I just had a flashback to my worst academic experience ever. I think it was a combination of my recent posts about all those scientists losing their jobs and that cool video of Pakistani mechanics cutting and shaping steel.
In the 1990s, I was an assistant professor at Temple University, and I had a magnificent custom microscopy rig. A top of the line Leica was at the heart of it, but I had modified the heck out of it. I’d built an air table — a massive 2cm thick sheet of steel resting on a cushion of tennis balls — that had been a huge effort to get cut and hauled up to my lab. I had hydraulic actuators for single cell injections. The microscope itself was modified with a motorized stage and a UV filter wheel (thanks to my friends at Applied Scientific Instrumentation, who are still in business, I’m pleased to see) all programmable and controlled by custom software I’d written. It was beautiful, and unique.
Unfortunately, I did not get tenure at Temple. You may not be aware of this, but if you’re hired by a university for a tenure track faculty position, and you do not get tenure, you’re done. You have one year to clear out your stuff, and then the axe falls, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. You’re a dead man walking, still ambling zombie-like about the university, still obligated to do your teaching and committee duties, but there’s a deadline ahead of you, at which time you have to vacate your office, your lab, everything, it all comes to an abrupt close.
Yeesh, but that was a miserable year, with all my former colleagues cutting ties. Fortunately, I landed another job in Minnesota, but that gorgeous microscope was not mine, it belonged to the university. I had to abandon it.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. At that time, there was a political crisis: HMOs were consolidating and going bankrupt, and many of them had associations with research universities that they were abruptly shutting down. Temple saw that they could buy up entire research groups for a song! It was time to shuffle out the peons working at their university already, and instead bring in all these big biomedical people who already had research grants. And so they did.
One day, in the waning days of my employment, a pair of these new hires walked into my lab, zeroed in on my microscope (that I was using at the time!), and started taking photos, writing down part numbers, and measuring stuff with a tape measure, while talking to each other about where they could put it in their lab space. They looked a bit puzzled by the filter wheel and the weird piezoelectric stage and the strange camera I was using, but they didn’t ask about any of it. They didn’t talk to me at all. They didn’t even acknowledge my existence. It was a strange experience that left me feeling like a ghost, and also sad, because these clueless twits were no doubt going to carve up my microscope for parts.
It was a dehumanizing experience that poisoned all my good memories of working at Temple. It did make me feel better about saying goodbye to that place.
Academia is a cruel and heartless beast, and overpaid biomedical researchers who lack the basics of human interaction are the worst.
That’s just dreadful. They probably were uncomfortable at usurping this cool thing you built, but still…be an adult, be a person, own up to it.
It me.
I was able to bring home various small “souvenirs” of my work, but the apparatus that was abandoned, turned over to the property management team, surplussed, remaindered. Those were tough. I’m sure there are artists who feel this way when their studios close up for some reason, or even when they sell something! I can only hope that some of the stuff got cannibalized and put to use in other productive work. After all — that’s how I came into some of it! Raiding the surplus yard and the basement storage areas was considered necessary for young researchers! We are only caretakers of things for a short while — even our own bodies. All is impermanence and shifting forms.
I like to think that the branches of academia that knocked me back regretted it in later years. I’m sure Temple regretted not giving you tenure!
Nah, they’ve got plenty of talent on the faculty there.
Its not only Pakistan that those trades exist in. For several years I was after an English style geological hammer. Its very different from the American style geologists pick. I had made do with inferior Chines made clones until I visited Fiji and discovered an engineering workshop in a small town. The local quarry business used to get its machinery repaired there. After a brief discussion with their blacksmith/toolmaker he produced a beautifully forged and hardened tool which lasted for years until someone “borrowed” it. My father’s generation was one which made do and repaired. At the age of 10 we moved to the city and had to replace the light utility truck with a sedan. No problem their was an equivalent sedan so he brought a wreck that was written of due to front end damage. Using the parts from both and the chassis from ours we built a sedan version, rebuilding the engine and transmission at the same time. The skills from this enabled me to keep a long succession of cars on the road by doing my own repairs. My son does the same and he is a much better mechanic than me.
Not long after the car episode we expanded my bedroom by shifting an internal wall. Just before I retired my son and I with assistance from his cousins and some trades completed a 200 sqm. extension to the house.
I worked for most of my life in a laboratory with equipment that was older than me but I was able to keep most of it operating and if I couldn’t I found workshops that could. Some of the equipment is still doing the job it was designed for after over 80 years ago. Our last lab relocation wasn’t looking good. We had a suitable building but the consultants engaged to review my designs estimated a cost so high that they were seriously considering closing the lab which had the lowest operating cost of any of the departments facilities. Using what I knew and shopping around for off the shelf components I could assemble myself and some creative problem solving, we ended up with a lab at one third the cost estimated by the consultants. The skills are still around but these days equipment manufacturers design their equipment t be next to impossible to repair or even maintain without specialised tools, intensive labour and expensive throw-away parts. Thats how the workforce is being de-skilled.
garydargan @5
In the 80s I had a Volvo 370 which developed a hot starting problem, I told the garage about it but they said they could find nothing wrong – not surprising as they weren’t hot starting it. I ended up stuck at a service station in the middle of the night on my own, because the car wouldn’t start again after I stopped for a coffee and a break. When the recovery guy finally turned up he explained that the starter motor was in a really awkward position, so despite it being a known problem garages were reluctant to replace them, he also told me a bout some model of Citroen that was so ‘designed’ that in order to change the fan belt you had to take the engine out(!), then he gave me a jump and I got back home safely. But I changed garages after that to some nice old guys running a small back street affair who listened to what I said, and did what I asked.
I have to admit that I lack much in the basic interactions of humanity.
I still understand when I am doing something wrong.
I may not be able to correct it.
I’m working on it.
I vaguely recall you leaving Temple for Minnesota Morris back in the decades ago t.o. days, but not that horrific story. That is so demeaning! Glad you found something else that has lasted all these years.
Back then I really hated Dawkins but your whole atheist thing made me reconsider. That came full circle. Fuck that guy again!
I had an aunt and cousins living in Trevose back when I visited the Philly in like 1987. My only exposure to the area aside from Always Sunny and Rocky. Oh and reading about the Bartrams. And steak sandwiches.