First complaint, 2005

July 3, 2005
Dr. A. Leigh DeNeef
Dean of Graduate School
Duke University

Dear Dr. A. Leigh DeNeef,

This letter follows our meeting of June 30 and serves as my petition for reexamining my advisor Professor Sucheta Mazumdar’s unprofessional academic advising, including the manipulation of relationship by unequal power and the perpetration of emotional abuse over the past two years. Between late May and early June I had two meetings with the Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Chair of History Department to discuss the problems with my advisor. The result of these discussions is a probationary letter in which the Department of History gives me one year to find a new adviser and take the preliminary examinations (See the attached copy of the probationary letter). Although I accept without reservation the expectations the department sets for me over the next ten months, I disagree with the department about the reasons on which the probationary decision is based. Therefore, this petition also serves as my reply to the probationary letter. Here I bring up the issue to the Graduate School for your attention.

Professor Mazumdar has repeatedly displayed her unprofessional conduct in advising her students, which was further exacerbated by her authoritarian and capricious personality, and discrimination toward Chinese students, especially in the semester of Spring 2005. As for the unprofessional advising, I request that the Graduate School initiate a formal investigation of the following facts:

Professor Mazumdar has changed my program concentration three times without giving reasonable explanations (See the attached Self-Evaluation Report and Professor Wood’s evaluation to my work in HST 302 for details). As a result, my research focus has drifted from Sino-U.S. trade to racial issues in China, then to Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta. Actually, when it happened to me the first time, I had been kept in the dark until another professor told me in his class that my advisor changed my program concentration. The frequent change of my concentration in the two years has created great difficulty for me in focusing on my research. More importantly, I have no power over my future research and focus of academic interest.

Professor Mazumdar has disparaged such basic principles as academic freedom in her instruction and research. Instead of open discussion, she always imposes her own views on her students. In the first semester, I was asked to write a paper about modern Chinese intellectuals’ racial prejudices and discrimination toward black people. Although I had expressed my disagreement with her proposition, I had feared offending her and had to seek any possible proof of such discrimination to cater to her academic interest (See the attached Self-Evaluation Report for the details, also see Chronicle of January 25 for Andrew Collins’s story and Dialogue of June 17 for Minutes of the Academic Council)

Professor Mazumdar failed to provide supportive coursework to my research. In the attached Self-Evaluation Report, I have listed all courses I took in the past two years. As you will find, there is no solid coherence that put all the courses together, and most courses are unrelated to the field of my dissertation. And as a Chinese student who has studied Chinese history for seven years and acquired a master degree in China, I was still forced to take many basic courses of Chinese history. Actually, I felt I was required to take her courses of Chinese history because there were not many students registering her courses.

Professor Mazumdar lacks basic knowledge and skills in advising her students. (1) Only in late May, two years into my graduate career, did Professor Mazumdar say I had four fields of study, which I should know in my first semester. They are American south and African American history, Asian American studies, gender issues in 20th century China, and the United States history. All these four cannot make sense with my program concentration. (2) Although I didn’t fail to pass my academic writing course, Professor Mazumdar expressed her strong concern about my English writing for which her solution was to ask me in the past semester to watch movies and write reviews each week. She didn’t accept my reviews except that I had gone to the writing studio for the modification. It took extra time and energy to go through this whole process, and I don’t think it is an effective solution. (3) She failed to give a reasonable explanation about the course sequence. In the first semester, I was asked to take Professor Wood’s class that was set for students who were preparing for master thesis or dissertation. Professor Wood had expressed his great concern about the rationale of my taking this class because it was very unusual for a first-year graduate student to take this senior seminar (See the attached Self-Evaluation Report for the details).

So far, I got E or E minus for most of my courses in history except one B and one B plus. Professor Mazumdar (and the department in the probationary letter) thought I failed to make satisfactory progress. Although I disagree with Professor Mazumdar that my performance is poor, I would like the Graduate School to take into serious account the poor training I have received in the past two years.

The unprofessional academic advising is just one part of my terrible experience at Duke. The more intolerable is the emotional abuse I have suffered at her hands. In the past two years, I worked as a slave for her and lived in the great trepidation every day; sometimes I had to endure her discrimination. Here are some facts:

According to the handbook of the History Department graduate studies, the graduate students “do not owe their advisers any work outside the formal, paid roles of research assistant or teaching assistant”, but Professor Mazumdar failed to meet these standards. In the first semester, she asked me to work for her without pay until the department notified me that such work should be terminated since I had no obligation to work for any person except the required RAs and TAs for the department. After that she paid me about $270 per month to continue to work for her in the second semester. In the semester of 2004 Spring, she applied for a CIT Fellow project. Since she thought I had good knowledge and skills in information technology, she invited me to work on the project for which I got one third of the fellowship. My responsibilities in the project included searching online resources, downloading usable materials, editing the database, and putting them together in the proper order. Obviously, it turned out that my work went beyond the project in the following year. Actually I became her secretary and teaching assistant of all courses. I had to check out and return her books, photocopy her documents unrelated to the project, scan images, set up equipment before her class, take charge of her class, collect final papers for her class, and do other manual work. In her version of this story, she said to the DGS in this June that she applied a funding for me so that I didn’t need to work in the summer of 2005. The truth is the CIT project began in the summer of 2004.

