Graduate Student Abuse

Following is a copy of a grievance letter I submitted to the Texas
Professional Engineering Licensing Board, stipulating half a dozen
felonies by staff at the UT Austin Aerospace Engineering Department:


July 24, 2004

Professional Engineering Licensing Board
1917 South IH 35
Austin TX 78741

Dear Sir or Madam,

This is a narrative summary of events related to the attached
complaint. I have provided essential documents, but many more are
available that quite thoroughly document the following events.

I began graduate school in the Department of Aerospace Engineering
at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1997. My first
advisor was Dr. Fowler, but I was reassigned to Dr. Roger Broucke, an
expert in celestial mechanics (Dr. Fowler's expertise is orbital
mechanics). Dr. Broucke was my primary advisor until late in the fall
semester 2000, at which time Dr. Fowler became my primary advisor again
because Dr. Broucke was a professor emeritus and there had just been
new rule implemented (possibly because of my assertions) that required
all professors emeritus who had graduate students to have another full
time regular faculty member who was the graduate student's main
advisor. Dr. Broucke retired in the summer of 2001, and he told me he
no longer wanted to have graduate students, so at that time Dr. Fowler
was my main and only advisor.

I took a supervised research Thesis class in the summer of 1998
and, with Dr. Brocke's approval, began to create a numerical model of
the Earth to Mars trajectory. I did not get any help at all from Dr.
Broucke for this project, despite its being a "supervised research"
class, but kept him updated of my work and kept working on the problem.
By the time I took a second supervised research class in the summer of
2000 the program was complete, and had shown good results. However, I
still got no help at all from Dr. Broucke on this research. It is at
this point that I complained to the graduate advisor, Dr. Hull; who
took no action, then to Dr. Terry Kahn at the Graduate College level;
who took no action either. That fall I kept complaining, and eventually
they let me present my research at a formal seminar (the flyer is
enclosed), which was attended by Dr.s Hull, Abusali, Fowler, Chambers,
and a few graduate students. Dr. Abusali told me the following summer
in an email that he was surprised I had not graduated yet because he
had thought that seminar I gave in November 2000 was my dissertation
defense. I took nine hours of supervised graduate research class that
fall, but again got nothing in return. The seminar was not associated
with this supervised research in the least, and was in fact organized
by a new professor in the Department Dr. Cesar Ocampo.

It seems as though my complaints against Dr. Broucke were thought
to be against Dr. Fowler, when the College of Engineering finally got
involved (the Office of Students with Disabilities was also involved
marginally; as I am technically a disabled Viet Nam era veteran), and
he had to go to the Dean's office to explain things. He never mentioned
any of this to me, and I only found out about it in his letter quitting
as my advisor (enclosed) and in other paperwork that was generated as
the appeals process went its course.

Be that as it may, I continued my research, and continued to try
and get help from Dr. Fowler who's expertise is trajectory
optimization, and who's own Ph.D was a model of the Earth to Mars
trajectory. I took six hours of graduate research classes that spring,
three more in the summer, and nine more in the fall. Again, I got
absolutely no help in furthering my research in all of these courses,
from either Dr. Broucke or Dr. Fowler. That summer I passed the written
qualifying exams and was slated to take the oral qualifying exam in the
fall.

In August 2001 I had a meeting with Dr. Fowler at his office in the
Center for Space Research and he said my research looked good and
needed very little more work; all I needed was to write it up and
perhaps develop a theoretical basis for the faster, safer, more
efficient trajectory my algorithm found. I had some theory in what I
had presented in the seminar in November 2000, but either Dr. Fowler
did not notice that part of my presentation or wanted me to find
something more. This was an unusual stipulation because my work had up
to that point been a straight forward numerical model. It is not
customary to require theory to accompany a model, just to show that the
model conforms to acceptable physical laws and engineering practice,
which I had done.

Having been so stipulated to reinforce my work with a strong
theoretical basis, I then started to seek assistance and help outside
of the University, via emails to many experts around the world
(attached). I found several individuals and organizations who were very
interested in my research (I had put it all on the web, then asked them
to visit my website and see what I was doing, download the sourcecode,
read my reports, etc..) The individuals were interested in being on my
dissertation committee, particularly Dr. John Birge, Dean of
Engineering and Mathematics at Northwestern University whose forte was
optimization and he was interested in my methods. Several others were
interested:

· Juris Vagners, orbital mechanics expert at the University of
Washington
· Frank Tveter, astrophysicist at a Norway research group
· Robert Cassanova, Director NAIC
· Jorg Kapmann, a computer consultant in Denmark
· Robort Tolson, orbital mechanics expert at George Washington
University

The University allows you to have one person outside the University
on your dissertation committee, and Dr. Birge was going to do that for
me. The others were going to help.

