Chapter 1134 - 841: Offensive Without Defense_2

This is what dignity looks like.

[It’s not that I can’t stand you as a person—you were never qualified to even enter my line of sight. But the things you parade in front of others are so nauseating that, for my own sake, for the sake of the environment, for everyone’s peace and quiet, I’m going to give you some Advanced guidance—and take the chance to kick you to death like some stray dog on the roadside.]—

—This effortless, weightless pose was exactly the effect Weng Pinting wanted.

"The qualifications of the reviewers determine the quality of the review itself." Weng Pinting said to her own PPT. "To show why this proposal is necessary, I’d like to take the actual situation of one teacher as a reference, in order to illustrate what kinds of deviations may occur if we don’t have such a preliminary mechanism—"

In truth, this was nonsense.

Setting up such a preliminary mechanism is theoretically unnecessary, because the hiring requirements for university teachers are already higher than this. Creating something like this is like a workplace leader making everyone work overtime in a meeting to discuss how to stop everyone from working overtime in meetings.

"Let me use the case of the teacher present here, Bi Yanling." said Weng Pinting.

She had already repeated this name many times today. The first time she mentioned it, everyone had already reacted with different emotions; and with each repetition of the name, everyone’s own emotions were being steered toward their respective peaks.

At this moment, Bi Yanling finally emerged from her stress reaction; she realized that in terms of principles and rules, the current situation should be entirely to her advantage.

"Weng Pinting, you..."

But Bi Yanling probably hadn’t realized that the string of preamble from Weng Pinting just now was an attempt to seize as much ground as possible on the level of rules.

This made it much easier to carry out behavior outside the rules.

Weng Pinting directly cut off the words that Bi Yanling had just managed to squeeze out: "First, I’d like to ask everyone a question—"

"—If a teacher has not independently led any research projects related to the relevant topic in the past three years, should she be assigned a seat on a thesis proposal review panel?"

The PPT slid to the next slide. A huge yet crude statistical table appeared on the screen.

Crude because—there just wasn’t much to show.

...

Pointing at the PPT, Weng Pinting said to the people below the stage: "This is the list of papers that Teacher Bi Yanling has published as first author since taking this job—four."

"You can see that almost every one of her papers is coauthored with her husband, Mr. Chang; she has no independent work."

"And if we remove all the articles and projects in which Mr. Chang was deeply involved, the number of vertical research projects that Teacher Bi Yanling has independently researched, independently applied for, and had approved is—"

Weng Pinting slightly curled her palm, making the gesture of holding a duck egg: "—Zero."

No wonder this PPT slide was so crude—Weng Pinting and her team had wanted to make it look rich, but simply lacked the material.

Still, the effect was quite good.

Bi Yanling switched into a new mode, springing to her feet in a flash. She wanted to say something, but then realized there wasn’t much she could say, and finally squeezed out only one sentence: "Weng Pinting, if you’re going to conduct a personal—against me here—"

Weng Pinting did not even glance at her, as if she were a mosquito buzzing in the distance.

She switched the PPT and continued her presentation: "These are the time-in-program data for the PhD students under Teacher Bi Yanling’s supervision. The two who are still enrolled have both already exceeded five years and are about to reach the limit for regular doctoral students; none of her other PhD students graduated within the usual timeframe either."

"According to the current professional title evaluation standards, any teacher with an associate senior title who meets the conditions may participate in thesis proposal review work. The professionalism requirement of the review is that the reviewers possess academic judgment ability corresponding to the topic’s direction."

Weng Pinting’s tone was steady: "But if a teacher’s independent academic output, independent project experience, and ability to guide students in independently completing research all fail to meet basic requirements, then when she sits on a thesis proposal review panel alongside other highly respected professors, sharing in their reputation and credibility as a reviewer—"

"—What are her judgments based on?"

Weng Pinting looked around, turning her gaze to the students and reviewers below: "I think this question is very worth thinking about."

This institutional topic sounded serious, and the students below generally agreed.

As students who had failed their initial thesis proposal defense, few of them believed it was their own fault—and for most students, that was indeed the case. Thesis proposals all have to be signed off by the supervisor; except in cases where the supervisor is so unqualified that they fail to notice obvious flaws, almost all students who need to redo their proposals each year are there because their topics conflict with the reviewers’ research areas.

Teacher Waterpot quietly leaned toward the vice dean: "Between the lines just now, was she complimenting us a bit?"

After so many years as a university teacher, Teacher Waterpot certainly wouldn’t be delighted by a single sentence of praise. Leaving aside the social flattery exchanged between high-EQ colleagues, his students’ constant bootlicking in the research group already had him too tired to even lift his feet for them.

But coming from the mouth of Weng Pinting, such words were rare.

The vice dean glanced at Teacher Waterpot and twitched the corner of his mouth.

He touched his heart and let out a long sigh.

Bi Yanling was the only one in the room with a different reaction: "Weng Pinting, don’t mix institutional proposals with personal attacks; students failing to graduate is because—"

Once again, Weng Pinting ignored her, blocking her words: "Institutions are implemented by specific people. If the system itself lacks a preliminary screening mechanism, then when a teacher who does not possess the corresponding professional judgment ability is placed on the review panel, the flaw in the system will manifest in concrete ways—for example, by rejecting a student’s topic on the unprofessional ground that ’this direction doesn’t look like psychology’."

The PPT flipped to the next slide.

On the screen was a screenshot of the original thesis proposal review standards of the Beidu Normal University Psychology College, with the core content highlighted in a red box: clear academic basis, clear research questions, and reasonable methodology and pathway.

"Teacher Bi Yanling’s research direction and this student’s direction do not overlap; her academic accumulation is insufficient to support an independent professional judgment. Because she has no way to evaluate its merits, she can only judge the student’s topic based on her personal preferences."

"Unfortunately, our review standards are not ’score-based’; it’s not as if we have some reasonable system where we drop the highest and lowest scores."

"On the contrary, every reviewer’s opinion must be fully adopted by the student. This is what creates the huge loophole in our review process."

She still seemed to be talking about the system, but all the aggression had been condensed onto the individual.

The few review professors whom she had just described as "highly respected" all remained silent at this moment; the only one who had initially wanted to speak, the vice dean, had already abandoned that idea.

Bi Yanling was still fighting, to the point of becoming somewhat incoherent: "Weng Pinting, you’re no longer with this university; you have no right to criticize our teachers at a formal academic meeting—"

Her way of fighting back was actually quite interesting.

While bearing the brunt of Weng Pinting’s attacks, she was simultaneously attacking Weng Pinting.

But in the face of Bi Yanling’s counterattacks, Weng Pinting remained in a state of pure offense without defense. In psychological terms, this is a state that only individuals with extremely pure intrinsic motivation and a highly integrated Self will present.

In Weng Pinting’s cognition, her goal in the moment was very clear, so she would not waste cognitive resources on "verifying whether Bi Yanling’s attacks were true"; these external evaluative threats were completely filtered out by her psychological boundary system.

When the aggressive information released by Bi Yanling attempted to penetrate Weng Pinting’s cognitive framework, her brain simply classified it directly as noise.

By contrast, Bi Yanling, this young teacher who had constructed such a positive image for herself within the university, was revealing an extremely fragile self-concept.