MCLC: more on Xia Yeliang firing (2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: more on Xia Yeliang firing (2)
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The question I have is has anyone verified the negative evaluations
actually exist? I don’t think Professor Xia ever had an opportunity to see
who his critics were. I covered higher education in China for several
years for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and leading universities—even
PKU and Tsinghua—are full of incompetent people who never get fired.
Students told me about professors who often didn’t show up for class, or
who read from notes written a decade earlier.

I also wrote a few times about prominent academics who had been caught
plagiarizing or lying about their credentials. I confirmed some of these
reports re credentials by contacting foreign universities, but these
individuals held on to their positions. Of course, it seems that in most
of these cases, the academics had close ties to the Party. Chinese
universities have a history of persecuting outspoken academics. Just look
at the cases of He Weifang, Jiao Guobiao,  and Xu Yuyou, just to mention a
few names. Remember that the party secretary is the real person in charge
at Chinese universities.

Paul