I wouldn't begin to know how to talk about how ethnicity affects graduate advising, particularly when it comes to the sciences. But Moe, an Indian-American engineer, has a fascinating anecdote that leads to some equally fascinating questions:

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 he 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.

I've never heard about or encountered anything like this.

At any rate, the added exploitation that might seem permissible because of in-group familiarity (you're of my ethnic group, so I know you'll work harder for me) is generally balanced by a corresponding degree of in-group favoritism (you're of my ethnic group, so I'm going to write an especially strong recommendation). Both are unprofessional wherever they occur.

The tendency of foreign grad students to cluster has some small advantages -- especially for students who've just arrived in the U.S. and are still adjusting. But in the long run it leads to ghettoization, and is especially problematic for students who are looking for further work in academia, where a professional attitude is essential, as is the ability to work with people from other backgrounds.

Speaking as an American grad. student in engineering, I have heard that certain foreign profs. are more likely to abuse their compatriots than others. But that is probably a case-by-case thing, not endemic. The only definite trend I have seen (this is a second tier Eng. school) is that even profs. who run their groups like feudal lords are deferential to Americans. First of all, they love showing federal funding agencies that they have Americans on board. Second, they know that if they get too abusive towards us, we'll just tell 'em to stick it, and find jobs, while the Chinese know their advisor is the only thing keeping them on this side of the Pacific Ocean. Third, Americans around here tend to be more creative, team-oriented, and industrious than the Chinese. I know some Indians but don't know the social dynamics as well.

My own experiences in graduate school were similar to what Prof. Singh describes above - a tendency for favoritism that was balanced by the expectation of hard work. However, speaking to the students themselves resulted in a litany of complaints about poor/selfish guidance with no noticeable favoritism when it came to finding jobs or internships.I suppose, though, that it could also be just normal grad student complaining.

I suspect that it is not just a matter of advisors and advisees being from the same country. There may well be some specific dynamics arising out of Idian culture. Their culture is not just like the US, but with spicier food.

I'd love to hear from readers--teachers, students, parents, people of the world--about what kinds of reading they were assigned in high school and how it was taught, about what they think ought to be assigned and how they think it should be taught, and about what they make of the present trend toward using popular literature--and sometimes even pulp fiction--in the classroom.
I went to prep schools in Boston in the late fifties, early sixties. I remember Great Gatsby, Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Walden and some essays, Moby Dick and Billy Budd, Scarlet Letter, big chunks of the King James Version, Huck Finn, some short stories by James, Red Badge of Courage, and there was more. Obviously no one was assigning us anything off the bestseller list.

The material was taught essentially the same way it was in college a few years later: lecture, discussion, papers. The only difference I recall between high school and college is that in college we could smoke in class, and in high school we had to wait until break for a cigarette. The New Criticism rode high and was the lens we were expected to see things through. Certainly no one babied us in high schoolóin fact, college came as a huge relief. Iíve never worked harder than I did in grades 7-12, not even in graduate school.

I found teaching literature in both college and high school unpleasant, and the more I liked a book, the more unpleasant I found it. It drove me crazy to hear people say things that couldnít be right, that were just plain old dumbóbut, naturally, itís not exactly cool professional practice to scream at a student, ìThatís the stupidest shit Iíve ever heard.î Though thatís how I felt. So, rather than leading discussions, I found myself in arguments.

When it came to assigning reading material, I tended to fall on the feed-ëem-honey side of the argument. Otherwise, one tends to spend time being a cop and playing games. Most of what I used Iíve forgotten (funny that I remember what I read in high school!). I do remember in high school using an Ursula LeGuin trilogy, which was grand for introducing stuff like symbolism, motifs, and soóbut, yíknow, I really hated introducing all that. Itís what students think about because of tests, and for the better students it might eventually add something to the pleasure of reading, but for the poorer students, it subtracts from the pleasure.

It always felt so heavyhanded to point at that stuff. Some students were excited to see the secret springs of fiction, others were appalled that the adult world had tossed them yet one more instance of nothing-is-what-it-seems.

People who like to read will find their good books eventually; people who donít wonít be fired up by Silas Marner or bestsellers either.

Teaching writing, which I do now, is much more to my taste. By theway, I work in Bangor Maine, just like the teacher in the Onion satire.

I thought you might like the post below from www.emcc.edu//faculty/jgoldfine since you figure in it indirectly.

Nov. 12 Later. Keeping Loose:
Monday the 10th I was looking at an isearch I'd seen before in many many different versions. Content was strong, but the structure was a little squinky. Maybe because I was in class and distracted or because I'd seen so many earlier drafts, I just couldn't see the material straight and figure out what went where.

I told the student: "When I had my kidney stone in September the doctor gave me four Percocets. I still have three left and now anytime there's a problem--hangnail, miss a whisker shaving, spill a glass of milk--I tell my wife I'm going to hit those Percocets. With this piece, I really need to look at it from a fresh perspective, clear my mind--so I think I'll take it home and try it with three Percocets."

He laughed, said: "Just where does this start to get constructive?"

Same class a few weeks ago. Before class I need something off a website, so I type in my stuff and up comes a picture of a Playboy bunny! The students who usually pay me not the least bit of attention are suddenly all over my computer. "Whooo! Look at what Mr. Goldfine is into! You dog! Does your wife know about this?" I can feel myself getting pink.

I say, "Ooops! All the difference in the world between dot.com and dot.org, fellas." I change the com to an org and pretty quick we have the bland innocuous website I'd meant to go to: www.erinoconnor.org . Excitement over, everyone back to his own chair.

One of the guys (we still hadn't started class) says to the room, "So how do you find those porn sites anyway?" The damnedest thing happens: all these guys who've dragged their feet about doing research and sometimes just can't navigate the web suddenly have a ton of advice, very sophisticated advice, about search engines, free and pay sites, cookies, scams, spyware, keywords, etc., etc. Ah, the looks of sad disappointment on those eager faces when I start boring old class....

You also have to consider the possibility that in this case it has more to do with finances than ethnicity. It is common for faculty members in engineering to have outside consulting relationships with companies that sponsor research. If this grad student were to intern with the company and they saw someone more enthusiastic, just slightly less knowledgeable, and considerably less expensive than the faculty member, they might not need the faculty member to perform the consulting work.