Stanford Leader Confirms China Scholar’s Expulsion

The president of Stanford University has confirmed the expulsion of a controversial anthropology graduate student, accusing the China scholar of lying to him.

In a 40-page letter to Steven W. Mosher, 34, dated Monday, Stanford President Donald Kennedy said Mosher’s “lack of candor” had “eroded the trust and confidence necessary to graduate education.”

Mosher was expelled in 1983, just short of his doctorate, for what anthropology department officials called “illegal and seriously unethical conduct” and “behavior inappropriate for an anthropologist” while doing research in China in 1979 and 1980.

Falsifying Receipt Charged

Kennedy specifically accused Mosher of forging a sales receipt for a camera that was university property and was used in his Chinese field research and then lying to him about it.

Kennedy, using evidence supplied by Mosher’s former wife, also claimed that Mosher, a former Navy officer, posed while a graduate student as a military officer with top secret clearance to get free government air transportation to Japan.

Kennedy’s letter is a response to Mosher’s appeal from earlier decisions by the faculty of the school’s anthropology department and a special review panel of Stanford scholars. It effectively ends Mosher’s on-campus appeals.

Mosher, reached by telephone at his Fresno home Tuesday, said he would meet Wednesday with his attorney, Melvin Belli, to “decide when and where to file a lawsuit” to force Stanford to grant him a degree.

Mosher reiterated that he is an innocent victim of Stanford’s desire to placate Chinese officials angered by the publication four years ago in a Taiwan journal of a Mosher article about China’s controversial population control program, including Mosher’s vivid pictures of coerced abortions involving women in their eighth month of pregnancy.

Kennedy, in his letter to Mosher, admitted that it “is very likely true” that the Chinese were angered by the article and a book later published by Mosher.

Kennedy acknowledged that he received a letter last year from an official of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences warning that “Mosher’s behavior seriously damaged the cultural and scholastic exchange between China and the U.S.”

‘Wrong to Give In’

Kennedy said that letter had no influence on his decision. The Chinese message, he said, “sounds like a threat. . . . It is wrong to give in to a threat.”

Mosher had a different interpretation. “It’s clear to me that what happened was that I recorded unpleasant truths about China--that the government is performing forced sterilizations and abortions on women and that there are numerous cases of officially sanctioned infanticide,” Mosher said.