Chronicle of Spring 2005
Zihui Tang
My relationship with Professor Sucheta Mazumdar in the semester of Spring 2005 became very difficult. In order for you to get sense of the drama unfolded in the entire semester, I chronologically detailed all incidents in the following part. I also attach all our correspondence in this period for your information.
I. I would like to overview my study and work in Spring 2005.
Coursework I took
(1) HST 399 with Professor Raymond Gavins (The History of the US South and the
Reconstruction);
(2) HST 399 with Professor Sucheta Mazumdar (combined with her class HST 196S—
Globalization, Women and Development, so I also took this seminar);
(3) HST 199 with Professor Rhonda Jones (Oral History of Jim Crow South).
In addition, Professor Mazumdar recommended that I sit in on Professor Chafe’s course
about the twentieth-century US history. After a couple of classes I had to stop since I had a
tight schedule for this semester.
I completed my RA work for the department (required work for part of my stipend).
Continuously worked on visual materials for Professor Mazumdar’s HST 172C. This is also relevant to CIT Faculty Fellows project. As a graduate assistant in the project, I worked every weekend to collect images and maps and create a coherent portfolio. Professor Mazumdar and I worked together to modify it every Wednesday and Friday afternoon. The work lasted until early April after I speeded up and finally finished in advance according to her demands. (See the attached CDs for evaluating my workload for this project. The total size is about 1G.)
Continuously worked as Professor Mazumdar’s TA for HST 172 and HST 196S, including setting up equipment for class Wednesdays and Fridays, photocopying E-reserve materials, coping with E-reserve problems, borrowing/checking videotapes, and other manual work.
Continuously worked as her RA, including borrowing/returning her books, photocopying, scanning, and taking care of all her work she couldn’t cope with or wouldn’t like to do;
Continuously worked on cataloging and setting up a corresponding database for her “global women” materials. (See the attached CDs for this database of 594 items)
My work relationship with Professor Mazumdar has been characterized by lofty and persistent expectations. In the interest of maintaining the best possible relationship with her, since she was my primary advisor and also the only faculty of Chinese history in the department, I felt compelled to accept the obligations, however exaggerated they were.
For Professor Mazumdar, I was expected to submit a 5-page movie review every Tuesday and a 5-page reading response based on Chinese women’s studies every Friday. At no point did we work together on my thesis project on “Mississippi Chinese,” nor did I receive any useful advice.
We regularly met Wednesdays and Fridays for her work. According to her promise, she was also supposed to meet me to discuss my intellectual work from 3 pm to 4 pm on Thursday. Since she, too, set her office hour for her other classes and students on Thursday afternoons, she was sometimes not available at this arranged time, or sometimes talked with me for a very short time after finishing her meetings with other undergraduates and graduates. In addition, she usually had to make preparation for HST 196S before it began at 6 pm on the same day.
Because of these circumstances, I could hardly get the opportunity to regularly meet her for my academic work, not mention one hour each week. My academic progress clearly never rose on her list of priorities to a position that would have afforded me more advising time.
II. For details, I attach all the emails she directly sent to me in Spring 2005. It is clear how she occupied my time for her own work and to what extent she “cares about” my study.
1. From Jan. 11, 2005 (Tuesday) to Feb. 11, 2005 (Friday)
In one month she sent me 27 emails, among which 5 messages are related to my study (Jan. 11, 15,18, Feb. 11). The remaining 22 are basically about her work, for which 4 are her requirements of visual course materials, and the other 18 emails include computer issues, printing, converting files, designing flyer, library search and checking out books, coping with E-reserve troubles. My time was totally fragmented because of these various demands that almost interrupted my intellectual work every day.
On Jan. 12 (Tuesday), we had the first talk at in the semester. According to the talking, she sent to me a summary of her requirements on my study on Jan.15 (Saturday).
From Jan. 15 to Jan. 17 (Monday), in addition to my regular work for her, she further sent me demands as follows:
Setting up computer over the weekend;
Checking E-reserve for HST 172 on Saturday;
Adding new images for visual materials on Sunday;
Checking overdue item with the library;
Tackling E-reserves problems on her computer on Monday;
Figuring out how to make a PDF file workable for her on Monday night.
