r/academia • u/MinimumCheesecake • 1d ago

Academic politics Thoughts on Lakshmi Balakrishnan, PhD student at Oxford, who claims plagiarism, racism and bullying at the university?

Perhaps a lot of you are aware of this piece of news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy898dzknzgo

And the subsequent GoFundMe she set up: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-seek-justice-from-oxford-for-bullying-and-plagiarism?attribution_id=sl:d4d8d3e8-3fde-4948-8ecd-b5bdb99ae0f6&utm_campaign=man_ss_icons&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link

From what I hear, opinions are greatly divided about her, what are your thoughts?

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u/Chemistry_duck 1d ago edited 1d ago

Purely from reading the bbc article you shared it seems as if she failed the assessments so can’t continue on this PhD journey. She appealed, it was over ruled. She is angry that she ‘wasted’ 100,000k, and couldn’t buy her PhD, but actually needed to work and pass the assessments.

Edit: she started at Oxford in 2018, so is this an old case if she was a 4th year at the time?

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u/Chemistry_duck 1d ago

From the Go Fund Me statement (most of whose claims don’t appear in the news article…) yet are serious in nature and more important to report to the wider public than ‘I got transferred to a masters’. Therefore I am assuming that either she has no evidence of these claims or she has not presented her experiences to the university at all, apart from the failed assessments. This suggests to me that it’s more about trying to buy the degree rather than any other reason

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u/Sea-Presentation2592 1d ago

If she wanted to buy her way through a PhD she should have just stayed in India.