Kaifu Lee (left), Fang Zhouzi (right)
Last night, Fang Zhouzi took to his Weibo to criticize a few pieces of Kaifu Lee’s autobiography. Lee was not happy with the criticism and fired back, but today Fang Zhouzi is saying that his criticism was just business, not personal.
Tech geeks may not be as familiar with Fang as they are with Lee, the former head of Google China and now the man behind Innovation Works, but Fang is as famous in his own right as China’s “science cop”, a journalist who keeps academics and other high profile people honest by fact-checking their claims. He’s uncovered some pretty serious academic fraud this way, and not everyone is always happy about it; last year he was attacked by thugs in likely retaliation for one of his exposes.
Fang’s beef with Kaifu Lee is that he makes some claims about his time at Carnegie Mellon University that don’t seem to be accurate. The discussion, which has turned into a bit of a spat between the two on Sina Weibo, has centered around Lee’s claim that at 26 he broke records as Carnegie Mellon’s youngest-ever assistant professor. Fang points out that Lee’s own CV suggests he was a “Research Computer Scientist” at Carnegie Mellon at that time, a postdoctoral position that is not a professorship and is non-tenure-track. Lee responded that he was made a Research Computer Scientist instead of a “research associate” so that he could then be shifted to a tenure-track assistant professorship.
Indeed, Lee did become an assistant professor at age 28, but Fang points out that that doesn’t make him CMU’s youngest-ever assistant professor. Lee responded that he just meant he was the youngest assistant at that time, but that doesn’t seem too “record-breaking” to us.
Additionally, Lee claimed assistant professorships are tenure-track positions and that professors must decide within six or seven years whether they want tenure. But Fang pointed out that those are just CMU’s general rules, and that each department has its own specific rules. In Lee’s department, assistant professors are never considered for tenure, and the tenure evaluation process doesn’t begin until a real or associate professor has been with the school for eight years.
Kaifu Lee's autobiography, Making a World of Difference (Via Amazon)
Needless to say, the spat has led some Weibo observers to suggest there’s a grudge between the two men, but Fang says that’s not the case. “I’ve got no grievance with him, this is not a grudge,” he told Sina Tech, pointing out that he only chose to report on this issue because someone else mentioned it to him. He said that he had not spoken privately with Kaifu Lee about the matter.
Fang also stressed that Lee’s infractions were different from the Tang Jun case that garnered so much attention last year, in which Tang Jun claimed to hold a degree he didn’t have. “This is not the same as that,” said Fang, “that was pure fabrication.” Although he does think Lee is guilty of some exaggeration in his autobiography, Fang said, “Everyone doesn’t have to always compare everything to Tang Jun. This [the Kaifu Lee argument] really isn’t that big of an issue.”
The argument is winding down, but you can follow it on Fang and Lee’s Weibo accounts if you can read Chinese. To us, it seems that while Lee was probably guilty of a bit “factual manipulation”, as Fang pointed out, it’s nothing on the scale of the Tang Jun incident or some of Fang’s other unearthings. Additionally, it’s hard to say whether or not Lee was intentionally misleading readers or perhaps misunderstood things himself. With regard to the “record-breaking” claim he made, for example, Lee says that CMU’s president told him he had broken a record when he joined the faculty. Perhaps Lee mistook an offhanded remark intended as a form of congratulations as a statement of fact? It’s possible.
[Image via Sina Tech]