My response to Bosco (also posted to Peking Duck) was more concise. I took aim at the main allegations of fact.
Regarding my being "a pariah at every school that mistakenly hired him," I pointed out:
I taught at Tsinghua University ... through the 2001-2 academic year. The English department chair provided a recommendation letter for me the following year. (I requested it when a subsequent employer, Lanzhou University, asked me for references. I subsequently obtained favorable references from Lanzhou U. as well.)
On my "inability to teach," I referred readers to my story of CFAU, which includes quotations of favorable messages from my students (e.g. in chapter 24).
As to my "paranoid fabrications," I offered:
[A]nyone on a "foreign expert" contract in China might be interested in what happens when the contract's arbitration clause is invoked. My story reports the outcome factually and in detail.
Though I didn't mention it, Bosco's own blog shows that at least one of the relatively minor problems described in my CFAU story is not "flat-out lunacy," and continues to bedevil foreign faculty today.
CFAU is indeed a significant school, and as such plays host to lectures by noteworthy statesmen and intellectuals. But my Western colleagues and I (there were ten of us at CFAU) would be left oblivious of such visits because signs were posted only in Chinese, and no one in the administration bothered to inform us.
The school's foreign affairs office always affected great concern for the well-being of the foreign faculty members. Yet it would have been virtually effortless for someone in that office to send all ten of us a simple email message when noteworthy English-language lectures were to take place. Chapter 17 of "Inside China's Diplomacy School" describes how, after my prodding, a reluctant office staffer agreed to do just that.
This elementary courtesy apparently did not outlast my departure from CFAU. A Bosco blog entry dated June 28, 2004 reports:
Thomas Friedman, a writer and thinker I'd very much like to spend some time jawboning with, was at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing (where I am a visiting professor of "Media & Foreign Policy") last week and delivered a lecture that was exceedingly well-received by students, many of whom asked quite probing, intelligent questions and received answers that impressed them. I know, because they told me so in follow-up discussions in class. Now, I was of course delighted by this turn of events--but not nearly as much as if I'd been present for his lecture and visit to our tiny campus!Yes, I missed it. Such are the vicissitudes of teaching at three universities and not being able to read Mandarin. While my schedule ostensibly precluded my attendance, I might have been able to alter it had I been able to read the hand-written posters that accounts for most of the intra-campus communication here.... While I have a wonderful relationship with the Chinese faculty, they forget that we "Foreign Experts" cannot read Chinese....
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
that was one hell of a tale Uriel, thanks. Your relationship with Bosco reminds me a bit of my dealings with Andrew Sullivan a few years ago.
2 - Angelina Fiorentino
I would personally like to thank Joe Bosco for writing the fascinating book A Problem Of Evidence. I am glad someone had the balls to straight out say the truth about the Brown Family. (The Family Brown Ch. 12) I feel so sorry for Nicole Brown Simpson having been sold out by her family for OJ's money. And then they have the nerve, ESPECIALLY Denise Brown, to start a charity, that has been underfire by the IRS, under their murdered sister's name. Now she's the big DV expert? Denise Brown is the biggest phoney!
I have followed this case since the day I heard about the murders, I saw Denise Brown mouthing off to every tv show and the family selling Nicole's Diary, Nude Pictures (sold by sister Dominique), everything of Nicole's for In My Opinion, blood money!