Social Closure and Intergenerational Privilege within Academia

When I was young I believed the social sciences could fix what they named. I'd seen a friend drop out over tuition, a neighbor's family slide downhill after one injury, two equally sharp kids land in two different Americas over nothing but their zip codes. Here, at last, was a discipline built to explain exactly that—and I gave myself to it, determined to make poverty and inequality a little smaller.

Once inside, it took me a long time to admit what I saw. The stars of my department were brilliant at the podium—on stratification, on how capital nails people in place for generations. But the scholars who studied injustice best often knew its mechanics from the inside. The lecture on privilege would end, and the distribution of privilege resumed behind the office door: whose name went first, where the grant money flowed, which student got installed in a position another was promised. They studied power and wielded it fluently.

What chilled me wasn't the corruption—corruption is everywhere. It was that a field devoted to justice housed it so easily, and saw no contradiction.

• The social sciences' great analyses of inequality had become a craft you traded for tenure, not a promise you redeemed with your life.
• None of this is visible from where a student sits. Students see the front of the podium—clean, articulate, luminous—not the paint peeling on the back wall. I thought social science had shown me the structure of the world. It had shown me a single classroom.

Here, my personal firsthand experience deep inside the academia (PS: It is a truth not often spoken, yet universally observed, that the life of the scholar is best pursued by those whose fathers have furnished them either a fortune or the acquaintance of influential men.),

lift the veil, he weaponized his administrative authority to secure a paid position at the same department for his wife, Kuo, who is on fixed-term non-tenure contract at JHU Sociology. Hung’s wife’s fixed term employment contract at the department has been renewed multiple by Hung in the role of the department Chair, with stark promotion from "Temporary Lecturer" to "Associate Research Professor" in short time.

Not only Hung’s wife, Hung’s son, has also been "specially" admitted to and enrolled at JHU from 2023. At JHU, three members spanning two generations of one family have secured positions and opportunities relying on a single individual’s institutional influence at JHU.

Hung’s son’s JHU degree program BA International Studies and Viola involves courses taught and graded by Hung’s wife and their everyday colleagues at JHU Mergenthaler Hall. Hung and Hung’s wife hold significant positions and colleague connections.

Ironically, Ho-fung Hung’s public research portfolio centers on international political economy, power, corruption, and contentious issues. He builds his entire academic reputation on studying and denouncing power abuse and systemic corruption.

Yet in his own JHU department, he operates a blatant family patronage system.