Ms. Yuan, a prestigious Chinese professor in the United States, wrote a long letter after her decision to solemnly expel a Chinese student. She, both a professor at the university and a mentor to the fired Chinese graduate student, took a valuable lesson for the student, and for thousands of people, through a long letter of her own.
The following authors:
Creighton University Professor of philosophy: yuan Jinmei
XX:
Having received the news that your appeal for retention of school status was rejected by the Board of Directors of the Graduate School, I would like to inform you that this is your failure, and that it is also my failure. You're sad, and so am I. A professor can't train many graduate students all his life. Your worshiped professor Y, who has just passed away, has trained nine graduate students in comparative philosophy between the East and the West all his life.
I founded C University East-West Comparative study, from the first graduate student to the last graduate student, a total of 11. You're the eleventh. Now, the eleventh is gone. Because the project has stopped, there will be no more.
In the United States, or in C University, western culture is everywhere. It is not easy to add a few Chinese cultural research projects, all of which are voluntary and unpaid contributions by professors. All the graduate students are the works of the professor. I use the same criteria to require all graduate students, and I want every work to be outstanding. You were cancelled, and your eleventh work was scrapped. Your failure to meet the standard is a common failure of me and you.
What you think is: your future is broken. This is wrong. You still have an infinite number of options for your future. You can do business, run your essay website online, or go back to China to start a company, and then switch to a project that will take you to study, and so on. I hope you can achieve something in other industries and places. If you make up your mind to learn in academia, what I write below is a farewell present for you. If you don't want to learn, next, you don't have to look at it.
The world is a lot of road, do not have to do learning, be a good person, it is worth life. You can see this ending: "you are a good man, I wish you good luck."
If you look down, I assume you want to know why you failed when you first started on the road to learning. If you still want to follow the path of learning, the following words will be useful to you. I'll be straight with you.
As a matter of fact, I have never bypassed you, nor have I changed my demands on you. Some of the reasons for your failure are your own responsibilities, some of the educational models and social environment that taught you this way, and some of mine.
Let's start with my responsibility. It's my duty: I shouldn't have accepted you. I can't give you what you want.
What you want is to come to the United States to see, get along with the professor, make some ideas, let the professor follow your design, give you some homework, and you can easily get a degree; With this degree, say you've become a scholar, and find a decent job in China or the United States. You said you wanted to be a professor in the future, and you told me more than once that you had to get the degree. I understand the importance of this degree to you.
But what I can teach you is the basic principles of being human and learning, and making you a person who respects knowledge and loves truth. In the academic world, you must lie not for any benefit, only tell the truth, and be responsible for every word you say; you must be down-to-earth, step by step in search of the unknown, and there is no shortcut to it; You must also know your limitations and ignorance, put your personal perspective and judgment in a low level under "justice" so that you can begin to learn. To get a degree from me, you have to meet these standards. I don't sell degrees. My knowledge can be freely available to students willing to follow me in the search for truth, but does not trade.
This is a mistake between us. It was only after you chose my two classes that I realized this misunderstanding between us. This misconception has caused all the conflicts between us. I realized that admitting you was a mistake I made and a mistake I made to you, which made you plan for the future wrongly.
Second, talk about your responsibilities. Speaking of your responsibility, in fact, is my final assessment of you. Or, it's the explanation I gave you-why you're not fit to learn. You can be a good businessman, company boss or any other professional. Academic, business, or cleaners do not differ in their careers, but there are obvious differences in their professional requirements. To be learned, to have character, the most important thing is to be a human being. The mistake I said earlier is not so much academic as how to be a human being.
When you were in college C, I was teaching you all the time, and I was teaching you all the time. Those techniques were written in detail in every homework and paper you wrote. But I didn't tell you all about the relationship between learning and being a person. I'll talk about it when I talk about your responsibility.
Because your undergraduate grade is not good, I personally interview you in Beijing, before deciding to admit you. To admit you, I shot the board. At that time, my judgment of you is: people are very smart. However, it was a wrong judgment, because that wrong judgment, I have to share the responsibility for your failure. Now, my opinion of you is: you are not intelligent, you do not have any of the wisdom necessary for a learned man. This intelligence is what Socrates said, "I know my ignorance."
As soon as you enter school, you think it's easy to go to college in the United States. You know how to play. You can't stop showing that you know everything; you don't know what you're talking about, you don't know what you know, and you don't know what you're talking about. Class, you do not read, you must read not buy, read some online third-hand book reviews, brief introduction, dare to declare: read the book, understand. He dares to add comments. You have all sorts of reasons to think you're right, so you can easily claim that you understand, you know faster than your classmates and professors. You have your dexterity. But I'm not optimistic about your clever reading. It's the skill of doing business, not the skill of learning.
