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Re:Sexual harassment is rife in the sciences, finds landmark...
by carlyfan on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @06:27PM
(#17307530)
That incident was in the middle of the Obama's 8-year term. I tend to think local-level management has more to do with it than the president. Of course, the current one doesn't help either.
The amount of mismanagement in that school was fascinating to witness. I couldn't be happier seeing the dissatisfaction level in that school was so damn high that the president of that university was protested out of his position by African American students not long after. Not because of me, of course, but when he made the CNN front page, I thought, holy shit for once history happened.
International students are the minority that gets fucked the most when bad people are in charge. We have no rights, we aren't even considered immigrants, we get fucked if we speak up, we get fucked if we don't. Even now, you see, I still have to speak about my experience under a nickname.
I just knew from a first-hand source, a very accomplished PI was suspended just a couple of weeks ago from the job held at a large research institute. He also had appointments at the two largest universities in the same state. The description was that he "stormed out of the building." Apparently, he (white male, eh) employs a number of postdocs from China and apparently made out/had sex with them. It was so ridiculous that there were witnesses of him pushing the postdoc-single mom baby's cart in the park. The reason is described in the article: If the postdocs want good recommendations, they better keep their mouths shut. Oh, and somehow, according to the same source (first-hand), reports of the sexual harassment from the PI was swept under the rug and was mysteriously disappeared before the #meeto movement.
As an international student, I understand how hard it is to change jobs as a student in F-1 visa in here. The visa situation for international students and postdocs made it especially easy to exploit those people. If you get kicked out of the lab you're currently in, you have extremely limited time to find a lab in the same university, otherwise, you will be kicked back to the home country. If you find out that you're not a good fit for the university then you're literally fucked -- you can't be employed, you can't have gap time to find another one. The only way is to find another university who is willing to adopt you first and then transfer. But heck, that's a catch-22: How can you find another university if you don't have a good recommendation?
Personally, I can attest to that visa situation from another angle. I have a very bad taste in my mouth the first week I worked for a public school as a grad student here. So before I entered grad school, I worked for a public educational institution in the US as an OPT student after receiving my bachelor's degree. They were grateful for the extra work I did for them before I departed for grad school, so they offered to pay me some trivial extra amount of money. So, to make sure everything was OK, I called up the international office in the new school to explain the situation. Not waiting for me to finish my sentence, they threatened to deport me because "I told you not to work on anything else when you're on F-1 visa." I was totally disheartened by that response and it literally ruined my whole positive outlook for the grad school for me.