Deborah,

Let's examine this calmly. First I agree with you.

Kevin tends to mimimize the venomous damage that he can inflict upon foreign teachers in his school. Yes, he is a manager. All of the Chinese leaders will tell you that he is a manager. He is the Associate Director of Academic Studies, or something like that. Kevin loves to take the Pearl-Harbor approach to doing damage to a foreign teacher most of the time. He is a bully and he only frontally attacks those that he believes he can easily overwhelm. Otherwise he resorts to the tactics that he uses here -- character impersonisation, falsification of emails, fraudulent emails, disgenuous attempts to cover his real role and personality, etc., etc. Just look at the calomny that he has been attempting to do to Raoul, to me, and to every poster who crosses his past. Often, I fear that his posts are sincerely psychiatrically delusional.

Kevin is very well-protected in the school, owing to a certain relationship that he maintains with a senior leader. It is not for me to comment upon that relationship except that it serves him well and undoubtedly brings him pleasure in life.

When Kevin sets his sites upon a foreign teacher, he will attempt to destroy the teacher directly through emails, through verbal abuse, through harassment, through patterns of behaviour that at least in the West are exceptionally illegal. When that modus operandi does not work, he resorts to his special relationship to inflict maximum damage. He is the Lucrezia Borgia of the school.

Silvery or Tunoi have described him as suffering from NPD. That may be very true. I am more concerned, however, with his Adolf-Hitler like fits of rage and madness, which, once they are over, he wipes away from his memory as if they never occurred. Freud himself would be concerned.

Furthermore, I am acutely concerned by what I view as his lawlessness -- attempts at fraud, calomnious attacks, libel, slander, workplace bullying, harrassment, and the like. He has placed him above the law, in China, in the United States and on the world forum.

I would rate Kevin's intelligence level as very mid-level, very provincial and exceptionally lower middle class. In his global and widepsread irrational anger at persons whose innate abilities far exceed his, he reacts with instinct -- what he cannot posses, he must destroy. It is exceptionally primeavel. One is always limited by one's background and genetic predispostion.

Now, in terms of the school, there seems to be a near-universal agreement, on this board, and on nearly every other board on the Internet, that this school is an "absolute avoid".

In this line, it has come to my attention that there are serious financial problems present in the school and that the school has indeed been afflicted, perhaps mortally, by the financial crisis that is roiling China. It is the second major private institution in the Suzhou area to be experiencing cash flow problems these days. It has been having serious conversations with its bankers over its financial stability. This has been widely reported. I surely would not want to work in a school that could vanish overnight, so to speak, or that may end up being taken over by the government. It is just not financially solid.