Academic Betrayal: The Bullying of a Graduate Student

Much has been written about the staggering cost of student loan debt and the negative impact and drag on the US economy. “Academic Betrayal: The Bullying of a Graduate Student” authored by Loren Mayshark, is an expose of atrocious (lesser known) educational fraud. In 2008, Mayshark enrolled at Hunter College aspiring to earn a M.A. degree in their advertised two year 30 credit graduate degree program. By 2015, Mayshark realized he had no option but to resign from the program. The degree he had spent six years and tens of thousands in educational expenses to attain was only a mirage.

After successfully completing his BA in history from Manhattanville College in Westchester, N.Y. Mayshark moved to San Francisco, C.A. and became interested in Latin American people and culture. With a girlfriend, he traveled to South America where he spent 6 months learning and practicing the Spanish language and observing local lifestyles and customs. Mayshark enthusatically decided to improve his employment prospects with a goal of completing a graduate degree, teaching as an adjunct professor in Latin American History-- a PhD in History might have followed.

Following Mayshark’s acceptance at Hunter College, there were many deliberate set-backs and obstacles in the way that blocked what should have been a simple enrollment process to begin classes. As he began his graduate school experience, he would eventually find himself ensnared in an academic “intellectual prison.” Mayshark maintained a 3.6 GPA, his first two theses were outright rejected without concrete reasons or explanations. The reasons for the failure were placed solely on him without further options or recourse by the professor supposedly working with and mentoring him. In addition, Mayshark provided exact documentation with times and dates and other important details that supported his version of the story.

Since Mayshark had already spent tremendous amounts of time and great expense on the degree, he accepted an offer from another professor who declared: “We have failed you.” Mayshark had studied Colonial Latin America with this professor, and was encouraged to try again. Taking no chances for failure, he hired a professional editor before presenting the drafts of his theses, and another professor from a different school checked his work and found it suitable for submission. The closer he got to graduation however, the expectations and rules would change, fees to maintain matriculation continued, and expenses mounted with no degree in sight.

One of the most notable intellectuals in the world Noam Chomsky, observed “How America’s Great University System is Getting Destroyed” (essay) that highlight the corporatization of American higher education, where the focus is not on our students, but rather is a system engineered favoring corporate interests. Later, Mayshark met with Professor Lebowitz, the only adjunct professor at Hunter where he had established a genuine connection, he discovered that Lebowitz along with others, had been forced out of their positions, contracts were not renewed due to political reasons having nothing to do with academics. All calls and email inquiries were ignored by Hunter president Terry Daub.
Mayshark is advocating for more oversight and accountability in higher education for student rights, as he continues to share his shocking story. ~ With thanks to the author via NetGalley for the direct e-copy for the purpose of review.

Higher education has been in a parlous state for some time now, and the higher you go up the food chain, degree-wise, the more parlous it is. Although Loren Mayshark's experience is unusually bad, it is symptomatic of the kinds of problems that grad students can expect to face, and is a cautionary tale for what to avoid if you do decide to get a graduate degree.

Mayshark decided he wanted to get an MA in Latin American history in order to teach at the college level. An MA would only qualify him for adjuncting at best, which is a terrible career path, so there was problem #1. He applied to a number of programs, despite having low GRE scores, and was only admitted into one, at Hunter College in the CUNY system, and only as a non-matriculated student. He spent the next 6 years being jerked around by faculty and staff as he attempted to finish the program and get a degree.

In something like this, it's easy to point fingers and say he shouldn't have done what he did, and indeed, I would not advise anyone who struggles with testing and has low GRE scores, or who can't get into any decent programs as a fully matriculated student, to go to grad school. Not because the GRE is that important in the grand scheme of things, or measures your worth as a person, but because indeed, the ability to do this kind of standardized testing and hoop-jumping is an important component of being able to get through grad school. If Mayshark had come to me at that point for advice (FYI: I have a PhD and work in higher education), I would have told him to go back to bartending or anything other than higher ed, because that was a sign that higher ed was not going to be a welcoming profession for him.

That being said, Hunter College and the CUNY system, which by the way, are supposed to be pretty lousy places both to work and to study, as evidenced by, for example, their egregious use of adjuncts and general mistreatment of their faculty, exploited Mayshark and strung him along for years, in part because of systemic problems with the college, in part because of personality issues with individual faculty.

They advertised a degree, and admitted him into a degree program, that it turned out they were not actually able to offer. The adjunct faculty were not allowed to work with him on his exams and thesis, and indeed were often sent on their merry way before he had finished the program, and the tenured faculty had little interest in working with him and were often actively obstructive. He was failed twice on his comprehensive exams but not allowed to work with professors to prepare for them, and the reasons giving for his failure were things such as "poor paragraphing" in a handwritten, timed test. Then they decided not to require that he pass the exams at all, but could go straight to writing his thesis, only no one wanted to work with him. When he finally found an advisor, that person made him rewrite his first chapter 8 (!) times, again complaining about paragraphing and other trivialities. Eventually, after 6 years and thousands of dollars, Mayshark quit and left the country, which he probably should have done years earlier.

Mayshark's experience, although particularly egregious, is not unusual: most universities have a cumbersome bureaucracy that students struggle to navigate, and that often hits them with unexpected fees and obstacles, and many of them have a culture of mistreating students. Many professors, like those Mayshark encountered, confuse "rigor" with judging students according to very specific criteria that they can not define or explain, and force graduate students in particular to rewrite their projects again and again according to random whims, while refusing to meet with them or read their work in a timely fashion. Although one wants to think of the academia as a place of free intellectual inquiry, in fact, American higher ed in general is a highly exploitative system with a strong culture of hazing and bullying. Mayshark just happened to be caught up in a perfect storm.

Not everyone who goes to grad school will have such a negative experience, but pretty much everyone will encounter some level of these kinds of problems, so prospective grad students may want to read this in order to prepare themselves and know what kind of pitfalls to avoid and when to cut their losses.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

The strange world of academia can be a difficult one to navigate. As someone who has multiple graduate degrees, I can completely understand the author's story. I have been held at the mercy of a professor and an institution that was not concerned about my growth as a leader or my continued development as a writer and a thinker. The author does a perfect job of outlining how impersonal higher education has become and how devastating it can be if someone cannot make it through to the end of the race. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and the honest and open description of how higher education has changed and not for the better.
The amazing odyssey that the author described in his work is one that does not make it to the graduate catalogs of "prestigious" institutions, nor does it fit with the stock photos of smiling graduate students found on many departmental websites. The administrative minutiae that Loren describes is indicative of the strange idea that many graduate institutions have defaulted towards. It is ironic that a department like the history department at Hunter College could be allowed to continue to advertise a program like their concentration in Latin American History, admit students into that program, allow students to take classes towards that end, and then inform them that the program does not exist. It is also disturbing that professors can be so cold and unfeeling towards a student who is desperate to complete a thesis and graduate. However, I can sympathize with Loren as one of my major professors on my dissertation did that exact thing.!
I hope that Loren's book becomes required reading for anyone considering graduate school, especially in a discipline such as History. Professors should not be allowed to hold someone's academic future hostage. Administrators should maintain office hours for questions and should be brave enough to lead change and not to shy away from helping someone to be successful. I truly enjoyed Academic Betrayal. I enjoyed the writing and how easy it was to identify with the author and his struggles. I would highly recommend Academic Betrayal: The Bullying of a Graduate Student to anyone who may be having a rough time in their chosen academic world.