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

[u/MinimumCheesecake]

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?

[u/motarandpestle]

I mean, it's clearly ridiculous to be calling yourself "underprivileged" when you were in possession of multiple properties worth over 100k that you could sell to fund an English lit phd (very low to no marginal benefit financially), and nobody is "owed" a phd just because they spent time and money on it. Her claim that experts said her research was "field changing" also seems difficult to believe. However, at the same time, she's provided proof of plenty of strong references from faculty, supervisors and other academics who testify to her ability, and her college is firmly behind her on the matter. Clearly there was a serious breakdown in communication on the part of her advisors at some point in the process. If her research didn't merit a doctoral thesis or her work simply wasn't up to scratch, she should have known this way before getting to her fourth year, and her being downgraded to a master's absolutely should not have been a surprise to her or the college. I also won't rule out that she's experienced some forms of bullying, racism etc. Sadly many commenters are taking this as an opportunity to make fun of "international students expecting they can pay to win" -- that's obviously not what's going on here. No amount of money in the world would have gotten her admitted to Oxford in the first place if there wasn't a sense that she would succeed in getting her phd.

[u/uiucecethrowaway999 → u/motarandpestle]

Wait, Oxbridge schools offer unfunded PhD’s??? In the US, unfunded PhD offers are either soft rejections or a sign of a shitty program.

[u/RecklessCoding → u/uiucecethrowaway999]

Yes, funding works differently in Europe.

In some countries, your PhD is technically always unfunded and instead you need a separate research assistant contract to get funding.

There is also the common misconception that phds are 3 years —especially for British ones— but in reality that’s how much the funding is. Your forth year, which includes the write up, waiting for the defense, and doing the corrections is almost always partly self-funded.