Following is the text of a press release issued Monday by the International Students’ Organizing Committee of the Graduate Employees and Students’ Organization (GESO) at Yale. It concerns a meeting between state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and Chinese scholars at Yale who feel discriminated against by the university.
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal Meets With Chinese Scholars at Yale Who Filed Class-Action Grievance
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal met this morning with a group of Chinese teachers and researchers at Yale University. These students recently filed a class-action grievance with the University alleging that Yale faculty and administrators are engaged in a pattern of workplace exploitation of Chinese nationals in science laboratories and a pattern of discrimination on the basis of national origin. The Attorney General listened to specific allegations of discrimination and exploitation, and heard about more general concerns of unfair treatment facing Chinese scholars at Yale. The meeting was organized by the International Students’ Organizing Committee of the Graduate Employees and Students’ Organization (GESO) at Yale.
Leidong Mao, a graduate researcher in Electrical Engineering, told the Attorney General about the relationship between insecure funding in his department and his legal visa status in the United States. “They know our visa situation,” he said “that if we lose funding and we are asked to leave the university, we have to leave the country. I think sometimes supervisors take advantage of this and ask us to do more work.” Another graduate researcher spoke about how the high cost of dependant health care —” it cost over $7,000 to insure a family of three at Yale —” and visa restrictions on his wife’s ability to work in the US have led to him and his wife deciding to leave their one year old daughter in China. Huaping Tang, a graduate researcher in the biological sciences, cited a recent study showing international post-docs work longer hours for lower pay and with fewer benefits than their American counterparts. (Survey results available at http://www.Postdoc.sigmaxi.org/results.)
Other individuals spoke about alleged discrimination in campus housing, citing a case last spring in which Chinese residents led a campaign to end unfair treatment in a graduate dorm. They told the Attorney General that 2/3 of the dorm’s residents signed a petition calling for an end to discriminatory treatment and the establishment of a democratically elected housing council. “The administration said they had no obligation to respond to our petition because it wasn’t a formal grievance. But they said we couldn’t file a formal grievance because it was not an academic issue,” said Cong Huang, a graduate teacher in the statistics department.
The primary complainant in the class-action grievance, Xuemei Han also attended the meeting. She said that although the Yale administration had resolved most of her case, she remained upset that nobody has held responsible for the way she was treated. “I had to work very hard for a very long time to fight to stay here,” she said, “and in the end the administration’s response showed I had every right to be here. That should not happen again to any other graduate student.”
World-wide publicity surrounding the grievance ignited an ongoing debate, both in the US and abroad, about the inevitable problems resulting from the widespread reliance on international workers in the field of scientific research. The grievance was covered widely in the US national press, Nature, the domestic Chinese-language papers, countless publications in mainland China, and even a number of stories on the largest television station in Hong Kong. In recent weeks GESO’s Chinese organizers have received calls and emails from Chinese scholars around the country who have faced similar problems. Today’s meeting with Connecticut’s Attorney General underscores the extent to which the treatment of international scholars is a national problem with international policy implications.
The Chinese scholars who met with Blumenthal expressed their hopes that Yale would go beyond their current policies of handling cases on an “individual basis” and become a global leader in ensuring fair treatment of all international academic and scientific workers. The Yale administration has said it will set up an ad hoc committee to address some of these problems, but has rejected many of the solutions the Chinese student community proposed in the grievance. Initial steps, they suggested, should include holding an open forum, inviting some of the individuals involved in the filing of the grievance to serve on the proposed ad hoc committee, and, most importantly allowing for a fair and impartial review of their current grievance procedure and the potential creation of a third party grievance procedure.
Those present at the meeting with the Attorney General agreed that cases of exploitation and discrimination would continue until the university agrees to implement a fair and impartial third party, and they looked forward to working with the university to determine who or what that third party might be.