If you know the word schadenfreude, it likely that you have experienced it with some relish, even if momentarily. You know the act of deriving joy or pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. I have had my moments of schadenfreude when it comes to douchebags coming to harm. There are those who just deserve unkind karmic justice even though karmic justice is more like gravity, just too subtle at times.
Schadenfreude is not what I feel while reading about journalist Nidhi Razdan’s terrible predicament in discovering that her appointment as an “Associate Professor of Journalism” at Harvard University was bogus. But I do feel baffled at her sheer credulity in believing a scam for so many months, especially when she should have known that becoming an associate professor in any university in America, let alone the Ivy League one like Harvard, is quite a process that involves years. I did some quick calculations and found that it averages between four and ten years before you become one after teaching for a length of time. That is elementary knowledge.
When Razdan first announce in June last year that she was leaving NDTV for Harvard, I had a perfunctory interest of a journalist since it involved her teaching journalism at Harvard. Even at that point I was intrigued that she could have directly landed an associate professorship at a non-existent program. I don’t think you could do that even at a subpar university here let alone Harvard. But then I reasoned that perhaps Harvard, not necessarily an agonizing stickler for not bending its own standards a bit in favor of some celebrity, might have given that position to her. It turns out not. As Razdan clarified in a Twitter statement she was duped by what she calls a “sophisticated and coordinated phishing attack” where she says the perpetrators used “clever forgeries and misrepresentations” to convince her that they were legit.
I am just putting it out there. If even a local community college asked me to become a lecturer, let alone an associate professor, I would at least call them first to ascertain that they did indeed make the offer. I presume when Razdan was approached she interacted with someone in authority at Harvard’s journalism to confirm that the offer was genuine. Such offers are easy to confirm with a phone call or two. The passage of six months between her first announcement that she was leaving NDTV for Harvard and the one that said she was in fact duped by some sophisticated scammers is worrisome. May be there is a perfectly convincing explanation for this long gap. Perhaps it took that long back and forth to determine that it was a sinister phishing attack likely partly motivated by the fact she is a reviled figure among India’s extreme right-wing acolytes. These is just surmising on my part. I have no specific clue.
She does call the scam an attack on her and has asked the police to investigate. That still does not answer the primary question about her credulity in taking the offer at its face value to begin with. It would be interesting to find out how much time passed between her being approached via, presumably, electronic communication and even formal one by mail and her actually calling the university.
I just called the university while writing the post and the operator told me there is no department of journalism listed on her system. She transferred me to their public affairs which is a messaging service where I left a message. Hopefully, someone will call back. But I know that Harvard does not have a journalism program. Razdan too would have known with one phone call.
It is not my case that there is no department of journalism Harvard—although it is my case because there is none at the university—but if there were it should have been listed on the university’s official phone directory which it is not. So please know that I am on the job and will unravel this utterly trivial and inconsequential story soon. Because that’s what I do--look for thing that do not exist.
And yes, genuinely no schadenfreude here.
* My headline is deliberately misleading.