These demands made me impossibly concentrate on my study, so I had to ask to put off my first movie review on next Tuesday (Jan. 25). In replying to my email on Jan. 18, Professor Mazumdar realized I worked too much for her. Although she also thought I need to focus on practicing writing, she did not stop usurping my time.
From Jan. 18 (Tuesday) to Feb. 11 (Tuesday), except 1 email on Feb.11 (Friday) is about my homework (for HST 196S), all 18 emails she sent to me are her expectations for various work.
*During this period, I submitted to her two movie reviews on “Mississippi Burning”, “Norma Rae”, and a response on the book Dragon Village. She gave feedback to Dragon Village, let me rewrite both “Norma Rae” and Dragon Village, and returned to me an untouched “Mississippi Burning”. On the other hand, although she set my research topic to “Chinese Mississippians” and tri-racial issues in Mississippi Delta, I never got the chance to discuss this issue with her during this time. All my time was occupied and fragmented by her personal work, movie and book reviews that had no connection to my research topic.
2. From Feb. 13, 2005 (Sunday) to Mar. 13, 2005 (Sunday)
Professor Mazumdar set new writing assignments for me on Feb. 13 (Sunday) in addition to the first one on Jan.15 despite the fact that she never gave me constructive advice on my intellectual work or regularly discussed it with me. The extra assignment, my own classes, her visual materials, TA/RAs, other manual work upon her request, all exhausted my energy that should be focused on my intellectual work. I felt very much overwhelmed and thus told her on Wednesday afternoon (Feb. 16) that I was overloaded and worked much for her. It was my first time to say this issue in a direct manner.
In the following day (Thursday, Feb. 17) we had a talk that was supposed to discuss my own work (see her email Feb. 17). At the beginning of this meeting, it went on normally; all in sudden she shifted our discussion to my “personal problems.” “Do you know PMS?” she asked, I did not reply; so she continued, “it is premenstrual syndrome.” She then said that I showed some of its symptoms in our last talk because I was easily excited and anxious. She further let me go to Whole Foods to buy medicine to calm myself down. Then she demanded I go to see a counselor. Next, she picked up a yellow book and got the phone of CAPS. She said on line that her graduate student was very anxious and need talk with a counselor. Then she gave me the phone requiring me to make an appointment. The appointment was scheduled on Feb. 25. She said she would check. On Friday (Feb. 18), I went to her office to pick up her computer and set up presentation for HST 172 class. She chatted with me while eating her lunch. She said there was a book called Our Bodies, Ourselves, and suggested I go to Whole Foods to buy one or could also go to Perkins to borrow one. She thought this book could help me know more about myself and adjust myself when I was in PMS. I felt insulted and mentally destroyed by those humiliating words and her authoritarian attitude.
On Feb. 19, Saturday, I was required to help with the conference she organized. After the meeting, she asked me to get Derk Bodde’s book, scan, and post to the Blackboard (also see her email on Feb. 20, 22).
* During this period, we still didn’t work together on my thesis project. Even in a limited time when she stated that she would meet me for my work, she tended to focus more on her work. She required me to do extra research into Chinese women during the land reform movement. I was kept working back and forth between two different and irrelevant themes in the semester: Chinese women in the 1950s and the Reconstruction and southern US history. Overwhelmed and exhausted by her unprofessional direction and all her personal work, I couldn’t focus on my intellectual work as well as my classes.
3. From Mar. 21, 2005 (Monday) to Apr. 12, 2005 (Friday)
From Mar. 21 to Apr. 8, Professor Mazumdar continuously assigned different work to me:
Selecting and sending picture to CIT;
Finishing her visual course materials ahead of the planning;
Taking charge of her class HST 172 while she was out of town;
Accompanying her two guests to visit Duke Homestead (she required me to introduce to them British American Tobacco Company and southern life; I had to spent much time on the topic of “southern life”).
On Apr. 9, Professor Mazumdar asked me to send her a draft of Graduate Annual Progress Report, which I had submitted on the night of Apr. 7 to meet the deadline (Apr. 8) the department set earlier in the semester. I couldn’t first turn in to her because she was out of town and very busy after returning. After knowing I handed in the report without first letting her know, she lost her temper and used discriminatory words to disparage me and Chinese students, saying “Basically, I don’t think any student from China, even one with a far stronger background than yours, and with far fewer writing problems can possible take their prelims in the third year and pass.” I was shocked; I had to rewrite and wait until getting her approval in the end and re-submitted the report on Apr. 12.