My judgment to you is that in my first three classes, I asked you to read, either you didn't read it, or you didn't understand it. One of the books you really started reading was Logic in my fourth course, Comparative Logic. At present, you understand 60% of this book. This is your progress.
I want to tell you: your bad way of learning is at least half responsible for your three "C" and two "I".
You can't do learning in your way of learning. You can find a little bit of strange information, put it on your website, let the public read (it's your right), like the old teahouse storyteller, the aim is to attract interest of the audience. There's nothing wrong with it. It's also a form of media. But this approach must not be used for learning. Learning is not an odd hunt, nor is it a quick search for information. To do knowledge is to accumulate little by little, on the basis of the work of others, to remove the weeds in front of us, to analyze them in detail, to torture ourselves with reason, to torture our ancestors, and to make a careful analysis of the weeds in front of us. Then, carefully forward, put a small new stone, let posterity step on, do not fall down. This is why Wittgenstein will be able to think clearly as a moral issue. You love to say it, and you always say it. However, you rarely get a clear picture of the problem. In learning, "whatever you can say, you speak clearly; whatever you cannot say clearly, leave silence." When Wittgenstein, Tractatus) was half-informed, you said, "spread ignorance," it is harmful, misleading, is a waste of other people's lives. A learned man is responsible for every word he says. If you can't, or don't want to take this responsibility, don't go this way. I don't train product marketers or grandstanding online editors.
Because you have a poor knowledge base, you have to make up for this fatal defect in order to learn. It doesn't matter that you don't have a good foundation. You can catch up with it when you start with it. However, you have used some strange, incompatible methods to hide your fatal weakness.
The first example, when you first came here, talked to me, pulled out some social celebrities, this, that, you know them all. I don't know any of the celebrities you're talking about, and I don't know why you put these people's names in your conversation with me. I also don't want to know these social "celebrities". If they achieve something, I'm happy for them, but they have nothing to do with you and me. You have to learn and learn from me. You don't have to go after social celebrities. Academic is not social, not famous, but on the bench. Your purpose in learning must be love of truth and curiosity of the unknown. The name has nothing to do with the scholar, winning the prize is also a pie falling from the sky. To scholars, learning itself is the pleasure. Want to use social "celebrity" to set off your own position, you either lie to others, or lie to yourself, are trying to hide your innate deficiencies, no self-confidence. You can't learn if you don't want to win the trust of others with your own charisma.
Another example is your plagiarism in XXX class. You can explain to me that copying things from the Internet, posting them to me as homework, not "plagiarism", is my "misunderstanding". In fact, I didn't really report you plagiarizing. You don't have to explain, say you didn't mean to plagiarize, I don't understand. I understand or do not understand, in fact, is not the key. The key is: first, I did not report the incident; Second, regardless of whether I "misunderstand" or "misunderstand", the fact is that more than 7% of the homework you hand over is definitely the same as that of other people on the Internet, which is called "plagiarism" (by the definition of Major C, more than 7% is called "plagiarism"). This is the beginning of my firm opposition to your desire to find shortcuts to cover up your poor foundations and incompetent academic abilities. I am alarmed and opposed to your shortcuts until last week's final exam.
As for the first plagiarism, I just want you to say, "I'm sorry, I won't do it again." But what I've got is a lot of complaints over and over again: why don't I understand your explanation-it's not plagiarism. I didn't report you plagiarism, not even cancel your scholarship, this is the best I can do to protect you, is to give you a chance to correct. But, you want me to accept "that is not plagiarism", this is you are referring to the deer for the horse, but also openly ask your professor to follow you to lie to themselves, it is very ridiculous. You can blame a mistake, I can not pursue, but at the same time you have lost my trust in you. If you still want to learn, you must always have the ability and courage to recognize and assume your mistakes, otherwise, you cannot do knowledge.
Your own responsibilities include your split personality. I can't blame you all for this. Personality division is the result of malformed education, and this is the responsibility of your social background as I end up talking about. You are the most contradictory student I have ever seen. When I think of your social background, I sympathize with your split personality. But I have to point out that this is pathological. You should get the help of a psychologist as soon as possible to cure the problem. A learned man must be consistent inside and outside, and words and deeds in line with each other.
It was a shame to read the letter from the professor of the gringo. We have a lot of Chinese students studying abroad. Now please ask yourself what is the purpose of studying abroad? If you want to do a good job of learning, you must first learn to be a human being.