Abusive Treatment of Graduate Students

[Tim Beasley]

Dear SEELangers (hi, Suzie!):

I was a student in UCLA Slavic, I was on leave when the 8-year review that
Tolpova refers to was conducted, but was around until the term before the
interviews for it were held.  Since then my status has lapsed; dissertation
work continues, at a snail's pace (said in the interest of full disclosure).

To the extent I have the documents she's (if it's a she) posted, they're
accurate.  I haven't checked for details and I don't have a couple.  Even
the student government resolution, useless though it be, seems
valid.  Suzie's post implied as much:  if the documents are valid, a
pseudonym is irrelevant; if they're not, the pseudonym is still
irrelevant.  And I can't imagine thinking the site was some kind of
collective effort by the graduate students.  That would, depending on the
current climate, be foolish, dangerous, or simply inflammatory.  I can
think of a couple of people that might have produced the site, but I don't
understand the timing.  Then again, I'm pretty much out of the loop.

I have trouble faulting the literature faculty.  Their denial after the
report came out was excessive in some cases, I think, but I could imagine
myself doing about the same.  I can't judge how salient the problems were
to the other faculty before the report came out.  The review of the
literature side of things was reasonable; I've seen maybe two dozen outside
reviews of UCLA departments, and participated in on-site interviews in
several as a graduate student representative.

The report took two problem Slavic linguistics professors to task, but was
conservative in how it handled the evidence--it wasn't an investigation, it
was just interviews.  "Abuse" is the correct term in many instances.  The
two problem faculty that should have been, in a just world, hung out to
dry, weren't; this isn't a just world, and frequently "the right thing" and
"the just thing" are different.  One's retired; I suspect the other isn't
allowed free rein, and that one's performance will be examined during the
next review.

If I thought that Tolpova's site was a good thing, I would have set up one
years ago, and probably wouldn't have been smart enough to use a proxy
service (a whois search returns a proxy firm in Arizona).  But since the
program is pretty much moribund--no new students, faculty FTE in the
program are down, market forces are having their say, and the new program
the outside report triggered is unlikely to attact anybody--Tolpova's site
has little usefulness as a warning.  As far as revenge goes, the professors
involved already had pretty weak personal reputations from what I gather,
whatever their academic cred was.   It's unlikely to make the poster feel
any better; for that, I'd recommend some borovicka.

Tim B.

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