Aochen Li ASA002 A04 Week 5

Aochen Li ASA002 A04 Week 5

In the chapter of reading, "An offering: Healing the Wounds and Ruptures of Graduate School", Cindy Nhi Huynh describes the difficulties she met while she pursued her doctorate. She outlines her experience in five stages, "Wrecking, Bleeding Out, Cleaning the Wound, (Ad)dressing the Wound, and Scar Tissue". What impressed me a lot is the "Bleeding Out" stage. In this part of the chapter, the author uses her own experience to describe how she was treated in academia. She describes herself as a pawn and she was forced to do those researches that she didn't want to conduct and she was blocked to conduct those researches she is interested in. Moreover, after Cindy transitioned between dissertation chairs, she thought she met a better dissertation chair since she thought she is better supported in various ways. However, her new dissertation chair gave her a threat when she expresses her own opinion about a high ranking administrator on campus. From my perspective, this is also a violation of free speech. From this part, I felt it will be arduous for a person to pursue justice in academia since those stakeholders have various ways to impede you to find the truth. Also, it made me feel upset since people you trust to be supportive may change their attitudes to you because of the stakeholders. After reading this chapter, my impression of academia is totally changed.

Question: Since people who cause injustice in academia usually have great power(for example, the threat discussed above), is it really useful to fight with those people?

Reference: Valverde, K.-L. C., & Dariotis, W. M. (2020). Fight the tower: Asian American women scholars resistance and renewal in the academy. Rutgers University Press.
(n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/if-you-love-research-academia-may-not-be-you