In the context of the preceding account (# 1, 2, 3,) of the demands on my time, I had no opportunity for sustained engagement with my own intellectual work. My time was both heavily circumscribed by formal and informal work responsibilities and fragmented by the unpredictability of these demands.
4. From Apr. 13, 2005 to May. 15, 2005
Having ignored my work for the past three months, Professor Mazumdar began to show her concern about my study in the end of the semester.
In the email of Apr. 13, although she was not the instructor of most courses I took in Spring 2005, she demanded that I follow her scheme to finish my final papers of all the courses without fail.
About the paper of rural Chinese women
Although she had agreed on Apr. 8 that I could focus the issue of the emancipation of Chinese women on the first half of the twentieth century (which I had done the research), she required that I take two guest speakers Anita Chan’s and Jonathan Unger’s lecture comments and combine them into my papers. I don’t think it is appropriate to integrate their lectures into my paper since they respectively focus on contemporary China since the 1950s.
About the paper of US South
I worked on the US South in both Professor Gavins’ class and Professor Jones’ Class. The requirement for the final work in both classes was different. Professor Gavins expected that I submit a paper based on the 10 books he listed for my special readings, which focused on the Reconstruction in the Deep South. Professor Jones’s class was on methodology of doing oral history; the final paper was a research report based on my chosen transcript of sharecroppers in the era of the modern civil rights movement.
Professor Mazumdar required that I work on them together despite that fact that these two papers had different focus with individual requirements from the instructors. Furthermore, she asked me to send to her a combined outline of Professor Gavins’ and Mazumdar’s papers.
I was confused by these changing and clueless demands. They also distracted my original focus of topics in different papers. In the fear of offending her and being criticized not following her directions, I painfully hesitated between following her scheme to cater to her and sticking to my original schedule to meet requirement from classes.
Only from after Apr. 12 did I have a certain extent of control of my time to focus on my intellectual work. It became clear at that time, because of overloaded work and various unpredictable responsibilities, my reading work in the second period of Gavins’ class and my thesis project were both delayed. I had to first make up for the delayed readings for Gavins’ HST 399 and thus missed the deadlines Professor Mazumdar set on Apr.13. While I was concentrating on writing final papers during this limited time of the semester, Professor Mazumdar kept interrupting my work by flooding my mailbox with emails to which she asked me to immediately respond, threatened me that she would give me “F” if I fail to follow her schedule and special requirement.
I finally turned in my final papers to Professor Gavins and Professor Jones on time, but failed to meet her deadline and requirement for her HST 399 of which I got an “incomplete”. For this failure I would like to overview the very last period of the semester of Spring 2005:
I turned in a draft of my paper for her HST 399 on April 30, and told her to send her a final one after finishing Gavins’ paper during May 2-8.
From May 2 to May 8 I was concentrating on writing Gavins’ paper into which she required me to integrate Mississippi Chinese issues. As for this paper, Professor Mazumdar set the deadline to May 5 although the one for Gavins’s class was May.8.
On May 3, she said she agreed to take Gavins’ paper as a compromise for the paper on Mississippi Chinese for an “Incomplete” course in the semester of Spring 2004.
On May 6, she changed her idea to require annotated bibliography on Mississippi Chinese along with a 5-page intellectual statement to remove that “Incomplete” with the deadline of May.8. The intellectual statement was a new requirement because she never mentioned it to me in the semester or discussed relevant issues. Because of this change, I had to put off sending her a final version of her HST 399 and write the intellectual statement according to her new demand.
On May 9, she graded my paper for that “Incomplete” (annotated bibliography + 5-page intellectual statement) as “C-“ and required me to rewrite. Her requirement for the rewritten work changed again. She said in the email “it needs at least 10 pages;” she also redefined an annotated bibliography as composing “at least 25 lines on each item (each book and each journal I listed).”
On May.14, she said the rewritten work did not live up to her expectation because it lacked Chinese materials. She required I revise and submit it on May 15.
On May 15, she said the revised work was ok and graded it as “B+”. In addition, she demanded I write a 5-page self-evaluation and self-criticism and submit it on May.21.
On May 26, I went to report the whole story to the DGS.
