Talk:Mae Fah Luang University

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This article has some serious inaccuracies concerning the child prostitution charges and the insinuations directed at the missionaries. I was teaching there at the time and was closely involved with trying to make the prostitution issues more public. The article is far more alarmist than the actual events. People are welcome to write to me: csloane at nwnexus period com

Cliff Sloane

I saw this several months ago, but only recently read the paragraph about foreigners at Mae Fah Luang. These untruths made me very angry, so I changed them. The arguments that foreigners were never given a voice in the university because they lacked "tenure" and "merit" or that foreign teachers all left because of "dereliction of duty" is absurd. The university went through highly qualified teachers including PhDs and teachers with decades of experience in public schools as if they were disposable tissue paper. If they had treated the qualified teachers they recruited with respect and rewarded their hard work, their initial plans of making Mae Fah Luang into an international English curriculum university would have been amply rewarded.

I'm speaking as a teacher who put a great effort into teaching and supervising MFLU only to be cheated to and lied to. To blame the problems on foreigners who didn't understand Thai culture is absurd. I personally supervised business English there for close to two years, doing my utmost to see that high academic standards were met. I personally wrote exams and made deadlines that other foreigners were too lazy to meet. When one instructor leaked an exam, I reported it to maintain the integrity of the examination process, even though other foreign instructors urged me not to. There were many other teachers who did the same. The criticism is automatically made, no matter what, that foreigners do not understand Thai culture. Making promises and breaking them is not Thai culture. I am now working for an institution that never breaks promises. The university administrators at Mae Fah Luang get away with lieing and cheating because they are far away in the provinces and they leave no record of what they do, and I might add, they cheated foreigners who cannot defend themselves, their right to continue residing in the Kingdom expiring a mere seven days after they finish work at Mae Fah Luang. I agree with Cliff above, but the truth was not adequately conveyed by what I read today in this entry. Some small accurate note of what happened to successive waves of teachers teaching at this university should be made to convey the truth of what happened there. (Jonfernquest 11:20, 27 August 2006 (UTC))