UMKC Fires Another Prominent Pharmacy Professor
The school didn’t provide details, but another was fired months ago, accused of using students as slave labor.
The University of Missouri-Kansas dismissed another top-tier pharmacy teacher months after the dismissal of another. From UMKC.edu:
According to The Kansas City Star, UMKC fired Dr. Anil Kumar following his review by the 10-person UMKC Campus Faculty Committee on Tenure.
The university has refused to comment on the circumstances surrounding his review, citing privacy laws that prevent disclosure due to personal matters.
“When issues are reported with members of our faculty, we investigate and take appropriate actions as dictated by UMKC policy and the Collected Rules and Regulations of the University of Missouri System,” said Chancellor Mauli Agrawal in a statement.
Dr. Kumar was a prominent member of the pharmacy faculty, formerly the chair of the school’s pharmacology division. His ouster follows that of former pharmacy professor Dr. Asim Mitra earlier this year. Following accusations by Indian graduate students of being used as personal servants while working under him, Mitra resigned from the university. UMKC subsequently sued Mitra for allegedly stealing millions of dollars worth of research from another of his graduate students. No connection has been made between Mitra’s actions and those of Kumar.
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Comments
Street shitters not conforming to American behavioral norms, such as the prohibition of slavery?
How many American graduate students did they admit? Hopefully their replacements will admit more. It sounds like some students squealed about the commonly-understood deal under which they were brought to the USA.
The ethnicity / country of origin is besides the point regarding these two professors treatment of graduate students. Oh, and “street shitters”, BT? Really? Ethnic slur much?
It’s in fact not uncommon – at least in the US – for faculty to treat graduate students working under them badly. Requiring them to do the scutwork of research and teaching for little recompense, requiring them to share credit for published papers regardless of how much or how little the faculty actually contributed to the work involved, and so on. The power imbalance between professors and the graduate students assigned to them leaves the students little recourse.
It’s long been a running joke in US academia to refer to graduate students as slave labour, but in these two cases the faculty seems to have taken the joke more literally than is usual. This may well have been somewhat related to norms in their original culture, but by no means should one assume that – as a group – Indian professors are more inclined to abusing grad students than other professors based on a sample size of two.
Alternately, there have been so many reported cases of Islamic families treating immigrant servants as virtual slaves that you would be prudent to caution anyone in that group offered a job as such a domestic against accepting the offer.
Sorry BobM, I hit reply, I thought, and it down rated you. Not my intent.
I don’t think BerettaTomcat was making an ethnic slur, no, he was just referring to those two Americans being from San Francisco.