Academic misconduct can kill innocent lives: thoughts on Huixiang Chen’s suicide
Update on Nov 26, 2020:
I created a Github repo to gather information on academic misconduct (https://github.com/felicitia/FightingAcademicMisconduct). This has to stop. Please contribute to it if you have information or thoughts to shed light on this important issue.
Background:
The Hidden Story Behind the Suicide PhD Candidate Huixiang Chen (https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice/the-hidden-story-behind-the-suicide-phd-candidate-huixiang-chen-236cd39f79d3)
posted by the official Medium account regarding this issue: https://medium.com/@huixiangvoice (the latest article is seeking for help to protect the insiders who are being threatened)
Discussions about this case on Zhihu (in Chinese): https://www.zhihu.com/question/329605591
(The top comment shared an anonymous Ph.D. student’s own experience on reporting her/his advisor's unethical behaviors, such as faking data, Photoshopping diagrams in papers. It was a really tough journey and the university wouldn’t do anything about it until there’s “solid evidence”. The Ph.D. student and her/his labmates started recording conversations with their advisor to get solid evidence and finally got the university to investigate this. In the end, the advisor left the university and the Ph.D. student defended in her/his 8th year in the Ph.D. program without the advisor being in the committee and had withdrawn the problematic papers that were accepted. During the long fight with her/his advisor, the Ph.D. student was aware of the risk of “wasting” over seven years without getting a Ph.D. degree, but she/he said she/he wouldn’t regret it.)
A Chinese article reporting the story of Huixiang Chen’s suicide: 《一位博士生选择自杀，在论文中了顶会之后》https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/71856581
My thoughts:
I’m deeply sorry to hear about Huixiang’s suicide yesterday and it keeps bothering me a lot. I couldn’t even find a word to describe my feelings. This is not the first time this has happened (just Google Ph.D. student suicide) and it started to become a thing. At the end of such news, they always end up with something like study shows Ph.D. students suffer from mental problems and here’s how to deal with it. There are tips like going to the therapists, handling stress better, quitting your Ph.D., changing your advisor, etc, etc. All of the tips are saying Ph.D. students are responsible for this and they should adapt to it and adjust themselves. BUT, is it really Ph.D. student’s fault?
As far as I can tell, those suicide tragedies share one thing in common: those students have insanely unethical advisors (not only faking data in papers, but the advisors also treat their students as “paper slaves” with no respect, e.g., swearing, threatening, postponing graduation, forcing students to overwork, cutting their fundings, etc). I think these unethical advisors are the root cause of such tragedies and can ruin so many students’ lives if we don’t stop it (note that we are only aware of the reported suicide cases and I’m pretty sure there’s more to the story that we don’t know).
There’s a lot that’s worth discussing in this case, but I don’t want to exaggerate things or make false assumptions before more evidence comes out, so I will only stick to a few facts that I believe are true with my thoughts on them (from a Computer Science Ph.D. student’s perspective).
*Note: This article is my personal opinion and I choose to believe Huixiang’s suicide note, especially after knowing Tao Li’s bad reputation is already well-known in Computer Architecture community from my close friend directly. If for whatever reason, there is another side of the story, I will take back my opinion on this individual case, but most of my thoughts are on academic misconduct in general, which I think it’s time to give it a serious thought and further investigate it to avoid future tragedies.
- Ph.D. students usually have personal websites about their research work to increase their visibility. In Huixiang Chen’s website (https://sites.google.com/site/huixiangchen5319), he put up some useful links about research advice, such as how to write a good research paper. Based on my experience as a 6th-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science, this is an indicator that he cares about doing good research, which is consistent with his attitude in the revealed chat history. Of course, I’m not saying putting up useful materials has a strong correlation with doing good research, but it does show that Huixiang spent time seeking for advice on conducting good research. As a Ph.D. student, I can totally imagine how much pain he was in when he was told by the authority (his advisor who’s supposed to be the role model) that “lying” is the right thing to do, which actually did lead his advisor to “success” in academia (see my second point). What a huge disappointment when you have a strong belief in conducting good research, and you work really hard to achieve that goal, only to learn that “lying” is what made your advisor (whom you admired before and wanted to learn from) successful.
2. Based on Tao Li’s (Huixiang’s advisor) website (http://www.taoli.ece.ufl.edu/), he is already a full professor, IEEE Fellow, Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Computers, and has won many many awards. This is considered pretty successful in academia already. How could someone like this have gone this far without being kicked out of the game? It indicates that he is not the only “outlier” player in the game. This scares me. There are other “Tao Li” out there that we’re not aware of and there might be other “Huixiang” tragedies in the future if we don’t do something about it.
Furthermore, if Tao Li gets away with this or we only kick out Tao Li from academia without further investigating other “Tao Li”s, even after all the attention it has received, can you imagine what this will lead to? There will be more people like Tao Li! Other unethical researchers would have no fear to continue academic misconduct if there are no serious consequences to it. We will also be setting a precedent for future professors, and for prospective student’s applying to Ph.D. programs. This is far from what academia should be.
