Kumar wrote:I am trying to understand what happened here.. and would like guys like jay to shed some light on the illegal things done by the university..
Well, I cannot say a thing about it, because I teach at perhaps the most ethical of university systems in the whole world (in fact, it *is* the most ethical and democratically run university in the world - the Univ. of California). Within that system, I happen to teach in the most conservative and old-fashioned school, UC Irvine. So, I am the last one to talk of any unethical practices. Frankly, I cannot point to a single unethical thing I have experienced at UC Irvine. None whatsoever. Except one professor who has kept a website for an Indian sport on a computer server (which the univ did ask about, and was given the answer that it is totally not-for-profit and was to help US universities recruit good sportsmen from India)
Specifically on the immigration matter, at least at UCI, it is impossible to do anything crazy. Well, they still do trust the faculty's written assurance on funds being available to support a student when they prepare I-20 showing financial support. I have had a couple of cases when the funds did not materialize and I had to scramble etc. Yes, technically, if a professor wants to really do some scams, I suppose one can. I could for instance offer financial assitance to 5 students asking for $10K each. That is uotright fraud of course, and if the students don't tell anybody, it may go unnoticed as long as they come here and just pay the fees and enroll. The moment they default on paying the fees, the UCI offices will come after me and ask why my promise to support them was not happening (and I will be up s**t creek soon after!)
And how the honest students could be easily duped by this system and be considered not as victim but as perpetrator? or is this a case of students going willing along with a ffraud?
My thinking is along the lines of what Atithee is saying. Don't tell me that a large majority of these students did not know what they were getting into. Quite possibly these are students who wouldn't be admitted in any university anybody has heard of, or they would not go to that place, giving money. So, except for some very few odd cases, they deserve no sympathy for their "dreams being shattered" and all that, like the ambulance-chasing Indian media says. When you get an unfair advantage from a paper university over many others (who can't find a way to get a US degree), they know it - and for that they deserve no sympathy. Nobody gets sympathy for believing that there is a free lunch - because most of the time they know that the lunch is not really free and that they are part of a scam that makes the lunch free.
Having said that, the question is not whether they are victims or not. What crime have they committed, is the issue. The students seem to have broken no law, if the university had the approval to grant visas and the students did nothing to help the university circumvent any laws (as far as we can see). So, though I am not shedding tears for the students, they shouldn't be victimized, and the ankle-tags are over the line in my view.
I am just mad at the flaws in the US immigration system that causes these students to be granted visas to come here. That from an IIT grad who had full financial support from the Univ. of Texas and was rejected twice for visas for no reasons back in 1985 (except perhaps looking like a clueless malayalee country bumpkin)! .. Looks like they did smell a fish within a year about this TriValley U and started doing something about it - so I guess I will give the US authorities credit for that. But it shouldn't have come to this.
More seriously, I have to think that there are others doing the same scam like this Susan Su (who cannot even seem to speak English at all, and she is running a university here!). In fact TVU seems to be particularly careless about how they did things, if they did something so easy to catch as giving the same address for 100s of students. How can that escape US immigration folks' attention? Ther has got to be paper universities who are doing this scam to perfection out there. It seems like a pretty easy scam, to me - if with just a list of 30 or 40 professors, without much of even a building and hardly any students, you could get permission to grant I-20s like TVU got two years back.
Another side of the issue is with some of the professors at these paper universities. By the way there are a lot of Indian who claim to be PhDs and to be professors who do this stuff in the US. In the past I have even checked up on some of the people I know in social circles who use "Dr" and "Prof" and have seen some shocking results too. But that's another matter....
But once again, it is the one-sided bandwagon coverage of issues by Indian media that just drives me mad most!
Jay
