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mosher[f85,jmc]		Double standard in Mosher case
su-bboards
Mosher

	I have been slow in responding to the bboard justification
of Mosher's expulsion partly because CKSUM (for some unknown reason)
didn't turn up the relevant bboard items but mostly because I had
hoped to have time to read the reports, etc.   Unfortunately, I
didn't have time and have to make do with my sketchy reading.

	Bill Poser asks if I have evidence that Stanford is
persecuting Mosher for his political opinions.  It is in the
nature of the case that there won't be evidence of motive.
My opinion is based on the weakness of the charges against
Mosher.  They are almost all the kind of third party injuries
that were explicitly rejected as a reason for University 
action agaist radicals in the 1970s with Stanford taking the
position that if the police wished to take action that is their
business.  Come to think of it we have the current example of
Stanford refusing to take any action of its own against the
students who blocked the trustees' cars.

	Some of the charges are downright silly, e.g. the one that
he changed the subject of his thesis.

	Poser builds up a straw man in hypothecating that Mosher's
book constitutes a draft of his thesis.  Maybe Mosher intends it as
such and maybe he doesn't, but a thesis can't be rejected before
it is submitted.  My own hope is that Mosher will publish a
scholarly paper discussing what seems to me to be a fundamental
difference in methodology between him and the tradition of scholarly
writing about China and other communist countries.  Namely, other
scholars take seriously the announced policies of the central
committees, poltibureaus and maximal leaders and evaluate how
successfully they have been carried out.  Mosher, along with
dissident Soviet writing, takes the announced policies as merely
an indication of power struggles among the autocrats and as tools
in these struggles.  In my view this approach is worth considering.

	Returning to the Anthropology Department's options, they
took the most aggressive possible course in expelling him.
I'm not even sure it has previously been used for getting rid of
a graduate student.  All they actually had to do was to deny
further assistantships, let his adviser resign, find a thesis
inadequate, and let the the clock run out.  I don't know whether
a student at Stanford can submit a thesis except through an
adviser.  I can only assume that they chose to act as they did
because they welcomed the publicity.  The most plausible reason
for that was to kowtow to the Chinese.

	Without having looked into the matter carefully, I
doubt the existence of a published "anthropologist's code"
that specifies an anthropologist's duty to obey every
post facto interpretation of every regulation of the
country in which he works.  I suspect that
the reactions of the Anthropology Department and its
Chairman would have been considerably different if the
protests about his violating regulations had come from
the government of Taiwan.

	Finally, I shall reproduce the Wall Street Journal
editorial on the subject in order to answer Eric Berglund's
characterization of me as a "right wing fanatic".  If so
I have respectable company.

		Stanford Gets Its Man

	Stanford University has finally and officially kicked Sinologist
Steven Mosher out of its doctoral program, and Stanford President
Donald Kennedy has released a 40-page letter, with 35-page appendix,
giving its reasons.

	Mr. Mosher has been an academic  cause celebre  since Stanford's
anthropology department shunned him in 1983.  He came to prominence
when he reported that the Chinese government had been carrying out a
population-control based in part on forced abortions, sometimes as
late as the last trimester of pregnancy.  He further reported that
strict limitations on family size, coupled with traditional Chinese
desires to produce male offspring, had created perverse incentives
resulting in acts of female infanticide.

	It should be pointed out that no-one has ever raised
significant objections to the veracity of Mr. Mosher's revelations
on this subject.  Indeed, his revelations have been confirmed in an
astoundin three-part series thi past January by the Washington Post's
former China correspondent Michael Weisskopf.

	The revelations were bound to upset Mr. Mosher's Chinese hosts,
of course, and the Chinese attacked him with allegations of
unacceptable behavior.  Following a Stanford faculty investigation,
the anthropology department dismissed him from its doctoral
program.  Though it previously had refused to release the report
explaining its reasons, Stanford has denied throughout that its
actions had anything to do with China's threats to deny access
for future U.S. researchers.

	Mr. Kennedy's letter finally explaining the reasons is a
remarkable document - on its face reflecting fidelity to academic
procedure but never dispelling the impression that Mr. Mosher's
real sin was too aggressively pursuing the truth.

	What then did Steven Mosher do?  Explicitly divorcing his
decision from the content of Mr. Mosher's work in China (subsequently
published in a well-reviewed book "Broken Earth"), Mr. Kennedy
cites "the erosion of the necessary relationship of trust
between faculty and student ..."  Mr. Kennedy writes that "some
of the most important aspects" for this erosion consist primarily
of "conflicting stories" Mr. Mosher told the faculty regarding the
official status of his research assistant in China, the details
of his customs inspections, the intended use in China of a van
he purchased, the number of documents he collected, his failure
to report an arrest incident to his advisers "until directly asked",
his payment for publication of an article about China's abortion
policies, and his unannounced decision to switch his thesis topic
to China ("your advisors were expecting to receive a demographic
comparison between a fishing village and a farming community
in Taiwan").

	Stanford's case, however, reaches an evidential apogee
in an appendix summarizing "new material received" during President
Kennedy's review.  This centers, at length, on a dispute over Mr.
Mosher's purchase of a Nikon camera, whether it was a Nikon FE or
a Nikon F2, and whether the camera rightfully belonged to Mr.
Mosher or the Stanford anthropology department.  To resolve this,
Stanford hired a Hong Kong detective agency called Fact Finders
to "get additional evidence on various aspects of the purchase".
Stanford also made a meticulous comparison of Mr. Mosher's submitted
receipts against camera and lens prices published by a store
advertising the the Dec. 2, 1979 New York Times and by Sharp Photo
in the April 1980 Modern Photography ("page 170").  The receipts
were also submitted to experts in handwriting analysis.

	Arriving at the end of this extraordinary in-house indictment,
a reader is hard put to resist President Kennedy's conclusion
that Mr. Mosher and Stanford have a problem about "the trust and
confidence necessary to graduate education".  Mr. Mosher is a bit
more like Indiana Jones than like your average university
anthropologist.  Mr. Kennedy has no real authority over the
anthropology faculty, but he does have the responsibility to
defend its actions against Mr. Mosher's likely lawsuit, for
which he has hired Melvin Belli.

	In important respects, though, Mr. Kennedy's letter adds to,
rather than dispels, doubts about what goes on these days in
American universities.  He quotes the faculty's 1983 report,
which chastises Mr. Mosher for traveling in China "without such
permission being specified in writing on his travel permit", thereby
"testing the limits of the Chinese security system," an unacceptable
act by "an exchange scholar with the obligation to protect the
reputation of the program."  We read ths as confirming, rather than
refuting, the essential charge that Stanford's actions were linked to
Mr. Mosher's disquieting revelations about China.  Moreover, such
procedural fastidiousness leaves us with the strong impression that
had Mr. Mosher been a tenured university anthropologist rather than
an Indiana Jones, the world would never have learned of the horrors
he had discovered in Guangdong Province.

	Somehow, an institution supposedly devoted to seeking the
truth could find no middle ground in this complex and difficult
affair, but instead feels itself forced to destroy an academic
career.  We do not intend to pick a quarrel with Stanford, for this
is by no means the only recent instance of faculty and administrators
flushing from their midst colleagues or visitors they deem intellectually,
politically, or personally uncongenial.  We worry about a more
general intolerance on the part of what seems to be an increasingly
enervated class of U.S. university intellectuals.  Should these
habits prevail, society will come to look elsewhere for new knowledge,
while departments of anthropology seek out graduate students willing
to produce comparisons of Taiwan's fishing and farming villages.