3. Academic communities are relatively small and you can’t really hide anything. According to insiders (including my close friend) in the Computer Architecture community, Tao Li’s bad reputation is already well-known in his community. This shows that we know the “bugs” (unethical researchers) already but we chose to not fix it. In a software system, the “bugs” that we choose to not fix are either “not severe” or “too hard to fix”. In this case of Huixiang’s suicide, this “bug” is already exposed as “severe” since it can kill innocent lives. So I think it’s time to seriously consider the ways to fix it right now in order to avoid future tragedies.
Currently, there’s no easy way to report academic misconduct or obtain solid evidence on it, which I think is very necessary. For example, in the top comment in Zhihu that I shared at the beginning of this article, it took those Ph.D. students years to report their advisor and get final justice, and they took the risk of “wasting” over seven years without getting a Ph.D. degree. This process shouldn’t be this hard. Imagine if there is an easy and safe way for Huixiang to report his advisor earlier, we might be able to save his life and potentially other students from suffering.
4. Huixiang Chen and his advisor Tao Li are both Chinese, and so am I. As Huixiang’s suicide gets more and more attention, we started to hear a lot of negative voices on Chinese professors and Ph.D. programs in Chinese forums. Quite a few Chinese parents raised their concerns about Ph.D. programs and even studying abroad in general, thus refused to have their kids to study abroad. Quite a few Chinese students were scared about Ph.D. programs and even Chinese advisors in general, and said they would avoid Chinese advisors when applying for Ph.D. programs.
This shouldn’t be generalized. Ph.D. program is supposed to be an enjoyable journey where you have the freedom to dive deep into an important problem that you are passionate about. And there are so many Chinese professors who are doing good research as well. Yes, there are ups and downs in Ph.D., and yes, there are Chinese advisors who are unethical. But the solution shouldn’t be avoiding Ph.D. programs or Chinese advisors in general, but really should be removing the root cause (unethical researchers) to achieve a cleaner academic environment. If our reactions to those suicide cases are “avoiding”, how can we get good Ph.D. students to carry on good research? Ph.D. students will become advisors and they will be the leading researchers to solve important problems in the world in the next generation. This should be sustainable. Without people applying for Ph.D. programs, how can our world advance in the future?
5. As a 6th-year Ph.D. student, I do not understand how much Tao Li cares about publishing that one ISCA paper as a full professor with tenure. What I can see in academia is, professors at that stage really care about doing impactful work and producing good students in academia rather than the quantity of papers. Sure, it’s a top-conference paper, but what’s the point of publishing one top-conference paper with fake results? Top conferences have good credibility and visibility, and a fake paper can be misleading for other people to follow and can cause wasted time and efforts for the followers. You shouldn’t be publishing for the sake of publishing, but should be publishing because you want to solve important problems and encourage more followers to solve that problem together. And at the same time, fake papers getting accepted at top conferences means some good papers can’t make it since the acceptance rate is stable. Is this really what we want to see?
Ending message:
OK, enough about the problems. I want to end with what’s next to call for solutions and I really hope this is the last time I hear about this type of tragedy.
To prevent academic misconduct in the wild:
Currently, there’s not enough supervision on the quality of reviewers and accepted papers. However, there is already a trend in academia to push forward Open Science, such as ACM Artifact Evaluation, and ROSE Festival in the Software Engineering community. Hope to see more efforts on this.
To prevent academic misconduct in the lab:
This is the root and we really should “kill” it here to prevent future tragedies such as Huixiang’s suicide. I think universities should take action in this and make it easier and safer for students (the weaker group than their advisors) to report academic misconduct. For example, some universities have semi-annual reviews on Ph.D. students research progress and course evaluations on the lecturers. Can we also have similar things to evaluate advisors and the lab environment?
Also, I think we should raise Ph.D. students’ awareness of these issues because a lot of times we Ph.D. students are not used to questioning advisors or the lab environment, but would think we are the ones who should adapt to the environment. Nobody has done a Ph.D. before entering the Ph.D. program (mostly), and we might think this is just the way it is. Sound familiar? I think this is similar to the recent case of George Tyndall’s sex abuse. George Tyndall got away with what he did for over 10 years and nobody had said anything. One of the major reasons is that most victims have never done women’s health exam before and they thought that’s just how the exam is done. Thus, not only educating Ph.D. students on research skills is important, but educating them on these issues such as academic misconduct is equally important.
There are of course other ways to deal with academic misconduct and I hope Huixiang’s suicide (along with other similar tragedies) can really demonstrate how severe this problem is, and in turn, start a conversation to really DO something about it instead of mourning for Huixiang’s death. Huixiang should not die in vain. R.I.P.
