Robert Stark is on a mission. The assistant professor of English at Wenzhou-Kean University in China has made 19 public records requests to New Jersey–based Kean University, his university’s parent-slash-sibling institution, and two complaints to its accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. He’s seeking answers to basic employment questions and governance inconsistencies that he said Wenzhou-Kean officials have failed to sufficiently address. For example, why isn’t social insurance—the Chinese equivalent of Social Security deductions that American employers are required to withhold—coming out of his paychecks? And why hasn’t the institution ever established a full-fledged academic senate, as dictated by its founding documents?
These questions and others have been met with noncommittal answers and redirects, but most of all, silence, said Stark.
“We’re dealing with the most artful constructive ambiguity that I’ve encountered. It’s astonishing how effective and how useful this prevarication is,” Stark said. “Kean can always blame everything on WKU, and WKU can always blame everything in Kean.”
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