That suicide is so unfortunate. As someone who was a PhD student, I understand the perceived gravity of the situation for him. It’s unfortunate he had nobody to put it in perspective.
This is one of the fields that you can easily leave academia for industry or even switch to another academic institution with ease if things start to go bad. Nobody but your own advisor will realistically care about a retracted paper (especially if you do it before publication). And if your advisor does hold it against you, that’s not an advisor you want anyway.
Please, please, please, if you ever find yourself in this situation, just walk away. You are being paid less than a Starbucks Barista to stuff a tenure-track professor’s portfolio with rushed research nobody will realistically care about in 3 years (if it was even relevant to begin with).
A PhD will teach you how to research. 99% of the research that comes out of that process will be useless, incremental crap. Issue retractions, miss deadlines, whatever. The stakes in the CS academic game are so small a complete come-apart as a PhD student can easily be turned into an extended masters degree on a resume.
Except the impact on people's reputation, livelihood, and lives are not really small stakes.
I think that quote comes partially from the perspective of someone who doesn't recognize the nature of the stakes because they're different, not because they're smaller - if it was really intended as much more than a snarky critique of academia.
It's not as if everything outside of academia somehow involves much higher stakes. You could basically dismiss the whole of Google or Facebook as being small stakes, following similar logic.
It's all tragic. If anyone ever finds themselves in a situation like Huixiang Chen, you have integrity that the world needs more of, don't despair. I suggest that your first order of business might be to find trustworthy people who can give give good advice, in confidence. Ideally, you'll eventually find someone with clout, who can take over fixing the problems, but the maybe first is to simply get good advice from trustworthy people. In parallel, go talk with a mental health counselor about how you're feeling, since feeling depressed and initially not being able to imagine any good outcome is normal.
1) Crime networks at universities are powerful. If you're at an elite school, whistle-blowing will almost certainly cost you your career, if not more.
2) Trusted sources with both clout and insider knowledge will generally advise you to get out with your hide in tact, and let sleeping dogs lie. That is the strategy I'd also advise to anyone who is not independently wealthy and has a powerful network of allies.
3) Even indication you /might/ whistle blow is enough to trigger blow-back. Be discreet. In particular, don't use university IT equipment for either personal use, or anything related to the situation. If things blow up, the university controls your data. That can give an incredible information asymmetry, as well as leverage.
... and be aware things will get better. At the time, it seems like the world. A few years later, it's old history.
These things won't change without systemic change. Unless universities adopt transparency measures, accountability measures, compensation limits, etc., we'll continue to see corrupt crooks in the admin. And universities shouldn't be able to use NDAs, non-disparage, etc. agreements to cover this stuff up. Simply no.
It's like standing up to a police officers. If you do it, you might get your head blown off. If we change the system, you might not need to worry about getting your head blown off.
If someone behaves like the mentoring professor did, they aren't a mentor, they are a crux bringing you down. Burn their reputation, your life is worth more than their "research".
I do understand the pressure this person was feeling, unfortunately they didn't see a way out.
You know how people are protesting the structural policing systems in the US in part because the systems seem like they're built to protect police instead of holding them accountable?
It's been my experience that tenure provides something similar in academia. As a lowly grad student, even in the most outrageous of cases, you aren't likely to succeed in bringing these issues to light. It would take tremendous determination and there's a very good chance you will derail your own academic career.
In most cases you have two options when you run into something like this as a Ph.D. student:
A) Stick it out, get the degree.
B) Bail.
Unfortunately I don't see folks within the system acknowledging (at least not openly) that the system is broken without extremely tragic events such as this one taking place.
As long as the department is sympathetic to the student's complaint, it will accommodate the switch if it can.
Furthermore, there is increasing attention to providing "Faculty Mentors" -- people of faculty rank who are emphatically not the student's advisor, tasked in that capacity with advocating for the student's needs alone. Look within the University for other outlets for your concern.
