A mini-version of the culture in Singapore???
ST Jan 7, 2006
S. KOREAN graduate students just can't say 'no'[/b][/size]
Culture of following professors' orders blindly being questioned in
wake of stem-cell scandal.
IN THIS hard-driving, Confucian-influenced society, seniority
rules.
Challenging bosses is uncommon and failing to bow to superiors
invites reproach.
A culture of following orders is most evident in academia, a field
that has been roiled by the fraud scandal surrounding the once
esteemed stem-cell scientist Hwang Woo Suk.
Blindly obeying lordly professors is seen as the surest way to
success. Graduate students compete for coveted tenured faculty
positions known here as an iron rice bowl a Chinese term
meaning as a guaranteed lifetime job.
But some are now questioning the system, including a few in
academias & a newspaper that editorialized against the
university culture.
Mr Kim Sun Jong, a former researcher at Prof Hwangs lab, has told
South Korean media that the professor ordered him to fabricate data
for a paper on the designer stem cells published in the journal
Science in May last year.
The problem, said the Segye Times newspaper in its editorial, is
an outdated, pre-modern lab culture of obeying seniors orders.
While it was Prof Hwang who should have ensured truth &
conscience, it is lamentable the researchers couldnt restrain such
misconduct & instead blindly followed the orders.
Some experts say Prof Hwangs underlings at the Seoul National
University had no real choice.
Prof Hwangs researchers followed the only logic of survival
available to them
even if it meant faking the research results,
said Korean studies Professor Vladimir Tikhonov at the University
of Oslo.
MBC television network reported on Tuesday that one of the two
researchers at Prof Hwangs Seoul lab, who donated eggs for
research, was pressured to do so for fear he would not list her as
a co-author for a paper.
Influential professors at prestigious schools are allowed to build
their own private kingdoms, promoting & demoting their
underlings largely at will, said Prof Tikhonov, a naturalized
Korean of Russian origin.
Listing professors as senior authors on papers even if they
contributed little, fabricating receipts to cover up their personal
use of research funds, & running errands for them are just some
of the headaches grad school students say they face.
Its hard to refuse requests for fear of retaliation, said a
doctoral degree candidate, who once went to his professors house
on a weekend to fix a computer.
But professors argue that such is misconduct is uncommon.
I think its just a small number of professors who make such
absurd requests, said Professor Cho Dong Jun, who teaches
international relations at the University of Seoul.
Ive never seen such a case.
