T80SMS1 at NIU.bitnet writes:
>A situation as arisen involving a conflict between authors of
>a paper. What I wish to do is see if others agree with my
>advice. The situation is as follows. A woman did a MS thesis
>and is now in conflict with her former advisor over the
>publication. ...
I ran into a similar situation as I was finishing up the
collection of my doctoral dissertation data. My mentor kept
suggesting small add-on experiments that were not part
of the initial design and frankly had no possibility of
valid statistical analysis. Unfortunately, I was not in
a position in tell him to kiss off, since I wouldn't have
received my degree.
What I did was to speak with a lawyer, and found out that
these types of things have no place in a court of law. Ie,
I couldn't sue him.
I then spoke with another professor who was on my commitee,
and he more or less intervened and found a compromise that
was acceptable to the both of us.
The bottom line is that the mentor/mentee relationship is
not that different from master/slave.
I received my degree, the paper got published after
a couple of revisions, and now I'm out of the field.
I suspect that many graduate students have even more horrible
experiences that they could relate. These things are not at all
uncommon.
--
Will Nelson
Computer Resource Administrator
The Beckman Center at Stanford
will at cmgm.stanford.edu