You're going to be working very closely with your advisor and relying on them for guidance and networking after graduation. If the relationship is toxic and the only options are A or B, think real hard about the upside of B before selecting A.
as international students, there are far more limitations, paperwork and deadlines than just switching advisors. also, the problem of heading. angry one professor , and their clique will be angry at you
what dept are you in where faculty wouldn't support each other?
surely the powerful faculty usually are the ones with the grants coming in, sometimes funding the other faculty (at least the dept/university).
His mentor (one of those involved in this fraud) refused to withdraw the paper, according to the translated messages with friends from the same link above.
It isn't up to his mentor to withdraw a paper for which he isn't the first author. It doesn't even require a retraction as it wouldn't be published yet, albeit, withdrawing is still frowned upon
It seems like Huixiang did not feel comfortable overriding his mentor's preference. All quoted remarks below are Huixing, except the one explicitly marked "friend."
> (May 22) Withdrawing the paper will cause a big impact to my mentor (Tao Li)
> He asked me that I have to finish it
...
> (May 27, friend) How is the talking with your mentor?
> he refused to withdraw my paper resolutely
> (May 28) He push me to fake, if I can't publish the paper before deadline
> (June 6) I'm done communicating with Tao Li
> The result is he will never withdraw the paper
...
> I had a fight with him. And the police almost came.
> He refused to withdraw the paper resolutely.
...
> My mentor's words are: if I destroy his reputation, he will kill me.
You have to remember how academia works both in terms of jobs and funding. His funding depended on his advisor. His future job prospects in academia and to a large extent outside of academia depended on his advisor. Because of this extreme multi-year power imbalance, and near indentured servitude at the hands of most advisors who are borderline abusive to students, senior authors control the publication process. It's true that any author could have stopped publication in theory.. but that doesn't mean anything.
> His future job prospects in academia and to a large extent outside of academia depended on his advisor.
In academia, you're absolutely right. But outside, sorry, no.
I can perfectly understand how a PhD student under an abusive advisor would feel they're trapped. And I'm gonna sound racist, but I've seen the kind of toxicity there is among Chinese researchers in Western universities, and that's probably making this kind of situations even worse.
But I've worked in the industry, and then in academia (as technical staff, never researcher), and now I'm back in the industry, in a team where more than half the people have a PhD (or better).
Outside academia, people either don't give a damn, or know very well how fucked up it can be. Unless you're extremely unlucky and the hiring manager is somehow in the close network of your advisor, nobody will bat an eye if you, as a job candidate, say "academia was not for me, I dropped out of my PhD."
So please, if you read this and feel like you have no options, don't believe that.
> Only one e-mail response is received. That PC member said the first author of a paper has no right to withdraw an article due to methodology concerns and that if an advisor says publish, they should just publish without complaint.
Well thanks for that, I'm confused about the relevance of an 'advisor' to a paper from the perspective of the PC or publisher, or how they would even determine who an advisor is. Do IEEE/ACM have rules for this or is this part of the alleged fraud?
It is of course good to have the support of your supervisor, but if the relationship breaks down then you shouldn't feel that your graduation is at risk because of this. I think most universities will have a policy on changing supervisors that favours the student? Whether or not this affects your future career I don't know.
This is one of the fields that you can easily leave academia for industry or even switch to another academic institution with ease if things start to go bad. Nobody but your own advisor will realistically care about a retracted paper (especially if you do it before publication). And if your advisor does hold it against you, that’s not an advisor you want anyway.
Please, please, please, if you ever find yourself in this situation, just walk away. You are being paid less than a Starbucks Barista to stuff a tenure-track professor’s portfolio with rushed research nobody will realistically care about in 3 years (if it was even relevant to begin with).
A PhD will teach you how to research. 99% of the research that comes out of that process will be useless, incremental crap. Issue retractions, miss deadlines, whatever. The stakes in the CS academic game are so small a complete come-apart as a PhD student can easily be turned into an extended masters degree on a resume.