Professor Mazumdar abused the power and the trust with which her position endowed her when she worked with me. She paid much more attention to her personal trivia than my intellectual work. Even in summer and winter breaks, she also required me to give my schedule over to her and work for her. During the past two semesters, I had to come to her classroom in advance to prepare for her class and stay in the graduate lounge to wait for a short talk about my intellectual work after her class was over. Actually such talks usually ended up with her new personal trivia assigned to me. From this January to March, I spent most of my time in working as her secretary and teaching assistant for such numberless trivia as converting her documents into PDF files, taking care of E-reserves, designing the flyer for her conference, even showing the way to the parking lot for the attendants of her conference (See the attached correspondence during this period). In the meantime, I took three courses, worked as an RA for the department, and did extra ten-page writing every week by her demands. She treated me as a cheap (sometimes free) labor instead of her student. It is ridiculous that she reproached me for my so-called “poor performance” and failure to meet her deadline in the April.

Professor Mazumdar violated Harassment Policy at Duke at the most severe extent. She not only lacked the least respect for her student but also displayed her disagreeable personality through emotional abuse. The most insulting moment happened in February, 2005 when I said I was overloaded and had difficulties to manage my time to get all things done, Professor Mazumdar seemed to lose her temper. In the following day, she declared I had PMS (Pre-Menstrual Syndrome). She also called the CAPS in my presence and forced me to make an appointment. And she said she would check with the CAPS to see if I had talked with a psychiatrist. Intimidated by her power, I had to go to see a psychiatrist. In addition, in late May, Professor Mazumdar required that I write a self-evaluation and self-criticism to explain my “poor” performance. I don’t know which other professor on the earth could do that to her student.

With the increasing tension between Professor Mazumdar and me from April of 2005 on, she began to punish me by setting up obstacles for my final papers. In the end of the past semester, she flooded my mailbox with Emails and asked me to respond right away. In these emails, she required me to follow her strict procedures to finish the final papers, both for her and other classes. The requirement was very unreasonable. For example, she asked me to turn in the outline of each paper I was writing for other classes for her approval (See the attached correspondence of this period for the details). She insisted that I could not go ahead with papers without her approval of outlines. In addition, Professor Mazumdar also threatened to give me a C minus for my work of Mississippi Chinese because I failed to give her an annotated bibliography in which I was required to write 25 lines for each item in bibliographical list. By requiring extra work and unnecessary procedures she successfully murdered my limited time in the end.

Professor Mazumdar also expressed her discrimination toward Chinese students and added her disparaging remarks toward my former university. In the Email she sent to me on April 9, she wrote, “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 possibly take their prelims in the third year and pass”. It is absolutely discriminatory that Professor Mazumdar extended her judgment based on the limited sample to the whole group of Chinese students, but obviously at least one of her Chinese students became the victim of her discrimination. After studying fours years here, her third student (name erased) became so disappointed that finally she had to quit the Ph.D. program. In late May, Professor Mazumdar attacked my former university by asserting that “I had no idea that compared to Nanda, or Beida, where I had students from, or Zhongda where I studied, Nankai training was so poor.” (See the attached correspondence of this period for the details) Such remarks are totally irresponsible and unsuitable that any professor who has the least common sense will avoid making under any situation, not to mention that Nankai University is so prestigious in the field of History that its many alumni are leading American History research in China.

I regret that I didn’t report the problems to the Department of History and the Graduate School earlier. It is every Duke student including international student’s right to live and work in a safe and friendly environment free of intimidation and discrimination; it is also every student’s right to receive professional academic training and embrace our deep belief in academic freedom. Unfortunately, my experience at Duke has become a painful one because of a professor who disparages and tramples the common values of this intellectual community and our dignity as human beings. Based on the above facts, I request that the Department of History repeal the probationary letter which failed to admit the professor’s misconduct and give convincing reasons for the probation. If the Department of History considers the original probationary letter as the final decision, I hope that the Department can add this document to Professor Mazumdar’s file and explain the university’s harassment policies to her in detail after the Graduate School confirms the facts I have given in this letter and the attached documents. In addition, I hope the Graduate School can watch for any possible revenge from the professor or any other individual of the department during my stay in Duke.

I appreciate the Graduate School’s effort to solve the problem and look forward to the results of investigation. Please let me know if I can be of any help in the process.

Sincerely,

Zihui Tang
Graduate Student
Department of History

Appendix
Chronicle of Spring 2005 with all correspondence
Self-Evaluation Report
Probationary Letter
Peter Wood’s Evaluation for HST 302
CDs for CIT Fellow Project and the Database of Sucheta Mazumdar’s Global Women’s materials
Copies of Chronicle of January 25, 2005 and Dialogue of June 17, 2005