Moe Time

Brown on Brown Oppression

The Squeeze's brother, Oblaw, is in graduate school at a state university on the Eastern seaboard. His thesis advisor is an Indian professor, and he recently told me a story that has become all too familiar.

Seems he wanted to do an internship this summer, and his advisor allowed him to look for one. He interviewed at several places, and after many closed doors, finally found an internship with a company that actually worked with his professor on occasion.

He went back to his professor and told him the good news. The professor suddenly changed his mind. All of a sudden, the internship was not okay. He had a project deadline in August, and needed this guy around. Well, Oblaw was a little taken aback. He had been going through some tough times financially, and was really looking forward to the extra five or six thousand bucks that he would make over the summer. Now, even if he worked full-time over the summer at school, he would make only half of that. He tried pressing his advisor on the matter, but his advisor was adamant - and the fact that he had given permission to look for an internship earlier was completely ignored.

So now, Oblaw was in a tough situation. He had the offer letter (which was for six months and had an eye-popping number on it). If he defied his professor and went anyway, there would be repercussions - he might lose funding next semester, or his advisor might, in his displeasure, throw roadblocks on the way to the PhD. If he did not go, he wouldn't get the extra money and carry forward debts that we was counting on getting rid of. After weighing the pros and cons, he reluctantly decided to stay in school over the summer, and try to get his advisor to pay him a full-time wage. He figured that he would rather count on funding for the duration of his graduate course than risk that for a couple of thousand dollars.

I've heard a lot about Indian professors in the U.S. treating their Indian graduate students quite badly. I never personally experienced it - I never got a PhD and I worked only with American professors - but enough people have told me horror stories about their Indian professors. Overwork, underpay, work outside of graduate research, and threats to funding are all fair game and are routinely thrown at Indian students. Apparently, it is a common joke in India that students coming here for graduate school should always look for an American advisor - he has to watch football on Sunday, so you get a day off.

I know that graduate life is hard, but the treatment of Indian graduate students by Indian professors seems to be a little beyond the pale. Manipulating funding and rudely changing the options available to a student without notice go beyond the hard work and poor pay that graduate students can expect. I've noticed that Indian professors tend to have mostly Indian graduate students as well - I wonder if this is because the professors find it easier to squeeze every penny's worth out of them.

I don't know if this is true for other ethnicities as well - do Chinese students have the same problem with Chinese professors? I think that with Indians, the professors expect the same sort of deference to their status that students show professors in India, and they take advantage of it. Also I don't know if this is just an engineering thing, or whether it's true of other departments in which there are Indian professors (although I can't imagine that there are many).

Does Oblaw have any options? Or does he simply have to take the fact that his advisor arbitrarily changed his mind on him as a fact of life at the bottom of the academic food-chain? I'd be interested to know the experience of others in this situation.

Posted by moe at May 26, 2004 10:46 AM