PhD at the Yale (!) in 1912, he was working in Berkeley (!) as a postdoc till about 1917. Then he was drafted as a soldier during the World War I. After his coming back he could work a couple of years more as some kind of postdoc, but then he has left the "academic world" to become a teacher in the junior college ... He tried to come back to the official science, but in vain ! This is just what I could borrow from the published correspondence between Dr. Linhart and Linus Pauling in the late 30-ies of the last century. Therefore, this undoubtedly 1st-tier scientist was clearly banished away from the official science ! Most recently I could also read Dr. Linhart's preprints kindly made available to me courtesy to his modern colleagues from the junior college he was working in ...

    ... I am preparing now a series of publications about Dr. Linhart's research, in which he greatly contributes to our understanding of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, the "Arrow of Time" and similar fundamental concepts. Dr. Linhart is definitely the researcher of the scale of L. Boltzmann, A. Einstein, M. Planck and other great scientists. And that story wasn't taking place in the USSR or North Korea or Hitler's Germany - there is none of politics and/or economics in it. It is solely about the "stony way" of a True Scientist ...

    ... This is why, dear Hank, these are by far not local/internal problems - it's definitely a global problem common to all mankind - and should in no way be overlooked ...


    Respectfully yours,

    Evgeni B Starikov
    Evgeni Starikov | 10/03/10 | 14:49 PM