In the meantime I found four more professors in the Aerospace
Engineering Department to be on my oral exam committee (one backup in
case somebody had to cancel), which included Dr. Fowler, Dr. Schutz,
Dr. Ocampo, Dr. Mark (the backup), and Dr. Lightsey. I found a time and
date that was agreeable to all of them - the morning of December 17th I
believe. The Department sent written notifications to each of these
professors, all of whom I had talked with previously, described my
research; they were all interested, and would be glad to do the oral
exam and to be on my dissertation committee (it is customary for the
people to be on your dissertation committee who are on your oral exam
committee). When I went in to take the oral exam as scheduled, I was
told I had been dismissed from the program. Apparently the letter
mailed to me by Dr. Dolling was held up in the Christmas rush and I did
not receive it for another couple of days.

I had previously been told that a committee had been set up to
review my research, after I had written to ABET complaining about not
getting what I paid for with the supervised research classes. I got a
letter asking me to come in to hear the results of that evaluation but
as I was studying hard for my oral exam I asked if it could wait until
after I passed the exam, and Dr. Dolling said that was OK. Evidently in
the interim, Dr. Fowler quit as my advisor and when Dr. Dolling (the
Chairman of the Aerospace Department) could find no other professor to
be my advisor, that is when they dismissed me. You will notice that all
of this administrative activity took place in less than ten days, which
was during the final exam time when all the professors were busy
administering exams, grading them, and so forth.

During all of this nobody made an attempt to contact me by
telephone or email to let me know what was going on, so that I could
lobby to find another professor to be my advisor - my research was of
interested to many of the professors, who were on the exam committee;
and others as well. One of two things happened: they were all so upset
that I had contacted ABET that they shared the opinion expressed by Dr.
Fowler in his letter (which was placed in my personnel file in the
Department, and which file they would have looked at to see if they
wanted to be my advisor) or they were upset at the quality of my
research.

The part of the documents I submitted - essentially a copy of the
website that the aforementioned professors outside the University had
looked at, then expressed an interest in - that may have caused the
most angst is the theoretical part, which at the time was very
tentative and which I have since established mathematically from many
perspectives. However, the fact remains that they rejected me because
of this research, the same material which several equally reputable
experts outside the University had looked at, studied, and even
acknowledging that it was not complete, but still thought it was
promising enough to volunteer to be on my dissertation committee and/or
to help in any way they could in furthering this research project once
I entered candidacy. There are no written, unwritten, or assumed
regulations that require any candidate to have previously shown
qualifications in doing Ph.D level research.

I can think of many reasons why Dr. Fowler might have behaved as he
did, and by inference his peers in the orbital mechanics group:

· I had appealed to a higher authority, as is my civil right; i.e.
to the Engineering College, the Graduate School, and ultimately to ABET
stating things that they had done wrong
· Their having stated in writing that my research had some major
flaws is an acknowledgment that the supervising professors during the
39 hours of supervised research classes I took during this time either
did not help me, gave me bad advice, or I did not do the work. The
latter cannot be supported, because every part of the way I Copyrighted
the work I was doing (attached list). So the Department had to expel me
to keep from looking incompetent, or worse.
· Perhaps they didn't feel that just because I was a P.E. I was
due any sort of different treatment than any other student; which in
fact I had not asked for or expected, just to be treated like any other
graduate student
· Most of this seemed to happen right after I told Dr. Fowler and
Dr. Hull that I had a "stress disorder" so they may have acted out of
prejudice, or assumed that my disability made me claim grandiose things
(even though the research had been accepted at conferences)
· They didn't even help me to prepare my research to present it at
other conferences, and there were several, as is customary with other
graduate students at my level
· Dr. Broucke told me once that "there is an informal rule in the
Department not to give a student any feedback on his or her research
until after being formally admitted to candidacy" because they were
afraid of having their ideas stolen
· Other departments like the School of Architecture have a written
contract between the professor and student setting goals for work to be
done in supervised research classes, but not the Aerospace Department.
Perhaps they were afraid my activities would lead to that kind of thing
and did not want their academic freedom curtailed in that way.
· Having created a committee to evaluate my research as stated in
the enclosed letter from the Department is a clear acknowledgement that
what I had said all along was true; i.e. I had gotten absolutely no
help from anybody in any of my supervised graduate research classes.
Once this letter was issued, and I picked up on the implications right
away and used this in my appeal, it behooved the Department to get rid
of me as quickly as possible.
· The reviewers clearly spent very little time studying my
algorithm and computer code, comparing my results to the simplest model
you can create with a few calculations on the back of an envelope;
whereas my model had 24 degrees of freedom - 23 more than the model
they used to compare it with, thereby claiming I was totally wrong.
Perhaps they could not follow the code, or they did not believe that it
worked as I claimed because it was very complicated; or even believe
that I could not have written it myself - even though I have over the
last 15 year had my own Bar X Software company, and have given away
half a dozen engineering design computer programs with my two textbooks
from McGraw-Hill
· One graduate student told me he thought Dr. Broucke was
extremely jealous that I had published two authoritative textbooks with
McGraw-Hill.
· There is a saying in physics, and celestial mechanics is a kind
of astrophysics, that nobody past 25 can come up with decent new ideas
- I was in my early 40's. Maybe they assumed that older people cannot
do good work on the theoretical level.
· Dr. Schutz evaluated the celestial mechanics part of my
research, which is quite abstract (and even more so now that I have had
a chance to fully illustrate and support my work with mathematical
proofs); he presented himself to the University as an expert in
celestial mechanics, even though his academic career has next to
nothing to do with any of the classical problems of celestial
mechanics; but mostly satellite geodesy, statistical modeling, and
related fields. In this regard he misrepresented his qualifications, as
had Dr. Fowler and others. This is a serious thing to do, and involved
the whole Department actually.
· When I arrived at UT the Aerospace Department had the best
celestial mechanics group in the world; when I left they had no
celestial mechanics group at all, even though they continue
representing this capability in the graduate catalog. Perhaps they were
afraid somebody would notice that, and they could not have those
"phantom courses" in their catalog.
· As I went through the appeals process, I got the feeling that
many people in the orbital mechanics field do not believe that it is
even possible to solve the interplanetary trajectory without the use of
third party optimization software. In fact, it is so very non linear
that most experts use genetic algorithms to solve the problem. This was
Dr. Fowler's favorite method, as he stated often in his classes -
perhaps he resented that I had found another way; Dr. Hull the Graduate
Advisor was the expert in optimization; perhaps he resented that I had
found a solution to the problem that did not use optimization methods
at all, but just some celestial mechanics and some insightful computer
programming tricks. They may not have thought it possible that I did in
25 pages of code what NASA does with thousands of pages; or that my
optimization converges to a solution in 30 seconds on a 333 Mhz PC
whereas NASA's takes many minutes on a supercomputer.
· You will note that many of these superior kinds of attitudes are
just what was found in the blue label committee that investigated the
problems leading to the crash of the Challenger NASA shuttle,
attributing them to the "NASA culture." Well, UT Austin is the leading
NASA research university, the Center for Space Research is second only
to JPL in the space community, and in fact at least half the people you
see in any TV shots at JPL are UT Austin graduates.
· Prejudice against my being a disabled student, assuming that my
disability had caused me to imagine all the problems. Dr. Kahn as much
as said so, as did Lee Smith the Vice President of Legal Affairs - who
only recently has forbidden me from contacting anybody at the
University involved in the appeals process. It makes me wonder what
they're afraid of.
· Dr. Broucke as not very well liked at all by everybody else in
the Aerospace Department, especially the people in the orbital
mechanics group. Apparently Dr. Broucke was outspoken in trying to get
professors to spend more time with students and teaching duties and
less time in research and consulting. When Dr. Broucke left, this
hatred may have transferred to me, his last graduate student; and a
mature engineer with his same feelings about academia.


It seems absurd to me that a student who does good research, has
good grades, has passed his written qualifying exams on the first try;
that a student like that who has a high intrinsic value and has proven
a lot, that I could have been dismissed for this shopping list of
petty, personal, and irrelevant reasons.

The most distressing part to me is that I have advanced my research
quite a ways - far beyond even a draft dissertation I delivered six
weeks ago to professors in the orbital mechanics group - and I am not
even permitted the usual courtesy of local consultants or researchers,
to present my work at a University or Center for Space Research
Seminar. I can only hope that in a month or so after I have generated a
polished dissertation document, that somebody will be interested.

Regards,

William H. Clark II

NOTE: The P.E. Board took no action on this letter. My Texas State
Representative Ron Baxter refused to take any action either. As of this
point (March 2005) I have been prohibited from contacting anybody at
the University by the UT Vice President for Legal Affaris, Dr. Lee
Smith, JD - thus I cannot get references to complete my research
elsewhere, or even to get a job.